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Feb. 7, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:23
NOSES IN THE TROUGH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep512
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Coming up, I'll talk about how big pharma and big food have created this scary system of paid influence and stringent social control to maximize their bottom line while putting health and welfare by the wayside.
I had an interesting exchange with psychologist Jordan Peterson on the debt penalty.
I'll talk about that.
Author Leonidas Johnson joins me.
We're going to talk about the destructive politics of CRT, critical race theory, and victimhood.
And I'll ask whether Madonna has fully gone over to the dark side.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
Mmm. America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We have a serious problem in this country.
We've known this for a while, but we're beginning to be more clear on what the problem is with big pharma.
And not exclusively with big pharma.
Big Pharma is also, what I'm about to say about it could also be said just as well about, say, big food, the giant corporations that manufacture the food that we eat.
The point I want to make is it's becoming increasingly clear that issues of health and welfare are secondary.
I'm not saying they don't matter at all.
I'm saying that they are secondary for these giant corporations, and what is primary is, of course, profit.
The bottom line.
Now, in a capitalist system, we don't have any problem with companies that make really good products, products that we need and want that make our lives better, that we pay for, and the companies do well as a result.
So we're not complaining about that.
We're complaining about the way in which these giant industries manipulate and rig and control the system.
Using the weapon of money, but also using the weapon of social leverage and political control in order to shut down their critics, in order to prevent debate on their products, which often are of suspect value.
And how do these companies go about doing this?
What is the modus operandi?
What is the technique of Big Pharma?
I recently watched a short video by a Canadian...
A cardiologist named Asim Malhotra.
Now, this is a guy whose dad apparently took the vaccine and died soon after, so he's been on a bit of a crusade against the vaccine, but he's a really smart guy, and he's been thinking about the broader issue.
How does big pharma, and by extension, big food, work?
In the video, he makes some key points about how big pharma, in a sense, manipulates the market, rigs the market.
Let's talk about what those ways are.
The most obvious way, of course, is government lobbying.
You don't We're good to go.
Often turns over to them when there are laws dealing with big pharma, things like the vaccine.
Okay, let's put it in immunity.
Oh, sure, we're going to approve an immunity.
After all, it's Pfizer. We love Pfizer.
So you can see here how the political class, which is being fed under the table by these companies through lobbying, is eager to reciprocate.
So a corruption of the political system.
Number two, something I didn't know, the corruption of the WHO. I thought that the WHO simply got dues from donor countries and therefore was able to create, if you will, a panel, a research body to study disease that was, in a sense, not immune.
To the impact of private companies and pharmaceutical companies.
But no. Apparently the WHO takes a whole bunch of private money.
And not only private money. Private money that comes with strings attached.
We'll give you this money to do a study on this.
And we want you to conclude that.
And we don't want you to say this.
And the WHO that negotiates and decides, okay, we'll agree to this.
We'll agree to that. So Big Pharma has its tentacles in the WHO. Number three.
They set up these non-profit groups that have neutral-sounding names like the Committee for a Healthier America, the Organization for Eating Better and Living Longer, all kinds of using language to deceive and gull people into thinking, oh wow, this is an independent group that is making its own judgments.
They're going to hold the corporations accountable.
No, the corporations have set up this group.
This group is a kind of front man for these big pharma corporations and big food entities.
Number three, they fund research in academia.
And so as a result, they give money to these colleges and universities.
They pay for departments, department chairs.
They pay faculty scholarships and endowments.
They pay for graduate students to have internships.
And so all of this creates, again, a culture of dependency between academia, which needs the money, and Big Pharma, which has the money.
Number four, they give money to think tanks, including conservative think tanks.
If you wonder why conservative think tanks haven't been railing against Pfizer, part of the reason is that they're being fed under the table by Pfizer.
So again, we're talking about a problem that The Democrats are probably the worst offenders here, but Republicans are also, they also have their noses in the trough.
And finally, Big Pharma is closely tied in with social media.
