All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 14, 2023 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:17:48
Interview With Ed Dutton, the Jolly Heretic
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jared Taylor.
I'm with American Renaissance.
And with me today is a guest, Ed Dutton.
Ed Dutton is the author of probably the largest number of books that I possess or that even know of written by a single living person.
He is remarkably prolific.
He's a man who started off getting a PhD in religious studies, but then moved in a very different direction.
He's been affiliated with universities all around the world, it seems, or at least concentrated in Eastern Europe, but including an affiliation with a Saudi Arabian institution, but Lithuanian, I believe, Finnish,
Polish. In fact, his background is so interesting and complicated that, Ed, I would like you to explain it yourself.
Where were you born and reared, and how did you get into your current line of work?
Oh, hello.
Thank you for having me on.
Where was I born?
I was born in Tooting in southwest London.
I was born three months prematurely, which was useful to be born at that hospital because it had the country's best specialist baby unit.
And then I was brought up near Wimbledon in southwest London.
And when I was doing my A-levels, which is the sort of leading certificate at British schools, you choose your three best subjects from your GCSEs, and my three best were English literature, history, and Christian theology.
And I always thought I'd read history, or English for that matter, but I really, really enjoyed and was fascinated by the A-level in Christian theology.
And so I chose to do a theology degree, and that was at Durham University.
And then when I finished there, I wasn't sure what to do or whatever, and there was the possibility of doing a master's by research.
And then that turned into, I never did a master's, that just turned into a PhD, which I did at the University of Aberdeen.
So, you'd never had an interest in being a clerical?
No, not really.
The nearest I had to that was when I moved to Finland in 2005.
I was unemployed, and so I went to the unemployment office, and they gave me an integration program.
And the integration program was that I would learn Finnish, but also they looked at what qualifications I have, which is, of course, a PhD in divinity.
And so they said, oh, well, we'll put...
I thought they called it work practice where you will do work practice as a Lutheran priest and you will get more than social security money because you're doing this work practice as a Lutheran priest and so for a while I followed around Lutheran priests and was sort of an understudy.
So there were material rewards for spiritual virtue.
Well I didn't get them in the end but yes, in theory that would have occurred.
Well gosh, we got ahead of ourselves.
So, I met this Finnish girl at Aberdeen University.
She was an exchange student and we started a long-distance relationship and eventually she moved to Scotland and then she got this job in Finland, in Northern Finland, and so we moved there.
Well, chercher la femme.
Almost always the explanation.
So, and then your career and your interests took a dramatic turn, did they not?
Well, not immediately.
I started off...
Continuing to research what I had done at Aberdeen, which was basically social anthropology, so fieldwork based.
My doctorate was on fundamentalist Christian students and the differences in these groups between different kinds of university.
And then from there, obviously in Finland, I started to become interested in the dynamics of Finnish culture and I was noticing all these little differences, subtle differences.
And so I started writing about it and I had this idea.
That Finns definitely weren't like other Scandinavians.
They weren't Scandinavians at all, but people don't really know that.
And maybe the differences I was seeing were caused by something else.
I don't know, northerness or something.
And I started noticing similarities between what I read about the Greenlandic and what I read about what I was seeing with the Finns.
And I coined this term the Finuit.
And that was my second book, which got quite a lot of publicity in Finland, where I bent around asking, starting random Finns about Finnish culture and stuff like this.
And the more I looked into it, at the time I was doing occasional work at the university, in various departments at the university, and I was doing journalism and so on.
And the more I looked into it, the more I began to...
To understand that this wasn't...
What a lot of people were saying was, oh, we Finns are quiet and silent and taciturn and whatever because of the Winter War or because of whatever bad things have happened to us.
But then you look into the history of it and they've always been like that.
And they've been stereotyped like that in the 18th century.
And so this raises the possibility of something which was not something I've been really...
My whole education in theology and then in religious studies was that everything's environmental.
Environmental determinism.
And somehow, even though perhaps on some level we understand that behavioural traits run in families and whatever, and you're noticing that there are these families that are fundamentalist Christians and their parents are fundamentalist Christians, the whole way of thinking was environmental.
And I happened, I guess, I happened to be in Olu University Library one day looking through...
And in those days, Finland was based, as it were, compared to now.
Finland was not into multiculturalism.
The average person was...
It was by modern parlance, you know, completely unacceptable in their views.
And I happened across one of Richard Lynn's books.
His book with Tatoo van Hennen as well, that was in the library there.
I'm sorry, Tatoo van Hennen?
Yes, Tatoo van Hennen.
And, of course, he was the son of the Finnish Prime Minister at the time.
That had been a scandal while I was in Finland, actually, just before I went there, 2004, I think it was, that he had publicly stated the results of his book in a Finnish newspaper, and they tried to prosecute him for saying that, and failed.
And then there was Rushton's book, obviously, that was in the library there, and Wilson's.
Back one step further, however, maybe the books were there, but it takes a certain turn of curiosity to look for those books and find those books.
There's thousands of books.
I was literally thumbing along the shelves.
Bored. Really?
Perhaps waiting to do a lecture.
I don't know.
Time to kill.
And you literally stumbled on it.
And I just Richard Lim, bright blue.
And what was the title?
Published by Washington Summit, Race Differences in Intelligence and Evolutionary Analysis, I think it was.
Well, for heaven's sake.
So this jumped off the shelf at you, and your life's never been the same.
Well, it was a slow process from there.
But yeah, and so I started to think, well, actually, perhaps what I'm saying in the finuit is wrong.
Yes. And I've subsequently done a book called The Silent Raper Pandemic, How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers, where I look at it from a much more genetic evolutionary perspective, the nature of Finnishness.
And so, yeah, from there it began to change.
Gradually, gradually, gradually you're realising that, no, the genetics and the science of this is extremely important and you can't put everything down from environmental perspectives and you have basically been sort of lied to, really, or at least misled when you were an undergraduate and when you were a postgraduate.
So this picture...
I think on some level I kind of knew it.
When I was about 15, I was about to have an election in England.
It was the first election.
It was the 92 and then it was the 97 election.
It was going to be a big election.
There was clearly going to be a change in government.
And I became very interested in...
There were all these minor political parties that were standing because you only had to contest 50 seats to get a party political broadcast.
And I became very interested in this and I wrote to or rang various political parties and got them to send me their information packs, pre-internet, of course, in those days.
And the more based parties, should we say, had a book list.
And one of the books on there was IQ and Racial Differences.
Another one was called The Biology of the Race Problem.
One of those two books, I forget, which was by Henry Garrett, who was a professor at Columbia.
And so I read those at 15. Oh, for heaven's sake.
Nearly 16. And I was like, crikey, you know.
But I somehow managed, and this is something we discussed earlier, of course, in Mindvue, I somehow managed through...
Effortful control through just the feeling that you can't even think this.
To compartmentalise this off and just not talk about it or think about it until I was in my early 30s, really.
By then, by the time I was in my late 20s, I was realising there were serious problems with anthropology and I was understanding that it has to be underpinned by your conciliance.
E. O. Wilson's idea, you know, by science, essentially.
It has to be, or it's meaningless.
But you had read those books at the age of 15 or 16. 15, 15. Gracious.
And they were germinating in your brain, almost unbeknownst to you.
And then, finally, when you got illumination from another quarter, you went back to those books with a kind of an aha thing.
Or back to those ideas, certainly.
And then I started reading more about, obviously, the other research relating to this, not just Rushton, but other people, Audrey Shuey or Jensen or whoever.
What was going on?
And my eyes become slowly open to just the utter corruption of academia and the extent to which it's moving back.
It's moving back towards what it was, which was just an expression of the religion of the time.
It used to be Christianity and Anglicanism in Oxford and Cambridge, and now it's just wokeism.
So what period would this have been?
What year to what year?
Early 2006.
We first got in touch, I think, in about 2005.
So you can see that by then my eyes were slowly opening to this.
