The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - A Blasphemer Against the Woke Religion

00:00:00.000 Hello. Today is a special day. We're having a good interview with Ed Dutton, who just completed a

00:00:06.820 book about the life of the imminent scientist James Dewey Watson. Watson, in case you don't

00:00:13.680 know, discovered the structure of DNA, figured out that it was a double helix. He was undoubtedly a

00:00:21.980 genius. The book is something of a biography, but it's much more than that, because it is

00:00:28.940 interspersed with incredible insights about the nature of genius, about how the human mind works,

00:00:37.200 different personality types, differences between different groups, and their ability to create

00:00:42.580 geniuses. And I think your interest in Watson came from the fact that he was, according to you,

00:00:50.040 one of the first imminent people to be properly cancelled in 2007, because of some controversial

00:00:57.140 remarks he made about the differences in IQ between different racial groups and how these

00:01:04.220 impact development and economic progress. And then you went on, I thought, very astutely to explain

00:01:12.540 why he was absolutely correct to have said the things that he said. But that didn't stop him

00:01:18.480 being cancelled, because as you rightly point out, he was a blasphemer against the woke religion.

00:01:24.840 The interesting thing is, thank you for having me on, Feras, and I hope it's a good interview,

00:01:28.840 I can't guarantee that. But the particularly interesting thing is, I think it was in 2007,

00:01:36.540 which is when he said, in private, sort of what he saw as a semi-private conversation with a

00:01:43.880 journalist called Charlotte Hunt Grubb, who he had brought, who was a journalist for the Sunday Times,

00:01:48.620 but who had been staying with him in his house in Cold Spring Harbour, and who was almost like a sort of

00:01:53.360 a foster child, almost. And she repeated what he'd said about how well the assumptions about the

00:02:01.820 future of Africa is that they're the same as us in terms of intelligence, but all the research tells

00:02:05.360 us, well, not really. And for this, yeah, he was the, this was, this was making a clear point,

00:02:11.820 which is that there is a new regime in town, and this is wokeness, and under this, or proto-wokeness,

00:02:18.720 and under this regime, not even the most, one of the most eminent men alive is safe.

00:02:26.780 Yes.

00:02:27.400 It's making a clear point, this man will be punished for blaspheming, as you say, against

00:02:33.680 the dogmas of wokeness, and indeed also for what, part of the dogmas of wokeness is that

00:02:39.180 feelings and hurting people's feelings...

00:02:41.920 Yes.

00:02:42.300 ...is more important than anything else...

00:02:44.420 Yes.

00:02:44.800 ...including the truth.

00:02:46.500 Yes, yes.

00:02:47.360 ...and therefore an example must be made of him, and so he was forced to step down as

00:02:56.160 the Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he had taken from, by the way, from being

00:03:01.980 a backwater to being DNA town.

00:03:05.100 Yes.

00:03:05.240 And it's hard to stress for your viewers the significance of his and Crick's, well, it

00:03:09.620 was mainly him, discovery of the structure of DNA. If we didn't know that, we wouldn't

00:03:14.380 be able to use DNA in the way that we can, you wouldn't be able to have targeted therapies

00:03:18.880 for cancer, you would all this kind of stuff. Now, the interesting thing was that throughout

00:03:23.180 his career, he was known, and this is consistent with the kind of person that is a genius, to

00:03:29.880 make controversial remarks that upset people. So in the year 2000, he did a lecture at the

00:03:36.380 University of California at Berkeley, in which you had, of course, female academics say, I

00:03:41.980 couldn't bear to finish it. I got up and walked out. And male ones, feminized male academics say,

00:03:47.680 doesn't someone with the influence of Jim Watson have the responsibility to be careful with how he

00:03:52.700 expresses himself?

00:03:53.680 Yes.

00:03:53.880 But everything he said in that lecture, as I prove in the book, this is the year 2000,

00:03:58.540 was true. He said that on average, thin people are likely to be more neurotic, and this is what

00:04:07.480 keeps them thin. This was considered offensive. This seems to be true. He talked about how he

00:04:13.160 talked about the psychological differences that are associated with being overweight. He talked

00:04:18.620 about various other things, which I look at in the book, which people saw as offensive,

00:04:21.700 but they were all, I show in the book, that subsequent research has validated what he said.

00:04:26.940 But in the year 2000, he could get away with that. In the year 2000, he wasn't cancelled,

00:04:31.860 because we hadn't quite moved so far yet in this process of runaway individualism, of runaway

00:04:39.740 concern with equality and harm avoidance, such that these things are put above the truth, such

00:04:43.620 that it's like a world basically run by girls, where you're just being mean.

00:04:49.500 Yes.

00:04:50.100 It's so mean.

00:04:51.780 It's, I mean, I think you need to sort of explain a little bit more the importance of his discoveries

00:05:01.160 to show the, first, the authority with which he spoke on these topics. Second, the sheer brilliance

00:05:10.600 of the man. And third, the extremism involved in cancelling somebody of that calibre.

00:05:19.660 Well, that's a very good point, because he wasn't an expert on these topics.

00:05:24.380 Right.

00:05:24.700 And that's, in many ways, that's the point about genius.

00:05:28.480 But he wasn't, because he wasn't an expert on genetics either.

00:05:31.560 No, that's the point about genius.

00:05:33.560 Yes, yes, yes.

00:05:34.120 So you, I mean, the book is a kind of a biography, but it's, in general, it examines the archetype

00:05:41.600 of genius and looks at the extent to which Watson is congruous with it, which he is. And

00:05:47.040 if you look at these people, and there's a lot of research on this, what they have is

00:05:52.800 outlier and skewed high intelligence. High intelligence is not the same as skewed intelligence.

00:05:58.680 So from what we know of his tested IQ, it was 125, which, he discovered this at school,

00:06:05.780 which is very intelligent, but it's not super duper brilliant. It's not the top 2% of the

00:06:10.320 population, but it was highly skewed. And when intelligence is highly skewed, then you get

00:06:16.320 the positive manifold between the different kinds of intelligence kind of breaks up. And so you have

00:06:22.800 a person, for example, who is very high in mathematical intelligence. He's very high in linguistic

00:06:27.180 intelligence, but his spatial intelligence is so deficient that he had tremendous trouble

00:06:32.920 learning to drive a car, and he can't and has never been able to peel an orange.

00:06:37.440 Right.

00:06:38.220 Right. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is basically moderate psychopathy,

00:06:43.700 i.e. if you are low in impulse control, in conscientiousness, then you are not rule bound,

00:06:50.780 and you think outside the box, and you can come up with the unthinkable. Obviously, when

00:06:57.800 Darwin came up with evolution, it was unthinkable, or perceived as such. If you're moderately low

00:07:03.560 in agreeableness, then new ideas offend against vested interests. You're either too autistic to

00:07:11.840 realise that they will, or you don't care that they will. Or indeed, you actually quite like

00:07:16.620 tickling them up.

00:07:18.360 With a bit of neuroses.

00:07:19.540 And I think, and then bring in the neuroses, which means that you're constantly thinking,

00:07:23.520 you're constantly ruminating, you're constantly generating ideas and thoughts. And also you have

00:07:27.780 a deep desire to structure your world and make sense of things. And then finally, openness,

00:07:35.360 just general openness. And so when we talk about being an expert, what often happens with these

00:07:40.180 genius, these creative academics, or in the extreme cases, geniuses, is they are not trained in the area

00:07:46.240 in which they make their breakthrough.

00:07:48.520 Yes.

00:07:48.920 And he wasn't.

00:07:50.060 Yes.

00:07:50.340 And most of them aren't. And so he was trained in zoology. That was what his degree was in.

00:07:54.900 Yes.

00:07:55.100 But in those days, they understood, they were less bureaucratic, and they understood more

00:08:02.140 the importance, I think, of these, we can look at why, of these kinds of people. It's this kind of

00:08:07.960 person that's behind the Industrial Revolution. It's this kind of person that's behind the nuclear

00:08:12.280 bomb. It's this kind of person. And so he's in zoology, but he basically is told by the

00:08:18.700 University of Indiana, where he did his PhD, you can do whatever you like. And then as a postdoc,

00:08:24.320 he took a tremendous risk to go to Cambridge without the clear permissions to just do it

00:08:29.480 whenever he liked. And he wasn't a chemist. And Crick wasn't a chemist. He was a physicist.

00:08:33.740 And they, but if they, these people are highly creative, so they will, they will focus on a

00:08:39.100 subject, and then they will be all the time looking around and seeing the bigger picture

00:08:43.620 and making the connections between their area and another area. And that's how you make new

00:08:47.800 knowledge. It's consilience, as E.O. Wilson put it. E.O. Wilson, by the way, and Bill Watson

00:08:52.700 for a very long time hated each other. But you make connections between different domains,

00:08:58.240 and that's where new ideas come from. And that's what he, what he did. So he commented

00:09:03.600 on these things without expertise, but he was right.

