E27 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Brave New Policies for a Brave New World | DarkHorse Podcast
In this 27th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, foll...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream our 27th.
I am sitting with Dr. Heather Hying, and wow, is there a lot going on in the world.
I want to start at the very top, though, in a different way.
We have been frivolous at the top to get people in a good mood, but we don't have time for that now.
As you can see, I'm still wearing the same outfit I was wearing on Tucker Carlson tonight, last night.
That's because I no longer sleep.
All right, so what I want to talk to you about is the Dark Horse Duo plan, which is now the Unity 2020 plan, in order to give it a little breathing room from the podcast and other things.
Here's the situation.
We are getting a ton of positive feedback on this plan.
People are really enthusiastic about it.
It has captured their imaginations.
But in order to make it viable, what we need are lots and lots of people to sign up, to follow our Twitter account, to look at our white paper, and to give us their email address so that we can demonstrate That this is an effort with enough momentum that it can actually carry the day.
So what I'm going to say is that this podcast is going to reach something like a hundred thousand people on YouTube alone in the next couple of days if it follows the pattern of recent live streams.
If all of those people were simply to follow our Twitter account, go to our white paper and give us their email address, it would greatly magnify our credibility with those that we need to reach in order to move forward.
So, if you have been following me, some of you have been following me for something like three years now, have you ever known me to beg?
It's not my thing.
Have you ever known me to beg?
Don't answer that.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to beg you to go to those places.
It's absolutely free.
Just sign up, follow us, and that will bring us to the next step.
Do you want to put this up?
Yes, I'd love to put that up.
Zachary, you can put up my screen here.
So this is the Articles of Unity that you posted, and at the bottom of it, so this is on Medium, you can find it by searching on Unity 2020 on Medium, and at the bottom of it, right?
Or is it on the separate website?
No, it's down there at the bottom.
So much cat bell today.
Inquiries 2 for those who are listening and not watching, info at articlesofunity.com.
There's also, if you scroll up a little bit, there's a place to just enter your email address and then we can find you and if you have an offer of help you can let us know what capabilities you bring to the table.
I should also say there has been a great deal of Assistance, help, guidance provided by members of the amazing Yang Gang, who are very enthusiastic about this plan.
We are, of course, very interested in whether Andrew might himself be willing to participate on the ticket.
We would love to have him.
It's not necessary that he be there.
And many of the people in the Yang Gang are, of course, they would prefer it to be him, but they don't need it to be him.
So for those of you holdouts, please join us.
All right, Heather, are we ready?
Yeah, what are we ready for?
We're going to do a podcast right now.
Oh, okay, that wasn't part of the podcast.
That was a part of the podcast, but it was like a pre-podcast.
Okay, pre-podcast.
So you want me to just launch into something else?
Yes, like the next thing.
Oh, right, I think I can do that.
Okay, so especially since our last episode, which was a mere three days ago, In which we talked a fair bit about the schools.
I've been hearing, and I suspect you have been too, but I've been monitoring specifically emails that are coming in from people in a variety of industries who are facing this monster, this ideology.
that has captured the protests on the streets and has captured so much else.
So I want to just go through a few examples and have us talk about them.
So by this ideology, you mean critical race theory and intersectionalism.
Intersectionality, critical race theory, bastardizations of the kernel of good scholarship and thinking in postmodernism.
So I just...
Places that we've talked about it before, in episode 17, as many other places, which was the third, which aired and we did on the third anniversary of the beginning of the evergreen riots and meltdown.
We talked a lot about what was going on and what has been going on in higher ed, right?
You got something?
No.
Okay, you're just smirking at me.
All right.
And we talked about how pernicious it is, and of course many of you have found Brett and me through the Evergreen story.
But gratefully, on our end actually, increasingly people don't necessarily know that part of our history when they find us, which is fabulous.
But we do of course have, well to use the egregiously Abused term, the lived experience to back up our decades-long suspicion, deep suspicion of this kind of thinking.
So that was on May 23rd of this year, episode 17.
So that was before the death of George Floyd.
We were all pretty much still in lockdown as we pretty close to are still in Portland.
And we were all actively wearying of that.
We were not yet seeing protests on the streets.
There were some protests on the right about the lockdown, but there were not the protests that have been roiling America for almost a month now.
No, yeah, almost a month now.
We hadn't seen that yet.
Okay, so that was episode 17 over a month ago.
In the last episode, in episode 26, we talked about the capture of schools of education and therefore of the minds of children and also of the administrators of higher ed.
A few episodes back in episode 22, we talked about the movement to shut down STEM, which had not just that hashtag, hashtag shut down STEM, but shut down academia and a number of others as well, and spoke to how a focus on shutting down science and its associated ways of thinking is doomed, is certain to doom our civilization.
So, just another follow-on to that before I move into some of the other domains where we're seeing this.
Oxford, this is slightly old news at this point.
It's a couple weeks old.
Oxford is decolonizing degrees in math and science.
Do you hear this?
Yep, that's right.
Oxford, and this is not the first time they've gone down this absurd road.
Let me pull it up.
Okay, yeah, you can show our screen now, Zach.
As reported in the Times, the London paper, Oxford University has revealed plans to decolonize, in quotes, its maths and science degrees and will allow students of any subject who have been affected by the Black Lives Matter furor to seek lenient marking.