And I was writing for you and I wrote for Chronicles quite a few times and Right Now magazine, remember that perhaps?
So I was aware of it.
I was even younger, even at 22 I was aware of it, though I wasn't as aware of the importance of taking a quantitative approach, perhaps, because I wasn't educated in that.
And so there was these kinds,
I started doing some work for him,
and about the time which this...
English-language newspaper which I was working for in Oulu aimed at expatriates.
It was going to shut basically at exactly that time.
He then started offering me funding to do this research and then I could just go for it.
Well, your story is a very interesting one to me because I was once entirely conventional on the question of race.
And I'm fascinated by people who started off being conventional but then arrived at a more realistic, and you and I think, to be the true view of racial differences and their significance and HBD and everything that goes along with that.
And I've always wanted to know, had they come across a particular argument that did the job or a particular incident?
Or some sort of parallel or some particular book.
And almost no one, when I asked them...
I can name you the book.
Well, but you started off the racial differences in intelligence.
No, but the one that really did it was Why Race Matters by Michael Levin.
Ah. Is that right?
Isn't that interesting?
Well, but you see, you had an almost purely intellectual conversion, so to speak.
So many people, and I find it very disturbing, so many people say, well, it was when my sister was mugged and raped, or some sort of horrible thing happened, or when I was in the Navy, and all the blacks ganged up on me and beat me.
I'm very disappointed that it takes that kind of...
I've never had a negative experience like that.
No, I've almost never, ever had a negative experience.
And I was at a birthday I had a party in about 1989, and I was the only non-Muslim there, the only white person there.
And at the other party, I was the only non-Korean there.
No, I never had a negative experience like that, no.
Well, good.
It was a pure intellectual process, and I think that's the best, really, because that's one that is not associated with some kind of trauma, some kind of extraordinary experience.
It's simply a sifting through the data and drawing the conclusion and saying, well, gosh.
What I was told just is not based in any kind of correct answer.
I remember as a child, how old would I have been?
Eight or nine?
My grandfather, how old would I have been?
Something like that, I don't know.
And my grandfather showed me a photograph of a load of workers that had been working to prop up Winchester Cathedral, which was collapsing into the swamp on which it's built.
And one of those workers was his grandfather.
And there was this famous diver that went under the cathedral and helped to prop it back up again.
And of course, everyone was white.
I remember saying, where are all the Asian and black people?
And I went, you didn't get no Asian or black people in them days!
And I didn't know that!
I see.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, I'll say one more thing about myself, and then we'll get back to you, which is really the purpose of this conversation, and I beg your pardon.
But there was, I had one of these equivalent experiences you had at 15 and 16, reading these extraordinary books, certainly extraordinary at that time, and then sort of cordoning that off.
What I remember is, I guess at about age six or seven, there was a world championship boxing match.
Between Ingemar Johansson, a Swede, and Floyd Patterson, a black American.
I was living in Japan.
I had no experience with blacks, no experience with Swedes.
But I remember seeing Ingemar Johansson flat on his back, and there is Floyd Patterson, triumphant.
And I remember thinking to myself, wait a minute, that's not right.
Don't we have one of our guys who can take this fellow?
And I remember asking my father, gosh, isn't there any...
White guy who can beat him?
No, no, no, he's champion of the world.
He didn't seem to think one way or the other about it.
And I had forgotten that instinctive, sort of primitive racial loyalty reaction to that photograph until my mid-30s, until I arrived from a completely separate route to a different understanding of race and the necessity of racial loyalty.
So, these things happen.
That was a memory that...
Really had dropped completely out of the storehouse.
And then finally back it came.
But anyway, I beg your pardon.
And we'll return to your career once you discovered Richard Lynn, is what it sounds like.
Well, yeah, pretty much.
It was a bit of a turning point.
So he offered me this funding.
And then not long after that, he wanted to meet me.
And I happened to be in England anyway.
It was Christmas.
This was Christmas 2012.
And so I...
Yeah, the culmination of my career as a cultural anthropologist was 2012 in a sense.
I was a visiting lecturer at Riga Stradin's University.
I think that's what you were mixing up with earlier in Lithuania, you said, in Latvia.
Although I'm not affiliated there anymore, but I was visiting.
And yeah, that was the year of the change.
I was able to start researching.
Proper stuff, as it were.
And I had the ability to do so.
So yeah, so then he started funding me and that went on for quite a while.
And then set off, opened up other doors, opened up other doors, opened up other doors.
And then people have been saying to me, another thing was that people have been saying to me for years that I should set up a YouTube channel or whatever, or channel anyway.
And that's for the Generation Z people, that's for the young people.
I can't do that.
The very idea of sitting in front of a screen and talking into the void.
And for some reason that took off.
But yeah, Richard Lynn, I read a lot of papers with him and a book with him.
So that opened doors, which opened doors, and finally opened the doors to this very studio.
Seemingly, yes.
So here we are.
Well, because Richard Lynn, the name's come up, and he has so recently died, and you knew him better than I, I, of course, I admired him greatly.
And I thought he was a wonderful man, as well as a very courageous scientist.
I've written an obituary of him, perhaps a tribute to him is a better word for it, and I really feel his loss deeply.
We were in correspondence up until maybe just a few months before he died, and he always seemed miraculously to put out one book a year, practically, even in his 90s he was writing books.
But could you tell me a little bit about your personal impressions of Richard Mann?
He was an extremely kind and generous guy.
So I remember when I first met him, he emailed me.
I told him the work I was currently doing, as I told you, journalism and whatever.
He said, this sounds most unsatisfying.
Let me write this in the email.
That would be Richard Lynch.
That sounds like a bore.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I took the train to Bristol, which is quite a long way from London, three hours or something.
And then he met me in his little Ford Fiesta at Bristol, the railway station at Temple Meads.
And I was a little hunched over, you know, white-haired man in the distance, waving a sort of handkerchief.
And then I went over, and what would he have been at the time?
82, I suppose.
And he drove me to the oldest pub in Bristol, some medieval pub that's still going, and then he drove me to...
It's not a cathedral, it's some church, or rather, where Chaston, the poet, is buried there, and various interesting people in the history of Bristol.
Because he's from Bristol originally.
He went to Bristol Grammar School, and after he retired, he moved back to his roots.
So that was his hometown.
And then we went for lunch, some Italian place or whatever, and then we got on.
We just got on well.
When you say he was always kind, that was my impression always too.
Always cheerful, always kind, and always very eager to explain some scientific detail to a non-scientist like me.
Very patient.
Extremely polite.
Yes, very polite.
The most agreeable sort of man.
Yes, and he would always make a point of wanting to write back.
He would always email back.
I mean, I was already corresponding with him, I guess, in the mid-2000s when I read his book.
One of these situations where I emailed him and I didn't expect a response, but of course I got one, which was quite a pleasant surprise.
He was always extremely polite.
He would try to help you out.
He was very, very generous.
I think he saw me and a number of other people as kind of protégés.
And wanted to aid off careers in any way that he could.
Well, of course, in a saner world, he would have been in charge of a graduate department with all sorts of people studying under him.
But he was.
Well, yes, some time ago.
And then he was even stripped of his emeritus status, I understand, from University of Coleraine when the students decided that he was blaggard.
But... I suppose in his own way, he was fulfilling this function of making sure that people who understood the world as he understood it, in other words, correctly, had a way to move forward.
Are you at liberty to tell me the names of other people that you might consider his proteges?
Well, I think that's fairly clear from whom he's published with.
So David Davide Piffer, Michael Woodley, David Becker, the various people who are considerably younger than him, often young enough to be his grandchildren, who have written with him, published
with him, would be great.
Well, I think what he's done is absolutely wonderful.
When someone's in his 90s, you should not be too surprised, should he die?
But I was still somehow shocked.
Perhaps if I had been in daily contact with him face-to-face and seen him slowing down, as I understand he was, I wouldn't have been surprised.
We just had email correspondence, and he was always brisk and full of interesting ideas, but still it was a shock.
