The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 294. Eugenics： Flawed Thinking Behind Pushed Science ｜ Alex Story

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00:02:48.600 Hello, everyone.

00:02:50.520 I'm talking today with Alex Story.

00:02:54.340 Born in France to an English academic, Professor Jonathan Story, and an Austrian artist, Heidi.

00:03:01.140 Alex grew up in Fontainebleau, France, where he was expelled from three schools for being turbulent.

00:03:08.960 He was then introduced to rowing by his father to get some discipline.

00:03:13.780 Alex left home at 17, moved to the United Kingdom to pursue his rowing ambitions,

00:03:19.960 and was an Olympian in 1996 and a competitor in the World Championship in 92, 94, 95, and 97,

00:03:27.780 where he placed in the top ranks, and held the world record from 98 for several decades.

00:03:34.740 Alex was then accepted at Cambridge to study modern and medieval languages.

00:03:39.600 He stood for parliamentary office in 2005, 2010, and 2015 in the poorest parts of the UK,

00:03:46.720 and won the right to become a member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber in 2016,

00:03:53.760 although he didn't take the seat.

00:03:55.220 He attended the MBA program at Judge Business School in 2014 to 2016 at Cambridge,

00:04:02.600 and currently works in finance as head of sales at a U.S. broker.

00:04:07.560 Alex also started writing publicly in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement during the COVID lockdowns,

00:04:14.220 and publishes weekly in the U.K. and U.S. press for The Express, The Critics, Spectator, Country Squire magazine,

00:04:22.060 National Review, and American Greatness.

00:04:26.900 Today, we're going to talk about a variety of topics, including Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes,

00:04:33.740 Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus, who originated the hypothesis that biologically-minded political actors

00:04:49.120 used to justify the claim that we are suffering from an excess of population.

00:04:54.420 And so, while away we go with that discussion.

00:04:59.420 So, very nice to meet you, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

00:05:04.300 It's my pleasure.

00:05:05.380 So, we talked a little bit about where we might want to start.

00:05:09.140 You had a bit of a biographical account that will lead us into the topic of today.

00:05:13.880 So, I'm going to turn it over to you.

00:05:15.540 Yeah.

00:05:16.820 So, I'm a father of four.

00:05:19.220 My first son has Down syndrome.

00:05:23.060 When something like that happens, things happen, and the world is revealed in a slightly different way.

00:05:32.140 When Joshua was born and we took him home, the initial question that anybody and everybody asked was,

00:05:41.100 didn't you know?

00:05:42.980 And initially, I just said, well, we didn't know.

00:05:46.380 But it kept coming back and back and back.

00:05:50.640 And then eventually, I just thought, what are you saying?

00:05:54.340 If we had known, what do you think we ought to have done?

00:05:58.820 And essentially, what they were saying is, it's unusual to have a Downs baby.

00:06:04.280 Of course, if you had known, you would have had an abortion, or you'd have had an abortion of the baby. 1.00

00:06:08.780 That's the thinking process.

00:06:12.040 And obviously, accidents do happen.

00:06:15.780 But accidents sometimes can be very good for somebody, in the sense that Joshua, I think, may be a much, much better person than I was before.

00:06:22.960 Simply because I realized that in that day, on the day that I learned about his condition, I thought the most important thing is living and life.

00:06:39.160 And it doesn't matter whether he goes to Cambridge or not, and it doesn't matter whether he can speak a few languages, and any of that actually became irrelevant.

00:06:49.680 And as my wife was crying, she discovered this.

00:06:55.200 I tried to not cry, because I am the man of the family, so it's really important that I don't, and I stay stoic about these things.

00:07:03.020 But I said to her, look, he's not going to be very good at maths.

00:07:06.460 He's going to be like his dad.

00:07:08.120 He's going to be quite clumsy, like his dad.

00:07:10.940 There's all sorts of things like his dad that he's going to be.

00:07:13.380 We will love him.

00:07:14.160 And I think that really brought our relationship even closer.

00:07:21.000 And so, this discovery that suddenly my son was the subject of speculation about whether he ought to remain alive or not, made me think very, very profoundly, in my view.

00:07:34.520 Well, perhaps not profoundly, because I'm thinking, but it felt profound.

00:07:38.080 Right, right, right.

00:07:39.180 Because I had to really go into the nooks and crannies of the thinking process.

00:07:42.900 So, this thing, this question, which keeps coming back even now, I think was the seed of some kind of thought process that started and that led me to the field of eugenics and the study of eugenics, or at least trying to understand where this ideology comes from.

00:08:05.640 You said that one of the consequences of Joshua's birth is that you became a better person and that your relationship with your wife deepened.

00:08:16.960 And you mentioned that that was the benefit of the trouble, let's say, or the unexpected occurrence.

00:08:22.600 And so, in what way do you think, more particularly, in what way do you think, having had this experience, having had your son, has made you a better person?

00:08:34.880 And why specifically do you see that it steepened your relationship with your wife?

00:08:40.960 Because suddenly I had to man up and I had to take responsibility.

00:08:45.480 And I had to, I had to be there for her, you know.

00:08:50.420 And for her in a way that was different than before.

00:08:53.020 Absolutely.

00:08:53.620 So, what made it different?

00:08:55.960 Well, because we were both together.

00:08:58.100 And this was our family that we were building.

00:09:02.220 And everybody in that family would be my responsibility.

00:09:06.620 So, it was just something like the determination to take on a joint challenge.

00:09:11.880 Exactly.

00:09:12.580 And actually, when I heard that sometimes men leave their wives because of a birth like that, I was appalled.

00:09:21.640 But also, I thought, I'm not going to be like that.

00:09:24.540 I will be something, I'll be somebody else.

00:09:27.720 And so, my life up to then had been relatively carefree.

00:09:33.800 You know.

00:09:34.100 Ah.

00:09:34.360 I was also extremely lucky because I fell in love with my wife on the day I met her.

00:09:41.020 And I married her just a few weeks later.

00:09:44.500 And so.

00:09:44.940 And how long had you been married before the birth?

00:09:47.660 Not very long.

00:09:50.020 We were married perhaps a year and a half.

00:09:52.780 I see.

00:09:53.220 So, this in some sense was the first significant joint challenge or challenge that you had encountered.

00:09:58.560 Well, actually.

00:10:00.380 Actually, the first one was the discovery.

00:10:03.660 That I knew nothing about a lot when she had a miscarriage.

00:10:08.980 It was complete.

00:10:09.820 She had two.

00:10:11.020 And I just stood helpless when she was screaming in pain. 0.59

00:10:14.560 And I wasn't really sure what to do.

00:10:16.080 And I felt and I realized how little I knew about things.

00:10:19.660 And I had no idea about what to do.

00:10:23.160 And I, apart from trying to say empty words, you know, to try and...

00:10:28.200 So, you felt at that point that there was something missing from the way you were looking at the world?

00:10:32.580 No, no.

00:10:33.440 It's just that I was...

00:10:34.740 My point is simply that when my wife and I tried to have a child, the first two were miscarriages.

00:10:41.080 And I just realized how little I knew and how helpless I was to help her.

00:10:47.120 And so, when Joshua was born, the third birth, I was determined to be a good, old-fashioned, old-school father.

00:10:58.180 And I thought that that was much, much more important than what people thought about me or my political views or anything else.

00:11:04.480 But I think it did determine a great deal about what I became afterwards.

00:11:10.680 And so, when you said you wanted to become an old-fashioned, old-school father as a consequence of this challenge, how did that manifest itself to you?

00:11:22.860 What was it that you said you strove to take on more responsibility?

00:11:25.740 And you made that clear to your wife.

00:11:27.200 And you also regard the decision to take on that responsibility as something that was transformative morally, but also intellectually.

00:11:33.900 Which is what we're going to get into.

00:11:35.620 And what did it mean to you to become an old-fashioned, old-school father?

00:11:39.760 As opposed to, let's say, as opposed to what?

00:11:43.540 Well, by that, I mean the thing that did rescue me was sports.

00:11:48.320 I got kicked out of a few schools, mainly because I was always challenging authority.

00:11:53.960 And I think if you speak to a lot of my peers, in fact, one of the friend of mine, David, I won't say his surname because I might be upset if I tell you.

00:12:01.860 But I was with his son and his son asked a question about me.

00:12:07.780 And we'd been drinking a lot of really good wine at the time.

00:12:12.540 And David just said, Alex is just unmanageable.

00:12:17.200 And I think that this is something that had led me into lots of problems at school.

00:12:21.740 And my father did the old-fashioned thing of saying, you need some boundaries.

00:12:28.700 You need a routine.

00:12:30.000 You need to be able to work through a process in order to go from A to B.

00:12:34.680 You need to be able to become good at something.

00:12:37.600 Right.

00:12:37.880 So the adoption of a disciplinary framework.

00:12:40.340 Exactly.

00:12:41.040 And rowing is brutal in that sense.

00:12:43.780 I mean, we don't run into one another, but we lift a lot of weights.

00:12:46.480 We train two or three times a day.

00:12:48.900 It's complete and utter dedication.

00:12:51.520 And this is, you know, once you get onto that treadmill, what happens is that your body changes very quickly.

00:13:00.120 The perception of yourself changes as well.

00:13:03.480 You become big and strong and fit.

00:13:06.300 And also because you don't do any of the things that your peers might be doing,

00:13:10.300 such as taking drugs or drinking wine or getting drunk at parties.

00:13:14.760 All of this is...

00:13:16.300 Sacrificed.

00:13:17.180 All these landmines are avoided.

00:13:20.240 So why did you do it?

00:13:21.620 If you were unmanageable and you were a discipline problem in school, why were you willing to subjugate

00:13:26.600 yourself to the discipline of rowing?

00:13:28.340 Because of glory.

00:13:30.140 And I think glory is important.

00:13:31.640 And I think we live in a glory-free world.

00:13:33.840 In fact, when the Queen's passing, what was interesting was suddenly that we started to hear

00:13:39.760 beautiful and sublime language again.

00:13:42.980 And it's in contrast to the very clunky, bureaucratic language that we now hear more and more.

00:13:48.340 This idea of glory for me has always mattered.

00:13:51.060 So when your father proposed the rowing as an option, were you familiar with it at all?

00:13:59.100 No, no, not really, no.

00:14:00.140 In fact, I was surprised that my father had been a rower.

00:14:02.740 But then it turns out that my grandfather was a rower as well.

00:14:05.400 And it also turns out that story is a Norwegian name.

00:14:09.540 S-T-O-R-R means big in Norwegian.

00:14:12.600 And I'm six foot eight.

00:14:13.800 And we have Norwegian origins.

00:14:16.360 And I think if you trace the story firmly back, we are Vikings.

00:14:20.500 So I think we were always boat people, in a sense.

00:14:24.200 But no, I...

00:14:25.540 Well, it's quite a transition to go from somebody who's making trouble like that to someone who's

00:14:29.800 disciplined and athletic.

00:14:30.840 And you said, so how did you perceive the opportunity for what you call glory?

00:14:37.300 Like, why did that beckon to you, do you think?

00:14:39.780 And was it related to, in some ways, to that impulse that had driven you to cause trouble to begin with?

00:14:46.020 Maybe.

00:14:46.740 I got into trouble very often.

00:14:49.820 I got into fights very long.

00:14:51.420 And I think the idea of being physically strong mattered to me at the time.

00:14:57.920 And it's something that I could control.

00:14:59.640 I was impatient in certain things.

00:15:01.620 But I liked the idea of feeling myself grow into a man.

00:15:06.060 Because I started at the age of 13, 14.

00:15:08.560 And that transition, you know, I was six foot.

00:15:12.700 I was six foot when I was 12.