Now, if that's not a gameable position, I don't know what is.
And, you know, maybe to their credit, they don't say only for BIPOC or people of color, students of color.
They say for anyone who's been affected, we will offer you the option to seek lenient marking.
So, I should point out, it's a gameable position, but it is also, to the extent that it just simply happens, we are hobbling our position relative to others automatically.
So if we take something like mathematics and we elevate people whose marks are lower because they've been busy with something else, then what we are doing is we are hobbling our position in math.
Now, I don't frankly know where math people end up in terms of building civilization and innovating new things.
They do, but it's just, it's a little harder to detect where they are because, you know, you can't apply math directly.
It doesn't make things.
But let's say you do this with your engineering school.
And we've actually, we've seen that, I didn't pull it up, but we received an email this week as well from someone who's getting their PhD in engineering who is seeing a dissertation being defended on basically the need for social justice in engineering.
For that work, they will receive a PhD in engineering.
For work advocating for social justice activism In engineering, they will receive the highest degree awarded in engineering.
That's capture, right there.
We do know what role engineering plays in civilization.
And so the point would be, were you to have a diversity of positions on this, the engineering schools that did not engage in this would outcompete those that did engage in it.
The students from those schools would be higher quality.
They would go on to populate the world.
So the fact that we are going to see increasingly that this takes over the entirety of the academy, there are no holdouts because there can't be, because power is being used to make sure there are not, that is going to put the United States and any other country that can't resist this madness at a disadvantage.
We will then be hobbled relative to our enemies that don't play this game abroad.
And so the question is...
So the we here is some, you know, weird amalgam of just those who fall prey to the bullying and the ideology.
Well, I guess what I would say the difficult lesson is that even those who believe that they are advocating for their interests in advancing this, those interests are very short term, even Even if you come out on top, you're on top on a ship that you're setting up to sink.
And so, this is not in anyone's interest.
That's going to be a hard message.
Many people won't be able to hear it, but it is necessary that we shut down this ideology in order that we ourselves don't sink something that would harm us all, everyone, the protesters, everyone.
So this is necessary that we do this above the objection of anybody who would stand in our way, which does not mean That we don't subscribe to the idea that black lives are undervalued, that that's gone on too long, and that it's time for it to stop.
At that level, yes, of course.
But at the level of, should we destroy the republic in order to make a statement about black lives that is ambiguous or worse?
No, of course we shouldn't.
Everyone is depending on us not doing that.
Right.
And just to go full circle here on the Oxford, I don't even know where this term decolonizing began.
I'm sure it's somewhere over in critical race theory, you know, theory space.
But the idea of decolonizing maths and sciences by allowing lenient grading for anyone who claims to have been affected by their own activism effectively, this is not the first time we've seen this.
There are a lot of schools where we've seen a push for this, and we first saw it, indeed, at Evergreen, where the administration, in fact, caved to almost all the demands that came their way and accepted that students should be, at Evergreen there weren't grades, but assessed more leniently and, you know, basically not have credits taken away if the reason that they had not fulfilled their academic duties was because they were too busy
Rioting, actually, right?
So, this is becoming yet another thing that's standard in the playbook.
So I would just point out that one of the moves that is being made is the partnering of the DNC with this movement, right?
We are seeing moves in the direction of the demands of this movement being advanced by the Democratic Party.
And I would point out that is perfectly parallel to what happened at Evergreen.
It is exactly what happened at Evergreen.
And if you think this is going to work out well, I would suggest you look into the position of Evergreen Relative to other colleges today the lost has been spectacular and immediate and The fact is people recognize widely that you don't want to send your kid.
You don't want to spend money educating your kid in an institution that has so aggressively signed up for something so anti meritocratic and You really want, you know, you want to send your kids somewhere where they're going to get skills that will allow them to get ahead.
So this is the same thing we are now going to do to the United States, and it just can't be allowed to happen.
So I'd like, before I go on and start talking about some of the other domains in which we're seeing this, could you be more explicit in the analogy that you draw between the Democratic National Committee falling in line behind critical race theory, spurred ideology, and what happened at Evergreen?
Well, what is it that you're looking for?
I know the story, but most people don't know what happened at Evergreen.
What is the analogy?
Are you talking about George Bridges, the president of the college?
Are you talking about Inslee, the governor of Washington?
Like what exactly is the mirror there? - So let's put it this way.
The argument that I am advancing is that the Democratic Party is corrupt.
This is not a secret.
Its corruption is centered in the DNC.
Also not a secret.
And that that entity serves the true constituents of the modern democratic party, which are special interests that fuel that cabal.
So in order to serve those interests, the party cannot embrace the interests of working class people, right?
That is antithetical to their corruption.
Their corruption involves parasitizing working class people.
So how do you keep working class people from rebelling against the corrupt entity?
Well, you point them at somebody else.
And in this case, maybe you even point them at somebody else from whom they might be able to extract well-being in order to distract them from where opportunity really concentrated at the top amongst rent-seeking elites.
So, there is a game afoot.
To partner with this movement in order to deflect attention from the real problem onto some fictional version of the problem.
That fictional version of the problem being some kind of white supremacy that is ubiquitous inside white minds and will never be gone.
Right?
That's nonsense, of course, but it is the alternative story to the true story of where the well-being went.
