In this special episode of the Lotus Eaters, we are joined by Josh Neal, author of American Extremist and Understanding Conspiracy Theories, to discuss his new book, Intolerant Interpretations. In this episode, we discuss the book, its origins, and why he chose to write it.
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to this special episode of the Lotus Eaters. I'm Harry, today joined by the author Josh Neal, and we're going to be talking about his latest publication with Antelope Hill Publishing, Intolerant Interpretations.
00:00:14.280Josh Neal is the author of American Extremist and Understanding Conspiracy Theories, and we're very grateful to have him on. Thank you for joining us, Josh. How are you doing today?
00:00:23.720I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I'm a big fan of your program. Love what you guys do, and I'm very happy to talk about my new book.
00:00:32.080Yes, I'm very happy to talk about it as well. So we were sent this by Antelope Hill, and I took up the opportunity to give it a read.
00:00:39.700And I've got to say, I was very, very impressed. Just straight away for the audience, if you get the chance to pick this up, and you can pick it up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, other retailers, you can get it from Antelope Hill's website.
00:00:51.540Well worth a look, because it is a really interesting piece of sociology and philosophy looking at and critically examining some of the, what I would argue are some of the critical thinkers of our modern global liberal technocracy.
00:01:07.720And again, it is very, very critical of these. These are thinkers ranging all the way from Karl Popper to Jonathan Haidt to Daniel Kahneman and the sociologist and child psychologist, I believe, Paul Bloom.
00:01:21.260And let's start off with the first thing. What made you choose these particular authors to critique? Particularly somebody like Jonathan Haidt, whose work seems to be quite respected on both sides of the political aisle.
00:01:36.540And Karl Popper, who I, as someone, I have my own critiques of him, but it's rare to find a lot of really thorough academic scholarly critiques of Karl Popper's work from a right-wing perspective.
00:01:50.540Well, with regards to Jonathan Haidt, I first read his book 2014, 2015, and I won't say it changed my life, but it definitely, I was in between doctoral applications, I was trying to make it as a professional psychologist.
00:02:12.200I didn't have a research project in mind, which was the major obstacle to pursuing a PhD. At least in the States, for a lot of the programs I was looking at, 2015, 2016, the types of, well, let's put it this way, the woke DEI regime was very much in full swing.
00:02:34.520So when I was looking at different programs, it was, this is not every university, every research lab, but a lot of them were, you know, a black woman studying microaggressions, a gay person studying the comorbidity of depression and HIV, not to be vulgar or disgusting for your audience.
00:02:54.360I mean, you scroll through a dozen of those, two dozen of those, and you think, maybe there's not really a place for me in this environment.
00:03:02.560But I read Jonathan Haidt's book, and I had political opinions, but I, growing up, I was a libertarian some 10 years ago, I didn't, I had major issues with the way that the right and the left or the states, Republican and Democrat, were conceptualized.
00:03:21.820And reading that book, I thought it was interesting, because Haidt used a lot of the more rigorous psychological models to make his argument, but at the end, it, I still had that same problem of, there's a conceptual issue.
00:03:37.960Well, there's two problems. Any good liberal social scientist, no matter how good their analysis or critique is, at the end, their conclusion is always, well, we just need more progressive liberalism.
00:03:49.820We just need more managerialism. We need more equality. We need more compassion. So that was one issue. But the other issue was, as I said before, this conceptualization problem.
00:04:00.140Like, what do we really mean when we talk about the Democrats and Republicans, or the Tories and Labor, or, you know, so on and so forth?
00:04:08.800And that had just been kicking around in my head for the last 10 years. And when I wrote my first book, American Extremist, which was more directly about American political culture, I started, I kind of put down my own foundations of what I think about politics.
00:04:28.500And it was easier for me to revisit Jonathan Haidt and say, well, you know what, the problem here is that this is a liberal looking at a hegemonic liberal system, and he's not able to step outside of that framework.
00:04:42.640He's not, for a social scientist, Jonathan Haidt, I think, is one of the good ones. He does a tremendous, there's a lot of things he invokes that are sort of heterodox in the social sciences.
00:04:54.140He talks about group selection. That's a no-no. He talks about irrationalism, what he calls the social intuition model.
00:05:02.720And irrationalism, which I sort of have my own issues with, is something you don't talk about positively in the academy, because irrationalism invokes things like Nietzsche.
00:05:14.780It invokes things like prejudice and bigotry in the 20th century, and, you know, mass violence campaigns, which is not true.
00:05:22.780I mean, you can maybe tease out a genealogical strain here or there, but you can't blanket condemn these philosophical traditions or points of view simply because of what's taboo in the current political climate.
00:05:38.180So Jonathan Haidt was sort of an outlier. The rest of the people I focus on in the book have a more direct relationship to the ideas of the open society and liberalism, egalitarianism.
00:05:51.320They have a direct relationship to the conspiracy, the fear-mongering about conspiratorialism.
00:05:57.580So I put Jonathan Haidt in there because I had promised my audience for a long time that I would write a formal essay about it, but because I had also read – the thing that had helped me unpack Jonathan Haidt a little bit was reading James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, and that sort of unlocked a lot of doors for me.
00:06:17.620And thinking about the polarization in the United States in terms of political economy and demographics rather than in terms of strict conventional wisdom about political affiliations.
