Bret and Heather 29th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Unity Vs. Division - Only One Way Forward
In this 29th 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). TIMESTAMPS at bottom of description. 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 cha...
You have just seen us scrambling to get things going.
So here we are.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
Is this our 29th live stream?
In a few short months.
In a few short months, yes.
So we've got lots to do and talk about today.
We are also Being filmed as we speak by CBS, which wants to talk about cancel culture.
I don't know if they have advanced warning that we are soon to be canceled again, but it is possible that another cancellation is coming.
So keep your eye out for that.
I have also asked them if we could possibly talk on CBS about Unity 2020, and that possibility exists, so please keep your eye out for further information that may come across your regular old TV through the network.
In the meantime... Should we also say that... Did you already say that Zach is a couple hundred miles away today?
Yes, Zach has run off.
He put a sheet and he filled it with some clothes and I don't know what else, a laptop, and he threw it over a stick on his shoulder and he wandered off and he's gotten a couple hundred miles away.
He is remotely monitoring this, but he's in no position to save us if things go wrong.
So let's hope they do not.
All right.
All right.
Dr. Hying.
Dr. Weinstein.
I have promised my Twitter followers that I will talk about Unity 2020 at the top here, so they don't have to wait if that's what they're waiting for.
Oh, I see.
I've got things sticking up and back.
Well, there's nothing to be done at this point, is there?
Okay, Unity 2020.
Here's the deal.
It is going great at one level.
We are discovering the most amazing set of patriots.
These are people who are frightened about where we're headed, people who love their country and are ready to sacrifice for it, and they are showing up to offer all kinds of help, skills that we definitely need.
So things are rapidly in motion.
As I have mentioned before, there is a curious lack that people who tell us that they are very much on board with the plan do not always do anything that allows us to count them so that we can say how many people are actually rooting for us.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about why I think that might be.
So before you talk about why you think there's a failure somewhere, why don't you say both here, why don't you bracket this conversation by saying what should be happening?
What would you like people to be doing?
Well, here's the long and short of it.
The long and short of it is there is exactly one thing that we do not have, and this plan could actually work, believe it or not.
It is not too late.
Everything that needs to happen can happen.
What we need is a visible groundswell of American citizens eligible to vote.
Right, but where do they sign up?
Where's the place that you want them to be signing up?
We want them to go to the website articlesofunity.org.
You will find there are links to offer your volunteer support, to sign up for our email list, and let us know.
Where you are and what you're thinking.
So please do that.
You should also follow our Twitter account if you are on Twitter.
Articles of Unity.
At Articles of Unity.
Those are the places to go.
There will be more opportunities showing up this week.
And so, anyway, those are the places to sign up for you to find out about what is emerging.
And yes, we are looking for your help.
But really, you want to do something for us?
Find two people with ears to hear and tell them.
That's it.
Two people.
And then you ask them, can you find two people?
That'll work, right?
But you won't know that will have happened unless they also sign up.
Unless they show up at those addresses.
Yeah.
All right, so now I want to talk to you.
I'm noticing I need to center myself a little bit more in the shot.
Okay, here's the model that I came up with as I was driving back from dropping Zach at his bicycle maintenance course that he is taking.
What I realized was that we are hearing pushback from a couple of quadrants, and one of those quadrants Are people who say things to us like, um, this sounds like a great plan.
How about waiting till 2024 when we've already allowed Joe Biden to clear Donald Trump from the White House, et cetera, et cetera.
Could you please just shelve this plan?
Seems really cool, but.
I gotta say, that sounds like a great idea because it will give all of the enemies of the plan much more time to organize and get their shit together.
I hadn't even thought of that.
That's a great point.
Here's the thing.
If you are somebody who has been alarmed about the corruption of our system and the role that the duopoly plays in that corruption, if you've been aware of that for decades, then you know that every single election cycle, we go through this, right?
You say, you know what?
This is not going to solve itself.
the duopoly has a lock on power, and that lock on power is being used to serve interests that are not the interests of the American people.
What are we going to do about it?
Well, why don't you just go through the normal channels?
Go through the normal channels.
But if you say, well, we've done that, and it doesn't work, and you say, maybe we have to do something else, what happens next is people say, ah, if you do something else, you will elect the greater evil, and this will be your fault, right?
And nobody wants to be your fault, right?
We've seen that happen to people like Ralph Nader.
UND 2020 is being set up to explain the re-election of Trump, when in fact we can squarely point at the DNC.
Well, first of all, the DNC is responsible for this in more ways than one.
The RNC as well.
The duopoly has played tag team with their little corruption racket.
And so in any case, you will hear each election cycle.
You will hear you're going to elect the greater evil and this is going to be your fault.
And then if you persist, you will be told, well, you can't do it this time because of the Supreme Court.
Right.
This is just every single, every single election cycle.
It's amazing, the Supreme Court always seems to be on the verge of retirement and collapse.
It's funny, it's almost as if it's staffed by mortals who have a lifespan and ultimately end up retiring and need to be replaced, so it's never the time for something new.
Not to suggest that the makeup of the Supreme Court isn't critical, but it's always sort of, I don't know, was that the second or the third rejoinder to, it has to be now.
Well, let's put it this way.
The fact that it is critical this time is not an argument against something different because it only gets more critical over time.
So if you think it's critical now and that's a reason not to do it, you've actually got it backwards.
Now is the time we have to do it because next time it's going to be even more critical.
Well, maybe people are suggesting going back in time.
If they have a mechanism, I'm all ears.
But in any case, here's the thing.
I've heard so many times that you can't do it because you'll elect a greater evil.
The whole structure of this plan is built to address that concern, right?
We don't have that problem because we have structurally built a mechanism that will not spoil the election.
In spite of that fact, we are getting this pushback from certain people who say, lovely plan, all ears, do it in 2024 and we'll get on board, but not now because of the problem.
So I want to tell you about my model that I came up with as I was driving back.
The model is this.
For many people, Donald Trump is the equivalent of a rock in your shoe, right?
If you've ever had a rock in your shoe, and we've all had rocks in our shoe, right?
A rock in your shoe is top priority.
