2878 The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations - Saturday Call In Show - January 3rd, 2015
During the “Racist Until Proven Innocent” show, part of the discussion involved the historical context of racism in America - how much does the modality in which racism is expressed depend on the regional and cultural differences within the United States? What causes a person to change and what are the limits that can be expected as to how much a person can change? Where does virtue come from - is it just a biological expression as a result of evolution? Are non-merit based valuations the initiation of force?
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All right.
Well, up for us today is John.
John wrote in and said, during the racist until proven innocent Colin show, part of the discussion involved the historical context of racism in America.
And this raised an important question.
How much does the modality in which racism is expressed depend on the regional and cultural differences within the United States?
That's a great question.
Do you have thoughts?
I mean, I have some thoughts on it, but your show too.
So do you have any thoughts on it, John?
Well, first of all, good evening, Steph, and aloha from Hawaii.
I love Free Domain Radio.
I've been listening for a while, and it's kind of weird being calling in, actually, and being on the other end of the podcast, because I know I'm going to listen to my own voice, and that's just going to seem strange.
Well, first of all, you have a really nice voice, and secondly, it's just going to get weirder from here.
So, please, keep going.
All right, so...
A couple of things.
I think this question is an important question because the United States is not a homogenous culture.
There are a lot of different cultures within the culture and sometimes these cultural differences have spilled over into extreme forms of violence.
You go back 150, 160 years, you're looking at the United States Civil War and you can also, I think you can include all the various pogroms against various people And groups in the United States as part of some of this racial-based violence and cultural-based violence.
There's a couple of books that are interesting that I think really outline some of the things that I'm talking about in these questions.
At least it outlines what the regional and cultural differences within the United States might be.
In 1982, there was a book.
It was called The Nine Nations of North America, and it was written by Joel Garao.
And this book is actually really important politically because a lot of the political scientists who helped during the Reagan Revolution and some of the more conservative revolutions that kind of came place and sort of replaced a lot of the democratic control of United States politics,
they utilized the information in this book to really sort of capture The people of these different various regions and tailor their message.
And so that helped them win the votes.
Well, in 2012, the book was sort of redone by a different author.
His name is Colin Woodard.
It's called American Nations, A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America.
And there's a map.
And I sent Mike a map of the different cultural regions.
And I don't know if he got that on Skype.
But I think that map is really important to look at, you know, if we're going to start talking about some of these different regions, just to get an understanding of what they could be.
I'm just curious why you care.
I'm not saying it's not a good reason to care.
I'm just, why does it matter?
Culture is my sworn enemy.
And so what does it matter to you?
And again, I don't want to sound overly skeptical.
I'm happy to hear the reason.
What does it matter to you, John, what these cultural differences are?
I think it matters because I'm interested and curious about the cultural differences in the United States and places where I live.
You know, one of the things that really struck me, because I'm originally from Minnesota and they moved out to Hawaii in 2008, but one of the things that struck me is just how much my own cultural biases really affected the way that I viewed society and my political opinions And there's a lot of times based off of,
I mean, this is one of the things I learned from this book, is that based off of looking at some of this, I was able to sort of analyze some of my own political views and some of my own views on ethics and other people and understand them in a different way.
Kind of help me understand, you know what, there's probably some racism here that doesn't get talked about.
There's some kind of discrimination here that doesn't really get addressed in our society because it's It's being dominated by certain cultural groups within the United States and we sort of don't have a way of, we haven't really had a discussion about that.
Okay, so hang on a sec.
Sorry, so when you talk about racism, what are you talking about?
So, to define racism as prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against someone Of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
So I guess that's a pretty good definition.
Okay.
And so which group are we talking about here?
That's – I guess it's a matter of where we should start.
I think here's a good place to start.
Well, no.
Hang on.
Which group are you talking about?
Because, I mean, if we're going to, I mean, look, there are lots of different races and cultures, and so if we're going to talk about Japanese prejudice against Filipinos or Hispanic prejudice against Asians, you know, because every group has those within it who view their group as superior and everyone else's as inferior.
So if we're going to talk about racism, I need to know which groups we're discussing.
This isn't, okay, this is kind of a tricky question because the Subject of race, when we're trying to understand how different groups are oppressed, sometimes it's not necessarily race-specific, but it's culture-specific.
And so you can have cultural groups that share cultural ideals or memes or norms with another kind of cultural group, and that group can be equally repressed in certain cultural regions of the United States.
So it sort of depends on It's hard to say, okay, well, all blacks, they have this, because it's not necessarily...
It doesn't necessarily follow that...
I don't know how to exactly...
Hang on.
Are you talking about...
And I'm sorry to be difficult.
I just, you know, definitions and clarity solve 95% of human communication challenges and resolve about 99% of debates.
But are you talking about in-group versus out-group preferences?
Yeah.
I mean, there are many different races who are Catholics, and Catholics believe that they have the surefire route to heaven.
And other religions don't, so that would be an in-group preferences.
There are people who are born in England who think England is the best, and that carries across a wide variety.
There are people who believe a certain football or hockey team are the best, and they would go across a wide variety of races.
There are, of course, those who believe races are superior to one another, which I think is quite silly, but obviously people believe that.
And so if you're talking about in-group preferences as a whole, in other words, if it's culture plus nationalism plus sports plus geography of every kind plus whatever, I mean, there are people who believe that there's a very common problem in psychology that which is called the women are wonderful.
I think we're good to go.
Then I don't know how talking about race is particularly illuminating, if that makes sense.
Because just one aspect of about a billion.
I think one of the things...
Well, how about I try and compare and contrast this?
Because I think I know what you're getting at, but there's a lot of...
Wait, hang on, hang on.
I'm not trying to get at anything.
I'm trying to understand what we're talking about before we dive in, right?
Right.
But I'm trying to decide if this is an accurate paraphrase or not.
Okay.
If that makes sense.
So...
In in-group and out-group preference, that can be part of it, but also some of it is straight racism where one race feels that they are superior to another.
I think depending on where you go within North America, your view of racism may be different depending on the cultural norms that you grew up with.
For example, in the Deep South, you might have been raised with this idea that white people are superior to black and that you are looking at more of a caste system where you're born into this one race and that race is a very strict marker of quality.
Whereas if you're born in Yankeedom or the North, it may be more culturally based.
For example, So, hang on.
So, if you're talking about racism, you're talking about white racism against blacks in the South.
Is that right?
Yes.
And would that racism be that all whites are superior to all blacks?
So, some toothless, moonshining hick in the backwoods of Tennessee Is superior to, say, Dr.
Thomas Sowell or to, I don't know, Morgan Freeman or, you know, other high achieving, high worth, high value blacks?
Like they would say all whites are superior to all blacks?
Is that my understanding of what you mean by racism?
Yes, and there's – I don't know.
I have a – there's a – I don't know if I should even say it.
It's kind of a joke that was told in the South, and it was written in a book.
I can't remember what it was, but it was sort of – it sort of portrays the attitude in the South that they had.
And so I'm going to try and not use any inflammatory language when I tell this joke, but hopefully you kind of get the point from it.
Do you mean the use of the N-word?
Yes.
Yeah, you can use the word nigger.
Look, it's not a Molotov cocktail, it's a language, and it describes a gruesome racial epithet, but you don't have to worry about that here.
Okay, well, so the joke is, and this is coming from the South, what do you call a nigger with a PhD?
What do you call?
A nigger.
A nigger.
That's the point, is that even if you're black...
Oh, so if a black person goes and gets a really great education, you still got to put him down with a racial epithet, right?
Yeah, and that's sort of the view that was really common in the South, is that the black person is always black.
It doesn't matter what they do.
They're always going to be, like, one caste beneath white people.
But not all white people, right?
You know, if you think about the people who would tell that joke, I think you might be surprised.
I mean, even, like, poor white people could tell that joke, and they could feel...
No, no, look, I understand that.
Obviously, it's a vicious and nasty joke, but do you think that there is a person alive who would say that, I don't know, who's...
Who's a noble black guy?
I mean, Denzel Washington, I've seen him give speeches and all that.
I mean, incredibly eloquent and moving and noble guy and a great actor and all that.
So would somebody say that Charles Manson is superior to Denzel Washington because Charles Manson is white?
Or Adolf Hitler.
I don't know what these people feel about Hitler.
But would they say that Charles Manson is superior to Morgan Freeman because Charles Manson is white?
You know, I've never lived in the Deep South.
But from the stories that I've heard from people that have lived there...
Hearsay, Your Honor.
Hearsay, Your Honor.
I mean, we can't, you know, I think we need some facts, right?
Stories I've heard, I mean, that's pretty unverifiable stuff as a whole, right?
Well, I think what we're talking about here is...
And as I've said before on this show...
I've never met a racist.
I've lived in a bunch of different countries.
I've moved in a whole bunch of different circles.
I myself have never met a racist.
Now, when I lived in England in the 70s, the closest that I heard of when I lived in England in the 70s, and this is from my childhood memory, so if I get the facts wrong, forgive me, but this is the general approximation.
I think that there was a gate that was closing as far as getting British citizenship from the ex-colonies, and in particular from India and Pakistan.
And there were...
So there was a huge influx as the gate was coming down.
Like, this year you can apply for your citizenship to England, and if you don't get it this year, basically you have to never get it, or it's going to be hugely complicated and expensive.
And there was a huge influx of Indians and Pakistanis into England when I was a kid.
And there was some resentment around this, but...
I'd never heard that the resentment was because they were a different race.
The resentment was, you know, because we all lived in these really cramped, sardine-like apartment buildings, or what was it called?
Flat buildings, flats.
And so when the Indians and the Pakistanis would move in, they couldn't speak the language, but that was not a huge deal.
At least a lot of them couldn't.
And that did create challenges, of course, for, you know, schools and all that kind of stuff.
But a lot of it was that the smell of the cooking was very pervasive because, of course, India and Pakistan, like a lot of hot countries, they use a lot of spice.
And generally they use a lot of spice to cover up the smell of mildly decaying meat because, you know, it's really hard to keep meat fresh in a hot climate.
So they use a lot of spice.
And there was, I remember some people grumbling about how smelly to their noses the apartment building was become because there were all of these Pakistanis and Indians who were moving in and cooking all this very spicy food.
And it did, you know, it lingered in the air and, you know, it really did change the composition of what you were inhaling.
Was that racism?
I don't think so.
I mean, there was obviously cultural incompatibilities.
And look, to be fair to the Indians and the Pakistanis, I'm sure that the smell of fried fish and whatever was probably kind of off-putting to them as well.
But I think that's sort of the closest.
Oh, no, no.
Actually, there was...
South Africa is a whole other story, which we don't have to get into right now.
But I have not met...
People who say the kinds of things that racism is called.
And look, again, that's just a personal anecdote, but I've not lived a hugely sheltered life.
I've dated women of different races, I've had friends of different races, and I've done plays with people of different races, and it's all been, in general, a very pleasant experience.
And where there's less than pleasant experiences, it's more due to personality.
In fact, it's exclusively due to personality than it is due to race.
So...
I have a challenge.
And the challenge is I don't like to believe other people based on say-so.
Because otherwise I'd believe in a flat earth with certain people.
I'd believe in ghosts.
I'd believe in UFOs.
Like the CIA just revealed that at least half of the reported UFO sightings in the 50s were their spy planes that were going ridiculously high and they couldn't talk about them at the time because they were secret aliens.
So I keep hearing about all this racism, and when the racism is talked about, particular pieces of evidence are put forward.
Now, those particular pieces of evidence almost exclusively tend to dissolve under further scrutiny.