00:09:07.120 And this, I think one of the points that you, that you mentioned repeatedly in the book is

00:09:11.160 the importance of intuition in being able to see hidden structures, in being able to go

00:09:19.900 into a field that you're not specialized in, specializing in zoology and going into the DNA,

00:09:25.180 I suppose, is chemistry, much more so than zoology or biochemistry, and using intuition,

00:09:32.340 being able to gain insights that border on the religious experience.

00:09:38.300 Yes, this is very true. I should say, but the book is called The Genius Famine, The Cancellation

00:09:44.100 of James Watson. But yes, this is true. So if you, if you look at the nature of religious

00:09:51.180 experience, there's a certain psychology that will have dramatic religious experiences.

00:09:57.200 Basically, if you're high in stress, if you're very, very high in stress, then our intuition,

00:10:03.180 our instinct, if you like, is to believe in God. This instinct is induced at times of stress,

00:10:08.620 particularly mortality salience. And so people that are high in neuroticism are more likely

00:10:13.300 to have these kinds of experiences, people that are high and low in impulse control are more likely

00:10:18.740 to have these kinds of religious experiences. And it sort of deals with their intense stress,

00:10:24.560 makes their stress not go too extreme, so that they damage themselves and makes them feel better

00:10:28.060 and gives meaning to their lives for a while. The other thing is openness. Openness is a weird

00:10:34.800 kind of construct of different things. But one of them is basically unusual psychological experiences

00:10:40.640 of various kinds. And on the day that he realised from the photograph, the x-ray that he got from

00:10:49.340 Ross and Franklin's student, the truth, he said he just lay there on his bed in a kind of religious,

00:10:55.960 effectively in a kind of religious stupor, just looking at images of DNA appearing to him almost

00:11:04.860 like synesthesia on the ceiling. And that's what you would expect. Another thing that may be

00:11:13.720 associated with genius is certain kinds of powerful experiences, extroversion, perhaps we can say,

00:11:21.240 or aspects of openness, such that when you make your breakthrough, it is so ecstatically wonderful

00:11:30.060 that it motivates you. It motivates you to keep researching. It motivates you not to give up. It

00:11:36.100 motivates you to keep going, because you know that when you make that connection, it's going to be

00:11:40.640 better than sex. It's going to be, it's going to be absolutely extraordinary. And you're going to feel

00:11:47.020 this, the kind of thing, I don't know if you've experienced this, but when I was younger, I think

00:11:53.040 when younger people feel feelings more strongly, they feel negative, this is a fact, they feel negative

00:11:57.860 feelings more strongly, and they feel positive feelings more strongly. I remember the day I got

00:12:01.300 my A-level results, for example, and I was like, I was so happy with them, and I was like walking on air,

00:12:05.840 and I couldn't stay still, and it was totally overwhelmed by this buzz, right? And I think that

00:12:11.940 there's a degree to which genius types, and this is clear with Watson, are kind of childlike.

00:12:20.700 Psychologically, they are childlike. I mean, agreeableness goes up with age, they're quite low

00:12:25.040 in it. Neuroticism goes down with age, they're quite high in it. Conscientiousness goes up with age,

00:12:30.440 they are quite low in it. And openness goes down with age, they're quite high in it. So they are

00:12:35.260 childlike. And I think that that acts as a kind of motivator for their behavior.

00:12:40.980 Well, it's interesting, in the New Testament, Christ says, unless you are like the children,

00:12:46.400 you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And that's, I don't want to go into that right now,

00:12:51.960 but it's sort of an interesting parallel that you must be childlike to keep experiencing the world

00:12:59.760 and new and to keep making new connections and to keep on learning and gaining new insights rather

00:13:06.180 than being constantly set in your ways. And I suppose, in a scientific environment, the value

00:13:11.920 of that is that you are always able to re-examine the assumptions, offensive as that might be to the

00:13:20.060 establishment, upsetting as that might be to the vested interests. But it does mean that you gain

00:13:26.040 breakthroughs and make breakthroughs that others wouldn't make. It also means that you have this

00:13:33.560 ability to go into domains that aren't exactly yours and to still see new things inside of them

00:13:41.480 because of that childlike quality. So this combination of willingness to be disagreeable

00:13:49.200 and openness ends up meaning for the highly creative mind that you're willing to go up to

00:13:57.120 an expert in the field and say, you're completely wrong about everything.

00:13:59.940 Yeah, the emperor with no clothes, the child with the emperor with no clothes.

00:14:02.800 Yes.

00:14:03.080 Exactly. And this is, as for intuition, I suppose one of the things that these people learn is that

00:14:11.580 intuition is kind of unconscious thinking. And so your things are, things are whirring along

00:14:16.800 in the background. And also, I think it may be relevant that Watson is, and he has talked about

00:14:23.040 this, is relatively high in certain kind of autistic traits. So he is obsessive and there's various

00:14:28.880 other autistic traits that he has. And he was socially clumsy, particularly when he was younger.

00:14:35.520 And with autism, you are taking in lots and lots of information. You are taking in way more

00:14:42.640 information than a normal person would do. Now, the bad thing about that is that you can't filter

00:14:46.960 out the crap and you can't, you know, that you'll be very sensitive to your environment and you'll

00:14:50.400 become overwhelmed and you'll, you know, pass out. But the good thing about that is the very fact

00:14:54.880 that you're taking in subtleties of information that another person won't do. And this is whirring

00:14:59.760 along in the, in the background, as it were. And then eventually it will seem to kind of come

00:15:03.600 together. In this eureka moment. In this eureka moment. Which is often experienced as religious

00:15:08.560 ecstasy. Which will feel like kind of a religious ecstasy because these are people that, autistics,

00:15:13.680 that have a deep, deep, deep desire to comprehend the world. They feel sensations strongly, including

00:15:21.680 the sensations of their own body. And that's what joy is. Joy is, or sadness or whatever, is basically

00:15:28.560 sensations happening within your body. That's what, that's what it is. Yes. And they will feel these

00:15:33.040 things much more intensely. And from this you can see how it will, it will be almost, it will be so

00:15:38.400 overwhelming. The religious experience often involves, for example, an oscillation between

00:15:44.720 the hyper, between quiescence, hyper calm and hyper arousal. And if you're at the point of hyper

00:15:51.280 arousal, then the calmness fits in and you're overwhelmed with these, these hormones and you feel

00:15:57.120 this joy. And it's like that. So that's how you, how it is probably experienced subjectively to them.

00:16:04.640 That's interesting. I mean, I think this is the first thing that I've read that I've,

00:16:08.000 that has tried to put me in the mindset of somebody who is a genius. And to try to explain how

00:16:16.960 people like that operate. And I think one of the points that you made

00:16:19.520 is that there's this weird way of working for people of genius, which is highly obsessive diving

00:16:28.640 into something and then losing interest in it. And a lot of erratic

00:16:38.960 working habits that don't necessarily make a lot of sense, which sort of goes into the point that

00:16:45.280 there's something operating in the background. And as it matures, there's this sort of

00:16:51.040 manic drive to complete the work that you're doing and then gain these insights.

00:16:57.200 Yes. One of the problems with modern academia is it's highly bureaucratized.

00:17:01.520 Yes. And what we, what we used to have, if we think about why it is we've become less tolerant of

00:17:06.480 genius than we used to be. Geniuses, obviously they do their brilliant work,

00:17:10.480 they do their breakthroughs. The flip side is they are antisocial.

00:17:13.440 Yes. They stir things up. They are, they are a social, or they can be a social irritant.

00:17:19.520 But we, we have tolerated that. I think under, under periods of greater poverty and a greater

00:17:27.200 stress than we have now, because we are, we come to understand that a certain kind of person

00:17:33.520 is, although for all their faults, is the person that comes up with the very, very important things.

00:17:38.880 And if you, if you are a society that is up against it, that is up against death,

00:17:44.720 then you understand the significance of these things and in making life better and making sure

00:17:49.760 basically that your children don't die and related issues. One. And two, you, you have a sense of a, of,

00:17:57.920 of being on a journey to something greater, to put it in religious terms, a sense of the transcendence,

00:18:04.720 a sense of moving forward towards, you know, the end. Truth with a capital T. That kind of thing.

00:18:10.080 Right. Truth with a capital T. Exactly. That's very interesting. But if you look at something like

00:18:13.120 neo-Thomism, we, we had a situation where, um, the reason for, um, the, the founding of academia was,

00:18:21.440 was, was what we call natural theology. Um, the idea that you are, you are there to reveal God's creation.

00:18:29.040 And so to lie is kind of blasphemous. Now, there are nuances to this. I mean, you know,

00:18:34.640 Newton had to be careful about his more avant-garde research and so on, but that was basically it.

