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Oct. 23, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:26:58
DarkHorse Podcast with Greg Lukianoff and Bret Weinstein
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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the honor of sitting today with Greg Lukianoff, who is president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling of the American Mind.
He is also, I believe, the recipient of the 2008 Playboy Freedom of Expression Award.
Is that correct, Greg?
Yes.
Well done.
It was an honor.
If you read Coddling, you might have heard that I had a pretty rough 2007 and I was in a pretty big low.
And getting that really helped.
I used the moral support in 2008.
But it did not require the production of any photographs that you now fear being released or anything like that.
Christy Heffner runs a lot of the Free Speech Awards, and I actually was pleased to hear an elderly recipient of one of the awards say what the rest of us were thinking.
It's like, why don't we get invited to any of the fun Playboy parties?
It was very upscale, very respectable, almost to the point of being mildly disappointing.
Got it.
All right.
Well, there's so much to talk about, I don't hardly know where to start.
Oh, yeah.
Business is booming.
You might have missed it.
Right.
How are you enjoying the collapse of Western civilization?
Is it going about as you expected?
Luckily, given my family history, and, you know, my father was born in 1926 in Yugoslavia.
His father then died when he was six, and I've always had that to compare myself to.
You know, it's kind of like, am I an orphan with rickets in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, about to be killed by Stalin or Nazis?
But it's, I mean, and the thing is, like, I don't usually say very over-the-top things, but, like, I tweeted in the past six months, this is as bad as I've seen it.
Like, I would have thought, if you had told me five years ago, even though we were way ahead of the curve on talking about free speech issues on campus and runaway ideology, I would still think you were making stuff up, because it is, everything has gone nuts.
Well, that's very interesting to hear you say that.
I should say I get a lot of credit for having predicted what was going to happen, but you and Jonathan Haidt were well ahead of me in terms of predicting this, and to hear that you are surprised, I must say I can't be terribly surprised at what has happened, but I'm certainly surprised at the speed with which it is happening.
Exactly.
So, in an original article in 2015, we were predicting that there was going to be an increase in anxiety and depression.
And, you know, we thought it would be a modestly measurable, you know, little thing on a graph.
Like, oh, see here, it's a... We're talking about, you know, graphs that go up like hockey sticks when it comes to mental health.
So, basically, we saw a lot of this stuff coming.
We didn't expect it to come, like, next year.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I wonder what it is that sounds like caused us both to be caught off guard by the speed.
Is there an accelerant in here that we might have perceived if we had looked at it?
You know, definitely social media has sped everything up.
It's sped up polarization, it's sped up sorting, it's sped up mental health issues.
We argue in the book at least.
But definitely I'd say Trump.
I feel like the The ridiculous political era we're in has sped up all of the political processes we talked about in Coddling the American Mind.
Because one of the things we did say was one of the reasons why Generation Z was so different was because the polarization politically was hotter than ever and that just went through the roof in 2016.
Yeah, it really did go through the roof.
Now, you of course focused in coddling on the degree to which online dynamics do amplify these processes, so that didn't come out of nowhere.
That was definitely a big part of your model.
And I did write something in 2014 called Freedom From Speech, which talked about how I think that as other... And the thing is, you know, ultimately, in a lot of ways, I'm a Steve Pinker optimist.
I would rather live now than 100 years ago.
You know, I'm excited about space elevators and carbon nanotubes and having nanites in my blood and all that kind of stuff.
Um, but one thing that I did want to add some nuance to the argument of things getting better, which was really almost like there was a sugar high in the early part of the teens.
That there are some things that get worse precisely because other things are getting better.
So technological advancements that let you live in communities that reflect your values or even find those communities even if you don't live close to them, you know, that sounds lovely.
But also as, you know, everything from, you know, psychoactive drugs that decrease pain Frankly, we're having what I call in the book a problem of comfort, that essentially we're in self-reaffirming groups, both in our real lives, physically we've moved to more isolated areas.
And online, they pat you on the back for that.
And my argument in freedom from speech was that essentially there's a category of things that will get worse precisely because some of the things are getting better.
And I do think the situation for free speech, as things get worse, is going, as things get better technologically, is going to get worse.
I think people become more non-compromising in a situation where, you know, 500 people I can't be wrong.
Why should I compromise on this stuff?
Having to remind people that compromise in democracy is good.
So I want to run something by you.
It's a model I've been playing with and forgive me if I'm reinventing something that you have already described.
But I have the sense that the online environment, that what we have in fact seen is a phase transition where we are now dealing with a critical mass of people for whom the online environment is primary.
And The online environment is of course not actually primary, but if you were to mistake it as primary, it might result in certain dynamics that I think we are now seeing unfold.
So, in short, what I would say is, if I'm having a discussion with evolutionary biologists online, If I'm in a chat about evolutionary biology, presumably I have the right, or we have the right, to exclude young Earth creationists.
It's not that they don't have the right to speak about young Earth creationism, but if we are to have the ability to talk about evolutionary biology anywhere, there has to be a place where we can simply say, actually we're not going to entertain young Earth creationism here.
And so that right, whatever it is made of, looks to me like it has been extrapolated to all sorts of things where it doesn't belong.
So, for example, online we are told that if one has any skepticism about the claim that a man who declares himself a woman is in fact a woman upon that declaration, if we have any doubts about that, then we are TERFs.
We are trans-exclusionary radical feminists and therefore we have committed a sin A grave moral wrong, yeah.
A grave moral wrong, and we are to be driven out.
And so I have the sense that this... I mean, it's obvious nonsense, I'm a biologist, I know that the fact that you may declare yourself female doesn't make you female, and that, you know, we might agree that that's the way you should be treated, but it doesn't change certain underlying biological realities.
Nonetheless, if you imagine that people see the internet as a space in which they are allowed to establish this rule in the same way that I as an evolutionary biologist might establish the rule that young earth creationism isn't to be discussed in this, you know, in this subreddit or whatever, that you would get this behavior where the point is you have to exclude those who violate the rule in order that the conversation can progress as normal.
I think there's a lot of truth to that and it's actually, it's a lot where my head is about two different things.
The first is that one of the reasons why I think things have gotten so hot in 2020 in terms of hyperpolarization and ideology run wild is that because of COVID, because we're home all the time, we have become our avatars.
We've become our online personality 24 hours a day and without face-to-face contact, without the, you know, the rigmarole of daily life, People, in their avatars, they're much less reasonable, they're much more ideologically pure, they're much braver, of course, because you're not actually facing people.
So I think that we're seeing the distortion of what happened.
Because at first, I remember, during COVID, it was kind of nice to see everybody online.
And we all spent way more time online.
It was like, hi everybody, how are you doing?
There was this kind of honeymoon period.
And then that weird kind of spiral of ideology took over.
But here's the least probably popular or un-PC thing I'm probably going to say, is that I feel like what's happened to our entire society is that tactics for winning arguments in dormitories and in departments In the 1990s, have become treated as if they are the law of Solomon.
That essentially, you know, any dissent from theories of privilege, any dissent from theories about sexuality, theories about sexual identity, that's just a grave moral sin.
And that doesn't have to be discussed.
But all these things, they weren't meant to actually be true.
They were supposed to give you a rhetorical advantage in arguing.
But, you know, if you do assume they're 100% true, I mean, that was one of the reasons why, you know, and this goes beyond what fire does, but why I was concerned about the 1619 thing is because the 1619 argument, the argument that it all was only ever just about slavery and nothing else, was something that you would hear on campus sometimes, and it was, you know, debated, as it should be, but then it just got treated suddenly just in the past couple... Was that this year?
I believe it was about a year ago.
It's been a long year.
Wow.
Yeah, so, but that argument got being treated as if it was gospel fact.