00:15:14.220 And so I, going to the gym, in fact, spending some time with my dad at the gym was important.

00:15:22.680 So all of this was not subjugation.

00:15:26.720 It was the desire to do it.

00:15:28.480 It was this desire to be strong.

00:15:30.360 And it was desire to push myself and to prove to others that that child that was always in

00:15:37.480 trouble could become something much greater.

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00:16:46.480 Yeah, well, it's a lovely way of conceptualizing the idea of the regulation of aggression, so

00:16:56.860 to speak, because generally, in our culture, we presume that a child's self-expression is

00:17:05.200 limited in some sense by force by the external world.

00:17:08.700 And so that there's an intrinsic conflict between the motivational impulses of the child

00:17:14.320 on the hedonistic front, let's say, and also in relationship to aggression and the force

00:17:19.060 that society applies to inhibit that.

00:17:22.440 But it's a much better idea to conceptualize that in the optimal sense as a kind of integration

00:17:29.680 rather than as a kind of suppression.

00:17:31.380 And so you could say, if you were a child, you were physically larger.

00:17:35.360 And so that is one of the predispositions to a more, that is one of the factors that

00:17:39.500 predisposes to a more aggressive temperament.

00:17:41.740 Because if you're aggressive and little, you tend to get pounded flat.

00:17:46.060 But if you're aggressive and big, you tend to be more victorious.

00:17:48.780 And so it maintains itself.

00:17:50.160 But then you might say, well, what do you do in a situation where you have a child who's

00:17:55.800 motivated, at least in part, by aggressive and competitive urges?

00:17:58.800 And the answer should be that you sublimate that into something that utilizes those capabilities

00:18:05.280 on the competitive front, let's say, but also disciplines and harnesses them.

00:18:09.840 And the thing that's interesting to me about your story is that for some reason, you laid

00:18:13.560 out some of the answer to that, you were also willing to abide by that disciplinary routine.

00:18:19.060 So did you start enjoying going to the gym rapidly?

00:18:21.960 Like, how did that all occur?

00:18:23.220 Well, the gym was, again, it's an accident and a happy one.

00:18:27.380 My father walked into a French Olympic gold medalist who'd been a fencer, of all things.

00:18:36.680 And a gym had opened just close to where we lived.

00:18:41.000 And my father got to speak to him.

00:18:44.140 And the coach was great.

00:18:46.980 And he-

00:18:47.620 What made him great?

00:18:48.940 Well, because he was very helpful.

00:18:51.160 And he was, he also had Olympic gold medals around his neck.

00:18:55.400 Right.

00:18:55.580 He was very, very considerate and understood that there are certain things that, in terms

00:19:03.680 of the training programs were set and they were really clear.

00:19:09.420 And he then, he's the one actually that told my father about the rowing clubs that I should

00:19:16.460 be able, that I should join.

00:19:18.520 So there was this fatherly nature to the coach.

00:19:26.920 And also, it enabled me to spend some time with my father because my father was an academic

00:19:31.420 and at INSEAD and he would have worked 16 to 18 hour days.

00:19:37.840 And he was always writing.

00:19:39.300 And in those days, smoking the pipe in his office.

00:19:43.480 But-

00:19:45.320 So you had some good paternal role models, both in your father, especially in relationship

00:19:50.220 to the rowing and to his encouragement of you, but also with regard to this coach.

00:19:54.200 And then, so then it also, that seems to indicate to me too, that when you decided to take on

00:19:58.900 the challenge jointly with your wife, and because you mentioned that you wanted to be an old school

00:20:05.520 father, that you already had a model for what that might look like in mind, in some deep

00:20:10.260 sense, because you would have been socialized optimally when you were a teenager, even under

00:20:15.940 relatively, you know, fraught conditions given the behavioral issues at that point.

00:20:20.940 But what's interesting is when people talk about privilege, I do claim that I have privilege.

00:20:28.820 And my privilege is that my parents are still together and that the rock on which the Story

00:20:37.000 family was built was solid.

00:20:39.760 And that's something that I think is crucial.

00:20:43.920 When I was politicking in Northern England, in Wakefield, for instance, most of the trouble

00:20:50.920 that you could see stemmed from the fact that lots of boys and girls had no father figure

00:20:56.720 anywhere near the house.

00:20:58.620 Right, right.

00:20:59.000 And this is one of the things that we might be able to cover later.

00:21:02.480 But there's a strong Marxist tendency, what we're witnessing is the implementation of

00:21:08.640 Marxist policies.

00:21:10.100 If you read Das Kapital, sorry, if you read the Communist Manifesto, the most important

00:21:15.420 point in the book is the destruction of the family.

00:21:19.940 It's the number one thing of the book.

00:21:23.440 Nothing else matters as much as that.

00:21:25.940 And that's standing in the way of the establishment of the communist utopia.

00:21:29.720 Exactly.

00:21:30.380 But it's the destruction of the family, as Marx says it, is important because it means

00:21:38.860 we want people to have no past.

00:21:42.480 Right, right.

00:21:43.020 We don't want traditions.

00:21:44.280 We don't want people to be able to remember certain things because we will defy.

00:21:48.180 Right, you obliterate the traditions to rebuild, to build a man of the future.

00:21:51.400 I mean, Mao did that during the Cultural Revolution when he had his gang of young people go around

00:21:55.780 and destroy, well, a tremendous amount of China's immense past in an attempt to wipe the slate 0.93

00:22:04.100 clean, which meant wiping a lot of people off the slate, by the way, to wipe the slate

00:22:08.960 clean so that the new utopian man could be built.

00:22:13.000 And that's also allied with that modern notion of radical social constructivism, which is that

00:22:18.080 we're only what our socialization makes of us.

00:22:21.320 There's no intrinsic nature.

00:22:23.340 And so the idea, for example, that there might be multiple reasons for the absolute necessity

00:22:30.720 of the nuclear family as the bedrock to civil society, that's just an arbitrary supposition

00:22:35.480 as far as the Marxists and the radical constructivists are concerned.

00:22:39.780 And so...

00:22:40.420 Yeah, so I mean that we saw it in the Black Lives Matter manifesto.

00:22:43.920 That's the key point was the destruction of the Western family structure.

00:22:48.140 But, so my privilege is, if I have any, is that my parents were there and it wasn't always

00:22:56.900 easy because in those days when you were kicked out of school, there was a 1920s-style punishment

00:23:03.100 that awaited me.

00:23:04.580 I mean...

00:23:05.140 At home.

00:23:07.240 Yeah.

00:23:07.580 It was pretty scary.

00:23:08.840 And I remember, because in those days it was just one phone and we had some gravel in

00:23:14.380 front of the house and me coming back knowing that I'd misbehaved, the teachers had already

00:23:21.860 called saying I wouldn't be welcome back at the school.

00:23:24.480 And then I heard my mother pick up the phone, dial my father's office.

00:23:29.620 She spoke quietly and I could hear on the first floor my father shouting down the line.

00:23:34.400 And I was petrified.

00:23:36.760 So why do you think you have a positive attitude towards your parents given that they were...

00:23:42.160 Because you can make a case that, you know, the school, you had multiple disagreements

00:23:47.120 with the school and it's an open question in such cases whether it's the school's fault

00:23:52.180 for being arbitrary and not dealing with you properly or if it's a consequence of your

00:23:55.700 misbehaviour and they report you to your parents.

00:23:58.380 Your parents don't take your side precisely or that's one way of looking at it.

00:24:02.280 There's punishment associated with that and some fear.

00:24:05.880 But you speak of your parents with respect.

00:24:08.560 And so why is that?

00:24:09.940 Why do you think that despite your fear as a consequence of the apprehension of the consequences

00:24:18.700 of your misbehaviour, you still have this overlying sense of the support and integrity

00:24:23.960 of your parents?

00:24:25.600 Well, that's because I think they were right.

00:24:28.560 I accept that I behave badly.

00:24:31.220 I don't blame the school and I don't blame my parents.

00:24:34.980 I blame my own behaviour.

00:24:37.620 And I think one of the interesting things about the life we live in is that the person who

00:24:42.020 takes responsibility for his action is always more pleasant to meet than somebody who keeps

00:24:47.540 blaming somebody else for his woes.

00:24:50.280 Oh, it's also hard to change other people.

00:24:52.240 Exactly.

00:24:52.960 But it's also easier to blame somebody else.

00:24:55.500 And I think the introspection, and this is the sense of self-discovery, questioning what

00:25:03.000 you've done and questioning how you did it and what impact you might have had through

00:25:07.980 your words and your actions onto others, I think is a crucial aspect of humanity.

00:25:12.640 Oh, that's the confession.

00:25:14.160 That's the prerequisite for redemption and atonement fundamentally.

00:25:17.200 Well, it is.

00:25:18.040 I mean, that's the, you know, it's...

00:25:19.700 You have to know what you did wrong and you have to come to terms with it because how are

00:25:22.520 you going to change it otherwise?

00:25:23.660 Exactly.

00:25:24.220 And you have to figure out exactly what you did wrong and then you have to figure out

00:25:27.300 how you might change that if you could and then you have to be willing to.

00:25:31.340 When you started rowing, when you started to discipline yourself, were you also, do you

00:25:36.920 think, attempting to atone for your misbehaviour?

00:25:39.540 Were those things tangled together?

00:25:40.760 No, I had, there's a very romantic side to the way I look at the world.

00:25:48.080 So I'll give you an example.

00:25:50.300 I had a job interview when I was much younger and the person asked, so where do you, what

00:25:58.000 would you really like to be?

00:25:59.500 And I said, is that a real question?

00:26:01.180 The guy goes, yeah.

00:26:02.320 I said, I would love to be a knight on a white horse with a shining armour, rescuing...

00:26:08.680 How old were you?

00:26:09.400 I was about 25.

00:26:11.040 Oh.

00:26:11.440 Rescuing, rescuing damsels and in distress.

00:26:15.160 So I didn't get the job.

00:26:17.360 But I just thought I'd let it rip.

00:26:22.820 I'm just, I don't need to be, to be...

00:26:24.580 Where do you think that image came from for you?

00:26:27.820 I don't know.

00:26:28.540 It's an interesting one.

00:26:29.400 I mean, I started reading a lot about medieval history and the more I do read about medieval

00:26:35.180 history, the more intricate and beautiful it becomes because there are lots and lots of

00:26:39.260 things in the tapestry of history that are worth looking at.

00:26:42.120 And so it's not just that once you get involved in that kind of universe, it drags you all

00:26:50.300 the way to the beginning of time in a way.

00:26:53.340 Because you keep thinking that one occurrence in, let's say, 1190 was actually based on a

00:27:02.980 presupposition on a philosophy for 500 years before.

00:27:07.920 And then you start to dig into this really, really incredibly rich soil that's our history.

00:27:14.100 Yeah, well, you can see the lingering attraction of such things in popular, in the grip of

00:27:19.780 the popular imagination by, well, you could say the Harry Potter series, which has a real

00:27:24.420 medieval element to it, and also by a series like The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit.

00:27:29.940 I mean, that's a fantastically popular modern myth, and it's set in a medieval ethos in some

00:27:36.340 sense.

00:27:36.700 And that's also associated with that idea you had.

00:27:40.100 It seemed attractive to you about glory, which is also kind of an anachronistic concept.

00:27:44.500 Well, it is, but I think, I don't know if it is.

00:27:47.800 In fact, anachronism is an interesting word that we, if we have time, we could perhaps...

00:27:51.980 Yeah, it wasn't a criticism, just an observation.

00:27:54.380 No, no, I know.

00:27:54.960 But I mean, but it's an interesting term because with the Queen's passing, all those people who

00:28:00.480 were saying that the monarchy was an anachronism are now proven completely wrong.