Now, at Evergreen, we had a president who, for whatever reason, wanted to increase his power and consolidate it, and he made many moves to do so.
Basically, he structured an administration to insulate him from blame and to protect him from being eliminated and to allow him to advance the ball.
He became effectively like, you know, a dictator relative to the college.
And so he cynically partnered with the protesters who became rioters so quickly at Evergreen.
And in so doing, he did advance the ball.
He is going to now retire at the end of his contract with commendations on his bravery and wisdom.
So brave.
There are no characteristics on which he scores lower than those two.
And he's, it's like...
I'm sorry, bravery and wisdom, did you say?
Yes, bravery and wisdom.
So he is going to retire at the end of his contract.
He's actually going to be allowed to teach at Evergreen at a time when we're... I mean, this just doesn't make any sense relative to the story.
So he made it.
He succeeded in advancing his own ball.
He made $300,000 a year at the head of this college, but the college isn't going to survive it.
So the point is the DNC is protecting itself.
It's going to partner with this ideology.
This ideology is truly going to wreck the Republic.
And frankly, it's not even going to get the chance to, which is something we should talk about.
Because if you just let the DNC go and there was no other force out there, then yes, okay, they would unhook all of the protections.
America would become a race-first nation in which we prioritized everything intersectionally.
But we're not going to get there because you have a large Well-armed white population that now has an actual reason to fear what comes next and that is going to boil over into mayhem very very soon and so Zack did you get the picture of the histogram?
So I want to just make a quick argument here Okay, so you're gonna have to allow me to draw you a picture.
Is it a URL?
It's not.
So you have all seen bell-shaped distributions, normal distributions, a scatter of dots that roughly makes the shape of a bell.
This describes many, many processes.
It basically describes almost any process in which you have a large number of factors, and that results in some very small results, some very large results, and the bulk of results being towards the center.
We are now seeing something that hints at the far tail of a distribution of violence, right?
We are seeing events happen now in the streets regularly that suggest that we are headed to the far tail of triggering events.
So, Zach, could you put up the Federalist article?
So Zach is going to put on the screen an article that describes an event that many of you will have noted in which a vehicle was blocked by protesters.
This was all captured on film.
Vehicle was blocked by protesters.
The Occupant of the vehicle was then threatened with a gun, I believe.
You can see, it's not so clear that I could swear it was a gun myself, but people have looked at it.
Somebody, one of the protesters, pulled a gun on the driver of this car.
The driver sped away, hitting one of the protesters.
And NPR reported this as a violent white supremacist attack on protesters with a vehicle saying that these vehicular attacks are on the rise.
And you know, they got it wrong, famously.
But nonetheless, the point is we are seeing people.
In their cars blocked by protesters and a confrontation in which violence is threatened.
People are going to get hit by cars.
It's not going to be long before somebody is killed.
I mean, it's obviously happened before in Ferguson that it was a true white supremacist attack, but we are now seeing Charlottesville.
Sorry.
My bad.
Can you show the other vehicular The Provo, Provo, Utah.
So this is much more recent.
I mean, we're talking scale of weeks anyway.
Here we have a video.
This is Provo, Utah.
The Black Lives Matter demonstration.
The, uh, here's the gunshots.
This is just a citizen driving through?
Yeah, as far as we can tell.
A citizen's driving through, but what you hear is gunshots.
Um, so, what I'm telling you is, we are far down the road towards a conflict that will be unstoppable between people who now have a reason to fear what's coming next, what will unfold politically, um, and this movement which is discovering its power.
That is going to be a catastrophe for the United States.
And, you know, I hear a lot of people talking about, well, you know, 2024, that's our year.
I don't know who, you know, given the shape of the distribution and the number of these extreme events we are now seeing, I don't know who it is who's confident that we make it to 2024 without crossing some Rubicon from which we cannot come back.
Okay, let's talk about the non-violent ways that this happens.
Okay.
So, I mean, unless you have more of this.
No, no.
We've been talking about the capture of higher ed.
We've been talking about the capture of the K-12 schools, and therefore the minds of the children.
We've been talking about the shutdown STEM movement.
We've talked about the capture of journalism.
In one of the episodes, I don't remember which one recently, we talked about the change in the editorial board at the New York Times, and it's happening all over.
Now we are hearing also, and really we have been ever since Evergreen blew up receiving communiques to this effect, but in the last week they have increased a lot, about many and myriad attempts to take down the arts.
So if you're going to attempt to take down sciences and arts within academia, then that's basically all of scholarly and creative production.
Yes, the humanities and social sciences are real, but sciences and arts are sort of the bastions Of what is, I feel, what is absolutely necessary for a democratic society to pursue truth and compassion for all of its people.
We need both.
We need sciences and we need arts.
We've seen, we've demonstrated some of the attempts to weaken or dismantle STEM.
And here, the arts.
We have, let's see, I've just got a couple of examples.
Last time, Brett, you showed a couple of examples of theater, what's going on in theater in Atlanta in particular.
Art of New York has posted a blog with the title, Yes, I have white supremacist tendencies and I am working to change.
Here's a quotation from it.
I'm not going to name this person.
So and so.
So, the person writing is an executive director who is white.
And this person writes, such and such explained that as a white executive director, my act of redirecting a conversation between two African American speakers was itself an example of white supremacist behavior.