So there was a piece of evidence that blacks were being arrested.
I think it was in New Jersey.
They were being arrested more for speeding.
And so they set up a bunch of cameras and they did all these tests.
And they found out that, lo and behold, blacks were speeding more.
And that's why they were getting dinged more for speeding.
In fact, they were getting dinged less for the ratio of speeding that they were doing.
There was this Tawana Brawley case that Al Sharpton got involved with, where this black girl was supposed to have been arrested.
She's abducted and raped by a bunch of white guys, I think.
And it turned out she just was staying at her boyfriend's place and was afraid of what her parents would say.
The Duke Lacrosse thing, where this Crystal Mangum was, this stripper was at a Duke Lacrosse party, and she said that they all raped her, and it turned out it completely fell apart, and then she ended up in jail for murder, which could have been prevented, of course.
But all of this...
Ann Coulter has a good book on this called, I think it's called Mugged, Racial Demagoguery from the 70s to Obama.
And the same thing with Mark Furman, who was supposed to be this big racist because he used the word nigger, and it turns out that he used the word nigger in dictating a tough cop, mean cop screenplay to a girl he was having sex with at the time, a woman he was having sex with who was writing some screenplay.
And he had, in fact, done all of these really great things with blacks, and he'd had...
Mixed race, Hispanic and black partners who said nothing but great things about him and so on.
So I keep hearing about this giant racism that is foundational and all pervasive and institutional and so on.
And it's all well and good except I've never actually met a racist.
And I'm not saying that racists don't exist.
I mean, I'm sure that they do.
But this idea that it's this big, giant, overarching thing in society that needs to consume our time and attention...
From here to eternity, I'm still waiting.
Again, I'm wildly open to it.
In a weird way, I'd be kind of relieved if someone could find all of these racial prejudices.
There are in-group preferences that are fairly common, that are biological, but I don't know that we'd call that racism.
So, again, I'm not trying to be difficult here.
I just want to tell you sort of where I'm coming from.
I'm sort of with Morgan Freeman, who was on TV a while back, Basically, I can't remember, some guy, Lemon, I think his name is, who was asking him, you know, is there prejudice that prevents people from getting what you want?
And the Morgan Freeman said, no.
I mean, you and I are proof of that.
And I just, I'm really looking to find the person who says, I won't go and see a Morgan Freeman movie because he's black, you know, or something like that.
So...
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what to say other than I'm not going to accept as a given this massive racism without significantly more evidence.
Because every time these things are put forward, there seems to be such a huge amount of manipulation and falsehood going on that I would assume that if there was better evidence of racism, it would have been presented already rather than these wild series of hoaxes about how racist white people are that then fall apart under close room.
I'm open to this evidence, but the evidence that's put forward is ridiculous and falls apart under even the most cursory scrutiny.
Massive racism and massive rape culture and so on.
I'm open.
Tell me the proof.
But there's a racist joke that some people tell.
Yeah, okay.
But I fully accept that there are some racists.
I just have never met them.
And I've been to academia.
I've been to the art world.
I've been in the business world.
I grew up poor.
I had some money in my 20s and 30s, really.
So, I mean, I've moved.
I grew up in Ireland.
I was born in Ireland.
I grew up in England, lived in Canada, visited all over the world.
And I just have a tough time finding this evidence of this massive racism that is driving society.
So, this is why I'm asking, like, well, what are we talking about?
I can't just take it for granted that it's there and it's real.
Does that make sense?
I'm not saying you agree, but...
I understand what you're saying.
It's hard for me to talk about the Deep South because I've never lived there.
I've only met people that have come from there and we've had discussions about what people were like when they were back home.
However, I think if we go back in history, It becomes more apparent, especially in the Deep South, that, you know, look, you had the institution of slavery.
Slavery is something that was an institution that was deeply racist.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't see how that follows.
So, have you read any of the pro-slavery, the pro-slavery institution writings?
No, no.
I mean, look, slavery throughout human history...
Winner takes loser.
Winner takes loser.
So whichever army conquered would generally sell off the victims as slaves.
This occurred in Africa.
This occurred in Asia.
This occurred in the Middle East.
And this occurred in the Roman Empire, of course, got a lot of its slaves from its conquered people.
So it was not race fundamentally that drove slavery or was the division within slavery.
It was race.
Winner versus loser.
And tragically for the blacks in Africa, Europeans were significantly technologically advanced compared to the blacks.
But the blacks in Africa were rounding each other up, marching each other in chains to the seashore and selling them to the white slaves.
White slavers, sorry.
And this occurred throughout the world.
White Irish slaves were sold and worked in the Caribbean sugar plantations where they were forcibly raped and interbred with blacks to create a more robust kind of slave.
It was not fundamentally race that drove slavery.
It was conqueror versus the conqueror versus victim.
Winner versus loser.
And, of course, it would have been impossible for whites to go into Africa to get the slaves.
And, you know, if you want to know more about this, I've got a whole video called The Truth About Slavery.
Yeah, I've watched it.
Yeah, so there's no way that whites could have got all those slaves, because the average life expectancy for a white man in Africa was 11 months, because, you know, just so many diseases and animals and Lord knows what would kill him off.
So it was not, you know, the black tribes who conquered other black tribes would either keep those slaves or would sell those slaves to the whites.
But the fundamental division was victor and vanquished.
It was not race.
So saying that slavery is fundamentally racist is, I think, a misreading of what happens in war or what happens in conquest in human history.
Whoever wins gets to keep the other people as slaves.
It's tragic and it's horrible.
That's the way war has worked for most of human history.
But it's not race.
Because, I mean, there were lots of white slaves throughout the world and they were treated even far more brutally in the Middle East than they were in the Americas.
So I just wanted to mention that.
And of course, sorry, the last thing I'll say is that to maintain slavery...
In the South, white people had to be forced to join slave hunting patrols, which they hated and resented and didn't want.
And so they were enslaved in a sense, not as badly, of course, as the blacks, but they were enslaved to maintain the institution and they hated that enslavement.
So to me, it's, you know, whoever invents the gunpowder gets to be the slave owner.
And it's sad but true, but it's not fundamentally about race that I can see.
I think it might depend on what culture is actually engaging in the institution of slavery.
Think about it like this, Stefan.
So let's say you're a little boy, and you're white, and you belong to a household that owns slaves.
And you grow up being around other slave families, and you're You really are starting to ask the questions of whether or not, why do I have this kind of life and why do these other children who seem just children, why do they have that kind of life?
If you start thinking about the answers that were delivered back at that time, the kind of answers that would have been delivered to kind of keep that culture going, you can You can easily imagine that the parents would sit down with the child and say, look, you know, this is, you know, slavery is part of the Bible.
You can find it in part of here.
It was set down by God, and, you know, they would come up with all kinds of racial justifications for what that child would be seeing.
Yes, but you're talking, sorry to interrupt, John, but you're only talking about one instance of slavery.
I mean, how did it work in the ancient Greek empires or the Roman empires, the Byzantine empires, and so on?
Where slavery was common and was not specifically delineated by race.
I don't know if that really matters for the United States.
If we're going to try and understand racial attitudes...
Okay, well, no, no, no.
You said slavery is racial.
Now, if you're just talking about southern United States slavery from, you know, the 17th century until the 19th century, then you're taking a very tiny slice of human slavery and saying that...
So if you want to talk about just...
Southern U.S. two and change centuries slavery or 300 and change slavery That is as you understand slavery has been going on for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years throughout human history all across the world Until the 18th and 19th centuries when white Western Christians decided to to end it So if you're going to talk about a very tight a short time slice of of slavery In the South,
right before white people ended slavery and fought to end slavery around the world, we can do that, for sure.
But when you said slavery is racial, what I'm talking about is there's more to human history than the American South for 300 years.
I agree.
So the question I asked regarded the regional and cultural differences within the United States and how racism might be expressed.
And so what I'm trying to get across, the point I'm trying to get across, is that in the Deep South, you have one view and one kind of way that racism is being expressed, and that's different No,
It might also be because you're being raised in a different kind of cultural group that doesn't share those values and norms.
Does that make sense, Stefan?
No, I don't know what that means.
I'm not trying to be obtuse.
I just don't know what that means.
Okay, so if you had been raised in the Deep South, you probably would have had a higher chance of coming across people with racist attitudes.
I mean, I was raised in Minnesota, and I definitely have come across people who have had racist attitudes.
Oh, absolutely.
So have I. I mean, just say, for instance, put out videos on Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and slavery, and you will see some astonishingly and amazingly racist attitudes.
Tragically, they mostly come from black people, not from white people.
So how are you able to say, then, that you haven't really come across a racist?
Well, I mean, I'm not sure, like...
Personally, I've never met them.
And they represent the minority of comments that show up on my videos where race is discussed.
But there certainly are some people out there who are like, oh, yeah, you know, white boy must die.
Whites are a cancer on the world and so on.
And there are a few minority of lunatics and nasty people who also say terrible things about blacks.
And I'm sure every race, creed and color that you can imagine.
But I don't view a YouTube comment as me having a direct knowledge of somebody who's a racist.
I don't know if they're trolls.
Like, I don't know who they are.
But I have seen racist comments on my videos.
But I haven't run the numbers.
But just my gut sense is that the most virulent racism or the strongest racism seems to come from blacks or, you know, people who say they're black or black avatars or whatever, claim that they're black.
Again, but that's not scientific.
That's just sort of things that I've seen.
Hmm.
So, I mean, I could share a couple of stories from people in my family, you know, and this is growing up in the North, you know, which is different.
And I think this is one of the points I wanted to get after, is that there might be some ways of expressing racism that we haven't thought about as being racist.
But if you start thinking about them, they kind of are.
So, if we compare what was going on in the Deep South and we start thinking about, okay, well, you've got this caste system that's racially based and it's being defended by biblical passages and there's all kinds of writing and lots of proof for this.
You can go out and read all of this stuff.
We compare that with some of the racism that you see in the North.
Again, what kind of racism are we talking about here?
Again, you're using this word And I don't know what you're talking about.
Are you talking about white racism here against blacks specifically and exclusively?
In the Deep South, we're talking more of white racism against people of other races, especially in black.
Hang on, but you also talked about Minnesota and your relatives and so on.
So the only people that you're talking about being racists are whites.
So when you say racism, you mean white racism against blacks?
No, not at all.
Is that what you mean?
Not at all.
Not at all, because you've not mentioned anything about any other races being racist.
Okay, well, it's sort of focused on me right now in my background, okay?
So you're racist.
I'm white.
Well, I grew up around people who had some racist attitudes, okay?
And so one of the things that I'm talking about, though, is that if I'm...
Dude, you've got to be more honest with me.
Like, I've got to interrupt you here.
You're basically just hammering the same boring nail, whites are racist against blacks.
And, you know, when I try and talk to you about it, or try to widen the conversation, or try to get, you just keep weaseling out, you just keep wriggling off.
If you want to talk to me about white racism against black people exclusively, and that's what racism means, we can have that discussion.
But I don't feel that I'm getting a particularly clear view of where you're coming from.
I think you're insinuating that white people are racist against black people, but then when I ask you if that's the case, you say, oh, no, no, not at all.
And it's like, but you've not talked about anyone else.
And, you know, we're, what, 45 minutes into the conversation and you've only talked about white racism against blacks in your environment and in the South.
And I'm saying, well, that's not all of racism and there's lots of racism that goes on in the world and so on.
But you keep kind of gravitating back to this well of white racism against blacks.
And then when I say, well, I haven't met a lot of racists, then that's not, you know, that's not proof definitive or anything like that.
