RadixJournal - Pandemic!

00:00:01.000 It's Saturday, February 1st, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.

00:00:08.320 Joining me today are Irishman Keith Woods and the ever-insufferable Edward Dutton.

00:00:14.900 Top issue, pandemic.

00:00:17.800 The coronavirus outbreak shows no signs of slowing down, and the world is on edge.

00:00:24.380 Is this just a regional epidemic that has sparked pandemonium through social media?

00:00:29.260 Or might this be the big one, an unstoppable killer spread through the pathways of globalization

00:00:35.780 that will devastate nations and bring modern medicine to its knees, we discuss.

00:00:42.580 Taking a step back, the panel examines pandemics throughout history.

00:00:47.340 Looked at through a cruel, unfeeling lens, might there be some positive, eugenic silver linings to the devastation?

00:00:54.480 We go there.

00:00:59.260 All right, Keith.

00:01:00.960 Well, let's first talk about the most important question related to this matter.

00:01:08.060 There are no reports of coronavirus in Ireland, so I presume the hysteria has not affected your bat-eating penchant. 1.00

00:01:20.040 Yeah, no, well, you know, as long as it doesn't affect the potatoes, you know, we're all right.

00:01:25.700 Well, I mean, I know they say, you know, one of the great...

00:01:28.620 That's going to play with potatoes, I don't know.

00:01:29.940 Well, yeah, I bet, you know, I mean, one of the arguments for diversity is, you know, the recipes.

00:01:34.540 And I'm quite looking forward to all the splices we're going to get, you know, bat and Irish stew, you know, 1.00

00:01:41.740 once we get these great cultures coming together, so...

00:01:44.260 It sounds delicious.

00:01:45.680 You probably wouldn't even know it's bat, you know.

00:01:48.100 Oh, no, how could you really tell the difference between bat and Irish cooking?

00:01:53.100 Well, I would say perhaps the most appalling cuisine I've had is snail.

00:02:06.340 I've had escargot, but these snails are cooked, steamed, and I have to say that I love to eat snails.

00:02:12.440 It's one of my favorite appetizers when I'm at a, you know, hoity-toity restaurant.

00:02:17.320 So who am I to judge bat-eating? 1.00

00:02:19.420 I guess perhaps we are to judge.

00:02:23.080 The Chinese do, or I think particularly regions of China, just like to eat everything. 1.00

00:02:29.200 My Twitter feed has been inundated with videos of people eating raw, maybe even alive animals that I can't identify.

00:02:39.900 And this is quite something.

00:02:42.920 There's a quote by Prince Philip.

00:02:45.820 Prince Philip said, if it has four legs and it isn't a chair, or if it swims and it isn't a submarine, or if it flies and it isn't a plane, the Cantonese will eat it.

00:02:54.920 Yes, it is something.

00:02:58.620 But yes, we're going to talk about the coronavirus, and I think we'll touch upon just some of the newsy aspects of it.

00:03:11.460 But I think it's more important to take a couple steps back and talk about, A, just the hysteria that can spread extremely quickly.

00:03:24.180 But then also the kind of way in which a pandemic, or even the idea of a pandemic, is a kind of dark side of globalization.

00:03:33.280 And also whether, and I guess I'm getting quite dark here, we have a global population built on effectively dysgenic breeding, and we have very low mortality rate, child mortality rates.

00:03:53.900 And overpopulation, and just the degeneration of the population is a serious issue.

00:04:02.980 And this must be part of the context that we think about this, you know, global pandemic virus.

00:04:12.020 Anyway, let's start off with the just newsy aspects, you know, and then kind of jump into deeper questions.

00:04:21.280 So as of Monday, reportedly, 80 people have died, but the infection is much higher.

00:04:33.520 There is, again, I'm taking these from mainstream sources, New York Times, Wikipedia, the infection is approaching 3,000.

00:04:44.920 And it's, so that would be a fairly low mortality rate, but the infection rate, you know, again, this is the reported infection rate.

00:04:54.040 Many people have suggested that the information is being suppressed, and so on.

00:04:59.480 But the reported infection rate is climbing at a, you could say, parabolic rate.

00:05:05.380 And it is not increasing in a linear fashion, it is parabolically increasing.

00:05:13.520 Diseases, the way of thinking about them is this basic reproduction number, which is that if you have it, how many people are going to be affected?

00:05:23.660 And, you know, much like you can think about it like a birth rate, effectively of a population, if the basic reproduction number is less than one, that means that if you have this flu or whatever virus that you will affect, you will pass it on to less than one person on average.

00:05:44.060 And that means that if you have infection rates in that, you know, above one, especially if it's something like four or eight, which is quite high, you are going to start to get exponential spreading.

00:05:59.780 It will breed like rabbits, it will double and double and double, and it's doubling the doubling, compounding the problem, and it can be a terrible thing.

00:06:08.320 So the basic reproduction number of this virus seems to be between 1.4 and 3.8, which means that, I mean, again, this is a mainstream report.

00:06:18.880 I guess we can plausibly assume that it's an underestimation.

00:06:24.420 So this means that the virus will continue.

00:06:28.140 Now, we've seen all this before.

00:06:30.140 We can remember avian flu and SARS and a couple of other pandemic fears that made the media and got everyone excited for about a month and then were forgotten about.

00:06:46.700 But I would say at some point, this actually is going to be real.

00:06:53.920 And so anyway, what do you all, I think we should put it all in context.

00:06:58.100 I mean, remember, some, it was between 60,000 and 80,000 people died of influenza in the United States last year.

00:07:08.520 That actually is a shocking number.

00:07:12.400 If, you know, if there were an 80,000 death catastrophe, we would never hear the end of it.

00:07:18.600 It would be something that would be blasted all over the media.

00:07:20.400 But now it's something that's just kind of forgotten because it's assumed it's like car accidents and so on.

00:07:25.000 And so these kinds of things, even in their much more benign, you know, mundane forms, can actually have a catastrophic death toll.

00:07:36.940 And Keith, I'll start with you first.

00:07:39.000 We've seen this, as I've mentioned earlier, we've seen these kinds of things before, and they've resulted in deaths and hysteria, but then they've ultimately faded and kind of left the news cycle after a month or two.

00:07:54.220 So, what do you think is going to happen with the coronavirus?

00:08:00.380 And also, you know, is hysteria justified in the sense, you know, not necessarily that this will be the big one, but that these kinds of things have occurred throughout world history and will occur again?

00:08:16.600 Yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard to know at this stage how to see if people are taking it seriously enough or not serious enough.

00:08:27.000 But, you know, it is one of those things that as advanced as we're getting technologically, there's still things we can't really protect ourselves against.

00:08:35.240 And there's things that the system can't really deal with.

00:08:38.060 I mean, like, there's this problem now that's a direct result of globalization, like antibiotic-resistant diseases.

00:08:45.160 And, you know, that's directly due to the spread of first-world medicine to third-world countries.

00:08:50.180 But more generally, like...

00:08:52.420 Breeding super viruses, in a way.

00:08:54.440 Because either the patient is not taking the full term of the medication, and so they're kind of killing off the weak virus and the strong survive, and thus they're, you know, evolving into stronger viruses.

00:09:08.860 Or, you know, there is that, you know, tiny percentage that will survive the full term of the medication, and the viruses are going stronger.

00:09:17.920 It's almost a kind of pendulum effect with the spread of medicine, where you can, you know, we can resist the small-level diseases, but we almost create more intense ones.

00:09:32.340 Yeah, and I mean, you know, one of the other things that gets discussed a lot, probably more on the left, is, like, the impact of climate change and how we're going to see all these catastrophes.

00:09:42.140 And, you know, whatever you think about climate change, there's definitely historical precedent for these kind of pandemics coinciding with big climactic changes.

00:09:53.160 I mean, like, you know, the sort of golden age, or when the Roman Empire really came to its pinnacle, was during an ideal climate period.

00:10:04.160 They called it the Roman Climate Optimum, which was, like, 200 BC to 150 AD.

00:10:08.600 And then in 150 AD, when you get kind of an interim period, that's the start of the Antonine Plague.

00:10:19.060 And that's probably smallpox now, looking back at it.

00:10:23.100 But, you know, that's a time when Marcus Aurelius is in power.