The idea that you cannot interject in a conversation based on the fact of the race of the participants being evidence of white supremacy, that's also the end of discourse.
It's not just the end of art.
Okay, so here is – hold on a second, Zach.
My trackpad isn't working.
Here's an LA Times article, which you can show, Zach.
Uh, from, it's actually a couple weeks ago, titled the spreadsheet that shook the theater world, Marie Sisco's not speaking out list.
Um, so here's a single, a single woman who created a public Google spreadsheet, and we've seen this before, a public Google spreadsheet, which you can click on in the link in the article called theaters not speaking out.
And, um, what they've done We have Cat Madness in here at the moment.
She has created this and she says in the article that she expects it not to go very far, but she wakes up and there's many, many theater troops and such that are on the Google Sheet.
They have Boy, I can't find, oh.
Among other columns, which theaters have made statements?
Apparently if you don't make a statement, don't put up a black square on the appropriate day, you're on the list.
What the action steps are of the theaters, whether or not they have specifically mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement, and also the race of each theater's artistic director and board chair.
So that is what is passing for social justice activism right now.
You can take that down, Zach.
We have Also, the examples go on and on and on.
We're hearing from artists and directors of art companies and galleries across many media, in music, in dance, in 2D art, more.
They see the thing coming for them.
They're not sure what to do.
They're asking us what to do, and we don't have All the answers by any means, and it's always going to be context specific, but I'm going to get to shortly here.
I'm going to read with the author's permission something from a letter that I got that That I think helps point out that would you feel like you're all alone and you have not yet raised your voice and said, I don't think so.
I don't agree with this.
This doesn't look to me like widespread systemic racism or white supremacy or whatever it is.
Until you stand up, of course you think you're alone.
Of course you do.
And as soon as you say something, Every story we've heard has people saying, and then my colleagues started coming to me quietly at first and saying, thank you.
Thank you for saying something.
I don't know what's happening.
I wish it would just go away, but it doesn't look like it's going to go away.
So, those are some examples within the arts.
Shutdown literature is also happening, and there's no hashtag as far as I know, but we've spoken in earlier episodes about the ridiculous capture of young adult Fiction, we spoke about recently the novel American Dirt, which was at risk of being cancelled because the author of the novel is not herself a perfect match demographically for her protagonist.
The Booker Prize, which is probably the most prestigious literary prize for fiction in the known universe on this planet.
Um, has fired several people, including a vice president who, presumably not coincidentally, had recently been in an argument with a trans model, arguing for things the likes of which J.K.
Rowling has been arguing.
We need literature, as I've said before.
We need literature to show us what we ourselves have not yet seen, to reveal our worlds that are possible and that other people are living, but that we haven't lived.
And if the only literature that is going to be possible is that written by people who have frankly done no imagination, only written their own experience, that's called memoir.
And there's a place for memoir, but there is also a place for fiction.
Can I just jump in here and say, there are places where human beings sort out that which is not black and white, right?
They include literature.
They include theater.
They include, in more recent times, movies and this long-form television.
They include humor.
All of these things are under attack because the idea is nuance is actually the death of this ideology.
If there is nuance, this ideology cannot thrive.
Therefore, it has to drive everything, one side or the other.
It either has to paint you as a white supremacist, or you have to embrace it and sign up to do whatever it asks.
There's no middle ground.
And that's the problem.
That's how you know But you will have to stand up, because it's asking you, are you willing to do anything for this ideology?
And if the answer is no, there are things I wouldn't do, then don't let it march you there, because that's what it's doing.
It's marching you one step at a time.
Yeah.
And actually, your mention of humor, stand-up comedians were the canaries here.
I mean, there were many of us within academia who were seeing this and who were talking about it, mostly within academia.
You know, most of us didn't have public platforms at that point, but fine, I don't know that that's an excuse.
But for, I think, decades at this point, we have been hearing stand-up comedians say, you know what, I can't do this on college campuses anymore.
And, you know, the idea, which we heard whenever Green blew up, that this was limited to college campuses, that what happens on campus will stay on campus?
No, it will not.
Of course it won't.
The whole point of a college campus is that what happens there is educating people to live the rest of their lives in a full and complete and democratic way.
The whole point.
The whole point.
This is the point.
So to have the argument come back to us that of course the parts that we don't really like and might be dangerous will stay there, but the parts that we do like will leave the campus, that makes no logical sense at all.
And of course it didn't happen.
But there's also an aspect of hope here, because comedy went through a very bleak period as a result of this.
And yes, not coming to college campuses was one thing, but it also had an effect on what humor sounded like for, I don't know, a decade.
But we are beginning to see, you know, it is interesting that it's some of the most powerful comics around who are able to fight their way back against this.
But we've seen Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Ricky Gervais, David... I can hear the music in my head.
I don't know yet.
Larry David.
These guys have really pushed the ball back the other direction, and they have carved out the right to make jokes that are edgy, which is necessary.
If jokes aren't edgy, they're also not useful.
And I'm speaking evolutionarily.
Human beings have humor for a reason.
That reason has to do with sorting out difficult things, discovering what's in other minds when they won't tell you.
And it is necessary.
You want to solve racism?
That's how you're going to do it.
And if you don't believe me, go back and watch Chappelle's show.
Okay?
That's how we sort out racism.
