Latest / Thinking Class / #029 - Lorenzo Warby - Forget The War Of The Sexes: Men And Women Were Made To Complement Each Other

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#029 - Lorenzo Warby - Forget The War Of The Sexes: Men And Women Were Made To Complement Each Other · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Lorenzo Warby.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Lorenzo writes for one of Substack's featured publications in 2024, Helendale's Not on Your Team but Always Fair, as well as for his own Substack, Lorenzo from Oz.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lorenzo writes frequently about evolutionary psychology, human nature, the institutional health of the West, the differences between civilizations, and the impact of political ideologies on public life.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's got a very interesting background, having worked in the Australian public service and the non-profit sector, and now he puts on medieval and ancient days for schools.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Lorenzo tells us about human social dynamics and why women are not a finer form of Homo sapien, why we shouldn't see the sexes as in competition with each other, but with complementary qualities, the impact of feminism and the feminization of society, the advantages of Western civilization, how small networks of ideologically motivated people can have an outsized effect on society, the different sides of egalitarianism, the cultural degradation of the masculine, expect to hear about the latest Star Wars films, and the impact of male coordination on human evolution.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: This was one of my favourite conversations by a country mile.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose you can never get bored of speaking to very smart people, and Lorenzo is very smart.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: He is a polymath and has an uncanny ability to avoid using jargon every other word.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: You won't see the room he was sitting in while we were speaking, but it was filled with towering stacks of books.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you can tell that he's spent years self-studying philosophy, psychology, human nature, evolutionary disciplines, history and politics.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a very, very enjoyable conversation.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching the show on, because the more subscribers we have and the more guests we can attract, the faster Thinking Class will grow.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Thinking Class, Lorenzo Warnby.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for joining me.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: She um is the author of one of Substack's recommended publications, or whatever they call them, kind of a best publication.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And she decided to give you a platform.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: She obviously found you very interesting, as I certainly have done, as I came across uh various essay series that you published on them.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And Helen, her name betrays her is a woman, and for people's background, she um was a rather high-profile lawyer and has since become a writer, um, since she has uh given up her law profession.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And um, the series that I got in touch with you about, Lorenzo, is you wrote um uh an essay series subtitled Women Are Not a Finer Form of Homo Sapiens.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Helen, whose substack is called Not on Your Team, but always fair, uh, clearly saw something in this.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose modern sensibilities would say, why would a woman commission that kind of work?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And also, what is this man's agenda?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, is he a misogynist?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Does he not believe in equality?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start Lorenzo with why you chose to wrote an essay series subtitled Women Are Not a Finer Form of Homo sapiens?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so uh a bit of background.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: Helen Dow and I have known each other for quite some years now.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um and Helen's had a fascinating career herself because she was a novelist and then she was a lawyer, and then she was a novelist again, and now, as you say, she is uh income is basically from writing, which puts her in a very small group.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um and yes, so she commissioned a few essays for me, just one-offs, and then I had a this massive burst of productivity, and I produced this long, long series of essays called Worshiping the Future, and she decided that would be make a great um series.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: So I've been doing that on her substack and plus a couple of occasional other essays.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: On my own Substack, I've been sort of doing various essays, including the women are not a not a pure reform of Homo sapien, not a finer form of Homo sapien.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh what's what prompted me that to do that is I had I have a project which hasn't appeared anywhere online, which is to write a book on marriage applying the evolutionary lens.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: So marriage through the ages, and focusing on the fact that we have remarkably biologically expensive children, and this fact which we sort of kind of take for granted, if you think about it seriously, it it really is an eye-opening way of looking at human social dynamics.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_03: So I had that project.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um I was dismayed about various current trends.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: I I had all I had long thought that the bio progressive anchor things in an imagined future from which we know have no information is a very bad way to think about things and a very bad way to set your moral benchmarks.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so this all came together in this great burst of essays, um, and uh which have been unfolding.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: But part of what I did there is I looked at feminism and I also looked at feminization.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: And when you think that through, that then you notice that one thing that feminism does persistently is try and implicitly or explicitly argue that somehow women are better than men, and this is a continuing theme in feminism, and grappling with that with the evolutionary lens is why I wrote on my own subsac that series on women are not a finer form of famous sapien.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um now, men and women, we are a cognitively dimorphic species, in that there's an overlap in our psychology.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just talking about here about the you know personality traits.