Latest / Thinking Class / #039 - Lorenzo Warby - Why Our Genes And Cultures Undermine The Quest For Equality

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#039 - Lorenzo Warby - Why Our Genes And Cultures Undermine The Quest For Equality · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Lorenzo Warby.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Lorenzo writes a Substack, Lorenzo from Oz, and he contributes regularly to one of Substack's recommended publications, which is run by Helen Dale.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Not on your team, but always fair.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Lorenzo and I talk about what hereditarianism is and whether it is compatible with our notions of equality, the pitfalls of making political decisions based on people's genes, cultures, and environment over considerations of equality, the current problems with making political decisions based on equality alone, why social justice ideals are so prevalent within our institutions, the core tenets of Western civilization and where they came from, and whether Western civilization has been subverted, and the prospects of a restoration, and much more.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is the second time Lorenzo has joined Thinking Class, and it won't be the last.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: You simply can't get bored of speaking with a polymath.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: We cover some serious ground here, and as in episode 29, when Lorenzo last joined me, he delivers.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you clicked subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching the show on, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to Thinking Class, Lorenzo.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Pleasure to be here.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: So um what I'd love to get into today is you've been writing quite a bit about hereditarianism, the impact of genes, environment, and traits on who we are and who we become.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And this is obviously, I would say, in stark contrast to the culture in which we live, which is very focused on egalitarianism, and we can get into all of those things and our social norms of equality.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: But perhaps before we start to get there, we can unpack that ism.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: So what is hereditarianism and why do you think it's an important concept for us to grasp?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the simplest way of thinking about it is we are not blank slates.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: We inherit things from our ancestors, particularly our parents.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that inheritance is genetic.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that inheritance is epigenetic, so things that happen after we're conceived.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And some things, some of those things are transmitted because we are a deeply cultural species, and culture is transmitted partly intentionally, a lot of it unintentionally from our parents.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a whole lot of inheritances which uh range from specific to your family, specific to your locality, specific to your culture, which results in differences between human groups.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when people say hereditarianism, they say they they often think, oh, you mean genetics.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, you don't just mean genetics.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Genes are absolutely inherited and they matter, but um cultures matter also.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: To give a stark example in Australia, we have both Maronite, i.e., Christian Lebanese migrants and Muslim Lebanese migrants, people who literally came from the same country, who are genetically, as far as I'm aware, not very distinguishable, but nevertheless, those two groups have had quite different general experiences in Australia, which are clearly due to their cultural differences.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the Maronites who are in communion with the Catholic Church have just used the Catholic networks and integrated into Australia very, very effectively.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now we've had a you know Premier Victoria, who was of uh Maronite background, we've had uh Lord Mayor of Sydney who was of Maronite background, we've got uh had a Governor of New South Wales who was of a Maronite background.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um so they've integrated extremely successfully.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Muslim Lebanese, not so much.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, there's quite a stark difference.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that there's not going to be a huge amount of genetic difference there, but there's a lot of cultural difference, and that's that turns out the matter.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, religion, religion sits at the base of culture so often, and I know people don't really want to get into it, but religion is obviously practice, tradition, ritual.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you're going to be embodying that out in the world, and then that's to extend back through generations and thus its behaviours, conduct, and how it is that you interact with people and how you see people, then it's bound to have an impact on um where it is that you slot in.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so to slot into a a Western country like Australia, from uh you know, ceded from that that Anglo the Anglosphere, as it were, um it it makes sense that those who are Christian are able to slot in more easily, but I don't think that's really something that in the public domain you'll find people speaking about.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if they do, it's it's tends to be in in hushed tones.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: But also hereditarianism, it's interesting to unpack it and to show that it is more than just genes, because I think typically people get very hung up on it being about genes being the sole arbiter of your future on one side, um, it becomes binary.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's either that, it's that that's the sole arbiter of your future, or it's blank slateism.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, what you've just pulled forward there is none of the above.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I should actually, without Lebanese example, there is a potential genetic difference, which is Christianity's generally very much against consinuity, some continuous marriage, don't marry your cousins, right?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Islam does not, particularly Middle Eastern Islam, doesn't have any such restriction.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they go the opposite way, they have a very high rate of cause of marriage.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an area where there would be a genetic difference.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But notice that's a genetic difference that flows from culture.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you have a culture that says don't marry your cousins, and you have a culture that says it's where your cousins are preferred marriage partners, that's going to have a genetic difference, particularly if you do it for 1400 years, but it's a genetic difference that flows from culture.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Culture and biology, people have found it very hard to be able to see how they impact one another.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think often culture can be spoken about as something apart from all of the other environmental aspects.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's this abstract thing which humans have created.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if that's because we're marinated in this worldview of social constructivism, but people find it really hard to get that culture can either be downstream from biological things and the other way around, that culture can impact environment and biology.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: How, Lorenzo, does hereditarianism square with equality?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: So let's try and think about what equality is.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Where did it come from?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a very Christian ideal, and the Christian ideal was emalgo de, you know, created in the image of God, and thus we are all afforded the same dignity in the eyes of God and worth the same dignity.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then over time, that has been institutionalized through equality before the law, or and later on equality of the franchise voting rights.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's been much later iterations of it where you've got the classical liberal equality of opportunity, you've got the more um communist equality of outcome, see equity.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Does the hereditarian view of the world square with any or all or none of those things?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's completely compatible with equality before the law and uh what you might call all the process equalities, right?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But um it means that you you will not expect outcomes between groups to be the same.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, you will expect the opposite.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: You will expect that because if you think of culture as a set of life strategies, because all life strategies are not created equal and are not equally efficacious, you will expect that there will be differences in outcomes between groups.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it says that just because you have differences in outcomes, that does not imply that there's some morally nefarious thing happening.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, you expect differences and outcomes between groups.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, differences and outcomes can be the result of nefarious social action.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let's discuss, you know, the Jim Crow South, for example.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is, when it is, those things are explicit.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: They're clear, they're not hard to discover.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: The trouble with the expectation of you will get equal outcomes between groups is when you don't, and you never do, when you don't, that create that leads you down the path of looking for invisible sociological gremlins to explain why you've got unequal outcomes.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is not invisible sociological gremlins, the problem is you've got this expectation which is unfounded.