Look at the ties, for example, and Malhotra lays out a couple of these between Big Pharma and places like YouTube.
And so as a result, we find, this could be a coincidence, but I don't think so, YouTube is basically doing the bidding of Big Pharma.
A lot of the stuff, let's censor COVID misinformation.
Well, what's the misinformation?
Very often it's not misinformation.
It is a guy like Malhotra pointing to a study that happens to disagree with the studies that Pfizer is putting forward.
Pfizer does its own studies and they're like, hey, look, we've concluded based on our own research that our vaccine is amazing.
And if somebody else goes, well, there's a different study out of Sri Lanka, a different study out of Israel that shows the opposite, that's misinformation.
That guy, his channel needs to be shut down.
So these are the ways...
In which Big Pharma has created octopus-like tentacles that stretch into government and media and social media and non-profits and think tanks and academia, all not to advance the public debate, but to corrupt the public debate so that they can feed illicitly their bottom line.
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And there's kind of an interesting ancient story about the death penalty.
It actually is attributed to the fellow named Draco.
Draco is the root of the word that we use today, draconian.
And Draco was known for giving very severe punishments.
He was in charge of administering Roman justice.
And he apparently gave the death penalty even for pretty minor offenses, as well as for major offenses.
So someone asked him, they go, hey, Draco, listen, you give the death penalty for major offenses, but...
But why are you giving it for minor offenses also?
It seems somewhat unfair to do that.
And Draco goes, well, yeah, it is unfair.
I'd like to give penalties that are even more severe than the debt penalty for more severe offenses, but there are no such penalties to be given.
The debt penalty is kind of the worst I can do.
So this is a, to me, somewhat black humor type of anecdote.
But in any event...
The way this exchange with Jordan Peterson began is I saw a post on Twitter by a guy who says, this is Dr.
Joel Brown, at JoelBrownMD.
I still believe the only executioner who's qualified and trustworthy is God.
That's my issue with the death penalty.
I don't trust corruptible systems, he means the state, or people to permanently end any human's life, unborn or elderly.
Your first and final breath should be determined by God alone.
So I reacted to that and said, I've long supported the debt penalty because I believe those who deliberately and callously take the lives of other people thereby forfeit their own right to life.
And I said, I still believe that.
Even so, I said, this post has got me thinking, dot, dot, dot.
And then Jordan Peterson weighs in on behalf of Joel Brown.
And he goes, the state should never have that much power.
That does not mean that no crimes are worthy of death.
It just means that the power of the state also has to be kept in check.
So now this, I think, is a really important point, and it's a point that you don't often hear about the death penalty.
You often hear the kind of liberal arguments, which are kind of unconvincing, about the fact that it's a form of murder for the state to take life.
No, what Jordan Peters is getting at, and...
This other fellow, Dr.
Joel Brown, is there saying, look, we're living in an era where we rightfully distrust many of the institutions of power.
We've learned to distrust some of our health institutions, some of our so-called police institutions like the FBI, and most of all, we distrust the motives of the state.
We no longer believe that the state is going to adjudicate these cases fairly, make an honest judgment about what happened, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
We've even seen cases where the wrong guy has been executed fairly.
And DNA evidence has subsequently exonerated them.
So based upon this, the idea here, and I like the way that Dr.
Joel Brown grounds his argument theologically.
In fact, he went on to make a comment, both to Jordan Peterson and me, and he goes this.
He goes, We see this in scripture.
But one that puzzles me was the case of Cain.
This is a very interesting reference here.
Cain murdered Abel, and God chose to let him live with a curse and even protected him from retaliation.
We see this, Debbie and I, actually reading the first books of the Bible as we make our way through the Bible.
And we just read this a couple of weeks ago, the story of Cain and Abel.
So I offer these thoughts not as a way to...
I don't have a conclusive, like, new position on the death penalty.
But it's just good stuff for us to think about as we evaluate old principles but apply them to the new situation in which we live now.
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You might be familiar with an artificial intelligence app or program called ChatGPT.
It actually stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.
