00:00:00.060Before we begin, we'd like to say that in our opinion it is not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition.
00:00:18.340Hello and welcome to this very special live episode of Trigonometry.
00:00:27.900And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:33.760I don't think it gets any more fascinating than the two people we have for you today.
00:00:37.640You know them all, evolutionary biologist Dr. Heather Hying and of course Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
00:00:43.260We're going to bring them in in a second.
00:00:45.180Before we do, I should just tell you very quickly the format of our conversation today.
00:00:49.400We're going to talk for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes.
00:00:52.460It will be us in conversation with Jordan and Heather.
00:00:54.880Then we're going to have a quick break and then we're going to take all your questions.
00:00:58.600If you want to submit a question for us to put to either of our guests or for us to discuss as a group, there's a PayPal link below in the description of the video.
00:02:17.780But nonetheless, many people say the product of all of that has been the focus on identity.
00:02:26.220The breakdown of the family has resulted in many of the things that we're seeing now.
00:02:31.280Identity politics, obsession with finding your own community that's not really about your family because you don't really feel attached to yours, to the one that you have, etc.
00:02:41.900Heather, it's your first time on the show.
00:02:53.480And what are your thoughts on that issue?
00:02:57.100There's about eight different topics in what you asked, right?
00:02:59.740Since you raised the cat who's partially visible on camera here, cats are, of course, sexually reproducing organisms, as all mammals are, as all vertebrates are, with a couple, a handful of exceptions.
00:03:15.080I mean, they do at the genetic level, but they don't at the social or behavioral level the way that humans do.
00:03:21.000And so, you know, there's an ongoing live question as to exactly how monogamous humans really are.
00:03:28.300And in polygynous cultures, children don't know their fathers as much.
00:03:33.600It's at least a different kind of relationship.
00:03:35.040But the cultures that we are living in are at least monogamous by expectation.
00:03:42.080And, you know, that doesn't suggest that there isn't a whole lot of cheating that goes on, of course.
00:03:46.160But, you know, what does it mean to have a father then?
00:03:48.400What does it mean for me to say, for instance, that this cat doesn't have a father?
00:03:52.560You know, he had a relationship with a mother who nursed him and who taught him some things about being a cat.
00:03:59.120And then they probably never met again.
00:04:01.640Whereas in humans, the relationship with both parents is critical for most to emerge into adulthood as, you know, as able humans, regardless of what sex we are.
00:04:16.360So, you know, was it the loss of fathers in the family, the breakdown of the nuclear family that contributed to identity politics?
00:04:26.320That's not one of the things that I tend to point to, but I think it certainly contributed.
00:04:30.160I often go a little bit more recently, you know, 30 years ago-ish, we start to have this perfect storm of postmodernism in academia, gaining ground of legal drugs being shoved at children.
00:04:47.560And it's different ones for girls and boys because we see different so-called failings in boys and girls.
00:04:53.120It's the screens, it's the helicopter parenting, but, you know, add into that mix having only one parent in a household so that you don't have the tension, the back and forth, the ability for two parents to actually both have their eyes on a problem, you know, be it behavior that a child's engaging in or, you know, whatever else and discuss it.
00:05:16.060And, yeah, that's going to make things much harder for children growing up.
00:05:28.580Well, I think there are two questions that are sort of importantly nested in your question.
00:05:35.720And one is the issue of identity per se and why that's become a question.
00:05:42.360And then the second question is why has identity politics arisen as an answer to that question?
00:05:50.520I would say the first issue has arisen because of technological transformation in large part.
00:05:57.540And you could say that reproductive technology and its consequent effects on the family would be one branch of that.
00:06:05.000But, look, if you look at more traditional societies, and so let's say those are societies that aren't transforming technologically at the same rate that the world is transforming now,
00:06:16.440the issue of identity doesn't come up that much because there isn't much choice.
00:06:35.680And we don't know how many there are, what the limits are, and we don't even know what the options are to some degree because things change so quick we can't even keep up with them.
00:06:45.520I can't keep up with my computer, let alone the world.
00:06:49.540I mean, it's so interesting, well, and distressing in some sense, and this is partly a function of age.
00:06:55.500I'm surrounded by gadgets I don't understand that are changing faster than I can adapt to that are smarter than me.
00:07:02.800And that's just one, and I'm actually fairly technologically astute, you know, like I mastered computers, well, to some degree, at least I could use them when I was in my 30s.
00:07:14.440And, you know, I was sort of on the edge of, I would say, the generation that managed that, at least to some degree.
00:07:20.020But the issue of identity comes up when the pathway isn't fixed.
00:07:26.740Okay, so then, see, Nietzsche said at one point that the issue of morality per se, the question of what is moral, doesn't emerge until you compare many moralities.
00:07:53.620Well, and then, because no one knows the answer to that off the top of their heads and has never generated an articulated and lengthy thought-through response to that,
00:08:04.440someone can say, well, it's your felt sense of gender.
00:09:05.200But it's not like you can just generate that on the fly.
00:09:08.520And so, you know, we fall prey to these casual critiques in some sense.
00:09:13.180But they're less casual than our ability to articulate our, you know, implicit beliefs.
00:09:18.260And so we get caught out all the time.
00:09:20.740Technological transformation makes us uncertain of who we are.
00:09:23.600And partly by providing us with more freedom.
00:09:26.060And then answers arise to the questions that are driven by that.
00:09:29.820And we have a hard time making philosophical sense of them or defending ourselves against them.
00:09:34.780You know, I've been trying to think through this idea that human social institutions are fundamentally predicated on the arbitrary expression of power.
00:10:08.740And there are compelling arguments in evolutionary biology space as to how it is that males wield power in the outside world more often in a nuclear family situation than females do.
00:10:28.060But there's a question then of what your definition of power is.
00:10:31.800You know, this will seem like we quickly fall into a semantic trap.
00:10:35.560But it's, you know, if you're going to argue, you know, patriarchy.
00:10:45.860And if women tend to have power within the family, within social systems, women tend to engage in hierarchies in which the competition is more covert.
00:10:56.420Men tend to engage in competition and hierarchies that are more, that's more overt.
00:11:03.380And so, you know, that is the power that is more overt.
00:11:10.560You can point to it and say, well, that's where the power is.
00:11:12.940But the power that women tend to yield, being more cryptic, being more covert.
00:11:17.540And, you know, that's partially because we are sexually dimorphic.
00:11:22.580We do have some history of at least, you know, some history of polygamy in our past such that men are on average bigger and stronger and all of this.
00:11:30.540And so in engagement between the sexes, women aren't going to use power, aren't going to use physical power.
00:11:39.600And so once you start down that road where women are going to be more likely to be able to compete on something like an even playing field,
00:11:50.680if they're going to be using psychological or social tools as opposed to physical tools when engaging with men,
00:11:56.760then also you expect, and we see this is, there's plenty of evidence in the psychological literature as to, you know,
00:12:04.340the kinds of competition that women engage in being more covert.
