Mike Nayna | Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Podcast #7
Award winning documentary filmmaker, Mike Nayna sits down with Bret Weinstein on the DarkHorse Podcast to discuss his documentary on the infamous situation at The Evergreen State College, as well as his current work documenting the scandal surrounding the Grievance Studies. Please subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell.Find Mike Nayna on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzk08fzh5c_BhjQa1w35wtAFind Katie Herzog on Twitter:@MikeNaynaFind and Help Support this work b...
I am Brett Weinstein, your host, and I am pleased to be sitting here with Mike Nayna, documentary filmmaker extraordinaire.
Welcome, Mike.
Thank you.
Yeah, hey, how you going?
Pretty good, pretty good.
Let's start by recognizing that you don't sound like you're from around these parts.
No, I'm from Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Australia.
That seems really far away.
It is.
And yet, your language is so intuitive, something.
So what brings you to the US?
Many things.
I think that opportunities in the film and television industry at home dried up.
And a project in particular took me over here.
So I was working on a documentary about the Grievance Studies Affair.
It's Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrow's work.
Submitting hoax articles to academic journals to test the political bias of certain academic fields.
And I got tangled up in that project with them before they started writing.
So I've been filming the process all the way through.
So I've been going back and forth between Australia and here for, I'd say, near on two years now.
When's the first time we met?
It was at the James Damore event.
I guess it was at the James Damore event, so I met you through Peter, I also met James and Helen through Peter, and so we met at the Damore event, and then I think the next time we met would have been... maybe you guys came over to our place?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would have been that, yeah.
And so, just to catch people up, you were working on the Grievance Studies Affair, and you were documenting it as it unfolded.
And at some level, the Evergreen Affair was tangential to that, because it was happening locally, because we knew Peter, and so you looked into it to be kind of a I don't know, a sidelight or an added dimension to what you were working on.
Yeah.
And at the point that you started looking into the evergreen situation, it becomes difficult to turn it into a small snapshot.
Very much so, yeah.
There's so much depth to it.
It's the gravity of the evergreen story.
You kind of get drawn into it and you're like, holy crap, what has actually happened to you?
Yeah.
It's a modern-day witch-burning, really.
And, as you know, not even figuratively.
The people who orchestrated it, much to my amazement, I did not know this at the time, but the people who orchestrated it viewed it as a justified witch-hunt.
That because I was white and male and straight, that I was deserving of being witch-hunted in order to give me the same experience that others have had.
Well, your image became an effigy, which they then burnt.
Repeatedly.
Yes.
Alright, so you came to The Evergreen Affair at the point that you realized that it was its own story, and you made what I regard as an absolutely beautiful three-part documentary, which people can find.
I will link it in the description.
And that documentary is a number of different things.
I mean I must say it's personally very meaningful to me at a number of different levels.
There's a way in which it solved a problem that was inherent to where Heather and I had landed.
And the problem was that our predicament was almost impossible to fathom from any normal position because it was so odd.
And that created a kind of alienation because interacting with other people, they would say, oh, can you explain what happened at Evergreen just briefly?
And it was like, no, I can't quite.
What's more, even if one attempts to describe it at length, describing it doesn't quite cut it.
No.
So, Benjamin Boyce had done a lot of work necessary for people to understand what happened.
He unearthed a tremendous amount of stuff and put out a lot of it in very interesting form on his channel.
Which was integral to my film as well.
Right, and you picked up a lot of what he had unearthed.
Yeah.
And you put it in this very cinematic form.
Yeah.
And anyway, the net outgrowth of that was The things I thought nobody was ever really going to understand about what happened at Evergreen, things that I remember, even in real time, sitting there.
The canoe meeting, for example.
Sitting in the canoe meeting, one of my thoughts was, what is going on here is jaw-dropping.
There's no way to convey what is happening here to outsiders.
And your films They solved that problem, because they did convey it.
Yeah.
And so, that was a big weight off my shoulders.
Well, that particular piece of footage was the reason why I sought you out, because, so we'd met, and I'd only loosely heard about the Evergreen, the events at Evergreen, and then after meeting you, I went and did some homework and read the Washington Examiner piece that you guys had, and it linked to that piece of footage.
And it was a moment of, because I was working on the grievance study stuff and I was quite a few months in reading the scholarly canon, I guess, and the major texts around that, and what it was looking to me like was some kind of victimhood theology, that's what I was calling it, because
The peer review comments that the guys were getting back for the fake papers they were writing were very, it was paying lip service to the scientific method and rigour, but really what it was policing was some kind of It was like a set of moral rules, and I was slowly figuring out what this was.
It's not science they were trying to sort out here, it was some kind of intuitive moral system they were creating.
And so it really did start looking like some kind of theology to me.
It was very like a prescriptive sociology that was Based on moral intuitions.
And I was like, well, how do I convey that?
Because it's all paper and it's all words and comments and things like that.
And it took me a long time to figure out that this is potentially what's going on here.
And then I saw that footage and I was like, this is a service.
This is what I'm seeing in their scholarship.
And the major text that they're working is here.
This is like, it's the natural progression.
of what I imagine a theology would create.
So you mean, when you say this is a service, you mean this is a religious service.
You're not saying they've done us a service by providing.
Well, it's funny because I had the other reaction while I was sitting there.
Because they set this thing up, they strongly encouraged us to go to this meeting.
And when I got there, they have these very fancy television cameras They have a television studio that they outfitted and it's always been a complaint amongst faculty that it was underutilized.
Right.
And the Bridges administration started using these cameras.
They filmed everything.
And thank the good Lord for that.
But anyway, I walk in there and these cameras are set up, right?
And I begin to realize how How they view what they're doing.
And then as the thing unfolds, you know, it's been built as a forum to discuss the plan, but there's no room to discuss anything other than the goodness of its objectives, right?
Its utopian view of things.
And as I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, okay, nobody's ever going to understand this.
I can't explain it.
It's going to be hard enough to explain to Heather.
And she knew that the meeting was coming.
And in fact, she said, you have to go to this, right?
No, she wasn't going to things, but I was going religiously, as it were, to everything because there was so much going on.
But I guess maybe I hadn't even realized that there was a meeting.
She's like, no, no, no, you got to go.
But I wasn't going to be able to explain it to her because it was so far beyond the most extreme thing I had yet seen at that point.
And then as I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, they're filming this.
Yeah.
And then I thought, There's no way that they are dumb enough to allow that footage out.
And so I was trying to figure out, can I force them to release it before they delete it?
Which any reasonable person who had done what they were doing would have done.
Because that footage is very clear, right?
How far around the bend this movement was.
Not for us, not for them.
Exactly.
So anyway, somewhere there's an email in which I emailed them after the event and was like, I do think the entire community, not everybody was present, I do think the entire community needs to see the footage of that meeting.
When can we expect it?
You know, trying to prompt them.
But they were proud of it and they put it out, much to my surprise, and you made excellent use of it.
It is an interesting thing at the heart of the Evergreen Moral panic was how proud everyone was.
There was a lot of footage of that.
It's this huge, from my perspective, it's this huge sociological event.
It was really the case study for this way of thinking.
And the fact that everyone was so proud to put up, they filmed everything in pride.
They filmed it because they were proud of it.
And I'm seeing all these horrific things from my position outside of that moral community going, What the hell is going on here?
Why would you be proud of that?
And so the series, which is kind of an accidental series, I kind of stumbled into it, is more or less just that, really.
It's you and my perspective of the stuff that they're probably still proud of.
They're still doubling down on this way of thinking.
Still?
Yeah.
Like, as of this week, they are still doubling?
I would love to sit down and watch that series next to, like, George or Naima and just ask them questions.
I really want to hang out with these guys.
I agree, I think this is, it may or may not be possible because they did figure out one thing right away, which was that every time they touched media outside of their little bubble, it did not play well.
You can't get them.
You can't get anyone.
Like the amount of people I've tried to reach out to and talk about this stuff, as soon as they get a hint.
I mean it's a hostile media environment.
So you can kind of – like for everyone.
So if someone wants to put a camera on you, you're looking for a friendly.
But even so, you know, look, I know you.
I know me.
Yeah.
The fact is I would give them a fair shot.
And I think, you know, as we've talked about repeatedly, there are a lot of these concepts that have something true in them somewhere.
And then they've been distorted so grotesquely that they become, you know, the basis for a witch hunt.
But there is a lot to talk about, and so anyway, it would be fascinating if they would interact, but they have this litmus test.
Either you will sign up for these things, which are so far beyond the pale that no reasonable person will, or we won't talk to you.
And that's just simply where it stands.
But you're right, their pride, and it's not just pride, their certitude that what they are doing is still correct, they've learned The only thing they've learned is not to talk to people who will record them.
But I would say I see no evidence of any other learning of any kind and that is maybe the greatest tragedy.
Well it's the blinkers.
Height says morality binds and blinds and so from the religious stance, I'm using it as a descriptive tool, this religious way of looking at it and I think it's the most powerful one to understand what the hell's going on there.
But from a Durkheimian perspective you've got A religion is a moral community that's gathered around a group of stories and scriptures.
And so I started looking at the stories and scriptures and trying to figure that out, and then to better understand the moral community.
But they can't see outside of it.
That's why all this crazy stuff is happening, because inside the bubble it makes sense, but as soon as you're outside of it, it's clown world.
It's clown world and it is also, you know, what Heather and I spent a year saying in the aftermath of this was that Evergreen was really set up to serve underserved communities.
It was the college for people who were not a good fit for other places.
And a lot of the people who were not a good fit for other places were people from, you know, racial backgrounds that were disadvantaged or had some other unusual feature to their story and they really needed faculty to deal with them as individuals, which Evergreen, the structure of it made possible.
Yeah.
What is very hard for us to get past is that Evergreen was not highly functional at the point it came apart, but it was still functional and it could easily have been fixed.
What they did instead was they destroyed the functional part, which was well-suited to serve people who are usually underserved, and replaced it with A myth that is incapable of serving anybody, and in fact it does the opposite.
It leads them to believe that there is some sort of help to be had from, you know, from wallowing in victimhood, which frankly isn't going to work.
It's the saddest part about this, I think.
You talk about empowering communities.
You couldn't disempower a community more by getting them to To build their identity around their victimhood, which is this sacred totem that they have.
To build their identity around victimhood and to reject the very tools that would empower them most and that are the antidote to bias.
And they're everyone's tools.
Like, I mean, they've got the whole master's tools.
Don't touch the... Master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
But they're your fucking tools!
Like, they're everyone's tools and humanity has taken a long time to get to these tools.
They're like the most beautiful thing that anyone can pick up.
I gotta tell you, the master has the best tools.
His shed has the nicest quality stuff, and if you want to take down his house, that's the place to find the stuff with the power to do it.
And so, you know, I do want to say, I'm certain that Audre Lorde meant something by that quote that, you know, I probably would argue with it even in the way that she meant it.
The way that it is utilized is absolutely self-destructive.
And, you know, science This is counterintuitive too.
We view science as this very powerful paradigm.
It is very powerful.
The reason it's powerful is that it corrects for bias.
That human beings have a confirmation bias problem and science is the thing that allows us to see past it.
So to the extent that one believes civilization is biased against people, the tool that you want to hone is scientific.
And so to attack science, to attack enlightenment values, to attack the idea of merit and then substitute in this religious view of who is deserving on the basis of what characteristics that they walked through the door with is just, it's the most ironic self-sabotage imaginable.
But there is this sense that, this is very, I think, the original postmodernists are cool, I like them, and so they get a lot of flack for what's going on, but deep inside it is this sense that So, deep inside the Foucauldian view is that there is science, right?
But there's also the branding of science.
So science gets kind of used as weapons for the powerful.
And so, what's happened with this next iteration is they're going for actually the beautiful thing in the middle instead of The surrounding uses of science.
So Foucault kind of laid down the blueprint of how knowledge works and how power works through that knowledge.
And they have adopted that to create their own version of the worst part of that.
Does that make sense to you?
And so it is working insofar as that blueprint is true.
Like I think that they're really these applied postmodernists, these people who came through the 90s are trying to take over our systems of knowledge production.
And it's hitting up against reality and scientists because it's only true in certain aspects, like in the promotional kind of this big marketing campaign that they're creating.
