In this episode, Dr. Gadsad joins me to talk about his new book, "The Woke Mind Virus," and to discuss Donald Trump's recent executive order declaring that there are only two genders in the United States.
00:00:00.000There's a lot of good sex in Islam. So a lot of stuff that I can't pursue in the earthly realm, I can certainly be promised in the afterlife.
00:00:10.560A reasonably conservative estimate is 300 million killed in the 1400 years of Islam. It's a lot of souls lost.
00:00:19.180There is no documented society throughout human history where Islam has become the majority religion and thereafter individual freedoms have flourished.
00:00:29.640Gay, trans, as long as you don't tell me that men too can menstruate, right, then I'm the most socially liberal guy in the world.
00:00:37.800When it comes to immigration, when it comes to death penalty of repeat child molesters, I'm the number one guy for execute them.
00:00:45.200Donald Trump does intimate most of the positions that the average person with a brain has.
00:00:50.660Anybody who replaces Justin Trudeau would be a great advance for Canada.
00:00:55.420A lobotomized turtle would be coming in with a lot of excitement.
00:00:58.980Why is it that the West is so completely impotent to ever connect the dots together?
00:01:06.380If we have to murder and rape truth to get to that ultimate goal, so be it.
00:01:13.440Dr. Gadsad, thanks so much for joining me. It's really great to have you with me. How are you doing?
00:01:18.680I'm doing well. I could be better. I've had a rough week last week and I've had to reschedule our meeting because I suffered from a nasty stomach bug.
00:01:29.340Well, I hope you're feeling a bit better and thank you for doing that. So I appreciate it.
00:01:33.980Listen, we're talking now as a result of the rescheduling. It's a momentous moment, actually.
00:01:38.760So I feel quite privileged because we know that Donald Trump's going to take the U.S. to the moon, that there are now only two genders in the United States, that the Gulf of Mexico is going to be the Gulf of America, that America is going to be the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth again, that he's a peacemaker and a unifier.
00:02:00.040I mean, this is messianic stuff. What do you make of it?
00:02:03.480Well, I mean, I guess it depends what you use as your metric of comparison, right?
00:02:09.440If you're comparing to the current administration, then a lobotomized turtle would be coming in with a lot of excitement.
00:02:18.020So again, it's like saying Justin Trudeau, anybody who replaces Justin Trudeau would be a great advance for Canada.
00:02:26.380But that notwithstanding, I think that Donald Trump does intimate most of the positions that the average person with a brain has.
00:02:35.880We are a sexually reproducing species made up of two phenotypes called male and female.
00:02:41.940Your compatriot, Charles Darwin, explained that to us on the origin of species.
00:02:46.580And until about 15 minutes ago, that was incontestable, but apparently it wasn't for the previous administration.
00:02:52.340So I think there will definitely be some wonderful auto-corrections to all of the woke nonsense.
00:02:58.620Now, will it reach the heights that he's promising?
00:03:00.900Probably not, but I'm certainly hopeful.
00:03:05.060I mean, it's unusual to have leaders, sadly, these days who seem to do that.
00:03:09.680And I must say, I think it's strange times when we find that an incoming US president has to make an executive order to say that there are men and women.
00:03:20.240It seems like we've really caught the woke mind virus.
00:03:24.640And to talk about your work, this is really a parasitic mind virus.
00:03:29.020One does wonder what the purpose of this parasite was.
00:03:33.700Most parasites infect their host for a distinct purpose of their own.
00:03:37.820What on earth was the purpose of the mind virus that had us deciding there were all these different genders and men can be women and women can be men just if they say so and put a bit of lipstick on or whatever?
00:03:50.220I actually addressed that in the parasitic mind.
00:03:52.340Let me draw an analogy with, say, oncology.
00:03:56.140You know, you could study cancer, many different forms of cancer.
00:04:00.160Pancreatic cancer behaves differently from leukemia, behaves differently from, you know, liver cancer or skin melanoma.
00:04:07.180But one thing that they do all have in common is the unchecked division of cells.
00:04:12.360So if nothing else, we know that that is a fundamental commonality to all cancers.
00:04:17.140And so I try to address exactly your question in the same way that you've got all these different cancers that at least have one thing in common, unchecked cell division.
00:04:27.300I try to look for what is the commonality across all of these parasitic ideas.
00:04:32.540And just for your viewers and listeners, a parasitic idea would be so the granddaddy would be postmodernism.
00:04:38.340There are no objective truths other than the one objective truth, but there are no objective truths.
00:04:43.460Social constructivism would be another one.
00:04:45.580Radical feminism would be another one.
00:04:47.480Cultural relativism would be another one.