00:12:08.400So all of that is sort of a background answer to, you know, is the system we live in patriarchal?
00:12:14.620Only if the only kind of power you're interested in is the overt expressions of power, especially raw physical power.
00:12:20.680Well, it's also, it's also whether or not you think that the fundamental principle that structures social organizations is in fact the expression of power.
00:12:36.100Well, if you look even at primates like chimps, and chimps are a lot more violent.
00:12:41.760The males are a lot more violent than human males, at least reactively.
00:12:45.660And their structure and their social structures are more vicious and violent than human social structures.
00:12:50.680The alpha male, so to speak, that the top chimp is constantly engaged in grooming and reconciliation and in stable chimp societies attends to the needs of the females and the infants to a large degree.
00:13:07.780And so what DeWall has demonstrated quite nicely is that even among chimpanzees, social structures predicated on the arbitrary expression of power, which we could define as the use of force to compel others to act against their wishes, let's say, or against their intrinsic desires, produces very unstable social hierarchies that are ripe for revolution.
00:13:31.340And the chimps that rule for a long time are markedly cooperative.
00:13:36.820Now, they're still capable of exerting force, but force isn't the animating principle of the society, which is the claim that social relations among humans are predicated on power.
00:14:13.200I think I think that's that's exactly right.
00:14:15.400And just exactly as you say, alpha alpha males are not brutes in non-human primates and in human primates where the systems are functional.
00:14:25.440There may be other males who are brutes, but it's not the alpha.
00:14:28.320Alphas use affiliative behaviors and conciliatory behaviors and cooperation to to accrue loyalty, which then is a way of of maintaining power.
00:14:40.780And, you know, that's that's only sort of a male hierarchy space.
00:14:44.180And, of course, you know, what's what I think one of the modern problems that we are experiencing is male hierarchies and female hierarchies both exist.
00:14:56.460There are different rules of engagement.
00:14:57.700It's a very rare species that actually has both because typically in other species, one or the other sex disperses and you don't and and you also don't have multiple males and multiple females in a group together.
00:15:10.440Baboons being an interesting exception to that.
00:15:13.300But for us, we've combined, you know, we now live in this attempting to be egalitarian world where we've got this, you know, call it six million years since we split with the ancestors of bonobos and chimps.
00:15:27.780Six million years of evolution within our particular lineage in which we've got female hierarchical relationships and male hierarchical relationships.
00:15:37.080And now, I don't know, post-industrial, something since at least agriculture.
00:15:42.220So at a minimum, at a maximum 10,000 years old, we're combining these two hierarchies and we're pretending it's just going to be easy and fine.
00:15:52.400Like we have to figure out how to work together.
00:15:54.300But imagining that we're just going to default into male style of hierarchy and it's going to be cool with all the women or that we're going to just default into female style of hierarchy and it's going to be cool with all the men is an amazing error.
00:16:07.740And in fact, what I feel like we see is this like pendulum swing from, well, we were just doing it the male way because women came into sort of the external realizations of power later.
00:16:16.800And that wasn't really working for everyone.
00:16:19.600And at the moment, we're seeing this pendulum swing over into really female styles of dominance relationship.
00:16:43.840But don't you think part of this problem, and I'll direct this question first at Jordan, is that we now think that we are above animals.
00:16:52.080We think that we are evolved, that we are higher, superior, more intelligent.
00:16:57.420But isn't that one of our main failings, not acknowledging the fact that we are part of the animal world?
00:17:02.960Well, I think it's very useful to inform your ideas about what constitutes human beings by looking at carefully controlled experiments on animals and observations of animals.
00:17:18.120Because, well, if you look at our morphology, our physiology, I mean, we share organs pretty much all the way down the vertebrate chain.
00:17:27.060You know, there's a lot about us that's like other creatures.
00:17:29.660Now, you know, there's important differences, too.
00:17:31.500So you look across species and you try to make comparisons where that seems useful.
00:17:34.860And sometimes that can clue you into how things originated.
00:17:39.000So DeWall, for example, who studied, primarily studied chimpanzees, has looked at the emotional basis of morality as it emerged in chimpanzees.
00:17:48.680And before that, people like Jock Panksepp, who's a brilliant animal rat psychologist, essentially, rat researcher, researcher of rats, showed that even rats engage in fair play when you put them together in repeated play bouts.
00:18:04.340So if a big rat can dominate a little rat by the expression of power, which he can do if he's about 10% bigger, he will do that if you put them together and they play once.
00:18:14.140But if they play repeatedly, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, at least, the little rat will stop playing.
00:18:23.800And the proclivity for reciprocity has been well documented in many mammalian species.
00:18:32.820And so we can see that our behavioral patterns have roots that are very deep, and that's useful.
00:18:39.360It helps clarify the philosophical discussion.
00:18:41.460It helps us understand ourselves better.
00:18:42.960It helps us understand that moral behavior, for example, isn't merely a consequence of rational decision-making or a rational inference, let's say.
00:18:52.140It's much more deeply rooted in us than that.
00:18:55.420And so, now, having said that, I would also say there are many important differences between human beings and other animals,
00:19:02.900not least our linguistic capacity and our incredible capacity for complex mimicry, which is unparalleled, I would say.
00:19:10.620In our visual ability, there's lots of things about us that are quite unique.
00:19:13.980But, you know, you try to derive your wisdom where you can, and you're a fool if you ignore biology.
00:19:18.880And it's a lot easier to ignore it because it's actually difficult to study.
00:19:22.180And you have to work at it, and so it's easier, especially now, especially if you're driven by utopian social theory that implies that human beings are infinitely malleable,
00:19:33.160and you want to make them malleable in your mold of what constitutes the ideal.
00:19:37.400Well, then you can ignore biology and, you know, call people biological essentialists and other such idiocy.
00:19:48.700Do you think by turning our back on the animal world, thinking that, you know, that blanks latism, et cetera, et cetera,
00:19:55.620what we've actually done is create a whole raft of problems for ourselves that didn't exist before?
00:20:02.820We're absolutely creating a whole raft of problems for ourselves.
00:20:06.200I would add to what Jordan said another, I guess, another way in, another way in to point out how similar we are to many other species out there.
00:20:17.520That what Jordan's pointing out is our shared history, our shared phylogenetic history, evolutionary history,
00:20:22.400such that we can look at non-human primates and see in chimps and bonobos, who are our two closest extant relatives,
00:20:29.660many similarities, you know, ability to, you know, and yet chimps and bonobos are so different socially.
00:20:35.880You know, one of them, bonobos, tend very much towards explicit affiliation and peacemaking.
00:20:42.580And one of them, chimps, not as much, with the big caveat, as Jordan indicated before, that the alpha is actually a conciliatory figure.
00:20:50.940And you go farther back, you know, you go into other mammals.
00:20:54.060And, yes, because we all share this sort of founding thing for which we are named, mammary glands,
00:21:01.340that obligates us to maternal care, and that obligates us to sociality and relationship, and it brings in love.