00:10:26.380 It may have actually been what killed Marcus Aurelius.

00:10:29.560 It killed his co-emperor.

00:10:30.880 But that was a time of huge social change in the Roman Empire that was brought about by this pandemic that was, in turn, brought about by climate change.

00:10:40.660 And I've been reading some interesting stuff on that.

00:10:43.700 And some of the more recent work done on this, you know, like, the fall of Rome is something that's been theorized a lot.

00:10:49.180 I think there was a German classist that put together, like, over 200 reasons that have been invented for the fall of Rome.

00:10:56.980 But one thing we have available now that someone like Gibbon didn't have available is this large record of evidence now we have about the climate from that period.

00:11:07.140 Like, you can actually see from Arctic ice deposits, they've seen that a result of the Antonine Plague was that Roman mining fell to pre-empire levels.

00:11:19.580 So, you know, we're starting to discover that these plagues had probably a fair greater impact than we would have thought.

00:11:26.160 Like, Gibbon did put down one of the reasons for the fall of Rome being that it spread itself too thin.

00:11:30.960 But obviously, if you lose, you know, half your pop has probably happened in about 550 AD with the Justinian Plague, which was another, that probably was bubonic plague.

00:11:42.120 And that followed, again, the start of a mini ice age that was caused by volcanic activity.

00:11:48.840 But one of the interesting effects, you know, this gets to the social effects that these things have throughout history that are often maybe overlooked, is I've written some stuff about the rise of Christianity, because the start of the 3rd century was especially a significant time.

00:12:03.700 You know, around 180 AD was, I think, was when Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations.

00:12:08.840 And that was a time when Rome was under severe pressure in terms of losing their agricultural base, losing soldiers to this, because it's especially spread among soldiers, you know, due to conditions.

00:12:20.340 But one of the things this caused was a massive, massive rise in Christianity, because some of the recent work done on it, you know, there was this, there was this practice of exposure by Romans,

00:12:32.200 where they left children to the elements, and it was often thought that this was a form of birth control, basically.

00:12:39.840 But we've discovered recently that there was actually common herbal forms of birth control that would have been popular.

00:12:46.720 And so this wasn't done for family planning, it was done for other reasons, like, you know, the kids having deformities or whatever.

00:12:52.980 But probably one of the most common reasons was that they were born girls.

00:12:56.480 And there's someone compiled a lot of verses by various Roman poets where they talk about this practice as being common among girls.

00:13:05.320 And that, you know, there was a particular quote from a Roman poet that even the rich families get rid of the girls and even the poor families keep the boys.

00:13:15.340 And one of the things was that there was a dowry for girls that put an economic pressure on poor families, especially. 0.94

00:13:20.320 But this wasn't a practice among Christians.

00:13:23.840 And so one of the things that was theorized was when there was this huge falling off of population, that it wasn't so much that Christians were affected less.

00:13:31.420 So they probably were due to, you know, their own forms of charity within their community and stronger social bonds.

00:13:38.100 But actually they were able to rebound far, far better than the pagans because, you know, there was a much greater stress because there was less Roman women to start with.

00:13:48.200 But then they also had to have more children to make up for, you know, the exposures, whereas Christians had a much more even balance.

00:13:57.940 And also it was a time when there was like a 40 percent conversion rate to Christianity.

00:14:02.500 So most converts were tended to be younger.

00:14:04.880 So not only did they have an even balance between men and women, but they had a fair younger population and they had this kind of stronger social solidarity with the charity that was done in this time.

00:14:16.220 So it is interesting to look at the social effects these things have.

00:14:19.680 I mean, you look at the meditations and you read that and it's much different from the kind of paganism that would have come before Marcus Aurelius.

00:14:27.220 It's much more, I guess it's much more kind of a, yeah, well, stoic.

00:14:32.520 And I mean, then even you look at, you know, following the bubonic plague in the 14th century and you have like the cloud of unknown, which is this great mystical text that's much closer to kind of Eastern spiritualities than traditional Christianity.

00:14:45.840 So, I mean, yeah, we, I guess the conclusion for all this is, you know, we have a much better idea now of how these things impacted world history.

00:14:54.460 And it seems like there were, there were much more causatives than we would have thought.

00:14:58.320 Right.

00:14:59.200 And yeah, as, as, as we, yeah, I can see similar things happening today.

00:15:05.460 Uh, with, with people gazing into the abyss, uh, of, of, of global catastrophe and, uh, moving away from the kind of happy consumerist liberalism and, and reverting back to a, uh, either a kind of Eastern mystical religion or a more primitive Christianity or something.

00:15:27.860 I, I think there are actually strong trends in that direction now, you know, uh, anyway, uh, regardless of, of, of, of whatever happens to coronavirus.

00:15:37.440 Um, uh, Ed, uh, what do you think about this subject of, you know, pandemics in global history and their effects on the population and also their effects on religiousness and kind of world outlook?

00:15:54.720 Yeah, it's very interesting. It's a very interesting point that, uh, Keith made that I pick up on about why it's fascinating that it would have caused, uh, the, the plagues in Rome would have caused less damage to Christians. 0.51

00:16:07.080 It also makes sense in terms of intelligence because intelligence would have, uh, the people that were converting to Christianity tended to be middle class.

00:16:14.540 There's this sort of urban myth that they were working class and they were poor. It's not true.

00:16:18.300 An analysis even of the kind of names they had indicates that these people tended to be from the middle class of society.

00:16:23.860 Being in middle class is associated with intelligence and intelligence would be associated with, um, making plans to avoid plagues.

00:16:31.420 It would be associated with having money, which would allow you to avoid these problems as well.

00:16:35.560 And intelligence is also associated with the low level of mutational load.

00:16:38.900 And if you have a low level of mutational load in the brain, then you're going to have it probably in the body as well.

00:16:42.940 And so therefore with a greater resistance to play. So it completely makes sense that this would have elevated, uh, the demographics of, of Christians. 0.96

00:16:50.480 Um, and so I, uh, that, that makes sense, but more, more broadly in terms of these plagues, yeah, there is a sense in which they, they, they make key changes.

00:16:57.680 One is to intelligence and the other is to religiousness. So in terms of intelligence, so obviously, yeah, better immune system.

00:17:04.260 If you're more intelligent, uh, you're more able to plan for the future. You're more able to get away from the situation.

00:17:09.180 You're more able to successfully pursue your plans. And so, um, plagues will tend to elevate intelligence.

00:17:15.920 And this is quite clear. If you look at the black death, that it does elevate clear, very clear that it elevates intelligence. 0.99

00:17:23.120 Because in a hundred years after the black death, you have the Renaissance and the Renaissance is a manifestation of the, of a Europe that has become much more intelligent.

00:17:30.820 The other thing it does.

00:17:32.280 Can I jump in real quick? Um, I don't want to interrupt your flow, but there is a, a, uh,

00:17:38.660 a theory about the black death and just the creation of the middle class itself, uh, from a purely economics, uh, point of view in the sense that, uh, you had a, uh, lower supply of labor and therefore higher prices of, of labor.

00:17:56.420 And just this general kind of upward push that generated, uh, a more urban middle class, just because, you know, your, your labor was worth more after this catastrophe.

00:18:09.320 Um, and that this is actually a tremendous, you know, tremendously important in the creation of the modern world yet, you know, we don't generally like to think of, you know, die-offs inventing liberalism and middle-class lifestyle itself.

00:18:24.360 Yeah. You know, for catastrophe, something wonderful, I guess.

00:18:27.440 Well, perhaps.

00:18:28.580 Yes. The black death kill. It's true. Well, I don't know. It depends on how the middle class people that we are, it's a double-edged sword because they're often attracted to left wing. 1.00

00:18:37.180 That's what I was about to say.

00:18:39.100 We couldn't be driving SUVs without the dinosaurs. I mean, it's all.

00:18:42.880 Well, yes, but one thing that's the mortality rate in England of the, of the black death was at least 40%.

00:18:50.560 But the mortality rate among the, the, what's called the lower source, so the free laborers and the serfs, was 80%.

00:18:58.560 Why?