I was like, wow, okay, we've really, we've really, these arguments have won, but not because they're true, because they're rhetorically useful and taken for granted by a certain group of former college students, or current college students.
Well, I wonder if our models are about to converge here, because the way I would interpret... They sound like they could.
Yeah, I think they're headed in this direction.
So what I'm imagining is that People from our generation.
Am I right?
Gen X?
Gen X, yes.
Woohoo!
Woo!
Pearl Jam!
Those of us who still remain in this tiny generation should gather for a reunion at some point.
Absolutely.
So what I'm imagining is that people from our generation and those above Uh-huh.
are misunderstanding something about the arguments that are being deployed.
Because they come couched as arguments about matters of fact, which is very confusing, right?
But in fact, what I suspect they are is gambits in a negotiation.
That in effect, if you take my model that basically there is a generation or several generations now that are playing with the idea that the online environment is in fact, in some sense, deeper, truer, more real.
And I can still man that point, although it's obviously wrong in the end.
But if you imagine that people are proceeding from that starting point, Right.
Then there's a question about establishing the rules of that environment going forward.
And if you believe, as I do, and I would presume you do, that the U.S., for example, is Not perfectly fair with respect to race that there are in fact historical biases that echo through to Modernity then the point is well those need carry no weight online Right, we can actually neutralize them.
Yeah for real and it's not that difficult What we do is we set out the rules by which online discussion proceeds and you can see this in the case of the gender question because at some level If we're talking about how you are to be treated online, if you say you're a woman, you're a woman.
Right?
That's plausible online.
It becomes implausible when you go to see your doctor, right?
Or when you commit a crime and we have to decide which prison to send you to, or we have to decide whether or not you can enter a race in a women's category rather than compete against men.
But online, there's no need for any of those things to be relevant.
We can just simply decide The sexes are equal, you are what you say you are, let's go.
And so we can neutralize issues of class, we can neutralize issues of race, we can neutralize issues of gender online.
And that when we are told that if I say, well, no, there's an issue of gamete size, that there's no amount of surgery that can correct for it, and it has implications, right?
I've just said something I don't think is controversial at a biological level.
But if I say that online then the point is I have to be punished because I've violated the proposed rule and that in effect the vast pylon of people who will call me a TERF are really basically enforcing the new rules of how of essentially etiquette of how we are to interact in the online environment.
So Then the problem comes that the outside world actually is primary.
It is real.
And they wish to export.
Are we sure it's real?
Well, if you're going to push me to the philosophy, I'll say we cannot be perfectly certain.
But it would be pointless to worry about it.
But 1619 is effectively the online rules, right, in which we are to treat, we have been told that we are to treat the United States as if it was exclusively about slavery, that that was 100% of the project.
We are to treat that as real, I would argue as some sort of compensation, right?
That there has been a historical blindness to the importance of slavery, and so now there's going to be a compensatory overemphasis, that's the rules of the online environment, but they're now being exported into the world.
We are now going to teach them to children as fact, right?
Rather than them being the rules of the discussion online.
Yeah, and one last wrinkle on it is the place that I, you know, Hyte, his primary area of scholarship is on what's called moral foundations, which I'm sure you know all about.
And, you know, when we were working on the book, I was asking, are you saying that some of this ideology is analogous to religion, or is taking the place of religion?
And he says, it's taking the place of religion, flat out.
So some of these rules, because they have this sort of moral heat behind them, that basically your brain is supposed to shut off if they're violated, it really, like the word you used before, it really does have all the markings of sin.
Yeah, it does, and then I would add my evolutionary wrinkle to your work and John's work here, and I would say the problem is that it is functioning as a literal religion, but without the one thing that religion brings to the table that makes it more or less safe, which is the fact— Forgiveness and mercy?
No, but these would be downstream products of that.
It would be the fact that whatever religion, if it's a true religion, right, it's long-standing, right?
So you know it's not riddled with fatal errors.
It may be riddled with untruths.
Oh, nice!
Okay, yeah, I get it.
So at some level what we're facing is the invention of a new religion and there is no one alive who can tell you it doesn't end in gulags or gas chambers or starvation or, you know, nuclear exchange.
We don't know what happens because this one is, you know, it's a prototype.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's playing with all of the most important tools.
We're watching it sweep through, you know, governance, which means that suddenly, you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is dealing with the question of whether or not, you know, presumably fission is a process born of white supremacy or who knows what, right?
So that's very dangerous.
Oh yeah, and it's kind of funny because we're both left-leaning people.
I used to work at this program called the Environmenters Project in the 90s.
We worked with inner-city high school kids to do environmental justice work.
And I got all my Democrat friends together back in 2003 to say, listen, really what we should be focusing on is energy.
And to see my side of the spectrum actually saying, we care about global warming, but we want to get rid of fracking and no nuclear?
It's like, are you serious about this?
And that gets treated like an article of faith.
And we're all arguing with the same kind of one-offsmanship and grandstanding that people argue in dorms.
Yes.
Now, you and I might come out different places on fracking and fission.
I don't know, but nonetheless... I'd love to be spending astronomical amounts of money on fusion, to be clear.
Oh, me too.
That's exactly where I think we should be investing, and it's possible that we need some upgraded kind of fission to get us there, because we don't know when fission will be viable.
For now, it's better than the other options, and we're not going to get to where we need to be.
But really, I think we should be spending Apollo Project-type money on fusion.
I agree.
I have argued we need a Manhattan Project for fusion.
Woohoo!
I didn't know that!
Because it's actually the one technology that I think plausibly saves us going forward.
That said, I think if we invented it today, if it got announced this afternoon, it would make things worse, not better.
Yeah, I can actually think of a lot of ways, or at least we'd just figure out a way to argue ourselves out of it.
I mean, this has already started happening with some of the super carbon materials, like, that I got excited about.
You know, like, I was amazed at how fast people were talking about, you know, the potential of particulate matter, you know, to be very harmful to people's lungs.
But as if that's why we shouldn't pursue it?
It's like, this could be, this could change everything.
This gives, you know, if we have this, can't we try to figure out that issue?
I don't know.
It's like the precautionary principle that they have currently in the European Union, which is just a formula for stagnation and not being able to fix any of the problems you currently have.
Well, so, uh, Heather and I have a book that will be coming out, uh, next year.
Ooh, tell me.
And it is going to include in it the argument that we need some version of the precautionary principle, but that the problem with the precautionary principle is that everything depends on how you instantiate it, because if you instantiate it narrowly, you're right, you bring everything to a halt because you can't be totally certain of the safety of anything.
Sure.
Um, so anyway, there's a, I think there's a more sophisticated way To pursue it, but yes, it is something we would have to agree to broadly.
And in fact, you know, you're an interesting person to be talking to about this because it is, I think, clear to both of us that we are actually watching a very dangerous breakdown in civilization that is in some ways the downstream consequence of new technologies whose danger we didn't anticipate.
Do you mean specifically social media?
Well, I mean, you know, social media, I mean feed algorithms, search algorithms, I mean focus groups and the ability to predict behavior and to modify it with sophisticated propaganda, All of these technologies have caused a breakdown in our sense making and in our sense of allegiance to each other.
That's obviously at one level the root of the problem, which I think is part of the argument you deploy in coddling.
Yeah.
So how do you square that with your sense about the precautionary principle?
Was there a place where we needed to look at what was unfolding and say, wait a minute, this could be so dangerous that we have to put the brakes on it in some way?
Um, you know, if we had a precautionary principle for social media, like, let's say that was part of the culture already, social media still would have gone ahead, because really, people didn't see any harm in it.
It's like, oh, you show cat pictures, and hey, you get pat on the back for what group you're in.
I think even a strong version of that still would have led to the existence of Twitter and Facebook and sorting algorithms.
And of course, you know, since I'm a civil liberties guy, you know, I think in terms of My biggest fear, of course, is centralized power.