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because it's unfounded, it's completely going to continually going to be frustrated.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh one of the big problems besetting the United States is uh back in the early 70s, the US Supreme Court came up with the idea of disparate impact, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a test, which on the face of it is fair, but different groups score noticeably different on the test, that's a disparate impact.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And but the presumption was that there was something wrong with that.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you end up with, well, invisible sociological gremlins because there's no particular thing anyone's doing.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there's no reason to expect that if you have a test, which is reasonably fair, that each group will score in equally.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's just a nonsense idea.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason to expect that at all.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole lot of reasons not to expect it.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, if you deny the power of culture and you deny the power of genes and you deny that, you know, all life strategies aren't created equal, um then yes, you have this completely fallacious expectation, and you've got to look around for weird and wonderful reasons why your fallacious expectation turns out to be fallacious.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, there's a quote that comes to mind, which I'd read from Alexander Solzhenits in the Soviet dissident, and I suspect we'll get into this quite a lot later when we discuss one of your concepts that you've coined, dominion capital, which is how people respond to these things that they see in the world and come up with an explanation, but we'll save that for later.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Is he wrote that human beings are born with different capacities, and if they are free, they're not equal, and if they are equal, they're not free, which suggests that any attempt to equalize these outcomes which you've been talking about, inevitably leads to, or is inevitably enabled by a loss of freedom.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Someone's trying to impose those outcomes.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: So parking that for a little while, let's think about our responses typically to the world in policy, in politics, is to try to equalize everything in some way.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's got to be a third party to come in and do it.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Why why do you think that looking at the world through this hereditarian understanding, all of the interplays between gene and environment and traits and culture, uh, might lead to better political decisions than trying to force through egalitarianism in some of the ways that we've discussed it beyond equality before the law and equality of dignity.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's an interesting tension here because just assuming that everyone, every group should be equal, and then if they're not, there's something wrong.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: That, in a way, is a very simple, even convenient way to look at the world.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it then leads to you have to engage in a whole lot of plot policy complexity to try and make all that work.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Conversely, if you say, well, it's actually quite complicated, and you can expect lots and lots of people to have disparate outcomes, and you can't expect groups to have equal outcomes, that oddly enough, actually simplifies policy because you've just got to say, right, we've got to have the same rules for everyone and the same test for everybody, and then we let the chips fall where they may.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually a simpler um architecture of public policy than oops, they're getting unequal outcomes, we're gonna spend money here, we've got to spend money there, we've got to do this, we've got to do that, we've got to change that rule, we're gonna right.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's a much more complicated policy agenda, which of course is part of part of the appeal, particularly to various non-profits, um, bureaucracies and so forth who just live off this whole gravy train of we're gonna fix this, we're gonna fix that, we've got to fix that.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Conversely, if you go back to no same rules for everyone, same test for everyone, just let things go with for where they may, um, that's a much simpler policy apparatus, and um there's a lot less for the various busybodies to do, both in and out of government.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So uh there's an interesting trade-off there.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think the reason why people would push back against that notion is typically because to borrow Jonathan Haidt's moral foundation theory, where he talks about the difference between those who are a liberal and those who are conservative, quite broad brushed terms, but liberalism liberals typically tend to care more about care and fairness and justice, whereas conservatives will think will care about those things to a slightly lesser degree because they are then balancing out things like sanctity and tradition and loyalty.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then within that you've got libertarians, I suppose, on both sides that will actually be proponents of some of the ideals that you're talking about, which is just let the chips fall down.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: But obviously, when people see outcomes, if they typically care about care, fairness, justice, they'll go, hang on, but if we let the chips fall where they fall, and we see individuals, but they typically see people as groups of people falling by the wayside, then we must do something about it.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Would you would your rejoinder to that be that actually by doing so sends a a signal that who whatever whoever you are and whatever group you are part of, if that's the way you see the world, it's it's a call to get your ducks in a row to find a way to raise yourself up to those those standards and to culturally uh change in that way.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what you would hope for by doing this, or is it more just a let's just see what happens and that's the fair way of doing things?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yes.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the one of the things about all this is letting people know what works.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's actually creating quite important.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because if you keep saying, well, it's not there's nothing you've done wrong, it's some evil sociological gremlins in the society which is doing this to you.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's very, very bad for trying to work out now, actually, there are things you could do which would make things better for you.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so part of the problem with this is it's suppressing information that people should have about what works and what not what works, not works, what doesn't work.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I would also caution the chips what's made doesn't mean that you mightn't have some sort of safety net.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um because you might still have a safety net, it's just whoever falls down there, regardless of you know what group they belong to, are treated in the same way, right?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, Hayek, you know, who's not a big government guy, um, he was quite um calm about them being some sort of safety net to catch people.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's Bill Freeman for that matter.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's not the say it's not necessarily that you want a completely um you know Daltwinian process in your social arrangements, um, but it is a going back to yes, we can have this, but we don't have it targeted at identity groups.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: We just say, if you fall into this category, then you are eligible for this or that, right?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very much about um allowing things to move forward in an even-handed way without expecting that that will result in even outcomes.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, as a sort of reinforced point further, you've really got to think about what information, what signals are you sending to people?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you say, well, if your group's doing badly, then it's all in someone else's fault.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else is doing to you, and not saying, yeah, there's probably a bit of a story here.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: What are your life strategies?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: How are they being propagated?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is this working for you?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh yeah, I'm I'm I'm not a libertarian.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm quite strong in freedom, and I think governments nowadays do way too much, but I'm not a libertarian.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and one of the one of those um sort of unfortunate historical truths is by far the best commun uh community ever for getting people to not fall through the cracks for general uplift was Puritan New England.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that was not a very free society.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was an intensely theocratic minding your neighbour's business society, but because it had a set of rules that worked, uh even people in other societies would be fact as failures, were pushed into prudential behaviour that was actually successful.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there's as often in human affairs, some really unsettling trade-offs to be had in these things when you start thinking these things through.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Very unsettling trade-offs.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: We'll all be walking around dressed as pilgrims before we know it.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I'd like to get into the dangers of the hereditarian worldview, perhaps if it was misconstrued, which I'm sure it so often is, and there's a bit of pretext to the question.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: You as you were describing the the pitfalls of going down the identitarian worldview and dividing people purely into groups, and then trying to reorder society so some groups are uh given um more resources or focus because they have been determined to be more deserving, and others aren't, is that can cause conflict.