00:28:07.780 It's not an anachronism.

00:28:09.940 The simple reason that it lives, it lives, it's dynamic, it grows...

00:28:13.880 Well, she helped ensure that it didn't become a mere anachronism.

00:28:16.680 Well, exactly.

00:28:17.360 But the point is that that's what families do.

00:28:19.500 And of course, the monarchy has a very simple, is a very simple concept to understand.

00:28:24.360 My son, Josh, understood that when she died, Charles would become king.

00:28:29.200 And if you tried to explain the French constitution to him, you'd find it much more difficult.

00:28:34.280 Right, right.

00:28:34.980 So she embodies something that echoes very deeply for everyone.

00:28:38.220 Well, absolutely.

00:28:38.780 And it's a very simple, she's the top of the family.

00:28:42.740 That's essentially, or she was the matriarch, right? 0.99

00:28:45.420 And a lot of people, a very small number of people have been talking about the demise,

00:28:54.260 the eventual demise of the monarchy.

00:28:58.440 But actually, you realize that their support is very, very, very thin.

00:29:02.800 And what you realize, it's not just on this topic, it's on every single topic that they

00:29:07.660 push through.

00:29:08.200 And the reason for this, in my view, is the fact that it's not anchored in anything, it's

00:29:14.580 anchored in theories.

00:29:15.820 And the theories, they then try to impose these theories on a very complex reality.

00:29:23.220 They're always wrong because the one thing that they don't do is try to understand the

00:29:27.400 humanity, the complexity of it.

00:29:28.540 Well, that's why they deny that the a priori structures exist, because that enables them

00:29:33.720 to remain invisible.

00:29:34.860 If I start with the presupposition that you and your family are nothing but, what would

00:29:42.860 you call, a relativistic manifestation of the arbitrary social contract, then there is

00:29:49.300 nothing to understand.

00:29:50.340 You can just replace that with another arbitrary construct.

00:29:52.700 And the danger in that, I would say, apart from the fact that it's incorrect on multiple

00:30:00.380 grounds, including biological grounds, and much more than that.

00:30:03.920 But it also justifies your use of power.

00:30:08.000 And that might be the underlying...

00:30:09.580 It's so interesting because the Marxist types tend to claim that power motivates everything.

00:30:13.720 And I always think of that as more of a confession, as an observation.

00:30:16.880 It's like, well, your ideology sets you up such that you're tempted constantly to use power

00:30:22.520 because you believe that people are infinitely malleable and they should be made over in the

00:30:26.080 image of your ideology.

00:30:27.080 And since you believe that there's nothing but power, that opens up the door for you to

00:30:30.980 use power to obtain your, whatever it is you're attempting to do, hypothetical utopia, usually

00:30:36.780 results in the destruction of many people instead, which indicates to me that maybe that was the

00:30:41.440 point to begin with.

00:30:42.780 So, okay.

00:30:43.240 So back, if you don't mind, back to your son.

00:30:46.120 You said, and we delved into that quite deeply, that his birth and your decision to take responsibility

00:30:51.700 for that, which I suppose was being a knight on a white horse for a damsel in distress,

00:30:56.480 let's say, also catalyzed an intellectual interest.

00:31:02.060 And you started becoming interested in eugenics because of the comments that people were making

00:31:08.000 to you obliquely about why your son was, let's say, allowed to be born.

00:31:12.580 And so maybe we could track that a little bit.

00:31:15.380 Yeah.

00:31:15.800 So I think the most shocking part of that was when I was walking with my son, he was only

00:31:25.280 two, a race more, and this woman came along and she said, you know that your son will be

00:31:31.800 a burden on the state.

00:31:33.460 Oh, yes.

00:31:34.840 And...

00:31:35.680 Yeah, well, you know, when the Nazis started there, before they launched their full-scale 0.89

00:31:41.060 genocidal movements, they started to clean up the mental institutions and the old folks' 1.00

00:31:46.620 homes and so forth, any people who were in long-term care, let's say, who were a burden

00:31:52.260 on the state.

00:31:53.360 And they definitely regarded them as a burden on the state.

00:31:56.440 And they further pushed forward their pre-genocidal movement by making the case that, well, not

00:32:04.920 only were these people a non-productive burden, but their quality of life was so low that it

00:32:12.180 was actually more merciful to dispense with them altogether.

00:32:15.260 And that really, in a very serious way, went out of hand very, very rapidly.

00:32:20.200 People don't understand the genesis of these sorts of movements.

00:32:22.940 But that, like, a lot of the Nazi eradication policies had their origin in public health

00:32:31.040 policy.

00:32:32.500 Yeah.

00:32:32.600 It's quite frightening.

00:32:33.440 And it's interesting to realize that the Germans, in fact, considered it a, if I'm

00:32:42.440 correct, considered it the eugenics as a medical, as a medical solution.

00:32:48.560 And that was in the 1913s.

00:32:50.900 So I think a law was passed in 1913, so way before the Second World War.

00:32:56.640 So this concept was already there.

00:32:58.500 And this is the interesting thing that we witness at the moment.

00:33:03.900 And I think that's the reason why my son's Down syndrome, I think, has been such an interesting

00:33:08.740 catalyst, is the fact that we seem to live in an era where our betters and leaders, whether

00:33:15.520 they're political or corporate, are increasingly anti-human.

00:33:22.500 And initially, it's a bit like the glitch in the matrix.

00:33:26.540 You see something, you wake up a little bit, and then you keep pulling on that string.

00:33:34.340 And then you suddenly realize that there is this massive effort to try and depopulate the

00:33:39.560 world.

00:33:39.700 You know, Freud, when Freud described what came to be known as Freudian slips, that was

00:33:46.440 exactly the observation he made, is that you listen to someone talk and there'll be a

00:33:50.860 disjunction in their speech.

00:33:52.420 Something will emerge, right?

00:33:53.640 If they say a non sequitur, or they make a joke that's slightly off kilter, and there's

00:33:58.060 some emotional awkwardness, there's something that just doesn't flow.

00:34:01.640 And Freud and Jung learned that behind that, there was an assemblage of complex sub-personalities

00:34:10.840 that, in some sense, part of them had gripped control of the speech flow for a moment.

00:34:16.780 And then if you delved into that, you'd start to see all sorts of unresolved conflicts and

00:34:21.840 pathologies that characterize the person's personality.

00:34:25.440 And so that's all there in a Freudian slip.

00:34:28.960 And people will reveal themselves in some sense.

00:34:31.880 And you said when you were taking your son for a walk, this woman, it was a woman who

00:34:36.660 came up to you and said that he would be a burden on the state.

00:34:39.360 It's like, you know, what happens is the persona falls in a situation like that, and you see

00:34:43.940 something utterly monstrous reveal itself, and then it snaps shut again.

00:34:48.140 And generally what people will do is they'll just jump over that and continue on.

00:34:53.100 But you weren't able to do that because you had this relationship with your son.

00:34:56.640 Yeah, because I think the reason why I wasn't able to move away from it and ignore it is

00:35:02.720 because it was a daily occurrence.

00:35:04.180 I mean, she was the worst one. 0.96

00:35:06.100 But again, this idea of didn't you know, it kept becoming a heavier and heavier sentence

00:35:12.700 for me to hear and to carry because I kept thinking, you are asking me whether we should

00:35:20.800 have aborted our son before we even gave him a chance to live.

00:35:23.920 I mean, that's the...

00:35:24.340 Right.

00:35:25.360 Yeah, when you had his like living, breathing reality right there to contemplate while that

00:35:29.980 was occurring.

00:35:30.860 No, I noticed when my wife had, when we had little kids, I lived in Boston.

00:35:36.440 And when I was in Boston with my wife, we were the youngest parents we knew with the oldest

00:35:41.960 kids.

00:35:42.740 And we weren't young.

00:35:44.080 And my wife and I didn't start having kids until our late 20s.

00:35:47.460 And so we were already pushing the envelope in some sense.

00:35:51.340 But in that community at that time, we were still the youngest parents with the oldest

00:35:55.080 kids.

00:35:55.780 And one of the things I really noticed was that my wife was often not treated well, especially 0.99

00:36:02.200 at restaurants, but often shops too, when she entered the shops with our little kids.

00:36:06.520 And our little kids were very well behaved.

00:36:09.300 And we had helped them learn how to act properly, let's say, in a restaurant.

00:36:13.840 They didn't cause trouble, but they weren't treated well.

00:36:16.380 And I thought, there's something very pathological going on here because there's my wife and she's 0.79

00:36:20.580 a perfectly pleasant person, although she has a bite. 0.61

00:36:23.740 And she has these children.

00:36:25.480 They're very cute and they're well behaved.

00:36:27.020 And yet, when she goes into a social situation with them, she's immediately treated like a second

00:36:33.020 class person and she's treated like, in some sense, she and the kids have no right to be 0.99

00:36:38.020 there.

00:36:38.240 And I thought, that's a hell of a way to treat a young woman with children. 0.92

00:36:42.400 It's not only wrong, it's the opposite of what it should be.

00:36:46.780 And that there's something very dark lurking under there, which is also associated with

00:36:50.600 the reasons why we were the youngest parents with the oldest kids.

00:36:54.460 That's part of that anti-human proclivity that you were outlining.

00:36:59.780 So you were experiencing this, you said, on a relatively daily basis.

00:37:03.500 Yeah, yeah, because that's a lot.

00:37:04.840 In particular, because it was obvious.

00:37:08.320 Interestingly enough, I couldn't see that he had Downs, right?

00:37:10.900 So I just was the proud father of a good-looking child as I saw it.

00:37:17.760 And I asked my friends, but can you see that he has Downs?

00:37:20.900 And they went, yeah.

00:37:23.220 And I went, oh, I see, because I can't see it.

00:37:25.400 And they used to think I was slightly mad or...

00:37:28.300 Right, denial.

00:37:28.920 But it wasn't, I just thought, but I can't see it, really.

00:37:32.560 It's weird.

00:37:33.860 Okay, so how do you, how do you and how did you account for that?

00:37:38.140 I mean, obviously...

00:37:39.060 Well, no, I just thought he was, I said to my wife, Nadine, who has to bear me,

00:37:44.720 so she's a saint, really.

00:37:46.320 I said to her, you know, he's going to be the best-looking Downs there's ever been.

00:37:52.700 He's going to be a good-looking one.

00:37:54.000 He's going to look just like me.

00:37:55.100 And she obviously cried.

00:37:58.160 She didn't laugh.

00:37:58.960 I was hoping to try and make her laugh.

00:38:00.620 So you saw the, you were able to see the person behind the syndrome, let's say.

00:38:05.480 Well, I was just, but I don't know.

00:38:08.900 I mean, I knew and I thought, actually, it's amazing.

00:38:12.620 He's quite, he looks good.

00:38:14.360 He's very strong.

00:38:15.200 He's big and he's fine.

00:38:17.440 But I couldn't, I couldn't, and I can't really explain why or exactly why I couldn't see it.

00:38:23.940 But it was just an observation.

00:38:26.920 And I used to, you know, when I used to ask my friends, they probably thought I was perhaps denial.

00:38:32.440 Or if, you know, if you're a psychiatrist, you might go deeper into it.

00:38:36.060 But I just...

00:38:36.480 How long after he was born do you say that you loved him?

00:38:40.180 Oh, as soon as I saw him.

00:38:43.760 So it's interesting that you were able to manage that despite the challenge, let's say.

00:38:50.120 Yeah.

00:38:50.900 So, I mean, it seems to me that that's something that you're relating,

00:38:55.240 is that you had a relationship with your son immediately that superseded the condition.

00:39:00.160 Yeah.

00:39:01.080 And then, and you could think of that as a form of blindness.

