Where Are We Heading? Bret Speaks with Peter Boghossian
Bret Speaks with Peter Boghossian on a multitude of subjects surrounding wokeism, Covid, and the endpoint of our present course. Support the sponsors of the show:Eight Sleep: Personalized thermoregulation while you sleep, and when you wake. Eight Sleep’s amazing Pod Pro Cover (for your mattress) is $150 off at www.eightsleep.com/darkhorseVivo Barefoot: Shoes for healthy feet—comfortable and regenerative, enhances stability and tactile feedback. Go to www.vivobarefoot.com/us/darkhorse to ...
We are not allowed to believe that there are two sexes and that gender is their behavioral manifestation.
We are not allowed to believe that we are understood to be bad people if we do.
Yeah, I'm a little self-conscious about saying this, but I think that my former co-author and I were the first people to come up with that idea of wokeism as a religion in 2014, an essay we published in Allthink, Privileges the Original Sin.
We talked about this as a new religion.
But you see, so this is the explanatory mechanism for why media, literally every institution you can think of, has been captured.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I am, of course, Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I am sitting with Professor in Exile, Peter Boghossian.
Peter Boghossian, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thanks, Brett.
I should alert the audience that you are co-author of the very successful book, How to Have Impossible Conversations.
You are founding faculty at the University of Austin.
Correct.
You are the author of articles in Scientific American, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, many different places.
People will be familiar with you, of course, from what has come to be called the so-called squared hoax, or whatever the proper term is.
The Grievance Studies affair, those being one and the same.
In any case, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you.
I appreciate being here.
It's overdue that you're here.
You and I are both Portlanders.
We are also friends and this should have happened long ago.
I should probably tell people who are going to be scratching their heads about why you're sitting in the chair I usually sit in.
Oh yes, that's good.
Well, I'm deaf in this ear.
And so, if I sat there, I would hear almost nothing you had to say to me.
So, is it, is it, I mean, let's just put it this way.
This is a feature, potentially, because if I start saying things that offend you, then you can just switch over to silence.
That's right, that's right.
That's how you know that I like you when I talk to you, because I put you on the mic.
Right, you want to be, you want to be hearing what I have to say.
I actually woke up one day, just totally out of the blue, at 42, and I went to the, it's an interesting story, I went to the, to OHSU over here.
And the head of the Ear, Nose, and Throat Division came, this really old, older guy with Gravitas, and he said to me, he looked in my ear and it had this view screen up there.
He said, I'm afraid I have really bad news for you.
And I just freaked out.
I'm like, oh my God, this is like some brain aneurysm.
I'm gonna die or something.
And he said to me, you have sudden idiopathic unilateral hearing loss.
So sudden.
Idiopathic, no non-cause, unilateral, one, hearing loss.
And it took me a second to comprehend that and then he said to me, you're never going to hear out of that ear again.
And it was, I was awash in relief because I thought he told me I was going to die.
I thought he told me like I had some brain... Right.
Something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it sounds bad.
It is bad, but it's not bad in a things are much worse than you know, because obviously you had realized you weren't hearing anything.
Right.
And I actually breathed a sigh of relief when he told me.
Anyway, so that's why I'm sitting on this side.
Yeah, well that's interesting.
It actually does raise a question about whether or not the Army of the Woke has a metaphorical version of this disease where they can't hear anything to the right of them.
Yeah, if you overlay a moral template on that, and so they believe anything to the right of them.
If it's Steven Pinker's The Left Pole, when you're on The Left Pole, everyone looks to the right.
But they overlay a moral template on that, and so they think that they're better people because they don't listen, or because they walk out, or because they shout you down.
That gives them not just social status, but moral standing.
Well, that's actually, of course, the literal definition of the word prejudice.
Correct.
To prejudge.
They have prejudged everything on a basis that where they are is correct.
They do nothing to check this and therefore anything that challenges them is wrong by definition.
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It is an astonishing degree of arrogance.
It is astonishing degree of unshakable moral certitude.
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It is an astonishing degree of arrogance.
It is astonishing degree of unshakable moral certitude, of hubris.
And also embedded in that, it's not as if you've taken the time to do the intellectual work and a diligent, rigorous study of the history of Western intellectual thought or even, I see your bookshelf over here, Suicide of the Western.
It's It's not as if they've looked at pieces and looked at articles that disagree with their thoughts and then come up with the best reason, then reasoned.
No, there's none of that.
There's no intellectual work.
A complete withdrawal from any, in which they would not do with almost anything else of significant consequence.
Well, it's a little bit like they have been intellectually arrested in their development before the acquisition of nuance, right?
It's like, you know, many of us have strong beliefs about the way things work, but we're aware that not all of the evidence goes in that direction, that, you know, that the universe is complex.
And until you develop that recognition, things look very black and white.
And really the question is, Are they capable of growing out of it?
Okay, so we need one more piece to that before we talk about.
The other piece is that they gain, their ideas are, they're rewarded for those ideas through the institutions.
They're rewarded through the ideas when they see these ideas percolate in various media outlets, in the academy.
Especially.
And so they're receiving the sanctuary and imprimatur and they go through these ideas.
It's basically these colleges are now, particularly humanities, are ideology mills.
And so they receive training.
It's ideological.
They believe there's bodies of literature.
So for them, their certitude drives, at least in part, because they believe that it's been gained through a legitimate process from people who have done the intellectual work that they themselves have not done.
Right, and it goes to a point that Heather and I make.
It's one of our core educational points, is that you cannot trust an education that is based entirely on things that are mediated through a social channel.
In other words, if the fact that the person at the front of the room thinks that what you've said is very clever doesn't mean that it is or it isn't.
And so it's very important that everybody Engage systems that are capable of telling you when you're thinking isn't any good.
You know, if you're a carpenter and you're making a dovetail joint and you think it should work this way and then you attempt it and it doesn't fit, nobody has to tell you that didn't work and you need to change it.
Right.
Another way to think about that is a corrective mechanism.
You need some way to correct your cognitions to align them with reality.
And there are, there's a limit, there's so many things you could do in the physical domain Like carpentry, you can just empirically, you can just start cutting up joints and sticking them in.
But in the cognitive domain, you can do that linguistically through a dialectic.
So you can do that in conversation with others, provided that those people actually, as opposed to just, you know, being your devil's advocate.
Which is an interesting history of the phrase as well from the Catholic Church.
What is needed is exactly, the tools that are needed are exactly the things that the woke absent themselves from.
Being in a dialectic of people who disagree with you and developing arguments so that you can accurately assess how confident you should be in a belief based upon the reason and evidence you have for that belief.
Right, it's basically a methodological confirmation bias.
Were they to confront evidence that runs counter to their belief system, it would be harder to maintain it.
