June 20, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, we're doing a panel today, and joining me is old grizzled "Rubin Report" veteran | ||
| and author of "Heavens on Earth," Michael Shermer, and new returning champ. | ||
| I'm giving you a returning champ cred before you've even sat down here once. | ||
| Author of the new book, Political Tribes, Amy Chua, how are ya? | ||
| Great, thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah, well, thank you guys for coming in. | ||
| Michael, you set this up, so I'm going to not let you speak for just a moment. | ||
| No, you set this up. | ||
| You said the three of us should sit down and talk about a whole slew of issues. | ||
| But Amy, just so my audience can get to know you a little bit, since they know a lot about Michael already, just give me a two-minute synopsis of who you are before we talk about the book and why. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I'm a Yale Law professor. | ||
| I principally write about foreign policy and democracy and ethnic conflict, mostly in developing countries. | ||
| I teach at Yale Law School. | ||
| In 2011, something crazy happened to me, and that is I wrote, in three months, a memoir that I thought was going to be really funny, and it was called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and the world exploded. | ||
| I created an international firestorm. | ||
| Everybody hated me. | ||
| I got death threats. | ||
| It was sort of just at the beginning of people going bananas on Twitter, too. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I didn't have those tools. | ||
| I had no social media tools. | ||
| I wasn't on Facebook. | ||
| And I was just caught off guard. | ||
| And I became known as the Notorious Tiger Mother. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so in some ways this new book is, I got sick of only being known as the Tiger Mother. | ||
| I was on a TV show talking about Ukrainian nationalism, which I actually, I know about nationalism. | ||
| I've written about it. | ||
| And afterwards I saw the Twitter feed and they were like, why does this woman, this tiger woman, think that she can talk about nationalism? | ||
| And you were like, I did have a career before this. | ||
| Yeah, so I thought, that's it. | ||
| You know, I've lost control of the situation. | ||
| So, in a way, the new book goes back to what I actually know a little bit about. | ||
| Yeah, well, I just want to go on the record as saying that as I am sitting next to the Tiger Mom, I feel an undue pressure to do this show correctly. | ||
| No, it's awesome! | ||
| Normally I can phone it in when I have Shermer, but I feel a little extra credit. | ||
| David, the book is actually about my younger daughter rebelling. | ||
| It's a huge book about, it's a proper rebellion book. | ||
| You'd like it. | ||
| The whole book is so wildly misunderstood, but it's been fun. | ||
| Yeah, well I do want to talk a little bit about some Tiger Mom stuff towards the end because I think there's some interesting things happening right now that we all kind of need a little bit more of that perhaps than the outrage machine thought a couple years ago. | ||
| But Michael, why did you think that this would be a good group to sit down together when you sent me that email? | ||
| Well, because the book Political Tribes kind of set me back a little bit in the sense that I've kind of had this lifelong mission of spreading science and reason and critical thinking. | ||
| And then after reading Pinker's book, The Better Angels, that inspired me to write The Moral Arc, And kind of go into this other direction of spreading, not just science reason and critical thinking, but liberal democracy, market capitalism, and other social tools that can be measured in the same way that scientific things can be measured. | ||
| And one of the things that I like about Steve's work is that he, as a social scientist, tries to tease out what are the causal variables that are influencing people to do this or that. | ||
| Can we tilt the incentives to get people to be less violent by doing this rather than that? | ||
| Exactly like any scientist would. | ||
| And so this idea, and I'd read all this literature about spreading democracy is a good thing, and spreading capitalism is a good thing, but as you show on Political Tribes, it's not quite as simple as I like to think in my head. | ||
| If we could just go to all these places around the world and bring them liberal democracy, bring them market capitalism, freedom and prosperity will prosper, and at some point we'll have this global community, which is where I'd like to go. | ||
| I mean, at some point we're going to be a multi-planetary species. | ||
| We can't be fighting these little tribal battles on Mars, but actually I think we might end up doing that, if you're right, that in fact these tribal tendencies are pretty deep. | ||
| I mean, I like these things too. | ||
| I love democracy and liberalism and capitalism, these enlightenment principles. | ||
| But there's sort of no natural reason that they should have ethnically neutral implications, consequences. | ||
| So democracy, you know, at some day, you know, if you had a global democracy. | ||
| But it makes perfect sense that democracy is going to empower the majority group, the one with the bigger numbers. | ||
| That's just numbers. | ||
| That's very scientific, actually. | ||
| But similarly, markets, this is when I coined the term market-dominant minority in 2003, we all start in different places. | ||
| So just free market capitalism, even though it's fair in many ways, you could argue that or we could have a huge debate, but there's no real logical reason that at any given point in a given society that free markets will benefit all ethnic or all racial or all class or all religious groups equally. | ||
| So once you acknowledge that, you have these transition questions. | ||
| So I thought maybe we should then, with that in mind, start with something that's sort of happening right now that might help people frame a little bit of what all three of our political positions are. | ||
| Because you, I know, I think the first time I had you on, at one point you had said you're a libertarian, then I think you've also kind of said you're a classical liberal, then you've kind of said, ah, enough with the labels altogether. | ||
| I consider myself a classical liberal. | ||
| I have your t-shirt. | ||
| I've seen you in the classical liberal t-shirt, that's right. | ||
| Of course everyone knows that I consider myself a classical liberal, but I definitely like a lot of the ideas of libertarianism. | ||
| I'm always sort of more drawn to that. | ||
| If we were to put a label on you, just to start, before I get into the specific issue. | ||
| I'm definitely not a classical liberal, and I love classical liberals, but I think that one of the things I point out in my book is that a lot of people are tribal who don't think they are. | ||
| So if you think liberal, cosmopolitans, enlightenment people, you think of yourself as the opposite Because that came out of the alignment, anti-religious warfare. | ||
| But what I'm saying is, where we are now, in America or even the world, being a liberal cosmopolitan is actually a pretty hard tribe to get into. | ||
| They're a very judgy tribe. | ||
| Yes, and you've probably met a lot of different kinds of people to be so cosmopolitan. | ||
| I was very struck and ashamed myself, I have a student, Poor white person from the South who had never been on a plane. | ||
| And that was actually kind of startling because the first question some professor was asking. | ||
| So I think that I like writing about tribalism because I'm very aware of its effects. | ||
| I'm the child of immigrant parents, but I'm very proud of my ethnic identity. | ||
| But I also love this idea of America as this umbrella identity. | ||
| So that must, it's a complicated answer, right? | ||
| Because I guess as a real, you know, real liberals don't have an account of why you even have the nation state. | ||
| Well, that's how far you wanna go down that road. | ||
| Right, so patriotism and all this stuff, and presumably, that's at best a transitional thing for you, right? | ||
| Well, that's where I don't go so far. | ||
| I mean, that depends how far you wanna go down the road of liberty or freedom, depending on how you define it. | ||
| So for me, a classical liberal idea is there is some utility of the state. | ||
| We just have to figure out what that is, and I would want it to be the lightest touch possible. | ||
| All right, so that's a good... | ||
| Oh, just to answer in one, what I really am is, I am somebody that loves about America, and it's very unique that this is a country that at once has a very strong collective national identity, or at least did, we can get to that. | ||
| And secondly, allows individual subgroup, or tribal identities to flourish. | ||
| Like you can be, I'm Irish-American, or I'm Korean-American, or I'm a classic liberal, and possibly be very patriotic at the same time. | ||