I interviewed him on The Jolly Heretic at Christmas.
And I had to send someone down to Bristol to sort it out and whatever, and then there was a problem with his internet.
Of course, he has no idea about internet and things like this, and so it was about half an hour into the show that we finally got it working, and he comes on.
And it turned out, I mean, it's not the last published interview with him, because there's going to be another one that's going to come out and on, but it's the last interview chronologically that was done with him.
And he was reasonably sharp, as a man of 93 could be, 92, whatever he was at the time.
And, yeah, it went very well.
Unfailingly polite.
I got up.
I was asked at ISA, the International Society of Intelligence Research, where I was last week in Berkeley, California, to someone said, you should get up at the dinner and do the banquet and do a little speech about Richard.
Well, by all means, you should.
And I did.
Oh, absolutely.
And I was concerned about doing so.
I was a new person.
I'd never been there before.
I was surprised by the reception, though, to me.
A lot of people heard of Jolly Heretic, heard of me, heard of Jolly Heretic, heard of my research.
It was quite touching, really.
Had a lot of support there, it seems.
So this chap, the guy that's the founder of the Society, basically, said, well, I will get up and sort of introduce you, and then you've kind of got my...
Blessings. And I'll get up on it.
So I did, and I just said, about how he's a courageous researcher, that he just focused on the truth, that he didn't let political considerations or whatever stand in the way.
He was just focused on understanding his issues.
He basically discovered the Flynn effect, and Flynn himself admitted that.
But Richard was so deferential and so modest that he was prepared to say, oh, no, no, no, it was something for...
He insisted that it be called the...
Exactly, yeah.
Yes, because this Tudnam fellow had discovered that between the First and Second World Wars, the tested IQs of American GIs had sprung up surprisingly.
And he noticed this, but he never published it, never got a name.
In any case, yes, I think it was very...
It was gentlemanly of Flynn to say that Lynn had found it first.
Flynn was a jolly good chap as well, I should emphasise.
And then, also, I think, particularly gentlemanly of Lynn to say, no, no, it's really Tudnam.
Well, they were.
I never unfortunately met for them.
I corresponded with them.
And he gave me a dust jacket quote for Adolf Witsend.
And he tried his best to help me get it published.
He gave it positive reviews for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press.
But there was always the anonymous negative review.
And then they went with that.
So I ended up with another publisher.
But he, yeah, he was always courageous, intellectually courageous.
He was always unfailingly polite to anybody.
I have a friend, for example, who's always racist.
I have a friend who at that time had a Well, I will tell you then a story.
I will break in into this interview with you and interview myself.
I beg your pardon.
What you just described reminds me of an experience I had with Michael Levin.
You said his book was the one that really pushed you over the edge.
Well, it's so detailed, so philosophical.
In any case, I knew him personally and I went to City College in New York City and I had an appointment with him.
And I was kept waiting in his office for about a half an hour.
I'd come a long way to meet him, but he...
Kept me waiting while he gave a black student last-minute personal instruction on a symbolic logic test that was going to be given the next day.
So I thought this was so remarkable.
I thought it was just fine that he was doing this for a student.
Here's this man who had been vilified for years as an evil racist, making a friend wait while he gave instruction, free instruction, absolutely no under-obligation to do this, to some girl who had fallen behind, and he really felt that it was an important thing to do.
No, quite.
And not surprising, really.
I would not have really thought of it in any terms except that he was seen as such a wicked black person hating him.
Of course, it's in the interests of his detractors to try and destroy the character of those who dare challenge their ideology and therefore challenge their power.
And that's what they do with Lynn.
And if anybody knew Richard Lynn, he was one of the kindest, most reasonable chaps.
He made mistakes, particularly towards the end.
Elderly. With all that that implies, I'm afraid, about what that does to the mind.
But he...
Don't remind me.
Yeah, well...
No, of the people I've met over the last couple of days, you've had a better memory for things.
But, yeah, it was what he was like.
Well, I'm very curious.
I certainly hadn't heard the story of your tribute to Richard Lynn at...
This is an after-dinner moment?
Yes. And it's the International Society of the Study of Intelligence.
Is that what it is?
Yes. Someone said they should have recorded it.
Now, as I seem to recall, Steven Pinker was one of the keynote speakers, wasn't he?
Yes, I met him in the lift.
You met him in the lift.
Was he there when you spoke about Richard Lynn?
No. He clocked my name tag and sort of...
Did a double take and then sort of smiled.
Oh, I see.
And then shook my hand and introduced myself.
Oh, so he knew who you were?
Of course he knew who I was.
He slagged me off in public.
I bet you what.
He slagged me off in public.
Oh, I see.
I did a paper cautiously, very cautiously defending Kevin MacDonald.
I see.
And he kicked up a strop.
And said it should never have been published and it was terrible.
And then he complained to the editor of the journal because he was on the editorial board.
See, that's my impression of this International Society of Study of Intelligence.
And so I am delighted to hear that your tribute to Richard Lynn was so well received.
People were clapping and everything, yes.
Wonderful. But it was interesting that they get him along as a kind of, I get the impression, as a kind of a protection thing.
So he's just about acceptable to the mainstream.
I think he's more than just about.
He's acceptable to the mainstream, but yet he's prepared to stick his neck out and advocate for this society.
And so they get him two years running to do the HeNet speech.
I see, I see.
So the people who are actually doing the work, attending, members, thinking about these things, they are more, shall we say, in the know than they let on.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There's lots of people there, I obviously won't name them, who completely agree with the perspective of the race realists and whatever at the conference, but they're not going to go publicly and say that.
I have a lot of them there that watch my show.
I'm not going to go on it.
No. But they watch it and they like it.
Ah, these are sad and fearful times, aren't they?
Well, gosh, we are working our way through your background, and I don't think we'll have the time, we'll be here all day, if we work our way through every single title.
Could you tell me which are the books that you think were most significant, the ones that you're proudest of?
Ah, that's an interesting question.
In terms of the books that have had the most impact, I mean, I'll talk about books...
Well, that's not necessarily my question, but that could be the same thing.
Well, I'll tell two separate things.
So, obviously, at our wits' end, while we're becoming less intelligent, what it means for the future, which is with Michael Rudin.
Repeat that more slowly for our head.
At our wits' end...
Why we're becoming less intelligent and what it means for the future.
This has been translated into a number of languages and is being translated into Japanese and whatever and German and whatever.
So this has obviously had a significant impact.
In fact, I was told that at Durham University there was like a secret...
based society and everybody that joined it this is a few years ago was told to read that book and then people that found that site of course now met me in person through the there was a successor to that book called the past the future country the coming conservative demographic revolution
in which me and my co-author looked at the gss data and the general social survey america and plotted from that who's breeding and why and and what the future will be and one of the things that we found was that if you're going to be a part of the future of the
Look only at the top.
Within the top quartile, then the big, big predictor of infertility, of not having children, is that you are left-wing or that you are an atheist.
And the big predictor of having...
Within the top intelligence.
Because what matters is not what...
OK, fine, having low IQ predicts being right-wing or whatever, but so what?
It's revolutions and significant changes happen among those that are the smart fraction.
And similarly, among those that are of high IQ, the big fertilizer is that you are right wing and that you are fundamentalist, basically, that you're very, very religious.
And so religiosity and conservatism become the protective shell of intelligence.
And this is what is going on.
And we looked in detail at what this will mean for the future of America.
Yes. Yes.
that there will be a collapse, there will be there will be Balkanisation, there will be all the things if you read Pasha Glob or whatever that, you know, the fate of Empires that happen at the end of Empire.
Those things will happen.
There will be Balkan, there will be breakup and probably there will be what happened last time which is the retreat into a
And the question is, well, where will they be?
In other words, there will be enclaves of surviving civilization.
There will be enclaves of surviving civilization.
And those places there, I'm not saying they're going to be nice.
I mean, those places may be like the Talibanization of the West.
