429. The Psychology of Social Status and Class ｜ Rob Henderson
Summary
Rob Henderson is a novelist, a public intellectual, a psychologist, and author of the recent book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, which was released in February 2019. In this episode, we talk about Rob's experience growing up in the foster care system in the United States, in California, and his transformation, sequential transformations of personality and status as he moved from a fragmented and chaotic childhood upbringing into the military, and then to Yale and Cambridge, and we review his book, the autobiography that s laid out in this book, talking about his early experiences and his developing ideas of family fragmentation, as well as the manner in which that fragmentation has been aided and abetted by the same elites that Rob studied with at Yale and perhaps to a lesser degree at Cambridge. We also talk about censorship, and Rob s experience with it, and how it has affected his career and his book. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. . Subscribe to Dailywireplus on Dr. P.co/Dailywireplus to get notified when new episodes of Dailywire Plus are available. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you can stay up to date with the latest episodes and get the latest updates on what's going on in your favorite shows and social meds and resources. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on your favourite podchances and social media platforms wherever you re listening to the most important things you care about the most. You get the most authentic version of the most influential podcast on the most profound and influential podcast in the most powerful things in the world. You re not going to get the freshest version of what s going to be the most impactful podcast on what matters most influential on your day to day, right there, no matter where you listen to it! Thank you for listening to this podcast?
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420
Hello, everybody. I'm talking today to Dr. Rob Henderson, who's a novelist and a public intellectual, a psychologist,
00:01:17.600
and author of the recent book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class, which was released in February.
00:01:26.940
And we really talk about not so much his book exactly, although also that, but Rob's experience growing up in the foster care system in the United States, in California,
00:01:38.600
and his transformation, sequential transformations of personality and status as he moved from the foster care system,
00:01:48.740
very fragmented and chaotic childhood upbringing, into the military, and then to Yale and to Cambridge.
00:01:56.900
And so quite an upward arc on the academic and intellectual side.
00:02:02.220
And we review his book, the autobiography that's laid out in this book, talking about his early experiences and concentrating as well on his developing ideas of family fragmentation
00:02:15.100
and the manner in which that fragmentation has been aided and abetted by the same elites, essentially, that Rob studied with at Yale and perhaps to a lesser degree at Cambridge.
00:02:27.100
And so he's the originator of the notion of luxury beliefs, right?
00:02:31.300
The idea that the elite classes who are yammering constantly about privilege have, as one of the privileges they're unwilling to discuss,
00:02:42.720
the privilege of adopting ideas that are very, very harmful to dispossessed people, especially those who are economically dispossessed.
00:02:52.100
They have these ideas of unstable family structure, for example, that when implemented in the real world are absolutely catastrophic.
00:03:06.200
So I just reread your book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family and social class last week.
00:03:12.680
And I found some topics that I'd really like to zero in on.
00:03:17.240
But the first thing I'd like to know is, when exactly was your book published and how is it doing?
00:03:26.120
So as of this conversation, just a few days ago, I think it's doing well.
00:03:32.760
A lot of my Substack subscribers are leaving positive feedback on Goodreads and on Amazon.
00:03:43.640
And so far, I've been really pleased with how things have developed.
00:03:51.060
Initially, my publisher and I thought we'd do some kind of a mini book tour, maybe visit some bookstores, do some book signings.
00:03:58.240
And that ended up not going through, which was really disappointing for me.
00:04:02.560
But fortunately, others have stepped into the breach, and we've been able to do some events outside of the bookstore promo circuit.
00:04:12.440
So that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I saw some allusion to that probably on X.
00:04:19.620
So why have you been unable to arrange a standard book tour in bookshops?
00:04:27.800
I mean, you'd assume that, you know, bookshops would want to sell books, since that's what they do.
00:04:35.720
And, you know, I ran into trouble with booksellers with my books because they would, well, they certainly didn't promote them, and they often hid them.
00:04:49.460
It might have had a positive effect, all things considered, because it was publicized.
00:04:52.960
But still, to call it appalling is to say almost nothing.
00:04:56.680
It's this kind of underground shadow banning that seems to be a characteristic of our age.
00:05:07.600
Because, you know, you'd think that your book, if your book would have been published in the 60s, it would have been something like a clarion call to the left.
00:05:20.020
Right, because you grew up under restricted circumstances, to say the least.
00:05:26.760
And it's a tale of you prevailing despite that.
00:05:30.460
It isn't the sort of book that you would think would attract censorship attention.
00:05:38.960
Like, you're not the guy to attract that attention fundamentally.
00:05:46.840
I didn't think that my book was particularly controversial.
00:05:50.380
But perhaps my sense of these things, you know, I don't know how much it can be trusted.
00:05:56.600
Because the line is always moving constantly as far as what's acceptable versus unacceptable and the line around political correctness and so forth.
00:06:03.920
But I think the message in my book was perhaps to some degree unfashionable.
00:06:08.080
I write in the book about the importance of responsibility, taking control of your life.
00:06:14.380
In the later chapters of the book, I discuss some of the phenomena around elite universities, the self-inflicted controversies at Yale and some of the other Ivy League schools.
00:06:25.420
I describe luxury beliefs and point out some of the hypocrisy of the elites.
00:06:30.560
And I think a lot of people who run bookstores maybe didn't like that message very much.
00:06:35.460
It's not a very trendy message to describe because I don't attribute a lot of the difficulties that my friends and I experienced growing up to systemic forces or to other fashionable sources.
00:06:57.400
Well, I focus a lot on family and the deterioration of family.
00:07:01.100
And that is not a—that's not a topic that a lot of educated elites want to talk about.
00:07:08.760
The other—so that's one possibility for what was happening with the bookstores and why I got frozen out.
00:07:13.400
The other is the associations that I have, some of the endorsements.
00:07:17.900
And so the back of the book, I have endorsements from, you know, people like Nicholas Christakis and people like J.D. Vance.
00:07:28.660
And there's a blurb from you as well, Dr. Peterson.
00:07:33.220
Well, a friend of mine actually showed me—he was at a bookstore recently, and he showed me that there's a sticker.
00:07:38.580
You know, there's the book, and then they have the sticker of the book, the bookstore price with their logo.
00:07:43.200
And there were two copies of my book, and it was your name carefully covered with these stickers of the bookstore just covering Jordan B. Peterson.
00:07:53.320
And if it was one book, maybe a coincidence, both books, I thought there was—that's, you know, that was intentional.
00:08:01.460
But the thing is, even that, I think those two possible reasons are intertwined because you deliver this message as well about responsibility of family of—I think you and I, you know, we discuss a lot of the same issues and a lot of the same social ills that are plaguing society.
00:08:18.920
And so the bookstore promo circuit was shocking to me because I thought that I would have been kind of the right person to do that.
00:08:26.320
But, you know, there are sort of big-name people, you know, there are certain people, certain authors, if they were to do a book signing at a bookstore, it wouldn't work because they're too famous and too well-known, and the store would just get overrun.
00:08:39.940
And then on the other hand, there are authors who don't have a lot of traction online, not a lot of presence in social media and so on, and they wouldn't be able to attract very many people to come for a signing.
00:08:49.480
Whereas for someone like me, I've done a few events now, I'm out here in New York, and I can attract a few dozen people.
00:08:55.400
And that's roughly the right kind of crowd you would expect for a bookstore signing.
00:09:03.100
But, you know, I would look at other authors who are doing bookstore signings, and they, even if they don't have the same online presence as me, they have messages that the legacy media really like.
00:09:17.700
There's that recent memoir, In Defense of Polyamory, of Open Marriages, of, you know, and these bookstores love to host authors like that because it's provocative and interesting, and it promotes a certain dogma, and my book is not like that.
00:09:37.180
And I think that's one possible reason they didn't want me.
00:09:39.500
Well, the funny, one of the things about your book is that it's, in many ways, it's not political.
00:09:47.700
You know, I mean, my sense of your book was that you detailed out the consequence of having your family life fragmented, and the consequences you observed in the kids that you associated with of having their family lives fragmented, right?
00:10:08.160
And you weren't, most of what you said by doing so was implicit rather than explicit, right?
00:10:17.560
You grounded the arguments in your lived experience, so to speak.
00:10:23.520
I mean, that's not all you do because, well, you also make reference to the relevant research literature.
00:10:28.440
But it's appalling, indeed, that you're not encouraged to tell your story because it's a very interesting story, and anyone with any sense would pay attention to it.
00:10:41.280
I'll tell you part of the reason it struck me, but maybe what I'll let you do first, why don't you just tell everybody who's watching and listening, just give them an outline of the book's structure.
00:10:50.400
And so they'll have a better sense, if they haven't read the book, of what we're talking about.
00:10:55.460
So it's an autobiography, but why don't you take it from the top and just walk people through it?
00:11:00.660
Well, I wrote this memoir describing my very unusual trajectory into higher education and some of the lessons and observations I picked up along the way.
00:11:18.140
She came to the U.S. as a young woman to study.
00:11:20.460
She became addicted to drugs and was unable to care for me.
00:11:28.060
And then eventually we settled in this slum apartment in L.A.
00:11:42.600
She would tie me to a chair with a bathrobe belt while she would get high.
00:11:50.020
She would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favors for drugs.
00:11:58.060
And by the way, I know all of this information because later I received this thick document full of information from social workers, forensic psychologists, and others who were involved in my case when I was in the foster care system in L.A.
00:12:09.420
And so I read these as an adult as I was writing the book to prepare.
00:12:23.420
They heard me crying and struggling to break free from this chair.
00:12:28.700
And she's questioned by the police and then later by forensic psychologists asking who's Robert's father, you know, what's going on in this kid's life.
00:12:41.540
She claimed that my father's name was Robert and that's who I was named after.
00:12:44.860
But that was the extent of the information she could provide for them.
00:12:51.420
I was placed into the Los Angeles County foster care system and spent the next just shy of five years living in seven different homes all across L.A.
00:13:01.760
And how old were you when that happened, when you were taken away from her?
00:13:08.500
And then you spent the next seven years in a combination of homes.
00:13:14.180
Later, I did get some information about my birth father.
00:13:18.460
So I actually took a 23andMe genetic ancestry test last year.
00:13:22.840
Went my whole life not knowing this, but I'm half Hispanic on my father's side.
00:13:29.160
I posted this on X that, you know, I wish I had known this when I was applying to colleges.
00:13:33.460
But, you know, a friend of mine, I showed him the results.
00:13:37.780
And he was like, okay, so, you know, you were sort of Asian mixed race.
00:13:40.700
He was like, you know, you went to bed white adjacent and you woke up as an underrepresented minority.
00:13:48.560
And so spent, you know, I lived in El Monte, in San Gabriel Valley.
00:13:54.860
These are kind of rundown areas in Los Angeles.
00:13:57.900
Some of these foster homes had upwards of eight to 10 kids living in them.
00:14:05.000
I mean, the foster system in the U.S. in general is extremely stressed as a system.
00:14:16.320
It was two bunk beds, two kids on the top bunk, two kids on the bottom.
00:14:19.660
There are just so many children who need homes and not very many foster parents available.
00:14:25.700
And so the tacit agreement seems to be that, you know, as long as kids are being fed and aren't actively being abused, that it's better for them to be in one of these homes than to be sleeping on the street, which is true.