00:04:49.440So then what I was trying to do to your question is, well, why would these parasitic ideas be so alluring, so sticky, so enticing, so viral?
00:05:35.440Then radical feminists come along and they say, in the service of squashing the toxic masculine patriarchy,
00:05:43.040we need to now promulgate the idea that there are no distinguishable evolved differences between men and women.
00:05:51.120All differences between the sexes must be due to social construction because that will allow us to achieve our noble goal of squashing the patriarchy.
00:05:59.700So in the service of what started off as a nice idea, if I murder and rape truth, so be it.
00:06:05.380And so I argue that all of these parasitic ideas, they free us from the pesky shackles of reality.
00:06:13.040I don't want to be shackled by my genitalia.
00:06:15.980I don't want to be shackled by my biological limitations, right?
00:06:20.360It makes it's much more hopeful for me to espouse the idea that your child and mine could be the next Michael Jordan and the next Lionel Messi.
00:06:30.600So if in the service of some noble goal, I have to squash the edifices of reason, so be it.
00:06:38.220But it just seems so idiotic that we've got to the point where we had to literally rot our brains to get there.
00:06:44.100That, you know, the very starting point that men and women are just constructed differently by our narratives and our society is so counter to fact that it does seem a dangerous place for us to have gone.
00:06:59.300And I think many are therefore grateful that perhaps there is, well, the leader of the free world resetting it a bit, right?
00:07:05.120By the way, just if I may add, my first exposure to these parasitic ideas was precisely in my scientific work, which sought to incorporate evolutionary thinking in the study of human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular.
00:07:22.660So I came into the business school saying, hey, guys, you can't study consumer behavior or economic decision making or entrepreneurship or behavioral economics without studying the fundamental biological mechanisms that drive our purpose and behavior.
00:07:37.440Well, to me, that seemed like a profoundly obvious and banal point to make to almost all of my colleagues, whether it be in the business schools or in social sciences.
00:07:50.500Surely biology applied for every other species except one called human beings.
00:07:56.380And if it applied to human beings, Jonathan, it only applied up to the neck.
00:08:00.800So sure, go ahead and use biology to explain why we have opposable thumbs.
00:08:05.320But surely you're not some kind of quack Jewish Nazi who believes that the human mind is prone to the same evolutionary forces as your dog.
00:08:14.620And so that was my first exposure to, boy, some really intelligent people could actually be bafflingly imbecilic.
00:08:23.440And that's how I then got onto the journey of the parasitic mind.
00:08:26.800So I think medically we fight parasites with anti-parasitics.
00:08:31.620I'm curious what the antidote should be.
00:08:34.380What's our thinking anti-parasitic and how can we stop the development of more sophisticated parasites?
00:08:40.400And I guess where I'm going with this is, you know, if we think about the mind virus, as it's been called, is the way to deal with it that we set up a lab in Wuhan and develop better mind viruses and try to infect our enemies or ourselves?
00:08:54.800Or is it that we come up with these, you know, anti-virals, anti-parasitics, whatever we want to metaphorically call them?
00:09:00.360Is there a way out of this predisposition we have to be infected?
00:09:04.520Beautiful. So I'll first answer the last part.
00:09:07.920You said predisposition to be infected.
00:09:10.220And then I'll answer the sort of the general mind vaccine.
00:09:13.420That's a really important sentence you said, because often people ask me, is this a new reality that we face?
00:10:21.900Number two, I've actually have been arguing to, for many years, and I'm now kind of connecting with some pretty powerful people who would love for me to develop a mind vaccine institute, right?
00:10:36.160Where you literally bring people in of all types.
00:11:45.740And that, of course, holds true even though your aunt Linda is taller than your uncle Jethro, right?
00:11:51.280And there's a way by which we can test that truth.
00:11:54.160But what about more difficult statements?
00:11:56.900What if I were to tell you, Jonathan, it is not true that toy preferences are socially constructed, as every single social scientist has told us.
00:12:05.620There are evolutionary and biological reasons why little boys prefer certain toys and little girls prefer other toys.
00:12:12.940How would I go about demonstrating that truth?
00:12:16.580Well, they've done that with apes, haven't they?
00:12:18.060They've shown like male apes will pick up cars and things and female apes will pick up dolls and babies.
00:12:23.900I'm going to come exactly to that in a second.
00:12:25.940So one type of mind vaccine is the building of what I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
00:12:35.740But what it basically means is, can I come up with every conceivable line of evidence, distinct lines of evidence that would triangulate and supporting my argument?
00:12:49.960I can get you data, cross species, to your point, with vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees, showing you that they exhibit the same sex specificity as human infants.