| I think that's a very unique thing. | ||
| About this country, and that we're in danger of losing that kind of magic formula, possibly. | ||
| So I think you just described the melting pot, right? | ||
| I mean, isn't that the- You don't have to melt. | ||
| That's the true secret sauce. | ||
| Well, melting pots suggest that everybody loses their identity, and I think that happened very successfully with a lot of the Northern European immigrants, but we've never really been a great melting pot. | ||
| If you take the African American population, there have been many discreet groups that never melted into that pot. | ||
| I think part of it is a melting pot, assimilation for sure, but I think this common identity thing can coexist with a lot of different kinds of diversity. | ||
| Some might be closer to the Canadian kind of mosaic thing, but I do really believe that you need this connective tissue. | ||
| So I guess it depends what analogy you like, whether it's melting pot or mosaic. | ||
| But we've basically done multiculturalism better than pretty much everybody else. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, so the balance here is how can I maintain my local group identity, which is easy to do because I identify with people that look like me or live near me or whatever, that's totally natural. | ||
| And still respect others because there's some umbrella. | ||
| And there, previously, when I was younger, I would have thought, well, we don't need a government, you know, this can happen just from the bottom up. | ||
| I've become a little more cynical about human nature being dark and tribal, in the sense that at some point you need some kind of rules to govern, say, the marketplace, to a certain extent, at least steer it. | ||
| And that's why this cake baking thing is You know, I just go back and forth. | ||
| It's like, yes, yes, he should be able to bake any cake he wants or not. | ||
| But then, you know, in the battle days when people justified racism and, you know, lunch counters and buses segregated. | ||
| And at some point it took the federal government saying, we're sending the troops in to integrate your schools, even though they're down there in Alabama saying segregation forever. | ||
| At some point, sometimes you have to use force to get people, at least to start to bring them around. | ||
| Right, okay, so that is the one issue that I wanted to do up top before we dive into the book. | ||
| So, I tweeted out when the decision was made that basically my feeling is that you have to offer, we have the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I don't want to re-litigate it, you have to offer products to every person regardless of race, color, creed, and all of that stuff, but that if there's a specific There's no artistic quality to it or a customization to it that happens to go against your beliefs, that you just don't have to do it. | ||
| Whether I think that's abhorrent or not, you just don't. | ||
| We wouldn't ask, a Satanist wouldn't be allowed to walk into a Muslim baker and say, you know, put Muhammad on the cake. | ||
| No one in their right mind, I think, would think that that's the government's job to force the baker to do that. | ||
| What lawyers always do when we teach is they start spinning out the hypotheticals. | ||
| That makes complete sense what you said. | ||
| But then they say, I think Justice Kagan might have asked, how about a makeup artist? | ||
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Right? | |
| Can a makeup artist refuse to provide services to, you know, to gay people? | ||
| So once you start pressing, what counts as being an artistic expression? | ||
| The florist, the photographer. | ||
| Photography is a form of art. | ||
| Grocery store. | ||
| Well, so that is the interesting thing. | ||
| So go grocery store bagging, right? | ||
| So it's sort of a mundane task. | ||
| We all go to the grocery to buy the products that are there, and all they have to do is put it in the bag and walk out. | ||
| If a grocer was saying, we're not going to bag groceries for black people, that is actually in violation of the 1964 Civil Liberties Act. | ||
| But the idea that we would force a specific Product you wouldn't want a Jewish painter who shouldn't have to be forced to take commissions from a neo-nazi or there you tweeted out several other examples on this but your fear basically where I think we don't quite see eye-to-eye is that | ||
| Eventually, if we don't do some of this, that things will devolve? | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
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Maybe. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You might be right that in 2018, it's not 1964, so maybe we don't need such draconian laws. | ||
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Historically, when you... But also, we needed those laws to reverse trim crow laws. | |
| I mean, that was the thing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Which don't exist anymore. | ||
| In the battle days, you needed to send the federal troops in to integrate the schools. | ||
| Maybe we don't need to do that now. | ||
| Maybe, you know, this one baker out of a hundred will refuse to bake a cake. | ||
| But as the justices pointed out, okay, we're going to protect this guy's religious expressions, but if it turns out that every other baker refuses to bake cakes for blacks and gays and so on, then we can't let that happen. | ||
| That may never happen. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of that? | ||
| Part of the decision. | ||
| That struck me as like a really like kind of slimy way out of this. | ||
| Well, you're the law professor. | ||
| Maybe you know why they did that. | ||
| Well, actually, I think, you know, it is, as everybody says, it's an extremely narrow holding. | ||
| It's like a punt. | ||
| It just said that this particular commission was displaying hostility to religion in a way that couldn't make them impartial. | ||
| So I think there will be another decision. | ||
| I mean, it's in a way, it's just kind of kicked down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It just seemed like it had no teeth in that regard. | ||
| It's like, why didn't you make... | ||
| I don't think it was an unreasonable holding, but I do think they just avoided the question. | ||
| You know what I think is, what worries me right now, is the Constitution was supposed to be the vaccine, the sort of what protected against political tribalism, and I know we're going to get to that, but what I see that's kind of dangerous and dismaying in the Twitter feed right now is that It's like tribalism is attacking the Constitution, too. | ||
| It's not just something that we disagree with, but it's like there's a lot of demonization of the other side. | ||
| Look, if you teach at a law school, and I'm not a con law professor. | ||
| That's not my area. | ||
| I teach contracts and international business transactions. | ||
| But one thing you know is there are hard cases, and this is a hard case. | ||
| You will have multiple principles or different rights clashing or weird facts. | ||
| What I think is almost more scary is you see people on the two sides right now. | ||
| It's like, if you think that a baker should be allowed to refuse to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage, then you are a bigoted homophobe, right? | ||
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Yeah. | |
| But on the other side, there are no... Right. | ||
| It's like, if you're on the other side, if you take the other view, then you are declaring jihad on Judeo-Christian values. | ||
| The rhetoric is so ratcheted up. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| I think the main takeaway is spend less time on Twitter. | ||
| Well, that actually is part of it, because if you talk to average people, not average people, I don't even like that phrase, if you talk to your neighbor and everyone else in real life, they don't behave the way they behave on Twitter. | ||
| And yet it seemingly has taken a hold of our entire national discourse. | ||
| So let me ask you this then, because I do think most of these things become local. | ||
| If there was a baker that did not want to bake a cake for Chinese people or whatever it is, What would you feel is the right thing to do? | ||
| Well, that's just a personal thing. | ||
| I would just go to a different bakery. | ||
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But that's why I wanted to make it personal. | |
| Even saying that doesn't mean that I would disrespect somebody else that did. | ||
| It's really just my approach to life. | ||
| I really wouldn't want that wedding cake. | ||
| Yeah, but isn't that the only way, really, to respect freedom? | ||
| I mean, the freedoms that we have here isn't your decision to either do something or not do something or go to a business or not go to a business or whatever else. | ||
| Like, the only real way to broadly protect freedom is that. | ||