00:39:04.660 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:39:05.960 But I've often thought about this with children, you know,

00:39:08.160 because everyone thinks their child is special.

00:39:10.540 And of course, there's millions of children.

00:39:12.580 And you don't necessarily think that every child that you encounter on the street is special.

00:39:18.280 And then you might say, well, are you blind about your child?

00:39:21.740 Or are you blind to every other child?

00:39:24.300 And I would say it's the second that's true, is that you can actually see your children.

00:39:29.020 But you don't have enough mental energy or maybe enough breadth of character to see all other children.

00:39:34.280 And so maybe, and I've thought too, that love in some sense is the grace of God, you know,

00:39:38.660 is that if you're in a relationship with someone that's characterized by love,

00:39:43.540 you see each other in some deep sense.

00:39:47.000 And you can't see other people like that because you don't have the ability.

00:39:49.920 But it's not like the love is a delusion.

00:39:51.880 It's the opposite of a delusion.

00:39:52.820 Well, exactly.

00:39:53.620 And that's the interesting thing, perhaps, is the negation of love by, you know,

00:40:00.300 imposing and very smart people who tell you that love is nothing but a chemical.

00:40:05.080 Yeah, right, right.

00:40:05.880 Well, that's, yes, exactly.

00:40:07.580 And it produces a delusion.

00:40:10.080 It's a hell of a way to look at things.

00:40:11.340 I know.

00:40:11.880 And of course, what they're robbing people of is the most beautiful thing,

00:40:15.460 which is the ability to emote for somebody else and to invest yourself in something else.

00:40:21.320 Well, and also to live in that condition.

00:40:23.640 I mean, if you're around someone that you love and that love defines the relationship,

00:40:29.280 there isn't any better thing you can do.

00:40:31.860 And so then to minimize that, to call it some sort of biological or biochemical aberration,

00:40:36.640 which is the worst form of unconscionable reductionism,

00:40:40.240 is to reduce the highest possible goal to something that's nothing but like a trivial consequence

00:40:46.660 of some underlying materiality.

00:40:48.280 It's appalling and it's really demoralizing.

00:40:51.560 Well, yeah, because the thing that elevates everybody,

00:40:54.840 that enables you to sacrifice for the greater good of your family or whatever it is,

00:41:01.800 is that notion of love.

00:41:03.180 It's what gives you the ambition.

00:41:07.920 It gives you the motivation to do greater things.

00:41:11.160 And once you start to get into that thinking process,

00:41:18.000 you realize just how established in our institutions this idea of lack of love has become.

00:41:28.360 And so, and I think that's the, again, it's the denial of the human being.

00:41:33.100 And it's, you know, it's the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh.

00:41:37.780 In order to be a good human being, you don't go through a tick box exercise.

00:41:42.380 You have to be, you have to emote for the other person.

00:41:45.940 And this reciprocity is essentially has been dismantled.

00:41:50.820 It's no longer, you know, it's that you love your neighbor as you love yourself.

00:41:55.160 You treat everybody equally.

00:42:00.100 Everybody has worth.

00:42:02.040 Now, all of these things are reciprocal.

00:42:04.980 And I think that's the beauty of the old religion that we've lost. 0.91

00:42:09.320 The new religion, which I...

00:42:11.620 You know, this is a bit of a sidebar, but not really.

00:42:15.240 So there's a Dutch primatologist, Franz De Waal, who's a brilliant primatologist.

00:42:20.380 And along with Richard Rangham, those are probably the two top primatologists in the world.

00:42:25.160 And Rangham has been studying chimpanzee behavior for decades at the Arnhem Zoo and also in the wild.

00:42:31.660 And there's this idea.

00:42:33.360 I had a graduate student once who is now a business colleague of mine.

00:42:37.560 Very smart guy.

00:42:38.680 Doesn't say much.

00:42:40.600 But when he says something, he's thought about it for like 10 years.

00:42:43.420 And he thinks all the way to the bottom because he's also an engineer.

00:42:46.180 And he told me once that I should stop using the term dominance hierarchy.

00:42:50.980 And it took me quite aback because I understand and believe that social animals organize themselves into hierarchical structures.

00:43:01.960 And I'd never really considered the implications of the term dominance hierarchy.

00:43:06.200 And he said, there's a Marxist element to that terminology that you're not taking into account.

00:43:11.420 And I said, well, what do you mean?

00:43:12.740 He said, well, it's predicated on the idea that the fundamental process that arranges the hierarchies of social order is the expression of power.

00:43:22.560 And I thought, oh, my God, that's true.

00:43:25.100 And I thought, really, that that strain of Marxism had invaded biology to such a degree that that became an axiomatic presumption.

00:43:31.520 It was really shocking to me.

00:43:32.960 And then I started talking about hierarchies of competence and more recently of hierarchies of voluntary play.

00:43:39.600 Now, De Waal, and this isn't just an arbitrary reconfiguring of my thought.

00:43:46.520 There was a man named Yak Panksepp who studied play behavior in rats.

00:43:51.060 And he showed quite clearly that if you paired juvenile rats together and allowed them to play because they wrestle, that in the first contact, the bigger rat could win over the smaller rat.

00:44:03.080 10% weight advantage would be enough to guarantee victory.

00:44:05.760 So if you just studied one play bout, you could derive the conclusion that the bigger, stronger, and more dominant animal won, and the play was based on domination.

00:44:15.660 But he paired them together repeatedly, and this is key to the issue of reciprocity.

00:44:19.860 He paired them together repeatedly.

00:44:21.860 And rats live in social groups, so they interact repeatedly.

00:44:25.520 Once they have established that initial hierarchy of ability, let's say in the wrestling ring, it's incumbent on the little rat to invite the big rat to play.

00:44:36.760 But the big rat, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time across repeated bouts, even though he could win every single time, if he doesn't allow the little rat to win 30% of the time, the little rat will stop asking him to play.

00:44:49.960 That's a stunningly brilliant observation.

00:44:52.840 And then De Waal has shown, you know, you have this notion of the alpha chimp, right?

00:44:57.420 And everybody has kind of a caricature in their mind of the alpha chimp. 0.76

00:45:00.300 It's like chest bumping, playground bully thug, rises to the top, has preferential sexual access, and thus is more reproductively fit. 0.87

00:45:10.120 And De Waal has taken that idea completely apart.

00:45:13.060 It's simply not true.

00:45:14.420 The first thing he's demonstrated, or one of the things he's demonstrated, is that some chimps do rise to positions of sexual predominance and social authority through the use of physical intimidation.

00:45:29.700 But they tend to have short-lived rules.

00:45:33.200 Their troops tend to be very fractious and emotionally unstable and rife with conflict.

00:45:39.120 And they tend to meet a very sudden and violent end.

00:45:43.100 Because if they ever weaken, then two of the chimps that they've intimidated will band together and tear them into pieces. 0.91

00:45:50.920 And he's documented that quite continually.

00:45:53.280 And then he showed, too, that in many of the troops that he studied, sometimes the smallest male has the highest social status, particularly if he's extremely good at reciprocal interactions and peacemaking.

00:46:04.000 And he showed that the stable alphas are the most reciprocal animals in the troop, male or female, and that they cultivate reciprocal social relationships and mutual grooming constantly and track their friendship networks and are extremely reciprocal.

00:46:20.600 And so De Waal has shown, like Panksep did, that the true basis of stable social organization is reciprocity, fundamentally.

00:46:30.460 And consent as well.

00:46:32.060 Well, it's voluntary.

00:46:32.780 Yeah, exactly.

00:46:33.860 A voluntary reciprocity.

00:46:34.980 And this, if we go back to sports, that's the voluntary investment of your life in a discipline.

00:46:44.100 It's voluntary.

00:46:44.620 You want to do it because you think you can get something out of it.

00:46:48.080 But the consent bit is an interesting one because we live in an era of revelation, in my view.

00:46:55.960 Things have happened where suddenly we've opened a world for those who want to see.

00:47:02.780 That the idea that we were living in a system where consent needed to be sought actually has been dismantled.

00:47:13.360 How did we see it?

00:47:14.560 How did we see it?

00:47:15.480 Now, in the UK, we had Brexit, for instance.

00:47:18.340 It took six years.

00:47:19.920 We still have these battles.

00:47:21.640 But what you see is more and more people on the Remain side of the argument denying that the vote nearly took place or attacking those people who voted in the wrong way.

00:47:33.320 The idea, the notion that you should seek consent or consensus is completely gone.

00:47:40.460 Bottom up.

00:47:41.100 And the reason for this is because, as we said, humanity, if you think about this anti-human nature, you can say, my opinion is worth much more than yours.

00:47:55.580 We are not the same.

00:47:56.460 There is no reciprocity.

00:47:58.360 Well, and there's no reciprocity if the fundamental basis is power.

00:48:01.840 Exactly, but that's the interesting thing about the alpha male, because I completely see, and I think most of us see, that without consent, there can be no stability.

00:48:11.800 You cannot create stability out of perpetual warfare.

00:48:17.600 But the thing about perpetual warfare is that it enables dilettantes to think that something is changing.

00:48:25.060 So, in other words, they require discord in order to have meaning for themselves.

00:48:30.200 So, hatred is a powerful emotion that replaces everything.

00:48:35.840 That's, in my view, one of the things that we're witnessing at the moment, where you have one group that's hoping, it doesn't matter how many they are or represent, the numbers they represent, but they are quite happy to impose their worldview because they're righteous.

00:48:50.020 So, your theory is something like the generation of chaos produces a landscape where the narcissists are more likely to thrive.

00:48:59.360 It's something like that.

00:49:00.900 Yeah, because it's a question of self-importance.

00:49:03.320 I asked my wife what, because she's from East Germany, and East Germany was an extremely unpleasant place. 1.00

00:49:09.880 Yeah, one-third of the people there were government informers.

00:49:12.260 I know, and we don't have the time to go through it today, but some of the stories that my parents-in-law told me were quite interesting.

00:49:22.560 But what she said is, I just want stability.

00:49:29.920 In other words, I don't want perpetual revolution.

00:49:33.340 I want stability.

00:49:34.500 And if you think about societies, most people, and most of us here, want stability.

00:49:41.120 And yet, what we keep being sold is change.

00:49:43.760 Change is the only constant.

00:49:46.600 You need to go for change, change, change.

00:49:48.600 You have politics.

00:49:48.980 And the faster, the better.

00:49:50.120 Yeah, exactly.

00:49:50.480 Especially in the face of an emergency.

00:49:52.140 Well, exactly.

00:49:52.800 And so, what does that lead to?

00:49:55.060 It leads to a confusion.

00:49:57.520 It can only lead to confusion.

00:49:58.960 If the one thing that you go for is change, and if you completely disregard stability.

00:50:04.820 Stability, whether it's in society or within the family setup, it's the thing on which you build everything else.

00:50:15.600 It's even the thing within which...

00:50:17.560 So, you know, there are two fundamental personality traits.

00:50:21.920 So, there's five dimensions, but they clump.

00:50:23.940 And one clump is stability, and the other clump is plasticity.

00:50:28.680 And people who are higher in plasticity tend to be the entrepreneurs and the artists and the entertainers.

00:50:33.640 And so, they are agents of transformation.

00:50:36.180 But both of those personality elements working in tandem are necessary for, let's call it, the most stable solution to emerge across the longest span of time.

00:50:46.200 And so, you have the proper elements of order and stability with an interleaving of necessary transformation as the environment transforms.

00:50:55.520 Your dreams sort of do this.

00:50:57.380 So, imagine that during the day, when you're conscious and awake, the parts of your brain that are responsible for that operation are imposing a stable order on the world, despite its aberrations.

00:51:10.280 Because, of course, you don't know everything, so you don't map everything accurately.