I mean, those places will be very, very fundamentalist and religious and whatever, we suspect.
And they may be on infertile mountaintops.
We don't know.
Well, well, perhaps.
But, I mean, that's the best case scenario, anyway.
So that's another book that I'm quite proud of.
The book that I most enjoyed...
At wit's end, did you have a co-author?
Yes, Michael Woodley.
Yes, Michael Woodley.
There's loads of books that I've done, but the one that I most enjoyed researching, actually, not that it sold very well, but was Churchill's headmaster of the British Empire.
And that was the biography of Herbert Snade Kinsley, who was Winston Churchill's much reviled prep school headmaster.
I see.
Who's utterly notorious, you know, in the Churchill world.
And I was realising many negative things about Churchill, and many things that we're told about as being wonderful and are not true.
There are all kinds of problems with Churchill.
You could argue that he kind of brought about World War II, and you could argue it was unnecessary.
There's all kinds of things you could argue.
And this got me thinking, well, what they're saying about Herbert Snade Kinesley, is that true?
Let's look into it.
And the idea at first was it was a paper, just an article, and then it gradually developed into a book.
And so that was what I really enjoyed.
Victorian England kind of came to life as I went back to the sources and I researched it.
Well, it sounds as though maybe doing something rather different from your ordinary or usual kind of HBD matters was a refreshing change.
It was, yeah.
And another one that I quite, well, again, it's not, was one called Set Before Their Time, which was about...
People that are born prematurely.
And I showed that those people are over-represented among genius and major religious innovators for various reasons, basically.
It's skewed intelligence.
I guess they wanted to get a head start on life.
They had to get out there and make a mark on things.
Yes, they could say that.
My mother used to say that.
But skewed intelligence plus autism plus ADHD plus psychopathic personality traits.
And these things are what predict genius.
So you can see why there's so many examples of Buddha.
Well, I guess there's no reliable data on Jesus.
His birth was extraordinary in other ways.
Well, I've certainly never heard of that book of yours.
You have really covered a remarkable variety of subjects.
And I'm curious to know, has even one of your books been banned by Amazon?
No. Not one.
Well, you lead a charmed life.
And you have a YouTube station, you have a Twitter account, and you have all of these things.
Well, you just don't go too far.
Well, you're...
I know people in Finland that have been prosecuted for hate speech.
This has not happened to me.
Just calmly state the situation.
Well, that's what most of us try to do, but some of us nevertheless fall afoul of these arbitrary decisions.
You're probably the most respectable person who has darkened these doors in some time now to be able to claim that all of your books are available and you have a YouTube channel and a Twitter account.
I hope I don't jinx any of this or spook any of this by mentioning this.
So, let's see.
What are your particular interests now?
At the moment, I'm very interested in the collapse of California, and basically where cognitive capital is moving, and why.
I'm interested in understanding the Flynn effect in more detail, and I'm doing a paper on that at the moment with a colleague, understanding exactly what's going on, because there are some people in Norway that have argued that the negative Flynn effect, should I say, the collapse of the Flynn effect,
can be entirely environmentally explained.
I'm very...
Confident that it is at least part of the genetic, yes.
And so we're doing a paper in relation to that.
Well, tell me, these are all very interesting areas.
If you don't mind my asking a little more detail about California, for example, where are they going?
Well, certainly they're just going to basically all other states, but certainly a significant proportion of them that are highly intelligent are moving to Texas.
That's not just a stereotype.
They try to dismiss this stereotype.
No, it really is true.
Yeah, but there is an emigration of cognitive talent to Texas, and then the reverse, which is that states are kind of sending their worst people to California.
And you see that, and it's quite extraordinary going there.
We went to Berkeley campus, and we're looking around, and because it's a public campus, these tramps can just live there.
That's right.
And they do live there, in tents and things.
Yes, it's extraordinary.
Practically any open space in some of these cities, Washington, D.C., is the same.
All of a sudden, you think this is an Everest staging ground or something.
All of these tents.
And these are all people who used to live in cardboard boxes.
I'm wanting to know how all of a sudden they get these sporty tents.
But yes, Berkeley, the last time I was in Berkeley was probably 20 years ago.
It was already well in that way, but I'm sure things are vastly worse now.
Yeah, it was awful.
The smell of urine was barely out of my nostrils, except when I was in the hotel.
If I went outside the hotel, literally to the doorway of the hotel, you just smelled piss straight away.
Well, public urination is no longer a crime, and the police can walk by you in full...
We went to, in the morning, we went to San Francisco, and they were, what time was it, I don't know, 10 o'clock, 9 o'clock, and they were hosing...
I assume with hot water, the pavement of the previous night's accumulation of...
Yes, liquids and solids.
Liquids and solids, yes.
I mean, it's amazing.
It's just the collapse of civil...
And then we went to this Oakton, whatever it's called.
Oakland. Oakland is where you are now.
Indeed. Oakland.
And the thing, I've never seen anything like it.
I mean, you have a secondary school.
Next section was a children's park with swings and whatever.
And part of that school is just a field.
And they're just living in tents.
And then all along the road, living in these dilapidated old cars and whatever.
And there was only one of them that prepared to talk.
And I get the impression that he committed various crimes and things and things have gone wrong for him and whatever.
But it was just...
You just think, good God, this is meant to be the centre of empire.
This is meant to be the country.
This is the reserve currency.
This is the country that all else springs from.
And this is just a third world country.
And nothing is done.
And this is in the most...
It kind of brought out these moral foundations.
We all have five moral foundations.
And the in-group loyalty and obedience to authority and sanctity versus disgust.
And then there's the individually oriented foundations of equality and harm avoidance.
And conservatives are about equal.
And liberals are very high in the latter two because they're individualists.
And if you're an individual, then it helps you to be into equality.
So you get your fair share.
It helps you to be into harm points.
And so it kind of brought out the woolly liberal in me, the leftist in me, I'm afraid.
I was just like, bloody hell, what kind of society?
I mean, there was one woman, she was called, I interviewed her actually, called Monet.
And she was just living in the street in Berkeley, quite near the hotel, this Shattuck Plaza, whatever it's called, that we were staying at.
And she's just lying at the table.
She just sits there all day by a cafe covered in her own piss.
And I talked to her and she was obviously schizophrenic, but she had imbibed certain bits of information correctly about it.
Oh dear.
And she'd understood that.
Was that your impression?
And that was my impression.
She was obviously not very intelligent.
But she was also, I think, schizoid.
And she would talk about, oh, I've died 30 times and weird things like this.
But I think she had the mental age of eight.
And in any sane society, okay, she's paranoid.
And the law says that they can't force her into an institution to help her.
And in England, we have...
People can be sectioned under the Mental Health Act and you can just say, no, this person cannot be allowed to live like this for the good of society and for the good of themselves.
And they are going to go in an institution where they can get help and where they're at least not covered in their own urine sitting in the street.
It's appalling.
We used to do that.
I'm in the most liberal state in America, probably in one of the most liberal cities in the most liberal state in America, and they just let that happen.
It's despicable.
I couldn't believe what I was saying.
No, we are suffering from self-inflicted wounds that could well be mortal.
But you were asking also, you mentioned also another area, and I've forgotten what it was, but it sounded equally interesting.
You said people leaving California for all these reasons, and then there was another thing you mentioned, a current area of investigation that you had.
Finifex, I talked about.
Ah, that's the Finifex, yes.
Now, I've never...
I'm not sure I, in fact, entirely believe the Flynn effect.
I mean, everyone says there was such a thing as the Flynn effect, and so I guess I have to believe.
Well, it has real world consequences economically.
Well, now...
I'm, again, the merest layman on these matters, but presumably what this means is that if you took an American, white American, from, say, 1945 and tested him according to the tests of the current era,
he would have a score, he would have an IQ of perhaps 80. Yes, perhaps, but for very specific reasons.
Well, what are those reasons?
So what the IQ test is...