00:06:35.100So someone like Karl Popper was very easy for me to choose. Richard Hofstadter, very easy for me to choose, because both of these are sort of liberal maximalists.
00:06:46.440Both of them wrote extensively critiquing conspiratorialism. Richard Hofstadter is obviously most famous for The Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay he wrote about Barry Goldwater, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.
00:07:03.440Obviously, obviously, Joseph McCarthy and the success of Red Scares in the United States. Karl Popper also wrote an essay called The Conspiracy Theory of Society.
00:07:15.920Richard Hofstadter, in an earlier book, wrote The Conspiracy Theory of History.
00:07:19.980So you have these liberal maximalists in the case of Richard Hofstadter – actually, both of them, Hofstadter and Karl Popper – in their youth were card-carrying communists.
00:07:30.520Richard Hofstadter was a member of the American Communist Party. Karl Popper was active in communist demonstrations when he was still living in Europe.
00:07:42.180In both cases, they moved to a liberal-moderate – heavily scare-quoting that – liberal-moderate position.
00:07:49.720But they maintained sort of a philosophically unjustifiable prejudice against what we can call closed societies or nativism, conservatism.
00:08:06.520Richard Hofstadter, also very famous for coining the phrase pseudo-conservatism to malign the types of people that Sam Francis would have called middle American radicals.
00:08:19.420You know, just normal Americans with even a modestly conservative bent who are economically productive.
00:08:31.080They are participating members of society.
00:08:34.060And bear in mind, at the time that Richard Hofstadter is doing some of his most important writings, the United States is going through this massive transformation.
00:08:43.080It had just undergone the New Deal, and at the time of the paranoid style in American politics, the United States was beginning a civil rights revolution.
00:08:54.620You have just normal Americans all across the country who neither like nor understand the direction that their country is going in.
00:09:04.600And so these were people who were very easy to select, one, because they're very prestigious members of the recent liberal philosophical tradition.
00:09:14.700Richard Hofstadter won multiple Pulitzer Prizes.
00:09:21.080On the one hand, he's been a right-hand punching bag going back to the days of Glenn Beck.
00:09:25.480But all you have to do is look at someone like George Soros, who named his foundation the Open Society Foundation.
00:09:31.500And it's not just that he named it the Open Society Foundation.
00:09:35.180It's actually that Karl Popper mentored many of these prominent liberal maximalists, one or two degrees of separation away from people like George Soros, Richard Hofstadter, Cass Sunstein, who's another sort of antagonist in the book.
00:09:52.300He was the author of the book Nudge, wasn't he, Sunstein?
00:09:57.360He was also the information czar under Barack Obama.
00:10:00.980It is interesting how all of these people connected to Karl Popper, who have this explicit goal of this open society, all default to a form of technocracy, which is increasingly top-down.
00:10:15.000This is what I got out of James Burnham, was that there is something that changed liberalism in the 20th century.
00:10:23.920James Burnham argues that the Soviets and the NSDAP were sort of developmentally ahead of Great Britain and the United States in regards of developing this elaborate technocratic managerial regime.
00:10:39.260And certainly by the time we get FDR, the technocracy is being established.
00:10:47.380Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism and the American Tradition talks about the journey that American intellectuals underwent from being sort of alienated from the establishment to suddenly being critical to the establishment, the state administering policies, managing the population, nudging the population.
00:11:15.120So this also brings in Daniel Kahneman, whose very famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
00:11:22.740He published 10 or 15 years ago, and he was a Nobel Prize winner for his critique of utility theory.
00:11:34.860But more importantly, he spearheaded this program called the Heuristics and Biases Research Program, which was this massive revolution in the cognitive sciences.
00:11:45.580Without being unfair to him, sort of the received wisdom of his program is that human cognition kind of sucks.
00:12:00.420And he makes sort of, again, this is one of the trends that I uncovered researching this book, is the extent to which all of these very intelligent, highly credentialed, well-placed intellectuals have a very unintellectually rigorous approach to presenting the ideas that they want the audience to accept.
00:12:25.340I think this was particularly critical with authors like Popper and Hofstadter in the first essay in the book.
00:12:33.740I noticed the passages that you were quoting from them, particularly as regards to conspiracy theories and labeling people conspiracy theorists.
00:12:44.160I got a passage here from Popper from The Open Society and its Enemies, where he says,
00:12:52.060conspiracies occur, it must be admitted, but the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful.
00:13:03.020Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.
00:13:06.000To which you ask some reasonable questions, which are, what are these conspiracies that never turned out as intended or were never consummated?
00:13:20.620And you ask a number of other questions because these authors just seem to think that they can get away with stating it as fact without providing any evidence.
00:13:29.300Which, ironically, for somebody who was a scientist like Popper, you would expect that he would have some kind of empirically rigorous evidence and argumentation to back up his statements.
00:13:42.340Whereas he seems perfectly willing to just throw them out almost ad hominem, which, as we'll get onto later when we discuss the other idea that you introduce in the first essay of the ethno-narratives,
00:13:54.840seems to be very consistent with this brand of thinker.
00:13:59.640We just saw, I mean, you mentioned the John Birch Society.
00:14:03.320I mean, we just saw the other day with Mark Levin's speech where he was going against Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes,
00:14:10.700bragging about how he, how, you know, we've cancelled people before.
