July 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:33
3029 The Decline and Fall of the West | Dr. Jim Penman and Stefan Molyneux
Western civilization is on a path to destruction. In coming decades, economies will shrink, democracy will retreat and nations crumble. The long-term result will be grinding poverty, superstition and disease. This isn't scaremongering it is science. In Biohistory: The Decline and Fall of the West, Jim Penman, PhD, details a revolutionary new theory about why civilizations collapse. For the first time, Penman directly links human biology with the rise and fall of civilizations a cataclysmic relationship that brought the Romans, the ancient Greeks and all other Empires to their knees. It is it already too late to change the course of history? | For more go to: http://www.biohistory.org and http://www.fdrurl.com/biohistory
So for those of you who've been following my R versus K selection ramblings, you will be very interested in Dr.
Jim Penman.
He's the author of Biohistory and Biohistory, Decline, and Fall of the West, which he's working on a truly mind-blowing new theory about the physiological underpinnings of social change and its probable effects on civilizations.
You can find out more at biohistory.org.
He's also, along with reinventing the biology of the future, past and present, he dabbles as the full-time CEO of Jim's Group, which is the largest franchise in Australia with over 3,000 franchises to date.
Jim, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Yeah, it's good to talk to you, Stephan.
So for me, I guess the biological imperative or looking beyond the realm of reason and evidence came out of, I wouldn't say it was mounting frustration, but a growing awareness that most people don't really listen to reason and but a growing awareness that most people don't really listen to reason and And in sort of studying this, I began to realize that there are very strong biological defenses against reason and evidence.
Like there's lots of studies that show that if somebody has a prejudice and you bring reason and evidence that counteracts that prejudice, it actually strengthens the prejudice.
In other words, the only weapons with which we can fight ignorance tend to make ignorance stronger.
And so I began to look sort of beyond the Socratic discourse and the philosophical training that I'd gotten in graduate school and the work that I'd been doing trying to bring...
Philosophy to the masses, and it led sort of unerringly to this epigenetics, to this biological underpinnings, and I took an R versus K approach, and then you were kind enough to send me your book, which I highly recommend.
You know, the book is so, it's very well written, but the concepts are so challenging.
I actually had to stop listening even to classical music while I was reading it because it really requires significant laser-like concentration and focus.
So thanks so much for that.
What was it that drove you or drew you into this web of biology and its explanatory power in human society?
I started off, Stefan, looking at many of the reasons for the decline and fall of civilizations.
And I started as a history, doing a history PhD.
And the further I got into it, the more I realized it wasn't just history.
And then I started reading up on cross-culture anthropology, and then into zoology, and eventually into physiology.
And in recent times in epigenetics, it's kind of just looking for an explanation of what's going on.
For example, you look at something like the origins of the First World War.
I mean, people see that in terms of national rivalries and so forth.
What I think it is, it's the same thing as a lemming migration.
And you can see extreme parallels between the way human populations work and the way that lemmings and muskrats have these regular cycles with this period of migration.
That's just an example.
And there is a very strong sense, and I remember this way back in the day studying the Roman Empire, which you go into, of course, in great detail in your book, this old saying that civilizations rise in hobnail boots and descend in silk slippers, that the work, slaving, and genius of our forefathers provide us such bounty that we become soft-spined, lazy, and effet.
And I think that there is that genuine sense of...
A cyclical nature and and of course some people say it's to do with the economy some people to do with technology and so on and those explanations have never quite satisfied me and I think of course your approach which you know we should probably stop teasing people with and actually Get into I think is is fascinating so you've got I mean the big three letters that that you're working with C for civilization V for vigor and S for stability I'd like to start,
if we could, with the C for civilization, because if I understand it, that's the one that, in terms of domestic tranquility and progress, is the one that's most important.
Yes, it is.
Look, basically C is the civilization temperament, you might say.
And it starts from the observation that civilized societies have...
Certain family patterns in common, they tend to control their children, they tend to restrict sexual activity, they tend to marry relatively late, and they're more likely to be monogamous.
There's a whole series of behavioral, temperamental things.
Now, when you see that in animals, particularly in primates, what you see is associated with food shortage.
Animals like gibbons that live in a very food-limited environment tend to show those exact characteristics.
They're also very hard-working.
They spend a lot of time searching for food even when they're not hungry.
And what actually happens when people started to develop civilization, and first of all starting with agriculture, they needed a certain temperament, which is this food shortage temperament.
And that can be credited to a certain extent by limiting food, But the major way it's done is by restricting sexual activity and by other kinds of behavioral systems that mimic the effect of food shortage.
So when societies develop these cultural systems, particularly religions like Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism, they develop these religious, what I call cultural technologies, that create this civilized temperament.
Now, what happens when a civilization collapses is it becomes It's very hard-working.
It's very successful.
It forms large states.
It's very disciplined.
It becomes wealthy.
It becomes powerful.
And the wealth then undermines this sea temperament.
And it also tends to destroy these religious behaviours too.
So you get a gradual softening, a weakening that goes on.
And the civilisation declines.
So the decline of the civilisation is actually caused by its success.
Yeah, and in American entrepreneurial lore or legend, it's the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, you know, that there's some guy who's working a manual labor job who works really hard, and then he goes up to silk shirts and all that, but then his kids end up blowing it all and they go back to shirt sleeves.
There is this sense that success brings decay.
Now, Let's dive a little bit into, I thought that the work that you brought to bear on the topic, particularly with testosterone, was fascinating.
Particularly, you know, we look at movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or the movie Wall Street, and we think that, you know, these reptilian, aggressive, lizard-like human beings are running our whole financial industry.
But you point out, I think, with a very few exceptions, of which stock trading is sometimes one of them, that professional success at the highest echelons of human economic activity is associated with lower testosterone.
And that this mild hunger and restriction of sexual appetite also produces low testosterone.
I wonder if you could flesh that out a little bit for people.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
The way this food restriction mechanism works, and we've been investigating in my research team over the last seven years the physiology of the whole thing.
What happens when you restrict food is it causes a number of changes.
It reduces hormones like leptin, for example, but the most significant one is it reduces testosterone.
And that seems to be, that has ongoing epigenetic effects, especially when it happens very early in life.
And that's what creates this kind of civilized temperament.
But you're right, the whole idea that testosterone is something to do with success, It's not actually true at all, and the most obvious, if you look at the nerds versus jocks idea in high school, how you have the jocks who are, you know, the high testosterone sporting guys, and the girls like them, but in later life, they tend to, you know, work as construction laborers, and it's the nerds, the shy, pimply ones that go on to found, you know, major enterprises.
