In this 51st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss Bret’s recent Facebook ban. What are the implications for democracy when social media platforms are in the business of deciding who gets to speak? In the second half, we discuss Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Are there two mass movements currently competing with one another for adherents? Can creativity provide people wit...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 51.
Dr. Heather Hying sitting to my right.
I am indeed.
Yes.
Here we are.
Number 51.
We are here.
And we have a lot to talk about because 2020 marches on.
Things are afoot.
It does.
I believe that we are going to start by talking about some social media shenanigans, to put it rather more lightly than is actually the case, and then move on to talking a little bit about the nature of mass movements.
All right, the nature of mass movements.
Good.
Well, I'm looking forward to that.
But yes, we should start with what has happened in the last week.
It seems like a month, but you know, that's the nature of time travel at the period approaching the election.
Here's what happened for those of you who have not been paying attention.
What happened was I was involved in a private discussion in which somebody posted a Facebook link that I was supposed to go look at and I clicked on the link and I got an amazing message.
Zach, could you show the message?
Oh, this is awkward.
We're waiting to show you the message.
Here's the message.
It says, your account has been disabled.
You can't use Facebook because your account or activity on it didn't follow our community standards.
We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed.
Et cetera, et cetera.
So I saw this.
I was completely shocked.
Now, those of you who are not Facebook friends of mine, I might need to give you a little bit of orientation.
I used to be not a heavy user of Facebook, but a regular user of Facebook.
And then after the evergreen meltdown, Facebook became a very toxic environment and I effectively walked away from it, moving most of my social media presence over to Twitter where things were more manageable and more hospitable, believe it or not.
So, I barely post there, and I was shocked to see this warning here that says that my account has been permanently disabled, because as far as I knew, I hadn't posted anything on it recently, and I believe I might have logged on in October, but my last logon in which I did anything might have been even September.
So what the heck triggered this?
Well, of course, we don't know because it's Facebook and they do not feel obligated to tell us anything about what rules mean, how we might have violated them, and there's no mechanism to appeal the decision.
I was suitably shocked and confused and I posted a tweet.
Zach, could you show the tweet?
It says, I have been evicted from Facebook.
No explanation, no appeal.
I have downloaded, quote, my information, end quote, and seen nothing that explains it.
We are governed now, in private, by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process.
Disaster is inevitable.
We are living it.
And this we're governed now in private thing that you write here is in reference to the same thing that you talked about I believe in our last live stream in which you were talking about basically government is that which governs.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm referring to.
Government is that which governs and so it is – there is no shame to the founders that they did not anticipate social media and therefore did not protect the rights that they knew were necessary in order for democracy to function in the context of social media because there would have been no way to write those rules.
So what we are now stuck with They were remarkably prophetic, but they could not predict the specificity of the future, nor especially so many, many years out.
Right.
I mean, you know... The rate of change is impossible as it is, and they couldn't have predicted the rate of change, much less what was happening as the rate of change itself accelerated.
These people had never seen a train.
They had never seen a chainsaw.
They would have known of at least hot air balloons.
That's about the extent of the technology.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, the razzle-dazzle that would have been available to them in imagining.
What was needed.
But there would have been no way to anticipate this.
And, you know, to see the degree of the problem, think about if somebody had told you in 2000 about Twitter.
That they had told you there was a wildly popular service in which people were limited to a tiny number of characters and they barked into the ether and others listened and rebroadcast these things.
You wouldn't have known what they were talking about.
And I might have begun looking for a new planet.
Right.
Yes, Elon, get on it.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
I don't want him in charge.
Because he'll take us to Mars and there's nothing to do there.
Right?
Right.
Okay.
Well, I would agree with that.
But in any case, there's no way we could expect them to write rules that would have protected us.
And the thing that, you know, the problem that we have to deal with is We are told by an ever-present chorus of people who respond when one complains about an arbitrary decision like this that, well, these are private corporations and you're using their service and you're getting it for free and they're entitled to do what they want.
So, tough.
And the answer is actually no.
This is now an essential artery of our democracy.
To the extent that it is now bottlenecked by people who are up to this sort of political shenanigans, and I will get to why I believe it is political in a second here, but to the extent that it is bottlenecked by those people, one of two things has to happen.
Either we have to be provided an alternative where our rights are protected, or our rights have to be protected in the context of these private platforms so that democracy can do what is necessary.
The entire reason that we have the First Amendment is because the exchange of ideas, the free exchange of ideas, was understood correctly by the founders to be essential to the functioning of the democracy, right?
They knew they had to protect good ideas, bad ideas, vile ideas, They had to protect the whole landscape from governmental interference in order that we could govern ourselves well.
That the good ideas that sound wrong at first could rise to the top and, you know, gain resonance.
And they were, as I said, quite right that this was necessary.
But they couldn't possibly understand where those ideas were going to be exchanged in the 21st century.
So we are now stuck in this predicament where the rights are not protected, where it is clear that we are actually involved in the discussions that affect governance, and we are being governed by private concerns that are not protected, from which we are not protected.
Just an asterisk for perhaps a later conversation.
I wonder if some of the problem that we have when trying to have this conversation with people, when they respond with, it's a private corporation, they can do what they want, is the naming.
That calling them social media suggests that it is in fact media.
And, of course, Freedom of the Press suggests exactly that.
Something like the New York Times has editorial control, and they can publish or refuse to publish whomever they want, and that is part of what Freedom of the Press guarantees.
And that calling these platforms social media suggests that they are like that, except that they effectively have monopolies.
Right, and in fact there is a provision, I'm, is it 2.30?
I've forgotten the number, but there's a question about whether or not these platforms are publishers or not, and in effect the platforms are taking the position that they are publishers where that protects them, and that they are not publishers with respect to responsibility, so they're gaining the better... It's a grab bag.
Yeah, they get the best of both worlds, and it leaves us with a bad predicament.
If I can complete the story here if you look at this tweet if you're watching this on YouTube You'll see it has quite a large number of likes now.
This is on Twitter on Twitter Yes, my my pointing out to my Twitter followers that I had been banned from Facebook without explanation and no opportunity for appeal caught people's attention because well as you can see in the replies to that tweet people regard me as a very
Sober and responsible voice and they wanted to know what I might have done on Facebook that could have triggered this the answer is nothing And so anyway, it's spread like let me just it's not even that everything that you would have been doing on Facebook I mean you've already said this but it's not even that everything that you had been doing on Facebook was completely defensible and well within you know, everyone's understanding even if like the Overton window that these the social media platforms are
Or for some reason patrolling the borders of, but you literally had said nothing.
There was literally nothing that prompted this so far as we could tell, because you literally aren't active on this platform.
And I'll say, I don't even have a Facebook account and never have, so I can't even view what's going on there, but like literally you had done nothing.
And usually that is actually metaphorically you'd done nothing.
Here, just there was nothing that you had done on Facebook that prompted this.
Well, right.
I mean, you know, unless they decided to go back into the history.
There's nothing I did in the period here where I got banned that could possibly explain it, because I wasn't doing anything.
So I think the, you know, I referred in my tweet, suggesting that people come visit us on Dark Horse today, that we were going to pull back the silicone curtain and silicone curtain, and the silicone curtain here reveals, I think, That there is a politically motivated core within Facebook that has the power to ban people.
And frankly, I think if I had been active on Facebook recently, it probably would have found something.
They've set, you know, community standards that are so arbitrary and vague.
That they can find something, but in this case it was like, well, I didn't do anything that could justify this because I wasn't active, and so we'll ban him anyway, and what's he gonna do about it?
There's not even a link where you can click for an appeal.
They tell me they've already reviewed it.
Okay, now, already reviewed it has a very clear connotation.
It suggests that a human being looked at this and decided that whatever the complaint about me was was valid and that's why I have no right to an appeal because the appeal had effectively already been filed on my behalf and I had failed to compel them that I was a decent citizen.
All the steps that can happen have already happened.
You're done.
Yeah, totally Orwellian.