In fact, I've never met a racist.
And...
And then, like you're saying, well, there could be ways of being racist that we don't even know about or aren't aware of and so on.
And then I ask you to make that case and we go back to white racism again, right?
I think we're sort of drifting around the point.
I'll see if I can be a lot more clear.
So here's an example of something that I would consider to be a different expression of racism.
If you think about public schools and the kind of The kind of culture that produced public schools.
Public schools are coming out of Prussia.
They're based in this real northern European cultural norms, and there's a lot of things that sort of are pushed on every group that's being forced to go into public schools.
And it's regardless of what kind of cultural norms that they have.
And so when we look at people's scores and how well they actually do in schools like this, You tend to see huge disparities where people who are accepting the kinds of norms that are being pushed on them from the schools, they're going to do a lot better.
But other groups that maybe aren't familiar or they haven't been raised with those same cultural values, they're not going to do as well.
And a lot of times, the people that aren't raised with those cultural values end up being people of different races.
Does that make sense, Stefan?
No, because what you're talking about is blacks.
I mean, are you saying that Japanese immigrants do really badly in schools?
They don't.
No, they don't.
Are you saying Chinese immigrants do really badly in schools?
They don't.
They do a lot better than white people in a lot of cases.
They do.
And there are West African blacks who have a 15% higher average income than whites.
So you're talking about a particular subculture of blacks.
Now, Thomas Sowell has a book called...
Black rednecks and white liberals, that's worth looking at.
Basically, he's saying that a lot of this sort of thuggish gangster culture in certain sections of American blacks, of course, you can't talk about – talking about American blacks as a homogenous unit is like talking about Europeans as a homogenous unit.
It doesn't really make any sense.
But he's saying there are certain aspects of black culture that come directly from Celtic, northern England and southern Scotland that was transmitted to the blacks by the people who owned the slaves.
And it's a very compelling book, and I think he makes fantastic arguments.
But this idea that it's racism that causes blacks to do badly, it just really has – you have a tough, tough time trying to find the data that actually supports that.
Just by coincidence, I was shoveling my driveway today, I was listening to a lecture by Thomas Sowell.
And he was talking about how, you know, the Chinese do better because they just outwork everyone.
They just outwork everyone.
And he cites data that says, if you want to know who's going to get into college, all you do is you look and you don't care about race.
You look at how much homework they're doing.
How much extra work are they doing?
And the more work that people do, the more likely they are to get into college.
And it has no bearing on race whatsoever.
So blacks who put in as much work as Chinese people...
I'm paraphrasing because I just heard it today.
It's very tough to say that there's irrefutable data that shows racial prejudice as the fundamental reason as to why Blacks are having trouble succeeding.
And so that's, you know, when you're talking about, well, racists have a certain tough time getting ahead, what you mean is blacks.
And there are a number of explanations for that.
I don't know what the truth is, right, to be honest with you.
The explanations range from genetics to culture to work ethic to black racism against the dominant white culture and reinforcement of, oh, if you work hard and you study and you speak eloquently according to sort of mainstream English, you're acting white, you're an Oreo, you know, you're black on the outside, but you're white on the inside.
And there is all these conspiracies about white people putting black music and all the CIA putting drugs.
I don't know what the answer is.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's not as simple as racism.
Racism, to me, to explain problems in the black community is as useful as God to explain the origins of the universe.
It seems like an answer, but whenever you try and dig in and find the data that really supports it, it all seems to My thoughts are, I think that...
Corporal punishment is very high in the black community compared even to a white community.
The white community has pretty high corporal punishment in America compared to certainly most European nations excluding, well, whether you consider England or not a European nation.
But I think corporal punishment is very high.
Corporal punishment has been shown to have a negative effect on IQ and development because every time you're hitting a child you're not negotiating.
With the child.
Single parenthood, you know, there's six million people who've written about this stuff.
And single parenthood is absolutely disastrous and used to be 22% in the 50s when, of course, blacks were exposed to far more racism.
Now it's 75, 76, 77% single mom-led households in the black community.
That's catastrophic.
A study just came out That was talking about, you know, we've got this widening income disparity in the United States.
And one of the reasons for that is the rise of single motherhood, which is that a single mom has much less opportunity, time, and energy and effort that she can expend on helping her children with homework.
So the more homework that you get in a school system, the more disadvantaged the kids from single-parent households are.
Now, is it racism that makes single families...
That produces so many single families in the black community?
No, of course not.
Not fundamentally, because in the 50s, blacks experienced a lot more, even under Jim Crow, institutionalized racism from the laws.
And it was like less than a third what it is now.
into it.
So it's really tough to find the answer as to the problems that blacks have in Western society.
But one of the things I think is a huge problem, and I'm not saying this is proven, I'm I'm just saying this is what I think.
So, you know, take it with as much of a grain of salt as you want.
But I think that this constant, constant blaring of you're doomed because whites are racist.
You're doomed because your society is racist.
Whites want to keep you down.
Whites want to stab you and shoot you and choke you.
And whites want to pump you full of drugs.
And whites want to keep you down.
And like every white person just wakes up in the morning and their to-do list is like, keep black people down.
And somehow elevate Asian people above the income of white people.
This is how bad racists we are.
We're supposed to be like our race is supposed to be superior.
But if we have so much power as a race, we're doing a terrible job of keeping the Asians down or keeping the Indians down or keeping the West African blacks down or I mean, we're just doing a terror.
It's just one particular group that somehow we can differentiate and keep down.
And I think that the more that black people are told and this is not fundamentally the fault of black people.
I think it's a lot to do with this really lefty media that goes on.
But the more black people are told that there's this massive racism that is just going to keep them down and grind them down and they can't get ahead.
I'm going to go ahead.
I think that that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that the racism is this soft bigotry of low expectations and this constant fencing in of the black community by telling them they can't get ahead because whites are just so racist and whites are just so terrible and whites just want to kill them and whites just want to lock them in prison and so on.
I think this creates a massive amount of resentful nihilism within the black community.
And I think it makes them punchy.
I think it makes them aggressive because I'm putting myself, if somebody had said to me, oh my God, there's society out there, blah, blah, blah.
They're gonna just grind you down, they'll never let you get ahead, they hate you for the color of your skin, you're never gonna get anywhere, blah blah blah.
I mean, my God, how many self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating by constantly repeating this mantra into the ears of particular sections of the black community saying, you can't get ahead, you can't win.
Whites, they hate you, they're racist, they just want to grind you down, they enjoy fencing you into ghettos and shooting your children's eyeballs full of crack cocaine and blah.
My God, I mean, how horrendous is that?
And how unbelievably tragic it is.
If it's not actually that true, like, oh my God, like, if somebody said to me, Steph, there are tigers roaming Canada.
Like, hundreds of thousands or millions of tigers roaming Canada.
I would, like, stay home a lot.
I'd only go out when absolutely necessary.
I'd get my groceries.
I'd become agoraphobic.
Now, if there are tigers out there, yes, I appreciate knowing that there are tigers out there.
But if the tigers are really rare, and everyone keeps telling me there are tigers out there, I'm staying home for nothing.
I'm staying home for fear.
It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In other words, the only tigers out there are the words tigers.
That's the only thing that's hunting me is the language, not the reality of the flesh-eating mammal that wants to rip my eyeballs out with its back teeth.
And that is my sort of concern, is that, boy, when you start telling a whole community, they're fucked because everyone hates them.
By God, you better have some really great data behind that.
And that data is really, really, really hard to find.
And I've studied this stuff a fair amount.
I think it was in Malaysia, Thomas Sowell was talking about today.
He said in Malaysia there's Chinese people and there would be these regular eruptions of pogroms against these Chinese people because they owned a lot of the land, they owned a lot of the rice paddies, they owned a lot of the stores and so on.
And in a few days, in a few days, more Chinese people would be murdered in a few days than the entire history of lynching in the American South.
And they still got ahead.
And think of how much the Jews, right?
So my concern, fundamentally, is that if we keep talking about this racism everywhere, racism is the sunlight, racism is what white people wash themselves in the morning and is what they bathe themselves in at night, and racism, racism, racism.
And if it's true, then yeah, okay, I mean, let's really make people aware of just this racism and so on, right?
They can't get ahead and so on.
But the problem is that the data says it's not true.
The data says it's not true and we can't just ignore the data.
That's prejudicial.
And the data says that it doesn't matter whether you're black and white.
It matters how smart you are.
It matters how hard you work.
Culture.
Thomas Sowell is a strong opponent Of the IQ thesis, right?
The IQ thesis being that blacks have a standard deviation on average lower IQ than whites in America.
And I think it's two standard deviations in sub-Saharan Africa.
And he makes great arguments.
He is a strong opponent and has been a very strong opponent of the IQ thesis as to why blacks aren't doing well.
So he would be on the other side of people like Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray and...
Richard Hearnstein and the Bell Curve guys.
And he makes a great case.
He actually believes that it's culture that is causing these problems.
In other words, it's a culture of resentment, this culture of can't win, don't try, can't get ahead.
And if this culture is false, this culture of you're doomed because whites are so racist, if this is false, then it is actually creating a self-perpetuating and self-sustained problem in America.
Because let me just finish and then I'll shut up and let you get your whole thing in, right?
And the reason being, John, is that if there is this belief in certain sections of the black community, this can't win, don't try, racism, rage, the only reason I'm not getting ahead is because white guys keep me down, then it creates the only reason I'm not getting ahead is because white guys keep me down, Then it creates a lot of aggression.
Right?
It creates a lot of aggression and it creates a belief that participating in the free market is collaborating with the enemy.
That getting an education is acting white.
And because acting white is being a nasty, bad, evil person, then they're really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
And then you get groups of blacks in certain areas of the black community and they They scorn education, they pursue drug use, you've got the violent rap lyrics, you've got this anti-hero nihilistic subculture, and they don't feel bound by the rules of society.
Because they feel like, okay, well, if America is basically still a slave-owning, racist society, I don't have to obey the laws.
In fact, not obeying the laws is like Paul Revere.
It's like the Underground Railroad.
It's kind of, yes, I mean, this Rosa Parks didn't obey the rules run by the government that you had to sit in the back of the bus, and she's heroic, right?
And so they get this, well, let's just not obey the rules.
And a lot of them, of course, don't obey rules that are actually not bad, you know, like protection of property, person, and so on.
And so then what happens is because there's this belief that there's all this racism out there and you can't get ahead and you're doomed and white people just hate you and so on, there's a race war created and That isn't necessary and isn't supported by the data, but it's only driven by the narrative.
It's only driven by the language.
It's only driven by the dialogue.
The only predator is in the dictionary.
And then what happens is white people look at this surly, violent, criminal bunch of people.
I'm not talking about all blacks, but just a certain subculture within the black community that buys all of this stuff.
They look at that stuff and they say, whoa!
You know, there sure are a lot of blacks breaking the laws, and there sure are a lot of blacks in prison, and this, that, and the other, right?
And then, something becomes more credible to believe because it's been talked about so long, right?
So, just throwing a couple of stats out there, right?
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, non-Hispanic blacks accounted for almost 40% of the total prison and jail population in 2009.
And blacks are like 12% of the population, 13% of the population.
They're triple represented.
And given that it's basically young black men who are a couple of percentage points of the population, it could be like 10 to 1 or more.
And 2010 incarceration rates by race for 100,000 US residents of all ages, adult rates would be higher.
Whites, 769 per 100,000.
Hispanics, 1,908 per 100,000.
Blacks, 4,607 per 100,000.