Testosterone is anything that's, we call them C promoters, anything that reduces testosterone is called a C promoter.
Right.
And this testosterone reduction is required for people to have civilized interactions, to keep their deals, to not reach for their sword in this hair-trigger way every time there's a dispute, but to recognize the long-term benefits of win-win negotiated and compromised trade.
So, I think that lowering of testosterone, there are other mechanisms which, of course, you mentioned in the book and other writers have mentioned that contribute to the lowering of testosterone, such as, of course, marriage and fatherhood in particular for men.
I remember being quite shocked after I became stay-at-home dad that my testosterone levels had gone down by 40 to 50 percent.
I mean, I didn't actually get it tested, but that was the information that I got.
And so these things which have been promoted by religion, such as getting married and having children and so on, are all C promoters in that it's not the only factor, but the lowering of the testosterone is very significant.
Yeah, religions are very good at that, and they've developed over time, whether you see that as divine innovation or whether it's just cultural revolution, these mechanisms for doing it.
So the history of development of civilization is the development of more and more powerful and effective religious systems.
And that's why the West has been so powerful and so successful, because Christianity is a very, very powerful sea promoter.
So is Judaism, for example, too, which is why Jews are so successful.
And you see this process.
It's so easy to understand why civilizations collapse.
You see the process everywhere.
And also why new immigrants come in and they're successful for a while.
And then they merge into the general population.
And then new, more vigorous immigrants come in.
Wealth is very corrosive.
And this is exactly the R versus K thing.
I don't use that in my book very much.
But food restriction has a K promoting effect.
It turns us into more K selective.
Right.
So...
To sort of join these two worlds, which I was trying—this is one of the reasons why your book was a challenge to get through.
I mean, the concepts are heady, but I was also trying to mesh it together with some of the K and R selection.
A civilization would certainly seem to have a lot to do with— The promotion of a C, as you call it, which is the K selection, which of course is a response to limited resources and usually being at the top of the food chain.
And of course, all of the epigenetic and cultural and emotional and familial and trade-based responses to limited resources, to hoard your resources, to be anxious about depletion of your resources and to really work to enmesh yourself in a productive social group that's mutually supportive.
All of these things that are Responses to scarce resources produce this massive abundance, this incredible geyser of resources which then wash away all of the tendencies which were developed for scarce resources, which is the whole reason you have these reasons.
It's incredibly frustrating when you think about it.
It's like there's nothing worse than success for the long-term health of a civilization.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
It's the irony of it, too.
Another part of my theory actually says that it's prosperity that creates recessions.
Because prosperity, like in the 1960s and 1990s, for example, creates a more extroverted, more arselective kind of temperament, which then goes for stimulus, which then causes the level of cortisol to rise, which causes the recession.
So it's the same irony that the very wealth creates the destruction.
Right.
Now, I wonder if you could talk about some of the epigenetic changes that occur that some of your experiments and some of the other people have done on the females who have reduced diets and what effects that has on their offspring.
We've only just started to look at the exact epigenetic changes, but there are lots.
I mean, epigenetics, as you know, is a change to the way in which genes function.
And what we see is that certain kinds of um activity especially food restriction of any kind tends to have a dramatic in early life especially a very dramatically exaggerated effect curiously enough to um very very early food restriction can have a increase in testosterone effect it can actually cause testosterone to go up so there's this kind of countervailing effects so for example when you get a You can get an actual situation where a
civilization has been very food-restricted, in a sense, like, say, Victorian England, which is one indication of which is a very, very late age of puberty.
And then it goes through this dramatic increase in wealth, which causes testosterone to surge dramatically, and that's part of the reason we got these terrible wars in the early 20th century, First and Second World Wars, because it's a surge of testosterone taking place.
As this whole system sort of falls apart, you might say, this scarcity thing, this high C. Right.
Because I've talked quite a bit about the First World War, I wonder if we could break down some of that in more detail, right?
So it is the low testosterone people create an abundant and peaceful society in general.
I mean, there's a lot of exceptions and so on.
Which then produces all of this excess, which reduces any food deprivation for the moms, and that produces high testosterone offspring.
Do I have that correct?
I went over this like three times before the call, but I think I have that correct.
Yes, it's a little bit complicated in terms of the way it works.
It has a different effect at different ages.
But essentially, yes, you get this prosperity, which causes this surge of testosterone, which causes all this violence and so forth.
Right.
And the control over sexuality is also interesting.
Of course, one of the aspects of the case selected species is a strict control over sexuality.
I mean, promiscuity does not pay for large top of the food chain complex organisms like wolves and owls and so on that need to teach their young how to hunt, that need to hunt like jackals do cooperatively.
And so promiscuity and a lack of investment in offspring Simply, those animals that pursue that in the K world can't compete with the animals that breed more selectively.
Now, of course, we live in such a sexuality-saturated world.
I remember the first time I went to Las Vegas was for business, really, honestly.
There was a software convention there.
And I just remember wandering around Las Vegas.
And the same thing happened when I went to give a speech on Bitcoin in Amsterdam and walked through the red light district.
I mean, The sex-saturated aspects of our society are really quite striking and seem to me to be very strongly promoting the R-style promiscuity behavior, along, of course, with having giant welfare systems that take away the negative consequences of promiscuity.
But those aspects of controlling sexuality, which I think you point out was very strong in the early to middle aspects of the Roman Empire before divorce and promiscuity sort of took over as has happened in the West since the 60s.
What are the mechanisms by which sexual deprivation, which really means a healthy case sexuality, but how does sexual deprivation affect these epigenetics?
Restricting sex has the same effect as restricting food.
I mean, just as an example, there's a wonderful experiment done with mice, or actually mice or rats, I forget which, in which they, some were given no sexual activity after puberty, and the others had immediate sexual activity after puberty.
Now, even though they didn't have it for a long time after that, the two were completely different.
The levels of testosterone were like double in the ones that had early sexual activity.
So, Sexual activity, especially in early puberty, has dramatically effect in lowering the level of C or increasing the level of testosterone.
And this is also interesting back up from the Kinsey Report.
Now, the Kinsey Report's a whole series of books done with the idea of promoting that sexuality is good, but there's some fascinating stuff in there.
One of the best indicators of success in later life is nocturnal emissions.
The kids that go on to have success in life and to get more education and have higher occupational status, regardless of their class background, tend to have a lot of nocturnal emissions.
And that would be the result, sorry, that would be the result not just of not having sexual intercourse but not masturbating.
Just for my younger listeners, you know, nocturnal emissions is what happens when your internet is down.