All right, so as this tweet that is, I guess, now on the screen was gaining likes and being circulated, at some point a representative from Facebook popped in in the replies.
Zach, can you show the next So Liz Shepard, who goes by Liz Bourgeois on Twitter of all the tone-deaf things to say, says, Your account was mistakenly flagged by our system for identifying imposter accounts.
We've restored it and are sorry for the mistake.
Now, I find this fascinating because This clearly suggests that this was an automated phenomenon, which then seems to call into question whatever review they claim took place that meant I wasn't entitled to any sort of an appeal.
She says it was flagged by our system for identifying impostor accounts.
Now that, I think, is nonsense because My account is a very long-standing account.
I have a large number of Facebook friends.
They are coherent in the sense that many of them stem from places that are geographical places.
You know, places I've worked, Evergreen and the like.
So, the account does not look like an imposter account, nor was it behaving like an imposter account because it was largely dormant.
So, clearly something is up.
Well, how am I ever going to figure out what might be the cause of this?
Well, I don't know.
Let's see who Liz Shepard is.
Can you go to the next screenshot, Zach?
Liz Shepard, Facebook comms, formerly at the Democrats, and Speaker Pelosi.
My God, this person is directly connected to top-level DNC Democrats.
Could it be that my unruly behavior suggesting that the duopoly is a corrupt entity and must be addressed in order that we properly govern ourselves?
Could it be that I caused offense and they called in people inside of Facebook in order to punish me or to provide a warning to others who might be uppity in this particular way?
Certainly seems likely.
But the account is even strange.
Take a look at it.
Now, I must say, this is a screen grab from today.
Liz Shepard has a lot more followers today than she did when she popped into the replies to tell me that they had made a mistake over at Facebook.
She had fewer than a thousand followers, and she was following more than 800 people.
So that's not a good ratio.
There are enough people who follow back that, you know, to follow 800 people and have less than a thousand followers means she's A very light user of Twitter, or not very interesting to people, and yet here she is verified.
So somehow it would appear that Twitter, which hasn't verified you, you're a notable person.
How many Twitter followers do you have?
Me?
What, 120,000?
120,000 followers!
You've actually had people pretend to be you, am I correct?
120,000 followers.
You've actually had people pretend to be you.
Am I correct?
Yes, unfortunately.
Yes, you've had people actually try to-- I've actually had imposter accounts show up.
You've actually had imposter accounts show up, and Twitter refuses to verify you.
I should say, when I got verified, there was a process for requesting that they establish who you were and, you know, if they decided you were notable, whatever that means.
They would do it, and then when you did the same thing, they had changed the process and basically they said that they were no longer verifying people because it had become a hallmark of it, like a sanction from Twitter.
But this is nonsense.
They're obviously… Well, I mean, that's a rabbit hole, but it's not – they didn't say they're no longer verifying people.
They're saying they want to do it by application anymore and by demonstrating that you have a public presence.
They basically acknowledge that they're going to give blue checkmarks to whoever they feel like it, and you can't request it, and you don't know when it'll come, if it'll come, etc.
They turned it into exactly the thing they claimed they didn't want it to be, which is a sanction from Twitter.
You can't apply for it.
Exactly.
They will hand it down at the point that they like you, and apparently they don't like you.
No.
Not very likable.
I guess not.
I mean, I find you likable, but Twitter does not agree.
So, in any case… It was bourgeois, though.
Quite likable.
Yeah, Liz Shepard here.
She is quite likable and, you know, a proud DNC Democrat connected to Speaker Pelosi.
So that does suggest a possible explanation for what is taking place.
So I tweeted back.
Can you go to the next screenshot?
And I said, my first indication of a problem was this message saying Facebook had already reviewed the suspension and the decision can't be reversed.
My tweet about it clearly got your attention, meaning you, Liz Shepard.
But I have 400,000 Twitter followers.
What protects regular people from such, quote, mistakes, Liz?
Nothing.
Nothing protects regular people from such mistakes, especially when the original message suggests that everything has already happened that could possibly happen and that there is no way that you could possibly get another review because review has already happened.
Yep.
Now, I will say the... It's deeply anti-democratic.
Now, Twitter doesn't claim to be democratic.
This person who now works for Facebook is apparently part of the democratic machine.
One would hope that she lived by democratic principles or would choose to work for an organization that does.
This is not democratic.
Well, yes, of course, the elite Democrats of the DNC are famously not democratic.
In fact, some viewers will remember that Howard Dean's joke before he disappeared from the race in what year would that have been?
I don't remember.
In any case, actually, you should check out Eric's opening essay on his most recent portal with Douglas Murray.
He talks about the Dean's Scream episode, the thing that ended Dean's candidacy, but Howard Dean used to joke That he was from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
That was his line.
And it was hilarious because all of those of us who were liberal Democrats understood that there was this machine inside the party that wasn't interested in democracy and was basically taking advantage of us.
And Dean's renegade candidacy gave us hope for a while.
The way, more recently, you know, Bernie Sanders' campaign did and Tulsi Gabbard.
So, alright.
You have the Yeah, it was halfway through Bush 2, it was 2004.
2004, yep.
Alright, so Liz Shepard has not responded and explained anything more about the mistake.
I think we've gotten all of the information we're going to get and probably we're not going to find out anything more, but it is certainly interesting that Liz is sanctioned by Twitter.
An establishment DNC Democrat, proud of such on her profile.
Now, these connections, though, are many.
I don't think we have any idea how many of these people are inside of Facebook and Twitter and Google.
Occasionally one of these things reaches the attention of the press, so we've seen several other examples of that.
Could you put up the next screenshot?
So here we have Nick Passilio, who is at communications at Twitter.
That means he is basically at Twitter comms, whereas Liz Shepard is at Facebook comms, comms having something to do with decision-making power over what is and is not tolerated on the platform.
And he is a former Kamala Harris press secretary.
Isn't that interesting?
All right, next screenshot, Zach.
All right, now we have, can you read his name?
Carlos Monge?
Carlos Monge.
Carlos Monge is, he was at Twitter, he has now moved on to Biden's transition team, seems a little premature to me, but nonetheless he's moved on to Biden's transition team.
So, in any case, there are these connections.
We don't know how many of them there are, and we don't know what the interaction between these partisan folks in our governmental structure and these private platforms is.
But in some sense, what we have Is a new version of the revolving door, right?
So the traditional revolving door as it is used to describe governmental corruption involves people who take a who step out of industry and into government for some number of years and then return to industry.
That would be the classic pattern.
And of course, it functions as some kind of a legal bribing mechanism because the person knowing that they've come from an industry knows what the industry wants, knowing that they will return there.
They do the industry's bidding.
And the point is no fingerprints.
Another way this can work is industry can approach somebody in government, persuade them, hey, you know, when you come out, why don't you look us up, see if there's a job that we might have for you.
Yep.
It's another mechanism.
But then this version with Twitter and Facebook and presumably Google has a different spin to it, right?
It works in a different direction.
That in effect, instead of going into government to do industries bidding, these are people from a partisan faction of government who go into industry, right, to do the parties bidding.
And so it's a different revolving door, a fundamentally different revolving door.
But it's no less influence peddling.
Well that's just the thing.
So if we can step back, and of course this is a heck of a week to be discussing influence peddling, but what we've got is a party which is not supposed to have a product.
Right?
Parties are supposed to represent people, like me.
Lifetime Democrat.
You as well?
Lifetime Democrat.
We are the Democratic Party.
But the Democratic Party is run by the DNC, which is, as I've been saying throughout the period of unity, an influence-peddling operation, pure and simple.
Now that influence peddling operation has to acquire power for which it needs votes.
And then what it does with that power is it peddles it, right?
So to the extent that voters stop electing the Democratic Party, it has nothing to monetize.
It can't sell its influence.
And so it must maintain that influence.
It must win voters.
How do you do that?
Well, you've got to control the conversation because if people were to understand what's actually driving policy, they would throw the bums out.
So how do you control the discussion?
Well, the discussion is taking place on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, who knows where else.
So the point is the revolving door now has to be in the places where the bounds of polite conversation are set in a private context.
So there is no First Amendment protection and we are left with the results.
And what does it look like?
Well, frankly, it looks like what Twitter did with the Hunter Biden story.
Right?
Twitter actually shut down the account of the New York Post, a 200-year-old newspaper, and made it impossible to share in a normal sense the article in which the obvious influence peddling going on in the Biden family was made plain.
There's no justification for this.
Obviously, the voters have a right to understand that one of the major party candidates has a son who was peddling his influence when he was vice president, and they are entitled to extrapolate that that might characterize a Biden administration, too.
And this is, of course, deeply connected to recent history because it was, you know, the Ukrainian connection and the allegation Of influence peddling that caused the president to, yes, I believe he abused his power trying to get Biden's son investigated in Ukraine, which triggered an impeachment.
So, you know, this is the most important business of the nation.
Here you have real revelations that appear to be robust on the basis of evidence, right?
Evidence from Hunter Biden's own computer.
And we are being told that that information is so suspect that even though published in a major American paper, it cannot be shared.
We're not even allowed to see it and decide whether it makes sense to us.
So we are now being infantilized and lied to and having our right to decide, actually I do want to discuss that, overridden by, you know, it's not the nanny state, it's the nanny corporations.
So, I mean, the whole thing is absolutely frightening.
And, you know, I have to point out that the motivation for the Unity 2020 plan was that we were faced with essentially an influence peddling operation on the Democratic side and a different version of abuse of power on the Republican side.
It was the system that caused this sort of breakdown that left people frozen out of governmental power which has made them frustrated and angry and is causing them to lash out in the streets and essentially we have to confront the mechanism that generates this failure or it's going to take the Republic apart.
And, you know, we're seeing it, we're seeing it all laid bare.
We're looking at the corruption, we're understanding how it functions, we're seeing that it actually is, you know, it is affecting the way we are able to collectively think by basically deciding not to pass certain messages.
I mean, remember, the unity...
2020 Twitter account was suspended for registering phony accounts in order to boost a hashtag and it didn't register phony accounts.
Which it did not do.
We didn't do it.
Suspended for an infraction which it did not engage in.
And it remains suspended and it is true even this week that if you attempt to DM somebody a link to our website in which we discuss governmental corruption It's a very odd behavior.
You try to DM somebody and on your side it looks like you've succeeded in doing it.
On their side it's hidden, right?
It's a very bizarre, nefarious way of controlling what thoughts, I mean, you know, think about it this way.
So you said it's not the nanny state, it's nanny corporations and I'm not, there's something important here and it's not quite right because Censorship, you know, we do censor what children are allowed to experience, right?
And so, if we can take the connotation of nanny out of it, like, you know, who gets in loco parentis?
Who gets to take on the status of sort of parenting the populace?
To some degree, you know, we, as liberals, really truly believe that given especially the global nature of some things like Like social media, like a lot of technology, we need regulation that actually does protect the populace from some of the things that cannot be regulated by individuals or cities or state level, right?
State as opposed to nation or more.
But censorship is something that has always been a part of human life.
And here we have a sort of imprimatur of from the corporations that are actually allowing us to speak with one another, that is deciding when and what we are allowed to hear and with whom we're allowed to speak.
Whereas in the past, what the state was protecting us from with regard to corporations was often corporations basically doing sort of, you know, psyops on us and advertising such that we would not engage our best interests and become our best selves.
So there's some mess here.
That it's not clean.
I don't think you meant to suggest that it was clean, that it's moved from sort of nanny state to nanny corporation.
That there's censorship, that there's still attempt to create motivations in people that serve the corporation rather than the person.
And maybe part of what you're seeing and saying here is that now we have corporations working on behalf of particular political parties Who want to change the motivations of people even when that is not in their best interest and it isn't only in the interest of, in this case, the DNC.
Well, I think there are two things there.
Yes, it is not the people, you know, the nanny, the reference nanny is about an adult who is empowered to tell you no, presumably to protect you from your own worst instincts as a child.
Right.
And so being infantilized by a government that wants to protect us against our own instincts is bad enough when it actually happens.
The term nanny state is often used to dismiss regulation that exactly that is about preventing real harm that can't be prevented in other ways.
But but it is also true that we see overreach.
But the thing is, as Americans, the values encoded in the First Amendment, whether the First Amendment should in some way be extended to or something else should come to protect us online.
I mean, and I would remind you, Twitter, Facebook, Google, these are private concerns, but they are on public roads.
I mean, the internet started as DARPAnet, right?
This was our governmental structure generating a mechanism that then created an opportunity for these private concerns.
But it's not a simple matter of, hey, they're private, they can do what they want, because effectively, We don't have a public access to this internet that we built, right?
So it's one of these things where there is at the very least a gray area, as it is with research, where the public funds the research and the product of it is private.
And as it has, I mean, just a closer analogy would be, say, the telephone companies, right?
I don't remember the history well enough to even replay it briefly, but the government went in and broke up Bell and made a bunch of baby Bells because there was a monopoly.
And in fact, the airwaves are ours.
The airwaves are ours.
And in the case of telephone, it's not airwaves, but similar things have happened with regard to networks.
Yeah, this is true.
But at a deeper level, I would say we Americans have almost uniquely protected speech on the basis that speech itself is not understood to be harmful, right?
Or at the very least, that the harm that can come from speech itself, that is to say, there's lots of bad speech, but it is a symptom of something else that is harmful.
But, to the extent that speech might even be harmful, it is understood that the greater harm is done by empowering something to decide what can be said, which is exactly what is happening here.
And so, it actually strikes me that there's an analogy between this question and something that we discuss in our book about the fact that in our ancestral environment, A bad smell was not itself typically harmful, I mean in fact almost never.
That is to say you smell something bad like a rotting fish and the fact that you've smelled it doesn't hurt you, but it does tell you don't eat that, right?
Now in this case... The warning itself is not dangerous, it's telling you, it's advising you as to how to modify your behavior going forward, as opposed to...
Right, so in this case, you've got, you know, you can have Hitlerian speech, right?
It's not the speech that hurts you, it's the Hitlerianism that generates the speech.
So hearing the speech actually allows you to deduce that there's something dangerous there, whereas blocking the speech is if the speech is doing the harm, then leaves open A, it makes certain things taboo, which makes them attractive, and B, it means nobody's really in a good position to know what is being thought and how commonly.
Okay.
I'm not sure.
I don't think I love this analogy because I thought what we talk about in the book is that modernity has brought with us smells that themselves are dangerous.
Like solvents.
Solvents, like toluene or something.
Is it toluene?
Yeah.
I think, right.
So this is a novel circumstance for which we have no evolutionary history.
And in general, the response to recoil in response to a bad smell and to not go towards it and to not eat it and all of this has been sufficient up until at least until the Industrial Revolution, I think.
More or less.
And it's not sufficient anymore.
And it's impossible to tell, unless you happen to be familiar with the particular thing that you are smelling, based on smelling something novel and reprehensible to your nose, whether or not the actual smelling of it is doing you harm.
I think that some of what is going on with regard to, for instance, the actual free speech debate, Is that people on the authoritarian left are making exactly this claim about speech.
That now speech itself is going to harm you.
And I think this is completely wrong and therefore I don't like this analogy.
No, it is wrong.
But this is the point.
Is, you know what?
We need to have a discussion about that.
Because to the extent that speech is now being equated with violence.
That is something that we have to determine, right?
If something about speech has changed, we need to have a discussion about what it is and what that means about the regulatory environment.
And assuming that nothing has changed, that speech is still speech and violence is still violence, then the answer is actually, where is speech taking place?
That's where we need to protect it, especially if there is no alternative.
So, it all creates a pretty interesting puzzle, and the derangement of our ability to think is obviously downstream of these corrupt entities, like the DNC, influencing these private concerns, which are beyond the reach of constitutional protections, which are the places where we have all gathered to figure out what's what, and we can't figure out what's what, because if you think what's what involves
You know, the Articles of Unity webpage, you can't send it over DM to somebody, so, you know, if you think about the way memory works, you know, memory at a biological level involves you detecting that things have happened, or that you think they've happened, and then when those things are reinforced because you return to them, They become inscribed in your memory in a deeper way so that they last.
So you can't remember what you had for breakfast last Thursday because you haven't thought about it, right?
So that memory has vanished.
Other memories get built in, they get wired in so you can access them for life because you keep returning to them.
And so, in some sense, you've got the nanny corporation deciding, there's certain thoughts that we would rather you not remember.
It's like proactive memory holding.
You know what we don't really want you to remember?
Is that Hunter Biden actually sold access to his father and, you know, was employed by this corporation and that this was connected to an impeachment of a sitting president.
So, add to this the derangement of memory that comes with How pretty much all of us now use the internet, where even those of us who try to be scrupulous and clear off our virtual desktops and close down our tabs and all of this, will at some point, usually pretty reliably, have open a million tabs, right?
And so you just keep running into the same thing where you're like, I left it open because I thought maybe, and oh right, And every time you run into this, it jumps back into memory, you recall something maybe a little bit less than you did last time about the eight connections that you thought you might want to make, but it makes it less likely that you can actually put together a coherent map of your universe.
And I'm reminded, actually I think this also might be something that about in the book, I'm reminded of one of my favorite short pieces by Borges called "Funas the Memorias" in which he reports on someone, maybe at some point I'll just read it, it's very short.
He reports on a character who cannot forget anything.
And this seems to be the way forward, the way that you end up just becoming replete with knowledge.
And of course, of course, no, because the way that we make sense of our universe is to take in as many things as we possibly can, and then to do the analysis and the editing and the culling and to be left with this.
And this is, you know, this is actually how some of development works too, right?
It's like apoptosis, this selective, this programmed cell death, Wherein we start with webbing between our fingers and then we, you know, we lose the material that we don't need.
And this happens with neuronal growth as well, right?
We have many more neurons and neuronal connections in utero and in very early childhood than we then have as adults.
And it's not that we're getting dumber.
It's not that we're getting stupid.
It's that you overbuild and then you trim.
So memory works best when you can and fill, but then you have the time and the space for the analysis, for the thought, for the reflection.
And you don't have to keep being reminded of the things that you kind of thought you were already going to get rid of, or you thought, ah, maybe this, maybe that.
Let me put it in some bucket and be reminded of it once a month, as opposed to, oh my God, I got 80 tabs open.
Let me see what's on them.
Well, actually, if you think back, the movie version of Men in - Mm-hmm. - Right?
Is there a non-movie version of Men in Black?
Yeah, it's a comic.
The Neuralizer, the device that allows these governmental UFO dudes to cause you to forget what you've just seen because lots of people in this movie world are seeing aliens all the time and the government is, you know, erasing these memories.
It's almost like these social media platforms are using a neuralyzer.
Who are they using it for?
Oh, they're using it for their friends, you know, high up in these governmental parties where, you know, presumably these platforms love the access that they have and they don't understand that the corruption of the government structure is actually endangering the republic that they're depending on.
And, you know, it's all a frightening catastrophe.
But yes, the magic of understanding how to think involves editing down.
It's a sculpting process.
And the insidious thing here is this is not an individual free to engage in thinking about things and then editing away the ones that weren't that valuable, the dead ends and all of that.
This is some external force that doesn't have to explain to you what their goal was or why they thought something wasn't for you to think about.
It's editing your memories down.
Right.
Well, yes, you need at least two things to be able to think carefully and to learn how to be in possession of a mind that can do so.
You need to be free to find whatever information you go looking for, and this is one of the reasons that some people lament the loss of actual library stacks.
That actually walking around a physical library where things have been more or less put into a spot so that you went looking for one book and you end up finding ten others that are a little bit related but not quite, which is harder to do when you're doing, say, a Google Scholar search or a web of science search looking for scientific literature, for instance.
But then you also need the silence, basically the mental silence and the ability to stop at the gates any more stuff from coming in and impinging on your ability to consider what all it is that you have now taken in and what it means.
And we are losing both of these.
Do you have more here or shall we move on?
Well, I would just say in closing, ultimately the message that I want people to derive is that the influence peddling itself is destroying the Republic.
The mechanisms through which it functions and preserves itself are ever-changing, but I believe it is the case that until we figure out how to deal with the influence peddling problem and the fact that it has left the American public as a sidelight to issues of policy, we are going to face a system that gets worse and not better.
And to the extent that Twitter and Facebook and Google don't want us discussing the influence peddling by the people that they assure us we have to vote for, they are the problem and we're going to have to confront them.
So I think that's where we are.
So someone that's trying to make the analogy that you can't dam a river on your private property, not just want to.
Can't dam a river on your private property, meaning that private property is not the end all and be all of rights.
Yeah.
Unless, Unless you own the land that the river runs through all the way out to the ocean, in which case you might be able to.
But so long as the river goes onto other people's land, you're not allowed to affect that which is not yours with regard to damming.
Yeah.
And we are all having deep effects on each other.
So these ideas of this is mine and I can do with it what I want is often not the case because there are deep implications.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
So last week we did a deep dive into Rod Dreher's new book, Live Not by Lives, which is named for the Solzhenitsyn essay, which I read an excerpt from in the previous episode, in episode 49.
And after that, I was thinking a bit about this book, which I've had on my bed stand for a while, Eric Hoffer's The True Believer Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, and I've dipped into it here and there.
And I think it really has a number of things to teach us about our current moment, and in a way there's some hope to be had from it.
So, this book was written in 1951, which means it has the issue as all older tomes do, as all older texts do, just as we were talking about with regard to the Constitution and the framers of the Constitution, They could not have accurately predicted what had not yet happened, and so the examples are inherently from that time in this book and before, and so I think we might extrapolate a little bit from some of his thoughts.
But let me just say first, so basically I want to talk a little bit about what enables mass movements, who participates, what are the tools by which they work, where do the fanatics come from, and specifically then, how can creativity provide resistance to their appeal, and what do honorable leaders look like?
So, this Eric Hoffer, just reading from the back, who lived from 1902 to 1983, was self-educated and lived the life of a drifter through the 1930s.
After Pearl Harbor, he worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco for 25 years.
Yeah.
And he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 and died later that year.
And specifically, The True Believer, which is the first of his books, which I guess if it's published in 1951, the first of his books was published when he was 49 years old, became a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest televised press conferences.
So that's what this book is.
I can't imagine a current politician Okay, so I'm going to read a few short excerpts as we proceed here.
Let's see.
From the very beginning of the preface, this book deals with some This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions, or nationalist movements.
It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness.
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action.
All of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.
All of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life.
All of them demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.
All movements, however, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherence from the same types of humanity.
They all appeal to the same types of mind.
Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical Nationalist, the fanatical Communist, and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one.
The same is true of the force which drives them onto expansion and world dominion.
There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity, and of self-sacrifice.
There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective.
He who, like Pascal, Blaise Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine, has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi, and Nationalist doctrine.
However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
This book concerns itself chiefly with the active, revivalist phase of mass movements.
This phase is dominated by the true believer, the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause, and an attempt is made to trace his genesis and outline his nature.
As an aid in this effort, use is made of a working hypothesis.
Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements at the usually joint of their own accord, it is assumed, one, that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer, and two, that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.
So, this strikes me, there are a number of other places that we want to go here, but his core hypothesis in this book is that actually finding a group of people who are frustrated is
is sufficient and I think he is actually arguing that it's um that is maybe not necessary but if you have it it is sufficient so it is akin to necessary and sufficient to creating a mass a mass movement if you if you then know what to do with it um and I would say that there's something there's something to be teased out here um from the election four years ago in the United States the 2016 election
The vast majority of people on the left saw Trump seeming to use exactly the frustration of a vast majority of people on the right as a unifying agent.
That he was saying things like drain the swamp, and make America great again, and we're going to bring jobs back, and we're going to stop the flow of people who are taking your jobs, and he was finding the ways that people were frustrated.
And those on the left could look at his rallies, and his rhetoric, and the seeming lockstep approval by his rallying base, and see in it the seeds of these other kinds of mass movements.
Fascism, for instance.
And this was the thing that we started to hear from the left, right?
Like, he is going to bring in fascism.
This became, in turn, and we have said many, many times that we don't see that, we don't think that Trump was trying to be fascist, nor is likely to bring in fascism, but he was using some of these kinds of techniques of the most effective leaders of mass movements, specifically by cuing in on the frustration of his base.
This then became in turn the rallying cry of the mass movement that rose up, quote, in resistance, right?
What we now see many on the left, everyone from, you know, the woke to the mainstream Democrats who are largely playing footsie with the woke, are using Fear mongering and hatred and mass delusion by claiming that fear mongering and hatred and mass delusion is what Trump is doing and therefore that's what people on the left must do as well.
So it's a mass movement to, the claim is, to defend against what seemed to be maybe a mass movement and I would argue actually what was going on with Trump was not that.
It wasn't what it appeared to me on the left.
But what has risen up and what happened long before the 2016 election, actually, was they were looking for an excuse.
They, the hard left, the far left, right, were looking for an excuse to create a mass movement.
And could they find huge numbers of frustrated people?
Of course.
Of course they could.
You have something to add here?
Well, I mean, I think you're pointing to something interesting, which is that the frustration that usually causes a mass movement has caused two mass movements.
Yeah.
And the reason, I mean, maybe that's more common than we know, but that essentially what you've got is I don't even want to call it an unstable equilibrium, because I think I drew a diagram on one of our podcasts before that basically had a zone of stability, a little trough in which the ball could reside, but if it went too far in one direction or the other, it went over the side.
Yes.
And in some sense, maybe that's not the right model here.
Maybe the right model here is that you've got a trough that holds the ball and then something causes it to be a peak and it causes a slide into two different things.
But basically what you've got, I would argue, the bottom thing is A very novel system that is making people sick and a very corrupt governmental structure that is freezing them out of the solution making.
Yep.
Right?
So they are left outside.
That is almost literally going to cause frustration of every kind.
The sense that one cannot do enough that is right to get ahead.
Right?
That thing will cause people to look for the explanation of what it is that's blocking their well-being.
And that means they are susceptible to snake oil salesmen who want to tell them that, you know, what is causing your frustration is rampant racism.
Right.
Really?
Didn't we just elect a black president twice?
I mean, you know, is it rampant racism?
Yes, it's rampant racism.
That's the reason.
You know, or on the other side, I guess it would be, you know, it's governmental incompetence and immigrants or whatever it is that's, you know, taking the well-being that is due you and driving it somewhere else.
And the point is really, If we were paying attention and understood deeply, we would recognize that actually there is something that is taking well-being, and it's rent seekers, and they own the governmental structure, and they are dealing with us as an inconvenient periodic electoral hazard that has to be dealt with.
But you want to jumpstart the economy, right?
What you need to do is get the governmental structure to stop functioning in this partisan way.
And by partisan, in this case, I just mean working for people who can buy access and against everyone else.
Yes.
And how do you do it?
How do you bring the frustrated together?
There are a number of unifying techniques, and by unifying I don't mean anything lovely or wonderful, but in Hoffer's explanation, You know, how is it that you bring the frustrated together?
What can unify them?
Well, hatred, obviously, right?
So, for instance, here from Hoffer again, hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.
It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his wheel and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking.
He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass.
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.
Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.
When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered, no, we should have then to invent him.
It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.
F.A.
Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist Movement.
Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement.
He replied, It is magnificent.
I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't because we haven't got any Jews.
It is perhaps true that the insight and shrewdness of the men who know how to set a mass movement in motion, or how to keep one going, manifest themselves as much in knowing how to pick a worthy enemy as in knowing what doctrine to embrace and what program to adopt.
The theoreticians of the Kremlin hardly waited for the guns of the Second World War to cool before they picked the Democratic West, and particularly America, as the chosen enemy.
It is doubtful whether any gesture of goodwill or any concession from our side will reduce the volume and venom of vilification against us emanating from the Kremlin.
Remember this is 1951.
One of Shanghai Shek's most serious shortcomings was his failure to find an appropriate new devil once the Japanese enemy vanished from the scene at the end of the war.
The ambitious but simple-minded general was perhaps too conceited to realize that it was not he, but the Japanese devil who generated the enthusiasm, the unity, and the readiness for self-sacrifice of the Chinese masses.
So this line, mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil, is Critical, I think.
Absolutely.
And, you know, how many devils does the new authoritarian left have?
You know, anything that they will append a fob to, or ist to, you can find the devil there.
So, if you're being accused of being racist, you can find that white people are the devil.
If you are being accused of being sexist, you can find that men are the devil, that cis people are the devil, that able-bodied people are the devil.
All of these particular ways, immutable demographics, immutable characteristics become the devil in this new world order, and it's quite effective because Man, rage feels good.
And it brings people together, even if they're not actually fighting for anything.
Alright, this leads to multiple things, but I think the behavior of hymenopterans... Ants, bees, and wasps.
Yeah, bees and wasps are the ones in mind in this case, have a behavior, and actually, You know, but they don't.
My graduate work in Panama involved dealing with the hazard of Africanized bees.
That there were bees that had been hybridized with African strains that went into this very aggressive stinging behavior where you could die from being stung so many times, which was not the ancestral state for our New World version of these bees.
So just notable there is that the difference between Africanized honeybees and non-Africanized honeybees is entirely one of behavior and a difference in group behavior by the bees.
Right.
Genetically transmitted.
But many people don't understand.
They may think that it's a different venom.
No, it's actually when stung by one of our non-Africanized honeybees.
I think it's just apis.
Yep.
Typically you'll get one sting and maybe a couple and you can get away, but Africanized honeybees chase you down.
They do, and this is a response to different hazards to the hive.
It's not like the Africanized or the African bees are being wasteful, they just have hazards that require a lot more stings to dissuade them.
But the thing I wanted to point to is that one of the things that we have learned in the study of these animals Is that they mark the animal that they perceive to have been a threat to the hive, whether it was or not.
So if you walk too close to a hive and you get a sting, you are now carrying a chemical signature and so you now The fact that you back away from the hive is now not good enough because you have been marked as hazard to hive and therefore you run.
Yes.
You run and you hope very much that you don't run into a thicket you can't get through or trip or, you know, and there's a famous story in research circles, it would now be 20 years ago at least, of a student who disturbed a hive in a cave and tripped and died, was stung to death.
But in any case, the... Wait, there was a hive in a cave?
Somehow.
Okay.
Yeah.
It seems strange, but... I don't remember the exact story.
It was a OTS student, I believe.
But in any case, the fact of the... we're gonna set a bar, and if you...
Tread across it we're going to label you with some phobia or something like that which makes you devil and then You know no holds barred from that from that moment on that is very much how this seems to work Now the other thing that this makes me think though is I must say I have I do not resonate with the idea of hating people very frequently.
It's a very rare individual that I find deserving of hate.
I can be very angry.
I'm very angry at the behavior, for example, of these platforms and the way that they are attempting to control the way we think.
But as for actually hating people, I reserve that for ultra-special occasions.
Well, and I think we're going to get to, you know, he starts, the little excerpt that I read in the very beginning suggests that it's really, it's a particular kind of person.
And what I'd like to do is talk about, even if you do enjoy succumbing to rage, even if you do find yourself as someone who has Who has done this and may be, you know, flippable to a different ideology that appears to be exactly the opposite, but it's actually the same kind of personality defect, really, that you are revealing.
How is it that you could instead become someone who is not as susceptible to rage, who does not find it so enjoyable?
Yes, and in some sense, I wonder, I think this goes, this is one characteristic.
The propensity to hate means that you are vulnerable to becoming a pawn of one of these movements.
And these movements are very often driven by people who have an agenda that isn't about you, it's about them.
Right.
And so, not being susceptible to hate may even be like an immune response to prevent yourself from being capturable.
Yes, so that's excellent.
Not being susceptible to hate may provide a kind of immune response.
Here we have his list, which is just interesting, of the disaffected who are most likely to be grabbable.
So apart from the discussion of can you find yourself immune to it, apart from what you can 100% change about your own life, Um, these are things, um, some of which be very hard to escape from, and so you might have to work harder to not succumb to a mass movement.
Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories.
The poor, misfits, outcasts, minorities, adolescent youth, the ambitious, whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities, Those in the grip of some vice or obsession, the impotent in body or mind, the inordinately selfish, the bored, the sinners.
So he then proceeds to spend many many pages on a description of many of these, which we don't have time to do for the most part here, but I want to share a little bit specifically about I'm not sure that's what's next though.
From that list though, you know, the poor, misfits, minorities, etc., what we see here, if we can read, and again I don't think that the Trump phenomenon really is a mass movement the way the left makes it out to be, although it does have some elements of it, but if we for the moment read these as two competing mass movements, It is, in effect, pitting members of some of those groups against one another.
The left seems to have completely forgotten about class, which when we were growing up, this was the concern that we understood to be the thing that really continues to keep people down.
And Trump does speak to that, whereas people on the left, the most vocal leaders on the left come from quite a lot of money privilege, which is the kind of privilege that speaks loudest.
So, let's see.
When people, Hofer writes, are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program.
And furthermore, since all mass movements draw their adherence from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows that all mass movements are competitive and the gain of one adherence is the loss of all the others.
All mass movements are interchangeable.
One mass movement really transforms itself into another.
A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement, a social revolution into militant nationalism or a religious movement, a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.
And I would say that we saw this even, I didn't pull up any clips, but in the early days of the post-George Floyd death protests that quickly became riots as well, we saw some, you know, Clearly, like, good faith, Black Lives Matter people.
And I don't know if they identify as leaders or not.
I don't know what kind of a hierarchical or non-hierarchical system they have in place.
But we saw people really appealing to rioters saying, you know, you are doing damage to what we are trying to accomplish here.
But what you saw were a lot of people who were disaffected, who were frustrated, seeing this outpouring of energy and rage on the streets, who were coming in, who even if we Allow that the germ of the Black Lives Matter movement had good people in it, which certainly it had good people in it, whether or not the original founders of it were honest brokers.
It quickly became corrupted by all of these other people who were just looking for a mass movement.
And the argument here would be they could have just as easily, you know, they want to call themselves communists, they could have just as easily become fascists, you know, in any of these other ideologies.
The ideology isn't the driving force, it's the belonging, it's the sense of frustration, it's the, frankly, it's the abolition of the past, which is another thing that he talks about here.
And in order to really dissuade one from thinking about the past, one also has to make the idea of the present into a living hell, and so you cannot imagine that today is okay or that tomorrow is okay.
You're only looking forward into basically a utopian future, largely.
So, for those of you who have not yet checked out the podcast I did with Douglas Murray, definitely worth checking out.
We had a great discussion.
One of the things that I raised there and that he and I discussed has to do with, A, the fact that there's a dynamic tension between left and right, which is where the magic of our system comes from.
But I believe that there's an insidious downside to this.
To the dynamic tension?
Yes, in other words, if it is, you know, if liberals are the ones with the ambition to figure out how the system might be made better, and the conservatives are the ones who keep the liberals from, you know, driving us into terrible unintended consequences, right?
If that tension is necessary to moving actually forward, but doing so with enough discipline that you don't fall into a utopian abyss, that the downside of it has to do With the fact that each side tends to overplay its hand.
And what I think is going on is, A, because we are inherently, evolutionarily competitive beings, right?
And we are placed in a system that puts us in competition with each other, right?
We are in competition in the marketplace.
One of the go-to moves that people who have done well or have ended up empowered, whether or not by their own success, One of the go-to moves for them is to limit the access of others to the tools that make you powerful.
Because, of course, if you've done well or are doing well, you don't necessarily want everybody empowered to displace you, right?
So pulling up the ladder is a go-to move.
At the point that you pull up the ladder, and so, you know, oh my goodness, education is failing everyone, it's crap, right?
Okay, so lots of people are not being well educated, which means by the time they reach adulthood, they have dull, feeble tools.
Right.
Right?
Dull, feeble tools, when you have them, are going to leave you susceptible to the argument that you should join this movement to do away with the devil that's blocking you from well-being.
In other words, the roots of the For lack of a better term, communal communist impulse to overthrow the structure is in the enfeebling of people so that they are incapable... The reason that we are now hearing arguments against meritocracy is that many people have been badly armed for meritocracy and they know that in a meritocracy they will not succeed.
Hence the list that Hoffer gives there of all of these different categories of people who resonate with these messages.
Yeah, there's nothing in what you're saying or what I'm saying or what Hoffer's saying that suggests that people don't have legitimate reason to be frustrated.
There will always be reason to be frustrated.
There will always be large numbers of people who are frustrated.
And I would say, as I've said many times before here and elsewhere, that we have in fact uniquely right now a whole generation
that is more widespreadly legitimately frustrated due to this sort of perfect storm of helicopter parenting, which rendered them unable to face risk and to know what risk looks like, the legal drugs that have rendered them unable to read or mitigate their own moods and bodies, and ubiquitous screens that depersonalize all interactions.
And the list goes on, but those are sort of the The three big things that I always come back to.
And then you add to that the powerful who have actually rendered an economy that's almost impossible to enter, huge loads of debt, inability to buy real estate or get out from under your educational debt which didn't really educate you anyway.
Of course people are frustrated.
There was no argument that we are making that people should not be frustrated, but how can you turn your frustration into something that might do good, as opposed to joining an ideology that renders you more hopeless, more helpless, more filled with rage, less capable of actually pulling yourself out of it in the future and doing some good.
I would just add to that.
So A, ultimately, if you don't want the attack on meritocracy to topple your functional civilization, then the answer is you have to arm people so that they're capable of competing in a meritocracy.
So I think one of the things that's missing from the discussion for me is that those of us who have succeeded in a meritocracy have succeeded against fewer possible challengers than we otherwise would have.
Yes.
Successful in a context where merit matters, but had an unfair advantage in the access to it And so the solution to this problem ultimately involves arming everybody to compete in a meritocracy which of course if you're really You know ideologically true to your values makes the market work better you know so that is the solution but the
What we are what we are going to see the alternative is an attack on meritocracy by those who see it as a place where they will lose and probably accurately in most cases and Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to that problem There's no rapid solution because people who are badly armed for meritocracy cannot be instantly armed so they are going to engage in transfer which is going to jeopardize everything that works and
Yes.
Okay.
Hofer continues.
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.
Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual?
We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, quote, to be free from freedom.
It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed.
They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders.
Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?
So hold on, one more directly related to that.
People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident.
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
So this goes back to some of what we were talking about last week with regard to Dreher's book.
They are eager, the frustrated, to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding, and being responsible for inevitable failure.
They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command, and shoulder all responsibility.
Moreover, submission by all to a supreme leader is an approach to their ideal of equality.
In time of crisis, during floods, earthquakes, epidemics, depressions, and wars, separate individual effort is of no avail and people of every condition are ready to obey and follow a leader.
To obey is then the only firm point in a chaotic day-by-day existence.
So this begins to bring together some of the other elements of the perfect storm that, again, as we have said here before, what has been happening in Portland since the end of May and what happened in most major American cities and other major cities throughout the world,
For a much shorter period, in the beginning of June, would have been very unlikely to have happened, at least in the form in which it did, absent COVID-19, absent the pandemic with which the entire world was wrestling.
That the virus itself just made it possible for people to spill out onto the streets because they were more frustrated even than they ever had been before.
And they were either feeling that they needed to obey in order to keep themselves and their countrymen safe, the things like lockdowns, or they were being resistant to that and feeling frustrated by what felt to them like authoritarian measures.
Yeah, it's interesting because obviously there was not only the restriction on one's behavior, there was the looming economic crisis which people who are vulnerable can detect that this is going to fall very heavily on them.
And the response is exactly this being freed from responsibility, right?
Literally to the point of attacking buildings, right?
Like hammering on these buildings to get the federal demon to come out and, you know, confront them.
Right it's it's I mean it's a bizarre kind of theater But you know yes frustration is at the very root of this because of course frustration is an evolutionary adaptation Designed to alert you that you're in a cul-de-sac and that you need to somehow escape it right if you don't have opportunities To better yourself with where you are then you're motivated to seek somewhere else so that results in all of this lashing about For utopian states that might just solve the problem Right.
But of course, the lashing out that we see currently on the streets of Portland, and still elsewhere, is predicated on, well, several lies.
But at least one lie that comes to mind is the idea that they are actually anywhere close to being able to be self-sufficient.
And, you know, we saw this with Jazz Chop in Seattle.
These are people who are so confused as to the nature of what it would mean to actually be self-sufficient that they ended up getting porta-potties sent in by Seattle because they hadn't even imagined that far.
They're buying food with currency, they're using their They were outraged when the ambulances would not enter the space where violence was occurring because no one was willing to give the medics the assurance that they would actually be kept safe.
This is the opposite of self-sufficiency.
This is children in the bodies of adults who have deep reason to be frustrated, who don't have the tools that they should have at the age that they're at, who are for some reason being told by most of the leaders of these cities and these states that actually this is cool.
Keep at it guys.
So that's, you know, this is where we actually need, this is, you know, I hate the term nanny state, precisely, you know, in part because it has been used.
It's abused.
Yeah, and it is used as an epithet by people on the right, largely.
But, you know, Everyone acknowledges that actually part of what we're doing with government and with society is keeping sufficient order that when people are delusional, you shut it down.
You tell them, no, that's wrong.
You're wrong at the moment.
And we're going to take you over here and do whatever we need to do with you to make sure that you stop putting other people at risk.
That is the role of the state.
Yes, it is the role of the state to, you know, and it's amazing how much of this mirrors the role of proper parents, right?
The role of the state is to place limits that are clearly understandable and to enforce them irrespective of who violates them.
And this idea that you know the child is having a tantrum it must be very upset and I'm sympathetic the empathy with the the creature that is having a tantrum and putting the entire operation.
Uh, in jeopardy, um, is such low quality parent.
I mean, you know.
It's terrible.
And I, you know, in general, um, parents aren't experiencing empathy in that, in that moment, they're experiencing frustration and they're at their wit's end and they just want to make it stop.
But of course it just moves, it, it, it moves the problem farther into the future.
And in this case, allowing these society level tantrums.
Is moving the problem not just farther into the future, but across a wider and wider swath of society.
Shut the tantrum down.
It's externalizing it onto all of us, and ultimately you can't even justify it in terms of helping people who have a right to be frustrated, because they will be massively harmed by the coming apart of the structure on which they are as dependent as anyone else.
So, you know, indulging their utopian fantasies is hurting them in the future.
Yes.
Okay.
So, um, there's three more things that I really want to get through, um, before we, before we stop, even though we're well beyond our time here.
Um, Hoffer argues, and this is near and dear to my heart, you will recognize, because the idea of creativity has been one that I have been focused on since I was a child, really.
The idea of creativity, for instance, in science, creativity and analysis come together in the best science, and many people who aren't scientists imagine that science is just about arraying things and organizing them and then seeing patterns emerge.
But there is such deep creativity in many of the, you know, more of the earlier parts of the scientific method.
And it has often seemed to me that creatives, that people who are deeply creative, which includes many scientists and engineers, are more resilient, are more resistant to the kinds of mass movements and ideologies that they are advertising.
And Hoffer has a couple of explanations for why that might be the case.
In part, he says, because creativity is a cure for boredom.
He says, when people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.
The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom.
You will remember when our children were very young, I was I was clear with them that they would not proclaim themselves bored because that was a failure on their part.
That is an insane thing to declare yourself.
Should you say that out loud, that is demonstrative of a failure.
In your own head and not to say again that there are some people alive who actually just do not have the tools with which to cure their own boredom.
And of course that the advertisers and the consumer, the marketplace of stuff as opposed to ideas.
has made it really, really easy to run up against the end of your own abilities.
But certainly among children, there is no excuse for letting a child declare themselves bored and to walk in as an adult and say, I'll cure that for you.
No, you let the kid solve their own boredom.
He also says poverty, in which he's speaking about actual poverty, not having enough money, Poverty, when coupled with creativeness, is usually free of frustration.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's an interesting claim.
Poverty, when coupled with creativeness, is usually free of frustration.
Before I go on, remember this is a guy who worked as a, you know, railroad yards, and as a stevedore, and a longshoreman.
So it's, this is not, he is not speaking as a man from economic privilege.
Could you say the sentence again?
Poverty, Poverty, when coupled with creativeness, is usually free of frustration.
This is true of the poor artisan, skilled in his trade, and of the poor writer, artist and scientist in the full possession of creative powers.
Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create, to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.
The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individual to mass movements.
So this just dovetails beautifully with things that we have said from many avenues, right?
That those who actually can do something physical And, you know, we have said it in terms, you know, sport isn't inherently creative, although there is a kind of creativity in figuring out how to move your body in the world and how to interface depending on if it's a, you know, you against a mountain or you against a ball and another opponent or, you know, a whole team.
It's a different kind of creativity than finding the form in the stone, or putting the words on the page, or deciphering the pattern and generating the hypothesis.
These are all different kinds of creativity, but what you're doing in each case is finding meaning through Creating, I don't know what other word to use, something that did not exist before, right?
And that the ability to watch something come into existence that did not exist before, that you did, cannot leave you bored.
You just can't be bored if you're doing that, right?
And finally, just in this section, with regard to creativity, he asks, Hoffer asks, Whence come the fanatics?
Mostly from the ranks of the non-creative men of words.
The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot.
The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present.
His passion is to reform and not to destroy.
When the mass movement remains wholly in his keeping, he turns it into a mild affair.
I sure agree with that, but the reforms he initiates are of the surface and life flows on without a sudden break.
But such a development is possible only when the anarchic action of the masses does not come into play, either because the old order abdicates without a struggle or because the man of words allies himself with strong men of action the moment chaos threatens to break loose.
And he then provides basically a number of examples of what he calls non-creative men of words, including people like Hitler.
Who he says, these are people who aspired to be artists or writers and just couldn't hack it, right?
They didn't have it in them, and their aspirations to do something that they were actually incapable of doing is part of what turned them into the despots that they were.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
I'm reminded also of one of my favorite books, which now I'm going to forget the name of, by Crawford, Shopcraft as Soulcraft, in which here we have a deeply smart, analytically inclined, creative man with a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago
who goes to work inside the Beltway, writing reports that 10 people will read and that he's not sure will make any difference at all, and gives it up for a life that he finds much more fulfilling restoring vintage motorcycles at his own shop in Virginia, I think.
And it is, you know, Shopcraft as Soulcraft is the name of the book.
It is extraordinary and, you know, I'm not arguing that you need to be doing something physical in order to find your creative outlet, although I think if you have a creative outlet that also has some physical aspect to it, you're less likely to be fooled by it.
That even those who are talented, who are truly creative, in purely in fields that have no physical ramification, can probably more easily be turned into basically propagandists, can more easily have their skill with words or art be turned into people who are doing the work of some mass movement, as opposed to, you know, if you have
If you're a craftsman and, you know, either you've built a table that is both functional and beautiful or you have not, it is harder to become a tool of the ideology.