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not talking about spatial awareness or uh spread of IQ or anything like that, just personality traits.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: We are uh quite a cognitively dimorphic species, um, and that has consequences.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the consequences is the way that men typically go bad is rather different from the way women typically go bad.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing is, women also have their ways of typically going bad.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and that was what I wanted to explore in those essays.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to make very clear is it's it's much nicer to live in a gender egalitarian society.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, it's, you know, I've read far too much history and evolutionary anthropology not to be aware of the fact that it's much nicer to live in gender egalitarian societies.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: I have no problem at all with gender egalitarianism.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: I do have a problem with pretending that women always make things better.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: No, they don't.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's as silly as claiming that men always make things better.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: No, they don't.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um we we are equally troubled, we just and equally um, you know successful and valuable, um, we just troubled in somewhat different ways.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, violence, for example, is overwhelmingly male, mostly.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um there is one area where violence is evenly male and female, and that's violence against children.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: Women who's like to commit violence against children as men are.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: So when women are dealing with a group of homo sapiens who are systematically physically weaker than themselves, they're actually as bad as men.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but generally speaking, of course, when they're dealing with adult males, they're dealing with a sex that's physically stronger, and so their bad behavior comes out in different ways for obvious reasons.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the other so the argument, I suppose, you're you're you're putting forward is uh besides the let's not try and raise one sex above the other, is that there is a complementarity between the sexes, that raising one to a point of making all of the important decisions without any input from the other or trying to diminish the other uh in some other way is likely to lead to adverse outcomes than trying to create a situation where the sexes and the differences that they bring can complement one another.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean it's very clear that one of the um one of the major advantages, advantages of what became known as Western civilization is it was much better using the um skills of women than the other civilizations, comparable civilizations.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: So it was much better using the skills of women than Islam was, than the Confucian societies were, than Brahmin society were.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that comes out of the Christian sanctification of the Roman synthesis, which includes, of course, single-spouse marriage.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you have single-spuse marriage, you have partnership marriages, um, where you've got a common interest in your shared children, and um, which leads to a pattern where it was perfectly bog standard in medieval Europe, for is the husband away, he's left his wife in charge.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just he too cent of the king was away, he left the queen in charge.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, or if you're Richard Lionheart and your mother is Eleanor Aquitaine, you leave your mother in charge.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: But um no, no slur on his wife, Barringer Navarre, but she was a 1918, 19-year-old girl.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: And if your mother is Eleanor and Aquitaine, well, obviously those two, you can see who's going to leave in charge.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: And nobody okay, nobody blinked.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: It was the yeah, obviously.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, sure, of course you're putting your mother in charge.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but that's a pattern that's sort of just endemic and normal in Christian Europe.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: But of course, if you have one elite male who has several wives or concubines, they're all competing for the prospects for their children.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: You don't go away and leave one of them in charge.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's a complete recipe for disaster.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you've got the elite women who are who are, you know, locked in these internal domestic battles for their children.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: So that's where their talents go.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and um, you know, haring politics could be you know literally poisonous.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh so yes, they you know, much worse at using the talents of their women.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um you can do get some interesting exceptions in the Islamic world, for example, but they turned out in cases where, for whatever reason, the guy only had one wife.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um and then you see something more like the Christian pattern, but generally speaking, that's not how it works.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and yes, so um back then there's you know real advantages in living in a gender egalitarian society.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_03: So it was a persistent advantage of the West that it just used the talents of its women rather better than the alternatives, the Afro-Eurasian alternatives did.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots of people who look at the impact of Christianity clearly on Western civilization as being at its root, but people are making the argument that we are uh have become like fish in water, we don't really recognize that we are surrounded by Christian assumptions and ideals.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Tom Holland, quite famously in his book Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind, where he talked about how Christianity created our moral structure in the way that we see the world, argues that almost everything that has come out of particularly the Reformation, all of the ideological strains like feminism, for example, he argues even the idea of wokeism in the end.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but these would are not possible with any other lineage, like genealogical, ideological, genealogical lineage than Christianity.