It's just for those people.
But that would be an indication of a very strictly controlled sexuality to the point of not masturbating as well.
Is that correct?
That's exactly right.
Masturbation and masturbation.
Homosexual, heterosexual, masturbation, they're all undermining.
They're all increasing testosterone.
They're all undermining C. It doesn't really matter a lot what else.
So one of the curious things is there's a big fight now in the conservative community about homosexuality.
But in fact, heterosexual promiscuity is a far bigger problem because there's a lot more heterosexuals around than homosexuals.
But masturbation is also a problem.
All these things are a serious, serious issue.
So you actually have a look back to the Victorian age when they had these myths that it would make you go, masturbation would make you go blind or insane or all these kind of things.
Completely untrue, but in a certain sense probably contributed greatly to the success of the individuals in the society.
Right.
Yeah, that aesthetic sense of, you know, there's a very funny, there's an old American sitcom called Seinfeld, and in it one of the characters decides, or for some reason can't have sex, and finds that he turns into a genius when he's not able to pursue that, and...
I think that's a very interesting thing because we live in such a sexually libertine or licentious or, I don't know, maybe you could even go so far as to say decadent society where when any restriction is considered to be placed upon sexuality, there's a very violent rebellion against it.
It's considered to be unbelievably square and repressed and like crazy and so on.
But, you know...
There are some pretty good reasons as to why restrictions upon sexuality can be very much to the benefit of society as a whole.
Yes.
One of the problems we've got is that there's a significant delay that people can have a very active sex life as adults, but if they didn't do it in their early teens and their parents did it, they're still highly effective.
But their children and their grandchildren are going to suffer.
So really what's happened is there was this big change that took place during the 60s, especially starting from there.
And it's really the kids that were born to those parents.
That are having tremendous problems in the today world where you have very, very high levels of unemployment.
We're having declining productivity.
There's a growing gap between rich and poor.
There's a growing cynicism about politics.
There's all kinds of problems going on in society right now.
And to me, that's clearly a delayed result of what happened particularly in the 60s and afterwards.
It is that, and it's what the Austrian economists talk about in terms of inflation and the business cycle, that the connection between environment or the decisions made in that environment and the manifestation of epigenetic behavior or economic business cycles is sometimes, in the Austrian case, years, but in what you're talking about decades or a generation away.
And it's very, very hard to trace back.
And of course, we're all very adept at creating stories as to why we are the way we are, when of course a lot of it may be driven by elements of our physiology and genetics and epigenetics that are very much beyond our control and beyond our conscious awareness.
Yes, that's right.
You look at groups like...
Mormons, for example, is a good example of a religion with very, very, very strong sea promoters because they're extremely disciplined.
And what you're seeing with time is not only they're having more children, but they're also becoming increasingly successful.
And, you know, in politics, for example, in business, there's so many areas that this disciplined lifestyle, this sea promoting lifestyle is highly effective.
Okay, so, and I'm trying to, I really want to, I want to get to V in a sec, but there's something else that struck me in your book.
I talked about this at some point in the past as well.
And it's the question of the difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
And the Victorians, of course, were very generous because they were Christians and, you know, they followed the dictates of the Bible in terms of charity.
But they were very skeptical about the poor, and they were very aware of the capacity of the poor to mimic bad fortune when their poverty is actually, to some degree, the result of bad choices.
And they were very—they would interview people, they would cross-examine people.
You see these showing up in Dickinson and other of the Victorian novelists, these scenes where the women are grilled, or, you know, what happened, and so on.
That really fell away.
I mean, in the 1930s, under a lot of the semi-socialist policies of FDR, certainly in the post-war period, and then very much with the Great Society under LBJ in the 60s, this idea that the poor could at all ever be responsible for their own misfortune became...
I mean, almost a kind of heresy.
I put out a video a while back ago called The Truth About Poverty, where I talked about the fact that people who are poor, their households work an average of 10 hours a week, which is not exactly onerous.
And, you know, the response is like, oh, you hate the poor.
You wish to gnaw on their bones like Gollum on a herring or something.
And this idea that the poor are always innocent victims, I guess it comes out of Marxism, this sort of economic determinism, but the idea that the poor could never be responsible for their own behavior would be incomprehensible to the Victorians, and the idea that the poor can be responsible for their own situation has now become incomprehensible to us.
How does that fit into what you talk about?
Well, actually, the interesting thing about our current attitude that we just simply give without consideration is going back to the Middle Ages.
In many ways, what's happened to our society in the last 50, 100 years is a return to the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages were relatively unproductive.
We're becoming unproductive.
The Middle Ages gave unconditional charity.
We're doing the same thing.
The Middle Ages had very early puberty.
We've gone back to very early puberty.
They were much less disciplined.
We're much less disciplined.
It's really a return.
There was this incredible increase to the 19th century where you got this powerful industrial revolution taking place.
And we are now going back, as our society declines, to a much older and more primitive pattern.
Right.
And it's being driven by...
Okay, so now we must.
We must turn to V. So I wonder if you could give a bit of a background in V and also where it fits relative to C, because I thought the interaction of the two was fascinating.
Okay, V is aggression.
V is vigor.
V is small group.
V is a very military virtue.
What it is, it's a kind of a system that reacts to periodic danger.
If you're an animal like a baboon with famine taking place or predators attacking you, there's enormous stresses, intermittent stresses, and that creates this very toughened stress reaction.
It becomes very, very strong, very robust.
You get a lot of adrenaline.
You get a very effective, fast cortisol reaction.
There's a whole lot of physiology behind it.
I hate to break in, but just for those who've been following my ARC vs.
K stuff, this only occurs in animals that have any potential to fight the predator.
So as you point out in the book, the baboons, I think it was, they would surround a leopard and attack it if they could corner it or had any way of winning, which of course a rabbit can't do against a wolf pack.
Yes, that's right.
It's a certain kind of – it's almost – it is a kind of an R-selective strategy, but one that's very good at fighting off, dealing with dangers, group cooperation, those kind of things like that.
Human societies develop this too, but we do it deliberately.
And this is the reason why the tribes of the desert and the mountains and the cold north tend to be very, very aggressive because they live in these very harsh environments.
But on top of that, you also have cultural patterns too, mainly patriarchy that has the same effect.
Baboons, for example, are extremely patriarchal.
The males are about twice the size of the females, and the females are very subordinate.
So when you have a cultural pattern which is extremely patriarchy, it tends to increase V, and then makes them very, very military.
Kind of child-rearing pattern is if you have punishment, harsh treatment of juveniles, that's after the age of infancy.