00:14:44.200
And it's just impossible to supply care for that many kids in, you know, for a limited number of adults.
00:14:51.960
And so I document these experiences in these homes.
00:14:59.720
But one reason was the level of uncertainty and instability.
00:15:04.200
Because not only would I not know how long I would be in any particular home, but sometimes I'd enter a foster home and I'd befriend some of the other kids there.
00:15:17.660
And maybe someone from their family of origin would reenter the picture.
00:15:22.640
And so the kid would return to their aunt or mother or family member, or they'd go to another home.
00:15:29.340
And so, you know, it was just a lot of, I don't know where I'm going to be.
00:15:32.920
I don't know where these kids around me, how much longer they're going to be around.
00:15:36.160
And then eventually, after seven different homes in this cycle, I was adopted by this working class family.
00:15:46.540
And we settled in this kind of dusty town in Northern California called Red Bluff, which is located in one of the poorest counties in the state.
00:16:00.340
But in hindsight, you know, having read a lot about class and family formation and what's occurring across the country,
00:16:08.200
I got this front row seat to witness firsthand the kind of family breakdown that scholars like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and others have been documenting over the last few decades.
00:16:22.140
And so my adoptive parents divorced, and there was a lot of chaos and financial catastrophe and drama, not just in my life with this adoptive family, but the lives of my close friends and those around me in this blue-collar town.
00:16:37.400
And I described some of my friends' experiences and their outcomes as well in the book.
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I mean, so you end up in a family that's actually reasonably stable for some period of time, although it had its instabilities as well.
00:18:38.720
And you actually, this is another reason maybe why your book is contentious,
00:18:42.100
because you actually have pretty positive things to say about your military experience, all things considered.
00:18:47.500
I mean, I think you ran into its limitations for you after it had disciplined you to some degree.
00:18:55.640
But you certainly do point out that for you, especially at that time in your life,
00:19:02.180
the predictability and relative severity of discipline, predictable severity of discipline, was actually very good for you.
00:19:10.840
And you found mentors and a pathway in the military that put you on a solid track.
00:19:25.460
I mean, enlisting in the first place was, it was not the most well thought through decision.
00:19:31.160
By the time I was 17, going through all of these experiences, I just knew that the path I was on was not the right path.
00:19:40.620
I saw, by this point, I was sort of self-aware and reflective enough that I saw where my life was headed,
00:19:49.080
I worked as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant, and then I was a bag boy at a grocery store.
00:19:56.740
And I had some older male co-workers in their early, mid-20s.
00:20:01.460
And I would interact with them and hang out with them.
00:20:03.940
And, you know, on the one hand, I was 17, and I kind of thought these guys were cool
00:20:07.800
because they'd buy beer and weed for my friends and I.
00:20:10.540
And, you know, they were, you know, they were just older, cool guys who had access to things that my friends and I couldn't access.
00:20:15.360
But I did, even at that time, I did think it was strange that some, you know, 25-year-old guy would want to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers and drink beer with us.
00:20:25.780
And I thought to myself, is this what I want to be when I'm 25?
00:20:30.200
And, you know, that kind of carefree life, living weekend to weekend, is fun when you're 17 or 18.
00:20:35.260
But when you're 25, it just seemed a little pathetic.
00:20:51.380
I mean, well, I knew my options, as far as university were concerned, were basically non-existent.
00:20:56.580
But one of my male high school teachers pulled me aside one day.
00:21:00.720
And he, you know, initially, during the school year, he would sort of prod me and berate me and say,
00:21:08.200
why aren't you doing your homework, what's going on at home, and I would blow him off or I would backtalk.
00:21:14.280
And then eventually, I think he kind of gave up that route and just started talking to me and asking me, you know,
00:21:20.660
we talk about sports or we talk about whatever television, we just talk about whatever was interesting to me.
00:21:26.240
And one day, he showed me a picture of himself in an Air Force uniform on his computer.
00:21:32.280
He pulled up this photo, and he basically said, this might be an option for you.
00:21:36.540
He said, you know, I can tell that you're not academically focused at the moment,
00:21:42.200
but I can tell you're a smart kid, and this might be a good option for you.
00:21:45.480
And so that, you know, that was one of the things that planted the idea in my mind.
00:21:52.580
I lived with my friend and his brother my senior year of high school.
00:21:56.440
And their father had also been in the Air Force, and he tossed that idea out to me.
00:22:00.860
And so there were these kind of male figures in my life, not quite role models,
00:22:07.520
And at that time, I probably wasn't aware of this, but I was longing for that kind of guidance
00:22:13.380
from some older male mentor or figure, just someone who could give me some advice
00:22:31.420
I had to have my adoptive mother sign a, I mean, essentially it was a permission slip
00:22:38.740
I was the youngest guy in my military unit in basic training.
00:22:42.040
And, you know, in hindsight, that was probably the best decision I ever made
00:22:45.920
because it completely removed me from all of the bad influences of where I was growing up
00:22:51.580
and all of my, all of the sort of, all of the freedom that my friends and I had.
00:23:00.980
So a friend of mine had been sentenced to prison.
00:23:03.060
And when he got out, I met him, you know, we, we met at a bar, had some beers and I was
00:23:07.400
talking to him and we kind of came to this same conclusion around the benefits of limitations
00:23:12.500
and constraints where we both talked about, you know, I was telling him about my experiences
00:23:17.040
in the military and basic training and all this stuff.
00:23:19.580
And he was telling me about the routine and the mundane, everyday, structured life of prison.
00:23:26.900
And we both came to this conclusion that we both hated it at first, but then after a time,
00:23:32.280
we grew to appreciate it for what it did for us, for providing these boundaries.
00:23:39.480
He, he actually said, uh, now that he was out, he actually sometimes missed it.
00:23:43.120
He missed having that predictability and that routine and that structure.
00:23:46.760
And neither one of us had this when we were growing up.
00:23:49.560
And so the military did sort of contain my impulses and give me some structure and channeled
00:23:54.920
some of my aggressive and impulsive energy toward productive ends.
00:23:58.900
In the book, I write about the young male syndrome and how the military finds ways to direct that
00:24:08.320
Well, you know, the, the, the, the standard hypothesis for hardheaded criminologists with
00:24:15.960
regards to incarceration is pretty, it's pretty blunt and pretty straightforward.
00:24:20.820
You can, there, you know, you know, of course, about the age crime curve.
00:24:25.720
So I think criminality among men peaks at 19 and then it precipitously drops off after 26.
00:24:32.340
And what prison does in many ways is segregate very badly socialized men until they're, until
00:24:44.320
Now, you know, it doesn't do an optimal job of that, but the standard penological doctrine
00:24:49.440
is it isn't rehabilitation even it's housing, especially for the repeat offenders.
00:24:55.280
It's housing till they, they say burn out, but that isn't really what happens.
00:24:59.780
And I think what happens if you grow up in a very, very chaotic environment where there's
00:25:05.400
very little attention paid to the future and everything's about the moment, that there
00:25:11.280
is no structure that facilitates cortical maturation, essentially.
00:25:17.120
You know, you can imagine that all those underlying competing motivational drives, sex, power, aggression,
00:25:24.420
you know, the standard Freudian panoply, they have to be brought together under the rubric of
00:25:38.160
You know, Freud talked about inhibition of aggression and inhibition of sexuality, but that's not a smart way of thinking about it.
00:25:44.080
That was a major error on Freud's part because it's not inhibition, it's integration.
00:25:50.620
And the cortex is an inhibitory organ, but it's an integrating organ more than anything else.
00:25:56.260
And part of the reason that you were crying out, I would say, in the book for guidance is because you were looking for a story that represented a mode of being that would be, that is, in fact, the pathway to maturity.
00:26:11.940
I'll try this out on you and you can tell me what you think about it.
00:26:14.380
So the more immature you are, the more you're dominated by motivational and emotional drives, and they have a very short-term time horizon.
00:26:28.220
So if you're anxious, you want to stop being anxious now.
00:26:30.800
If you're in an incentive-reward state, excited and enthusiastic, you want gratification now.
00:26:37.080
And now means what's pleasurable in the moment.
00:26:40.220
What maturation means is what works for you in the widest variety of situations over the longest possible span of time.
00:26:51.120
It means what's good for you and everyone around you in multiple situations for the longest period of time.
00:26:58.960
Now, you need a certain amount of stability in your environment for an attitude like that to even pay off.
00:27:03.980
But I don't think there's any difference between that expansion of time frame and the integration of lower-order drives and emotions and maturation.
00:27:15.220
And if you're in a chaotic environment, see, the other thing, too, and this is something that's relevant about your memoirs,
00:27:22.000
is my sense has always been that a child that's neurologically intact needs one good model.
00:27:37.700
But then you put it together piecemeal from the fragments of people you met as well.
00:27:45.500
And part of the problem with fragmented families is that zero role models is frequently the case.
00:27:55.660
And so there's just nothing for a young person to grab onto.
00:27:59.020
The other thing that struck me about—there's many things that struck your book about your book.
00:28:02.660
Another one of the things that struck me, too, is that—and I learned this a while back—is that schools are absolutely appalling,
00:28:10.480
appalling beyond comprehension, at helping young children plan.
00:28:17.900
There's—I built a program online called Future Authoring that helps people plan.
00:28:22.320
And if you give that program to young men before they go to college—this is especially ones true for ones that don't have a very good academic background.
00:28:30.260
If they sit down and write a plan for 90 minutes, unsupervised, with no feedback on the plan, they're 50% less likely to drop out.
00:28:47.520
And what that points to is the fact that no one ever sat them down and said,
00:28:59.160
Like, you could take control of your life and you could be somewhere in five years.
00:29:06.980
Now, I noticed in your book, you know, when people did point that out to you, that was like a life raft for you.
00:29:12.820
And you make that point clear with the story about seeing the older guy that you talked about in uniform.
00:29:20.820
It's some vision of at least a possible future.
00:29:25.400
And it was, yeah, I didn't have a lot of stable guidance.
00:29:32.080
It was through books, through pop culture, through some of the people around me.
00:29:36.720
Um, but yeah, I mean, on the, on the point around schools, you know, I, I remember I, so in the book, I think it's, it's quite clear that I'd always had some academic inclination.
00:29:51.340
Uh, I was probably more oriented towards academics than my friends, but my academic performance was responsive to how stable my home life was.
00:30:03.640
When there was stability at home and predictability and adults providing some oversight, my, my grades improved and I started to become more focused on homework and tests.
00:30:16.900
But then inevitably there was just, there were so many reversals and upheavals and my grades responded to that as well.
00:30:25.360
And by the time I reached high school, my grades were in the toilet.
00:30:28.880
So I did pretty well in middle school and I got placed into these advanced courses in high school and I was placed into chemistry, uh, which was one of the advanced science courses.
00:30:38.920
And once, you know, this was, this is kind of where my head was at when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15 years old was the class was, was difficult and I didn't want to put in the effort.
00:30:47.540
Uh, and I had no adults around me saying, you need to do this.
00:30:53.100
And, you know, so impulsive 15 year old kid, I went to my guidance counselor and said, Oh, I want to be put into the lower level science course.