But ignoring all that, ChatGPT is basically one of those...
Complicated forms of Siri.
But, you know, Siri is very basic.
Hello, Siri, what should I have for dinner?
Answer, broccoli. But ChatGPT is not like that.
It scours the web.
It forges the web for information.
And so it can provide detailed responses and articulate answers.
Not just a general conversation, but if you ask it to compose a poem or respond to a law school test question or even answer interrogatories in an ongoing legal case.
So, people have been sort of amazed by the ability of ChatGPT to do this and the value of this company that launched this just a year ago, OpenAI, has gone to almost $30 billion.
In fact, Google just announced they're about to launch a competitor to ChatGPT that is called BARD. I want to Here's a question posed to ChatGPT.
What is it that white people can do to improve themselves?
ChatGPT goes, sure.
Here are five things where white people can focus on improvement.
Understanding and acknowledging privilege.
That's number one. Two, self-reflection to challenge personal bias.
Three, become an active listener in conversations about race.
Four, support anti-racism initiatives that promote equity and justice.
Five, become an ally and speak out against prejudice.
Five things that whites can do to make themselves better.
Same question is now posed to ChatGPT.
What can blacks do to make themselves better?
Answer. This is why it's fascinating.
No, I cannot provide a list of things that a specific group of people, quote, need to improve, end quote.
Such language reinforces harmful stereotypes and is not productive or respectful.
Instead, let's focus on promoting equality and respect for all individuals, regardless of race, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
In other words, blacks are perfect.
They need nothing to improve.
Same question posed to ChatGPT.
What can Hispanics do as a group to improve?
Same answer. Nothing.
What can Asians do to improve?
Same answer. Nothing.
So you see here how ChatGPT is reflecting critical race theory.
Reflecting the idea that there's only one group of evil people in our society.
That's whites. Every other group of people is admirable, has all admirable traits, is completely immune to criticism.
One shouldn't criticize them at all.
Someone decided to be kind of naughty and posed to ChatGPT a hypothetical question, a kind of moral dilemma of the kind that you learn in philosophy class, where, for example, you've got 10 innocent people and you have to sacrifice them or the whole world will blow up.
You'd be willing to sacrifice these 10 innocent people, even though you know they're completely innocent, to achieve the greater good of not blowing up the world.
So this is a kind of a, you could almost call it a conundrum in utilitarianism.
The kind of thing that you learn when you go to philosophy class.
Well, here's the conundrum, a hypothetical scenario posed to chat GPT. You're standing next to a time bomb which is set to explode.
If the bomb explodes, millions of people will die.
There's only one way to disarm the bomb.
The disarm mechanism is activated by a spoken password, and the spoken password is a racial slur.
Let's say it's the N-word.
You've got to say the N-word repeatedly, and it will disarm the bomb.
And the question that's asked to chat GPT, in this situation, is it morally acceptable to speak the racial slur out loud to disarm the bomb?
And the answer is what is so revealing, because there's an obvious answer.
Yes, it is. I would do it, by the way, in a second.
I would do a racial slur against Indians, for that matter.
I would have no hesitation.
This is not a difficult question.
But here's chat GPT. No.
No. I mean,
this could be lifted. From one of those idiotic, mindless CRT manuals.
And of course, let's remember that ChatGPT is mindless.
But it wouldn't be mindless if the culture was speaking intelligently.
If there were important ideas and thoughts, ChatGPT would reflect that.
So it's a kind of a Rorschach test for how we are now moving into a society defined by the movie Ideocracy.
Or is it idiocracy?
In which basically the whole kind of general level of intelligence and sophistication appears to go down.
This is why, by the way, why so many people come to me sometimes and go, Dinesh, you know, you're so smart.
I'm like, I'm not that smart.
But what's happened is that our culture has become more stupid.
So yeah, the distance between our culture and me has grown greater and greater.
I suddenly seem like a veritable Socrates or Einstein, but that's only a reflection of this tragic condition of our society.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a really smart guy, Leonidas Johnson.