00:21:08.700And, therefore, we get this sort of cascading series of events wherein we have closer relationships
00:21:14.340than we're at least obligated by anatomy and physiology before the evolution of milk and lactation.
00:21:21.700But I would say that that's actually not even the most interesting thing, that we can also look to birds.
00:21:29.600And our most recent common ancestry with birds was some, you know, reptile-y thing that bears no resemblance to any extant reptile now,
00:21:37.460you know, many hundreds of millions of years ago.
00:21:39.360So birds and mammals are not all that closely related, but in some species of birds, in crows, in parrots, in a variety of lineages of birds,
00:21:48.440we also find what looks like love, and long-term relationships, and fair play, and exchanging of ideas.
00:21:59.000How is it that we have converged between, like, crows, and parrots, and dolphins, and elephants, and wolves, and chimps, and humans?
00:22:07.720And I'm leaving some things off that list.
00:22:09.900But that list is, like, okay, social, but there's a lot more things than that that are social.
00:22:14.760Long-lived, generational overlap, so you can have exchange of ideas and learning between generations, and long childhoods.
00:22:22.980So that, you know, these organisms are born or hatched, depending on if they're mammals or birds, without yet fully being what they're going to be.
00:22:30.900You know, compare that to, I mean, any mammal, excuse me, is somewhat, somewhat what we call altricial, which is to say born, you know, not fully able yet to do everything it's going to do,
00:22:43.800because it's going to need milk from its mother.
00:22:45.540But a horse, within a half an hour of being born, is able to run around and keep up with the herd-ish, because if not, it's going to get eaten.
00:22:53.540Whereas the more altricial you're born, the more helpless you're born, the more software you are.
00:23:02.800But, and this is something that Brett and I talk about a lot, and we've actually written into the book that we have coming out in the chapters on childhood and on parenthood and relationship.
00:23:11.640We're not blank slates, but we are, we argue, the blankest slates of any species on the planet.
00:23:17.260Like, when we are born with whatever genetics we have on board, we have the most potential of any species on the planet to become anything else.
00:23:26.320Like, our fate, our fate as individuals, is less guaranteed at birth than even for a dolphin or an elephant or a parrot, and certainly than for a squid or a cedar or, you know, a mouse.
00:23:39.740So, yeah, we aren't blank slates, but we have tremendous potential to become almost anything.
00:23:47.380And that's not at odds with the pushback that you guys, you know, all of you and I as well are giving to identity politics.
00:23:55.580Because that, you know, that, I think, identity politics is a failure of an understanding of emergence, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
00:24:07.760It is a reductionist approach, that the identity politics says, you know, I am white and female and middle-aged and American and, you know, over-educated.
00:24:19.560And, okay, all those things are true, but they don't even begin to encompass a description of me, and I could do the same thing for any of you or any other human being.
00:24:27.240And that is a reductionist, sort of metric-laden approach to an understanding of what humans are.
00:24:34.760It's an insistence, and it's an innumeracy, too.
00:24:38.000Like, if you can count it, then it's real.
00:24:40.180And, no, sometimes the most important things aren't countable, and sometimes the things that you can count don't matter.
00:24:45.660So, let's be our whole best selves as opposed to reducing us to the things that you can label.
00:24:53.280I wanted to weave a couple of the themes that we've talked about together there, particularly technology and the sexual dimorphism that is inherent in us.
00:25:02.300Do you think there will come a point where technologically we're capable of eradicating that, should we choose to?
00:25:08.680There seems to be a lot of people who'd like to do that.
00:25:13.880Or to compensate for it somehow in a way that it doesn't manifest itself in the way that it currently does, where one sex is stronger and therefore, quote-unquote, more oppressive, and the other one is, you know, you know what I'm talking about.
00:25:36.180I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and all options were on the table for me.
00:25:41.300And granted, I grew up on, you know, the West Coast of America with parents who, you know, looked at me and said, okay, we weren't expecting that in a girl, but cool, you want to be mathy, you want to be sportsy, like, go for it.
00:25:55.400And it was because we, the world seemed to be willing to abandon those regressive gender roles that weren't necessary anymore without ever pretending that me being good at math meant I wasn't a girl, right?
00:26:09.920Like, that's the thing that we are emerging into now.
00:26:13.420It's this regressive, backward slide into stereotypes that I thought we were free of.
00:26:21.340Like, actually, no, men can't gestate or lactate or give birth or any of that.
00:26:27.000And if you are a particularly caregiving man who wants to be the primary parent for your child, that's awesome, but you still don't get to breastfeed because that's not what men do, right?
00:26:38.980So, like, we can get rid of a lot of the layer on top that we weren't able to before.
00:26:46.700And, you know, there's a tension, as you, Jordan, have pointed out, you know, like, we've got all this freedom and you push it too far and you get people really, really confused and unable to make choices among all of the things that are downstream of the freedom.
00:27:00.140But if we can just hold on to the reality at base and then say, okay, now, you know, if you're a scientist, that doesn't make you male-ish.
00:27:10.280And if you're an artist, that doesn't make you female-ish.
00:27:13.300And we, like, we should be able to live in that world.
00:27:16.860I feel like that is the world that we were creating until, you know, frankly, until sort of the 90s when this grip on academia that looked postmodern and poststructuralist was happening.
00:27:29.260And then it bled out into the schools of ed and the media and Hollywood and big tech and every place else.
00:27:40.100And, Jordan, do you think the problem comes from the fact that we don't believe in religion anymore?
00:27:48.140And if you don't believe in religion, I don't know who said this, then you don't believe.
00:29:08.340And it fills us with enthusiasm, which is to be filled with God, because that's what enthusiasm means.
00:29:15.000We feel awe towards certain actions that people undertake, particularly if they're radically altruistic or radically truthful.
00:29:23.920We're possessed by the desire to mimic people that we see act out an ideal that we don't understand, etc., etc.
00:29:33.620And, like, I've made a list of about 50 of these things that I'm not going to go through all of them.
00:29:37.780But so you imagine there's an instinct that orients us towards the ideal.
00:29:42.660And that would be part of the consequence of us having to emerge from this insufficient biological substructure that Heather was talking about
00:29:51.300and move towards whatever we could be.
00:30:11.660All of that is reflective of a religious instinct.
00:30:14.520So now then you might posit societies have to organize themselves so that that religious instinct is fulfilled without it disrupting other functions or without other functions being disrupted by it.
00:30:32.940And so then what happens, as far as I can tell, is it just plummets down the value hierarchy until it hits a point where it can find some satisfaction.
00:30:44.460See, you know, maybe we have some sense of an absolute ideal.
00:30:49.320We have the need for an absolute ideal.
00:30:51.460And maybe you make that abstract and you view that as God.
00:30:55.940And God is distant and ineffable and undefinable and abstract and eternal.
00:31:00.360He's not local to your country and your place like a figure like Stalin or Mao.
00:31:08.780And maybe if you don't have something to project that ideal onto, something abstracted, let's say, and perhaps even something communal,
00:31:18.080then it starts to contaminate other functions.