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so feminism came on the scene, and as you have said, is that there is a an assumption within it, um, at least within strains of it, that actually it's trying to raise uh women above men.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um how would you describe the changing face of feminism?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and and what are the other core assumptions that we've come to live by, particularly in the Anglosphere, with the rise of feminism?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's um okay, so we had a women's movement before we had feminism as such.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you can argue back and forth.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but forms of feminism are actually relatively old, they go back to the 19th century.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but it's not clear to me that many suffragettes would have described themselves as feminists, for example.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um perhaps they would, perhaps they would, but that's not clear to me that they would.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: And feminism really came on straw in the 20th century.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: When of course the push for women's suffrage and more equal treatment of women in law, you know, goes back to the 19th century.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, the for example the Married Women's Property Act.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so yes, so what's happened is there's there's a long what I call the emancipation sequence in Western society.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: So abolish the slave trade, abolish slavery, Jewish emancipation, Catholic emancipation, uh adult male suffrage, adult female suffrage, gay liberation, women's liberation.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's this sequence of movements to incorporate more and more people in the political order and the equal legal order.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: So this is obviously something going on.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: This is deeply Christian in its roots, right?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: We're all you know children of God, we're all equal before God.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, more or less every um political philosophy in the West is some sort of Christian heresy or some sort of Christian derudic.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: The one that is most clearly not is Nazism.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that's why, as Tom Holland has pointed out, Hitler is a secular Satan.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: And it's why people regularly say Nazism's worse than communism, even though communism is going to fit way more people.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's narcissism seen as worse because it's much more viscerally a denial of those underlying Christian assumptions.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um Hitler, because he was operating in a country that was mostly Christian, um in public was not all that direct about that all the time.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: But it's very clear that his underlying logic was deeply, deeply, deeply anti-Christian.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and in fact, in his table talk, he waxes lyrical about how war Islam is much better because it's a good warrior religion.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um so, yes.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: So uh you get these very strains going on, but what makes feminism really striking in this sequence is it's the one that decides it needs its own philosophy, it needs its own view of the world, right?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: So when people said uh, well, we've got to abolish slavery, they didn't need a special ideology for slavery.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: When they when Jewish emancipation came, you didn't need a special ideology for the Jews.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: When Catholic emancipation came, you didn't need a special ideology for the Catholics, right?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: They it was just about joining, right?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and and take Martin Luther King, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: A man who, in his thinking, is Christian to his boot hills.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: If you read any of his stuff, he's a Christian all the way down.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um he what did he what did he appeal to?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: He appealed to two things.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: He appealed to Christian uh regard for the other, and what my neighbor of that, but he also appealed to the ideals of the American Revolution, the American War of Independence.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: So what he's he's not saying we need a special system for African Americans.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: He was saying you have these two things which demand that we be included, that we be added in, right?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh feminism is the first one that comes along and says, yeah, no, we need our own special, special um philosophy for it.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um and it's really quite striking that you have this difference.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's not merely we want in, but we somehow we need this special ideology.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: And um, I think one of the reasons for this is it's the first one that has to actually deal with biological differences.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, we're a sexually reproducing species, right?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: There are differences in our role in society because we're male and female.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of feminism was very uncomfortable with the idea that men and women are cognitively different.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: Because the fear was that if you admitted that, it would get in the way of women getting access to everything.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: That that that I mean, obviously, a lot of the argument against it was, well, women are like this, so therefore we shouldn't let them in to all these areas.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: So an obvious move is no, no, no, no, no, no, we're all the same.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and uh so yeah, you had to sort of grapple, you had to make claims that were different from the sort of claims you had to say, because you know, all the other claims were basically we're human.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: We're human, so we're allowed in, right?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they didn't have to deal with, you know, there were claims about biological differences, but they're all crap.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and um so but with women, you do actually have to deal with the fact that, you know, they're physically weaker on by and large, and um, they have different roles in reproduction, and um, despite claims to the contrary, we are actually cognitive dimorphic.