And so what happens is because there's this constant narrative of racism being pounded into people, pounded into people all the time, the blacks in particular, and nobody stops and thinks, well, if whites are so good at oppressing other races, why are the Asians doing so well?
Why are other blacks doing so well?
And then what happens is the blacks in certain communities give up.
And they view doing well as collaborating with racial Nazi whites.
And they turn to crime and they turn to nihilism.
They don't think for tomorrow.
And then what happens is whites see a whole bunch of criminals who are blacks and say, oh my god, what the hell is going on?
Maybe there is something.
But it's not real.
It's not supported by the data that exists prior to all of this language or independent of all of this language.
So I'm happy to talk about racism, but I'm not going to take it as a given until I see really strong data that That shows me that blacks who are as intelligent and work just as hard as everyone else mysteriously get pushed into the background, onto the underground.
Or where there's data that shows that blacks are arrested, not more than whites, but disproportionate to the crimes.
Or blacks who get longer sentences don't get longer sentences because they are doing more crimes or have a longer rap sheet or whatever.
But I want to see The real data that shows this racism, because you and I both know that if people are wrong about this all-pervasive white racism, they are dooming hundreds and hundreds of thousands of black youths to unnecessary lives of nihilism, violence, and despair.
To me, if we're gonna do that...
We better be damn sure that we're right about all this racism because otherwise it's just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That's the end of my soapbox.
It's all over to you now.
So here's something to consider, I think.
Think about the message that black youth receive when they're being forced into public school.
They're being forced this narrative that this entire race, there's all this racism out there and people are going to be pushing you down.
And it kind of gets you into thinking that there's a victim mentality and you can't get out of the public school.
I mean, you can, but you're literally forced to go and get this propaganda.
Wait, why can't blacks get out of the public school?
They certainly can, but what I'm saying is that all children— No, no, no, dude, dude.
But this is exactly what I'm talking about.
First of all, you're talking about black youths.
And I said, we cannot talk in aggregate about the black communities because there's a wide variety of them in the U.S. Some are native, some are southern, some are northern, some are from other countries and other cultures.
And you just said blacks can't get out of the public school system.
An absolutely false statement.
That's an absolutely false statement that you just applied to all blacks giving them helplessness.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
They can homeschool.
They can unschool.
They can go for charter schools.
They can go to private schools.
Particularly if it's a mom who's not working, which is unfortunately quite a lot of black communities, the mom can homeschool.
But you just gave this whole thing where blacks are doomed and forced to the government school system without reminding them that they have as many options as anyone else as far as getting out of this system goes.
But you see, you don't even notice that you're doing it and you're saying maybe there's this subtle kind of racism out there that nobody knows about or nobody notices or is really hard to see.
You just did that.
You just did that.
You stripped of all black parents any right or responsibility or possibility of getting their kids out of government school system and then you tell me, well, maybe there's this racism out there that's really hard to see.
But you just did it!
Stefan, you're making my point, actually, that I was trying to make and the point that I'm trying to make is Is that perhaps this narrative of low expectations is racist.
Your narrative?
No, your narrative is low expectations.
You know, I guess so.
Wait, wait, wait.
What do you mean you guess so?
Did you not just tell me and the world that blacks cannot get out of the government system of schooling?
I misspoke.
Okay.
Okay.
I mean, I'm trying to...
I'm trying to condense what I'm saying, you know, just trying to get the message out there, and I misspoke.
Okay, but when you condense things, you can't say false things, right?
If I say two and two make five, I'm not condensing two and two make four.
It doesn't take a lot longer to say it can be tougher to get out of the government school system.
But saying blacks can't get out, that's not taking shortcuts.
It's just saying things that aren't true.
Of course, that's not true, but When you look at the statistics of where people are going to school, I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that there's a narrative that is being forced on people that it's kind of like a victimization narrative that you're a victim and you need our help and that you've got to have all these services.
I wonder if that in and of itself could be racist.
Well, I mean, I think that a lot of people have written about the degree to which the Democratic Party in particular, which was the founder, like the KKK was an offshoot of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party has resisted almost every advancement that the Republicans have put forward in the area of civil rights.
And Republicans oppose the welfare state because, partly because they perceive it to be horribly racist.
Okay.
And so I think this paternalism towards blacks to me is the biggest challenge.
The biggest challenge.
I said this years and years and years ago in this podcast.
It's a fundamental question that I've always had about race relations, which is, do you want me to care if you're black or not?
Do you want me to care if you're Hispanic or not?
Do you want me to care if you're Asian or not?
Do you want me to care if you're white or not?
Now, if you want me to care...
about your race, then you're asking me, you're inviting me, you're kind of demanding that I take your race into account as some sort of primary mechanism for dealing with you.
In other words, you're saying race is primary in how I should deal with you, which is demanding that I be a racist, which I won't do.
I don't want to care if anyone is any color in particular or any creed or anything.
I don't care.
Now, When it comes to things like affirmative action, well, okay, this is hard-coded in.
And again, to return to one of my favorite thinkers in general, Thomas Sowell, he says affirmative action is disastrous for blacks.
The only people that helps is it helps black people with PhDs get tenure.
But it doesn't help people with less experience, less capacity.
So people with a proven track record get moved ahead really quickly through affirmative action.
But people who don't, blacks who don't have that track record, who don't have that resume, who don't have that stamp of approval, those blacks end up not being hired.
Because the best way to give people a chance is to allow them to be fired easily.
Right?
I mean, and this is true of everyone.
I mean, just look at what's happened to the French labor market where you can't fire anyone and nobody gets hired anymore.
And so he's been a foe of affirmative action.
And of course, affirmative action has been disastrous for so many blacks because with affirmative action, blacks get promoted regardless of competence because they just have to fulfill a quota.
Of course, the whole thing was put in.
There won't be quotas.
And then, of course, immediately it becomes quotas.
And so what happens is the blacks who graduate, two employers, they don't know which blacks have graduated because they are...
Competent, smart, and great people.
And the blacks who are there because of affirmative action.
And so the value of a degree for a black is diluted, is lowered.
And that makes it less of an incentive to go to college and all that.
It's the usual law of unintended consequences when you bring coercion into the mix.
But I will not...
I will not view racism as a foundational issue within society other than racism created by belief in racism.
It's the whole thing that Henry Ford said.
He says, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
If you think there's racism, you're right.
If you think there isn't racism, you're right.
And again, I don't mean there's no racism.
I mean, there are people who believe all kinds of crazy stuff in the world.
There are flat earthers.
There are people who believe no one ever landed on the moon.
There are all kinds of crazy stuff.
Even though you can see a telescope and see stuff on the moon that was left there, they believe that people never went to the moon.
People believe all kinds of crazy stuff.
But nobody goes to physics conference and say, we have a huge problem of people who believe that you can't send a rocket through the Van Allen belt and land on the moon and come back.
They don't even bother with those people because they're such fringe lunatics.
Who cares?
This is not where we put people front and center in social debates.
Geographers don't get together every year and spend 98% of their conference talking about how they got to reeducate the flat earthers into understanding that the world is round.
They're just like, okay, there's a bunch of fringe lunatics out there.
Let's move on with the human story.
Let's move on with the progress of the planet.
And let's leave these racist idiots behind in the same way we leave the flat earthers behind or the people who still believe the sun is the center of the solar system.
I feel that this language has become such a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And again, just to be clear, if there's massive evidence out there that...
I mean, I took a whole course on race relations in college.
I read about a whole bunch of it, studied it.
And again, I'm no expert, but this is just my own study.
But if there is all of this data that shows racism, then it has to show...
How it's only blacks that white people are racist against.
It has to show how white people promote the interests of Asians and other people who are doing better than white people.
It has to deal with the IQ challenge.
It has to deal with the work ethic challenge.
It has to deal with the culture challenge.
It has to normalize for all of that.
And if after all of that work is done, there's still clear evidence of racism, I will absolutely revise my opinion.
But every time I've seen those numbers break down, when you compare apples to apples, racism seems to pretty much vanish.
And that is my concern, that we just keep talking about it.
Or like, well, I think it was Morgan Freeman who said, can we just shut up about it?
Like, can we just stop talking about it and see what happens?
What if the fact that we can't stop talking about it, and when I talk about we, I mean, I'm including myself because I'm talking about it.
What if that's racist?
Then stop talking about it.
So I think that's the point that I'm trying to bring up, is that this expectation in especially the culture that I grew up, There's this racism out there, and people are being taught this, that it leads to a lot of the things that we're talking about.
And I really wonder if that attitude in and of itself is racist.
Well, it is.
And the tragic thing, and this goes back to...
The truth about immigration is that it was an explicit communist goal to stoke resentment among blacks in America to destabilize the system.
You know, that's all left.
It's all coming from the left.
And the left is unbelievably racist, in my opinion and experience, and in a lot of the data.
You know, this constant, constant race baiting that goes on is all part, and you can look at the minutes from the communist international from the 1920s, and Stalin was very explicitly said, look, we're going to get involved with the blacks in America, and we're going to stoke their resentment against the whites, and that's how we're going to destabilize capitalism in America. and that's how we're going to destabilize capitalism in America.
And this is just Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
This is just standard infiltration and subversion that comes from the left, that comes from the communists.
They do it with blacks and they do it with women.
And it's incredibly racist and it's incredibly sexist.
But they don't give a flying fuck how many black people they hurt and they don't give a flying fuck how many women they hurt as long as they can crush the free market and gain power.
These are assholes of almost infinite degree.
They don't fundamentally give a shit about black people and they don't fundamentally give a shit about women.
They fundamentally give a shit about creating groups who resent the existing order, who believe that freedom Freedom to trade is unjust, is brutal, is exploitive.
Women only get paid 70 cents on the dollar.
Blacks only get paid blah blah blah.
No!
No!
Freedom is freedom.
Freedom is choices and consequences.
You can choose to say that adopting a mainstream dialect, studying, working hard, and going to college or whatever, or starting a business, you can choose to say that that is all acting white And that is all terrible, and that's collaborating with the white racist overlord enemy.
You can choose to do all of that, and guess what?
You're not going to make much money on this planet.
And you can choose to say, oh, you know, the fact that women choose to work part-time because they kind of like spending time with their children and so on, and there's lots of reasons why women make less money than men, and then you have to explain why, if there's this incredible pool of underpaid blacks and underpaid women, Why some enterprising capitalist hasn't swooped in and made a complete fortune by paying them 5% more?
And then some other guy comes in and pays...
Capitalists are always looking for ways to exploit underpaid people by paying them a tiny little bit more.
And if there's this incredible talent and pool of blacks and women...
God, why isn't anyone hiring them and making an absolute fortune?
Well, because it's not as unjust as it seems.
So...
If blacks listen to these people who say you're screwed because there's white racism, and these are not the friends of black people, they don't give a flying fuck about black people, and they don't give a flying fuck about women, all they care is about stoking resentment, causing problems, making the system non-functional, so that they can say, well, you know, we gave freedom a try, now it's time for central planning, let's all join the socialist-communist bandwagon and ride it off to the dark patch of hell no, the North Korea where we can all live together as one big, unhappy, miserable, flying fuck of a family in the future.
So yes, it is horribly racist.
And this has always been the problem that comes out of the left and comes out of communism.
Don't get me wrong.
What comes out of the right can be hugely problematic too.
But it is horribly racist.
And it is one of these self-fulfilling prophecies.
And they don't give a shit.
Look, if you want black people to do better, start confronting them about the single-parent household.
Obama has got a fantastic bully pulpit to start talking to people about the single-parent household and the degree to which that affects blacks.
