The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today with Dr. J.D. Haltigan.

00:01:13.440 Dr. Haltigan is a developmental psychologist with a real interest in psychopathology, the study of mental illness,

00:01:21.680 and the manner in which it develops in relationship to such things as early childhood experience.

00:01:27.300 And so he's also quite a pronounced and courageous voice on social media, which is really where I first came across him.

00:01:36.920 There are a lot of crazy things going on in the psychological community at the moment.

00:01:42.840 And so Haltigan is one of the few voices in the psychological community that are properly expressing dismay at the state of the culture and of the profession.

00:01:55.900 And so I've been following him, watching what he's doing and appreciating it and learning more about his story.

00:02:04.720 You know, he's a pretty good researcher, certainly good enough so that he should have, at minimum, a decent academic job and maybe good enough so that he should have an excellent one.

00:02:16.640 But instead, he's working at a deli because he decided he'd rather have his conscience than his position.

00:02:22.900 And that's, you know, impressive.

00:02:27.540 So I thought I'd reach out to him and have a chat.

00:02:30.060 And I know my wife has done the same on her podcast platform.

00:02:34.520 That's Tammy Peterson.

00:02:36.320 And so join us.

00:02:39.360 Hello, Dr. Haltigan.

00:02:40.620 Thanks for joining me today.

00:02:42.460 Very pleasure to meet you, Jordan, here on our call.

00:02:45.840 And it was a very pleasure to see you here in Pittsburgh and great to meet you as well here.

00:02:50.580 Let's start by talking about who you are and what you do.

00:02:54.420 Just why don't we walk you, why don't you walk everybody through your, well, let's go into your graduate education.

00:03:01.240 We'll start there and walk people through.

00:03:03.060 And so they get a sense of what you do, but also what position you're in at the moment and why.

00:03:08.040 Sure.

00:03:08.580 So my academic trajectory was, my graduate academic trajectory started really after I did some residential treatment work in upstate New York here in the States.

00:03:18.920 And then I did my PhD in developmental psych at the University of Miami in Florida.

00:03:24.260 And I was really interested in that time and attachment theory.

00:03:27.540 And the advisor I worked with there was doing some early, early stage autism work.

00:03:32.740 So I kind of looked at attachment in the context of early risk for autism.

00:03:37.000 And then subsequent to Miami, I did a couple of postdocs, one of which at the University of Illinois was with an advisor who was fairly prominent in the attachment literature.

00:03:47.060 And I trained on things like, you know, measures that are kind of conventional for the attachment developmental tradition, like the adult attachment interview and the strain situation.

00:03:58.160 I can discuss those later, but I did that.

00:04:01.060 And then I kind of kept doing postdocs and trying to find a tenure track position in academia and psychology.

00:04:07.240 And it was just so difficult.

00:04:10.020 Ended up going to the University of Ottawa to do another postdoc.

00:04:14.540 And that's when kind of things sort of transitioned.

00:04:17.960 I was there for two years to talk, taught some courses.

00:04:21.060 And at the end of the day, was recruited down to the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

00:04:27.300 And that's where I got my appointment at U of T in psychiatry and was there from about 2016 to 2023.

00:04:34.660 And that appointment ended.

00:04:36.580 And that was kind of right around the time, 2016, 2023, when things were getting a little woke in the academy.

00:04:42.680 And, you know, I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with some of the research and how it was being conducted.

00:04:47.980 And what we were able to say about mental health and early development and came back to Pittsburgh, which is where I'm here today.

00:04:57.180 And really trying to stay involved in academia in any way that I can and get through this period of what I consider to be woke insanity, for lack of a better term.

00:05:08.180 And working some odd, you know, odd end jobs, blue collar jobs at a local deli to kind of make it while continuing to write about some of this stuff.

00:05:16.860 And to use my platform to speak about some of these issues like the gender stuff and other things that I've researched in my career.

00:05:24.820 Okay, good.

00:05:25.840 Well, that's great grist for the mill.

00:05:27.760 So why don't we start by having you explain to everybody, well, two things.

00:05:31.920 Why don't you tell them what developmental psychology is, broadly speaking, who the masters are in the field and what attracted you to it?

00:05:40.220 And then zoom in a little bit more, particularly on attachment theory.

00:05:44.960 Sure.

00:05:45.260 So developmental psychology is more or less a study of development across the lifespan from the cradle to the grave, which was one of the earlier terms that John Bowlby, the sort of originator of attachment theory, came up with.

00:05:58.840 So across birth to death, and we look at how individuals develop, how they develop their cognitive skills, how they develop their emotional capacities, in particular, you know, the earliest stages of life and infancy, how the relationship with parents impacts that, the development of language, the development of, you know, theory of mind, for example, and other things.

00:06:21.540 And some of the earlier stuff that happens in adolescence, the crisis of identity is another big one.

00:06:30.200 And then in aging, which is not really my focus, I was always early infancy to middle childhood.

00:06:37.340 But in aging, you study the similar things, the decline of mental faculties, emotional capacities in old age and so forth.

00:06:46.300 I guess some of the big names that listeners might be aware of in terms of developmental psych would be Piaget, maybe Bowlby a little bit less so.

00:06:55.540 But if they're interested in developmental psych, Bowlby would be a name that would come up.

00:07:00.060 Certainly, some of the old school theorists played a role in developmental psych as well.

00:07:06.080 I mean, the tradition of Freud and so forth definitely played a role in some of that.

00:07:12.200 But I would say Piaget, Vygotsky is another one, the Russian psychologist who studied language acquisition and how that impacted emotional development and cognitive mastery of the environment and the child's ability to learn.

00:07:26.880 And so those would be some of the people that I would associate or would think that some people might recognize as developmental psychologists.

00:07:35.240 Yeah, so Freud, I mean, Freud at least attempted a taxonomy and a classification of developmental stages.

00:07:44.820 And, you know, I think he actually made some pretty good contributions to our understanding of parental relationships insofar as they impact psychopathology.

00:07:55.660 I mean, my sense, especially in modern times, I'd like your take on this, is that Freud's specification of the Oedipal complex was a major step forward in identification of, well, much of the pathology that characterizes the modern world.

00:08:12.080 I mean, it's a variant of really what Freud was pointing to in a rather oblique way because he tended to sexualize everything.

00:08:21.560 Freud was very convinced that the fundamental motivating factor in human beings could be construed in a relatively unitary manner and that sex occupied that place, although he also was concerned with the impulse towards death.

00:08:37.180 But Freud certainly pointed out that the instinct that mothers have to love and care for their infants was also something that if it went wrong could pose a remarkably pervasive danger to those same infants.

00:08:56.260 And the psychoanalysts, for example, the psychoanalysts, for example, posited that the good mother necessarily fails.

00:09:04.760 And so, and that stemmed from the Freudian tradition, the idea that the mother was in this uncomfortable position of having to make a transition from the indefinite amount of care that has to be poured into a newborn who's completely helpless,

00:09:18.400 to the facilitated to the facilitated of the relative autonomy that a toddler requires and then obviously older children and adolescents.

00:09:26.820 And Freud pointed out, highlighted, let's say, the fact that a mother who extended her concern for the infant past its due date could then pose a major threat to the developing psyche.

00:09:43.440 And I think he got that right and then, of course, Jung and his followers followed that up, especially Eric Neumann with their descriptions of the symbolism and mythology associated with the devouring mother.

00:09:54.560 And I can't help but see in the pathologization of the current administrative environment, let's say, particularly in universities and also in the K-12 system,

00:10:06.400 all the hallmarks of a maternal instinct gone absolutely stark raving mad so that everything becomes an infant.

00:10:14.840 And if it isn't an infant, then it's likely a predator.

00:10:17.200 And that's a bad situation to be in if you're either the infant or the predator and you actually happen to be neither.

00:10:25.220 So any comments about that?

00:10:28.900 Like part of the reason I wanted to talk to you, I think, is because I've been following you on Twitter for a long time and you're one of the very few psychologists.

00:10:39.100 Yeah, they could probably be listed on one hand who's willing to make a case for the developmental psychopathology that's associated with the current culture war.

00:10:51.800 And so I'm kind of wondering how you construe that and then we'll get back to some of these more fundamental developmental theorists.

00:10:59.040 Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Freud and how he kind of, you know, some of his contributions, because I see Freud's work as mostly a cultural psychologist.

00:11:06.500 I think Freud, like you said, he sexualized everything.

00:11:10.620 People have dismissed him out of hand because of that and kind of in some ways, rightfully so if you're a psychological scientist.

00:11:16.500 But from a cultural perspective, when you're looking at what's happening now in our culture, he was really indeed onto something.

00:11:23.200 And you mentioned the good enough mother.

00:11:25.240 And that's kind of where I departed and where attachment theory departs a little bit from Freud.

00:11:29.840 The object relations school, like Winnicott, Donald Woods, Winnicott, who was the famous British psychoanalyst, and then Bowlby following from him, they kind of broke away from Freud.

00:11:41.240 In fact, Bowlby was excluded from the British Psychoanalytic Society because he focused on the environment, what was actually happening in the world and to the infant rather than in some fantasy world.

00:11:53.220 And really, Winnicott's notion of the good enough mother was that she would fail or the good enough caregiver would fail.

00:11:59.760 In other words, they wouldn't suffocate the infant or try to be too perfect.

00:12:04.900 And so that's kind of a critical concept that is really happening.

00:12:08.560 And as I see it in the world today, this sort of overprotectiveness or suffocation of children's ability because children have to grow up and develop and master, cognitively master the environment.

00:12:22.420 And so if you constantly shield them from any challenges or impingements, as Winnicott might say, on the environment, you're necessarily going to restrict their ability to adapt to that.

00:12:32.080 Well, we should point out too, what that failure of adaptation means is that, so a child who's intimidated by a novel situation will turn, a young child will turn to their caregiver, their mother or father or substitute to regulate their anxiety when a challenges confronts them that their emotions indicate might be too large to master.

00:13:00.260 And so what the good enough parent does is replace that need for dependency on an external source with competence and skill on behalf of the child.

00:13:12.660 Now, the problem with that, and I think Freud and certainly the Jungians as well got this right, is that for a mother whose status and sense of moral superiority depends on that relationship with her child,

00:13:30.260 maybe her emotional dependency is there too, maybe her emotional dependency is there too, the fact of that child's dawning competence actually poses a threat to her psychological integrity.

00:13:40.600 And that, and that I think becomes particularly relevant when we're discussing, let's say, mothers with cluster B psychopathology who are very, very immature and narcissistic themselves, like toddlers, let's say, and who are unable in consequence to attend to the child without putting their own emotional, personal emotional needs first and foremost.