00:13:01.280Already that would be fatal to the social constructivist, but I'm not going to stop there.
00:13:06.280I'm going to get you data from developmental psychology, showing you that human children who are too young to yet have the capacity to be socialized, already exhibit those pensions.
00:13:17.120So that already doesn't look good for the social constructivist.
00:13:20.940I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology, where little girls will suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is a masculinizing disorder.
00:13:30.540Those little girls will have sex reversal of their toy preferences.
00:13:34.580I can get you data from completely different societies, sub-Saharan Africa, so it's not the West, where they exhibit the same preferences.
00:13:42.240I can get you data from 2,500 years ago on ancient funerary mausoleums in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where little children are depicted with the exact same sex specific toy preferences.
00:13:57.560I've gotten you cross-cultural, cross-temporal, cross-methodology, cross-species, and it becomes impossible for you to refute it.
00:14:06.020Now, here's the problem with this particular mind vaccine.
00:14:09.620It's effortful to take that vaccine because it's not easily, you know, amenable to each person to go out and build such a network.
00:14:19.540But what allows me to not be, one of the reasons why it's hard to cancel me is because when I go into very hostile territory with a lot of interlocutors who hate anything that I have to say, I've already built that nomological network for whatever debate we're having.
00:14:38.300I've already inoculated myself against all of your bullshit.
00:14:42.360So if you're going to come and debate me to our earlier point about you speaking at Oxford Union, good luck.
00:14:49.460But what that allows me to do is I have epistemic humility, meaning that I really know what I know and I know what I don't know.
00:14:57.920So if you ask me a question where I haven't built the requisite nomological network, I will be a lot more tepid in my answer.
00:15:04.880Hey, that's a great question, Jonathan.
00:15:06.200Unfortunately, it's above my pay grade.
00:15:07.960I don't know enough about it to tell you.
00:15:09.400So I think that there are, at times, effortful ways by which we could inoculate ourselves against the lunacy.
00:15:17.980So I'm pleased to hear that you are working in developing a kind of mind virus vaccine.
00:15:24.980I hope it doesn't make you like the Fauci of the mind.
00:15:28.740I might be a good caller if that's possible.
00:15:37.840But let's flip to another kind of issue I think that I've heard you speak a lot about recently, which does touch on this, and that is Islam.
00:15:49.860So I think that since October the 7th, many people have been a lot bolder in criticizing Islam.
00:15:55.740And that's because I think there was a realization that what happened in Israel was not just about land or about Palestinians and Israelis, but it was effectively about jihad.
00:16:07.020And similarly, I think it's coincided, well, in slow motion with jihad around the world.
00:16:12.640So whether it's been driving a truck into a crowd in New Orleans or in Germany or any of the numerous Muslim terrorist attacks around the world, I think people are slowly waking up, and I say slowly, to this threat.
00:16:28.420So I wonder how you think, as a professor, an expert, an academic, on the mind and on how ideas influence us.
00:16:37.840I'm very curious about Islam as a set of ideas rather than as a religion.
00:16:42.460And why you think, as somebody that grew up in an environment where it was prevalent, why you think it is so appealing to people, is it, as I suspect, in a way, one of the most expert religions in terms of marketing?
00:16:57.000Is it that it has a very good way of selling itself to human beings?
00:17:01.460So I've actually made that exact point in several forays, and certainly in the parasitic mind, where I compare, let's say, Islam to Judaism.
00:17:12.240Well, Judaism absolutely sucks as a marketing endeavor, right?
00:17:17.440Because if the goal is to, quote, penetrate the market, if the goal is to build customers, then we have about 15 million customers in Judaism, and that number doesn't seem to grow much.
00:17:29.920And we have about 125 times as much Muslims, right?
00:17:35.260Now, every single element of the architecture of the mimetics of Islam is structured to promote that growth.
00:17:48.340And regrettably, if we care about market penetration, it's the opposite in Judaism.
00:17:52.520So let's just take one, but we could discuss other ones if you want.
00:17:56.480Judaism is not a proselytizing religion.
00:17:58.800If you wish to convert to Judaism, it is really, you know, you're tested in your will to convert.
00:18:06.300So it's not, you say that one public proclamation, the shahada, and then, boom, you're Muslim, right?
00:18:16.440By the way, you're not even allowed to, even though many people violate that, you're not supposed to convert in Judaism for ulterior motives.
00:18:23.960So if you convert because you're trying to marry a Jewish spouse, that would be a no-no.
00:18:30.020It really has to be from a pure sort of spiritual awakening that you're doing this, right?