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And as you said, so you were talking about these groups ultimately feeling as though there's a sociological gremlin, which is the reason why they're being held back, and a danger to me seems that that can be applied totally on the other side.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So if anyone is taking a hereditarian worldview and focusing purely on things like race and ethnicity, and well, there's clear differences between us groups, and if I look at my political opponents on the other side who are saying that there are sociological gremlins keeping me down and we must rebalance things, and then they end up, whoever it is, the proponents of it start trying to reorder society.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is those people who are being impacted by that who started to take that hereditarian view, at least purely from a race and ethnicity point of view, could go, well, hang on, I can see the sociological gremlins forming against me right now, and now I'm being held down.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And if we're all so different, then perhaps I maybe I deserve more because I'm being kept back.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that is one of the dangers of the hereditarian worldview and and losing this sense of um freedom, equality, ability to um talk about things as you see them arising in in real time instead of uh putting a taboo and a suppression around the subject?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: To marry together the identitarian idea of very strong concept of groups with the heritarian idea.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you're saying you're acknowledging there's differences between groups, but then you don't acknowledge that groups are populations.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're group, they're they're could they're families and individuals together as populations.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you say we're not getting uh equal outcomes between groups, that's a statistical comment, right?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: So some people in one group will do very well, and some groups in another group will do badly, but it's just that one group has more of the former and less of the latter, right?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: But there's going to be a huge amount of overlap.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem with the identitarian thing is it puts these hard boundaries around what are human populations, which are fuzzy boundary things, right?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so, yes, if you're going to marry hereditarianism with conflict theory, you are setting yourself up for very, very nasty outcomes and nasty social strife.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I mean, go back to Jim Crow.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what Jim Crow did, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: It said that the whites were better, the blacks were worse.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: These are groups that have to be defined very, very separately.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, it was the one-drop rule.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you had any African ancestry, you were in that group, and you had to be pure European to be in the other group.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, I mean, there's in there's there's incredible dangers in putting hard boundaries around groups.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I would point out that of course the equalitarians do the same, the identitarian equalitarians do this very, very precisely, um, and it's having very invidious uh uh problems.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and one of the things that's um a real danger on the equalitarian side is if a group does unusually well, they've got their acts together in various ways, that means they're targets.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because if your explanation of success is oppression, because your explanation of lack of success is oppression, then if a group does particularly well, well, they effectively become the new Kulaks, aren't they, aren't they?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're the group that's exploiting others.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only explanation for them doing well, because that's the only explanation that you're letting in.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you can see this in the US with the way the Jews have become a targeted group on the grounds that they're successful.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Asian Americans became a targeted group on the grounds that they're successful.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now it was sort of surreptitious, but the Ivy League universities were clearly putting the thumb on the scale to keep Asian Americans out because they were doing too well.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was, you know, the explanation, the the justification was to let more African Americans in, but then you're back to you've you've screwed up the equal process for everyone, equal rules for everybody, you're putting your thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways, and you can't do that in a way that is actually fair.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was clearly ridiculous that an African American would get one result on the SAT, an Asian American would get a different result, and there was a penalty.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people could mathematically deduce the penalty for being Asian American and the benefit for being African American.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yes, whether you do it on a um hereditarian basis or whether you do it on a qualitarian basis, putting these hard boundaries around groups is a very, very dangerous thing because then everything becomes zero-zarm.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know, what my group is getting, your group isn't.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yes, and it's also, of course, you're going to be false because you look at the outcomes and there's gonna be a real spread in each group.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there are rich African Americans and there are poor Asian Americans, and there are uh you know poor, poor Euro-Americans.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in fact, uh this is actually one of those things where people who argue against the hereditarian discussion of a genetic level between groups of humans, one of the things they say is variation between groups is much larger than variation between uh with variation, sorry, variation within groups is much larger than variation between groups, which of course is true.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: But then they don't they don't apply that backwards because that exactly the same point applies to the equalitarian building big barriers against groups.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: If, as is true, the variation in social outcomes within groups is bigger than the variation in social outcomes between groups, and is typically much bigger, then clearly the group membership isn't the crucial thing, is it?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a statistical propensity going on, but it's not actually determining the outcomes.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, your group membership isn't determining outcomes.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: One, you know, one group's got various statistical benefits from you know different life strategies, perhaps genetic differences, plus interactions between them.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not actually the group that's divided, it's not the group membership that's driving this.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very dangerous way to think of the world.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and a way that is frequently employed to view the world, and we see it in institutions, and you touched on it when you're talking about Ivy League institutions, the university, sorry, having their thumbs on the scale in the admissions process.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was actually speaking to someone who was in the corporate world working for a very large organization, quite influential, and each year they have performance year-end reviews.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And within that, everyone goes and gathers all sorts of feedback on how well they've done on projects and what their colleagues think of them and what clients think of them and all of those things.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then they all go and get their cases put forward by someone who's representing them to try and determine what their score will be, which will determine what their salary and their bonus will be.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then they all have a conflab and say, right, this is what these people are getting.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And promotions are decided on the back of it as well.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: He then said it was the first time he then realized there was a diversity and inclusion champion, which then applied a separate score to the end-of-year process.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the people he was looking after, he was white, he was Australian, uh, this was in Australia, and the diversity and inclusion score then ended up dropping his end-of-year score, which meant he missed out on promotion.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, How so, just to be clear, he's not getting promoted because of his sex and his ethnicity.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer to that was yes, in a very roundabout, mumbled fashion, is the way he relayed it to me.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so he had effectively had to go and tell them that for diversity and inclusion purposes, he's not going to be getting promoted this year.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: So with there are thumbs on the scale going on all over the place, and perhaps we should start digging into the worldview that we've been touching on and we've been skirting around.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you have been writing about what motivates people who are now running institutions.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um you've talked about it being faith-based.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically, you've you talk about the term the dialectical faith.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: So what is that?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's the notion that there's a dialectical process, uh opposites, entities, and things interacting with each other, which over time will let you achieve a society without oppression, provided those things which are getting in the way are excluded or repressed.