Well, they also don't appreciate, and I think almost nobody appreciates how much stuff is functioning that depends on this other worldview.
And so, if you're very focused on what doesn't work in your world because, you know, let's say you're black in the U.S.
Black in the U.S.
is a problem.
Does it mean there are no successful blacks?
No, but it is a problem, right?
It's a predicament that has a long history that nobody alive today had anything to do with building.
But if you're focused on that problem, and your point is, well, if we swap out the thing that empowered those who did this, then we'll be good.
You don't realize that the electric grid Nuclear reactors, the thing that keeps us from being attacked by foreign powers, all of this is actually built on a scientific framework.
Has that framework been misused?
Regularly.
And you should expect it to continue to be misused, right?
What we want to do is minimize the level at which it's misused, but you can't prevent it.
But when somebody like me, a scientist, says, no, the scientific method is about preventing bias.
We're talking about the method.
We're not talking about Those who wear a lab coat are speaking the truth, right?
That's preposterous, not scientific.
So, anyway... See, that conception of the person in the lab coat speaking the truth and him being full of shit, that is inside their way of thinking.
And so they put on a lab coat, they put the PhD badge on, and then they They speak so confidently, like they speak so confidently about things they shouldn't be confident about because in their world view everyone else is speaking like that.
And unfortunately the scientific establishment has allowed some really low quality stuff to be sanctioned for mundane economic reasons that have to do with the way universities are funded and all of that.
I mean, it's just life, right?
Nothing's perfect.
You're gonna have some issues.
You can attack those issues.
I think it could be a lot better.
Yeah, yeah.
Declare a border between the market and science.
And we could protect science as the important thing that it is.
We should do that.
Having not done that, there is a lot of garbage stuff that gets dressed up in scientific clothing.
And so it's not as if there's no point to be made.
But if your point is there is no science, it's all about power.
It's like, well, no.
Hang on, guys.
You might want to back off that one a little bit.
That's the thing.
Foucault's like their Jesus.
But he talks about this stuff.
He says that there is such thing as functional power.
He just wanted to figure out the blueprint of power.
I mean, he had his own biases that he definitely put in there.
And he went too far.
He's like this wild man.
But what they've done from late 80s into the 90s is Mind-boggling what they've done with his ideas and the ideas of the other, the postmodernists that were kind of kicking around at the time.
Right, and we're now seeing it.
We're living, yeah.
We're living in the sins of Michel Foucault.
Well, so, for some of us, I will ask just out of courtesy, but I know for certain that you will be in the same camp.
Do you not have the experience of looking at some of the stuff that we are now apparently fighting about and thinking, if you'd asked me five years ago whether anybody was going to challenge the truth in, let's say, the fact that there's a difference between males and females and it's not perfectly arbitrary, I knew that there was, like,
Hints in that direction, but the idea that we would be fighting about whether or not a trans woman can compete against people who are born female in athletic competition, I would have said it's inconceivable.
It's disorientating.
And most people feel like that.
I think the majority of people are like, what the hell is going on?
We're in some strange Slip Universe or something like that.
So it has been operating like this very much from the 90s onward.
So they've got 30 years of scholarship.
Then Tumblr comes along and makes it super accessible.
And it's spread.
We're already kind of living in their...
What is it?
Their kind of moral hegemony.
Like, my whole life has been in this milieu, the kind of victimhood mentality.
But it very much collided with the internet and all of a sudden, it's absolutely everywhere.
And it's in its, I would say, purest form.
It's in the form that they lay down inside their scholarship.
Well, you know, it'd be interesting.
I'm not convinced that we have a full understanding of why the Internet had the effect on it that it did.
But it allows very fringe ideas that are held by isolated pockets to congeal into a hole that they otherwise would not.
And it also allows a kind of tactical uh... growth, where each one of these forays into the absurd learns a bit about what it cannot do, what arguments are feeble and which ones are forceful.
And so it learns and is spreading in a way that is quite dangerous.
Yeah.
I mean it's Darwinian, but it's selecting for uh... emotion.
And so So this scholarship, it's navigating around these deep moral emotions.
I mean, Jung would call them like an archetypal type thing, Jonathan Haidt would call them, what are they, moral foundations.
They're kind of revolving around, it's very much care harm in the Jonathan Haidt way of looking at it.
So they're revolving around, do you know how I said they weren't policing for anything scientific, it was more moral intuition?
Yep.
They're circling around these moral intuitions and they've created like, it's reams and reams and reams of work.
just circling around these moral intuitions and policing this new worldview.
And so you plug the internet into that, and it's something where we're already living in this world where social justice is.
It's kind of our religion, really.
It's the most gripping moral system that we have.
There's Christianity, and it's kind of on the outskirts of the media entertainment system.
And so it just, it filled those plugs, right?
It was a moral system that kind of moved across the internet because the internet selects for emotion.
And then you've got things like the shooting videos, and my first film was about a video I took about a racist incident on a bus in Australia.
And they're all exploding, becoming very viral, because it's proof, it's worldview of this thing, but if you actually look at the stories behind these viral videos, it's a lot more complicated than that.
It's not this kind of Cartoon world that they've created that's based on this these deep moral intuitions So there are a couple things I want to explore from what you said.
One of them has to do with the fact that we as human beings are not prepared for the modern environment in a lot of ways.
But one of them that's very clear is that our ability to see events that are remote and the bias in favor of seeing remote events that are interesting rather than ones that are not interesting results in a total distortion Of our sampling of the world.
And so, I remember as a kid, plane crashes were a regular topic of conversation.
Why?
Because every time a plane crashes, it ends up on the news, it's grisly, there are bodies being picked part by part, it's hard to look away.
And that, because it spends a lot of time on your TV, you get the sense that it's a common thing, whereas statistically speaking, you're never safer than when you're on a plane.
You know, even in the worst year you're never safer than when you're on a plane.
The most dangerous thing to you on a plane is if you have a heart attack there or a stroke and you can't get to the ground fast enough.
But frankly any time that you're in that plane you're being protected from all the things that could happen to you on the ground, right?
And so we get a very warped view based on what's on the screen.
It's the same as the milk carton kids that went missing.
So all of a sudden there's all this hysteria around child abduction.
Totally.
Which changed the way we raise children in a completely incoherent way.
There's a huge sociological event based on, I guess it's technology.
We're kind of colliding against this technology.
And the amount of time that people spend interacting with a screen, that's their world, most people.
A lot of people are leaving their screen and not really even interacting with reality that they live in.
They actually understand the world through this screen.
Well, I bet that will be reflected neurologically.
No question, I'm a McLuhan fan, so it's very much, I think this is fundamentally technological.
It's fundamentally technological, but my guess is we will start to see reflected in the neurobiology of people with this device, that because so much of your reward structure is tied in through events that happen over the device, that you actually begin to see through it.
And what that does mean is that what you and I would consider normal interaction, Is, you know, at best, a second kind of normal interaction.
Yeah.
Rather than the real deal and... Well, even... I feel this myself.
I spend way too much time.
Me too.
And I'm trying to spend less, but... I'm only just getting used to doing this kind of thing.
And then when you invited me, I was like, oh, maybe I can squeeze out and we can do it via Skype?
Because I just felt like I would be more comfortable in that situation.
And I guess this is happening more and more.
It is.
It's where I'm comfortable.
I'm kind of in my room and then I can look at everything through a screen and be a little bit more disconnected from it.
Well, you know, on the one hand I have kind of a mixed reaction to video calls.
There's one way in which video calls are just not as productive as they should be.
There's another way in which they are better There is some fraction of like facial expressions and things that are conveyed well enough through a video call.
Yeah.
It's not as good as sitting with somebody but it's better than just listening to them.
But there is something missing and I don't know what it is.
I don't know what channel it travels on but frankly my enthusiasm for having a conversation with somebody like you goes way up if we're gonna be sitting in the same room because much of what makes it You know, the right analogy is really a corrective lens, right?
A corrective lens is for somebody who has an eye that is seeing in a distorted fashion.
You take a distortion to correct for the distortion that you've got on board.
We all have a distortion that comes from the increasing role that screens are playing in our perception of what's actually taking place and why.
And there's another correction that comes from you and I sitting in person You know, it's not natural.
We've got devices here.
We are talking to people asynchronously out there who are not talking back, but we imagine what they might think about what we're saying.
Very unnatural.
On the other hand, the very fact that some part of this is natural, that you and I are sitting in a physical room having the conversation, corrects for part of it.
But even my feeling of it, there's a lot of inputs here that are making me a little more anxious than if they were through a screen.
I've noticed that.
So I spent a lot of time studying this stuff and and just editing over the past year and I was going outside less and less and less and then it's like early onset early onset agoraphobia or something like that like I don't know what happened but when I went outside everything was louder and it was It was hard to talk to people.
And I've never been like, I'm extroverted.
I grew up like this extroverted guy.
And now all of a sudden it's like, I don't know what's happened.
And I know it's the screen.
It's something to do with too much time on the screen, too much time by yourself, too much time in your thoughts.
That's interesting.
That make you feel different.
And I'm an artist, so I'm sensitive to those sort of things.
And I think that this is happening.
I'm seeing it in other people.
I'm seeing it in a lot of people.
They're retreating from the world and they're Interacting with the world via screen, and that is some kind of... So, am I wrong?
I'm not having this experience.
I'm actually... I tend to be kind of introverted, and my life in the last... it's not even since Evergreen, from before that, has forced me into... I'm sort of a secondary extrovert, where I've had to get used to it, and I have now.
But it was unnatural to me at first.
I'm in motion in the other direction.
Yeah.
But I'm imagining based on what you're saying that there's a feeling of like nakedness.
Yeah.
When you're in person.
Yeah.
That is like, you know, behind the screen is like properly clothed.
You're not revealing anything, which is really, I mean, I don't want to overreact to it, but it's a little bit tragic that people, human beings, are feeling jeopardized by the presence of other human beings in their physical space, like, oh no.
Particularly millennials, right?
I'm a millennial, and even the generation under, it's... it is strange.
They were, um...
There's this thing, there's this thing going around, like you can, memes are really good.
The memes that go out, they kind of give you an insight into how the generation is feeling, and there's this, there's several, like, kind of class of memes about the intrusion of a phone call.
Yeah.
And a phone call is a massive intrusion.
It's like, no, no, text me.
Don't call me.
And it's, it's, it really is, it's an insight into where all our brains are, brains are at.
So there's something physiological happening because of The technology we're surrounding ourselves with.
So I wonder, now that you mention it, so I am not a millennial, I'm a Gen X. Yeah.
That's not a boomer.
All right, Gen X. What is it?
OK.
That's better.
OKX.
OKX, yeah, no, I like that.
When I grew up, I mean, you know, my earliest memories, a phone was an object that was plugged into the wall and a cordless phone was kind of a thing.
Yeah.
You know, it was, I remember that being like most phones were actually just physically plugged in.
And then I remember cell phones.
I didn't get one for the longest time.
It didn't occur to me that I needed one.
And then suddenly they became ubiquitous and it was like, yeah, you're just handicapped not to have it.
But I wonder, If the key reason that people who are young, you know, millennial and younger might be having some of the experience you're describing is that asynchronous communication allows a lot of room for posturing.
Yeah.
Figuring out how something is going to land and delivering it in a way that you feel like, yep, that one's ready for the world.
We've become an actor, right?
Actors are cool because their lines are written for them, but if you If you have the time to script your communication, then all of a sudden you're cool and you would be.
Right.
So this actually dovetails with something I've heard Jordan Peterson say it, I've heard me say it, I've heard Ben Shapiro say it, that at the point that you find yourself in situations like this where something is going to go into the world and it will have some impact and you'll just have to live with the aftermath of it,
You go into this mode where you are speaking and then some part of you is watching what you're about to say and checking everything.
I wonder if that's not a bit lacking.
If your experience was that a lot of communication is asynchronous, if that's how you grew up, then I wonder if that's harder.
You know, I can do it in real time, it's taxing, but it's possible.
But if my experience was that your average communication, even interpersonal communication, was asynchronous, then maybe that circuit just isn't very strong.
Yeah.
And it's also you...