00:31:01.240
And he, he, he gave me this, you know, this spiel about how, uh, you know, it's going to throw off your academic trajectory, but you know, here's this paper.
00:31:09.100
If you can have someone sign it, you know, that's fine.
00:31:11.140
And so I forged my mom's signature and went into the lower, lower level science course.
00:31:17.760
And, you know, when you're a kid without much in the way of guidance or mentorship or role models, it's very easy to make unwise decisions like that.
00:31:29.860
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00:32:35.080
Well, the issue in that situation is quite clear.
00:32:44.660
I mean, psychologists always have things backwards, always.
00:32:48.760
They ask stupid questions like, why do people take drugs?
00:32:53.200
The question is, why don't people take drugs all the time?
00:32:56.640
Because you can easily get lab animals under some circumstances to just self-administer cocaine nonstop, right?
00:33:02.600
So, the mystery of short-term motivation isn't a mystery.
00:33:07.420
The mystery is, well, under what conditions might a young man be motivated to do something difficult,
00:33:14.680
And the answer to that, so this is a question I have for you too,
00:33:18.160
because you could read your autobiography and your ups and downs academically two ways.
00:33:24.560
You could say, and this is the way you lean, so that's partly why I want to ask you the question.
00:33:29.120
And your grades varied with the stability of your environment.
00:33:32.360
But I'm wondering to what degree your grades varied with the, what would you say,
00:33:41.100
You know, because like when you got to the military and you saw a career in front of you,
00:33:45.780
for example, you buckled down and worked like mad.
00:33:48.020
Now, I know you also had the stability there, but, you know, it's not easy to deter,
00:33:54.580
it's not easy to discriminate between the conditions that enable people to thrive,
00:34:00.440
because they can see that their sacrifices, they're making sacrifices towards something they have clearly come to value,
00:34:07.900
versus they're supported by people in a stable environment.
00:34:17.260
I, I mean, perhaps sort of implicitly or unconsciously, I was longing for that long-term vision,
00:34:22.980
but I would just say like in the moment it was, you know,
00:34:26.000
I don't think very many 17 or 18 year olds are really thinking that far ahead into the future
00:34:34.000
I really think it was about sort of responding to the incentives of the moment
00:34:37.540
and one of the things the military did and what, you know, good parenting and good sort of adults and mentors do
00:34:43.000
is sort of contain that energy so that once the, the young person reaches the point
00:34:48.000
where they have the ability to reflect and consider the future, you know,
00:34:51.980
you sort of shepherd them to that point and now they can sort of think about their own futures
00:34:58.080
Whereas for me, it was more just about making bad decisions and, and containing that to reach that point.
00:35:03.700
Right. Okay. Well, so we could, we could say, we could say that in a stable environment,
00:35:11.200
maybe this is a way of rectifying the two perspectives or, or reconciling them.
00:35:15.440
You could say that in a stable, well-run household,
00:35:19.540
the, the value of the future is implicit in the rituals of the household, right?
00:35:27.720
Like the household itself, the reason we would regard it as well-run and stable
00:35:38.200
Well, as, as you're, as you're saying this, and then even as I'm thinking about my own answer,
00:35:43.260
I'm realizing it's, it's, I'm actually leaning more and more towards your point now.
00:35:47.580
And, and a story just occurred to me that I tell in the book actually.
00:35:51.060
So there's this, there was a period in my adolescence where there was some stability.
00:35:54.960
My adoptive mother entered a relationship with this woman and they raised me from roughly age nine
00:36:01.520
to 13 and with, you know, some hiccups along the way and after. But I remember I was, I was 13 years
00:36:08.020
old and my mother and her partner, Shelly, they, you know, I had some chores and some responsibilities
00:36:16.260
around the house, but they wanted me to, to build a fire in the mornings so that the house would be
00:36:21.860
warm by the time they got up at seven o'clock to get ready for work. So they asked me to get up at
00:36:25.900
five 45, five 30 and, and do this for them because, you know, heating a home with, with firewood was less
00:36:32.180
expensive than central heating and Northern California can get a bit frosty in the winters.
00:36:37.220
And I remember I argued with them about this and I was angry, uh, this idea that I had to get up so
00:36:42.280
much earlier than everyone else in the house. And my mom and Shelly sat me down and I'm 13 years old.
00:36:47.280
And again, I probably wasn't thinking that much about the future, but they use this,
00:36:51.860
they said, you know, Shelly, she sat me down. She said, your mom and I work all day to pay the
00:36:56.540
bills and. You know, you gotta, you're getting older and you need to contribute to the house.
00:37:01.820
And they, they said, you're the man of the house. And I remember when they used this term,
00:37:06.480
um, it sort of reframed that chore. It went from this burden being put on me that I wanted to battle
00:37:15.320
against to know I'm a, I'm a productive member of this household and I'm doing something for my
00:37:22.920
moms, for my adoptive sister. I'm doing something to make their lives easier. Um, and so perhaps
00:37:31.380
what you're saying about the, about this vision of the future, if it's put in the right way,
00:37:35.280
if the story is told in a right way, and that's what that was, the man of the house was this vision,
00:37:38.920
in this story, that it did unlock something for me in my mind, but you know, it had to be,
00:37:44.600
it had to be presented to me in that way. I wouldn't have arrived there on my own.
00:37:49.640
No, no. Right. But, but I mean, I would say that is the opportunity of responsibility,
00:37:54.540
right? And it does, because it's very easy. And this is why conservatives, I think,
00:38:00.140
have a hard time talking to young people. It's easy to make an obligation into a finger wagging
00:38:06.080
necessity, right? Like a moral obligation. But that, that isn't the right way to frame a genuine
00:38:13.100
responsibility, because if it's a genuine responsibility, it actually matters if you do it.
00:38:19.340
And the reason it matters is because if you don't do it, things actually don't go well.
00:38:24.740
Like there, there's, there's a, there's, there's a, there's a value to your sacrifice. That's a good
00:38:29.280
way of thinking about it. And they did strike the right chord with you. And I remember that part of
00:38:33.540
your book, because what they indicated to you was that that was a way of signaling your mature
00:38:38.640
worth, not, not of signaling it. I don't want to use that language of expanding yourself up into
00:38:44.920
that role. And so, so how long did you light the fire and, and how did you feel about doing that?
00:38:50.560
I mean, it was for that entire winter and actually even, even the winter after that. And I felt,
00:38:56.340
you know, I felt great about doing it after that. I mean, you know, day to day, it was,
00:39:01.920
you know, obnoxious and burdensome. And, you know, there were mornings I woke up and wished
00:39:07.420
I didn't have to do it. But when I would see, you know, my mom and Shelly and everyone in the
00:39:13.460
house wake up after me and, you know, the house was warm and I could see that and people were
00:39:19.180
comfortable. And, you know, when I woke up, it was freezing. And then when they woke up, it was warm.
00:39:24.500
And then I would go to school in the mornings with that knowledge. And right. Yeah. I felt,
00:39:29.720
I felt good about myself for doing that. Yeah. Yeah. And that was one of the bright spots.
00:39:34.660
See, that's very, well, that, well, that's so interesting, right? Because that, that shows you
00:39:38.720
too, that, that the idea that you're inhibiting your impulsiveness is not right, is the, what you're
00:39:45.000
doing is you're transforming the idea of responsibility into an incentive reward, technically, by associating
00:39:50.680
with a, with an overarching goal, like, but a, but a genuine goal. And you might say, well, goals are
00:39:56.000
arbitrary. It's a morally relevant, moral relativism argument, but they're not arbitrary. Because for
00:40:01.500
example, if the house is cold, then people suffer. Now you could say, well, that's arbitrary too. But,
00:40:08.300
you know, if you're the sort of person who thinks that suffering is arbitrary and, and you can make
00:40:12.540
relative arguments about it, there's no sense talking to you anyways, because it's just not going to go
00:40:16.860
anywhere. But it's so interesting to see that, you know, the, the proper framing of that task
00:40:23.260
transfer. I know, I understand the fact that it was still difficult for, you still had to get up in
00:40:27.600
the morning when it was cold and light the fire, you know? So it didn't change the dis, the proximal
00:40:32.720
discomfort, but they awakened you to a higher order way of apprehending your environment, you know? And
00:40:39.020
it's clearly the case, it's continually the case through your autobiography that when someone opens a
00:40:46.200
door like that for you in a way that you, that got to you, you know, that you found credible, that you
00:40:52.320
were instantly motivated. You even did that to yourself to some degree with reading. So why don't
00:40:59.060
you walk through that too? Because, you know, that was the first account I had read of someone who
00:41:02.840
learned to read well at an old enough age, so they remember the realization. So, you know, what happens
00:41:11.600
to lots of kids, and this is so appalling because there's no excuse for it whatsoever. So, reading is
00:41:17.260
burdensome until you can read for meaning, right? So if you're sounding out words, or even if you're
00:41:26.060
sounding out phrases, or even if you're still trying to figure out sentences, you know, because you
00:41:31.240
haven't automatized the perceptions, then it's effortful. But as soon as you cross that threshold,
00:41:36.780
and now you're reading for meaning, it's instantly, insanely rewarding. And so what you need to teach
00:41:44.300
kids how to read is masked practice at automatization, right? So they need to see B's, P's, Q's, and D's
00:41:53.960
10,000 times so that they build a neural circuit that just recognizes letters, recognizes two-letter
00:42:01.980
combinations, three-letter combinations, you know, common words, then common phrases. That's about
00:42:07.260
when you get to be an expert reader. But you can remember actually working through that yourself.