It's an instrument, so it's not a perfect measurer of what it purports to measure, which is intelligence.
It also measures other things.
And you have various...
Everyone knows the big three.
Spatial, you have verbal, and you have mathematical intelligence.
Now, you get some people that are tilted, but these tend to intercorrelate, so you get this thing called G, general intelligence.
General intelligence is about.8 heritable.
It's highly genetic in nature.
So the IQ that is tapping into these, and there are various...
Subtests which tap into them to various degrees.
So you have some subtests which are highly environmentally sensitive, and some subtests that are not particularly environmentally sensitive, that are highly, you know, it's just measuring something that's basically genetic.
So one of these subtests is similarities.
And what appears to have happened is that over a relatively short period of time, since the 1900s, society becoming more scientific has pushed very quickly our ability in similarities to its phenotypic maximum.
And what that means is, of course, the similarities are massively going up.
And on an imperfect test...
But not similarities.
This is some sort of visual comparison of shapes.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
Like the ravens.
The ability to see what's the next shape in the sequence.
So those scores, Raven's progressive matrices, is one that has actually had to be re-normed over and over and over?
Well, we re-normed them all, but yeah, particularly this.
So what can happen if that's happening really quickly and to a massive extent is it can, of course, because the test is an imperfect measure of G, it can overwhelm everything else that's happening.
And so what you end up with is an IQ score rise.
That doesn't mean IQs are actually going up in the sense in which we think about them.
It's a problem of the...
The imperfection of the instrument.
To give a parallel example, it's not a very good example, but perhaps it makes more sense of it.
How long your trunk is, your body, that's highly genetic.
How long your legs are, that's highly environmentally mediated.
So we've got taller over the last 100 or so years, or 150 years, because of better nutrition, which has meant that our legs have got longer.
Well, then this suggests that there are subtests that should not show the Flynn effect.
Indeed, the Flynn effect is not on G. Right.
So it's not what you call a Jensen effect.
It's not on G. It's on these specific subtests.
But I thought Ravens was one of the very best tests that...
Most closely...
Well, I was giving an example.
The similarity is very similar to the ravens, yeah.
But this is true.
It is not on G. And what we find...
So actually, we call it a cloaking effect, whereby intelligence can be going down.
Real intelligence, G. But this is being cloaked by this environment, which is pushing our...
To its phenotypic maximum.
Now, what you would expect is that once that phenotypic maximum was reached...
Then the declining G would show up even on the IQ tests.
And that's what you see circa about 1997, people born about 1979.
You start to see a negative Flynn effect.
Is that pretty widely established?
Seemingly so, yes.
I did a meta-analysis of it with Richard Lynn, actually, and my colleague Dimitri van der Linden.
And so this then is consistent with what we call Woodley effects, which is these various proxies for intelligence, reaction times getting longer, per capita major innovation decreasing, whatever.
I remember being hugely impressed by a very simple measure that Richard Lynn proposed to determine whether or not genetic intelligence is decreasing or if it's likely to be decreasing.
And he said, if you have a whole high school full of people, take all of their IQ tests and then ask them all, how many brothers and sisters do you have?
And if we find out that the people with the highest IQ scores have the fewest brothers and sisters and those of the lowest have the most, then you know that society is heading in a bad direction.
And this is inevitably the case.
And we know that if you go back to...
Before the Industrial Revolution, certainly until about 1800, I think it was static by 1900, and then it goes into reverse.
But there was a positive relationship between the number of surviving children you had, because there was massive child mortality among the poor, who were the low IQ.
So we were selecting for intelligence, and you had a society of social dissent, whereby when people trace their family trees, they always get surprised, you know, their Victorian ancestors are shepherds or whatever, and then they get back to 1650, and their ancestors are yeoman.
farmers which is a wealthy farmer just below the gentry or even actually gentry and they shouldn't be surprised because those are the people that have descendants uh because we were selecting
Yeah, well,
when I've found evidence of a positive...
Yes, they may...
Yeah, well, I don't know if they're selecting for...
They probably are.
I've found some, perhaps, somewhere.
But I've found evidence, even among the Middle Easterners, that they're in negative dysgenic fertility.
Certainly China is in dysgenic fertility.
Oh, I think so.
And various other places.
So I don't know.
What is interesting, though, is there are some subgroups that are...
Positively selecting for intelligence.
The Mormons in America, the white Mormons.
Well, is that in fact the case?
Yes. In other words, within the Mormon population, are the more intelligent Mormons having more children?
The white Mormon population.
The white Mormon population.
The more intelligent ones are having more children.
I see.
So it's only a weak relationship.
Yes, I would imagine.
But it is there.
And as I said, among the more intelligent, conservatism and so forth, and religiosity predicts fertility.
But yeah, the more...
Mormons, I don't know what's going on among the Amish, we don't have data, but the Mormons, myself and Emil Kierkegaard recently published a paper on this in Evolutionary Psychological Science, and they do seem to be in eugenic fertility.
And other countries went into dysgenic fertility later, so obviously the countries industrialised first, England or whatever, France, they go into dysgenics first.
Somewhere like Finland, there's some evidence that in 1970, wealthy men had more children than poorer men.
Though I don't know if the fact that poorer men tend to become alcoholic and thus revolting to women in Finland is relevant.
Yes, it could be.
Well, this is a...
Side question compared to the actual science of this.
But in your view, why is it that any discussion of this kind, of dysgenic fertility, is so taboo?
It seems to me it should be obvious.
And so many people consider dysgenic fertility in their own decisions.
Amniocentesis, for example.
Or when you get a sperm donor or an egg donor.
People are very concerned about the abilities in the background of the donor of the sperm or the egg.
But to talk in general terms about eugenics is one of these horrible taboos.
Do you have any idea?
Yes, since the 60s, we have tipped over.
We mentioned those moral foundations earlier, and you have this balance in the moral foundations.
And liberals...
Conservatives are only interested in the two.
Conservatives are interested in all five, on average anyway.
And you do get perhaps some extreme conservatives that are only interested in the group-oriented ones.
And conservatives will cede ground to these people.
They will cede ground to them because we can empathise with their concerns.
We care about equality and harm avoidance.
But they can't empathise with our concerns.
No, they certainly can't.
So because they don't...
They're not interested in such things.
So it's very, very easy for societies to move leftwards.
And then once they start doing so, eventually you will get dysphoria, you will get chaos, you will get war, you will get violence, you will get something.
And then you get a kind of a conservative backlash.
Now, when you get a conservative backlash, it can work in the same kind of way, which is that more intelligence is associated with social conformity.
People who are intelligent can look around the world, see what the dominant worldview is.
They are better at norm mapping.
And this is true, and data on children shows this.
They're better at norm mapping.
They're better at understanding the dominant worldview.
they have the effortful control to force themselves to not just imbibe but accept that worldview and to then competitively signal it in order to attain status.
So you can get run away into
And I suspect that's what we saw in Victorian England.
I think it was probably set off by the fact that all of these diseases became endemic at once, which they did around about early 1800s.
All of these things like cholera, tuberculosis, lots and lots of illnesses, typhus.
They all became endemic quite quickly, and I wonder...
And how did that result?
Well, the result is that it evokes your stress, your high mortality salience, this makes you more religious, your disgust response is evoked, disgust is a strongly group-oriented moral foundation.
And so then to discuss response, and then you have sexual purity, and then you have runaway sexual purity, and you get to the point where it's ridiculous.
I mean, you get to the point where a young girl has an illegitimate child, and rather than have that child, by the 50s, rather than have that child brought up by her, oh, she's adopted by a family that aren't related to her at all.
What you were saying got in my interview about wanting to be genetically similar to you.
I mean, in that way, okay, I'm sure there are some people that get adopted and it's bloody good for them because their parents are alcoholics or something like this.
But within that situation, I would say, no, goodness me, right?
And so...
This goes on and on and on.
And I suspect that what happened, you get a reaction against that.
It went too far.
That's the one thing.