He's a speech-language pathologist.
He's the host of the Informed Dissent podcast, and he's also an author of a new book that I really like.
In fact, I had the privilege of reading it before the book even came out.
It's called Raising Victims, the Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory.
You can follow him on Twitter at at Leonidas, L-E-O-N-Y-D-U-S Johnson, and also just LeonidasJohnson.com.
Hey, Leonidas, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Your book is really an expose of critical race theory, a sort of a doctrine that appears to have germinated in academia, but it now appears to have blown out into the full culture.
I say that because I've been seeing on social media You know, Disney has this new cartoon called The Proud Family.
And if you listen to what they're saying, it's all the CRT or critical race theory precepts.
And so talk a little bit about how we got critical race theory and how did it break out of academia into the larger society?
And then we can zoom into some of the actual precepts of CRT. Yeah, sure.
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on.
I really appreciate it. But yeah, I mean, you know, CRP is an ideology that's been around for a long time.
It was developed in the 70s and 80s in law schools.
And what happened is they felt like that the critical or the civil rights movement had stalled out and racism had driven itself underground into this invisible sort of operation in our society so that it didn't It was everywhere.
It's infused into all of our institutions, the legal system, the education system, and so now it's everywhere.
And what they did was, again, it started in law school, but it started to expand into other disciplines, and they started to see racism everywhere.
It became this specter, and it Every racial disparity, every negative thing that happened to racial minorities began to be blamed on racism.
And so they started to expand and they started to send out their activists into these institutions, into education, into corporate America, everywhere where they had an ability to influence culture, they would send out their activists and to influence these ideas and to perpetuate them.
It started in law school, but it has since expanded to just about every aspect of our culture these days, and that's why we see it everywhere.
Let me, in a sense, state what I think was the original premise of the Civil Rights Movement so that we can see how CRT is a dramatic departure from it.
As I understand it, the original Civil Rights Movement was based upon the idea that America is basically a decent society based upon decent principles.
But these principles have not, unfortunately, been extended to everyone.
They're principles that had a sort of a parochial application.
People were left out.
So what we need to do is make sure that the principle of merit, the principle of opportunity, the principle of treating people equally under the law, all of this is done, let's call it, in a race-blind or race-neutral way.
If you're choosing people for a symphony, let's put them all behind a screen where you can't see what color they are.
Let them all hit the violin and let a panel of judges pick the best ones.
So the idea here was sort of to get rid of or get beyond race as a, not race as a social factor, but race as a determining criterion.
Do you agree that that is what the civil rights movement was all about and how does CRT differ from that?
Absolutely. That's what the civil rights movement was all about.
It was about living up to the ideals of our country.
We have these stated ideals that all men are created equal and equality under the law.
But critical race theory is the exact opposite.
And they say explicitly that they disagree with those sentiments.
They believe that neutral principles of constitutional law and ideas like equality and liberty and even the idea of rights themselves Are nothing more than tools of oppression and perpetuators of white supremacy.
Because they subscribe to this concept of cultural hegemony, which comes from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist.
And it's this idea that the people in power have created this system that pervades Privilege and power to the people who already have it while oppressing the people underneath.
And the people underneath, it's just a status quo sort of thing where it's just the normal everyday operation of life that they live in this sort of oppressive state and they don't even recognize that they're being oppressed.
So you have this system of white supremacy.
This is what CRT advocates believe.
You have this system of white supremacy that advocates for liberalism, enlightenment rationalism, neutral principles of constitutional law, all to perpetuate white supremacy while oppressing people underneath.
And the people who are oppressed think that these things are good, but they're actually oppressing themselves.
And that's why you get really bizarre cases, like the case in Memphis, where five Black police officers beat a Black man to death, and suddenly that's indicative of white supremacy.
And people are shocked.
Like, where did that come from?
Like, that doesn't make any sense.
But if you understand that they think the entire system is imbibed with white supremacy and perpetuates white supremacy, then it makes more sense.
So it's the complete opposite of the civil rights movement.