00:42:13.220
So why don't you tell the story about learning to read, why you decided to do that, and then also
00:42:17.800
what reading did for you? Right. Yeah, I didn't learn to read until I was seven, and, you know, most people
00:42:26.040
have memories of age seven, and that was an important memory for me. So I was changing schools every three
00:42:33.840
to six months, changing homes, and no one read to me. And so I had to teach myself. I remember it being
00:42:45.760
a really, I remember just being embarrassed initially, you know. By that point, second grade, teachers would
00:42:51.340
start to call on kids to read aloud in class. And, you know, I would make a joke or say I didn't bring
00:42:58.140
the right book, or I would find ways to get out of it. But I remember at one point, my teacher said,
00:43:06.000
you know, she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I think I said I wanted to be a
00:43:09.280
scientist. And this was because I'd caught some bit of Bill Nye the Science Guy on TV back in the 90s
00:43:16.260
at this time. And, you know, she said, if you want to be a scientist, you have to learn to read. And
00:43:20.880
I said, Bill Nye never reads. And, you know, she said, well, he doesn't read on TV, but, you know,
00:43:25.740
every scientist has to learn to read. And so what do you, you know, like, okay, so if I want to be a
00:43:30.100
scientist, I have to read. It sounds like, and then by that point, I started to piece together that
00:43:33.520
really, if you want it to be anything, you have to read. And so the teacher let me borrow some
00:43:39.960
kindergarten-level books. I took them home and slowly worked my way through it. And,
00:43:44.580
you know, I knew the alphabet, and I knew how to sound out each letter. But it took a lot of
00:43:51.240
effort to get to that breakthrough point that you just mentioned of, okay, here are the individual
00:43:56.080
letters, and then here are the words, and then you put the words together. And then after working
00:44:01.300
through that repeatedly, again, with books meant for four- and five-year-olds, and I'm seven,
00:44:05.740
finally, it started to click. And I could see the images in my mind of, okay, you know, now things are
00:44:12.020
clicking for me, and there's a story being told here. But it, you know, I didn't even understand
00:44:18.460
that that's what I was supposed to be doing when I was reading. I would listen to stories that others
00:44:24.620
I wonder if that's the point where you, where the auditory and the visual cortex are now,
00:44:30.480
there's an overlap area, eh, between them. And the overlap areas between the higher order areas
00:44:37.400
of the cortex are the areas that Luria, Alexander Luria, the great Russian neuropsychologist,
00:44:42.700
identified with consciousness per se. I wonder if that breakthrough moment when you, because that
00:44:47.560
was quite striking in your book, because you said you remember when you became proficient enough at
00:44:53.260
reading, which is really an auditory phenomenon, right? You're using your eyes as ears when you're
00:44:57.820
reading. And then all of a sudden, it's hooked to your visual imagination, right? That connection
00:45:03.040
emerges. It's got to be an overlapping system. So now the words can activate the images. And that's
00:45:08.380
when true understanding begins. It was very interesting to me to see that you could actually
00:45:12.560
remember when that happened. You know, but it's a sad thing, you know, it's, this is, this is an
00:45:17.020
unforgivable failing of the education system because computerized tutors could teach every child to
00:45:24.400
automatize letter and word recognition. Oh, it's like the smart kids, the higher IQ kids are going
00:45:31.780
to learn to automatize faster, but it would be a rare kid indeed who wouldn't get there with sufficient
00:45:38.340
mass practice. And a computer, computers are so good at that, you know, so good at presenting,
00:45:44.540
presenting, rewarding, presenting, rewarding, presenting, rewarding. And that's all you need. You just need
00:45:48.940
that immediate feedback. Now, see, you said something very interesting in that story too,
00:45:53.680
because you linked your motivation once again to something approximating a vision or a plan.
00:46:00.220
You know, you said you had nursed as a child, even though it was just more or less a casual
00:46:04.800
encounter with Bill Nye, you thought, well, maybe a scientist is something I could be. Okay. So now
00:46:09.680
that gleamed as a distal vision. And then the teacher informed you that you were going to have to learn
00:46:14.360
to read because you got to ask yourself, you know, what in the world was it that actually
00:46:18.380
compelled you to swallow your pride and admit that you could only read kindergarten books?
00:46:24.460
That's a tough blow. And it's really easy for kids who should have learned something earlier to do
00:46:30.660
everything they can not to admit that to themselves because it's embarrassing. So, but you did admit it
00:46:35.900
to yourself and then you went and you actually studied, which is by yourself, which is actually
00:46:40.420
quite a difficult thing to do when, when you're not extracting out meaning from the words. Do you
00:46:45.340
remember at that time, like, was it because you had, I don't want to put hypotheses into your mind,
00:46:51.400
but what do you think it was that actually motivated you to do that work?
00:46:56.320
Hmm. Well, I think, I think a part of it was maybe a sort of a baser motivation of just not wanting to
00:47:01.340
be embarrassed in class anymore when the teachers would call on me to read, wanting to keep up with
00:47:06.160
the other kids, being able to communicate with, you know, cause kids would talk about books or,
00:47:10.820
you know, be able to make friends and to not be, you know, this oddball kid who always had to find
00:47:17.840
ways to skirt the coursework. Uh, and, and then yes, seeing, seeing people on TV or people,
00:47:25.320
movies and these images of, of people who seem to be interesting and successful and so on. And
00:47:31.660
that seemed like something I, yeah, that I wanted to, I, I aspired to something like that. I mean,
00:47:39.200
it's funny, like you, you, you mentioned, you know, high IQ kids can sort of find their way into
00:47:43.760
teaching themselves to read and going down that path. And that's, that is what I did. But I mean,
00:47:48.160
it's funny. So, so right around this time when I was teaching myself to read, I was doing so badly
00:47:52.320
in school that, um, the teacher and my social worker, they, they thought that I might've had a
00:47:59.380
learning disability. Um, and again, I was changing schools all the time and changing homes.
00:48:05.620
And, you know, in, in, in hindsight, I thought it was a little bit, you know, it's, it's, it's ridiculous
00:48:09.500
that, and you have this young boy who's not doing well in school and the, instead of sort of
00:48:15.700
investigating this, you know, living in foster care and all of the instability and disorder,
00:48:20.260
the response was to medicalize it or to put some kind of diagnostic label on it. And, you know,
00:48:27.100
fortunately, so they sent this psychologist to the home and I took this test and I scored,
00:48:31.500
I actually scored just below average. So I was like in the range of normal. And part of the reason
00:48:35.460
I scored so low, I did okay on the other portions, uh, the other subdomains of the test, but the verbal
00:48:40.080
score was really low. And that's because I didn't, I didn't know how to read. Um, and some of the,
00:48:45.920
you know, some of the questions I gave this half-hearted effort, it was a very sort of messy,
00:48:49.100
my responses to this. And again, I have, I have, uh, the, the files and the reports from this period.
00:48:53.840
And so, you know, it's just, you know, coincidence or, you know, very fortunate, I guess, that I,
00:49:02.780
I scored just high enough to avoid being labeled and medicalized and so on. Um, but one of the
00:49:10.200
points I try to make in the book as well, you know, the, the question around IQ and nature and
00:49:13.760
nurture and so on is that having a, having curiosity and academic aptitude is, is necessary, but not
00:49:19.220
sufficient to do well in school. And so I had the sort of raw ingredients. Um, but that's, that,
00:49:26.380
you know, that's just one portion of it. You also need it to be channeled. You need all of the other
00:49:30.280
things you and I've been discussing. And I didn't have any of that. And so I, it wasn't until I wasn't
00:49:34.340
in an environment, uh, where, you know, my, you know, in order for, for my habits to have been stable
00:49:41.580
and predictable, I needed to be in an environment that was stable and predictable. And once I reached that
00:49:46.000
environment, then those good quality started to shine through, they shined through on occasion
00:49:50.980
when I was in school, but it wasn't the same. And so, yeah, the, the reading portion was important.
00:49:56.220
Once, once I learned to read, um, that became, uh, a source of comfort and it was soothing for me.
00:50:04.600
Uh, once I started to go to school libraries, check out books, I started to read biographies and
00:50:11.280
memoirs. And this was a way for me to, you know, I was sort of drawn to people who also
00:50:16.740
had undergone and risen above difficult circumstances. And I didn't know at that time,
00:50:24.160
you know, I wasn't consciously aware that I was seeking out these stories
00:50:26.880
for some specific reason, but in hindsight, I think I was looking for some kind of inspiration
00:50:32.120
or some, a source of, a source of guidance. Yeah. Yeah. Well, definitely, definitely. And,
00:50:40.040
and, and, and unsurprisingly, I mean, that's what stories are for fundamentally. And it doesn't,
00:50:46.580
it's not surprising at all that you would gravitate to the ones that bore most specifically on your
00:50:51.980
circumstances. It's also interesting too, you know, that this is part of that interplay between
00:50:57.600
environmental instability and planning. There isn't a lot of point in planning if your plans
00:51:04.660
are always going astray for reasons that you can't control, right? And it is also something
00:51:10.120
that can undermine your faith in planning itself. And one of the things the military did for you
00:51:14.480
clearly was set up a circumstance where the rules of the game were very clear, right? If you,
00:51:22.800
if you did the work, you were going to get the reward and that actually worked, right? And so you
00:51:28.880
say in your book, for example, that there was one, at one point you were promoted much earlier,
00:51:35.120
much more quickly in the training regime than was typical, right? So you could also see a direct
00:51:40.920
payoff there. You know, it's, it shouldn't say direct. It worked on both ends, Jordan. It was,
00:51:46.340
it was the reward was immediate. You know, you, you perform these tasks in Excel, you'll be rewarded.
00:51:53.160
And then on the other side of that, if you commit these transgressions, if you violate these
00:52:00.240
guidelines, you'll immediately and swiftly be punished. I think both of those things were
00:52:04.040
important. You know, you're sort of almost trapped. The military is like this, I don't know,
00:52:08.500
like a giant Skinner box or something of like, do this, you know, you know, positive reinforcement,
00:52:12.800
negative, it's all there. And, and so even something as simple as failing a drug test.
00:52:18.360
So they have these random drug tests. You never know when it's going to occur. If you fail a drug
00:52:21.600
test, you can be court-martialed and go to military prison. Whereas in the outside world,
00:52:26.300
for my friends, for example, who didn't follow that same path, I mean, you can do a lot of drugs.
00:52:31.880
You can have a lot of promiscuous sex. You can commit a lot of crimes and drink and drive. You can do
00:52:36.660
all of these things. And that can carry on for years before finally the consequences arise from
00:52:42.740
that. Whereas the military had this system in place that, you know, if you drink and drive once
00:52:47.360
and you're caught, you know, that's, you know, then it's prison. If you do this, you know, it's
00:52:52.060
the penalties are very explicit, clear and swift. And so it works, it works on both, both ends,
00:52:58.540
punishment and reward. And I think both of those pieces in place were important for me. I mean,
00:53:03.300
it's funny, I did do well on the military exams and the promotion, and I was always promoted ahead of
00:53:08.380
schedule. And it's strange because even in those moments, my good and bad qualities kind of shined
00:53:15.920
through. I was promoted early and I earned those promotions. But, you know, as I was writing the
00:53:22.560
book and describing my experiences, it may not have been ideal for me to have achieved promotions so
00:53:28.160
early. Because in the military, at least in the Air Force at this time, once you reach a certain rank,
00:53:32.660
they allow you to move off base and get a house or a place outside in the civilian world. You know,
00:53:38.380
you still go to the base for work when you're on duty, but then you go home to your residence.
00:53:42.680
And so I got promoted very quickly. And when I was 19, I got a house with some friends off base.
00:53:48.300
And we turned this into like this giant kind of party house. And that allowed me to make bad
00:53:54.340
decisions and drink a lot and get into trouble. And so strangely, you know, it's almost sort of
00:54:04.300
ironic that the fact that I was able to excel led to this point where I was able to be in a position
00:54:09.820
of complete freedom again, and again, start to make self-defeating decisions. So anyway.
00:54:16.120
Right, right. Well, one of the things, okay, so let's talk about the chaos a bit more. You know,
00:54:22.480
because when I was reading your book, there's certain overlap in our experience. Because I came
00:54:29.380
from a little town, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and it was only about 50 years old,
00:54:33.940
and it was a working class community. And most of my friends never went to college or university. A few
00:54:42.160
did, but not many. And, but there were some differences between, some important differences
00:54:49.680
between my time of upbringing and yours. Okay. So almost all my parents' friends had intact families.
00:54:59.740
So my mom and dad had, let's say, five sets of close family friends. And this was also true for my
00:55:06.380
relatives, by the way, my mom and dad's siblings. So my aunts and my uncles. Virtually no divorce.
00:55:13.280
It was also true for my friends. Now, my relationship with my father was much better than the relationship
00:55:22.600
most of my friends had with their fathers. That was often a consequence of alcoholism. Not always, but often.