I mean, part of being so judgmental about everything everyone says is because they've had time to think about it.
Like, people used to shoot off the hip and say whatever they want, and it was okay.
It was okay to make mistakes.
You know, I wonder if this is not actually playing a huge role here.
I mean, maybe this is exactly what you're saying, but I watch people get cancelled for something that I agree they shouldn't have said.
Yeah.
Right?
But it's like, wait, that was fatal?
Yeah.
You know?
And it's like, whoa.
You're talking about taking somebody's well-being and zeroing it out over something that they said.
Sometimes it's not even what they meant.
They were just trying something out.
And, you know, when I was teaching, we had these things called covenants.
Students and professors would agree at the beginning of a course what the rules were, right?
And those could be rules about grading, how you – if something isn't to your liking, what you do about it and all that.
But I used to include in that that everybody has the right to take back what they've said and restate it.
You can say, that wasn't what I meant or it was what I meant but I no longer think that.
Everybody has that right and you should speak knowing that you have that right and you should treat everybody else as if they have it.
And that's being human.
Right.
It's normal.
Yeah.
And so maybe your point is just Let's put it this way.
I've never heard this anywhere else, but it does immediately strike me as an important component here, is that people are being held responsible at a new level because asynchronous communication allows people to pretty stuff up more than is normal.
And so people aren't used to the noise of people saying something a bit tone-deaf and then, you know... The policing is a different thing as well.
There's another input here which is, so in our legal justice system you often punish people to show everyone else that that shouldn't be done.
Yep.
And send a message I guess.
Deterrence.
Yeah and so within this Scripture, let's call it.
They're the canon.
Racism is perpetuated through discourses, so the way we think about things.
So if someone puts their foot wrong, it's not actually the human that's doing it.
It's this strange thing where individual responsibility, they don't really consider it very much.
It's not the human, it's the discourses working through the human.
So if you converge on it and get rid of it, you're actually Going after the evil that's in the world.
You're not going after the human, you're going after the eagle, because the discourses are working through them.
It's so, when you start actually learning what's going on here, you can see, because it's so intuitive, and you can see how something like that would spread as a new, it's a metaphysical system that's spreading over everything.
And I mean, the technology is creating the atmosphere in which this can take place really quickly.
Yes.
And as we were talking about, we could talk all day about the different inputs that are making this huge cultural phenomenon.
But underneath it, the scripture, they've laid all this out.
It's all there.
And they talk about it.
Unapologetically.
When you go behind the closed doors of the academy.
Yes.
Okay.
I've got two places I want to go.
I want to make sure we don't lose them.
I think they're both important.
So if I forget, remind me that I want to talk about Yale.
Okay.
And what happened there.
But first, let's talk about the question about these moral intuitions.
And I like how you phrase it.
It resonates for me.
So there's this moral intuition.
And some of these moral intuitions, I think, they're not right as they're stated, but you could fix them, right?
The intuition is correct, it's just the phrasing is way the hell off.
Well, not even phrasing, like action.
So all moral intuitions are intuitions, but unless you're lining them up with some kind of empirical You know, method to get what you want based on those intuitions and that's all they are, they're just discharging feelings.
Well let me, let's take an example so that this is more concrete.
Okay.
Let's take the idea that the difference in performance, that is to say economic performance, of people from different racial groups is the result of bias and unfairness.
I actually suspect that that's probably almost correct.
I think there's a lot of it down to that, but you couldn't put that out as a blanket rule.
You can't assume it, but my guess would be, based on everything I've seen, and everything I've seen includes an awful lot of time tromping around in other people's minds when they were my student.
I looked into their minds in order to help them learn, and I, in the process, learned an awful lot about them.
I'm totally open to that, I actually think it's probably the case.
So I think if you did, just thought experiment level, if you fixed the unfairness so that all of the little threads that have carried through one generation to the next were actually just neutralized and you started us all, you know, in the same position with the same advantages, the same access to education and all.
I believe that almost all of this would disappear.
And what you would find is that in general, people are very similar in their capacity.
They're very similar in their built-in desires.
And that basically these massive differences that we find in preference for activities and things is all, you know, some of it's arbitrary, but it's based on the fact that we've traveled different paths and had different opportunities.
And so, anyway, the problem is...
You cannot project that onto the system.
As I say, you can't take it as an assumption.
There could be differences, and they might matter.
My intuition is that they don't matter very much.
Big ones might exist between males and females.
There's a very good biological reason to expect differences there.
Which would make them more fit for other things, you know what I mean?
It seems like a power imbalance because of the culture, but it's like...
Women are going to be, on average, better at certain things and men are going to be, on average, better at other things.
And that can't help but be the case.
That is the nature.
Between males and females.
And that's awesome!
Why not encourage that and play to that rather than play against it?
Well, frankly, I'm very up for a world in which we absolutely free people to jump that line and decide, you know what, I may be female, but I like the stuff that men are more typically into, and I'm going to do that.
You know, Heather is this way.
Heather is very masculine in her orientation to the world.
And I think that's great.
But when you're looking at it on, like, I mean, one to one, you should be looking at it in that kind of way.
But I mean, if you're looking at it from a sociological 200,000 feet up and you have to think in numbers, right?
You have to think in bell curves.
Because if you don't think in bell curves then you're going to hurt people unnecessarily.
You got to play to the bell curves.
Well, that's the whole irony I'm getting at, the difference between the moral intuition and the thing that might be rescued if you studied it carefully, the thing that you might find that actually is the reason for the intuition.
To the extent that the intuition is there for organic reasons, It's about something.
If I'm right, that if you did neutralize advantages that people are basically the same and responding to different opportunities based on, you know, their particular place in the world, then you could say something that there's an X factor, right?
The things that make different populations function differently has to do with a lot of arbitrary things that are not inherent to the creature.
So I want to clear something up here a little bit.
So my, when I say moral intuition, I'm going deeper than, um, so at some point there is, so there's the, I'm going to find this very difficult to explain, there is the intuition that's an emotional feeling, right?
It's, it's, it's I often thought if they had symbolism it'd be like Mary, Mary, Mother of Christ with the baby.
And then there's another symbol of the bear protecting its young, right?
This is a fucking mode.
It's a mode that you can click into and you can really feel it and it's in the guts and that's the evolution part of it.
So, culturally, so that's the hardware.
That's the hardware we're working with as humans, it's universal, and it travels through time.
And that's, I love looking, trying to find, trying to triangulate what these deep emotional feelings are by looking at stories throughout time and, you know, religious stories and things like that.
Culturally, we put a software on top of that.
And that is a home for those moral intuitions.
But underneath those moral intuitions, they're just, they're kind of, Driving us in a certain direction, getting us to make certain decisions, it's a movement thing.
It's like the energy that's moving a culture when you've got a moral system on top of a culture.
But even just one human, he makes his decisions based on his kind of moral intuitions, the hardware that we're stuck with.
So when you said that the moral intuition is moving something, I do think you're right.
You're more talking about the software on top of it.
So their canon is creating a different software that is primarily focused on this care-harm one, this kind of bear protecting its cub type thinking.
And you can see it.
You see it in patterns.
And so I totally agree.
Like it's going to, these intuitions, they're intuitions and they're going to pull us in the right and wrong direction.
And a lot of people are buying into the stories based on the intuitions and they're being sold into it on quite logical things that seem right.
But it actually gets darker and crazier and weirder the further you go into what they're actually trying to sell to the world.
Does that make sense?
I'm not articulate about these things sometimes.
No, I think it was articulate, but I have to tell you this is a place where I think our, what we biologists teach as to where the border is between biology and other things is so broken that we can't help but trip over this at this place.
So let me just tell you what I think.
I'm going to give you a preview of what I think we will understand about humans a hundred years from now if we're still around.
The software layer.
The software layer is composed of a couple of things.
It's composed of what I would call culture, that is things that are passed down, and it is composed of things that are learned in real time, right?
They may not be durable.
Your software layer is composed of these two things, but they are just as much biological as that which your genes set in motion directly.
So there is something going on where these moral intuitions are being searched for a couple of things.
One, they're being searched for content, but they're also being explored in terms of their utility.
And utility is relative to something else that I think we teach very, very badly, which is human beings are In some ways just like every other creature but in some special ways we do this uniquely.
We are built for lineage against lineage competition.
The moral intuitions are partially an exploration of what might be true and they are partially a claim that doesn't matter if it's true.
The question is, is this useful?
Does this advance my lineage's interest to say it out loud?
And so this is very confusing because it's a factual claim.
Right.
The fact that there are not equal numbers of men and women in the ranks of programmers at Google, and that that necessarily implies that there is some sort of discrimination taking place, that's a claim.
It's a false claim.
Is there discrimination?
I don't know.
But the idea that it has to be there because there's a difference in the numbers, that's a false claim.
We know that.
But it doesn't mean it's not an effective claim.
And so anyway, we're seeing a mixture of this sort of empirical claim and the strategic claim that are indistinguishable from each other.
And it makes it very confusing to confront it because you don't know how to take it apart.
But one thing, if we can just finish out the thread about the moral intuitions and whether or not they actually line up with something that would be real if we studied it carefully.
The thing that I find so frightening is that the way in which biases of the past or arbitrary differences in starting point have altered the fate of modern people are so complex that you cannot just come at them painting with a broad brush, right?
Lots of this stuff Maybe unfair and have nothing to do with discrimination, right?
Guns, germs and steel, great example.
The whole book is about kinds of unfairness that have nothing to do with discrimination.
They may result in discrimination, but they don't start there.
They're basically, you know, did you have goats in your environment or didn't you?
Yeah.
And so, anyway, it's a very difficult topic and the moral intuition might lead you to study it, but what they're doing is sabotaging the means by which you would study it and figure out, you know, is there a basis to the claim that we can read the degree of unfairness in the difference in outcomes?
And that's why I'm calling it a theology.
Yeah, it's a faith.
Because it's a faith.
Because they're feeling it out.
That's why they've moved so far away into this strange, what kids are calling a clown world now.
Because usually these moral intuitions are grounded by, inside the academy, should be grounded by some empirical evidence.
general rigor, you know what I mean?
Or at least advancing the, they could be advancing the Western canon, but they've decided to create their own canon, shake the etch-a-sketch on everything we've learned beforehand.
Beautiful phrase, by the way.
Yeah, they hit reset.
And then they've gone, started from the late 80s and started again.
But it's not scientific.
No.
So they've diverged into this strange area of theology, and so it's a startup religion.
It's a 30-year-old religion.
Yeah, it's a 30-year-old religion and...
You know, no 30-year-old religion is wise.
We've tried it a few times before.
Boy, we've seen it.
A lot of people die.
All right, so now let's pick up the Yale thread, because I think these two things converge.
I'd be interested to hear what you've got in here.
So there's a thing that I've heard routinely, and you know, we've seen it a lot of different places, but you know, Yale with the Christakis, this was particularly clear.
You watch these people chastising Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard there.
And, you know, this is easy for you and me to interpret because that was an early version of it, but we've now seen enough of these instances that it's, you know, it's that same tragic thing unfolding.
But what you hear is a critique.
Is these people who are chastising Nicholas are among the most privileged people anywhere, right?
How is it that they are not recognizing that they are at Yale?
But I actually think this critique is wrong.
And here's why.
Because we are built for lineage against lineage competition.
If you are a member of a lineage that has faced a particular obstacle, an unfair obstacle, and then you as a member of that lineage have found yourself in a privileged position, it is actually, I think, quite natural for you to speak on behalf of the lineage that is still lagging.
I think it's very confusing when you see it on a screen because what you see is an individual who clearly has a ton of privilege acting as an oppressed individual.
It's like an Identity 404.
They're taking on the identity that they think they should have.
It's a cartoon version of their identity.
We're not speaking on behalf of their people, we're speaking on their behalf.
Their personal behalf.
I hate to impose this on them, but I think they're a little bit confused about what is First of all, I think they're some bad actors, and I just want to dismiss them because what they're doing is straightforward and uninteresting.
But for many of these people, they're not bad actors.
They're giving voice to something that feels very real, and I have a feeling that what they are saying is Has some truth in it, but because it's phrased in the individual, it is a paradox.