00:18:59.420 Because, of course, they were poorer, and so it was only those that had, for random genetic reasons or just through nepotism working against them,

00:19:07.620 who had been kept down in that class, in the lower class, uh, who suddenly found that their labor was worth an enormous amount of money.

00:19:14.980 And so, yes, it certainly had this kind of interesting effect. But the other effect was, I think, was the elevation of religiousness.

00:19:21.620 So what religiousness is, there was actually an interesting study on this in terms of the pacification of Europe on the issue of execution.

00:19:28.920 And it was found, um, it was found that across the medieval period, we executed about 2% of the male population every generation,

00:19:37.340 because all felonies carried the death penalty. And that, that 2% would have been young and would have been male

00:19:44.760 and would, would seemingly have been at the bottom of society. And there's records to indicate that.

00:19:49.940 And so, obviously, intelligence, the heritability of intelligence is about 0.8. Intelligence is associated, low intelligence is associated with criminality.

00:19:57.620 And the heritability of personality traits is at least 0.5. And it's low conscientiousness and low agreeableness that are associated with criminality.

00:20:05.840 So we're removing from the population, due to this execution, the system of widespread execution, every generation, stupid, psychopathic men who are young. 1.00

00:20:16.740 And so, of course, they're not passing on their genes. And so this is going to act to pacify Europe, to change the personality of Europe. 0.99

00:20:23.560 But I argued in a paper, we traced across time, the extent of people being, dedicating themselves to religion to the extent of becoming monks or nuns.

00:20:31.540 And we show that it increases across the medieval period, quite steadily, as there's this increase, which would be consistent when it's becoming more religious.

00:20:39.260 Now, religion is about 0.4 heritable, and it's associated with precisely these personality traits that would predict low criminality.

00:20:46.260 It's associated with conscientiousness, i.e. impulse control, rule following, and it's associated with agreeableness, i.e. altruism and empathy, for various reasons.

00:20:53.260 But those associations are there. So what we demonstrated was that it was certainly the case that we were becoming more religious across the medieval period.

00:21:00.320 Now, to the extent what the plague would have done, then, is not only would it have selected for intelligence, it would have selected for religiousness, indirectly.

00:21:09.420 Because religious people being higher in conscientiousness and higher in agreeableness would be of higher socioeconomic status than the more psychopathic people. 0.97

00:21:17.700 And they would also be more able, being higher in conscientiousness, to make plans and alliances and whatever to get out of the situation.

00:21:23.300 So it seems that the plague did those two things. It elevated intelligence, substantially, so you get the Renaissance, but it also elevated religiousness, and consequently you get the Reformation.

00:21:34.060 And it creates general social chaos, and one of the things at the environmental level that's associated with religiousness is chaos, is a feeling of insecurity and uncertainty.

00:21:45.260 So then you get this massive religious revival under John Wycliffe and people like this, and it continues.

00:21:50.400 And it seems that we were selecting for religiousness right up until the Industrial Revolution, and also for intelligence.

00:21:57.560 And then, of course, Darwinian conditions are relaxed. So, yeah, I think it's probably that was what was going on in ancient times, and it's what was going on more recently.

00:22:04.200 And if there was a complete breakdown, and Darwinian select, because of this coronavirus, which is unlikely, let's face it, but anyway, then I would suspect that those two things would be under selection pressure once more.

00:22:14.300 We definitely become more religious across the medieval period, and we proved this.

00:22:18.760 But the proxy we used in our study was the percentage of the population that are adjoining monasteries and things.

00:22:23.680 And it goes up across the medieval period and then starts to go down.

00:22:27.260 And what seems to be happening is that we're just becoming more religious, because we're selecting for religiousness, because religious people breed. 0.95

00:22:32.680 Religiousness is associated with a general factor of personality. It's associated with high social status in these societies.

00:22:40.000 So religious people pass on their G. It's associated with conscientiousness, which gives you high status, and high status is what predicts breeding. 0.99

00:22:46.980 And so religious people seem to breed. And so we become more religious. 0.91

00:22:49.860 And it's probable that the Black Death would have massively selected in favor of religiousness, because what would have predicted surviving it would have been high impulse control, ability to cooperate with other people. 0.82

00:22:59.340 And those things are associated with religiousness, which would have elevated religiousness massively, which would expand intelligence as well.

00:23:05.380 It would have selected for intelligence, which which would explain why a hundred years later, you see both the Renaissance, i.e.

00:23:13.760 a function of the high intelligence and the Reformation, i.e.

00:23:16.720 a function of the high religiousness.

00:23:18.280 Right. So those are my thoughts on what Keith was saying.

00:23:23.920 Just to put a point on this matter, one of the narratives in the mainstream media with global warming is it kind of reminds me of the old joke of the world ends.

00:23:37.100 This is a New York Times headline. The world ends women and minorities most affected. 0.99

00:23:41.480 And this notion that, you know, obviously it's picking a victim, but this notion, the basic narrative is that global warming, A, is terrible, and B, it's going to actually affect the third world more in the sense of rising, rising water levels.

00:24:02.940 And yes, I think in the words of Andrew Yang, you've got to get your thousand dollars a month and run to high ground.

00:24:09.260 But to the contrary, at least taking, you know, taking an historical global view on it, warmer climates are going to positively affect the third world.

00:24:23.220 It's simply easier to survive when it's warmer, as simple as that.

00:24:27.960 And we've seen that. I mean, northern populations are not growing.

00:24:34.040 They're stagnating or declining. Africa is exploding, sub-Saharan Africa in particular.

00:24:40.540 So this notion, you know, the general, I mean, whether, you know, if we accept general global warming trends, this is something that is very positive for the third world.

00:24:53.740 And a global cooling would result in much harsher living for lower IQ people.

00:25:03.300 That's right. Well, there's the mediating factor of health care and whatever.

00:25:09.620 But as we were to become, as we select against intelligence, as we know, these things are, I think, are a temporary thing that are going to decline.

00:25:16.280 And if there were a massive pandemic of the kind that people like to speculate on the possibility of, then, yeah, undoubtedly, the people that it's going to affect will be people who can't access health care, of course, which is the third world.

00:25:28.280 But also the mutants within the first world, such as trans, you know, transsexuals and left wing people and whatever, will affect them because they have poor genetic health. 1.00

00:25:37.020 It's just a fact. So they'll be more likely to die.

00:25:40.400 They have poor immune system. Literally, they have poor immune systems.

00:25:43.220 There's studies on this. Religious people have better immune systems than atheists. 1.00

00:25:46.960 There's actual studies on that.

00:25:48.700 So, yeah, so I think it's it's it's not it's not necessarily an entirely bad thing from that perspective.

00:25:54.760 It could even be everyone on this podcast will perish.

00:25:57.880 A white hill. Yeah, we'll be all right.

00:25:59.840 We'll be all right. I'm no concern about it.

00:26:01.960 But but but I guess I broadly agree with Keith on what I think some very interesting points.

00:26:07.260 But I think it's I just enjoy putting it back into the science.

00:26:10.320 I think we can do that with the collapse, the rise and fall into the climate.

00:26:13.920 And we can do it with the with the religion and what he said about the was the one you mentioned.

00:26:18.800 But to get more arty farty out of the matters, do you think that the the obsession with the global pandemic,

00:26:29.000 even in what you're saying, Ed, it does express a certain religious sentiment that this that that some kind of omnipotent being will kind of wipe out.

00:26:42.520 I people that we don't like or or us because we've kind of send and we in a way deserve it.

00:26:50.060 Now, I don't I don't necessarily dispute what you're saying.

00:26:53.440 I think everything you're saying makes logical sense. 0.98

00:26:55.620 But this notion that, you know, the low IQ and mutant transsexuals will not survive. 1.00

00:27:02.020 There does seem to be a kind of comeuppance, you know, sentiment involved in all of that. 0.74

00:27:08.340 I know, no, no, I'm only interested in the data.

00:27:11.300 And if the data happens to me, no, no, no, no.

00:27:13.820 One thing that Keith mentioned was what Keith was saying before in the sense of there, there, you know,

00:27:19.780 the human being has to deal with this in some way.

00:27:23.600 It was I caught the coronavirus virus, you could say.

00:27:26.940 I became really obsessed with this.

00:27:28.940 I actually rented the on on on iTunes or whatever.