Blacks were doing pretty well in the post-war period, climbing their way out of poverty.
I think it was Robert Higgs who pointed out that blacks went from the 19th century almost 100% illiteracy to 50% literacy in a matter of decades.
That is incredible.
That is fantastic.
That is wonderful.
And they were doing pretty well getting out of poverty in the post-war period.
And then, you know, communists came along, social welfare state comes along, the Democrats come along, and it was just a mess.
I'll just give you one last quote from this.
The Communist International Comintern was an international communist organization based in Moscow.
It began operating in 1919.
Under the supervision of the Soviet Communist Party and its chief goal was spreading communism and establishing...
...establishing Soviet-style governments throughout the world.
A few months later, Communist Party USA, CPUSA, was established as part of the Comintern Network and began operating as a subsidiary of the Communist Party in Russia.
In 1922, the Comintern held its fourth international congress and put the topic of African Americans on its agenda.
The following goal was established after discussions ended.
Quote, the Fourth Congress considers it essential to support all forms of the black movement which aim either to undermine or weaken capitalism and imperialism or to prevent their further expansion.
The language of that is very, very important.
Didn't say to support all forms of the black movement to assure racial equality under the law in the United States.
No, no, no.
They said they consider it essential to support all forms of the black movement which aim either to undermine or weaken capitalism and imperialism or to prevent their future expansion.
CPUSA received a $300,000 subsidy.
This is in the 20s when that was a lot of money.
They recruited and trained black communists in organized protests against the US government.
Many black leaders were sent to Moscow for further education.
The party's subversive activities quickly attracted the eyes of the government and the FBI. You can look at the truth about the race war, which we're going to put out today, the truth about immigration.
You just look at the voting patterns, right?
The voting patterns of blacks are almost exclusively towards the left.
When was the last time That a major black civil rights leader said that what we need to do is we need to reduce the size of government, we need to cut back on government unions, we need to stop licensing to the point where a third of Americans need a government slip of paper and permission to actually have a goddamn job, and we need to privatize the schools.
I mean, this just doesn't happen.
All that in general you hear, with some exceptions, again, To repeat, Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L-L, just read the guy, watch the guy, he'll come away, like, the guy's, like, incredibly brilliant.
And every time I listen to him, like, I get...
The hairs go up on the back of my neck, because, you know, not much to go up on the top.
And...
But with a few exceptions, there is almost an exclusive focus in the civil rights movement of more government, more government, more government, more government.
With the implicit assumption that freedom is terrible for blacks.
And that makes sense if you believe that in a state of freedom, whites are horribly racist.
In other words, they will sacrifice their own economic self-interest in order to exercise racism against equally qualified and intelligent people.
And the idea that in a state of freedom, human beings act terribly is the foundational driver of totalitarianism regimes or ideologies like those on the left.
So anyway, I got to move on to the next caller.
But listen, John, first of all, can I really thank you for calling in and talking about this?
Thanks.
Thanks, Stefan.
I guess there's one last real quick thing I wanted to point out.
And that's then and then, you know, thank you for adding me to the call.
I really appreciate it.
I think we identified at least two forms of racism just in our discussion.
At least the one that you're talking about is one that we don't really talk about in our society.
I mean, I came to libertarianism from the left.
And I mean, I have a lot of things to unlearn.
Well, I know.
You didn't have to tell me that.
I know.
I have a lot of things to unlearn.
And I think I really appreciate you pointing out some of those, what I'm calling, what I'm misspeaking or something.
That's something that I learned from the left.
And I'm trying to undo a lot of that stuff.
Because I do.
I think that that's...
Fundamentally, some of those attitudes are racist, but we don't – like society in general and other liberals, they don't really consider them to be racist.
I mean we only sort of look at slavery in the Deep South and how that was racist at one time.
So thank you, Steph.
I appreciate the call, and I'll let you move on to the next caller.
Yeah, and look, I'll start respecting the left's focus on racism when they start talking about Israel, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
All right, who do we have up next?
All right, up next today is Jason.
Jason wrote in...
Please God, let it be Morgan Freeman!
I will be a Christian.
You know what?
I'll actually be a Zoroastrian.
I might even tinker with Satanism if...
The next caller was Morgan Freeman.
That would be nice.
I mean, I feel that if you simply speak someone's name enough, they're going to show up.
That's my theory.
Just say it three times, Steph, and he's going to show up behind you with a meat cleaver.
Oh, wait, no.
All right.
Up next is Jason.
Jason wrote in and said, what causes a person to change and what are the limits that can be expected as per change in a person?
What causes a person to change?
Jason, was it?
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
Hello.
Okay.
Hello.
Is there anything you want to say before I rudely start talking about this topic?
No.
No, that's okay.
It's good to talk to you.
I'm pretty excited.
Your formulation of the language is a challenge.
Because if something causes someone to change, they're not really changing, are they?
Do you know what I mean?
Like if it's kind of deterministic, it's like saying, which rock do I have to push for that rock to decide to start going down the hill?
Well, if I'm pushing it, the rock isn't deciding.
And if the rock is deciding, I don't need to push it.
So when you say what causes someone to change, it's almost like you're saying, what is the last domino before change?
You know, like it seems like you're sort of taking the free willy stuff out.
And I just want to make sure that's not the case if I'm misunderstanding that.
Oh no, I've listened to all your arguments on the determinism argument.
And yeah, I understand the whole free will part where we come in and there's something more than just the rock falling down the hill.
So can you tell me what kind of change you're referring to?
Well, okay, so I'll give you the example that I'm thinking of.
Last time I was at work, I was pretty leftist, that kind of engineer.
And then I studied a bunch of stuff during my layoff period.
And I'm so different that the people that I've come back to work with after the layoff, which was about two years, the people that I've come back to work with, they...
They offer me some of the same kind of jineer that I was used to.
And I'm just like, wow.
Sorry, some of the same kind of what?
Like, for example...
I wasn't sure what the word was.
Jineer?
Yeah, yeah.
So like a liberal kind of show.
And then I'm like, well, that's not really what I'm interested in.
So I consider myself as being very changed from that point.
So I'm saying, what do you think would it have been?
Just the fact that I learned a lot more since then?
And then what are the limits that we can expect to see from someone?
Like my stepdad, I've been talking to him for years and there's really been no change.
He just gets irrational.
Right.
Now I'm going to...
Put forward a hypothesis.
I'm not saying it's proven, it's not syllogistic, but see where it lands for you.
I'll try and keep it brief and let me know if it makes sense.
Is that okay?
Oh yeah, yeah.
Okay.
To me, the fundamental change that occurs in a human being is the elongation of perspective and the concomitant rebalancing of costs and benefits.
To take a simple example, For the next five minutes, it's always to the advantage of the smoker to keep smoking, right?
Okay.
But if the smoker thinks about sort of long-term health, then the cost-benefit of the next cigarette versus, say, dying a horrible death from lung cancer, they change, right?
Does that make sense?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
It's the same thing.
So when I was younger, I had, oh, a temper.
I had a temper.
And what I found was that, and I remember, so I remember when I was a kid, we just moved to Canada, I was 11.
I had a, I don't know if kids even play with these anymore, they probably do.
It was a little racing set, so you put these cars on these grooves in these black tracks, and you had these little squeezy things that supplied more or less electricity, and the cars would go race around you trying not to have them fall off the track.
Yeah, I remember those, yeah.
I'm thinking Hot Wheels, but I'm also thinking Hot Wheels are just those little cars, like the little metal ones, right?
Do you know what they're called, those car sets?
No, I was very young.
Okay, model trains, I know.
I did model trains.
I used to sleep when I was a kid.
I used to sleep under my train set because I had this little tiny bedroom and there was no room for a train set except over me.
I just remember falling asleep to the smell of sawdust and plaster of Paris and molten plastic from when I was working on stuff.
But anyway, and I was really frustrated.
One time, and I was trying to put these tracks together, and they were horrible to clip in together.
They had to hold pretty tight, because the electricity had to have contacts, like train tracks, I guess.
They had to have contacts that stayed touching so that the electricity would go all the way around the track.
Otherwise, it'd be like, and then they'd stop.
And they were really tough to clip together.
And I was struggling with one, and I was getting really frustrated.
I think I was 11 or so.
No, in fact, I, let's see, yeah, I was 11.
And what happened, I got so angry that I just, I stood up and I ripped them apart.
And I broke them.
And I remember looking down at that and saying, hmm, well, given that the train tracks can't, sorry, given that the racetracks can't suffer, I just broke them, and now I can't use these two pieces.
And I went to my mom and I said, okay, mom, I'm really confused here.
I really got angry.
I broke this racetrack set or these two pieces.
Does that even make any sense?
Like, does it make any sense?
I felt like it felt better in the moment to rip these things apart.
But now I'm sitting here thinking, well, what did I do?
Now, I don't remember what my mom answered.
And of course, going to my mom for advice on temper was probably not the best thing.
But, you know, she was the only person around who I could ask.
Now, I struggled with a temper throughout my early to mid-teens.
But what I thought of during that struggle, and this is when I started reading books on self-knowledge, psychology, and so on.
What I thought of during that struggle, Jason, was, what's my life going to be like if I have a bad temper?
What's my life going to be like if I had a bad temper?
And I thought of the people I admired.
And I thought of the people that I admired, how many do I know have a really bad temper?
And I thought, well, not many.
Like a friend of mine's father is a man I still admire.
And he was a very gentle and peaceful but strong and firm person.
And so I kind of, I mean, I knew I had the goal of not having as bad a temper or, you know, I didn't want to get rid of anger completely.
I don't want sort of the overreaction to the other direction.
And a lot of it had to do with, well, who do I admire and how do they live?
And what will my life be like if I have this temper?
I mean, who's going to want to spend time with me?
What's my career going to be like?
What's, you know, what's it going to be like for me?
Because, you know, you've got to work with people in your life, right?
And that sort of struggle for me had to do with thinking beyond the satisfactions of the moment.
Like what emotionally satisfies you in the moment when you have a bad temper is to yell at someone or to break something or whatever, right?
Now, I would imagine that for you, and obviously correct me if I'm off base here, Jason, but I think that for you, probably you did a zoom out.
A zoom out.
And a zoom out is what happens when you don't live in your life, you know, like a centrifuge, like a wind tunnel.
You're just flapping your way through the moments.
But a zoom out, I talked about this when I was diagnosed with cancer, but the zoom out is when you zoom out at the big picture of your life.
And you say, not what do I want in the moment, what satisfies my needs in the moment, what's going to work for the next 10 minutes or the next week, but what's going to work for my life?
What do I want?
What is going to work for my life as a whole?
And if you had something like that where you say, well, it's tough to quit smoking, but I don't want to die.
Well, it's tough to quit drinking, but I don't want to die.
Well, it's tough to eat less, but I don't want to be fat.
Because obesity takes like eight years off your lifespan or something.
And so if you have the zoom out, then you get a bigger picture.
Most people are navigating the woods without a GPS, without a map, but just by looking at their feet.
You know, is the next thing I step in squishy or solid?
Do I have a log to climb over?
Is there a stream I've got to ford or go around or jump across or something like that?
All they're doing is they're navigating their way through the woods by looking down, looking at their feet the whole time.
Now, the zoom out is, you know, you ever do that thing on Google Earth?
You go into Stellar, right?
You just zoom out.
And you get a big picture of where you are and where you're going.
Now, I believe that that zoom out is foundational to a change that sticks.
You know, I mean, we're just past New Year's resolution.
And the only...
