Cluster B World: Joshua Slocum on the DarkHorse Podcast
Bret Speaks with Joshua Slocum of the Disaffected Podcast on DarkHorse. They discuss personality disorders, blame, societal failure, and the links therein.Find Joshua on X: https://twitter.com/DisaffectedPodFind Joshua on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF_kJax21k2zVlc3tJn-22Q*****Sponsors:Mindbloom: at-home ketamine therapy. Use code DARKHORSE at www.Mindbloom.com to receive $100 off your first six session program.PaleoValley: Wide array of amazing products, including SuperFood Gol...
The vast majority of people who turn out this way come from a broken kind of environment at home.
We cannot want to convict the parents, but we want so badly not to convict them that we actually end up doing the children a disservice because we will blame them before we'll blame the parents.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Josh Slocum, who is co-host of the Disaffected podcast.
Welcome to Dark Horse, Josh.
Thanks, Brett.
Appreciate having me.
Yeah, it's good to see you.
You and I have had a number of conversations outside of podcast space, but in any case, I'm looking forward to this one.
I will confess up front that events in the last two days in Israel have captured my attention and have me a little bit distracted, so I'm having to return myself to the mindset that will put this conversation In proper context, I apologize for that, but that's unavoidable.
It is unavoidable.
So let's talk about who you are before we get to the topic in question.
I have struggled to describe the Disaffected podcast.
I think probably you will do a better job than I would.
How would you encapsulate the subject matter of Disaffected?
Sure.
Disaffected is a weekly show.
We have a thesis.
My friend and producer, Kevin, is the other half of the show, and the thesis is that we are living in a society where the kinds of abusive psychology and abusive actions that we are familiar with in terms of domestic abuse and child abuse, that those dynamics that we think of as happening behind closed doors in the home, have now exploded out of the home
Basically, I like to say domestic abuse has gone public and feral.
So the kinds of cognitive distortions, emotional abuse, lying, reversing the truth, making perpetrators out of victims, these are things that are familiar to me from my childhood growing up in a home that featured this kind of behavior.
And I now believe that our mainstream society, not just the fringe, not just the worst actors, and no, not just Twitter, but our mainstream society itself, is acting like it has a Cluster B personality disorder.
We say the show is politics, culture, and relationships through a psychological lens, and the lens that we use is particularly focused on this cluster of personality disorder traits.
Excellent.
All right, now let's talk about your background, as it is relevant.
Am I correct that you are not a degreed psychologist?
You are correct.
I am not a mental health professional.
I do not have a psychology degree.
I do not represent to anyone that I am a mental health professional.
What I am is a very well-read layman, And a layman who has extensive personal, lifelong experience with this psychology in my home, and who also has worked around people with these traits and disorders, and now I actually consult with clients who are facing these difficulties in their personal and professional lives.
So I don't like the term, I don't like the connotations that it has, but You know, if you'll bracket all that off and just give me a dispensation, I'm a child abuse survivor, right?
And what I want to do is help people to understand, because I think that this does help people understand, why we are living in the world we are living in, and what WOKE actually is.
Excellent.
I will say, the name of this podcast is obviously Dark Horse, and the intent when I started it was to talk to people who you wouldn't ordinarily imagine would have a great deal of expertise in an area, but had shown great promise through their behavior rather than advanced degrees and formal accolades.
So anyway, you are a dark horse in the exact sense that I meant this when I named the podcast.
In other words, frankly, the expert class has so embarrassed itself in the last several years that I think all of us should be looking for anybody whose insight in the world is actually predictive of things, and we should be ignoring things like formal degrees that often disguise pure foolishness.
So I welcome your amateur status.
Thank you.
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So let's figure out how to broach the subject and let us also say that this is an interesting moment to be talking about the possibility that cluster B pathologies have broken into a larger scale and may be dominating something in our political and sociocultural landscape because of course that idea has now emerged under some other Names.
I have seen Michael Schellenberger talk about this and I believe Michael Schellenberger references your work in his presentation.
Is that correct?
Yeah, yeah.
He, yeah, he rounded up three or four people in his piece last week that that he says have been helpful to his formulating his thinking on that.
Yeah.
So that's good.
I believe he has learned a lot from you and that it shows.
I've also seen Chris Ruffo has recently, I think, published a book on the topic of cluster B diagnoses and their relevance to things like the woke Are you sure that he published a book, or is it perhaps more... He may have published a book, I wasn't aware of that, but I do know that he released a long article and also an 11-minute video, so yeah, it has been coming out there.
If there's a book, I was unaware until you just told me.
Interesting.
I am not sure if my memory is faulty here, but I thought that the article had been a...
An excerpt from a book, but maybe I have imagined that.
In any case, he has certainly talked very publicly about the possibility that cluster B disorders have scaled up into larger social phenomena.
As far as you know, does he cite your work?
No, he does not.
He does not cite your work.
All right.
I find that interesting.
It's hard to imagine that he's been thinking deeply about this topic and is not aware of your ongoing exploration of it, but who knows what we don't know.
In any case, I think it would be interesting, since you're both deeply involved in this question, it would be interesting to hear you pool your thoughts and see whether or not There might not be some emergent set of understandings that would be produced by the sum of those parts.
So, let us hear your encapsulation of your thesis regarding cluster B personality disorders and the larger social environment.
Okay, so I don't know your audience's level of familiarity with the topic, but I would assume that there are plenty out there for whom this will be new terminology.
Yeah, so let's just start with what is Cluster B?
Good, okay.
So, I like to start actually with what are personality disorders.
That's a foundational concept I think people need to be able to grasp to think carefully about this.
Personality disorders.
Are a kind, you can think of them as a kind of mental illness, but they are not the kind of mental illness that that phrase, mental illness, probably evokes in people who are listening right now.
Mainly, generally, I'll say this before I go a lot further too, because this is bound to come up among your audience, perhaps in the response.
I'm going to be speaking, I'm going to be making a lot of generalizations.
I'm going to be speaking broadly.
I am a reductionist by nature.
I understand the necessity for complication and nuance, but it is my belief that right now in the era that we live in, we actually need a good old-fashioned dose of pattern detection and reductionism to common denominators.
So I am going to be making some very broad general statements.
I believe that they are largely accurate.
I'm not going to caveat everything I say.
I'm not going to give a series of not alls and not in this case.
I will not do that.
So I always and I ask my own audience, supply your own not alls.
I am aware that what I say will not be applicable to every single situation.
I am also aware that my thesis is not the only thesis that can help explain this.
So now that I've gotten that out of the way, Tedious as it sounds, you're probably going to appreciate it, Brett, because one of the things that comes back very quickly from people who don't want to hear this is, oh, you're painting with a broad brush.
This is, you know, you're projecting one man's personal rare experience onto a whole thing.
You know, it's a very common reaction.
Well, let me intrude here to say that one of the things that I think we face when we look at psychological phenomena is that psychology aspires to be a science in the way that biology or physics or chemistry is a science.
And it has a problem Which is that not only is it a complex system, which it shares with biology more generally, but it is a complex system built of information and information processors in the mind.
These are things we understand very poorly, and so what psychology is left with is the recognition of
Patterns of phenomena that is not the same thing as comprehending the underlying mechanisms and so we have to treat psychology very differently than we treat other disciplines because instead of being able to point for example to an enzyme that accomplishes a particular reduction in activation energy for a particular set of reactants
What we have instead are checklists where oftentimes we'll say this disorder is present if 9 of the following 12 conditions are there.
That is not a precise landscape.
We may be talking about multiple phenomena which are combined in one basket and so in any case, Need to generalize is clear.
Your need to imply caveats for everything should be assumed.
Anybody who is speaking carefully and rigorously in this landscape is either going to be so dogged by the requirement to say not all and all else being equal in front of every sentence.
Yeah.
Or it just has to be assumed.
So anyway, I know why you're there.
I will say one slight bit of pushback on the issue of reductionism.
Reductionism is one fantastic side of a two-sided coin.
The other side is synthesis.
Synthesis is my stock and trade.
And so in any case, I do believe that the requirement for proper reductionism is present, but the need to then build those reductive elements into a synthetic hole that makes some kind of sense is equally important.
Agreed.
And I believe that you do that as well.
So I don't want you to corner yourself as a reductionist when in fact I think you're involved in both of these processes.
Thank you.
That's not a perspective I get very often, usually.
One does feel defensive when talking about this.
Sure.
It's unpopular.
So personality disorders.
So if we think of them as a kind of mental illness, they're not the kind of mental illness that your audience just thought of when I used that phrase.
What most people think of are things like depression, even chronic major depression, Chronic pathological levels of anxiety that we might describe as generalized anxiety disorder or panic disorder.
It's not schizophrenia where a person is actually out of touch with reality.
We're not talking about that.
That's not the people I'm talking about.
So they're not classic mental illnesses and again I ask people to understand that this is general and there are overlaps and there are cases where things can look like other things.
But we tend to think of... personality disorders are what they say they are.
They are disorders of personality.
Yes, it is personal.
Yes, it is talking about the who, the you, who you are.
It's very personal.
This is why it's hard for people sometimes to accept hearing it, because I can't say, oh no, this isn't a personal criticism.
It is.
This is about who you are as a person.
And what I mean by that is they are long-standing, deeply, deeply ingrained patterns of mentation, emotional processing, and behavior to yourself and to other people.
Deeply ingrained, pathological, States now hold on hold on I have to I now see what my role is going to be here I'm going to have to translate this into evolutionary terms and you should just know I have a principle that I live by Which is that all true narratives must reconcile.
Which is to say, if you're saying true things about psychology, and I understand things in terms of evolutionary biology, then we must be able to translate between them.
And if we can't, it's because we don't know something yet or we've got something wrong.
So when you say these are, you use the term pathological, right?
Yes.
When you say that these are pathological disorders, do you mean to imply that the person exhibiting them necessarily comes out behind as a result of the presence of these disorders?
Define behind.
If I say that influenza is a pathogen.
I am implying that to have influenza does not give you an advantage that it costs you inherently.
The amount it costs you may vary but that it costs you is inherent.
Is it true that these disorders inherently disadvantage the people who have them?
That's very broad but I'm going to take it in a particular direction that I think you're aiming for.
What I am saying, when I say pathological in this context, what I mean is that they are negative and deleterious behaviors.
Negative to whom?