00:14:09.240 Need for status, need for status, need for love, need for security, need for belonging, all those sorts of things.

00:14:15.160 That shouldn't be there twisting and dementing the child's pathway forward.

00:14:22.780 And so that also gives, I guess, gives us a route into discussing developmental psychopathology in the relationship.

00:14:29.260 I've read, for example, that up to 50% of mothers whose children progress with trans surgery, for example, have some variant of the cluster B personality disorders.

00:14:43.720 Yes, and I think cluster B personality disorders in the attachment literature would track what we call preoccupation with the attachment relationship.

00:14:55.300 In other words, there's sort of some inability of, in this case, you know, typically the mother to extract herself from whatever she was dealing with in her own early childhood or around those sorts of relationships with her own parental figures.

00:15:12.100 And this preoccupation is a constant focus or hyper-focus, a hyper-affective focus on aspects of the relationship.

00:15:22.120 And so what happens is, is that they regulate, the parent regulates their own sense of satisfaction or affirmation through their child.

00:15:30.020 And so it's kind of exactly what you're suggesting is that the child is basically placed in the position, a reverse position of providing the sort of emotional satisfaction for the parent that the parent would otherwise sort of seek to establish in the child a sense of competence, a sense of direction in the world.

00:15:49.140 And so it's kind of an inverted, what we call role-reverse relationship.

00:15:54.180 And that's very toxic for a child who has to, in other words, to adapt to the environment, develop his own sense of mastery and competence.

00:16:04.080 But when it's inverted like that, the caregiver, in most cases the mother, will place that burden on the child.

00:16:11.580 And so that's kind of where you see that inversion.

00:16:14.180 And of course that leads to all sorts of psychopathology in the child, certainly influences it in terms of a weak identity structure, inability to regulate their own emotions,

00:16:23.520 and the child's constant focus on pleasing the caregiver or the mother at the risk of if they don't, they're going to lose that source of caregiving that protects them and is their source of parental love and authority.

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00:17:39.640 Right.

00:17:40.280 Well, they face the additional problem, those children, that the parent, let's say, most often in this case, the mother.

00:17:49.060 Cluster B fathers tend to be absent.

00:17:51.480 So cluster B mothers tend to be present.

00:17:54.280 And so we should outline for our viewers and listeners what cluster B consists of.

00:17:59.520 So that's a grouping of statistically and symptomatically related pathologies of personality that include histrionic.

00:18:11.380 And so that's kind of the modern variant of the Freudian hysteric, who's very dramatic and over-emotional.

00:18:18.160 Narcissistic, and so narcissistic, people with narcissistic personality disorder are always attempting to garner unearned social status and attention.

00:18:30.500 Psychopathic, which is callous and unfeeling, very, very self-centered, very present-focused, and antisocial.

00:18:44.680 And that's more associated with criminality per se.

00:18:49.640 That particular variant is more common among men, especially in its more violent forms.

00:18:56.020 As I said, those sorts of fathers tend to be absent.

00:18:59.300 So now part of the problem if you're a child and you have a mother with cluster B psychopathology is that not only are you called upon to attend to her unmet emotional needs constantly,

00:19:12.820 but there is actually no way of meeting those needs, treating cluster B people is notoriously difficult and stressful for even a very practiced therapist who's only around some of the time.

00:19:28.520 For a child, it's filling a pit that is so deep that a lifetime of work would not be sufficient to fill it to the brim.

00:19:41.420 So why don't you tell us a little bit about how, let's tie that into attachment theory and how that develops.

00:19:49.120 We can focus a bit on the multigenerational transmission of familial emotional pathology.

00:19:55.520 Well, yeah, I think it's important to consider that multigenerational transmission from both the sort of biological and the social perspectives.

00:20:02.800 And that means that there will be some inherent dispositions on the part of caregivers to be, you know,

00:20:09.560 we all have our own baseline levels of emotional regulation,

00:20:13.340 but the actual social relationship of early childhood is critical to sort of fine tune or to calibrate the ability to emotionally regulate.

00:20:24.560 So we have, we all have a baseline of the ability to regulate our emotions and so forth,

00:20:29.060 but it's really that early caregiving relationship that kind of fine tunes or calibrates it.

00:20:33.920 And if that fails, what you end up having is a complete failure and inability to regulate emotions.

00:20:40.080 And that's kind of what we see in some of the cluster B histrionic preoccupied discourse or personality disorders.

00:20:49.840 And so when that continues generationally, it basically perpetuates itself and propagates itself from parent to child and child to the next generation.

00:21:00.420 So I think it's important for listeners to understand that if there's a failure to regulate or to sort of scaffold the infant and child in developing their own regulations,

00:21:12.660 that's going to persist until there is some corrective course or it won't.

00:21:17.760 There won't be any corrective course.

00:21:19.160 And I think that's kind of what we're seeing now is that a lot of these failures have sort of aggregated in the culture.

00:21:25.340 And you're seeing that play out as sort of a more of a macro social level.

00:21:30.340 So let's, I'm going to walk you through a very brief description of a,

00:21:37.120 what let's call it a summary of proper infant development.

00:21:40.000 And then I'll like you to comment on that and flesh it out or offer criticisms, if you will.

00:21:44.560 So you could imagine this neurologically and practically.

00:21:49.560 So an infant comes into the world with a few primary emotions, which develop across time,

00:21:58.300 a few primary motivations and a few wired up motor skills, skills for action and perception.

00:22:06.740 So a child, a very early, very young child, an infant can focus his eyes or her eyes on the face of the mother at about the distance from breast to mother's face.

00:22:19.940 The sucking reflex, it's not precisely reflex because it's more sophisticated than that.

00:22:26.040 The child's mouth and tongue are quite developed when the child's born.

00:22:30.120 So you can imagine an animal like a deer or a moose, something like that.

00:22:36.040 Very soon after they're born, they can stand up and walk or even run.

00:22:40.340 Human infants can't.

00:22:41.620 But we do come equipped into the world with some hard wiring and our lips and our tongues work pretty well.

00:22:49.560 And so we can latch onto a nipple, say.

00:22:51.620 And it's partly also why very young children put things in their mouth because the motor and sensory apparatus of the tongue and lips are there.

00:23:01.200 The child sort of develops from that outward, it develops from the center outward.

00:23:06.380 The basic emotional structure is positive and negative emotion, but it works on a very, very short-term basis.

00:23:13.740 And it's very focused on the immediate needs of the child.

00:23:16.720 And those emotions are very intense and all-consuming.

00:23:22.240 And the negative emotions can include pain, it's there at the beginning.

00:23:26.620 Anger, that's there very early.

00:23:28.540 Fear, that develops about when the child starts to be able to move.

00:23:33.340 And on the positive emotional side, well, interest, excitement, enthusiasm, certainly the capacity for love.

00:23:41.380 Those are all there.

00:23:42.240 What the parent and the social environment is trying to do with that panoply of motivations and emotions is to further the skill development,

00:23:59.600 but also help the child learn to integrate its emotions in a playful manner with the family and then a broader social community

00:24:09.460 and to facilitate that movement from egocentricity to thoroughly engaged social play.

00:24:18.180 And rough and tumble play helps with that.

00:24:20.100 And so does the more subtle forms of play that a mother might engage in.

00:24:23.360 And hopefully that gets to the point where, by the age of about three, a child that would otherwise be egocentric and hyper-emotional

00:24:31.500 is now able to take the stance of another person and start to develop the ability to play and to engage in turn-taking reciprocal friendships.

00:24:45.440 And then those friendships scaffold further development from the age of four onward.

00:24:51.580 And the best evidence that I had come across, and I haven't reviewed this literature for a long time,

00:24:57.980 was that there was something like a critical stage of development for play between the ages of two and four,

00:25:04.460 such that if a more aggressive and emotional child wasn't socialized into proper play behavior by the age of four,

00:25:12.340 it was very difficult for them to establish friendships and they tended to fall further and further behind

00:25:18.020 and to be isolated and alienated and sometimes criminal for the rest of their lives.

00:25:25.360 So anyways, that's my memory of the developmental literature in a nutshell.

00:25:30.400 And so elaborate on that, criticize that, tell me what you think about that as a model.

00:25:35.820 I think as a model, that's kind of a broad generalized overview that's pretty on point.

00:25:40.340 I would say our sort of understanding of critical points of time is still fluid.

00:25:46.060 We're still looking at that in the literature.

00:25:47.780 But I'm glad you brought up sort of the basic instincts and drives because I was just discussing this the other day on another show

00:25:55.460 that the best sort of analogy or best sort of understanding to give your listeners would be

00:26:00.960 there's a paradigm in infant research called the face-to-face, still-face paradigm.

00:26:05.200 And basically what that is, is it illustrates everything you just said with remarkable clarity.

00:26:10.900 Basically, the paradigm is this.

00:26:12.320 It's a well-known paradigm in developmental tradition.

00:26:15.180 Usually an infant and a mother is brought into the lab or in some cases his father too.

00:26:20.400 I don't want to emphasize the mother, but in most cases that is true.

00:26:23.540 And you place the infant in a car seat in front of the mother or the caregiver, and you have them looking at each other.

00:26:31.840 They're separated by maybe a little bit of space.

00:26:35.160 And the paradigm is this.

00:26:36.520 You have three minutes of free play where the mother usually engages facially and communicatively with the infant.

00:26:42.620 Then you have a two-minute period where the mother sits back, kind of like I'm doing now, and maintains a completely still face.

00:26:51.520 And then you have a follow-up three-minute period where they resume interaction.

00:26:56.280 And one of the best replicated effects in all of infant literature is during that still face,

00:27:01.680 when the parent cuts off that social communication, those facial gestures,

00:27:06.140 the infant's negative affect just rockets up.

00:27:09.700 And I've seen this in the lab myself, crying, squirming in the car seat, and so forth.

00:27:15.200 And then typically we call that the still face effect.

00:27:18.740 And then in the reunion, once there's a rapprochement and the mother engages typically,

00:27:23.840 or the caregiver engages back with this emotional communication, gestures, like you said, sort of social play,

00:27:30.600 the infant is still highly negative in affect, but there's sort of a deadening of that sort of towards a more positive, affective tone,

00:27:39.080 typically by the end of that three minutes, there's some sort of reintegration.

00:27:43.120 And that little encapsulated eight-minute sequence right there illustrates in sort of a tight way what's happening all across infancy and childhood.

00:27:53.060 And so what we can see from that procedure is that if there's inability of sort of the reunion effect,

00:27:59.860 if there's still consistent negativity,

00:28:01.780 you kind of get a window into how that socialization process is maybe going.