00:18:38.240 They were motivated. They strongly believed in God and they were motivated by the idea that their

00:18:41.920 purpose was to reveal the truth of God's creation. Now, gradually, I mean, Jim Watson doesn't believe

00:18:47.040 in God. Gradually, the, the notion of God kind of, kind of evaporates for various reasons to do,

00:18:53.280 uh, which there's no need to go into. Um, but it, there's a sense in which this fundamental

00:18:58.160 belief in the truth among some people remains, particularly among, I think, people that are

00:19:02.960 of an autistic bent, which is what geniuses are like. They have this strong desire for the truth

00:19:06.880 and justice and, and the truth and the order and structure of things. I suppose you could argue

00:19:12.160 that there's a kind, if you believe in that, there's a kind of implicit

00:19:16.000 religiosity behind that. Well, why do you believe in the truth? Who verifies it as true?

00:19:19.920 Yes. So you could argue it's a kind of implicit belief in God, but it's not explicit. Um, but

00:19:25.520 nevertheless, that was the situation. And we realized that people like Eben Cartwright or

00:19:30.240 who started the Industrial Revolution or whatever, they, they, they, they would have been eccentrics

00:19:34.560 and so on, but we tolerate the eccentric because we know what the, the eccentric can bring us.

00:19:39.360 Now, um, and he's good for the group. And, and because we were much less self-righteous,

00:19:43.840 I think one, one dimension of the tolerance of genius is, is that in a society that is highly

00:19:51.840 Christian, first, there is the idea of truth as being part of the revelation of God and therefore

00:19:58.720 to, uh, to lie is to blaspheme against God because he is the truth. Um, but the second dimension I would

00:20:08.240 submit for your consideration is that we didn't have this sense of self-righteousness because

00:20:13.920 everybody had to go to confession and knew that they had to go to confession and knew that that

00:20:19.200 was necessary for salvation. And there was therefore, as a social consequence of that belief system,

00:20:27.840 the idea that, um, well, we've all got our own faults. None of us is actually perfect. Therefore,

00:20:34.640 we are more tolerant of those who differ from us. Yes. There may, there may be some truth in that or,

00:20:42.640 or I will come back to that. What I was, what I was going to, what I was going to say was that,

00:20:47.280 so you, you know that you need, you know that you need people like this. Um, I, I suspect it's sort of

00:20:52.720 Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There comes a point where you are so rich and so, um, not content with

00:20:58.800 life exactly, but you are so materially wealthy and so decadent and so sure in a sense that like

00:21:03.360 nothing bad can ever happen. Yes. You're so divorced. Which perfectly describes the current mindset.

00:21:08.480 Right. If you go back at just a few, to when I was a kid, the people that were in charge had fought

00:21:13.600 and won a war. Yes. And then their parents had fought and won a war. And I think this comedy kind of

00:21:20.480 slowed down the decadence. Yes. The march of the decadence that was first noticed in kind of the

00:21:24.640 1890s, Victorian England, Audrey Beardsley, that kind of weird Oscar Wilde. Um, uh, and, and so,

00:21:31.520 and you know, and you realize the importance of these eccentrics like Alan Turing of these nutters.

00:21:36.480 Um, and perhaps as going back to what you were saying, um, it gives you a, it gives you a humility.

00:21:42.560 Yes. To realize that all could be lost and nearly was lost. Yes. And so you'd better,

00:21:49.040 you'd better pay attention to what these nutters, these eccentrics, these social irritants have to

00:21:53.680 say, and you'd better not be too concerned about your feelings and your feelings being hurt because

00:21:58.880 these are the people that will stop your feelings being hurt in a very major way.

00:22:02.080 Um, i.e. by being, you know, killed or starved. If enigma hadn't been broken.

00:22:07.280 Right. The war would have gone on for another probably six, four years, three years, these kinds of things.

00:22:11.360 Yes. Um, now, so, so you're right. The, the, the religiosity encourages you to think, uh,

00:22:19.120 to think that you are less than perfect. It therefore encourages you to say, well, Jim Watson,

00:22:25.040 he may offend people and hurt people's feelings and whatever, and say mean things about girls or

00:22:31.120 blacks or whatever it happens to be. But there's a clear, brilliant side to him. Yes. If you take away

00:22:36.000 that humility and you, and you insert the idea that, uh, this narcissistic idea that I'm morally

00:22:41.040 superior and I'm wonderful, then it's, it's much easier to say, well, look, it doesn't matter that

00:22:46.000 he does all these genius things because we don't need those things anymore because society is so

00:22:49.680 great and funky and easy. So we don't need people like this. The government can endlessly print money

00:22:54.640 and give everybody whatever they need. Exactly. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. There's food always.

00:22:58.800 It will all be fine. It will all be fine forever. We don't, so therefore we don't need these people

00:23:03.840 to go around stirring things up. And in reality, they're just offending people and hurting people.

00:23:08.240 So we should, we should cancel them. We should, um, exclude them from the girl, from the parties

00:23:14.400 with the glossy posse and the pretty girls in, we should do that. And that was what 07 did. And that

00:23:19.520 wasn't good enough because then in 2019, um, uh, an interview was organized with, with, with, with

00:23:25.280 Watson, uh, American masters. And he was asked, have you changed your mind? And he said, no.

00:23:29.920 And then he was completely defenestrated. They took away all his honorary titles and all this

00:23:35.360 kind of thing, and even changed the name of one of their laboratories completely. By that time,

00:23:40.640 he was what, pushing 90. Um, and, uh, well, how old would he have been 2019? No, but 91, 91. Um, um,

00:23:47.280 so completely ripped him apart. And now you have this elderly man living in this house, uh, who can't really

00:23:54.080 say anything. And he, you've got to understand as well that he sees himself as a man of the left

00:23:59.520 and his parents were Democrats and his parents were leftists. And when all this happened,

00:24:04.240 one of the things that he said was, my God, what would my parents think? Yeah.

00:24:07.680 I'm being accused of being racist and all this stuff. And he, he was dev, really personally

00:24:12.800 devastated. So this is something that I wanted to bring up. I think you, his father was a socialist.

00:24:17.920 You, you find in your book and an atheist, which was extremely unusual for the 1930s.

00:24:23.040 Um, this was at a time when socialism and atheism were completely unacceptable socially. And there

00:24:30.240 is this link between the sort of, um, disagreeableness or willingness to be disagreeable by the father

00:24:37.440 and, and, and that by the son. And he ended up stopping going to church, uh, when he was 11 to do

00:24:42.240 birdwatching. Yes. Absolute obsession. The, the detail he goes into in his books about different birds,

00:24:47.040 you see. And, and, and, and I like how you use that as evidence of, of the extent of autism,

00:24:51.440 because I think pretty much all ornithologists must be on some level, slightly autistic. Um,

00:24:57.680 but the point I, I propose to you is this, it was more necessary to cancel him because he was a man of

00:25:05.840 the left. Because you go into your book into how wokeness is a bit of a religion. And I a hundred

00:25:13.600 percent agree with you on that. And I think it's a religion patterned on Catholicism to the extent

00:25:20.480 that I would describe it as a Christian heresy. Uh, original sin is, um, now slavery and homophobia and

00:25:28.320 sexism. Um, the, the sacrificial offering, the sacrificial lamb are all of these disadvantaged

00:25:35.920 groups, BAMI, minorities, uh, women, transsexuals, homosexuals, et cetera. Um, there is an eschatology

00:25:44.400 in the climate movement and, um, there is a very disfigured soul in the idea of gender being something

00:25:54.400 that is unrelated to physical manifestation, uh, which is just a way of saying I'm more than what

00:26:00.640 I'm God. Yes. Yes. I am this I am. I exactly. Uh, but I think very, the point of cancel culture

00:26:09.920 is that it is a form of excommunication and you don't excuse me, excommunicate average sinners.

00:26:18.880 You excommunicate blasphemers. These are the guys that you must go after.

00:26:23.920 But it's worse than that because even when they used to burn heretics, you'd have a chance to,

00:26:28.320 you'd have, you could recant or you could, you had two chances before they'd burn you or whatever.

00:26:33.440 Yes. And they were, the authorities would do everything they could to try to avoid having to do

00:26:38.720 that. That's not the case with, with work. They are very, very keen to exclude you. Yes.

00:26:43.680 And once they have excluded you, there is no coming back either.

00:26:46.320 Which, which comes from their lack of a sense of their own sinfulness,

00:26:51.200 which comes from their own vanity that we are not at fault. It's just the world around us that

00:26:56.160 is evil and we are the ones writing it, which comes with a increased intolerance of geniuses,

00:27:02.800 especially geniuses like Watson, who are of the left, but are sinning against, but are blaspheming

00:27:10.320 against the dog. Well, I'm not sure the extent to which people knew that he was originally of the

00:27:15.840 left. I mean, he did quite openly give money to Barack Obama's campaigns twice, but, but,

00:27:20.240 but yeah, that's, I mean, in a way though, as I understand it, the way that people punished

00:27:24.480 those that are of their own, uh, that, that to break the rules is harsher than, than their attitude

00:27:29.760 towards people that are from a different group. Yes.