Well, negative to other people.
My orientation to this, I'm going to disclose my priors to everybody.
I'm going to tell you what all my biases are and all my prior assumptions.
My bias is to those who are affected and harmed by this.
I do not have warm and sympathetic feelings to those with Cluster B personality disorders.
I will not pretend that I do.
I am concerned because I believe we're living in a society right now where destructive and hateful kinds of behaviors and emotional manipulations are considered normal and the people against whom they are directed are not listened to.
We tend to think, like for example, we say, well somebody suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.
It's built into the very way we talk about this.
My response to that would be, yeah, do you know who suffers from narcissistic personality disorder?
His wife, their children, right?
I'm not concerned here primarily.
I do not have a therapeutic interest personally myself.
in most of the people who I believe have these disorders.
I'm on the side of their victims, and I don't want to over-egg that too.
I realize that that is also an emotionally charged term.
Hold on.
I think we've just got something really important here.
This was a paradox I've wondered about coming into this conversation.
I now think I know the answer to it.
These are pathologies, inherently.
But in order to understand that they are pathologies, in the same sense that influenza is a pathology, we have to understand that the correct unit to be looking, to be evaluating the consequence over, is not the individual.
Correct.
That the individual may well come out ahead, but to the extent that their slice of pie grows as a result of their Absolutely.
at a cost to the entire size of the pie, that they are draining those around them in order to embolden or enrich themselves, that is the nature of the pathology.
You see it clearly is pathological if you look at the family or the lineage or whatever it is that has had its wealth burned up by this pattern.
So you will end up, like, when you're saying, does this give you an advantage?
I mean, I don't know the answer to this, but I play these, I play these, I turn these models over in my mind constantly.
I'm always thinking about this.
I have questions, for example, about, um, Ken's psychopathy, which is, and we'll get to that, I'm going to actually give people, I'm going to give them a quick overview of the cluster B disorders.
But you can, you know, I can imagine A plausible world in which you might find, if you looked at the data, that having a psychopathic orientation to the world in certain contexts gave you a reproductive fitness advantage.
Not necessarily constantly over all millennia and all time, but certainly perhaps within certain contexts and historical epics.
That's a bigger question.
We can't answer that whole question here.
But no, it's not the case that everybody with these disorders ends up losing out and never has any power.
They often, not all of them, some of them do.
But very often they rise to positions of extraordinary power above the average person, and they become wealthy and successful, and they go undetected.
So it is sometimes an advantage to the individual.
Yeah, and we have a bias in our understanding of this, even a bias that I know extends into the psychological literature on the topic.
Because we tend to discover the sociopathy or psychopathy of those who aren't especially great at it.
The ones who get caught.
And the ones who succeed brilliantly and manage to evade detection may not read as sociopaths.
And therefore, when we study sociopaths, we go and look at the cases of basically failed sociopaths.
And it's too easy to conclude, oh, these are Yes, correct.
So what are the Cluster B personality disorders and what does the term Cluster B mean?
This is an American diagnostic schema from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
There are three clusters of personality disorders.
And again, personality disorders are not just a passing cloud.
It's not depression that affects your friend some days, but then when she comes out of it, there's a normal range temperament person underneath there, right?
That's how it's not like that.
This is who the person is all the time across domains.
Not necessarily exactly the same, but this is a pervasive pattern.
This is a higher level, okay?
This is a higher level stuff we're dealing with here.
More dangerous.
Less treatable.
Often, most often, not very treatable at all.
So what are they?
There's clusters A, B and C. I'm concerned only with cluster B. This cluster is called the dramatic and erratic personality disorders.
It includes, ostensibly, four.
And I say ostensibly, I'll come back to why I say that.
They are borderline personality disorder.
That does not mean somebody who's only on the border and isn't really there.
It's a full personality disorder.
It is severe by definition.
My understanding is that the term borderline refers to the fact that the condition is between two other conditions, not that it is borderline pathological.
Correct.
It refers to people who straddle the line between neurosis and psychosis.
Neurosis is negative emotionality, rumination, depression, obsession, anxiety.
All humans have a level of neurosis.
All of us, right?
Normal range people and personality disorder people.
Psychosis, its base term, it doesn't mean violent killer people.
That's the colloquial misunderstanding.
Psychosis means you are actually disconnected from reality.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that you are hearing voices, although that is one form of psychosis.
It could mean that you have an incredibly elaborate, Baroque fantasy of persecution that people might think of in terms of paranoid traits.
The borderline tends to hover on the cusp of this, unstably.
I don't remember the clinician and writer who coined this phrase, but it's brilliant.
You can think of borderlines as stably unstable.
So the core of borderline is fears of abandonment, having a weak or absent sense of self, emotional clinginess, severe and rapid mood swings.
And I don't mean I'm cranky in one minute and then I'm more pleasant the next.
I mean swings from suicidal or homicidal rage and despair To elation, and I love you more than anyone else in the world, within the span of hours or one day.
It is not bipolar.
People mistake this all the time.
Not bipolar, not manic depression.
Manic depressives, bipolars, tend to cycle over weeks and the curve looks like this.
The borderline looks like this.
Okay, so if it's minutes, hours, or days, you don't have a bipolar friend.
You probably have a borderline friend.
So for those of you, for those of the audience who are only listening and not watching, what you've just done with your hands is you've said that a manic depressive, a bipolar person, I hope I'm using those terms correctly as synonyms.
It has like an S curve pattern over the course of weeks.
They may be debilitated one week and three weeks later they may be elated and highly productive.
With the borderline, you've got these very jagged sharp peaks that over the span of hours causes the person to go.
Yes.
Correct.
So that's borderline personality disorder.
Narcissistic personality disorder is the other one.
That seems self-explanatory, and to a large degree it is.
But two things I want to point out about narcissistic personality.
One, all cluster B's, not only NPD, narcissistic PD, all four of them, all have extraordinarily elevated levels of narcissism.
That is a commonality that binds the cluster B's together, okay?
Self-obsession.
Self-obsession, yes.
You can call it solipsism, you can call it extreme self-centeredness, you can call it actually narcissism, but all of them are characterized by this.
Narcissistic PD, there are two main types.
It's easy to see the classic, grandiose narcissist, the braggart, the Donald Trump, right?
I have the best cars, the most beautiful women, the most voters, the this, that, and the other thing, right?
You can see this guy coming.
We've all known this guy at some point in our lives.
He's obnoxious at the bar.
Uh, you know, he's always bragging about his new sports car, or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
That's your grandiose narcissist.
But there's another kind, and I think this kind is actually more active, more prevalent, and more dangerous today, called the covert narcissist.
They don't have the same affect.
They don't walk in chest first and say, I'm the biggest jock, da-da-da-da-da.
Instead, they present falsely as victims.
They present themselves as extraordinarily caring, Deeply empathetic and compassionate people.
Much more than you.
Much more than her.
I'm the most compassionate.
I care more about them.
And by constructing a sort of angelic image of themselves as this deeply empathic person, they manipulate other people and they extract egotistical supply from people by presenting as a victim and saying things like, you know, I've worked for 25 years, I've cooked more food for the homeless than any other person on the face of the planet.
And no one has ever recognized me.
And I have been oppressed.
And you see this in woke all the time.
Covert narcissism is just woke through and through and through.
All right, so I have a question for you, and I do want you to absolutely complete the chart you're building for us.
But it's been years since I've read about narcissistic personality disorder.
I don't think I was aware until you have alerted me to it of the covert version of this, which the relevance to WOKE is quite clear now that you say it.
But the thing that struck me when I Read into this topic was that the let's take the Braggart version of the narcissist we normies for lack of a better term.
Yes.
See this person and imagine that their internal experience of self is also grand, a mirror for the outside, and we misunderstand that in fact they may be a deeply insecure person, and that what we are seeing on the outside is a compensation for this deep sort of self-doubt.
Correct.
Not maybe.
Not maybe.
Are.
Always.
So does that also apply to the covert narcissist?
It applies to all of the Cluster B personality disorders, all four of them and all subtypes.
Insecurity.
Insecurity, that's right.
Because we're going to talk a lot about abuse, in this child abuse and domestic abuse.
In the vast majority of cases, we can't know the backstories and histories of everybody, we can't even verify them.
But in the vast majority of cases, Those who end up with cluster B personality disorders end up that way because of abusive and neglectful childhoods.
Genuine trauma usually did occur to these people.
That is true.
They didn't just pop out of the womb this way.
Yes, we all have different levels of hardwired inclinations, vulnerabilities, and strengths.
Some of us are more highly strung than others and would be, regardless of how our childhood was, some of us are more stable.
This is true.
But when you look at the case histories of people diagnosed with these disorders, the rate of child abuse, child sexual abuse, child emotional abuse, abandonment, neglect is sky high.
Okay?
Yeah, I think that is a crucial point to understand.
And this is, it's also tragically disruptive of our ability to have a proper conversation about this.
Yes.
So let me just, as an aside, say that in many cases of the sexual abuse of children, the person engaged in this has a history of being abused in exactly this way.
You tell me if I've got any of this wrong.
That's right.
It's not universal, but it is, there's a strong correlation.
Yes.
A strong, unignorable correlation.
Correct.
That unignorable correlation means that we have to wrestle with properly dealing with the horrifying monster who is destroying a person's life by abusing them sexually.
And we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that that person may be there as the result of the fact that someone did this to them.
And so, though they are now monster, they started as victim.
Yes.
And we do constantly.
That requires adult levels of nuance to just even grapple with it.
The temptation of those who focus on the victim part of that story will be to let the monster off the hook, which we mustn't do.
And we do constantly.
Yes.
Okay.
So then, quickly, just to end up the four categories.
Histrionic personality disorder, in my view, is very close to borderline, may even be a subset of borderline.
I'm open to this.
It's an ongoing conversation I'm having with myself.
But it means what it sounds like.
And let me disambiguate here.
There's a big misconception about etymology here.
Histrionic does not come from hysterical.
The root word is not hysterical.
This is not a misogynist or sexist extrapolation.
You might be shocked how many people incorrectly believe this.
The root is the Greek word histrios, which means like an actor.
Not uterus.
Not hysteros.
History.
Yes, I would probably be shocked at how many people had that misconception, including me, until just now.
It's a helpful, it's a misconception that happens to be quite handy for doctrinaire feminists, so that's where I see a lot of it.