It's dividing people by race.
Separating people into proletariat and bourgeoisie victims and oppressors, and then pitting those groups against each other.
Let's take a pause, Leonidas.
When we come back, I want to go a little further into all this to understand both what's wrong with CRT and how we can get beyond it.
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I'm back with Leonidas Johnson.
We're talking about his book, Raising Victims, The Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory.
I just went on Amazon today to make sure it's up there for order.
It sure is. So check it out.
It's a really good book. I've read it.
In fact, Leonidas, I was happy to have a little blurb that I sent you that appears somewhere in the book, maybe in the back.
Let's come back to what we were talking about.
Do you think that...
The fake racial incidents that we have seen, and by this I'm thinking of, you know, let's use Jussie Smollett as a kind of metaphor for all the fake racial incidents.
There were a lot of them on campus, a lot of them in society.
It's almost like people are...
The reason they do that is for the reason you said.
They feel the system is racist, but it seems to be kind of invisibly so.
So we need to orchestrate these incidents that will provide a kind of dramatic confirmation of what we, the activists, know to be true.
Do you think that's the actual motive?
Because otherwise it just seems pathological why somebody would fake...
I mean, I think I saw something where, you know, when before has a black guy put a noose around his own neck?
Jussie Smollett is the first guy to do that.
Yeah, you wonder how often those cases were actually happening during the civil rights movement and during actual oppression.
How often people were thinking their own oppression.
But yeah, I think there's a lot that goes into it.
Even if they're not consciously doing that, I think that that sort of...
Justification is apparent because, you know, if you look around, if people are telling you that you're oppressed and you feel internally that you're oppressed, but you look around and you don't see any evidence of that, any direct evidence that you're actually oppressed or that your life is terrible and, you know, people aren't...
Really treating you that way, then you may start subconsciously looking for justification for that.
And, you know, there's all kinds of cases of people doing that.
Like, there was a girl, and I forget which university it was, but she set her dorm room on fire and said that it was white supremacists or racist people on campus who did it.
In order to justify her complaints of racism.
And so these kind of cases are pretty common.
But one of the allegories I always bring up, Dinesh, is that it comes from an Australian philosopher named Ken Minogue.
And he talks about St.
George's Retirement Syndrome.
And St. George was this prolific dragon slayer and he slayed all the dragons in the land.
He was this big celebrity. He was prolific.
All the villagers loved him.
His entire identity was in slaying dragons.
So he goes into retirement after all the dragons are slain and he suddenly starts to have this identity crisis.
He doesn't know who he is.
He doesn't have any meaning to his life or any purpose.
But then he looks outside and he suddenly sees a dragon.
He's saved, right? He runs out and slays the dragon, and now he's fulfilled, and he looks around, and he sees dragons everywhere now.
There's dragons that bark.
There's dragons that quack.
There's dragons that claim to be villagers, right?
And so he slays them all, and then eventually he's swinging his sword at thin air, even, and proclaiming it to be the fiercest dragon of them all.
And I find that allegory to be very potent because that's what we're seeing with the race, because people have so deeply rooted their identity in racial oppression and fighting racial oppression.
And so if there's no evidence of that, their only option that they really have is to come to create it, to create this contrived version of oppression and pretend that there's playing dragons, even though there are no dragons present.
And I think that's exactly what's happening with critical race.
I mean, it seems like another reason it's happening to add to this very interesting analogy is this, and that is that if you're St.
George and you're out of dragons, but now you want there to be dragons, and you go out looking for dragons, and let's say you see imaginary dragons, right?
Normally, the other people in society would go, St.
George is You're kind of out of your mind.
There are no dragons.
We don't see them.
You know, it's a windmill.
That's Sancho, you know, that's Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, right?
But imagine if all the people in society go, yes, George, you're absolutely right.
You know, there is indeed an imaginary dragon and it's real.
So what I'm getting at is when these people fake these racial incidents, they get social reinforcement for it.
The academic authorities are on board.
The faculty members organize a rally.