00:27:31.840 So yeah, you're right. It was, it was making it absolutely clear that this,

00:27:34.960 this, this, this, this, this is, it's Watson. It could be anybody. It could be you shut up.

00:27:41.520 And there've been so many points from the sixties onwards, um, even in his book, uh, the, um, the,

00:27:48.160 the, uh, double helix, uh, where he'd made spicy remarks, but it was gradually less and less tolerable

00:27:54.560 until the year 2000, when you had this whole controversy over, over him, uh, uh, uh, talking

00:27:59.040 about, uh, saying various remarks about, uh, sex and whatever else, um, and sex differences. Um,

00:28:05.360 and then suddenly no seven, that's it. He's, and then 2019, he's just absolutely crushed.

00:28:10.800 Yes. And it's, it's just, it's showing you, uh, that if not even Watson is, is safe. Um,

00:28:18.800 The new average bureaucrat, average academic, average person are absolutely unsafe because of

00:28:26.400 a man of this caliber who literally discovered the structure of the DNA and then led on the

00:28:31.200 Human Genome Project. Yeah. Uh, are never going to match him. Therefore beware. Therefore beware.

00:28:39.440 Right. And, but there's always, as you go, going back to what we were saying earlier about how they

00:28:42.560 tend to come from a field outside their own, um, there's always this, uh, this tension between

00:28:48.080 people like Watson, the genius type and what I call the midwit, uh, the person that just does their

00:28:52.960 degree in whatever subject and does their PhD in whatever subject and then just sticks with that

00:28:56.880 subject and doesn't look outside of it and whatever. And they're very different people.

00:29:01.360 And they're, one of them is basically a careerist and will, will put always, um, the good of their

00:29:07.440 career above the pursuit of truth. Um, and, and the other is, is the opposite, but it's, it's the other

00:29:12.960 person that innovates things and actually does things and makes important breakthroughs rather than

00:29:17.600 getting research somebody else has done and just adding a bit on the end. Yes. And that's what,

00:29:21.360 that's, those are the people that brought him down, the midwits, the people, these insignificant people,

00:29:25.920 um, who were offended by what he said in the year 2000 at Berkeley, which is, uh, over the,

00:29:32.320 they get the research on who doesn't add a bit on the end and they're, they're nobodies. Yes. Um, and

00:29:36.640 it means that all of the potential that Watson still had as a man in his eighties, um, he was 79 when

00:29:42.720 he was, I think, how old was he when he was completely canceled? Anyway, uh, eighties,

00:29:46.240 uh, was suppressed basically because it puts a lot of pressure on his family and it puts a lot of

00:29:51.920 pressure on his colleagues and it puts them in a difficult situation. Uh, and, um, he's living in a

00:29:58.080 house that is basically owned by, um, um, the laboratory, which is the laboratory that has canceled him.

00:30:04.320 And so obviously you don't want to push your, uh, bite the hand that feeds you too, too, too far.

00:30:09.680 Um, uh, particularly when you've got a wife who's 20 years younger than you, who's going to need to

00:30:14.000 somewhere to live under schizophrenic son who can't work. Um, and, and, and so it's a, it's a,

00:30:19.840 it's a really, really terrible situation. Absolutely. And I, I think, you know,

00:30:27.200 I think the point that he was absolutely right on the science with his intuition,

00:30:31.920 so the, that he was right on the science when it comes to, well, firstly, racial differences,

00:30:37.040 uh, and the fact that, you know, uh, different countries, um, economic output is in part a

00:30:45.680 function of average IQ. There are other factors that come into play, but average IQ does make a

00:30:51.280 difference. And if a country is poor natural resources, low on IQ, then it's, it's very difficult

00:30:58.800 for, for such a country to develop. Whereas the assumption right now is that, um, no, no,

00:31:04.800 everybody's equal all the time and everybody can achieve exactly the same outcome that the West

00:31:10.880 or China or Japan have achieved. Um, so do you want to go into the science of that a little bit?

00:31:17.840 Well, yeah, I'm, I'm perfect. The research is, uh, quite clear, or the group differences in IQ,

00:31:24.000 um, the, uh, for example, black people, uh, do better on the less culturally fair parts of the

00:31:34.560 test, right? So this is showing you that this is a genuine result. This is not as a consequence of

00:31:40.560 something to do with, uh, culture. Um, they, the genetic, they do, they do worse on the more

00:31:47.600 genetically mediated components of the IQ test. Um, they, they are lower in alleles, the prevalence

00:31:56.000 of alleles that are associated with high intelligence. And so we have every reason to

00:32:02.080 believe that these differences are genetic in nature. And also, of course, you have adoption,

00:32:07.360 twin adoption studies, which demonstrate that when a black person is raised by very intelligent white

00:32:12.880 people, they end up with an IQ, they end up as adults, because as a children, they're being,

00:32:18.640 they're subject to an environment which reflects the intelligence of their parents. Uh, whereas as

00:32:23.120 adults, they are then start creating their own environment, consistently innate intelligence,

00:32:27.280 and the IQ of these adopted blacks drops back to about the mean of blacks. So, um, and, and you have a

00:32:34.560 similar, uh, genetic analyses of different other racial groups, the East Asians, whatever, which show you

00:32:39.840 that the, these are genetic differences in intelligence. And why wouldn't they be? Because

00:32:43.680 these races are groups that are, uh, separated by environment and endogamy and are adapted and

00:32:49.440 evolved to different ecologies in which intelligence will be more or less useful. If you are high in

00:32:54.880 intelligence, then you are balancing that with something else that you will be low in. You will be

00:32:59.280 low in lethal impulsivity, for example, which is very, very useful in unstable ecology. You have to

00:33:05.680 lethally act violently in the moment. Boom. Um, if you're more intelligent, you won't be able to do

00:33:10.080 that and you will be killed. So, um, there are these differences, um, and they don't change and

00:33:17.200 they are intractable and they are very real. Um, the other thing you don't, you said it was the average

00:33:22.400 IQ of the society. Yup, this is true that that is a, has a big effect on things because if they have a

00:33:26.800 low IQ, you have lots and lots of people make being present oriented and making lots and lots of little

00:33:32.240 mistakes all the time. Um, and this builds up to a chaotic society. Um, I've just got back from

00:33:39.200 Moldova, uh, average IQ 80. Um, and it's quite extraordinary the kind of the way they live in

00:33:44.560 the now. So it's, they, they spend money on, they dress very well. The women, the society is 56%

00:33:51.200 females due to immigration. So there's sexual signaling, you know, competition. Uh, the women

00:33:56.160 spend all this money on makeup and how they dress and whatever. They're very interested in things

00:34:00.080 looking nice. So when they build things, it looks beautiful, you know, which is good. It's good for

00:34:04.960 the soul, you know, um, and all that sort of thing. Even putting your seatbelt on, the seatbelts will

00:34:11.040 have these kind of wool lined covers. So they feel nice against your hand when you put the seatbelt on.

00:34:16.800 But do they spend money on actually fixing the roads? No. And so, uh, this messes up the whole

00:34:22.960 infrastructure. The roads are like roller coasters. And then when it rains, the roads are flood and you have,

00:34:30.240 water splurging all over the place. It's chaos. Um, that's what happens in the society of low

00:34:35.600 intelligence quotient. But the other thing is that the intelligence is the smart fraction.

00:34:40.160 And this is interesting with regard to what you said about Japan. Japan has not achieved that much.

00:34:44.800 What Japan has done is taken things that Europeans have achieved and copied them and done them more

00:34:49.120 efficiently. Um, the IQ of the Japanese, and I suspect the Chinese and the Koreans and also the Finns,

00:34:54.640 actually, um, is more bunched towards the mean. They have a smaller gene pool. They have a smaller

00:35:00.240 standard deviation. So everyone's bunched towards the mean, which means you get fewer sort of tramps

00:35:05.600 and vagrants and just really stupid people, essentially. But you also get fewer of the

00:35:10.160 other geniuses. Yes.

00:35:11.280 Innovators, people of outlier high intelligence. And equally in that context, because they're

00:35:16.000 lower in psychopathy, because they're evolved to a harsh yet stable ecology, which will select in

00:35:20.720 favour of cooperation, uh, in order to survive and that sort of thing. They're lower in psychopathy

00:35:26.320 as well. That means less, uh, criminals, psychopaths, killers, whatever, but also means fewer, uh, genius

00:35:33.920 types. Um, so then it's also the smart fraction that influences how well a society does, as well as

00:35:39.520 the average IQ.