00:27:33.820 I rented this movie called Contagion from about 10 years ago, which really remarkably prophesied what exactly we're dealing with.

00:27:44.340 It was actually like a pig and bat virus that is what is the word?

00:27:48.780 Zoo zootopic. 0.95

00:27:50.220 I believe it's it's when a an animal virus passes to humans and it originated in China.

00:27:56.880 And it was it was it's in a it's not a great film by any stretch might be worth watching, but certainly not great.

00:28:03.520 But it's kind of interesting, again, on this kind of backside of globalization, where you have a bunch of, you know, competent people,

00:28:12.680 but they're ultimately all helpless.

00:28:14.620 And the people who die or at least are destroyed by this virus in some kind of personal way kind of had it coming.

00:28:23.900 There's some sin that they're being punished for.

00:28:27.280 And the the patient one of this is actually a obnoxious white woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow in a, you know, effort at perfect casting, 0.95

00:28:37.520 who is just kind of this silly, you know, corporate female going to China and going to casinos and picking up the virus from a chef. 1.00

00:28:47.900 And then she's actually cheating on her husband, her poor husband, who doesn't. 1.00

00:28:51.660 The cuck does not die.

00:28:52.800 He survives and he takes care of his daughter.

00:28:54.580 But there is a at least implied in the film, a kind of comeuppance for this woman that you can't have it all. 0.94

00:29:03.580 And you can't just be this silly person flying all over the globe, you know, doing corporate nonsense and not kind of be punished for it.

00:29:13.080 And everyone in the film, it kind of has a either a great or small sin that brings them down. 0.95

00:29:20.000 And I think this film, which was it was directed by Steven Sonnenberg, it was written for high IQ white liberals, like no question.

00:29:27.500 They're the only people who liked this movie, even among them, the most rational, like least religious, et cetera.

00:29:34.700 Even among them, there is this kind of religious instinct for punishment on a global scale.

00:29:40.800 And I think in a way, this is this is the kind of like flip side of global secularism in the sense that I mean, I'm just going to be speak frankly.

00:29:53.860 We're all kind of fascinated by this.

00:29:56.180 And at some dark level, we actually kind of want it.

00:29:59.940 We have a death instinct that we're fascinated.

00:30:02.440 You know, it's like, oh, look, there's been more infections.

00:30:05.220 More people have died.

00:30:07.180 It expresses something about our psychology that we almost want this end times to occur.

00:30:14.160 Well, yes.

00:30:15.840 I don't know who Keith.

00:30:17.220 I mean, I was I've got quite a lot of things.

00:30:19.920 Yeah, well, no, I just say, yeah, I noticed that trend.

00:30:24.120 You do get that a lot in the right, especially these like collapsical people that like, you know, they don't they're very pessimistic about everything and they don't want to get involved in the sort of power process of politics.

00:30:37.940 But they have this like it's kind of like, you know, save Western civilization with this one weird trick.

00:30:43.200 And it's like it's going to it's going to wipe out all the problems that they have overnight because everyone in the cities is going to die.

00:30:51.860 And in the rural communities, it's going to be ethnically homogenous because, you know, non-whites live in cities. 0.96

00:30:58.900 And, you know, it's like all their problems are going to be solved kind of overnight with this this one collapse.

00:31:04.440 But I just find that God, basically.

00:31:07.220 Yeah.

00:31:07.620 I mean, yeah.

00:31:08.600 God or nature, you know, Deus, Suv, Natura, like Spinoza.

00:31:11.760 But I just find it's like, you know, those people tend to be very passive because everything comes back to, you know, well, nature is going to return to harmony and fix all this anyway.

00:31:21.680 But I mean, I said it on the last show I was on with you guys that like it's unbelievable how many people like whether they're left or right, everyone seems to believe that there's going to be some catastrophic collapse in the next, you know, in this century.

00:31:34.540 Right.

00:31:34.640 It's like I just find it incredible how widespread this, you know, at a time when we have such technological progress and, you know, our elites tell us we've never had it so good.

00:31:43.680 And Steven Pinker is writing the better angels of our nature saying that this is like the best time ever to be alive.

00:31:49.260 And like everyone you speak to thinks there's going to be like a full scale apocalypse within a few decades.

00:31:54.680 So, like, I do think it's interesting, the contrast there.

00:31:59.500 And there have been studies of this that people tend to, that there is a kind of wisdom of crowds in this.

00:32:05.100 When people have this ability, we have this ability of reading signals on an adaptive thing, on reading subtle signals in all kinds of ways of social interaction.

00:32:13.860 We have the ability to read these things.

00:32:16.480 And that's one of the reasons why pessimism will spread around a population and then optimism will spread around a population.

00:32:22.500 It's one of the reasons why you get equal collapses on the stock market or whatever.

00:32:25.880 People have this sort of instinct and it's a correct instinct often of how other people are going to behave.

00:32:31.200 And so if we do think there's going to be an apocalyptic collapse or there's going to be serious violence, I mean, the negative, the thought is there's going to be serious violence in the next 10 years, let's say.

00:32:41.000 And that's consistent with serious research by super forecasters that have been like this guy, this guy Turkin, Pete Turkin.

00:32:49.680 That's precisely what is predicted to happen, that 2020 is going to be the most appallingly violent decade.

00:32:55.860 Yeah, starting out with a bang.

00:32:58.620 Yeah, I would throw this in there.

00:33:00.440 I don't know if I've mentioned this on a podcast that you two have been on, but I've long been fascinated by this stock market forecaster named Robert Prechter.

00:33:09.800 And he talks about this.

00:33:12.280 He has a social mood hypothesis, which is basically that many people think that the stock market causes depression in society.

00:33:23.360 So the economy and the stock market will crash and then people get depressed.

00:33:27.160 And he actually takes, he thinks the causality is reverse.

00:33:30.800 News, this is kind of funny to say, news does not create stock market volatility.

00:33:36.620 Stock market volatility creates the news.

00:33:38.820 And stock market volatility is itself just an expression of social mood and pessimism, which is periodic and predictable.

00:33:49.220 And again, I'm not positive I buy into it wholly, but it is actually interesting.

00:33:55.300 And what he showed this, he traces this through popular culture.

00:33:58.480 And things like the return and revitalization of the horror movie genre is usually precedes a stock market crash.

00:34:08.900 And popular music is actually very interesting.

00:34:12.140 You go from very upbeat bebop, et cetera, to the kind of 1970s of this soft rock and ballads and so on.

00:34:23.200 And then you end up in punk music, which is kind of like the ultimate expression of nihilism, you know, banging away a good car and screaming.

00:34:30.760 And then that kind of flips over and you get pop music again.

00:34:33.340 And this is traceable to stock market.

00:34:35.200 That's very interesting.

00:34:35.860 What's his name?

00:34:36.800 What's his name?

00:34:37.360 Robert Prechter.

00:34:38.380 The most famous one and the most kind of obvious one is the miniskirt.

00:34:42.840 And so basically, as times get better and people are more euphoric, and again, remember, euphoria can be just as dangerous, if not more, than pessimism.

00:34:53.700 But as things get euphoric, basically, the skirts get higher and sexier. 1.00

00:34:59.200 And they end up being the unbelievable miniskirt, effectively, you're wearing a bikini.

00:35:04.880 And then basically, by the 1970s, the popularity was the maxi skirt.

00:35:09.220 That is a skirt that was literally dragging on the ground. 1.00

00:35:12.840 And men's lapels and tie widths. 0.98

00:35:16.460 I know this sounds totally stupid, but it's not. 0.99

00:35:20.920 It doesn't sound stupid. 1.00

00:35:22.540 It sounds stupid to a lot of people. 0.99

00:35:25.100 For it to be a good theory, it should make predictions at every level. 1.00

00:35:29.140 There shouldn't be all these ad hoc exceptions where you can say, oh, well, accept those lapels and accept that skirt.

00:35:33.860 But the lapel size, if you look at photos from the 1930s, the classic thing is a double-breasted suit and this massive lapel that goes to your shoulders.

00:35:44.520 Then if you go to the mid-1960s, so peak euphoria, peak stock market boom, what did we have?

00:35:49.980 We had tiny little thin lapels and tiny little ties.