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So history has a direction, it's a dialectical process of the interaction, and at the end of that process, there is this golden utopian rainbow where there'll be no oppression.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's a that's essentially the idea.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's something that you know comes mostly out of Marx.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we talked about the public sector and the business world and what drives some of the people who are in charge of those institutions.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And anyone who's listening or watching who's spent any time in these sectors will see very frequent references to human capital and to social capital.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And within that, they'll generally see commitments to social justice ideals and programs.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: And in some of your writings recently, Lorenzo, you've coined a new term, dominion capital.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: So tell us what that is and why it's so bound up with the dialectical faith.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the idea is that if you Dominion capital is the combination of skills and connections, therefore, human capital and social capital, because social capital is basically connections, and human capital is basically skills.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the combination of human and social capital operating in networks to give people social leverage in within and into institutions.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a structure that motivates and coordinates people to allow them to dominate others.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's why, and dominate institutions.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I call it dominion capital.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's about control, and it's about that combination of skills and networking, skills and connections to give yourself control.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you need you need a motivating structure, which is also a signaling structure, right?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: The way you use language, what you approve of, what you don't approve of, and what is motivating you in to come together in this way.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: So there seems there needs to be signals and motivations to coordinate and drive you.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the dialectical faith with the notion that you're thinking there's conflict between groups, um, that uh there's um oppression everywhere, this everything's about structures of power, everything's about structures of oppression.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: But if you coordinate and uh operate together and you know, repressive tolerance, you exclude all those who are either facilitating oppression or are um allowing it to happen or actively doing it, if you exclude all those, which of course delegitimizes everybody who's not part of your network, then you can at the end of the day create this wonderful utopian society where there is no oppression.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um so the dialectical faith generates both the language signals where you know we're all together, and also the motivation, the glorious future which we will create, and the sense of who's in and who's out.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, this can work as a layered thing.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a core group who are the you know the full devoted people of the dialectical faith, but you can have a larger group around them who uh just buy into the various narratives, and they get coordinated in as well.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: They they they may not be entirely aware where all these things come from, and they're certainly not likely to be deeply steeped in the theory, but they've taken up the narratives, they've taken up the signals, and they are you know effectively become part of the uh networks and the connections.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you sort of get this sort of onion-like thing.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's a core, and there's groups going out who are using those social strategies because they're made available to them.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the core keeps generating the signals and the ideas and the narratives.
• 34:14
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• 34:49
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• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds very, very Soviet Union, and it reminds me of that Vaclav Havel uh greengrocer parable where he talks about the green grocery puts workers of the world unite sign up in the in the window of his grocery store.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, not because he believes in it, but he knows at least the motivations of the greengrocer is he knows he needs to say it to stay safe and to continue having some kind of a living and not be harangued by the authorities.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose that's one such motivation for you being on the edges of the core, is go along with it because you get an easier life.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose for some others, and I think this is probably going to be an argument you'll hear from lots of the conversation going on in the public domain now.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Christianity is being spoken about without it being dismissed as everyone's taken on that Tom Holland uh um narrative, which is the reason why we care about freedom, equality, compassion, all of those things is that we're just so steeped in in Christian ideals.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so, even to the to the untrained ear, these ideological commitments and drives and spasms that we we're all um being impacted by sounds on first hearing to be quite reasonable.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you are from a culture which prizes freedom, equality, compassion, then anything that uses words which are about liberating people, which are about equalizing outcomes because it's about fairness and because we don't want to tread on the drown downtrodden anymore, it's well, why wouldn't we go along with it?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's definitely an interesting wrinkle that people don't realise.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I also wonder how much I think people in the core know this, and let's go back to that Solz Janitsin quote of a society that is free is not equal, and and one that is equal is not free.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Is those in the core might well know that ultimately they are trying to bring about an unfree society because the world they want to bring into being, the utopian world you're talking about, is one which requires them to be the governors of it, the ones who can bring it into play, and they're they are uniquely disposed to be able to do it.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Others aren't capable of doing it and perhaps don't understand the need to do it.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so, look, we're we're gonna bring it into being, and and whilst we're gonna take these things away, this is for the good of everyone, including you, really.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you see the links there?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, um uh Horkheimer, the founder of critical theory, um actually was very explicit about this in one of his later, um, one of his later, right.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm quoting Max Horkheimer here.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: The more freedom, the less justice.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: The more justice, the less freedom.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is very, very explicit, right?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's not ambiguous at all.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: So Hawkheimer absolutely sees it in this way.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um yes, so and very much that that notion that people have to be stopped from saying bad things.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: They have to be stopped from thinking bad things.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and the the when you said it was Soviet, it is Soviet, but there's an interesting and somewhat frightening difference is that the Soviet model, of course, was the centrally directed party, the Bolshevik model of democratic centralism, as Lenin said.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: So he is the master of centrally directed party politics.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: This doesn't work like that, not at all.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: The modern version.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's all networking.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there are, you know, nodes in particular institutions and and and non-profits and academic institu uh academic departments and so forth, but it's fundamentally a networking process.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's not centrally directed in that you know, Bolshevik Party Politburo.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's no there's no Politburo equivalent somewhere, there's a sort of uh shifting group of thinkers and activists who are in mutual communication, and that's why the signaling process and the language process is so important.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're not receiving you know instructions from the Central Party headquarters, but it's this evolving structure of ideas and concepts.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what works for people gets selected for, and what doesn't work doesn't get selected for.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that over time actually makes it more powerful because it looks it it's selected to get into the cracks, selected to get into the weaknesses, and then move those bits further in the direction of the social leverage and the benefits of the people playing the dominion capital game.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, it is Soviet in a sense, but there's a really profound sense in which it's very un-Soviet because it's so networked and about mutual signalling rather than centrally directed.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is where people get a bit blackpilled about the future of civilization.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I know John Gray, I wouldn't say he's he's well, actually, he probably is quite naturally blackpilled, but the political philosopher from my part of the world, the northeast of England, he believes this is why liberalism and liberal ideals are are finished, because it's not like previous ideological um uh capture of institutions, which is uh led from a top-down, you know, there's a core elite that that spreads it out and then imposes it on everyone.