Then we have what's called antisocial personality disorder, and the audience knows this colloquially as either sociopathy or psychopathy.
So now I've described the four cluster... Wait, wait, wait, hold on.
I've done a lot of reading in that area too.
I am perennially troubled by the Yes, I can.
failure to clearly delineate between these two.
Some people treat them as synonyms, and some people treat them as distinct, either by degree or by some characteristic.
Can you just tell me how it is that you're using these two terms?
Yes, I can.
It will not fully satisfy you.
Here's the deal.
Sociopath and psychopath are not actually recognized universal clinical terms.
They are contested terms.
I know people don't like to hear this.
There isn't an answer.
I can't settle it for you.
I can tell you antisocial personality disorder is the technical recognized clinical term Sociopath and psychopath are used colloquially.
What I warn people against, and I am certain that right now, as you and I are talking, or well, no, this isn't live, but when people start commenting on this, I can write their comment for you.
I'm going to do it right now.
You're going to get people who say, psychopaths are born and sociopaths are made, and you really should have said that, and everybody knows that, and people get very had up about this.
No, there is not agreement or consensus on that.
I wish that there were.
I like clarity too.
Maybe I should let you finish your thought here, and then I would like to introduce a hypothesis, a partial hypothesis.
Thank you.
I'm going to finish that, and then I have something that's very important.
I'm going to wrap that up.
So when I use them, I do use them as synonyms.
I know that is unsatisfying to some of you, but I'm not doing wrong, because there isn't a right.
We don't have consensus on it, okay?
So I use them as synonyms.
Ossensibly, there are four Cluster B personality disorders.
I no longer believe that most humans can be easily categorized in only one of four slots.
I think it is closer to the truth that there is such a state of mind, a real, extant, objectively observable state of mind that we call Cluster B. However, that's real, but most people, not all, but most, We'll have a helping of traits from each of the four categories, or a heavy helping from here, a heavy helping from here.
I'll give a concrete example in the real world.
My mother.
I can describe my mother two ways.
I can say my mother is cluster B and has traits from this slot, this slot, this slot.
The shorthand that I use to describe my mother, which is slightly inaccurate, is that she has both borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
Do I think that my mother has Two discreet, observable, hardline, she just happens to have two things that are comorbid together?
No, I don't believe that.
I believe my mother has a cluster B mind, and that she has the heaviest possible combination of both borderline and narcissistic traits.
So yeah, this is one of these places that goes exactly back to what we were discussing a few minutes ago about psychology, you know, more often providing a checklist and then putting you into a category.
The right way to think about this, if you're accurate in your understanding, is that you have a large category that contains components and the question is one of admixture.
Yes.
Which components in what measure and each of the combinations will produce a somewhat unique outgrowth in terms of behavior.
There are people, and there are enough of them that they're noticeable and we can talk about them.
There are people who hew much more closely to the classic presentation of borderline personality disorder or the classic presentation of psychopathy, and there are in fact, when you get to the psychopathic end, the truly Machiavellian, conscience-free, that's the thing that distinguishes when you're All the way at the end that includes antisocial, sociopathy, psychopathy.
You can say, for example, that many, I don't know how many, but I do think many, people with borderline personality disorder do have the capacity for empathy.
It is compromised, it is unstable, and sometimes they cannot access that empathy when they need it.
That's boredom.
When you get down to sociopathy and psychopathy, these are people who don't have any damned empathy.
It's not that they can't access it.
It's that it does not exist.
They don't care about you at all.
Okay, so I want to do a little hypothetical.
Potential cleanup of that concept based on what I know and in this context you are very definitely the expert and I am a rank amateur by comparison But what has always troubled me?
So first of all, let me just say on the distinction between psychopathy and sociopathy Following what I think was the description, I believe, of Robert Hare.
Do I have the person right?
Yeah, you do.
He once described this as a distinction between somebody who is indifferent To your suffering, that would be the sociopath versus somebody who delights in it, that would be the psychopath.
And that seems to me a non-arbitrary distinction.
It is a real distinction.
Another word for it, the most accurate word I believe, is we're talking about the difference between a sadist and a non-sadist.
Yes.
This is sadism that we're talking about.
Right.
Somebody who's willing, who feels none of your pain as they inflict it.
Doesn't necessarily seek to inflict it.
They're just willing to do whatever puts them ahead.
Somebody who's actually looking to deliver pain is a very different creature.
Yes, and it's not only a real distinction, but it is a salient distinction for personal safety as well.
Oh, absolutely.
I'll agree for the sake of this conversation we're having.
I'll agree to this definition.
Okay, so I want to add one more thing though.
Actually, two things.
One, I suspect part of why we trip over the concept of sociopathy and psychopathy, let's take them as a pair, is, and the reason that we often see people who have at least sociopathy rise to extreme levels of power and influence, is that these things are not inherently maladaptive.
There's a way that we could look at the world where we would say actually if you describe the characteristics of a sociopath that that person would be perfectly placed on a battlefield fighting an enemy that must be destroyed.
Correct.
You do not want that person suffering from empathy as they are destroying an enemy that threatens your existence.
Exactly right.
So you would imagine that a society might have a mechanism For producing a certain number of sociopaths so that it can be made safe.
Or at least accommodating them.
Right.
So my thought is sociopaths would make sense if they were pointed outwards in a prior world.
I don't want to live in that world.
I think we have an alternative to it.
But in a prior world where lineages destroyed other lineages, having sociopaths who face outwards and can do what needs to be done to keep the population safe makes perfect adaptive sense.
It doesn't strike me as pathological.
And what we have that is pathological is that this pattern is now deployed arbitrarily so that people are going after their own population with the same toolkit.
Yeah.
That is very destructive.
But then this leads to this next question.
We are fascinated, I think all of us, by stories of people who, based on their behavior, would have to be included in this category.
Mobsters, for example.
Yes.
Right?
Mobsters who will Kill for business reasons.
They will torture in order to disincentivize an enemy from doing X, Y, or Z, but famously are extremely loyal.
And you may tell me I've got it wrong, but appear to love their families, maybe even to an extraordinary degree.
And the idea of a person who is sociopathic in one context and familial in another, Suggest to me that there's a facultative piece to this puzzle.
That there is such a thing as a person who is contextually sociopathic.
And it may also be that we, and this is a very unpleasant thought to me, but nonetheless I still think it's accurate.
If you consider that there are terrible horrors that take place remotely About which you are essentially indifferent.
That we can all detect in ourselves that there is sort of a zone of remoteness that makes us de facto sociopathic relative to the suffering of people we have little connection to.
I absolutely understand what you're saying.
To the second part, I would say, respectfully, I think that that drags the concept out so far that it may lose actual functional meaning.
Got it.
I don't think that can properly be called sociopathic.
Yeah, I don't think it is sociopathic.
I think it's normal.
And the problem is...
Go ahead.
I'm also going to challenge you on the mobster.
I'm not saying that I know that I'm right.
I suspect that I am.
I can be argued into a different position.
But I suspect that may be a romantic falsehood.
You have posited the existence of a kind of person who is fully sociopathic when it comes to business, but then is a loving family man at home.
That guy doesn't exist, Brett.
That's not real.
That is one possibility I have been wondering about, because the stories that we are so fascinated by are dramatizations.
Yeah, they're Hollywood.
Right, so there's a question about whether or not we in the audience are being, you know, whether these are effectively Like some kind of genre in which the possibility of such a monster who walks amongst us and behaves normally with respect to their family is that much more terrifying than somebody who's simply broken?
That may be.
And again, nothing is 100% and I will change my mind if evidence comes along to contradict it, but I'm going to stake a position here.
I don't believe that character exists.
I don't believe that type of human exists.
I think it's nonsense that is largely Hollywood and largely Think of it this way.
I don't mean to say you're full of nonsense, Brett.
No, no, no.
You're doing exactly what you should do, and I love the idea that the way to resolve this puzzle is to recognize that there's no evidence of such a person.
I don't know if there is evidence, but... I don't believe there is, and frankly, it doesn't make epistemological sense when you walk through it.
When you step through it in your mind, it simply falls apart.
It doesn't hang together.
We say, for example, I had a conversation with my therapist about something similar a couple years ago.
As you can imagine, we spent a lot of time talking about how people's minds work.
You know, my family is shot through with cluster B personality disorders.
I'm a typical outcome of such a family, so this is warp and woof of our conversation.
And I said to him one day, Therapist, what are we to make of the claims that we often hear?
And we often hear these claims in true crime, which is a genre I like very much.
I am fascinated by dark psychology.
Absolutely.
Admit it.
But we often hear these claims that, you know, so-and-so who ended up being a murderer grew up in a perfectly normal middle-class home with loving parents.
We hear this all the bloody time.
We have no good reason to take that on faith, yet we do.
We take it on faith all the time.
But we don't have any good reason to take it on faith.
Because it goes against everything that we do actually know, and there's a lot we don't.
But we know an awful lot about childhood development, in some ways.
And it simply is not true.
So I said to my therapist, what do we make of these claims where we've got a woman who clearly has borderline personality disorder and probably secondary psychopathic states that she gets into, even if she's not a global psychopath every day, 24 hours a day, and she came from a loving household and my therapist said to me two things.
Number one, Are people, are self-reports always reliable?
Do we believe everything that everyone says about their childhood and we believe that that is the most accurate rendition?
Of course it isn't.
Self-reports can be unreliable.
We also are fighting I believe that this is a fairy story that we normal people tell ourselves so that we don't have to face the real world.
We don't want it to be real, that there are wicked and actually evil parents.
That is so disturbing to us, and we can see why it's disturbing.
It is so activating and disturbing to us that we will actually tell ourselves a fairy tale lie to avoid having to deal with it.
So we like to think, and when I say we, I mean broad, pop culture, general society.
We would rather believe in the bad seed than we would believe in the depravity of the parent.
I think that explains a lot of why we have these romantic notions about the guy who's really loving at home, but he'll cap somebody for business.
I don't think he's real.
Okay.
I want to push back just slightly.
I think I agree with your instinct here almost completely, that normal developmental environments Almost never produce severe psychological pathology.
Correct.
That said, I believe that there are causes, disruptions that can occur that are not about a failure of parenting.
I believe that as well.
Traumatic brain injury is one example.