It's very hard to ignore, right?
Every step, it reminds you that this has to be dealt with.
And there are a lot of people who are experiencing Trump as the rock in their shoe that needs to be dealt with.
But we've got a rock in our shoe at the same time that we've got basically the equivalent of a famine, right?
We have a duopoly that has concentrated its power and built a system that you can never escape.
And it has essentially denied people access to the policy mechanisms that are supposed to serve their needs.
And this has gone on for decades.
And because of that, people are not only frozen out of the well-being that they produce through their labor, But they are also aware of it, and they're sick of it.
They know that the system is rigged.
They may not know exactly in what way it is rigged, but they're angry.
And here's the important point.
Whether or not the rock in the shoe is the one thing you can think of or it's one on a set of high priorities that all have to be addressed has to do in some sense with how threatened by the famine you are.
If you're especially well positioned in society then from your perspective it may well make sense we have to deal with the rock in our shoe because even in a famine you wouldn't want to leave a rock in your shoe because Whatever you're going to do to deal with the famine, getting the rock out of your shoe first makes sense.
So if you're not directly threatened by the famine, then you will think rock in your shoe is the only thing we got.
And you'll say stuff like, well, why don't you wait till 2024, right?
Let's deal with the rock in our shoe and then 2024 we can deal with the famine.
But for anybody who's either starving or threatened with starvation, that doesn't make any sense because the rock in the shoe is a high priority and the famine is a high priority.
And we're going to have to do something to deal with both of them.
Maybe we got to get the rock out.
We've also got to deal with the famine and here's an election in which you could do both.
Could I read to you a couple of sentences from an excellent document that I found from almost 10 years ago?
Please do.
Recent decades, this is from 2011.
Recent decades have witnessed a de facto coup against the democratic structures of the world and the wholesale capture and sabotage of the entire public regulatory apparatus.
The co-opted structures have been redirected and now serve to liquidate the world's resources and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a tiny, unelected elite.
Only the costs remain public.
And it goes on.
This is from the Declaration of Interdependence, which you wrote during Occupy, and which proceeds to make a number of highly specific and actionable bullet points about what to do.
Just to the argument that not now, not now, please wait until next time when there's a greater chance of success when there will presumably be no two evils to choose between.
This was the first time that I know that you had formalized in writing some of exactly the concerns that you have laid out in the first whatever five minutes of this live stream today.
This is from 2011.
That's amazing.
Thank you.
You know, I have thought frequently during this Unity 2020 phase, I've thought about that document and I just literally have not had the time to go find it.
But yeah, I wrote the Declaration of Interdependence, and it lays out exactly the problem.
And what that tells you is that the fact that that Bit that you read there is equally applicable today That tells you some of us have been aware of this for quite some time And we've tried to call people's attention to it and what people have been is too calm to address it Yeah, and you know let me say that you know we as as we have been making clear throughout you know had to been anyway still are lifelong Democrats liberals progressives and You know, much to the irritation of some in our audience, but this was written in 2011.
This was written during Obama's first term.
We were so hopeful about Obama in the beginning, and that does not mean that we did not critique during his first and certainly his second term what it was that was actually being accomplished after that great rhetorical movement that actually got him elected.
And it was, it's what it was, it was rhetoric.
It was a rhetoric.
It was a rhetorical moment.
You're absolutely right about that.
And you know, I still like a lot of the rhetoric, but the fact is it didn't translate into policy that served people.
And what that tells you is that the duopoly, I mean, let's face facts, folk.
They don't want to solve the problem, not because they wouldn't ideally like to do it also, but it is counterproductive from the point of view of the thing that they actually do, which is deliver well-being to a small number of very powerful entities that have bought access.
It's an influence-peddling racket, so we shouldn't expect them to deliver us rhetoric and symbolism and false solutions until we finally get wise to it.
And my point would be, well, maybe it's time we finally got wise to it.
I mean, collectively.
We can actually evict them from the positions from which they capture all of the well-being that should be widely available and deliver it to their own.
Yeah.
It's really, it's quite a thing.
But if you are hearing the same thing we are hearing, if you are hearing people say, well, that's a cool plan.
How about we try that in 2024?
Think about whether or not the people who are telling you that are really telling you that from their perspective the famine isn't such a big deal, because on the whole the duopoly has, probably inadvertently in most of their cases, served their interests just by virtue of where in society they are.
And for people who are closer to the bottom of the ladder, or who have fallen off the bottom of the ladder, this has been critical for decades.
The danger to working people is so extreme that now we see quite predictable movements in the street of people, frankly, shouting incoherently to tear the thing down because all they can see is the harm that it does because that harm is concentrated where they are.
So that is all very important.
Now I would point to the last thing here, which is really the place that's harder That I find hardest to make the point.
It has long been true that the Democratic Party in particular has delivered symbolism in lieu of actual well-being, right?
That's been their go-to strategy.
Which party did you say is particularly prone to that?
Well, it's not that one party is particularly prone to it.
It's that the Democratic Party has traditionally served the interests of working people.
And so having shifted away from that, now it has to deliver symbolism in lieu of actual policy.
Symbols are cheaper.
They are cheaper, but in this case the symbols have begun to run out.
People aren't buying it anymore, right?
We went through eight years of Obama and things did not get better, so we know that the rhetoric doesn't add up to policy that actually serves people.
We know that we still have, you know, a system of medical care, for example, that people can't access and that is dependent on their relationship with their employer and that the economic system is fragile in the way it's constructed and so you can lose your health care, you know, at the drop of a hat.
So, what has changed is the Democratic Party seems to be toying with a mechanism to deliver many people who are stressed out by what I'm calling the famine, to deliver them something.
But the something that they're going to deliver is well-being that currently is held by other people who are in a similar strata.
In other words, The intersectional thing is about pointing people who are angry about having been frozen out, redirecting them away from the places where well-being is actually concentrated, and pointing them at another group of citizens.
And this is the most deeply unpatriotic move you can imagine.
Pointing Americans at each other, rather than dealing with the fact that opportunity has concentrated at the top, is just appalling.