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually that there are so many people of different stripes and backgrounds and geo geographies without that top-down institutional thing that brought it to the institutions in the first place, and everyone's taken it on voluntarily.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so then you see if you spend any time anywhere in the corners of the internet, people saying, and and I get this quite a lot as someone who hopes that there's something to restore from the the ruins of civilization or the good cultural uh products of our civilizations, that it's just cope to talk about it if you were uh as if there was something to restore, because most people have just given up on it and they have taken on these new fancy ideas um wholeheartedly and and off their own volition.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and and let's talk a little bit about the networking and and how these ideals have gained such traction, Lorenzo.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was reading a book recently by Jacques Aloul, who is a uh he was a he was a Catholic French sociologist, and he's written lots of interesting books, some about the the technologization of society and our culture.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: But he's also written a book on propaganda.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's called Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll read the quote out and then perhaps we can explore whether it's as simple as propaganda as the reason why we've ended up where we are.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: So the quote is: to be effective, propaganda must constantly short circuit all thought and decision.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces, but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate and expected action.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's become it's become common to those uh on the right or the left of this political spectrum, if that exists, to say that universities and the media have enabled mass brainwashing in some way.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: So is that true?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is is propaganda the reason why all of this has become so popular if we're if we're talking about enabling, not enabling, um making use of all of the different medium by which we communicate and all of our different institutions, and then people take it on faith rather than critically thinking about it, and it becomes the thing to do.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's why it became so popular, or is there more to it?
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so popular in is a loaded turn there because in the general public public population it is in fact not popular.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: The general public is not clean on all this stuff at all.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're just feeling left out and powerless, right?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or they're just getting on, they're just putting their heads down and getting on with their lives.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the question becomes in which social malus is popular, and it's clearly very popular amongst a whole lot of university graduates.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's very popular amongst much of the professional class, it's very popular amongst the NEWES, it's very popular amongst the laptop class, which is Term that you want to use.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so the question then becomes why is it popular amongst them?
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the reason is we live in such a bureaucratized society.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And with a bureaucratized society, conformity is selected for.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh sort of busybody model projects are selected for because that gives the bureaucracies more power.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be at all sorts of levels.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Your corporate HR department can be very enthusiastic about this stuff because it gives them lots of leverage and lots of things to do.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: There can be non-profits who are very enthusiastic about this stuff because it generates a donor stream and it gets them into institutions and it gives the uh and it gives them an income stream as well.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, to take the most silent example of the moment, the way various um gay and lesbian advocacy groups turned into trans advocacy groups, despite the fact that these are very different agendas with very different implications, which despite the blatherings of intersexuality, are actually very opposed to each other.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, hence the push in recent times for the LGB to divorce the T.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: So but why is it why does it work?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: It does give people a strong sense of belonging to a moral elite, it does give them a whole set of narratives, which are easy framings of the world, it does simplify the information requirements to some extent.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a frame where you can just explain everything, right?
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it gives you a powerful moral sense of moral righteousness, which for people whose position in life is not based on where they were born or who their family is or their locality, so not ascribed relations uh connections, but earned connections.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: You have a degree, you have a professional qualification, you have this thing.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: What's in your head is what gives you your status, and that allows you to connect with other people who have the same broad things in your head.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: So your networks become very readily transnational.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And as many people have commented, you can end up in a situation where you've got more in common with a professional in another country than you have with the working class in your own country.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that those combinations of what's in my head is the great thing.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: And remember the dialect of faith, that's very much about what's in your head because it's about this vision of the future, and this your commitment to this vision of the future is that splendor in your head that you're going to essentially worship and motivates you because you know I I'm a great moral person because I am committed to this vision, which can be deeply, deeply motivating.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so, yes, so there's a whole lot to do with professionalization of everything, university administration, university education, but academics in particular are prone to the splendor in their head view of the world.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and the dialect of faith is splendor in your head to the nth degree because it's a commitment to this wonderful future.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you see through all the oppression around and you see how unjust everything is, and if people like you were just given the authority, uh you know things will get better.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we're Homo sapiens, we're very, very good at rationalizing and moralizing our self-interest.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but also, I mean, it's not to be um, I call it dialectical faith for a reason.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: You shouldn't underestimate the capacity of people to become devoted agents.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is a concept from uh Scott Atran and his colleagues, who in particular studied Israel-Palestine um conflicts.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what they came up with was the idea of the devoted actor, the person who uh there are things they just will not trade off.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: There are things, sacred things, things that are sacred to them, which they will not trade off against.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: They are devoted actors, so they will not be instrumentally rational about those matters.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because if you have people like that, your potential for coordination and effective social action goes up quite a lot.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's the same point in another way that Taleb's pointing to when he talks about the power of an intolerant minority.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've got people who will just push and push and push and push and push and will uh not compromise on key things, or the most able do is um sort of stop where they've got too much resistance and then go round and try again.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this way, when they meet too much resistance, they go round and try, they just keep coming forever.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um that all can make it very, very powerful, very effective.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so you end up with a situation where a lot of people go along with us all because it's it's what you get a quiet life.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there are genuine penalties for not going along.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: So why is it popular?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's a layered question.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because for you know, lots of people it's not popular, they don't like it, they don't approve.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in fact, you know, it's fairly clear that in your country the Tories are going to have an absolute electoral disaster because they got the votes of a whole lot of people who had never voted Tory before, and then they had no idea what to do about it.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: None whatsoever.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh and the problem in part is the Tory politicians and the staffers are professional class, they are laptop class, they are anywheres, and they just aren't connecting with the physical class, the somewheres, whose boats they manage to get in large numbers, and then just because it the framing, they just don't have the right framing to think about these issues, have just basically wasted away, um, and they're going to get slaughtered at the polls almost certainly, because they didn't understand the people who voted for them, and they didn't understand why they had voted for them.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: If or if they did, that's even worse.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because why did you have this electoral base unit worked up and then just toss it away?