And, you know, as you started, you pointed out that basically the institutions are rewarding people for wrong thinking.
Correct.
Right?
For thinking incorrect things.
And that results in the mind basically adapting itself to this Niche, right?
The niche is here are some wrong things that we want you to believe by the time you leave this institution.
And if you challenge them because they are wrong, you will be penalized.
You will come out worse.
And if you accept them and in fact advance them, then you will do better.
And so it is impossible for a compliant mind to recognize that it is being sort of lured into fitting a container that is itself a fiction.
So, I want to talk about some of those things, oppression variables, systemic racism, equity, but the piece of this we haven't talked about, it's on the other side as well.
It's from the professoriate.
Professors see this, administrators see this, so the whole system is in a sense geared to misalign people's Beliefs with reality.
It's been ideologically captured.
They've created mechanisms, testing, they've incentivized you, our students, believing certain things.
Even the very shift from education as a truth-seeking institution, Educare to lead out of, To education being to remediate or alleviate oppression from polyphorous pedagogy of the oppressed.
Even the very way that we think about the structure of our institutions in their newest star has changed.
Right.
And any questioning of that is blasphemy by the way.
Right, as Jonathan Haidt points out, you can't have a social justice university and a truth-seeking university, it's one or the other.
That's the other thing, there are so many things you can't have, you can't have equity and equality, you can't have, but here's the thing, when you opt out of the law of non-contradiction, none of those things are a problem.
Explain that.
Well, when you just say, you know, I'm not buying into this notion that things that I say can't contradict itself.
Because I don't buy into this idea that there's an objective reality.
Like, my subjective experience, my standpoint of epistemology, that is the only thing that matters.
And so, if something is a contradiction, that's just a contradiction to you.
It's not something that I have to be legitimately concerned about or concerned about in any way at all.
Not only the rules of discourse, it's just the rules of thinking themselves they've absented themselves from.
Well, I suspect that this is also in its own way a failure of development in the sense that A child, a very young child, does not necessarily have a sense of where they are in time, right?
What the relationship of yesterday is to today is to tomorrow.
And if you do an instantaneous measure, this thing I am saying feels very right at this moment.
The fact that it contradicts something I said ten minutes ago only matters if I believe in a kind of consistency between ten minutes ago and now.
But if I'm only holding myself accountable for the thing that's emerging from my mouth in this instant, then it isn't such a problem.
And I would argue, Heather and I noticed when we were professors, that there was an odd contradiction between what the faculty thought of each other and what the students apparently took away from those faculty.
So, if you gathered the faculty in a room, right, the faculty vehemently disagreed with each other on fundamental issues.
There was no worldview that they all embraced that could be described in which there were, you know, maybe disagreements at the fringe.
There were fundamental disagreements between, from one department to the next, but when the students Went from one class to the next.
They did not treat what they learned two hours ago as if it had to reconcile with what they're learning right now.
They treated everything a la carte, right?
Everything was, you know, basically with respect to this professor, am I making sense?
And so it was clear that the students were playing a game, right?
That they were not learned.
They did not even in their own minds imagine that they were learning about the universe and some large story that humanity has figured out.
That's a grand narrative.
Right, it's a grand adder.
What they were doing was learning to please the person at the front of the room and it was very hard when we were teaching to break them of this habit because in general the professors would punish them for trying to reconcile things that they had learned in different courses, right?
The professors wanted the insulation of presenting their own story and not having a challenge come back.
So, that's releasing a number of levels.
One is that you create a culture in which people don't speak honestly and openly.
So, you don't know what anybody else believes, you just know what their verbal behavior is.
So, the cultural aspect, I would even go beyond that and say that you create a culture in which everybody operating in that is pretending to know something they don't know.
Yes.
So, this is something I'm thinking about for years now.
Okay, so this is a big thing because it's coupled with systems.
To what extent do people have to understand arguments against their position before they can have adequate confidence to justify their belief in a claim?
Well, I would argue it depends very much on the nature of what is being asserted.
And one of the most difficult logical skills is understanding to what degree this part of an argument is contingent on this part of the argument.
In other words, just simply knowing that all the pieces aren't true in an argument doesn't tell you what the consequence of the falseness of this piece is.
Right.
Okay.
So this is also something, to piggyback off of that, that I've been thinking about a long time.
The really canonical documents about critical thinking, so really the deep dive stuff.
The American Philosophical Association has this piece I talk about all the time.
It's wonderful.
It's called the Delphi Report.
And basically, they say that critical thinking is a skill set and a disposition.
But what's been a main thrust of my work is if you have the skill set, but don't have the disposition, you'll drive yourself further into delusion.
Because you'll look in your epistemic landscape, you'll look for things that confirm what you already believe.
So you have to have the attitudinal disposition.
Certain attitudes being trustful of reason and willing to revise your belief would be, in my opinion, the top two.
But we don't really teach the attitude.
In fact, we almost punish the attitude.
Ah, and here's the ultimate case, right?
In science, you have to have what I would say is a perverse disposition, right?
We are all born wanting to be right about things, right?
It's much more pleasant to be right about things than to be wrong.
To be good at science, you have to take a belief that you are actually rooting for.
Let's say you come up with some clever hypothesis.
You can't help but want it to be right, right?
But you have to work hard to prove it's wrong.
To disconfirm it, yeah.
And that is, so it's a difficult counterintuitive kind of skill.
And here's the problem.
What we have done to the funding of science has caused scientists to become advocates for themselves.
And when you train them to be advocates, when you're constantly forcing them to- Oh, because they won't get grants if they don't show up.
They have to sell their proposal to the granting agencies, to, you know, their departments.
And the point is, it turns them into salesmen.
And they become absolutely incapable of scientific thinking.
Yet, as you point out, they have all the tools, right?
I mean, in some cases, they literally have the tools.
They have very fancy scientific, you know, machinery.
And they have the language, so they sound like scientists, they look like scientists, they function in a way like scientists, but the mindset is completely reversed.
And what it results in is very compelling wrong narratives delivered by people who have the authority that, you know, that causes other people to simply say, well, what would I know?
Yeah, I published a piece that was an adjunct to that idea that talks about when very smart people get together.
Was that from your bike?
Yes for my bike accident.
When very smart people get together people who are better at rationalizing you know coming up with good reasons for bad conclusions in groups you're better at that and so when groups of smart people to get together they're better at rationalizing in other words coming up with good reasons for bad conclusions and that's why you see entire departments There's a line in that, that the gatekeepers of reason have fallen, talking about philosophers.
So they just basically promote the dominant moral orthodoxy.
They promote these narratives to which there's really, not only is there no evidence at this point, but we actually know, for example, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions.
There's a large, a growing body of evidence against that.
So, it explains a kind of mechanism, a social mechanism, for how culture is created and how organizations, particularly academic organizations, become ideologically captured.