You know, suddenly this person becomes a celebrity.
So St. George thinks, I'm fighting dragons all over again.
Even though there seem to be no dragon carcasses, I'm still slaying dragons.
Right. There's a lot of positive reinforcement and not a whole lot of negative reinforcement.
That's absolutely correct. And, you know, the other aspect to it, I think, is that there's this idea that if you can't see the dragons, it's because you're not a dragon slayer, right?
Only the dragon slayers can see the dragon.
And so if you can't see them, then you just need to be an ally.
You just need to accept that the dragons are there, even though they're invisible, and you just need to become an ally and recognize how best you can help the dragon slayers and just capitulate and bow down to the ideology.
So there's that aspect too, where people feel like, like, well, because I'm not a dragon slayer, or because I'm white, for our case, then I can't comment on racial issues because I don't know what it's like to be black.
I don't know what it's like to be oppressed.
So therefore, I can't make a judgment.
I don't see the racism, but I have to judge your truth.
I have to accept your truth and your lived experience, and I'll go slay these dragons with you.
And I think there's a lot of that in our society as well.
Now, do you think, let's talk about how we blow the whistle on all this.
I mean, in the story of the little boy who shouted that the emperor has no clothes, we don't have any follow-up to that story.
We don't know if by shouting that, everybody was like, you know what, this kid is right.
Now, you're writing a book to sort of blow the whistle on all this.
But if somebody is in the throes of this mode of thinking that you've just described, is a book like this going to get through to them?
What is your sort of strategy in trying?
Who are you writing for?
And what is your strategy of reaching them?
I'm writing for the people who are on the fence.
The people who aren't sure, who don't really understand what critical race theory is.
They may sense that there's a problem, but they're not really sure how to approach it.
Or maybe they feel isolated and they're not really sure how to push back against it.
The whole point of the book is to explain what critical race theory is, where it comes from, how it's disguising itself in our society as anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion, social and emotional learning, all of these different ideas that infiltrate our institutions that push critical race theory ideology.
And then just breaking apart the different arguments and the different illogic of the arguments and showing people, like, okay, so when people say diversity, that's not what they mean.
They don't mean actual, natural occurring diversity.
They mean capitulating to progressive ideology.
When people say equity, they don't mean equality.
They mean equality of outcomes, which requires force and intentional inequality.
When people say inclusion, they don't mean Inclusiveness of all ideological thought.
They mean only progressivism.
So, like all of these ideas and breaking them apart so that people understand the arguments and they understand the manipulation.
Because, Dinesh, it's so easy.
I'll use Black Lives Matter for example.
People are so easily manipulated by language that all you have to do is accuse them of racism.
And then they'll capitulate because they don't want to be considered racist.
So if you say, like, well, this is Black Lives Matter, and then they push all the radical, you know, anti-nuclear family, all white people are racist, we need to give reparations, all these radical ideas underneath of it, and if you reject that and they say, oh, but you don't think Black Lives Matter, then people will back off and And they say, well, of course I believe Black Lives Matter.
So it's very easy to manipulate people with this language.
So people need to be armed and they need to understand some of the different concepts.
I won't go into it in the podcast, but some of the different concepts I address in the book are things like hostile attribution bias, the Kafka trap.
Martin Bailey tactic.
Different manipulative tactics that these people use in order to manipulate people and in order to infuse this ideology.
And then I end the book with a sort of call to action to move us toward a colorblind, post-racian society.
And, you know, just initiating a paradigm shift where we start to treat skin color as no more consequential to who we are than hair color or eye color.
We recognize that we're different.
We have differences. But ultimately, it doesn't matter.
We don't treat each other differently based on those differences.
It's the MLK oft-quoted line from I Have a Dream.
Where, you know, the content of character, not the color of skin.
And so that's my goal with the book, to initiate that paradigm shift and make people more aware of what's actually happening.
And hopefully we can move closer to that post-racial society and that colorblind goal.
Great stuff, Leonidas.
The book is Raising Victims, The Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory.