00:18:35.820Okay, so then it doesn't take a fancy professor to then say, well, which one is likely to, you know, one of them I just say abracadabra and I become that thing.
00:18:44.480The other one I have to get a PhD before I become, well, let me do the abracadabra one.
00:18:48.660So, now, there are also rules about, I mean, literally reproduction, right?
00:18:54.200Islam is built, you can have up to four wives, you could take non-Muslim women, but not the...
00:19:00.760So there are many, many elements of Islam that allow it to proliferate beyond just the sword,
00:19:07.340which is, of course, another way by which it has proliferated for 1400 years.
00:19:11.740So there is definitely, so what you said is exactly right, but what...
00:19:17.780If I may jump in, because I see where you're going, but what I'm asking, I think, aside from this, is why are the ideas of Islam,
00:19:24.620it may be easy to put into action and understand why it's happening, but the ideas of Islam, when I read the Quran,
00:19:30.640seemed maybe attractive to someone in the 7th century in Arabia, but to me, the promise of flowing water, sex on tap, food and fruits,
00:19:39.240I mean, I've got the shop at the end of my road where I can find probably most of those, if not all.
00:19:43.900I'm not sure about the sex on tap, but you never know.
00:19:46.380I think in the modern world, it seems to me a strange assortment of fear and promise,
00:19:53.440and I wonder why you think mentally and psychologically that's attractive.
00:19:56.560Right, so I, yeah, so I was answering the first part, which is just, why is it memetically viral in the sense that I answered it,
00:20:05.220but you're talking about the specific contents of the codified elements of Islam.
00:20:11.960Well, again, as an evolutionary psychologist who understands that there are four key Darwinian modules that drive our behavior,
00:20:20.220two of which are survival and reproduction, there's a lot of good sex in Islam, right?
00:20:25.540You're promised a lot of, so a lot of stuff that I can't pursue with a lot of Darwinian alacrity in the earthly realm,
00:20:37.020I can certainly be promised, and they give you details about how those prospective mates are going to look like in the afterlife.
00:20:46.280And so, by the way, right, when you tell a female suicide bomber in Islam that you can do it,
00:20:55.780it doesn't say you have access to 72 cabana boys with really pouty asses,
00:21:02.100because it turns out that all religions seem to be really good as evolutionary psychologists
00:21:07.680in understanding that there are sex-specific mating preferences that are different across the two sexes.
00:21:14.220So the promissory note that I give to the male as jihadi suicide bomber is different than the one that I give for females.
00:21:23.340So I think we can easily analyze it from a Darwinian perspective.
00:21:26.960I think the next question, which you didn't necessarily ask, is why is it that the West is so completely impotent,
00:21:34.500notwithstanding that you're saying that some are starting to criticize, completely impotent to ever connect the dots together?
00:21:44.640And so I've got a chapter in the parasitic mind.
00:21:47.580It's called Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome, because, of course, the ostrich, while it doesn't literally do that,
00:21:53.580it's become a metaphor of ignoring reality.
00:21:55.680So I literally list all of the reasons that super bien-pensant Westerners have come up with for why a particular terror attack happened.
00:22:09.280So, for example, we needed Bill Nye, the science guy, to explain to us that the Bataclan terror attack in Paris,
00:22:17.460where they screened Allahu Akbar, and then gave us the specific Quranic incantations,
00:22:23.660that was actually due to climate change.
00:24:09.280So other than, you know, I mean, what I'm trying to get at is it's very, very explicit.
00:24:15.060If you read Islam's fundamental text, its foundational text, it's not about different strains or different practices.
00:24:22.080The actual foundational touchstone is so clear on what it thinks of, let's say, me.
00:24:29.580Why is it that it's seen as impolite or racist or politically incorrect?
00:24:35.200And for so many Jews, why do you think Jews are supremely bad at daring to criticize something which is very, very explicit about them?
00:24:44.120So there are several possible, you know, factors at play, one of which could be linked to the dimmi psychology, right?
00:24:55.200So in Islamic society, a dimmi is not even a second-class citizen.
00:25:02.140It's less than a second-class citizen.
00:25:03.600It's people of the book, meaning of Abrahamic faith, Christians or Jews, that could be tolerated in Islamic society until, of course, we reserve the right to stop tolerating at any time.
00:25:18.500And because we are going to tolerate you, we're going to have to impose certain very humiliating restrictions on you.
00:25:24.900Now, not in every Islamic society it has been, you know, imposed with complete, you know, judiciousness.
00:25:32.580But certainly in the Quranic principles, you have that.
00:25:35.220Now, imagine if I am a dimmi in such a society.