That's right.
So before we move on to public services from arts and literature, I offer a quote from Joseph Brodsky, who was a Nobel Laureate, and in fact, the United States Poet Laureate.
And this is a quote from his opening remarks as United States Poet Laureate in October of 1991.
He says, by failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan.
In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech.
Poetry is not a form of entertainment, and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological genetic goal, our evolutionary linguistic beacon.
Hell yeah!
Extraordinary, right?
That is a great quote.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I mean he's, I want to finish actually the hour with another quote from him, but this, I mean he is, his essay is, you know, he's a poet, but as we talked about with regard to Orwell, right, poetry and narrative fiction Go farther, generally, than essays do.
A speech at a commencement ceremony, or as you accept the role of poet laureate, can be powerful in a way that can thread between those things.
Okay, that's some of the evidence that arts and literature are also being come for.
We've had so many people from what I sometimes derisively called cubicle land, and that's not fair, but you know, not people working in the arts, not people working in the sciences specifically, but people, you know, the vast majority of white collar workers out there in America who are saying, It's not mandatory yet, but what do I do when it becomes mandatory?
The training.
What should I, what can I do?
One of the most remarkable communicators I got this week was from a professional.
She authorized me to share this.
I'm anonymizing her slightly here.
She's a professional woman in her 30s who works at the Department of Human Services in Minneapolis, which of course, as we all know, is the city at the epicenter of current protests and riots.
She is a long-term resident.
She loves Minneapolis so deeply and cannot believe what she is seeing there.
I'm not actually going to read the part of her letter that talks about what she's seen in the riots.
I could, I suppose, come back to it, but just these two paragraphs with regard to what she wrote to me.
Like I said, she told me She actually told me I could share this, but only if I said I was not going to say what city she was in to help anonymize her.
And she said, no, please say that I'm from Minneapolis because I want people to understand that what they're seeing in the videos is not what my city is.
And I just felt that so strongly because we both felt that so strongly with regard to Evergreen.
That is not the best of what Evergreen was.
That's not what it could do.
It was allowed to be taken over.
As this letter writer says, my city has been allowed to be taken over.
It was a small quadrant that became the college almost instantly.
Yeah, exactly.
So this is a professional woman in her 30s who writes, in part, after George Floyd's death over the last month I have received a blitzkrieg of communications from my union, leadership, and various equity committees about the structural changes they wish to force on our union, in our programs, and on the agency as a whole.
The communications which I've attached to this message A riddled and buzzwords from critical race theory includes instructions for white people in particular to do the anti-racism work.
My job is not now in immediate jeopardy.
So far everything has remained voluntary.
But our commissioner has informed us the agency will require anti-racism training in the future and possible restructuring of programs.
This makes me very nervous.
I fear that if this ideology takes hold it will destroy the agency.
I also worry that my job might be on the line in the future if I refuse to do the training or speak out publicly against it.
I've spoken to one employee who's also a good friend about my fears and he seems to think that everything will be fine because if things get out of hand people will speak out against it when the time comes.
I'm not so optimistic.
So I do have one more paragraph to read but that just gives me chills reading it aloud.
People will speak out against having faith in the idea that people will speak out against it when the time comes.
Misunderstands that you won't know when the time has come.
What this author is saying is, I think the time has come and I don't know what to do.
And that's what we're hearing from people.
And I would say one thing, and I did respond to her at some length, but one thing I would add to what I responded with was, if you have a friend who can see this as you can, and they think that people will start speaking up later, They won't.
And you need to talk to him, your friend.
This will be one of the easier conversations.
Because he can already see it and say, why do we think that people will start speaking up later?
It will only get harder to do so.
Ah.
It will only get harder to do so.
That's the key.
Not only will they not know, because the time is now.
Right?
This is already out of hand.
If they're not speaking up now, then they've misunderstood where we are.
But the problem is that this ideology is discovering how powerful it is.
And because it's discovering how powerful it is, at the point you get to this mythological place where you're going to know it's gone too far, its ability to leverage against you will be that much greater.
So, I mean, we know from experience, it doesn't happen.
The people who were going to stand up did so early.
Yeah.
Right?
That's right.
Accumulated almost anyone in the evergreen community after a certain point everybody who kept their wits about them Spoke up in one way or another and then the rest have been silent and so even the ones who know better Silent to this day.
Yep.
That's right So one more paragraph from the same letter writer Should I say something publicly now, or wait until the mandatory training starts and refuse to take them?
Take the training and offer criticism?
Quietly warn others against this?
Simply ignore it and hope it goes away?
I know you've offered general advice already, but speaking publicly now may not be the best approach.
If I'm going to stick my neck out, I'd like it at least to be effective.
Do you have any advice for what to do about the changes enacted by the Minneapolis City Council?
Should I call it a lost cause and abandon the city I love?
Should I buy a gun?
I told you last night as I was reading this, I said I've just received an amazing letter and I want to read part of it.
So this was your first time hearing this as well.
I relate to it, and I do think we have an obligation to speak to the question.
What I can't say is that there is a good answer.
There are better answers and worse answers, but there are no good answers.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, I could read part of my answer here, but it says much that.
Yeah.
So I think one thing is, you have to start thinking on a different time scale, right?
There is no solution to your problem in the moment by design.
And how do you know that that's really what's going on?