To use the pie analogy, the zero-sum, non-zero-sum language that we have used, it is possible that some growth in some sectors can continue.
But even if we assume that we are in zero-sum space at a national level with regard to well-being, and I'm not saying that that's true, but even if we assume that, what you are saying, if I hear you correctly, is there is some pie for And this is going to be hard to operationalize, but for well-being, which is to some degree the good proxies resources there for all of Americans.
And what you were pointing out is that the elite, the 1%, the people with power, have observed that a number of people are seeing this, you know, since Occupy, since before then, right?
And saying, well, if we can pit some of the kind of haves against the recognizing have-nots against each other, we can redefine what the pie actually is to be that very tiny sliver of the actual pie while we keep all the rest of it.
So it's like a pie within a pie, and the people with most of it are successfully redefining what the actual pie is and causing the rest of us to fight amongst ourselves.
Yeah, so I was toying with the idea that Biden was the let them eat cake candidate, that that's really the nature of Joe Biden at the moment.
And you fixed that analogy beautifully.
Remember what you said?
Not at the moment.
You said, no, he's the let-them-eat-their-cake candidate.
Oh, yeah.
Because in this scene, in let-them-eat-cake, there's no cake.
That's the point.
The rent-seeking elites in the monarchy don't understand that there's no cake.
Right.
And so that's an absurd solution.
Only they have cake.
Only they have cake.
Right.
So they think cake is everywhere.
Right.
There is cake.
Well, there's an abundance of, there's such an abundance of cheap goods that were exactly the things that we're limiting until like a second ago, historically speaking, that yeah, let them eat their cake.
Cake's available.
Right.
And so in this case, instead of taking the, you know, and again, we have to draw a distinction between the productivity of elites, which actually serves everybody, and the rent seeking of people who become powerful.
Some of them have gotten powerful through being highly productive and contributing things that matter, but once they are productive, It's very hard to resist.
They don't even necessarily know that they are engaged in rent-seeking.
There are just opportunities that pay, and they do that which pays, and many of those opportunities are rent-seeking, by definition.
So, the DNC has decided to point us at each other, and the basic point is, well, there's not enough cake, but if this group goes after the cake of that group, then the rent-seeking elites can continue on for another four, eight, who knows how many election cycles, or eight years.
The baked goods analogy gets twisted, but it's like a cupcake within a pie.
Well, there are twisted baked goods, not that many, but some very, you know, like a... Delicious ones, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So anyway, that's the developing model.
Yeah.
And here's the question.
Presumably, if you're watching or listening to this podcast, you're wise to this stuff.
You're aware of game theory.
You're aware of what rent-seeking is and why it's a hazard.
You're aware of the evolutionary forces that will take a corrupt system and make it more corrupt because the loopholes will tend to self-enlarge.
So, if you can see it, Then isn't this the moment?
Wouldn't you like, in four months, for us to have turned the corner for something unexpected, new, and potentially very desirable to have happened?
Wouldn't you like adults at the helm?
I mean, don't you have a right to demand that as an American?
To have adults at the helm?
Don't we all?
So, how about it?
Fabulous.
All right.
So, I know you have things on your agenda for today.
Yeah, you know, nothing as big, but it all plays into part of why we need big structural change, right?
So, maybe this is all kind of working by fire here.
I'm going to have us put something up on the screen, if we can.
You didn't just suggest a trial by fire, did you?
I was about to, and then I stopped.
Let's see.
Yeah, if we can get… Oh, I'm on, aren't you?
You're on because Zach is many hundreds of miles away.
All right.
Let's see.
That and then… Hey, look at that.
Look at that.
It's like magic.
Okay.
For those of you listening in podcast space, sorry, you're going to get a lot of this time.
Okay, so here's a guy, Christopher Rufo.
I don't know him, but he's written a really quite extraordinary thread on Twitter, the first tweet of which reads, the city of Seattle held a training session for white employees called, quote, interrupting internalized racial superiority and whiteness, end quote.
So I did a public records request, he says, to find out exactly what this means.
Let's go through it together in this thread.
So it's worth looking at.
It's all the same garbage.
I want us to go through this little, this first flyer that he talks about.
And then I also want to talk about, since I went to the Excruciating exercise last week of reading White Fragility, of just giving a little bit of ammunition to people who are being forced to read it as if it is an actually anti-racist argument, when in fact it's quite not.
So first, this.
Again, the city of Seattle, which, you know, the whole Pacific Northwest unfortunately, which we live in and love it, but this is a bit of a hotbed of this kind of thinking, suggests that Internalized racial superiority reveals itself in values such as individualism, intellectualization, comfort, and objectivity.
And there are a number of other things on this list, but this is the sort of thing we've seen over and over again.
Basically equating enlightenment values and science with the idea, and understanding all human beings as individuals, with the idea of racial superiority.
As if those aren't exactly ideas that we should want everyone to have and embrace and engage in.
On the internalized racial inferiority list, we have addiction, as if that is particular to people who have suffered under racism, rage, self-hate, self-doubt, shame, let's see, hopelessness, apathy, invisibility.
Again, this movement is about division.
This movement is about separating us and unfortunately what it feels like, so we were just talking in terms of the DNC, the power elite for half-ish of the country.
Looking at the accumulation of resources by a few and seeking, trying to put off any attempt to access those resources by the many, and they are looking to divide us.
But here's part of how that works, that they are embracing this incredibly divisive movement that goes by many different names.
Intersectionalism, woke politics, social justice politics, Identity politics and it serves to divide.
Are there any things on this list that you want to address?
- Well, I wanna point out that the tragedy of taking the values that are the stuff power is made of and not democratizing them, basically declaring them null and void, it's utterly tragic.
And it's obviously not going to work, because anybody who holds onto those tools is going to have an advantage over anybody who decides those tools are not the stuff of power.
So the only right solution has ever been to democratize these things and distribute them as widely as possible.
So in some sense, I think if you can see that far, if you can just simply recognize, hey, there's stuff that makes people powerful, like for example, science, right?
You got two choices.
We can also declare science, we can declare it unfair or null and void or whatever.
We can hashtag shut down STEM.
Right.