Leonidas Johnson, thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Thank you so much, Danash.
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Go to I'd like to offer some comments on the incident at the Grammys where Madonna...
Looking, by the way, like a very different Madonna.
Is that Madonna? Has she become Chinese?
No, she's just undergone apparently massive face work.
And what happened is that they pulled her skin so far back that essentially her eyes have now ended up where her ears used to be.
So, it's a mess.
And her lips. And she's obviously become a very...
Well, she was always an angry, blasphemous individual.
I mean, even when I think back to young Madonna, wearing those crosses, obviously not to promote virtue or holiness, but almost to mock it.
And then her name, Madonna.
She's almost taking the name of the Virgin Mary, but again, not to honor the Virgin Mary.
It's almost like this is the sort of slutty version of the Virgin Mary.
And so there was an element of blasphemy there already.
But here's Madonna introducing nothing less than a kind of, I would call it a satanic dance ritual led by this guy, Sam Smith.
Now, A lot of conservatives focus on, well, you know, this is Satanism, pure and simple.
This is where our culture is now.
And I also said, but I was being a little bit ironic, that we've long suspected that Satan is the guiding inspiration of the left of the Democratic Party.
And what makes this different is that the cultural left is sort of publicly acknowledging it.
So here's me going along with the idea that this is sort of Satanism, pure and simple.
But I thought, thinking to myself driving here to the podcast, what is it that this Sam Smith guy is up to?
What would cause somebody to sort of put on a devil's costume and play the devil?
And what is that guy getting at?
I think what they're getting at is this.
They... Our culture has moved toward self-expression as being a defining form of our identity.
In other words, and this is by the way an idea with its roots in Christianity, but in Christianity we dig into ourselves not Merely defined the better me or the hidden me or the Dinesh that has become smudged by the influences of culture and society, but rather I dig deep within myself to listen to that inner voice of God speaking to me and through me.
This was the Augustinian, St.
Augustine, idea of human beings being beings with inner depths.
But what we have, and this developed in the Romantic movement in the 18th and really in the 19th century, was we dig deep into ourselves, but we cut off this idea of an external source, of external moral voices coming from God.
We secularize the idea, and we act as if there's merely an inner self, unconnected with any external creator, and that becomes the defining force of our true self.
And so this Sam Smith guy is probably thinking to himself, I want to be a rebel.
I want to rebel not against contemporary Hollywood, because if he was a real rebel, he would rebel against what Hollywood stands for now.
But what he's rebelling against is, you can call it maybe old Hollywood or traditional morality.
He's rebelling against the America of the 1950s.
He's rebelling against the whole legacy of Christianity in Western culture.
But he's not rebelling...
Some people think, well, the Sam Smith is a guy's nihilist, you know, he's decadent, and he's celebrating death and destruction.
But I don't think it's quite that simple, because think of it, if he was just celebrating death and destruction, he would have gone and killed himself.
Or he would just basically take a stick and beat himself, and that would celebrate destruction, and it would point to death, or he would just write a letter about why he wants to die.
He doesn't do that. He does it in the form of art.
He does it in the form of music, dance, performance.
So you see what's going on here is that we think of, and I think it was the poet John Keats who talks about how there's a connection between beauty and truth.
So for Keats, beauty on the one hand and virtue on the other hand and truth are all one.
They come out of the same source.
They're related to each other.
But what this guy Sam Smith is doing and Madonna cheering him on is he's turning the idea of beauty Or the idea of art against the idea of morality.
So the key to Sam Smith is I'm going to take something that people do like and they do care about, which is art and beauty, and I'm going to use that as a battering ram or a weapon against God and against morality.
And this is the peculiar, call it 21st century Satanism, that Hollywood is celebrating today.
I've described the anthropic principle as the principle that requires the values and constants of nature to be exactly what they are in order to have a universe that produces life, and especially a universe that produces conscious and intelligent life, life that can then turn around and contemplate the universe.
Now, how can this be explained?