How can you tell?
It's all so confusing.
You're confronted with people who you know to be good, who are saying things that sound like they're motivated by the right stuff, and yet the result of them is that you don't have any choice about what you say next, whether you believe it or not.
Right, so what's going on?
Well, you can tell that this is not what it seems.
It is not advocating for the values that it claims because there's no diversity.
Were there Were this a natural movement rather than an authoritarian first movement?
Diversity of ideas?
Well, that's just it.
You would have diversity of opinion over these things.
And you know that because they're not clear.
Like, let's say that it was true that sex was not a binary, right?
It's certainly not clear that sex is not a binary.
There are certainly a great many arguments on the side of it being a binary.
Now you and I would say, of course, it is a binary, and there's in fact one unfudgable binary at the bottom of it that explains this and things for...
Hundreds of millions of years prior to humans, so... 500 million years of uninterrupted sexual reproduction in our human ancestry alone.
Tells you... It's about gamete size.
It's about which gamete you got.
Big ones or little ones.
Yeah.
So anyway, but let's say that, you know, somewhere Some quadrant of biology had discovered that, oh, in fact, it's not a binary.
Well, that thing would not overnight turn us all into people who believed sex wasn't a binary.
It would take time for the very facts to sort themselves out and to figure out which of these things dominated the discussion.
The fact that it goes instantaneously from science would claim that sex is a binary to science knows that it is not a binary and you have no choice but to say that online because to be a holdout at this moment is evidence of mental defect and prejudice is preposterous.
You can tell.
It's the point.
You know, you hear, where did I, was it, Douglas Murray, who was just invoking the medium as the message.
In this case, the medium is the message, and the medium is authoritarianism.
That's the message.
This is about power, right?
It's about power.
The claims are secondary.
And they are the way you can tell that this power is substantial, because, you know, there's not a college in the country that has resisted this completely.
You've got one... Not even Chicago.
Yeah, Chicago has resisted it better than the others, but the fact that everybody is being pulled in this direction tells you something's wrong.
There ought to be at least two schools of thought, and there aren't.
Anyway, this is the situation you're facing, and if you try to solve your problem on the scale of the individual discussion, how do I get out of this individual discussion without saying something I don't believe, or getting myself fired?
You have a problem if you realize that this thing that has come for you is not stable Okay, it cannot last it could topple civilization But it cannot last something comes after and if you think about that someplace after and where you would like to be relative to it and Then you're playing a different game already.
So, you know, Eric has perfected a kind of method for detecting the... maybe there needs to be a coefficient of authoritarianism that you can detect in the following way.
So what he'll do is he will tweet a claim that he knows to be controversial.
And then he will have a poll accompanying the tweet.
And so now what he's done is he's triggered something where you get reactions to the very same thing, the tweet, in two forms.
The form of the discussion and the form of an anonymous poll.
And so what you know is that the audience is actually the same.
Right?
Because it's who saw the tweet.
Yeah.
And the discussion will sound very much like the discussions we are all now hearing, right?
Where you'll get a huge number of people broadcasting their horror at the controversial idea that you've just expressed, but the poll reflects the opposite.
That people actually widely understand the truth, they just can't figure out how to say it.
That's so interesting.
I only remember one of these, I've only seen one of these, which is from Years ago, around about when the De Moore memo was happening, and he said something like, who would you rather talk to on issues of sex and gender?
Biologists, gender scholars, neither.
Maybe it was just two, right?
And it was like 99% biologists, which, you know, It wasn't quite that high, but it was close.
It would be easy to say, well, of course, that's Eric's audience.
Right.
Excepted in the comments.
In the comments, there were a lot of activists.
There were a lot of gender activists in the audience.
So I didn't know he'd been doing this since then.
He's done it several times, and it's very effective.
But anyway, the message of it is the following thing.
You have no ability to directly detect what people actually think around you.
And we saw this so clearly at Evergreen.
So here's the sequence, right?
Something is happening.
You, for whatever reason, if you're me, you can't stomach this thing happening and not saying what's actually true.
You know, this is a threat to the college.
This is not doing black people any favors.
You say this, there's an outcry against you, and then there is this private flood of people who come to you and say, thank you.
Thank you for saying what you said.
We agree.
We just can't say so out loud.
So, you know, if you step into the line of fire, you'll detect that something is going on.
And then, oh, the final thing in the sequence is...
You then say to the email audience or whoever it is, you say, look, there's a culture of fear on this campus.
I can tell you it's here because lots of people come to me privately and they tell me they agree, but they say they can't possibly say this publicly.
Right?
And then people say, who is it?
Who is it?
Who came to you?
And it's like... There's no culture of fear.
Prove it.
Right.
Tell us your sources.
Tell us your sources.
And so anyway, that puts you in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
So of course, you're a good person.
You don't tell them your sources, but then it looks like maybe you're making it up.
So anyway, what I would say is the first thing you have to do is put out feelers to figure out who else is made uncomfortable by being forced to say things they don't believe.
Even if the only thing you can do is sit privately somewhere where no one else can hear and look each other in the eye and say, you know what?
I don't know how to resist this, but this is not okay.
If you can say that to another person, you have found the bottom rung of the ladder of climbing your way out.
And that's something that I didn't know to do at Evergreen, in part because we had each other.