And so when I was working on the book with Haidt, when we were finishing up our recommendation sections for social media, you know, he definitely had a lot more faith in top-down solutions.
But I know what top-down solutions are going to look like.
It's going to be, you know, the president of Princeton.
I shouldn't pick on Princeton.
Actually, no.
No, you should pick on Princeton at the moment.
The Professor Katz thing was actually pretty bad.
And it always turns out to be whatever is in the interest of power.
That's the thing that gets banned.
And people say, please have more censorship to protect the downtrodden.
It's like, yes, we'll take that and now I'm going to shut up my critics.
You know, it is the way it works.
So my hope is that we start developing cultural norms around use of social media.
I think that's really the only way out is some process of developing norms around it.
I feel like I've seen some Glimmers of reasonability in little enclaves on Twitter or on Facebook, for example.
Maybe I'm just completely spoiled.
So, I think that the precautionary principle wouldn't have known far enough into the future what the downside would have been.
Meanwhile, and this is something I've been saying for a long time, but I still really think it.
Twitter is the closest to looking at the way the human mind works of probably any technology that's ever been developed.
And what's better is, or better in the sense of more interesting, is that it's immediate and it's for hundreds of millions of people.
So it's kind of like looking into the collective unconscious of the entire species.
And if that doesn't get people excited as a research opportunity, You know, it's one of the reasons, Nicholas Christakis and I have been friends ever since, actually since well before the incident at Yale.
But he gets really excited about this stuff too.
And there's so much to learn about human nature and tribalism and that kind of stuff from this technology if we can just survive its initial impact.
I feel like we're in the period, you know, sometimes people will say, oh, Lukianoff and Haidt, you know, people said the same thing about the printing press.
And it's like you chose a bad example there because it led to hundreds of years of religious war.
It came pretty much directly out of it.
So I think right now we're in the religious war.
I just hope it's not hundreds of years.
Right, or fatal to the species.
That would be unfortunate.
But, alright, so this is interesting.
You are hostile to the idea of structures that would be, and I agree, would be abused by people to shut down their critics.
I mean, we're already seeing this.
I would challenge your sense about a view into the collective unconscious.
Okay, great.
Because I believe Twitter would be that if Twitter were an unmanaged platform.
So it's more like the superego now?
No.
Since there's so many powerful norms?
It's downstream of many things, but one of them is Twitter's perverse incentives.
Yeah, you're right.
Right?
And so the problem is, it's like a glimpse into the unconscious of a propagandized person, right?
You're a propagandized population.
And therefore, what we think on Twitter is heavily edited, not just by Our distorted fear of a pylon, right?
The fact that a hundred people piling on you in an ugly way is enough to dissuade you from saying something when in fact a hundred... Or for leaving the house.
Right, exactly.
But the point is, the way people pile on, and the way people have now organized themselves to pile on more effectively to modify what gets said is a distortion of the view into the unconscious.
And then there's Twitter's obnoxious policy of deciding, you know, for example, that,
That COVID-19, that SARS-CoV-2 is inherently... that the scientific consensus that it is a natural virus that emerged from bats is so secure that we can declare anything that doesn't adhere to this consensus as a kind of unforgivable thought?
That it will label things?
Right.
What that does is it tamps down the fact that you've got lots of people who are looking at the facts, even just the basic facts, and saying, that doesn't add up.
And there's this other hypothesis that does add up, and it doesn't seem like we know enough to know.
Which origin it has.
It's kind of funny, kind of the gateway drug to censorship in a lot of cases are conspiracy theories.
And I take two different approaches to that as being a free speech person who isn't particularly bothered by this.
Is one, even if they're false, conspiracies move the world and it's important to know what people really think, full stop.
This is my free speech radicalism and it comes down to something very simple.
It's always important to know what people really think.
Period.
And so, for example, we would have such a poor understanding of where the anti-Semitism came from before World War II if we didn't understand the Protocols of Zion being this huge fraud and hit.
But understanding, like, people's paranoia and superstitions, all of this stuff is so incredibly important.
But also, the other part is there's always a possibility that it could be true.
And, I mean, given, you know, my family had to flee the Soviets, you know, it's just one conspiracy after the other.
So, this is funny, Brett.
This room doesn't think I'm here, so I occasionally have to do this.
Well, maybe you should just take up gesticulating as a more central part of your communication modality.
Oh, I'm actually really tamping it down right now.
This is the one that I seem to do for everything, according to my wife.
It's an atom or the galaxy or, you know, like there's so many things that actually it's like, well, this is going to happen.
And it's like, yeah, I do it without even realizing it.
It's arguments in 2020.
Yeah, right.
There's a certain roundness to that argument.
There is a certain, yeah.
That was a favorite law school professor said that one time trying to be nice.
But I thought that was great.
So let me take you back to two things you just said here.
Cool.
One, I want to talk to you about conspiracy theories.
Yes.
Because I feel like we're missing the boat on this one.
Okay, great.
There is a very obvious way to deal with conspiracy theories, and that is not to traffic in them, right?
But There's a way to deal with the possibility of true things, and it just so happens that we have the most excellent system you could possibly want for dealing with them, which is science.
So I want to be very clear, and I have been very clear with my audience, that Theory has a precise meaning.
That means it has withstood rigorous tests.
There should only ever be one theory at a time, right?
That is to say, the theory of natural selection is the theory of natural selection because we have so thoroughly tested it and there is no competitor, right?
Before it was tested, it was a hypothesis.
And so I would say the responsible way to deal with the conspiracy issue is to say, these are hypotheses.
The fact that one advances a hypothesis doesn't mean you even believe it's true, right?
You can have all kinds of hypotheses.
Our conversation could be taking place in a simulated universe.
I don't believe that's true, but I do regard it as a hypothesis, and to the extent that it makes predictions, it's testable.
So, I think the point is, we have been sold a bill of goods, we've been led into a dangerous territory by thinking in terms of conspiracy theories, when in fact they are hypotheses, they make predictions, and we can treat them exactly as seriously as you would a proposed scientific idea that hasn't been tested or has, you know, given mixed results.
Well, here's where you get in trouble, Brett.
Thought experimentation, devil's advocacy, are absolutely essential to the production of ideas.
And I say this stuff on campus and people are like, what?
People have to take the other side of different arguments?
I'm like, yeah, actually, ideally, you'd have someone who actually believes the other side of the argument because they're going to know the most arguments for it and they're going to be able to defend it.
But if not, someone in your team should pretend that they are willing to throw out these other hypotheses on what actually happened.
And I'm seeing a situation on campus where that's been sort of obliquely threatened, and now it's being very directly threatened.
We just had a case at St.
John's where a prof- Do you know this one, Brett?
I don't think so.
This is a case where a professor was, in a history class, was talking about the Columbian Exchange.
You know, all the wonderful things that the rest of the world got from Columbus' quote-unquote, discovering the New World.
And of course, that includes things as basic as potatoes and tomatoes.
That alone would have made an incredibly important exchange.
But this is a serious historical question, kind of like for all the horrors that came out of the triangle slavery and all this, and the murder and the exposure to smallpox and all of these horrible things, the question is, you know, was it worth it?
Any serious intellectual, any serious student should be able to go, huh, you know, and puzzle through that and be able to come down on his side.
But it's treated, in this case, so much like heresy that the professor was suspended at St.
John's.
And I think he still is.
He was relieved from teaching.
And I'm seeing more and more cases, because I saw a ton of cases for years where a professor was saying something on Twitter that would get them in trouble.
Absolutely a free speech issue.
Absolutely important.
But it's moving closer and closer to the classroom, although you might know something about that.
Well, yes, it does seem to me I encountered something a few years back.
I'll see if I can remember what it was.
But okay, so I totally agree with this.
Thought experiment is an essential tool, right?