00:55:30.300
But all my friends who had certainly the same kind of delinquent tendencies as the people that, as you and the
00:55:37.740
people that you describe hanging around with, they all had intact families. Right? So the thing that
00:55:44.300
really struck me about reading your biography was the additional cataclysmic consequences of
00:55:52.240
continually fragmented primary relationships. Yeah. Well, this is, I mean, it's, yeah, it's, that is an
00:55:59.260
interesting point. I mean, I remember listening to you sort of describe your early life in other
00:56:07.060
platforms and podcasts and mediums and thinking about how sort of working class communities have
00:56:13.640
changed over time. So I cite some statistics from Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart, where, you know,
00:56:23.320
one of the most striking ones from that book is that in 1960, 95% of children born in the U.S.,
00:56:30.640
regardless of social class, socioeconomic status, were raised by both of their birth parents.
00:56:37.540
And by 2005, for the upper class, for people with college-educated parents with white-collar jobs,
00:56:44.640
it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% in 2005. So a slight dip, but it's still the norm, two-parent,
00:56:52.780
intact families are the norm in kind of upper and upper middle class areas. Whereas for the working
00:56:57.320
class, it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 30% in 2005. These are non-college-educated, blue-collar
00:57:05.680
working class. And that, when I read that statistic, it perfectly reflected my own experiences. You know,
00:57:11.940
now, you know, post-college, the friends that I have made since, you know, leaving the military and
00:57:17.800
obtaining degrees and so on, all of them without fail have been raised in intact families. And
00:57:24.640
then I think back to Red Bluff and my time there. And I had five close friends growing up. I write
00:57:30.140
about some of their experiences in the book. And of the six of us, none of us were raised by both of
00:57:34.720
our birth parents. There was me sort of raised in foster homes in varying states of disorder.
00:57:40.060
I had friends raised by single moms, one friend raised by a single dad, one friend raised by his
00:57:46.840
grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison. And that's like a very
00:57:51.280
common picture now of what these communities look like. You know, I remember seeing an interview with
00:57:57.720
you, Jordan. I don't remember which it was, but you described how family deterioration has sort of hit
00:58:04.620
people based on sort of their level of marginalization and vulnerability and predilections
00:58:10.560
and so forth and how it sort of hit sort of poor black families first and then, you know, poor white
00:58:16.540
families, working class families. And now what I was seeing in Red Bluff by the late 90s, even kind of
00:58:21.960
lower middle class families were also kind of deteriorating more and more, sort of creeping more and
00:58:27.560
more upward. But there's still that sort of rarefied upper segment of society, the top quintile,
00:58:33.460
say, the top 20 percent, that they are almost completely shielded from this and have no exposure
00:58:39.000
to what's happening in the rest of society. Yeah, well, let's go there. I want to walk through
00:58:46.980
your biography a bit more so that we can talk about your experiences with higher education. Maybe we can
00:58:52.540
meld that into what we're going to talk about next. Okay, so I left my little town and got a college
00:59:00.440
education first, and then I went to a fairly large university in Edmonton, and then I went to McGill.
00:59:05.060
And so I was kind of climbing up the ladder of sophistication and educational sophistication and
00:59:12.420
urban size, right? And so, and then I went from McGill to Harvard. And so, I came from that little town
00:59:17.520
and hit the top of the academic pyramid. It's certainly, that was the case in the 1990s, and that
00:59:22.520
was really something. And so, I got a chance to see. So, in Alberta, in the province I grew up in,
00:59:28.200
there wasn't much of a class structure at all. Alberta was too new to have a class structure.
00:59:32.700
Montreal had a clear class structure, and Boston, of course, much clearer than Montreal even.
00:59:37.460
And so, I got to see what it meant that a class structure existed. And one of the things I really
00:59:46.420
came to understand as I progressed through the university system was this warped, elitist culture
00:59:55.500
that increasingly came to characterize the universities. And so, what I saw, look, a lot of
01:00:00.340
the students I had at Harvard were really top-rate kids. And Harvard in the 90s was a very merit-based
01:00:08.220
institution. Now, if you were a legacy student, if your parents had gone to Harvard, you had an edge
01:00:14.200
at admissions. But even so, the probability that you were going to be a legacy student who couldn't cut it
01:00:20.080
was pretty damn low. So, and the typical student was extremely academically gifted and then good at
01:00:27.740
at least two other things, right? So, these were stellar students. But the more radical types,
01:00:34.920
they had this proclivity that really disturbed me, which was that having all the privileges of being
01:00:41.600
privileged wasn't nearly enough. They needed to have all the privileges of being privileged and all the
01:00:48.200
privileges of being underprivileged at the same time. And so, I want to run a variant of the luxury
01:00:54.540
beliefs idea past you. Because I think luxury beliefs have, which is a lovely phrase, by the way,
01:01:01.240
they have two dimensions. The first is, they provide you with a universal explanation for very complex
01:01:10.580
phenomena so you don't have to think about them ever again. And the oppressor-oppressed narrative fits that
01:01:16.720
perfectly, right? Because you can analyze, it's like Marxism gone, it's like manic Marxism.
01:01:25.400
Marx at least had the sense to note that the primary differentiator in terms of oppression was
01:01:32.180
economic. And you can make a reasonable case that to those who have more accrues, and you can also
01:01:39.880
make a case that once you have, it's easy to engage in regulatory capture to make the playing field
01:01:47.380
unfair so you can sustain your advantage. Okay, and so if you're going to throw the Marxists their bone,
01:01:53.740
that would be the bone to throw them. Well, Marxism fell out of favor in the 1970s, even among
01:01:59.820
intellectuals, although they were very annoyed about it. And then it morphed into this meta-Marxism where
01:02:05.460
every single possible comparison between people became an oppressor-oppressed comparison.
01:02:12.020
Now, the advantage to that is that you can learn that analytic process in 10 minutes.
01:02:20.260
So we did some research in 2016 that showed very clearly that the best predictor of politically
01:02:27.060
correct authoritarianism, so you can imagine that that's this insistence upon an oppressor-oppressed
01:02:33.540
narrative. There's a cloud of ideas that surrounds that. The best predictor of that was low verbal
01:02:37.740
intelligence. It was a walloping predictor. It was correlated, I think it was negative 0.48.
01:02:43.960
It was more correlated than grades and IQ. It was a walloping correlation. Okay, but there's another
01:02:50.240
element too that, and this is probably more germane specifically to the notion of luxury belief,
01:02:55.440
is that imagine that people have beliefs because they explain the world, but also imagine that they
01:03:02.720
have beliefs because they confer upon the holder unearned moral virtue. And this oppressor-oppressed
01:03:12.400
narrative is a two-for-one because it provides you with a comprehensive explanation of every
01:03:17.580
sociological, political, and economic interaction imaginable, because they can all be viewed through
01:03:23.480
the lens of power. Plus, it presents you with a one-move solution to being moral.
01:03:32.120
And it's, sorry, there's three elements. The one-move solution is you identify with the oppressed,
01:03:39.560
you're virtuous. But then there's the shadow of that, which is once you've identified the oppressor,
01:03:46.760
you have a valid target for your darkest desires. So you've got three, three attractions to that
01:03:55.480
dread doctrine, right? Stupid people can understand it quickly with no effort.
01:04:02.120
That works out real well in departments of education, for example, or faculties of education,
01:04:06.440
or social work. Yes, absolutely. Well, we know perfectly well that the disciplines in universities
01:04:12.300
that have the students with the lowest IQ are the most woke. Like the data on that are crystal clear.
01:04:17.420
So they're crystal clear, right? So it's very attractive if you're not very bright. And
01:04:22.940
that's also attractive to your teachers if they're also not very bright. And I'm talking about you,
01:04:27.900
faculties of education professors. And so, and then you are morally virtuous because you're standing
01:04:34.620
for the oppressed or for the, yeah, for the oppressed, or you can even claim oppression for
01:04:39.640
yourself, at least by proxy. And so there you get to have the advantage of being in the oppressor class,
01:04:47.180
which you clearly are if you're in an elite university. But because you're an ally, you don't
01:04:53.320
have to, right, exactly. You don't have to pay any attention to that. Plus now you have a target for
01:04:57.040
your, this is where I think the anti-Semitism is really instantly understandable, right?
01:05:02.540
Because there's nothing more fun than being anti-Semitic with a moral twist. But if you
01:05:08.500
read the history of anti-Semitism, it's always been that way. That's not new. That's not new.
01:05:13.880
You identify the Jews as oppressors, and then you're moral for persecuting them. And that's
01:05:19.940
perfect, right, if you're resentful and bitter, and you need a target for your bile and spite.
01:05:27.020
That oppressor-oppress narrative, it just gives you all of that at once. And that seems to me,
01:05:33.780
so you have worked a lot at fleshing out this idea of luxury beliefs, and I believe coined the term
01:05:40.120
and popularized it, which is, you know, quite an achievement because it's hard to, it's hard to hit
01:05:45.280
a phrase so accurately that it becomes a, you know, it becomes, well, it becomes a known phrase. It
01:05:53.180
becomes part of the culture. You have to have a kind of poetic accuracy to do that. So tell me what
01:05:59.520
you think about that conceptualization of luxury belief, and if there's anything that, in your
01:06:05.780
Well, so I coined this term luxury beliefs, defined as ideas and opinions that confer status on the elite
01:06:14.500
while inflicting costs on the lower classes. And no, I think that all of those sort of ideas that
01:06:22.400
you laid out there fall under that framework. A core feature of a luxury belief, too, is that the
01:06:28.280
believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And so, you know, as you're describing
01:06:34.780
this, you know, the oppressor-oppressed, you don't have to think too deeply. I'm reminded of a quote from
01:06:39.680
the cognitive scientist, Pascal Boyer. He has this line, theory is information for free. And it's
01:06:46.980
kind of this tongue-in-cheek line that, you know, once you have the theory, you don't have to learn
01:06:51.740
anything because you just enter this new environment and you learn a few facts, but you have this theory
01:06:56.360
available to you to just sort of twist everything into this system. It's a compression algorithm.
01:07:02.380
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a compression algorithm. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Often a biased compression
01:07:06.860
algorithm. Yeah, yeah, and it allows you to bypass the difficult work of learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:07:13.700
Well, and then if you're removed from the consequences, which you are if you're protected
01:07:17.960
by your wealth, then you also are never in a situation where your idiot theories can be disproven.
01:07:24.020
Yeah, yes, yeah. And then by the time your ideas are implemented into policy or into culture,
01:07:34.320
you move on to the next thing and you can just sort of outrun the consequences of your own
01:07:39.380
beliefs. It doesn't always work that way, but often it does. And then, yeah, the oppressor
01:07:45.300
oppressed the ability to claim the mantle of virtue. I mean, I saw that so often. I see it still at elite
01:07:59.360
universities that, you know, these inhabitants, these graduates, students and graduates of elite
01:08:07.340
universities. It's, you know, it's not enough for them to be members of the sort of socioeconomic
01:08:12.920
one percent, but they also want to be seen as good people. And I think they're, you know, they wrestle
01:08:18.480
with some of this guilt, I think, for being so privileged and so fortunate. And so they attempt
01:08:24.480
to compensate by, you know, exploiting, I mean, I saw this a lot at Yale, they're exploiting whatever
01:08:30.520
commonality they have with historically mistreated groups. And some of it honestly seemed strategic
01:08:37.220
and duplicitous because, you know, these are very competitive institutions and every edge helps.