Traumatic brain injury, toxins, there are various things that can disrupt development which would leave good parents with an offspring who had been wrecked by one of these patterns.
And the other thing is, I believe that we Those of us who derive our moral sense from Western values, I believe, are also likely to trip over the fact that we know it is wrong to infer somebody's guilt without Proof, right?
In fact, our legal system is biased to release 10 innocent people.
I mean, to release 10 guilty people rather than convict a single innocent person.
So when it is that what we've got is somebody is behaving destructively, It's not a perfectly solid case that their parenting must have been broken.
And so we quite correctly do not want to convict the parents.
But that means that we also ignore the overwhelming pattern, which is that it is a broken pattern of parenting that generally produces these things.
Yes, you're correct.
The problem, and it really is a problem, is that our bias misleads us and it causes us to be inaccurate.
It is simply a fact.
It's not my opinion.
It's not some clinician's opinion.
It's a fact that the vast majority of people who turn out this way come from a broken kind of environment at home.
We cannot want to convict the parents, but we want so badly not to convict them.
That we actually end up doing the children a disservice because we will blame them before we'll blame the parents.
I'm seeing this all over the place, Brett.
I'm sorry.
It's very disturbing to me.
Very disturbing to me.
Normal range people, decent people, people you might describe as good.
We all have good and bad in us, but I'm not talking about people who are hateful or who are abusing their children.
But we are so damned Emotionally fragile these days, and so used to lying to ourselves about who we really are as people.
Our entire society is a lie at this point.
That we've got these normal range parents.
I see this happening every day.
I look at forums, online forums for
For parents of children who identify as transgender or children who have been transitioned either by another parent in a divorce situation or an intrusive medical system or social work or something like that, and to a person, to a person, almost, let me not go too far,
I would guess about 80% of the parents who describe their family situation, and they're certainly in strife.
They're very upset.
Their children don't speak to them anymore.
Their children claim to be a sex that they are not.
80% of these people, nothing ever went wrong.
We were great parents.
We loved our kids.
We never did this.
We never did that.
Of course, most of them probably didn't beat their children.
Abuse is not a synonym for physical beating.
Abuse and neglect take a lot of different forms.
But what bothers me, I expect people to rationalize, to get out from under their own guilt, we all do that, but the parents around them, oh it must be so sad for you, I'm sorry your teenager is treating you so badly, I can't believe, and I think to myself, I'm sorry, this does emotionally activate me, as you can tell.
I get furious at this, and I'm just like, wake up!
You are talking about a 17-year-old here.
You would rather, because you, parents, you emotionally identify with other parents.
Because, and you are reading into, you are protecting your own ego by making sure these other parents can't be seen as having failed, because then you might, you might have to question if you did the best job.
This is all understandable, but it has driven us to the point where we, where we react as if it is more reasonable and more numerically likely that there's all these bad seed kids popping up out of nowhere than that there might be a Pattern of parental problems.
Does this make sense?
Oh, it makes absolute sense.
And in fact, one of my long-standing gripes against psychology is that it obsesses about the individual.
When evolutionarily speaking, it makes no sense to do so.
That in fact, especially in light of what kind of creature humans are, What we have is a system of what would be called dual inheritance.
We get our genes, which program us far less than any other creature that has ever existed.
And then we have a package of behavioral traits that are passed outside of the genome, almost entirely from parents to offspring.
And it is the noise in that part of the transmission that causes most of the bad programming.
And so in any case, the idea that a psychologist, you walk into the psychologist's office and you say, you know, doc, I'm miserable.
The clinical orientation is to fix that problem rather than to ask if you're miserable because you're abusing the people around you and they rightly hate you for it.
Right?
So, you know, so the point is the real question is It's very inconvenient to understand these problems holistically in the context that they happen, but it's the only rigorous proper way to do it.
Yes, sometimes an individual may have an individual problem, but the degree to which that is not always the case is extreme.
And anyway, I think psychology has done itself a tremendous disservice by Treating the clinical practice as synonymous with the scientific discipline.
In fact, we just said you do not know enough scientifically to treat people.
What psychologists do as a service is something that has traditionally been done by Friends, family members, members of the clergy, people who are in a position to see the, you know, imagine a clergy person giving Advice to people able to see the effects on children of parents myopia.
That's a very powerful position From which to advise in a way that fixes something that is a system So in any case I'll get off my soapbox but I do think psychology is obsessed with the individual because the individual is easy to study and describe and that that misses the point a large part of the time and I think you're right, and you're right fractally, because it goes deeper and more detailed, too.
Psychology is not only obsessed with the individual, to the exclusion of the family or social system in which Good therapy, good psychological practice takes this into account.
I know that that exists because I am now experiencing it in my five-year therapeutic relationship, but it is numerically rare these days.
Psychology has significantly declined.
Even if you didn't think it was very great before, it's much worse now than it used to be.
Well, in large measure because the same The same forces.
The same hypnotic obsession with pharmaceuticals.
And I know that psychologists don't prescribe pharmaceuticals themselves, but the discipline of treating people for psychological disorders has so diverted itself on a phony theory of chemical imbalance to treating people with drugs.
And if I may say one more thing, as foolish as it is to imagine that you can treat complex psychological disorders with chemicals, it is insane to attempt this with children.
Yes, all but the most extreme cases, because what you are doing simultaneously, even if you manage to do something that temporarily alters a pattern in some desirable way, you are disrupting the self corrective process that might leave this person intact as an adult.
All right, Josh, this is fascinating, as I hoped it would be.
I I have learned a lot already.
My model is getting better based on what you're describing.
I also think I see, based on what you said here in the last few minutes, the connection between these patterns that have long been somewhat understood, at least in individuals and families, and the dysfunction that we see across civilization.
For lack of a better term, the woke revolution obviously has some of these characteristics.
So, do you want to flesh out what you see the connection between these psychological cluster B patterns and dysfunction of society?
Yeah.
I think woke is cluster B.
I think woke is cluster B. I think another term... I think there are a number of terms that we use in different contexts that all point to the same fundamental referent.
Okay?
So, let's just call it the referent.
I'm not even going to say that cluster B is the base.
Cluster B is one term to describe the referent, the actual phenomenon itself, or the set of phenomena.
Sometimes we call it Cluster B. Sometimes we call it woke.
Sometimes we call it cult dynamics.
Sometimes we call it political authoritarianism.
A number of different ways.
I believe all of those things are pointing to the same underlying psychological mechanisms.
The same states of mind.
The same broken states of mind.
I think this because I used to be somebody that you would have called woke.
What I'm about to say I offer descriptively.
It is not judgmental toward anyone else.
It's simply to let people know where I'm coming from and why I say what I say.
I was a leftist, a card-carrying Democrat all of my adult life.
I was a progressive leftist.
I wasn't just a center-left person.
I was on the woke side.
I got my start Well, things were different in those days, but when I was 16 years old, I was already becoming a local celebrity in my town.
I was the poster boy for a new ordinance, a gay rights ordinance, in Syracuse, New York.
It did successfully pass.
It made it illegal within the city of Syracuse to fire an employee simply on the grounds of homosexuality.
I had run into that problem at my grocery store employer, and I had come out unusually early in those days.
I was about 13 when I came out publicly in the mid to late 80s, which was not very common in those days.
I don't want to over-egg it, but I was used by political activists who saw an articulate young man who was not afraid to talk to the camera.
I made a great poster boy for this campaign.
Right.
So I've been doing leftist politicking for a very long time.
I no longer consider myself a leftist.
I did not go and join the Republican Party.
I'm not a card carrying member of any party.
Most people on the left would describe me today as a conservative.
But these words and definitions are often tools and weapons against people rather than they are enlightening descriptors.
So people will describe me however they want, but I'm certainly not a leftist.
I'm not a liberal.
And that changed for me only seven years ago.
This is recent.
I'm 49 today.
This started happening when I was about 41 years old.
I'll do this briefly, and I'll also preface this by saying to anyone listening, I am doing this descriptively because I want you to understand my thought process.
This is not fishing for sympathy.
I do not ask for, nor do I want people to think of me as somebody they need to say, I'm so sorry.
You know, oh, what a horrible life you had.
I'm not looking for sympathy.
I'm not fishing for any emotional support from anyone.
This is simply descriptive.
My mother, as I alluded to before, my mother is deranged.
She's not just a not great mother, she is deranged.
And for those, she has what I call a combination of borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
I believe she also has context-dependent sociopathic traits.
I did not recognize this until I was about 41 years old.
Our childhood growing up, Was a mixture of... I'll put it to you this way.
Those of you of a certain age, probably 40 or older, I'm getting older now and so my cultural references don't hit younger generations anymore.
I can't help that, I'm sorry.
I don't know your world and you don't know mine.
But if you want to know the kind of person that my mother was that her children experienced, I'll give you two movie characters and ask you to make a composite out of them.
Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest and Margaret White, the mother in the horror film Carrie, the religious fanatic mother.
If the people who have seen these movies and understand those cultural references, my mother was a combination of these two people.
Um, if that sounds extreme, and if people are want to react by saying, oh, but those movies were so ridiculous, I can tell you from my point of view, I didn't see anything in either of those movies that struck me as unbelievable or extreme.
I saw things in those movies that looked like the interior of our home.
Okay?
Those mothers exist.
They're not one in one million, either.
Thank God they're not.
They're not one in five.
But they sure as hell are not one in a million.
And they're not even one in a hundred.
There's a lot more of them than that.
So let me just say, I believe such mothers would have been vanishingly rare in the ancestral past.
That in a harsh environment in which food is limited and the ability to partner with people was the difference between persisting through tough times and starving, there would have been a strong selective force against pathology that severe.
You know, a self-terminating strategy, I would say.
What we have is a society that has produced such excess that it allows patterns that would otherwise have self-terminated to persist.
And so what we see is those patterns spreading, especially since they are transmissible.
Absolutely, absolutely.
So what that meant was that my childhood was filled with, half of our childhood, my brother and sister and I, was my mother and my violent stepfather.
So there was also an abusive personality disordered father figure in the house.
But the majority of our childhood he was not part of that picture.
That was a five to six year period and then he was put out of the house.
So that was early rather than late?
Yeah, for me it was between the ages of five and, um, no, four years old and nine to ten years old that my stepfather was part of our lives.