00:51:13.220 There's another part of your brain that sort of keeps track of the things that don't fit in.

00:51:17.880 And then, when you go to sleep at night, you become more plastic.

00:51:21.360 And your brain starts to try to make order and sense out of the things that don't fit in.

00:51:25.660 And the monstrosity of your dreams and the, what would you call it, the cherubic and monstrosity-like imagery in dreams is an attempt to aggregate those aberrations.

00:51:40.660 And to start feeding updates slowly into the system that regulates stability.

00:51:47.220 Artificial intelligence engineers have found, too, that in order to build a system of apprehension that doesn't collapse, you need part of the system to impose something approximating regularity.

00:51:59.120 And then you need a separate system to keep track of deviations and slowly update the first system, because otherwise it will precipitously collapse.

00:52:07.840 And so there's a balance.

00:52:09.600 And here's another, this is something very cool, too.

00:52:12.040 So imagine that there's a balance that needs to be maintained constantly between the forces of stability and the forces of transformation.

00:52:21.640 And then it's an open question, how much stability you need and how much transformation, because it depends to some degree on how rapidly things are changing around you.

00:52:30.820 And so it moves with the situation.

00:52:33.460 And so you need to be able to mark the shifting boundary.

00:52:37.360 Well, one hypothesis that I think is a very good hypothesis is that the spirit of play emerges when the balance between stability and transformation is attained properly.

00:52:48.660 So imagine, so if you're in a team, or you're even competing against yourself, you're pushing yourself to the edge of transformation, right?

00:52:56.980 And if you're playing properly, you're pushing yourself so you're transforming as rapidly as you can without exhausting or undermining yourself.

00:53:05.880 And that manifests itself as a sense of deep, and maybe as the sense of deep engagement that you found when you decided to start rowing instead of misbehaving, right?

00:53:15.720 So you hit that point of optimal play, and that also catalyzed your development.

00:53:21.060 And you could say that play is reciprocal in the most fundamental sense, to play with other people, or to play against yourself in some sense.

00:53:31.060 And the sense of meaning that emerges is a signal that you've balanced the necessity for transformation with the necessity for stability.

00:53:38.980 It's a lovely idea, right? Because it gives some real deep grounding to the notion of existential meaning.

00:53:45.660 Yeah. And I think also, in order to, the stability presupposes something else as well.

00:53:54.040 So the modulation, the way that things modulate, in other words, you've got new technologies, new technologies don't necessarily mean that we as human beings are better or worse.

00:54:02.980 Mm-hmm. I mean, we have more expanse for trouble and opportunity.

00:54:08.900 So it's not, technology is obviously changes all the time. We can see it.

00:54:12.540 But actually, the reason why you and I can read the Odyssey and feel for Helen is that we can read a story from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago,

00:54:26.900 and the arc of the story remains the same, and the tragedies are better.

00:54:31.920 Well, that's sort of the fundamental religious claim, in some sense, is that the arc of the story remains the same.

00:54:37.440 Exactly. And so there's the eternal and there's the ephemeral.

00:54:41.680 And that's the, so what is immovable is the thing that I think a lot of our leaders refuse to accept.

00:54:49.100 So what they're trying, so in order to, what presupposes stability is the desire to keep something as it is.

00:54:57.260 It's your respect for something. If you keep selling the change story, what you're essentially saying is that you want to dismantle what is there,

00:55:06.520 because obviously in this particular context, because it's bad.

00:55:09.660 Well, if you're low status, let's say, within the current hierarchy, one medication is to advance yourself according to the rules of the current game.

00:55:19.960 And maybe you can't because you can't fit in, but maybe you can't because you're unwilling to be able, let's say.

00:55:26.200 And then you take the path of false presumption, and that's a narcissistic path.

00:55:31.040 But then your best bet under those circumstances is to destabilize things, because that way you destroy the order that implies that your particular contribution,

00:55:40.720 well, that there is a contribution at all, and that implies that your contribution isn't appropriate.

00:55:46.680 So I hadn't thought through exactly the idea that the sowing of chaos by, what would you say, overvaluing transformation

00:55:56.160 is another trick of narcissists and psychopaths and Machiavellians to gain the upper hand.

00:56:02.160 But that's highly probable. You know, I've seen, for example, I've had a lot of demonstrations levied against me, a lot.

00:56:08.680 And some of them were very intense and unpleasant, like very intense and unpleasant.

00:56:13.660 And they were often, they were mounted against me by people of the left, although that happens on the right as well,

00:56:21.320 and it's happened to people I know by radical right-wingers.

00:56:24.780 It was very interesting for me as a clinician to observe the people who are fomenting the protests.

00:56:34.100 In my case, a lot of them were female, about 60%, probably 70%.

00:56:39.800 And a lot of them were left-wing activist types, university students.

00:56:45.200 And so, but intermingled with those women were a handful of men.

00:56:49.820 And in Toronto in particular, and in Ontario, I encountered a lot of protests.

00:56:56.440 And at a number of the protests, the same men showed up.

00:56:59.940 And as a clinician, I could just spot who those people were immediately.

00:57:03.400 Like one of them, for example, stood with a girl about two feet behind me at, I think it was, University of Western Ontario.

00:57:12.240 It's one of the worst protests that I was in.

00:57:14.280 And they had an air horn.

00:57:16.100 And air horns are plenty loud enough to damage your hearing.

00:57:18.900 And they were blowing that air horn right on the edge of where it was damaging to me.

00:57:23.900 And I looked at the guy, the girl, well, I thought, yeah, well, you know, I don't know what you're up to.

00:57:28.140 But he was, I could tell what sort of person he was.

00:57:31.380 He was there to upset things so he could prey on the women in the crowd who were the protesters. 0.96

00:57:37.020 So he would come and advance himself as, well, I'm on your side.

00:57:40.140 I'm one of you.

00:57:40.940 And it's like, he was 100% a predator.

00:57:44.120 And I saw him and his ilk at all sorts of different demonstrations.

00:57:47.860 And so he's the sort of person, if he sows chaos, it gives him opportunities that he wouldn't otherwise have because he had no competence in any real sense.

00:57:58.780 Those sorts of men are so appalling that you can hardly even imagine what they're like unless you're very unlucky and have had the opportunity to get to know someone like that.

00:58:08.280 So that notion that chaos can be sowed so the narcissists and the Machiavellians can flourish, that's a very interesting idea and highly probable.

00:58:19.640 You certainly see it on the protest front.

00:58:23.260 Okay, so back to your son.

00:58:25.540 People were questioning the ethics of your decision to continue with his life, essentially.

00:58:33.780 And also questioning you about the blindness that you had that in some sense enabled that.

00:58:42.060 And then you said that gave you an insight into something that was deeply anti-human going on underneath the surface.

00:58:47.620 Exactly.

00:58:48.260 And so I like reading.

00:58:52.900 And so I read the biography of Keynes.

00:58:58.520 And the biography of Keynes is all about Keynes as the economist.

00:59:04.100 There are some segues into his politics.

00:59:06.660 He was liberal or labor, certainly of the left.

00:59:11.580 Can you fill people in a little bit?

00:59:13.580 Tell us a little bit about Keynes and the figure and the position that occupies now among economists.

00:59:20.020 Keynes is the cornerstone of the Western economic thinking infrastructure in a way, because GDP is essentially the way that we calculate our wealth across the world is an equation that he came up with.

00:59:37.320 So he set the metrics.

00:59:38.300 Yeah, he was extremely influential.

00:59:41.220 What was interesting about Keynes is that he is the one that negotiated the reparations that Germany had to pay with the French after the First World War.

00:59:53.020 So he was a very, very influential character already in the 30s and 40s.

00:59:59.120 He obviously was an asset manager, but he was also very involved in politics and in the field of think tankery.

01:00:07.040 In other words, he was very close to Mosley, interestingly enough, which he was our fascist leader.

01:00:14.760 And Mosley had been...

01:00:16.100 In the UK, the fascist leader in the UK.

01:00:18.240 And he had been, unsurprisingly, a very prominent Labour MP.

01:00:24.860 And he was also very interested in sociology.

01:00:30.520 So he was part of the Bloomsbury group that was very close to the Fabian group, and the Fabian group became the Labour Research group.

01:00:39.900 So...

01:00:40.220 And this is Keynes specific, not Mosley.

01:00:42.200 No, no.

01:00:42.860 I'm just explaining the kind of groups that you had.

01:00:46.920 So Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury group, but it was very close intellectually to characters like Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, and all these people.

01:00:57.160 Who were extremely influential.

01:01:00.320 In fact, the LSE is a product of...

01:01:02.880 The London School of Economics.

01:01:04.360 Yeah, exactly.

01:01:05.620 And so when you read the book, it's nicely written and obviously a substantial amount of research.

01:01:12.820 But the thing that completely goes by the wayside is the most important part of what Keynes himself believed about society.

01:01:22.460 And you can only see it in an asterisk.

01:01:27.300 It's a little asterisk.

01:01:28.260 And as I said, you read the sentence and it says, you know, John had to go to this place.

01:01:36.080 And the slight description below is, he went to speak to the Eugenics Society.

01:01:41.440 And of course...

01:01:41.940 It's a Freudian slip.

01:01:43.100 Exactly.

01:01:43.440 And so, again, it's the glitch in the machine, because you're going, hang on, it's 1943.

01:01:50.420 We have a war going on with somebody who's very, very for eugenics. 0.63

01:01:56.860 We are at war.

01:01:58.140 We're sacrificing the entire British Empire to defeat that man.

01:02:02.560 And that man's cornerstone ideology is eugenics. 0.89

01:02:06.000 What is somebody as substantial as John Maynard Keynes doing at a eugenics dinner?

01:02:13.980 And it turns out that he was the president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944.

01:02:21.200 And his last speech at the Galton Institute, Galton being the cousin of Darwin, importantly, Galton was a very, very prominent eugenicist.

01:02:34.340 And at that speech, he stood up and he said, the most important field of social endeavor is eugenics.

01:02:42.680 And so...

01:02:43.460 So we should do a sidebar quickly so that everybody understands what the field of eugenics proposes.

01:02:49.120 And the idea is, it's an offshoot of a pathological streak of Darwinism that claims that it stems in some sense out of the claim that the fittest survives.

01:03:01.260 But then there's a twist on that to imply that the fittest are therefore morally and physically superior in some moral sense.

01:03:10.040 And then, which is not an implication, by the way, of standard modern biological evolutionary theory.

01:03:16.860 And then more that you can identify those who are fit, let's say, by looking at those who are currently successful in society.

01:03:27.440 And you can infer their moral and physiological superiority.

01:03:31.380 And then you can rank order people by that superiority.

01:03:34.340 And you could improve the race by not allowing those who were substandard, let's say, to use the Nazi terminology, to multiply. 0.69

01:03:43.800 And that's technically wrong from the perspective of evolutionary biology, because it's a tenant of modern evolutionary biology that you cannot select for fitness.

01:03:56.660 So you can select for a given attribute, and you can presume that that attribute is associated with fitness, but you have no, there's no justification whatsoever for that claim.

01:04:07.100 Because what constitutes fitness in some real sense varies unpredictably as the underlying landscape transforms.

01:04:18.880 And so there's no basis for eugenics claims in modern, in the tenets of modern evolutionary biology.

01:04:26.360 But that didn't stop hypothetically biologically oriented thinkers who were saying, follow the science to lay forth a eugenics movement that did capture much of the left wing and the right wing in very many ways.

01:04:41.200 All from about 1890 to about, well, until 1945.

01:04:46.620 Well, no, actually, I'd go much further than that.