00:31:23.480And I think this is where the new atheists went so wrong.
00:31:27.520They assumed that if we just dispensed with all that idiotic superstition, we'd all become, you know, avatars of Richard Dawkins-style logic,
00:31:36.960assuming we had the capability, which we generally don't.
00:31:40.040And I just don't see that that's true.
00:31:42.380I don't see any evidence that that's the case.
00:31:44.600I think what happens is we become—we dispense with the catastrophic superstition of Catholicism
00:31:52.280and end up swallowing something much more ungainly and horrible.
00:31:57.520Jordan, I want to latch on to that because we've been talking about religion and, you know, how we've turned our back on religion.
00:32:06.160Don't you think a lot of these crises come from the fact that we don't yet know in the West how to address the issue of death?
00:32:14.060And you can see the way we dealt with COVID.
00:33:13.140Well, we're trying to figure that out in our collective religious ideation, let's say.
00:33:16.920So, for example, when I look at Christianity, I think, well, at minimum, speaking as a psychologist, the figure of Christ is the consequence of a centuries-long, a millennial-long discussion of what constitutes the ideal human being.
00:33:31.000Now, you might ask, is it any more than that?
00:33:33.900That would be a metaphysical question.
00:34:09.640You have something that looks like a set of arbitrary axiomatic assumptions that are enforced by fiat.
00:34:16.300And that's not a—like, part of Christianity, let's say, was an exploration of what the ideal was.
00:34:22.720There was at least that exploratory element.
00:34:24.820I mean, I know things degenerate into insistence.
00:34:27.340But it wasn't—you really think all of that was insistence by force?
00:34:32.520I don't think that's a plausible explanation in the least.
00:34:35.300I mean, Christ isn't the sort of character that a power-hungry maniac would dream up to exercise arbitrary control over a docile population.
00:34:45.160It's just—that just doesn't make sense.
00:34:47.520I'm going to give our ancestors and us more credit than that.
00:34:50.600You know, we were at least trying to figure out how to be, ideally, in the face of our catastrophic morality.
00:34:57.280And that question, that's not going away.
00:34:59.220Heather, I can't see your facial expressions at the moment, which is deeply frustrating to me, because I suspect—I can't tell whether there's a lot of agreement or disagreement with you on this.
00:35:11.860Tell me, from an evolutionary biologist perspective, what is the function of religion?
00:36:36.420And, again, you know, again, one of the concepts that Brett and I explore in our forthcoming book, there needs to be tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between the sacred and the shamanistic.
00:36:47.120And, you know, and without this system that people are raised into and they can say, I see that, I see the sacred there, I see the holy, and maybe I want to go to it and maybe I want to turn away.
00:37:02.940People are just unable to even know where to find meaning.
00:37:07.120And so, you know, mind, body, and soul.
00:37:09.780I don't know, I don't have a brilliant grasp of what all is meant by soul, although much of it is in what Jordan is talking about, in the ineffable, in awe, in glory, what we feel when we experience a piece of music that just moves us viscerally.
00:37:25.120But even that, you know, that word that I just used at the end, that is a recognition that they all tie together, visceral, it's body, right?
00:37:34.560And so much of what we're experiencing now, the decohering of not just society, but I think of individuals, is people thinking, well, I don't need any of the stuff of the past.
00:37:47.580I don't even need to be tied to my own body.
00:37:49.840I can pretend that the thing that I am from the very beginning is simply a social assignment.
00:39:08.040It seems that there's an emergent issue.
00:39:10.660Heather, maybe you can tell me what you think about this if you don't mind.
00:39:13.620So, you know, we have to organize ourselves in relationship to values because we can't figure out what to pursue unless we rank order things because we can't pursue everything at once.
00:39:23.760And so we have to rank order things in terms of their value and their approachability.
00:39:27.540So then imagine that, well, out of that we can abstract something like value as such, right?
00:39:33.720And then you might say, well, there's an implicit understanding there that there are higher and lower values.
00:39:39.520And the whole value hierarchy is oriented around whatever value is.
00:39:44.340And you could say that the drive to God is the drive to understand the central factor that organizes all value.
00:39:53.200Or you could say it's representative of the thing that's at the top of a properly structured value hierarchy.
00:39:59.660We all kind of have an intimation of that.
00:40:01.580I mean, everyone I ever met upbraids themselves for not being all they could be.
00:40:30.780But it's an interesting phenomenon because it sort of operates independently.
00:40:35.060And it's not subject to your will exactly because, you know, wouldn't we all be able to like to be able to just dispense with the dictates of conscience?
00:40:43.740It's no, you compare yourself to an implicit ideal and you torture yourself to the degree that you deviate.
00:40:51.000And you might rationalize and lie and deceive and try to ignore it and all of those things.
00:40:58.900And so that's another example, I think, of something that's akin to, well, that's partly the function of religion from a social and biological perspective.
00:41:06.980It's like it orients you towards a collective ideal.
00:41:12.500If I may tell an anecdote from my deep history, maybe the first time that I was in Madagascar, Brett and I were in Madagascar, before I was doing my research there.
00:41:22.440And we'd been on a, I don't remember the numbers, but it was something like a 43-hour bus ride that took us only 430 kilometers across the southern half of Madagascar.
00:41:35.220But we met a young man who was on the, on the bus, bus with us, who invited us at the, at our end point to have dinner with his family.
00:41:44.760And it was at the home of a, of a female judge.
00:41:47.400This was the early nineties, female judge and her husband, whose work, line of work, I don't remember.
00:41:53.360And they were, you know, solidly middle-class Malagazi, which is still, there's almost no relationship to what middle-class looks like in the, in the weird world, in the Western educated, industrialized, rich democratic world.
00:42:03.940Um, but we were having, um, a very interesting meal, mostly in French.
00:42:09.700Um, we spoke almost no Malagazi and they spoke almost no English.
00:42:13.680Um, until one of them, it was extended families.
00:42:18.600There's like eight or nine of the Malagazi family and, and Brett and me as young, you know, between college and graduate school at that point.
00:42:25.060So 22, 23, something, one of them asked us what our religion was.
00:42:31.180And we said, we didn't have any, we didn't say we were atheists.
00:42:35.120And Brett actually does not, will not use that word about himself.
00:42:38.480Um, we said we didn't have any and they recoiled in horror and they almost kicked us out of the house.
00:42:44.800And if we hadn't already had an hour, hour and a half with them, establishing rapport and establishing that we were decent human beings, I think they would have.
00:42:54.680And the conversation that continued forward was them trying to figure out how we could possibly be relied on to be moral if we didn't have religion.
00:43:03.620And, you know, I think having, having been forced into that conversation by well-meaning Malagazi people in my early twenties, really, you know, forced into full consciousness.
00:43:32.640It has to be, you know, in, in my case, I'm very lucky and, you know, I had Brett and I had each other then and we still do.
00:43:39.420And so, you know, to have someone else to whom you can always go to and say, tell me if I have done wrong.