00:35:54.700 And this keeps recurring.

00:35:56.460 1970s, big fat lapels, depression, low economic activity, stagflation, et cetera.

00:36:02.940 And you can actually see this come back again.

00:36:04.880 I remember when he was – in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple computer, he gave a speech at one of these Macworld or whatever.

00:36:17.640 And he was literally wearing a coat without a lapel.

00:36:22.340 So it had gone to zero, the lapel indicator.

00:36:26.600 Hang on.

00:36:26.960 So lapel is a sign of a good old –

00:36:28.040 The stock market crashed three months later.

00:36:30.380 I'm not joking.

00:36:31.140 So pessimistic is small lapel.

00:36:34.260 That's very interesting.

00:36:35.340 No, no.

00:36:35.440 Wide lapel is pessimism.

00:36:38.020 Long skirts, wide lapels, wide ties are pessimism.

00:36:42.300 Why?

00:36:43.340 Psychologically, why would you –

00:36:44.580 Well, the skirt makes sense in the sense of you're euphoric, it's sexy, you're floating on air kind of thing.

00:36:52.380 And then you're – when there's a greater pessimism, there's a greater tendency towards, you could say, prudery or prudishness in fashion.

00:37:06.140 And also, housing bubble era, what was popular?

00:37:09.440 Mad men and wearing these tiny lapel suits and tiny little thin ties.

00:37:14.060 That kind of mid-60s thing came back right at the moment of the housing boom.

00:37:19.600 So it is quite predictable and –

00:37:22.220 That's very interesting.

00:37:22.960 I was thinking about as well – I was thinking about – you talk about music.

00:37:25.640 I was thinking when I started at university or whatever, 1999, 2000, boom, bubble, popular, happy, euphoric people.

00:37:34.400 And you think about how women were dressing, and it was this – what you call a crop top and a hipster trousers.

00:37:40.420 Right.

00:37:40.760 And the shirt would go down above the navel.

00:37:43.920 The trousers would be just above the, you know, vaginal hairline, essentially. 1.00

00:37:47.980 And there'd be this big gap where there was bare flesh.

00:37:50.680 It was very – and then when collapse happened, that's gone.

00:37:54.860 That's gone.

00:37:55.300 That's – it's a much more prudish way of dressing.

00:37:58.260 And the music as well in the late 90s, early – people like aqua, Barbie girl, bubblegum pop.

00:38:06.480 Exactly.

00:38:06.600 These silly, jolly things.

00:38:08.540 And almost to a point of parody where it can't go any further.

00:38:11.720 And this is kind of what Prechter would point on.

00:38:14.120 You know, aqua as like – what is that?

00:38:16.540 Come on, Barbie girl. 1.00

00:38:18.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:18.860 Okay, it's almost a parody of pop music, and so it can't go any further.

00:38:23.740 Much like punk became a kind of parody of rock where, you know, it's – you're banging three chords and you're screaming out of tune into a microphone.

00:38:32.820 You can't get any more nihilistic.

00:38:35.340 It just has to flip over.

00:38:36.900 And even bands themselves that emerged out of punk went into kind of synth pop in the 80s, New Order being an excellent example of that.

00:38:46.560 They went from the punkishness to kind of using synthesizers, really kind of almost feel-goody kind of things.

00:38:55.820 But – 0.99

00:38:56.420 What's the name of that crazy bitch with blue hair that everyone keeps telling me I should listen to? 1.00

00:39:00.220 You didn't – 1.00

00:39:00.580 I forget how – 1.00

00:39:01.920 I don't know what to say when you say that crazy bitch with blue hair. 1.00

00:39:06.680 You need to narrow it down. 1.00

00:39:07.120 You've got blue hair and –

00:39:09.520 Billie Eilish.

00:39:10.780 Billie Eilish, that's the one.

00:39:11.880 Oh, yeah.

00:39:12.780 We've got a resident Zoomer here, so we can actually talk about this now.

00:39:16.260 And people kept saying I should listen to it.

00:39:18.500 I listened to it.

00:39:18.800 I was like, good God, what is this?

00:39:20.500 You know, I much prefer Aqua, frankly.

00:39:24.060 I bought two of their albums back in the day.

00:39:27.680 Yeah, we can – okay.

00:39:29.860 We've gone into digression, so might as well just go on a full-on rabbit hole.

00:39:34.060 I think she won five Grammys last night.

00:39:36.460 She did.

00:39:37.160 And what is – I listen – after we talked about her, I went and also forced myself to listen to Billie Eilish.

00:39:44.340 It's not certainly the worst thing I've ever heard, but what's interesting is this depressive attitude that we were getting at.

00:39:52.780 It's like she's – it reminds me of music from the early 90s.

00:39:56.340 It was like I can't even – I can't even bring myself to sing this song, and I'm almost mumbling while I'm singing it.

00:40:04.120 But it's a very – it's an interesting look, and I think it bespeaks at some level this general depression in the anxiety that she is the artist of the moment.

00:40:16.620 She's kind of the Madonna of the moment.

00:40:18.900 Mid-90s was very depressing stuff.

00:40:20.760 There was some British band in the mid-90s that they satirized in Father Ted, I remember, which I liked, because they were so depressive.

00:40:28.120 I forget what the band was called.

00:40:29.540 Oh, Radiohead.

00:40:30.400 Radiohead, yeah, just awesome.

00:40:32.120 Oh, I loved them when I was in high school.

00:40:33.660 Yeah, they're awesome.

00:40:34.540 They're still good. 0.99

00:40:35.200 And idiots at school used to – when they should have been buying Aqua albums and things – 0.99

00:40:41.400 were Perch and – there was this Irish band as well at the same time as Aqua. 1.00

00:40:45.880 I'm a freak.

00:40:47.740 I'm a widow. 0.82

00:40:50.660 What the hell am I doing here?

00:40:52.980 Yeah, it's that kind of thing.

00:40:54.200 Yeah, did you – in the late 90s, the late 90s was positive.

00:40:58.880 Did you listen to this band called Bewitched?

00:41:01.360 I don't know them.

00:41:02.840 Irish band, and they did a song called C'est La Vie, and it was just these Irish girls being 0.99

00:41:08.120 ridiculously happy.

00:41:10.080 That was it.

00:41:11.480 Some people say, I look like me, duh.

00:41:13.000 You're serious?

00:41:13.920 Ba-ba. 0.76

00:41:14.900 Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum. 0.96

00:41:15.680 It was very good.

00:41:16.460 I bought that one.

00:41:17.000 I bought that one as well.

00:41:18.860 It's very rare that I buy music, but, you know.

00:41:20.680 Right, but generally, the whole point is – and Radiohead is a good band, I would defend

00:41:26.680 them – the whole point is that there is a kind of social mood in which some artist is

00:41:35.020 the thing, and it's – she's – or he or she – it's not necessarily even that they

00:41:40.020 sell the most albums, it's that they're the most culturally significant.

00:41:42.860 They kind of speak to this age.

00:41:44.360 And if you speak to the current Zoomers and young millennials, it's about being depressed 1.00

00:41:52.240 and embracing your mental illness in a very strange way, and I don't think we can just 0.89

00:41:58.620 overlook this and say, oh, they're – the kids these days, they need to get their act

00:42:02.880 together and start working harder.

00:42:04.360 I think it's telling us something about a broader social mood, which is extremely negative

00:42:11.980 and nihilistic even.

00:42:13.320 When people my age left university in, like, 2001, they immediately got a job.

00:42:20.200 No one had any trouble.

00:42:21.520 It might not be quite the job they wanted, but it was a reasonably well-paid job because

00:42:26.160 you've got a degree.

00:42:27.460 And now – no, no way.

00:42:29.260 At University of Virginia, when I was there in the late 90s, graduating – and again, UVA

00:42:34.580 is a very good school, but it's not Harvard, it's not Stanford.

00:42:38.480 Goldman Sachs was recruiting on campus, and they were passing around Goldman Sachs Frisbees.

00:42:48.520 So it was like, come work for us.

00:42:50.020 It's fun.

00:42:50.680 Like, that was the level of euphoria and excitement.

00:42:54.900 And you got a degree, boom.

00:42:56.720 You're going to make – you'll make 80, 100 grand in a year, you know, kind of thing.