00:28:07.560 And so during the reunion, what we typically see is that the caregiver will work to reengage,

00:28:13.860 you know, to lessen the negative affect in the infant.

00:28:16.940 And so that's kind of the basic sort of analogy to use even in later development.

00:28:24.260 What the idea is, the parent is scaffolding, in many ways, that regulation of emotion.

00:28:30.820 And as the child ages, that includes things like letting the child explore the environment.

00:28:36.060 What if the child is out and playing, you know, on the street, has a fall, they're injured.

00:28:41.460 How does that process of seeking comfort work out?

00:28:45.060 And how does the parent regulate sort of the need for autonomy

00:28:48.120 from a need for closeness and some sort of protection as the child grows?

00:28:54.640 Right.

00:28:55.280 Well, and we should point out too that this is a very tricky business in the real world

00:29:00.900 for parents to negotiate, not least because children vary widely

00:29:07.080 in their intrinsic levels of negative emotion.

00:29:10.480 And so there are children who are by temperament,

00:29:13.600 they're much more likely to become upset,

00:29:15.640 but also once upset are much more difficult to soothe.

00:29:19.420 And so how in the lab do you separate out or can you at all

00:29:22.840 the competence of the parent in reestablishing that relationship

00:29:28.540 and the intrinsic sensitivity or trait neuroticism of the child who's involved?

00:29:34.640 Well, that's kind of what gets down to the heart of the methodology

00:29:37.740 about some of this work that's been so degraded with the current insanity

00:29:41.800 that we're living through in the academy.

00:29:43.340 And so we have these gold standard measures that measure infant temperament,

00:29:46.980 which is essentially personality and infant.

00:29:49.700 And we have measures that we have, you know, coded observational protocols

00:29:53.900 to look at how sensitive, for example, a parent is being towards the child

00:29:58.860 in a free play setting or the still face.

00:30:01.660 How much do they look?

00:30:02.760 How much do they engage?

00:30:03.640 And you can code all of that.

00:30:05.080 And then you can look at that in a multivariable analytic framework.

00:30:09.460 So that's one way to do that.

00:30:11.160 But what you point out with sort of the basic instinctual drives,

00:30:16.220 as well as the sort of social influence is crucial because now there's sort of a hyper

00:30:22.220 focus on the only reason that, for example, an infant or child could become screwed up in

00:30:29.000 a way or maladjusted is from social influences.

00:30:32.360 There's never a proper accounting of the role that temperament does play.

00:30:36.620 Some children are much more difficult to soothe.

00:30:39.860 And that's why Winnicott and others beyond him emphasize that the parent's role is not to be

00:30:44.840 perfect.

00:30:45.760 They got to do the best they can to manage those different levels of baseline negative

00:30:50.980 affectivity and other sort of intrinsic characteristics of their child.

00:30:55.680 But there's become a constant hyper focus in today's culture about this idea of perfection

00:31:00.640 and the perfect child or the perfect environment.

00:31:04.320 And I think that has led to a lot of the sort of the notion of the suffocation or the devouring

00:31:09.660 mother that is actually, you know, enicmal to healthy development.

00:31:14.220 You might say as a rule of thumb that the combined influence of the mother and father should be

00:31:22.120 about as positive and about as negative as the typical potentially social interaction that a child's

00:31:30.740 likely to have in the world, right?

00:31:33.020 So you can think of parents as caregivers, but as the child matures, the parents should also become

00:31:41.300 proxies for the actual social world that the child's most likely to encounter.

00:31:46.380 So one of the reasons that disciplinary strategies are necessary with regards to the fostering of

00:31:55.940 infant and toddler development is that parents obviously have to prepare their children to

00:32:02.280 behave in the real world.

00:32:04.360 And that means that the child has to learn to integrate their emotions into a framework of

00:32:11.760 behavior and attention that other people find attractive and inviting.

00:32:18.180 And that the, see, when I worked in the developmental field, which was back in the, mostly in the 90s,

00:32:26.460 mid 90s to say mid 2000s, or the first decade of the 2000s, I was struck and hurt in some ways by the

00:32:35.420 fact that the destiny of children who aren't well socialized between that age of two and four is

00:32:42.360 pretty damn dismal.

00:32:44.060 And it really struck home for me the necessity of parents to do everything they could to encourage

00:32:51.060 another instinct in their children, which is that instinct towards mastery and integration.

00:32:55.680 You know, we talked about the instinctual basis of negative emotion and positive emotion, but there's

00:33:00.380 also an instinct towards integration, which is probably associated with the transfer of behavioral

00:33:06.960 control from the more primordial and immediate emotional systems to the more distal and social systems

00:33:14.760 that are mediated by the cortex, which is, takes a lot more socialization, so to speak, to program.

00:33:22.980 And so the reason that parents need to regulate the emotions of their children is, first of all, so their

00:33:28.560 children won't be suffering as a consequence of the domination of their negative emotion, but also

00:33:34.380 so that other people can appreciate or even stand having their children around so they'll play with them

00:33:41.220 and educate them. And so if you're at the beck and call of your infant constantly, and you're doing

00:33:51.500 that in part because you can't tolerate any distress on the part of the infant, or you're covertly rewarding

00:34:01.200 the infant's infantile behavior so that he or she won't leave, then you're absolutely devastating there.

00:34:10.940 You're destroying the possibility that they're going to be able to have friends and thrive in the world.

00:34:17.560 And so why do you think, do you think there's any evidence that that developmental process has been

00:34:24.640 interfered with at a societal level now?

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00:35:40.920 Well, that's right. What you said is right. It's completely a fair description of sort of this

00:35:49.960 process of impulse control development and so forth. And I think, you know, there's a lot of

00:35:54.180 work that has been done regarding sort of broad-based trends and sort of helicopter parenting

00:36:00.700 or, you know, parental over-involvement. And I think that's exactly what's happening,

00:36:07.000 at least at some sort of generalized level in the larger culture. If there's an inability

00:36:12.440 for the child to engage the environment because they're constantly dependent on the parent for

00:36:19.420 whatever reason, either to fulfill the parent's needs of their own emotional satisfaction or to

00:36:24.960 fulfill the child's need, who's never told, you know, you need to explore the environment.

00:36:29.720 What you see is an inability to regulate the, you know, the impulses. And that ends up in,

00:36:35.060 you know, down the road, a complete failure. And that's kind of what you see in the phenotype

00:36:40.420 of some of this cluster B stuff we're seeing play out on the tent cities and these campus protests,

00:36:45.980 for example, even in 2020 with a lot of the rioting. It's just sort of this completely emotionally

00:36:52.880 dysregulated behavior. And that's downstream from the millennial generation being raised in sort of

00:37:01.800 this different way than was, you know, 30, 40 years ago where the child went out, they explored,

00:37:08.020 they, you know, a lot of sort of commentators have noted, you know, you went and played it on

00:37:12.600 the street till it got dark and you came home. That isn't happening anymore. And so what is the sort

00:37:18.040 of effect or can we sort of quantify in some way what that's doing? I think there's definitely evidence

00:37:24.240 for this playing out. There's definitely, you know, evidence for an influence of some of this

00:37:29.920 overprotection. But in terms of, and this is one of the things that the ideologues in the academy

00:37:35.560 will do is they want you to sort of mechanistically fine grain, measure this and make the case for it

00:37:40.160 in sort of a mechanistic way. And that's sort of the challenge that someone like me is faced with.

00:37:44.960 We can see with our own eyes, these trends playing out, but then how do we frame it in an academic

00:37:51.020 methodological way to make the case? And I think we are at that point, but there has to be room in

00:37:57.800 the academy to investigate these questions. They can't be censored. They can't be, you know, allowed

00:38:03.360 to be not asked. And so, you know, grant money needs to be funded for those types of things. But I

00:38:08.220 definitely think there's evidence for these types of large trends that we're seeing. I mean, we see

00:38:15.700 them with our own eyes. And so it's undeniable in the sense that you can look at something that's

00:38:21.020 happening earlier. And, you know, you can see something that's happening now and you can make

00:38:25.980 the link, but the challenge is really, is really formalizing that in some sort of methodology.

00:38:31.600 Right. Yeah. Well, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been struggling with that.

00:38:36.120 Abigail Schreier is another one.

00:38:37.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me offer some sociological explanations for this

00:38:44.560 dysregulation. Because I'm always inclined to, well, you have to give the devil his due. And as

00:38:52.080 you said, if you're going to consider multiple variables, you consider sociological and economic

00:38:57.100 variables along with psychological variables. So tell me what you think about these contributors.

00:39:02.520 So while now we have older parents, often old enough so that under normal human conditions,

00:39:08.940 they would have been grandparents. And so older parents are more conservative. And they're also,

00:39:17.200 they also tend to be richer. And they have far fewer children. So they have all their eggs in one

00:39:24.420 basket, so to speak. Plus, they're more conservative. And they can also provide for their children in a way

00:39:33.880 that makes saying no to their wants dependent on the decision of the parent rather than the

00:39:40.300 restrictions of their economic circumstances. So those are three big changes, right? So now let's

00:39:47.100 say the typical mother is 30. Let's say the, and because she's 30, likely to be in more positive

00:39:57.940 economic circumstances and therefore able to respond to the child's demands with the provision

00:40:03.500 of material wealth. Then we also have the fact that there's far fewer children in each family. And so

00:40:10.640 that means each child doesn't have to contend in what's likely a beneficial way, at least under some

00:40:17.200 circumstances, with a multiplicity of siblings with whom they have to share the attention and resources and

00:40:23.440 learn how to get along with, right? In that intense cooperative and competitive environment that

00:40:29.000 characterizes a sibling relationship. And then we also have the additional problem of single parents

00:40:36.120 or parents with multiple relationships who've had disrupted familial relationships themselves.

00:40:42.620 Then we have the problem as well that there just aren't as many children out on the street.

00:40:46.800 There aren't mothers watching them all the time like there were when there were neighborhoods full of

00:40:51.880 children. And so, and then, so that's, that's in some sense, independent of the psychological

00:40:57.180 variables that we've been describing. And so what does the current literature in relationship to

00:41:04.420 developmental psychopathology have to say about those longer term sociological transformations?