I think another thing is a broader shift, a bigger shift, which was that if Darwinian selection pressure collapses, which it did do from child mortality of 50% to child mortality of 1%, then all of these, you have this build-up of mutation in the population.
And we were strongly selected to be religious.
We know this.
I mean, religion is an adaptation.
It has all the markers of one.
To be religious and conservative and group-oriented, basically.
And so if that selection pressure collapses, then it's going to...
Okay, yes, you will get some deviation in an extreme conservative direction, which as well, which will be associated with mutation.
But it's mainly going to be in the direction of liberalism and atheism, which indeed it is.
I looked at this in this paper that I did, The Mutant Session's Heart There Is No God.
In other words, at this point we have been through so many harrowing millennia of adaptation that we've pretty much reached all the good alleles and so anything that accidentally changes is going to be bad.
I wouldn't put it in that way, but kind of like that.
Certainly strongly adapted to a very cold, harsh, stable ecology.
Right, but now if we have a random mutation of some kind, it's very unlikely to be for good.
That's the general case of mutations, but perhaps more so.
And so the result of that, and also it's got warmer as well.
Let's not forget that.
The modern minimum 1700, it's got warmer.
So selection pressure weakens.
And in the Industrial Revolution, obviously, you bring in inoculations, you bring in better medicine, you bring in better housing, you bring in better wealth, whatever.
And so the selection pressure weakens substantially.
And so one of the things that was being killed off was people with low IQ, low intelligence, genetically correlates with physical poor health and with mental poor health.
So you're going to get this build-up of basically individualists.
That's what they're going to be.
And eventually, the model that I have looked at is the idea of the spiteful mutant.
Certainly these people would be high in mutational load, some of them perhaps, if they're advocating for something which they may do, which is entirely in their individual interest.
Go back and explain the term spiteful mutant.
The term spiteful mutant was William Hamilton, and it was the idea that...
That you could have a mutation that would cause you to do something which would be basically maladaptive for the group and you would encourage...
Not just to yourself, but to the group.
Perhaps even not to yourself, but to the group.
And you would therefore encourage members of your group to do essentially maladaptive things because we are a highly pro-social species.
We're very sensitive to those that are around us.
I mean, you know, everyone says depression is highly genetic, but there is an environmental component to depression.
And I don't mean bad things happening to you.
I mean, if you're with someone that's depressed, you can almost catch it.
I see.
There was an interesting paper on that by someone called T.E. Joyner in the mid-90s.
And so you get these kinds of people more and more and they will create dysphoria for the society by having maladaptive ideas and by subverting...
Long-developed practices which take people and push them on the adaptive roadmap of life.
Well, these are going to be angry, unhappy, resentful people that are going to attack these practices and create chaos.
And remember, if you are deviating from that pre-industrial norm, what you are evolved to is chaos.
I mean, you're an R strategist.
You're evolved to live fast, die young.
You're evolved to a situation of chaos.
You're going to be high in psychopathic personality.
You're going to be high in narcissism.
You're evolved to chaos.
And it's best for you to kind of...
Create chaos, which is a lot of what modern art is about, modern architecture.
It creates this sense of chaos in which you can thrive.
So, but returning to my point, if I may, is that, you've set me off now, is that you're going to get this bill of, let's just call them individualists.
Let's dispense with this, just say individualists.
And eventually there will be a tipping point, and some research indicates that that can be as little as sort of 20%, where...
Somehow we notice that this seems to be the up-and-coming view.
And then more intelligent people, you know, they'll want to get ahead of the game.
And they'll adopt it.
And then we tip over.
And that tipping can happen quite quickly.
And I would date it.
I would date it to 1963.
Sex came rather late for me in 1963.
Somewhere between the end of the Chatterley Band, the Beatles' first LP.
And so, well, what does that have to do with what happened in 1963 in terms of this tipping point?
Well, then that's when we start tipping over into being a conservative society.
Was there any event that you can point to in 1963 that might have provoked it or that was a sign of it?
The Beatles' first LP.
Oh, the Beatles' first LP.
Degeneracy. I see, I see.
What was it called?
I don't know, I don't care.
My mum was into them.
She was about nine.
63. 63. I think something else happened in 63. A certain president might have been assassinated.
I think that was relevant.
I think Murray, actually, Charles Murray, in his book, I think it might be Coming Apart.
It was either Coming Apart or the one that's about white people.
Is that the same book?
Well... It's about white people, yes.
He talks about 63 as well as being a turning point in America.
Civil rights sort of really took off, didn't it, 63?
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, that's very interesting.
Of course, I mean, there is a certain plausibility to your view about this accumulation of unfortunate maladaptations, genetic mistakes.
And I can understand that how people who have these views can create an environment in which people who are not necessarily born with these metodactyl mutations then absorb them.
As you say, people can pick up pretty clearly, pretty quickly.
This is important.
They are in an evolutionary mismatch.
And if you're in an evolutionary mismatch, which we are, I mean, even in the 80s...
When the generation that were born in the 20s or 30s were in charge of the country, okay, we flipped over in the 60s perhaps, but these people were still in charge and we were still being pushed at school on what I would say is the adaptive roadmap of life towards group-oriented ends.
There was still traditional religion.
Now, this is now, for the generation that were born in the year 2000 or whatever, of course, this is now very different.
Those people are their great-grandparents and they're long gone.
Well, my question was going in a slightly different direction.
I can certainly understand what you're describing in Western society.
You can see if what you're describing is true, we can see many different revolting effects of all of this throughout the West.
Why would you say is it that the same effect isn't nearly so visible in East Asian societies?
They've probably been reducing their infant mortality just the way...
Caucasians have.
But we don't see anything like the accumulation of this.
I think there's a number of reasons for that.
So, first of all, they industrialize later.
So, simply on those grounds alone, you would expect the effects...
It would be interesting to see the decline in infant mortality in the case of the Japanese versus the English.
Sure. One possibility, anyway, is that they industrialize later.
Secondly, I suspect that they have a smaller gene pool.
And there's just less...
I mean, for example, in intelligence, for example, the variation between the cleverest...
It's narrower.
So this is consistent.
You also get this with Finns, by the way.
They have the narrowest standard deviation of any European people and the highest IQ.
And so it's narrower.
So there's less room for weird...
There's less variation in the population, which means there's less...
Something that can be chucked up.
Thirdly, I suspect that they're just congenitally more ethnocentric.
And so we get this runaway individualism, and it gets to the point where you're...
And also just more conservative.
They're higher in conscientiousness than us.
They're more K-strategic.
So I think that things happen more slowly.
So I guess ethnocentrism, in some ways, is the opposite of individualism.
Yes, it's group orientation.
And so they're higher in ethnocentrism, positive and negative ethnocentrism.
So this means that they are less likely to imbibe foreign ideas.
And it also means that they are...
The boundary will be drawn with regard to certain ideas that manifest, for example, about foreigners coming or whatever, and you would expect them to be far more conservative, to a certain extent anyway.
Of course, the Chinese go through revolutions and goodness knows what, but far more conservative with regard to certain kinds of change, which would be not evolutionarily beneficial and would create a mismatch.
You'd expect them to be more conservative about it.
What I do notice, which I think is very interesting, is that obviously their fertility rate is even lower than ours.
In Korea, it's about 0.2%.
8. In Japan, it's about 1 or a bit less even than that.
My theory, I have an idea about that, which is that if you are case-strategic, you are more environmentally sensitive.
If people are intelligent, there's some evidence they are more environmentally sensitive.
They're basically less hard-wired.
And this is good, because it means that if you're confronted with a novel problem, the new intelligence involves not solving it in the instinctive way.
It's often wrong.
Yes. But it involves looking at unusual, weird possibilities and whatever.
More flexible thinking.
Right, more flexible thinking.
And that would be consistent with being more environmentally sensitive, less hardwired, less instinctive.
Okay, now you're not talking about the ozone layer environment.
Just aware of their surroundings.