00:43:45.960You tell me if I have done wrong and you, you know, you don't hold back and better if you have a few of those people.
00:43:52.560Because, you know, absent imagining that someone is up there who can see all, you need, you need more than just your own honesty, no matter how honest you are.
00:44:05.480Francis, aren't you glad you and I have each other?
00:44:14.760So we are currently experiencing a pandemic.
00:44:18.380Do you think that's going to see a reawaking of religion as we're confronted with our own mortality, as we're reminded that actually we are not these omnipotent beings?
00:44:28.120We don't have control over Mother Nature.
00:44:30.660We can't even control something as simple as a virus.
00:44:34.580Which religion is the question, isn't it?
00:44:37.400Well, Dr. Randy Thornhill, who studied the relationship between infectious disease and political belief, would predict that people will become more conservative as a consequence of this.
00:44:53.720You know, I think that when you're faced with a challenge, the issue of what constitutes the ideal and what constitutes deviation from that starts to loom large, right?
00:45:07.600And there's a reason for that, which is when you're subjected to a catastrophe, one of the logical things to do is to figure out where you went wrong so it didn't happen again.
00:45:18.120And to figure out where you went wrong is to do something like what Heather described doing with Brett, except internally, right?
00:45:27.720You posit an ideal in your imagination, and you make that into an avatar.
00:45:33.300That avatar becomes your judge, and you have a conversation with it, something like that.
00:45:38.240Or maybe that's all played out at the level of emotion, but that's not optimal.
00:45:43.260And then you call yourself on it, you say, well, maybe if I was a better person, this wouldn't happen to me.
00:45:49.220And, you know, sometimes that's not true.
00:45:52.620Sometimes you just got run over by a bus, driven by a maniac, right?
00:45:56.740It's just, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and tough luck for you.
00:46:00.520But by and large, if you take account of those things that you can take account of, the desire to not reproduce past errors that produced a catastrophe is a pretty useful approach.
00:46:15.800And we're very, we abstract these things up to a very, very high level.
00:46:20.020You know, that's one of the things that's very peculiar about human beings is, well, another thing that God is, is the voice of the omniscient collective within.
00:46:28.800And, you know, you might think, you might object, well, that's not God.
00:46:33.200It's like, well, these things are not as obvious as they look.
00:46:36.140I mean, the conscience, again, calling to you from within.
00:46:40.040I mean, here's, here's part of what that is.
00:46:42.920So imagine that you're subject to social pressure of all sorts, right?
00:46:46.560And, and you, you see, you see that social structure abstracted as well in literature and stories.
00:46:53.920And so that's like a concentrated social structure.
00:46:56.800And you're just completely bombarded by that information all the time.
00:47:01.540And you build an internal representation of the spirit that that characterizes.
00:47:07.100And it's what calls you out on your own misbehavior.
00:47:10.980But that spirit is something that has aggregated itself over God only knows how long.
00:47:17.600Since the dawn of consciousness itself.
00:47:33.200But when you tangle in the fact that consciousness itself generated that, at least in part, and that you have no idea whatsoever what consciousness is, then you start to skirt the edges of a profound metaphysics of, like the omniscient observer, pretty closely.
00:47:51.660And those things aren't easily rationalized away, not as far as I can tell.
00:47:58.320The deeper I've looked into it, the more peculiar and odd it becomes, especially when you start to think about consciousness itself.
00:48:07.120Heather, I want to give you the last word on this because I want to move on to something a little bit different.
00:48:11.980So is there anything you'd like to add?
00:48:13.240You know, hours worth, but maybe we move on because that was a great place to end, I think, unconsciousness.
00:48:20.240Well, listen, in addition to both of you being experts in your field and really making a significant contribution to the sort of abstract discussion, there's something else that we wanted to talk to you about, which I think is very relevant in the current climate.
00:48:33.560And, Jordan, I'm sure you'll argue that partly this is a product of technology.
00:48:37.820Both of you have made a stand at one point or another for something that you felt was important to make a stand about, whether it was principle, whether it was a line being crossed, whether it was an approach you just felt was not appropriate.
00:48:51.380And I think increasingly all of us in our society are confronted with the fact that there are certain things that are being violated on the one hand that we're unwilling to see violated and say nothing.
00:49:03.380And on the other hand, it's very easy at the same time to descend into the sort of social media driven desire to destroy people with facts and logic, quote unquote, and have these pointless, meaningless, superficial, trivial battles with each other on the time.
00:49:21.380And I was wondering, as you two people who've managed to be at the very, you know, in the very heart of this argument that is raging in Western society, yet conduct yourself with a lot of dignity.
00:49:35.140How do we, as individuals, how do we, as individuals, pick our battles so that we can distinguish between making a stand on something that's really important without finding that Nietzsche quote, the abyss is staring so much back into us that we become the monster that we're fighting?
00:49:58.000And there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer.
00:50:00.560Definitely pick your battles and don't spend time waiting in mucking about battles that you have decided that you're not going to fight in.
00:50:11.680You know, it used to be before social media was so ubiquitous that authors would say, you know, I only read a couple of reviews or I don't read reviews at all because getting that into my head is not helpful for my creative process.
00:50:25.040And I think there's a lot of truth in that, that we need to be able to hear our critics, certainly, you know, certainly as a scientist, you know, being open to ideas that challenge what it is that you currently think is true is absolutely paramount, right?
00:50:43.580So how do you walk that fine line where you can be open enough to hear reasonable challenge from good faith interlocutors and not find yourself just, you know, pelted with tomatoes hurled by, you know, sometimes real people, but often not even, right?
00:51:04.900So, you know, the fact that much of the chaos online doesn't even seem to be organic actually for me makes it easier to say, you know what, off, just not doing that because I'm not turning off people.
00:51:21.840I'm turning off some combination of people and chaos.
00:51:25.140And I suspect actually, Jordan, that you and I and Brett are effective in some ways in this realm for similar reasons, that even though you were a professor also for many, many years, it was, I think, your clinical psychology practice and your relationship with your patients that gave you such a deep sense of the humanity of people.
00:51:51.520And in Brett's, in my case, it was the particular institution we were at and the way that we were able to teach.
00:51:56.980And so it was our relationship with our students, wherein you see that so many people in their interactions with other human beings actually kind of maybe don't even regard the person on the other side as a full human.
00:52:09.080And, you know, we see the dehumanization certainly in, you know, Brexit era and Trump era and, you know, just each side picking a moment, a person aside and accusing, you know, fully half of the other, fully half of the population of not quite being real, honestly, you know, deplorable or reprehensible or incompetent or, you know, whatever it is.
00:52:36.280And I think that having been face-to-face with so many, you know, patients in your case, Jordan, and students in my case who I just came to know so well.
00:52:49.900You know, what I say is that teaching actually made me much less of a misanthrope than I used to be.
00:52:56.120I used to have almost no hope for humanity.
00:52:57.940And people who were superficially familiar with what happened at Evergreen would be like, are you kidding me?