00:14:17.020We cancelled Pat Buchanan, as if that's something to be proud of.
00:14:20.800He doesn't mention him, but you mentioned Sam Francis.
00:14:23.260They all cancelled Sam Francis back in the 1990s.
00:14:26.800And he goes back and says, we cancelled the John Birch Society as well.
00:14:30.960And in the essay, you have your own criticisms of the John Birch Society, where they didn't go far enough,
00:14:36.940how they were still kind of trying to operate within this 1950s, 1960s conservative liberal framework.
00:14:45.520But that was seen as enough of a threat by some people for the ADL to infiltrate them and to bring that organization down.
00:14:56.940So these people really don't operate on the basis of argument, evidence,
00:15:03.780anything that can really be considered within the Western tradition of empirical, self-reflective, introspective, critical thinking.
00:15:14.380They really operate on the basis of bullying and name-calling and just mafia tactics operating as a mafia and crowding you out of your own movement.
00:16:10.900But of course, I came to these people, Karl Popper, Richard Hofstadter, so on and so forth, Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, with a suspicion that these people were doing something, like you said, other than science, other than, you know, rigorous, empirical, substantiated, philosophical or empirical reasoning.
00:16:33.860So, I mean, and the punchline at the end of the book is that you need to, just because something is published in a book, and it has a notable, prestigious publishing house on the front cover of the book, and the author has an Ivy League degree and you saw him on television or whatever, doesn't mean that the contents of the book are themselves meritorious.
00:17:00.280It's all of this, to borrow a phrase from Robert Cialdini, who's a famous social psychologist, it's all pre-suasion.
00:17:09.080In other words, you are sort of encouraged to accept the contents before you have read the contents, because it's front-loaded with all of this establishment, pomp, and circumstance.
00:17:21.620There's credit, and this is sort of what defines technocracy, in a sense, that you have people who are rubber-stamped by the state, and you can now turn off your critical faculties and say, well, this is an approved authority figure, and what they are saying is correct.
00:17:39.820At the very least, what they're saying is something that they've labored intensely over, even if they're marginally inaccurate here and there, well, this is a guy or lady who spent his whole life studying this, or her life.
00:17:52.840So clearly there's merit to this, and people like Nathan Kaufness today, or Tom Nichols, who wrote The Death of Expertise 10 years ago, 12 years ago, as people like them lament, that's gone.
00:18:08.140People don't believe experts, they don't believe credentialed professionals, and they don't believe them for reasons like you just presented.
00:18:16.640Karl Popper makes these polemical declarations that he never tries to substantiate, and when you test the polemical declarations logically, they don't even cohere.
00:18:29.580So there's one section in that excerpt that you quoted from, where Karl Popper, this is really funny to me, Karl Popper says that, for example, the reason that, you know, the Germans or the Italians didn't win in the 20th century is because they didn't have a completely accurate social theory to inform their government policy.
00:18:59.580So in other words, if they were bigger nerds with lab coats and thick-rimmed glasses, then they would have won, and we would be celebrating them today instead of maligning them.
00:19:10.220The amazing thing there being that, if anybody knows about the Germans of the mid-1930s, is that they actually did have a lot of writing and thought backing up everything that they were doing, agree with it or not, but he does understand how, I mean, wasn't he an Austrian Jew, Karl Popper?
00:19:29.520So he should have a rather firm grasp of how autistic the Germans are with such things.
00:19:36.100But there's those two things there, which is one which is the desire to try to reduce everything down to a elaborate tree experiment with very, very controlled variables.
00:19:51.300And this is something that you discussed with Daniel Kahneman and his nudge theories, and also the research that he did into the way that the brain operates.
00:20:00.500And he came to the conclusion that the brain has these two differing functions which clash with one another, that you actually contrast with the thoughts and work of, what's his name, Gerd, Gigerenz?
00:20:15.180Gigerenz, could you pronounce that for me again, please?
00:20:18.020I mean, I could be missing it too, but I say Gigerenz.
00:20:21.300Yeah, Gerd Gigerenz, who sees the brain as a much more holistic organ that works together in a way that's able to spot patterns over repeated frequencies, whereas somebody like Kahneman wanted to reduce everything down to single experiments,
00:20:40.180which prove that the brain on those single examples is unable to properly calculate something, the desired result, which actually in a way kind of results in a gotcha.
00:20:53.540When I was reading the examples that you were giving of Kahneman, so for instance, he says,
00:20:58.220If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1 in 1,000 has a false positive rate of 5%, what's the chance that a person found to have a positive result as the disease, assuming you know nothing else about the person's symptoms or signs?
00:21:11.460And you mentioned how with that example given, most of the students at Harvard answered wrong.
00:21:19.340Only 18% of them gave the correct answer.
00:21:23.160But when, for instance, you word the question differently in a way that goes less to a single example as given there and talks about the frequencies,
00:21:35.260if it's got 1 out of 1,000 Americans has this disease, every time you do these tests, if you test 1,000 people, 50 of them test positive for the disease even though they're perfectly healthy.
00:21:50.180If you've got 1,000 people, how many, if taking this test, who get positives would you expect to actually have positive?
00:21:56.820And people were much better able to calculate the proper answer there and come to a 76% of the subjects when it's phrased differently were able to actually give the correct answer there.