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I I suspect it's just at a certain level, they're just too anywhere, they're too professional class, they literally don't understand their own voters.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: The unconscious ultimate betrayal of votes.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: We've we've talked a bit about why people may get um sucked up by these ideas.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, most recently, you've made a case that sounds similar to Eric Kaufman, who was on my podcast not that long ago, talking about how actually we can blame the woke and those who are into the dialectical faith all we like, but it's the bleeding heart liberals that have enabled it by letting them through the door.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, Eric makes a powerful point there.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, and and I think it's hard to disagree.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: People want an easy life ultimately and are averse to conflict and being shouted down.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: So anything that comes, I think, uh packaged up in the language which we've talked about that we're we're familiar with because of growing up in at least the shadow of a Christian culture of equality, compassion, freedom, uh, and all the liberatory stuff that goes with it, is you're you're gonna wave that through.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: And lingering on that point a little bit more, I know you've been writing about the the cities that represent what made Western civilization.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose when we talk about Christianity, we're probably referring to Jerusalem at that point.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I uh whilst we have been talking about the crossover between Christian Christianity's cultural products and how people get sucked up with the ideological stuff, which is very different.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk a little bit about why it this dialectical faith might be so subversive actually to Western civilization, even if it does look like there's overlap, because we've talked about the liberation, particularly around uh ethnicity, we talk about sex.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: Does it does it endanger cooperation, increased chances of conflict?
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because, for example, you wrote in one of your articles about the four cities that are archetypally represent Western civilization, that one of the one of the the key hacks, I suppose, of this successful civilization is that we um made non-kin cooperation very possible through Christianity, and that's how it came to you know dominate the globe with its economic offshoots and what have you.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, what what what do what do you why do you think it's so subversive to those four tenets?
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe we could walk us through what those four archetypal cities are that made Western civilization.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the four cities are Jerusalem because of the Judeo-Christian, but particularly the Christian, because that became dominant.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: So Jerusalem for Christians and Christianity.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: Athens for philosophy, history, and uh the systematic study of politics, right?
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: So uh philosophy for Plato and Socrates, systematic study of politics, Aristotle, um history, Herodotus, Thucydides, then a fon.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so that's there are two cities.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: So one Jerusalem of the Gospels and the Torah, Athens of history, philosophy, and systematic study of politics.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Alexandria for two things one is science.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um Aristotle he was an observant philosopher, but he wasn't a scientist.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you did get in the Hellenistic people, well, people who were serious scientists, and Alexandria was the great city for them.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: But Alexandra and Alexandria is also the city where you get a lot of the synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem, right?
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: So taking national war, natural war philosophy and making it compatible with monotheism.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you get Philov Alexandria does that uh Judaism, later many centuries later, maybe Maumenides is going to bring that to fruition.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and Capital of Alexandria does it for Christianity, right?
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a synthesizing city, it's a scientific city, but it's also an occult city.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the esoteric tradition in Western thought, Alexandria is the great city for it, so the medicism and Gnosticism and so forth.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the one of the sort of constant embarrassments in Western intellectual history is occultism and science are not nearly as separate as people think.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's not merely that um chemistry came out of alchemy, which it did, but it's also the sort of people who ask questions about how the world works can ask a very broad range of questions about how the world works.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, you needn't go past Sir Isaac Newton, scientist and alchemist, um, who was playing both sides of the that game, and that's actually a genuine theme, and I'll come back to that.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: The fourth city is Rome, because Rome gives us the rule of law, uh, Rome also gives us engineering.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that sort of make things work element of Western um thought is very Roman, but so is rule of law.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's very Roman at all.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's Roman at all as well.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh and in fact, non-king cooperation, what the Christians essentially did is they sanctified the Roman synthesis um of, you know, uh don't marry your cousins, only one husband, only one wife, consent for marriage, individual wills, um, and the the Christian church comes along and sanctifies all that, and then you know, in fact, expands it.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so uh so there's the Rome, it's the Rome plus Jerusalem that really gives you the non-king cooperation thing that we the Western Society uh made such a success of.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: But Alexandria has that, it has the science element and has the occult element, and so it it has the element of the secret knowledge that the initiates have that makes them understand the world so much better than everybody else.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the dialectical faith is just seeped in that.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: And part of it's quite direct because, of course, Marx got so much of his framing, he then rearranged it, but he got so much of his framing from Hegel.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, the early Marx is all about wrestling with Hegel.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, everything he wrote, almost everything he wrote in the 1840s, is about wrestling with Hegel at one level or the other.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Hegel's a hermetic thinker.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Hegel's quite explicitly a hermetic thinker.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he's actually steeped in this occult mystical tradition.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so that sense of, you know, the greater knowledge about the world given to the initiates, or as we would say nowadays, those people with critical consciousness, which is the updated secularized version of the same vision.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: But also, um, if you see the world as uh as a structure of oppression, you see society as a structure of oppression, that's very Gnostic.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: It needn't be supernatural.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea that we are imprisoned in structures that are imposed upon us and we need to be liberated from, that's deeply Gnostic.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so, yeah, and you see in all the versions of the lectical faith, there's a demiurgic force, you know, a maligned force that imprisons people.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: So in Marx, it's the bourgeois who imprisoned the proletariat.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: In radical feminism, it's patriarchy who imprisoned women.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: In critical race theory, it's white supremacy that impris people of color.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in queer theory, it's normalcy that imprisons those who are oppressed by normalcy.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you get the same pattern over and over again, but it's this there is an imprisoning power, which people have to be liberated from, and there is secret knowledge that if you're initiated to, you see the world as it truly is, and if you get to operate on that knowledge, then you can liberate society.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, in the original version, of course, all this is mystical and supernatural, and what Marx does, Hegel, oddly enough, does this a bit, but Marx really does, is make it material and secular and ostentially non-religious.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: But in fact, when you dig into it, um, all the religious patterns are there, they're just not presented as supernatural.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're they're being the spiritual, the porgent, the social.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, quote James Lindsay's very nice paraphrase of all this.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: So um so there's a lot of Alexandrian um thought or that sort of tradition that ends up um in becoming sectorized, um, as so much has been over the last couple of centuries.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: Become sectoralized.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: So the subversion is not necessarily because it sits totally outside of Western civilization and its underpinnings, but that it focuses too heavily on one aspect of it and and diminishes the roles of the other um fruits of Western civilization, like Roman law, like the things that came out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in uh by seeking by seeking primacy through occultism, scientism.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting, interesting.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and what what prospects, I suppose?