00:35:40.960 So talk to me a little bit about intelligence and environment and cooperation, because so I'm from

00:35:48.000 Lebanon and one of the big problems in, in that country is the inability to cooperate across

00:35:55.920 religious differences. Now, part of that is because of these religious differences, it breaks down

00:36:01.600 trust. And as trust breaks down, um, the incentive is to be predatory now rather than cooperate over

00:36:08.880 the long term. But as this pattern repeats, it seems that it becomes a much more self-reinforcing cycle

00:36:14.960 and degrades also communities that should, in theory, have trust within the in-group, so to speak.

00:36:22.480 Um, but I find the, the point about ecology and cooperation to be quite fascinating. Because with

00:36:31.280 cooperation, even if you don't have a high impulse to immediate lethal violence, you are able to build

00:36:39.760 a much more organised and effective military machine, which means that a small band of redcoats

00:36:45.760 can take on a Zulu army and, and absolutely crush it. In part because it has the technology, but also in

00:36:51.680 part because it has the discipline to operate in a highly cohesive manner rather than reliant,

00:36:58.480 than being reliant on individual courage. And you see the same thing with the Crusades. With the Crusades,

00:37:03.840 the, the Crusader Knights, uh, always outnumber, always had much smaller numbers than the Arab or Turkish

00:37:14.320 horse archers. But the Arab and Turkish horse archers would sort of attack in waves that were disorganised.

00:37:20.720 Yes. Whereas the Crusader Knights were able to maintain a discipline and cooperation that allowed

00:37:27.120 them to use tactics that defeated the bigger numbers. So the way that intelligence affects cooperation

00:37:35.360 ends up having very many consequences in real life, including in military affairs, but also in terms of

00:37:44.320 organising a market day, being able to, uh, leave nice things outside your door without them being stolen,

00:37:51.280 uh, being able to just function in a high trust way. So talk to me a little bit about that connection, please.

00:37:58.080 Uh, well, um, yes, intelligence can be conceived of as a bit like a pyramid. Um, at the base of the

00:38:06.640 pyramid are certain specialised abilities, like the ability to drive a car or, or catch a ball or something.

00:38:12.320 Um, and then you have, they correlate, they can be factor analysed down into three key forms of

00:38:17.680 intelligence, verbal, spatial, mathematical, and then underpinning this, they can be factor analysed down

00:38:22.160 into just G, which is general intelligence, which is about 80% to do with genes and genetic differences

00:38:27.760 in individual samples. Um, and there are many correlates of intelligence, um, and, um, and it

00:38:34.640 has evolved to an environment which is as a reflection of an environment which is harsh yet stable. If it is

00:38:40.720 harsh yet stable, then, um, cooperation can be paid back. Yes. So therefore it's worth cooperating. It's not

00:38:49.120 just intelligence, this selectable, but a certain kind of personality which is relevant to what

00:38:52.240 you're saying as well. So high agreeableness, um, um, um, that, that you have to be able to think

00:38:58.160 about the future and not act in the now or you'll die. So high. That's why the English are so polite

00:39:03.840 all the time. So, well, they were, um, so, so, so, so high conscientiousness that you have to be, uh,

00:39:10.560 mentally stable or you'll do, you'll do impulsive things and you'll just get killed. So low,

00:39:15.200 relatively low neuroticism though a subsection of it, high social anxiety because it's a very

00:39:20.480 difficult environment and you, you can't function on your own. Um, that, you know, basic needs are

00:39:25.440 not met. So you have to be part of a group. If you're cast up by the group, you're dead. So

00:39:30.480 therefore you have, you will be high in social, uh, anxiety, relatively low extraversion because

00:39:36.560 extraversion is basically feeling positive, feeling strongly. It motivates you to experiment and,

00:39:41.600 and things like this. But if you experiment in a harsh ecology, then you could just die.

00:39:45.280 So you don't, um, so you have this suite of traits that are interrelated and correlate

00:39:49.840 weekly, um, intelligence and this certain kind of basically pro-social personality,

00:39:55.360 what are called the general factor of personality. There are many, many, uh, correlates,

00:39:58.800 therefore of intelligence relating to, uh, cooperation, possibly military mediated by the fact that if you

00:40:05.120 are intelligent, even putting aside personality, you are better able to, um, work things out.

00:40:12.640 And so you're better able to just putting aside personality to understand how another person is

00:40:17.760 thinking, um, um, to put yourself in their place and imagine what it's like to be them. So this

00:40:23.200 media militates in favor of being empathetic, uh, and us being cooperative. So that, so then you have

00:40:31.040 higher cooperation. You're also higher in trust if you're intelligent. Why? Well, because if you're low

00:40:37.120 intelligence, you're probably gonna get conned because you're stupid and you won't see the signs

00:40:41.920 of something being a problem. And so you get conned. So it's best to trust nobody. Whereas

00:40:46.640 if you're intelligent, you're going to see the signs. You're probably not going to get conned

00:40:51.280 because you'll have a greater awareness of what's going on, um, and make connections better. And so

00:40:57.440 you may as well take the chance to trust people, which itself then builds up the possibility of greater

00:41:02.400 cooperation. Yes. Um, so this becomes a sort of virtuous. Right. Right. When, when, when you think

00:41:07.600 about it in, in, in a sort of broader context of a game being played over, over generations,

00:41:14.160 each of those factors ends up reinforcing the other factors and to, and through selection

00:41:21.680 and through environment, it therefore becomes a lot easier to build a high trust society. Yes.

00:41:27.040 And now what the problem comes when, uh, as the research by, uh, God, what's his name?

00:41:32.160 E Pluribus Unum Putnam. That's his name. Um, so obviously with Lebanon, it's gone from being this

00:41:36.640 Christian society to, uh, letting in Muslims. And we, we all know the problems that, uh, in the 80s,

00:41:42.240 it was on TV all the time when I was a kid. Uh, and so there's two things going on. You don't,

00:41:48.560 you're not going to get cooperation between groups because the groups are, these religions are genetic

00:41:54.720 cleavages. Um, they are, they, they are endogamous. They are genetically separate and it is in our

00:42:02.400 interest to cooperate with the, it's the group that survives is the group that is high in positive

00:42:06.400 and negative ethnocentrism in, in computer modeling. And so it's in our interests to cooperate with our

00:42:12.000 own group and not with, in most circumstances, with other groups. So therefore the groups will,

00:42:16.720 will have problems cooperating. So you, social trust breaks down once you have a multi-ethnic society.

00:42:23.440 Uh, indeed there was a book by Tatu Vanden called, what was it called now? Um, uh, ethnic conflicts.

00:42:29.680 And, and, and he showed that about 66% of the cause of ethnic conflict is just ethnic diversity.

00:42:35.680 So it will always lead to conflict because these are separate, uh, uh, genetic, uh, uh, subgroups

00:42:42.320 and they're not going to cooperate. But the really awful thing happens. Once this happens,

00:42:46.800 um, then of course you, people unconsciously rightly understand that some people within

00:42:54.160 their group are either more kind of left wing people really, um, are going to collaborate

00:42:59.920 with the outsider in their own interests. We know what left wing people do. They identify

00:43:06.240 with people that are genetically relatively more distant from self. They, but they say,

00:43:11.600 oh, I'm doing this because I'm so virtuous and they're so poor and excluded and whatever. But

00:43:15.840 in reality, um, that that's a cover for what they're doing, um, so that they don't get found

00:43:20.880 out, which is that you cooperate with the outsider in order to get as a means of gaining power over the

00:43:26.960 in group. Yes. Which is what they do again, which is exactly what happened in Lebanon, which is what

00:43:31.600 Jeremy Corbyn is doing here, which is sort of a replica. It replicates across the board.

00:43:38.240 Uh, the leadership of the communist party in Lebanon was very Christian. Uh, the, um, the workers

00:43:43.840 union thing. I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, it was a supposed labor organization that

00:43:49.680 ended up forming a militia. The leadership was also Christian. And so you see this pattern being

00:43:55.040 repeated, but I think you also in your book address the differences in personality types

00:44:01.280 between the left and the right. Yeah. And I want you to please elaborate on that.

00:44:08.480 Well, there's, yeah, there's quite good research on this. So, um, in general, those that are,

00:44:14.240 we are, if we're like a theoretical basis for this, essentially, we can argue that under harsh

00:44:19.120 conditions, we are kind of evolved to be conservative, to be right wing. Right.

00:44:22.800 Under, under harsh conditions of 50% or 40% child mortality, which were prevalent until 1800,

00:44:27.440 what were we selecting for? We were selecting for genetic physical health, obviously. We were

00:44:32.400 selecting for genetic mental health, and these two things correlate. They are player triptically

00:44:36.960 related. When things are being selected for... But not in geniuses, which is a point I'll get to.