And you've lived it, I've lived it.
Right, and then the following dynamic emerges, right?
You see it.
Eventually, you call it out.
Right.
Because what else can you do?
And then the point is... Wait, wait.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
You see it.
You ask about it.
Right.
You politely ask about it.
That doesn't go so well.
Yeah, that doesn't go well.
Maybe we share this.
Then you kind of up it a little bit and say... Okay, so first you ask to understand.
Then you ask for evidence.
And that goes even worse.
Yes, and in fact, it is a cryptic negotiation, right?
The institution is constantly, in myriad ways, asking you, what would it take for you to just shut the fuck up about this?
And if the answer is, well, no, actually, that is... Evidence!
That's what it would take!
Yeah, you'd have to show that there was some reason to think you were right, and short of that, The whole reason I'm here is to call out bad thinking like that, but then the point is okay, so you are driven out which then reinforces the false consensus, right?
When those who disagree with it are driven out, what you're left with is the consensus.
And I forget who described it this way, but it is analogous to evaporative cooling, right?
That effectively what this does is concentrates the group thinking mentality because anybody who shows any inclination to challenge it leaves, and that leaves the people who are least likely to challenge it.
That leaves them more confident in their assertions.
They calibrate their confidence up in their beliefs and then they're all bouncing it back.
And then the incentivization structure for the promotion and tenure basket, for example, and I see what happened with Bruce Gilley when he's published so much stuff in his department chairs constantly telling him he's not published enough.
I mean, it's just, it's crazy.
I mean, it's like, it's a craziness.
It's literally crazy.
The whole thing.
I mean, you know, I mean, So, okay, so we have multiple layers of craziness.
We have the people who participate in the systems and those systems have the imprimatur of social legitimacy through the academy.
Portland State being my former employer.
And then you have the kind of the foot soldiers of the ideology.
And I think that these individuals share certain characteristics.
I wrote, put a tweet on this and people lost their fucking minds.
Can I swear on your podcast?
Oh, please.
They lost their fucking minds.
And it was about poor body habitus of people who, I can't remember the exact quotation, but people who participate in certain worldviews.
I mean, you see it with neo-Nazis, right?
Their ideology manifests in their bodies.
They're grossly overweight, or they're just like uber, steroid, muscular people.
So, you have a level of people who have some kind of undiagnosed low-level mental condition who believe that they should be more successful.
They're not.
They blame the system.
They get together with other people who believe this thing and then they go to the academies or they even go to teacher training programs.
It's like those who can't do teach, those who can't teach, teach Jim Woody Allen's favorite thing.
They become teachers.
And so we have a kind of Western civilization has seen itself in Portland.
We don't need to go anywhere.
We've seen ongoing continuous riots of people and we know who these people are.
We know these people are basically dyspeptic, malcontents, under-accomplished, raging at the system.
They've told us they can't be governed.
They put it on signs, right?
Right, and the offering of all of this, and that's the other thing that's infuriating, not even infuriating, it used to be infuriating to me, but now it's just frustrating, is the link between the academy and the spillout to the academy.
The link between what people learn and how people get caught in the orbit of the ideology, even if they're not true believers of every tenet or every belief.
And then how that gives cover for the radicals.
All right, so here's the place where this gets strange for me.
I have always been pretty bold about sharing my beliefs, even if I knew that they were out of phase with the room I was in, right?
That's always been a positive thing.
It's not always positive in the moment, right?
It does cause issues, but the net effect of it has been positive.
Increasingly, as the world has gone crazy and embraced sheer nonsense, right?
In Portland here, most people, if you asked them what they believed, would, you know, check lots and lots of boxes that would cause your and my blood pressure to rise.
But here's the funny thing.
When I confess my doubts, right, if I'm having an interaction and we're at the place in the interaction where I'm supposed to say the usual things about embracing equity and, you know, gender diversity or whatever it is that I'm supposed to say, I never say it.
And I always say, well, actually, I'm concerned that that is a very wrong perspective.
And I explain something of what I see.
I don't say very much, but I say enough that somebody can register that I am not party to that set of beliefs.
I essentially never get challenged.
What I get is relief from the person on the other side and then, yeah, I'm not on board with that either, in fact.
And then they pick up the ball.
And so I have the sense that what's going on is you have a lot of people who think everybody else is believing this thing and they better go along with it.
It's the slightest indication that they are in the presence of somebody who can handle a different perspective.
Right.
And they want to talk about it.
They're just itching to do so.
Right.
So that's the culture of pretending that I talked about.
And I think it was breaking the spell.
Dan Dennett talks about that a little bit.
But we've created a culture in which people are pretending to know things they don't know and pretending to believe things that they couldn't possibly believe.
Couldn't possibly believe.
Right.
Men can become women just by saying so.
Enough that we should send them to a women's prison even if they're being sent for sex offense.
And they're intact, so shall we say.
Right.
They're intact.
They haven't had bottom surgery.
Capable of committing rape.
Right.
Guilty of a sexual crime.
Right.
We should still take them at their word.
Transwomen are women, period.
Period, no matter what.
And so, and it's customary in every conversation, I have to say this, I'm sure this, I don't speak for people.
Wait, are we declaring pronouns?
No, no.
I support the right of anybody over 18 to transition.
Me too.
I support them to live fulfilling, happy lives, etc, etc, etc.
This is not about that.
Yep.
No, absolutely.
Look, if you're really in a situation where you're going to be happier and more fulfilled saying, you know what?
For whatever reason, my body is out of phase with my mind and I'm making this transition.
I actively support it.
100%.
But I don't support pretending that that is more common than it is and going after people too young to have a nuanced enough mindset.
People who are, frankly, Rightly feeling out of place, right?
If every young person is feeling out of place because civilization isn't working, and then you say, hey, you know why you're feeling out of place?
Were you born in the wrong body?
Right.
Right.
Abigail Schreier talks about that irreversible damage.
It's the clustering effect.
Yeah.
You see the clustering effect.
And the point is, it is creating an artificial, momentary sense of relief that is going to be followed for most of these folks with a lifetime of regret.
Right.
And that's the thing that's so horrific about this.
Once this ideology falls into disrepute, irrepute, Who in their right mind, were you going to see epic gaslighting?
Who, literally nobody is going to say, you know what, I was in favor of mutilating the generals of children experimentally.
Yeah.
Nobody's going to say that.
Nobody's going to admit that.
They're all going to pretend they were on the other side.
Yeah.
You were on the other side, all right.
I never said that.
I never believed that there'd be epic gaslighting.
But that gets back to what we talked about before of speaking openly, speaking honestly.
And like you said, you know, some people are just not going to like you.
Well, fuck them.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, it's so also I want it.
So that's it brings us to something.
So if I said something Publicly or what have you that you didn't like?