So short in duration, or comparatively short in duration, but in a phase when it was liable to have the biggest developmental effect.
Yeah, I mean, as an example, you know, we three children watched him try to murder my mother.
So that is the kind of childhood that I had.
And yes, it's extreme.
I know it's extreme.
But it is not as rare as your audience thinks it is.
It really isn't.
I'm glad that it's not common.
But these things don't just take place on what we used to call movie of the week, right?
That's the childhood that I grew up in.
That distorted me severely psychologically.
I am a typical outcome of that childhood.
There's nothing unusual about the person that I became.
I have struggled with major clinical depression.
I've been diagnosed with panic disorder.
Major clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's-like tick symptoms.
I spent 22 years as a severe alcoholic and self-destructive.
I'm not an alcoholic anymore.
I am common.
I am a typical run-of-the-mill outcome of that kind of childhood.
I didn't know what was wrong with my family until I was 41 years old and after an extended period of not living physically close to my mother and that part of the family, I brought her back into my life.
I bought a house for her to live in as she retired and got older.
I made a series of very bad mistakes and within two years, Everything that all of the insanity of my childhood was now back in my face in my 40s and in bright living color.
And I had told myself a fairy story that If I could solve my mother's chronic poverty and my mother's chronic need to feel safe and protected, if I could do that, if I could give her this affordable place to live and solve that problem, then she'd become the calm and nurturing person that she really was underneath.
No.
So, so.
So just to fill that in for people for whom this is a new topic.
You're laughing now because that is a implausible thought, psychologically speaking, given the nature of these disorders.
Yes, correct.
They don't get better, for the most part.
It was such a crisis at 41 that I had what we colloquially call a nervous breakdown.
It was a turning point in my life and I had to make a decision, and the decision I made was to sue my mother and evict her from my house and to put her out of my life entirely.
It was the very hardest, most painful and brutal year of my life, but it was also the best thing that ever happened to me.
It set me free for the first time in my life.
So that's when I learned what Cluster B was.
I finally had a taxonomy and a system that could explain to me what I had always thought of as my mother's peculiar insanity that I can never explain to anyone else.
I realized that there actually was an explanation for it.
But very quickly after coming to that realization and deciding that I would no longer have that as part of my domestic life, I looked around and I said, Good God Almighty, this is happening in the world around me, and not only is it happening in the world around me, it's my friends, it's my political tribe, it's the people that I've been hanging around with.
I have surrounded myself with people who are acting out a version of my childhood.
It rocked me, Brett, to my core.
It destabilized everything I thought was true about the world.
Over seven years, That led me to my current view that Cluster B style emotion, Cluster B style psychology and victim games that I knew well from home have become normalized and are woke.
This is woke.
The screaming, People out on the street.
We remember this from 2016 during the Donald Trump election.
Now, I did say, I remind everyone, I already did stipulate that I believe that Donald Trump is himself a clinical narcissist.
So, you know, even if you are, some of you in the audience are emotionally reacting to me right now because you may not like that I'm saying some very not nice things about lots of left stuff, I also recognize the problem on the other side too.
But the reaction we had to that.
The reaction I had to it, Brett.
Here, I'll tell you what I did election night, 2016.
what I did election night 2016.
I stayed up all night crying, crying that Donald Trump was elected, Crying that this horrible man was going to... Yes, it's embarrassing, of course.
It's histrionic.
It was an absolutely emotionally histrionic reaction.
And it was not an intellectual reaction.
I was still stuck.
This was just the beginning of my coming out of who I was as a person back then.
But you saw this.
You saw people on the street literally screaming at the top of their lungs in genuine emotional distress, toddler-level emotional distress.
That's extreme, but that's an example.
Histrionic or borderline personality style behavior.
Inability to regulate emotions.
Exaggerated emotions.
And then I began to see that all of these people that, you know, I went to Sarah Lawrence College.
I was a card-carrying liberal.
Decolonize this.
You know, white people are terrible.
Men are all misogynist.
This was me, right?
I regurgitated this bile most of my life.
It's clear to me now that this is a case of reversal.
It's a case of narcissistic reversal.
If you want to point to the one trait, the one characteristic that almost always indicates at least Cluster B style thinking, even if we're not to say that this person has a disorder, reversing the truth is the key.
Black is white.
Bitter is sweet.
Good is bad.
Ugly is beautiful.
That's woke.
Woke has reversed everything.
We have organizations like BLM that claim to be full of victims of racism who are actually abusive and very obviously, some of them, psychopathic.
They're burning buildings down, right?
Endangering the lives of people.
And unabashedly racist.
Unabashedly racist, but they project it onto other people.
They say, you are doing this to me.
You, the white man, are doing this to me.
You, the white woman, are doing this to me.
Trans is the same thing.
It is now abuse.
We are actually normal people.
Normal people who show up on shows like Good Morning America, and ABC Nightly News, and the New York Times, and MSNBC.
Allegedly normal people say, as if it were normal, That the people who are trying to stop boy children from having their testicles taken off, and trying to stop girl children from having their breasts sliced off, the people trying to stop that are the abusers who are killing those children.
It is, if I were a religious person, I say this on the show, it is satanic.
It is satanic in its reversal.
It is the lie, it is the original lie, and it is wicked and evil.
We are living in a land of complete moral and conceptual inversion.
That, I believe, is what characterizes our woke era.
Yeah, there is something powerfully upside down about it.
It's not just nonsense, it's the inverse of the truth, and it is Ironically, imperiling the system that has offered the best hope of any system in history of actually leveling the playing field.
Yes.
It is destroying the cure in a false and implausible quest to cure the disease with the poison.
Yes, and it's, it's, it's bad.
It's, it's much worse.
I think some, I think, I think more people are starting to see how bad it is.
But even just a couple of years ago, I, you know, I can, I'm sure that you can, I'm sure that there's a, if you will, an empathic way that you can connect to this.
I'm betting that you, you have experienced some of this in your own sphere.
I sometimes, I still, it's like for a moment, I forget.
That the world is what it is, and I forget, and I think that it's the normal world that I used to think existed, and I'm shocked awake, and I say, oh my, this is really happening.
This is actually happening.
We're actually calling the Mengele-level mutilation of children, we're actually calling that love.
We're calling it care.
This is real.
Josh, you're not having a nightmare, you're actually awake.
You're living a nightmare, yes.
It is literally a nightmare, and I say this without Without conscious hyperbole, I don't mean to exaggerate this, I mean this very plainly.
We are living in a dystopian science fiction film.
It's not coming, it's already here.
Yes, it's here and it has captivated institutions with a great deal of power, which is terrifying.
Now I do believe that something tactical on what I call the blue team has come to understand that as much as it wished to suppress discussion of this pathology it has failed for the same reason that it failed to enforce its orthodoxy through the mainstream media because we found places to discuss this that were not under its control.
And as much as it tried to stamp them out, it failed.
In this case, still trying.
Oh, still trying.
And with respect to the woke nonsense, it is also still trying.
But the fact is people, reasonable people, people with common sense, people who are able to extrapolate properly have been discussing this pathology, have stared down the stigmas that are used to silence them.
And many people are now awake, at least partially, to the paradoxes and the absurdity of, for example, mutilating children in the name of love.
Yep.
So, that has caused, I believe, a tactical shift on the blue team, which is staring at an election picture that threatens to upend their control.
And they are creating distance with wokeism.
I believe it's purely cynical and strategic.
Okay.
And in fact, one thing that I have faced, which viewers of Dark Horse will recognize, is that those on the blue team who are attempting to distance themselves from Woke for electoral reasons have a problem, which is that there are people like Heather and me who have been trying to call attention to this horror Who are on the left.
Yep.
And they do not wish to empower us.
Oh no.
Right?
They do not wish to... Right.
They absolutely see it as an existential threat.
If they have to admit that we were right, Then they will have to listen to us on other topics, like the horror of the vaccination campaign that they have just deployed.
So they have now arranged a narrative in which, once upon a time, I was a decent chap teaching at a college who Yes.
Yes.
to correctly spot the problem of woke and then went insane.
Right?
Yes.
That's the narrative.
So anyway, I don't mean to descend down that rabbit hole, but I just want to point out, do expect woke to be de-emphasized by those who have been pushing it and expect them to We never really believed that.
You know, we know, you know, there were some of us who really went extreme and we probably should have, we probably should have spoken up a little bit more about that, but that was never the heart of our program.
And, you know, as much, you know, with all due respect to people like Heather Hying and Brett, Um, you know, while they had a point in the beginning, they didn't stay on the side of sanity.
And what we need right now, what we all need right now, is just to really calmly just understand that there's truth on both sides.
Yeah, I can write the whole goddamn thing.
Yep.
Yeah, it's happening every single day.
I mean, look, you know, you, of course, everybody knows.
I know this.
I mean, I didn't know who you were.
The first time I heard your name and saw your face was in documentaries about the Evergreen fiasco that threw you and Heather out.
Obviously, I stayed and paid attention.
But in a much less dramatic and smaller venue, I lost my career of 20 years.
It's coming up on a year that I was forced out of my job as the 20-year director of a nonprofit consumer protection organization by a coup within the organization, a leftist coup within the organization, to smear my name, to extort donors and say, um, they lined up, don't, uh, our major donors pulled out.
If you don't fire Joshua Slocum and make a public statement disavowing him for what he does in his private time, in his political views, we're going to bankrupt the organization to pull out our membership.
All that dirty shit was pulled.
And, um, as, as I'm sorry, most of these non-profits are in fact leftist, even when they call themselves non-partisan.
As leftist organizations do, they left me to hang out to dry.
So yes, I did actually resign rather than being fired, but had I not resigned, I would have been fired three days later and I would have had no leverage at all.
So let's fill this, assuming you're willing, let's fill that in a little bit so people understand what you had dedicated your life to, that you were tossed out for Political incorrectness.
Can you describe your work?
Yes.
I spent 20 years as the executive director of a non-profit organization called Funeral Consumers Alliance.
Yes, I realize that sounds strange.
I asked people, think of it like it was the Consumer Reports magazine, but only for the funeral purchase.
The goal of the organization was to educate the public Because the funeral industry, funerals and cemetery sales, are more than $20 billion a year in this country.
We spend a great deal of money burying our dead.
Thousands of people every year feel that they have been overcharged, that it's burdensomely expensive, and that they have to make very consequential financial decisions on the worst day of their lives without sufficient information and time to make those decisions.