00:41:11.460 Well, I think that's an excellent question. It isn't really being asked in the developmental

00:41:15.200 psychology literature, at least to the extent that I've seen it recently. The developmental psychology

00:41:20.440 literature tends to be heavily focused on sort of a mechanistic investigation of things in infancy

00:41:26.480 or childhood with less of a focus on those broad-based trends that you just mentioned. And I think

00:41:31.640 that's one area that needs to be improved in the literature. Obviously, single parenting has been

00:41:38.200 studied. But the role of what you're noting, these more broad-based secular trends, for example, of older

00:41:45.540 parenting, fewer children, to my knowledge, at least, at least in terms of the literature scope that I have

00:41:51.580 looked at recently, those types of questions aren't being asked. Because in part, I think

00:41:57.100 the answers is not what the ideologues in the academy want to hear, that there is sort of evidence for some

00:42:05.400 of the things that they don't want said. So, you know, the role of younger parents and single parenting

00:42:11.860 and older parents has to be all looked at with sort of an equal poise that is not really happening right

00:42:17.580 now in developmental psych. And that's one of the limitations of developmental psych is it's so

00:42:22.900 fine-grained and focused on some of these more fine-tuned interactions, like I mentioned to you with

00:42:30.880 the face-to-face still face, and they miss the forest by focusing exclusively on the trees. And so I think we

00:42:37.800 need to get back to some of these bigger questions that are asking, why do we see a generation growing up in

00:42:45.620 the way they are with sort of an undeniable, I guess, less of an ability to regulate their emotions than

00:42:51.960 previous generations? How much of that is due to actual three things, really? How much of it is due to their

00:42:58.640 inborn temperament? How much of it is due to being differences in how they were reared? But also, how much of it is due to

00:43:05.680 differences in the larger cultural milieu and how that's influencing their decisions, perhaps

00:43:12.200 consciously, to regulate or not regulate their emotions?

00:43:16.440 Okay, so we could add some additional variables there that need to be considered. So,

00:43:21.320 Jonathan Haidt has been making a strong case for the danger of, let's call it-

00:43:27.340 Social media.

00:43:27.780 Well, yeah, but we could expand that a bit because it's, there's, I've talked to some of the

00:43:35.180 leaders, let's say, of the social media networks about Haidt's concerns. And, you know, they made

00:43:41.340 some very interesting points. It's social media to some degree and the intense competitiveness,

00:43:47.580 abstraction, and backbiting that characterize those realms. But the thing is, it isn't obvious at all

00:43:54.460 that children and adolescents are spending the bulk of their time on social media per se. Depends on

00:44:01.240 how you define it. So, they're also texting instead of interacting face-to-face, for example.

00:44:08.260 And then they're also exposing themselves to other content online like pornography. But then there's

00:44:15.220 something more fundamental, I think, that's often missed, which is that, see, when we had little kids

00:44:21.480 back in the 90s. My wife and I were the youngest parents we knew with the oldest kids, even though

00:44:28.820 we weren't that young. We didn't start having kids till we were in our late 20s. Now, one of the things

00:44:33.600 that would happen was that we would take our kids over to other houses that had children. And when we

00:44:39.560 got there, the parents would put on a television show for the kids to watch, which I was never happy

00:44:46.440 with. Because what should have happened was the kids were thrown into the basement, so to speak,

00:44:51.820 and with nothing to do, so that they had to play. And so, they could watch TV. And of course,

00:44:59.040 they were quiet if they were doing that. But they weren't inventing their own dramas. They weren't

00:45:04.180 interacting face-to-face in a manner that made them come up with the creative conceptualizations that

00:45:10.580 characterize dramatic play, like playing house, for example, that lay the bloody groundwork for future

00:45:17.340 adult relationships. Now, and that was TV. That had nothing on screens, because everyone was concerned

00:45:24.080 about the detrimental effect of TV back then. But my God, now, you know, screens are absolutely

00:45:29.560 everywhere. So, the screens have content, but they also interfere with child's play. And so, I'd like your

00:45:36.060 opinion about that. And also, one other thing that I've been thinking about, let me, tell me what you

00:45:40.380 think about this. You know, I watch all these strange identity issues that are emerging in

00:45:47.080 adolescence, and even on university campuses in early adulthood. This preoccupation with sexual

00:45:52.780 identity, with gender identity, and also the variant forms of even more imaginative play that are

00:46:01.080 associated with that, like the furry culture, for example, and the anime culture. And what I see there

00:46:07.660 is delayed dramatic play, right? So, I'm wondering if what's happening to some of these kids is that

00:46:14.480 they get away from this oppressive family environment where they're never allowed any

00:46:19.740 freedom. They burst out at, say, the age of 17 or 18, and then they have to frenetically engage in a

00:46:27.200 dramatic search for identity because they didn't do it when they were like three, which is when it

00:46:32.280 really needs to happen. We radically underestimate the significance of dramatic play. Then we have

00:46:37.960 dramatic play on the part of rebellious adolescents constantly, you know, as they protest in the

00:46:43.940 streets. That's right, 100%. You know, I've spoken with Jonathan Haid and others, and I've really been

00:46:51.020 kind of engaged in the discourse about the role of social media, you know, and how that plays into the

00:46:57.160 development of emotional regulation. You're right. How do we define that? But I think your point about,

00:47:01.080 you know, it's basically more broadly than just whether they're on TikTok or whether they're on

00:47:06.700 Facebook or whether they're, you know, on Snapchat. It's looking at a screen rather than at another

00:47:13.120 face. And you see that wherever you go. I mean, even when I do work in a supermarket deli now on a

00:47:19.560 part-time basis, customers will come in, they'll be looking at their phone, or I'll be trying to look

00:47:23.840 at my phone. And it's a completely different world and landscape that we're now in that has sort of

00:47:30.160 taken away the normal face-to-face, communicative, rough-and-tumble play where you're actually

00:47:36.900 physically looking at somebody rather than at a screen, or your attention is not constantly

00:47:43.080 looking at a screen. So it's much more broader. And I think the other point, too, you said,

00:47:48.340 well, it's not just social media. You're right. It's social media combined with an increasing

00:47:54.360 secularism that has basically, we've lost all sense of moral constraint. So when there's no

00:48:01.100 sort of, when there's sort of a weakening of all, you know, traditional classical religions,

00:48:06.440 and there's no orienting structure, you get thrown into the social media world where you can basically

00:48:12.360 create anything. That gives rise to what we see is this complete inability to form, you know,

00:48:19.820 an identity in early childhood. Now they're on the screens where there's just basically a consumer

00:48:24.760 market for identities, whether that's identities as furries, whether it's an identity as, you know,

00:48:31.580 gender identity, or even, like you say, I mean, it's a complete role-playing world now that's happening

00:48:37.460 on social media. And one of the individuals who's done a lot of great work on this is Catherine D.,

00:48:44.180 who's default friend on Twitter. She's looked at some of this, and I think we're missing,

00:48:48.620 to a certain extent, and all the discourse around the role of social media on mental health,

00:48:55.060 you know, and the ability to establish a strong identity is the fact that we're now moving into

00:49:01.580 a different era where we're actually living online rather than in the world. And that's why I've been

00:49:08.560 constantly stressing the need for athletics-based programs or environmental programs.

00:49:18.300 where children are in nature to get away from this sort of movement to a world that's completely

00:49:24.560 imaginary online. Because that leads to all sorts of limitless ability to establish identities that,

00:49:33.480 identities that while they may exist in this creative realm, when you get back into the real

00:49:38.840 world, they're useless. They're dysfunctional, really. And that's sort of what we see.

00:49:44.220 Well, they're also not subject, as far as I can tell, they're also not subject to the constraints

00:49:50.400 that are characteristic of the real world. Like, one of the things I've been very concerned about,

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00:51:35.120 I think it was, what's the boxer's name? Mike Tyson, who so famously said, the problem with the

00:51:44.040 virtual world is that it's made all of you all too comfortable with never getting punched when you

00:51:48.620 deserve it. Now, that's a bad paraphrase, but he did actually say that. And I think there's something

00:51:54.360 about that that's actually very interesting and very correct. I don't know how many comments I've

00:52:03.200 looked at online, but it's tens of thousands, and I've started to develop something like a troll

00:52:09.260 taxonomy. And there is a culture online they call lulls culture, and that's laugh out loud,

00:52:17.720 or I did it for the lulls. And it's basically a culture of sadists and psychopaths. And this is

00:52:23.720 actually quite well documented in the relevant research literature, because there has been

00:52:28.620 ongoing research into the personality structure of provocative trolls, and they're dark tetrad types.

00:52:36.780 So they'd fit into the cluster B psychopathology. They are narcissistic, so they want unearned attention.

00:52:45.100 They're Machiavellian, so they use their language as a tool to manipulate rather than to communicate.

00:52:50.580 They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. And that wasn't good enough,

00:52:56.100 as it turned out, because that was the dark triad. They had to add sadistic to that. And that's where

00:53:01.820 the lulls element really comes into play, because the sadist takes positive delight in the suffering of

00:53:07.960 others. And that's really the nature of lulls culture. And it can thrive online, because,

00:53:13.420 well, people say things online all the time that would get them an immediate slap in the real world,

00:53:18.980 like a morally required immediate slap. And so they say things that now, the reason that concerns me,

00:53:26.520 see, my sense is that we know that the base rate of psychopathy across cultures is about 4%,

00:53:35.540 which isn't that high. But we also know that there were historical epochs in which the cluster B

00:53:41.680 personality types probably got the upper hand. And I would suspect that happened in the French

00:53:46.940 Revolution. I think it probably happened in the Russian Revolution, probably happened during the

00:53:51.540 rise of the Nazis in National Socialist Germany. You don't need that many people to be disinhibited in

00:54:01.680 their psychopathology before your culture might be in grave danger. And that's particularly true if

00:54:08.200 they can organize, which they can really do online. And so I'm very concerned that the incentive

00:54:16.240 structure online facilitates dark tetrad behavior. Now, there's more evidence too, right? Because here's

00:54:24.300 another problem. 25% or thereabouts of online content is pornographic. So basically criminal, right? It's

00:54:33.040 basically prostitution facilitated by electronic pimps. So that's not good. And then a tremendous amount of

00:54:41.020 online activity is outright criminal, right? I mean, older people are just being scammed on a,

00:54:46.660 like an unbelievably constant basis. And so it might be that 50% of online activity is in the

00:54:54.280 psychopathic, antisocial and cluster B realm. It's very, very difficult to regulate. And my suspicions

00:55:01.300 are, is that spilling over in really, a really counterproductive manner into the actual flesh and

00:55:08.340 blood world. And so, you know, I'm curious about your thoughts about that because one of the things

00:55:13.640 that's odd about you on Twitter in a good way is that you are constantly drawing people's attention

00:55:20.280 to the relationship between cluster B psychopathology and online and political behavior. And so

00:55:27.700 what do you think about that as a hypothesis with regard to the pathological incentive structure of the

00:55:34.800 virtual world, right? Maybe it's a non-playable degenerating game. Like it could be.