00:22:11.200So it's kind of this weird thing where Kahneman has formulated a problem in such a way as to kind of act as a gotcha to his own test subjects and kind of forms the problem in a way that only really exists in those sterile, controlled, perfect lab scenarios.
00:22:30.460Whereas the environment that we interact with in a day-to-day basis is not a sterile lab.
00:22:38.280We have all of these different variables.
00:22:40.120We have all of these different patterns that we recognize through frequency, not purely through one-off occurrences.
00:22:48.200And then there's also the idea that Popper is presenting, which is that in the same way that the scientist presents himself as purely neutral, the forces of history, so to speak, are purely neutral.
00:23:05.040There is a one-way travel of direction for the way that history works.
00:23:10.240So the reason the Germans and Italians weren't able to succeed during the Second World War was because they just got the conspiracy wrong.
00:23:19.160That just wasn't the way that history was flowing, which completely ignores all of the other variables.
00:23:26.260And this is the other thing that Popper and a lot of these other writers take out.
00:23:31.020And I think this is Height's mistake that he makes when he's analyzing, coming to some of his conclusions, which is they completely remove, purposefully or accidentally, the role of top-down power in generating consensus and generating opinion.
00:23:48.520I mean, Popper, for instance, there's the whole idea of the paradox of tolerance, which is argued quite often on social media,
00:23:59.780where there's the one graphic that comes up of, here's what Popper said against the paradox of tolerance.
00:24:05.060And then there's an opposing one that says, no, no, no.
00:24:08.120It's kind of from like a centrist center-right perspective, where they say, no, here's what he actually means with the paradox of tolerance.
00:24:16.340But then you actually go into the open society.
00:24:18.820And interestingly enough, it's something that's been argued over.
00:24:22.780It's an end note at the end of the book.
00:24:24.740And I went through it, and the whole idea of the paradox of tolerance is you can't tolerate the intolerant because if you do, they will destroy tolerance, right?
00:24:33.520Which seems like something that, for our current globalist, open society, liberal regime, is very useful.
00:24:41.880Because what it allows them to do is just label their enemies as intolerant or as conspiracy theorists who are unwilling to tolerate opposing views to their conspiracies,
00:24:53.080as we see often through the writers in the book, and then just say, well, you're off limits from discussion.
00:24:59.980You don't get to participate in society.
00:25:01.800You don't get to express yourselves freely, because if we do allow you to do that, then you are going to destroy everybody else's opportunity to do so.
00:25:13.920And people try and argue against this by saying, like, no, if you read it, he doesn't actually mean that.
00:25:18.700And they go into a big word salad about why it's actually in favor of centrist free speech.
00:25:23.420And then you actually read the passage.
00:25:24.520And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the government reserves the right to do this to people who are intolerant,
00:25:31.000which ignores the fact that the government, by being the power center, by having the ability to propagandize and generate consensus,
00:25:40.400can just label you a priori as intolerant, which cuts you off from discussion entirely.
00:25:47.680And that's something that a lot of these writers do, which is they are ignoring the top-down position of power in generating consensus.
00:25:56.080And I think that's where Height goes a little bit wrong, because I had, when I read the book, the same problem as you,
00:26:00.840which is by the end he kind of defaults to a normal liberal, oh, we just need to keep defending democracy and things will turn out all right.
00:26:08.240Whereas he's suggesting through the moral foundations that there's something inherently wrong with liberals' brains, almost,
00:26:17.820by saying that, oh, they don't have these moral foundations.
00:26:21.760And it plays into, as you explained, the conservative prejudice to, like, these liberals, they don't think right.
00:26:28.320But ultimately, no, no, what they are, they are conformists.
00:26:32.680They have been fed an ideology top-down that they have naturally conformed to, because, as we know, most people will go along to get along.
00:26:42.180Most people are not natural mavericks who are going to step themselves out of the crowd if they can help it.
00:26:47.880So it's not that they don't have these moral foundations.
00:26:50.400It's that those moral foundations have been turned to non-conservative ends.
00:27:02.740There's so many things I want to pick up on.
00:27:04.420With regards to the paradox of intolerance, I would recommend to you and your audience a book by Daniel Ziblatt and Stephen Levitsky called How Democracies Die,
00:27:14.460where they basically say that they take this paradox of intolerance and they say, well, that's literally how liberal democracies operate,
00:27:21.660is that the major hegemonic parties will collude to shut out the radicals.
00:27:28.600They will collude to marginalize sort of like the genuine, whether it's like Bernie Sanders style economic populism on the left or, you know, MAGA style populism, Nick Fuentes, whatever style, more nativist right wing populism.
00:27:47.400These are the groups that are the most intolerant, which is a way of saying they are the most threatening to the paradigm of liberal democracy.
00:27:56.000And something else as well, people want to draw these distinctions between Popper and like Frankfurt School radicals, for instance, like Mark Hughes.
00:28:05.160But I fail to see how that's any difference from Mark Hughes's idea of repressive tolerance.
00:28:14.280These ideas had already been seeded within the government apparatus long, long before Mark Hughes ever wrote his essay for the consumption of university students.
00:28:25.080By the way, Richard Hofstetter and Karl Popper were avowed acolytes of the Frankfurt School, which is like in their free time, they're reading that and it's informing their work.
00:28:36.120The other thing you said about the social theory, I mean, this is maybe more of a heuristic than a golden bullet, but if you're going to make a critique, and I'm very conscious of this myself, you have to be careful that the critique can't be turned on yourself if circumstances should change.