00:53:04.700It was those Yahoo students who, you know, took Brett out and you were like, no, actually, the Yahoo students were indoctrinated by Yahoo faculty who were in charge there.
00:53:14.520That was the indoctrinated faculty and staff who did that.
00:53:23.180But none of our students behaved that way.
00:53:27.680Our students were loyal to a person because we created them, we created them, we treated them like whole human beings.
00:53:35.580And, you know, what I used to say at Evergreen was, my God, the bar for being an educator at the college level should be, you know, something real.
00:53:44.720And you fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students.
00:53:47.160And I'm shocked at how many people fail one or two or all of those.
00:53:52.280And so I do think that for those of us who do have something real to share, do know how to communicate it, and do fundamentally believe in the humanity of the people on the other side, that comes across.
00:54:04.140It's clear that we're real and human and actually, you know, fallible, but doing our best.
00:54:10.360And it probably also makes us more susceptible to garbage arguments from bad faith actors that come our way.
00:54:18.100And so it may be, for me, I say, you know what, I am willing to just, you know, shut the curtain a lot of the time, because I know that I engage truly and honestly and really with people when I know they're actually people.
00:54:32.080And I therefore don't have to with a lot of the social media stuff.
00:54:36.560And Jordan, how do you manage to keep your head when all around you are losing theirs?
00:54:45.800Well, it isn't self-evident that I did.
00:54:51.020You know, I mean, first of all, battles pick you much as you pick them, maybe more.
00:54:56.600You know, when I made the first video I made, I was playing around with YouTube.
00:55:54.800Well, you know, the spirit that animates our social institutions is a lot more in the nature of caring teacher with deviation than it is power-hungry tyrant.
00:57:28.900You just don't know the causal chain that led to your demise.
00:57:33.480So, you know, that plus my understanding, too, that one of the factors that sustained and generated totalitarian atrocity was the willingness of ordinary people to swallow things they knew to not be true.
00:57:51.960That was insisted upon by the sophisticated observers of totalitarian states that I found most influential.
00:57:59.040You swallow enough lies, your state becomes a monster.
00:58:03.480And so, you know, I've upbraided myself continually for bringing the chaos of the world into my nice, tight, tidy little family.
00:58:44.840I mean, you know that I was born in the Soviet Union and I've seen the process of whereby people are having to make those decisions every day.
00:58:52.460And actually, that's very much the reason we asked you both this question, because you are both remarkable people in your own right.
00:58:59.580And you've, as you say, you've suffered terribly, both of you, for what you took a stand on.
00:59:05.800But also, people would argue you've been rewarded, and I would argue you've had both, right?
00:59:09.500You've been punished and rewarded at the same time.
00:59:12.640But there are a lot of people who, maybe they're wrong, but they do feel, you know, we get the messages every day.
00:59:18.500I'm sure you get heaps of messages every day from people saying, look, you know, I hate the fact that my kids are being indoctrinated at school, but I also want to be able to feed them.
00:59:28.960And if I lose my job speaking out, then, okay, great, they're not being indoctrinated anymore.
00:59:33.360Or maybe they still are, but I'm also not able to feed them anymore.
00:59:36.620How do ordinary people who are not college professors, let's say, who may not become a YouTube host or whatever it is,
00:59:45.840who maybe don't feel that they want to be a public person as a result of making some kind of stand, how do they square those two conflicting desires, Heather?
01:00:01.560I'm sure, I'm sure that all of our inboxes look similar in this regard, and it's heartbreaking.
01:00:07.960And I do, when Evergreen was actively blowing up, I was saying, you know, I completely understand why all of the people who are coming to us privately to say,
01:00:24.220hey, I see what's going on, and I support you, but I can't have your back publicly.
01:00:30.880I felt very generous to them then, and I feel less generous to them now.
01:00:36.720And I actually am a little surprised that that's the direction it's gone.
01:00:40.280What is clear is if there is a fever pitch, if there is a moment, then you need a critical mass of people to stand up and you can't stop it.
01:00:50.120I don't know what the equivalent of that is when there's not a precipitating event, right?
01:00:56.140Because most of social media is just this slow burn, and I don't know what it would mean to stand up on mass there.
01:01:03.640I don't think there is any virtual equivalent in that slow burn space.
01:01:08.560But when there is an event and someone is, you know, someone's the witch, when someone's a witch, and there are 30% of people in the organization who are privately saying, oh, my God, this is really dangerous and bad.
01:01:23.200And half of them are saying to the would-be witch, I know you're not a witch, but I can't stand up.
01:01:28.560If that 15%, you know, and I'm making up numbers here, but, you know, if some substantial fraction, substantial minority of people can actually see what's going on, and I think that's actually a conservative estimate, and then even 50% of those people said, this will not stand, not in my name, no, then those events can get turned back.
01:01:51.180And, you know, I don't, in the particular case of my story, I don't know that the institution was savable, even if 15% of the faculty and staff had gone public with, you know, and we know that at least that number of people actually saw what was going on and didn't approve.
01:02:10.300But in some cases, systems aren't that far gone, and they would be savable, and it requires courage.
01:02:19.120And that wasn't easy for me to feel back when we were losing two tenured positions, and that was all we knew.
01:02:27.140And it feels easy to, you know, it may feel like it's easy for me to say now with the hindsight of four years and, you know, effectively being funded by the crowd.
01:02:38.120And it's, you know, it's both less security and vastly more security.
01:02:44.080Most people won't end up in, you know, being able to transition in that way, nor will they want to, exactly as you said, Constantine.
01:02:50.520So how can you encourage people to stand up in defense of the system that they are in, you know, the functionality of the institution that they're at,
01:03:00.320such that it can continue on without being captured, without any more witch hunts?
01:03:04.440You know, that's the piece of it that I don't exactly know.
01:03:08.960No, it has to be something like, don't lie.
01:03:13.420You know, like, if you're being called upon to lie, or to bury your head in the sand, well, where's that going to end?
01:04:00.500Yeah, well, it's high risk, high reward, fine.
01:04:02.560But I would have settled for much less reward and much less risk.
01:04:06.600So, and I was perfectly happy with that.
01:04:08.840Now, I'm not ungrateful for what I've accrued in the meantime, but it's not an improvement, that's for sure.
01:04:15.300And I wouldn't lecture people about, you know, their moral obligation, because you've pointed out the problem.
01:04:22.080It's the proximal cost and the distal reward, right?
01:04:25.620You know, you see a system degenerating, and you're going to say something, and the cost to you is going to be bloody high.
01:04:31.920And that impact is going to be perhaps not even measurable.
01:04:35.580But then you run into the problem that Heather just described, which is, well, if 70% of you don't like what's going on, and you don't say anything, then, you know, where is it going to end?
01:04:46.260And people have to make those moral decisions for themselves.
01:04:49.380The only thing that I know, perhaps, is that lying doesn't seem like a good idea.
01:04:55.280And being forced to, particularly, you know, this is where I took my stand.