So we were talking to each other constantly.
And there were a couple of other people who were public, but I can actually imagine in my mind's eye right now, and off camera I will tell you who I'm thinking of, and I'm positive you will have the same sense.
I remember seeing a few people whom I really liked Being more and more circumspect, walking on campus with their eyes down, hiding out in their offices, being much less public, coming to fewer meetings.
And as it turned out, you know, later, we found out that they were actually having exactly the same catbell issues again.
Um, exactly the same concerns, um, that we were, but they were responding to those concerns by, um, by just not looking at it and hoping it would go away, which is, which is a lot of our instincts.
Please, please can this just stop, right?
And I didn't, I didn't recognize those signs at the time.
I just thought, you know, they're introverts, these are academics, um, whatever, but, um,
I think actually if you're looking for people who are also concerned about what's happening, those colleagues of yours whom you see less around, who seem less willing to be engaged in casual conversation, may well be hiding in part because they don't want to be dragged into one of these so-called casual conversations in which they're basically forced to make a claim they don't believe.
And once you start doing it, it's very hard to stop.
So you and I had a little bit different experiences because just by happenstance you were on sabbatical as Evergreen really came apart.
The final five months I was not on campus, actually.
So for me, I was, you know, as we've told people who follow us many times, Evergreen's model was such that we were in Full-time contact with our students like it was a full-time job The one class we taught was a full-time job for the professor and for the students So we knew each other really well and some of these people had been one of our students for years So I knew them even better.
So I was talking to them about what was unfolding which kept me grounded and I think actually Probably in some way had an effect on the event itself because as I discovered when Mike Nayna talked to me About what he was seeing looking at the video it dawned on me what the protesters were expecting the day they protested my class.
They were expecting a mutiny, that students in my class would feel this pressure and that they would jump ship because obviously the better deal was to, you know, turn on their racist professor and join these good-hearted protesters.
And not a one did, right?
In part, not a one did.
Yes, they knew us very well.
But we had also looked each other in the eye and said, this is not okay.
We had talked to each other about the fact that there was something going on.
It didn't make any sense.
And, you know, that camaraderie actually emboldened them and emboldened them.
Emboldened your students.
My students.
Yes.
Who, you know, as I've also pointed out multiple times, actually some of them defended me, even as dangerous as that was for students to defend me during that crazy riots.
Students of mine actually stood up and said no to this mob of hundreds of people.
So that was an incredible act of bravery on their part, especially the students of color who did it, because students of color who go against the narrative are a bigger danger to the narrative, so they get punished more brutally.
So anyway, seeing all that, So what did you do in advance that produced that?
We've talked before about the particular curriculum you were building and about informing people of how evolution works and how it renders behaviors in people who both claim to be enemies and friends, but more important than any of those things was that you actually created Connection and community and trust with these people who were your students in advance.
And, uh, you know, most faculty don't bother.
Most faculty don't even imagine that's on the list of possibilities, frankly.
But I think also, um, most supposed communities haven't actually done that.
They haven't actually looked at each other and recognized that they're dealing with another human being just as flawed, just as weird, just as That they're capable of waking up on the wrong side of the bed as you are, and that they will sometimes speak poorly, they will sometimes make mistakes, and they will sometimes be capable of great courage and amazingness.
And we all imagine that the person we're dealing with is a caricature, especially when they're coming at us.
And none of them actually.
Very few people are actually that kind of black and white caricature of evil or good.
Oh yeah, there are very few evil people.
There are a lot of confused people, there are a lot of people who are easily corrupted, but evil is a very rare phenomenon because it's not a good strategy.
Pure evil.
Yeah.
So, you know, you and I, for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this, for the entire time we were teaching at Evergreen, which was 15 years, Um, we're always very genuine with our students.
We always cared about our students in a way that wasn't really required by the job.
I mean, it wasn't at all.
Most of the people who had the job didn't do it.
I actually got laughed at by my co-faculty on occasion.
Yeah.
I mean, this points to, you know, the rot at the core of that particular institution at a place where you were supposed, where teaching and community were supposed to be paramount.
Yeah.
The idea that someone that I was actually engaged in co-teaching with would say to me, why are you bothering to learn their names?
Right.
That's just the first level of respect, and of course you and I both went far beyond that, but why are you bothering to learn their names?
Yeah.
At the founding of the college, every single person would have done it the way you and I did it.
They would have invested in their students, they would have cared about them individually, but that had broken down at the point that we got there so that it was the exception and not the rule.
We always cared about our students as individuals, and we didn't lie to them.
We told them the truth, and we were, you know, in a way that you just couldn't under normal circumstances at a different college.
And so I think the thing is...
Building human trust is the antidote to this thing that breaks down human trust.
And if you're trying to solve the problem, we don't know the particulars of your situation, but in a general sense, that's the route out, is to figure out, even if you can't figure out how to resist, who else understands that that's necessary?
Who else understands that you're going to have to tell lies to keep your job potentially?
And you know, I'm not telling you I would much rather you didn't.
You know, I don't want you to tell lies in order to keep your job, but I'm not in your situation.
You may need that job and, you know, it's nobody else's to tell you you can afford this.
But what I will tell you is that...
To save your job now empowers the beast, and the beast is down the road not going to stop asking.