And the ability to voice a thought experiment, even an obnoxious thought experiment, right, is part and parcel of how, you know, we do moral philosophy among other things.
I mean, trolley problems, right?
If you couldn't talk trolley problems because you're killing innocents, well, then, you know, you're robbed of this important tool for the advancement of ethics.
But, okay, so we, well, I want to take you back to that second thing before we lose the Sure, sure, sure.
So you are very skeptical about top-down solutions to our online problem.
You agree that we are dealing with very dangerous downstream consequences of technologies that we couldn't foresee the hazard as they were invented.
So that some sort of precaution, were it possible, might have saved us from that, but maybe no conceivable precaution could have existed.
But here's the question.
Isn't the solution for online an upgrade to our constitutional protections that have worked so well for speech in other realms?
So like, what would that look like?
Well, I think it would look like exactly what you have just described, which is a radical commitment to keeping the space open to ideas, including obnoxious ones, because the consequence of trying to shut it down and leaving only respectable ideas is unthinkably terrible on very short timescales.
Yeah.
And that's been my, and people like David French's, argument.
That essentially, if you're going to start regulating speech, guess what?
You have this absolutely brilliant body.
And I'm the obnoxious American.
My mother's British slash Irish.
My father grew up in Yugoslavia but is Russian.
And, you know, you're taught from a pretty early age not to go over there with thinking your values are superior.
But I totally break that norm when I go to other countries and talk about First Amendment.
And what I explain is I know you guys think we're nuts, but in this country, you know, any practically any country in Europe, you're going after speech because someone finds it In our country, one of the major differences between us and everybody else is actually relatively small.
But it's that we have a bedrock principle that it can never be merely because someone finds it offensive.
That doesn't make cultural sense.
These norms change from period to period.
They're different from economic class to economic class, from nation to nation, from men to women in some cases.
So the principles that actually are, have been thought out by, frankly, some of the best minds in U.S.
history.
I mean, you know, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis were no slouches on this stuff.
And that it presents this really sensible body of law and actually philosophy and how you actually deal with speech.
And I think that it would be ideal way to regulate speech To use those standards to regulate speech on the internet.
I can't quite bring myself, though, to want to give up the freedom of association and expressive rights that these companies have in the first place, but I do think that if there was a place that actually applied these rules, and applied them very firmly, it would be a healthier environment, for one, even though there'd be some nastiness, of course, to be expected.
But the direction that Twitter and Facebook are currently going I think it's going to start looking like the absurdities that you see In Europe and and worse it's going to also involve things and and you know one of the reasons why nobody wants to even do the thought Experimentation what if this actually was a biological weapon well because of the power wealth and influence of China Well, that's true.
I should say just point of clarity That it was a biological weapon is a hypothesis.
Oh, no.
And I assume that.
And the funny thing is I know people on the on the interwebs would be like, well, you claim this.
And I'm like, yeah, no, it's I totally understood as a hypothesis.
It's a hypo.
Well, that wasn't the one that.
So I personally believe the most robust hypothesis.
We don't have a theory of its origin yet.
We really don't know.
But the most robust hypothesis is a lab leak, but not a weapon.
Yeah.
This was a virus that had picked up capacities through what's called gain-of-function research and then escaped.
Presumably it infected a worker and would have gotten out that way, though that's not the only path.
But in any case, these are competing hypotheses, right?
I haven't seen any support yet for the bioweapon hypothesis, though it's a hypothesis whether there's any evidence for it or not.
The point is, were it true, it would make certain predictions about the way it behaved.
Well, the whole time bomb aspect of it, the ability to transmit it asymptomatically and then you get walloped by it, you know, two weeks later is, that's clever.
And that's definitely one of the reasons why I think people think it, you know, sometimes go to it being a weapon is it's just so perfectly designed to spread.
Well, I would say that's not a prediction, though.
That is an observation of its nature, which leads to the hypothesis that it could be a bioweapon, in which case it would have to have other features.
But in any case, I guess my only point is, it just so happens that we have The most robust system ever devised, I believe the most robust system possible for figuring out what's true, and it's already the bedrock of Western civilization, why do we exclude conspiracies from its application?
Why do we leap to calling these things theories rather than start with the idea that they're hypotheses?
You know, and, you know, to your point about thought experiments, The beauty of this system is that it is a formal feature of it.
That the fact that you are advancing an explanation for something and positing predictions that would come from that explanation has nothing to say about whether you believe it's true.
In fact, when you're working scientifically, the right thing to do is to generate as many hypotheses to explain an observation as you can, and then test to see which of them is correct, which means that you've simultaneously advanced mutually exclusive ideas.
That's part of the nature of the work.
And so, if we simply brought the discipline of this hypothetico-deductive thinking to questions of Conspiracy and collusion.
We free ourselves from the madness that happens when, you know, even voicing a conspiracy is now taken to be an embrace of it, and that is taken to be a sign of some sort of mental failure.
Yeah.
Well, and that's what I was getting at by saying, you know, what your problem is, kind of jokingly.
But it does seem that so much progress comes from us Trying to get into our prefrontal cortex, you know, basically kind of like putting our assumptions to one side and trying to actually bring it forward based on evidence and that kind of stuff.
But it's really important to remind Everyone, you know, like there's a reason why, you know, rational thinking was a radical idea when it was proposed, you know, by Greek thinkers or Buddhist thinkers, you know, for example, the discernment, you know, as it's called in the Buddhist tradition.
Because everything about human beings, you know, almost everything, pulls us against it.
We're superstitious, we're tribal, we're not good at seeing our own biases and blindness, all this kind of stuff.
But which also, you know, A little digression, but it's something I care a lot about.
It's funny in these arguments that you see on campus is you can see things that basically say, we only recently discovered this thing called bias, and by bias they mean prejudice.
And that's kind of amazing though that they put it in the language of bias because it's kind of like what do you think the Constitution is about?
What do you think separation of powers is about?
What do you think all of these things were partially because we were lucky enough to be founded as a country during a period where there was a lot of rational thinking about how badly and well we make decisions and therefore splitting things up and having checks and balances and all this kind of stuff.
Absolutely brilliant.
Well, so when you said earlier that you depart from the norms by advocating for the idea that our principles are superior, I'm not shy about this.
I mean, and to me it seems like another empirical question.
I mean, on the one hand it is certainly true that our system was counterintuitive on its founding and has spread.
Right?
People have seen what it does and they have embraced it in large numbers.
So that suggests something about it.
I would also argue that, you know, to say whether it is superior or not, one has to identify a criterion that you are, or several criteria that you are trying to maximize.
But I think it would be hard to do better than realized liberty, right?
That to the extent that a human being is a fantastically capable creature that can engage in insight, innovation, compassion, The creation of beauty and all of these things, that it's wonderful when a system liberates us to do that, and that therefore there is some basis to judge our system.
And to the extent that there are others out there that do very well on those evaluations, most of them are building on the prototype that was set up here.
Yeah, and it's interesting because I've always been, as someone who's like a big fan of David Hume and a lot of the Scottish Enlightenment, I've always been pretty hard on the romantics, and I think that a lot of the evil of the world came out of the post-Enlightenment period, and I still think that.
However, I have developed a little bit of a soft spot in my heart, you know, for what it must have been like for those early days of liberty.
That basically kind of like, what can I see about the beauty and complexity of the world and about my own nature if I'm freed from a narrow expectation, a religious expectation of what every single person in the world should be like?
And I get at an emotional level how powerful that must have been.
And interestingly, at the same time, jeez, Interestingly, at the same time, we got to learn more about human nature because of that.
So it ended up being this interesting feedback loop the rationalists keep on kind of studying, but once they actually see what a full flowering of humanity could look like with everybody from, you know, Walt Whitman to Oscar Wilde to Einstein, in this co-relationship of liberty and learning, we got to learn a lot more about human nature.