Not in infancy, that's very different.
But after the age of infancy, you also have an increase in this V characteristics.
They become more aggressive.
Also, they're better at accepting harsh and powerful authority.
Like Muslim, Arabs, a good example of this kind of characteristics.
I mean, when I was going to school at the age of six, I was shipped off to a boarding school that had literally fallen through the time tunnel from like the 1870s where, you know, children were caned.
There was food deprivation.
I mean, it was quite Dickensian in a lot of ways.
That's all changed now.
But that was, it was quite an expensive private school, and my family came from a family with a strong martial history.
And it was very much, you could feel it, you know, trying to build up this, you know, this British backbone of the empire armor around you and make you...
A good and willing foot soldier.
And I guess this would be leader of foot soldiers based on my family history.
But that was quite strong and very different from the kind of aggression that we were talking about earlier that's the opposite of C because high C and high V can coexist very well.
So it's not the same kind of excess of adrenaline, hair, trigger, temper.
It's a very disciplined form of aggression.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, yeah.
The low C, the high testosterone aggression, is very undisciplined.
It's more like criminal behavior.
It can make you aggressive, but also they tend to be very undisciplined soldiers, people with very high testosterone.
The V-type aggression is far more effective because it's disciplined, it's more group-oriented, the kind of thing that makes you want to die for your fellow man.
It's the super military kind of aggression.
And you're right, the English public schools traditionally, the way Spartans used to bring up their kids, the boys, they were very, very harsh, only had one cloak for the whole year and have to steal food and all kinds of things.
They're all also army basic training, and especially that of the SAS, those kinds of super military They're very harsh, lots of stress, lots of harsh people yelling at you.
These are all V promoters.
So V seems to me to be associated with the great missing fiber of the West, which is cultural self-confidence.
You've got some quotes in your book about, in the 19th century, the degree to which Western Europeans, and in particular the British, I felt that they'd sort of been gloriously picked in this Hegelian sense to lead the world to culture and civilization.
And they had no doubt whatsoever that British society could scarcely be improved upon, except by more Britishness throughout the world.
And that kind of...
And I got some of that even as a child in the boarding school that I was at.
There was very much the British, you know, we were proud of the Second World War.
We fought the forces of evil.
England is a civilizing effect on the world.
It's a dark and dangerous world.
And it's our job, like policemen, to go out there and fix it up for the benighted civilizations that can't seem to get it done themselves.
And I, you know, one of the reasons that I retained a fair amount of sense of pride and respect for Western culture, which seemed to have been scrubbed out of most of my contemporaries in graduate school, I think had something to do with this being trained in cultural pride at a very early age.
And how does V diminish?
If V is associated with this kind of cultural pride, how does it diminish into this relativism of, you know, everyone's equal and it's all kind of soupy?
Well, V is a product of intermittent starvation or stresses.
It's undermined by wealth and urbanization, pretty much like C, but it happens even more quickly.
In actual fact, the level of V in the West has been declining since the 16th century.
It's high V that actually helps to drive C to rise.
And then when the society becomes more prosperous, there's less famines going on and so forth, and it becomes more urbanized, V drops very rapidly, and that's part of what helps to drag C down as well.
So the decline of a civilization is really a product of both of these things.
V goes down first and then C. But the interesting thing is that when V drops, V has a certain conservative element to it, especially the late childhood punishment.
So if you've got a relatively high C, but V is dropping, you have a very, very creative, productive society.
And a good example of that is the West in the mid-20th century when you had this Great productivity and creativity.
It's a temporary thing, though.
You also had a very low level of inequality.
It was a very equal time, around the 1970s especially.
I brought to mind some of the darker but still intensely creative aspects of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s in Germany.
Yes, yeah.
It is creativity.
If you look at ancient Greek civilization, like the Athenians, for example, that's a period when they actually had relatively not so much of this punishment thing.
They weren't that harsh on their children, but they had very, very high C. And it was that that made them incredibly creative.
But then as V was undermined, they became less aggressive, and then they lost the creativity as well.
It's the same thing that's happening to us.
So it's a decline in both.
The decline in V, in some ways, is nice.
It kind of makes us a bit more...
Humane and a bit less aggressive, but in the end you get that sort of weak lack of confidence that you were talking about.
Loss of confidence, loss of energy, loss of vigor, loss of the willingness to fight to defend your country.
And in the end that destroys the civilization.
Well, I hesitate to wander into the field of your expertise and try and contribute anything, but the thought that came to my mind was that in the realm of philosophy, the C comes up with the principles and V demands that you stick to them, is willing to sacrifice to maintain them.
And so in the Enlightenment, we came up with, as a civilization, you know, separation of church and state and limited government and republicanism and so on.
And then, and that was a high C, you know, the extrapolation of trade and reason and evidence of scientific revolution and so on.
And then the V were the revolutions that said this is going to be necessary to maintain these, is going to be a hard slog, you know, as one of the founding fathers may have been.
Franklin, who came out and someone said, what kind of government did you give us?
And he said, a republic, if you can keep it.
And so I think C creates the ideals, but V creates the assertiveness and the drive to maintain those ideals, which never, ever seems to last in society.
Yeah, look, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
You do need both.
You can't really have one without the other.
A very high C society with only moderate V can be good, but in the end, the drop of V makes C unsupportable.
These are very artificial.
That's the point about it.
They're difficult to maintain.
It's really difficult to live the kind of life that religion says you should live, to be very disciplined, not to go out and have affairs, not to do whatever you feel like, not to eat too much, to fast, to observe the Sabbath, to pray regularly.
All the kind of...
To do religious rituals, all these things require discipline.
They're difficult.
So the whole thing very, very easily breaks down.
That's what's happening.
And it only takes...
You know, I think of this line, like this phalanx of...
Of Roman soldiers, you know, and it takes one or two guys to break it and run for the whole thing to start falling apart because we're an intensely comparative species, right?
I mean, I grew up with a brother and so, of course, like everyone with a sibling that was even remotely close in age, you know, if my brother got a scoop and a half of ice cream, by God, I was going to get me a scoop and a half of ice cream.
And this idea that if someone else is getting away with something, why should I have these standards?
When everybody's kind of hungry, And everybody is experiencing privation, then I think people are like, okay, well, that's just natural and so on.
But when there's an excess and some people gorge themselves, it becomes really hard to maintain standards when there's lots of people violating them all around you.
And they think the same through sexuality as well.
Well, the very interesting thing about high C society is that even people who are very wealthy can live in a fairly austere sort of fashion, which is very unusual.