| It's kind of shitty. | ||
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Right? | |
| It doesn't feel great. | ||
| And it could be we don't need the laws now because we have social media. | ||
| People could just shun that baker on social media and not go to that store. | ||
| Or if that's what you want, you do give them your business. | ||
| And so the market sort of sorts it out. | ||
| But it goes back to your point about the civil rights and needing force initially, right? | ||
| Like where do you get there? | ||
| How do we get these norms? | ||
| We didn't end slavery by market forces. | ||
| It took a war. | ||
| By that token, if you allow lots of people to do this, can you get a regressive norm change? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It depends on what you think about human nature. | ||
| I think I'm similar to you. | ||
| I believe, I feel like there's no going back. | ||
| I mean, I don't know that, yeah. | ||
| Right, I think, well, I would, I always say I'm a world-weary optimist. | ||
| It's the only way that I could do this the way that I do it. | ||
| Look, I just don't think, I'm not calling for reversing, but just to be very clear, I'm not saying we should relitigate it or reverse the Civil Rights Act, but the idea that we need that in 2018 so that people aren't opening up white-only businesses or anti-gay Or gay businesses, or bowling alleys that aren't for trans people, or give me a couple other good ones here, you know what I mean? | ||
| Roller skating rinks not for Asian people! | ||
| You know, but Dave, I don't know, it's really interesting, going to the political situation, there are some differences in America today, because I studied American history, that's kind of what I've been looking at for the last even hundred years, and because of these big demographic changes that we're having now, the so-called with whites about to, on the verge of no longer | ||
| being a majority in this country. | ||
| That's about 15 years from now, right? | ||
| Yeah, well the numbers range from 2044 to 2050 and then there are debates about whether | ||
| that's even gonna happen, but most people can see that even in Texas and California, it's already happened. | ||
| And again, the studies kind of show, I mean, this is gonna sound terrible, | ||
| but for most of this country's history, it was dominated economically, politically, | ||
| and culturally by a white majority. | ||
| And the result of that is lots of bad things could happen, but there's also a little room for generosity. | ||
| It's a little, right now with this demographic change about to happen, what I write in the | ||
| book is that every group feels threatened. This is, you know, it's not just the | ||
| minorities feel threatened, whites feel threatened, Latinos, Asians feel threatened, | ||
| you know, with the Me Too movement, men feel threatened, women feel threatened, | ||
| straight, you know, so and it's when people feel threatened that they retreat into tribalism | ||
| and get more us versus them. | ||
| So on this Baker thing, you know, you just never know. | ||
| Like, we're at a funny moment right now. | ||
| There are candidates running on, like, white nationalist platforms in a way that wasn't like in the last 50 years, or openly at least. | ||
| Right, so granting you that, I guess what I would say then is that if that's all true, and we maybe are about to get much more tribal and start seeing more outward racism and the rest of it, that perhaps even if we allowed those businesses to exist, that your answer is still the right one. | ||
| The answer of use social media, use your influence, use your dollars, don't live in a state or a town that is supporting these things, that the experiment should still go on with the least amount of government. | ||
| But I get why this is so complex. | ||
| My favorite example, when you brought that up in the book about everybody feels persecuted, as an atheist, I'm always amazed when these born-again Christians go, we are a persecuted minority in this country. | ||
| It's like, are you kidding me? | ||
| Nine out of 10 of you are walking around me. | ||
| You're the persecuted minority. | ||
| Right, and you probably really feel you are. | ||
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Yeah, well I live in LA, it's not so bad. | |
| But when I travel it's like, okay, wow, I am really in the minority here. | ||
| But two quick things on sometimes the need for government force, like Sati, the burning of widows in India. | ||
| You know, that was ended by the British colonialists that said, you're going to stop doing this or else. | ||
| And they said, but you have to respect our culture. | ||
| And they said, all right, here's our culture. | ||
| If you burn women, we build gallows and hang you. | ||
| So you go ahead and build your funeral pyres and we're going to build our gallows and we can respect each other's culture. | ||
| And that put an end to it. | ||
| And then in Papua New Guinea, Jared Diamond tells this story about You know, rates of violence, I mean, it was like hundreds of times more than the natural background rates of violence, even in the 60s. | ||
| And no one liked the violence, but it was just the result of these little local tribes. | ||
| And finally, the overall government, when they got some power, they said, all right, no more violence. | ||
| If you kill somebody out of vengeance or whatever, you took your pig and so, you know, whatever. | ||
| We're gonna put you in jail, and we're gonna lock you up, and that's it. | ||
| But most people were happy about this, Jared. | ||
| It was like, thank God somebody came in. | ||
| The parent came in and said, stop fighting! | ||
| Right, and I guess I would say we don't live in Papua New Guinea, and we don't live in British colonial the world. | ||
| So you need some kind of structure. | ||
| Stop cheating. | ||
| Stop killing. | ||
| Yeah, we don't want to cheat. | ||
| But, you know, but you've got to tilt the incentive somehow. | ||
| And, you know, I hate to say it, but sometimes that has to come from the top down a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| So all right, your book is called Political Tribes. | ||
| Now, as you know, I'm a believer in the individual. | ||
| I think that the individual is the answer to stop bigotry and prejudice and all of those things, because you won't look at someone as the member of a group and you won't, oh, black people think this, or Muslim people think this, or gay people think this, if you look at the individual. | ||
| You will wait till you know what they think. | ||
| So sell me on the value of tribe. | ||
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Well, actually, Or just the reality of tribes. | |
| I'm closer to you. | ||
| I think we all need a big dose of individualism in this country right now. | ||
| I teach on a college campus and that's what we're supposed to be famous for. | ||
| America's a bunch of mavericks. | ||
| But all, you know, I don't think these things are inconsistent. | ||
| I do say that human beings, and this is not me saying it first, but human beings are just biologically tribal. | ||
| We need to belong to groups. | ||
| There are very, very few hermits. | ||
| There can be individualists, but they're not hermits. | ||
| Even monks belong to orders. | ||
| They compete with each other. | ||
| So there's very few sort of jadey salingers at the end in the forest. | ||
| There's not many of those. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I bet if there were a retreat for those people, they'd probably really get along. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| And tribalism doesn't have to be bad, and in fact, it can be consistent | ||
| with a lot of individualism. | ||
| In sports, you were saying, but that's a great example. | ||
| Imagine somebody telling you to stop liking your favorite team. | ||
| And family can be very tribal. | ||
| What I'm writing about now is when tribalism takes over a political system. | ||
| And that is what is really dangerous because feature of the kind of tribalism I'm talking about is you | ||
| just want to stick to your side no matter what. You actually take pleasure in | ||
| seeing the other side fail or just sticking it to them. And by the way, I | ||
| experience this all the time, right? If somebody hurts you, it's just human nature. But | ||
| we are, we have massive problems in this country right now and as both of you have | ||
| talked about before, We're at a point where we just can't talk to each other. | ||
| You know, Americans can't talk to each other. | ||
| Anytime anything happens, whether it's a shooting or anything, the case, I think even worse than, I'm not, you know, you could say it's all, Steve Pinker makes a great case, and I'm not saying that we're worse than, in every way, in terms of violence. | ||
| In terms of tribalism in the political sphere, I think this is an unusual moment. | ||
| And partly that is, I think, because of the demographic change. | ||