Absolutely.
Now, here, I actually have no idea what you'll think of this, but my sense... I love it!
Yeah, well, we'll see about that.
So, my sense is that the founding structures of the U.S.
were an absolutely brilliant prototype.
Flawed in many ways, but every prototype will be.
Cynical and pessimistic at the same time.
Oh, sorry, cynical and optimistic at the same time, sorry.
Well, they had the correct tensions identified for the most part.
They couldn't possibly have anticipated the technological world that these protections would need to function in.
And so in some sense, I have the feeling that as brilliant as the founding documents are, that they are inadequate to our modern puzzle, that they point the right direction to what problems we should be trying to solve.
But for example, I think The founders were keenly aware of the danger of malignant governance.
They were not nearly frightened enough of the kinds of scaling effects that the internet would bring about and the fact that the kinds of power that they feared might not be in governmental hands at the point that we faced the next battle with them, that they would be in private hands, which I think is the problem.
But to be clear, in defense of the founders, one of the things that they added besides tremendous optimism about human nature and realism and pessimism about what we're actually like in groups was flexibility, was the ability to actually change it.
And that's something that no religion would allow for.
It's like, well, we're kind of assuming we're not right about everything.
And that epistemic humility they had from the beginning, we're going to make it hard to change it, but it's not impossible.
to adapt to new changes.
So they basically anticipated the fact that they couldn't possibly have known everything and allowed for changes, just they had to be, it had to jump through a serious hurdle.
And what is on us is that we're too partisan divided to actually be able to, you know, to make any of those kind of super majority type situations, they're basically impossible in the current environment.
All right, two points.
One, I agree with you about their farsightedness with respect to building in a self-correction mechanism.
I still think we may have outstripped the capacity of that mechanism, at least as it's understood, and that there's a huge danger.
So I think, you know, We do effectively need the upgraded Constitution, but we dare not open the process that would create it because it would be a disaster if we did.
We'd get so many stupid things.
We'd get the dumbest amendments you've ever seen in your life.
So the mechanism is not up to the challenge of modernity, but I do want to point out, you might want to, are you sitting down Greg?
Better.
Okay, good.
Now, you can stand up but you might want to hold on to something because what I'm about to say is so mind-blowing that it could result in a disequilibrium.
The religions also have an update capacity, but it's an evolutionary one.
And so, for example, Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses on the church door results in a, well, what in biology we might call a speciation event, what in computer science we might call a forking event, right?
And basically it creates a new version of Christianity, which then forks into a bunch of different versions of Protestantism, and the point is, sectarian disagreements over
How things are to be understood, what traditions are to be held, which ones are to be jettisoned, that is the fodder that selection functions on, and what we see is religions are constantly in battle to figure out, you know, does your version of Christianity listen to the Pope or not, right?
You can keep your Catholicism, but you jettison the Pope and you become, you know, the Greek Orthodox Church or something like this.
Or you become American Catholics.
Well, and that would be one of many different versions where, you know, the book is the same... Oh, atheists, by the way, raised Catholic, just, I'm picking on my own people, it's okay.
You're picking on your own people, then it was at least forgivable until five minutes ago, I don't know if it's still within the rules.
But in any case, yes, the update mechanism is different.
In the constitutional case, the founders gave us a conscious mechanism for intentionally changing the structure.
In the religious case, what we have is an evolutionary and unconscious mechanism for update.
But I would argue they amount to something very similar.
Interesting.
Yeah, I like it.
Have you had Jonathan Rauch on your show?
Nope, not yet.
He's coming out with a book that's awesome and I'm totally jealous of it.
It's called The Constitution of Knowledge and you know like some of the stuff that you were describing before it just made me think of his theory of liberal science.
Just the idea, and I think it deserves theory rather than a hypothesis in this case, just the idea that the Enlightenment produced a system for deciding things.
It's not quite the scientific method.
Actually, you could kind of include the scientific method as a sub-part of liberal science.
And it's something that he wrote in his 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors, but he's really expanding on that now.
And what I like is he's taking on both you know, academia and journalism, you know, with a left facing threat, but then the epistemic disaster that is the Trump administration.
And he's taking it from both directions.
I've gotten to read some of it so far, and I think he'd love it.
Awesome.
Well, so I'm now speaking without knowledge of the topic on which we're talking, but I would say it sounds, I would argue that we have the scientific method, but that that method is embedded in a larger method, which you might call liberal science.
And the fact is many features of that larger informal agreement are essential for it to work well.
In other words, nowhere in the scientific method will you see the process by which we innovate our way out of a cul-de-sac, right?
It's not captured there.
It's captured in the habits of mind and discussion amongst the sorts of people who become fixated on Yeah.
the way fields get stuck, right?
And so getting a field unstuck is an unruly process in which you entertain all sorts of outlandish possibilities, most of which are simply wrong, and you then end up finding some sort of path out of your, off your local optimum onto a higher peak. and you then end up finding some sort of path So anyway, yes, I would love to see if somebody has captured that and described it properly.
I would love to see the sort of expanded scientific method understood well, because frankly it only does you so much good to teach students, you know, observe, hypothesize, predict, test, right?
That's part of it for sure, but it ain't the whole thing by a long shot.
No, absolutely not.
Yeah.
So, all right, if we maybe switch topics just a little bit.
Can I ask you, you and I met in, must be late 2017?
Does that sound right?
It was at the FIRE Professor Conference.
Yeah, the FIRE Professor Conference.
Who was our speaker?
Was that Alex Treger?
Yes, it was Alice Jaeger.
She was great.
Man, that was a great talk.
You know what came out of that conference, by the way, Brett?
There were two professors there.
One was Italian, one was Spanish, and they were so inspired by how lively it was, and then they also really stumbled on Mayan Heights work and got really excited about it, and they invited me over to a conference in Italy.
I thought just to be on a panel, and then I found out that they had made this giant, exhibit, you know, based on, and I was like completely floored.
I'm like, are we, are we big in Italy suddenly?
Like it was, so the fact that the, the, the spirit of the, of the fire professor, um, a conference gets people all riled up just makes me, it just makes me very happy.
Yeah.
Well, it was a, it was a great conference.
Um, and, uh, I can absolutely see if somebody wasn't deeply steeped in your way of thinking them showing up at that conference and, uh, being stunned by it makes, makes perfect sense to me.
Um, Let me ask you, though.
So you and Jonathan Haidt had done your initial article and you were already thinking very deeply about the hazard of what was taking place on college campuses and you had formulated the idea of iGen, basically the internet generation and the fact that they were cognitively seemingly quite different from the generations that had preceded them.
At some point the evergreen debacle happened.
Do you remember, this is before we knew each other, do you remember your encounter with that material and what you thought in light of what you had already imagined was taking place?
And your debacle, that was the spring of 2017, right?
It started May 23rd of 2017, just before 10 in the morning.
Wow.
I remember hearing about it and by that point I was so shocked and sad and jaded because, you know, the Milo riots, which we cover in some detail in the book, I don't care what you think about Milo Yiannopoulos, but that was insane.
And then we had, you know, the wonderful Alison Stanger assaulted, you know, defending a professor she disagrees with at Middlebury.
You had the surrounding of the place where Heather MacDonald was speaking at Claremont McKenna.
And so basically, when that started happening to you, I was already so sad and cynical.
But yeah, I remember that being especially outrageous and wanting to... And it's interesting because sometimes the cases that are the most spectacular are the ones that FIRE gets very cautious around because there just seems to be too many moving parts.
And we're very serious about making sure we had our facts straight.
And honestly, Brett, your case was really hard to keep track of how many freaking things were happening at the same time.
There was like seven... I use it actually now in my slideshows to talk about I talk about the different threads that create problems on campus.
I talk about legal issues.