00:44:40.640 That's a separate thing. That's a separate thing. But in normal range people, uh, so these things

00:44:45.280 are mental health and physical health are player triptically related to each other. People on

00:44:48.640 average that are physically healthy are more mentally healthy. Uh, then we are, we were selecting

00:44:52.560 for, um, uh, basically being group oriented because under harsh conditions, it's the more cooperative

00:44:58.000 group that will survive, the more ethnocentric group that will survive. So we're selecting for

00:45:01.520 being group oriented. And what that is basically reducible down to is conservatism. Um, we have these

00:45:07.440 five moral foundations because we are pack animals, but also we have to reach the top of the pack because

00:45:12.640 women sexually select for status because in prehistory, because until, until 1800 or whatever,

00:45:17.680 there was a relationship, quite a strong relationship between how many surviving offspring you had

00:45:21.120 and your socioeconomic status. Um, and also because it is just good to have a small portion of the

00:45:26.560 society that is uncooperative and, and whatever. Um, uh, uh, a, because it's a way of branching out

00:45:32.320 and innovating new things via that personality. And B, because it's the psychopaths and so on that we

00:45:36.480 need in battle to throw themselves before the guns and whatever. I mean, they don't do it because

00:45:40.000 they're cooperative. They do it because they like danger, but it's, it's, it's useful to have such things.

00:45:44.240 So we have this balance, five, uh, moral foundations, the individually, uh, the group

00:45:49.120 oriented foundations of, um, uh, ethnic and group loyalty, of obedience to authority, traditional

00:45:54.080 authority, uh, and of sanctity, sanctity versus disgust. So normally we sanctify that which is good

00:45:58.560 for the society and we taboo that which is, which is bad for it. Um, and then you have the individually

00:46:02.720 oriented foundations, if you're at the bottom, as it were, of harm avoidance. If you avoid harm,

00:46:07.200 you go against harm, you avoid harm to you. And equality, uh, which is you want equality, you get more of the pie.

00:46:12.000 These are the five moral foundations. Conservatives are about the same in all of them. Liberals are high

00:46:18.080 in the individually oriented ones and low in the group oriented ones. Right. So the, and they're

00:46:22.160 also, so, so that's, that's conservatism. So we're selecting for, we're selecting for conservatism.

00:46:27.600 And then finally, we're selecting for religiosity, which, um, we know it's, it's 0.6 heritable

00:46:34.000 religiosity, depending on the measure. I mean, like if you have a conversion experience, that's up to about

00:46:37.920 0.7 heritable. Um, and this is obviously, uh, the collective worship of a moral God,

00:46:43.680 uh, uh, that, that basically you take that which is adaptive and you make it into the will of God.

00:46:48.480 And we know this from, from twin studies and whatever, uh, that this is genetic. And they all

00:46:52.640 intercorrelate physical health, mental health, uh, religiosity, conservatism. They're all

00:46:56.800 player tripically related. They're a bundle. They're a fitness factor. So that's what we were selecting for.

00:47:02.160 With the collapse of child mortality from 40, 50% down to 1%, then obviously what you're going to get

00:47:07.760 is a deviation from that fitness factor. And because it was, we were under such, uh, harsh

00:47:14.640 levels of selection, the deviation will generally be in the direction of being left wing. And so what you

00:47:22.080 see on numerous markers is that left wing people are higher in evidence of basically a mutational load.

00:47:29.600 So they are less physically healthy. They are less, uh, physically, the men are less physically

00:47:34.160 strong. Um, the men are shorter. Uh, the women's faces are less symmetrical. The women's faces are

00:47:41.040 rated as uglier. Um, the, uh, uh, their, their, their hands are less symmetrical than those of,

00:47:47.840 those of, uh, uh, conservative people. They are more likely to be left-handed if, um, and being, uh,

00:47:54.480 left-handed is associated with developmental instability, uh, problems with the brain being skewed,

00:47:59.440 and things like this. Um, and so there are, um, uh, there, there are many markers of this.

00:48:04.720 They're also more likely to have cluster to have not just mental illness, but certain cluster B

00:48:09.280 personality disorders, um, in particular narcissism, uh, and, and, and Machiavellianism.

00:48:15.280 And this may, and if you look at what they're doing, basically you have people that are high

00:48:19.440 in mental instability, but they're individually oriented. So they're power hungry, but they fear a

00:48:25.120 fair fight. So therefore they play for status covertly, uh, via, via virtue signaling and of

00:48:33.200 course, by collaborating with the outsider. Um, and that is, and that is how they, um, that,

00:48:38.320 that, that is how they attain status. So that's, that's, that's the leftist. Um, the, the,

00:48:43.520 the weird tension in it is that conservatives, um, have a feeling that they are, um, that they have

00:48:54.000 free will, that they are in control of the world, but yet they believe in God or more so. And on

00:49:01.360 average, there is a sense in which if you will, if you believe in God, then you surely believe

00:49:04.720 someone is directing your life. And in a sense, you, you almost don't have it. You, it'll all be okay

00:49:09.280 in the end. It'll all be okay in the end, right? That's not a, I don't think that's accurate,

00:49:14.560 but I don't want to get into this discussion. But it is a sense, it's a sense in which

00:49:17.360 Christians will say, God is guiding my life. God has a plan for me and that plan is unfolding.

00:49:23.120 Yes. Right. Now I would argue that's inconsistent with the feeling that you are in control of your

00:49:27.600 life and what you do is there's, that's it. Oh yes. There, there, within, within religion,

00:49:33.040 there are all kinds of what I would describe as resolvable contradictions or intentions.

00:49:37.680 And then the left get the contradiction that they are saying they don't believe they have

00:49:41.840 free will. They believe things happen for exterior reasons, but yet they also don't believe in God.

00:49:48.880 But anyway, that's, that's overall it. And the other thing that, of course,

00:49:52.000 you would expect to happen is if religion is a series of, of sub-traits such as obedience to authority,

00:49:59.840 over-detecting agency, over-detecting causation, a number of different things that have come together

00:50:05.600 into the religious bundle of the collective worship of a moral God. And so you'd expect

00:50:09.680 this to start to break up. Yes.

00:50:11.440 So then you'd have religion, but without God, which is perhaps what you see in, in wokeness.

00:50:15.920 Yes, very much so.

00:50:16.800 So that's, that's the difference in the personality between, between right and left.

00:50:21.520 Um, and what, what's interesting here is that it, the, the studies find that it is, um, currently the case

00:50:28.240 that psychopathy is associated with being on the far right, which makes sense.

00:50:31.760 Because if you're a psychopath, you're going to want danger and you're going to be disagreeable.

00:50:35.280 And it's a left wing society. Whereas if you're the people that narcissism, i.e., you're mentally

00:50:41.280 unstable, you feel bad about yourself. And so you tell yourself that you're morally superior in

00:50:46.160 relation to the current morality and you signal it and you get narcissistic supply, left wing.

00:50:51.040 Machiavellianism, uh, you're mentally unstable. You want to take, you want to power over the world.

00:50:55.440 How do you get it by being left wing? And I wonder if that would reverse

00:50:58.960 in a right wing society, if the, if the opposite would occur when the pendulum swings, the pendulum

00:51:04.960 swings. And I think I've been thinking about this a lot at the moment, like you, you get more and more

00:51:11.040 women, uh, involved in our circles. And I'm particularly skeptical if someone says, oh,

00:51:18.400 I used to be left wing. I used to be really, really left wing. And then I realized the problems

00:51:22.720 with it. And now I'm involved in, you know, now I watched the Lotus Eaters and come on the Lotus

00:51:26.800 Eaters and whatever. And I think it was, hang on a minute. No. Right. So you were left wing.

00:51:32.960 And, and I think you have, and you, I think you like attention and you like being different

00:51:38.640 and you like, uh, uh, you like a black and white world and you're extreme. And, and then you move

00:51:45.680 over to something that's kind of in some ways the opposite of that, but your personality hasn't changed.

00:51:52.160 You still have the personality type that is attracted to these, and is attention seeking,

00:51:56.800 uh, and, and is very much an outlier for a female in that sense, in the sense of wanting to be famous

00:52:02.320 or have power or influence. Um, and so probably you're a bit sus. Same, a bit, a bit sus. Yes.

00:52:09.680 Yeah, a bit sus. And you also talk about the feminization of society and how that sort of

00:52:15.040 makes everything worse, I suppose. Yes. Um, uh, women are, are more likely than, and this is, uh,

00:52:22.080 something, one of the things that Watson said was that it was much easier to get along in

00:52:26.400 Cambridge in the early fifties because it was overwhelmingly male. Yes. So you didn't have

00:52:29.920 women to distract you. And the irony of it was that he championed getting more women.

00:52:35.040 Charlotte Hunt Grubb was an example of this. So he championed... And she was the one who ended up ruining it.