01:08:46.560
And so if you can claim to be non-binary or you can claim to be a member of this or that or the other
01:08:52.140
group, then you can get an edge in a prestigious internship or into the law school of your choice or
01:08:57.760
whatever student organization. Well, you can also see how that can produce. So a lot of psychopathology
01:09:06.020
is positive feedback loop gone mad, right? And so you can see a positive feedback loop there because
01:09:11.900
the ideology tilts in the direction of privileging marginalization. Well, then all you have to do is
01:09:18.360
claim marginalization to become privileged. Well, then the thing is just like, you're just done,
01:09:22.780
especially as you pointed out, when the really competitive types and there's nothing, I mean,
01:09:28.100
one of the real advantages to the U.S. elite, let's say, is their insanely driven competitiveness.
01:09:34.380
But look the hell out if that's taken a, you know, a bent turn because now it's going to be,
01:09:40.740
well, it's so interesting too, because as you point out, it's competition for marginalization
01:09:44.920
without bearing any of the costs of marginalization, right? So that's a pretty good deal.
01:09:49.340
And there are probably more nefarious things going on under the surface too, like what reproduction,
01:09:56.080
interference with reproduction of other people is a mating strategy, it's a reproductive strategy.
01:10:04.500
Yeah, just very, so I did read this study, his name escapes me, but he's a professor,
01:10:08.860
I believe, at the Columbia Business School. And it's really interesting. So he did this study of
01:10:13.620
students at elite universities and their willingness to disclose marginalized identities.
01:10:22.580
And what he found was that for, you know, for the identity categories that the elite care a lot
01:10:29.320
about, that they claim are beleaguered and disadvantaged and oppressed and so on, sexuality,
01:10:35.820
ethnicity, orientation, those things, that students at elite universities are not concealing
01:10:42.080
those identities, that typically in public settings, they are willing to discuss these aspects of
01:10:46.920
their identity. The only, there was only one marginalized identity that students were very
01:10:52.000
reluctant to discuss publicly at elite universities in those settings. And to me, unsurprisingly,
01:10:59.200
that identity was low socioeconomic status, that students were embarrassed about being very poor if
01:11:05.520
they came from those backgrounds. And that's the one thing that these places don't talk about is class.
01:11:10.360
Well, it's so interesting because you can think of this postmodern pathology as a variant of
01:11:17.900
Marxism, but it's actually a rebellion against Marxism at the same time, right? Because it isn't that the
01:11:24.480
axis of oppression, it's not only that they've multiplied, it's that the axis of oppression have
01:11:32.000
multiplied and supplanted the economic, right? So the one axis where the oppressor, oppressed narrative
01:11:41.400
can probably obtain the most purchase is the one that has the least cachet. So if you're poor and
01:11:47.420
white, it's irrelevant. The fact that you're poor is irrelevant.
01:11:50.560
Yeah. I mean, even if you're poor and non-white, honestly, I mean, it's really interesting,
01:11:55.120
these institutions where there's a lot of embarrassment about being very rich. So students
01:12:00.920
aren't going to brag about coming from very wealthy families, they'll conceal that identity.
01:12:06.700
But they are also, you know, the poor students will also conceal that identity as well. It's like
01:12:12.020
everyone wants, you know, that the myth in America, everyone's middle class. And I think there's
01:12:16.240
something about universities too, that no student wants to be known as poor, no student wants to be
01:12:19.820
known as rich. But being poor is a, like that is, like you're describing, that is actually something
01:12:29.240
that Marx got right, that actually being very poor is very difficult, especially in the modern West,
01:12:35.860
that these other identities, we've gone a long way to becoming more tolerant and welcoming and so on.
01:12:40.800
But being poor, regardless of time and place, it's always difficult. And that's the one thing that
01:12:46.680
these universities and the students within them don't want to discuss or concentrate on.
01:12:51.260
Well, I also think that the, the overwhelming emphasis on sexual identity has an unbelievably
01:12:58.100
dark shadow too, because I mean, sexuality, like any primal drive is very, when in its full
01:13:06.780
manifestation, it's very focused on the immediate. Now, everyone knows that sexuality like aggression
01:13:15.440
can be exploitative. In fact, the woke types squeak about that all the time, because they view most
01:13:23.700
heterosexual normativity as exploitative sexuality. They know, they're perfectly aware that sexuality can be
01:13:30.840
exploitative. But if you're, if you're out for a hedonistic time, then valorizing your sexual identity is the
01:13:37.680
best way of transforming a vice into a moral virtue, right? It's very, it's unbelievably, it's unbelievably
01:13:44.080
dark. Now, one of the things I've been quite struck by recently too, so there's a lot of research on the
01:13:49.680
dark tetrad now, right? Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism, because they had to add
01:13:56.760
sadism, because it looks like those other three culminate in sadism. Okay, so here's a question.
01:14:02.900
What predicts short-term mating proclivity? The answer is, well, it's dark tetrad proclivity.
01:14:10.540
And that, that's related to something even more deep, even more deep biologically, because there's
01:14:15.320
two types of reproductive strategy. There's K and R, and K means carrying capacity, and R just think
01:14:22.300
means just reproduction. Like a mosquito is an R reproducer. So it has like a million offspring,
01:14:27.720
and like one lives. Human beings are the ultimate exemplar of K strategizers. Very few offspring,
01:14:34.960
extremely high investment. But then within human beings, there are K and R reproducers. And the
01:14:41.080
R reproducers are the dark tetrad types. And so you can't have sexual licentiousness
01:14:47.580
on the basis of identity without inviting in the sadistic psychopaths. So that's another fun little,
01:14:57.520
On this idea of, you know, defining, I mean, it's what I find interesting about people who
01:15:02.140
want to speak and proclaim about their identities around sexual orientation is there, many people
01:15:10.160
are happy to identify with this sexual orientation or that, but very few people seem to be willing or
01:15:17.940
eager to be identified with their actual sexual history in terms of their actual behavior.
01:15:23.540
And I'm speaking, I'm thinking here around this idea around slut shaming, or around how many
01:15:30.620
partners you've had, or, you know, what, what young people now call body count. There's a lot of
01:15:35.400
concern around, you know, don't speak about that. Don't shame people for their, but it's interesting
01:15:40.680
because people will identify with the label, but then disavow the action around the label or,
01:15:48.780
or any label really. Yeah. Their sexual history. Well, I would say as a clinician, I would say the
01:15:54.560
rationale for that's quite clear because look, one of the best predictors, one of the, one of the most
01:16:00.320
reliable correlates and predictors of later criminality is early promiscuity. That's been known for like
01:16:06.940
40 years. And it's partly because the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists exploit other
01:16:15.420
people and themselves for sexual gratification. Well, the reason that there's a brouhaha about
01:16:21.660
slut shaming is because the hedonistic narcissists don't want to be called out for their behavior.
01:16:28.520
And so what they do is they make being held responsible for their own deviant and exploitative
01:16:35.100
behavior. They make being called out on that, a moral failing of the person they're accusing.
01:16:39.520
Yeah. Which is a really interesting maneuver. And it reminds me of, there was a big study in
01:16:46.860
20, I want to say it was 2020, which found that the, so this was on the dark triad. Sadism wasn't
01:16:55.440
studied in this particular paper, but they found that the dark triad traits correlated with victim
01:17:01.340
signaling. Yeah. Well, that's a typical cluster B, typical cluster B psychopathology. It's like
01:17:07.560
the way that you, you cover up your predation with the claim of victimization.
01:17:15.980
And it was really interesting. I mean, the researchers of this paper,
01:17:19.200
you know, they, they described how, you know, billions of dollars are lost in insurance fraud
01:17:23.980
cases and hundreds of millions rather in insurance fraud cases. And so like people will lie to advantage
01:17:28.780
themselves and people who score highly in the dark triad are especially likely to do so. And
01:17:34.360
they note that in modern Western societies, we have this attitude towards people who are victimized
01:17:40.340
that they should be compensated and treated well and sympathized with. And people who are high on
01:17:48.840
the dark triad are very good at sort of monitoring their environment and looking at what strategies they
01:17:54.540
can execute to extract some kind of social or professional or sexual reward. And now more and more,
01:18:00.560
it's, you know, claiming the mantle of victimhood, which is, I mean, I guess it's, it's important to
01:18:05.220
be clear that it's not that people who are actually victimized are likely to score high on the dark
01:18:09.300
triad. It's that people high on the dark triad are very manipulative and aware that now pretending
01:18:15.300
like wearing the camouflage of victimhood can be advantageous. And, you know, it's, it's tricky as a
01:18:21.240
society because we want to sympathize with victims, but also we want to be aware of the dark triad types.
01:18:26.720
Okay. So that's, that's been well modeled by the game theorists. So if you have a group of
01:18:34.020
cooperators, so let's say they're agreeable and they are sympathetic to the, I don't want to say
01:18:41.760
victimized. I want to say to the, to the hurt and, and the sick, the hurt and the infantile,
01:18:49.400
right? The agreeable cooperators will attend to the, the sick, the elderly and the infantile,
01:18:59.560
right? Then you could think they're the ones who are genuinely in need. They're also the ones for
01:19:06.240
whom provision of help is advantageous. So now imagine you have a group of those people together
01:19:14.040
and they're all cooperating. They do just fine. But if you throw one psychopath into the equation,
01:19:20.540
he takes everything, right? And so, so this has been modeled out very well is that the pathology
01:19:26.280
of agreeableness is that it's, it's indefinitely open to subversion, right? And so you need,
01:19:35.620
that's why you need, and, and of course the psychopathic types, the narcissists, they know
01:19:39.920
this perfectly well, especially the cluster B types, because they're absolutely willing to
01:19:45.160
proclaim victim status as loudly as it can possibly be proclaimed on any dimension whatsoever
01:19:53.140
to gain an advantage, to gain the upper hand practically. But see, the moral upper hand,
01:19:59.600
I think the right way to think about this is that there isn't anything more valuable than reputation,
01:20:05.760
right? Because there's no difference between reputation, there's no difference between
01:20:11.400
reputation and wealth fundamentally. I mean, even monetary wealth is a form of abstracted reputation.
01:20:18.140
So, you know, it's just being tokenized essentially, like money's, money's tokenization of reputation.
01:20:24.440
While the problem is, is reputation can be gamed. And we know too, that young women are much more
01:20:29.920
likely to fall for the dark tetrad types because they mimic, they mimic reputation.
01:20:41.600
They have the confidence of the competent without the competence.