Why is somebody who is experiencing the kind of privilege that somebody obviously is?
I don't care if you're at Yale on scholarship, you're still there, right?
You've got a launchpad into the world that most people just simply don't have.
But, if you are internally, in some way that you cannot understand or explain, a representative of a lineage that is actually lagging for reasons that do have a lot to do with history and unfairness, then giving voice to that at the moment that you arrive in a place of privilege is not false.
But it would need to be explained so that you don't find yourself chastising Nicholas Christakis, who is not involved in oppression, as if he were, and speaking from a position of being oppressed, which you aren't.
So why is it so confused, do you think?
Because the thing is that there are intuitions that are legitimate there, and we can both agree that they're acting on some intuition where there is a level of legitimacy to it.
But it looks absurd, right?
Because there's this identity 404 thing going on.
I still blame the canon.
And I know that I'm going to draw all roads lead there.
A huge text within their canon was Paolo Friari's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Have you read this?
I've encountered it.
I don't think I've read it.
Maybe.
Maybe, Paolo.
I would probably disagree with some of his stuff, but underneath it, he's a Frankfurt School style Marxist, and he was living in, I think, the 60s in Brazil, and his whole thing was, alright, we've got to teach these, he was teaching people who couldn't read, the genuine downtrodden class and was teaching to read and he was figuring out, oh, let's, let's teach them that they're oppressed.
Let's, these people don't know that they're oppressed.
Very Frankfurt school, right?
Let's teach them, let's teach them that they're oppressed so they can liberate themselves.
Maybe, maybe in Brazil in, uh, in the sixties, maybe I'm, I'm a little... I'm still fuck off.
Let these people make best of their own situations.
But fast forward to the Applied Postmodernists and you've got... you've got Bell Hooks who is Naima Lowe's uh... go-to guru.
And all these... so she's written Teaching to Transgress.
That's why I named the second one Teaching to Transgress.
So I mean, you read it and you're like, oh, I kind of get it.
It's like a bit of a... Have you seen that film Dangerous Minds?
It's like a Dangerous Minds fantasy.
Creating a little lovely cult-y kind of thing with your class, and really getting in with them.
It's 101 to create a cult, really.
And so, she's sprinkled all this postmodern bullshit on it, and then it's all of a sudden, she's bringing the same energy that Paulo did to Brazil in the 60s to Ivy League.
And so all of a sudden, these people are being taught that they're oppressed.
And they're being taught in such a... these people are pretending that they are their heroes, who lived in different times, different geographies, and they're being taught with the same passion, with the same kind of zeal.
The truth is simple, and if you follow this path, it results in this amazingly better result.
And it's just, it's unfair.
But think about how much, how many things you actually have to tweak.
You need postmodernism to be able to feel like that in our current situation.
So think about how many things these students need, they need to tweak in these students to get buy-in.
And then all of a sudden you get them discharging this emotion that feels like from us there is something true there, there is something true.
But it looks absurd because they've, they've, they've been, they're bought into this, this, this It's very selfish as well, I think, because these people are living out their favorite civil rights heroes in a time where it's not, you don't do it, it's not warranted to that degree.
Right.
Oh, I think it is selfish in more than one way, that in effect basically people who don't know how to question these positive sounding syllogisms find themselves as pawns of a movement that Not only does it not really care about their well-being in the end, it has no plan for how to take care of them.
And so you get a bunch of college students to revolt against their institution and to reject science.
And then what are they going to do?
I call it king of the rubble thinking.
They're going to be kings of the rubble.
It's hard to advance within this system.
Let's turn it into rubble and we'll be the kings.
Little do I know, they're very sensitive so I'm going to be okay if it turns to violence on the streets.
No, I think this is exactly what's going to happen and actually I think there's a trajectory that inside of the university system You either have the ability to do science or you do not.
If you do not have the ability to do science inside of the university system, it will move out of the university system and it will become something else.
At which point you will have universities that don't have that thing.
I don't think they're viable.
I think they will collapse.
And so the point is to turn your university upside down and reject the science is to cause the thing that maybe does offer you the possibility of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or the equivalent and wrecking it.
And yeah, King of the Rebel is about... And it's also the goal of the university.
I mean, Jonathan Haidt talks about this.
He figured this stuff out quite well from a slightly different angle to what I'm looking at it.
But the Talos thing, have you heard his Talos thing?
So he, the talos of the university, it used to be about truth.
Oh, and now it's about social justice.
And now it's about change.
And that's what it is.
It's like, it's the function of the university has been hijacked.
It has been hijacked.
We need something, we need something, we need that scientific rigor.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be prescriptive because the culture has to look after the prescription of that and politics and whatnot, not the academy.
When the academy pulls in change, like how to use the science, it's a church.
That's why I think a prescriptive sociology Based on moral intuition.
That's what this side of the academy is doing, and through the administrative class, is taking over the entire... trying to, you know, it's hitting up against a lot of trouble.
But that's the goal, they're in the church business, so they're trying to, I mean the academies were, were scholastic monasteries before they became, they devoted themselves to science.
But they could head back there.
They could head back there and what they are doing wrong at the moment is that they are allowing, that basically administrators I mean, this is why you're sitting here talking to me, is that they came after me.
It's not an accident that they came after me.
It's not an accident, is it?
Right.
See, this is the weird thing.
sitting here talking to me, is that they came after me.
It's not an accident that they came after me.
It's not an accident, is it?
Right.
No.
See, this is the weird thing.
Do you think it's because you have confidence in your science that you kind of stood against them and then they came after you?
Because it's the hardest thing, because so much of this movement, it seems so natural.
Yeah.
But someone has to know.
It's like, is this some kind of the ideology working through humans, and then it'll naturally go to that place?
Or is it explicit?
I think in your case, it would be that, I mean, Your personality, right?
Like, if you know something and someone comes after you, you're going to go against them, and that's oil and water, I guess.
Yeah, although, I mean, I think your question has a precise answer.
I don't know it precisely, but I do have a sense of what it is.
There is a very rare characteristic in humans.
The characteristic involves Not being persuaded by the degree to which other people believe something.
In general, a human being who is faced with a room full of people who disagrees with them will change their opinion.
And the reason, this is not entirely nuts, the reason is because if you think about an ancestor, An ancestor who was alone in their opinion on something that mattered was in danger, right?
They were in danger of being outcast because even if they were right, being alone in that belief is rowing in the wrong direction.
And so we are wired to be very frightened by the prospect of being out of phase with other people.
On the other hand I believe that a certain number of people have to be capable of that thing.
It probably comes at a substantial cost It does.
It's why I'm sitting here in this room and not working on high-scale productions back home in Australia.
That thing, right?
It's a high cost.
It's a high cost.
I often think of it as a disability, like not being able to naturally go into the room and then just become one of the other people.
You find yourself on the outskirts of A lot of projects, a lot of institutions and things like that.
Sometimes I look at the people who can just be, and it's like, oh, this is magic.
I wish I had this weird disability that makes me... It's funny, I have no desire to be on the other side.
No?
You don't?
I was going to hypothesize that you have exactly the same thing.
I think the place where we differ is there's some part of you that feels like that would be easier and my feeling is...
I can't imagine what the point of living.
You've got a few more years under your belt.
And maybe you've got your brother and stuff.
I find my little tribes.
I've got my tribes.
Well, I mean, this is true.
Having Eric and Heather as a reality check, at worst, a phone call away, changed everything.
I would be this way anyway, but the degree to which I might imagine I was crazy would be much greater.
That's the hard part as well, when everyone around you... It makes you feel crazy.
And they call you crazy.
They do.
They hate you as well, because you're showing them something they don't want to see.
I don't know what it is.
Maybe I'm just chronically crippled in this direction.
But I do want to steel man the thing that they are applying.
I think it's a real thing and it actually makes sense.
It just doesn't make sense here at all.
Okay.
So the point I used to make to my students, I used to talk about...
There was this great film called The Hunters about the Kung San, the Bushmen.
And basically an anthropologist followed a Kung San hunting party on a hunt.
And they hunted a giraffe and kill it and he documents it.
Anyway, so I would talk to my students about what about somebody who was on such a hunting party who looked at the leaves of a tree?
You know, imagine some tree like a birch in which the bottom side and the top side of the leaf are very different colors and they shake in the wind.
That person might look at the leaf and think, you know, that implies something about a binary.
You might be able to encode all kinds of things in a binary.
Indeed, there might be all sorts of things about us that are encoded in some sort of binary form.
That person might have had the first thought that ultimately thousands of years later leads to a computer, right?
The answer to the guy who won't shut up about the shimmering of the leaves is shut up.
We're hunting.
Starvation is what happens if we don't do it well.
I don't know what you're on about with respect to those leaves, but stop being on about it or you're out, right?
So my point would be, there are times when pulling in the same direction is vastly more important than seeing some precise truth.
And then there are other times where exactly the opposite thing is the case.
And my feeling is we are in exactly the opposite case, right?
We need people who see with clarity because the people who know where they're going are confused, every single one of them.
People are looking, there must be another, people are looking for the people with clarity as well and there's a lot of people standing on soap boxes that don't have that clarity.
They're potentially the guys looking at the branch and going, what if that's some kind of backward binary with an upside down, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think a lot of people have the sense, right?
Have the sense that we've got to look for these people.
And we want them.
It's times like these, these strange times where messiahs pop up and cults bubble up out of nowhere.
Yeah, both things happen, is that you get some people who actually have insight and do see the path through the bottleneck and then you have other people who sound similar but either are delusional or are disingenuous.
Well, I think... Did you have a point you wanted to go on with?
Well, I mean, I do have a significant one.
No, no, go on.
I want you to keep going.
So this all leads to somewhere else that I wanted to bring up with you, which has to do with something that your film revealed to me about the event that I lived through, the one that I am now so identified with, that I just didn't know.
And you'll see this all comes back to an earlier part of this conversation in a way that I think is useful.
I looked at the video of the moments where those students, for people who haven't seen it or don't remember, these are students I've never met who came charging through the door chanting for me to be fired or to resign.
They, you know, they're surrounding me.
I'm trying to film them, which they want to block, but they very much want to film it so that they can put it into the world.
As you say, they're proud of it.
And I reacted away.
So many of them, not a single one of them knew me.
I don't think I'd had a conversation with any of them.
But some of them didn't even really have any familiarity with who I was or why I was being protested.
I learned much later that they had been sent to protest.
They'd been given a piece of paper.
And at the point that I stopped, that I reacted in a way that confounded their story of the racist monster that they had been sent to protest, they were, like, not sure what to do.
Yeah.
Because... The wheels are in motion.
Right!
The wheels are like, what is this?
What would I do?
Right?
So they, there's a point in the video where...
Very tragically, from my perspective, they go from actually interacting with me to just chanting what's on the paper.
And if you listen to what they chant on that paper, they're talking about who they're there to represent.
They're actually making an appeal to my students.
They wanted my students to flee from me and to join that amorphous moral intuition church on the spot.
Imagine what that scene would have looked like if my students had done that, right?
Now, it didn't even occur to me, even for months afterwards, until I saw your film, it did not occur to me that what they were hoping and expecting was that I would be abandoned by my students.
My students weren't going to do that.
And the reason my students weren't going to do that was because of the dynamic that existed in my classroom, which none of those students knew because they hadn't been my students.
Heather and I... Well, not only that, I did hear a story of one of your students that said that you were, at the time, teaching them about witch hunts.
Oh yeah.
It was on the board like the day before.
I mean, science is kind of a little bit of an inoculation against this kind of stuff.
If you're there with it, right?
Well, let's be clear about why the witch hunt stuff was on the board.
There are two reasons.
One of them you could say was almost prophetic in this case, which was that the subject matter of the course The final course that I probably will ever teach as a college professor.
The subject matter of the course was, if you imagine that civilization is headed off a cliff, there are two questions.
What should we be doing instead of what we are doing?
And how might you shift civilization to start doing that thing?
I don't know anybody who knows the answer to the second thing.
There's no good answer to how you would get power and apply it properly to make things work.
So let's abandon that question.
Let's focus on the second question.
If we had a mechanism to set something in motion that wouldn't have the defects of our system and wouldn't run us off a similar cliff, what would those rules be, right?