00:52:38.960 He betrayed him. Yes. So, so the, um, this was, yeah, he championed all of these kind of left-wing

00:52:43.760 ideas and they came back to bite him. Yes. Uh, and hurt him. Uh, yeah. So he, he, um,

00:52:50.640 he was clear on, on, on this. He wanted more women involved, uh, whatever. But the result of that

00:52:55.600 is that the, the, the nature of the institution changes. Yes. From being a male institution,

00:53:01.200 which reflects the, if we reduce it to Simon Baron Cohen's idea, which I think is rather good,

00:53:05.600 of the male brain. The male brain is autistic. It is systematizing, but it is feelings blind.

00:53:10.880 The female brain is obsessed with feelings, but it is system blind. Yes. You move women,

00:53:15.680 more and more women into academia, um, and they're much more interested than men, um, in equality,

00:53:21.680 uh, and in harm avoidance and in everyone feeling validated, uh, and in, uh, and in basically like a

00:53:29.280 lack of danger and all of this sort of thing. Um, and they're much less interested that these things

00:53:34.720 trump the autistic pursuit of the truth and the kind of cut and thrust of that autistic

00:53:39.680 pursuit of the truth. And then you get into a situation where, well, realistically, you know,

00:53:44.880 who are you going to give the job to? Are you going to give the job to what I call, or my colleague

00:53:48.320 Bruce Charlton rather coined it, the head girl type, who is intelligent within the normal range,

00:53:53.920 high general factor of personality, highly ambitious towards socially approved goals,

00:53:58.480 um, and, and who can play the game. You know, she's going to publish the four academic papers a year.

00:54:02.320 She's going to, she's going to go to the conferences. She's going to be cooperative

00:54:05.120 and raise money. Or do you give the job to the autistic weirdo, um, who may well come up with

00:54:11.840 something brilliant, uh, at some point? Because of course, what they used to do was they didn't have

00:54:15.600 all this pressure to publish papers. They just go away. And hopefully some of you will come up with an

00:54:20.000 idea. Yes. And you had these safe spaces for them to do that, not just university, but for example,

00:54:25.120 a lot of vicars. Yes. And they'd have this job where they really didn't have to do anything.

00:54:28.560 Um, and most of them would just sort of eat and drink themselves to death, but become an expert

00:54:33.680 on butterflies. Or right. Or some, some something. Yes. But then some of them, i.e. Edmund Cartwright

00:54:38.800 or whatever would, um, would, would do something absolutely brilliant. And they don't have these

00:54:42.800 safe spaces anymore because even the Church of England is bureaucratized and so on. But also,

00:54:47.440 obviously university has become bureaucratized and obsessed with money and, and all of this. Um,

00:54:52.240 and so they're just sort of cast out. Uh, and I suppose we have growing a kind of para academia or

00:54:58.400 alternative funding sources through the internet, that sort of thing. Um, but that's what's happened.

00:55:03.280 And so women, they take over the university and then it becomes what women should be doing when

00:55:08.880 they're in their twenties and thirties, which is basically a giant nursery school. Yes. Uh, where,

00:55:13.280 where you don't upset people, you don't bully people, you don't offend people. And it's also the

00:55:17.760 same with the state. The, the, the nanny state is the sort of perfect example of the phenomenon

00:55:24.400 that you're describing. Oh yeah. Like just as I got off, you know, I, I know I, I, I told you I'd

00:55:28.960 try and be here by 10 and I bugged it up, but I, but I was trying to get here as quickly as possible.

00:55:32.720 And I was kind of running down the stairs. And as I was running down the stairs at Swindon station,

00:55:36.320 there was an announcement telling people not to run or no, no, no, telling people to hold onto the

00:55:40.400 banister. Yes. Now these things have accrued over time. Um, things that the nanny state telling us,

00:55:49.600 Oh, be careful. It's wet. Oh, hold onto the banister. Just what you would say to a five-year-old

00:55:58.000 uh, being broadcast to adults. Right. I bet this is, this is, this is what happens with the

00:56:02.720 feminization of society. Even this recent thing that's happened. It's interesting with the

00:56:07.440 defenestration of Prince Andrew now, which has happened like yesterday. Yes. Right. He's been,

00:56:12.640 he's been, he, he has not been stripped of his title of the Duke of York. No, no. He has voluntarily

00:56:20.080 relinquished it while stating that he vigorously denies the allegations. Now in man world, he gets

00:56:27.440 punished. He he's, he's served his time. He's kind of forgiven. Get on with it. Yes. In woman world,

00:56:36.880 this is what he's being subject to in order not to really, really hurt his feelings. Yes.

00:56:42.480 He's not stripped of the title. He's merely shamed by his brother pressured into not using it in

00:56:49.680 public. Yes. But he can still say to himself, well, I'm HRH and Duke of York. Really? I'm just

00:56:55.520 in control and choosing not to use it. Um, so there is actually no punishment. So there isn't,

00:57:00.720 there's no possibility of forgiveness or redemption. And so then he's just in this limbo forever for the

00:57:05.920 rest of his life where he's just excluded from the normal royal society of which he's a part,

00:57:11.760 uh, like girls would do. Uh, no, I'm not defending Prince Andrew. I mean, I've read his book,

00:57:17.520 the book entitled, and it's, it proves as far as I'm concerned, beyond doubt that he had,

00:57:22.480 that he was involved with this Virginia Roberts girl and, and that he's done and Jeffrey Epstein and

00:57:27.280 lied and whatever. But I'm just noticing that I think it would be a lot more satisfying if the,

00:57:32.960 if the king just said, I am completely stripping you of your title, Duke of York,

00:57:37.120 that is your punishment. And then it's over. Yes. It, it, the, the shaming never ends big in the

00:57:44.240 same way that, you know, a woman might pick up a fight two or three days later. Uh, what did you

00:57:50.640 say last week or something of that sort? Which is different from how a man would function. We have a

00:57:57.440 fist fight, then we shake hands and, and then it's over. Um, so yes, the feminization of society has

00:58:04.080 had this effect, but it also has an effect on the, as you say, the ability of genius to operate

00:58:12.400 and perhaps even the ability to create genius to begin with because these intelligent women,

00:58:20.480 um, who are in roles that are completely unsuited to women in general

00:58:24.240 are not having children. Whereas in a normal society, it's the above average intelligence

00:58:33.120 woman who is the most likely to mother a genius. Yes, this is very, very true. So what, what we find

00:58:38.160 with geniuses as with Watson is that they have, uh, intelligent parents and what families, for

00:58:42.800 example, Watson's uncle was a professor of physics, uh, Wieland Watson, I think his name was. So, um,

00:58:48.240 uh, highly intelligent people, um, that then by genetic chance produce someone that is either

00:58:53.760 super intelligent or as I say, highly skewed in their intelligence. So very, very intelligent in

00:58:58.880 a specific area of intelligence. Um, and, and that they combine this with these autistic and, and, and

00:59:04.560 sub subclinical psychopathic and, uh, ADHD and whatever kind of traits. Um, and you're right then that,

00:59:10.240 that, um, as we are selecting against intelligence, we are selecting against, literally against,

00:59:16.640 um, the fitness factor. So we're selecting against intelligence. We are selecting against mental

00:59:20.320 health. We are selecting against physical health. Um, we are, uh, we're taking in favor of religiosity,

00:59:25.680 but, uh, and, and, and particularly we're in setting in favor when you control for intelligence,

00:59:29.360 but, but then you're going to get fewer, uh, per capita geniuses as that happens. And I looked,

00:59:35.200 I did a book years ago called at our wits end, why we become less intelligent, what it means to the

00:59:38.640 future, uh, where me and my colleague, Michael Woodley of Munee, um, set that out. Less per capita,

00:59:43.280 we, we reached a height of per capita innovation about 1870, where we were probably, um, maybe 20

00:59:49.520 points or more, uh, intelligent than we are now on our, based on various proxies that we have,

00:59:54.720 like reaction times and, and things like this. Uh, and, and then we start going down and now we are

01:00:00.240 back in terms of per capita major innovation to where we were at about 1600. So when Queen Elizabeth

01:00:07.040 the first was on the throne and it's only going to continue to get worse. And by the end of the

01:00:11.840 century, we were likely to have an average IQ, if we were a hundred now, uh, of 85, uh, which is the

01:00:18.000 average IQ of African Americans among whites, uh, just for genetic reasons, even taking, not even

01:00:23.440 taking into account the fact that society becomes more chaotic, um, and therefore, uh, intelligence

01:00:29.520 at the, in terms of the environmental causes of it, uh, is to do with an intellectually stimulating

01:00:33.760 environment. The environment will become less intellectually stimulating and this will reduce

01:00:37.760 intelligence further, uh, as well, just the genetics. So it's a very serious thing. And so you, you just

01:00:43.440 get fewer per capita geniuses. You just get fewer Watsons. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's pretty tragic

01:00:48.960 that the feminization of society has contributed to this to such an extent and that the liberation of