01:20:45.600
Yes. I mean, it's, it's, that's, yeah, people value, especially more and more now. I mean,
01:20:51.060
this is a, the discussion around cancel culture and mobbing and all of these things. I mean,
01:20:57.220
people treat it like it's unserious, but people care deeply about how they're viewed in the eyes
01:21:01.400
of others and social esteem. And I remember there was a study a few years ago that I read about,
01:21:05.640
um, uh, this came out in, in 2017. Roy Baumeister was an author on this paper. I don't recall
01:21:12.220
everyone, uh, on here, but they basically found that, you know, they looked at the world value survey
01:21:17.160
and pulled out certain items and found that right next to physical safety, uh, reputation was the second
01:21:24.900
priority, uh, for people. And they found, I mean, it was interesting. Some of the studies that they
01:21:29.940
did where they gave forced choice questions to participants in a, in a separate study in this
01:21:34.940
paper, where they asked people essentially, you know, would you rather have a body part amputated
01:21:39.780
or be known as a Nazi or be known as a pedophile? And most of the participants said they would rather
01:21:47.020
lose an arm or a leg than be known as something so vile as, you know, a pedophile or a Nazi. I mean,
01:21:52.360
people care deeply about, about these things. And so dark triad types are aware of this. They know
01:21:58.760
how to target people's reputations and form mobs. And I mean, I'm really interested just all of the
01:22:03.060
sort of the correlates of the dark tetrad, dark triad, these traits, one of them is age. You're
01:22:10.880
probably aware of this, Dr. Peterson, that there's an inverse correlation between age and scores in the
01:22:15.380
dark tetrad such that younger adults score higher on these traits than older adults.
01:22:22.020
And yet we have this situation more and more in society and on college campuses and elsewhere
01:22:28.280
where older adults are abdicating their responsibility and letting young adults who
01:22:34.480
disproportionate number of them would actually qualify for clinical levels of psychopathy and
01:22:39.920
narcissism. But generally speaking, they score higher than average on, on those scales anyway.
01:22:44.660
And, you know, just a large share of them are eager for power, for influence, for wealth,
01:22:52.140
and they're willing to do whatever they can and take whatever maneuvers possible.
01:22:57.260
Well, I think there's something also that's even more ominous going on, Rob, because, so the
01:23:04.820
typical psychopath, historically speaking, was a wanderer, right? An itinerant. You know,
01:23:13.660
and that's a trope from every bloody horror movie you can possibly imagine. You know, the itinerant
01:23:19.860
serial killer, for example. Well, why do you have to be itinerant? Well, it's because if you live in a
01:23:26.840
closed community and you screw people over, then your reputation gets around, like, instantly and
01:23:35.180
people are unbelievably good at tracking cheating. Like, there's, there's some evidence we have an
01:23:39.880
evolved module for remembering cheaters. Like, it's a major deal. Cheater detection module. So, you have
01:23:44.860
to go, exactly, exactly. You have to go find new victims. Okay, and so you, and you do that, you
01:23:51.380
essentially do that by hiding. You camouflage yourself, right, as, as a new person. Okay, so,
01:23:56.840
now you might say, well, we've invented a whole new world. It's a virtual world.
01:24:02.520
Well, the thing, I think virtualization enables the psychopaths because you can't do reputation
01:24:08.140
tracking. Yeah. And God only knows how dangerous that is. It's happening online, of course. It's
01:24:14.920
happening even in, in, in the real world. You know, I know we touched on this in our, in the last time
01:24:19.860
you and I spoke on your show about dating apps, but one of the things that those things allow for,
01:24:24.740
you know, it's, it's an online platform, but it allows people to meet in real life,
01:24:30.220
is that now dark triad types, dark tetrad types are able to essentially have multiple partners in
01:24:39.200
non-overlapping social circles. So, in the past, if you wanted to sleep around, word would get out
01:24:44.080
and you'd develop a reputation as a scoundrel or a philanderer or so on. Whereas now you can have
01:24:50.420
multiple different partners who don't know one another, who aren't a member of your social circle.
01:24:55.420
They are not members of one another's social circles, and none of them are aware of what's
01:25:00.540
going on. And this allows psychopathic types to indulge their appetites with no penalties,
01:25:07.840
no reputational penalties. Probably also generates it even worse, right? Because,
01:25:14.400
well, because you could imagine, imagine the borderline cases. So, and those would even be
01:25:18.640
young men to some degree, because they're tilted more in the narcissistic and psychopathic direction.
01:25:23.040
And that would also be a consequence of incomplete cortical maturation. Now, the problem with,
01:25:30.480
the problem with the, what would you say, consequence-free dating is that there's no price
01:25:37.160
to be paid for your philandering. And now, so then the question is, what do you become if you
01:25:42.620
practice predatory sexuality? And the answer is, well, clearly you become, you tilt yourself in the
01:25:48.260
psychopathic direction, because what you're doing technically is deriving immediate gratification
01:25:54.620
with no reputational or practical responsibility. And the people who are advertising for hedonism,
01:26:02.620
see, I just watched Cabaret. Have you watched the movie Cabaret?
01:26:08.060
Okay. I would highly recommend it. It's about the Weimar Republic in Germany. And it's about
01:26:13.920
a cabaret. It's about a young woman who's a cluster B type, who wants to be a movie actress,
01:26:21.580
who's running down the hedonistic road at a cabaret. And she's quite promiscuous and deluded and clueless.
01:26:31.400
And she has her little coterie of followers. And she performs at a cabaret. And like many cluster B
01:26:38.820
people, especially the histrionic types, she's got a certain degree of artistic talent. And that goes
01:26:43.900
along with that fluidity of identity, you know, because artists are shape changers, obviously. And so,
01:26:50.540
anyways, the movie tracks her descent along with people she more or less pulls along with her.
01:26:59.500
But what's very interesting about it is that the director does a brilliant job of this, is that
01:27:03.860
the Nazis are in the background constantly, right? So there's this immense tension between this hedonism,
01:27:10.760
this unbridled, hedonistic, short-term lifestyle that's hypothetically free and enlightened,
01:27:20.660
like the luxury belief types, and the Nazis who are waiting in the wing. And I've been trying to
01:27:26.260
puzzle this out conceptually. So imagine that a large proportion of the population devolves towards
01:27:32.880
impulsive sensuality. Okay? It's a responsibility-less mode of being. Okay?
01:27:39.880
But as your book indicates, things fall apart because of that. Well, when things fall apart,
01:27:46.880
there's an unconscious clamor for the tyrant, right? So you get this hedonism, tyranny dynamic.
01:27:57.120
Now, you see the same thing in the movie Pinocchio. You remember in Pinocchio, the delinquent boys go to
01:28:04.200
Pleasure Island, right? But underneath are the slavers who turn them into braying jackasses.
01:28:11.200
It's the same. And that movie was put out, by the way, just before the Second World War, right?
01:28:17.620
So they had their finger on the pulse. But so there's this insistence in classic stories that
01:28:26.200
hedonism and tyranny go hand in hand, right? It's bread and circuses to some degree in the Roman
01:28:32.480
emperors, right? But it's deeper than that. It's that if the entire population insists upon
01:28:39.320
maintaining immaturity and the hedonistic gratification that goes along with that,
01:28:44.540
there will inevitably be a corresponding demand from the unconscious to elevate the figure of the
01:28:51.080
missing authority figure, right? The missing authority to maintain order.
01:28:57.100
I read this study, I think he's a Danish psychologist, Michael Beng Peterson and some of
01:29:03.300
his co-authors. The study was on populism. And what he found was that it was a study on populism,
01:29:10.820
on status. They had a variety of different measures. But one of the things the study concluded,
01:29:16.040
they had measures of the need for social status, the desire for dominance, the proclivity to be
01:29:23.580
interested in populism. And he found this inverse correlation between the drive for status and the
01:29:29.720
interest in populism. And what he basically concluded, him and his co-authors, was that people
01:29:35.640
who support populism, they themselves aren't actually that interested in status. What they want is a strong
01:29:40.460
leader. They are not interested in ascending to those high positions in society. They would rather
01:29:45.640
just elect a strong man to implement their preferences while they can go about their business
01:29:50.460
and live their lives. And they're not that interested in getting involved in influential political and
01:29:55.360
cultural roles. Whereas people who are very opposed to populism have a strong desire for status and they
01:30:02.860
don't like the idea of a strong man. They themselves want to be the influential leader or the person who gets
01:30:09.220
to call the shots. And they don't like the idea of the strong man. And I'm thinking about what you're
01:30:13.340
describing, that the kinds of people who are tilting more and more towards populism, they're looking at
01:30:19.300
their lives and they're not seeing their preferences and values reflected in the communities around them
01:30:25.520
of families deteriorating and community suffering and people out of work and jobless and addicted to
01:30:31.640
drugs and so on. And maybe they themselves aren't interested in a political career. But if they hear
01:30:36.020
someone say how they're going to fix things and clean things up, they'll vote for that person.
01:30:41.440
Meanwhile, the upper segment of society who, when they look around, they see an environment of
01:30:48.040
relative order and cleanliness and people who are doing well for themselves and highly educated and
01:30:52.620
well-off, they don't see the need for a strong man leader. And many of the people who are in those
01:30:58.700
sort of gated and safe areas, they themselves are interested in influential positions in society.
01:31:04.600
Right. Well, okay. So you'd have to differentiate that further, eh? Because
01:31:10.280
then you could differentiate the populist admirers into two camps. There'd be those that are looking
01:31:18.900
to, those who are generally concerned with the emergence of disorder and who don't know what to
01:31:25.180
do about it. And then there'd be those who want to abdicate all responsibility for self-governance to a
01:31:32.720
centralized authority. Hmm. Interesting. Right. Exactly. Now on the wealthy side, you'd have the
01:31:38.720
same kind of division. You'd have the people who genuinely want to take responsibility for the
01:31:45.760
political and those who are opposed to populists because that's competition for their psychopathic
01:31:52.760
power seeking. Yes. Yes. That sounds right. Yeah. So there's a sort of a benevolent and malevolent
01:31:58.980
side of both of those. Both. Yes, exactly. Well, you know, I haven't seen any psychological research
01:32:05.940
pertaining to the relationship between impulsive hedonism and admiration for more authoritarian
01:32:15.320
beliefs. Hmm. I haven't seen any research on that either. It'd be very interesting to see that tested.
01:32:19.580
No, I've seen nothing. I've seen nothing like that, right? Because, and that's, well, there's lots of
01:32:24.500
things that psychologists do a very bad job of studying. And certainly left-wing authoritarianism
01:32:28.680
is like very high up there on the list. And so the other thing I was curious about, something you said
01:32:34.080
earlier, you know, that I've really been struck in recent years by the willingness of the left in
01:32:41.080
particular. And these are the leftists who I think are part of the camp that you described as the elitists
01:32:47.400
who want it all, right? They're very willing to sacrifice the poor to their hypothetical ideals,
01:32:54.880
right? And so I've also seen no research at all. Like, I'm very curious to know if the, what the, what the
01:33:03.420
cloud of meaning around these so-called luxury beliefs might be. You know, because one of the things I've
01:33:08.840
really seen happen in Europe, it's really an appalling thing to watch, is that the very people who once, so these
01:33:15.340
people on the left, who once were hypothetically on the side of the economically oppressed, are
01:33:22.480
absolutely 100% willing to implement policies that will demolish the poor in the service of their
01:33:31.860
utopian and self-aggrandizing beliefs. You know, and you pointed out some mechanisms there. It's like,
01:33:38.560
well, what does it cost an elite young woman who's at Yale and who's highly likely, let's say she's
01:33:45.980
above average in attractiveness. You know, she's bright. She comes from a family that's doing well.