You would and now I'm speaking for you.
You would tell me.
Yeah.
Yeah, and if you said something well that First of all, I would tell you privately you would I would expect you to tell me privately I wouldn't expect you to go to you know Well, it depends.
If you said something that mattered publicly, I would feel entitled to respond publicly because the point is you're having a public discussion about something.
It wouldn't be personal.
Okay, well, wait a second, wait a second.
Wouldn't it be better for you to tell me privately and then for me to Perhaps reconsider or readjust my beliefs publicly so that it comes from me as opposed to the social.
It depends.
It depends.
You know, if you say, as many have, that religion is a mental disorder.
Right.
It's a mind virus.
Right?
Which I think I have said something very similar to that.
Wouldn't surprise me in light of the fact that that was considered sophisticated in new atheist circles.
I don't see any reason that I shouldn't say, here's why that can't be right, and make an argument.
Yeah, okay, so I guess it depends on the claim.
I guess it depends on what the claim is.
I would think, so let me put it on myself.
So if you said something that I thought was way out of line, I would tell you privately.
No, no.
I don't think it is way out of line to say religion is a mental disorder.
I think it is factually incorrect.
It is logically untenable, right?
So, saying something is out of line... I guess it depends on... That's the question.
If I think you overstepped, then yes, I would say privately, look, here's the problem I have with what you said.
But if you're taking an analytical position publicly, I don't see any reason I shouldn't analytically point out why I did it.
You may be right and I may be wrong.
Right, and that's the critical thinking piece again.
Wow, how much more would you respect me if I reflected on it, thought about it, and said, you know what?
I had this opinion.
Brett or whoever said something to me.
I looked it up for myself.
I looked up the best available arguments and evidence from people on the other side.
I don't have sufficient evidence.
I've thought about it.
I've changed my mind.
Boom.
Well, there are two failure modes.
So, I see this as an important part of being an honorable interlocutor.
Yeah, interlocutor.
One, people do respect you for reversing your position on the basis of evidence or a persuasive argument.
It in fact enhances your credibility with people.
Unless you do it too often because what it indicates is that you're not putting in the work on the front end trying to be right.
So you're wrong a lot and you reverse your position.
That makes you not very credible.
So, the ideal thing is to do your homework on the front end, try not to make arguments that are substantially incorrect, and when you do make an argument that's substantially incorrect, or miss a piece of evidence, or misinterpret it, get on the right side of it, do it forthrightly, explain how you made your error, why you changed your mind, and then the point is that's about the best you can do.
Because, you know, especially on complex topics, nobody is going to avoid being wrong all the time.
Isn't it better to have a friend like that who has those dispositions?
That's a disposition.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Isn't it better to develop and cultivate a friendship with someone who has those dispositions than with someone who does not?
I would go further.
I would say you don't want that as much as you may in principle like somebody who can't do that, it's too dangerous and too costly, right?
The fact is friendships are about something real, right?
Friendships may be pleasant and aesthetically nice when times are good, but the point is a real friend is somebody who's there when times aren't good and which you can't afford Is somebody who is going to talk themselves into a nonsense position because it's convenient to do so.
And a real friend is also someone you know what they mean when they're honest with you, they're forthright with you, and they're telling you something because they believe, even if they're incorrect, that it's in your interest to hear it.
Right.
And if you surround yourself by people who don't do that, Not only will you never be fulfilled in your life, you know, those forms of friendship, you know, virtue friendships, if you don't have that, you're really leading a life bereft of, I mean, you might have meaning, but bereft of any potential that you could ultimately have.
Well, I think actually the pandemic Revealed this in spades.
Yeah that there, you know most people especially young people who have somehow Oddly gotten over the idea that they're supposed to partner with somebody right who sort of see that as unnecessary or antiquated or something that people got caught Without anybody whose opinion they could actually trust.
And what they heard was the party line coming from every person.
You had no idea why anybody was saying those things.
Whether they really believed it, whether they believed it deeply.
So I think part of that confusion comes from a whole constellation of factors.
Less so young people and more so older people.
The older people, I think, it's older people just don't trust our institutions anymore.
I've been texting, tweeting about this for years now.
It's a crisis of legitimacy.
Harper Moss talks about that.
We don't trust our institutions because our institutions Are not worth our trust.
Younger people often conflate platform size with something to say.
Just because someone has a large platform in whatever.
I just had a podcast with a really nice guy.
He had a lot of Twitter subscribers.
First time I ever talked to him.
I really enjoyed our conversation tremendously.
But just because someone has a large platform, that doesn't mean anything.
Nothing follows from that other than that they have a large platform.
Right.
Well, you know, I think that there are certain rubrics you can use to figure out whose critique is worth paying attention to.
And somebody who has accomplished something, their critique means a lot more than someone who hasn't or maybe even can't accomplish something.
Also somebody with predictive power.
That second thing, I'm glad I didn't interrupt.
If you think you're smart, make a prediction.
Make a prediction.
Make a prediction.
Right.
Now I'm caught up on predictions.
What was the first thing you said?
Somebody who has accomplished something.
Yeah, so I've been thinking about Tom Nichols writes about a death of expertise.
We have a death of expertise.
You mentioned the pandemic.
We would have been so much better off in the beginning if people said, look, we don't know.
We really don't know yet.
That's literally all they had to say.
We're doing our best.
We don't know.
They did.
But the problem is two things happened.
One, lots of us said, we don't know.
Let's figure out what we can.
And the natural process whereby a model of the virus, a model of the epidemic, a model of people's behavior began to emerge.
That thing was actually doing beautifully.
Handed down from on high was then a set of prescriptions where we were told what the virus was Where it came from how it behaved what we needed to do and all of it was wrong.
Yeah, so so You know, I'm always amazed when people ask me about this.
Like what do you think about?
I mean, how the fuck do I know?
I have no not only do I have nothing substantive to add I have in a high school no offense, but I haven't had a high school biology class since I was in high school and high school is my last That's my interaction of biology.
I have no knowledge.
So like nobody should listen to me.
No, wrong.
Really?
Why?
Tell me why anybody should listen to me.
Well, it's not that they should listen to you as an authority on the biology.
But let's just say we were all told that the COVID vaccines were highly effective and that what was necessary in order to control the disease was our compliance.
Right?
Correct.
Correct.
I wouldn't use the word compliance, but that we all should be.
And I would say in Given a high-quality vaccine that was safe enough that, yeah, we should all do our part and get it.
But anybody... And I got it right away.
I got it for a multitude of reasons.
I told you I have Crohn's disease, it's an autoimmune disease, so I got it right away and boosted, etc.
Right.
Well, maybe we'll come back to what happened to you.
But nonetheless, my point would be...