00:55:40.600 Well, I think in a lot of ways, that's exactly why, and I know you're familiar with the paper that I

00:55:44.960 wrote on this, is social media is an incubator of all this cluster B type of stuff. Because on social

00:55:51.120 media, you have this indirect communicative language-based amplification of all of these traits,

00:55:58.980 whereas male aggression in the real world, it doesn't scale. You have an encounter,

00:56:02.940 there's something said, somebody gets, you know, punched in the face and that's it.

00:56:06.740 What you have is on social media, indirect aggression, and you have all of these traits

00:56:12.860 and antagonism and histrionic, you know, behavior that just basically gets amplified and emotionally

00:56:18.880 resonates and resonates and resonates and balloons out. And it builds and builds and builds. And,

00:56:24.240 you know, one of the best examples of that is what we saw with Hamas. I mean,

00:56:28.620 they filmed all their atrocities as they were going into Israel. And that was one of the most,

00:56:34.040 you know, interesting in a morbid way, kind of aspects of that incursion was it was just filmed.

00:56:41.340 They were basically, in fact, doing it for the laws, regardless of whether you think on how much

00:56:46.860 atrocities or what was the exact specific atrocities that were committed. They were filming them on GoPro

00:56:52.560 for exactly that reason and to amplify that. And so, you know, that is one way for a perfect example

00:56:59.600 of how this is all spiraled out of control. And I will say for myself, you know, others have written

00:57:05.500 about the cluster B stuff in terms of political ideology and how that's played out before. You know,

00:57:11.600 the famous Lobozovsky is one of them and others. So, but I just see it so clearly because when you

00:57:19.160 look at the traits and you look at what's happening online, it's a perfect incubator for all these just

00:57:26.300 to continue to amplify and amplify and amplify without any mechanism that limits it. And it just

00:57:33.980 spills out. And then what happens is you have an event like October 7th, or you have an event like

00:57:39.640 what you're seeing on these campus tent cities, all that's mediated and amplified online. And then it

00:57:45.760 gets played out with all this petulance and romper room behavior on campuses.

00:57:50.060 Yeah. Okay. So let's dig into that two ways. So the first, the thing I'd like to point out,

00:57:57.960 and you can comment on this if you would, is that, you know, you mentioned that male aggression doesn't

00:58:03.660 scale well and it doesn't work that well in the real world. And that's definitely the case. I mean,

00:58:08.520 one of the things that my daughter was often perplexed about when she was growing up in our

00:58:15.800 household with our brother is the difference in response pattern to aggression between boys and

00:58:23.260 between girls. So my son and his teenage friends would not that infrequently have an altercation, you know,

00:58:34.480 sometimes it might even come to brief blows, but, and that would end it. And that would often not

00:58:41.040 only not stop a friendship, but strengthen it. Partly because they knew where they stood with each

00:58:48.040 other. Now this didn't happen that often, but the threat of it happening was always there.

00:58:52.880 Now with the girls, by contrast, they could backbite and gossip and screech and moan and bitch and kill each

00:59:00.200 other virtually online. And there was no limit to it. And there was very, it was very difficult to

00:59:06.640 limit at all. It's definitely the case that female style antisocial behavior is unbelievably difficult

00:59:13.220 to regulate. Now, having said that, I'm not blaming the females for online pathological behavior,

00:59:20.680 although there's certainly the female equivalent of that in places like TikTok. But what I do see

00:59:27.200 happening is that the histrionic, narcissistic, and borderline, the men who have those traits

00:59:35.200 can get away with that kind of female type antisocial behavior online, that gossiping and

00:59:41.680 backbiting and reputation savaging and, you know, outright Machiavellian deception with absolutely no

00:59:48.300 consequences, or even worse, with a certain level of perverse reward because attention is brought to it

00:59:55.560 and maybe even amplified by the social media companies. So that's not good, to say the least.

01:00:01.720 Now, let's add one more thing to that that people need to understand. So, you know, the conflict between

01:00:09.380 Hamas, let's say, and the people of Israel, and the rest of the bloody world, for that matter,

01:00:16.420 can be construed as a political or as a religious or economic battle. But you put your finger on

01:00:23.420 something that's absolutely vital. So the cluster B types, the psychopaths and the narcissists and

01:00:30.880 the Machiavellians, they're unbelievably good at using proclamations of victimization to justify

01:00:38.060 their aggression and also to camouflage what they're doing with a moral story. And so, like,

01:00:47.320 when I think of violent religious fundamentalists, I don't actually generally think of the religion

01:00:53.040 itself as a motivation, even though it can be. I think of the psychopathic, power-striving,

01:01:00.340 narcissistic Machiavellian adopting the cloak of the religious. That's what the Pharisees do in

01:01:06.880 the Gospels, by the way, and they're Christ's biggest enemy. They adopt the camouflage of moral

01:01:13.260 virtue, religious, economic, or social. And then they pretend to be the good guys. Well, in fact,

01:01:19.600 they're ravening, what did Christ call them? The ravening graves that would devour even the

01:01:28.220 ancestors that they claim to worship. And so I think that as a culture, we're radically

01:01:33.400 underestimating the perverse consequences of the intermingling of the cluster B psychopathologies

01:01:41.760 with the hypothetically religious, political, and economic, right? We're making them primary

01:01:46.780 when, in fact, the pathology, the cluster B pathology is probably the primary problem.

01:01:54.120 So maybe when you see people involved in sectarian violence, the first thing you should ask yourself

01:01:58.760 is, well, is that sectarian violence or is that just an excuse for the Cain-like narcissists to get

01:02:06.000 the upper hand? So what do you think about that? I think that's exactly right. I mean, I see the

01:02:11.740 world from that lens of looking at psychopathology as opposed to the background

01:02:16.500 religion itself. Clearly, there's definitely historical religious conflicts that motivate

01:02:24.860 some of this, but I see it much more from the perspective of how does this culture give rise

01:02:30.380 to these macrosocial, what I consider contagions of these cluster B traits. And you mentioned lying

01:02:36.660 and moral virtue. And I think one of the things, and I just made this point a couple of days ago

01:02:42.540 with regards to what's happening here in the States and sort of the lies that the mainstream media have

01:02:47.700 told about Joe Biden is that there's lying that most corrupt politicians will do. Many people lie,

01:02:54.900 there's white lies and so forth. And then there's lying, but moralizing that lie. And moralizing that lie,

01:03:00.940 in my view, is much more worse and psychopathic than just some lie that you beat some kid on the street

01:03:07.140 the other day and it never happened. And you see, that's the strategy that they use. They lie,

01:03:13.660 but they moralize it. They're the oppressed, they're the victim. So that gives them the currency

01:03:18.060 to then create and engage in all sorts of atrocities or behaviors that somehow are socially acceptable.

01:03:26.180 And, you know, you mentioned too, the sort of male instantiation of these cluster B traits. And that's

01:03:31.920 something that I saw during COVID online too. A lot of the female scholars that I was, you know,

01:03:39.400 collaborating with at one point or that kind of grew to new who were doing COVID work or pushing for

01:03:46.180 the elimination of mask mandates or saying that lockdowns were harmful, they were getting attacked

01:03:52.020 by these male narcissistic, you know, what I would consider trolls on Twitter who had credential

01:03:59.580 degrees, but they were constantly bullying these female nurses, doctors, and so forth in the most

01:04:06.340 trollish way. And so that sort of manifestation was something that was very glaring. That would have

01:04:12.020 never played out in the real world. It was only made possible by the sort of milieu of the social

01:04:17.680 environment of the internet and social media. And it was something that really bothered me.

01:04:22.640 And so there's this idea that you moralize that, you know, a few people might be harmed by lockdowns,

01:04:29.980 but the majority of the population won't be. And it's the majority of the population that were in fact harmed.

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01:05:30.460 Yeah. So, hey, so when you watched the Hamas atrocities and you said that what you saw first

01:05:44.180 and foremost was the pathology. Okay. So I want to delve into that a little bit, eh? Because one of

01:05:48.840 the things that's really struck me about the peculiar times that we're in is the dissociation

01:05:57.760 of atrocity from guilt. So one of the things that you had to give the Nazis credit for,

01:06:05.740 so to speak, is that they were guilty about their crimes and they tried to hide them.

01:06:11.160 And one of the things that I see at the moment that's so unbelievably pathological that I can

01:06:17.440 hardly get my head around it is that the butchery on the trans side, for example, is trumpeted as a

01:06:26.260 moral virtue, right? There's no attempt to hide what's going on. In fact, it's brought forward as

01:06:32.560 something that's positive. Now, that's associated in a way with what you saw with regard to the Hamas

01:06:38.800 massacres is that this is actually being reveled in. Again, we're going to talk about this independent

01:06:45.580 of the hypothetical reasons for the cause. I mean, people, you just think about it, man.

01:06:50.400 The sadistic types want to claim victimization because they're also predatory parasites. And if

01:06:57.520 you're a victim, then other people have to kowtow to you and take care of you. And we know that

01:07:02.360 half of criminal lifestyle is parasitical lifestyle, right? There's the rule breaking and the actual

01:07:08.780 crime. That's the predation. But the other part of it is living off the work of other people in an

01:07:15.840 insanely unconscientious manner and coming up with a story to justify it. That the successful are just

01:07:22.640 thieves themselves, for example, or that nobody really works to get what they deserve. There's

01:07:27.920 no really such thing as merit. There's only power. And so since everyone's a thief, there's no reason not

01:07:34.320 to get in there and get some of your own. And so you watched the tapes with the eye of a

01:07:41.700 psychopathologist. And so what do you think you saw? Well, what I saw was the valorization of

01:07:47.980 sadistic behavior, not just sexually sadistic behavior, but the killing and mass slaughter of

01:07:54.940 people. It was meant to be propagated on the screen for that exact reason and to be seen as something to

01:08:04.720 be glamorized. And I think in part, they sort of wanted to valorize it as somehow,

01:08:12.720 in a way, it was allowable for some sort of oppression that they had experienced at the hands of

01:08:18.480 Israeli occupation or the situation in Gaza. But you can also see that, like you say, in the trans

01:08:25.380 movement, online, Reddit, TikTok, there's a glamorization about this stuff that is sort of

01:08:35.220 so widely discrepant from what is actually happening in the actual perpetration of, in the case of the

01:08:43.280 trans stuff, the mangling and the confusion of children and, you know, other negative effects

01:08:49.620 that this leads to, that it's almost something that they're trying to create an environment where

01:08:55.860 it's seen as heroic to engage in these behaviors when in fact it's just the opposite. And that's made

01:09:03.460 possible by the social media landscape where you can click like and you can get all the retweets and

01:09:09.100 shares or, or create these echo chambers, but it's a parasitic lifestyle, which is exactly what

01:09:15.440 Herbie Cleckley, which, who, who really was sort of behind the, the original construct of psychopathy,

01:09:22.100 that's exactly what he identified, this parasitic lifestyle. And they moralize that type of behavior

01:09:28.440 as virtuous. It's like virtuous victimhood. And it's very toxic.