| It's very dislocating. | ||
| And so I, anyway. | ||
| No, well, not to bring everything back to social media, but I'm still partly convinced that it's not just, I accept the changing demographics and Trumpism and all of those things, but I still think And I see this as I'm on tour with Jordan Peterson now, and I'm getting back into stand-up, and I'm meeting people across, you know, from all the diversity that the left loves, but across a true diverse set of ideas, too, who they want answers. | ||
| And we're just not hearing from these people. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason that the things that we're all doing are working. | ||
| It's because we're fighting the forces of that. | ||
| So for that reason, I'm an optimist. | ||
| And, you know, when I had you on the first time, which seems like 18 lifetimes ago, and we were talking about the moral arc, I mean, that really was what you were selling me. | ||
| I mean, it's very similar to the Pinker idea, that things are bending in a good way. | ||
| It's just harder to see it now, perhaps. | ||
| Well, and also because we set our standards higher, so that people say students in the 60s would be outraged by the Vietnam War. | ||
| Now they're outraged by Halloween costumes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's actually good, because it shows you it's a smaller thing that we're upset by. | ||
| Well, but also there's a correction. | ||
| I think that went too far, right? | ||
| I think that's a good example of suggesting what you are calling the market. | ||
| I think we're seeing a correction right now, that whatever people think about the 2016 election Many, many, many people, including elites, were shocked. | ||
| And so there's a lot of rethinking. | ||
| And even from the Halloween costume thing now, I think it's, I feel, I feel that there's a little, you can't tell immediately, you're still going to see the controversies, but I think there's a shift. | ||
| Yeah, well I think that's what's interesting because it seems to me that some of us in this intellectual dark web or whatever you want to call us at this point, we kind of saw this for the last couple of years and that's what drew people to us and that's the confirmation for me that there is something bigger growing here. | ||
| Yeah, the identity politics thing is a problem because it feeds into the tribes. | ||
| Your chapters, well the chapter on the Trump phenomenon, going through NASCAR and World Wrestling Entertainment, and it's like I never really thought of those as tribes, but of course they are. | ||
| Yeah, and I contrasted that, and I can't believe I didn't get in trouble. | ||
| You know, I teach at a very liberal school. | ||
| Just wait, you're on the Rubin Report. | ||
| Anything can happen. | ||
| Well, I write about the Occupy Movement, which, you know, and again, I supported a lot of my students. | ||
| I love my students, I have to say. | ||
| I am an independent, and a lot of them are doing great things for justice. | ||
| So I even think, you know, social justice warrior is, again, too big a term. | ||
| You know, I think that's also a label. | ||
| Occupy is a movement that I say was a movement ostensibly to help the poor that included no members of the poor. | ||
| It was vastly an elite group, highly educated, all these post grads. | ||
| And yes, then I say, you know, actually a lot of the progressive elites aren't aware. | ||
| In fact, a lot of the working class, white working class or any working class are actually very suspicious of a lot of the activists that are supposedly trying to help them. | ||
| And that was an irony. | ||
| And then I talk about so many of the poorer Including minorities belonging to the prosperity gospel. | ||
| The irony, they're praying for money. | ||
| They want money. | ||
| They're not trying to occupy. | ||
| So yeah, that's part of the thing that a lot of theses that a lot of elites in this country wanting to do well actually just are very blind to the group identities and tribal dynamics that matter most to just people on the ground. | ||
| So to that point, was Trump's greatest coup here that he was able to take the white working class mainly, but other groups too, and break them out of their tribalism? | ||
| Or even the Christian conservatives who voted for him at record numbers, I think, and still his support with them is like 90% or something crazy, that they didn't vote for him for tribal reasons because he's actually not one of them, right? | ||
| He was a rich New Yorker. | ||
| I think that he has done a masterful job. | ||
| He tapped into it. | ||
| Well, I think he's done a brilliant job portraying himself as a member of their cultural tribe. | ||
| The same cultural tribe as white working class Americans. | ||
| And I don't think it's all a show because a lot of group identification is aesthetic. | ||
| It's aesthetic, it's a matter of style and values, and in terms of the way that President Trump dresses and he stuffs himself on McDonald's compared to, you know, not vegan, healthy, it's just McDonald's and steaks and the suits, the NASCAR and World Wide Wrestling are these things that I write about. | ||
| These are not, I got There was a negative review that said, oh, this fringe phenomenon. | ||
| And I showed the numbers. | ||
| These are massive phenomenon. | ||
| These are the prosperity gospel. | ||
| These are millions and millions. | ||
| Trump's in the Hall of Fame of the World Wrestling. | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
|
unidentified
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He is. | |
| They almost shaved his head. | ||
| And so in my circles, you know, every time he said something sexist or racist, everyone was like, now he's going to be out of the office. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And the point is that people actually, a lot of Americans, actually identify with the way he talks and says something wrong or maybe lies and gets in trouble, then he's called out. | ||
| They're actually like, this happens to me all the time. | ||
| That's how they feel. | ||
| They don't feel like... So I think that he has established a cultural tribal connection even though, yes, he's a... And that goes to the other thing. | ||
| I think a lot of elites, I've been doing some research into this. | ||
| The socialists include a lot of people who attend our top universities. | ||
| There are a lot of working class Americans, whether Latino, African American, white, who actually would love to make it big, would love to hit it rich, would love to have a big building, would love to have a nice car. | ||
| So there's a lot of irony in who is championing what, and it's actually very, very fascinating Yeah, so it's just tribalism of a different sort, I suppose. | ||
| So it's like all these rappers years ago were rapping about Trump because they liked all of the gold and the bling and, you know, the branding and all of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, he tapped into lots of different strands. | ||
| Of course there was a racial thing that he was able to tap into too, but there was a lot of stuff there. | ||
| Wait, I want to just slightly jump back to this liberal tribe that thinks that it's not a tribe, because that seems to be the group that I'm sort of most personally frustrated with at the moment. | ||
| They go after you a lot. | ||
| Yeah, well, I guess that probably has a lot to do with it, I'm not denying it. | ||
| Well, but they're accusing you of being in a tribe and they're not in a tribe, but that's not true. | ||
| So I guess that's what's driving me crazy about this, is that they constantly are telling you, and I'm sort of talking about the New York Times elite, sort of, I lived on the Upper West for 15 years, so I like a lot of these people, personally, individually, of course, but that set of people that think that everyone else is this thing, and that they are actually the ones who have coffee while drinking the New York Times. | ||
| I really do think that all of us are tribal, and that is definitely a tribe. | ||
| And it's even by, like, if you take, like, anthropological or social scientist definitions, you know, in terms of what you eat, and your values, and your self-perception, and, you know, people vacation all the same places. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| No, it's definitely a tribe. | ||
| And, you know, I, and I'm, a lot of them are, my friends are in that tribe, and it's very, just because it's, You know, one thing I say is a lot of progressivism is actually, it could also be doing great things, but it is also really fun. | ||
| It's an identity formation, you know, people, like Occupy was a very, it gave them solidarity, it was a fun feeling, a lot of the marches. | ||
| I think people are going to get a lot of the politics wrong because they keep measuring the size of the crowds everywhere, the size of the protests, and I think that's, I don't know. | ||