Just free ourselves from the question of how and focus entirely on the question of what.
Well, that is the answer to the question that the church you're talking about does not ask, right?
The church that you're talking about is stuck in how do we fix this object and get our share from it rather than maybe the object is just run its course and maybe it's time to think of a new object in which case...
Nothing in the place.
Yeah.
Right.
No proactive solutions ever.
It's the whole thing is complaint.
Right.
Complaint.
The whole thing is broken.
Yeah.
It's going to kill us all if we don't fix it.
And so let's think about, you know, maybe this is just easier to solve in terms of solving each of the issues...
And you know, I don't mean, you know, I'm not talking about utopian solutions.
I'm talking about Pareto optimal solutions, where you're not 100% free, but you're 80% free.
And you know what?
So is everybody else, because it's a quite fair system, etc.
But the...
The second reason that witch hunts were on the board in my class was that I was having this experience where as the college descended into madness, I took it on myself to go to every meeting, which nobody does.
There are just too many meetings.
And so people go to some percentage every year.
I started going to every one because bombshells were dropped at every one and nobody was in a position to track everything that happened.
Yeah, right and so it sort of felt like it was a necessary thing and so I started to do it and what that meant was that part of my mind was beginning to see the entire picture of what was happening to this institution and I was becoming a target because I was the person who anytime they left an opportunity to raise their hand and say hey this is not such a good idea
You know, my hand went up and so, anyway, as I was being accused of more and more preposterous stuff by colleagues, you know, who shouldn't be accusing me of anything, I'm just simply, I'm doing my job, I'm raising my hand and asking questions about what we're doing, you know?
As that was unfolding, it began to become clear that I was going to become the scapegoat.
And so anyway, imagine that that's all true and imagine a college in which the good professors have very...
very close relationships with their classes where I am not just some abstraction to them, but I come in and to the extent that I'm preoccupied by the fact that my colleagues are going insane around me, there's no honest way not to have some sort of interaction with them and say, look, here's what's throwing me. there's no honest way not to have some sort of I'm watching crazy stuff unfold in the college and I don't know what to do about it.
So, you know, they had some sense of something that they couldn't see over in faculty space going bonkers and then it emerges through the door.
or how However, here's the tough part.
There was a nasty accusation that was periodically leveled at Heather and me while we were teaching.
It was that the community of very committed students who circulated between our classes and who became very energized about evolutionary biology, that that was a cult.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't.
And, you know, sometimes students would bring this up, like they're people who would challenge them.
Oh, you're part of the call of Brett and Heather.
Can I interject there for a second?
Because I think Evergreen was... is...
I mean, it had a beautiful structure, but it also had the most dangerous structure you can have.
Bingo.
Because universities, when you're introducing people to knowledge, it's like one step out from a cult, really.
It just depends on what you want to do with that.
And then to be put with students for that long a period of time, you guys going away with them, Naima was doing projects with them outside of the class, and there's this bond It gets created.
Evergreen is probably a series of cults, right?
Knowledge cults.
Some are good, some are bad.
I would totally phrase this a different way.
I don't think you're wrong, I just think the labels are confusing.
What it is, is that cult is the pathological version of something that I'm not exactly sure what the name is.
So... Oh, do you know what it is?
What?
So I have been thinking about this.
So you would have brought people in, in not too dissimilar, very dissimilar fashion, but it's here's some knowledge, it does excellent things for us, you can learn it too and then go out in the world and do what you want with it.
Yeah.
Whereas a naive teaching to transgress or, you know, this kind of milieu is we have the solutions, we know what we want you to think, and we will instruct you and then you go out in the world and be just like us.
So it's this So, you're absolutely right that a university, a functional one, is a series of things that have some of the components of a cult.
The real deep question is, do the people at the head of the room, are they honorable and do they know something?
In which case, using that Yes.
that power that's there can be liberating for students.
Or are they self-interested or confused in a way that they will mislead these people into self-harm?
Yes.
And so, you know, I used to – I'm always cautious about saying this because seduction has a sexual connotation that isn't part of what I'm talking about.
But seduction is a question of making somebody want something to motivate them, right?
That can be used for ill or it can be used for good.
But I always thought that...
Pedagogy, teaching, was best thought of as a kind of intellectual seduction.
If you're trying to get people to do stuff by threatening them with a loss of credit or a bad grade if they don't do it, you're not going to teach them.
But if you say, look, I'm not going to make you do this, I'm not even necessarily going to give you a bad evaluation if you don't do it well, but You should want what I'm trying to deliver because you'll be more powerful if you have it.
And you know, on my first day of class, typically, I gave a hell of a speech every time.
And it was basically, you might not want to be in this class.
Here are the reasons you don't want to be here.
Here are the things I'm not good at as a professor.
And then, if none of that scares you off, here are the reasons you might want to stick around.
And I would say, you know, I used to speak in what I would call riddles, and the idea of speaking in riddles is that it causes the conscious mind to become active because you can't parse them straightforwardly.
They weren't really riddles, they were just little paradoxes.
And I would say, look, I actually want you to leave my class knowing less than you did when you came in.
But the stuff that you know, I want it to be much more powerful.
And I would say you could graduate college with the equivalent of a giant trailer full of knowledge, right?
Or you could have a little backpack full of stuff that's so powerful that it actually outweighs what's in that trailer.
And that's the stuff that you should pursue.
So the interesting thing here is that I'm trying to get in the head of the people that I'm studying and so if you're operating from a completely different worldview, science is a cult to them.
The norms, the bell curves are a cult and they're trying to I call them the second culture, because they're designing a second culture based on being other from the main culture.
Yeah.
And if you... this seduction you talk about, it is... it's everywhere.
If you can get... if you get a camera in any one of these rooms, there's... it's this big emotional... It's the seduction, but the content is... The content's nowhere.
It is somewhere.
It's a... it's a cohesive worldview.
It's based on offense-based rules, but it has a different metaphysics.
It's like, if you have to... In order to buy in, you have to shake the edges against Western civilization.
So there's this queering thing, there's all these strange things they do that replicate what you would go through.
You're reborn into it, right?
Like, you leave your family, you leave the world of norms, and then you're reborn into this new...
I guess it's a group of outsiders and they teach you that the world is designed in a completely different way than you had imagined.
And it's a completely destructive thing.
But I can imagine that they were building their own little cult and then they're like this.
I can see how they could see what was going on in the other classes of the cult.
It's warring factions, really.
It's warring factions, you can see it.
Using the students.
Oh, the students are the soldiers in this battle.
There's a tacit conspiracy between the students.
It's an ideological conspiracy, but the students and the faculty.
And that's one thing that I want.
The student leaders and the faculty have this tacit agreement.
It's hard to explain.
The way that institutional mechanisms are weaponized against certain teachers like yourself and Peter Boghossian and things like that, it's through a complaint But the complaints usually come from a student or someone who is... Sure.
But then, all of a sudden, the institutional mechanism kicks into place and it uses that complaint to then oust the problematic person.
But it's problematic usually from an ideological perspective, not...
No, these are minor complaints.
These are very, very minor complaints that a lot of people are getting kicked out of their universes for.
Totally.
And, you know, the irony of ironies was that one of the things that Heather and I were delivering was, you know, a Guns, Germs and Steel plus mechanism for understanding how we did end up where we are.
So it's sort of like the scientific version that to the extent that there are tools to be had to liberate us from the legacy of oppression, they are scientific.
Yeah.
And so, yes, the phony version had to come after the real version.
The real version was very inconvenient.
Just as any place where a person of color at Evergreen said they didn't feel oppressed resulted in an allergic reaction.
These are the last ones.
The last ones.
Exactly.
So you were on a path there.
The students that came to you were told that you were having a cult.
So you were halfway through that story.
Oh, well, so I think the question is what is the version where the dynamics – I mean it wasn't a cult.
The thing that Heather and I were doing wasn't remotely a cult.
What we would say to our own students when they would report to us that somebody had accused them of this, they would say, you know, a bunch of people said I was in the cult of Brett and Heather.
It was a very simple response, which was, you know that in class you are expected to question us at the front and back.
Yeah, yeah, that's the difference, right?
Absolutely expect and that if you don't do it, I mean personally I used to engage in this thing which I have a feeling would look a little off if you didn't see enough of it to get what it was about.
But if I got the sense that a student was telling me what they thought I wanted to hear rather than what they would believe, I would use that and I would lead them out onto a branch, you know, by signaling what I wanted them to say and then I would cut the branch off behind them.
Look what we're talking about here, the responsibility that you have as a teacher.
Yeah.
It's actually very delicate and could potentially be taken.
Like, think about how that responsibility can be taken.
Oh my God!
And then look at the ed schools.
This is exactly it.
Frankly, it's a fucking sacred responsibility.
It really is.
It's a sacred responsibility.
Anybody who either doesn't know what they're talking about or isn't well-intentioned enough to wield that thing carefully is a huge hazard to the people in their classes.
And not only that...
You can scale that human up.
There is a lot of them and they're all... they're attached to these disciplines.
So, I mean, I look at this stuff and it's horrifying to me because you're describing quite a beautiful process, right?
Giving someone the tools from which they can leave the school and then create something of their life.
Giving someone the weapons they can use to ruin their life for themselves is what's happening on the other end.
That's it.
It's like the educational equivalent of cutting, you know?
Right, like they're being given sharp tools and taught how to injure themselves.
The other thing is it's not just beautiful when the students leave, right?
Armed with these really powerful analytical tools.
It's beautiful once the students understand what it is that they're doing.
Yeah.
Right?
So this was the thing.
The reason that Heather and my students got accused of being in a cult was that they came back from class very energized by what we were talking about.
They didn't necessarily agree.
Yeah.
They wanted to talk about it outside of class.
It had a life.
I felt that.
I felt that around with I hung out a couple times and I felt that around you and Heather.
You see some magic.
I haven't said that to Heather.
You guys see some magic.
I want to see what you see.
When someone loves something, it comes out of them, right?
Well, and it's such a joy.
Here's the thing.
Once I got good, I was there for 14 years.
At first, I was being thrown into the deep end.
Literally, what happened to me was they needed a teacher.
And they called up Heather and they were like, can your husband teach?
Does he know anything?
I was like, definitely.
And then she looked at me, and we're like, well, we'll find out, you know?
Look away.
Right.
So they literally said, write a course description for us to put in the course catalog.
And I wrote the craziest thing I could come up with.
I wrote what I wanted to think about.
Yeah, and it was a course called Adaptation, Evolution of Organisms, Mechanisms, and Ideas.
And the idea was that these three things evolve in a parallel but not identical way.
Let's explore that.
And I wrote an abstract to this thing.
And it was just like, I know they're going to reject this, but maybe they'll let me use it as a starting point.
And they were like, good, do it.
And then I had a bunch of students walk through the door, and they were ready to play.
This was a good class, right?
Something about that description caused the right people to show up in the room.
And then it was just so much fun to walk in and see how far we could move in a three-hour period or whatever.
But anyway, after 14 years of this, this became quite efficient, right?
It was a question of, there was a landscape, we had to explore it, there's actually not an order that we have to explore it in, it's not a linear presentation the way you might do chemistry or something.
It was more like walking into a forest with students and saying, let's go look at this over here, you know, here's what these cicadas are doing.
So anyway, that thing, once you get a community of people who A, there's always somebody in the room who's ready to play, you know, back and forth with the professor, you say something paradoxical, they say, but what about this?
And you say, ah, but what about that?
You know, once the others in the room begin to get the idea, A, that they are safe, that they can explore, that it doesn't fall apart, that if they're wrong publicly it's not a disaster, that they end up looking smart in the end because they do come up with stuff that's novel.
Sometimes they come up with stuff the professor doesn't even know, right?
It's sort of addictive.
Anyway, that thing unfolding inside the classroom was very threatening to the things unfolding in other classrooms.
It's so, it's so complex what happened there.
It's the gravity of the evergreen story, because it speaks about so many different things.
Yeah.
And there's so many different threads, and there's, I can see on Benjamin Boyce, he just, What is it, two years down the track now?
He's still talking about it and untangling it and yeah, there's something about what happened there.
There's the layers, the layers that are in there.
It's still going, right?