01:04:50.400 Eugenics is now the core of our modern societies. 1.00

01:04:59.680 I think it's eugenics has seeped through. 0.93

01:05:01.640 Don't forget that Keynes was one of the drivers of the formation of the United Nations,

01:05:07.840 and giving the pound sterling's supremacy to the American by allowing the dollar to be the only currency pegged to gold.

01:05:20.620 All the other currencies in the world would have to translate or exchange their currencies into dollars, and then from dollar to gold.

01:05:29.180 And that's a really important point.

01:05:30.740 So in other words, he was already going for this idea of one global government.

01:05:34.300 And there are some really interesting books that you can read.

01:05:37.720 I'll send them to you because they're so interesting.

01:05:40.300 One of them is Fabianism and the Empire.

01:05:43.700 And in there, the pamphlet states very quickly, very clearly, we start with national socialism.

01:05:51.760 We will then go to international socialism.

01:05:54.180 So this idea that you consolidate socialism at home nationally, and that's important because the national socialists and the international socialists, the communists, are essentially not on different sides of the equation.

01:06:06.800 It's just a progression.

01:06:09.160 One is national, and then it goes into the international space.

01:06:13.340 It's a progression towards radical centralization.

01:06:16.220 Exactly.

01:06:17.060 Predicated on the idea of implicit superiority.

01:06:19.180 Exactly, but it's always done with the imposition.

01:06:23.200 Force is always needed.

01:06:24.600 And you can see that you can read that.

01:06:25.800 Well, not everything's power.

01:06:27.100 Well, that's right.

01:06:28.220 And if you read Mein Kampf, for instance, what happens is that Adolf is very, very clear about his views.

01:06:35.800 You use power to impose, and you don't dwell too much in the detail.

01:06:41.220 That's what he says in his book.

01:06:42.260 He says, I don't want to be criticized because of my policies.

01:06:46.600 I just want you guys to understand the broad picture.

01:06:49.920 Right, right.

01:06:50.640 So in other words, it's a replication.

01:06:52.080 Well, yeah.

01:06:52.620 Well, and Hitler definitely led by inference, because if you look at his statements, the statements of the sort that you described, 0.75

01:06:59.360 he would lay out a low-resolution vision and insist, in some sense, that other people fill in, let's call them, the gory details.

01:07:09.120 Yeah, no, exactly.

01:07:10.000 And so the idea, when you start to think about what it implies, that booklet is so interesting,

01:07:15.760 because they talk about the idea of free trade as being an imposition on less cultured nations.

01:07:20.120 And that book says that China will have to, we will have to impose free trade on the Chinese. 0.95

01:07:27.220 It's 1902 at the time, because these people, because their culture doesn't, hasn't moved on.

01:07:34.220 And therefore, because it hasn't moved on, it's subject to, you know, Darwinian eradication.

01:07:41.740 Exactly.

01:07:41.980 And so you've got, so the reason why that's so important is because if you then bring it to the United Nations

01:07:49.060 and what Keynes' view of the world was, you can see...

01:07:52.660 Yeah, so there's a strange implication in that phrase, survival of the fittest.

01:07:57.660 Yeah.

01:07:58.000 Because in some sense, and this is the case scientifically, the Darwinian proposition is a tautology,

01:08:04.480 because it really means those who survive, survive.

01:08:08.100 It doesn't mean those who survive are most fit, except if you gerrymander the meaning of the term fit.

01:08:15.460 And you don't know what it means, right?

01:08:16.600 Well, it changes too.

01:08:17.740 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:18.300 You know, so the way mosquitoes solve that problem is each mosquito, there's not a lot of variability

01:08:23.560 in mosquito behavior as a consequence of socialization.

01:08:27.100 So mosquitoes have a lot of offspring, you know, maybe, who knows how many tens of thousands

01:08:32.020 of potential offspring per mosquito.

01:08:33.740 And there's some biological variability across the set of offspring, and almost all of them

01:08:39.840 are eradicated before they reproduce, otherwise we'd be knee-deep in mosquitoes in no time.

01:08:44.460 But you can't predict, a priori, which of the variants that are produced by a given mosquito

01:08:50.060 pairing are going to survive.

01:08:52.300 You can't predict that without running the process.

01:08:55.140 And so you cannot, again, you cannot define what's fit before it manifests itself.

01:09:00.560 And so in some sense, the notion of fitness, it's a bad verbal choice, because it implies

01:09:06.360 something like moral superiority, or superiority even on biological grounds.

01:09:11.200 And there's no evidence for a kind of ethical or value-laden superiority.

01:09:16.920 Yeah, but so what's interesting about that, if we start to go deeply into this, is the fact

01:09:22.500 that once you start to repeat that slogan, the survival of the fittest, all sorts of politics,

01:09:30.100 all sorts of things become doable.

01:09:33.000 The one thing that is removed is the emotional aspect of humanity, because you can be cast aside.

01:09:40.300 Because if you don't survive, as you said, it's because you're not fit.

01:09:44.480 And if you're not fit to survive, perhaps you shouldn't be allowed.

01:09:49.440 Exactly.

01:09:49.900 And this is what happens when you start looking into the think tanks of the Fabian society

01:09:56.020 from 1884 to just after that.

01:09:59.360 And they were precursors to the modern socialists, the Fabians.

01:10:02.280 And with the English twist.

01:10:04.380 They weren't Marxist socialists, precisely.

01:10:06.400 They were their own brand.

01:10:07.420 Exactly.

01:10:08.120 But the template is the same.

01:10:09.980 So Mussolini was good friends with Lenin.

01:10:12.480 Lenin, it's really important to realize that.

01:10:14.460 He was the head of the Italian Socialist Party, and then he became a fascist because he was

01:10:21.060 of the opinion, as was Lenin, that you could use power and force to take the reins of government.

01:10:28.540 Catalyze the revolution.

01:10:29.460 Exactly.

01:10:30.280 And so, but Mussolini himself says it as well.

01:10:33.220 Take nationalism first, and then international socialism.

01:10:36.820 That's the way we're going to do it.

01:10:38.080 And so, this idea of using regulation and global laws in order to impose on weaker states

01:10:45.680 is completely, you can see it now.

01:10:48.820 There is, the template was set, and it's been a process of establishing, through the offices

01:10:56.120 of these international institutions, a world which would be governed centrally through the

01:11:02.800 offices of the United Nations, or the World Health Organization, or all these bodies, that strip

01:11:08.620 you or me and anybody in this room of any actual rights.

01:11:12.000 And you could see it in places like Austria, where the vaccine mandate was imposed.

01:11:17.600 And suddenly, the state tells you, it is unconstitutional, but we'll do it anyway.

01:11:24.920 And the reason why is because there's a scientific body of opinion that says that you ought to

01:11:31.440 have drugs in your veins.

01:11:33.980 Yes, and a scientific body of opinion never says you ought.

01:11:38.160 As soon as someone says that the science says you ought, they've made the gap, they've made

01:11:43.560 the leap from is to ought, and science concentrates on is, not on ought.

01:11:48.440 And so, the idea that you can somehow blindly follow the science, and also that you're moral

01:11:53.220 by doing so, is about the most anti-scientific proposition that there could be.

01:11:58.160 You know, and that, the COVID mandates as well in Canada have precipitated what I think will

01:12:02.740 be a constitutional crisis there too.

01:12:05.000 Yeah.

01:12:05.400 Because Trudeau is being taken to court right now on the grounds that his travel ban, which

01:12:09.540 had no scientific justification whatsoever, even by the admission of the health personnel

01:12:14.960 in Canada, that he attempted to compel, to produce a post-hoc scientific justification,

01:12:21.280 found that the grounds for his actions were so threadbare and directed towards ensuring

01:12:27.200 his hypothetical electoral victory in the last election, that they couldn't even fake a

01:12:31.820 scientific rationale post-hoc when they were demanded to by their bosses.

01:12:35.720 Yeah.

01:12:36.460 So, but Canada is in such rough shape conceptually at the moment that a scandal of that nature,

01:12:41.960 I think a scandal of that nature is so preposterous to Canadians that they can't even apprehend

01:12:47.220 it.

01:12:47.580 But I think the, what's really difficult is that these scandals are coming thick and fast.

01:12:53.940 Yeah.

01:12:54.080 Nothing changes.

01:12:55.240 Yeah.

01:12:55.340 So the one constant that we were talking about, which has changed, the one thing that is not

01:12:59.340 changing is the fact that these characters who are intellectually bankrupt are brazenly

01:13:05.880 get out.

01:13:06.580 Yeah.

01:13:06.880 Well, this might change all that.

01:13:09.180 As soon as energy costs hit mortgage rate levels in the UK, then that game is going to

01:13:14.860 be up because it just won't be sustainable.

01:13:16.920 But that's true.

01:13:17.660 And that's why, that's why the, the, the interesting thing is that, I mean, we, we probably shouldn't

01:13:23.260 spend too much time on the political landscape in the UK because it's complex and it's probably

01:13:27.100 not that interesting in the longterm, but what's interesting here is that some big things are

01:13:32.280 happening, which prove to us, to the observers, that the current, the current leadership and

01:13:39.320 thought, the current leadership structure and the current thought process has led to complete,

01:13:45.840 uh, uh, has led us, uh, or has been led by people who are constantly, are constantly wrong.

01:13:51.900 They're wrong about everything they do.

01:13:53.460 They're wrong in everything that they say.

01:13:55.360 They're wrong in their vision, they're wrong in their strategy, they're wrong in their

01:13:59.260 use of power.

01:14:00.080 In particular, because, uh, what, what we've seen in Europe, in Europe over the last, uh,

01:14:05.160 let's say 200 years is a desire through the Fabians.

01:14:08.060 It's interesting.

01:14:08.680 I will, I will send you that book.

01:14:10.220 It's very important.

01:14:11.340 Fabianism in the empire.

01:14:13.140 Um, what you, what you see is, um, uh, people despising people who work for money.

01:14:19.980 Yeah, right.

01:14:20.540 Right.

01:14:21.180 People, the, the markets are...

01:14:23.040 Oh, that's like the Dutch not paying attention to the farmers or the, or the Trudeau government 0.99

01:14:27.400 demonizing the truckers.

01:14:28.900 But it's deeply set.

01:14:30.180 I mean, this, uh, and the, the, the reason why the Fabians decided to permeate the institutions,

01:14:34.660 that's the terminology that you, you should perhaps keep in mind when you read these books,

01:14:38.880 the permeation of institutions.

01:14:40.240 So that's where the long march for the institutions came from.

01:14:43.240 That's the idea.

01:14:43.980 That's where the, that's the development.

01:14:45.120 So, so it's really, it's a, it's a very interesting, a bit dry, but it's an interesting book.

01:14:49.640 Um, and then suddenly what you, what you see is that they notice very quickly in the early

01:14:54.580 1880s that the working man doesn't vote for them or for their policies.

01:15:00.180 Right, right, right.

01:15:00.740 And they're really upset that they really like this chap called Disraeli, because Disraeli

01:15:04.980 was, um, a, a very, uh, very erudite, smart, funny kind of...

01:15:11.180 The working class is intractable in its refusal to see its own best interests. 1.00

01:15:15.400 Exactly.

01:15:15.720 And so, so, so that's, so that's part of the process.

01:15:18.500 So there's, they decided we cannot win, but what we can do is become experts.

01:15:22.760 And through our expertise, we go through the channels and we, we enable, uh, politicians

01:15:28.360 to implement our policies because we will advise them on the solutions.

01:15:32.520 And that's detailed out in...

01:15:33.980 Yeah, it's, it's, it's in, it's in, it's in a book.

01:15:36.280 Um, uh, and so once you, once you're, once you start to, to look at these things, you

01:15:41.860 realize that, uh, the, the enemy of, uh, these people is the person that says no to

01:15:48.220 them.