| I think people have to watch out because that's... I think if you just look at the size of the crowd, you're like, oh my gosh, I see where the election's going. | ||
| But maybe those are areas where the whole... I don't know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you were reading Amy's book, as someone that sort of tracked moral progress through time, Do you think there is a right amount of tribalism that allows us to be the best we can as people and as society? | ||
| Well, your epilogue talks about how to break through some of that, which I liked, because there's a lot of social psych there. | ||
| How can we quit thinking of each other in that way? | ||
| But the other bigger issue on the spread of market capitalism, say, That you identified these market-dominant minorities. | ||
| I had no idea this was happening in Vietnam, and I just binge-watched Ken Burns' 18 Hours of the Vietnam War, and I don't remember anything about like 10% of the population owned 90% of the companies. | ||
| Well, this relates to your point about, this is something funny, I keep getting in trouble for every book that I've written about, and they're taboo for reasons that I think I don't think they should be taboo. | ||
| So I coined this term in 2003, market-dominant minorities, and it refers to small, usually ethnic minorities, like the 3% Chinese in Indonesia. | ||
| Just 3% ethnic Chinese who control 70% of the economy. | ||
| Now when I wrote that, I think the instant U.S. | ||
| liberal progressive response is, wait, how could she say that? | ||
| It's like she's got to be stereotyping. | ||
| But I just documented it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even though it could also be argued that that's a positive stereotype because it's through work and education and all sorts of other things, right? | ||
| People are just so uncomfortable with any group, ethnic generalizations. | ||
| And I was saying, look, if we're going to ever solve these problems, so it also, and I even say whites in South Africa, about 14% controlling, you know, 80% of the best land. So even the reasons for being a | ||
| market dominant minority can vary. | ||
| Sometimes it can be a history of colonialism or apartheid. | ||
| So nobody's celebrating it necessarily. | ||
| Although groups like the Chinese or the Indians or the Lebanese are harder to explain because they were non colonizers. | ||
| So yes, this is a phenomenon that fits. | ||
| It coexists in a complicated way with these enlightenment forces. | ||
| Because you want it would be nice if markets just benefited all ethnicities equally. | ||
| But what does this tell you about how we treat the... | ||
| Victimhood, really. | ||
| So the example I can use, when you just mentioned this about the 3% Chinese, it's like when, I'm sure you guys saw this a couple months ago, when this documentary came out about Apu from The Simpsons, and I saw, 90% of what I saw online, and again, it's just what you're reading online, was actually, no, he was a good character, he's beloved by everybody, he's actually the hardest working guy in the town, he's one of Homer's good friends, they did an episode on immigration because of him, you know, he's a vegan, and all of these wonderful things. | ||
| Indian Americans, I think, are the number one socioeconomic group in the country. | ||
| We're pretty damn close to it. | ||
| I think their average median income is six figures. | ||
| It's a great measure of success and all of these things, and yet I saw this sliver of the people that I'm frustrated with, this sort of elite, lefty, whatever you want to call them, progressives, demanding that this victimhood should exist. | ||
| And that, to me, is the root of what so much of our tribal problems are about. | ||
| and forget your successes yeah i i am for so i just again just personally i understand why the people come from | ||
| a personally i i i i just | ||
| don't like the victim but they are I think it's also psychologically very debilitating and you get this oppression Olympics where you're, you know, you're who can be lower, you know, and have more problems. | ||
| But on this, without getting, because I have had a lot of South Asian friends say that they were very upset about it, to my surprise, so I try to understand. | ||
| And I wonder if there's a big generational thing, which is partly, it feels bad, but it's partly what makes America great. | ||
| You know, my dad, when I was young, my dad was the immigrant, he had a Chinese accent, and I would see him being what you might call discriminated against, somebody like, whatever, and I would feel so bad. | ||
| I'd be like this eight-year-old kid and just feel so ashamed and so angry and think my dad didn't even notice, you know, and then later I'd mention to my dad and he's like, who cares? | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| This is such a great country. | ||
|
unidentified
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You should see where I came from. | |
| And I'm going to rise? | ||
| And he just made it the American dream. | ||
| So I often, as an older person now, I see very generationally. | ||
| I bet if you asked an older generation of South Asians about that, I wonder if you might not get a difference. | ||
| Whereas you get the children or grandchildren of those immigrants, and they're in a very different mentality. | ||
| educated in our campuses, much more, you know. | ||
| So that's really what you're talking about when you talk about the Halloween costumes, right? | ||
| That the arc here has bent so much that you can actually put aside all of the successes | ||
| and then to just be upset by a cartoon character. | ||
| So this is, again, it's a net good. | ||
| I think it's important. | ||
| It's a net good, but it's fine-tuning younger people's intuitions to go toward smaller and smaller assaults on their ego or dignity or whatever that they then elevate into these massive, like, this is the equivalent of slavery. | ||
| You know, raping the environment is the equivalent of rape or whatever, you know, just elevating these words into things that they can get worked up about. | ||
| Because we do have a moral module or network or whatever in our brain that we get worked up over things. | ||
| And whether if it's the Vietnam War, OK, but now it's the Halloween costume. | ||
| But it's the same emotions that are still being driven. | ||
| And that's another problem with these tribalism. | ||
| You know, maybe the moral arc, maybe again, I'm an optimist, too. | ||
| And I think something is changing after 2016. | ||
| I have many, I quote this guy, Giovanni, extremely progressive student, Latin, you know, parents from Mexico, lived in a trailer park, and he's saying, I think we went too far. | ||
| We! | ||
| He named himself on this Halloween costume. | ||
| The line he uses is that crying wolf too much, right? | ||
| So that when you get serious and so I actually think there's some correction. | ||
| Not everybody, right? | ||
| There's still things that are just a waste of time. | ||
| You know, we have serious, serious problems. | ||
| But I think there is some sense even among this group saying, you know, maybe this is not the best thing to focus on. | ||
| What do you guys make of the fact that this seems to be global right now? | ||
| That because of technology that this Movement whatever whatever is happening here now where so many people are waking up to the overcorrection Or whatever you want to call it that the amount of email that I get from people that are seeing this in India Hmm is what I'm getting from people that are seeing this in Canada that that tells you something really interesting is happening despite the differences in the political histories and and You know the political establishments of those countries. | ||
| Yeah, it could be a You know, selective focus because of social media and real-time covering of these incidences. | ||
| I do wonder to what extent the problem really exists on college campuses of this campus craziness. | ||
| Like at Chapman University where I'm at, I never see anything like this. | ||
| And most of the time when I travel and give talks at colleges, you never see anything. | ||
| It's just people, just students are hunkered down doing their thing. | ||
| I gotta bring you to University of New Hampshire next time. | ||
| We'll change your opinion on that pretty quick. | ||
| When were they shaking or something? | ||
| They're very inventive. | ||
| But it could be that the minority, it's a minority, but they're loud. | ||
| And they're instantly covered now. | ||
| So it seems like, if you watch Tucker Carlson and his weekly campus craziness, it's like, If I walk on campus and I just see riots going, well no, you hardly ever see anything. | ||
| So there's this idea of pluralistic ignorance, or the spiral of silence, where a minority can take over, you know, a toxic ideology can take over a country, like Germany in the 1930s, where probably most Germans were not on board with Hitler's program. | ||