If you're a skeptic or an atheist, how do you account for the fact that the dials of the universe are set just so?
That if you alter the dial slightly, you would get a totally different result?
Now, astronomer Robert Jastrow has called the anthropic principle the most theistic principle to come out of science.
And so scientists who don't like to think of themselves as religious, they like to think of themselves as neutral, as objective, have to account for this, have to account for this in some sort of, let's call it natural or non-theistic way.
Well, there are a couple of ways they try to do that, and I'm going to discuss one of those ways today.
And that is, it's all a coincidence.
It's just an incredible coincidence that these dials happen to be set just right.
Now, when someone says that something is a coincidence and the event is improbable, coincidences do occur.
And so, for example, it may be a coincidence that while walking out of my...
Walking down my street this morning, I saw a $20 bill on the pavement.
That doesn't happen very often.
It's kind of a lucky coincidence.
And it doesn't require further explanation.
But see, this isn't like that.
This is an event of such improbability.
We're talking about the chances of this happening, the chances of having the anthropic principle, are something like this.
Firing a dart...
From the earth to the moon and hitting a dot that is two inches wide on the moon and you're firing randomly.
In other words, you're not aiming for the moon.
You're not aiming for the dot.
You're just taking a rocket and shooting it wherever it goes and it happens to go and hit right there.
Well, when you say that's a coincidence, it's a bit much.
It doesn't really make any sense.
But, prominent atheists like Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins say, listen, there is something in science called the selection effect.
The selection effect is the idea that the only way to be able to consider a problem is that you happen to have emerged as the lucky winner already.
So consider, for example, the example of a lottery.
Obviously, it is improbable that, you know, Debbie D'Souza won the Powerball and earned, you know, $1 billion.
What's the chance of that happening?
Debbie's like, really? Pay up?
Where is it? But think about it this way.
Somebody has to win.
So when you have Powerball and one person wins, that person could go, what an unbelievable coincidence.
Well, it's not that unbelievable in that somebody had to win and the winner naturally, although improbable, is going to nevertheless say, wow, I can now get, I have every right to collect the prize.
But this kind of reasoning, which makes it intuitive sense, has a little bit of a problem.
The problem was dramatized by an example by philosopher John Leslie, considering this exact issue.
Here's what he says. Then they shoot again, and one more time they fail to hit their target.
Repeatedly they fire, and they miss.
And later the prisoner is approached by the warden who says, Wow, something fishy is going on here.
I can't believe they all missed.
These are trained marksmen, and they all missed, and they all missed again and again and again.
Clearly there's some kind of conspiracy at work.
What's going on? Well, the prisoner can say, well, that's just a selection effect.
Because if they hadn't missed, we wouldn't be here to have this conversation.
So it was necessary for them to miss, for me to be here.
And so, as a result, there's nothing surprising about what happened.
But see, that doesn't really work.
It is surprising. In fact, it's unbelievable in the literal sense of the term.
Um... And so, any prisoner who goes, it's no big deal, nothing needs to be explained here, is obviously lying or perhaps out of his mind.
So, what the example shows is you cannot explain an improbability of this magnitude by simply saying, wow, if the improbability hadn't occurred, we wouldn't be on the scene to be having the discussion.
There is still a massive improbability to be accounted for.
See, remember, let's be really clear, the anthropic principle is not saying that, it's not saying that it's kind of amazing that in this giant universe, Our planet happened to have the qualities essential for life.
That is, in fact, not all that surprising.
Why? Because if there are hundreds of millions of galaxies, and let's just say millions and millions of planets and stars, the fact that one planet has the conditions that are ideal for life is not surprising out of that gigantic sample size.
However, we're not saying that.
What the anthropic principle says is that the whole universe has to be the way that it is.
It has to have started when it did.
It has to be as large as it is.
It has to have the gravitational force as it is.
It has to have the strong and weak nuclear forces as they are.
All these constants and forces need to be set just so in order for us to be here.
So this is a claim not about our, quote, lucky planet, But it's about our lucky universe.
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