01:15:48.680 Yeah.

01:15:49.120 So, so you need force, you need to, to, you, there is no consensus to be, uh, to be

01:15:56.600 had.

01:15:56.940 And therefore what we were talking about, which is this, um, uh, this relationship between

01:16:04.040 you and me, this reciprocity.

01:16:05.960 Mm-hmm.

01:16:06.460 This is a sign of respect.

01:16:07.860 It's our, you...

01:16:08.780 And sustainability.

01:16:09.880 Absolutely.

01:16:10.460 So, so if we are, lots can change, technology can change, but if we as human beings choose

01:16:17.000 to accept that we are the same, uh, in terms of value before, before God, uh, if we choose

01:16:22.960 to accept that for, for my actions, you might, there are certain things that, um, they will

01:16:27.940 have an impact on you and vice versa, then we create a society that actually is quite,

01:16:32.300 uh, quite stable and worth living in.

01:16:34.460 And if the moment you accept the Fabian premise that there is a small group of people who are

01:16:40.940 right and therefore the others are wrong, that is the most, that's when you start to create

01:16:46.260 a society.

01:16:47.040 And that's justified by reference to expertise.

01:16:49.260 Exactly.

01:16:49.760 And so there is a, there is a quick quote in that, in the book where, uh, one of the Fabians

01:16:56.320 says, we, our aim is to make sure that when the people come to the barricades, uh, to, to,

01:17:06.260 to make all the changes, the constitutional changes so that the moment they come to the

01:17:10.280 barricades, we will be able to crush them. In other words, you use the constitution and the law,

01:17:16.120 you change them through the experts and you strip the, uh, the masses, as it were, of their,

01:17:22.400 of their frightening power. Once they get to the barricades, it's too late. That's the, that was the,

01:17:27.660 that was the, uh, the idea that they were developing. And so all of that becomes, I think,

01:17:33.180 with hindsight, that's the reason why we live in this era of revelation, in my view. So, so much,

01:17:38.720 if, if, if we choose to see what, what, uh, you know, these discussions and the, uh, where these

01:17:44.400 ideas come from and really just try to, to map them on today's world, we see lots and lots of strands,

01:17:52.140 uh, that lead from the 1880s to 2022.

01:17:57.280 Do you have any sense, you talked to me before we started the podcast about

01:18:03.020 the entanglement of Cain's ideas with those of Marx and Darwin and Malthus?

01:18:07.500 Yeah.

01:18:07.840 And you talked about this profound anti-humanism that you saw manifested, say, in relationship to

01:18:14.680 your personal life because of the existence of your son. Now, and we talked about, we, we took a

01:18:21.460 pathway through the notion that, that top-down force is justified by the existence of, uh, a privileged

01:18:30.500 and fit elite, uh, with the rest of the people, let's say, being in some real sense,

01:18:35.440 necessarily expendable. So, I would like to know how you think that the Marxist ideas,

01:18:44.720 is the, is the connection with Marxism, the notion that the masses need to be transformed in their

01:18:53.260 conscious apprehension by the elites? Is that the, is that the fundamental point of contact?

01:18:57.480 So, so, uh, in, um, the Communist Manifesto, both, by the way, uh, Mein Kampf and the Communist

01:19:06.900 Manifesto say the same thing. Uh, one of them is, we will lead the revolution. There will be a small

01:19:12.980 group of believers who will lead this world or these people to the promised land. So, it's, again,

01:19:21.000 the experts. It's, it's the, that the, the reason why Marx is part of the picture, in my view, or the,

01:19:26.960 the, the kind of, uh, the, the, the ring, as it were, um, is because he sees humanity through the lens

01:19:37.820 of something that actually doesn't exist, which is class. I don't think that people see themselves

01:19:43.300 as part of a class. They might have said it, they might, they might say it in their speech,

01:19:47.100 because it's a, it's a shorthand for somebody who's here, somebody who's there. But actually,

01:19:51.980 conceptually, there is no such thing as, as, as a defined class. And you can see it in elections.

01:19:58.340 I mean, lots of politicians make mistakes and the mistake they make is that they assign somebody's

01:20:02.940 views about something on their political, uh, on their supposed social. So they presuppose a class

01:20:09.000 consciousness. And, and, and this presupposition leads them to, to making the wrong decisions or to be

01:20:14.440 taken by surprise. Right. Because the assumptions they made are not based on anything observable,

01:20:19.300 but they're based on their own delusions. You could see that in, in the U.S. with the

01:20:22.740 Democrats surprised that the working class is no longer on the side of the Democrats. And then,

01:20:27.180 and of course, they're to blame. Because. Right, right. Well, you see this in Canada too. No, no,

01:20:31.680 but it's it. If the, if the populace was just as enlightened as the leaders who were working on

01:20:35.920 their behalf, they'd obviously be, be supportive, let's say, of Trudeau's radically socialist

01:20:40.760 policies. Yeah. They're not enlightened enough for that. Well, no, of course, because they've got,

01:20:44.440 they've got real jobs and real jobs as we know. I, I worked in a restaurant when I was a kid

01:20:48.980 that was run by a couple of small businessmen, a guy who I worked directly for was named Scotty

01:20:54.680 Kyle. And Scotty was a rough guy. He was about 32 or 33. I was about 14 and he'd had most of his

01:21:00.000 teeth knocked out in fights and he'd been an alcoholic for years. He quit drinking about five

01:21:03.980 years before I knew him. Unbelievably funny person and very, very bright. And I was working for

01:21:09.440 the socialists in my town at that point when I was 14 and they had a pretty good small

01:21:13.980 business policy. At that point in my province, Alberta, there was one socialist and like 200

01:21:20.040 conservatives. That was it. And the socialist was an old labor leader and he has actually a

01:21:24.400 pretty good guy in any case. And people voted for him in this small town, not because he was a

01:21:28.800 socialist, but because he was a good guy. In any case, the socialist, the new democratic party had a

01:21:33.440 pretty good small business policy. And so, but the guy I worked for and the owner of the restaurant,

01:21:39.580 who was also a working class guy, they didn't have anything to do with the socialists. And I asked

01:21:44.060 Scotty one day, I said, why in the world don't you and Ken support the NDP? They have a way better

01:21:51.060 small business policy and you're a small business. He said, yeah, but we don't want to be a small

01:21:55.660 business. He said, people vote their dreams, not their reality. I thought that was so bloody smart,

01:22:01.660 you know. And I think that's, and that's part of the issue that's problematic with regard to class

01:22:06.520 consciousness is because a lot of people who are in the lower strata, let's say of the socioeconomic

01:22:11.760 hierarchy, don't identify, to use that horrible word, with that strata. They have aspirations and

01:22:18.200 if not for themselves, for their children. And they would like to set up a world where the successful

01:22:22.780 can thrive, partly because they would like their children to be successful. And then, so that's a

01:22:28.000 great reason. I never forgot that. And then, about the same time, I'd been reading George Orwell and

01:22:32.780 Orwell talked about the Fabian types a lot, even though Orwell had some socialist sympathies being,

01:22:40.660 what would you say, an avatar for the working class. The rote to Wig and Pitt. Yes, yes. 0.99

01:22:45.620 A must read. He said in that, he said that he couldn't understand the middle class, you know,

01:22:50.540 shoulder or elbow patch wearing socialist who identified with the working class, but was not,

01:22:56.300 certainly not part of it. His observation was part of the reason that socialism failed to grip the

01:23:02.180 working class is because those socialists didn't love the poor, they just hated the rich. And I also

01:23:08.840 think the working class has a real instinct for that working class, has an instinct for that, 0.87

01:23:13.720 and distrusts that sentiment of envy, you know, masquerading as compassion for the poor.

01:23:18.960 Yeah, but that's a really interesting one. So, the interesting thing about the dislike of the

01:23:24.080 rich is, of course, they are themselves rich. And there's a great description in the book when

01:23:28.840 they start off, or the Fabian society first meets about 15 or 20 people. And the guy just notes that

01:23:36.320 there's only one guy who could feasibly call himself working class. Right. And he was, I always 0.99

01:23:42.000 thought, it was a guy called Stan, who went there by mistake, and just turned out it was a pastor,

01:23:47.760 and he thought, oh, maybe there's some clients for me later. Right, right.

01:23:50.660 But the interesting thing is, the one thing they despised, in particular, was the landowning

01:23:56.560 class. And so, what I think they were trying to do is to find a way to become the new aristocracy

01:24:04.900 with the same privileges, and to find ways to be permanently funded. And that required the ability

01:24:12.380 to find pockets of capital. And what's the best place to seek permanent funding, well,

01:24:17.240 that's the government. And so, the interesting thing is that they did everything they possibly

01:24:22.360 could to, and you'll see in the writing, the aristocracy was part of where they came from

01:24:31.140 very often. But they wanted to be able to be in a position where they couldn't be removed

01:24:39.280 from earning good money. And at the same time, they also wouldn't have the ties to the working

01:24:48.440 population that you need when you're a landowner. Because, of course, when you're a landowner,

01:24:52.280 you work in agriculture, you work with people who are dirty, who've got dirty fingernails,

01:24:56.960 and all sorts of things like that.

01:24:58.560 Because they're in touch with reality.

01:25:00.540 Exactly. And so, what's interesting about the vocabulary used by the Fabians is extermination.

01:25:09.040 It's everything that has to do with commerce is evil and bad and dirty and everything else.

01:25:16.160 And you can see the language already being extremely...

01:25:18.140 That's disgust language, not fear language. So, if you read, I read a book called Hitler's Table Talk,

01:25:23.980 and I had learned at that point that there was a large connection between certain forms of extreme

01:25:32.120 political views and the emotion of disgust rather than fear. And Table Talk is a collection of

01:25:38.180 Hitler's spontaneous utterances at mealtimes collected over about four years. And all of 0.92

01:25:43.400 the references to the people that he wanted to exterminate are disgust language, not fear.

01:25:49.320 But that's what George Rolwell talks about. He says, it's the smell, they smell bad.

01:25:56.040 Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

01:25:57.080 And there's a result...

01:25:57.880 Which is a very visceral emotion.

01:25:59.080 Yeah, it's the worst that you can possibly say.

01:26:02.480 Right, right.

01:26:03.080 That's what he describes. But, yes, so Marx fits into this because, like all of these guys,

01:26:10.200 you're atomizing humanity in artificial, what's the word?

01:26:18.600 Categories.

01:26:19.160 Yeah, categories. And I think that that's what we are witnessing.

01:26:22.120 And then you put Malthus in there, that lays in very nicely.

01:26:25.560 Well, Malthus was the... The reason why Malthus makes sense is because he's the first one that

01:26:30.920 starts to go for economic reasons. In other words, for an abstraction.

01:26:35.560 Yeah.

01:26:36.840 Perhaps we should have fewer human beings.

01:26:39.320 Right.

01:26:39.720 Right. But too many of us. And then the concept of a life worth living. In other words,

01:26:45.480 if you're poor, quite clearly, your life is not going to be fun, right? So in other words,

01:26:50.760 rather than say that humanity is sacred and the person who is born ought to be able to live until

01:26:56.120 his dying day. And it might be tough, but actually, if he is, the more of us there are, the stronger,

01:27:05.560 more powerful we are, the more solutions we can create, the more brains they are, the more dynamic

01:27:09.640 things become. He was one of the first ones who just said, well, let them die. 0.97

01:27:16.120 Mm-hmm. Or that that will inevitably occur as population exceeds its capacity to produce.

01:27:21.320 And he was proven wrong all the time. Right. Continually.

01:27:24.360 He's been continually wrong. And yeah.