If you're told, if you are assured, this vaccine is very effective at preventing people from contracting and transmitting COVID, and then you find out two months later, well, it's not very effective at preventing people from contracting or transmitting COVID, and then it turns out it's not effective at all, and it turns out places where essentially everyone took it haven't controlled the virus, and now we have a wave of the virus That is running rampant through the vaccinated population.
And the answer is, well, I don't know anything about how I'm not speaking for me.
I'm speaking for a layperson, but I don't know anything about how viruses function or how vaccines create immunity.
But I can tell that what I was told.
Didn't turn out to be right and I can tell that the people who I was told were distributing misinformation Turned out to be much more predictive, right?
That is something anybody can see.
Yeah, so I guess in that situation And I'm even hesitant to have these conversations because I know so little about I don't want to even say the biology, the medical aspect, the epidemiological aspect of it.
Yeah, I think we can say that if we were told something and it turned out to be false, that that's a reason for suspicion.
It's probably a reason for suspicion.
It doesn't mean that the things that the people who told us Sure, but I would say what we have is a very powerful public health apparatus that told us many things.
Particularly in, this is my inference from that, people in a public setting should be more humble about what they claim to know, particularly when it comes to public health.
Sure.
But I would say what we have is a very powerful public health apparatus that told us many things.
Essentially, all of them turned out to be false.
You had a heterodox.
That I can't speak to, yeah.
Well, you can't but if you looked at it you could, you know, you're as capable as anyone of going back to the history and looking at who said what when and then seeing what happened, right?
And if it is true that the If the heterodox community of doctors and scientists who were discussing this were much more predictive than the public health authorities, and that in fact the public health authorities partnered with the social media platforms and demonized the heterodox scientists and doctors, and in fact ruthlessly stigmatized them, which goes on to this day, then that would tell you something.
It's odd that the people who had less predictive power were in a position to destroy the careers of people who were more predictive.
So you'd have to, yeah, so what you'd have to do, correct, what you'd have to do is you'd have to break down those claims and see which was true and which was false.
Absolutely.
It's a empirical question.
Right, well, here's the problem.
Nobody's doing that, but somebody should, right?
What this really requires is a top-notch old-school journalist to go back and say, well, We're now years in.
Let's figure out who was right and let's figure out what happened to them.
Right.
I hope that happens.
That would seem to me to be most, most reasonable.
Not only most reasonable, but incredibly pressing.
Yeah.
Neil Ferguson writes about that in Doom, this idea that you how do we prevent the next pandemic?
You know, what do we do?
What kind of things should we be thinking about?
What kind of infrastructure should we have?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, Let's put it this way.
We are not brand new to the question of, you know, how to figure out what's true, right?
There are thousands of years of track record on sorting out claims and figuring out what's accurate.
So I'm going to use that as a segue into something that I'm doing.
So when you talk about figuring out what's true, I don't know how much you listen to NPR, NPR, NPR.
Well, here, let me tell you a little something.
I don't know if anybody can see.
Yeah, I can see your shirt there.
I stopped donating to NPR.
Ask me why.
Yeah, so here's my history.
I used to be, as a, you know, as a graduate student, let's say, I was an NPR addict.
Enough so that when I went to Panama to do my field work, I was there for 18 months, I brought a shortwave radio with me because sitting there in the canal zone I was able to pick up NPR and I listened every day, right?
So I was definitely on board with NPR and you know, Heather and I look at each other sometimes now and we say, Was it this crazy then?
And I really don't think so.
Absolutely not.
Unquestionably not.
So what's happened to it has been ideologically captured.
It has become an ironic inversion of itself.
Yeah, it is really, and for this, so our show with Matt Thornton, our mutual friends, All Things Reconsidered.
I love that, by the way.
Thank you, I came up with that in the shower.
He is basically, he's not only my jiu-jitsu teacher, but when you talked about a friendship of virtue, he's someone with whom I have a friendship of virtue.
So, we're doing a show, All Things Reconsidered, and we, so the show, it's a five-segment show.
It's a five-episode show of multiple segments.
So, the first segment, almost everybody came up with this idea because I was talking to a buddy of mine.
And he said, yeah, and I was telling him I had this idea for a show about NPR.
And he said, you know, I stopped listening to NPR when?
And I realized, wow, I bet you so many people have stories of when they stopped listening to NPR.
So I just started asking stories and we put it out on Twitter.
Hey, do you have a story?
And we just got inundated with, I stopped listening to NPR when?
And if you haven't listened, I've listened to hundreds, if not a thousand hours of NPR preparation for this, and I can tell you what I learned in a minute.
But anyway, so we do these, I Stopped Listening to NPR When, and then we have episodes, and Matt and I analyze those episodes, and then we go into, we have a reverse pledge drive, you know, I pledge not to donate money to NPR.
So, unlike the Republicans who want NPR defunded, I don't want NPR defunded.
I think it's a terrible idea.
I want a station, because I used to listen to NPR.
I used to, not as fanatically as you, I loved NPR.
I loved, you know, Car Talk was the only thing I didn't like.
Really?
You're the only person.
Yeah, we'll get like 10,000 emails, you didn't like Car Talk, you bastard.
But I want a station everybody can listen to that's not left, that's not right, that's data-driven.
All things considered.
Right.
That presents facts.
We just don't have that anymore.
No.
And so that's why I'm doing it because I love NPR, not because I want to throat kick them and have them defund it.
But you know one thing I've learned from this?
I've learned a lot from listening to, I don't even, I truly don't even know how many hours of NPR, and then analyzing them with Matt.
They'll have their own expert on who's woke and I encourage viewers to listen if you can do the brain damage.
I told my team this is the hardest thing I ever had to ask of you to take away some IQ points.
But listen to NPR and you'll see this runs through all the episodes or virtually all the episodes.
Instead of presenting an expert who actually believes it on the other side, they will find somebody basically who's woke or forwards whatever narrative they're trying to forward in the suite of ideological propositions under the rubric of critical race theory or critical social justice or what have you.
And they'll say, well, what is an argument against that?
Or what does an expert say about that?
As opposed to just finding someone who actually believes it, who's a credible source and asking them, well, what do you mean?
So, it's not a credible expert on the other side.
It's not a steel man.
It's like an actual straw man argument incarnate.
And it is fascinating to me to listen to this and think about all those people, probably older people, and I read something a while ago, the demographic of people who listen to NPRs, by far and away, they vote.
And I'm thinking to myself, wow, all those people who listen to NPR, driving around, and they're hearing caricatures of positions that almost nobody believes.
Right.
It's become a disinformation.
And I think most of those people, because I've now talked to a lot of them, saying that, by the way, I love this little, this is a dark horse thing.
I love that.
Fam sent us that.
Oh, I love that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, cool, cool.
Yeah, they're driving on the scene.
I know something's wrong.