Scrooge is one of my role models, you might say, from Christmas Carol.
I know he's not considered the greatest of people, but he was the kind of man who was incredibly wealthy but lived a very, very abstemious, austere sort of personal life.
That is a very characteristic high C attitude.
And when Dickens was going on about giving away and all this kind of stuff too, the very early stages of this declining C is what he's promoting in effect.
Which is why people like him so much these days, but nobody really has a thought for dear old Scrooge.
But, you know, Scrooge was the man that built the society, not the Christmas turkeys and giving stuff away.
It's a productive investment.
Thinking for the future, not the present.
Will we sacrifice current ease, current leisure for future benefit?
That's seed.
Yes, I mean, the constant analogy that I and others use is don't eat your seed crop.
You know, it may seem very generous to give your seed crop away to people who are hungry, but you're all going to starve come spring.
And this to me is government debt and Greece and the euro and what's going on in China and so on.
This constant consumption of the future for the sake of the present is very R-selected and is, by the time it catches up with you, you know, it's like a lifetime of smoking.
By the time it catches up with you, it's too late to fix.
Actually, one of the interesting things about the R selection too, in nature, R selection causes massive, massive bad of breeding.
People have lots and lots and lots of offspring.
Now, the interesting thing is in human society, it has the opposite effect.
And that's because we consciously control our reproduction.
So if you're K-selective, if you're high C, you don't have a lot of children.
You have them very carefully, but you're really interested in them.
If you're arsenic, if you don't really care that much about children, so you just have them and then they just go off and wander off and you breathe some more.
But in humans, if you're not interested in children, you don't have them at all.
So that's where our populations are dropping.
Our birth rates are so, so low and they're not going to go up too because we're becoming arsenic.
We're becoming low C and low V as well.
Yeah, and I mean, I try, I mean, I obviously put myself somewhat squarely in the K camp, but, and I try to not have this good, no, K good or bad, you know, and I, in the last presentation that I, I was like, you need some R's to keep things, you know, pure K is like Chinese society that just photocopies every year and doesn't, doesn't progress.
Yeah.
But, um, it is, uh, uh, it is frustrating for me to see the degree to which these gene sets are multiplying and divide, like they're multiplying amongst themselves and they're dividing, uh, uh, in society.
And I, you know, it is the kind of thing that I think is, is really going to tear apart.
society apart because ours seem to me kind of lazy.
I mean, again, I try not to put these pejoratives on, but I'll be frank.
I mean, they seem kind of lazy to me and, you know, having children is a lot of work and a lot of ours can't be bothered, I guess.
If they can have the sex without having the kids, they'll take that any day.
You're right.
Exactly what's happening.
And the actual end results are far worse than anybody can possibly imagine.
I mean, people worry about global warming.
It's It's nothing compared with the entire collapse of industrial civilization.
I mean, we're going to be heading back.
If nothing is done about this, we're going to be heading back to, you know, poverty-stricken peasant farming.
You know, what the Middle East in a really, really bad year is where we're moving towards.
Because industrial civilization depends on this high sea temperament, and we're losing it very fast.
What happened to the Roman Empire was relatively slow, because even there, people still weren't hungry.
Here, the big problem is obesity.
So the collapse will be very much quicker than anybody can imagine.
And we're going to get sort of overrun by fundamentalists and so forth, Muslims most likely, and that's the end of it.
Oh, and seeing that kind of I hate to say inevitability because, again, I think that you can, you know, with this amazing communications technology, you can do a lot to do your best to try and avert this stuff.
I mean, I feel a little bit like a chicken little sometimes, but when the sky is falling, you're not being paranoid.
But it is very frustrating to know, based upon your studying of history and my studying of history, to know what it looks like.
When the population of Rome goes from like a million and change to 17,000 very shortly.
To know what happens when supply chains of food are cut off and you have all these people in a city who can't survive without the constant busloads of food coming in.
To see what happens when currency inflates and evaporates.
To see what a delicate series of threads Holds up civilization and people just hacking them as if it's going to float on its own.
It's genuinely alarming and it is something that is unsettling.
I get you.
The epigenetic stuff is going on.
I may be throwing my words at a tsunami, but I'm still going to do it.
But Stefan, actually, the interesting thing about biohistory is that it indicates that you could stop this if you understood the physiology.
This is very controversial, but it's in my last chapter.
We've done stuff with rats, for example, which we've actually managed to make rats into much, much better mothers and also just to stop them from using alcohol nearly as much.
We're really, really losing pheromones.
And we're actually at the moment doing this whole series of research projects to try and work out ways of achieving the same thing.
What you need is a combination of what you might call a moral revival and some biochemistry.
But if you put them together, there's no reason why we couldn't stop this thing from happening.
Okay, so let's say I'll put my shoulder to the wheel of the moral revival.
Let's go into some of the—I hate to say gene therapies because that sounds all kinds of sinister—but some of the countervailing approaches that you can take to remediating some of these epigenetic changes without having to wait for intergenerational traumas to reverse them.
Well, it's actually— In a way, you've got to think that our current prosperity is very unnatural.
It's like an ailment.
And what you can do is kind of just reverse that.
It's like a medical treatment in a way that counters these very negative effects of too much wealth.
So it's like a treatment.
I would say.
And in fact, we are very shortly going to be starting a clinical group.
I'm setting up a university very shortly to teach psychology and attached to that as a clinic which will apply these ideas to deal with things like problems like obesity and drug addiction and gambling addictions and anxiety, those kind of conditions, which are all problems that relate to this decline of C in particular.
So actually, there are ways to do something about it.
It's just a case of working out the science.
And currently, my research is costing about a million dollars a year, and we're just pushing.
We're getting some very, very exciting results, which indicate that we really can do something about this.
The first thing would most likely be, as I said, treatments for addiction and so forth.
Right.
And what would the new treatments for addiction under your protocols look like?
A combination of behavior and biochemistry, eventually.
Most likely a pheromone.
When you're around, we don't realize how much we're influenced by pheromones.
If you're around people with low C, you'll tend to become lower C yourself by nature.
This is why religious revivals take place in waves, because there's Hi, I see people.
They kind of infect each other and the same thing is happening the other way around.
So if we can sort of give people a bit of an immunity to this pressure by using these pheromones in particular, you need to be the most likely way to do it.
And then you also help them and encourage them to be more disciplined, like you have things like Apple watches and so forth to help people to get more exercise, which is a V promoter, or to be more disciplined, to get up at the same time of day, or to control their diet more carefully, or to work more consistently, like not working one day a week is a very strong C promoter, Sabbatarianism.