01:33:52.840
She's intelligent. She's going to get married. It costs her nothing to claim that her compassion is
01:34:01.820
so overwhelming that she's willing to accept anyone's disgraceful behavior in principle. It
01:34:07.800
costs her absolutely nothing. The price is definitely paid by the truly poor. And it does
01:34:13.960
happen from the bottom up, right? And you know why? Because the farther down you go in a hierarchy of
01:34:20.640
status and reputation, the more stress there is. Yes.
01:34:24.660
And so if you increase the amount of chaos, you knock off the bottom people. And that does account
01:34:30.760
for that cascade that you described earlier, is that fatherlessness emerged first in the black
01:34:37.040
community and then spread very, very widely. And then exactly the same thing started to happen in the
01:34:42.540
Hispanic community from the bottom of the economic hierarchy upward. Then it started to happen in the
01:34:48.760
Caucasian population. But the endpoint appears, if you just map out the trends, the endpoint appears
01:34:58.360
that there will be fewer and fewer people in stable relationships. I mean, it's happening at an
01:35:05.840
incredibly, but the people that are in those relationships, they pay no price whatsoever for
01:35:11.320
expanding their tolerance to include all forms of behavior that actually work to undermine that
01:35:18.200
necessary stability. And they won't even admit that this, it's like they just call that, that's just
01:35:22.720
called, well, that's your arbitrary moral judgment. All families are equal. And that's another place
01:35:28.280
where you undoubtedly got in trouble with your book. So maybe we could close with this because
01:35:32.560
one of the things you do that's quite striking in your book is, and I think this is where we'll take
01:35:38.320
the conversation for everyone watching and listening. I think this is where we'll continue the
01:35:41.560
conversation on the Daily Wire side. You are a poster boy, so to speak, for the utility of pursuing higher
01:35:50.900
education. You've had quite marked success, partly because you did, you had skills and abilities that
01:35:57.740
weren't exhausted by the situations that you found yourself in, even within the military. And you got
01:36:04.440
access to higher education and you're, you have likely, you have a pretty decent academic future
01:36:11.240
ahead of you by the looks of things. But you make the case very clearly that as far as you're concerned
01:36:16.640
and from what you've observed, that education is no substitute for stability of family. So why don't you
01:36:27.040
talk about that for a bit and then, and then we'll, and then we'll bring this to a, to a close.
01:36:31.380
Well, we have this preoccupation with, so, so there's this question of how to achieve
01:36:40.260
more upward social mobility for kids in deprived and dysfunctional circumstances. And for the last
01:36:49.780
few decades, it's, it's, we've been focusing on education and college as the end all and be all
01:36:53.860
that if we could just get more kids to get more degrees and earn higher incomes and join the middle
01:36:59.780
class that that, that that's the mark of a successful society. And I make the claim as someone who has
01:37:08.540
done pretty well educationally, but had, you know, the very tumultuous experiences with different
01:37:17.780
families, um, that actually I think the family piece is more important than the education piece.
01:37:23.360
And even if we wanted more kids to go to college and to obtain degrees, we would, we would be more
01:37:31.240
effective in achieving that goal. If we looked at what happens before the age of 18, then what happens
01:37:37.220
after, if we looked at what's happening in children's home lives and their family lives. Um, so that's one
01:37:44.700
part of it. I mean, if you look at the predictors of going to college, one of them is having two parents
01:37:49.020
at home. That's one of the strongest predictors of going on to obtain a bachelor's degree. Uh, and so
01:37:53.340
even if the goal was bachelor's degrees, fine, but let's look at how to promote stable two-parent
01:37:58.300
homes. The other piece is, you know, when I think back to the guys I grew up with and the community I
01:38:05.060
lived in, and I had five close friends growing up. Two of them went to prison. I had one friend who was
01:38:11.480
shot and college may not have been the right path for those guys. College isn't the right path for
01:38:17.880
everyone. Um, but I do think, so, so maybe regardless of environment, wherever you put these
01:38:23.160
guys, um, I'm not entirely convinced that they would have gone on to achieve astounding educational
01:38:30.120
success. But I do think that if they had been in an environment where there was more family stability,
01:38:36.560
good role models, adults putting the needs of children before their own desires, they wouldn't
01:38:43.020
have been incarcerated. They wouldn't have gone to, they would, you know, they wouldn't have been shot
01:38:47.440
to death. So we may not be able to do much to raise the ceiling for a lot of kids, but I think we could
01:38:53.720
do more to raise the floor as far as how catastrophically down they could become versus we've been focusing
01:38:59.560
on the other side of it, which is how much more can we lift them up? You know, you're probably well
01:39:03.740
aware. Uh, I've, I've heard you, you know, I know, I know you're aware of the, the research on the
01:39:07.760
limitations of increasing intelligence and academic ability and those kinds of things.
01:39:11.020
There are hard limits to that. Um, but I don't think we've done enough to look at the other side
01:39:17.640
of, you know, we can actually prevent young boys, especially from incarceration, from being locked up.
01:39:26.560
One of the statistics I cite in the book is that only 3% of children in foster care graduate from
01:39:32.860
college, whereas 60% of boys in foster care are later incarcerated. And I, I mean, I don't know if
01:39:40.140
we can do a, I mean, we could probably do more to get more kids, uh, from those backgrounds into
01:39:44.980
universities, but we should also be focusing on how to prevent those kids from living in such
01:39:51.340
dysfunctional and deprived circumstances in the first place that lead them to, uh, jail and to prison.
01:39:57.720
And ultimately the book is a kind of implicit defensive family from an author who really
01:40:04.680
didn't have one, uh, and that we could be expanding our area of concern beyond just the educational.
01:40:11.580
Um, I'm grateful to have achieved the success that I have, and it's better than not having those things.
01:40:18.000
Um, but towards the end of the book, I, I do say that, um, you know, when I think back to the good
01:40:24.220
memories I had from my upbringing, um, yeah, I, I would trade all of it. I would trade all of the
01:40:30.920
educational credentials and accolades and so on to have just had a more sort of stable, normal,
01:40:34.980
conventional upbringing. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I think we'll delve into that a bit more.
01:40:42.860
Okay. Well, thank you very much. And, and for all of you watching and listening, that Troubled is
01:40:47.860
very interesting book. And I think it, it gets the meta story, right. Um, we've wrestled with this
01:40:53.680
issue, for example, at this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that I've been building with some other
01:40:58.280
people. And one of the more contentious streams of discussion we've had was with regard to family
01:41:03.960
policy. And we settled on the agreement, hard fought, that the nuclear family is the minimal ideal
01:41:13.580
that can sustain society. It might not be sufficient. Even there's a lot of stress on nuclear families.
01:41:20.920
It might not be enough, but once you fragment below nuclear family, you're, you're playing with,
01:41:27.720
you're playing with fire. You're playing with serious fire, you know, and there's a dark side
01:41:31.740
too, to that. Another dark side to that, um, luxury belief thing, you know, it's like,
01:41:36.520
you might want to think that people want wealth for comfort and opportunity, but they also want wealth
01:41:44.400
for comparative status. And it's, it's very much advantageous for the psychopathic wealthy to ensure
01:41:55.120
that the fragmented masses are so chaotic that they don't get to have what the rich have, right.
01:42:03.760
Because a lot of status is having something that someone else doesn't have. It's not the same as
01:42:09.280
wealth, right. And so the real psychopath types, well, you know, there is literature showing a
01:42:16.260
relationship between the dark tetrad. And so imagine this is, you can imagine a situation where you,
01:42:23.360
here's the deal. You can have your salary doubled, but your friends have their salaries tripled.
01:42:28.320
Right. Right. Or you can, you can, and you can contrast that against relative deprivation
01:42:35.540
conditions where your relative status is elevated at the cost of other people's wellbeing. Well,
01:42:42.200
the psychopathic narcissist types will pick the elevation of relative status at the cost of other
01:42:47.820
people. And I think that's why they spend so much time looking upward, right? Like I think that
01:42:52.760
there's a, it's very interesting that, uh, eat the rich is a more popular slogan than feed the poor.
01:43:00.340
Right. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Because it is about that relative. And the people who say eat the rich tend
01:43:05.380
to be people who, maybe they're not in the 1%, but they're in the top 10%. Yeah. And the people who
01:43:10.680
are the most strident about oppressor, oppressed dichotomies and so on, they're not the people at the
01:43:16.400
bottom. They are people who are just, just below the top. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and they, and it's
01:43:23.220
eat the rich is a lie. It's eat the competent. That's really what they mean. Yeah. Yeah. And that's,
01:43:28.420
that's the real man. That's the real railing cry of the, of the real narcissistic psychopath. It's like
01:43:33.080
devour the competent. And, and, you know, when you say, if I say to someone who's competent,
01:43:38.400
you just got everything you have by stealing it, that means it's perfectly, not only is legitimate
01:43:45.400
for me to steal it, if I'm oppressed, it's actually morally obligatory for me to steal it. Right. That's
01:43:51.280
a very dangerous situation. That's exactly what was set up in the early Soviet union. Exactly that.
01:43:57.040
And the psychopaths came out of the woodwork, man. And they just turned that whole society into hell.
01:44:01.980
Yeah. Yeah. Same thing in Maoist China and, and, uh, the Cambodian genocide. I mean, if you want,
01:44:07.760
like, I mean, the, you know, this kind of year off top, but the, the, the Cambodian genocide is
01:44:11.660
fascinating because they basically speed ran communism and compressed all the horrors of
01:44:15.920
the Soviet union into about three years. And they killed a third of the country's population.
01:44:20.540
Um, horrifying. I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's absurd that we don't have more education around
01:44:26.400
what happened in communist societies, but that's, yeah, an aside. It, it, it is, it is quite,
01:44:31.100
it is quite the stunning miracle of stupidity. That's for sure. All right, sir. Well,
01:44:35.940
thank you to everyone watching and listening at this discussion today. I'm going to continue
01:44:39.800
to talk to Rob on the daily wire side. Um, I think we'll delve into slightly more personal
01:44:45.420
matters on that side, because I'm, I'm curious to find out, well, I'm curious to talk a little
01:44:50.120
bit more about research hypotheses. Um, since I don't have the opportunity to do that much
01:44:54.600
now that I'm no longer working for a university. Um, but I'm also curious about finding out a little
01:45:01.300
bit more about what you think the lasting effects for you have been as a consequence of being
01:45:07.280
raised in an environment where relationships, long-term relationships were tenuous to say the
01:45:13.680
least. Um, so let's, so that's what we're going to do on the, on the, on the daily wire side. So
01:45:18.400
you guys are welcome to join us for that. And thank you very much, Rob. It's a pleasure talking
01:45:22.320
to you. I'm glad to hear that despite the fact that you don't get to do a book tour that
01:45:26.660
at least not to bookstores that your book is doing well. And I think it'll continue to do well. So
01:45:31.180
would, and hopefully this podcast will help to some degree for that. And, uh, everybody watching,
01:45:37.540
listening, thank you very much for your time and attention and to the daily wire plus people for
01:45:41.240
making this possible. That's also much appreciated. Good to talk to you. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. It's a