00:43:01.840 And that was – it's huge money for –

00:43:04.860 You had it at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bristol, a few others, a thing called the milk ground,

00:43:09.760 where these companies would all come and, you know, pitch to you.

00:43:13.540 It wasn't you begging them to give you a job.

00:43:15.260 It was them begging you to come and work for you.

00:43:18.320 That was how it worked.

00:43:19.540 But what is it now?

00:43:20.580 What is the salient political issue for Zoomers, student loan forgiveness, UBI, less salient,

00:43:29.220 but still, you know, and impactful?

00:43:32.140 It's basically the politics of low expectations and depression.

00:43:38.760 You kind of see this reflected in the meme culture as well.

00:43:42.700 As in, you know, 10 years ago, memes were very, like, kind of normie-friendly or whatever about, you know,

00:43:50.940 whatever the daily stresses of life.

00:43:52.780 But they've gone – they've, like, they've been kind of abstracted to such a weird place now.

00:43:57.760 And they've kind of created all these weird archetypes.

00:44:01.380 But, like, they do touch on something.

00:44:03.100 You know, like, there's the doomer, which is, like, you know, the depressed guy in his early 20s

00:44:07.900 that spends all his time on the internet and chain smokes.

00:44:10.800 And, you know, like, the kind of the archetypal, like, alienated young man.

00:44:15.720 And, you know, there's the wagey, you know, the guy loaded with student debt

00:44:19.340 that has to work a wagey job at McDonald's or something. 0.68

00:44:22.600 So there's all these kind of, like, nihilistic archetypes that have really been created

00:44:28.840 through meme culture that kind of do a lot to reflect, like, the reality of life in the 21st century.

00:44:36.720 It's like – it's interesting they kind of morphed into that.

00:44:39.000 They've taken on this much sort of darker kind of nihilistic aspect

00:44:44.680 where they kind of deconstruct in society in kind of a deeper way now.

00:44:49.880 Yeah.

00:44:50.520 Are they polarised?

00:44:51.760 Are the memes polarised?

00:44:53.160 Because that's what you'd predict would happen as well,

00:44:54.800 that there'd be this polarisation of quite separate memes for left and right,

00:44:58.740 which wouldn't have been as pronounced.

00:45:00.880 Oh, yeah.

00:45:01.460 Well, I mean, like, you know, there's normie memes.

00:45:03.820 But then, you know, there's all this stuff.

00:45:05.340 There's all these archetypes now that are so, like, self-referential, like, you know,

00:45:08.760 the boomer and the doomer and the – you know, they spawn all these – like, there's, you know,

00:45:13.260 these subcultures that are so referential that if, you know, if an army looked at one of these,

00:45:17.680 they wouldn't be able to even begin to interpret it.

00:45:20.880 Right.

00:45:21.240 Why is there a frog with Joker makeup, you know, while he's killing a, you know, Bill Clinton or something?

00:45:30.940 Like, what the hell is this?

00:45:32.940 Like, I have no earthly idea what this even means.

00:45:35.800 Yeah.

00:45:36.960 Keith, are you familiar with Dory May?

00:45:39.240 Dory May.

00:45:40.780 No.

00:45:41.540 Somebody – I was introduced to that the other day by one of my followers.

00:45:43.580 It's this Japanese thing. 0.96

00:45:45.300 Just weird, messed up.

00:45:46.720 I just find all Japanese culture just weird. 1.00

00:45:51.240 I don't know if the Japanese have created it, but it's got anime images on the video

00:45:55.740 and then this bizarre – this really quite sort of poignant and not in any way a good way music.

00:46:02.560 I was surprised to find out, like, you know, a lot of people are talking about the weird culinary habits of the Chinese,

00:46:07.540 but, like, the Japanese being, like, weird sex pests actually goes back a long way as well 0.98

00:46:14.620 because, you know, like, all this weird, like, tentacle porn stuff they have. 0.97

00:46:18.520 It's like – there's actually, like – it was like a – there's all these old drawings from –

00:46:22.240 I've been researching that, actually.

00:46:24.420 Yeah.

00:46:25.340 Yeah.

00:46:25.640 But there's, like – there's old paintings and drawings from, like –

00:46:28.680 That was a meme in itself.

00:46:30.560 Yeah.

00:46:31.960 There's old drawings and paintings from AD where, you know, it's, like, erotic paintings of a woman having sex with a giant octopus 0.92

00:46:39.060 or a giant mushroom, so this has, like, a long history of the Japanese being perverts. 0.99

00:46:45.800 A friend of mine went to the biggest sex shop in Tokyo, which is on four floors or something, 0.99

00:46:52.680 and it's made with the assumption that people are short and thin,

00:46:55.840 so you have to sort of push past people that are sitting there looking at porn or whatever, you know.

00:46:59.560 And you've got the sort of children's section, essentially.

00:47:03.040 They're 18, maybe.

00:47:04.100 But being Japanese and 18, they look like children. 1.00

00:47:06.020 And then there's the sort of – 0.79

00:47:10.580 There's a children's section in the porn shop.

00:47:13.700 Maybe it's time to call the police. 0.79

00:47:16.160 Japanese girls have a slow life strategy, so many Japanese girls who are 18 years old will look, 1.00

00:47:21.920 for all intents and purposes, like they're 12.

00:47:23.580 Yeah.

00:47:24.120 And there's porn. 0.76

00:47:25.580 And then also you've got a tentacle porn section. 0.99

00:47:28.820 And there's a substantial section of this huge sex shop on four stories dedicated to tentacle porn. 0.98

00:47:33.880 That was an extraordinary thing. 0.97

00:47:37.760 As bad as, like, the, you know, the global homo-Americanized culture is, you know, 1.00

00:47:45.240 imagine if Japan had, like, global hegemony, the kind of culture we'd be.

00:47:52.720 Yeah.

00:47:53.220 I mean, they didn't ban child porn until about 10 years ago, Japan.

00:47:57.020 Really?

00:47:57.700 Yeah.

00:47:58.920 So they're very liberal on that. 0.61

00:48:01.740 And tentacle porn, obviously.

00:48:03.980 And taking your shoes off in the house. 0.94

00:48:07.440 All kinds of stuff.

00:48:08.880 Right.

00:48:09.960 They censor their pornography in a kind of weird way.

00:48:12.720 Where?

00:48:13.180 That's why bukkake became popular.

00:48:16.580 Isn't Japanese porn still censored?

00:48:19.720 I mean, I don't know. 0.67

00:48:20.720 I've never looked at pornography.

00:48:22.140 They censor pubic hair.

00:48:24.060 They censor pubic hair.

00:48:24.940 They censor pubic hair.

00:48:25.860 I'm just wondering, is there, like, is there, like, an alt-right Japanese Twitter

00:48:31.400 making, like, return to tradition memes where it's, like, one of those paintings of a woman 0.83

00:48:37.660 having sex with an octopus? 0.95

00:48:40.140 She's so dread. 1.00

00:48:41.680 Remember what they took from us.

00:48:43.080 Yeah.

00:48:46.220 Okay.

00:48:48.260 So is something like a global pandemic, do you think this...

00:48:52.620 It's back to that.

00:48:53.800 Yeah.

00:48:54.040 Yeah.

00:48:54.700 Do you think this would ultimately be eugenic in some way?

00:48:59.120 I mean, it's...

00:48:59.620 I read this, too, because I was reading up on pretty mainstream articles on the Spanish flu,

00:49:06.780 but it was striking that it was seemingly not eugenic at all, and it was affecting people

00:49:13.740 between the ages of 20 and 40.

00:49:15.260 So I guess I'm actually, you know, I would be safe.

00:49:19.400 I'm now from the coronavirus if it reproduces earlier pandemics.

00:49:24.380 But it was actually affecting men and affecting young, healthy men.

00:49:29.540 Then it also affects pregnant women as well, which seems to be, you know, going after the 0.98

00:49:37.860 most healthy, at least in...

00:49:39.720 In general, if we would look at intelligence as an example of something that we want, or

00:49:46.560 pro-social personality, then intelligence is associated with making sensible health decisions.

00:49:52.300 Right.

00:49:52.520 And also, it seems to also be literally correlated with a good immune system, and just, you basically...