01:27:26.120 Well, the way the Malthusian biologists deal with that is they say, well, you just got the

01:27:30.440 timeframe wrong. Exactly.

01:27:31.560 Yeah, yeah. And they can keep doing that.

01:27:32.840 So that's 200 years of being wrong.

01:27:34.440 Yeah. Well, no, it'll take 500 years.

01:27:36.360 Of course.

01:27:36.520 But eventually it'll happen.

01:27:37.480 But this notion then that we hear more and more often is that the world is overpopulated.

01:27:42.920 Yeah.

01:27:43.160 Okay. So what does that mean?

01:27:44.040 I know what the planet has. Too many people on it.

01:27:45.640 So the corollary there is, there are too many people. And what does that mean? Well, we need

01:27:51.320 to have fewer. And how do you have fewer?

01:27:52.840 Yeah. Well, we're working hard on that right now.

01:27:54.280 Yeah. Exactly. We'll create a humane policy. It's a little bit like One Flew Over Cuckoo's

01:28:00.360 Nest, where you just take out the brains and you just dismantle the guy because he's refusing to

01:28:14.600 accept what you're saying. But the-

01:28:15.960 Well, I just did a criticism. I wrote it for the Telegraph of a Deloitte memo

01:28:20.520 that was published in May.

01:28:21.720 Yeah. And I read it.

01:28:22.440 Deloitte, you read that. The Deloitte consultants claimed, well, we're in an ecological crisis.

01:28:29.400 And of course, that's of indeterminate magnitude, but it's an emergency crisis. And

01:28:33.480 it's such an emergency that no measures are too much. And if we don't take the measures,

01:28:38.520 things are going to be much worse at some unspecified time in the future, according to our models.

01:28:42.280 And so the solution to that right now is to get everyone to tighten their belts, not us,

01:28:47.800 of course, because we have ample girth. But all those, without any apprehension or with

01:28:53.800 complete blindness to the fact that if you take an economic hierarchy, there's always people at

01:28:59.720 the bottom that are barely holding on.

01:29:01.480 The poor that will always be with us.

01:29:03.400 Yes, exactly. And there's, let's say, several billion of them in the world right now.

01:29:07.880 And then if you add what to the top echelons is a five percent burden, let's say,

01:29:12.680 you take out huge swaths of the people who are at the bottom. But if the notion is, well,

01:29:18.680 we have to do that because the utopia won't arrive if we don't, and things will be worse,

01:29:23.960 then, of course, you can justify that continually. And if it's also driven by the ethos that, well,

01:29:29.480 if those people were as good in some intrinsic sense as we were, then they wouldn't be in the

01:29:34.840 position where they would be dying as a consequence of our necessary actions.

01:29:38.520 And I see all of that lurking behind the fact that in the UK right now, your energy prices have

01:29:43.000 already, what, doubled, tripled?

01:29:45.240 Well, they're insane, yeah.

01:29:46.280 Yeah, yeah. And they're nowhere near as insane as they're going to get. 0.88

01:29:48.760 Yeah.

01:29:49.160 And so, well, you know, you should just tighten your belt. You don't need to drive. You don't

01:29:52.920 need to heat your house. Switzerland, turn your thermostat beyond 19 degrees, three years in jail. 0.58

01:30:00.040 It's going to be a very cold winter. Yes, it certainly is. Cold, dark, and hungry.

01:30:05.240 Yeah. And so Malthus is essentially saying there's a price to living. You know, the human being can be

01:30:13.800 discarded. The concept of overpopulation becomes an academic topic, and that's taken seriously,

01:30:22.520 so it becomes ingrained. Right, and then some moral necessity to bring depopulation about.

01:30:27.080 Exactly. And so we're hearing people in positions of, you know, of power talking about the fact that

01:30:32.280 we need to retreat back to a world where we had 500 million people.

01:30:35.720 I know, I know.

01:30:36.840 That's, I mean, that's 7.5 billion people that you're trying to get rid of.

01:30:40.840 Yeah, but they're trying to beat the communist record for extermination.

01:30:43.800 It's insane. And yet these people have, and I think the reason why I think the,

01:30:49.320 so let me just go through.

01:30:51.400 Do you have any idea who came up with the 500 million figure?

01:30:54.360 Well, I forgot her name, but it was during a WEF.

01:30:59.160 Oh, there's a shock.

01:31:00.360 Yeah.

01:31:00.600 Yeah, so.

01:31:02.040 So they just threw that number up.

01:31:03.160 Yeah.

01:31:03.320 Well, we think it's about 500 million.

01:31:05.480 Yeah, but who?

01:31:05.800 Might be a billion, but it's only 500 million difference.

01:31:08.120 I mean, obviously, it's always people like them that will survive, of course.

01:31:10.600 I mean, that's the.

01:31:11.320 Well, that's what people think.

01:31:12.520 Yeah, of course.

01:31:13.800 But as we say, the thing that we know is that they're always wrong.

01:31:17.080 And the reason why they're always wrong, because the premise of the argument is not based on observations.

01:31:22.680 It's based on wishful thinking.

01:31:26.280 And so.

01:31:27.000 Self-serving, narcissistic, wishful thinking that comes along with the privilege that's always

01:31:31.640 what criticized.

01:31:33.080 Yeah.

01:31:33.400 It's really quite something.

01:31:34.520 Yeah.

01:31:35.400 So, so, yeah.

01:31:37.160 So Malthus is very important. 0.88

01:31:39.960 Keynes.

01:31:40.920 So Malthus is important because he says too many human beings.

01:31:45.240 Keynes is important because he's the leading member of the British eugenics society.

01:31:51.240 Then Marx is important because he, just like Keynes and Malthus, says that

01:31:59.400 people belong in boxes.

01:32:01.400 In other words, they're not humans.

01:32:02.840 They are what we say they are, not what they want, what the human being himself thinks he is.

01:32:07.480 That's biological essentialism, right?

01:32:09.000 Exactly.

01:32:09.400 Or religion.

01:32:10.280 The opiate of the masses.

01:32:11.640 Exactly.

01:32:12.040 And then you've got Darwin that comes in.

01:32:14.760 Darwin writes in particular about race.

01:32:20.280 And there are some very interesting quotes with him and parliamentarians where he explains

01:32:25.880 geopolitical changes, including with the Ottoman Empire, through the lens of race.

01:32:32.360 And one of the last sentence of dissent, his last book, is essentially, I would rather be

01:32:39.800 a descendant from a monkey than a savage.

01:32:44.200 And so the reason why these four people matter is because they are deeply rooted in our educational

01:32:54.360 framework, whether it's in Canada, the US, France, Germany.

01:32:59.640 These four characters represent biology, economics, politics, and sociology.

01:33:08.120 And so, for me, that's really important because that framework is essentially where

01:33:15.160 most of our leaders have grown up intellectually.

01:33:21.480 And so, what's important about this is that we have to escape, in my view, or we have to try

01:33:30.520 and at least become really aware of what these ideas were in order for us to be able to extricate ourselves.

01:33:38.920 And so, this is the reason why I get very uncomfortable, and I have been.

01:33:43.480 It's a bit, again, that glitch.

01:33:45.160 This sentence, extremes meet in the middle, for me, is inelegant.

01:33:51.080 And it's inelegant because extremes cannot meet in the middle.

01:33:55.080 It's either science is right or politics is right.

01:33:58.040 And if politics is driven by the leaders we have now, they're certainly not right.

01:34:02.760 So, extremes are what they are.

01:34:04.680 In other words, extremely hot, extremely cold, extremely large, extremely small.

01:34:09.160 They can never meet by definition.

01:34:10.760 So, why is the issue of extreme and the middle relevant in the course of the conversation?

01:34:16.680 The reason why it's important is because we have to be able to understand the world around us.

01:34:21.800 And we keep being shifted from, we keep talking about extreme right, extreme left.

01:34:25.960 But actually, we need to understand that there is no difference between one and the other.

01:34:30.440 And that's the reason why this framework, intellectually, I think is a nice way of explaining it.

01:34:37.240 It's this proclivity for centralization.

01:34:39.400 Exactly, human beings, a small minority of people, human beings, you can jettison them. 0.89

01:34:47.160 They are irrelevant.

01:34:48.600 Class matters, race matters, or your capabilities, all of this.

01:34:55.960 Your humanity is completely stripped, right?

01:34:58.600 So, actually, what we see when we think about this like a stadium or an arena is that Adolf is to Stalin, like the bronze medalist, is to the gold medalist.

01:35:11.480 They are standing in the same arena, competing in the same sport, facing in the same way.

01:35:16.040 I see what you mean.

01:35:16.600 And so, what they have is that they are all, the recipients, whether it's Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all these guys, have all the same ideas.

01:35:26.840 So, it's that field that is so important, in my view.

01:35:30.680 And what is the extreme opposite of these views?

01:35:36.280 Yeah, that is a question.

01:35:38.360 It's love your neighbor as you love yourself.

01:35:40.760 I thought about it as the spirit of playful reciprocity.

01:35:44.840 It's the opposite of power.

01:35:46.040 Exactly.

01:35:46.600 It's love your neighbor as you love yourself.

01:35:48.520 Yeah.

01:35:48.840 It's, we are made in the image of God.

01:35:52.200 Yeah.

01:35:52.520 Reciprocity.

01:35:53.480 This is what we've been talking about.

01:35:55.560 And consent and voluntary association.

01:35:57.240 Absolutely.

01:35:57.800 Yeah.

01:35:58.440 And so, there is an extreme, but the extreme is not either left or right.

01:36:02.360 The, we have to, so, if what I'm saying makes sense, it's a bit long-winded, I know, but it's because, you know, sometimes we have to unpack certain ideas and everything else.

01:36:12.200 I think the important thing there is to realize that whether the totalitarians themselves all operate under the same presumptions, that's what we're facing.

01:36:23.720 That's what we're facing.

01:36:25.080 And technology gives them a power they didn't have before.

01:36:28.440 But there is hope, as there always is.

01:36:31.560 The hope is that we rediscover our humanity.

01:36:34.440 And there is a body of texts that says just that.

01:36:38.120 Yeah.

01:36:38.360 It's just that we need to rediscover it.

01:36:40.280 And we need to be very clear about the roots of these ideologies.

01:36:46.440 Well, I've been talking today to Mr. Ellick's story about, well, his personal experiences on the familial front and the rabbit hole, let's say, that that led him down morally in relationship to his wife and also intellectually.

01:37:04.200 And we've attempted, as a consequence of this conversation, to draw parallels both biographical and conceptual between what he stumbled across or what was placed in front of him in the, what would you say, in the form of a challenge and responsibility that he accepted and some visions he had about the part of the underlying spirit, pathological spirit of the totalitarian impulses of the present age.

01:37:31.000 And so thank you very much for speaking with me and also for providing these readings.

01:37:36.040 I will make a list of the books that we discussed, Fabianism and the Empire and Darwin's Descent, as well as John Maynard Keynes' biography.

01:37:45.280 I'll put those in the links.

01:37:46.600 And thank you to all who are watching and listening.

01:37:49.220 Sidelsky is the author.

01:37:50.840 Lord Sidelsky.

01:37:52.200 Of the Keynes.

01:37:54.480 And Sidelsky?

01:37:56.520 You're putting me on the spot.

01:37:57.580 No, that's okay.

01:37:58.200 That's okay.

01:37:58.760 That's fine.

01:37:59.360 We'll put it in the link.

01:38:00.140 Well, so thank you very much.

01:38:01.160 It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

01:38:02.880 Thank you very much.

01:38:03.420 Yeah.

01:38:03.760 Hello, everyone.

01:38:06.480 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

01:38:13.020 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 06, 2022

294. Eugenics： Flawed Thinking Behind Pushed Science ｜ Alex Story

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