What world does that lead to if we decide that science is no longer valid?
It leads to a world in which whoever didn't listen to us has the advantage.
Or, we can democratize science.
And we know how to do it, right?
You and I were doing that for 15 years.
It's very enjoyable, rewarding work.
To democratize science.
So the same goes... Almost everyone who showed up in our classrooms was capable of learning and grappling with the tools of scientific inquiry, of observing patterns and posing hypotheses and trying to distinguish between those hypotheses.
And, you know, some of our students came from elite academic backgrounds, but most of them did not.
That wasn't the kind of school it was.
And so, you know, we had people who had been, you know, who would Failed at a high school who had never gotten degrees and who showed up and, you know, many of them were brilliant and some of them were just, you know, average and the school system failed them because that's what it does.
And almost to a person, they were able to do exactly what we're talking about, to engage in an attempt at objectivity as they looked to understand the world.
Because once you understand what is going on, then, then you can seek to change it.
If you pretend that the world is not what it is, then it is much harder to change it from some fiction to presumably some new fiction, like for instance a utopia.
And even the students, I don't think they ended up in our classes very frequently, but even the students who at the point they get to college aren't really capable of that, A, they could be capable of it if somebody was willing to invest enough time, and B, absolutely everybody who is born with a healthy brain, and I don't mean mind, I mean a healthy brain, can develop into somebody who can wield these tools if they're given a developmental environment that reinforces that.
So to the extent that there's any...
Concern, the capacity is built into us, right?
These are tools developed by humans who frankly knew a hell of a lot less than we do, right?
And the tools just simply work by virtue of the fact that they are elegant and once you get the hang of it, you know, you don't even think about thinking scientifically, it just happens to you.
So do you want to take that down now so I can look at my notes?
Yeah, let me try to remember how that works.
I'll start talking while you're figuring that out.
So this thing that we were just showing you guys, it's straight out of this crazy Robin DiAngelo book, White Fragility.
It precedes that by a lot.
Actually, I found an essay that I wrote from 1991 in which I'm pointing out the pitting of modernity versus post-modernity, which I'll actually share a couple of bits from as well later.
So to those who say, you guys helped create this beast, no.
No, we didn't.
We're not copying to that.
Just no.
But James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, as the people who put together that grievance studies Expose, I guess.
They don't want to call it a hoax.
This precedes D'Angelo, but it's the current Bible of the moment.
So in the last episode, I attempted to steel man, maybe her most irritating point, right?
The idea that all white people are racist.
And I said, well, if you understand that she's redefined what racist means, and now what racist means in her world is that you are accruing benefits from an historical system of racism and equality, then it's true.
Yes, if you have white skin, you continue to accrue the benefits from an historical system of racism and equality.
That is true.
But redefining the keyword and the sentiment is cheating.
Here are some other things that happen in the book that, you know, I hope you don't have to read it, but if you do, she conflates systemic problems, and this is to that redefinition of the word racism, she conflates systemic problems with individual ones, while claiming to be very clear on the differences.
So it's a bait-and-switch with regard to the system is rigged and therefore you are racist.
Well, no, you can't do that.
Individuals and populations are different.
She also conflates a biological understanding of humanity, which is part of what we are trying to share with the world, with Social Darwinism.
So Social Darwinism, as a phrase in which both are capitalized, is a long debunked bastardization of Darwinism, which has nothing really to do with an actual evolutionary understanding of the world.
But this bastardization, known as social Darwinism, suggests that current social conditions are inevitable and good.
You know, it's an excuse for why the rich are rich.
The rich are rich because Darwin said so, because nature said so.
No, that's wrong, and that's not how evolution works.
But she makes this kind of point, and thus slotting scientists like us into this twisted and archaic belief system, she sort of just leaves that for her adherents to come back to.
She posits, among other things, that if we are indeed all equal, which many of us believe us to be, the only explanation for disparities in condition must be the result of discrimination.
And here she's conflating equal with identical to, right?
Equal and identical to are not the same thing.
She rails against the way that Black History Month is celebrated, because she says it reinforces whiteness.
This will not be the first time, if you're reading this book, that you face a dilemma.
You can't win.
You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Should we then not celebrate Black History Month?
Well, then silence is violence.
But if you do celebrate it in any way at all, apparently, then you're doing it wrong, and you're further demonstrating your racism.
Silence is violence, and saying the wrong thing is Violence or its equivalent, therefore your choice is to repeat after us, and the problem is there's then no basis whatsoever to object on the, because what's being said is incorrect, which almost all of it is, or because the policy proposals that are being advanced are going to lead to the destruction of things on which we are all depending.
There are lots of, I mean, and this of course happened to us in microcosm at Evergreen.
Yep.
Because the primary, among the many objections, I would say the primary objection to what was being advocated was that it would destroy the college and that lots of people, including us, including our students, including the very people that they were claiming to be helping, were depending on the college being functional and, you know, driving it into bankruptcy.
Wasn't going to help anybody.
So was there language at Evergreen to say that you were actually about to cripple the college and that nothing that you're talking about could possibly be accomplished if you do that?
Nope, because the very fact of objecting meant that they were going to portray you as racist.
Yes, because the movement has declared, has named itself cleverly.
And this is not the first time we've seen this.
There are many examples of movements like this.
Antifa is one.
Frankly, pro-life is one.
But anti-racist, no, actually not.
I'm here to say I'm anti-anti-racist, and that does not make me racist.
No, because the movement is named in a way that is designed to trap you.
To go back to the book specifically for just a couple of moments, if you don't view race as the single most defining feature of the human experience, the single most defining feature of the human experience, you are, according to the book White Fragility, both racist and in denial.
Used to be, of course, that viewing everything through a racial lens was what made you a Well, times change, don't they?
So this book is a hot mess of sloppy scholarship and cherry-picked data, but that's not actually its biggest flaw.
Let me just quote D'Angelo herself here, a couple times from the book.
She says, she says, I have been unable to hide my surprise that the black man is the school principal.
Of all white people, she writes, I realize that we see ourselves as entitled to and deserving of more than people of color deserve.
She's right about one thing.