I talk about polarization issues.
I talk about things related to social justice.
And then at the very end, I actually put yours in saying, and by the way, all of these things were happening at the same time in the Brett Weinstein case.
Yeah.
So I don't know that it was the most-- what word did you use?
I don't know, I've forgotten what word you used.
Something to the effect of it being the most dangerous.
I don't know that it was.
I think it certainly was the most colorful, and it's interesting to hear that.
It was kind of comprehensive, because it just included, because you even had sort of backlash from right-wingers, you had administrators acting like administrators.
It was like a symphony.
Yes, it had it all.
I think Benjamin Boyce is actually writing a musical about it, which I think will be... it's the perfect way to do it, I think.
But yes, it was all-inclusive.
It had all of the layers, and it had an obsession with documentation, right?
So, do you remember the canoe meeting?
Yes.
Yes, the wonderful canoe meeting.
That is one of the weirdest, saddest, and the administration in so many cases, they acted really like, and I don't mean this, I mean this in a very literal sense, like children.
Or like cult members who have been reduced to this infantilized state.
But as I was sitting in that meeting, I was having this, this, uh, I wouldn't say despondent, but it was next door to the feeling of this despondent sense, because I didn't think I was going to be able to explain the absurdity of the situation to anyone, right?
I thought that it was going to be impossible for me to even, I was even concerned I wouldn't be able to explain it to Heather, right?
Who was only a couple blocks away at the time.
And I realized that Evergreen had these very fancy, they had basically a television studio, and they were recording the meeting.
And I thought, oh no, they're going to record it, but they're going to realize how bad this makes them look, and they're not going to release it.
Is there anything I can do to force them To release it, right?
And I was pondering that question.
And it turned out, nope, they didn't realize at all what they had filmed.
And they put it out, and it was like, well, thank goodness.
At least now I don't sound like a crazy person.
Yeah.
Right?
Because it actually happened.
They caught the whole thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a similar situation, because I was the one who videotaped Nicholas Christakis.
You are?
That was me, yeah.
In the Solomon Quad.
Wow.
Leading, by the way, to horrifying conspiracy theories.
Like, how did Greg Lukianoff end up in this?
And it's like, well, it's pretty simple.
Erica, who I adore, and Nicholas had invited me to speak there.
It's true.
I ended up in the middle of a firestorm, kind of shocked.
And so I was videotaping it.
And the reason why I released it was because there was at least a dozen other people videotaping it, including the Yale Daily News.
And they should forever be ashamed of themselves, because I was told that night by someone who worked for the news, but was critical of this, that they were planning to release the footage of the confrontation in a way that will make Nicholas look bad.
And I was like, OK, I guess I have to post my video now.
So I posted the video showing him showing, you know, absolutely amazing composure in the face of such shoddy, nasty treatment.
And keeping in mind also, they're coming after his wife.
You know, they were going after his kids who were there.
They asked his son to sign a denunciation of his mother, and he still, like, somehow, Nicholas was just amazing.
He just held it together.
And so, yeah, for a very different reason.
Like, Yale Daily News refused to put anything up because they thought it made the students look bad, but of course, it made them look bad because they were not behaving very well.
Yeah, no, it revealed something.
It's not that it made them look bad.
I mean, yes, and so this was the thing that was completely missing at Evergreen was there was no awareness that what they were revealing looked nuts to the rest of the world.
Right, it didn't need anybody to editorialize about it.
It was self-evident what was going on and it had a lot of elements of, you know, cult and bullying and This really heavy coercion and obviously, you know, so many things that were said were just completely at odds with the evidence.
So thank goodness, at least, that it has happened in a couple places where, I mean, I guess, wow, what would the Yale situation have looked like if you had not captured that?
Yeah, no, it was, yeah, it would have been hard to convey what was really going on there.
And that was something that was frustrating because for years FIRE had been saying that, you know, students are kind of apathetic, you know, that they're not all that politically motivated.
And then, you know, we should have watched what we asked for because we got it.
But so we suddenly have this explosion of student protest in the fall semester of 2015, you know, organized all around the country.
But then to, you know, we're like, all right, cool, protest.
I'm like, oh, but they're demanding less free speech.
They're demanding that this newspaper be shut down, that these administrators be fired.
And it was very clear that they're following the pattern of, you know, find a provocation no matter how small or tenuous.
And then make it into a big deal and demand that, you know, the UMass newspaper be shut down or Dean Spellman get fired or Nicholas Christakis.
I mean, and that's the killer.
It's like those students didn't have a better friend on campus than Nicholas and Erica Christakis.
They were truly, they're some of the best and smartest people I've ever met.
Yeah, and I think that one thing that they weren't expecting, though, was the fact that since you could actually see some of this, it didn't look as good on film as they thought it did.
Or it did in the venues that they, you know, if they were playing to an online audience that they knew, then these looked like wins, but they couldn't help but it being broadcast to a larger world that understood it was way off.
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, and while we still have some time, I did want to plug one thing while I'm on here.
Oh, please.
And I think you'll dig it.
So, one thing that FIRE really tries to do is, you know, we try to spread the good word of free speech and due process and academic freedom, but we try to also be creative about it.
We're most known for the individual incidents, cases where students get in trouble, professors get in trouble, and that's our bread and butter, so to speak.
But we always try to do more creative things.
So we did the documentary, Can We Take a Joke?
About cancel culture, but made in 2015.
We did, you know, Freedom From Speech.
We did Coddling the American Mind, which I'm really proud to say is still reaching people.
But my former assistant, who's now the vice president of communications, because he's amazing, went out, and he's not a filmmaker, went out on his own to make a documentary specifically about the life and times of Ira Glasser, who was the head of the ACLU right after Skokie all the way up through 2001.
And it's amazing.
The film that they actually made, and this was just a labor of love by non-filmmakers, but it comes out, I think, today, and I really recommend it to everybody because it's really inspiring because they show someone who's politically liberal but is willing to debate Bill Buckley, even take Bill Buckley to his first football game.
his first baseball game, who talks about the relationship between free speech and diversity and inclusion, frankly, in the context of Jackie Robinson, and of course, even being willing to defend the Nazis at Skokie, who, by the way, you get to see, by them being revealed, they look you get to see, by them being revealed, they look like absolute, like the absolute idiots they were.
If they weren't allowed to, you wouldn't have known how ridiculous they look.
There's a moment when this idiot is organizing this Nazi rally where he's just kind of, there's little things wrong, and it looks like he's just about to yell out, you're turning this Nazi rally into a disgrace!
Like, it's absolutely comedic when you get to see what this guy looks like in real life.
But yeah, it's called The Mighty Ira, and we're really psyched about it.
Awesome, I am definitely going to check that out.
You'll love it.
I must say, yeah, it's no surprise that you and I would agree on this, but yeah, the right cure for obnoxious speech is to let it be aired so people can see what it actually is, and unfortunately, you know, it's very clear that this era in which censorship is back with a vengeance
is also an era in which we are losing agreement on the most basic stuff, whether or not 2 plus 2 equals 4, whether or not men and women are different.
We have lost the ability to agree on anything, and I think people do not fully appreciate the danger of that.
Yeah.
No, it worries me.
and And yeah, I remember when people were saying, oh, well, you know, when these students get to the real world, that'll straighten them out.
And we were definitely saying from the very beginning, it's like, well, no, if there's enough of them, they'll change the real world into a very strange place.
And what drives me nuts is that Hyte and I have people who are in charge of all sorts of different companies come to us and say, it's like, listen, we've got a crop from this elite school or these elite schools, and it's dysfunctional.
Like things that used to be just interpersonal tensions have turned into immediately going to human resources.
And then like almost complete paralyzation of some organizations.
But they always say, but you can't say what organization this is, but it's going to bring organizations down.
It probably already has.