It's about power, and we can't afford where this is dragging us, so any way in which you can figure out how to maintain resistance, and most importantly, maintain the clarity in your own mind, that is absolutely essential.
You want to talk for a minute about Reddit?
Sure.
Reddit.
Yeah.
So they came out with a brave new policy for a brave new world.
Their new policies state that communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
While the rule on hate protects such groups, it continues, after a little while, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity.
For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority.
Hard to even know what to say.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
It makes me wonder so many things.
One thing is this.
Just one of many things that this brings up for me is, majority where?
Assessed how?
Right.
Does this mean that Indians who are writing from India are not protected by Reddit's new policy on hate speech?
Because they're not the minority when they're in India, being Indians and all.
How about women among undergraduates?
Women are now a majority among undergraduates.
How about women teachers?
What about the changing demographics of the entire world?
What were they thinking?
What could they possibly have been thinking?
On planet Earth, I'm gonna bet ya that people of color outnumber white Europeans, right?
Who's protected here?
What stable context could they possibly have imagined?
And isn't that exactly the error made by so many fields before?
You know, this would be in the weeds, but this is exactly the error that ecology makes.
I mean, this is the idea that we're going to pinpoint a moment in time that is the moment that we are fighting against most or trying to recover the most.
One moment And then write this thing, which refers to majority, as if that doesn't shift constantly.
No, no, no.
This is so innumerate.
No, it's not.
I mean, everything else that it is, it's innumerate.
Of course it is.
No, it's beautiful.
Oh, God!
It's brilliant.
It's the most beautiful piece of strategy of all, because the point of that law that they have instituted in Reddit land... Yes.
Is, you know what we mean.
You know who we're talking about, which means that the crime will be attacking people who you know are under our protection, and attacking people that you know we don't like.
Hell, we encourage that.
So the point is, look, don't come at me with your numerate garbage.
This is Reddit winking.
You know what that policy means.
And of course we all do.
Yeah, we know exactly.
And the problem is, the problem is, There is no longer any court where you can take this.
The horizontal nature of this revolutionary force means there is no place that you can go and make that argument about, this is innumerate, what are they even talking about?
There's no one who's going to listen.
And we know this, in a sense, because of the parallel evictions that we saw yesterday on Reddit and YouTube and Medium, and I'm not sure where else.
But the point is, That was not an accident.
You know what that was?
That was the same damn thing.
When terrorists coordinate bombings in different cities, they are telling you something about their power.
This wasn't, we got lucky.
This was good enough that we could do this in two different places at once, right?
And so this was a coordinated attack.
Now what we don't know is what preceded it.
What confrontations happened inside of YouTube and inside of Reddit and inside of Medium that caused this to happen?
In other words, who backed who against the wall and who caved and how is it that we in the world are now going to be left with the aftermath?
Well, they've got everyone in a position of power.
Who is white.
They're asking them to claim white supremacy.
Exactly what we saw them ask the president of Evergreen to say, which he managed to admit to on camera to HBO, which was a brilliant moment early in that story.
But people are doing it.
Oh, so I'm a white supremacist?
Oh, I didn't think so.
But oh, well, if I was questioning your statement, I guess I am.
So, look, believe it or not, this continues to be a problem for us, even though we have a large audience of people who have gotten this message in one way or another.
The world has confronted them and they've stood up to the challenge.
But for a second I want to talk to the people who are signed up for this movement, but who I don't think would be signed up for it if they really understood where it was headed and what is motivating it.
That's not to say the anger in the street.
I think the anger in the street is legitimate.
But the anger in the street is about the fact that well-being, that productivity was captured by rent-seeking elites.
And the fact is, when you sign up for a movement that's going to go after ordinary people, people of ordinary means, rather than go after the rent-seeking elites who caused the problem, rather, you know, actually partner with the rent-seeking elites who caused the problem and go after people of ordinary means who didn't cause it and aren't guilty of the thing that you're accusing them.
You're just a sucker.
Why would you do this?
Why would you not recognize that actually there is a huge majority of us who would sign up for a movement that was actually interested in draining the swamp and actually interested in going after the rent-seeking elites who have...
Captured both of our major parties and are preventing us from ever having any important influence on policy.
That's who we should be going after.
So what the hell are we doing?
Why are you being a sucker?
Why would you deliver the rest of us into the maw of this beast?
Don't do it.
Let's go after the people who actually absorb the well-being that belong to us.
Let's.
Let's.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
Let's.
And another thing.
No, I don't have another thing.
Allow me to end on two more quotations.
Sure.
One more from Joseph Brodsky, who, again, was U.S.
Poet Laureate and a Nobel Prize winner in literature.
This is from his commencement address at Williams College in 1984.
He said, That's beautiful.
Yeah.
said, the surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality even, if you will, eccentricity.
That is, something that cannot be feigned, faked, or imitated, something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who of course is the author of the Gulag Archipelago, said this, the strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization.
Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life.
If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development.
A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
Man.
So people have seen it before.
They've understood.
All right.
Before we close, I am not going to ask you to like, subscribe, make a comment.
I just, I'm forgoing it.
What I'm going to ask you to do is something concrete.
Please, please, please energize the Unity 2020 ticket.
If I can wear a jacket, then you can sign up for those things.
All right?
It's not that hard.
We need the momentum.
And if we get the momentum, we can actually change things.