01:05:00.500I'm not saying other things that other people want me to say.
01:06:39.080I mean, if you look at the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament, that's just one story after another of society degenerating towards a tyrannical state and a prophetic voice emerging, you know, representative of God in some abstract sense, saying,
01:06:53.560be careful, you're deviating from the proper path.
01:06:57.580And if you don't think there are going to be consequences, you're just not paying enough attention.
01:07:03.460Well, you know, how do you distinguish a false prophet from a true prophet?
01:07:07.440Maybe the false prophet tells you what you want to hear.
01:07:09.700I guess I would just add to that, that I think physical courage and mental courage are related, that there's a reason that we use one word for both,
01:07:18.680and that in the modern world, there is far less opportunity to manifest physical courage or to know what it would be like.
01:07:26.680And, you know, it's been much discussed, and I agree with the sense that, you know, the lack of war is both beautiful and, in some ways, demasculinizing for society, not having that as even a possibility on the horizon.
01:07:45.600And, you know, there's plenty of things that girls and women do as well that requires physical courage, but it tends to look different.
01:07:53.200And in our disembodied behind screens, especially for the last, you know, especially during COVID era, just, you know, a-physical lives,
01:08:03.900without having any sense of what physical courage might be or what physical risk might be, of course we're now also more confused about mental courage.
01:08:12.900And so, you know, being told things like silence is violence and also speech is violence.
01:08:18.260So, you know, the whole thing just falls apart very quickly.
01:08:23.240Before we go to our break and the Q&A, Jordan, I just want to come back to you on this because I'm not satisfied with the conversation we've had so far,
01:08:30.800and that's maybe because there is no answer, but I just feel like I've had so many conversations with people where I've said exactly the same thing to them.
01:15:40.720I apologize to both of you for those cringy ads, but it's our brand.
01:15:47.660Jordan, this is one for you, I think, but I'm sure, Heather, you'll have something to say on this as well.
01:15:51.900Rob Evans from Australia, I think, says, it seems to me that the descent of the West into Marxism stroke communism is inevitable at this point.
01:16:00.460Unfortunately, particularly with the COVID pandemic, he says, being used to accelerate it.
01:16:04.860What can we do about this and how can we reverse it if we can?
01:18:25.480It's not an operational answer, but I would go back to my answer from before and say,
01:18:30.040be assured that if you are seeing this, either as a parent or as a teacher or staff or administrator at some school that you are affiliated with,
01:18:40.040you are not the only one, and you're not the only one who's concerned.
01:18:44.640I feel certain, and it's impossible to do the numbers from where I'm sitting,
01:18:50.240but I feel certain that it's never just one person, and it's often a significant minority,
01:18:55.200and sometimes it's actually a majority of people at an institution who don't like what's happening
01:19:01.140are putting their head down and just trying to do what they perceive as their job
01:19:05.800or just trying to get their kids to the school because they don't feel like they can make trouble,
01:19:12.920They really cannot tolerate what is happening, and find each other.
01:19:18.880Figure out some way to find each other, and this is one of the few places where I would say,
01:19:22.640I am with you, Jordan, on the hyper-novel technology being a big part of the crisis that we're living through right now,
01:19:29.660and that's the thing that makes this different from Nixon era.
01:19:33.000It's just not like that because they didn't have social media.
01:19:37.200But one of the things that our hyper-connected, hyper-novel technology allows us to do is potentially find people
01:19:44.340and talk privately and establish some rapport and figure out what to do.
01:19:52.000And I think with regard to in the schools, know that there are many of us out here who see it and are doing what we can with bigger platforms,
01:20:02.840but figure out who it is, who else, where you are, can actually see this as well.
01:20:09.760And, you know, just start almost every, and this is not about CRT in schools, but like when I just engaged,
01:20:15.680I'm here in Portland, Oregon, which is sort of like the epicenter of ridiculous in a lot of ways.
01:21:43.180And I got involved in political structures in Canada a bit when I was younger.
01:21:46.800And they're so starving for people's participation that it's beyond belief.
01:21:51.420And so you can make an effect locally in your community or in your state or province or nationally, for that matter, if you want to put in the time.
01:22:00.540So those institutions, well, that's what we have.
01:22:04.040And so unless you want to generate new institutions, you could try using those.
01:22:08.080And people think they won't get listened to.
01:22:40.460So the next question is from the rather charmingly named Toey Redback.
01:22:48.820It's a dreadful name, but it's a good question.
01:22:50.520Do our big brains have a downside that we overthink things and impose behavior contradictory to our nature, e.g. veganism and gender, et cetera?
01:23:01.860So over to you, Heather, and then we'll go to Jordan with that one.
01:23:05.980I mean, of course, there's a tradeoff there.
01:23:08.920And just at the most maybe banal level, they're really expensive to run.
01:23:14.800You know, our brains are the most expensive organ in the body to run.
01:23:18.040And, you know, once we started growing our brains big, we needed more food, and then we needed to spend more time getting food, and then we needed to spend time figuring out new technologies in order to get our food to be more accessible to us.
01:23:33.300And you get a sort of cascade of events that is really hard to stop at the point that you start going down the we're going to solve this intellectually road.
01:23:46.080On the other hand, you know, we don't tend to solve things with brute force.
01:23:51.380We're not the brawniest ape or primate or mammal.
01:24:03.460Can we figure out how to, I mean, I feel like a broken record here, but, you know, can we return ourselves to something of an integrated, coherent whole?
01:24:13.780And remember that we are actually fully embodied beings with emotion, in addition, you know, fully embodied with emotion and not just analysis and intellect.
01:24:24.260It's not just the logic and the words and the, you know, typing furiously while hunched over your phone, right?
01:24:30.580It's, you know, we're here in these bodies, going out into nature, feeling all of our senses and having a sense of awe sometimes, of love, of anger, of spite even.
01:24:42.880You know, all of these are part of what it is to be human.
01:24:45.620And it is, I think, again, a failure that is best described as reductionist to say that's, you know, our big brains is what we are.
01:25:38.200And it might be a fatal difference in some sense.
01:25:40.740I mean, if you look at religious stories like the story of Adam and Eve, you know, when our eyes were opened, we discovered that we were going to die.
01:27:33.180Particularly, I think it's more likely to be on the political right.
01:27:36.260The introduction of the welfare state in the United States is what fueled the breakdown of the family.
01:27:44.000Do either of you have any strong feelings or thoughts on that issue?
01:27:46.940Well, as a conservative, in some sense, which I think I became, at least in part because I was a social scientist and learned about the law of unintended consequences, is that you mess with complex functional systems at your peril.
01:28:04.640And if you think that your well-meaning intervention is going to have the positive effect that you think it will, and only that effect, you're blinded by your own ignorance of your ignorance.
01:28:16.300It's a really profound form of ignorance.
01:28:18.860And so I think there were more factors driving the breakdown of the family.
01:28:25.120And we should also point out, it's like, well, what do you mean by the breakdown of the family?