What happened at the New York Times with James Bennett, that was absolutely this dynamic.
Definitely there were older people as well who were against him.
But the whole dynamic of just the, you know, if it's, if we can call it, make a strong argument that somehow this is, and of course they rhetorically use the, this is threatening our lives argument, which is the ultimate rhetorical card you can play, to get rid of a editor who is specifically hired to try to rock the boat back in 2016.
It's, this summer, I hope that, I feel like the fever's starting to break a little bit, at least this current fever.
And that maybe things aren't as illiberal and scary as they were maybe in, say, August.
But it's going to come back at some point if we don't do something about it.
Well, it's going to come back and a lot is riding on the election and it's not clear that either path actually addresses the issue.
But so, yeah, it's interesting that you see it as possibly the fever having broken.
I certainly hope that's the case.
I think we're in a great deal of danger.
We are.
I feel like there is at least some amount of pushback that I'm seeing where people aren't immediately getting fired for saying, you know, what would have once been considered mildly controversial stuff.
Yeah.
So you said it's going to bring down institutions.
I think, if anything, you're being too cautious.
That at some level, the game theory is very, very clear.
And to the extent that you have different... If you had universities with different commitments to wokeness, those that were woke would fail because they would be producing inferior graduates who were less capable of thinking clearly about all of the things that college is supposed to arm you
To think about, but when every college does it, the point is everything downstream of those colleges is going to suffer those flaws, which means that the private sector firms that depend on those graduates will be hobbled relative to any presumably foreign competitors that aren't similarly hobbled.
So effectively, you're looking at everything at the higher scales.
Being jeopardized simultaneously, which ultimately means the nation will be rendered incapable of fending off its competitors abroad, which could restructure the way the whole planet functions, and frankly, it could restructure the level of commitment to liberty that the planet has, because the U.S.
has been bedrock to that commitment to liberty.
Yeah, that's really funny you should say that, because that's exactly one of the things I'm working on an article about right now, about how Um, just by having an increasing incidence of actual, you know, papers being withdrawn and research really being seriously called into question at a time when higher education is already, there's already a lot of skepticism about it because people are realizing they can do this stuff online.
They can do this, they can do, they can do this stuff at home and it's ridiculously expensive.
Why not do it in other places?
And I think that the, um, the downstream effects of American higher education turning into Something of a laughing stock, you know, globally will have very dire results for the community, the educational community.
And well beyond, of course.
And well beyond, because at some level, even if you acknowledge, as you and I both did at the top of this discussion, that there is plenty of inequity in the U.S.
and that it is not evenly distributed, the fact is, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, even if those golden eggs are not evenly distributed, is going to be a loss for everyone.
And you know who's going to lose worst?
Are the most downtrodden people, the people who get the shaft every time.
So yeah, this is an incredibly foolish squandering of the power and position that we have, and it's not going to create a better world for anybody downstream of it.
Yeah.
I am worried, to say the least, and I got a two-year-old and a four-year-old, which makes me all the more...
Yes, although that's young enough that maybe the dust will have settled and we'll be on to something smarter than this by the time you need to send them into the world.
Well if something can't continue the way it's going, it won't.
Yeah, well that's a very frightening thing you've just said.
All right, I want to ask you about a couple last things before I let you go.
Great.
So I want to talk to you about the observation about the relationship of what we might have called social justice warriors back in 2015, what we might now call wokeness, and the relationship of that belief system Oh, they're just completely incompatible.
In what way?
Well, one of-- and it's one of these things, you know, as I explain in my book, I had anxiety and depression.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy saved my life.
But as I was studying Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, particularly given what I did, it was blazingly obvious that campuses seemed to be teaching everybody to engage in these cognitive distortions.
And this includes binary thinking, which is either-or thinking, mind reading, assuming that you know where someone's coming from.
Probably the biggest one is overgeneralization as a cognitive distortion.
And as you're teaching yourself all of these habits, hold on again.
Wow, it won't turn back on.
Anyway, as you're teaching yourself all of these habits, particularly working on campus, it was as if universities and administrators were saying, do overgeneralize, do engage in binary thinking.
And they are.
That's exactly what a lot of this ideology comes down to.
And I think that's actually one of the reasons why CBT has been shown to be somewhat less effective with this generation, because there are too many dogmas that rely on overgeneralization, binary thinking, catastrophizing, for example.
So the two, the cognitive behavioral therapy and getting over cognitive distortions, which is also a better way to argue, a better way to think, a better way to understand the world better, is to try to address these in yourselves.
A lot of the social justice stuff, the most toxic of it, relies on these things.
So they're completely, they're like matter and anti-matter.
And unfortunately, what I see happening is rather than Go with the, you know, the reality-based approach.
People are rejecting the obvious lessons of CBT.
That's so interesting.
So, A, I find this a very provocative insight and an important one.
It fits exactly with what I've encountered and so many others have as well.
But there is some Incredible process by which everything functional is being turned on its head.
It's almost as if there's some algorithm that seeks that which works to invalidate it.
So I remember, you know, before Evergreen melted down, I remember the first time I was in a faculty meeting and I said something about the hazard of what was taking place to Enlightenment values.
I didn't think the idea of Enlightenment values being a good thing could possibly be controversial in a room full of academics, but what I got back was pushback that Enlightenment values were This oppressive system, and I was just stunned the first time I heard it.
But then, you know, downstream a couple years and we're looking at the invalidation of basic arithmetic, we're dealing with the invalidation of the idea of a colorblind society, we're dealing with the invalidation of the idea that there is something Logical, that is independent of power.
It's just like every single thing on which you could start a reboot to some sort of agreement is being sabotaged, right?
And you know, I think you're, what I find so compelling about your point about cognitive behavioral therapy is that You're talking about the basic ability of the mind to cope is being sabotaged by an ideology that is going to make people weaker, more vulnerable, more volatile.
I mean, it's crazy.
Yeah, no, it's... and here's where I actually...
I work at a job that can make you very angry, and that's one of the reasons why you see me compulsively cracking jokes on Twitter, is because it's just like, you know, it's a coping mechanism.
But one thing that I've tried to do, since we are really trying to change the culture, is when I write something I tend to take out all the anger.
You know, I get rid of the adverbs, you know, I go after everything.
That shows anger, but there is one thing that I am very angry about, and I didn't say in the book, is we know this generation has higher levels of anxiety and depression.
We know this generation has higher levels of suicide.
Now, I think that some of that ideology that creeps in early is playing a part in it, but also I think things like, you know, the wealth stratification, and there's other factors at play.
But to know that, and then have students show up on your campus, and to tell them, Oh yeah, I know you have really high rates of suicide and depression and self-harm.
By the way, here's an ideology in which you are.
Evil.
And you, almost all of you, with some exceptions, are both oppressed and oppressors and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it other than feel deep, deep guilt and shame.
You should isolate yourself from other people.
These are your characteristics.
You have no locus of control.
You have no individual identity.
Have a nice day.
And there's something really messed up about, particularly when you know these kids are already coming in, really Sad, and really kind of like suffering to tell them something that hopeless, but also that you need to do something about it, but you'll never actually fix it?
Well, I've never seen a sort of sadder, less productive ideology.
I mean, actually no, I've seen downright harmful ones, but as far as one that doesn't seem to want to get you anywhere?
So, like, after George Floyd died, I was immediately being kind of like, well, there's police reform that we definitely need to do.
There's logical steps that we could actually take that we've been meaning to, so maybe this is the chance.
And instead, that opportunity being squandered and turned into something about, like, let's get kids kicked out of college.
Let's get professors in trouble for faux pas, essentially.
We've squandered this opportunity to help people in the real world.
to participate in this weird, pointless, sadful dance.
Yes, and in fact, what we saw was that students who figured out how to achieve were actually socially punished by their would-be peers for doing so.