00:25:39.160I developed the reflex to never criticize the one who could look at my beautiful daughter who's coming of age and decide that, you know, I've got designs on her, right?
00:25:51.420And so that would be for Jews in an Islamic, like I'm a Mizrahi Jew from Lebanon.
00:25:59.220So that might explain my situation, why people like me would not, not me.
00:26:04.580Obviously, I criticize Islam, but others.
00:26:06.700Now, other westernized Jews, because they have been at the forefront of fighting for civil rights,
00:26:13.920because their own civil rights have always been, you know, eradicated and so on.
00:26:18.960You know, they're walking in Selma, Alabama, and they're, you know, they're the pioneers of fighting for civil rights in the United States and so on.
00:26:27.660It becomes inculcated in the mind of a Jew that it is uniquely gauche to criticize another's religion.
00:26:36.520It's just, it's not something that, you know, when I speak with a progressive lisp and I go to Oberlin College and I'm a good Jewish moron, then it's just not something that we do.
00:26:49.020So even if you might end up decapitating me, I will know that I will go to my death being a progressive Jew speaking with a progressive lisp.
00:26:58.380By the way, it's a very similar mechanism for why French Canadians, in their desperate attempts to protect the French Canadian language in Quebec,
00:27:07.440have thought that it was a beautiful idea to let in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Muslims, who will then decapitate you.
00:27:15.240But before they do that, Jonathan, they say, bonjour, ça va?
00:27:19.760So as long as the decapitation happens in French, there really is no problem.
00:27:23.760So that might explain why the Jews have a hard time with it.
00:27:26.600I guess it's about priorities in that sense.
00:27:28.680But I've always thought as well that, you know, there is a great deal of truth to that.
00:27:33.040And I think there's an added element of guilt, which is, as a people who've been constantly persecuted for our religion or beliefs, unjustifiably,
00:27:41.840we are maybe afraid of criticizing other people's beliefs, even when they are so dangerous to our own existence.
00:27:49.800And I think that brings me to this other idea of yours, suicidal empathy.
00:27:54.360Because it's not just Jews who have this.
00:27:57.340It's this very modern Western liberal attitude that we must be empathetic and tolerant,
00:28:03.760even of unempathetic and intolerant people, even when they're literally killing us because of who we are.
00:28:12.300So I wonder, in terms of this idea of suicidal empathy, what do you think the best way to wake people up is?
00:28:22.260I've had many conversations where, you know, among like-minded people who always said,
00:28:27.440well, the next massive terror attack that's going to wake everyone up, you know, when they blow up the tube and then they blow up the tube and it didn't.
00:28:33.960Or when they, say, when they blow up a concert of little girls dancing to Ariana Grande, that'll wake them up and it doesn't.
00:28:42.240I wonder if you think there is anything that can wake us up.
00:28:45.800And the thing I wanted to specifically ask you about is, you know, when you have trouble waking up in the morning, there's two options.
00:28:51.340There's the, you know, really loud multiple alarm clocks choice.
00:28:55.240Well, there are those kind of expensive sun lamps that slowly come on and fool you into thinking it's daytime, even when it's still dark outside.
00:29:04.600What would be the, clearly the loud alarm clock version, you know, bombing us, killing us, isn't working.
00:29:10.220But what might be the sun lamp version and do you think there's any hope for it?
00:29:15.320Well, I like the language, the analogy.
00:30:10.540And so I demonstrate in that chapter that much of our maximal flourishing happens when we find that sweet spot across many bewildering number of domains.
00:30:20.020So now let's apply that principle to empathy.
00:30:22.520No one is suggesting that empathy is not a laudable value.
00:30:27.340As a matter of fact, from an evolutionary perspective, that positive emotion is an indelible part that oils our human sociality.
00:30:36.080So, for example, for you and I to have a meaningful exchange, I have to have theory of mind.
00:30:40.600I have to put myself in your mind, get a sense of what I think you know, and that oils our capacity to engage in a meaningful way.
00:30:47.740So you expect a highly intelligent social species to develop the emotion of empathy.
00:31:18.000But its root is based in an adaptive mechanism.
00:31:22.120The idea that I should scan the environment for environmental threats makes perfect evolutionary sense.
00:31:28.280If you are sneezing and then you go to shake my hand, I will very politely go to the bathroom to wash my hands because I don't want to catch your stomach bug or your, you know, flu or whatever it is.
00:32:12.560So it's a hyperactive mechanism that is otherwise adapted.
00:32:16.560Well, I argue for the exact same principle when it comes to empathy.
00:32:20.680Empathy is great, but it's not, it shouldn't be meted out to Guatemalan gang members more so than American vets.