So there's that coming together series that I looked into and thought this is like clearly an insight into what the hell's going on here.
They've doubled down on that.
They're doing another, I don't know if you saw the footage recently, but another coming together, tearing apart series.
I don't understand how their convictions grow stronger as the evidence that they're on the wrong track also grows stronger.
Yeah, who knows?
That's the hard part, is at what point do you get shaken out of that moral community, you know?
Yeah.
It's stunning.
It's also worrying.
I think there's something particularly strange about the Washington area, because I think that Puget Sound, there's a lot of A lot of roads lead back there, too, within the scholarship and all these strange things that I see.
So I think that there's something particularly...
skewed within this Washington area that Evergreen is.
Do you have any insights into that?
It's pure observation, and I'm wondering if these dots connect in some strange way.
Well, it'd be very interesting if they were.
You raise the issue of the schools of ed, which Lyle Asher, who's here in Portland, has been talking about, so we should explore that.
I don't know if that's connected to what you're saying.
What is it that you see in the Puget Sound area?
I mean, the tenants that they were talking about at the start of several meetings, because I'm monitoring this through anything I can, YouTube videos, scholarship, some writings.
And what is it, Race and Pedagogy, they have conferences there.
D'Angelo's a big player there and a lot, it seems as though, there's another militant Antifa person that was teaching there.
There's been three or four other things where I've just seen the logo on something like Insane that I've read.
Like, I've gone, well, this is too insane.
Because usually they have to sell it, right?
There's this insane version of it, but they still have to sell it to make it work within the academic university structure.
And so it's hidden, and usually you can tell when you're reading something hidden, but then occasionally you'll see this thing and it's like, it's there.
It's an outbreak.
Yeah.
And a few of them have led back to that.
So then I think what it is, so I was thrown a little bit by your question because it's like, well, geez, what is it?
Is it the level of rainfall?
But I think the evolutionary factors that are involved, but I think what you're describing is that there's a critical mass necessary to do the idea laundering.
And so the idea laundering doesn't show up in full force unless you have enough, you know, mirrors to bounce the laser off of, at which point... Hey guys, the coast is clear.
Let's get weird.
Right, exactly.
So, it may be that there happens to be a concentration of particular things that allow an ill-formed conception to make it into daylight here, just maybe for accidental reasons, or arbitrary ones.
I get the sense here in Portland, it's very left already, so if something was going to bubble up, it wouldn't get a bunch of... I mean, do these areas, are they predominantly left-wing?
These are definitely not swing states, right?
Oh, no, no.
There's something about... There's a weird experience I've had with I mean, I'll call them friends.
It was an odd situation.
So I grew up in Australia and I did a lot of work, a lot of different works, factory jobs and things like that.
And I remember moving to WA and there was these conversations with some people that I was working with landscaping there, where they were talking about the Aboriginal community.
And it was this strange experience of them being quite racist, but like openly racist.
And I was like, I didn't, I still wanted to be their friend, so I had to work with them.
Yeah.
But I did want to call them out.
And then it was this, it was this odd experience of like, do I let that go?
Or do I become the outcast?
Right.
And I wasn't going to work with this for long.
So I was like, whatever, I'll, whatever, I'll just leave, I'll leave that go just to keep the peace and move on.
I'm not going to change the way of thinking.
And so that experience, I mean, it's kind of stuck with me.
And then coming over here to Portland, I had the same experience, but they were talking about white men.
It was so weird.
I was sitting there and they were speaking about white men with hate.
And it was like, these white guys I'm dating, they're terrible.
God, I hate them.
All they do is play video games.
They're so useless.
Like this cartoon figure of what a white man is.
They could have been talking about specific people, but they were talking generally.
And I'm sitting there going, I want to be friends with these guys, but this is a fuck conversation.
Like this is – it's the same thing.
It's the same thing, different inputs.
Well, I think what you're getting at is super important and the parallel is a really interesting one.
In some sense, human beings have a mode, right?
When we are competing lineage against lineage, we have a mode.
There are certain ways we sound when we are, for example, about to make war on some other group, right?
When you're about to make war on some other group, you dehumanize them, right?
Swifties and Hutus, they said cockroach a lot of the time, started calling cockroaches.
Evergreen State College, the police officer, they were calling a cockroach.
Totally.
It's a question of making somebody out to be subhuman.
Vermin, pathogen comes up a lot.
And we are watching this unfold in Western civilization.
We're certain it's clearer how it happens in the university because some part of the university culture is about saying things publicly, about bringing ideas into the light.
And so we see it there more clearly.
We were talking a little bit about Lyle Asher who has unearthed another thread that is much harder to see and in fact when I first read his work my thought was this is really important and I would have missed it had he not done this work.
I've only just collided with his work so... You want to say what he's done?
I just want to kind of map out what I'm doing now because so I've been Lucky enough to watch a book come together that's coming out within the next few months by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
Ten years deep into looking at this canon, I guess.
Specifically the kind of scholarship, the social justice scholarship.
And so her and Jim, and a little bit of contribution from me over the course of the past two years, they've mapped out the idea space.
And it was clear to me we kept running into schools of education and pedagogy.
Pedagogy is a big thing, so theory of teaching.
And that kept popping up, and so they've created this map in cynical theories, it's mapped it out, and I think it could potentially be a big event in figuring out where this problem is actually stemming from.
But there's this big black hole.
Because we keep running into this thing that we haven't looked into properly.
And then all of a sudden this week I shot with Lyle Asher as part of the film and we got to talking and then I went to look at his work and so he has mapped out that the schools of education and how this kind of spread through these low standards within the school of education and they have moved from these I guess they were weak bodies, right?
They were kind of a weak body that some kind of disease started operating on.
Yeah, they were immune-compromised institutions.
Yes, immune-compromised.
They were quite weak, right?
For a lot of reasons.
Got taken over ideologically and then they've moved an administrator class that have become educators.
So they've gone back from administrative back into the education thing.
So it's mapping.
So there's this canon and ideas and then how it's actually operating in the real world and I think Lyle might be...
Well, I'm definitely going to keep in touch with him, put it that way.
Oh, yeah.
No, his stuff is mind-blowing.
So the studying of the schools of ed, most of us don't even think about schools of ed.
How often does it come up in your thinking about how civilization works?
But because it's a weak node and because so much comes from it, it's a very dangerous vulnerability.
But the thing I'm grappling with is, There's a distinction between what the movement says that it thinks and how it works.
And the thing that concerns me most is that The only way that this movement delivers something positive to those who have signed up for it in the end is through some sort of very frightening Maoist takeover in which it actually has the power to reallocate resources on a massive scale.
I don't see that as very likely.
It does organizationally.
So within a certain organization, if you get enough people to buy in, you can advance using your oppression variables quite beyond what you deserve to advance or it's an easy path.
I mean, there's a lot of competition around in all these places now, and it's like this extra element of competition that you can kind of ride.
So this is this is where I was heading.
Maybe I shouldn't say the only way it delivers, but you were heading the only way it delivers in a fashion that matches what it advertises.
Yeah.
is some sort of a Maoist takeover.
Yes, yes, yeah.
What it actually amounts to is a kind of affirmative action at every scale, which I have to tell you, game theoretically is a non-starter.
I'm not saying affirmative action can't work, although I think what we've learned through the affirmative action experiment is that the devil's in the details.
But The idea that every classroom is an opportunity to adjust well-being by silencing certain people and elevating the voices of others, that every courtroom might be a place, I mean, just the simple fact that
What is a crime may be shifted so that some people have more leeway to commit crimes and other people have less leeway to commit crimes.
Now, on the one hand, that's how it's been.
A racist court system... That's the justification for the new caste system, which is a reverse of... And in some senses it has been, you know what I mean?
It's more... It has and it hasn't, right?
When it's working well, it doesn't.
It was... Harder for me as an Australian.
Things are upright.
Right.
Well, I want to ask you about that.
Because, I mean, as you must be aware, Australia is something of which Americans are well aware and simultaneously not aware at all.
But the fact... Let's just take an ugly example.
Up until very recently, it would have been almost impossible in an American court for a black woman to successfully charge a white man with sexual assault, right?
So in effect, white men have had the ability to rape black women in the U.S.
and not have the courts step in.
Is that a thing?
How is that a thing?
I have no idea.
But it is so inconceivable, as an American, it is so inconceivable that, you know, prior to 1950, that such a court case, that if a white man had raped a black woman, that she would end up getting her day in court and the court would hear this as a legitimate accusation.
It's horrifying.
Like, that visually hurt me.
And I think that's why, you know what I mean?
There's a lot of energy there to play with.
But, you know, I mean, I don't know.
I'll be curious when this podcast emerges if anybody thinks I'm wrong about this.
No, the courts have been slanted, and they've been slanted in a way that's fallen on certain people's shoulders in a way that it hasn't fallen on others.
What happens if you say, well, it was like that for so and so many years, we're now flipping it and it's going to be the opposite way, right?
A, that is not going to be stable.
Right.
And that is not to say that what happened was in any way acceptable.
It wasn't.
But you're talking about destroying civilization by naively turning the tables on a historical fact.
And anyway, it is a lethal approach to solving this problem.
Taking a classroom and allowing certain people to speak and other people not being able to speak is also It's the same thing, but yeah, but the weird thing is it's a difference between Something happening subconsciously or you know as a result of these forces that are underneath this and also the The system was aspiring not to be that.
So if something was happening, it was happening implicitly through that.
And then they do that explicitly.
So they're not just, they're explicitly changing the system to be racist.
Explicitly.
Explicitly.
Right.
As opposed to... As opposed to just something that... The problems would occur, right?
But they're not explicitly occurring.
They've embraced racism as a solution.
Yes.
And they've defined it out of existence.
You've just defined critical race theory.
Right.
The whole game.
That's what it is.
And so for some of us this is absolutely jarring because as much as I agree that there is more unfairness than the system acknowledges, more remaining unfairness.
The idea of abandoning the pursuit of fairness in favor of some compensatory kind of racism is, it's obscene.
It's obscene.
And it It robs us of any legitimacy.
So anyway, I don't know where we end up with it, but just the simple recognition that if you stop listening to what it says, and you look at what it actually pursues, that's what it's doing.
It's saying that when you look at the canon.
If you look carefully, you can see it.
It's really, really hard.
I've had even problems talking to my sisters about this stuff, because from the outside it looks like I'm Getting drawn into the waltz ride or something like that.
And they're like, I don't remember you being that guy.
I'm like, I'm not that guy.
You have to see what I can see.
It's so ugly underneath the surface.
You have to look past the sound of what you're saying.
It takes an education to bring someone up to speed.
Luckily, I'm family with my sister, so I've got that ability to sit with them for a long time and tell them why I'm not a monster.
But most people are... A few doors have closed back home in Australia as a result of me looking into this stuff.
Well, that's the other thing is that I think when people can't hear you or when I try to convey why it is that we are not where people expect us to be based on the values that we hold, we can't take their answers too seriously.
Because the thing that the movement that we are talking about does so effectively is change the incentives of individuals so that it is easier to go along than it is to resist.
You just drive the costs up to people who resist in any form so high that it takes very unusual people to choose to pay.
And what happens then is people will rationalize what they are doing.
So if you're a coward, right?
If you're a coward then you don't want to find yourself having to explain to your family why you're not actually in the alt right.
So maybe it's easier to just embrace the platitudes and to do enough virtue signaling that you are no longer suspect.
I'm imagining, I don't know how other people's minds work, but were I to find myself in that position, which I would not allow myself to, but if I were to find myself in that position, the pain of having said what I didn't believe in order to get myself out of trouble Would be so great that it would be easier to rationalize that actually I do believe that.
And so I think this is unfolding throughout the entire thing is that people are convincing themselves of positions that they would not ordinarily be compelled by because it is the only solution to the problem that they've been given.
You do that long enough and you actually believe it.
There's no kind of process there.
Because a lot of people don't know what they believe as well.
So they're on, they're in this, they're kind of using their intuitions to go through it, you know, I'm liberal and I like the left and all that sort of thing.
But if you actually bring it down, you actually explore what it is you believe, it's harder to shake or something like that.
Like there's some people who aren't getting swept up in these things because I know what I believe.