There's this belief, you know, that achievement is itself your having capitulated to the system rather than you empowering yourself to do good in the world.
And, you know, I mean, you don't deliver the punchline of the setup you just gave, but basically you're arguing that this is going to kill people.
That you're taking people who are already vulnerable, because they already have anxiety and self-doubt, and you are creating an unwinnable circumstance, which is exactly the kind of hopeless situation that does lead people to hurt themselves.
And I agree with you.
As a professor, I very keenly felt an obligation to see students and to help them see clearly, in part because things do look pretty hopeless until somebody helps you, I don't know, navigate the world and understand where you fit in it.
And just to see a movement undoing that kind of work in some sort of generic blanket across the board super rapid way is very frightening.
Yeah.
Yeah, and ultimately relying on tactics to win arguments in dorms in the 1990s.
Once you say it, you're right about that.
Alright, last question.
Where do you think we're headed?
I always hope the last question will be, how dare you?
Where do I think we're headed?
I'm definitely a lot less confident in that prediction than I would have been maybe five years ago.
Things are going to get worse before they get better, for sure.
I am so optimistic about the upcoming election that my family and I are getting out of D.C.
for the entire month of November, and I love this town.
I like D.C.
as a city in its own right.
And I'm scared about what November is going to look like.
And people are like, what specifically?
And I'm like, when you can think of 14 different possible scenarios, it might be time to take your kids and go.
In the short term, I think things are going to be... I'm not looking forward to the next six months.
If there is a landslide, that would help, because certainty one way or another would help, but the idea that we actually have You know, someone saying, a president saying that the election is flawed, there's going to be, that's going to be radicalizing like the old McVeigh types, you know, from the 1990s who blew up stuff to, so that's going to be incredibly ugly.
So basically, yeah, I'm predicting things are going to be very ugly for the next six months.
I don't really know what things are going to look like after COVID.
I'm hopeful that 2021 will be a better year.
I think it almost statistically has to be a better year.
But when it comes to the long scheme, I'm bullish on the human race.
I think as long as we don't kill the golden goose of, not just of producing wealth and growth, which we desperately need to keep, which is much more essential to our society than people seem to get, you know, particularly in some of these circles.
I'm also very excited about, you know, technological progress.
And I do think the long-term health of free speech is better than you would think, given all the things conspiring against it, for one very simple reason that you alluded to before.
It works really well.
Societies that actually can talk about their problems tend to do better.
But for the next six months, if I could get...
I cracked a really long, convoluted joke on Twitter about this, about how...
Oh yeah, I agree with you.
trouble is possible and we know that if you can get any fragment of the speed of light, you start actually having noticeable time shifts and therefore I'd like the country to take the sacrifice and move me and my family into, I don't know, like May of next year as fast as possible.
I like it.
Oh yeah, I agree with you.
It seems like there's an awful lot of potential energy built up in the system.
I read David French's book, Divided We Fall, and I also have to remind my fellow Left of Center people, it's like, this is one of the few people who's Right of Center who's actually trying, so don't kick him away, but he made such a plausible case for for the country dividing.
And one thing that he did that I think was really important that people tend to forget is what the consequences for world peace would be if suddenly the US were divided and the number one and two powers in the world were China and Russia. - Yes, so can I ask you?
I have looked at the map and unfortunately the cities are kind of distributed about the place in such a way that they can't really secede from the rural parts of the U.S.
Have you ever noticed this?
Oh yeah, I talk about population density and how much of a predictor it is of where you are politically, and you're right.
I do think that probably the most plausible one would be some kind of like California secession was the one that I think would, that seems the most plausible to me.
California, wow, geez.
Okay, yeah, I mean we talk sometimes I think mostly jokingly about Cascadia up here, but yeah, I must say I'm stuck with the recognition that there's not a geographic mechanism to divide the country that solves the puzzle as it stands.
Well, that's one of the reasons why I like David French's closest thing to a conclusion, which is let's get comfortable with federalism again.
You know, essentially, like, if the states are going to be this different, let them be that different, you know, within the Bill of Rights, of course, because, you know, they should be obliged by that.
But, you know, if countries, if states want to experiment with everything from health care to, as they already are, you know, medical marijuana and that kind of stuff, then we should definitely remember that we, you know, we've been pretty disparate before.
And as long as you allow for something that allows a lot of internal diversity, we can actually potentially weather it.
But if we try too hard to impose uniformity, we're going to snap.
up.
Do you think we could give the woke revolution a state, or loan it to them, and then when they discover how dangerous what they're playing with is, maybe we could be generous and welcome them back and start over?
I wouldn't wish that upon my darkest enemy.
I hear ya.
Yeah, now that I hear myself say it, it's a terrible idea.
Here's my family story.
My great-grandfather was a serf.
He bought his way into freedom in 1858 and immediately Lukyanov started doing very well.
We became professors and lawyers and judges and landowners and all this kind of stuff.
We were peasants who made good.
And in any other country, that would be considered commendable.
And instead, there was an ideology that my family had been fighting, you know, ever since we could read, essentially, that was oversimplistic and that was usually by intellectuals, first generation educated people.
And meanwhile, the peasants were like, actually, I'd like things to be 15% better, you know, It would be lovely if I could own a couple more things and have some more time off.
But the intellectuals wanted the perfect revolution.
So for example in 1862, they assassinated Czar Alexander II on his way to create a Duma, on his way to create a parliament, because these radicals thought that that wasn't gonna, that would be too good, And people wouldn't want their glorious Bolshevik revolution at that point.
And so the progress of Russia was stalled by this category of people.
And they wanted to shoot people like me and my family in the back of the head because we were educated but didn't agree.
And that's one of the reasons why we had to get the hell out of there.
And I've seen what these ideologies can do once they take on that religious fervor.
And having to fight it again terrifies me.
And hopefully, you know, people will not let that happen again.
Hopefully.
Well, I have to say, I can't help but hear an echo of Evergreen and so many other places in what you just described.
You know, the idea of you becoming a villain because you're educated and you don't agree?
Yeah.
That feels like exactly what happened.
I will say, Greg, I'm not all that hopeful about where we're headed.
I agree with you about the danger of what's coming, but I'm really pleased to have you on the right side.
Absolutely, Brett.
And I'm looking forward to seeing you again.
I really hate the fact that we had to miss the Professor Conference this year.
That's become a highlight of my year.
Yeah, the restrictions on travel and gathering are more dangerous than I think people have yet spotted.
I mean, even just the fact that Americans are going to be sidelined from collaborating internationally in person If, you know, other parts of the world figure out how to solve this and we just decide to give up.
Yeah.
But anyway, yes, hopefully 2021 doesn't decide to teach 2020 a lesson by being even more dramatic.
Well, real pleasure.
Let me know when this is up, and, you know, stay in touch.
And of course, if you know anybody who gets in trouble on campus, because I'm sure they come to you, send them to us.
Oh my God, you should see my—well, you don't need to see my inbox, because you've got your own inbox full of the same stuff, I'm sure.
Okay, well thanks, Greg Lukianoff.
This has been a real pleasure and very eye-opening.
I look forward to our next meeting, and if not that, our next discussion.
Where can people find you?
At thefire.org.
That's my organization, and I also have a blog on it that's just for me called The Eternally Radical Idea.
The eternally radical idea.
And people, of course, if they haven't read Coddling of the American Mind, they should not pass go.
They should not collect $200.
They should go get a copy of this book and read it immediately.
I'm very proud of it.
I'm doing a series called Catching Up with Coddling, updating the data.
And unfortunately, most of the trends we saw back then are, shockingly, worse.
Oh.
Well, that's not lovely.
No.
No.
No, it isn't.
All right.
Thanks so much, Greg.
Absolutely.
Thanks, everyone.
We'll see you next time.
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