00:32:30.200Once you do that, you're targeting the wrong target.
00:32:32.760And so that would be the slow, what you call the slow sunlight, which is to kind of embolden people to recognize that orgiastic, unencumbered by any reason, empathy is nothing laudable and it's bad and has to stop.
00:32:49.300It's always so hard to sell people moderation though, isn't it?
00:32:52.360Because it's like the least sexy thing in the world.
00:32:54.620I think in reality, people kind of like an idea and they go for it more.
00:32:59.840And in this era of algorithmic instant gratification, we're often forced down those kind of rabbit holes of following our urges to their very limits.
00:33:10.480And one other aspect of it that I think I've heard you talk about is kind of tribalism, let's say.
00:33:17.420So, for example, the idea of the research that you did on how we distribute our gift-giving budget.
00:33:25.620So the idea that we prioritize those close to us.
00:33:28.940Again, I wondered how this fits in with Islam or religions because I get told a lot when I criticize Islamic thinking or doctrine that not all Muslims are suicide bombers and such like.
00:33:43.660And of course, that's true. And I know many Muslims who find all of that as reprehensible and destructive and terrible as I do.
00:33:52.200But then I have experienced something over the last 15 months.
00:33:54.760I wonder if you have too, which is some people who I knew as very moderate Muslims in their behavior, very modern people.
00:34:03.080When it came to this sort of crunch moment, there was a tribalism in that, their gift-giving of mental loyalty suddenly went a bit towards this deeply evil jihadi tendency.
00:34:15.640And I found myself thinking, wow, I thought we were friends.
00:34:19.360And you think there's a justification for the rape, murder and kidnap of my people, of any people.
00:34:25.620So do you think that there is a way for us to defeat these instincts like tribalism or our own biology in how we're coming up with ideas and loyalties?
00:34:35.460Fantastic question. And you're exactly right that I've addressed this in my scientific work.
00:34:42.400I've actually addressed it also using Israeli data, not really only relevant to the extent that we talked about some of these little Easter issues.
00:34:51.500I've done research with Israeli weddings showing that not only to the finding that you mentioned, that the closer I am genetically to the recipient of the gift, the larger the gift, right?
00:35:07.660But I also demonstrated with a few Israeli colleagues that the mother's side of the bride and groom give larger gifts than the father's side, the paternal side, because there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty, but there is such a thing as paternity uncertainty.
00:35:30.900So even in the context of a patriarchal society in the Middle East, biology matters.
00:35:39.780Because it's very, very difficult to eradicate some of these fundamental biological imperatives.
00:35:46.520So coalitional psychology is a fundamental feature of our human psychology.
00:35:52.460We view the world as blue team, red team.
00:35:54.760That's what makes Abrahamic religions so easy to internalize because there are the Jews and the Gory.
00:36:03.700There are the believers and the Kuffar.
00:36:05.540There are those who are going to be sitting with Jesus in heaven and the rest of us assholes are going to burn in hell.
00:36:11.280So all of these religions draw these demarcations.
00:36:13.680So to answer your question, we will never eradicate our capacity for coalitional thinking, but maybe we can eradicate the fact that if you're on the blue team and I'm on the red team, I decapitate you.
00:36:28.340Maybe I won't invite you every day over for dinner.
00:36:31.440Even that would be reprehensible, although in the Quran it says don't take Jews and Christians as your friends.
00:36:36.340But maybe my coalitional imperative doesn't have to instantiate itself in the most, you know, bloodthirsty ways.
00:36:46.600By the way, the idea of genetic relatedness and so on, there is a great quote from Leon Uris.
00:36:53.780I'm going to totally butcher it, but it's in this book right here in The Consuming Instinct where he says, you know, the nation versus this, my tribe versus other tribes, my clan versus that.
00:37:07.360So he's literally using in his own poetic way, the language of evolutionary psychology, which is we met out our investments as a function of these evolutionary imperative.
00:37:18.640So I don't think we'll get rid of it, but maybe we can sort of deactivate some of the ugly manifestations of that imperative.
00:37:25.820So in a way, I suppose one of the unique beauties of being human, as opposed to any other species, is perhaps that we allow ourselves to have a level of control or intellect over some of these biological or psychological urges.
00:37:40.080And I mean, when it comes back to the Islam question, I had a sort of remote conversation between two quite well-known Muslim friends.
00:37:50.860So one was Loai al-Sharif, who you might be familiar with.
00:38:23.900But they have very different attitudes towards what they do with it.
00:38:27.480So Mossab, on the one hand, says, you know, this is rotten.