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked a little bit about black pills, we've spoken a bit about how eminent political philosophers like John Grey know uh we're done.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, at least in liberalism, something else has come to take its place, and now that that battle's taking place, and then there are others just saying, well, that's that, we're we're done, you know, civilization's run its course, we've we've collapsed.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and people will attribute that to the dialectical faith having spread and and uh having done so relatively unchecked.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Although I would say the Overton window, the the bounds of acceptable acceptable discourse has shifted a lot in four and a half years, and lots of people are pushing back, and there is institutional pushback taking place, even if it's under the rubric of neutrality and moderation.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: But without force feeding you an answer, Lorenzo, what prospect do you see of there being a rebalancing of those fruits of Western civilization that the dialectical faith recedes and that we might have a healthier way of living once more?
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yes, I'm not a great one for prediction.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the reason why I'm not a great one for prediction is that we had way too much history.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um people have people have a very bad record of predicting.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's why successful predictions stand out so much because they're quite unusual and quite rare.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I can see scenarios, but I'm I'm not convinced you can get a clear sense of what's going to happen because I think there's too much happenstance.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, but part of what's going on here is we're in a position of enormous evolutionary novelty.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, our social arrangements and technological capacity have way outrun outrun our evolutionary adaptations.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and to to the most obvious perhaps example of that is our you know food environment is wildly maladaptive now.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um people are recognizing.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, um a lot of this is um bureaucratic malfunction interacting with evolutionary novelty.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: So to take a again keeping on the same theme, this then, nutrition guidelines.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: The official nutrition guidelines make no evolutionary sense, they don't make no scientific sense, they're nonsense.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: They make a lot of bureaucratic sense, unfortunately.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: They make a lot of corporate sense, again, unfortunately.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but to just take an example, I was listening to Nina Telfts, I can never pronounce people's names properly, uh, the author of The Big Fat Surprise, um, which is taking down the idea that fat is your enemy.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: But she was saying that the people doing the revision of the US nutrition guidelines are flatly refusing to look at any of the evidence about ketogenic diets and low-carb diets.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're just flatly refusing to look at the evidence.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_00: And nowadays, of course, there's a lot of evidence that these diets work, that these food regimes, which is the better way to think about them, these food regimes work.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they're just flatly refusing to look at the evidence.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the problem is if they look at the evidence, their previous nutrition guidelines will look like the crap they are.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: And no bureaucracy wants to admit that no, we've been getting it systematically wrong for 30 years, but you should trust us, honest.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um you're getting that bureaucratic dysfunction.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I like to point out to people is that the one thing the modern world took from a non-Western society the last couple of hundred years was the Chinese system of meritocratic bureaucracy, where you have exams to select people for your public service, right?
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_00: That was a very Chinese idea, which we adapted.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: And because it made a certain obvious sense.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is people looked at the Chinese idea, but they didn't look at the Chinese patents.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the Chinese patent is yes, you get a great bureaucracy that's quite efficient and meritocratic for about 150 years, and then the bureaucratic pathologies start multiplying, and things become a lot less functional, and a lot more people become alienated, and you get a much more corrupt, self serving elite because you've selected the capacity, sure, but you haven't selected the capacity.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Character, and over time more manipulative personalities come to the fore.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that the dialectical faith unfortunately has going for it is it's great for manipulative personalities.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: It really empowers manipulative personalities.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, bureaucracies can be really bad at becoming dominated by manipulative personalities.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: They can be quite bad at not filtering out the you know manipulative, destructive personalities.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yes, so we're getting what's clearly increased bureaucratic dysfunction, interacting with huge amounts of evolutionary novelty, interacting with a dialectic of faith which in fact selects for bureaucratic effectiveness.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you yeah, I understand the grounds for pessimism.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: However, I'm not convinced you can say, oh, well, it's just all over.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yes, we are at the end of a civilizational cycle.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's true.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a civilizational cycle that starts with the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth century and basically extends until the sexual revolution.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's that to me is a civilizational cycle.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: We are at the end of that.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's clear that in certain ways Western civilization absolutely is decadent, and I define decadence as the loss of adherence to things previously held sacred.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, simple definition of decadence.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yes, in that sense, Western civilization is suffering from decadence.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's true, and you can see a lot of very negative patterns, and you can see that, for example, family structures are no longer nearly as robust as they used to be.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and family structures are very important in transmitting culture.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can see that the church congregations went away, and we don't really have a replacement.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you get a lot of atomized and isolated individuals and households.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the the the the the important thing for congregations was not so much their Christian framing, although that didn't matter, but it mattered.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: You just got people meeting each other every Sunday from a you know right around your locality, and you could check talk to each other and you can network and you could get a sense of everywhere everyone was.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um that was actually a really useful social function, and it's not clear to me we have anything that replaces that very effectively.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you can see a whole lot of um, you know, things to be depressed over and things to be pessimistic about.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would caution against, therefore, you can write us off.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, first of all, because as you say, there are various pushbacks.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those are more wholesome than others, but they exist.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is that the dialect of faith makes everything worse.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: It does not make anything better, it does not improve the operation of anything, um, except sort of moralized grift.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um so the the the thing that will come out possibly then is it will just be brought down by its own dysfunction.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that it it does, everything it touches does go to the crap.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and people will over time begin to notice.