So FCA's goal was to give people factual information about their legal rights, factual information so they could evaluate the economic value of what they were asking for, so they could shop around.
And we also lobbied on behalf of consumers for regulations that would better protect the public from predatory sales practices.
So you were working to protect the public from an industry that takes advantage of people's grief.
Correct.
I started with Kevin, the other half of Disaffected.
This show was his idea.
This is his baby.
context, you were effectively thrown out because of political differences that had nothing to do with this.
Correct.
I started with Kevin, Kevin, the other half of Disaffected.
This show was his idea.
This this this is his baby.
He talked me into it.
We started the show.
We've been talking about this hypothesis from day one, the very first episode in late January of 2021, We said it explicitly, we're living in a cluster B world.
I knew when I started that, I did know that the likely outcome was going to be that I was going to be pushed out of my job.
This was too important.
I wasn't willing to keep my mouth shut.
It took about a year and a half, but it happened.
And why did it happen?
What happened?
The same story that you've been through, Brett.
The same story that anybody else working for any organization that doesn't explicitly disavow WOKE.
This non-profit had a lot of very good people, a lot of very charitable, kind-hearted volunteers, but it was extraordinarily heavily weighted toward hard leftism.
And then it began to be taken over by the set most known for Woke.
The HR women.
The millennial white women.
Yes, women.
Um, who get their jollies and their kicks by canceling other people, smearing their reputations, and looking like Lady Bountiful, most gracious mama in the world, who cares about all her little children of all races and all the genders and this, that, and the other thing.
These people, whether they're men or women, these are not kind people.
They're not good people.
They are narcissists.
They are exploitative.
Some of them, not all, some of them are sadistic as hell.
And they like hurting other people.
They like taking their jobs away from them.
That is what happened to me.
So let me just point out the larger pattern here, because yes, I have lived it in a very different form.
Yep.
The tragedy of what happened at Evergreen was that Evergreen was exactly the right place if you were a student who was not a good fit for a normal college environment but had high potential.
Yeah, there are a huge number of those people who need a place like Evergreen.
And what the woke activists did by creating a riot around a phony claim of racism, largely against me, was destroy the place so that it now does not exist in any meaningful sense.
It still hobbles along with huge state subsidies.
But the fact is it is not capable of doing the job of educating that it once was.
And so the point is in a symbolic hemorrhage ostensibly about protecting oppressed people, it hurt people who were actually benefiting from something.
In your case, your organization was protecting consumers from a predatory industry.
Those consumers were hurt by an internal woke takeover that had nothing to do with funeral services or the funeral industry, right?
It was petty and harmful to the exact people the organization was designed to help.
And I know other cases... Let me tell you how harmful, right?
There's no staff in the organization anymore.
The office is closed.
When I left, within four or five months of my leaving, they eliminated the second staff position.
They closed down the office.
Now, there are some volunteers who are still trying to keep it going, but they allowed, they allowed, and if any of them are watching, I am talking to you and about you.
You allowed wicked people who did not have your constituency's best interests at heart To push you into pushing me out at the expense of the organization, and now it exists on paper only.
I'm not even bitter about this anymore.
I'm glad I'm out of that now.
But yes, they left Evergreen in tatters.
My organization was left practically non-existent.
This happens to group after group after group, college after college after college.
It never works out to anyone's benefit except the people at the heart of these campaigns.
Except the petty tyrants.
And I will just say we also have a close friend who literally had an organization that he founded, brought to its knees over his willingness to acknowledge his friendship, to fail to disavow Heather, who is deemed to be a transphobe, which she is not.
So anyway, the point is, this was an environmental organization and a good one.
Most of them are not.
This was a good one that was actually doing real good in the world.
And the point is, what was the consequence of this woke campaign?
It was a setback.
For the environment.
Your example is a setback for consumers who are going to face this predatory industry without anyone looking out for their interests.
My situation was a setback for the students who were benefiting from an educational environment that could actually pay attention to their individual needs.
Yes.
This is an excellent place to insert this, I think, to tie some concepts together for people.
This is a perfect example of my thesis and Kevin's thesis that as in the home, so in society.
This does scale from domestic abuse to public life.
So, a domestically abusive family, a family with a borderline or a narcissist parent at the core, That is a Cluster B family.
Even though the children don't have personality disorders, every single member of that family is playing a role in a Cluster B scripted drama play.
One of the roles, one of the most common roles that children play, and other family members play, you become what they call a flying monkey.
For the Narcissist, and it's a reference to the Wizard of Oz.
The witch didn't do her own dirty work.
She had an army of monkeys with wings that she sent out to poison Dorothy and the Scarecrow and all this other stuff.
So you become a flying monkey for the Narcissist, for the pathological person.
You believe that they are actually the victim they claim to be.
You believe their story is that the people around them are hurting them, and that you, out of loyalty, feel that you need to go defend mom or dad.
Um, and how it works in the family, I was a flying monkey for my mother.
For decades, my mother had me convinced that my sister was clinically insane.
It was actually my mother, not my sister.
I abused my sister at my mother's behest.
I didn't think I was abusing her.
I didn't think I was mistreating her.
But I didn't believe her.
I called her a liar.
It's sick.
It's grotesque.
I mean, there's some things that I've done and that anyone in a family like this has done that are very shameful.
But this is what happens.
This is happening, too.
The person at the environmental organization who would not disavow friendship with Heather was being a flying monkey for a narcissist or a pathological person to in exactly a parallel way to the way children are conscripted to abuse their siblings.
This is how it scales.
Well, he refused to be a flying monkey.
Okay.
Which cost him his organization.
Right.
So you're going to be punished one way or another.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is a, you know...
That is an insightful and terrifying portrait that you paint, right?
It also means that one has to be careful to understand that the source of the abuse that they are on the wrong end of may or may not be the person delivering it.
Correct.
That person may be under a misapprehension.
Yep.
All right, so a couple things I wanted to just introduce in the discussion before you continue painting the picture of what's happened to society.
One, the woke revolution does an excellent job of triggering a circuit that turns off I use empathy and sympathy differently than most people.
In common parlance, it turns off empathy for people who deserve it.
The students who showed up at my classroom and called me a racist had never met me.
And under ordinary circumstances, if I had met them in any context other than that one, I would have won most of them, if not all of them over, because I was somebody who thinks deeply about the issues that they think they care about and has something to say that is actually useful.
But what they did was they caused these people to see me as a monster before they ever showed up.
It made it essentially impossible to alert them to the fact that they were doing something that their conscience would not accept if it understood it.
And so that you can see also in the I'm not sure exactly what the explanation for what happened in Israel two days ago was.
But I take the celebrations that have erupted around the world of this attack to be a terrifying indication of what it looks like for a population to truly lose their own humanity and their sense of others humanity.
The brutality of the attack, never mind whether or not you think an attack was justified, the brutality of the attack that unfolded, the murdering of parents in front of their children, and worse, is nothing a reasonable person could celebrate.
And yet, there was public celebration, cheering, dancing in the streets.
But my point is that what you are seeing when you watch people celebrate this, is people who somehow do not regard the suffering of other people as Meaningful or even real and I I don't know.
I'm sure we all carry genes that would allow that circuitry to exist in us because the history of history is exactly the sort of place where that characteristic existed in large measure, but I do not believe that I could delight in the torture of my worst enemy Even at my lowest moment.
There's no point at which I fail to understand that that is a human being, even if I thought they needed to suffer.
It's not the kind of thing I would find myself celebrating.
So, in any case, the fact that the woke revolutionaries have participated in these celebrations and have cheered them on on social media.
The fact that they have made excuses for those celebrating atrocities really should make people think about what it is they are partnering with.
We do not want a world in which anybody celebrates atrocities.
If they happen, they are shameful for all of us and I guess I think a lot of people and in fact I've heard and I've had arguments with lots of people who Make excuses and they tell us that the claims and the proposals that are being advanced by the woke revolutionaries are not what they seem, that it's hyperbolic language, but that's not true.
These are people who are experimenting.
They are toying with the very circuitry that precedes genocide.
Yes, sir.
And I don't, maybe, maybe this chapter will cause people to think twice, having now seen it.
But obviously the mutilation of children, atrocities against civilians, these are all things that nobody should find acceptable, and yet there is a sizable fraction of the population that apparently does.
Yeah, and I'm not, Brett, I'm not an optimist.
People who call themselves optimists call me a cynical or, and of course, as someone, you know, everybody who's called cynical says the same thing that I'm going to say, which is I think I'm actually a realist.
Who knows at the end of the day?
I'm not very hopeful right now.
I haven't been hopeful for a while.
The world that I thought existed does not exist.
And the human nature that I believed was real, I had a misunderstanding of human nature, a very profound misunderstanding until recent years, I think.
I did not know that it was possible.
i'm still so rocked back on my heels by the fact that in america in the 21st century we can have i i'm sorry to keep going back to this but i i think it is i think the trans the transitioning transgenderism is is to me the most florid deployment of absolute insanity
um that we could put our fingers on right now i it is the most deranged thing i have ever witnessed in my life at least with respect to children uh you know Yeah, well, I'll go farther than I think you're comfortable, and I'll speak only for myself.
I don't think it's very much better for adults either.
I think the entire thing is absolutely deranged.
I'm not saying that it is or it isn't.
What I'm saying... No, it is much worse with children for two reasons.
Yes, it is.
Adults have the right and should have the right to To experiment with whatever it is they wish to experiment with, so long as they are not doing harm to others.
And that is a term we have to define very carefully because there are lots of ways to cryptically harm others.
But I believe that an adult who truly feels that they are in the wrong body and within reason that there are remedies that might improve their situation.
And I, you know, I think there are examples of adults who appear to prove that this at least exists, that there are people who are happier having made modifications.
But even if that wasn't true, yes, even if that wasn't true, I am in no position to tell an adult, you don't know what you're talking about.
Yes, the children, and this is what I was going for, that we live in a society where not only do people Not react with mobs and pitchforks to protect children that someone proposes to do this to.
Not only do we not do that, we affirmatively celebrate the mutilation on shows like I'm Jazz Jennings.
We put them on breakfast television.
We put mothers, and there are fathers, but this is largely a mother's sin, and it is my belief Um, that the transitioning of children is simply a modern form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
I think it is exactly not like it.