I don't do New Year's resolutions because, to me, that would be a way of saying, don't do it for the other 364 days a year, right?
No.
The only thing I talked about with New Year's resolution was somebody left a comment on a video and said, whoa, super high def, 60 frames a second.
I'm like, yep, that's my New Year's resolution.
But...
We are in the time where people make these New Year's resolutions.
And for me, when I used to go to a gym, I hated January.
I hated January.
Because in January at the gym would be all these people who made the resolution to get in shape, right?
And they'd be clogging up the machines, and they'd be sweating up the place, and not knowing anything about gym etiquette, about wiping down the machines, and only doing 20 minutes of the cardio, or 25, or whatever the limit is.
Only doing two sets, and letting other people work in.
They basically just came in and clogged up the place, and you knew in three weeks they'd be gone.
But for those three weeks, you know, of course the gym people love it, because they get a year's membership, and people only show up for three weeks.
So...
So this is the time where everyone has their New Year's, no sugar, I'm not going to drink, no smoking, I'm going to get fit, I'm going to...
But why are they not able to sustain it?
They're not able to sustain it because they give themselves one day a year where they do the zoom out.
They say, what's the big picture of my life?
Where do I want to be?
Why do people save money rather than spend money?
It's more fun in the moment to spend money.
It's better for your future to save money.
In, you know, all other things being equal.
Because they don't do the zoom out.
And they don't zoom out to say, okay, well, if I want to retire at 60 or 65, how much money am I going to need to sit down with a financial advisor or at least do the math?
So how much do I need to save?
What do I need to work towards it?
And so on, right?
And so I think that the zoom out is essential to any kind of committed change.
And, you know, I wasn't fit when I was in my early to mid-teens.
And then...
When I was somewhere between 15 and 16, I just was like, is this how I want to be?
No.
So I actually started jogging around.
I remember jogging around this tiny apartment that I was living in, just jogging around.
There was a little loop around the kitchen in the living room.
And then I just started running.
I started exercising, joined the swim team, water polo team, cross-country team, you name it.
And since then, I've been committed, even through chemotherapy, committed to exercising and Three times a week, at a minimum, and I do my show standing up, and I write my book standing up, and I just, you know, sitting is about the same as smoking when it comes to your health.
And it's because of this zoom out that you can do and say, well, what kind of body, like, what kind of physiology, what kind of body do I want to have?
When I'm 60, because I'm borrowing my body for 12 years until I deliver it to the 60, and then the 60 is going to deliver it to the 70, and so on and so on.
We'll join Peter Thiel at 120, I guess.
But that zoom out, I think, is what's fundamental to change.
And the more you can give people the...
The more you can give people principles, the more you can give them abstract thinking, the more you can give them philosophy, I think the more likely they are to be able to do that zoom out.
Because philosophy is a big zoom out.
You know, when we do something like the history of the First World War or the truth about slavery, we're zooming way out, right?
So this first caller wanted to talk about, he said, like, all slavery is the Antebellum South for like 200 years or whatever.
And we've got to zoom out from that.
To look at the bigger picture.
If you only look at black-white relations in this time, then you're not zooming out enough.
And so a lot of what I do in this show is try to get people to zoom out and to look at the bigger picture, where they are, where they've come from, where they want to go.
Because you can't navigate by looking down at the ground.
All you can do is get through the next step and the next step and the next step.
What I want people to do is zoom out, get a map, pin a destination, and then take the next step towards their destination rather than stepping over the next obstacle in their way.
Does that make any sense?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that helps clear things up a lot, actually.
Yeah, the cost of benefit and the reality check.
Is that...
Yeah, I mean, in the short run, stealing is easier than working.
In the long run, working is easier than stealing.
So if you get people to zoom out, right, then they will have, I think, be able to make more rational perspectives.
They say reputation takes a lifetime to build and can vanish in a moment.
And a friendship can take a long time to build and can be destroyed in five minutes or less.
And if people understand all of that, then they're more measured, they're more rational.
It doesn't mean they don't have conflicts and so on.
Like, it always bothers me in conflicts with people when they start using absolutes.
You always, you never this kind of stuff, right?
Because that's just escalating language.
It just makes things worse.
It makes things more absolute.
It brings up defenses and so on.
And that may feel like you're winning in the moment.
And that's why people tend to get into these horrible conflicts that wreck their hearts.
It's they want to win in the moment.
They want to dominate in the moment because they're just used to win-lose.
That's why people get divorced.
It's because they make it, you know, when I was best man at someone's wedding many years ago and I gave him a speech basically like, how you feel today, that is your marriage.
This is what you always need to come back to.
There'll be times of stress and strain and conflict and disappointments and so on, but this is the living heart of your marriage.
This is what you need to return to.
This is your oasis in what can seem like a desert of intimacy at times.
And that is what I still believe as strongly.
And people blow up their marriages and blow up their friendships for the sake of an immediate gain, a victory in the moment.
And it's only after they have lost everything that they realized what a pyrrhic victory or what a shallow victory that was.
So, yeah, that's my thought about it.
Now, why people decide to zoom out?
Why they go Google Earth rather than Street View?
I don't know.
Right?
I mean, I certainly try to give people as many principles as I can to enable the zoom out, to give them the rocket, the helium balloon that gets them up out of the forest so they can map a bigger destination for themselves.
You know, you've heard me say to people, okay, well, so if you marry this person and they want to hit your kids, well, what's going to happen this?
What's going to happen that?
If your parents are still abusive and what happens if they're around your kids?
Trying to get them the bigger, longer view so they can make decisions not just about stepping over this log but which continent they want to end up in in the long run.
Yeah.
Yeah, wow.
Well...
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much for that.
You're very welcome.
I'm glad it was helpful.
And, yeah, it's a great question.
It's a great question.
You know, you can't make people change, right?
But you can give them the tools for change so that they can if they want, right?
Like, I can't make someone...
Build a chicken coop, right?
But I can at least make sure they have the tools.
So if they want to build a chicken coop, they can.
And I think giving people the tools is the best you can do.
You say, well, how much is my stepdad going to change and so on?
Well, you can give them two things.
You can give them inspiration through your change and you can tell them how you did it.
You can give them the tools on how you did it.
After that, it really has to be up to them.
That's the freedom and responsibility we have to give other people.
Because the moment we try to interfere with someone's free choice...
We are showing contempt for who they are.
You know, interfering with someone else's free choice is like some OCD central planner interfering with the free market.
No.
You set up the rules, you set up the standards, you set up what would be called the laws in a free society, and then people do what they want.
You know, you set up the rules of chess, you don't tell people which moves to make, because then you're saying that you don't trust them at all.
And the lack of trust that comes out of the management of other people is something that We think we're doing it to reduce anxiety and to help the relationship.
But all we're doing is we're confirming that we don't think the other person will ever make the decision that they should.
And that is a surefire way to end up with a terrible relationship.
So with regards to your stepdad, you can show him your change.
If he's interested or curious, you can tell him how you did it or, you know, whatever your thoughts are about how you did it.
And you can offer to support him, you know?
Yeah, it's a great chicken coop.
Here are my plans.
Here are the tools if you want them.
I'm happy to help if you want, but, you know, you've got to do the hammering.
And that's, I think, the most respect we can give to people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes he'll come back with the, well, how old are you?
And how old am I? And that means I'm right.
Yeah, I mean, that's a tough thing to say.
I mean, Einstein was in his 20s.
And Bill Gates founded companies in his 20s, so did Steve Jobs, that blew away all of the prior economic assumptions.
There are huge numbers of geniuses who, you know, there's an old saying in math and physics which says, if you haven't made your big mark by the time you're 30, you're not going to.
So this idea that somehow age has prevalence over youth, Well, just ask him to rootkit a cell phone and see how well he does.
Or whatever it is that you're good at based on some new paradigm.
But yeah, this idea that there's automatic value in age is like saying that a tree is wiser because it's got more rings.
No, it's just older.
Most people when they're older have just hardened their prejudices.
They haven't come up with any particular or original thinking.
And so the idea that...
I mean, does he use a cell phone?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Does he know that the engineers who created and designed that cell phone are almost certainly closer to your age than his?
Oh, yeah.
I don't think he thought a lot into that.
But that's the zoom out, right?
I mean, the idea that if you just don't die, you're wiser, you know?
All we have to do is stave off death, and that's the equivalent of self-knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy.
Yeah, or is Mike saying, yeah, he should just use the oldest cell phone because it's the best, you know, the ones that you had to stand outside, point at the satellite and not make sure there weren't any trees overhead and basically with the size of a shoebox because they're the oldest cell phones.
I'm sure they're the best.
Does he want the latest, newest model, the youngest model?
Of course he does.
Who does he find more attractive, you know, Jennifer Lawrence or Margaret Thatcher?
Well, she was older, so she has to be hotter, right?
Yeah.
I don't think he'd do too well with those arguments.
Right.
All right.
Let's move on to the next caller because, by God, we've got to get to the end of this list at least once in my lifetime.
But thanks for calling in, Jason, and congratulations on being on the change wagon.
You know, once it starts, it's really hard to stop.
So I appreciate what you're doing for yourself and the world.
Well, thank you, and thank you for helping teach me about peaceful parenting and making that available.
So, thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Up next is Barrett.
He wrote in and said, Where does virtue come from?
Is it just a biological expression as a result of evolution and survival?
If this is the case, why don't other animals display virtue, to the best of my knowledge?
Sorry, what's the name again?
Barrett.
Barrett.
All right.
All right.
Well, what do you think?
Well, I was reading a real-time relationship book, and you talk a lot about virtue in it and make a lot of good arguments.
Actually, I thought it was a really good book, but I didn't think it ever really addressed where does virtue come from.
Sorry, Barrett.
That's universally preferable behavior.
So Barrett's talking about a book that's free at freedomradio.com slash free called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, which is my take on how you apply philosophy to have better relationships.
I do talk about virtue in that.
I'm talking about sort of honesty and vulnerability and so on.
The definition of virtue is in another free book called Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
So, but go ahead.
Okay, so I guess I didn't read that book, so maybe I just missed the whole topic on where it actually comes from.
So, yeah, I just want to call in and kind of pick your brain on where it comes from because, I mean, just, I don't know, to me, To have it come from evolution, I don't know.
I have a hard time with that.
I don't know, because if it was just by accident, then what makes it comparable to a negative behavior?
Yeah, I certainly don't believe that ethics or virtue comes from evolution.
Oh, okay.
I mean, evolution is not limited to human beings, and it's tough to find evidence of ethics in, say, the insect kingdom.
Right.
So, no, I'm with you there.
I don't think it comes from evolution at all.
There are thinkers out there who believe that there are evolutionary advantages to things like reciprocal altruism and so on.
So, if you help people out and you're part of a community, then you help people and you're generous, you're kind and all that, then people will help you back, right?
And so, you know, the people who are helpful and beneficial and so on, they are blah-de-blah.
And I say blah-de-blah just because it doesn't really take into account hierarchies.
It's just kind of horizontal, usually at the middle class slave level.
So, there are advantages to helping people out.
You know, if you go and help your friends move, then when you say to your friends, listen, I'd really like you to help me move, then they'll probably come and do it, right?
And I think that's fine in a tribal sense.
I, you know...
I don't know if I'll ever move again, but I wouldn't call my friends to help me move because you just pay for some movers when you get older, right?
So, I mean, there's costs and benefits to this reciprocal altruism.
There is generally a positive health benefit to being in a social environment, like the loners tend to To not live as long.
It's one of the reasons why religion can be a net positive for people's health, because religion puts you in a community.
And you get that community support.