00:28:57.860In other words, if we are taking a Popperian view of fascism, national socialism, what have you, and we say ultimately it was an intellectual failure because they didn't have a rigorous enough social theory, just look at how things turned out.
00:29:14.380If they thought it out, well, the calamity of the 20th century wouldn't have happened.
00:29:19.000If we look at today's world, can we really say that the architects of liberal democracy had a coherent, cogent social theory that explained everything all of the time?
00:29:34.720Maybe your audience is familiar with the replication crisis.
00:29:38.040That's a problem in the social sciences, in particular psychology, where many landmark studies have been revisited, and they found that either the data was falsified or there were discrepancies, inaccuracies, what have you.
00:29:53.240Many of these landmark studies were studies conducted to present a formal liberal psychology, a formal liberal social theory that you could teach to university students, that you could publish on the nightly news, that you could write best-selling pop psychology books to propagandize the audience into believing things like,
00:30:19.060Oh, the more interactions you have with a foreigner, the more you're going to like them, you know, contact theory, all of these kinds of things.
00:30:27.860On experience, I can't agree with that one.
00:30:31.880Well, because what's funny to me is that the most hardline, whether we say nationalists, nativists, conservatives, that I've met have all been people like me, people from metropolitan, urban areas, where every day of your life you're rubbing elbows with,
00:30:49.060someone from Pakistan, someone from Kenya, someone from Kenya, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:30:55.320So clearly it doesn't work because the most radical ideologically opposed people are the people most inculcated in these heavily diverse liberal totalitarian states.
00:31:07.100Um, so that's kind of funny to me, um, there's, with regards to Jonathan Haidt and this, I'll put a bow on it.
00:31:15.680Um, they all, like you said, whether knowingly or unknowingly adopt this bottom up sort of emergent social order theory, theory of social order that, that, uh, things just happen organically.
00:31:35.160If you want to use it, if you want to use it, Delusian language, rhizomatically, you know, it's all flat, uh, horizontal, non-hierarchical, sporadic, voluntary, sort of impulsive.
00:31:49.460And that's how power structures emerge in this sort of, um, spontaneous order, a will, sort of a will of the people, spontaneous order thing.
00:31:58.680Um, but then you look at someone like Daniel Kahneman, who was the IDF psychologist embedded in the Israeli military.
00:32:07.320He's, he's revolutionizing the field of psychology in this totally top-down manner as someone who's in one of the most, I guess, in the 1960s, we wouldn't say Israel was one of the most powerful countries in the world.
00:32:21.280But nonetheless, they had a kind of prestige and authority and influence that other nations didn't have.
00:32:28.800Um, and, and that's what, what his system, uh, the, the heuristics and researches, uh, heuristics and biases program has done is basically, uh, taken over the cognitive sciences.
00:32:43.800There's very few people, prominent publishers in that area that will dispute, uh, the things that he said in terms of, um, this catalog of cognitive errors.
00:32:56.780Now you go into any university psychology 101, the cognitive science chapter is just this laundry list of cognitive errors that, as you said before, that Kahneman basically in a sort of Wittgensteinian language game,
00:33:13.800created a, a game, supplemented it with a type of statistical reasoning, basically putting his finger on the scale.
00:33:24.300And then administering these tests to psychology students who a are, you know, they're like 18 years old.
00:33:32.980They don't know anything B they're not technical, uh, uh, statisticians.
00:33:38.080So they're unfamiliar with the language and the methodology being employed and they are deliberately being manipulated to produce an outcome that will justify what people like Daniel Kahneman or Richard Thaler or Cass Sunstein or any of these people believe, which is that you're a dumb, dumb, you're a dumb, dumb.
00:33:58.640And we need, uh, and we need, uh, this paternalistic libertarian technocracy to make all of the decisions for you.
00:34:07.840And it is all in the, all for the goal, all for the aim of convincing people that in some way they're fundamentally due to just the way that the brain naturally happens, they're broken.
00:34:21.560And this is, this is a through line that can actually be traced, um, through the entire work that you've presented here, all the way from Hofstadter and Popper trying to demonize what you deem to be, what you title authentic folk narratives, which is like, because of the complete deluge of information that we have these days in the information age, where it's kind of in a way designed to be non-understandable.
00:34:50.400For the average person, people do come up with some crazy sounding ideas, but then also a lot of the crazy sounding ideas, when you look into the evidence of them, I'm thinking Pizzagate, for instance, seem to have a lot of evidence or at the very least lots and lots of converging circumstantial evidence that points in a particular direction, completely demonizing those kinds of narratives, which the mainstream media, if they were actually living up to their judgment,
00:35:20.400should look into them, should look into the same way. And instead just top down branding them all conspiracy theorists, and you do get people, as you note in here, like, um, latter day, Alex Jones, who play into that caricature and stereotype a little bit too well.
00:35:38.400well. Either way, those are normal ways of perceiving the world given the information
00:35:44.480that you have access to and given the way that the brain functions through recognizing patterns
00:35:49.360and seeing the frequencies of particular things and starting to paint a picture from them.