I don't quite know what it is, but they keep listening to NPR.
Right.
And it it does have to do.
I mean, I'm sick of the term virtue signaling.
Right.
It's grown tired.
But it does have to do with that.
In other words, the fact that you were in your car alone when you didn't have to listening to NPR is somehow evidence that you are you are virtuous.
And so it becomes that that hallmark.
But.
A, do we have any idea what happened?
I mean, NPR was always liberal, but I think it was liberal in the positive sense of that term 30 years ago.
And then it has become, you know, team blue.
It's the same thing that's happened.
This is simplistic, but I'm going to put this out as an explanation.
It's the same thing with everything else.
People went to the academies.
They studied the works of their professor and are tested on things.
People just their idea laundered.
They discharge their moral impulses in journals.
It comes out as knowledge.
They study that.
They get correct answers.
They graduate four to five, six, seven years.
They go into positions of authority.
They take all the insane nonsense that they learn with them.
And while the missions like the ACLU is completely ideologically captured, to use a phrase that keeps coming up, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The missions are the same, but the people responsible for discharging those missions are in the orbit of the ideology.
And so they don't, the ACLU now is in no way what it was when we were growing up.
So, I mean, you're at the risk of, I'm risking serious cultural insensitivity here, because what it sounds like you are, well, no, I'm risking, I'm risking a serious error.
Because what this evokes to me is like a collegiate madrasa.
Oh, right.
That's exactly what this is an indoctrination of In a religious perspective and I don't mean to denigrate all of the religious perspectives that have you know, gotten people through Thousands of years by guiding them right what I call literally false metaphorical metaphorically true Yeah.
beliefs.
But these are basically brand new religions.
These are cults.
And that cult, the problem is it is wielding a tremendous amount of power.
And it is not only wielding a tremendous amount of power, which arguably is its right in a democracy, but it is wielding wielding that power against others.
Correct.
Right.
We are not allowed to believe that there are two sexes and that gender is their behavioral manifestation.
We are not allowed to believe that we are understood to be bad people if we do.
Yeah, I'm a little self-conscious about saying this, but I think that my former co-author and I were the first people to come up with that idea of wokeism as a religion in 2014, an essay we published in All Think, Privileges the Original Sin.
We talked about this as a new religion.
But you see, so this is the explanatory mechanism for why media, literally every institution you can think of has been captured.
Well, it's the mechanism by which it has Contagiously spread.
Yes.
Metastasize is actually the exact right term.
It's not contagion.
It's metastasized across the body politic and Frankly, this is maybe we will talk a little bit about our mutual friend James Lindsay But this is why I have a hard time knowing what to think about where he is, which is that that metastasis is As far as I can tell, and you tell me if you see it differently, it is capable of destroying the West.
And it is not a terrible stretch to imagine that it jeopardizes our species in so doing.
Right.
The world is depending on the West to succeed.
Oh, I see.
I don't think it's a species-threatening problem.
I think that there are too many prophylactics in place in other countries to prevent that from happening.
I don't know how you could think that, frankly.
The problem is there are too many industrial processes on which we collectively depend, that if we suddenly decide that, you know, anybody who holds, you know, anybody who subscribes to wrong-think is not entitled to work, that those things will collapse.
Yeah, I know, I don't believe that.
That's Tom Friedman's idea of the flat earth.
I don't think that that's true.
Wait, what is?
The idea that, you know, like, that's why they're, you know, Theory of the Golden Archers, for example, no two countries have ever had McDonald's have gone to war with themselves into Yugoslavia.
There's something about trade relations.
Yeah, I'm not making that argument.
Oh, what argument are you making?
I'm making the argument that there are technological processes on which we depend That require smart people to operate them.
And if you drive all the smart people out because they can't stand being forced to say things they know are false, that those systems will come apart.
And when they do, it is not just simply the collapse of Western nations, but it is those technological processes that we are maintaining.
And it is not... I'm not saying... Like what?
Swift banking systems?
Or what are you talking about?
Or just agriculture?
How about the nuclear reactors?
Right?
The nuclear reactors require us to maintain vigilance, right?
We have a problem that lasts for tens of thousands, arguably hundreds of thousands of years that we have set in motion and we don't have a mechanism for getting stupid people to maintain it.
Okay, so let me throw this out to you.
I can't believe I'm going to admit this on your podcast, but I'll admit this.
When we first had this idea of wokeism as a religion, we tossed around the idea of infecting entire cultures with it.
Enemies of the United States.
North Korea, Iran, I wouldn't put China as an enemy.
Oh, you were thinking of using it as an offensive weapon?
Yeah, but we didn't know how to deploy it, right?
We just didn't know how to deploy critical race theory and social justice.
Yeah, they did.
They did.
They did beat us to it.
It spread on its own.
I don't know.
I don't know that.
I don't know how we rule out that this, the fact that we are attacking everything that works.
That we are un-inventing all of the things on which the West is based.
Correct.
Looks to me beyond what a pathology would do.
I want you to repeat that because that's so important.
What did you say?
Un-inventing?
We are un-inventing all of the mechanisms on which the West is based.
That is exactly the issue.
Yep.
Exactly.
Right.
But the point that I would make is, if we were neglecting the things that allow the West to work, I could say, okay, that's folly.
The fact that we are actively going after everything that works suggests enemy action.
Now, I don't know that it's our enemies.
Okay, so Faisal Almutar, a very, very, very close friend of mine, he told me that the Chinese government and the Russians, I think he told me this last year, I'm going to text him and ask him at the end of the podcast, we'll put it in the YouTube description if you want, in Qatar and Oman, etc., have English language stations that push BLM, CRT, etc., to undermine the foundations of our society.
I mean, it's brilliant.
You can do it without throwing a bomb.
It's like the whole Star Trek episode where the people walk into the... Right.
Look, it's...
People do not understand that culture is as biological as genes, okay?
Right.
We see culture as an alternative to biology, but in fact culture is biology.
And so the selfish gene was great for that.
Well, the selfish gene was not great.
It was the beginning of our ability to rigorously understand that fact, but it That's where I'm going with that.
Yes, but continue your thought though.
So here's the problem.
I want to give Dawkins his full due here because I think that the selfish gene is the thing that opens the door to our rigorously understanding culture.
But it makes an error, a serious one, but an error that I can't fault Dawkins for making.
Anybody who made as big a contribution as he did would be liable to make an error somewhere.
He made one.
And it has not been corrected and as a result we have the wrong understanding of culture and the error Is the Dawkins says culture is a new primeval soup right that this is a new evolutionary tree He's not right about that
It's been a while since I read the book, but you're saying that, so I mean if you look at it, what is the advent of grain 10,000 years ago, and if you couple that with the advent of language, that would certainly be new in terms of the broader evolutionary landscape.