It is exactly the same thing as the classic cases that we see of parents poisoning children to make them look as though they're ill to get attention.
I don't think it's eerily like that.
I think it is exactly the same thing.
It's that sick.
That's me.
I'm not saying that you have to agree with me.
No, no.
Look, I can't speak to every case, but does that pattern strike me as a good match?
It does.
And the inversion of reality where those who are mutilating children are celebrated.
They're called loving.
Loving and swarming.
And those who are resisting the mutilation of children are being portrayed as Putting their lives in jeopardy.
Right?
The trope that it is to prevent the suicides of trans people that we must rush them to transition when we know full well that most people who experience gender dysphoria as children get over it.
Right?
Their mind's correct.
Correct.
And the other part of it, which many gay people have been bringing up.
We've been shouting this from the rooftops for years.
I think we're finally starting to be listened to a little bit more.
But the undeniable fact that the numerical majority of these children are the children who would grow up to be homosexuals otherwise.
My point in bringing this up again is to say that
We are living in a society that is so morally deranged that not only are we not protecting children from this, we're affirmatively praising the very abusive, sick parents and doctors who are doing it to them, and we are threatening and successfully taking away custody, livelihood, and moral, social respectability and reputation from the parents trying to save the children from this.
We are so far in reversal I'm having one of those instances right now where I can barely believe it.
So if we live in that society, and we do live in that society, what hope do we have that anybody is going to look at what Hamas just did and actually react like any moral person might have reacted?
What can we depend on?
Can we count on our compatriots for anything?
Yeah, I, you know, I was raised in a house where the Holocaust was a regular topic of discussion.
And it was not overworked.
Overwrought discussion.
It was discussion, it was analytical discussion designed, I think, to make sure that we got the message about how this happened, that it could happen here, and that there were things that we could know about it that would allow us to know that it was happening.
And I, as an adult, I did not live, I did not expect to live to see this kind of transition at home.
I could imagine it would have happened elsewhere.
I could imagine it would have happened here, but a long time in the future.
To see this transition in real time, where people's empathy is broken intentionally, systematically, it's not hard at all to imagine people who once viewed you as a regular person like they are, Ushering you towards whatever cattle cars and gas chambers would look like in the new era.
It is very easy to understand how that happens once you've seen a transition like this where, you know, we have done absolutely ghastly things to children.
And to people under, I mean, you talked earlier, Brett, about the vaccination campaign.
I think most of us, I think this is probably true for you and Heather, I think you probably lost a lot of friends and colleagues during the Evergreen thing.
Most people do.
I lost, and again, you know, my story is no more dramatic, it is less dramatic than what some other people have gone through, but I lost almost my entire friendship circle, even people who had known me for 30 years over the last seven years.
And I not only lost some of them, but some of them, and it was painful to do.
It's still painful to me.
Some of them I actively threw out of my life and said, get away from me.
I never want to speak to you again.
I don't trust you.
I don't respect you.
I'm scared to turn my back on you.
I never thought I'd say that to you.
But you are not the person I thought you were.
I have actively pushed people out as well because I feared people that I used to say were my friends.
And I mean that.
It's not over-egging it to say that.
Right.
I've seen people that I thought I knew their soul.
I thought I knew their moral core.
And I saw them buckle down to COVID in ways that said to me, Josh, I Are you sure that this person who's been your friend for this many years would not call the public health authorities on you?
And when I couldn't answer yes, that was it.
That's how bad it is.
So I've now been through several of these events in my own life, and I've noticed a pattern, which is that in every case, these divisive crises reveal people's character.
And each time I've seen the same pattern.
There are people you thought you could trust who absolutely disappoint you.
And then there are people that you never expected, maybe you didn't even know them ahead of time, who rise to the challenge and they shine.
And you see that somebody, maybe you didn't know their name, But they turn out to have tremendous strength of character and insight and they stand up at the right moment and defend you for no reason.
Right?
No reason other than that it's the right thing to do.
And so each time I have lost friends and it's painful and I have gained people who are much higher quality.
And I call this the painful upgrade.
Right?
It keeps upgrading your social circle.
And I now have to look back on the world before I had been through any of these and realize that I was walking around with trust in people that carried with them the ability to absolutely betray under the worst possible circumstances, and that that's dangerous.
You are far better to know Who actually has the strength of character to face these things and to limit your significant interactions to that pool of people, right?
It is a gift, in fact, to know who cannot be trusted with your well-being.
And I, you know, I don't like to say that, but I think people need to be alerted to this because, you know, people are not labeled.
They don't even know themselves whether they're capable of this until they're faced with the situation.
It's the crisis that reveals it.
And, um, uh, you know, it's the silver lining of these terrible chapters is that it does tell you who's really on your team.
You know what scares me, Brett, the most?
The thing that keeps me up at night existentially.
And I don't know how far to go with this.
I think there's a lot to it, but I'm not entirely certain, and I cannot accurately separate my own emotional projection from whether I'm analyzing this as rigorously as I should.
So with those provisos, we talk about drug addicts and alcoholics.
And one of the common ways that we talk about them and understand them, if they're able to get sober and kick their addiction, is we say that person has to hit rock bottom.
It has to become so unbearable and so painful that he rescues himself.
And I think there's a great deal of truth to that.
I think that is usually the case.
There may be other ways of doing it, but I don't think they're common ways.
I know personally that to become free from, and I'm not free of the psychological damage that my childhood did to me, I'm trying to make something better out of that experience at this point in my life.
But, and again, I'm not fishing for pity, I'm doing this for illustration purposes because I want people to understand this on a human level.
I will never be the person I could have been in some ways, because my psyche was damaged during my formative years by incredible abuse.
The same is true of my sister, my brother, and millions of other people who've been through that.
That's true.
But, so, there are lifelong consequences to this.
In order for me But I'm in a much better place today than I was seven years ago when I was blind to this and I was still under the sway of the deranged household.
But to get there, I had to be completely psychologically broken.
And I was.
I was as close as I've ever been as an adult to actively considering suicide.
I'm not a suicidal person.
I'm a depressive.
I'm a neurotic.
Heavily neurotic.
But I'm not a suicidal person.
I was during that time.
The depth of pain and fear, absolute soul-shaking fear that I lived in at that time, I hope I never have to feel again.
But it was necessary.
If it had been less painful than it was, I don't think I would have broken free, and I don't think I would have had the opportunity to reevaluate the entire way that I saw the world.
So, if this is the case for the individual, for most of us as individuals, that we have to really hit the wall before we make a significant change, if that scales up to society, that's what scares me, Brett.
How low do we have to go as Americans, as Westerners?
How bad does it have to get?
How many people need to die?
How many of us need to lose our minds before we hit rock bottom?
Well, that is a terrifying thought.
Never considered it that way.
I do think that there is something very real about the phenomenon you're describing, and that, you know, we have a metaphor in evolutionary biology called the adaptive landscape, and it's useful in various ways.
Here it's kind of a loose analogy, but in order to get from a low peak where you were living To a higher peak, you have to go through a valley and these valleys are very dark and perilous places.
And there's no guarantee that you do get out the other side.
So hitting rock bottom is something not everybody survives, but it may be necessary to do it if you hope to live in a different state.
And I would, I would introduce one concept here.
I think, I just think this is one of the missing pieces of the puzzle when we talk about victims and abuse and psychological trauma, all of these things.
There is a rather exact psychological analogy to be drawn in the damage done by abuse.
to the damage done by physical injury.
You know, there's a reason that we say, you know, that you were hurt.
There's a reason that word works in both the physical and the psychological realm, and it's because there's a tight parallel between these things.
And what I would point out is that when you have been damaged by someone or some event, That damage is a persistent vulnerability.
It makes it impossible to live well.
And that the right thing to do is to aim for the same thing that happens to a physical injury.
It starts out as a wound, and the right thing to do is to aim to scar over.
Now a scar is not as good as the tissue that was damaged.
It's a patch.
As you say, you will never be the person that you would have been if you hadn't faced the abuse you faced.
Right.
But you scar over so that you can function.
And, you know, you keep saying that you don't say this or that to gain anybody's pity.
You don't strike me as a pitiable person.
Maybe you were.
But you strike me as somebody who has figured out how to take the damage that you sustained and to scar it over and to function and to do so, you know, not just, you know, treading water, but you're doing good in the world.
You're bringing light to this issue.
You were working to protect people from a predatory industry.
This is all very positive stuff.
So, in any case, I think one of the things that I see in the woke revolutionaries and all of the correlated pathologies Is that there is no desire to scar over.
And where we once would have heralded somebody for facing something terrible and then making something of themselves, what there is, is a desire to keep the wound open.
And it's part of a pattern of learned helplessness.
Yes, yes.
Where people, the whole idea is, I am owed A living for what I've been through or something along those lines.
And it's a con, right?
It's a parasitic way of viewing the world.
And I think one of the things for people of a certain age, it's this wallowing in self-pity That is so destructive, right?
We used to look with honor at people who faced something and stood up to it, and now it's like, that's the problem, right?
It's all about, you were injured, you'll forever be injured, and that's somebody else's problem and will permanently be, rather than, you know, hey, look, play the cards that you've been dealt.
Scar over.
Yeah, and you're exactly right.
There is an entire generation now, at least one generation, for whom the majority of them do not understand that there's another way to be a human being.
They literally do not know.
I talk about this on the show sometimes.
I perceive that there is a profound and historically Unparalleled cultural drop-off, a cliff that happens after my generation onto the next generation.
So from Gen X, which is me, to Millennials, and then to Zoomers.
I hate, I can't believe I just said that word, it's so annoying.
Baby boomers, silent generation, my parents, my grandparents.
Yes, in the 20th century, which is all that America, well, nobody remembers that anymore either.
But we say, oh, every generation that comes along says, oh, I don't want to be like my parents.
And the parents always look at the children and say they're messing everything up and things used to be better in the old days.
And there's some truth to that.
I do not believe that's what's going on here.
I think that after Generation X, there is a rip, an actual rip in our skin that separates me from there.
We no longer have a shared culture.
So, my grandmother's generation and my mother's generation, even though we were different generations, we shared 20th century culture.
I knew the hit records of their teen years, right?
Only three channels of television, so everybody was watching Walter Cronkite.
You get to millennials and Gen Z, Brett.