01:09:34.120 Like virtuous victimhood, valorizing sadism.

01:09:37.980 You mentioned lying. There's, there's a lying and then there's lying that, that is,

01:09:42.940 there's moralization of the lie. And I see the latter moralization of the lie as much, much worse.

01:09:49.800 And we see that just recently, I'm sure you're aware of, we had a debate here in the States,

01:09:54.220 Biden and Trump. It's obvious that Biden is cognitively really struggling. And we all knew

01:10:00.600 this for many years, but the mainstream media constantly moralized this lie that it was somehow

01:10:06.740 unfair to criticize Biden for that, or to acknowledge that that's much worse in my view

01:10:13.200 than, you know, Trump just shooting off some ridiculous remark. It's clearly a lie, but it's,

01:10:18.480 it's not, he's not moralizing that lie. He's not saying you're a bad person because you, you know,

01:10:24.540 you basically observed with your own eyes, what we've all known about Biden for four years.

01:10:29.080 And so I see the latter is much more psychopathic, parasitic and toxic to a culture than, than the

01:10:37.120 former. So, okay. So I'm going to tell you a frightening story and you tell me what you think

01:10:42.340 about it. This is, maybe this is too pessimistic, but I'm still working that out. You know, to what

01:10:51.780 degree do we have moral instincts, let's say that are in keeping with the self-sacrificing ethos of a

01:10:59.860 complex civilization? How much of that is part and parcel of our inborn conscience? You know,

01:11:06.280 Cleckley, of course, defined the psychopaths as someone without a conscience or with a very

01:11:10.260 underdeveloped conscience. So I read two books in quick succession. One of them was a book by

01:11:19.060 the Dutch primatologist, who unfortunately is recently deceased, Franz de Waal. One of his books

01:11:26.280 on chimpanzee behavior. I don't remember which one because I read a number of his books, but he detailed

01:11:33.800 out the phenomenon of chimpanzee war, essentially. And this was first discovered, I believe, by Jane Goodall,

01:11:43.780 who was pretty flipped upside down by the revelation, as she should have been. Because, of course, the

01:11:51.140 sociological types and the lefties and the cultural constructionists like to think that the human

01:11:56.120 proclivity for warfare is a consequence of corrupt social structure, a theory which is shot to hell by

01:12:03.260 the fact that chimpanzees go to war, which indicates that it's much more an inherent part of our primate

01:12:09.260 nature than anyone wants to think. So what happens with the chimps is that the juveniles in particular

01:12:15.680 will go on parties around the borders of their territory, let's say. They have a fairly acute

01:12:21.700 sense of territory. And if they come across chimpanzees from another troop and they outnumber them,

01:12:28.900 because they have a rudimentary sense of amount anyways, they can't count, but they have a sense of

01:12:34.500 amount. They'll attack them, sometimes with juvenile females accompanying them. And they tear them to

01:12:44.560 shreds, right? So what seems to be the case is that in the absence of a social hierarchy that limits

01:12:53.880 aggression. So if a male gets too aggressive in a troop, the rest of the troop gets upset and

01:13:02.360 generally the alpha male will step in to quell it or the rest of the troop will. So you can think about

01:13:09.200 the troop's level of negative emotion as an inhibitory function, has an inhibitory function.

01:13:16.860 It clamps down on male aggression, which might otherwise have no limit. Okay, so why would I say no limit?

01:13:24.900 Well, because when you look at the chimpanzees go to war, when they're attacking a troop member that has

01:13:31.320 no social standing, which would be a member of another troop, there's no limit to what they'll do.

01:13:38.280 Now, chimpanzees are capable of hunting. They hunt 40-pound colobus monkeys and they'll eat them alive

01:13:44.540 while they're screaming. So it isn't obvious that the distress of another primate has much inhibitory

01:13:50.080 force. And so they'll use their jaws to castrate the other chimpanzees, for example, and literally tear

01:13:57.800 their skin off. And they're very, very powerful. They're very, very strong, about six times as strong

01:14:03.500 as the typical adult male. So look the hell out if you're attacked by a chimpanzee. Okay, so the

01:14:10.900 hypothesis there would be our closest primate relatives have no inhibition whatsoever on their

01:14:16.420 capacity for aggression once they're outside the confines of a well-constituted social hierarchy.

01:14:22.140 Okay, so soon after that, I read The Rape of Nanking, which is a book about as brutal as any

01:14:29.740 book you might ever come across. And it details the magnitude of Japanese atrocity in the city of

01:14:35.920 Nanking just prior to World War II. And there isn't, you would have to be one pathological person indeed

01:14:43.640 to imagine, even in the wildest extremes of your most vicious fantasies, anything worse than what

01:14:51.000 happened in Nanking. You could take the worst possible chimpanzee troop and equip them with a

01:14:57.320 much more sadistic imagination and then set them free to do anything they could possibly imagine.

01:15:05.020 And that's what happened in Nanking. And so then I started thinking, oh my God,

01:15:10.220 does that actually mean that there's no limit on human aggression outside of like social hierarchy,

01:15:17.220 essentially, because, you know, there were a lot of normal Japanese soldiers that were involved in this.

01:15:24.540 It was certainly contagious. Now, undoubtedly, it was led by the bloody psychopathic sadistic types.

01:15:30.180 And it was certainly the case that the Japanese government had instilled in their troops a sense of

01:15:36.540 ethnic superiority with regard to the Chinese and dehumanization of the Chinese.

01:15:43.200 But that in itself isn't enough to account for this stunning sadistic brutality. And so,

01:15:50.360 you know, that would indicate that, well, what does it indicate? It indicates that that psychopathic

01:15:57.640 and sadistic tendency might be a lot more transmissible than we think at minimum.

01:16:03.520 Yeah, I think the abolition of hierarchies has led to worse hierarchies in almost every

01:16:10.840 situation and historical circumstance we can think of. Hierarchies are an ingrained part of human

01:16:18.140 behavior. And when you try to replace them with some other utopian scheme where there is no hierarchy

01:16:25.160 or dominance hierarchy, what you end up with is what you just described. And I think that's really

01:16:31.160 what the tyranny of structuralistness is all about. When there is no hierarchy or guiding set of

01:16:38.620 principles to create a hierarchy, you just have complete structuralistness. And to think about

01:16:46.020 it, that's what you see in all this cluster B behavior. It's completely dysregulated. There's

01:16:50.700 no structure to any of their behavior. And that's really what's at the heart of, I think, the cultural

01:16:56.360 malaise that we're living through is that all of these ideologues want to abolish structure or

01:17:02.040 categories, whether that's categories in mental health, diagnostic classifications, law and society.

01:17:10.740 And you see this with some of the LGBTQ T plus 3,100 world things. They want to abolish any type of

01:17:19.140 constraint. And as Reif, one of the cultural commentators, Philip Reif, who is no longer with us, once you have a

01:17:26.760 culture in which man is allowed to express anything, you have a culture in crisis. You have no constraints

01:17:33.180 on the ability of anybody to live any pathology they want or do anything they want. There's nothing,

01:17:39.800 no hierarchy, no containment at all to some of the underlying tyrannical behavior that can be given

01:17:46.640 rise to when you have a lack of structure or containment. So you have a culture in crisis right

01:17:52.520 now because they're trying to abolish all structure, all containment, all hierarchy. And that's just a

01:17:58.760 recipe for cultural disintegration. All right. So, okay. So, so on that note, let's turn to the more

01:18:05.500 particularly personal. So I sat on a lot of university hiring committees at Harvard and at the University

01:18:12.060 of Toronto, and I've evaluated a lot of CVs and your CV is, is good. It might be very good. You have an

01:18:21.080 age index of 34, which means that you have 34 papers with more than 34 citations. And so that's

01:18:28.180 at minimum respectable and a citation count of about 5,000. And for those of you listening,

01:18:35.680 scientific productivity and merit is quantified, not least by observing how many other scientists cite

01:18:45.240 someone's work. That is referred to it in their own writing, in their own research. Now, it's not a

01:18:49.580 perfect measure because you can be cited for being hyper popular in a sense, or you can be cited for

01:18:58.340 publishing an erroneous paper that people are required to refer to. But by and large,

01:19:04.680 citation count is actually a good predictor of future productivity. It's about the best predictor

01:19:09.320 we have, actually, that and pure number of papers. And so number of well-cited papers is also a good

01:19:16.340 indicator. So on purely objective grounds, you know, you're a contender, let's say, and you can

01:19:23.060 obviously speak, and you can obviously think, and you're very interested in research. And so we might

01:19:28.940 ask ourselves, why aren't you employed in the academy? And so do you want to tell that story? And

01:19:37.400 you were at the University of Toronto in the psychiatry department. Tell everyone what happened and how

01:19:43.440 things ended up for you, and why, as far as you're concerned.

01:19:47.140 I think there's a number of different things that I've thought. Obviously, I have no specific

01:19:52.020 answers to why I'm not in the academy. I have a number of different takes on why that may be, but

01:19:57.040 a couple of different things. A lot of my early work was in attachment, and that's a very nuanced

01:20:02.820 field of research that is, you know, has its own people in the academy that do that kind of work,

01:20:10.440 and so forth and so on. Another reason is that I'm very strident in what I believe and what I say

01:20:16.560 and what I feel. And if you're a white male, and especially in psychology, and you're strident,

01:20:22.540 and you tend to be a little bit more outspoken, that's seen as being too disagreeable. Once you

01:20:28.380 get on faculty interviews, of which I've been on many, it becomes a personality contest. And I think

01:20:35.300 in retrospect, I've been told things like I don't smile enough on faculty interviews or other

01:20:40.460 outlandish things that have nothing to do with my merit. I'm sure that there's been faculty interviews

01:20:45.700 or job market searches where I've given talks that haven't been great as other talks. So you never know

01:20:51.160 the real reason why you don't end up in the academy or you end up not staying in it. As far as sort of

01:20:58.300 where I'm at now, when I was at the University of Toronto and working, you know, at the medical

01:21:03.980 hospital that I was there, it was during that period of time where things were getting very

01:21:09.720 woke, especially around the gender stuff. I was working with people who, you know, they claim to

01:21:15.220 be scientists who are rigorous and you have they, them in their bios. And that to me was just

01:21:21.140 outlandish. I mean, how can you be at a medical research hospital purporting an ideology that is

01:21:27.340 totally disconnected from what we know about human sexual development? So I spoke out about that. I

01:21:34.860 spoke out about things on acts like land acknowledgments and how they were just absolutely

01:21:39.180 ridiculous. And they were they were being forced on people. And I think that didn't make things

01:21:45.680 that didn't make things sort of go well for me. I have to say, though, that others have been

01:21:51.180 canceled way worse than I was. I don't have a typical cancellation story.