| But they thought everybody else was, and there's punishment for dissent, so you get the spread of these toxic ideas when actually most people, like most college students, will privately say, I'm against binge drinking, I don't want to do it. | ||
| But they think, but I know all my friends are into it, so I do it. | ||
| But each of them says that. | ||
| That's what I'm more concerned about. | ||
| So I want to know about your experience on college campuses, because I find when I go there, and I'm usually invited by, it's usually libertarian groups or something, you know, center-right or something, or now it's college Republicans, and I, as I always say, I would gladly do it if the Democrats wouldn't invite me. | ||
| I'll give the same exact speech. | ||
| But what I find is that even for libertarians, who basically just want to live and let live, their finding, they're afraid to say what they think. | ||
| So it's not that All of the kids there are screaming and doing violence, but I'm more concerned about that secondary set of students that at college is afraid to say what they think, because you're not going to get out and suddenly start telling the world how you think. | ||
| This is a great irony, though, because for the libertarians, they say, I think you need strong leadership. | ||
| Oh yeah, the Liberians can do a hell of a lot better in that department, no doubt about that. | ||
| No, but I mean like even for the campus, I think it's something to think about. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I so agree with you, Michael. | ||
| I think that it's, this is a positive thing. | ||
| I think, and again, it's both sides. | ||
| And it's it's the loudest voices and then there's a lot of bullying and shaming and I've talked to so many students one-on-one or even but like even in my own classroom I'm pretty well known for having one of the most diverse actually maybe the most diverse class but not just ethnically and racially although that too but I had 15 members of the Federalist Society, in addition to 15 members of the Black Students Association and nine Muslim Americans. | ||
| Admittedly, it wasn't constitutional law. | ||
| It was a class that was a little bit not as charged. | ||
| But I still talk about democracy and ethnic conflict and all these issues, the 2016 election. | ||
| But I set the rules. | ||
| You know, like, you know, I just said, these are the rules for this class, and you, there was a rate list, so don't come if you can't do this, but if somebody, for this particular conversation, I know it's going to be difficult, but if somebody says something and they don't quite use the vocabulary that you would use, or they say something that maybe offends you, for this, just this class, I'll say, can you just not assume worse motives? | ||
| Just assume that they, And I can have success with it. | ||
| Now, it's not easy. | ||
| Even our dean said these are free speech norms. | ||
| You can protest. | ||
| Anybody can protest. | ||
| But they have to be allowed to speak. | ||
| So I think leadership. | ||
| I think there's been a lot of cowardice. | ||
| So you're selling me on, in this instance, on a top-down version of this. | ||
| I think you need it. | ||
| And I basically, especially at a college campus, I do agree with it because you can't, for lack of a better phrase, you can't have the inmates running the asylum. | ||
| These kids are supposed to learn there, and they have to learn by people that are smarter than them. | ||
| So in this case, I am okay with some top-down stuff. | ||
| Have you had any pushback against that, though? | ||
| Because I'd imagine it's got to be hard pill for them to swallow. | ||
| So again, I'm not the dean. | ||
| Our dean has, yes. | ||
| And there are always hard cases. | ||
| There are hard cases. | ||
| And I've, you know, yeah, I get in trouble all the time. | ||
| But not terrible trouble. | ||
| You know, I think maybe it's because I'm a minority woman, too. | ||
| Not everybody is going to be... | ||
| Ah, using identity politics against them. | ||
| Very clever. | ||
| I don't even think I use it. | ||
| I just like, you know, and I definitely know what it feels like to be an outsider. | ||
| Your first question, you know, I've always had a lot of classical liberals try to speak for me. | ||
| So I really kind of get it. | ||
| But yeah, anyway. | ||
| Well, you identify as a minority woman, don't you? | ||
| I've been feeling that more and more. | ||
| Yeah, so the other thing about reading your book, though, was how our State Department did not seem to get these tribal conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. | ||
| Does no one call a professor at Yale and go, hey, we're thinking about, this is our strategy, what do you think? | ||
| So when I was reading that, I kept thinking of, do you remember during the 2008 election, so Obama running the first time during the primaries, they're having the debate, the Democratic debate, and Joe Biden was still running at the time, and they're all talking about Iraq, and Joe Biden goes, you know what, actually Iraq should be split into three countries, because there should be a Sunni country and a Shia country and a Kurdish country, because this tribal stuff has been going on way before us, way before the Brits and the Ottomans and blah blah blah, and people thought he was He's completely bananas. | ||
| Now, I think there's probably plenty of other reasons to think he's bananas, but putting that aside, he was getting to the heart of what you were saying. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know if that was the right solution, but yes, absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, this is interesting because half the book is about our foreign policy fiascos and how it's our U.S. | ||
| blindness to these, again, the force of identities that we barely know anything about. | ||
| You know, we're like Sunni, Shias, Kurds, kind of the same, or Afghanistan, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, whatever, you know, Vietnam, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, all the same. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| It is something that I have not gotten in trouble for. | ||
| Because it's a lot of very critical chapters saying that our greatest foreign policy disasters stem from this one thing. | ||
| Our failure to see that there's these tribal identities that we imagine that democracy will just smooth it away. | ||
| Let's just have some elections and everything will just kind of melt away. | ||
| Or markets. | ||
| And what I show is that democracy under a lot of circumstances actually catalyzes those group conflicts. | ||
| It gets worse. | ||
| Are there moments, though, that for whatever reason, either because of war or famine or something else, that actually we can get past those things? | ||
| So, like, for example, things actually were going pretty well in Iraq after they had their elections, you know, towards the end of the George W. Bush, forgetting whether we should have gone in there or anything like that, but they were actually having free and fair elections. | ||
| It sounded like it was getting a little more secularized. | ||
| Then we left, and okay, so be it, but then things got reversed, but we actually began Out of the chaos, we started doing something good and now we're not there. | ||
| I tell a slightly more detailed story than that. | ||
| Slight disagreement. | ||
| I think we really messed up the democracy bit when we first got in there. | ||
| And I think, actually, most of the key players say that now. | ||
| You know, like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, you know, we should have paid more attention to the tribal structures and worked with that. | ||
| But what you're getting at is I write about a success case. | ||
| And this is the 2007 surge. | ||
| Again, putting aside politics, that's gotten so polarized. | ||
| But most Americans, if they even know about it, know that we put in more troops. | ||
| What they don't know is that it was a 180 degree change in our foreign policy. | ||
| The people in charge said, let's pay attention to the groups now. | ||
| Let's go talk to some Sunni sheiks. | ||
| And by the way, they educated their troops. | ||
| Like, here's the difference between them. | ||
| Here's what they wear. | ||
| Here's what they eat. | ||
| Here are their ceremonies. | ||
| And they really turned it around. | ||
| And I document all the numbers. | ||
| At a point when things were so bad, they brought sectarian violence down. | ||
| They brought suicide bombings down. | ||
| They brought casualties down. | ||
| And then, yes, at that point, U.S. | ||
| lost its political will. | ||
| We left. | ||
| Yeah, so that's where politics really just straight up messed it up, right? | ||
| Because things were getting better, they had real elections. | ||
| And it shows that if we do, again, the weird optimism. | ||
| I think that we have done so many things in our foreign policy so foolishly that we can really do so much better. | ||