00:38:32.100And even people who aren't extreme in their practice of Islam are therefore not Muslims, because they're not really adhering to any of Islamic doctrine.
00:38:41.720Whereas Loai says, no, no, there must be a sort of enlightened Islam eventually.
00:38:48.260And he urges the rest of us to hang on tight and hope it comes before we get beheaded.
00:38:52.900And that to take Mossab's approach, he said to me, is to put a target on billions of people's backs.
00:39:01.980My question, I guess, that I'm searching for here, what is the right approach?
00:39:06.080Is it to try then to convince existing Muslims that their belief system is problematic?
00:39:12.940Or is it to try to wait for this moderation of Islam and hope that we aren't slaughtered while we're waiting for it?
00:39:21.860But forgive me for putting you on the spot.
00:39:25.120Can you guess what my answer will be before I give it?
00:39:32.420I think you would want us, from observing your talking on this in the past, I think you would suggest that we need to kind of wake people up and convince them to leave behind the faulty ideas of not just Islam, but any ideology that you should try and convince people.
00:40:16.740So, not only all of them have been killed, any serious ones, and it has never, you know, gained any traction, but if you go by the official doctrines of Islam, it is the final, inerrant, eternal word of God to not be changed by one syllable.
00:40:43.080Doesn't that serve as the final mic drop?
00:40:45.280So, we could play all sorts of games, and I often satirically will go online, you've probably seen it, where I say, oh, but if only you understood Arabic philology, Quranic Arabic philology, you'd know that kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, take an espresso break, resume, or just a killing really means killed with kindness.
00:41:03.380But if only you knew that, but you need to be at Al-Azhar University studying under Sheikh Karadawi to be able to understand that kind of nuance.
00:41:12.660But all of you asshole Westerners don't get it, that's why you misunderstood.
00:41:15.980That's because we're reading it in translation, we couldn't possibly get it, right?
00:41:27.680How many more people have to die before, as your friend said, well, hang on tight and we'll resolve it.
00:41:35.120We've had 1,400 million years, 1,400 years.
00:41:38.580Depending on the estimates, we have up to, I mean, the estimates vary, but a reasonably conservative estimate is 300 million killed in the 1,400 years of Islam.
00:41:54.240So, but I understand that it's impractical and that, well, what are you going to do?
00:41:58.620You're going to press a button and it's going to cease to exist.
00:42:01.160So, what, you know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a different approach.
00:42:06.220She says, you can't ask people to leave a religion and be in void.
00:42:11.200She used to be more bent towards atheism.
00:42:14.120Now, she sees sort of Christianity as a sort of big sieve where people can go from being Muslim to maybe being Christian because they have to believe in something beyond simply non-belief.
00:42:27.920What I can tell you is there is no documented society throughout human history where Islam has become the majority religion and thereafter individual freedoms have flourished.
00:42:40.320That hasn't existed and it will never exist.
00:42:42.400And that's because I think that Islamic doctrine, it doesn't prioritise individual freedoms.
00:42:47.200In fact, that's one of the fundamentals of it.
00:42:49.120But that's very interesting because effectively that is the difference between Loa and Mossab.
00:42:54.100Loa continues to consider himself a Muslim but quite a Jewish one, he says, which is very confusing because Islam, of course, is meant to replace Jews.
00:43:03.380But then Mossab actually became a Christian.
00:43:06.040This is what he did after his 10 years of helping the Shabak to foil suicide bombings.
00:43:11.900And now I feel, you know, we had a long conversation, a bit like this one, but in person.
00:43:16.000And he told me he's kind of not moved on from Christianity, but he's not as practising and he's incorporated other kind of spiritualities into his thinking.
00:43:25.320So, I do think that's very interesting.
00:43:27.420I suppose where I want to go from that is to ask you, when I talk about a lot of this stuff, I get accused of being far right.
00:43:35.660There's also people like Tommy Robinson in the UK and Elon Musk is recently a sort of champion of his online.
00:43:43.000The idea that this makes you far right is interesting.
00:43:46.160And our own Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has suggested that those who were standing up for the young children who were raped and, as you said, tortured and even killed by the Muslim rape gangs in the UK,
00:44:00.960that people who talked about that were bolstering the far right.
00:44:04.760This idea of far right is an interesting one to me as well.
00:44:08.220What do you think is far right these days?
00:44:12.140And do you think people who are slurred as being far right should just embrace and say, well, if it's far right to stand up for children and women and gays, then so be it?
00:44:25.380You know, labels have never really, I mean, if I were to be hurt by labels, I would have been out of this game a long time ago because on any given day, I'm accused of every conceivable thing.
00:44:37.260I mean, I get hate mail where someone misinterprets my satire and thinks that I'm a jihadi.