Just aware, yeah.
Sensitive to...
But this would mean that if you were less instinctive, you would be more malleable, more plastic to the environment.
And there's some evidence that intelligent people are more plastic in their development later than less intelligent people.
And I would expect that that...
The East Asians are more intelligent than us, it seems.
They're certainly more K-strategic in numerous ways.
And being a K-strategic involves being able to find just the right niche, just the right tiny niche to survive in a highly competitive yet harsh economy.
So you've got to be environmentally flexible.
So I wonder if part of what's going on is that we are in a zoo, but for them, a far lower level of being in a zoo, a world that is far more like their evolutionary match, a world that is far wilder, is just intolerable.
In a way that it isn't for us.
They need to be put on the exact, precise, correct evolution or they go crazy.
Wait, and so that's why they're not having so many children?
It's a theory.
It's a theory I was thinking about.
Well, what about levels of testosterone, for example?
You often find by all the usual standards of the testosterone effect in human beings that...
Asians always come at the bottom end of the scale.
Blacks and whites, Hispanics, somewhere around there.
But that's always been the case, but they still have children.
It has.
Well, right.
But we're talking about fertility rates.
And that would have something to do with...
Well, yeah, sure, for sure.
That would be another environmental interaction.
So you've got people who have red and low testosterone anyway.
And so if you mess around with their environment, then this really is a problem.
Whereas with white people, slightly higher testosterone, so it's a problem to a lesser extent.
I think that would be consistent with my broader model that I've been throwing them out.
Well, it is a remarkable thing that all around the world, the highest IQ populations are having the fewest people.
It's not remarkable if you think they're more environmentally sensitive.
And you get the same thing during this period of Roman civilization.
It was commented on at the time of Augustus, that the upper classes are either more intelligent, which is not having children.
And they imposed a tax to punish men, upper-class men.
And they paid the tax.
They paid the tax anyway.
Because they were in this evolutionary mismatch.
You know, our evolutionary match is death, basically.
And if you elevate...
Lots of death all the time.
And if you elevate...
If you prime people with mortality salience, make them think about death.
Make people think about death, their own death.
They desire to have children.
They desire to have more children.
They desire to name those children after themselves.
So they desire a kind of symbolic eternity.
But if you prime them with the opposite, i.e.
you're wealthy and everything's fine, they don't want to have children.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, I've never heard that theory, but that's quite fascinating.
Has there been...
I'm just wondering how you would study that, these death salience.
How is it that you would measure?
You're priming, it's an effect.
You basically get somebody and you're putting, I suppose they're in a kind of, I don't say hypnotic state, but they're calm, right?
And then you just, you make them read about and think about death.
And then you ask them about their facility intentions and then you do the same with the control group.
Well, I have known people, certainly, who suddenly decided to have children if a sister died.
Or a mother die.
Or look at the baby booms you get after wars.
Of course there was a baby boom after World War II.
People had been confronted with death.
There was also a baby boom after World War I. Yes.
Was there a baby boom after the First World War?
Yes. No, it certainly makes sense.
And certainly, compared to historical standards, East Asians and Caucasians live in a very happy and fat and stress-free environment in terms of making a living, for the most part.
We're certainly not surrounded by death.
I don't have to think to myself, if I cut myself, you know, bloody hell, I could die.
Richard Lynn mentioned this, actually, in his memoir, that his grandmother...
I think it was either his grandma or his great-grandmother.
I forget which.
She was out doing the gardening one day.
She got a thorn or something.
Got infected.
Died. That was how it worked in those days.
Life was quick.
And so, of course, people were more religious.
Yes, yes.
Well, I have a different question for you.
And as you know, one of the great taboo subjects these days is racial differences in IQ.
Whatever one considers their origin might be.
Ordinarily, human beings are happy to think themselves superior to other groups.
You'll have university competitions in which we're going to root for our team no matter what.
Political parties.
Our boy, he's the greatest.
Hometowns. New York is better than Trenton.
And yet, we do not have this phenomenon in white people, for example.
Ordinarily, groups will clutch at the faintest opportunity to say that they have done it.
We used to have it.
Yes, we did.
We did.
This idea about white people now, if you tell them, well, you know, the fact is...
Probably, well, first of all, there's a 15-point IQ difference between average black and average white.
A lot of white people are utterly unaware even of this.
And then if you suggest that there might be some kind of genetic contribution to this distant, oh, they just go up in flames.
Whereas, I have found that white people are more receptive to the idea that East Asians might be more intelligent than they are.
That's perfectly okay to look into the classroom the first day, advanced calculus, whoa, full of Asians, this is going to be too tough.
I'm going elsewhere.
You have this ideology, this worldview, and you're a pack species, and you wish to conform to everybody.
But how would this get started?
How would it become virtuous to run down your own group?
That is the strange thing.
Is it strange?
It's very strange.
People don't run down their own groups.
I don't know.
They whoop up their own groups.
They do at certain points in history.
The winter of civilization, they did it last time.
The Romans and whatever.
Let's imitate Eastern things and all this kind of...
But did they?
I mean, they might have gotten lazy.
They might have let too many barbarians in.
We've got more extreme than them.
Well, we sure have.
Did they ever get to the point of saying Roman civilization itself?
Is bad and corrupt, and Romans themselves are somehow inferior.
Well, there were various Christians that were saying all kinds of terrible things about Roman civilization, I think.
Well, yes, but they were this weird exotic cult.
They were a weird exotic cult that took over.
They were in some ways the wokeness of their time, although the parallel doesn't quite work because they had high breeding compared to the pagans.
What we now have is the wokeness of our time, but they have low breeding.
Well, still, to me, this...
Unwillingness of white people to face racial reality.
In fact, Charles Murray's recent book is called Facing Reality.
And he talks about two things, racial differences in IQ and the whole problem of black crime rates.
And he says, unless you're prepared to grapple with these facts, then you can solve no problem in the United States.
And until we are talking honestly about these things, Well, it's difficult to talk honestly about these things for most people if their friendships and even their careers depend on not talking honestly about them.
And indeed the opposite, if their friendships and careers can be benefited by not talking honestly.
I understand, but how did we get to this?
Well, I've said to you, Howie, I've said my model is runaway individualism.
So unless something stands in the way of it, then first of all you will say...
Okay, class differences, let's do something about that.
There's no class differences.
I mean, in the 60s, Basil Bernstein was pilloried for saying that working class people and middle class people speak in qualitatively different ways, and this affects the development of the brains of the children.
How dare you say that?
And then we move from that to sex differences, to race differences, to sexuality, and you're one-upping the last man all the time, all the time, all the time.
We certainly are being taught To believe in absurdities.
And then once it gets to where you know a lot of people understand, unless they're very intellectually brave or very intelligent or...
Or whatever.
Or indeed, no, it's super, super intelligent.
It's the midwit.
It's the normal range of high intelligence that will be particularly susceptible to this.
People that have low IQ have too low intelligence to understand what the views are and to understand the benefits of conforming to them.
But it's those kinds of people.
And of course, in order to feel sane almost, in order to cope, and in order certainly to get status and to maintain it in anything like a normal way, then it is beneficial.
Yes, yes.
I think very few people are capable of...
Consciously repeating day after day things that they absolutely, in fact, know to be untrue.
No, it creates a cognitive dissonance, therefore, whereby on some level they know they're lying to themselves.
This makes them feel unhappy and it makes them feel...
It's a kind of humiliation, really.
And so it's more important to convince themselves that this nonsense is true.
And that they're not being humiliated, precisely.
And so you end up with this vicious cycle.
But occasionally they know on some level, I think.
And so they will be kind of triggered by certain things people say.
and particularly if they're high in sort of eroticism and negative effects, then they will deal with their own negative feelings this brings about by, you know, projecting onto others,
I don't think...
I don't find it shocking.
You say it as if you're aghast by what I'm going on.
For me, it fits completely with the models I'm aware of.
Well, I don't think...