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's a huge area of overlap, but there are some really distinct differences between the two.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: So they had to deal with biological differences in a way that the other let us in movements didn't.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so that's led all sorts of places.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: The inclusion aspect you're talking about there is very interesting because it strikes me that those who were representatives of groups, whether they be um ethnic or racial or or or religious in the past, we're not saying let us in and then elevate us to the top of the pyramid.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas I suppose what you're saying is what's marking out some of these later demands for inclusion, and I think you can see this within the corporate world of today as well as it's not just include us, but then let's also exclude other groups on the basis that they have too much power or they don't quite fit or or whatever.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a it's actually a sharp departure, I suppose, from that Christian heritage of all equal in the eyes of gods.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then I suppose it it this is probably why a lot of it gets uh labelled as being some kind of neo-Marxist thing, right?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's that Orwellian phrase which is all animals are equal, just some are more equal than others.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I I'll a point I would make here is that the women were the first who were in some sort of position to do that because they're half the population.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: The other groups didn't have the numbers.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you have argued that there are well, in fact, before we get into that, let's let's think about the number of people who would identify themselves as feminists.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I read, um, I can't remember where it came from, but I saw a poll that was conducted, it was way back in 2015, it was in the United Kingdom, and it was conducted on behalf of the Fawcett Society, which is known for its progressive credentials.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you would have actually thought that they would be trying to um uh push even greater numbers than this, but uh they found that 81% of women and 84% of men supported equality for women.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: However, only 9% of women and 5% of men identified as feminist.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: So um why uh well I suppose what what becomes the driver then?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one, how has it become so popular um in terms of a frame of reference and seeing the world and and creating policy, both public and private?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And who are the drivers?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh who are the ones that are carrying this forward?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: You you you've talked about the AWFLs, the affluent white female liberals, and and and and have some views as to what drives them.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you could unpack that a little bit for us, Lorenzo.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: So there are that that survey was done by Survation, which is a very um reputable polling company.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: Now, you get wide range of results because there's two different ways you can ask, do you identify as a feminist?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: One way is you can identify, you can you can you can define feminism as belief in equal rights between men and women, and then ask people, do you identify as a feminist?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: You will get very high rates because people don't want to say they don't agree with equality between men and women, because overwhelmingly, clearly they do believe in equality.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: So if you define feminism that way, you'll get very high weights of people saying feminist.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: However, salvation very carefully separated those two questions, which is why you've got over 80% of people endorsing equality between the sexes.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: You never Get that pie if you conflate the two together.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: But they got a much, much lower rate of people saying feminists, they identify feminists because they had separated them out.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: But here's the big but that identifying group, very, very disproportionately highly educated, ensconced in the institutions and organizations.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of this is about how do the networks work and where are they operating?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: And if you've got something that coordinates and motivates people in effective networks, they can have wildly disproportionate effect on institutions.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: And if you want an absolutely extreme version of that, I refer you to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: They were a relatively small group, and there were lots of competing groups, but they were brilliantly led by Lenin.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: They were ruthlessly coordinated, extremely motivated, and so they were very effective.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: So if you get networks that are both coordinated and motivated, and well targeted to organizations, they can then create a situation where they can have wildly disproportionate effects.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: Now, as the uh the American writer Wesley Yang says, no one ever votes for vocus.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: It never wins a vote in the electoral sense.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: But it pervades institutions because it's it's carried by these strongly motivated and coordinated networks.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so part of what happened with feminism is you had that.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: You had highly educated women, uh very successful women, um coordinating together, pushing their pushing the agenda, having very good media access, and so forth.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: So you get disproportionate effect like that.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: What's also happened is what I call the dialectical faith, which is not Marxism per se, but the core sort of idea is that the first spin-off is Marxism.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: So Marx put them together.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: The first spin-off is what he did, which he said, well, it's all economic, it's about bourgeois and capitalists and proletariat and so forth.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: And since then, various versions of the dialectical faith have wandered forward.