She's racist.
Like, Robin DiAngelo's actually a racist.
And it seems that it's possible that it's her personal racism that is projected on all the rest of white America at the moment that's given jet fuel to riots that started as protests that were good faith and had a germ of necessity at the core of them.
That we now have a totally chaotic and undefensible movement.
So, if you don't share Robin DiAngelo's racism, as in fact the vast majority of Americans don't, your defensiveness at being misunderstood and caricatured, as many of you who have had to sit through some of these workplace trainings will have experienced, that's going to be held up itself as proof of your racism.
And your desire to defend yourself against false claims being evidence of your white fragility, your white supremacism is, in fact, it's another rhetorical trick, and it's, I think, the central Kafka trap of the entire book.
You are X. No, I'm not.
By denying that you're X, you've proven that you're X. Classic Kafka trap, and that's the only bit of argumentation in the book that she actually engages in.
I like this model.
It makes a lot of sense to me.
Here's the question I have.
So, I don't assume that Robin DiAngelo is well-intentioned.
He's obviously getting quite wealthy, advancing this particular wrong set of ideas.
It is possible though that, you know, we have argued that people have better access by orders of magnitude to what takes place in their own mind than they do to the next closest mind to them, right?
You can see into your own mind, not perfectly, there's lots of stuff that happens in our minds that we can't see, but we do have some access to what goes on inside of our own minds.
So Robin DiAngelo, looking into her own mind, has discovered some completely preposterous stuff.
Offensive!
Offensive, if you look at it.
And, you know, it's... I'm not sure I would say it was racist, because the question is, does she want to see it that way?
It's clearly prejudiced, right?
But the point is... I've been unable to hide my surprise that the black man is the school principal.
I mean, these are just two... It's riddled throughout the book.
Oh, right.
That's hard speaking.
She clearly has this prejudice.
These are the examples she has shared.
Right.
Well, here's the point.
She has effectively portrayed all... She doesn't know what's going on in other people's minds.
Yeah.
So having looked into her own mind, maybe she's just decided, you know, her mind is a good model for everybody else's and it isn't.
She's put a mirror up to herself, and then declared that she put a mirror up to society.
And, you know, she's trained as a sociologist.
Putting a mirror up to society is what sociology is supposed to be.
Of course, sociology is long since captured and ridiculous.
Not everyone.
There are some excellent sociologists out there, Nicholas Christakis being one.
I wouldn't – she, you know, sociology suggests it's more scientific than it is.
I would say she's on the sociopath.
Oh, good.
It was inexpensive, so I just thought I'd try it out.
Yeah, so you did.
Are those crickets?
Yeah, we still need that cricket audio.
We need the cricket audio, yeah.
But anyway, it does seem like she is projecting and One would imagine that she knows better than this, but even if she doesn't, how tragic is it that we are going to grind civilization to a halt over a misunderstanding over whether what goes on in Robin DiAngelo's mind is a good match for what goes on in everybody else's mind?
I don't know, it's stunning.
I will point out, a friend of ours on Twitter may have solved the problem, cut the Gordian knot, as it were, with respect to white fragility.
So somebody had asked what to do in the case their employer was insisting that they read White Fragility, and Dave suggested that the answer to this was, I'll read that if you'll read 1984, which struck me as a very good answer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
That's good.
That's good.
So where should we head?
Well, let me just share, as I mentioned, that I had found a piece when I was looking for the Articles of Interdependence.
I found a… The Declaration of Interdependence.
Thank you.
Declaration of Interdependence.
And you know where you can find that?
Nowhere, except we have copies of it around.
Yes, we do.
But it's not online anymore.
Nope, you can't have it yet.
Maybe later.
It probably needs an update, because like our founding documents, right, there are elements of that document that I believe are timeless.
And there are elements of that document that I believe were very much resident in an era where the immediate concerns of the TARP program and Too Big to Fail and the downstream... And 2008.
2008, you know, the financial collapse and the, you know, The rudiments in the repeal of Glass-Steagall and all of that stuff was very much front of mind, and so this is something you always have to think about when you're trying to build a solution to something, is how much is your focus on the particular failures that you've just seen going to loom larger than it should?
Yeah.
The third amendment with regard to the soldiers quartering your home, lest the monarchy come.
Exactly.
Yes, right.
Not as big an issue as they were concerned about.
And there's also a lot of stuff in that declaration about the very frightening change in policing And the way it was being wielded as a system of extrajudicial punishment against people who would stand up and protest.
There were mass arrests of actually peaceful protesters happening in which people were being held for too long.
Held for too long and dragged into a court system that then drained them.
If you're anywhere, you know, if you're functioning on a budget that you have to make, drain them financially, put them in jeopardy with their employers by dragging them into situations that they, you know, they couldn't get out of.
So there's all of that and there was also in the aftermath of 9-11 you know 2008 isn't all that far down from from 9-11 in 2001 there was all of this stuff which is still live today where civil liberties had been eroded in the ostensible fight against terrorism and Occupy was portrayed as terrorist which basically kicked in all of these special extra constitutional
Provisions and allowed the federal government to sit down with investment banks and to Conspire against Occupy with some of the most absurd stuff like you know Agents of the federal government were actually licensed to engage in romantic and sexual relationships with Occupy Protesters in order to infiltrate the movement and discover what it was on the basis that it was terrorist which it wasn't I mean it's preposterous so
All kinds of madness, and yes, that means that back then those things were right at the forefront of our thinking and generating stuff like the Declaration of Interdependence.
Yeah.
Okay, before we move on, this actually was my final from 20th Century Debate, Models of Human Evolution, a class that you will remember as being co-taught by a pretty staunch postmodernist, actually.
So, I just want to raise again the point you made earlier in passing, that when people tell us, you created this monster and then it came after you and so we have no sympathy for you, the answer is actually, we have been fighting this directly since the 90s.
Since we were in college.
Since we were in college.
22 at most.
Okay, so this is actually a play in which the characters, I'm just going to read four lines from this play, but the characters are Science, Human Evolution, Bias, Modern, Postmodern, Feminism, and Power.
And I have just an exchange between postmodern and modern here from 1991.