00:35:54.640Then you've got Jonathan Haidt. And I don't think Jonathan Haidt is malicious in doing this. I think
00:36:00.460of the authors that you're critiquing here, Jonathan Haidt does not seem to be doing this
00:36:04.780on purpose. It might just be his liberal priors and his semi-conversion to conservatism that
00:36:12.820motivated this unknowingly. But he stigmatizes liberals as not being morally complete, you
00:36:22.220could say. And then Daniel Kahneman comes through saying, well, actually, if you look at it the way
00:36:26.680that I've studied it, the brain doesn't work at all, really. This thing that's been keeping us alive
00:36:32.700and was evolved to help us to navigate our environment doesn't work at all. And it creates
00:36:39.220all of these problems and errors according to my standards, which aren't the standards of the real
00:36:43.660world, but I'm a scientist. Therefore, I'm the priest class, you listen to me. And then you go
00:36:49.060to the final essay where you're examining the work of Paul Bloom and his studies on child psychology and
00:36:55.000the origins of evil, which seems to be him just trying to find a way to prevent armies of what
00:37:01.940he sees to be baby Hitler from rising up all over the world. Anywhere in Europe, there's a baby Hitler
00:37:07.740right now. So we need to beat into him that he has to be the exact opposite of that. He has to be a gay
00:37:14.260race communist or else things will be bad for the Jews again. Is this through line just saying,
00:37:20.560you're broken, you're broken, you're broken. You need us looking after you. And it does have real
00:37:25.140world effects. I mean, from my own generation and my own experience, it especially has effects on
00:37:32.200women. You talk about Paul Bloom, how he almost gloatingly talks about how when bombarded with all
00:37:40.120of this anti-white guilt from a very young age, people experience a great deal of personal anxiety
00:37:48.300just trying to navigate all of the different rules that you could call woke, people trying to be
00:37:54.240woke and stick to all of the ever-changing rules of being woke. They end up just in this
00:38:00.180permanent state of anxiety. And I know people who've been like that from a very young age. I was raised in
00:38:06.940this environment. I was raised under these narratives. And when people have that permanent
00:38:12.940state of anxiety, when they're told from everywhere, your brain doesn't really work properly,
00:38:17.880you're broken. They do revert to following what authority tells them to do. They make it very easy
00:38:26.340for something like the COVID lockdowns to push onto them this idea of like, oh, the science knows best,
00:38:34.000do what the science tells you. And the darkest part of that is the doctors pushing medication
00:38:39.040on these people. Loads of people that I know, because they think their brains don't work,
00:38:45.060because they have this kind of social anxiety that comes with all of the problems of modernity,
00:38:50.340the first thing that happens, they speak to a doctor, they get put straight onto medication,
00:38:54.060which doesn't actually help them. It just makes them a client of the technocratic regime we live
00:38:59.960under right now. Yeah, there's a lot there. It's just funny to me, when you were talking about
00:39:07.280Richard Hofstadter, one of the sort of black marks in his legacy is the extent to which,
00:39:14.140now, unlike Karl Popper, Hofstadter did name specific conspiracies. And in the two instances
00:39:20.940that I'm familiar with, both he was proven wrong. He, in the paranoid style in American politics,
00:39:28.760and I quote it, so you probably remember this passage, he talks about vaccinations. He says,
00:39:34.300you know, even if, he does a sort of Jacques Lacan thing. Lacan was a famous French structuralist and
00:39:41.060a psychoanalyst. And the sort of line that everybody knows from Jacques Lacan is,
00:39:47.300if you are jealous, or if you are worried that your wife is cheating on you, and she is cheating on you,
00:39:58.400it's still pathological that you had the skepticism about her. That's sort of like a
00:40:05.160Lacanian syllogism. And Hofstadter uses this, does a version of this, he says, even if it's proven
00:40:13.660that the government forcibly and covertly mandated vaccination. No, I'm sorry, he did fluoride in the
00:40:21.980water. That was the example. Yeah, yeah. Because I was thinking, it reminded me of the character
00:40:26.640from Dr. Strangelove, the Kubrick film. It was like, they're putting, they're destroying our virility
00:40:32.480with chemicals in the water. But that's kind of part of this, which is it's showing these characters
00:40:37.780as a point of mockery, but carry on. Yeah, yeah. It's one of the oldest media punching bags.