So if you can promote the discipline and also eventually get the biochemistry to help out, to resist these great Influences that are taking place in our society, you should be able to do something.
Maybe only for a minority of the population, but if you could get even 5% of the population to have their sea restored, they'd be so phenomenally successful that within a century the rest of society wouldn't matter very much.
I have this image of...
with a water bomber going over sydney you know just seeding the clouds or something uh but that's that's very that's very encouraging because of course the stuff that i've talked about is into is multi-generational which i'm not sure we really have time for anymore but uh if you can do things more proactively i think that would be fascinating and and relieving i would certainly be against just just promoting it wild it That would be completely unethical and wrong.
It's an individual treatment that people should choose.
I mean, one of the most likely things too is to start off a medical treatment and then you look at people who've got teenagers and, you know, you can have teenage kids which are absolutely perfect and then they go wild during your teenage years and they take drugs and they drop out the rest of it.
If there was a way of Protecting them against some of the malign influences so they turn out to be straight kids who work hard in school and are successful and make good parents.
If there was something that you could do to help them to be there, I think a lot of parents would be in favour of it.
And this is not artificial.
This is just natural pheromones that are in the environment.
You're just changing the balance of it.
Other things too, like for example, cortisol is an incredibly important chemical.
And too little cortisol, it has a very, very bad effect.
It can cause problems like Addison's disease.
There are treatments.
The level of cortisol in baby formula is absolutely crucial to success.
If you have too much, it's very bad.
Too little, it's very bad.
How do we determine how much cortisol we put into baby formula?
It's what's in cows.
Nobody even looks at what's the optimum form.
So little things like that saying, should we adjust very slightly the level of hormones in breast milk?
Well, not in breast milk, but in formula.
That would have a dramatic effect.
And we've seen things with mice, for example, that you put a little bit of extra cortisol into the mother's water and the offspring are so much more successful.
So that's another kind.
We're not talking about doing anything artificial.
We're just talking about restoring what's a more natural and healthy balance that we used to have.
Right.
Now, I wonder if we could take a tour through—there's a number of examples in the book.
I'm sort of leaning towards the sort of rise and fall of the West as the example that you give later on in the book after the Roman Empire example.
I wonder if you could—tall order, perhaps—give a sense of the sort of the bell curve, right?
The rise and fall and how— How they influenced the rise and fall of the West, just so people can sort of hook it into something that they're probably a little more familiar with.
Okay, once you get, let's just talk about the early Middle Ages.
You have a society which is very poor, lots of famine, most people are on the edge of subsistence, but you also have this very powerful Christian church, very pervasive influence with all these very, very high C, high V kinds of teachings.
Now what that initially does is cause a dramatic rise in V. Which is the energy, vigor, but also to do with things like punishment and so forth.
And that rises to a peak in the 16th century.
And as that gets higher and higher, combined with relatively limited food, combined with Christian principles, the level of C starts to rise, which is why nation states start to come about.
And productivity starts to rise and greater technology arises.
And then after the 16th century, the level of V starts to drop.
But because it's still high and because Christianity is still strong, the level of C continues to rise to an extreme peak in the 19th century.
And the way you can spot that is looking at the treatment of children.
When you control children, especially infants, You get a very, very high sea.
And these people are not only just productive, but they're very, very good with machines.
They're very good at industrialization.
They're very good engineers.
And this produces this incredible outpouring of the Industrial Revolution, because this is the highest sea society in all of human history.
And then, of course, as we know what happens, this incredibly successful high sea society creates this enormous wealth, Which then starts to undermine everything.
So the level of V starts to drop much, much faster.
And then, particularly from the 1960s onwards, the level of C starts to drop as well.
And that happens very, very rapidly and increasingly so.
And the end result is collapse.
Right.
Right.
Okay, so let's just go over the mechanics that you describe in the book, if you wouldn't mind, about the degree to which...
The term control of infants sounds, you know...
We're not talking about what Alice Munro talks about in Poisonous Pedagogy, which is, you know, basically hanging them from baskets with lice in them and all that.
Control of children is this constant reinforcement of social standards, a reminder of...
How they're supposed to behave and that kind of investment.
Is that roughly approximate to what you're talking about?
Yes, that's right.
There's a very big distinction between control and punishment.
They're very different, in some ways opposite.
You can use punishment to reinforce control.
But my kids, for example, I'm a fairly high C character.
My kids do not disobey me.
And I don't whack them.
I don't need to.
They just know that if dad says, this is to be done, that's to be done.
And they tend to be very hardworking, responsible, well-behaved sort of kids.
It's a natural part of it.
It doesn't matter what the control is.
It can be manners.
It can be obedience.
It can be diet.
It can be religious observance.
It doesn't matter what the nature of the control is.
The fact that their behavior is limited and constrained, and ideally in a way that they accept.
If they resent it and fight against it, it's not as effective.
It's the thing that they sort of see, yes, of course, I'll do that because it's just natural to me to do it, to be disciplined, to be controlled.
That's what tends to produce the best character.
And this is the high C character.
Right.
And you do talk about some of the societies where, you know, sort of trainspotting style, the kids are just wandering around and nobody particularly interferes with or gives them any suggestions or attempts to shape or modify or mold their characters or behavior in any way.
And that produces much lower C, if I remember the book correctly.
Yes, it's one of the most destructive ideas, this whole idea, just love children, that's enough.
It isn't.
It isn't enough.
It doesn't create good character.
There must be control.
Otherwise, they will not have the work ethic, the willingness to sacrifice, the sense of discipline that they need to be successful and for our society to be successful.
Absolutely vital.
But people get confused.
They think control means punishment.
It doesn't.
You can have control without punishment, and you can have punishment without control.
Like, for example, just hitting a kid for no reason.
The complete opposite effect.
And very, very bad, I might say.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so, I mean, in a sense, you could say it's civilizing the babies.
Because, of course, babies are born relatively blank slate.
You know, Muslim babies grow up to be Muslims and Christian babies often grow up to be Christians and so on.
So it is bringing the standards and values to the child in a way that the child can internalize and value themselves.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Yeah.
Now, for the babies who are, I say, indulged or unparented would probably be the way that I would describe it.
For the babies who are unparented, there are some cultures where there is harsher punishment later in life.
If I remember rightly, it was in some of the Japanese cultures in the past, the babies were unparented or indulged, hyper-spoiled, and then later there were punishments heaped upon the children as they grew older.
That's characteristic of the ancient civilizations like China and India and the Middle East.
The interesting thing about Japan is it's the one Asian country where children were fairly tightly disciplined.