This is, you know, my glib college writings, but postmodern.
Responding to someone, something someone of these characters has said, generalizations, all of them break down these preconceived ideas of how we are and what we do and start anew.
Modern says, better yet, honor and respect that which allows you to live in the convenience you now live in.
Postmodern says, you're such an arrogant bastard, Modern.
Modern says to Postmodern, and you're a soft and fuzzy dough boy with cauliflower for brains.
You have long had a flair for the English language.
So, there's much more content here, but I just, again to those who are saying, you helped, you're part of the system.
No, we've been seeing this for a long time, as have many others, and part of the question is, How is it that many of us are being exposed to these pretty ridiculous ideas on college campuses?
I think starting really in the mid-80s is when it began to gain steam through sort of the mid-90s, and then it really kind of died down.
We saw a little bit of it in grad school, and it mostly wasn't at the point that we were professors starting in 2002, 2001, 2002.
I wasn't there.
And then it really started to uptick again in sort of the 2010s.
And it has struck me for a long time that this is about those students back when we were students, who did not laugh at this and try to understand it such that they could fight against it with intellectual tools, actually became professors of these fields.
And then they started proliferating because the fields themselves began to proliferate.
And they have now been churning out students who have now been moving into media and journalism and arts and academia themselves.
And so we have a cycle that is growing in momentum.
Yeah, I've long liked your point about this, which is that part of what we are seeing is a generational phenomenon, right?
Where these people who were studying these, what we've called phony fields, have now matured into a higher level of power in the academy, and that has resulted in other fields that I have long laughed this stuff off being unable to resist because the power within the various faculties is distributed such that they can't.
But I want, as long as we're here, I want to steel man the postmoderns, right?
And then talk about what the competition really is here, okay?
The postmoderns have, in my opinion, one point.
And it's a good one, but it's one point.
It's not the basis for field after field.
The one point is that we are humans and we have only our perception as the basis for everything we think.
And even to the extent that you might have tools that would allow you to see something what we would claim is objectively, your interaction with those tools is still subjective, right?
And this is true.
It is true, and it results in a lot of places where bias leaks into what we believe, even where it is supposed to be absolutely analytical and rigorous and devoid of all of the things that might bias us.
It can't be totally, right?
Now here's the problem with that.
So that's the Steel Man version.
Perception is between you and the world.
You can't escape that.
And because of that, bias is impossible to stamp out completely.
And I believe that that's accurate.
However, If you were going to try to stamp out bias, the number one tool you would want in your arsenal, arguably the only tool you need, is science.
Because what science does, the entire reason that it exists, the entire reason that it has beaten every other system, is that it will tell you what's true in spite of your bias.
Now you have to do it, right?
If you have a corrupt system, if you have, you know, monetary corruption that is influenced You know, how quote-unquote science gets done because it's only the people who succeed at some sort of non-scientific phenomenon like grant writing.
Or you have a repeat of a good old boy network sort of thing with peer review.
Yeah, you can have all kinds of things interfere with proper science.
But if you can do the science properly and you can be vigilant about stamping out the things that cause science not to be done properly, then science will force you to discover the things that you don't intuitively believe, right?
That's what it does.
And so Yes, the postmoderns are right.
Bias is a serious problem.
What do you do about it?
You science it.
You science it.
To the extent that your science is influenced by things that it shouldn't be and is therefore biased, what's the solution to that?
Better science.
More science.
It's science.
That's the answer to postmodernism and it always has been.
So I'm going to add, I'm going to say, okay, if I have to pick one, it's going to be science.
But I want two things.
I mean, I want more.
I want more than that, but I want science and I want art.
Because art allows you to view the world through other people's lenses.
And, you know, postmodernism, at least it's modern, crazy, corrupt instantiations, are specifically demanding of us that we not see the world through other people's eyes.
That if we claim to be able to, then we are somehow revealing our own bigotry.
But art, especially narrative art, you know, especially fiction in whatever form, but 2D art, 3D art, any of it, also just allows you to stand in someone else's footsteps and see.
And science does this in a very different way, and if I have to pick one, I pick science.
But science and art together are going to be an incredibly potent rejoinder to this movement, and therefore I am not too surprised to find the shutdown STEM movement and the The very wide number of organizations that we are hearing from and seeing in the arts that are being gone after by this movement.
They're being targeted.
So I like this.
I still think it's the science that narrowly corrects for the bias, but the fact is, nobody reads scientific papers.
I mean, scientists do, right, in their own field, and sometimes they read a little farther afield than that.
But what moves the world is the conclusions that you come up with, the counterintuitive things that you discover through this process, that then get incorporated into something beautiful and intuitive and provocative enough to capture people's attention, which tends to be… it's not even always narrative.
I said it's easier to point to a narrative, but it's not just narrative.
2D art, 3D art, yeah.
2D art.
Just staring at an amazing sculpture, even an abstract one.
It's easier to do if it's a non-abstract sculpture, but you learn something about a different mind, about a different human being's mind by walking around some piece of art that's been created that is the product of another human mind.
And not even necessarily mind.
The mind is an interface and sometimes the mind is the point and its content is the point and that's what you discover.
But even something like, you know, there are some of these images of sculptures that very effectively capture The finest fabric flowing as if in the wind and it's so compelling you know or there's a famous sculpture with somebody's hand on somebody's leg and the way the fingers depress the skin of the person and the point is it's so compelling that it actually reveals something.
How could you render something soft Out of stone, right?
So even that counterpoint tells you something about the way the world works.
Or I'm frequently stunned by what is revealed by just simply changing one parameter of something you can observe yourself.
Like stop motion reveals certain things or you know.
The way, if you look at clouds and mountains and the way they interact in a time lapse, and the thing is you can read in a textbook all you want that the atmosphere functions as a fluid, right?
But until you see, yeah, until you see what the mountain does to the clouds as they move around it, it's like what we used to say, you know, an enzyme is a catalyst.
Not really.
That's incomplete, at best.
It's a catalyst in the same way that a factory is a catalyst, right?
A factory is a catalyst for making cars, right?