| We just have to pay a little bit of attention to these groups, which are what people raised it. | ||
| That's the first thing they hear about. | ||
| And by the way, the reason for this is something also I think positive, well, Why are we so blind? | ||
| Because I contrast this to the British. | ||
| The British in their divide and rule, they were incredibly group conscious. | ||
| They had these huge documents detailing all the different caste differences and they used it to divide. | ||
| I mean, that's not what we should do. | ||
| The opposite. | ||
| But I think it has to do with our own extraordinary success with assimilation. | ||
| You know, we, of course not every group, but more than any other country, we, you know, the idea is if Irish people and Italians and Hungarians and, you know, Polish can all become Americans within one generation, let's have some elections because Sunnis and Shias and Kurds, you know, and it's other countries are not like us. | ||
| Yeah, so if, let's say if, there's a movement building right now, and some of these enlightenment values are coming back. | ||
| There is! | ||
| There is! | ||
| I'm with ya! | ||
| Alright, so let's say it. | ||
| There is a movement building. | ||
| What do we have to do, as people that are part of it or want to build something good, to avoid the negative parts of tribalism that will inherently come along with it? | ||
| Well, read Amy's book first, because it ends positively about here's some of the things we could do. | ||
| I mean, I call this the Indugu effect from Jack Nicholson's film about Schmidt, where he adopts a child watching late-night TV. | ||
| You know, if you give $15 a month, this will help little Indugu. | ||
| And they show a picture of Ndugu. | ||
| Now, as we know from studies, if you show a picture of 10,000 starving kids in Kenya, people give a dollar. | ||
| If you show Little Ndugu, you're willing to give a hundred times more than that. | ||
| So, it's tricking the brain into thinking Little Ndugu is an honorary member of my tribe. | ||
| And so, we know how to do that from fundraising and so on. | ||
| That has to be applied, I think, politically. | ||
| You have to identify with these people. | ||
| As you point out, when you actually know a gay person, or a black person, or a Jew, or somebody like this that's not of your normal tribe, that does break down those tribal barriers. | ||
| your colleague Paul Blum in his book against empathy points out that the dark side of empathy if we're | ||
| if we're super cooperative and supportive of our tribe that makes us even | ||
| more uh... | ||
| uh... wary of other tribes because they could be a threat to our people that we | ||
| like so much and so we have to break through that | ||
| acknowledge the tribalism but also counter it. Yeah, ironically it comes back to your | ||
| favorite word, individualism, right? Because those studies that are really positive at | ||
| the end show that if you can pull people out of their groups | ||
| uh... and by the way not just dump them all together, diversity can lead to more hating of each other | ||
| but if you can interact with another person as an individual which of | ||
| course is the whole hard part | ||
| it's astounding how much progress you can make | ||
| The best example I like is the integration of the U.S. | ||
| military in the 1950s. | ||
| Everybody was against this. | ||
| It was like 80% and this can't work. | ||
| And afterwards, they found that the integrated troops were as or more effective than the all-white troops. | ||
| And then they interviewed everybody. | ||
| And it was just kind of your point. | ||
| They were like, you know, if you're in a foxhole, you miss your family in the same way, you have to put your life in somebody else's hand. | ||
| Alright, so let's shift a little bit here for the last little bit here. | ||
| or you don't care what the color of their skin is. | ||
| And that was like actually an incredible cross-pollinating moment. | ||
| All right, so let's shift a little bit here for the last little bit here. | ||
| So I wanna talk about some Tiger Mom stuff because I do think that partly what I'm seeing right now | ||
| as I'm on tour with Jordan Peterson is not that he's Tiger Dad, | ||
| but he's filling a role of something like that. | ||
| So it's not necessarily as outright aggressive as, say, Tiger Mom would be, but he's filling some role there. | ||
| Do you think that's sort of fair to say? | ||
| It's so funny that you said that, because obviously he's an incredibly polarizing figure, but when I watched a few things and read a few tips, that's what it reminded me of. | ||
| You know, it's kind of, you know, one of the things I said in Tiger Mom was, | ||
| "Assume strength rather than weakness in your children." | ||
| And I got in a lot of trouble for saying that. | ||
| But there's... | ||
| What's the pushback on a statement like that? Like... | ||
| Oh gosh, you know, all these mental health issues, and I got in a lot of trouble with... | ||
| It's, first of all, what is tiger parenting, right? | ||
| I mean, and it is really true that a lot of Asian Americans have parents that are too stifling and too strict on both sides, and they make their children miserable and People have committed suicide. | ||
| Parenting is one of those things that affects everybody, because not everybody has a child, but everybody had a parent. | ||
| So it's always personal. | ||
| But I think there was something, because I didn't understand why I was in the middle of this firestorm either. | ||
| And it's interesting, because you're in this moment, you're experiencing it, and people would ask me at the time, and at the time I had no idea. | ||
| At the time I was just trying to defend myself, until somebody told me to stop apologizing. | ||
| I just kept saying, it's just a memoir, you're misunderstanding, and finally I just decided to own it. | ||
| Okay, it is just a memoir, that's true, but I'm a proud strict mom. | ||
| And then things got a little bit better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think somebody, one person said, you know, Amy, I think that if the book had been about like a strict Italian mom or a strict Romanian mom, nobody would have cared. | ||
| It was at that moment that I hit fear of parenting and fear of China at the exact same moment. | ||
| Because that was when all these, those test scores came out and the U.S., this great superpower, was like at number 38. | ||
| And China, Singapore, they were all like 1, 2, 3, and it was going to, they're going to eat our lunch. | ||
| And I think also... So Greek Tiger Mom would have been more okay at the moment. | ||
| But going to your point, I think it did feel... people said it touched a nerve. | ||
| It's often where there's something missing already. | ||
| Like people need something. | ||
| There's a vacuum. | ||
| Something's off. | ||
| The pendulum has swung too far. | ||
| And then this random thing comes and fills a void. | ||
| So I think it could be a slightly similar phenomenon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You said quit apologizing. | ||
| In a way, that's what Jordan is saying on some level. | ||
| Quit apologizing. | ||
| Just be who you are, set the rules, and have goals, and don't apologize for it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And there's a lot of people going, yeah, okay, I'm going to be successful and I'm not going to apologize for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You shouldn't have to do that. | ||
| What do we do about that set of people, though, that is just looking to take everybody down? | ||
| Because that's part of the overcorrection crew, but they're not going to just go away. | ||
| They don't want restorative justice. | ||
| Social justice is not restorative justice. | ||
| It's the Old Testament retributive justice. | ||
| Lives must be destroyed. | ||
| You have to go down and grovel, and then we're going to destroy you. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why our friend Pete Boghossian, he calls this social justice thing, or this identity, a secular religion. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And I believe it is. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Original sin, you're white, male, whatever, and there is no restorative justice. | ||
| You just have to be destroyed. | ||
| So, what can we do? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a hard solution. | ||
| Push back and just say, no, I'm not going to apologize. | ||
| If I do something wrong, I will apologize, but I'm not going to apologize for something I didn't do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Or who I am. | ||
| I'm a white male. | ||
| Why should I apologize for that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very quickly, when you made the decision not to apologize anymore and to stand up for yourself, how quickly did it all kind of stop? | ||
| Because I think that's what a lot of people that are watching this are wondering. | ||