Not as much as in 19th century Europe, but much more.
And that's why the Japanese were so successful in industrializing so early.
Whereas if you don't control infants, and Muslims, Arabs, for example, are a very good example of that, but you're much harsher with older age groups, you get a society which is much poorer, less productive, but much more conservative and also more aggressive.
Very high V, but only very moderate C. They're not very low C, they still work, but they're not as hard working as, say, and productive as 19th century Europeans, for example.
And what's actually happening, you mentioned S before, S seems to be a genetic factor, as far as I can tell, that predisposes people to indulge their infants and be harsh with older children.
And that creates this more conservative, high V kind of character.
And what happens, early civilizations tend to be our kind, where you have early control, and they tend to be very creative, like ancient India, time of Buddha, or ancient China, time of Confucius.
They were sort of city-states, which is characteristic of these societies, immensely creative, incredibly productive.
And then they go through this civilization collapse, Ancient Sumeria is another example too.
Civilization collapse formed this unified empire, collapse into centuries of barbarism, and then when they come out of it, there's this, what we call the high S characteristic, where they're more indulgent of infants.
And I can see the same thing in my own house.
My wife's Chinese, for example.
And one of the very striking things is quite strict with older children, but very, very indulgent with younger ones, which I find very difficult, actually.
To me, one-year-old's quite old enough to understand.
But as far as she's concerned, until they're sort of like four or five, they don't understand.
You can't train them.
I've had the baby experts on this show who have actually done some experiments where they found moral reasoning occurring in babies of three months of age.
I've never imagined that my daughter, for instance, was morally reasoning at eight or nine months, and that was the time to begin her philosophical education.
That worked out very well.
Well, I think children can be trained very, very early.
The question is some people don't have the temperament to want to do it.
They absolutely adore babies.
They just tend to indulge them by nature.
So you get this high S. And what happens then is these civilizations become more stable.
They tend to form cosmopolitan empires rather than city-states or nation-states, and they're much less likely to collapse.
But they don't tend to become as wealthy or productive.
That's why the West was so powerful because you have this more primitive high, sorry, low S characteristic combined with very, very strong sea promoters.
That's what created the Industrial Revolution and that's why China and the Middle East and India couldn't industrialize in the same way because they don't have this extreme high sea temperament.
They have relatively high sea but not as high sea as in Europe because they indulge their infants.
Right.
And tying into this education of infants, the sea, you use for civilization, but it also mirrored in my mind the idea, Jim, of concepts.
That a sea was...
Because one of the things that characterizes the West from...
You know, with the dip, of course, in the Dark Ages, but all the way back from the pre-Socratics, is we have this constant addiction to push concepts to their logical extremes, so to speak, or to be consistent.
Civilization consistency concepts.
I think we have a theme going here of alliteration.
And, um, because you talk about the degree to which high sea societies extend their loyalties beyond the family, beyond the tribe, beyond the local clan, and are able to have loyalties to wider institutions like the nation state, like a distant king they may never meet or even see, and to things like the law and to things like ethics and, um, and so on.
That there is a way of helping infants and children to understand the value of adherence to abstractions they never see.
Not blood ties, but ties to virtue, ties to goodness, ties to responsibility.
And that, to me, is always associated with the deferral of gratification that is both a K- A case-selected species characteristic and a C-selected civilization characteristics, concepts and the deferral of gratification.
And I think it seems to me to be bound up into helping children to adhere to behavior that is not immediate.
In their, you know, pleasure, pain, hedonism, and recoil surroundings.
It is part of the same thing.
The characteristic of extreme high sea, especially when you have infant control, is impersonal loyalties.
That's loyalty to the law, loyalty to the republic, to the institutions.
And a good example of how this works is when the Sulla, the Roman general, marched on Rome.
I think it's about 90 BC. And the magistrates came out of the city and said, stop.
And he didn't.
Now the reason for that is because in the past, people's loyalty, the loyalty of ordinary soldiers to the state, to the Republic, was so strong they wouldn't obey the commander.
But by this time, because of the decline of sea, the loyalty is becoming more personal.
So that even though all but one of his commanders refused to go along with him, his ordinary soldiers went in and they took over the city.
And that was really the end of the Republic, even though it limped on for a few more decades.
And you see the same thing now, too, is people are becoming increasingly cynical about politics, and also there's a more and more focus on the individual leader.
As that goes on, our own Republican institutions are bound to decay because more and more people obey the leader.
See, people think about dictatorship as being to do with the dictator.
It's not to do with the dictator.
It's to do with whether the people are going to listen to one person or whether they're going to respect the law and the constitution.
And we see this increasingly in Western politics, and by the West, of course, I would include Australia, which is voting along lines of personal hedonism rather than the good of the society as a whole.
So it's very predictable.
The government workers vote for More government pay, and the people on welfare vote for more welfare, and the people who are profiting for the military-industrial complex vote for more military spending.
And there's this, seemingly, we've lost as a society the ability to sacrifice our interests for the sake of society as a whole.
And with that, plus the increasing power of the government to print money, borrow money, allocate resources, reward its friends, punish its enemies, and so on, You combine that kind of narcissistic, materialistic selfishness with the government's capacity to satisfy that greed.
And I think this is what is creating this unseen civil war that is tearing Europe apart, that is going to tear Western civilization apart, because people no longer have adherence to a society or a set of virtues that are larger than their immediate material interests and their voting rights.
You're right, too.
And what's going to happen is it's going to become more and more extreme, quite rapidly so as time goes by.
The government debt, for example, that's a horrific problem.
We can't solve it.
People want more and more spent on them, and they won't put up with the taxes, even if they can't afford the taxes.
Now what's going to happen in the end?
I'll tell you something that I've done in my own, one of the things that I've learned from it.
All my franchise agreements have an allowance for monthly CPI increases because I have no confidence in the currency long term.
If you keep on borrowing more than you earn, You keep on rising and rising debt, and productivity is not going to keep on going up.
Eventually, the government's going to have to print money.
There's no other way around it, and the currency is going to become worthless.
The same thing happened in the Roman Empire, and they actually switched during the empire.
They switched from money back to barter, and that was because they constantly devalued the currency.
Well, with us, it's incredibly easy.
With those days, they had to actually pull the coinage back and remint it with less of the precious metal in it.
Now, all the government's got to do is just Tap on a computer screen and they create billions of dollars more.
And that's incredibly disastrous.
This kind of currency cannot survive much of the loss at sea.
We're going to lose it.
And hyperinflation is one very obvious thing that will happen in the decades ahead.