So having time lapse is obviously a fairly modern phenomenon, but I think also art has ...has probably revealed what is possible and opened up technological worlds very often.
So the example that came to mind when you were talking that I imagine there's history written on this and I just I don't know it, but pointillism.
the 19th to 20th century, 19th, 20th century, turn of the century art form in which dots are used to convey great precision in vast scenes seems to presage the idea of pixels.
Like, you know, the idea that you can actually reveal things through points.
Was that in people's heads in da Vinci's time?
I don't know.
It might have been in da Vinci's head, because so much was.
My art history is weak, but the impressionists predate Point, formal pointillism.
I think so, yeah.
And I think what you're getting at is the retina is actually, it's the inverse of pixels.
It's, you know, it's just as a camera sensor would be.
And there is this interesting duality It's not the duality of man, but there is an interesting duality between the continuous and the discrete interpretation of the world.
And there are certain things that are simply discrete, and there are other things that are continuous.
And then there are many things which do not fall wholly in one or the other category.
And therefore, one needs to spend time borrowing from the alternative in order to see what it is that you were missing, what's in your blind spot because you had looked at it as discrete when in fact it was continuous at some level.
Yeah.
Science fiction serves this purpose as well.
Scientific investigations have gotten ideas from things that have been written in science fiction, in part because what science fiction reveals, what art may reveal in other forms, is maybe the categories we are currently using aren't right, or maybe the boundaries aren't quite where we thought they were, or maybe the boundaries were where we thought they were, but those boundaries are moving because other things are changing.
And art can allow you to live in that alternative space for a little bit and consider it and sometimes like, nope, actually not right.
Interesting to spend some time there, but that's not right.
And sometimes it can cause people to go, ah, actually, I think we do need an update.
Or radical change.
We need to actually build a whole new foundation over here with a new kind of science because the categories we were using of, boy, I'm also not up to date on the various older versions of what the world is made of, but it turns out that fire, earth, water, and air are not the basal elements of life, right?
Right.
It sort of hints at the periodic table, but it didn't get there.
It's got the wrong things on it.
It didn't get there, and you could not just do a brick-on-the-wall model from fire, earth, water, and air to get to the periodic table.
You actually needed to go all the way back in the decision tree to the question, what is it made of?
What are the fundamentals?
And rebuild from there.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it.
So, I guess... So we're at, oh, I don't know exactly when we started.
We're probably at 50, 55 minutes.
50 or 55 minutes.
All right, so we have a few minutes left, I guess.
Did you have something in mind with...
Yeah, let's spend a couple minutes here.
I was listening to your conversation with Eric in the podcast that you did with him a couple of weeks ago, a week or two ago, and you mentioned Flatland.
I imagine that most of our listeners, viewers, know this book, but it prompted me to think this, and I know you want to add something to this.
This is this book.
I think you can see it.
Flatland by Edwin Abbott.
It was written in 1884, Victorian-era England, and I read it when I was 12, 11 or 12, something like that, and I had two very distinct reactions to it.
One of my reactions was in line with why I think you invoked it in that conversation with Eric, which was It does exactly what we were just talking about, in fact.
It provides a lens into imagining what it might be like to live in a universe in which there are things bigger than the universe that you live in, and therefore so outside your sphere of experience that you can't really interpret them.
So when a sphere walks through the two-dimensional flatland universe of Abbott, I haven't reread it in decades, so I may be butchering it a little bit, But when a sphere comes through the plane that is flatland, it looks like first a point, and then a line, and then a circle that gets bigger, and then a circle, and then a point, and then it disappears again.
But it can never reveal itself as a sphere, because spheres don't exist in a two-dimensional landscape.
And that alone, that understanding what won't be understandable, what won't be comprehensible, even if you can get glimpses of it, In your current world is amazing.
And I think it, along with so many other experiences in my life, helped me think about, you know, so how do we know?
You know, what are the questions we could ask and how would we end up answering those questions?
So it was, you know, greatly foundational for me when I read it.
And then it's also true that this book is deeply sexist.
Now, it is... I just, I went to Wikipedia just before this to see, um... Wait, it's not deeply sexist.
It's objectively sexist.
It's objectively sexist, but no... It's mathematically sexist.
But dude, here's the thing, Wikipedia says it's satire in this regard, so let's just put That aside, because I think this is revisionist history, but who knows?
Maybe.
But the fact is that in the two-dimensional landscape where males are triangles or squares and they aspire to be circles with sort of an infinite number of sides, they're therefore 2D.
They're polygons.
Females are one-dimensional.
They're lines.
And in the one-dimensional landscape where men are lines, women are dots.
And in the three-dimensional landscape where men are cubes or Spheres, women are polygons.
It's insane.
It's deeply insulting.
And I read it and went, are you kidding me?
And then I thought a little bit about the scant that I knew about the era in which he'd been writing, which at that point was 100 years prior.
And I thought, okay, well, you know what, I can still get out of this book.
the remarkable truth in it, while also being perturbed by this insanity in it.
And that doesn't actually alter the value that I have in it.
So that was 1884.
There's also, so this is a copy of a book that my mother gave to our son Zach a number of years ago.
It's Heinlein, Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers.
Great books, both of them.
Let's see, Stranger in a Strange Land was written in 1961.
Heinlein also has a tremendous amount to teach us, and he's also of his era.
He's kind of misogynist.
I actually remember having a conversation with one of our male students on our Ecuador study abroad trip in 2016.
A bunch of us were sitting around talking about science fiction, and I mentioned Stranger in a Strange Land.
He said to me, How can you like that book?
It's, you know, The Treatment of Women.
I said, yeah, The Treatment of Women isn't great in that book, and I don't like that part of that book, but that doesn't mean that there's not things that you can learn from it.
So the idea of canceling entire, you know, historical figures or works of art or scientific ideas because the people who engaged in them were of their time and flawed is obviously a road that we should not want to go down, and you have a better example yet.
Well, there are so many examples.
But before we get there, I do want to say, I hope somebody will take up Flatland and bring it into modernity, where it turns out maybe, I mean, you can imagine females being prisms that only intersect the plane in which Flatland takes place at a line.