00:50:00.640 It's having a high IQ, it's a sign of low mutational load. 0.99

00:50:05.000 You have low mutational load in the brain, and so therefore you have low mutational load

00:50:08.680 everywhere, so it correlates with having a good immune system.

00:50:11.340 So in some way, probably very weakly, but one would expect a pandemic to be eugenic in some...

00:50:19.380 On the level of intelligence or personality, if that's what you're interested in.

00:50:22.220 Yeah.

00:50:22.780 And certainly in terms of immune system and things like that, and physical health, it 0.98

00:50:25.760 would, of course, be eugenic.

00:50:27.600 And we've been totally unwilling to engage in eugenics.

00:50:32.660 So after the Industrial Revolution, and I think something that's more impactful, really, the

00:50:39.000 fossil fuel revolution, which is related but separate from the Industrial Revolution, we had

00:50:45.280 this massive expansion of the population, lower mortality rates at birth, and general health

00:50:52.840 miracles, you could say, and sanitation and so on.

00:50:58.660 And in the 20th century, people usually coming from the elite, and coming from the wasp elite, actually, 0.93

00:51:08.220 recognize the necessity of eugenics as a countervailing force to these miracles that I don't think 0.99

00:51:17.920 anyone would oppose, and certainly you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

00:51:21.340 If we're going to have this level of health and medicine, we have to think about its negative

00:51:29.800 consequences.

00:51:30.700 And contraception is another thing that can be added in there. 0.99

00:51:33.260 We need to think about the potential negative and positive consequences of contraception.

00:51:38.300 And so basically, there was a there was a eugenic movement coming from the elite down that was

00:51:44.680 popular, remarkably, and also, you know, among the normie population, but but also was implemented

00:51:52.920 into policies.

00:51:54.820 By the 1930s, before the Second World War, that started to be become taboo in the Great Depression,

00:52:02.600 and the ascendancy of, you know, Boasian anthropology, and so on.

00:52:08.680 And then after the Second World War, eugenic measures, at least in the West, have become all

00:52:14.700 but impossible.

00:52:15.440 If you even suggest something like this, you're accused of being Hitler.

00:52:21.940 So basically, we've refrained from eugenics, we passed the singularity with the Industrial 0.94

00:52:27.280 Revolution and the Fossil Fuel Revolution, where natural, the natural selective forces

00:52:33.400 that were previously in effect, have dissipated, if not disappeared.

00:52:39.500 But we passed through that singularity, but we're not willing to engage in conscious evolution.

00:52:45.140 And at some level, these global pandemics, or a vengeful god, if you want to think of it

00:52:50.500 that way, are going to have to do it for us.

00:52:52.460 And I know that's a pretty dark thing to say, but I'm not sure it's exactly wrong.

00:53:00.160 If we actually engaged in sensible eugenic policies involving contraception and so on,

00:53:06.240 we would have a population that is more robust and is more ready to take on some of these,

00:53:13.460 you know, kind of negative consequences of globalization.

00:53:19.100 What do you think about that?

00:53:20.540 I mean, one of the things about eugenics is that, well, like, yeah, as you said, it was 0.84

00:53:28.000 hugely popular.

00:53:28.780 I mean, George Bernard Shaw was a big proponent of it, actually.

00:53:32.220 That's in one of his main plays.

00:53:33.900 But yeah, it was a pretty popular position.

00:53:35.360 But I mean, one of the things, the way people discuss it now, as if it's a no-go that you'd

00:53:42.000 even discuss it or that you'd do anything with that.

00:53:45.020 But it's one of those things, you can't not take a position on it, because not taking

00:53:48.460 on a position on it, you're still doing a form of eugenics.

00:53:51.240 I mean, if you think of something like a child benefit, like most countries have some kind

00:53:55.400 of universal welfare for having kids in Europe.

00:54:00.580 But I mean, that's something that, you know, when it's a flat rate like that, the poorer

00:54:03.780 you are, the more money that is to you relatively.

00:54:06.660 So I mean, that is a form of direct dysgenics through welfare.

00:54:10.840 Because, you know, obviously, you know, 500 euros a month is a lot more to someone that

00:54:16.560 doesn't have a job as compared to someone wealthy.

00:54:19.420 So I mean, you know, that's a direct form of dysgenics that we engage in.

00:54:25.220 So yeah, I just find the discussions around that are very muddied and people just kind

00:54:30.720 of close their ears and won't discuss it.

00:54:32.820 But it's just a denial of the reality that we're engaging in dysgenics in all kinds of

00:54:38.800 ways.

00:54:39.040 No question.

00:54:41.120 Yes.

00:54:41.620 Yes.

00:54:42.000 There's no question about it.

00:54:43.360 Adam Perkins' book, The Welfare Trade, has shown that if you divide England into families

00:54:48.620 where both parents are working, i.e.

00:54:50.600 IQ about 100 average, families with one parent's on welfare, IQ about 90, and families with both

00:54:55.640 parents are on welfare, IQ about 80, is only the parents where the families with both parents 0.57

00:55:01.300 are on welfare that are breeding at above replacement fertility.

00:55:04.480 So the future and the heritability of intelligence is extremely high.

00:55:09.040 It's about 0.8.

00:55:10.060 Heritability of personality about 0.5, 0.6.

00:55:13.100 Being on welfare is predicted by low IQ and poor impulse control, which is a personality

00:55:17.280 trait.

00:55:17.640 And so that the future is those people.

00:55:22.280 We know he also shows that when welfare is changed, when welfare is decreased, people

00:55:28.380 who are on welfare do seem to limit their fertility more.

00:55:31.520 And when it's increased, they happily, well, consciously, I suppose, but they seem to have more children.

00:55:37.300 So it clearly is an extremely dygenic thing to do. 1.00

00:55:40.860 On the other hand, bringing in a policy of eugenics is likely to be problematic because if

00:55:45.960 it's in terms of intelligence, then it seems that once a certain IQ is reached with a certain

00:55:50.700 level of luxury, people just don't want to have children.

00:55:53.840 And they noticed this in even in the time of Augustus, where men who didn't have children

00:56:00.600 who were upper class had to pay a tax and they and they paid the tax.

00:56:05.060 They did not.

00:56:06.000 They just didn't want to have children because when you reach a certain level of intelligence,

00:56:09.960 intelligence correlates with intellect, which is to do with ideas and fascination by your

00:56:15.520 life adventures and rationalizing everything, including the having of children and being

00:56:19.880 not particularly instinctive and being able to kind of control your instincts.

00:56:23.180 And these mean that once you get to a certain level of intelligence, you don't want to have

00:56:26.300 children.

00:56:26.820 And the only thing that makes you want to have children is religiousness, religiousness, 0.83

00:56:30.140 God telling you to have children. 0.90

00:56:31.260 If you genuinely are religious, that's what makes you want to have children.

00:56:33.740 And that's what Francis Galton argued.

00:56:35.980 And that's what other people, beyondism and these kinds of philosophies, all the same thing.

00:56:40.720 The only thing that allows a society to continue being eugenic, just to make intelligent

00:56:47.040 people have children, is religiousness.

00:56:49.160 And if religiousness isn't there, then they, due to spiteful mutants telling them not to 0.94

00:56:54.660 be religious or due to such low levels of stress that you no longer believe in God, because

00:56:59.540 believing in God does correlate with being, then it doesn't work.

00:57:03.600 So I just don't see how it could work.

00:57:05.300 It wouldn't work.

00:57:06.100 People would pay the tax and not breed.

00:57:10.280 And if they did select...

00:57:11.460 I agree.

00:57:12.080 I think it probably would help.

00:57:13.860 And I'm not at all opposed.

00:57:16.100 And I say this as someone who is not a Christian, but I am absolutely not opposed to this notion

00:57:25.400 that religion is necessary.

00:57:28.540 There should be no separation between church and state.

00:57:31.200 I don't think there...

00:57:31.940 I actually don't think there ultimately is on a phenomenological level.

00:57:35.620 But I don't think we should think in this term.

00:57:37.880 I think that's negative.

00:57:38.640 I don't think we should think about religion as some hyper-Protestant private thing that

00:57:43.440 we do, you know, on our own time or something.

00:57:45.640 No.