Do you know what I mean?
Oh, I know exactly.
I have to change a lot.
Like for some people to buy into something, they have to change a few little things.
Yeah.
But it's like, actually, if you want me to join this enterprise, which is afoot and everyone back home wanted me to join – It means I would have to change my understanding of human nature.
I would have to change my understanding of what being a liberal is.
I would have to change... And the damage I would do to myself for changing those things would be far worse than anything I can do to them.
Yeah.
I don't know, it's the bulwark around it or something like that.
Well, I get this completely and in fact the canoe meeting is the perfect example of this because, you know, as I'm... So I walked into that room and sat down in what socially felt like the seat to sit down in and then suddenly realized I was in front of these cameras.
Which is great for me.
I was really happy to have a shot of you actually in there.
It's great.
It's the perfect end to my little series, first episode.
But what it meant was that I was standing there as we were all beckoned to enter the canoe and rush off to the magical land of equity.
Everybody filed past me.
Yeah.
And... Some of them look ashamed.
They do.
In fact, there are ones every time I see that clip, there are ones who I know were embarrassed at what they had done.
I found those because there were some people who were giving you like a look out of the corner of the eye like a...
Oh, they looked right at me because they were my friends and they knew that this was wrong, and then they had to look me in the eye and say, watch, bye.
You can see it, and they looked right at you.
Right, exactly.
It's such a beautiful... I mean...
I write, and I couldn't write that.
Like, if I wrote that, I'd be really proud of myself.
That shot, that one shot.
Oh, right.
No, it captured it.
It actually happened.
But the other thing, what it sort of captures, is that one option for me in that room, technically, was to board their canoe.
On the simple basis that equity is desirable and that, you know, yada yada yada.
There wasn't a chance in the world that I was getting on their canoe.
That says something about you.
It was a big move not to get on that canoe, I would have thought.
It was preceded with a bunch of...
I would have walked on the tops of the seats to get out of that room, not to board their goddamn canoe.
And so, you know, I mean, it's all in that room.
You've got people who don't really know what's going on.
You've got people like the ones you described who walked by me with shame in their eyes because they knew that we both knew what was going on.
You got me who's like, you know, if I've got to burrow out the wall, I'm not getting on your canoe.
And you've got Benjamin behind a camera who's like, Thank God I've got an excuse not to be seen not getting on this magic canoe to the land of equity.
But the real question at some level is if we accept, and I think you do, that The movement says a bunch of things that don't add up, it's internally consistent but they don't add up if you evaluate them from a grounded external perspective.
But that it's highly effective because it puts people in a bind and gives them one option to solve their problem and that one option involves embracing these wrong ideas.
What we, who are not easily persuaded to join them are doing wrong is we are not understanding that it is our obligation to figure out how to honorably counteract that strategy.
And, I mean, maybe you are.
Maybe I'm speaking for myself and maybe you are figuring it out.
Maybe that's what your films are.
I think just looking at it, like, there's this weird draw into it and I've been spending a long time.
I mean, Douglas Murray said this as well.
He's written his book that's...
He's taken the battle to the gates of the university and I think that the cynical theories will take it right into the centre.
But he said himself, you start looking at this stuff and you can't stop it.
You kind of get drawn into it because you're like, holy crap, it is completely different than the iceberg tip that we get shown.
I just think that I just go there and then be productive, create art.
I think that's the only solution I know.
Gets me in a lot of trouble though.
So, I don't know how to operationalize what I think I know about this.
What I think I know is that there are always, I don't know if I'm even top tier in this, probably.
Yeah.
But in terms of resisting this kind of thinking.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, maybe start somewhere else.
My scientific work, my scientific approach Absolutely requires me not to be persuaded by the fact that absolutely everybody disagrees with me.
That's how you find new scientific stuff that matters.
If you're persuaded by the fact that everybody disagrees with you, you cannot traverse new ground in science, because everybody will disagree with you at the beginning, right?
So my professional mode is born of that same instinct, which is, well, it's interesting that everybody disagrees with me, but maybe that's even a sign that what I'm on to is important.
Well, I think I've had similar training in the art world.
I think that everyone, like I don't know how to explain my ideas.
And every time I have, everyone goes, it's a stupid idea.
Like the industry doesn't want to look after it or whatever.
And then all of a sudden I went, well, you know what, screw you guys.
I'm going to learn how to use a camera.
I'm going to edit.
And I do it.
And then all this awesome, and then the audience gets it.
And they go, this is amazing.
And it's like, so it's a similar thing.
It's like I've kicked in the dick constantly with The middleman between what I want.
So yeah, it's a similar training.
You're not going to produce that thing if you listen to everyone.
That's interesting.
I've heard Casey Neistat say something very similar about why he chose the path that he did.
And his point is that the barriers to bringing out your own vision I've never been lower.
Yeah.
Right?
Exactly.
And the industry is nuts.
Yeah.
You know, anyway.
The internet is both the reason why this thing spread, but it's also going to be the thing that kills it.
Yeah.
Because it's too easy to talk... So, I mean, you're talking about solutions, right?
Yeah.
My solution is very much just... I think it'll do its own work if people... if you can show people what it actually is.
I have... there's a faith in that.
Maybe I could be... No, no, I think it's part of it.
Yeah, right.
But I think there's another part of it.
So what I was talking about...
They need to see what it is.
They need to have the ability to see what it is.
You need to draw lines around it so they can differentiate it from the civil rights movements and the intuitions that they have that are correct.
I think maybe three things are necessary here, believe it or not.
One is, okay, the screen which we were decrying at the beginning of this conversation is the key to something else.
You need to see the canoe meeting on a screen without somebody sitting there with you judging you, right?
You need to be able to just see it and understand, whoa, that's a little weird, right?
Two, you need examples of people who show you that you can resist this, right?
I resisted.
People swore I was a conservative.
I swore I wasn't.
And you know what?
A couple years later, people have stopped telling me I'm a conservative.
They've gotten it.
So the point is, do you have to join the conservatives in order to reject this stuff?
No.
And in fact, there's a way of just saying, sorry, that's not where I am.
I'm friendly with conservatives, but I haven't joined them because I still think we've Yeah.
Helen is a, by the way, Helen Pluckrose.
If anyone's interested in Rosetta Stone to be left wing in this current climate.
Oh, totally.
She's it.
She's marvelous in so many different ways.
So you need examples of what it would look like to stand your philosophical ground in the face of this.
You need the ability to see what it looks like if you don't, right?
Who are you going to be in that room?
Are you going to be the people cheering the canoe?
Are you going to be the embarrassed people, you know, participating because they don't know what else to do?
And mind you, I should say in the defense of the people who walked by me in that room, It's not a fair comparison because I was a tenured professor.
Yeah.
They were staff.
I totally understand why you would jump on... Yeah.
I don't even know if I wouldn't just jump on the canoe just to... just to not... do you know what I mean?
Well... In other ways or something like that.
I'm not... I'm not... I am like you in that I want to stand against these things but I mean it makes sense to just Well, it's certainly better than losing your job.
And they hadn't had the information that you had as well, right?
No, they had, but I mean, again, they were staff, they were vulnerable in a way that I actually turned out to be vulnerable, but I was a lot less vulnerable as a tenured faculty.
But in any case, I don't, so A, in 2019, I don't think Mike Dana jumps on that canoe because he has seen the canoe meeting.
Yeah, I would lie.
Yeah, right.
But okay, so let's say that there are three things going on here.
There's the Ability to, with nobody pressuring you in the room, evaluate what this stuff actually just objectively looks like on your screen.
That's one thing.
There are examples of what you can do other than hop on the canoe.
And then there's the sort of IDW discussion layer, which is...
You know, as you pointed out earlier in this conversation, there is a large population that are sort of interested in this discussion.
Just as there is a large population looking for a movement to solve the difficult problems of existence, there's also a large number of people looking for a discussion that doesn't have this mind-numbing
...characteristic, which is why the IDW layer did so well, is that lots of people were feeling backed against the wall and then suddenly there were talking heads who didn't frankly agree with each other on, you know, politics, but did agree with each other on the fact that A. this movement was a problem and that B. we needed to be generous with each other and talk.
There's a hole in the market as well.
It's like Quillette exploded because there's all this stuff that the Mainstream media and arts and entertainment weren't touching and people want those things.
So it's like there's this big market force behind it as well, that's why it exploded.
They do.
Seems obvious now, after it's happened, you know what I mean?
Yeah, obvious in retrospect, because everything in evolution is, and so much else.
So I guess the interesting question, as an American, and maybe there's no such thing anymore, in the sense that the entire world has a Yeah.
And so anyway, some of us are privileged enough to have a vote in those elections.
Yeah.
But the question now is, given our electoral situation, does that layer that has bucked the trend actually survive to the finals?
And so, you know, Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang look very different to me than the rest of the field.
They even look different than Bernie Sanders, who is the guy I supported all the way to the end in the last election, last presidential election.
But okay, so let's...
Let's figure out how to bring in a couple of threads here before we wrap this up.
One, I want to talk to you about how things look different to an Australian.
Two, I want to talk to you about race and your own background and how you see race generally, how you see race unfolding in America.
Yeah.
So let's start there.
I'm scared to talk about race in America because it's a different thing.
But tell me that.
Where do you want me to start?
I want you to start right there.
So Americans in general don't know that much about how the American context is different.
Because the American context is so dominant in so many spheres, it sort of is the water we swim in.
The weird thing is Australians are looking at it through your lens inside our scholarship.
So there's this weird crossover.
We had a Black Lives Matter Parade at home and it's like there's issues between the police and Aboriginal communities.
Yeah.
Yeah, there is it but it's not it's not the same thing Like we have videos go viral because police don't shoot It's like there's a guy with a knife and then all the Americans are sharing going why the hell hasn't this guy shot?
It's just that we don't have the same problems as you guys so My personal experience with race, I'm mixed race, so my dad's Mauritian, African-Ireland, my mum's Dutch, blonde hair, blue eyes, so they're very, very different.
So race was nothing inside my household.
And like absolutely nothing, you can't even see it.
It's like different power dynamics and nothing has anything to do with race.
And then for race to become something, I had to leave the home.
And so it was this weird experience of race being something very sensitive and touchy, and I don't actually have the inputs to give a shit about that kind of stuff.
I remember in primary school someone said something racist to me, and the room went, And in my mind, I was like, oh, do you know what this means?
I can do whatever I want with this guy, and I win.
I can punch him, and the teacher won't even get angry at me.
And so I did.
But yeah, so it's always been like a bit of a tool, it seems to me, because I've never actually felt it.
And I've experienced, I think Australia's really good.
I think it's excellent for first generations.
There's no issues.
There's been some weird...
There's a lot of jokes around race but I always thought it was kind of inclusive racism in a weird way because the jokes weren't dissimilar to the fat kid or the kid with red hair or, you know, you're just feeling it out.
There's a taking the piss out of each other dynamic that is a little uncomfortable to describe but it's actually kind of a normal part of being human and it includes all kinds of stuff.
And the racial element of it, it was just You have to get someone where you think, it might be an Australian thing, you have to get someone where you think they'll be sensitive.
Right.
And then if you let them play with that, then that's intimacy.
Yeah.
And so to block that off, I don't know how I would have fit in.
I wouldn't think I would have fit in very well.
Oh totally.
So it was a very multicultural place I grew up in.
It always seemed like a tool.
Like, I think the first time I actually felt racism was when I started hanging out in the arts and entertainment with the progressives.
Yeah.
Because it was very much, insert brown man here, or hey, we've got this thing, and you're different, so we can use you because of that.
And they were all very, they were too sensitive around it.
What is this magical creature from another land?
And that felt like, it was an othering.
It was like an othering of inclusion.
An othering of inclusion.
Oh man.
That is so what it is.
And so I was like, I want to hang out with the guys who call me a black prick.
They're less racist than you guys in some sense.
And so, yeah, it's been a strange journey around the race stuff for me, because I don't feel it.
But also I put my foot in things.
I know that the history here is a lot more sensitive than I think it is back home.
I definitely don't want to...
Step on the problems within the Aboriginal communities and what my country did to the first people.
But I do think where it matters, Australia is really, really, really good.