You get that...
When the human brain is isolated, it sometimes devolves to worry.
But when it's socialized, it generally has a protection against that.
So having that social sphere around you can be very positive.
I think it's something that the agnostic and atheist community...
I mean, I'm happy that there are all these meetup groups around for people interested in philosophy coming out of this show.
I think it's great, and people should really pursue that and not underestimate how beneficial that is in general.
But I don't believe that there is evolutionary advantages to ethics, certainly not in all spheres.
I mean, a ridiculous percentage of geographical...
I think the Asian population can be directly traced back to the It's hard to see how the mass slaughterhouse of Genghis Khan would be considered virtuous, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it sure did spread some genes.
So I'm not sure that I could really buy that it's automatically advantageous for peaceful, virtuous, honest, ethical behavior.
To automatically be propagated among the gene pool, it seems to me that quite often nasty mean sociopathic behavior is spread among the gene pool as fast if not faster, right?
I mean, let's sort of give you an example, right?
So, what is more evolutionarily advantageous to women?
Just get comfortable.
It's going to be a tiny rant, by which I mean a huge rant.
But...
What is more evolutionary advantageous for women?
Physical attractiveness or virtue?
Physical attractiveness.
Right.
How long did you hesitate before responding to that question?
Not very long.
And why not?
Oh, it's just, I mean, you know, physical attractiveness, you know, just, you know, through, uh, You know, just through physical attraction, women can tell that you have better genes, you know?
Well, no, the answer is because you don't grow your own food, right?
Right.
Right.
So I assume you go to a supermarket or a grocery store or whatever, right?
Uh-huh.
So I was at the grocery store the other day, and I put on my little vomit helmet, and I decided to pick up a couple of women's magazines.
And you flip open the women's magazines, and if virtue were evolutionarily advantageous to women, then the women's magazines would look quite a bit different.
Than they do at the moment.
Have you ever flipped through one of these brain-eviscerating, highly made-up zombie fests known as women's magazines?
I try not to, but...
No, look!
You've got to know what's out there!
If you want to date women, then you've got to know what women are being exposed to.
It doesn't mean that all women are the same, but enough of them are that all the magazines are the same.
And what are the magazines?
Here's how to look perky!
Now, which celebrity wore it best?
Look, these celebrities have bobs.
And by that, I don't mean fictional characters from universally preferred behavior, rational proof of secular ethics.
It's apparently a kind of hairdo.
You know, here's how to make your eyelashes look like harpoon cable ropes that could take down a blue fucking whale.
Oh, isn't that great?
Because that's all about the attractiveness.
Here's to make your eyes look so shadowed it looks like you've gone one-on-one with Muhammad Ali.
Yeah.
Here's how to make your cheekbones look like Navajo pimples.
This is all the stuff that's in there for women.
These stockings can make your legs look longer.
Put your ass on a shelf with these high heels.
It's complete madness.
This is what is evolutionarily advantageous to women in the modern world.
To lie.
To lie.
Your boobs ain't that big.
That's some suspension bridge that would put the Brooklyn Bridge to shame.
And that ain't your real face color.
That ain't your real hair color.
That ain't the real length of your legs.
You know, there's also a movie with Anna Faris where she basically wakes up in the morning, puts makeup on, and then comes back to bed because she's like over 35 or something like that, right?
Yeah, Mike said, 18 ways to turn him on.
You know, I don't know that nakedness is 18 things, but that seems to be enough.
20 things to do with your boobs in bed.
What are you, playing castanets?
Are you showing some sort of Newton machine with these hangbots?
I mean, what the hell is going on?
Mike, are these actual titles?
Yes, these are actual titles I'm pulling up.
20 things to do with your boobs during sex.
Can I tell you?
I'm glad it's not 21 because that would be an odd number and then one of them would be left out in whatever the hell you were doing at the end.
Stroke a cat.
Pick up a quarter.
I just think that's quite amazing.
You on top.
The hardcore new success secret.
Ooh.
Oh yeah, you know, to have men enjoy sex, you need a success secret.
It's called vagina.
Have you ever found it?
Yes, that's the secret.
Steph, do you know how to bump-proof your bikini line?
Is this...
How to bump proof.
Oh, I know.
Actually, I know what that means.
I do.
That means that...
Razor stubble.
Those little ingrown hairs and stuff that make those little stubbly pimply things?
Mm-hmm.
Right.
I assume it's flamethrowers and a fire horse.
Your orgasm face.
What he thinks when he sees it.
Can I tell you something, ladies?
If he can see your orgasm face, you're doing it wrong.
Oh!
Oh!
I don't know.
My gyno talks to my vagina and other Doc shockers.
Oh, really?
I'm sorry.
Can I tap this or do I need to put the card actually in to get the payment?
Hello in there!
Hello.
Echo.
Hey, there was a nurse in here when we first started.
So, I mean, but this is, I mean, pick up, you know, Cosmopolitan or whatever, right?
And I made this joke before, it's like, how to fuck a man into thinking you're a likable human being.
But this – so if a virtue was evolutionarily advantageous to women at the moment, then it would be like Cicero.
It would be Socrates.
There wouldn't be any pictures of like fake boobs, fake eyelashes, fake nails, fake tits, fake liposuction, fake, fake, fake, right?
There wouldn't be any of that stuff.
Right, yeah.
There wouldn't be articles about how Kim Kardashian doesn't like to smile because it might give her wrinkles.
Right.
But the reality is if you If virtue were evolutionarily advantageous, then women's magazines would be about virtue, not about how to turn yourself into a postmodern piece of clown sex makeup in order to fool a man into thinking that you have more to offer than your pussy.
And that's not the way it works.
So where is the evolutionary advantage for virtue?
Now, through this show, as you may have noticed over these many years, through this show, I'm trying to put virtue front and center when it comes to deciding who to love or accepting who makes love even possible for you.
So that aspect of things is really, really essential to this show.
And until, until by God and unless, I open up a Cosmopolitan article and there's tips on how to be honest.
How to not fool a man into thinking you're something that you're not.
How to be loving.
How to support.
How to be a good listener.
How to accept.
How to judge a guy by his virtues rather than, he's cute, funny, but dimples.
I mean, God almighty.
It really is like making goo-goo eyes at Japanese fetishist retarded sex pre-teen anime robots when it comes to looking at these goddamn magazines.
But this obviously is what works.
This is what works.
If you turn yourself into...
A sex clown, then men will want to put up the big top for you.
I don't know how to put it from there.
So if virtue were evolutionary advantageous, then women's magazines would be about how to be virtuous.
But they're not.
So if it's not a result of evolutionary – an evolutionary trait, I guess, then is virtue something from culture or – Go, go.
I mean – Is science something from superstition?
I don't think that either.
I don't know.
Does mathematics come from witch doctors?
No!
It doesn't.
They just like counting their money.
Virtue, as I've argued before, and I'm sure we'll argue again, virtue is universally preferable behavior.
And I've got a whole book about it, and I just did this in the last show, so I'm not going to go into all of this, but there are very clear ways of rationally demonstrating universal secular virtue with no reference to the guns of the government or the ghosts of gods.
There are ways, and it's not irrational.
It's purely part of philosophy.
There is no virtue to be found in culture, because culture is obedience to the anti-rational.
Because if it's not Culture, it's rational.
This is why we know that science is not culture.
This is why if you get a scientist from India and a scientist from Iceland, and they both speak the same language, when they get together, we don't call it a cultural event.
We call it a scientist gathering, a scientific event.
Science is universal.
Mathematics is universal.
An engineer can build a bridge in New Delhi as he can build a bridge in Tallahassee.
I mean, there may be local phenomenon, but the methodology is still The same.
So what people called culture is inebriated and elevated bullshit that they don't want to call lies.
You know, what is culture?
Culture is, my dance is special, your dance is silly.
Well, that's just bullshit.
You know, culture is, my traditions are great, your traditions are weird.
I mean, it's just all nonsense.
Everybody can say that about everyone else's culture.
And so, ethics is a rational, philosophical discipline.
And it's not something that you do to appeal to the better angels of people's nature or to say, well, there's benefits down the road and it's better for you.
Fuck no.
The most and strongest ethical advances that occur in the species occur because people are self-destructive.
You know, like the first people who thought, hey, you know, man, maybe slavery is not such a good idea.
They did not live to see the end of slavery.
Good God, no.
They didn't live to see the end of it at all.
In fact, they were ostracized.
They were alienated.
They were ridiculed.
They were cursed.
They were spat upon.
They were slandered.
Everybody hated them.
The bigger the moral leap forward, the more insane the people have to be to advocate it.
What the hell kind of benefit is that?
Imagine if you're in the South.
We go back to the antebellum South, right?
We're back in the South, in the late 1700s, and you're like, no, slavery's wrong.
I mean, what does that do to your dating pool?
My Lord, he said slavery was wrong!
What's that?
That's crazy!
Right?
I mean, or let's say you're an atheist in the same time period, you know?
Well, the church has its iron grip on the local vajayjays of the fertile ladies.
You know, I mean, Christianity and religions, they hold a monopoly on eggs, whereas communism, with its sort of free love thing, offer you easy access to vaginas, right?
Hoard the eggs, access the vaginas.
That's the whole difference between the right and the left.
But it doesn't make any sense.
None of these things make that the people who went up against the papacy...
About the solar system or about science.
I mean, some of them were killed and tortured.
They didn't live to see the flourishing of science that happened 200 years later under Francis Bacon.
None of this stuff happened.
The bigger the advance, the more insane anti-evolutionary and anti-culture someone has to be.
You know, if I have the moral goal of getting my neighbor to put their garbage out the night before rather than the morning off, maybe they do it late.
This is not true.
This is just what I'm saying.
Maybe they do it late and I smell.
Like, okay, I may live to see that.
Maybe, maybe not.
It's not exactly a massive advancement in the ethics of mankind, right?
But if I wish to do something like replace the cult of the family with a voluntary family, I'm never going to live to see that in any significant way.
And it's crazy.
I mean, what idiot would take that on as a mission?
I mean, it goes against the deepest, most fundamental prejudice, pro-parents, pro-family prejudice that exists in the world.
It makes no sense.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
But it just happens to be the biggest moral advancement I believe that human beings are capable of.
Because you cannot deal with child abuse You cannot deal with corruption.
You cannot deal with abuse as a whole without introducing voluntarism.
The way you reform the post office is you privatize it.
The way you reform the family is you privatize it.
It's pure libertarianism extended to the only place that matters.
The family!
What sense does it make?
How many people misunderstand this?
How many people hate it?
I don't know.
Don't care.
Don't look.
Don't see.
Doesn't matter.
But it is the biggest moral advance.
I will never live to see it.
Why would anyone do it?
Well, because you're into principles and that's what you do.
And if not you, who, right?
So I don't think that there's much cultural advantage to ethics unless you're talking about conformity, in which case it's not ethics, but obedience.
That makes sense.
I guess I need to read your University Preferable Behavior book.
It's free!
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that virtue comes from rational thought.
Yeah, it has to.
The idea that we take away God and then elevate virtue to the status of a deity is scarcely atheism.
And this is what the idea that we can somehow...
Avoid the requirements of first principles and rational consistency and empirical evidence when it comes to ethics, which is the most essential of human disciplines.
And that somehow we can goo it up with evolution or culture or Sam Harris has this, you know, well, science can answer all of our ethical questions.
I'm paraphrasing or whatever, right?
It's like, well, you know, if we want less cholera, then I'm sure science, the science of water treatment has something to do with how we get that answer.
It's like...