Okay, but can we agree that the ability to cultivate food creates an opportunity to produce more people who carry genes, right?
Correct.
So the point is, that's physiological enough.
Yeah.
The point is when Dawkins founds the idea of memes and memetic evolution, right?
He has exactly the right idea, but he understands it as independent from genes and therefore he imagines that a bunch of stuff which is in conflict with the genes evolves there.
I know you're gonna make, I'm just gonna possibly prampt, but you're gonna say you're gonna make the argument that biological evolution
has certain built-in advantages that privileging or promoting certain cultural practices increases the likelihood that the species will continue and thus there's some covariance between genetics and cultural output.
You're working way too hard.
Oh, okay.
You're working way too hard.
What I'm saying is that cultural evolution is a means to an end, right?
The genes create a cultural mind.
They create a brain that can be inhabited by culture to solve a problem that the genes can't solve directly.
In the same way, your DNA cannot fly, but DNA can make wings that allow a bird to fly.
And so my point is, culture evolved to serve a genetic purpose.
I don't like the fact that it did, but it did.
What do you mean by a cultural mind?
If you were to pull a garter snake from your garden, and you were to lecture it on epistemology, Would not work, right?
Alphabetically, that is true.
Yeah, the animal does not have a mind that can take on that kind of information and alter its behavior on its basis.
Okay.
Likewise, a tree, an insect, there are very few creatures that have the capacity to alter their way of thinking after they are born.
In other words, they're not genetically pre-programmed in a way that is productive.
Okay.
Okay.
Now learning obviously exists, but the point is learning is not the same thing as culture because culture is the transmission between individuals of useful information.
Now, the question is, is that as Dawkins presents it in the self-street in chapter 11, is that a new evolutionary environment?
The same way if I programmed a new biological environment inside a computer, we could watch things evolve in there, you know, Game of Life-like, right?
Is it a new environment?
Or is it the genes doing something that they cannot do directly in an indirect form?
Why would you think the latter?
Because it can't be otherwise.
Okay, imagine, look, everything has a cost.
The cost of religious belief is through the roof with respect to the genes perspective, right?
Imagine a book full of things you're not allowed to do.
Genetically productive stuff.
You're not allowed to rape.
You're not allowed to steal.
You're not allowed to murder.
You're not allowed to lie, right?
Those are a lot of potentially valuable strategies that have been taken off the table by something that lives in culture, right?
The only way that the genes would not shut that shit down is if that stuff was more than paying for all of the costs with benefits in the gene's eye view.
Right?
In other words, Yeah, that doesn't that assume that that's the isn't that like a monolithic lens to view the problem?
I mean, it could be.
It could be that that those those are you're saying that you're not saying they're culturally adaptive then?
No, I'm saying they're culturally adaptive, but culturally adaptive is not adaptive in cultural terms.
You're saying in biological terms.
You're right.
I'm saying the genes are in the driver's seat.
So why couldn't those things be a byproduct, like the moral mind?
Why couldn't that be a byproduct of an evolutionary... It can't.
They're too useful.
It's not a byproduct, right?
No, but it could be an evolutionary accident.
Right, and we can make the same argument about a wing or an eye, and the point is it's not a very... That's the Stephen Jay Gould argument.
Yeah, but Stephen Jay Gould was wrong.
Yeah, that's the consensus from what you're saying, yeah.
I mean, it's just logically a feeble argument, right?
The idea that we don't know that a wing is an adaptation is a pretty weak argument.
We can establish that it's an adaptation by virtue of the fact that it is expensive and it doesn't go away over evolutionary time.
Yeah, that's also the creationist argument that you don't have half an eye, etc.
Well, you know.
But bracket that.
Go ahead.
I mean, you know, nobody does a better job with that argument than Dawkins, right?
Dawkins does a brilliant job of cataloging all of the partial I's that exist in nature and, you know, the creationists are of course wrong.
My point is that Dawkins was absolutely right and revolutionary in what he said, but he has fallen short of maximizing the return on what he spotted.
Okay, and we started talking about this Because we're talking about woke stuff.
Right.
And so the question is, wokeism is destructive of the fabric of the West.
Unquestionably.
And far less risky.
In fact, it's even intentionally disruptive.
Well, that's what I'm arguing.
I'm not arguing that I know this to be true, but I'm arguing that I know that to be true.
But we would be crazy Not to wonder.
Look, there are a lot of people... Not to wonder what?
Finish the sentence.
Not to wonder what?
If our antagonists in the world, our competitors, were not seeding this into our culture yet... Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's no... That's what... There's no question that they are.
No, no, no.
According to Faisal... There is a question.
Well, I've seen some of the shows, the BLM stuff coming out, but go ahead.
If the Bolsheviks introduce communism, right?
And I think, oh, that's going to mess up the Russians, and the Russians are my competitor, so I'm going to, you know, I'm going to add some communist propaganda.
That's not me taking down Russia.
Correct.
Right?
That's me amplifying.
Correct.
The question is, did this woke revolution come from somewhere?
Did somebody have a meeting and say, look... Oh, you're talking about the genesis beyond Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard.
You're talking about the way that was... I'm saying I don't want to assume that I know why the West is deliberately, it would seem, tearing apart every functional structure and replacing it with a fairy tale, right?
I don't even think they're replacing it.
It gets way too much crit.
What are they replacing it with?
Chess?
I mean, what are they replacing it with?
That's a fairy tale.
A dystopian one, but okay, I guess I'll give it to you.
No, the idea that you can get rid of the police and civilization will get better is a fairy tale.
It's bullshit, as fairy tales tend to be.
So my point is, look, I don't know if wokeism is organic in its inception and some enemy said, hey, look at this.
If we can get the West to embrace this stuff, we won't have to fire a shot.
That's possible.
Or it's possible that it came from some enemy to begin with.
I don't know.
Or maybe it's possible.
I mean, just look.
It's how possible.
It's always possible.
I know it's being funded by, I don't want to go so far as to say enemy regimes, but I guess in the case of Russia it is an enemy regime.
We know that this is being funded right now.
I don't know in terms of your comment about the genesis, I don't really know.
I mean it's a built-in divisive pitting people, genders against each other, pitting races against each other.
So here's the unfortunate problem.
Yeah.
Okay.
Religion is not a mind virus.
It's an adaptation, okay?
Yeah, you gave a great lecture in my class about that.
So, I don't think this is logically in doubt.
I think it's very difficult for people to swallow because they for a long time have been rewarded for simply pointing out the folly of much of the analytical content surrounding religion.
But that's not really the point.
What makes it an adaptation is the behavioral prescriptions, and those are not modern.
Those are behavioral prescriptions for a world we don't live in anymore.
But nonetheless, the point is, the term mind virus has been polluted by the new atheists using it incorrectly for things to which it doesn't apply.