| They're afraid to say anything because they don't want to just get caught in that meat grinder. | ||
| So I want to show them instances of, because every one of us that has stood up and said, we're here, we're not just gonna Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of this. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure what these apologies accomplish. | ||
| I think in a way, again, I see things through a tribal lens, right? | ||
| I think that's like a, it's a victory, it's a point, it's a trophy. | ||
| I got an apology, I'm going to extract this. | ||
| It was more myself, too, to just kind of Say, wait a second, I've made a lot of mistakes. | ||
| If you actually read the book, you'd realize it's about my younger daughter rebelling and it's funny and whatever, unreliable narrators. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I am actually pretty proud. | ||
| I'm pretty proud. | ||
| Stand by everything. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's hugely empowering, hugely empowering psychologically. | ||
| But you know, to play devil's advocate on the bigger picture, I think we all need to elevate ourselves, because I'm sort of in a different camp than you guys, like I'm looking at the country, and as the optimist, I feel like we all And that's why I admired Michael so much. | ||
| It's hard to recognize yourself as being somebody that's being tribal or whatever. | ||
| Us versus them, always. | ||
| And what I've noticed, because this has happened to me, is one bad thing happens to you. | ||
| We've all had this. | ||
| Some terrible attack, a very cruel thing, incredibly unfair. | ||
| And it's human nature. | ||
| I get so angry at the other side, right? | ||
| And rightfully. | ||
| So I think the warning I would have is, how many people do you put in the them category? | ||
| I think we should all narrow that. | ||
| Make it smaller, you know, because there are these big labels and people do it on all sides. | ||
| And I even do it. | ||
| I just get so mad at this mass pool of people that I think of as my enemies because something horrible just happened to me, you know, or something incredibly insulting or this terrible stuff that I get on Twitter. | ||
| I mean, we all get the hate. | ||
| And it's so easy just to hate back, I think. | ||
| I think that's the hard thing. | ||
| So I keep thinking, narrow the enemy. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, if you listen to conservative talk radio, oh my gosh, it's just so polarizing. | ||
| I mean, every other word is, you know, the liberals, the left, you know, the libtards, you know, the New York slimes, you know, the Washington compost, you know, these... | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| This is Mark Levin. | ||
| My wife calls him The Screamer. | ||
| She's from Germany. | ||
| He's like, who are these people on the radio screaming? | ||
| It's like, that's what gets ratings apparently. | ||
| They're just as bad as the people on the left. | ||
| Yeah, we have to stop doing this. | ||
| The principle of charity. | ||
| Just be charitable to the person you're talking to. | ||
| Don't assume, you know, because they slipped up and used this word instead of that word, therefore they're Hitler. | ||
| You know, no more reductio ad hitlerum. | ||
| You have to stop that. | ||
| So do you think it's possible, to wrap this up on a nice bow and use a little of our optimism here and a little of your moral arc here, that the exhaustion with all of this, enough of these conversations that actually clearly are breaking into the mainstream at the moment and all of that, will lead to a sort of political realignment, where it seems to me that I would argue at this point we basically needed Trump, even though I didn't vote for him. | ||
| We needed him for this now four years of just upheaval and fertile ground and ideas and people realigning their thinking and strange alliances and all that. | ||
| But we won't need another Trump after, I don't think, if everything actually goes okay. | ||
| We will actually be okay with something decent again. | ||
| But we needed the thing to be shook up before we could get there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm an optimist. | ||
| I think, and it's very hard to say, people are so angry, so it's also possible... Right, it could spin completely the other way, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I'm also, we started with the Masterpiece Cake thing, and I said I'm not a karma professor, but I've been giving talks a lot of places, and the question is, is there another, is there a model? | ||
| Is there a country that you've studied that could be the model for us to get out of our political tribalism? | ||
| And actually, this could even get me in trouble, but I just say, we're the model. | ||
| We are the model. | ||
| It's not that we're, oh my gosh, we have made so many terrible mistakes, we're in a very bad moment in many ways, but we have the apparatus. | ||
| We have something special, this thing that I call the super group context. | ||
| Our Constitution, of course we have repeatedly failed to live up to those ideals. | ||
| But the ideals are there. | ||
| And it is an ethnically and religiously neutral document. | ||
| Again, not the way it's played out. | ||
| Reality is always... Our ideals have always exceeded our reality. | ||
| So it's an aspirational country. | ||
| It's an aspirational document. | ||
| This is why we come full circle. | ||
| I think we're the Enlightenment experiment. | ||
| I never thought, this is where maybe Steve, I was not somebody that, do you remember in the late 90s when the Berlin Wall came down, it was like we're going to be one world, maybe Saudi Arabia and Turkey will join the EU, then maybe the United States will join the EU. | ||
| I was always like, never will that happen. | ||
| That thing ain't happening, I assure you. | ||
| It's too big. | ||
| So I'm still a little bit of a tribalist. | ||
| I think the world at this point is too big a unit. | ||
| Well, the EU's figuring out that for countries that are in Europe, so. | ||
| Yeah, I was right about that, yeah. | ||
| But I'm really glad, that'll be a good place to wrap this, that you mentioned these aspirational documents, because as you guys can see through our window right in there in our control room, we've got a huge American flag in there, but also what you can't see, maybe you can see it, Amy, is I just got these two huge, a giant print of the Declaration of Independence and a giant print of the Constitution that I was given at a speaking thing that I did through Turning Point, and yes, We haven't always lived up to those things, but if we could get back to the, that's why I care about these things. | ||
| I'm always tweeting about these things, and when I'm in D.C., I go and I take pictures of all these things and put up, oh, this is what Thomas Jefferson, they've given us the blueprint. | ||
| It doesn't mean that they were perfect. | ||
| It doesn't mean that we've always done it right. | ||
| But this idea of, is someone doing it better than us? | ||
| For as bad as it may seem, we're not killing each other in the streets right now. | ||
| Yes, is there unjust murder? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is there unjust this or that? | ||
| But it's still pretty damn good. | ||
| Bring it home, Shermer! | ||
| Well, I mentioned being a multi-planetary species. | ||
| When we colonize Mars, and we're going to do it, we've got to set up some kind of government, some kind of economic system. | ||
| What documents would you bring? | ||
| Yeah, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that would be the place to start. | ||
| Maybe they'll tweak it, experiment, and then it'll get a little bit better or worse, and then we can look at that as an experiment and go, OK, here's what we should do here. | ||
| But that perspective also gives us that Sagan-esque pale blue dot. | ||
| Look back at the Earth and go, oh, there are no borders from Mars. | ||
| It's just this blue dot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And maybe that'll change our perspective a little bit about the tribal nature of our species. | ||
| That's actually a great idea. | ||
| Maybe my new argument when people are telling me how horrible America is, it's like, you know what? | ||
| If we were on a Mars tomorrow, somewhere tomorrow, you got a better document to start us off with? | ||
| And I'm pretty sure nobody would have something better. | ||
| No. | ||
| They probably wouldn't know what to say, but that would be a pretty... I knew you could do something to finish us off strong that would bring us into the future and into outer space and all that. | ||
| Well, guys, this has been... I mean, this hour flew by. | ||
| This has been a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I am demanding that you come back for a one-on-one. | ||
| And Shermer, I'll do this one more time. |
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