I really don't see how runaway individualism makes white people prepared to believe...
Contrary to all the evidence of their senses that the average black person is as intelligent, maybe more intelligent than they are.
I think there's a little bit of a tenuous connection between these two.
Because runaway individualism will start with this topic, and then this topic, and then this topic, and then this topic in more depth and more detail, and so on and on and on.
It goes slowly, slowly, slowly.
Until you believe anything.
Until you believe that you can change sex.
Yes. Or you can change race.
And change race is the new frontier.
No, no, no.
Well, that's still taboo.
No, that's still taboo for reasons that are clear.
Because then it becomes more difficult for white people to flagellate other white people if you can change race.
You can't change to being black, but there's an interesting idea that you can change to being Korean.
Oh, I've just read about this.
They've actually got a spiffy acronym for it.
Something about changing race to other, CRT.
But this is something that's so manifestly absurd that it's the kind of thing that creates a sort of backlash, which it seems to be doing, because even for quite mainstream conservatives, this is just ridiculous.
And so it is creating some sort of backlash.
Yes. Well, one last point before we wrap up here.
You had said that...
When a society, and this is an interesting idea, you said that the way the human brain is constructed is it makes it easy, or at least the way the conservative brain is constructed, it makes it easy for society to move leftward.
I think that's a very interesting observation.
And Western society has continued to do that for the last several hundred years, except for an occasional jolt back the other way.
And you said, well, we get these jolts, we get too far, and then all of a sudden things happen.
I'd be curious, in your view, which are the most significant jolts back towards the right that we've seen in the last, say, several centuries, and whether or not you see that as a prospect in the West today?
Those are big questions.
Well, I do, actually, but not for that reason.
Yeah, so in England, anyway, in the 17th century, we have the Republic.
Yes, we do.
And then there was a massive jolt back away from what were essentially the left-wing values of extreme Protestantism to a much more conservative way of thinking.
And that lasted quite a long time.
And then the other extreme jolt in a conservative direction, well, let's say two things.
One is obviously the Victorian era that I mentioned earlier, which I would put down to disease.
And the other is, I think, the 80s.
And in America, in England, there was this movement to the right.
Now, why?
A response to the chaos of the 70s, economic chaos, perhaps, initially.
You're thinking of Margaret Thatcher, Reagan.
Economic chaos in the 70s.
And you have this chaos.
Basically, we're confronted with chaos.
Also, we're in a Cold War.
And we're in a war.
And this means you can't get to Deathwing.
And the other thing, I think, possibly AIDS.
Which then cemented it, and you had them in England passing laws which did not exist before, like banning the promotion of homosexuality in schools, things like this.
And the society became, one could say, perhaps more anti-gay than it had been in the 70s.
In the 70s, you've got people talking about the rights of paedophiles and goodness knows what in English newspapers.
And there was a movement against that.
Do I think there'll be a conservative backlash?
Kind of, yes.
I think there is, in that sense, a conservative backlash already, and the trans issue has set this off.
You could see Trump as part of this, whatever.
There is a conservative backlash in that way, just because it's become so liberal.
But then also you have, as you get at this stage of civilisation, just balkanisation.
You mean balkanisation politically?
They're breaking up of society into little warring microcosms.
No longer one clear society as there was when I was born in the 80s and there was four TV channels or whatever.
So on that level, I think also, I'm getting to know now a lot of people that are...
I can't believe these people.
They've never dated.
Remember when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister?
They still have opinions and ideas.
These people born in the late 90s, early 2000s, Generation Z. And when I was at school, it was...
It was, you know, believe in God and, you know, tuck your shirt in and whatever, and now it's believe in George Floyd and don't culturally appropriate your shirt.
I mean, it's ridiculous, and they're being told this stuff by these insane blue-haired teachers to mutilate themselves.
And so obviously those people that when you got the conformists when I was a kid who'd be religious and, you know, whatever, and the way you rebelled, as indeed I did, was by being a screaming atheist.
That's how you rebelled against people born in the 30s.
Now, of course, that same psychological mindset is going to rebel against the woke.
So you're going to get that element to it.
But I think there's a bigger shift happening, which is the evidence of this genetic shift, which is that the people that are maladaptive mentally and physically are also maladaptive such that they resign from the gene pool, or indeed people that are simply not sufficiently genetically desirous of children.
But that's going to take several generations.
Well, no, it can happen quite quickly.
I can't give dates.
People always ask for dates.
I think you will be seeing, by the time people my age are retiring, maybe, by then, maybe 20 or 30, you're going to see the percolation upwards into positions that are filling these positions of people that are...
But it's in the context of a breaking up society, though.
People that are more conservative and right-wing, because that's who's breeding.
So yes, based on the data we've analysed, I think certainly, probably by the time I'm an old man perhaps, some kind of shift will be taking place.
And there's the beginnings of that shift, I think, even now.
Because young people are...
It's a degree that has surprised me when I was in my 20s.
Early 20s, there was nobody talking about anything like this.
There was no based people.
Everybody just agreed on everything.
No, that's unquestionably the case.
I meet 25-year-olds all the time.
Who know more about all of these things that matter than I do when I was 45. Nobody when I was 22 had heard of Julius Eveler.
I mean, it was...
That's true.
No, I'm very, very impressed with how much these people have understood, how much reading they've done, and how clear their thinking is.
They understand the implications of these things, where these ideas came from, where they're leading.
I'm extremely impressed.
And I hope all of that's going to lead to something.
At the same time...
I see the world sort of as opposing tectonic plates.
You've got more and more people at one level who understand the reality of the way the world works.
In HBD, I don't know what is a convenient abbreviation to describe these people.
And then, on the other side, you have all of this ever-intensive propagandising in the opposite direction.
It doesn't seem to be coming from a position of...
Confidence? No.
No, it doesn't.
These people are terrified.
Well, they are naturally terrified because they're high in mental illness.
But, yeah, they are.
It doesn't come from a position of confidence or perceived future strength.
No, it comes from desperation.
When we published this article where we showed, look, we're breeding for conservatism, liberals are dying out.
Oh, this is nonsense.
How can you say this?
Why do they care?
They care because they know this is happening.
Well, they want to shoot down any argument that suggests that their future is not going to be the future.
That's certainly part of it.
They're on the right side of history, you know.
So anything that suggests they're not, they're not going to like.
But of course they care.
Of course they care.
Well, Ed Dutton, it's been a pleasure to have you in the studio.
Pleasure. Pleasure to meet you at last and to speak to us.
Yes, yes.
I'm very much obliged.
And ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your attention and we hope that you enjoyed this particular episode because it's unusual for us to have guests and we very much hope you enjoyed it.
I invite all of you to visit amren.com.
A-M-R-E-N dot com.
You'll find videos and podcasts, articles, discussions, I think a lot of things that will interest you.
And by the way, Ed, if people want to know more about your work and about you, where on the internet can they go?
My website is edwarddutton.com, which has my academic papers and books and so forth that you can find online.
edwarddutton.com And then my main website is my substack, which is jollyheretic.com And then, of course, you can find me on various online video platforms, YouTube, Odyssey, whatever.
So that's where you can find me.
Also, by the way...
Where does the name Jolly Heretic come from?
Oh, I guess people said I was an academic heretic, and people seem to think that I'm outgoing and extrovert.
I'm not really, but people seem to think I am.
I'm actually very introvert and timid and thoughtful.
And then there was a pub when I was a kid in Winchester, where my grandparents were from, called the Jolly Farmer.
And it occurred to me, and it's a picture of a fat, smiling farmer on the pub side, and it occurred to me, it wouldn't have been in a pub called The Jolly Heretic, with a heretic kind of being burned at the stake, but smiling.
Smiling as you burn.
Smiling as you burn, because you know you're right.
And that's kind of where it just sort of popped into my head one day.
I was in Denmark at London Conference for Intelligence, and it just popped into my head, called The Jolly Heretic.
▲
Export Selection