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: And even though well they are already at noticing, some people are already noticing, and people who've gone along with this stuff because uh you know it's um it's easy if they start associating it with serious dysfunction, which is inconvenience and a problem for them and their kids, then they may not be willing to go along with it every everywhere near as much.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you might get that sort of pushback.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you also might uh part of the part of the problem is a sort of false view of successful models elsewhere.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um, if you're wondering about the problems of Western civilization, let's talk about some of the problems of Russian civilization, or some of the problems of Muslim civilization, or some of the problems of Chinese civilization, because the point about lots and lots and lots of evolutionary novelty applies to everybody, and the closed, narrow societies are likely to handle it worse than the open societies, where there are you know the you know the dialect of faith wants to stop being open societies, but it hasn't achieved that yet, however much it's pushed on there.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so if you get, for example, if the first really dramatic crash uh is outside the West, then that'll have a different effect than if it's inside the West.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so you know there are societies which are in parlor states, um Iraq, for example, is is in much bigger problems than people realize, uh big mostly because of water problems.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um Palestine, not Palestine, sorry, Pakistan.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Pakistan is a deeply, deeply sick society.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh we've already had the sort of semi-collapse in Sri Lanka.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Venezuela is in desperate straits.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We we haven't had a sort of thorough social collapse as such.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_00: If we get one of those outside the West, that might be a oh my goodness, moment.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um so uh so and there's a lot more, I mean despite the attempt of the sensors, there's a lot more information floating around.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot more possibilities floating around.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, there are all sorts of things to be pessimistic about, because we do have increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracies, we do have this networking through our professional class of toxic and dysfunctional ideas, we do have all this evolutionary novelty that we're not coping very well with.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, we know if you bothered to look, there's evolutionary novelty that we're not coping with.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not some mysterious force out there.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, you can identify that these policies are dysfunctional, as people increasingly do.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can identify these aren't things aren't working.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the biggest problem is coordinating against it.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a lot of dissatisfied people.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's one thing.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_00: The question is is can you effectively coordinate against this, these structures, which are which are you know, as we've been discussing, very motivated, very coordinated.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so it's a it's a coordination problem on the other side.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, we don't know how that's going to play out because somebody or a group of somebody's can suddenly come up with something that coordinates the anti-woke push really, really well.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the people who are going along with it because it's easy will defect because you know it stopped being easy, or they just couldn't take, put up with dysfunctions any longer, or whatever.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I you know, I think, although there are certainly grounds for pessimism, I don't think we can say, well, yeah, it's over.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because we don't know the the flow of events, the contingency of events.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we don't know how uh people will react to some sort of unexpected crisis.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um the West pulled together quite well over Ukraine, for example.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Almost darkly well.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I agree actually that the black pill, this is over, that's that you can't really subscribe to because we've seen countless examples through history where things start coming to the fore in response to some kind of a threat.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_01: So let's think of some examples.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose people thought the Soviet Union was probably going to last forever until the Prague and Budapest and Bucharest uprisings.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose people thought the economic model that the European Union had been um promoting for so long and which the UK had been a part of would continue going on forever until Brits felt as though it was not serving them.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And not just from an economic perspective, but cult those cultural disintegration going on, the mass immigration changing the feeling of towns and cities, and people going, hmm, I'm not too sure I'm comfortable with this.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then they made it count with the ballot box.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I dare say we'll see that again in five to ten years' time when there might be people on the ballot box who represent an anti-mass immigration stance because people are having a sense of who we are and what we're not, and uh and you can't get away from that in humans.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I was reading Robert Toom's English and the History book recently, this big tome, it's excellent.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a point where he talks about the English colonies that were along the northern coast of France when there was all of that um joint kingdom activity going on, the constant toing and froing between whether England has France or France has England.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a point where the French actually didn't mind being under English suzerainty, as it were, but then the more of them that there were, and the more they saw they were in control, the more they started to get a a sense of national Frenchness and let's let's not have them in charge of us.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess the point I'm trying to make is anything that seems to be causing some disruption in the body politic, in whichever way, whether it's in identity, whether it's in kind of economics, is there is going to be some kind of a pushback, there's going to be some kind of a coordination, whether it's effective or not, is another question entirely, but you can never write it off.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lorenzo, you've been writing loads of interesting stuff recently.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, people can find you and your wonderful substat, Lorenzo from Oz, uh, and also your contributions to Hallendale's Substat, not on your team, but always fair.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_01: You've been writing about Dominion Capital recently.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Can we expect another big essay series coming out?
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've got at least two, possibly three essays in the pipeline, um, which will be extending the Dominion Capital thing.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_00: The the essay that's currently before me is the one on one on uh the connection between Dominion Capital and what I call spurious expertise.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Things that pretend to be expertise but are not, and there's a deep intimate connection there, which I'm trying to tease out.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um I am um going on a research trip to Central Europe um Wednesday, next Wednesday.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll be in Central Europe for about a month.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the writing, the writing may drop off during that period.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yes, I will definitely uh sooner or later come back to it because you know I am in the process of writing those essays.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yes, there will be more on this matter.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, looking forward to it, and who knows, maybe our paths will cross in Central Europe.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be there around the same time.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So let's stay in touch.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Lorenzo, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to the next tete tete and happy travels.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'll hopefully see you there.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: I've enjoyed it very much.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:18:53
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• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.