I've had people tell me they think I'm exaggerating, and I really don't think I am.
It is almost as if some of these young people do not actually believe the world did exist at all before they were born.
And it's not just that they look at old movies or pictures of old houses with old technology with sort of bemusement, which we all do.
I detect contempt and fear.
It's as if there's something disgusting about the way the world used to be, something threatening that they don't want to get close to.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something very different about this, and I think it's part of our social fabric unraveling.
Well, let me, I have seen this close up in a couple of different ways, and I have some thoughts on it that are not a complete picture, but I look forward to hearing what you'll make of them.
One, your point about Walter Cronkite, I make the same point and I use the same example, and so I know what comes back.
Right?
Like you think Walter Cronkite was telling you the truth.
You actually believe... Oh, that's not the point.
Right, that's not the point.
And in fact, I make this point in another way.
If you had to choose between a culture in which people read really good books, but not the same ones, versus a culture in which everybody read the same stuff, but it was of lower quality, you might be better off in a culture where people shared the content of these things.
And I feel the same way about the Walter Cronkite phenomenon, which is, if you all start with the same assumptions, Then you at least have a way to talk to each other.
And I'm not arguing that bad assumptions aren't poison.
They are.
Sure.
But the point is we can't even talk about which of our assumptions are bad because we don't start from anything we can agree on.
Like literally at this point, we can't agree that pedophilia is bad.
We don't agree that two plus two necessarily equals four.
We don't agree that men can't become women.
Right?
We literally can't agree on anything.
And when I was teaching at Evergreen, Heather and I used to make a point of taking our students out into the field, and we had great students.
They were all Millennials at that point.
We would take them into the field.
They weren't all Millennials.
There were some older students, but mostly the rooms were filled with Millennials.
And we would go into the field just for the purpose of breaking ourselves away from social media, Coming to understand each other, you know, where everybody's letting their hair down, we would sit around the campfire, right?
There was often a biological point to these things, but really mostly they were retreats so we could learn how to interact with each other.
And we would ask for people to bring songs to the campfire, things that we could sing together just to be human.
It was almost impossible to find any song that even all of the students knew in common, right?
They were all listening to their own stuff.
They had so much choice.
And, you know, I think in some ways the amount of really good music that's available now actually exceeds what I had access to at their age.
You know, the nature of the Internet has allowed smaller artists to find an audience, people who have really important stuff to say, but the lack of a shared culture Means they just don't even know how to interact.
Yes.
And I will put one more piece on that puzzle.
I was talking to Zach, my older son, he's 19, about what had taken place in Israel.
And he said, you know, I think there's something you ought to know.
I said, what's that?
And he said, I have literally, this is him talking, I have literally not seen a single post from anybody in my generation on what happened.
And we talked about this for a little bit.
Why would that be?
And the answer is, I think this event, Defies the normal rules by which this generation would decide which the right side of history was.
The woke side is blindly pro-Palestinian such that they are willing to excuse Hamas terrorism, brutality, atrocities.
And there are, of course, lots of Jews, people who have family in Israel, people who understand the geopolitical danger of destabilization in this region.
And so the point is, this generation has gotten used to having a, I think it's phony, but a North Star that tells them what they're supposed to believe and they level their arguments based on what they have been handed as a position.
They don't question it.
And in a point where we don't know how this is going to break, they're They are at loose ends and so they don't talk about it because the last thing you want to do is Venture a position that turns out to be on what will ultimately be declared to be the wrong side of history Yeah, right.
That's like that's a terrifying thought to them.
And so anyway, I I agree there is something There is something wrong with the way culture functions for Gen Zs, and I think pretty clearly for millennials, that is putting us in jeopardy because it is reviving the mechanisms that allow for things like genocide.
We are toying with those very tropes.
We may find out very soon.
Yeah, I wish people understood that that's really where we were, because I find myself again and again trying to wake people to the fact that That the West is in tremendous jeopardy and that in fact it is no mystery what happens if the West comes apart.
It's already in terrible condition.
If it comes apart, what happens is The prior version of human interaction.
History will reassert itself, and we will be back in a never-ending series of wars and genocides as lineages attempt to drive each other from the earth.
It's not somewhere that any reasonable person could want us to go, and the frivolousness with which we are dealing with that risk is truly frightening.
It is, and it's the sort of thing that I... You have to be conscious of it, you have to know.
I want people to be conscious of it as well, I want them to see it for what it really is.
And yet, if you are fully conscious of it, or maybe I should just say me, maybe this isn't reflective of other people, but if I'm fully conscious of this, every minute of every hour of the day, I can't take it.
I'm conscious of it most of the time, But it is wearing.
This is not a state.
For any of us, this is not a normal psychological state.
This is not a sustainable state.
Yeah, it's not a sustainable state.
And I fear that some combination of
The constant state of disruption that these younger generations have existed in and the clumsy remedies that have been offered them in pharmaceutical form, the massive number of distractions that they have been presented, which allow them to live an entire life without knowing even what their own mind sounds like in a quiet environment, that that is causing them
Not to be able to do, and actually I think it goes right to the point you were making about the way they view the past.
They have to disavow the recent past because it is the proof That it can be better.
That if you stop doing this shit, if you stop emphasizing race, if you start tolerating differences of opinion, figuring out how to hash them out and not make everything personal and turn everything into a cancelable offense, if you don't do that, it does not leave you with a perfect world, but it does leave you with a world that is livable.
I think that's exactly the... livable!
Yeah, livable.
And if you knew, if you could teleport these people for five minutes into that world and just get a sense for, you know, what it is like to live in a world where, yes, there is racism, but it's not decisive.
It's not present in every interaction.
It is an unfortunate feature of the landscape, and it's something that good people wanted to reduce.
Right?
Yeah.
You know, believe me, I have nothing but complaints about the failure of that earlier world to live up to its potential.
But compared to what we are doing, we were at least on the right track.
I don't even think we know.
I don't even think we know what we mean anymore collectively as a culture by most of the things that we claim we care about.
I don't think we know what we mean by racism.
I don't think we know what we mean by phobia.
I don't think we... Because none of this stuff... First, the idea that humans are perfectible, I think, is another poison.
We don't have time to get into that.
But the idea that it is possible, with the human organism, To eliminate racism or eliminate sexism or eliminate poverty is a child's fantasy.
It is not real.
It has never been real in this physical universe in which we are embodied.
It never will be real in any universe that continues to follow the laws of physics that have been bequeathed to us.
We are not perfectible.
We are flawed.
We are capable of Wonderful and wondrous acts.
We are capable of creating art that will make the most stoic man burst into tears.
We are capable of extraordinary compassion and grace, and we are capable of depravities worse than anything that you can dream up and put in a Hollywood script.
This is the human animal.
Most of the time, We've already seen that it's possible to have a world, not a perfect world, but a world in which that human animal can live, as you said, is livable, and can spend a reasonable amount of that time contented, or if not contented, then challenged in an engaging way that makes you want to get up the next day.
That is being human.
That world is possible, but the world that they think That the extremely woke think, that the power-hungry psychopaths think, or that the naive, very younger generations think, that we can get rid of these things.
Well, there'll just be a world someday where men never say insulting things about women, and everybody will say that they love gay people just as much as I do, and no one will ever look askance at a black person.
It's not real.
And if we think that to be happy and to be self-actualized, that we require that world to exist, then we are going to kill ourselves because it ain't never gonna exist.
Yeah, it's an interesting point.
And in fact, there is a direct mirror of what you just said generally in the issue of medical transition.
The promise that these people are being delivered is that the feeling that something is very desperately wrong is something that can be cured with this one program.
And the problem is it's a one-way trip and they have no way of knowing that in fact much of their sense of unease, which may in fact be perfectly accurate, It would be perfectly reasonable for a person to feel a tremendous constant sense of unease in a world as broken as the one that we are currently creating.
The idea that they are going to find a perfect alternative in which all they've done is flipped a switch and signed the paperwork and the doctor switches their gender and they are now something that feels good.
That is not how this works.
And it is terrifying to think that they are only going to discover that after they've surrendered their physiological health to this program.
So anyway, I think the idea that that is generally the error That there is a belief in the possibility of a world that, I swear to you, nobody who had ever built anything real could believe in.
Yes.
If you make machines, if you build structures, I think if you paint a painting that looks realistic, you will understand that you are going to have to take this, but you're going to have to give up that to get it, and you'll stop looking for perfection because it's impossible.
Which doesn't mean that an excellent world isn't possible, but if you think perfection is what we're shooting for, we are not going to achieve excellence, we're going to achieve dystopia.
Are we not inadvertently burning down the village to save it?
Are we not killing the entire world in order to save it?
I'm afraid that that is exactly what we are doing.
And the very troubling thing for me is that I believe there are those of us who understand that and are trying to tell people.
It's not that we don't see the problems you're talking about.
But they cannot be solved this way.
They cannot be solved this way.
They cannot be solved instantaneously.
They cannot be solved completely.
And your insistence that that's what we do is like, it's like you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean and you are noticing all the things that are wrong with that ship.
And so you decide to destroy it in the hope that a better ship will come along.
It's that crazy.
That's not how you do it.
You can address the problems of the ship.
You can talk about whether or not there's some way to get a better ship, which will also have problems.
But destroying the ship on the faith that the ship is the problem is going to drown us.
Yep.
Well, is there more that we should say to complete the picture of the cluster B, cluster bomb, cluster fuck that we face?
um - There's always more, but you know...
I don't know that there's more that we can say right now and here.
We covered a lot of territory.
And I'm disappointed to say we did not achieve a perfect world, or even a description of one.
I mean, that's a failure.
But I think we've done well.
All right, Josh, I want to thank you for this.
It's been a very fascinating, if not uplifting, conversation.
I hope that Dark Horse listeners will get as much out of it as I did.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much.
And, you know, it may not be uplifting in the moment.
You know, this is the world is grim right now.
It's grim.
But The fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that Dark Horse exists, that we can know each other and talk to each other, is one of the things that keeps me going.
So, it's not a perfect world, but it's a world that has good things in it.
Thank you.
Yeah, I appreciate that, and I would just, uh, there's a Hopi saying that I've always been fond of.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
But are we the ones that we want, Brett?
No, we could probably do better on that front, but we are the ones we've been waiting for, irrespective of that.