00:57:46.200 Religion is deeply connected with our future as a group and the power of the state itself.

00:57:53.920 And again, all of this, that rabbit hole that we...

00:57:57.340 Real quick.

00:57:57.820 That rabbit hole that we went down with, you know, negative social mood and something.

00:58:01.020 And there's no question that that's correlated with the waning of religiosity and just a descent

00:58:08.580 into nihilism among the population.

00:58:12.180 We need a new God.

00:58:15.660 At least today, I mean, there doesn't seem to be...

00:58:19.360 I mean, there's probably a correlation.

00:58:20.960 But I mean, if you look at...

00:58:21.920 I'm sure Ed can speak on this.

00:58:23.060 But if you look at countries like Poland that are 99% Catholic and the birth rate there is

00:58:27.540 like 1.3% and then, you know, Czechia, which is like 75% a-religious or non-Christian at

00:58:36.100 least, has like over twice the birth rate.

00:58:39.080 So I don't know.

00:58:40.820 Maybe you can speak on that.

00:58:41.840 But at least, you know, just a conventional return to Christianity doesn't seem to be enough 0.99

00:58:46.820 today, whether that's due to, you know, industrialization or whatever.

00:58:51.140 I don't know.

00:58:51.600 But part of it is religious.

00:58:54.480 I think part of it with these countries is the pressures they were under in the Cold

00:58:58.640 War and in wars and things like this.

00:59:01.620 And they can have things which are related to religion, like nationalism.

00:59:06.220 And nationalism without God is still nationalism.

00:59:11.200 And you reify the peasant or whatever.

00:59:15.060 So it may be other sort of mutations of religion that are popular in certain parts of Eastern

00:59:21.620 Europe. But when you said, Richard, we need a new God, I thought that Kiefer's going to

00:59:25.540 intervene and volunteer.

00:59:27.920 But he doesn't appear to have done so.

00:59:31.820 So but the other thing is that when women, for example, are given the chance to two things 1.00

00:59:36.480 to eugenically select what they select for, they want people that are extrovert. 0.99

00:59:39.840 That's what they want.

00:59:40.460 They don't care about intelligence.

00:59:41.620 Ask them to make a choice.

00:59:43.080 They want they want the sort of X factor bullshitter, basically.

00:59:46.260 Yeah. So it's so that's a problem.

00:59:48.680 Another problem is that we don't quite.

00:59:50.480 It's so complex.

00:59:51.480 This there's other issues as well, like group selection and having the optimum percentage

00:59:55.960 of different types within the society when battling with another society.

01:00:00.480 There's all these subtleties which we don't really understand, which would be which would

01:00:04.580 be problematic if we brought in overtly eugenic policies.

01:00:08.200 And also, it may just be that there's an inherent limit on intelligence, that once intelligence

01:00:12.160 gets too high because of its correlation with intellect and low levels of sort of instinctiveness

01:00:16.960 and whatever, then you stop having you stop being normal.

01:00:20.620 I mean, you yes, as people become more intelligent and their G goes up, their ability to do things

01:00:26.120 which are weakly G loaded, like tie their shoelaces or driving a car or whatever goes down.

01:00:30.400 Right.

01:00:30.640 And so if we keep going like the Sheldon Cooper types and a world of Sheldon Coopers, which

01:00:35.420 is what eugenics would ultimately lead to would be a world of chaos. 0.97

01:00:38.740 So so there needs to be it's very complex road to go down.

01:00:42.640 So maybe it would just have you just have to let nature take its course.

01:00:45.580 But you can do things to slow down the collapse.

01:00:48.120 And one of the things that would slow it down would be reducing these welfare payments, which

01:00:51.640 are preposterously high.

01:00:54.500 Right.

01:00:56.760 All right.

01:00:57.520 This was a very interesting discussion.

01:00:59.280 I might put a bookmark in it unless anyone has any pressing thing to add.

01:01:05.320 All right.

01:01:06.220 Well, I mean, one.

01:01:06.960 One thing I don't know if I don't think it was mentioned, but just about globalization and

01:01:13.700 these pandemics.

01:01:15.220 I mean, one thing that experts are really concerned about is this antibiotic resistant diseases

01:01:22.360 that are that are popping up.

01:01:23.660 But, you know, supposedly one of the actually one of the main causes of that is that in

01:01:28.200 less developed countries, you have people that will take, you know, they don't have they

01:01:32.140 don't have proper medicines to give out a full course of antibiotics.

01:01:34.940 So you'll go to the doctor and they'll give you three or four antibiotics and you'll take

01:01:39.000 those.

01:01:39.340 And apparently that's that's the main cause, actually, of these these antibiotic resistant

01:01:43.880 diseases.

01:01:44.300 They're not taking antibiotics.

01:01:45.460 Yeah, it'd be better.

01:01:46.280 It'd be better if they just didn't take anything, you know.

01:01:48.800 Yeah.

01:01:48.940 So that's that's that's that's the problem that's coming out of the third world. 1.00

01:01:52.560 And that's that's the direct result of globalization, because, you know, we're giving them first

01:01:56.260 world medicines, but they don't have the resources or the education to use them properly.

01:02:01.240 And so then it's coming back to us.

01:02:02.940 We're getting you know, we're giving them the first world medicines and we're getting

01:02:05.700 back antibiotic resistant bacteria.

01:02:09.320 Right.

01:02:12.720 All right.

01:02:13.400 We'll put a bookmark in it.

01:02:14.680 Thank you, Ed.

01:02:15.360 Thank you, Keith.

01:02:16.500 I hope we can do this again.

01:02:17.740 That was a wide ranging discussion.

01:02:19.820 We'll see you next time.

01:02:21.320 Bye bye.

01:02:22.560 I haven't had any bat recently, though, so I'm not I'm not worried for myself.

01:02:33.680 There is a Chinese restaurant in Olu that sells bat.

01:02:36.740 It's you know, how you could you know, how you can select the lobsters yourself.

01:02:40.360 You know, you go out to the lobsters.

01:02:41.020 I didn't know anyone ate that until five.

01:02:43.500 Yeah.

01:02:43.940 Yeah.

01:02:44.140 It's very wings are very.

01:02:46.560 You've got to make sure it's well done.

01:02:48.360 It's no good having rare bat.

01:02:50.000 Yeah.

01:02:50.200 Rare bat.

01:02:50.960 It's not like having beef or something in France or Spain.

01:02:53.920 You've got to have it well done.

01:02:55.640 And they take you to a cage where the lobsters are.

01:02:57.780 You say, oh, I'll have that one.

01:02:59.880 It's like that.

01:03:00.400 They take you to a cage full of live bats that are squawking about.

01:03:03.660 And that's what they did.

01:03:04.720 They took me to this cage full of live bats.

01:03:07.160 So you eat the bat?

01:03:08.720 You don't want them looking at you.

01:03:10.380 I mean, it kills, eats me.

01:03:11.660 But I don't want them looking at me in the face first.

01:03:13.180 But they're all these bats.

01:03:14.820 And I couldn't decide.

01:03:15.820 But then I saw one that looked like Keith.

01:03:17.340 So I said, I'll have that one.

01:03:19.040 And so, no, no, they don't.

01:03:23.180 I'm wondering, can you get a discount?

01:03:25.820 Is it possible to get a discount at a Chinese restaurant if you bring some roadkill with you? 0.99

01:03:29.940 Yeah, very possibly.

01:03:34.220 Maybe you have to pay the equivalent of corkage.

01:03:36.800 Yeah, it's a corking fee.

01:03:38.180 So if you say that, I've brought my own live mice.

01:03:42.260 Can I sit here and eat them, please?

01:03:44.160 No, like, certainly.

01:03:44.860 But you have to pay 10% of the value of the mice or something like that.

01:03:47.500 I was thinking more like if you bring them a badger and they make, like, a big soup out of it.

01:03:51.720 And they'll give you part of it free then.

01:03:54.420 Oh, I see.

01:03:55.140 Yeah, that's a good point.

01:03:55.900 They should think about that.

01:03:56.920 Have you ever seen a badger in real life?

01:03:58.640 I've never seen one.

01:03:59.940 I've never seen one.

RadixJournal - January 01, 2020

Pandemic!

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