However, wokeism is a mind virus, right?
It will not function as an adaptation.
What will happen to it over time?
Well, total destruction.
It will self-destruct.
It has to.
Nothing else is possible because it has no analytical content.
Yeah, not only that, so let's delve into that if you don't mind.
Sure.
I am positive that this is a, I don't know when the expiration date is.
Every time, so I've been screaming about this since 2012.
Yeah.
It's frankly, it's very frustrating to me.
I don't know when the expiration date is.
I see how quickly it's gone.
So I used to think, OK, well, it's in philosophy now, equity, you know, hiring people just because they have certain immutable physical characteristics.
As Thomas Sewell said, if you want diversity, then put some Republicans in the sociology department.
So I've watched this mind virus and I used to think, okay, well, they just think philosophy is not important.
And then it went from that to medicine.
It went from, I think it was American Airlines has diversity requirements among pilots.
Like pilots, holy shit.
And clearly nobody's going to say that those things aren't important.
Even if it won, it would lose.
Correct.
Because in the end... That's a great point.
If the coalition of the woke won all the power and had the ability to architect the world that it claims it wants, A, it does not have enough competence to make anything work.
But even more troubling... That's Peterson's talk about that, yeah.
Is the fact that the various different constituents of the coalition would destroy each other, right?
So it's self-unstable.
There's no question.
There's no there there, right?
So we know that.
I don't think it matters when.
The only question is are we going to let it go to fruition or are we going to stop it before it destroys everything in its path, which is what it's doing.
And that's where we are, right?
Those of us who both understand the problem with it and are willing to say it out loud.
And willing to reap the consequences of that.
Right.
And, you know, they're arbitrary.
The thing obviously detests us and, you know, frankly for understandable reasons.
Lost friendship, lost relationships is a big part of that.
Yep.
But that, I mean, that process is worse than we know.
Yeah.
I mean, at the risk of Making things difficult for us to parse.
What I saw happen with standard wokeness happened with COVID too.
I saw COVID wokeness and frankly I still see it, right?
Our entire medical establishment Is pretending to know things that not only does it not know but that aren't true and I don't know what you do when suddenly all of your doctors are Persuaded of fiction are effectively embracing Occult and you know health is in the balance.
I don't know what you do but that's where we are and that suggests something even more frightening which is that the Disconnect between the minds of intelligent people and reason is potentially independent of topic.
Yeah, that's what I think we came up with.
That's the substitution hypothesis that people just have to believe something and then the brain is the hardware and the content is just plugged in.
Well, I don't think that that's generally true, but I think that the dysfunction that we are seeing is happening across domains.
That's certainly the case.
And the thing that spooks me the most is that some of the people who I thought were most eloquent in spelling out what was wrong with the original version of wokeness missed the boat on COVID.
I don't know what to do with that.
People who had the immunity To woke thinking when the topic was, you know, race and gender, didn't have what it took when it came to viruses.
I feel the same way about the New Atheist and the Skeptical Movement.
The same people who had the tools.
And it really is true that the tools are the same.
You know, what is your evidence?
How do you weigh the evidence?
What is the argument against it?
You can do, you know, what Tim Van Gelder does, argument mapping, what have you.
The tools are the same, but the tremendous irony is that from the skeptical movement and the atheist movement emerged new movements of people who claim to be skeptics and atheists, who themselves were the most dogmatic religious people you would ever meet.
Right, like foot soldiers of these movements that are not supposed to have foot soldiers.
Yes.
And then, you know, I would point this out to folks.
And I will say a difference is unlike traditional religious people who say, yes, I'm religious.
Woke people won't say they're religious.
That idea hasn't become, I don't know, if acceptable or understood or mainstream.
I don't know what the word is, but they won't say, yes, I'm religious.
I'm the woke religion or the critical social justice religion.
I mean, in fact, what they do is they claim the mantle of science, which is upside down and backwards.
So, I find that we are in the place that we always end up when people of your and my mindset on this get together, which is that we talk ourselves blue in the face trying to say, look, this is not difficult to understand.
No, it's not difficult to understand at all.
It's dangerous, it's frightening, but it's not hard to see it.
The problem is that despite the fact that it's not hard to see it, most do not.
Correct.
Most do not and most are, not only do most people not, you know, we went around the country and then I got to go for dinner pretty soon.
We went around the country and we did these reverse Q&As and it's on my YouTube channel.
So what do you mean reverse Q&A?
Well, instead of the students asking the professor questions and the professor answering, I ask students questions and they answer and I ask.
It's street epistemology.
Asking people if their confidence in their belief is justified and we had like a Likert scale.
You know, strongly agree, agree, neutral, but what have you.
They start on the neutral, I'd ask them a question, they'd go to one side and then I'd ask them a question and encourage them to move.
That's part of the solution to this.
Encourage people.
That's the disposition again.
Changing your mind is a moral virtue, particularly if it's on the basis of reason and evidence.
You change your mind, that's a good thing.
You should be rewarded for that.
And among the things that I've learned from that is that so many of these young people, they're just, it's not that they're completely beholden to it, but that they accept basic premises of the tenets of critical social but that they accept basic premises of the tenets of critical social justice without ever giving it a thought, without even knowing what certain They just accept it or they just, they just buy into it.
Yeah.
I mean, and you know, it's faith.
Yeah, it's a type of faith absent metaphysics.
Yeah, right.
Well, I mean, it's almost like the purest essence of faith, right?
The deepest faith is the faith that is based on the least, and this is based on nothing.
Yeah, kind of fetism of, yeah, it's true.
It is true.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I feel like we've had half a conversation.
Maybe we should pick it up another time.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for stopping by Dark Horse.
Your new, I guess it's not, your new show is?
All Things Reconsidered.
It's going to be on YouTube.
We're shooting for October to do that.
You can watch those sidewalk exercises, the street epistemology that we've done there.
Quite interesting.
Yeah, on the YouTube stations.
We have so much content that we're putting on.
I have another book.
I'm going back to Hungary to travel around and talk about scientific skepticism and Wokeism and a whole bunch of stuff.
What's your new book?
Are you ready to say it?
I can't give the title yet.
It's still in work, but it's about a young Socrates who wanders a mythical Greek countryside, fomenting a rebellion against the gods.
He has a superpower, which is reason.
Having conversations with people of different races and mystical creatures.
It harkens back, not to conservative values, but to ancient values.
Discourse, dialectic, Socratic.
Broadly Socratic values.
So I'm putting the final... It's a fiction book for children.
It's far more difficult to... It's a year overdue.
It's very, very, very difficult to... It's my first attempt at fiction.
Awesome.
Well, I'm looking forward to reading that.
Okay.
Well, Peter Boghossian, it's been a real pleasure.