So this is about male perception that they were limited to.
Right, it's about males failing to grok what females are about.
Yeah, I think that'd be cool.
Well, nicely introduced grok there from Heinlein himself.
Well, there you go.
Although I still can't quite spell it.
Grok?
Yeah.
G-R-O-K.
G-R-O-K.
I would tend to say C-K, and then I get corrected.
This is all I know.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, I would just say, look, you know, the problem is, and you know, I don't even know how to do this.
With the internet.
I know how to do this in a conversation with human beings, but I don't know how to do it with the internet because you have to fear the editor, right?
What the editor is going to do with what you say is potentially going to overwhelm any point that you can make, and that's a tragic lesson, one I learned in college the first time and keeps getting reinforced.
But obviously, You need Mark Twain, for example, in order to understand race in America, because he gives us a snapshot, and he gives us a very humane snapshot, but it is not a snapshot devoid of what we now call the N-word.
And if you want to cancel that book because it contains a word that you've now been told that any white person who utters it is guilty of a crime, well now you've just robbed us of one of the greatest tools we have.
That's right.
Likewise, And, you know, maybe my favorite song ever is Hurricane by Bob Dylan.
From 1976.
1976.
It is, for those of you who don't know, and I really would invite you to go find it and listen to it carefully, right?
It is a story of Hurricane Carter, Reuben Carter, Who was falsely convicted of murder in a deeply racially biased court system, right?
So the police and the courts conspired against him and convicted him of a murder that he had not committed and the song is Blistering, right?
It is an absolutely blistering attack on the system that did this and it is also, it is not an overly analytical song.
It is a song that indicts the humanity of the people involved in this crime and humanizes Reuben Carter who we have been led to believe, we in civilization have been led to believe is a bad guy who did something bad and that's why he's been locked up.
So, anyway, that song contains... I hate that I have to say the N-word here, right?
But I don't know how else to do it so I don't get edited to that one sentence or that one word, you know?
I'll find video of me uttering that one word out of context and suddenly the ability to say, here's what I was saying, I was quoting Bob Dylan, I was quoting Bob Dylan in a song in which he is revealing What, again, I don't think this is the right word, but he was revealing what we now would be told is white supremacy, right?
A system that is systematically indifferent to the interests of black people, right?
He goes through it.
He explains, he actually details not only the circumstances of the crime and the investigation, but the bad witnesses and their perverse incentives and the structure of the court that Carter finds himself facing.
The whole, and the press, I mean, he goes through the whole thing.
It's a tour de force.
And the point is, you want to rob us of that?
You want to rob your kids of that?
You want to explain white supremacy and not have that as one of the tools in your toolkit?
Isn't the song actually instrumental in getting Hurricane Carter released?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So the point is, like, this is how it's done, people, right?
It's done narratively and it's done unflinchingly.
Can you do the stanza?
I mean, I understand why you don't want to say the word.
If I do the stanza, it is frankly against my religion to do it and say N-word, because for one thing, it interrupts a rhyme that's important to the whole thing.
The rhyme is obvious, though.
Yeah.
Well, OK.
So the stanza, I know it by heart, but can I do it in front of the camera?
Let's see.
It was...
Oh, to the white folks who watched, he was a revolutionary bum.
And to the black folks, he was just a crazy nigger.
Nobody doubted that he pulled the trigger.
And though they could not produce the gun, the D.A.
said he was the one who did the deed.
And the all-white jury agreed.
I mean, that's beautiful poetry.
Yeah.
Right?
And it is a very ugly word.
And it has to be there in order for that piece of poetry to work.
Yeah, I think you probably couldn't have called it up after saying the word if you had replaced it with N-word there, right?
You would have lost your place.
I would have lost my place, and I would have been heartbroken that this important tool had been made dull.
I mean, what do you do?
So, look... I mean, just like, it's obvious.
It's obvious that this is not a word that you are trying to use.
I have no need of that word to use in earnest, but sometimes there's a need to discuss its use in Twain, or to discuss its use by Dylan, or to discuss its modern use.
You need discretion.
The only way a system can work is if you have discretion to decide where a use is legitimate and where a use is illegitimate.
And you know what?
You're probably even going to have to be generous because even if you say, well, Twain is a legitimate case.
Dylan is a legitimate case most cases are illegitimate, and that's true.
They're gonna be some gray area cases right and I mean in fact Who was it this woman who just got cancelled for?
wearing blackface while mocking Oh, who was it?
The juror, the talking head on TV.
Is it Megyn Kelly?
Is it Megyn Kelly?
Gosh, we should know this.
Mocking her, when in fact what she had done was say something super clumsy, but you know, she had said something super clumsy about black faces.
She's trying to navigate something, that's my recollection anyway.
And then somebody makes a Halloween costume mocking her for her tone deafness on this issue, and you're going to ruin her life over this?
I mean, even if it's an error, it's not an error of some, you know, profound rot at her core.
It's an error!
No, we've talked about the death of empathy.
It's also the death of satire.
Yeah, right.
Again, the tool you would want most prominently at this moment in order to sort out this really difficult stuff.
You're going to rob us of satire?
That must be because you have an objective that involves power, and if we can satirize stuff, if we can laugh at ourselves, then you won't get there.
So, yeah.
All right, well, I think we are at a little over an hour, and I don't know how we do this part here.
I have some announcements.
Do you have any more announcements before we sign off?
Come find us at Unity 2020.
Unity 2020.
There you go.
Come to articlesofunity.org.
The hashtag unity2020 will also lead you to our Twitter handle at articlesofunity.
And... Do you have the final card to put up while I announce some things?
Or do we not have that capability?
Yes, I do.
If I can figure it out.
Okay, while you're talking, I will say the now standard things that we say at the end that we will start another live stream in about 15 minutes.
We will be taking your Super Chat questions, starting with the top monetary value ones from this live stream and then moving about halfway through to the questions that come in in the order that they come in in the next live stream.
That link, I think, is already live?
Or it is set to be live soon?
I don't know.
We'll figure it out.
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Well, you have to be a member to access it.
It's private.
To access the prior one?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
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