But the reason people don't want to do first principles is because they don't want to realize how fucked up their culture is.
They simply don't want to realize that.
When you compare mostly leftist kind of atheism to the culture as a whole, well, there's a place for it.
Right?
And that place for it is communism.
Communism is anti-God and pro-totalitarianism, pro-state.
Right?
Yeah.
pro-god and anti-state and so on right i mean not two extremes and so on and but but if you if you abandon all of these cliches if you refuse to allow yourself to be a ball that rolls into one of the many convenient holes that is there to swallow you up and stop your progress right then if you simply go with first principles right and And let's just say the non-aggression principle.
This is all talked about in the book.
But just non-aggression principle.
Thou shalt not initiate the use of force or fraud, right?
Well, of course, that deals with religion in that you cannot threaten children with hell and you cannot lie to them and say things are true for which you have no proof because that's fraud.
And it deals with the state, which is the initiation of violence.
It deals with child abuse, which is the initiation of violence.
It deals with just about everything.
They've been looking for this unified field theory in physics for, oh gosh, I think Einstein blew his brains out for the last couple of decades of his life trying to find this thing.
Something which unates strong and weak forces, electromagnetism and gravity.
Something that just puts everything together.
But to me, this non-aggression principle, UPB and so on, this is what it does to ethics.
It puts it all together, but...
What happens is that when you go to first principles, which the modern thinkers are perfectly capable of doing, but when you go to first principles, you are then thrown this insane giant ball of insanity called culture that is not revealed and doesn't attack you until you work from first principles.
And you say, well, taxation is the initiation of force.
Estate is the initiation of force.
Child abuse is the initiation of force.
Religion is the initiation of force and fraud because death threats are...
Wrong.
And the eternal torture is worse than a death threat.
Eternal torture of hell and punishment and so on.
And when you go with first principles, what happens is a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.
Right?
And you think that there's crazy people in the world, but most people are sane.
But when you go with first principles, then you realize that most people in the world are crazy and very few are sane or even willing to approach and examine and accept sanity, rationality, universality, consistency.
And what happens then is because you've created the light that shows the craziness of the world, the world feels in general that it has no choice but to call you crazy.
Because projection is pretty foundational, right?
I mean, people who believe lots of crazy stuff, when they come across a sane person, will call the sane person crazy.
That's inevitable, right?
And so all of that occurs, and this is one reason why it's so hard for people to work from first principles.
You need a very strong support structure.
You need a very strong soul.
You need a very deep and strong rootedness in empiricism and philosophy so that you can return and circle back and constantly reground yourself when everyone tries to shoot at your feet and have you dance the crazy dance while thinking that they're teaching you the Macarena.
So it's very hard for people to do it.
That's why, you know, when I say...
I love you guys and you women so much.
It's because in the pursuit of this radical, simple, rational empiricism...
It's a teeth-gritting shotgun blaster crazy to the forehead.
Sometimes it feels like every day that you have to endure.
And it is that endurance that makes a better world.
And there are very few people who have that level of endurance and commitment, particularly at this earlier stage in any kind of philosophical movement.
So yeah, my respect and admiration for you for this.
For the listeners as a whole, Barrett, is enormous.
So that's why I think it's so hard for people to get to simple and consistent and universal ethics.
Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
Anything else you wanted to ask?
God, God, have we finished the line and on time?
Can't be.
Yeah, it was just mainly that, and I think I just need to do some more reading, read more of your stuff, and I think it will make a lot more sense.
Yeah, well, thanks, man.
I appreciate that, and I hope you'll go and check it out.
Yeah, thank you.
You want to read that, Mike?
Yeah, actually, I'm bummed that he dropped out and no-showed, because I actually am really...
We haven't talked about this on the show in quite a while.
Is this your albino fetish?
I'm doing my best to be as attractive to Mike as possible by staying indoors, but apparently I'm too spotty.
Kyle was going to call in, but didn't.
And his question was, if I only hire 20-year-old albinos for my power washing company, my net potential output is drastically minimized relative to if I hired from the entire labor supply market.
Are non-merit valuations the initiation of force?
Are non-merit valuations the initiation of force?
Good God, no.
That's like saying that a preference for redheads is the same as rape.
I mean, people have particular romantic or physical or sexual preferences that they have, and they will be more likely to pursue people like that, but that's not the initiation of force.
Look, you can hire the 20-year-old albinos for your power washing company if you want, but...
The punishment that you'll receive is that by drawing from a smaller talent pool, you will end up with less talented people.
I mean, if you're going to cast a musical using only your family, you know, unless you're the Barrymores or whatever, it's going to be unlikely that you're going to have the same level of quality as if you audition a thousand people for your musical, right?
So the wider you cast your net, the more gold you're going to get.
To mix metaphors completely.
So no, it is not the initiation of force to have a preference for association with a particular group.
It's just that you are going to fail, most likely, relative to somebody who's willing to just hire whoever is the best rather than who fits a particular category.
And the more narrow that category, the less talent pool you have to.
Again, to sort of say, well, I'm going to cast a musical, but I'm only going to have 20-year-old albinos You're not going to get as good a set of singers, because in the bell curve, you're just not going to get a good set of singers as if you simply audition everyone to find the best singers.
So, no, it's not the initiation of force.
You will most likely be punished for it in one form or another, either through failure or through less success.
But I don't see how exercising a particular preference is the initiation of force, because otherwise everybody would be initiating force all the time.
So if I buy a particular microphone, then I'm not buying every other microphone.
And that is a preference that is exclusionary to every other microphone.
It's just this microphone.
And it'll be years before I buy another microphone, if I'm lucky.
So the idea that exercising a preference, even if that preference is not particularly rational or prejudicial, the idea that that's the initiation of force, I don't see how that could...
Could be the case.
I'm trying to think of a more...
I don't know how you could rebut that.
Yeah, and how would you oppose that?
Let's say that it was immoral.
How would you...
The problem is that the moment you have to be a mind reader, you can't be talking about ethics, which is why it's universally preferable behavior rather than universally preferable thoughts or preferences or prejudices or perspectives.
So if you stab someone, that's physical evidence, right?
I mean, there's a stab wound, there's a knife with blood on it somewhere, maybe on you and so on, right?
So that's evidence, right?
There's something that's physically there.
The problem with prejudice is that anyone can claim, I thought they were the best people for the job, right?
And so, you know, let's say you do have a power washing company with only 20-year-old albinos, and somebody says, well, that's prejudicial, that's immoral.
Someone could say, I genuinely, I interviewed a lot of people, I genuinely believed these guys were the best for the job.
And they could say, well, look, albinos like to work together because they're never pressured into sunbathing.
I don't know.
Like, whatever, right?
They get each other.
They understand what it's like to be albinos.
The fact that there's an albino team who does the power washing means that they've got better cohesiveness.
They're not going to be shunned because if I have one albino and a bunch of non-albinos, the albino is going to be looked at as weird with his red eyes and, you know, white skin and all that.
So I prefer to hire a bunch of albinos because they're really grateful, they're happy to work, they work well together, they understand each other, and they're only willing to work on underground parking lots.
So the problem is that someone can make a compelling story.
So we talked earlier about affirmative action.
One of the challenges with affirmative action is, well, first of all, there was originally IQ tests were...
Supposed to be how you differentiate these things, but IQ test was resulting in too few blacks getting hired for a variety of reasons we've talked about at other times without any conclusion.
And the problem with the affirmative action stuff is that someone can say, well, I did interview a whole bunch of people, but the whites fit in.
You know, they fit into the existing company culture and structure, and they were the most qualified, and they gave the best interview answers and so on.
And even if the interviews are recorded, it really becomes very subjective to figure out who was the best interviewee.
Or the person could say, well, I don't know, let's go with a cliche.
He says, I don't want to hire a man.
Because all of my customers are women.
It's a cosmetics sales company.
I don't want to hire a man because all my customers are women and it would just be weird for a man who doesn't wear makeup to come and sell makeup to women who do.
So, it just becomes really difficult to prove prejudice because very few people will admit prejudice, particularly if it's illegal.
They will simply say, it worked out this way or this is, you know, I interviewed lots of different, these were the best interviewees I had.
And then what are you supposed to say?
Can you then say, well, no, you're wrong.
These weren't the best interviewees.
You're prejudiced and so on.
And that's why they, because they couldn't deal with that from a legal standpoint, they had to get rid of entrance exams, like an IQ or intelligence test.
And then because people could always say, no, I wasn't prejudiced.
These were just, these 12 white guys were the best for the job.
You can't read people's minds.
And so it just had to become a quota system.
But I don't see how you could possibly figure out Whether someone is racist behind closed doors, because interviews happen behind...
I guess if somebody said, oh, you, whatever, expletive, I'm never going to hire an expletive here, Hispanic or whatever, right?
Then if someone recorded that, I guess you could say that or whatever.
But, you know, it seems to me that the right to be prejudiced is...
Everybody's right.
This is something that would be dealt with.
You could say it's aesthetically negative.
There's three categories in universally preferable behavior.
The first is universally preferable behavior, which is virtuous, and the opposite, which is evil.
Then there's aesthetically preferable actions, like being on time and being polite or whatever it is.
Reciprocating, right?
Like, you lent me 20 bucks last week.
Now you want to borrow 20 bucks.
If I say no, it's not great, but it's also nothing to get thrown in jail for.
And then there's morally neutral actions like, you know, running down the street.
Who knows whether it's good or bad.
And you could make a case that prejudice would fall into aesthetically negative actions.
In other words, we'd rather that it wouldn't be there, but it's not something we can throw people in jail for.
And again, the reasons for all of this and the differentiations are in the book, Universally Preferable Behavior, which is at freedomainradio.com slash free.
But I don't feel comfortable saying that someone is wrong.
Let's say there's a black woman who really gets turned on by white guys and really likes white guys and wants to marry a white guy.
Do we throw her in jail for her racial prejudice?
I don't think so.
I think that'd be a pretty horrible standard.
Let's say that there's a black girl, a black woman, who only wants to marry a black man.
Because she wants those lovely chocolate babies.
Well, I mean, would I be comfortable saying, well, that's racist, you should go to jail?
No, of course not.
People are welcome to have whatever prejudices or preferences, if you want, that they want.
And the market will punish those who have irrational preferences.
I would never say to a black woman that her preference for a black man is irrational.
I mean...
Black-white marriages or interracial marriages have a very bad track record.
They generally have much worse track records than same-race marriages, for whatever reason.
I don't know what the reason is, but there are very rational reasons for a black woman to say, I want to marry a black guy.
I mean, not least of all because there is some tribalism in the world, and, you know, the kids who are multiracial sometimes have difficulty finding where to fit and blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, I think that having prejudice or preferences or whatever, you know, you can try and talk people out of it.
You can let the economics deal with the situation if they're going against their own economic self-interest.
But the idea that this is some sort of initiation of force, I think, is not sustainable because you can never prove it.
And that which you cannot prove cannot be in the realm of good or evil because that's when you get crazy things like the thought police.
So, I hope that helps and...
That's it, right, Mike?
That is it for today.
Absolutely.
Dear God.
We made it through a show.
All right.
Well, thanks, everyone, so much.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
We're back on a regular schedule now.
We'll be back on Wednesday, Saturday, 8 p.m.
Eastern Standard.
Please do drop by, check us out.
Please, please, please, as always, it's a new year.
It's a new day.
It's a new life.
And we've got to get ourselves the cheddar to...
Get out into the world.
And we've got some great new show ideas.
Should have a big surprise for everyone this week, matter of fact.
Got a big surprise for everyone this week.
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