So we had a white Australia policy in the 70s and that got abolished where it was just like only people who were allowed to come in were white.
So that's an explicit racism, right?
Yeah.
They abolished that, and then they wanted... So, that was symbolic.
We don't want to be racist anymore.
And so they did that.
My dad, who came from a country who had imploded because the English moved out, and then there was racial tensions.
And so it was actually, like, hardcore racism that was going on there.
Like, legitimate.
Um, and he couldn't advance because he was Creole, you know, like African blood, they weren't being treated very well.
Um, and so, mixed blood.
He comes to Australia and he, so Australia was still kind of racist when he was there.
Like he still had that cultural stuff he had to work through.
But he did a lot of work to work through that and gain advancement to where we are now.
And to speak as though the people who were Black now are going through the same struggles that he went through in the 70s after doing all that work.
It's actually disgusting to me.
Yeah.
Because it's belittling all the hard work he did.
Australia said, we don't want to be racist.
Guys like my dad came and worked that into the culture with grit and sweat.
And we're in such a good place.
And he's advanced.
There's social mobility now.
He was living in a bed with his disabled brother when he moved here.
Fast forward, you know, quite a few, 50, 60 years.
And he's managed through the course of my life even.
We were poor when we started.
And now he's a wealthy man.
To zero that out in order to reinvigorate... People are trying to convince me that this is a horrible place and racism is everywhere.
Yeah, it is, but not in any... It's not like that.
We have made progress.
Yes, a lot.
And you're talking about Australia.
I think in general in the West, you've made a great deal of progress.
We're so against racism, in fact, that if someone is filmed saying a racist comment, their life is ruined.
Yeah.
And that's what's happening.
That's progress.
Their life is actually ruined.
Yeah.
It's huge progress.
Yeah.
To pretend we're living in the 50s and there's all this kind of, oh, poor me and my blackness and fuck off.
Like it's not the state of the world.
So there are two points I want to pick up from that.
One of them has to do with something that you and I have talked about, which is that, you know, I can't say for sure most of our minds are not accessible to the conscious part.
But I don't feel like I wake up a white guy.
I know that I'm a white guy.
It has impacts.
But it's not the way I approach my own life.
It's not the way I approach other people.
And there's a kind of camaraderie every time I meet somebody who can say the same thing about their origin.
Um, there's a kind of meeting and I want it defined so that people can join it voluntarily, right?
It's sort of like human first.
Yeah.
Right?
I am a white guy.
You're re-divining universalism, which is something that we had 20 years ago.
Right.
We had it.
Well, and I think the thing is it's always, it has, since the civil rights movement in this country, it has been the proper aspiration.
That's it.
That's the one.
If we can find a way to, to Tell people that this critical race theorists are operating in the same sphere as the white nationalists.
They're the same people, they just think that the rewards should go in the same way.
Two different teams.
Yeah, exactly.
If we can let people understand that, then they currently occupy some moral high ground.
Right, which they don't.
They have not earned.
It's horrific when you look at it.
And so this is something.
And this is why Martin Luther King gets brought up a lot.
Right, because it's contentious, because we all like the Martin Luther King story and so it has to be attacked for being somehow, you know, ill-conceived or failed or something like that, which it isn't.
So, the thing that, you know, you sometimes hear religious people talking about Their faith.
And for those of us, I don't know where you stand, but for me, I'm not a person of faith and I can't quite relate to the emotional power that they report for having embraced this.
But I feel something like what they describe in the space of people who, and I'm going to be very careful about this, Don't give a shit about race, okay?
Don't give a shit about race does not mean that you don't see it.
Colorblind is something the civilization has to be.
It has to be.
That doesn't mean that it can't see that you have a racial background and doesn't care about it to the extent it's important.
It means that when you come into a court, your race can't matter.
When you walk into a classroom, Your race cannot matter.
Can it come up at some point if it's relevant to a discussion?
Yes, but your teacher can't see you that way.
So the thing that I want to convey about it is that I think it is true that people who have made this step to human first experience a huge leap in the quality of their life.
That this is like a raise you can give yourself.
That at the point that you abandon suspicions of people based on their race, it is a huge weight off your shoulders.
And walking down the street is a better experience.
I think this is a scary thing, like I've been talking to a lot of white men, those evil white men, and a lot of them are reporting these strange things, like I see a An experience with a black person and having to think, having to calculate too much.
Yeah.
And that's so horrible to me, because that's like racism that's kind of reforming out of this thing.
It's like this re-emergence of racism.
It's like, just don't think about it, it's alright.
I totally agree with this.
It's the breakdown of something that wasn't perfect but was definitely working.
Yeah, it wasn't perfect, but it was perfect.
Well, let's take, here's my favorite example of this.
The N-word.
For decades in this country, we had an agreement.
Largely unspoken.
But an agreement.
White people didn't use the N-word.
Black people were free to.
I think that was the right arrangement.
It is not the right arrangement at the point that it can be prosecuted, especially if it is prosecuted by the simple fact of having uttered the syllables.
Yeah, not even, no intent behind it.
Right.
There are lots of reasons to use the N-word if you're a white person.
Let's suppose you're, you know, in a production of Huck Finn.
Right?
Yeah.
You might have to say it.
Yeah.
Right?
Suppose you're referring to, uh, you know, we're now in a problem where hip-hop invokes Analogues of the N-word, and sometimes the N-word itself, and white people aren't apparently allowed to sing it.
And then there's the other one.
Someone recently was using this AI thing they built to do a discourse analysis, and they were actually trying to map who was actually racist in the alt-right area, and by mapping a lot of the output.
And so obviously the N-word is going to be a big indicator there, but they weren't allowed to present their findings.
That's a good hand word, no!
What the hell, you're actually doing some serious work!
You're doing scholarly work, you might have to say it!
So, anyway, we had a gentleman's agreement, it's a compromised term, but we had a gentleman's agreement that worked.
I don't remember people in my circle ever violating it in earnest, right?
But it had to be predicated on the discretion that actually, yes, this white person did Yeah.
Can I bring that back to the theology?
Sure.
So what they're doing there, so Durkheimian view of religion is religions have something sacred.
And that's not to be touched, right?
So the way that I see that this has started in this strange thing is that you had the postmodernist shake the etch-a-sketch of Western civilization.
So it's like everything could be false and who knows what is true.
All it is about is about power and so on and so forth.
But it's very destructive, like they're just playing and ripping things apart and making people question why they believe these giant narratives.
Then all of a sudden you get Kimberley Crenshaw, who has really, she said, what we need to do is we need to map postmodern techniques onto political action.
And in that, she talks about, well, what do you keep?
How do you do that?
Because it's this kind of abstract thing.
You were currently living in the void.
The etch-a-sketch is a blank page.
And she said, we do that by keeping oppression based on race.
So she actually did the Descartes thing, I'm oppressed therefore I am.
That's all that there is.
That's all that there is.
She said that oppression is the thing we can keep, and we can build everything else around oppression.
So that's the sacred thing.
And it's oppression, it's victimhood, and that's where victimhood culture comes from.
There's this 30 years Of scholarship on top of this one thing where oppression based on identity is the only thing that's real.
And if you speak to these people, you'll find that that's the only thing that they hold sacred and they keep steady.
That's fascinating.
So I will just...
Say to my audience that I think what you have just unleashed here is a absolutely key insight and it has to do with the meaning of what sacred is and that if you misapply the normal stuff that goes along with the sacred and you apply it to oppression then you create a situation
Where as you approach the asymptote of a world in which people are judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, you have to work backwards because you can't bear for the thing at the core to evaporate.
And that explains what Douglas Murray has pointed out about the tendency of these movements that fight oppression to keep going even after they've gotten to the station.
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, that's a key piece of information.
It's a whole other podcast.
It's a whole other podcast.
It's a film.
Yeah.
So let me go back and clean up one thing.
Civilization has to aim towards colorblindness.
Individuals have to, I won't say have to, but I think they would be wise, every single individual would be wise to check in with the idea of being human first and shedding all of the cost that they pay out of whatever bigotries and suspicions they might harbor.
But this does not mean that anybody's ethnicity or background can be or should be erased.
And I wanted to tell a little story in light of what you were saying about people joking about race and the fat kid and all that.
I'm gonna shield the identities here because I think I have to.
Yeah, that's not really why.
And in fact, I think everybody involved in the story would be cool with it, but I just am not so sure that I'm ready to take the risk on their behalf.
Somebody well-known.
Very well known in the IDW sphere.
Invited Heather and me to a dinner party.
An intimate dinner party at this person's house.
And there were guests there that she clearly had carefully chosen who would be a good person to be at the dinner.
And a woman at the party told a joke at the dinner table.
And the joke was, do you know what the definition of anti-Semitism is?
I said, no, I don't.
She says, it's hating Jews more than is necessary, right?
And I must say, That joke could be taken very negatively, but the context of that joke, it was delivered in full knowledge of what table she was at, who she was talking to, and it felt very welcoming that this joke actually... It's a horrible joke!
It's not a horrible joke.
The point was, there's some natural tension around Jews, right?
Yeah, and that's released, right?
It's released.
The point is, this joke was an embrace, and it was Complex.
Yeah.
It's hard to even report it, so it doesn't cause people to say, oh, well, I don't know.
I did it.
I did it.
Right.
But the point is.
But the feelings in the room and the intent and the circumstance.
She knew what jokes she was telling, and she knew how the room was going to hear it.
I am that comfortable with you.
Right, exactly.
I am that comfortable.
Exactly.
And so anyway, you can't write the rule.
No.
I challenge you to write the rule that explains why that joke is OK.
Yeah.
Right?
That joke is okay because of something really deep inside that understands how it will be heard on the other side, right?
As is the nature of jokes.
It is both the key to there being biting and the key to there being generous.
And so you can't write the rule.
It's unwritable.
So, in a world where things as important as jokes have to abide by rules that cannot possibly be written, we have to be generous, right?
I saw Trevor Noah on a podcast discussing this N-word question, and his position was very clear.
White people do not get to sing the N-word when it's in a song, a hip-hop song.
Everybody has the ability to edit, you don't have an excuse.
Now my feeling is, we had an agreement.
Agreement's now broken down because you're now entering things into our common culture that require, you can't enter things into our common culture that we don't all have the right to equally participate in.
I don't have any need to say the N word.
I don't have any need for it.
You know what?
If I'm going to sing Hurricane, the Bob Dylan song, it's in there.
I'm singing it.
Right?
Now, in that case, Bob Dylan is white.
Does that give me... You know what I mean?
You can't write the goddamn rule.
Think about the calculations that are going on here around...
We're all adults.
You can tell.
You know when it's happening out of... You know when it's being said in earnest.
Yes.
Unless you're looking for discourses, right?
Right.
Unless you're looking for power.
In which case you can use a grey area case and prosecute it.
Yeah.
But it's discourses.
Humans don't matter.
They call them bodies.
They don't matter.
Well, and, you know, they, in some sense, what I'm talking about with respect to lineage reflects this truth, which is that we are simultaneously individuals and participants in something very real, biological, and larger, just the same way Your cells are actual cells that actually have to function, but they're also part of something larger.
So, yeah, these discourses, as it were, have a functional implication and the hazard of them is spectacular.
Well, do you have any final thoughts you want to... No, I think we covered a lot.
We did cover a lot.
All right, well, this was excellent, Mike.
I really appreciate you doing it.
No worries.
Where should people look for you?
Mike Naynor, Twitter, YouTube, preferably YouTube.
YouTube has got a lot of... it's got the series we were talking about and some other work that I'm just...
Uploading as I work on a feature-length film, so I'm just putting off cuts and other bits and pieces on YouTube.
Mike Naina's YouTube channel.
Among other things, you can find pieces of the Grievance Studies work.
You haven't completed the larger thing yet, but there are very interesting pieces there.
You can find the Evergreen, three-part Evergreen documentary.
If canoe meeting is a head-scratcher for you, you might want to...
Check into that.
Yeah, you're on Twitter?
Yep.
Your handle is?
Mike Naina.
N-A-Y-N-A.
N-A-Y-N-A.
Alright, and for my part, you can sign up for my YouTube channel if you haven't subscribed yet.