01:28:28.740If you lived in the 1900s or the 1800s, the late 1800s, let's say, the probability that you were going to lose a parent before the age of 10, before you were at the age of 10, was pretty damn high.
01:28:41.900And so the intact two-parent family with kids that lived and parents that lived, you know, for a substantial amount of time is a relatively novel and modern phenomenon.
01:28:54.460Certainly, it's a 20th century phenomenon, as far as we can tell.
01:28:57.740But, Jordan, I would argue that, and obviously I wouldn't argue with you about it, because you're actually an expert on this, but psychologically, I would imagine the impact of losing a parent to a natural cause like disease or whatever is different to the experience of feeling that your dad, let's say, walked out on you before you've even been born.
01:29:19.020Well, look, you can decompose that in a lot of ways.
01:29:21.820You know, I don't know if you can make a blanket case that it's worse to have a father who leaves or one that dies.
01:29:30.160There is less of a sense of perhaps the risk of feeling that it's your fault or that something could have been done about it, arguably.
01:29:37.940But putting that aside, like, I think if you look at the data on the development of children, the evidence that children who have intact two-sex, two-parent families do better is overwhelming.
01:29:52.680Now, I don't think we know enough to specify the fact that it has to be two sex, like, you know, a male and a female.
01:30:01.160I suspect that that's the case for a variety of complex reasons, but that doesn't mean that two people of the same sex couldn't make a good go of it.
01:30:08.740It also doesn't mean that single parents can't make a go of it.
01:30:12.560But on aggregate, it's better to have a mother and a father.
01:30:16.340And I think the reasons for that are self-evident, actually.
01:30:19.480It's like, well, because who are you going to model your masculinity from if you're a boy and your femininity from if you're a girl?
01:30:27.220You'll get echoes of that in the same-sex parent, but it's not enough for creatures that are as developmentally complex as us.
01:30:35.960And so it's kind of stunning to me that this is a discussion that we actually have to have.
01:30:41.820It's like, well, and especially when you also consider something we didn't talk about, relationship to the patriarchal structure of the nuclear family.
01:30:50.480It's like, I don't know how twisted you have to be to think that a man's commitment long-term to monogamy and child-raising over multiple decades is an expression of his desire for arbitrary patriarchal power.
01:31:56.180And yet, to oppose them means that there's something wrong with you ethically and politically.
01:32:01.720I just can't see how you can make a case that, on aggregate, a family without a father and a mother is better than or equal to a family that has both.
01:32:24.520I've never heard a promiscuous mating system identified as being like mosquitoes before Jordan, so that made me laugh.
01:32:33.080The one thing that I would add, and I basically agree with what you've said here, is that I think I don't see a reason to expect.
01:32:42.280I think that, you know, I agree with what you said, that all else being equal, two parents is better than one, and two parents of opposite sex is going to provide more diverse input to the developing child.
01:32:57.420And therefore, if you have a loving relationship between two women or between two men who are raising children, then, you know, one thing in their favor is they had to really, really want those children, whereas many heterosexual parents end up parents without necessarily wanting kids, right?
01:33:17.160You can happen into parenthood being hetero, and you can't if you're homosexual.
01:33:22.180But I think it's more important if you're raising children as a homosexual couple of either sex to make sure that you have adults around of the sex that you are not, so that they are providing some kind of model for your children of what it is to be the other sex.
01:33:41.260And that's, you know, this is not some sort of a bioessentialist imagining that, like, all men are like this and all women are like this, but that there are different ways of doing things.
01:33:50.740You know, even down to, on average, women being more agreeable than men, and, you know, just seeing what that looks like in real time, like, the more exposure to the more diverse kinds of people you give your children, the more likely they are to be able to wade through life later on.
01:34:10.420And especially if your, you know, if their natal home only has men or only has women, make sure you introduce them to some women or men.
01:34:31.960Well, it's hard to say exactly, but it's partly because they, their exposure to men from an early age allows them to read the social situations more carefully, more accurately.
01:35:07.200So, you know, that might be part of it to begin with, but it seems to be longer lasting than that.
01:35:12.380I mean, it's not so preposterous to claim that you're more likely to deal with people that you understand more deeply, deal, you know, effectively with people that you understand more, more deeply.
01:35:25.220I do, I think, look, I do think it's a, it's an indication of how confused we are by how much change is occurring, that all these things have become open to question.
01:35:37.320It might also be the case that, you know, that's a consequence of, well, a university education that isn't sufficiently cognizant of the debt that it owes to the past.
01:35:48.780Yeah, no, and I guess actually picking up on something that you said earlier with regard to what's going on at universities, I think, you know, you indicated that people who are concerned about their school boards could fill those spots because people are hungry, like the political environment is hungry for people at that level.
01:36:11.420And I think this is part of what happened in higher ed, that no one who didn't have to went and, you know, pursued governance.
01:36:19.560You know, we're all expected, all us academics are expected to do a certain amount of governance.
01:36:22.780But if you were one of the scientists with big grants, you'd normally got an exemption.
01:36:27.240Or if you, you know, if you otherwise had a lot going on, that was how the university basically paid you.
01:36:33.740Like, you don't have to do the governance.
01:36:35.260So who was left in all the governance spots?
01:36:39.160The people who were otherwise uninterested or incapable of bringing new ideas to the university and, frankly, to some degree, who were driven to bring ideology in.
01:36:52.500And so, you know, we absolutely need people who are creative and analytical and logical and compassionate and actually know something and know how to communicate it and believe in the humanity of other people to be in positions on school boards and in governance.
01:37:05.320And, you know, the work that doesn't feel like almost anyone's highest and best use, but that we need real good people in those positions.
01:37:15.700And the next question is by another awful name.
01:38:11.780Women, both, you know, to go back to what I was saying, you know, right at the beginning of our time together today,
01:38:17.260women being more likely to engage through covert competitive means than men with their overt competitive means,
01:38:25.200and also being more likely to be agreeable, which is related but not the same thing,
01:38:31.820are, you know, and a third thing, more likely to have their entire world wrapped up in their social universe,
01:38:39.480as opposed to men who are more likely to also, say, have a shop, be tinkering, like have something else going on.
01:38:45.640And all of those things, I think, make women more susceptible to groupthink, to social pressure,
01:38:55.240and to actually, at the point that they have adopted some new ideology, or just even just a piece of it,
01:39:02.680to feeling compelled to spread it to others.
01:39:06.820And I don't, I wouldn't actually put it, I feel like mama bear, to the degree that that's something that we can all immediately grok what that means,
01:39:16.420is one of the best, and frankly, I don't think capturable pieces of womanhood.
01:39:25.560That, you know, protection of your children, and of course fathers do this too,
01:39:29.300but protection of your children at all costs is actually what I think we need to be finding.
01:39:37.120I was just actually talking with Brett about this last night.
01:39:39.520Like, we need to get the mothers to discover what it is that is being done to the children.
01:39:44.520And once the mothers stand up, once the mothers stand up and say, actually, no, you don't get my kids.