And the R-selected or low-C-selected species don't really give much of a crap about their kids.
And I just don't see how it's possible for a society to look in the mirror and say it cares about its children while ladenning them with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debts and over a million dollars in unfunded liabilities before they're even born.
This fundamental...
Contract that is supposed to be between the generations, which is that you don't eat the seed capital that your children need to survive, has just broken down.
And it seems to me that we are no longer motivated by any love or affection for those who come after us, but we've turned into these...
We have appalling shark specimens of a feeding frenzy that has no care for those who come after us.
And people think this has something to do with the environment, and it does, of course, but even more fundamentally, the foundation of civilization, which is currency, which, as you say, low sea.
I think you gave the example of China.
Low sea can't function in the realm of currency.
They switch back to barter.
I mean, if we cared more about our kids, we would go to the wall to protect the currency that It keeps a civilization that we want to pass down to them afloat.
Look, it's quite horrific.
As you say, we're burning them with this massively pile of debt that they'll never repay.
At the same time, we're not even having so many of them.
I mean, in some Western countries, they're only having half as many kids.
And I have to say, I've done my part.
I've got 10 children.
And I love kids.
I think you've done your part and my part, so I'm happy about that.
Yes, but the people are not having kids and they're going to be burdened with debts.
And actually, the younger generation is in a very bad way.
Sky-high unemployment coming through.
And I think that's a lot to do with the decline of productivity.
But it's also just a terrible burden to put on them.
And they're going to be less and less able to cope with it.
We can't just keep on spending more and more money.
And my generation, which is the baby boomers, are the worst of the lot.
We've got these immense assets.
And we're just greedy.
We want more and more...
Ridiculously early, like 65 or earlier, which is crazy.
Absolutely crazy.
I don't intend to retire ever.
But the fact of the matter is you can't afford it.
You can't afford to have all these baby boomers just...
Going on the dollar and being supported by who?
At the price of massively increased debt.
And it's going to get much, much, much worse.
Oh, I mean, there's this horrible trifecta of we want more stuff, we don't want to pay the taxes, and we're not having children.
I mean, there's no way to square the circle of that in terms of sustainability.
It's completely impossible.
Yeah.
Look, the only hope is if we can do the science to try and figure out how to stop this thing happening, at least in interested individuals, and then you might be able to save a remnant and have some sort of survival.
The great thing about it is we can do what the Romans couldn't do.
The Emperor Augustus understood what was going on in Rome.
He could see the decay.
He could see people not wanting to have kids and being lazy and selfish and so forth.
And he knew, and he tried to stop it by law.
But governments can't do that.
Only individuals can change.
We need to have change at the individual level, and we need to understand the science to get the resources to do it.
As much as anything else with this book, what I'm trying to do is to get people interested to do the science, Every chapter in my book, there's an experiment that you could use to test my theory.
Biohistory is the first theory of society ever, of history ever, that you can test in the laboratory, that you can make non-obvious hypotheses and you can test them.
And what I'm saying to people is, look, You may think I'm crazy, but do the tests.
Do the science.
Find out if I'm right or not.
There are a multitude of different things that you could do to see whether my theory is correct or not.
And we've been doing them for the past seven years.
And when I first went to Professor Paolini, it was Dr.
Paolini in those days, in the psychology department at La Trobe University, I said to him, listen, here's some money.
I want you to test these things.
And he had no idea why.
But he said, here's a guy prepared to put up some money.
I'll see what happens.
And he started testing them.
And he said, all these amazing results come out.
Really, really striking changes.
Because I knew what to look for.
And eventually, he got interested.
And I said, okay, here's the book.
Read it.
And he said, yeah, that makes sense.
Because he understands the physiology of it.
But you can go into a laboratory, and you can do these things, and you can test them, and you can develop the treatments.
And, you know, these potentially billion-dollar drugs, too.
There's even money to be made.
And I want people to do the science.
I'm not out to make any money myself.
I'm pretty well off.
But I want people to do the science and find out whether I'm saying it's correct or not, and then let's do something about it.
Let's try and reverse these horrible changes.
Yeah, I mean, this is one thing that I find immensely encouraging, Jim, about what it is that you're doing, and in particular, the research you're funding and the work that you're bringing, the solutions that you're bringing to bear.
You know, there is this god-awful sense, if you study history, of knowing what's coming and not being able to stop it.
For the first time in history.
Yeah, first time in history that there's things that we can do.
We have this incredible communications network.
We have unbelievable medical advances and scientific capacities.
And we don't have to be cavemen looking at approaching media or saying, well, I guess that's it for us because there's nothing we can do.
Good example.
Yeah, we have untold capacities to avert disaster, but it is going to take significant brain-bending effort from smart people like yourself and so on to really try and get this word out.
It doesn't have to be the same.
Knowledge doesn't have to be, you know, the old biblical saying, he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Well, that was true when you could see things and couldn't change the disasters to come.
And for once in our history, in our benighted history, can we be human beings who do not change things?
Because of centuries of agony, but see something coming and proactively can work to avert it.
Yes, and I see that as possible.
And the two major keys as discipline behavior, which I would personally, I think religion has got to come into this.
Traditional religion is part of it, and the other part is science.
And if these two could be working together to reinforce and help each other, then we can do something about this.
And that's the exciting, optimistic thing.
I mean, if you read the book, it can be a bit grim.
And when you get to the last chapter, second to last chapter, where it talks about the decline of the West, it's a litany of Of horrors that are going on, you can so clearly see the trend.
And yet, as the last chapter says, it's something that we can solve.
Nothing in – no law can change it, but if we can change individuals, if people can be reformed from within, if we can escape this surfeit of resources, this overabundance, we can reform ourselves and we can change the world.
We can have an inoculation against inevitability, and that is a great thing to have in our fists for the first time in history, and I certainly appreciate and will do what I can to help spread the word about what it is that you're doing because it is very exciting and certainly puts the gas on the stuff that I've been talking about for the last 10 years or so. and I certainly appreciate and will do what I can So I hugely appreciate that.
Biohistory.org is where you go to find out more about this.
You have two major books out there, which I urge people to get a hold of and sit down and read and talk about this stuff with people, raise people's awareness.
You never know who in your circle is like a – A volcano waiting to erupt with curiosity if you just apply the right information to them.
So, you know, be not afraid and go into the social environment that you're in.
Talk about it at dinner parties.
Talk about it at parties.
Find out who's interested.
Send them to the right resources.
There's no reason why this can't spread.
And we can do the first time in history, jump the tracks of historical inevitability and roam free of our own volition.