01:00:57.040 women, I mean, has had so many damaging effects that the, the, the breakdown of differences between

01:01:05.920 men and women has been. Well, they're, they're evolved for us that they're evolved to live under

01:01:10.960 patriarchy. I mean, once you, once you, once you get, men are saying, men are saying to women,

01:01:15.600 I want sex. Women are saying to men, if you want sex, I won't get pregnant. I want you to invest

01:01:20.240 in me. I want you to look after the baby. Women say, men say to women, if that's the case,

01:01:24.560 I need to be able to control your sexuality to know I'm not cuckolded. Exactly. That arrangement

01:01:28.720 develops. Um, and then the, and then, is that simple? And then the women that are not,

01:01:33.280 that don't come across as patriarch. One of the reasons I think why women are more religious than

01:01:36.720 men is because religiousness tends to be a marker of being a person that, that is prepared to be

01:01:41.280 subject to the, to the patriarchy. Yes. And men, to the extent that they sexually select often,

01:01:46.000 will sexually select, uh, you know, beyond appearance, um, will sexually select for things like

01:01:50.640 evidence of religiosity, evidence, basically evidence that you're not a slut. Yes. Um,

01:01:55.200 and so, um, women then become, uh, more religious and they become more patriarchal. They are selected

01:02:00.800 to be like that. And so they are selected as there's a book by Menelaus Apostolo called something

01:02:05.840 like sexual selection under parental control, um, in which he shows this. And so if you take the

01:02:10.240 Patrick, so for example, um, the men, the, the, the family will want the woman, um, to have a, uh,

01:02:16.560 a partner that is in their genetic interests. The women will want a partner in her genetic

01:02:21.600 interests. So how does she get the partner that's in her genetic interests? The answer is she is

01:02:27.760 evolved to overplay it, to go for someone completely unsuitable so that via negotiation,

01:02:33.360 she gets the person that's in her genetic interests. So take away the patriarchy. She's in an

01:02:38.960 environment, she's in an evolutionary mismatch. Yes. In, in, in which she's evolved to behave in a

01:02:44.720 certain way in which she now doesn't need to. Yes. And so she's going to make all kinds of

01:02:49.840 poor decisions. Um, and, uh, this is at most obviously, uh, being sucked into this idea of

01:02:57.520 delaying her fertility and being, being, you know, getting educated, spending all of her twenties and

01:03:02.640 increasingly even the first half of her thirties, uh, in, in, uh, education and a career and, uh, and

01:03:08.720 being easily influenced by ridiculous ideas like feminism. And then she'll be, she'll look back and

01:03:14.160 she'll be childless and she'll be my 45, whatever. And she's not going to have a child. Um, and she'll

01:03:19.040 be deeply regretful and, and, and so on. And this is what we are now seeing. Yes. Yes. Um,

01:03:24.160 I'm afraid it sounds patronizing, but they are, they are, if most of them, not all of them,

01:03:28.560 because some of them are far-selfish strategists that probably wouldn't associate sexual or whatever,

01:03:32.560 but, but they're generally evolved to that. Yes. Um, and, and, and so then they're in an evolutionary

01:03:38.880 mismatch to a much worse degree than men are. Men are much more evolved to just be in control of

01:03:44.160 their own lives. And so they make these mistakes. Uh, it's, it's, um, it's, it's, it's terrible and

01:03:50.640 it's predictable. And the other thing of course, is they sexually select for status. And so if you

01:03:54.240 put women in a situation where they are more educated than men, which they now are, because

01:03:58.800 they're higher in conscientiousness and agreeableness and the intelligence difference is very small,

01:04:04.800 although it's there. So they end up more likely to have PhDs and adult things because, you know,

01:04:09.040 the head girl, you know, she wants to, you notice that on Twitter, that it's only girls that put

01:04:12.400 doctor before their name if they haven't. Yes. Um, you know, I put, put, put, put, put pictures up

01:04:20.160 saying, Oh, I'm so honored to have been, got my PhD and all this crap. But, uh, yeah. And then they end up,

01:04:26.240 uh, there's not enough men that are more educated than them. There's not enough men that are of higher

01:04:30.400 status than them. So they end up not having children at all. Uh, rather, rather like the,

01:04:35.440 uh, the spinster crisis in the, in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there's just,

01:04:39.840 there's too many women of a certain social class, which weirdly would predict them kind of purity

01:04:46.240 signaling and making an effort, but they don't seem to do that. One of the things that I've been

01:04:51.040 saying is that the next right wing government needs to completely gut the sort of

01:04:56.400 feminine structures in the economy from the NGO sector to the civil service,

01:05:02.720 to the education system, uh, to HR departments, these things, the regulations that allow these

01:05:10.240 things to be built must be burnt to the ground so that we can have a much more competitive economy

01:05:18.880 and society that allows for the correction of the, of the, of the areas that we've been

01:05:23.920 living under for so long. But, um, but I suspect that's a conversation for another day.

01:05:29.520 Yes, I suppose so. Uh, but, but yeah, we've, we've been living in the mind, basically,

01:05:33.520 of a girl that has borderline personality disorder and cuts herself because she's sad

01:05:38.400 for, um, about 30 years. Um, interestingly, by the way, one of,

01:05:42.960 one of Watson's obsessions, it's not just an obsession with birds, with the other kind of bird,

01:05:48.800 one of his books is Jeans, Girls and Gamow, where he just looks at the girls that he's humped and

01:05:53.280 would like to hump. Um, in, in, in, like in tremendous detail. Yes.

01:05:58.880 It does seem from analysis of some of his girlfriends that these are the BPD type. These

01:06:05.040 are the, the, the swinging in emotions, the manipulative, the, uh, uh, uh, identity disturbance,

01:06:11.920 the, you know, those kinds of women, you know what I mean? Yes, yes.

01:06:14.720 And he seems to be attracted to those, which would be, um, what kind of, what are you attracted

01:06:20.720 to if you're attracted to those kinds of women? They're highly intelligent and perceptive maybe

01:06:24.640 and creative. He's attracted to that, but you pay for that in, in the, in, in, and they're dramatic

01:06:30.640 as well, but you pay for that in the negative side of the drama in the collapse, either there's

01:06:34.720 the love bombing and then there's the, there's the, there's the de-idealization and the hating

01:06:38.640 and the loathing and then the back of the love bombing and the trauma bond and all this kind of

01:06:41.760 thing. Uh, and he's a sucker for that. Yes.

01:06:44.560 Yes. Which, which, which is, I think is consistent with elements of narcissism. Yes.

01:06:48.800 Because they will, they will stroke your narcissism, um, with the love bombing, but eventually if

01:06:53.200 you're narcissistic, you won't be, you won't tolerate the other side of it. Yes.

01:06:56.880 So eventually you get with other kinds of people, but he seems to be attracted to these kinds of,

01:07:00.160 which is consistent with that kind of, uh, cluster B type associated with intelligence,

01:07:04.560 which composes genius. Right. I'm looking at the time and I'm afraid it's all the time we have.

01:07:10.000 I, um, if it was up to me, we'd go on for another couple of hours, but we have the other thing

01:07:14.560 later. We do have the other thing later. Yes. Um, please buy the book when it comes out. Where,

01:07:20.080 where can people find it? It is out. It is out. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's called, uh,

01:07:24.160 genius under house arrest, the cancellation of James Watson. And I think now the paperback is out.

01:07:28.880 And so, um, you should be able to buy it on, on Amazon and, uh, or from the publisher,

01:07:33.200 which is academic oppress. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I hope it, I hope it is an insight into the

01:07:39.920 nature of genius and into perhaps one of the only living geniuses.

01:07:45.120 Can you tell us a little bit more about where people can find you?

01:07:47.360 Oh, me? Oh, well then. Yeah. You say my, my, uh, um, my YouTube, um, is a jolly,

01:07:52.720 the jolly heretic. Um, and then I have a sub stack called jollyheretic.com where I put, uh,

01:07:58.160 the, the more base things I come up on YouTube, in-person interviews, vlogs,

01:08:01.920 documentaries I make, that kind of thing. And if you'd like what I do,

01:08:04.320 you can support me for the cost of like a pint of beer a month. And I also live stream

01:08:08.000 on Mondays at 7 PM UK time. And I've written various books, um, Woke Eugenics, How Social

01:08:14.880 Justice and Master Social Darwinism, a biography of Jonathan Bowden. A lot of people seem to be

01:08:19.280 interested in, um, all of which are available on, uh, on Amazon.

01:08:22.640 Ed is absolutely brilliant on understanding the biology behind politics and how it affects society.

01:08:30.000 Very strongly recommend that you follow him, that you buy his books, that you check out his work.

01:08:34.320 And, uh, thank you so much for making the time to speak with me.

01:08:37.040 Pleasure for us. Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 27, 2025

A Blasphemer Against the Woke Religion ｜ Interview with Edward Dutton

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript