#128 Life, Death, and Meaning (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 128th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: What is it to be human, how much responsibility to we have for finding our own way, and how can we find hope, and meaning, even at the worst of times? Then: people have a moral obligation to grapple with the downstream effects of their own arguments...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 120.
That is about the least prime number we've ever hit.
Ever.
Ever.
Ever in our entire time.
Actually, probably mathematically we could evaluate that based on the number of factors.
It's got to be close.
But anyway, it's definitely not prime.
So for those of you who were, I don't know, standing ready for a prime number episode, well, you'll have to wait a bit.
Yeah.
Couple things.
We both have a cold.
So if you detect a change in our voices, that's what's going on.
My prediction is that this will increase the overall sultriness of the podcast.
That will be entirely as a result of your voice being more sultry.
Mine will just sound like phlegm.
Yours the audience?
Say what?
Yours the audience?
Mine.
Yes, yours.
No, no, not the audience.
We don't hear their voices.
I don't think so.
I mean, if you do hear their voices, that's something I want to know about because, I don't know, it's concerning.
Yeah.
Speaking of which, we're going to talk a little bit about mental health today.
We are going to talk a little bit about mental health, and if you are hearing voices talking about mental health, check.
They may be ours.
Right.
But I will say, this virus reminds me of something, okay?
This virus that we apparently have, this little cold.
It is beautifully designed.
Now, I resent it because it's making me feel unpleasant, but it is fantastically infectious.
All four members of the family have had it.
It is very slightly virulent, doesn't do a lot of harm.
And I just, I hope that the fools who were turbocharging bat plagues in Wuhan And North Carolina and elsewhere would take a lesson from this virus.
Getting into the future does not require making people incredibly sick.
And to the extent that you were doing that because of some nonsense you wrote in your grant applications, shame on you.
Indeed.
Yes.
Is that your announcements?
Well, there was one more, but I can't quite- We have a lot that we haven't done yet.
You just sort of launched into talking about having a cold.
Well, I just wanted them to know, you know, why we sound this way.
Go ahead.
You're done?
Yes.
Okay.
We are today going to talk about Viktor Frankl and Man's Search for Meaning.
We're going to talk about electoral politics and the West Coast of the U.S., including issues of homelessness and addiction and mental illness and crime and policing.
We are going to talk about gun control some.
We're going to talk about the moral responsibility to own the corollary of your claims and what it feels like to walk around American cities now as at least many of the lockdown measures are easing and people seem to be returning to a mental state that That maybe is like one that they had before, but actually, as we talked about a little bit in our episode two days ago, doesn't actually remind either of us of anything that we've exactly seen before.
So there's a lot that we're going to be talking about today.
I have forgotten to bring up the French version of our book, so we'll do that next time.
No, it's okay, we're good.
So we have coming up very soon the publication of Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century in both Spanish and French.
Which we're excited about, and we encourage you, if you have not yet picked up the book in English, and if you're listening in English, why not, to go there.
Because many of the arguments that we make, the framing that we have, which is, you know, neither traditionalist nor all progress is good, could be viewed as a middle ground, but we view it rather as an evolutionary lens.
A lens which understands both what we are, what we have been, and what we're capable of, all with an understanding of both the hardware and the software programs and capabilities that we have as humans who have been evolving on this planet like everything else on this planet for three and a half billion years, give or take.
It doesn't feel that long.
It does now.
Both less time and more time, you know how that happens?
Yeah, I do.
I don't really feel the more in this case.
It's been a shorter ride for me.
13 billion?
That doesn't ring any bells for you?
13 billion years?
A lot of that was kind of inanimate.
Yeah, it was, it was, it was.
Okay, so unfortunately Odyssey was glitching out on us, so we're just on YouTube at the moment.
We will of course be on all the podcast places and Spotify and every place else shortly after we live stream here.
Today, for the first time in a while, we're doing a Q&A.
Go over to darkhorsesubmissions.com as we are live streaming now or during the Q&A, which will immediately follow this stream, to post any questions that you have.
And you can find additional things that we're doing at Natural Selections, where, as we talked about two days ago, my most recent post is about the five-year anniversary of Evergreen, the place where we were tenured, the college where we were tenured for 15 years.
Blowing up five years ago.
And we are, as always, grateful to you.
We are supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channel, liking videos, sharing videos, both the main channel, Brett Weinstein's channel, and the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel, which has smaller bits, bits and pieces.
And we would remind you as much as we don't like to that we were demonetized by YouTube last summer and we have not been remonetized at any point and that took out a lot of our income at that point.
We were demonetized and demonized at the same time.
Indeed, but that is not actually the point here.
We were demonetized and we have not been remonetized and as such we are ever more grateful for those who have the ability and the interest who are able to support us financially and so You can join us on Patreon, for instance.
We have our private monthly Q&A on my Patreon tomorrow at 11am Pacific.
And we leave it up afterwards for those who can't join us live, although it's a wonderful conversation that we have, and we're able to have the chat.
It's an intimate enough conversation that we can interact with people in the chat and respond to stuff in real time.
And, of course, also we have our sponsors, whom we are very choosy about.
Brett objected to my use of the term discriminating before, but I persist in believing that we are discriminating in who we choose as our sponsors.
I just feel I deserve a trigger warning.
Well, I'm not going to give you one.
Yeah.
Typical.
Yeah, I don't.
I don't do that.
So this week, as per usual, we have three sponsors.
So here we go.
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I enjoy my coffee, but I don't need it, and that's intentional.
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I was studying while you were reading, but did you say net positive and mean net negative on the carbon footprint?
You know, it says net positive here, but yes, I must.
Net positive is like morally positive.
Yeah.
Net negative in terms of carbon.
No, I agree, and yet that's directly from what I inherited here, so.
Net good.
Yeah, net good, but that's, I agree, and I just decide not to correct myself in real time as I'm reading.
All right, well, I apparently decided to correct you in real time.
No, no, that's better, but I don't know where that error is, but anyway, they're doing honorable things.
When it comes to errors, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Watch this.
I doubt it, I doubt it.
We'll see, we'll see.
I'm correcting typos on the fly.
Our second sponsor this week is 8sleep, a relatively new sponsor for us, whom we are excited to know about and proud to have their support.
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Ain't that the truth?
Eight sleep allows fine-tuned temperature regulation for both people separately, I will add.
Having a cool room and a warm bed is a luxury that eight sleep makes easy to obtain.
And I will just add that this is such a big problem.
If you warm the room up for the person who wants it warmer than the person who wants it cooler can't get there because the best you can do is shed the covers and there's nowhere to radiate the heat if the room is warm.
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Let's be honest the standard alarm a standard alarm cannot I mean waking up It's called an alarm.
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Alright, not too many errors.
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I lost my place.
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I'm not sure exactly by whom it's known that as by.
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Maybe I should have some now.
A little bit.
Yeah, okay.
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That is our sponsors for this week.
I wanted to start by talking a bit about Viktor Frankl and this extraordinary book, Man's Search for Meaning, which many of you will know, some of you will not know at all, and probably my guess would be the largest category would be, yeah, I've heard of that, but I'm not actually totally sure what's going on there, which is where I was until recently.
I mentioned on our last episode that Zach and I went to the Holocaust Museum in D.C.
when we were there a week ago, a week and a half ago.
And a few weeks before that, I had found a copy of this book on our friend Dave Stevens' carefully curated library on his boat when we were with him in the Bahamas.
And he had encouraged me to read it when I said, you know, I've been meaning to and I have and he said, do.
He offered you his copy.
He declined it because that's the kind of guest you are.
He offered me his copy, even though he's on a boat.
He had a tiny library because he's on a boat, and I wasn't going to take his copy.
So this is not his copy, but he was willing to give me his copy.
And then I've also been listening to, and I think we'll end up talking a little bit about this later today, I've also been listening to Michael Schellenberger's book San Francisco on audiobook recently, and I find him also invoking Frankel and Man's Search for Meaning.
So there are a whole lot of sort of things pointing to this, and I finally picked it up yesterday, and I think I've mentioned, you know, I'm an avid reader, but I'm not that fast a reader, but I read the book yesterday, and it really...
It really touched me deeply in so many ways.
So I'm going to share a few excerpts.
I've talked to you, Brett, a little bit about it, but not a ton.
And I believe you have not read it, but you, of course, are familiar with him and some of his story.
But let me tell a little bit about his story and then read a few experts.
It's good to be that kind of day.
I'll read a few excerpts for us to talk about.
So, Frenkel was born in Vienna in 1905.
He was a psychiatrist.
He became a psychiatrist.
He wasn't a psychiatrist when he was born, interestingly.
Underachiever, I guess.
He was identified as a psychiatrist later.
Yes.
So, like the opposite of the underachiever.
Born in Vienna in 1905, became a psychiatrist, and he founded what has been since called the Third School of Viennese Psychotherapy.
Freud having founded the first, Alfred Adler having founded the second, and Frankel's what became known by him as Logotherapy became known as the Third School of Viennese Psychotherapy, the main tenet of which is that the primary motivation for humans is to find meaning in their life.
And here, before I say a little bit more about what his story is, here from an afterword in the book that he writes a long time later.
As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life.
The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed.
The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone.
In other words, meaning can be found not only in work, but also in love.
Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life.
Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.
He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
It's quite an interesting taxonomy.
It's quite an interesting taxonomy, isn't it?
And I haven't heard one like it before.
By 1939, remember he was born in 1905, by 1939 Frankl was the head of neurology at Rothschild Hospital in Vienna.
It was the only Jewish hospital in Vienna at the time.
After the Nazis closed the hospital down, he was offered an American visa in 1942, which would have allowed him to escape and to complete the book that he was working on, which was to be his first formalization of logotherapy.
He let the visa expire, though, because he did not want to abandon his parents in Vienna.
That same year, in 1942, he and his new wife and his parents were imprisoned in a concentration camp.
For him, it was the first of four concentration camps that he would be imprisoned in, which included Auschwitz.
He took with him the manuscript for the book that he was writing that would become His thesis on logotherapy and it was of course taken from him at intake at the first concentration camp that he was at and lost.
While imprisoned by the Nazis, Frenkel found meaning broadly in two sources.
The prospect of being reunited with his loved ones, specifically his wife and his parents.
He was with his father in that first camp and he Unfortunately, he was witness to his father's decline and death, so he knew that he had lost his father at some point, but he kept alive in his head the love that he felt for and the voice of specifically his wife, but also of the rest of his family that he was hoping was still alive.
And he also found meaning in those many years that he was imprisoned in that series of concentration camps.
The prospect of rewriting his manuscript, now informed by his horrific years seeing death and narrowly escaping death himself in the Nazi camps.
On April 27, 1945, Frenkel was liberated.
The camp was liberated and Frenkel became free, and shortly thereafter he learned that none of his family had survived.
Everyone was gone.
He wrote the first edition of this book, Man's Search for Meaning, over nine successive days within a year of the camp's liberation.
And there are a couple of afterwards epilogues in this version of the book now that he wrote later.
He went on to live a very long life, a very successful, productive, meaningful life.
But the vast majority of this book was written in nine days, within a year of him escaping from the horror that was the Holocaust and imprisonment in the concentration camps.
So, I have a couple of sections to read, given that background on Frankl's story.
The prisoner who had lost faith in the future, his future, was doomed.
With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold.
He let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.
Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate.
We all feared this moment, not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends.
Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds.
No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect.
He just lay there, hardly moving.
If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sickbay or to do anything to help himself.
He simply gave up.
There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore.
I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up.
A friend who I call, just by his first initial F. My senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day.
I would like to tell you something, Doctor.
I have had a strange dream.
A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know and all my questions would be answered.
What do you think I asked?
That I would like to know when the war would be over for me.
You know what I mean, Doctor, for me.
I want to know when we, when our camp would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.
When did you have this dream?
I asked.
In February 1945, he answered.
It was then the beginning of March.
What did your dream voice answer?
Furtively, he whispered to me, March 30th.
When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right.
But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date.
On March 29th, F suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature.
On March 30th, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness.
On March 31st, he was dead.
To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus.
Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man, his courage and hope, or lack of them, and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.
The ultimate cause of my friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come, and he was severely disappointed.
This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection.
His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed, and his body fell victim to illness, and thus the voice of his dream was right after all.
Wow.
I mean, we all, I think we all accept that there is a statistically disproportionate likelihood of somebody dying after a major event like a hundredth birthday or something like this.
So obviously these mechanisms exist.
You and I could talk at length about why evolution would have built such mechanisms.
They're a little bit paradoxical, but I don't think so, so hard to understand.
But it makes perfect sense that one's cognitive understanding of there being a point in living further would have a dramatic implication for one's homeostasis effectively.
And yeah I think the thing is most of us don't get a chance to to see it enough to know that it's real and so it's a it's a very abstract phenomenon but the camps concentrated this kind of tragedy so much that Yeah, they concentrated a lot of things, didn't they?
I mean, I think we all can see this with regard to much less dire outcomes than death.
What isn't included in that little excerpt I just read is that Frankl himself was, I think, in charge of the typhus ward, which meant that he also had typhus because he was exposed all the time.
And he saw that so many of the prisoners had this low level of typhus that was largely not killing them.
And then something would happen and people would die.
And And so in this case, it's not that the man became infected with typhus and that he died.
The man had been infected with typhus for a long time.
And he had found his meaning, he had found his hope in this external measure over which he had no control, and pinned everything on it, such that as it became clear that his hope was unfounded, he lost all of his sense of meaning.
And this is part of the work of Frankl, as we will see in a couple more.
slightly shorter excerpts that I'll share, that finding your meaning through work or a deed, through love, through emerging stronger from deep hardship – those are his three, that was his taxonomy that I read from to begin with – is extraordinary and really, really allows for so many possibilities, right?
Yeah.
I'm caught here because there are several different things that are relevant.
One, you know, what are we?
Evolutionarily speaking, we are trying to get our genes deeply into the future, which is kind of a pointless, mundane, and devoid of meaning activity.
On the other hand, we have this marvelous architecture that can make meaning of the universe, and many of us who do make meaning see it as paramount, even if it is subordinate to the other thing.
And so I guess the question is, I think it is apparent that physiology, we all know, it involves a lot of trade-offs.
We can't be specific about them.
But the ability to borrow from some capacity exists.
In other words, there are lots of things where you can stave off A Set of symptoms and then you crash at the point that you can right I've often been impressed when I was a younger person I did more backpacking I was often impressed by how infrequently you ran into somebody on the trail Who you know had the flu or something and was in the terrible pickle that you'd be in out You know in you know in the backcountry and
I did once encounter somebody with Giardia who soldiered on.
Well, that's a very acute thing that he presumably wasn't harboring for a while.
Right, he picked it up in the backcountry.
He picked it up and it hit him and yeah.
But there are lots of things you can borrow, there are lots of resources you can borrow from, but you really are borrowing.
The point is the cost of that borrowing is substantial and it hits you hard and you can imagine that a prisoner expecting to be freed, that if their physiology really did have an understanding that like, I have to get to this point because that's the point at which
Things will immediately get better and then it is apparent that they are not going to get better than the point as well I already spent it right I borrowed to get me to that day and now I have nowhere to borrow from So, you know, it's terrifying that our minds are that connected to our physiology, but I don't think I don't think it's actually all that surprising.
Yeah.
No, I agree Okay next short excerpt By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
I'm going to elide a bunch of what he writes here, but then say, freedom, however, is not the last word.
Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.
Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon, whose positive aspect is responsibleness.
In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness, unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast." So, you know, he obviously was writing – let's see, this is later, this is in the early 80s – but he did not see what the West Coast of the United States is currently enveloped in and enmeshed in.
Boy, could we use that?
Could we use a statue of liberty and a statue of responsibleness, as he calls it, or responsibility in this case, and see the tension between them and feel the necessity of both?
Yeah, I think we have a propensity to squander valuable things.
And it's really important that we learn not to do it, right?
So, you know, you can have free speech for example, and you can use it Pointlessly you can use it to go be a troll and make people's lives worse And yeah, that's a built-in downside of having that freedom.
But the point is really okay The freedom is important, but it's sort of a prerequisite to doing something useful with it.
But you don't acquire the skill to do something useful with it unless somebody sort of says, look, the objective of the exercise, you know, this is part of why I'm increasingly troubled by
The concept of recreation which I just I know it seems like wow what kind of freaking buzzkill do you have to be to be against recreation but I think the point is recreation is inherently devoid of value and that we have words for recreation that you know recreation is the the The hedonistic version.
And the point is you're supposed to be having fun as much as you can.
But fun is supposed to be a reward for doing something awesome, right?
Like wooing the right person, right?
You're supposed to have a great deal of fun with that person, right?
But if you can instead have a computer simulation of a right person who actually just sends you the right messages as if you were, you know, really a compelling, you know, partner, then okay.
Yeah, you may feel just as you would if you had actually like, you know, won somebody's heart that you valued.
But what did you do?
But we know that you don't I mean that's that that's what's at the base of this is that we can we We, our modern environment, our hyper-novelty, and our technology have figured out how to trigger many of the short-term reward circuits.
But what there is no market benefit in doing, and what is also much more complicated to do, and no one has figured out how to do, is how to actually replace the long-term reward circuits without actually doing the thing, right?
Doing the work, doing the thing, finding the value sourced in your meaning from doing a deed, or creating a thing, or discovering something, or finding love, or emerging stronger from a terrible set of events.
All of these kinds of ways that you can find meaning, as Frankl describes them, actually then result in joy.
And to short-circuit the like, yeah, but I just want the joy part, it's going to be shallow.
It's inherently shallow.
Yeah, it's like behavioral cocaine or something.
And I think you've hit the nail on the head, which is that there are these places where something doesn't work because the short-term version outcompetes the long-term version because you have to wait in order to do your calculation for the long-term version to show itself to be superior.
So yeah, in terms of the kind of joy and happiness That arises from some exercise of deep meaning which takes a long time and somebody who can trigger that same circuit, you know Within an hour if you pay the right amount Right.
The point is yeah, it's really hard for the meaning thing to show itself to be better Yeah, and this is part of what we you know, this is what markets do very very badly, right?
they allow people to figure out how to trigger every one of these reward circuits and Without your investment, because of course then you'll pay with money to take the shortcut.
But it's not good for you.
It's not good for you.
And well, there's a lot to say here.
Let me go to my penultimate excerpt here.
As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by, but nothing to live for.
They have the means, but no meaning.
To be sure, some—actually, I'm going to pause here for a moment.
Let me just remind the audience that this is a man who lived through years in the concentration camps.
And through dint of a lot of luck, and most people were not lucky, but also a set of skills and an understanding of how to find meaning and therefore to hold on to hope, he survived.
He was also exceedingly lucky, and most of the people who were capable of doing exactly what he did just weren't lucky.
But here is a man who is not Accepting that you cannot change your life and that you cannot take responsibility for your life.
So let me let me start I wanted to add something to that which is the way you described the story It is also a fact that his Failure to understand that the loved ones he was living to see again were already gone presumably saved his life because they provided meaning and prevented him from getting into the state where he just wouldn't get out of bed and would die and And, you know, this is the reality of the human animal.
This is the place where if you are too narrow in your understanding, you will say, well, you know, it was a fiction that kept him alive, right?
He believed they were alive, but they really weren't.
And so, you know, it's nothing.
And the point is, it's exactly the opposite.
It's the opposite of nothing.
Right.
For the same reason that we do not behave like most animals and simply at the point that we discover that an intimate of ours is gone, just move on and say, okay, well, I guess I gotta, you know, you know, not set a place for them at the dinner table.
And I, you know, I guess they won't be picking up my dry cleaning and You know, lots of creatures move on.
Some creatures don't.
Right.
And the point is there's a reason for that and it's not because being debilitated by sadness is good.
It's because something is very good and being debilitated by sadness is inextricably linked to it.
And when we talk about grief, we've talked about grief a fair bit, we talk about it in the book, I am often thrown by otherwise very savvy, intellectually sophisticated thinkers drawing this hard, this bright line between humans and non-human animals in this regard.
All of the, many of the usual suspects, by which I mean the long-lived social organisms with long childhoods and generational overlap where they live with multiple generations in the same social group, have grief.
You have the famous case of a chimp whose name I've forgotten, I think out of Gambia, I think it was one of the chimps in the troop that Godal originally habituated and studied.
Carried around the increasingly mummified corpse of her infant for weeks, I believe.
Elephants will return over and over and over again to the corpse of a dead one, especially the matriarch, in a family.
I think baboons are known to do this.
I've seen it in whales.
We see it in whales, for sure.
Resuscitation whales.
Dogs.
Dogs.
So, this is a place where a strictly humans are special and everything else is different understanding of the universe really does fall short.
It really fails to understand what we are and what grief is.
Well, in fact, it short circuits the important meaning.
What you and I get because we know what it means, we know all those organisms are very far separated on the phylogeny.
What that means is that again and again, every time selection builds a highly social creature with generational overlap, it cannot help but inflict grief upon it.
Grief that is so reliable that we can see it easily in these other creatures.
It is impossible to miss, in fact.
Grief is the downside of love.
Grief is the downside of love and, you know, boy is that a lesson about meaning, right?
And it doesn't require that the one you love remains alive, right?
The point is it's a real connection to something and yeah, don't miss it because you can do a narrow analysis in which, you know, someone is suddenly, you know, their line on the phylogeny has stopped.
Okay, I'm going to restart this little excerpt from, again, Man's Search for Meaning.
"As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by, but nothing to live for.
They have the means, but no meaning.
To be sure, some do not even have the means.
In particular, I think of the mass of people who are today unemployed.
Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called unemployment neurosis.
And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a two-fold erroneous identification.
Being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.
Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries, and the like, in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity, their depression disappeared, although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same.
The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
That line right there, the truth is that man does not live by welfare alone, strikes me as the incisive rejoinder to so much that is wrong in so-called lefty politics at the moment.
The idea that all we have to do is erase the current problems that people have, that we have identified as the main problems that they have, and then everything will be fine.
I think we'll talk a little bit later about how How the naming of situations affects how we view what we should do.
How, for instance, just to jump ahead a little bit, how referring to people as homeless as opposed to talking about people on the streets who are itinerant or transient or mentally ill or drug addicted allows us to imagine that providing them permanent homes will solve all of the other problems when, of course, there is abundant evidence that this is not going to be sufficient.
And that, to me, that brings us right back to the truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
Yes, which actually goes back to the taxonomy that you raised at the beginning, because one of the things, one of the paradoxes is that kids in wealthy families have all sorts of advantages, with which you might imagine they would be at advantage in pursuing meaning.
But they may in fact be hobbled because they have it too easy.
And so learning to produce meaning is not automatic.
Whereas, you know, let's say you come from hardscrabble background and in order to get out of it you have to build a business.
Well then by the time you've done that you know something.
And so what meaning is is more intuitive to you than somebody who would have to bootstrap it, you know, in a circumstance where it simply wasn't required to get all sorts of rewards.
And although Evergreen is a strange exception to this, the chaos that has erupted on college campuses in the last five plus years has largely been a problem of the private elite schools with the private elite kids who come from some family wealth, the chaos that has erupted on college campuses in the last five plus years has largely been a problem of Now, increasingly, the faculty and the administrators at those schools are bringing the problems to them.
But at least as of five and seven years ago, when we were still embedded in higher ed ourselves, what we were hearing from our colleagues at community colleges versus at the elite schools was the students at the elite schools were very interested in buying into a lot of the everyone's a victim ideology.
And the people at the community colleges, many of which were paying their own way through school, had full-time jobs.
Maybe they already had families.
They had no family support.
They had lots of stuff going on.
and they were sacrificing and they knew exactly what they were sacrificing in order to be there.
They weren't having any Yeah, and actually now that you mention it, I would say that what happened at Evergreen was that the faculty brought it.
Yes.
And, you know, it's not to say no student brought it through the door because it was in the ethos and it was circulating on social media and so many students will have had contact with it.
Although what we saw was actually it was, to the degree that we could see who Where it started among the students, it was among the rich students.
The rich students, sure.
Because they had the built-in sense of safety that allowed them to experiment with anarchy, right?
You've got to be pretty safe to want anarchy, right?
The built-in safety which allows you to experiment with anarchy.
There it is.
Yeah, there it is.
But I do think also the comparison between our classes and the classes that melted the school down is pretty clear, right?
The fact is lots of students walked through the doors to our classes
They didn't know what they were going to get but what they got was uh you know a broad-minded view of you know where we are and it wasn't a view that said things are fair you know pull yourself up by your bootstraps it was a thing that said you know we're we do have built-in suspicions of other races and we will default into that if we don't have better opportunities so we better protect those you know we better protect an egalitarian system
As an alternative, and I think the fact is you can actually, you can see this.
I keep mentioning that I didn't understand when the students that I'd never met, 50 of them that I'd never met, confronted me at my classroom.
I did not know for months until I had seen Mike Nena's very elegant little documentary.
I didn't know what it was that they had intended to accomplish because the chances that I was going to, you know, resign or be fired because they were chanting at me were zero.
What they expected was my students to defect.
And my students didn't think to defect because they knew me so well that they knew that what was being said was preposterous.
And so really what it says is, you've got all these people ready to be educated.
You've got faculty who are all about, you know, this victim hierarchy schema.
And then you've got other faculty who are about, no, there's a more subtle way of looking at this.
And actually the students will go either way.
Well, I think actually, I think, if you'll forgive me, I can fit this into my taxonomy that I created before Evergreen blew up, at the point that I was growing quite weary with many of our colleagues.
And you've heard this formulation many times before, but what I said was at the bar, The very low bar that anyone who is allowed to instruct undergraduates should meet is that they know something of value that they can communicate and that they fundamentally believe in the humanity of all of their students.
And too many college faculty fail on, frankly, both of those counts.
Yes, they would not belly up to that bar of yours.
They certainly couldn't go over it.
But the point there was... I don't remember now.
Damn, I feel bad, sorry.
Yeah, okay, so let me just finish up what I was going to be doing then.
You want to riff while I try to remember what I was talking about?
Well, let's see.
No, it's okay, I'll just skip it.
Okay, so the final excerpt here from Man's Search for Meaning is from the very final sentences of his original edition.
This is what he wrote in those nine days within a year of being freed from the concentration camp.
He says, and I can't find... I apologize.
I can't find the right sentence.
Where is it?
It's supposed to be right here.
Book darts never lie.
Book darts never- oh, there it is.
Okay.
In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints.
Man has both potentialities within himself.
Which one is actualized depends on decisions, but not on conditions.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is.
After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
However, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer, or the Shema Yisrael, on his lips.
We are both.
We are both things.
We are the worst of what we have been, and we are the best of what we have been.
And it is to our enduring detriment that we imagine that we are only one, or that we imagine that any human being has only one in him.
And this is also one of Frankl's repeating points throughout the book, that he saw goodness in some of the concentration camp guards, and he saw evil in some of his fellow prisoners.
And it was harder to view evil in the prisoners than it was to view evil in the guards.
And it was more reassuring to see any little tiny hints of goodness among the guards than to be good to one another as prisoners.
Because in both cases those were unexpected, but the fact that they're unexpected is in part his point.
That we all can behave differently than we are currently behaving in both directions.
And we should not either be held responsible for the failures of the group, nor should we hold ourselves to a past that we may feel we did not do the best that we could do.
We can do better in the future.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting to hear the idea that he saw evil in his fellow inmates sometimes and saw goodness in the guards.
It really can't be otherwise.
And I think this is one of the points that Jordan Peterson Makes really, really well, and people have a hard time with it.
But, you know, and I think we make it a different way, which is that, you know, evolution has built all of our best characteristics and our worst.
And the real question is, are we going to be a slave to the mechanism that simply wants to get our genes into the future so badly that it will default to whichever mode is most effective at that moment?
Or are we going to say, sorry, evolution, you blew it giving us the ability to choose and we are going to choose something that's worthy of us and we are going to reject things no matter how effective they would be at getting our genes into the future that are unacceptable.
And that's really where we have to be.
And we are losing ground on that at the moment, which is why some of us are so animated about The, you know, the little battles over nonsense that will be forgotten 20 years from now because no rational person could possibly believe it.
It doesn't matter.
The point is that is the sound of us relinquishing control to the mechanisms in which we demonize each other in order to justify what we do to each other.
And we simply mustn't.
Simply mustn't.
If you have any idea what happens after you make that step, you know that we simply mustn't.
That's right.
So there's a lot of places you want to go.
Yeah.
And I feel like That brings up many of the themes that I think that you want to cover, some of which you want to cover I don't know about, you wanted to surprise me.
So I am now leaving it to you to tell us where and when and how.
I wanted to start with a concept that I think increasingly I know that we need it.
We need to be able to discuss, I believe it is true, but we need to be able to discuss whether it is true in order that later we can reach for it.
One of the things that I think is disrupting our collective... I hate the term collective sensemaking now, given the way it gets abused, but for lack of a better term, one of the things that's disrupting our collective sensemaking Is that people do not understand that they own the downsides of their own arguments.
And I want to give a couple of cases of this so you can see how it plays into the particular focus of the moment, right?
Which has to do with the implications of a massacre and what it says about what we should or shouldn't do with respect to gun control in the U.S.
But I want to start with an analogy that will be clearer.
If we think back to some of the earlier battles in the COVID public health sphere, there were lots of people who, for example, argued that we, because we raised questions about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID vaccines, were guilty of killing the great many people, right?
And indeed, it is true that if the vaccines were safe and net effective, that as we said at the time, that it is inevitable that there would be people who would lose their life if they avoided them on the basis that we didn't know fully what their safety and effectiveness profile was.
That's unavoidable.
But if you say not that lives will be lost as a result of the argument you're making, which is true, but you say you are guilty of killing people by voicing that argument because you will cause hesitancy, well then guess what?
You just bought the other side of that argument, which is if it turns out that the vaccines are net harmful, if they, for example, have a net increase in all-cause mortality for those who took them, then now, by virtue of your own logic, you have become responsible for those deaths.
Now, does that mean that we're responsible if the vaccines are net positive and you're responsible if they're net negative?
No, because we didn't make that argument.
The argument we made was that the net savings of life comes from a discussion in which we work our way as quickly and as rigorously as possible to a correct conclusion about what the right way to think about these things and the right effect is.
And had we done that, we would have resulted in an intense risk stratification.
We would only have discussed the possibility of vaccinating people for whom there was the potential of these things being net positive.
And we would have excluded from all of the adverse events and other phenomena, many people who simply didn't need them.
At some level, what you're arguing is that words have consequences.
And that what we hear, what you have been told, is things like words are cheap, ideas are cheap, right?
Well, ideas aren't cheap, at least if they are carefully formulated.
And words, when they are accusations that come with them, the potential for You know, inciting of hatred and actual harm have consequences, and one of the consequences that you are describing is you are responsible for the corollary arguments.
Yes, you were responsible for the corollaries of your own arguments, and that's not us that's doing that to you.
That's you that did that to you, and you didn't realize you were doing it, presumably, or you were so arrogant to be that short of your argument that you didn't care because you thought it couldn't possibly be otherwise, and you were wrong.
But I want to change that a little bit.
It's not that words have consequence.
That's true.
It is that arguments have logical consequences, right?
And the point is you make an argument and you alone, there doesn't need to be another person on planet Earth, you yourself are signing up for things that logically follow from the things you say.
And how bad that is for you?
Depends on what you do when you discover it wasn't wrong, that it wasn't right.
Yeah.
Right?
If you make a bad argument, right, at the point you discover it was a bad argument or that it wasn't quite correct, what you do is you go back and you say, you know what, I misunderstood that.
And the point is, that doesn't completely negate the consequences, but it means that you're not continuing to be responsible for new harm that flows from the argument that you deployed.
So, you have an awful lot of control over how much responsibility actually belongs to you, but that's the concept.
The point is, you make an argument, and then in argument space, all sorts of things belong to you that you just bought, right?
That was you, it wasn't us.
And in any case, I'm...
I think we've been very, very careful to phrase arguments not in terms of personally, you know, accusing other people of doing harm.
But this principle is important and we have to be able to reach for it.
You are responsible for the corollaries to your own arguments, right?
And you should make arguments knowing that that is the case.
Now, the reason I raise it has nothing to do with COVID or vaccines or early treatment or any of those things to which this applies.
But it has to do with our current predicament, right?
We've just had this major jaw-dropping massacre in Texas.
And unfortunately, it raises all kinds of issues as it always does in the U.S.
when these things happen.
And the argument is very Low quality, but it is also a case in which many people who at the very least Have failed to challenge nonsense that's been advanced under one team's banner Are now very loudly proclaiming logical conclusions that do not follow and have been crippled by the arguments that they themselves have at least tolerated if not made.
We'll spell that out.
Yeah.
So to the extent that you have participated in the demonizing of the police, right?
The phony belief that the police are a net bringer of violence.
We all know that there is police violence, and that that's very bad.
And I think we all know that it could be less than it is, substantially.
And certainly some of it will have a racial component, though I don't think we know how much, and it's not nearly as much as portrayed.
But to the extent That the BLM riots involved the claim that all cops were bastards.
And in many places, including Portland, where we live, the argument was made that the police are not even deserving of the right to live, right?
The murder of police was actually called for regularly in graffiti and elsewhere.
And this was tolerated.
What was also tolerated were attacks on police stations, as I described in an earlier stream that we did.
There are still police stations in Portland that have just simply been boarded up and the broken glass, you know, hangs in the atrium and the atrium is dark because it's all plywooded over.
So that is the environment we have built around policing.
And now we are in a situation where we are looking at this massacre and we are saying, What is the implication for the right to own firearms in the US?
Right?
We're looking at that implication and we are looking at the police and we are saying, what should have happened here?
And I don't actually know how much you have looked at what the incident in Uvalde was and what the police response was and what people are increasingly troubled by.
Is it a story you've been looking at in depth?
Not in depth, no.
So there is this very long period after the police are on the scene in which they're taking no action.
And I think in the end, when we finally know all of the things that took place, it will turn out that that was clearly a terrible error that had dire consequences.
That said, all of the people that I hear critiquing this do not appear to be careful about what environment it is that police are doing policing in.
And I just, I thought it made sense, you know.
It's very easy to imagine that after the fact, we know exactly what everyone should have done.
And after years of having their jobs and livelihoods demonized, Being told now, well obviously this time you should have acted fast.
Seems like probably they should have, but just yesterday, just last week, just a month ago, just a year ago, these same people were being demonized and actually advised that they should die.
Right.
And, you know, it's different in Texas.
On the other hand, we're all participating in a national environment in which these things were frequently said.
And, you know, here in Portland, as in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles, there's a Notable lack of policing and mostly it is people's habit of obeying the law that is continuing to maintain order But you know you demonize the police and at some point they listen to you And it has reduced their enthusiasm for enforcing the law.
Now, I don't think that that's what happened in Texas But I just want to lay out, you know Scenario just so that people at least have something to you know Put a guardrail on their tendency to just say well, obviously, you know I think it's 19 kids and two teachers died and there was this long period of time in which the shooter was unchallenged inside the school Obviously that should have been different.
But let's suppose that the police had a And let's suppose that an officer had shot the gunman and only 10 children had died, but the police officer had shot one child and a teacher in the process.
Now, trolley problem-wise, that's better, right?
But we can't know both futures.
Right.
Had that happened, we would now be talking about what had gone wrong in the police response that children and teachers were caught in the crossfire.
In some quarters, that policeman would now be being called a murderer.
Something, you know, what if the police officer was white and the teacher was Hispanic, right?
What added situation does this, what added spin is this going to add to the fury over what went wrong in Uvalde, right?
So, you know, there is a principle called qualified immunity, which is supposed to give police Knowledge of their own security so that they can do what's right and if it doesn't go well effectively It's a it's a good Samaritan provision, but for professionals The problem is I don't know what the state of this thing is now, right?
I don't know that in an environment where the blue team is actually championing and championing the idea of In this case, blue stands for Democrats, not police.
Right, that's a good distinction.
Yes, when I say the blue team, I mean the Democratic Party is cynically partnered with a mob that is actively demonizing police, that is imposing racist interpretations on all sorts of unfortunate scenarios that don't have a racial component.
And so the point is, that cannot help but arrive with the police, right?
I'm reminded, actually, of an article written by a new friend of mine, Alana Redstone, that I wrote about in Natural Selections a couple weeks ago, in which she tells a story.
She's a – apologies, Dr. Redstone – I think a sociologist at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and she asks her students if a person, a reasonable person, could understand what happened to George Floyd without invoking a racial component.
And at first she is surprised that the responses come back, like 60% of her students are like, yeah, a reasonable person could understand what happened there without invoking racism, basically.
But then it turns out through further questioning that what reasonable person, what is hiding in reasonable person in the students' heads is Because they're ignorant.
Because, you know, reasonable people can be ignorant, but if they knew what I know, then that number, the percentage of students who actually thinks that you can understand that scene, that whole terrible thing that happened almost two years ago, almost exactly two years ago now, could not be understood without framing it in racial terms, goes, and I don't remember what the numbers are, but far, far lower.
And so, you know, that is the environment into which now, you know, two years later, this happens.
But our entire world has, and since before George Floyd, of course, the explicitly racialized context in which we are expected to engage all of our fellow human beings, as brought to us by, frankly, charlatans like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo,
With their best-selling books that have told us that if we don't focus on race at all times, we are ourselves actively being racist by doing so, when in fact it's exactly the opposite, has created a world in which, how could you not hesitate?
If you are about to go in and try to help someone, and there's a possibility that you're trying to help might not be perfect, and you then might be accused of doing exactly the harm that you are absolutely opposed to in the world.
Yeah, we have effectively created a minefield where the legal environment and the social condemnation mirror the predicament that we all face online, where we know that basically the terms of service
Cannot be followed right you will find out after the fact what the rules were Right because somebody will throw an interpretation on the terms of service that puts you over them So I'm not saying it's I think it's obvious to me That you had a lot of well-armed cops who were there well before the shooting stopped, right?
I think they should have maneuvered a vehicle.
I mean, you know, we've got to remember this guy is Had an AR-15.
I don't know what the walls were made of, but they can certainly go through almost anything that they would have.
So even just approaching the building, you know, without knowing where the shooter is inside is risky, but they could have maneuvered a vehicle close to the building.
They could have, you know, I don't know, used periscopes or these video scopes that, you know, you, you know, basically the end of some flexi stock, you could peer in a window and figure out where he is.
I think something Should have been happening that whole time.
I share that suspicion with people.
But I also understand that we have given cops an unsolvable puzzle.
And if the idea is, look, the puzzle that we gave them means that they are on the hook for anything they do that doesn't go well, and they prioritize not doing, then the point is, Well, that's on them because there were children and innocent teachers in that building But it's also on the people who did that demonizing who should have seen this coming, right?
So that's my that's my point about the downsides of arguments and into this environment.
Of course, we're losing police right and left You know, not only are police departments being in some cases defunded, although behind the scenes then a little bit more money is coming back into them, but many of the best cops either did not apply, you know, the future best cops went like, not going into that field, or retired early, or like, yep, I'm out of here.
Or were driven out by mandates.
And so the point is, we've done We've done all kinds of things to reduce the effectiveness of our police.
And now we're like, well, where the hell were the police?
Well, it's like, well, have you been paying attention?
Yeah.
Right?
Have you been paying attention over the last two years, what we've done to the police?
Right?
You don't think that played a role here?
Because I do.
So anyway, that's important.
But I've also, you know, this of course brings up all of the basic, you know, the
Stalemate that has existed over gun control versus Second Amendment rights in the US is always brought up predictably when we have a mass shooting like this and The problem is that I feel so first of all people who are curious about what my position is I won't speak for you, but people who are curious about my position should look at my unheard essay from November of 2021 which I posted a link to on
Twitter yesterday, but it's called something like the liberal case for gun ownership.
I'll put it in the show notes.
Yeah, it'll be in the show notes In any case I make the argument in that piece that The gun control advocates are and this is gonna make Others bristle, but hear me out gun control advocates are actually correct about the role that ubiquitous gun ownership in the US has on these shootings and
I'm not arguing that this is the only component, but that it is a necessary component for these shootings to be as common as they have become.
The question is, what does the world look like if we were to regard the Second Amendment as an error and we were to do something like Australia did with its buyback after they had a massacre?
And that's the part that I think changes the equation dramatically.
Right.
So the argument I made in that article is that actually, despite the fact that the public is not in a position to fend off tyranny in a fair fight, it is in a position to drive tyrants into retreat.
That an inferior force can often do that and has often done that.
It's been done to the U.S.
military numerous times in recent history.
And that the point is, A, the signs of tyranny Have greatly increased over the last several years on all kinds of fronts, from the insane rush towards censoring one's opponents to demonizing people according to their race, according to their vaccination status, the official propaganda, the public-private partnerships, which is actually a euphemism for fascism, right?
All of these things.
You want to spell that out?
Yes, the sine qua non, the signature feature of fascism is this fusion of the state and corporate power, right?
That's what public-private partnership is.
It's a soft peddling of fascism.
And public-private partnerships, for those who may not recognize that phrase, has been trotted out in lots of quarters recently.
But it has been promoted as this great win by the now no longer ...lead at the NIH, Francis Collins, one of whose chief agencies is of course the one that Fauci leads.
And he and they both basically brought in and made dominant in the funding structure of science in the United States, so-called private-public partnerships, which is code for the pharmaceutical companies have their financial interests in the research being done, the questions that are asked, and what is then promoted and publicized in the results.
So, we have all that.
We have a Ministry of Truth by a slightly different name, which okay, yes, has been put on temporary pause because we managed to mock it out of existence.
It's so easy to mock!
Don't kid yourself that that thing is going away.
No, it's not.
know as far as i know the department of homeland security hasn't rescinded its absurd claim that saying true things that cause people to distrust their government is uh malinformation terrorism so we've got the government threatening people for saying uh facts that are inconvenient right the signs of tyranny are all around now you can say you know your imagination's running away with you but how much of a risk do you want to take because
Because at the end of the day, these massacres are completely unacceptable and tragic.
But you know what else is completely unacceptable and tragic?
Pogroms and gas chambers and every other, you know, mass starvation, struggle sessions, all of this stuff.
So, all right, those signs are all out there, and the Second Amendment plays a role in protecting us from that.
What's more, The argument that was always weaker on the question of gun control, which was the right to personal self-defense, which I don't think is in the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment is phrased in a way that if I squint at it just right, it's possible that the founders were being extremely clever and that they did include it, but I don't think so.
So the reason I say that is that the Second Amendment reads, A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Now, you could interpret free state as the state of freedom.
It could be an individual right.
But I don't think that's what they meant.
It's a little hard to say.
I believe they've capitalized the word state, which implies that it's not personal.
But they also capitalized militia and arms.
So maybe they were just in a capital happy mood.
They do do that!
Was it Dr. Rolligator?
Maybe he's the doctor and he was at the founding and he capitalized some letters just to leave a note for us in the future.
But the point being... I don't know what's happening.
I'm just... we know one and only one person who's become somewhat famous for his abuse of the caps lock key.
That's totally different.
All caps and capitalizing lots of words throughout sentences is rather a different formulation.
Could have been a prototype.
We don't know how many hundreds of years he's been capitalizing and he's finally arrived at all.
All right, we're going to bail out of this particular fraction of the discussion.
But basic point being, look, the self-defense side of this question was always the dicier side of the argument, right?
The founders do not appear to have granted us the right to bear arms in order to defend our homes.
That may be more necessary now.
And especially in light, I mean, let's take our situation for a second.
We live in a city where a certain number of people believe us guilty of racism, of transphobia, of, you know, killing people by speaking about possible vaccine hazards.
Now, these people are crazy.
None of these things will stand up to scrutiny, but scrutiny isn't what it's about.
The question is, how safe are we here?
In that same city, the police have been demonized.
They don't tend to show up when people face threats.
Their ranks are thinning?
Their ranks are thinning.
And so the point is, look, you can say, well, you know, nobody told you to live in Portland.
And that's true.
But then you own the downside of that argument.
Because for this to be America, We have to have the right to live in any city in it, or anywhere in it, that we wish to.
And our beliefs cannot be the reason that we are in physical danger, right?
If you believe that our physical danger because we live in a place where there are a concentration of crazy people who misunderstand simple logic, that that's our fault, right?
Then you have uninvented America.
That's your fault, right?
So, in any case, my point would be, I think the gun control debate, I don't expect it to end, but I think it's logically over.
Because logically speaking, you cannot demonize the police and then not give people the right to defend themselves and the ability to do so.
And you cannot ratchet up all of the indicators that you are intent on a tyrannical bullying of your enemies and then say, well, but the Second Amendment is irrelevant because, you know, what's it for?
Well, it's for fending off tyrants.
Okay, you surprised me a bit.
Not because the logic in what you just laid out doesn't make sense, it does, but because you imagine that that logic, even if it were clear to all involved, that anyone in a position to actually consider this would pay attention.
Like, that's not the political machine that we live in at this point.
No, I said I don't expect the argument to end, but it is logically over.
That the point is, those who are advocating in the face of this tragedy, which has come and will come again, right?
That we must do away with these weapons are not paying attention to the net argument on which they own the downside of all of the things that they have been doing and arguing.
I suspect that there are those who have been considering these issues deeply for longer than you have, and to some degree than I have, for less time, yet will argue that that has been the case many times over.
That there have been other events, other changes in policy and politics and culture that have rendered actually these arguments long since logically over, and yet here we are still.
Well, I guess what I would argue then is that an honest broker can't help but see this one, right?
And I think most of the people we're arguing with are not honest brokers.
But an honest broker... Let's just try to put ourselves... One of the things, one of the places we find ourselves in the last five years is happily among people with similar values who are on the right.
Whereas we just didn't have much opportunity to find ourselves among very many conservatives before.
And many of the things that the, you know, snarkier among the conservatives will say is, this has always been what the liberals do, this is always what they sound like, there's a naivete, you know, that's the nice, that's them being nice, that's them not being very snarky, but there's a naivete to liberal policies that hasn't worked for all of these reasons for a very long time and wake up already.
So, you know, why do you think that this is the moment that ought to be waking people up?
I didn't say that.
I guess I don't know the history well enough to know sort of what previous moments maybe there ought to have been conversions happening to understand, okay, this is not as simple as either side would say it is.
I have no doubt that those on this side that I'm claiming has won the logical argument here will say, oh yeah, we were always right.
And in some sense, that's true, because the central issue is one of tyranny.
And it may be that tyranny is on the horizon and evident now in a way that it has not been Maybe ever in the US before or maybe it has but fairly deeply into history, but the The fact of these things being now so ubiquitous and so aggressively on the march means that In effect that can't help but be the central issue and if this isn't clear to people I want to I want to make it clear
There is nothing, as I say in my article, there is nothing that makes these massacres the slightest bit tolerable.
Right?
There is no net argument that makes them okay.
What we have is concrete deaths, tragic deaths in large numbers, but numbers that are small compared to what happens when tragedy unfolds historically, right?
So we are talking about actual children whose names we know against many more children whose names we don't know because it's an abstraction until it happens, right?
It's a tough argument to make because the concrete always outweighs the abstract in such a case, right?
The tragedy, the actual tragedy that we have is very hard to compare to a tragedy that we might have.
But the point is the order of magnitude of the tragedy that we risk Is so great.
Now, I'm not arguing that there is not a ton we could do to reduce.
I don't think we can eliminate the massacre problem, but I think we can greatly reduce it if we decide to.
For one thing, we have to be honest about the fact that guns may be necessary.
Ubiquitous guns may be necessary for this, but they are not the only thing, right?
There is a thread which, of course, is now a sacred cow and we can't really talk about it.
But Chris Martenson did a very good analysis, I think yesterday, where he talked about pharmaceuticals and the role that they appear to play.
There's strong statistical evidence that these are an important player in a majority of such cases.
Now, So, this does bring us full circle also and into one of the other topics that we wanted to touch on today.
Full circle to, you know, how is it that we find our meaning?
And why are so many people finding themselves with enough to stay alive but without enough to actually find meaning in their life?
And the so-called homelessness crisis is, at one level, a crisis of meaning.
And it's a crisis of opportunity in some cases to some degree, but addiction both to street drugs and to legal drugs that have been prescribed and then sometimes also sold as street drugs and sometimes just prescribed.
And also mental illness, which often is the result of early developmental issues, which may have to do with early prescription drugs, combine into, and this is something that Schellenberger talks about a lot in San Francisco, is the name of his excellent book.
I'm not quite done with it yet, but you know, I don't agree with all of it, but he really, he makes his point carefully and very well, many of his points.
And it is.
The point, in part, is the idea that you just have to let people do what they're doing on the street is actually not a kindness.
That's not humane.
That's not progressive.
It's not compassionate.
There is nothing nice about that.
And no, we're not just talking about the rich homeowners.
Whose streets have tents on them.
It's for the people themselves.
The people themselves who are trapped in these lives.
Some of whom will say, I've made a choice.
I'm here by choice.
Most of whom will not say that.
But then addicts don't own that.
And those who are mentally ill don't own that.
Right?
So there are many in the homelessness industry, which is a terrible word, but who will say, absolutely not, no way, shelter first, that's the only thing you need to do to save people.
Well, no.
Because actually, the reason that we think that, the reason that we can be led to believe that is because of what we have decided to call the whole group of people who we find Defecating on sidewalks, and walking around wearing only a blanket in the Pearl District in Portland, which I saw yesterday, and yelling at random passers-by, and having those people walk out into the street just to get away from like, what is that?
What is this situation?
Why do we have a problem here?
Oh, it's just a kindness to let them do that.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
So, you've got the issue of Kindness which has been weaponized and you have the issue of misdiagnosis.
The idea that the cause of homelessness is about homes.
Right.
And actually maybe we should play the video which involves Michael Schellenberger interviewing people on the street.
So before, so we've just invoked his name a few times.
Michael Schellenberger is a, I don't even actually not sure what he calls himself now, certainly a former liberal, maybe still someone who thinks of himself as a liberal, but is not understood that way by many on the left, who is running for governor of California, is hoping to get onto the ballot for the two-way runoff and the primary that will happen on June 7th.
In California, where if he gets there, he would then be running against Gavin Newsom, who's the incumbent.
Yes, he is an independent.
Yes.
But there's not much Republican presence in California, so he has a good chance, but he needs to come in.
Let's come back to the election on the other side, but let's take a look at his piece here, which I think is a campaign thing, which involves his interviews.
Broad day light, I saw someone get raped.
I was raped, bullied, picked on, stripped naked, robbed.
Somebody get stabbed.
I mean, like, someone robbed me with a machete today, of all my stuff.
Man, I'm not gonna speak.
You're lying.
Hit in the head with crowbars and bats.
I saw a dude get shot in the back of the head.
Somebody getting shot.
Do they live?
No.
You will end up getting hurt out here.
The other homeless people are, like, your worst enemy.
These people do not play out here.
Besides, I have weapons.
I have, like, protections.
Okay, what kind of weapons?
Bats, hatchets, knives, mazes, tasers.
And what's your drug of choice, brother?
Heroin.
Crystal meth.
Meth and heroin.
Crystal meth.
Meth?
I don't know anybody that doesn't smoke.
You don't know anybody that doesn't smoke meth?
No.
We saw a woman who was pregnant just now.
What is she smoking?
Fennel.
She's smoking fennel?
And she's eight months pregnant?
Yeah.
So are you seeing more people showing up in psychotic states naked now than say two, three years ago?
Yes, I think so.
I don't know what they're putting in this stuff.
I don't know if it was aliens.
I'm not trying to sound crazy and stuff.
It must be causing all these psychological breakdowns.
And I think that they had put a transmitter or something.
Because I was able to hear and communicate, and it looked like I was talking to myself.
My job was to intake homeless individuals on the street.
I don't have to be on the streets.
I just choose to be.
You just choose to be?
A lot of people are out here because they want to be out here.
Everyone, I mean everyone usually has a serious drug problem.
They kind of, just kind of quit society.
This right now is literally by choice.
Did you get the sense they kind of cared whether they were on drugs or not?
No, and I'm not trying to be like crazy with it, but definitely not.
I mean if we're going to be realistic, they pay you to be homeless here.
They make it so easy and normalize it.
Drug dealers are just being let go over and over and over.
It's like the cops were It's like they're your neighbor, you know?
They enable them because they allow the open-air drug market.
Open street dealing like that?
With the cops just across the street, like, watching them?
I think they've given up on the people that are out there on the street.
I've never seen anything like it, and I've been in the game for fucking 30 years, dude.
Never seen anything like it.
All right, so I want to make a couple points about what you've just seen.
That's obviously a campaign ad.
It's designed to persuade you, but nonetheless you can see his interviews, and I do think we have to say something about the Courage and dedication that is apparent in a candidate for governor actually spending as much time with the homeless as he clearly has to do these interviews.
I've watched many of them and he clearly he's humane about it.
He, you know, he treats them very decently.
And they tell him things because he's obviously a genuine guy who's interested to know.
But the obvious upshot is that this homelessness crisis is not about homes.
It's about something else.
Primarily, it's about drugs.
And if you think back to the beginning of our conversation today, the problem is that these... Drugs and mental illness, which he separates somewhat in the book.
Yeah, it is about both and actually you could make drugs a subset of mental illness because effectively what these things do is they hijack systems and they cause you to, you know, prioritize your next high over the kind of investment that might result in you having a roof over your head.
But in any case, it's powerful stuff and it's also not his only issue.
I will say that I have a misgiving about Michael Schellenberger, which I want to share with you.
When I first became aware of Michael Schellenberger, it was because his signature issue was about nuclear power.
And I believe he has it dead wrong, right?
And here's what I'm going to say.
I hope that ultimately he prevails in this election.
He displaces Gavin Newsom from the governor's office and then we get to have that conversation about the reality of nuclear power.
I know he's very compelled.
I've heard His argument, and I believe I know what's wrong with it.
Maybe I have it wrong.
His position is extant fission power is the way of the future.
Right.
Keep the plants open.
Why would we close these things?
Energy independence, comparatively clean power, etc.
And it's not that I don't understand his point.
I just think there's a point above it that inverts the conclusion.
But nonetheless, here's what I would say.
You and I are not Californians anymore, but we certainly both grew up there.
We both have family in California.
In fact, most of our family remains, our immediate family remains in California.
And we love the place.
And my sense is The emergency that is happening in all of the West Coast states, especially California, but not exclusively, is so great that we have to put aside even major differences, right?
I think nuclear power is a devastating and dangerous issue for which we have largely been spared the downside so far, but that that will not go on forever.
Nonetheless, I think the emergency that is faced by California is so much greater than that, that I even in light of the fact that I a Schellenberger presidency would likely, I mean, presidency, a governorship would likely increase the amount of nuclear power would keep plants open that I think should be shut down.
I think we have to risk it.
So I don't know that endorse is the right word since we're not Californians, but I feel like embracing this candidacy and suggesting to those who do have a vote in California that you very seriously consider voting for Michael Schellenberger, He appears to be genuine.
He appears to be a broad thinker and the test I mean, we know what Gavin Newsom is right?
He's a machine politician who is Deeply corrupt as part of a long-standing California and national political machine and he's been quite willing to go along with both woke and medically woke politics and politics Absolutely, he's got to go.
And I don't see a better prospect on the horizon.
So we will, you know, hopefully he will be displaced by Michael Schellenberger.
And when he is, hopefully we will discover that Michael Schellenberger is interested in bringing the right people on to actually refine his position on all these issues, which I would imagine would reverse his position on nuclear, but who knows.
And I would say, you know, I teased on Twitter about how we're going to get out of our predicament.
And I would point out that it is the moment, right?
It has been the moment for some time, but most people couldn't see it.
I think people now are beginning to get a sense for just how broken our system is and just how entrenched dangerous forms of power have become.
And the fact is, we have to take evasive action, and it's going to look unusual.
It's going to look like Michael Schellenberger.
It's going to look like Andrew Yang.
It's going to look like Unity 2020, right?
And, you know, I think we are all fellow travelers trying to figure out... Well, I mean, let's go back a little further.
There were good, honorable people who thought that it looked like Occupy, who thought that it looked like the Tea Party, who thought that it looked like Donald Trump.
All three of those, two of which were organizations rather than individuals, and loose aggregates of organizations in the case of the first two.
Who show up on supposedly completely opposite sides of some very, very important political fence.
But all three of those cases, Occupy, Tea Party, Trump, were in fact, outside of the system, at least some important level, looking in and saying, this won't work.
This will not work.
This must be broken down.
And that is in part what I think, you know, Andrew, that could be at least translated into something that Andrew Yang is on about, that Michael Schellenberger is on about, and that many of these, well, Dark Horse candidates are on about.
Yes.
Yes.
And some of us have been on this a very long time.
And you're right, there have been, you know, Game B is also an indicator that a bunch of people were registering the fact that we had a critical problem before most people could see it.
So yes, all of these things are attempts to do something that will displace power in some way that we can right the ship.
Let me say that, I mean, Bernie Sanders appeared to be that as well.
And so, you know, to go back what seems like into ancient history at this point, but remember when all of the so-called Bernie bros, when Bernie left the race and gave his vote to Hillary, a bunch of people famously, you know, anonymous people, but we heard endlessly about all of these people who had been supporters of Bernie Sanders, who are now supporting Donald Trump.
And no one in the mainstream media could possibly comprehend this.
Yes.
It made no sense because the politics appeared to be entirely different.
But they shared something fundamental.
They shared an understanding of a deep rot in the system that needed to go.
Yes.
There is a problem.
My way of viewing it has been capture and what I would call recapture.
We have to take back the system and people have frankly engaged in all kinds of desperate Hail Mary plays, but to the extent that we have a candidate running in California who appears to be a thinking person and somebody interested in solutions that are not
Existing on the map solutions that are born of an understanding that is deeper than the one that we are handed I think I think it makes a great deal of sense to go with it I would add that part of the problem that blocks this The reason that censorship matters so much, and the reason that Elon Musk's play to free Twitter, right?
It is a recapture play, right?
Return Twitter to the public, right?
That is effectively what he claims to want to do, and I think he wants to do.
The reason that that matters is that the censorship is the mechanism by which we are kept from understanding that it is that moment at which we must retake our system, right?
If we had had a natural discussion through all of COVID-19, we would have a very clear understanding of how desperately broken our system is and the fact that it belongs to other people who do not hold our well-being in high regard.
That would be obvious.
We don't have agreement on that.
Because we all live in various halls of mirrors in which some phony story is kept alive by the fact that those who challenge it are, you know, stigmatized, demonized, driven from the platforms and all of this.
And the fact is, the net analysis, right, is As we said earlier in the podcast, it is the conversation, the open conversation through which we figure out what is true.
How do you maximize the preservation of human life and human health?
Through figuring out what's true about disease and remedy, right?
You get there through an open conversation.
If you can get people by threatening them and by making examples of those who step out of line, you can make them self-censor.
Then the point is, yes, you may get your policy instead of the right policy.
But what's the result?
The result is a lot of people being less healthy than they would be.
And so the point is, look, censorship kills, right?
We have to escape that dynamic.
And we have to figure out, again, how we are going to have open conversations.
Not so that we can speak the truth, but so that we can figure out together what the truth is.
That's the point of the exercise.
All right, and so anyway, I will get off my soapbox, but This is an interesting moment the fact that we have multiple Highly capable players showing up ready to challenge power is encouraging.
I hope Andrew Yang will think carefully about what's coming his way if he attempts a third party run in the midst of an election that will surely be portrayed as a life or death moment for the Republic.
Yes, he will be portrayed as a spoiler.
And there are ways out of that, right?
It's time to dust off the unity proposal and figure out how to structure things to defeat the lesser evil paradox.
But nonetheless, let's go.
We gotta recapture the system and we gotta do it now.
There's not a lot of time.
All right.
Maybe just a reminder of Frenkel's taxonomy categories of ways to find meaning.
Creating a work or doing a deed.
The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone.
In other words, meaning can be found not only in work, but also in love.
And third, even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing, change himself.
He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
I feel like all of us can find meaning in all three of those ways, and we should be actively seeking to do so.
Too often now, it is easy to become hopeless, and to act helpless, and to play the victim, and to look at all of the powers arranged against a person, and an organization, and a set of meanings, and say, there's nothing I can do.
But you yourself, as an individual, can still find meaning, and in so doing, probably help change the world.
Yeah, I agree.
I would say I see a hierarchy in there.
What you want to do is prioritize the making of meaning in those first two ways so you're not forced to do it in that third way.
But one way or the other, it's the highest priority.
Well, we're all living through something that is deeply unfortunate right now, and some of us have more of an awareness of it than others.
Some of us are living the actual effects.
Again, I mentioned on our last show, You know, we still don't have complete freedom of movement among all of the sort of cultural and culinary entities in the city in which we live, because we have chosen not to get the experimental vaccines against COVID that are neither safe nor effective.
But at least we don't live in Canada, where not having done so means that you are really quite prescribed in terms of where you are allowed to go and how you are allowed to move through the universe.
That is extraordinary.
Many people who do not find themselves having made that choice are unaware and would rather not be reminded of this.
And it is an uncomfortable and unsavory position to be constantly reminding others of it, but the fact is it persists and it will only grow worse as it is allowed to continue.
to make inroads.
As you have said, Brett, the totalitarianism is making inroads in both the U.S.
and Canada and elsewhere as well.
Maybe just one last quick recommendation.
We watched Ricky Gervais's new special last night, Supernature, and it's terrific.
I'm not going to give anything away except to say I've never before heard a stand-up routine that included a joke about monotremes, to say those wacky mammals at the base of the mammalian tree, the echidnas and the duck-pilled platypus.
And that alone, at least for an evolutionary biologist, was worth the price of admission.
So highly recommend that.
Yeah, I would say it's the kind of routine that has something to offend everyone.
I don't-- does that say something?
I'm not sure I was offended.
You weren't?
Oh, surely.
No.
Well, I mean, he does a beautiful... I mean, I think that's really the whole point of the thing.
I'm not gonna, you know, go analytical on a funny routine and risk wrecking it.
But I do think he sort of had a meta point.
And the way he went about this, I thought was pretty effective at making it.
Awesome, okay.
Well, we will be back here same time next week with live stream number 129.
In the meantime, we're going to take a short break and then we'll be back with live Q&A.
You can ask questions at... it's not on the...
Dream.
It's not on the screen right now.
It is at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can ask questions there.
And we will have, beginning this upcoming Tuesday and for many weeks to come, there will be a Brett-hosted guest episode of Dark Horse weekly.
From now until, you know, maybe Infinity.
Strongly.
Strongly what?
Rather than weakly.
Weakly.
Spelled differently.
Not helpful.
You see what I have to live with, guys.
I can't actually model whether they have sympathy.
They probably do have sympathy over it.
I have no idea.
So, questions that you have for us that you would like us to answer, we won't get to all of them, we will get to as many as we can in the hour that we do, starting in about 10-15 minutes, with a link that you'll find right here where you're watching us now, or on YouTube, and hopefully Odyssey if we get that back up and running soon.
In the meantime, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