00:40:44.960But yeah, even if it's proven that the federal government is secretly administering fluoride in
00:40:52.160the water supply to bring about a socialist government, you would still be an irrational
00:40:57.680paranoid crank to think that, to worry about it. And obviously, many decades later, we know
00:41:05.500that that has happened. It's ongoing. Some years ago, the Massachusetts governor was,
00:41:11.260it might have been Massachusetts. She's like, we need to put more fluoridation into the water
00:41:16.400because of X, Y, Z political goal. And the other example he gave, and I don't quite remember this
00:41:22.320exactly, it was from the Age of Reform, another Pulitzer Prize winning book of his, where he basically,
00:41:28.060the Age of Reform is basically looking at the transition from the Gilded Age in the United States
00:41:34.220to the progressive era of the 20th century. And one of the arguments he's presenting is that the sort of
00:41:40.620the political concerns of the agrarian, if you want to say, Jeffersonian style population,
00:41:48.760the old style populists, didn't gain traction until progressives almost a century later had taken them
00:41:57.660up. Sort of disenfranchised, maybe petite bourgeois in places like Chicago and New York and elsewhere,
00:42:05.180who are also feeling the burn from money power, from industrialization, from the replacement of their
00:42:15.720era, which I would long for a great replacement of the 1830s, where it was just other Irish and other
00:42:23.420Germans and other so on and so forth. But he does this sort of caricature of the populist
00:42:32.540paranoia around money power. And then obviously, there was a study some 10 years ago, I cite it in
00:42:40.880the book, where a guy went back and like forensically recreated, you know, follow the money, figured out,
00:42:48.680you know, exactly how he was wrong. So he's using all these instances to sort of lambast and mock
00:42:54.140the conspiratorially minded people. And the most famous examples he's used have been proven to be
00:43:02.140correct in the opposite direction. And this is part of the reason I wrote this and the last book,
00:43:07.480Understanding Conspiracy Theories. So I wanted to impress, I wanted to support the conspiratorially
00:43:14.960minded and give ammunition, intellectual ammunition to the cause. Because in my view, and this is maybe
00:43:26.280a very America centric view, to be right wing, or even to be American, is to be kind of a conspiratorially
00:43:35.180minded person. The United States were founded in a climate of great power conflict. They were founded
00:43:44.880with covert organizations like Freemasonry, and so on and so forth. The very first third party in the
00:43:58.080United States, which was in that Gilded Age era, so we're not even 100 years after the signing of the
00:44:04.540Declaration or the Constitution. And they were anti-papist, anti-Freemason, anti-mass migration,
00:44:14.640the American People's Party, the know-nothings. These were sort of interregnum parties between the
00:44:20.500Whigs and the Republicans. And they were concerned with the same types of things that we're concerned
00:44:25.860with today. And these are fundamental civic questions. Who has control over the money? Who has control over the
00:44:37.780government? Who are we as a people? These are fundamental existential political questions. And we can say
00:44:45.320conspiratorial if we want. I would just say they're existential questions. And what is any conspiracy theorist
00:44:52.560primarily concerned with? They're concerned with existential questions. There is a malicious power
00:45:00.180out there who specifically wants to hurt me, or specifically wants to hurt my community, or my way
00:45:06.640of life, or my religion, or so on and so forth. So these are deeply existential questions. The polemic
00:45:12.440against conspiracy theorizing is a polemic against you and me engaging in existential discourse. Who are we?
00:45:22.560What are we? How do we have influence? How do we provide for our children? And how do we,
00:45:31.060I'm trying not to get too spicy here. How do we make sure that our way of life persists? You know,
00:45:35.980which is what every group of people all over around the world have ever wanted to do, have ever consumed
00:45:41.960themselves with, is we want to keep living. We want to be who we are, and we want to keep living.
00:45:46.960Um, so there's more things you said. I, I don't want to take up too much time. I'll kick it back
00:45:51.880to you. No, that, that's, that's all right. Um, that's all, yeah. Um, on, on the point that you
00:45:55.940were talking about there with, with Hofstadter, um, to begin with, uh, where it's just like, well,
00:46:01.460yeah, you could say that all of this stuff is happening maybe with the fluoridation of the water.
00:46:06.560And even if it's right, then you're still wrong for thinking of it. That, that, that kind of polemic is at the,
00:46:12.260uh, the heart of all of this, which is even if you're right, you're, you're wrong in one way or
00:46:18.680another, you can't win because you are not at the levers of power, but this only further encourages
00:46:24.660people to question, well, then if I'm not at the levers of power, if I can't do anything right,
00:46:30.020even if I'm factually correct, well, why is that? Who is it that's determining that I'm wrong by whose
00:46:37.540standards? Am I wrong? And that's where, uh, the, the spicy part of this whole thing, uh, does come
00:46:44.920in. That's where the question of is all of the work that you're critiquing here malicious or not
00:46:51.360comes in. Uh, because I, I think it's difficult not to acknowledge that every author that you're
00:46:58.160critiquing in this book is Jewish. And we, we, we, we just have to be upfront about that. And that's
00:47:05.200not to label all Jews as being in on some large conspiracy, but these particular liberal open
00:47:14.540society types do seem to be Paul Bloom, especially you point out how he doesn't seem to be able to go
00:47:21.880through a single page of his book on child psychology and the origins of evil without invoking the baby
00:47:29.340Hitler fallacy without invoking that. We need to find some way of preventing the next Holocaust. We
00:47:35.680need to, everything that he's doing is being heavily, heavily, uh, influenced by his experience
00:47:43.580as an American Jew in the post-war era. You mentioned that Kahneman was an IDF Israeli, um, like he worked
00:47:52.340for the IDF. Uh, so, so there, there is that question of whether or not this represents all people. And I
00:47:58.640don't think that it does. Uh, we can both reference people like Paul Gottfried, who I think that we would
00:48:03.500both agree has done some amazing work. Uh, he, like when you talk about pathologizing people, Paul Gottfried
00:48:10.200has been one of the best at pushing back against that in his books, like after liberalism and
00:48:15.540multiculturalism in the politics of guilt. Cause a lot of what you're discussing here is kind of
00:48:19.760presaged by his work, discussing how people have been through the technocracy, through the post-liberal
00:48:27.860order that we live in right now, pushed into this sense of feeling guilty for who they are. You're a
00:48:34.060broken person. You need to let me, the elite technocrat mend your brain. But still a lot of these
00:48:40.920people do seem to be motivated by their sense of their own Jewishness. And that's where you, you, uh,
00:48:48.140you, you mentioned the idea of, of ethno narratives. And that's where this whole idea of the intolerant
00:48:53.820interpretation comes from is, is recognizing that I don't think you can say that it's wrong
00:49:00.300for people to recognizing or recognize all of that in these people's work to recognize where somebody
00:49:06.560like Karl Popper is coming from, given his historical background to recognize, we mentioned the
00:49:11.900Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School, um, you know, Theodor Adorno, his work, his massive, massive work,
00:49:20.080the authoritarian personality, frankly, seems to me to be a pure attack on the idea of the stable
00:49:26.980Western nuclear family that does seem to be influenced by his experiences as somebody who,
00:49:35.500who was attacked by the, by the German regime of the 1930s. Karl Popper is going all the way back to
00:49:44.840Plato to try and libel, because that's frankly what it is. We've discussed how his arguments are
00:49:50.520completely specious. He's not actually making arguments. He's just saying, he's just libeling
00:49:56.740these people. He's libeling the foundations of Western philosophy. So, so there is something to,
00:50:02.860these people do seem to want to tear down a Western sensibility, a Western sense of selfhood
00:50:10.780by weaponizing our own conscience against us so that they can implement their own rule by
00:50:18.060technocracy. And that's that whole intolerant interpretation. There's nothing wrong with
00:50:24.020recognizing all of that, reading it, and allowing yourself to be on guard against such a thing.