Yeah, absolutely.
There is an awful lot to having succeeded in some place that allows you to know what success means rather than finding that judgment through somebody else who decides that you are successful and leaves you open to being manipulated.
Exactly.
Okay.
Individual creatives aren't sufficient though.
So for me, I grok at a fairly deep level, and you know this is why we were successful as professors working with individual students.
How to help individuals find their own creative, analytical, productive core self, and to help make individuals resistant to things like mass movements.
But individuals resisting isn't really sufficient because absent a unifying rhetoric, values of democracy and decency are likely to lose out to less nuanced and less democratic movements.
So I have, yeah, maybe I won't read this longer excerpt here, but just say that, as I said at the beginning of this discussion, that people are often willing to flip sides. that people are often willing to flip sides.
That they join one and they find the problems in it and they become, they're not immune to mass movements, right?
They're actually particularly susceptible to mass movements and are Perhaps just can become immune to the particular one that they were members of, rather than immune to mass movements in general.
So, how do we inoculate people against that?
When we see people flip, move directly from one side to the other.
How can we get people to pause and think as they're between sides, for instance, as they're being rejected by the side to which they once were tightly bound?
How can they say, maybe I don't need to belong to any, maybe it's okay for me to think that ideology itself is the problem?
And I might do better by considering my positions and my hopes for myself and my family and my community and my nation, all of these nested sets to which I belong, from first principles rather than from received authority.
How can you grab people who might be recognizing that some movement to which they are grabbed and pull them out into a sense of awareness?
And to that...
Hoffer actually says exactly as you did at the beginning of our conversation, that very often it's one mass movement that comes in to displace another, and that you end up having competing mass movements.
But that can't be the only way.
That's not going to be stable.
That's not going to create a democracy that's stable long term.
And so just to finish a little bit on leadership.
He says, let's see, with regard to leadership, The personality of the leader is probably a crucial factor in determining the nature and duration of a mass movement.
Such rare leaders as Lincoln and Gandhi not only try to curb the evil inherent in a mass movement, but are willing to put an end to the movement when its objective is more or less realized.
They are of the very few in whom power has developed a grandeur and generosity of the soul.
And finally, There are, of course, rare leaders such as, again, Lincoln, Gandhi, even FDR, Churchill, and Nehru.
They do not hesitate to harness man's hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in the service of a holy cause.
But, unlike a Hitler, a Stalin, or even a Luther and a Calvin, they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world.
The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from, and blended with, their faith in humanity.
For they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.
And that slime of frustrated souls, which is amazing, actually it turns out one of his opening quotations in the book, and slime had they for mortar.
I didn't know this, but that comes from Genesis.
That comes from the Old Testament.
Wow, I did not know that.
Yeah, I didn't remember that either.
Yeah, so unfortunately I think there's a problem buried here, which is that there is a kind of Idea of how how would we solve this problem?
What would we do instead?
And then there's a question of what do you do with the fact that you have hundreds?
Perhaps hundreds of millions if we think in a larger context than just the US of people who have been hobbled by a system that wasn't interested in making them capable.
Right?
That's not a problem.
You can't just start doing things right and that problem goes away.
Somehow we have to deal with the fact we have stopped handing over the tools to be self-sufficient that would cause people to be less susceptible to this nonsense.
And that if we started doing things right today, it would be more than a generation before we had gotten past the consequences of what we've done badly up to this point.
Yeah.
I mean, I think this also, you know, this is a much longer conversation, but this points to one of the real criticisms of something like UBI, actually, right?
That solving the wealth inequality, it wouldn't solve the wealth inequality, addressing the vast number of people who actually struggle to know whether or not they're going to have enough money to make their rent and buy food, By simply providing money does not provide the motivation to create inherently.
There are people who are active creatives or analysts of sorts who are absolutely kept from doing that work by the fact that they actually simply just have to work two jobs and cannot find the peace of mind, the space, the mental space in order to do what they desperately want to do.
But it would not address the motivational problem that the vast majority of people have, who are frustrated in part because they were not given the tools they needed, and now it seems it might be too late.
Yeah.
In fact, you can upgrade the tools that they've got, but you can't get people, you know, who you try to fix their toolkit at adulthood.
The opportunity has been largely lost.
Well, I guess I'm a little surprised to hear you say that.
I don't know how you do it at scale, but I feel like introducing and updating a toolkit like an evolutionary toolkit is exactly what we were doing in the classroom for 15 years.
Yeah, upgrading.
But it wasn't anything like what would have been true for those same people if they had had consistent A model for a system in which the cultivation of one's own tools results in the growth of capacities that then cause well-being to emerge from the world as a result of your own input of effort and creativity and skill.
And so, you know, I'm very proud of what we did, but the problem is We are dealing with people who have been hobbled and you can improve.
I mean, this is true for all of us.
We are all hobbled by increasingly forces that don't care about us and want to misinform us about what's important and misdirect us into, you know, wasting money and time on things that we shouldn't.
So, anyway, I'm not saying you can't make people's lives better.
What I'm saying is, A, how would you, you know, you said you can't do it at scale, okay?
I don't know how to do it at scale and I haven't come up with an answer.
I don't know that you can't.
You will do it worse at scale than you would do it personally.
The number of people who are capable of doing it personally are very few so we can't do it for that many and those for whom we do it are suffering the consequences of whatever bad educational experiences and you know misinformation they've gotten from advertisers trying to frustrate them into buying stuff and who you know we've got damaged people and yes we can we can improve things starting tomorrow if we decided to do it but
The degree to which we are dealing with a damaged population and that that will require a generation in which we are no longer doing new damage before the problem is actually even beginning to be solved is, I think, a critical issue.
It's critical, but I think this is too hopeless.
I mean, this is often the case that you take a much more pessimistic view of things than I do, in part because I don't know how to sleep with that degree of pessimism.
So does that mean that I'm engaging in delusion, perhaps?
In order to allay the strength of mass movement that is happening on the authoritarian left that is grabbing more and more people, revealing to some who might be on the fence, revealing to as many as possible of those who might be on the fence, that they could be Drawing.
Building.
Growing.
Connecting.
Healing.
Any number of things that actually brings real meaning to human existence.
And that that, unlike destroying, yelling, raging, etc., is more lasting, and will make them both more anti-fragile in general, and more resistant to the next ideology that comes along.
I agree.
I mean, it's the obvious direction to go.
The question is just how quickly does it change the hazard of mass movements, and I guess we differ a little bit on that.
Hopefully you're right.
All right.
So, we will go for 15 minutes, but tomorrow we have our monthly private Q&A, which you can access by joining my Patreon at 11am Pacific is when it starts.
It's a two hour Q&A.
We've already solicited the questions for tomorrow, but it's small enough that we are often able to watch the chat as it happens and sometimes engage with that in real time.
Starting Next weekend, I guess, are the conversations that you have on your Patreon.
Wait, that suggests we're almost done with October.
Yes, it does.
My God.
And of course, you can join the Discord server as well.
But if you want to ask a question in the next hour, where we will be doing just that, pose your Super Chat question either right now or at the top of the next hour, and we will get through as many of them as we can.
Yep, do check out the new podcast with Douglas Murray That I put out a couple days ago He was here reporting from Portland on what he sees and I think actually it is essential that those of you who are outside of Portland and don't really know what's been going on here and Hearing somebody come from Great Britain and look in on Portland and report on what he's seeing is really eye-opening.
I highly recommend it.
I have not listened to your conversation with him yet, but we had dinner with him and his partner the night before you did your podcast.
Yeah, seeing, you know, we don't share politics, but we are friends.
And he's just such an extraordinarily gracious and brilliant man.
And seeing someone not from here come in and observe and see what's going on and hearing his incisive, insightful takes is extraordinary.
Yeah.
I'm sure your conversation was amazing.
Yes, he's a great guy.
It's wonderful to have him as a friend and wonderful that we aren't in the same political place because the discussions are definitely highly productive.