01:21:55.400 You have an invisible canceled cancellation story. And I actually think in some ways that's worse.

01:22:01.520 Look, one one of the reasons I stopped working at the University of Toronto was because while

01:22:09.220 graduate students were interested in working with me, but the whole point of having a graduate

01:22:14.380 research student fundamentally, if they're really research oriented, is so that they can go off and

01:22:20.600 have their own research lab and pursue an academic career. And I knew with 100% certainty that any of

01:22:28.240 the Caucasian males that worked with me, or perhaps any females for that matter, would be so tainted by

01:22:35.360 their mere association with me that the probability that they would ever get an interview, even let alone

01:22:41.400 a job, was essentially zero. And so how in the world can I offer a person a position, even if they're

01:22:48.200 interested in working with me on those grounds? And I know perfectly well that a fair bit of that is

01:22:53.840 racial. So if you're Caucasian, you're much less likely to get an interview at the same degree of

01:23:00.020 merit. That's 100% true. And it's also true when it comes to gender. So you're much less likely to get

01:23:08.860 an interview if you're male. And so I also didn't want to partake in that anymore. It's like, go to hell,

01:23:14.640 you sons of bitches, if that's what you want. You think I need you. You've got another thing coming.

01:23:20.520 And so I don't know. You know, I read recently

01:23:24.780 that 94% of the 300,000 jobs that were distributed in the aftermath of George Floyd's death

01:23:38.460 went to non-white males. Non-white, non-males. Right. Sorry, I'm still not getting that right.

01:23:48.760 If you were white and male, you didn't get one of those jobs. Put it that way. Right. And so that's

01:23:54.460 inexcusable in my way of looking at things, because I also know, because I've done extensive work in

01:24:01.180 psychometrics, that we can assess merit, especially in the scientific realm, with a fair degree of

01:24:06.760 accuracy. And the best way to do that, as we already discussed, is by just looking at publication

01:24:11.580 record back before the whole goddamn publication system has also become corrupt beyond comprehension.

01:24:18.600 So, you know, you say you didn't get canceled that hard, which means you escaped without overt

01:24:24.040 reputational damage that was made public, but you don't have a bloody job. And so that doesn't seem so

01:24:30.580 minor to me, given that you have a stellar academic record, that you're obviously someone

01:24:37.460 who's genuinely interested in research, and those people aren't that common. And so where are you

01:24:43.000 working now? So I would see myself as, you know, having a soft cancellation. What I've done is I've

01:24:48.880 come back, I've tried to build my social media platform. And prior to me leaving Toronto, I had

01:24:54.180 numerous students reach out to me that wanted research, you know, you know, mentorship and so

01:25:02.020 forth. And those students came to me via the normal channels that you would when you're sort of a

01:25:06.400 professor at an institution. And, you know, I got so many emails, I didn't know what to do with them

01:25:11.320 all. So I said, look, the more high merit ones that I saw, I could see from their CVs. I said,

01:25:16.880 you know, if you're interested in getting some experience and you want to do it on an involuntary

01:25:20.340 basis and just kind of work with me offline and, you know, through some of the projects that I have

01:25:25.100 ongoing, feel free to do so. And many took me up on that offer. I had them write sub stack pieces

01:25:30.580 and tried to improve their writing skills in that way. And some still do kind of engage with me.

01:25:35.360 We're doing a meta analysis that I had started. But as far as my current work, it's kind of hard

01:25:40.380 because you have to have some sort of income. So I've kind of take a part time job at a deli,

01:25:45.460 cut some meat. I see the working class culture. I'm sort of in there,

01:25:49.440 but it's very difficult in the sense that to go from the sort of intellectual world to the blue

01:25:54.980 collar world, it is a dramatic change and you can't be dialed into all the sort of rapid pace

01:26:01.860 intellectual stuff that's going on now. And so that's really what I'm finding challenging and

01:26:06.300 difficult. But it is my love of research that has kept me in this. My students have kept me in this,

01:26:11.940 the ones that reach out to me via Twitter, via email, or who have just seen what I've said on Twitter

01:26:18.260 and emailed me independently saying, we thank you so much for speaking out. Because a lot of the

01:26:23.800 younger students, whether they're undergraduates or early graduate students, they don't have any,

01:26:29.440 either they don't have the temperament to speak out or they don't feel that they can. And giving

01:26:34.400 them a voice has been hugely influential for me. And so I guess right now I'm in sort of this

01:26:40.640 transitional state where I am slated to do some online teaching in the fall at my alma mater at

01:26:46.500 the University of Miami, teaching some stats there. And that's, you know, I feel very empowered to do

01:26:53.420 that and continuing to work with my students. But otherwise, it's just speaking out and trying to

01:26:58.800 build your independent platform. Another thing that I had happen is that through my Substack writing,

01:27:04.540 a Pacific legal team picked up a case on my behalf, we sued the University of Santa Cruz for their DEI

01:27:12.280 statement requirement, which all professors typically have to submit now as part of their job

01:27:17.920 applications. And that's still in the mix. It's now with the judge. There was a motion to dismiss,

01:27:24.460 but that case is one that we filed sort of saying that, look, DEI statements are a form of compelled

01:27:30.940 speech. And you're seeing now a lot of pushback on the DEI statements. And so I'm hoping that my case,

01:27:38.900 you know, whether the case is dismissed or not, will continue to work against it. But that's been

01:27:43.480 hugely influential to me to see some of the legal stuff that goes on behind the scenes and how badly

01:27:49.060 there is sort of this reverse discrimination in DEI statements, which are nothing more than political

01:27:54.920 litmus tests. And they filter out if you're not on board with social justice or equity or any of that

01:28:00.040 stuff, forget it. So for me, that was just pointless. Why apply when I have to submit stuff

01:28:04.800 that I don't believe in? And I'm not someone who, you know, that would sit well with me. So I want

01:28:09.420 to sleep well at night and sleeping well at night means staying true to who you are and what you

01:28:13.620 believe. And I'd rather do that and, you know, work at a deli than have a position where people around

01:28:20.840 me are saying outlandish things or they're sort of walking the walk and they don't believe any of the

01:28:26.740 stuff that they've said, you know, socially. Well, it's death for scientists because look,

01:28:32.500 well, okay, two things. First of all, you know, I've seen very little evidence in our discussion

01:28:37.080 so far that you're particularly strident. I've seen plenty of evidence that you're trying to do

01:28:43.000 your research and you're trying to go where it takes you and that you are doing that in a manner

01:28:49.020 that's more overtly conservative than the manner that might characterize the demented progressives

01:28:56.480 and the outright bloody cowardly liars that aggregate in the psychology field at the moment.

01:29:03.080 So there's that. So strident, like I don't see any evidence of that at all in your comportment. You

01:29:08.900 know, I've interviewed lots of people, like 500 people for YouTube alone. And so, and I've sat on

01:29:15.300 many, you know, juridical committees trying to evaluate potential candidates. And there isn't

01:29:22.520 a single bit of behavior that you manifested today that I would put in the strident camp. In fact,

01:29:26.940 when you're discussing not only your research preoccupations and your beliefs, but what's

01:29:31.720 happened in your own personal life, you're remarkably reserved and careful in your choice of words. So

01:29:38.480 that's just rubbish. It seems to me much more that, you know, you ran into the trouble that you ran

01:29:45.140 into because you wouldn't go along with the lies. And that's what one of the things we should point

01:29:50.240 out to people who are watching and listening is that that that's the death of the scientific

01:29:54.260 enterprise, right? Because the only thing that makes science true is the truth seeking behavior

01:30:02.000 on the part of scientists. You can falsify your data at every level in its recording, in its statistical

01:30:08.460 analysis, in its presentation at conferences, in its publication and papers, in your public discussions

01:30:15.320 of it. You can lie nonstop at all of those levels. If all you're doing, if you're incompetent or all

01:30:20.780 you're doing is pushing your career forward because there's no objective truth and you're not oriented

01:30:26.680 right to the bloody core of your soul for truth, you're definitely not a scientist because it's actually

01:30:32.400 hard to be a scientist and it rubs against the grain, you know. I mean, I had students who lost

01:30:38.180 two years work because we wouldn't publish a paper that they weren't able to replicate. You know,

01:30:45.040 there's a rule in my lab is you don't get to publish your study even if it works unless you can replicate

01:30:49.420 it. And so it would have been much easier on the students and certainly better for me in that narrow

01:30:57.060 sense of career provision if I would have just let my students publish the first paper that they had

01:31:02.840 positive results with. But that's, you know, not acceptable because it pollutes the literature and

01:31:08.960 if you believe in truth, you don't want to do that. If you don't want to pursue a goddamn lie for the rest

01:31:13.420 of your life too because you've been such an idiot as a graduate student, you allowed yourself to get

01:31:19.080 deluded into believing that you found something when you didn't. So, I, you know, I despair of

01:31:26.960 the academy putting itself back together on the research side. I mean, again, that's pretty damn

01:31:32.480 pessimistic, but I don't see an alternative to it at the moment. So, it's not surprising you're on the

01:31:37.820 outs. I really have become much more pessimistic as well. And even some of the students that work

01:31:42.880 with me now on an independent basis, I mean, you know, I teach them a lot of skills that are relentless

01:31:47.940 in terms of, you know, when you do a meta-analysis, you have to do a complete literature review that's

01:31:53.420 very detailed and systematic. And they're learning those skills, but it's a very aggressive and

01:32:00.440 relentless pace. And they're, you know, they're learning how to do good research. There's no

01:32:04.880 immediate payoff, but that's really how the academy is being degraded now with a lot of what's happening

01:32:11.540 is there's no attention to detail, there's no scientific rigor, and it's just anything goes. And

01:32:17.860 even when there is scientific rigor in the sense of appropriate methodology, it's being wandered

01:32:24.180 around ideologies where you might do a study. There's a recent thread I did on Twitter where

01:32:29.640 there's sort of a study on scales of identity dysfunction. And of course, what you find in

01:32:35.180 these scales is that there is a structure of identity dysfunction. It's associated with all this

01:32:39.420 negative mental health stuff. But when it comes to gender identity, the authors in the discussion

01:32:44.400 talk about how, well, we can't evaluate these associations in this, you know, in the gender

01:32:49.580 diverse population because they're not cis-normative. And so that's sort of a soft normalization of

01:32:54.780 psychopathology, in my view. It's not true scientific research. They see what they see in terms of the

01:33:03.040 statistics, and then they try to write it off by defining a population as somehow deserving of less

01:33:08.480 scrutiny or different scrutiny. And that's really, to me, even if you want to take that view, you have

01:33:15.680 to be, you know, have to demonstrate equal poise about what you're doing, and they don't do that.