00:50:31.380While also, of course, to be very clear, recognizing this is not representative of everybody, nor even
00:50:38.260necessarily a majority or even significant minority, but these people are all in, are all in powerful
00:50:45.460positions. Their word has had much more influence, sadly, than the work of somebody like Paul Gottfried.
00:50:52.880Paul Gottfried, who was mentored by Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School.
00:50:58.000Thank you for reminding me of that. Yeah, he came to very different conclusions.
00:51:02.720Yeah. I mean, I referenced Paul Gottfried extensively, especially in that Jonathan Haidt essay.
00:51:10.160There are very few... Paul Gottfried almost has like an Anglo sensibility in terms of
00:51:16.880sort of like plain spoken objectivity. Like, that's one of the reasons I like
00:51:24.800Paul Gottfried's work so much is that he has a really excellent ability to cut through
00:51:31.600fluff and BS and just say, well, this is what was really happening. This is what really...
00:51:36.000X represents X and so on and so forth. But yeah, with regards to Paul Bloom, and we're getting down
00:51:42.660to the bottom of the hour here, so maybe I'll make my final pitch and just try to put all these themes
00:51:49.820together. You get the sense reading Paul Bloom, and again, maybe Paul Bloom sort of seems like sort
00:51:55.500of an outlier in this, but I would remind your audience that Paul Bloom is like one or two steps
00:52:01.380removed from the dissident right, effectively. He does a lot of events with like Red Scare-affiliated
00:52:09.660people. So, you know, he's like one degree of separation from our milieu. He's one of these maybe
00:52:16.120more based, more moderate social scientists because he has certain niche views on other taboo subjects.
00:52:24.540But you read his book, and you get the impression that he must have spent all night
00:52:29.520binge watching the boys from Brazil, if he was so concerned about like knocking on the door,
00:52:35.180and there was, you know, little Adolf there. The things that are remarkable about the book,
00:52:40.020and you invoke this idea of an ethno-narrative, not my original conception that comes from
00:52:46.860Jean-Francois Lyotard, who in his book, The Postmodern Condition, talks about the collapse
00:52:53.860of grand metanarratives. And other people who've taken up this idea, like Stephen, I think his name
00:52:59.720was Stephen Hicks, who's like a very Jordan Peterson tier.
00:53:04.020Oh, yeah. He wrote that anti-postmodernist book, didn't he? Yeah, yeah.
00:53:08.940Yeah. So he's one of the more prominent critics of postmodernity and postmodern thinking,
00:53:17.500but they take on this idea of the collapse of grand metanarratives. That never really sat well
00:53:22.560with me. It wasn't like people spontaneously stopped believing in Christianity, or Britannia,
00:53:31.300or, you know, America, or whatever. It wasn't like we just woke up and said, oh, these things are
00:53:35.820outdated, and we have TV now and microwave dinners, so who needs it? It was the, and because I don't
00:53:44.560believe that, I sort of also don't believe in this idea of nihilism, that there's this epidemic of
00:53:50.140people who just don't care about anything, and they don't see meaning anywhere. What they
00:53:56.120specifically are experiencing is alienation. What they're specifically feeling is a disconnection
00:54:03.520from their own tradition, and their own way of life, and their own historical, you know, continuity,
00:54:10.740their ancestors, so on and so forth. So it's a very particular malady, which is the result of the,
00:54:18.020what I call the conflict of ethno-metanarratives, which is basically a way of saying different
00:54:23.700groups have different, have mythologized themselves in a particular way, and when they come into
00:54:32.220conflict, there's not just physical conflict, particularly in our day and age. It's cultural
00:54:37.700conflict, intellectual. You are making contact with other countries, you know, popular cultures,
00:54:46.120media markets, so on and so forth. First contact for a lot of us is through media. You know,
00:54:54.060before I ever met a Japanese person, there was Dragon Ball Z of my Saturday morning cartoon.