00:44:43.320I get emails where people say that, you know, I'm literally the guy orchestrating the bombing of Gazan children.
00:45:08.860Yes, of course, once in a while it annoys you, but you really have to have fixed skin.
00:45:14.020So, no, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about the labels.
00:45:17.740By the way, people have often, not accused me, but sort of been frustrated with me because they say, well, you seem to be coy about what your political orientation is.
00:46:19.700But I've got, I think, two last things I'd like to ask you, if we've still got time.
00:46:25.640One is about the idea of our biology influencing our behavior, which, of course, is quite fundamental to your work.
00:46:35.300And I heard an interesting question in one of the trigonometry podcasts, actually, from Constantin Kissin, where he was asking about this, about, for example, how testosterone might change our behaviors, but more than individually as a society.
00:46:48.660So, we often read that testosterone levels are much lower historically and that there's more estrogen in our food or water or whatever it might be.
00:46:59.340And then he was questioning whether that might have made us as a society somewhat, let's say, softer in our behavior.
00:47:07.160I wonder how you think that might chime in with the idea of suicidal empathy.
00:47:12.740Do you think that maybe part of the empatheticness of our being could have been influenced by something as simple as our decreasing testosterone levels?
00:47:24.620So, I think it's a two-pronged attack.
00:47:28.780One could well be those testosterone levels dropping so that it really is feminizing society.
00:47:37.640But I think a more direct pathway to that is the feminization of values, right?
00:47:44.460So, men and women are very, very similar, if not identical, on many traits, and they're different on others.
00:47:51.200And the framework that explains on which ones were similar versus which ones were dissimilar is exactly evolutionary psychology.
00:47:58.060And so, when it comes to, for example, certain objectives at a university, men leaders in academic institutions behave in very different ways.
00:48:11.560So, for example, I go to meetings, departmental meetings, if it's headed by a female head, where I'm unsure if I'm about to take nap time because I'm in grade five kindergarten.
00:49:22.940The men on each of the two tribes would really like to get the attractive resources that the other tribe has.
00:49:29.980The only thing that stops them, the only calculus that stops them, is that they know that there are men in the other tribe that would not take too well to that.
00:49:39.300So, they think about before they do it.
00:49:41.760Now, imagine if we create a new society where the men on one side of the river say,
00:49:52.260That is so violent, barbaric, and Neanderthal-like.
00:49:55.620A new mound, which was trained by radical feminists, says that no, give up your children.
00:50:03.740As a matter of fact, I'll show you where my children are hiding so you can gang rape them because I want you to feel welcome in my society, right?
00:50:10.620So, I think it's a lot more the radical change in the values as in part instituted by the parasitic ideas and the suicidal empathy that has feminized us much more so than that there is greater estrogen in some of the byproducts.
00:50:26.620So, our urges that you describe so clearly and our kind of biological tendencies, what's unique about humans is that we have the ability to transcend those, to transcend our biology, to kind of put our culture and our intellectual above our biological.
00:50:47.480But, of course, we're always going to be susceptible to those.
00:50:49.960So, I think in closing, I guess I want to ask you the big one, which is how should we tackle it?
00:50:56.380You mentioned that you'd seen this Oxford Union debate, if we can call it that, that I did.
00:51:01.680And a few people have said to me, you know what your mistake was?
00:51:04.300It was to go there and try and make a reasoned case because all they wanted in that room was an emotional case.
00:51:11.060And I've often sort of fleshed that out myself by saying that I think a lot of people prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth.
00:51:17.760So, if that's the case, these are very human and natural tendencies.
00:51:22.600It's going back to something I asked you earlier, I think.
00:51:25.240Should we be looking for a way to make our messages more emotional and more beautiful and more in line with the biological urges?
00:51:36.400Or should we be trying to make better humans and helping them overcome their biological determinism and their lack of conscious free will?
00:51:44.020Or should we be, again, should we be waking them up?
00:51:46.500Or should we be creating dreams out of what we want them to think and do ourselves?
00:51:50.960Well, first, I love the fact that you explain the canard of biological determinism.
00:51:56.100One of the reasons why people abhor the application of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior
00:52:02.860is precisely because they succumb to the fallacy, the false fallacy is redundant,
00:52:10.740that we are just mere passive executors of our genes, of our biological imperatives.
00:52:18.720Exactly to your point, I also have evolved other mechanisms that could temper those Darwinian, right?
00:52:24.840At any given moment, I've got Darwinian pulls pulling me in different directions.
00:52:30.300And that's what gives me that prefrontal cortex that allows me higher order technique.