01:33:19.980 I think that word cis is a curse. I hated that word when it first popped up. I knew exactly what those

01:33:27.380 goddamn lefties were up to with that. Progressive radicals were up to with the misuse of language in that

01:33:32.540 regard. I was just going to say, cis is basically the elimination of structure. It's basically defining sort of a

01:33:38.300 normative and trying to eliminate any sort of hierarchy or any sort of structure to what we've

01:33:43.940 understood in the natural world for a long time. And that gets back to what we were earlier talking

01:33:49.440 about. It's complete abolition of structure, the complete abolition of any definition of normativity.

01:33:56.640 And when you do that at scale, you have a culture in crisis.

01:34:00.520 So, Eric, I've got a horrible, one final horrible hypothesis for you.

01:34:05.700 So, you tell me what you think about this. So, you know that if you're marginal, you're likely to

01:34:13.220 occupy a lower rung socioeconomically, and your existence in some fundamental sense is much more

01:34:20.340 likely to be tenuous. So, if you occupy a lower rung in a hierarchy, you're more likely to develop

01:34:25.320 cardiovascular disease, and you're more likely to be unemployed, and you're more likely to be

01:34:29.240 mentally ill, and you're more likely to have an alcohol and drug problem. Of course, there's a

01:34:33.940 bidirectional causal relationship. So, you can imagine a structure with something at the center

01:34:39.740 and then rungs, circles, concentric circles of marginalization radiating outward from that center.

01:34:48.400 Okay, so now imagine this. You could think of the world as thesis and antithesis, right? There are

01:34:53.820 things and there are opposites, but that's not right. There are things and a plurality of opposites.

01:34:59.940 Now, imagine you try to make the marginalized central, which is the big postmodern push.

01:35:07.460 Let's bring the margin to the center. Well, that's fine, except the margin is a plurality.

01:35:12.700 So, now you're hypothesizing that you can make a plurality a unity, which you can't, and that's why

01:35:20.060 the LGBTQ, et cetera, mob continues to expand its nomenclature because there's no limit to the

01:35:27.580 plurality. There's literally no limit to the plurality. Okay, so what does that imply? Well,

01:35:33.960 let's say you bring the marginal to the center, but now that doesn't center all the marginal because

01:35:41.100 the marginal is an infinite plurality. And so, what that means is that when you bring the marginal to

01:35:46.700 the center, you just get a new margin, but that new margin is even more marginal. So, let's say

01:35:52.980 that's the addition of T to LGB. Okay, now the question is, when you bring the even more marginal to

01:36:00.980 the center, who do you destroy? Do you destroy the center or do you destroy the previously marginal?

01:36:08.900 And the answer to that seems to me, given the vulnerability of the marginal, is that when you

01:36:14.840 bring the fringe of the fringe in, you destroy the fringe, not the center. So, and I don't see a way

01:36:22.960 out of that because if the fringe are already compromised because of the multiple forms of stress

01:36:29.200 and the even more fringe come in, like at some point as you go out into the fringe, you're past the

01:36:37.580 fringe. You're into the bloody monstrous. This is what happened to the Scottish prime minister when

01:36:43.960 she decided that all men who said they were women were women, and so then made political moves to

01:36:51.320 allow, you know, psychopathic rapists to claim that they were women and to go into women's prisons.

01:36:58.300 The naivety of these people or their malevolence is really without bounds. It's like, you have no idea

01:37:05.020 what you're encouraging. And this is one of the advantages or disadvantages of being a psychopathologist.

01:37:10.740 Like, I've seen and studied some of the worst forms of human behavior, and I have some real sense of

01:37:16.840 just exactly what'll happen if you destroy all hierarchical structure. You know, and you saw this

01:37:23.140 after the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution. All the useful idiots lose their heads first.

01:37:28.160 So there's a warning to those who want to extend the alphabet brigade beyond any reasonable limit.

01:37:35.560 It's like, will you wait till you get to the real monsters, boys and girls, and you're damn close now.

01:37:40.240 They'll come out under their rocks, and you wish you'd never been born.

01:37:44.180 That's exactly right. And I've spoken out about pluralism on X as well. You're seeing that pluralism

01:37:50.140 language in developmental psychopathology is somehow lauded. Pluralism is being described as the new

01:37:57.920 wave of, you know, you have pluralism and methodology, but you have pluralism and integrating

01:38:04.840 lived experience into our understanding of mental illness. And what ends up happening, and I've said

01:38:11.100 this in these exact words, is unmitigated pluralism is ideographic insanity. It's just you have a thousand,

01:38:18.240 my thousand, my truths, and there's no truth. It just, it spirals completely out of control. And that's

01:38:23.940 exactly the language that is being used in developmental psychopathology right now.

01:38:29.860 Pluralism, that's lauded, but that's going to lead to completely, you know, at the end of the day,

01:38:35.260 that's going to lead to no psychopathology at all. Everybody's going to be living their own

01:38:39.000 psychopathology, their own idiosyncrasy, and you won't be allowed to categorize them as somehow

01:38:45.060 disordered or somehow non-normative. And so Christopher Lash, one of our great cultural commentators of all

01:38:52.160 time, he basically pointed this out. It's, it's, it's a pluralist utopia and it never works. And so

01:38:58.300 you have, you reach a threshold where you have so many plurals and it's just insanity. I mean, we see

01:39:03.960 this now even on, on, on social media, the plurals movement is this sort of the idea that you have all

01:39:09.820 these plurals that assume multiple identities online and it's just complete nonsense, but it's being

01:39:16.480 given a patina of credibility by this lunacy in the academy where I don't know if they're doing it

01:39:22.240 intentionally. And some pluralism might be good if you're like a methodologist and you want to have

01:39:27.680 different methodologies to sort of test something out, but that's not what they mean. It's much more

01:39:32.020 of an ideological political project. All right, sir. Look, um, I think we should probably close with

01:39:37.660 that. So, um, I'd like to keep in touch. I'm obviously following you with assiduously on Twitter

01:39:44.480 because as I said, you're one of the few voices in the psychological community that that's willing to

01:39:50.240 Jesus to point out the obvious. I'm so appalled by my colleagues. I'm so ashamed, especially of the

01:39:57.420 psychopathologists because they should know better. And the developmental psychologists too, they know

01:40:02.300 perfectly well that what's being foisted on is in terms of gender affirming care and the rewriting

01:40:07.520 of the rules around the classification of psychopathology. They know perfectly well. And,

01:40:12.960 and the whole notion that, um, we should do anything other than wait in the case of kids

01:40:19.180 with gender dysphoria who are primarily depressed and anxious and victims of their pathological

01:40:24.140 parenting. We all know that all psychologists with their salt know that bloody bunch of silent

01:40:31.740 cowards. And so, you know, so you're working at a deli, at least you've got your tongue

01:40:36.460 and that's, that's attached. That's the thing that's attached directly to your soul. So, you

01:40:42.020 know, good on you as far as I'm concerned. And I hope that you keep scrapping away. My suspicions

01:40:47.920 are that things will turn around for you quite dramatically when they do turn around. And at

01:40:53.380 least in 20 years, you're not going to have to be sitting there thinking, geez, you remember

01:40:57.180 when all those young girls were getting their breasts cut off and I was fully for it or too

01:41:01.580 damn cowardly to say anything about it. It's like, at least you had enough of a spine and a spirit to

01:41:08.880 put your money where your mouth is. And so, you know, that's very rare in today's world. And so I salute

01:41:15.080 you for it. Seriously, good work. Certainly you're the, you're one of the ones that has really

01:41:22.140 compelled everybody to speak out more. And I certainly have been influenced by, by a lot of your

01:41:26.780 people speaking out, but yeah, I mean, that's what allows me to sleep at night. I don't, I'm not

01:41:30.720 going to sit back and, and, and watch this unfold and not be able to speak out about it. And, you

01:41:36.560 know, I'll have to deal with whatever challenges. And I don't mean to imply that I have, you know,

01:41:42.040 extensive challenges. Certainly there's people that have many more, but it is hard not to be part of

01:41:46.580 the research, not to be part of the milieu, but I don't see any other way. I don't see any other way

01:41:52.900 except to continue to speak out and build your platform and hope for things to, to, to turn

01:41:56.860 around. All right, sir. So for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue my conversation

01:42:02.640 with Dr. Haldigan on the Daily Wire side of things. I'm not exactly sure what we'll delve into

01:42:07.180 there. Probably I'd like to find out a little bit more about the students that he still has and

01:42:11.940 how he's managing to continue his, developing his social media network and, and, and what he thinks

01:42:18.880 about the return of amateur scientists. You know, when the scientific endeavor emerged mostly, or

01:42:24.600 much, much of it in Great Britain, a lot of the founders of the disciplines we have now were

01:42:31.800 amateur scientists who actually did scientific work on their own. And, you know, for a while,

01:42:37.100 the universities were capable of protecting the eccentrics who had that kind of drive for knowledge.

01:42:42.580 And that was their damn job. That was the job of the secretaries and the administrators,

01:42:46.900 instead of hoisting their idiot opinions on the faculty members who were trying to

01:42:52.620 pursue truth. And so maybe we'll see a return to something like that. You know what? Independent

01:42:57.680 science. That means we'll have to do something about the way science is published, but that

01:43:02.200 doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle to me. So anyways, we'll talk about that more

01:43:06.900 on the Daily Wire side of things. Thank you very much, Dr. Haldigan, and to everybody watching,

01:43:10.980 listening to film crew here up in the wilds of Ontario. Appreciate your work today, too. Thank you, sir.

01:43:18.860 Thank you.

464. The Devouring Mother, War, & Human Aggression ｜ J. D. Haltigan

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