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: So you get uh Lukash and Gramsci doing cultural Marxism, you do um Adorno and Hawkheimer and Marcus doing, I mean, what do you want to call it?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: Western Marxism, critical Marxism, neo-Marxism, and then you get other versions, and that turns up again.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the ways it turns up is in forms of radical feminism.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: So there is a patriarchy that oppresses women who are the oppressed group, and the patriarchy has to be overthrown, and marginalized people and oppressed people have a moral status that their oppressors don't have.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so you that's a leverage then for saying, you know, white males are have this history of intrinsically being oppressors, so they have to be suppressed, and women are, you know, we're a historically oppressed group, so they have to be elevated.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and the sort of the most extreme version, at least at the moment, is of course uh with the trans agenda, where the trans become the ultimately oppressed group who must be elevated.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, they are you know that their moral claims are so great that we have to change our language, and we can't have male and females on forms, and you can't refer to you know uh mothers.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's got all this disgusting new language about chest feeding and you know, breeding persons and so forth.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, all offensive nonsense.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: But trans have these two huge advantages.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: One, there are um sort of become the ultimate oppressed group, um, even though that is vastly exaggerated.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the other thing they've got going for them is that the public dialectical faith is you have to transform society so it fits in with human subjectivity more perfectly, which is what Marx said communism is going to do.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and there's nothing that's more an example of that than transforming people's biology to fit in with their gender soul.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um so trans is just perfect for all this stuff.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and also you get the uh one of the ways that religions sort themselves is commitment to what looks like to outstriders to very strange beliefs.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: And by committing to them, you're showing themselves very much an in-group person.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: So if you say, well, of course, somebody for penis can be a woman, um, lots of people are going to go, that's rampage.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: But in the in-group, it becomes a moral marker of how committed to you are to the overthrow of oppression, um, and becomes the moral marker.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a whole lot of things going on together, um, which uh and feminism has become very important in this.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's really striking when you look at what comes what becomes wokery, how many of the key thinkers are women.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_03: Outside feminism itself, there really isn't another movement or set of movements which have so many female key thinkers.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you know, well, think about um Kimberly Crenshaw, for example, the woman who um she didn't come up with the term, but essentially created the structure of intersectionality, which is a way to tie all these things together.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um people like um Ms.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: Gender Trouble, Judith Butler, for example, um Ms.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: White Fragility, and so on and so forth.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: There's a whole series of women, Gail Gail Rubin, who is very important in the in the founding of the queer movement, um, and so forth and so forth.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: There's it's really striking how many women are involved.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's tying all this together, and of course, um they've all got a massive interest.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: If you're going to parade that if you're the more marginalized and oppressed you are, the greater your moral status.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: They've all got a massive interest in saying, well, as a woman, um, and the implication of this is, of course, as a woman, my moral perspective is superior to that of any man.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so these things sort of come together.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yes, so the you I suppose you've described that what we're we're witnessing is uh um a moral caste-based order, which I think you've dis you've used that terminology in your essays.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be interested to know uh why it is you think it is that women are so prominent behind these um particular changes in society.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is it because they were inheritors of the um ideological moral architecture from Marxism, which you just talked about there, um, which just sorts the world that way and it's it's motivated them to fight back against oppression and to um overthrow all the boundaries and the guardrails.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you think it's something to do with um women and their relations to one another?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um is it is it is there something psychological beneath it, or is it a mixture of the two?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, absolutely a mixture of two, because you these patterns, you know, you get feminists to push some of these patterns who are in no sense Marxists or not beholden, at least other than extremely indirectly, to what I'm calling the dialectical faith.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um so there's there's a mixture of things going on.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, part of what's going on here is uh there are differences in patterns between men and women, right?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: So uh and this is becoming increasingly an issue.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: In a situation where if you criticize men it's feminism, and if you criticize women, it's misogyny, you can't talk in a respectable fashion about the downsides of female behaviors which don't exist.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um now if you go into any schoolyard, you can see that boys, men, and tomboys form teams.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: Girls, women and sissies form teeks.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's a sort of pretty standard pattern.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um and this generates different behavior patterns.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um and obviously, you know, it's not all men on one side and all women on the side on the other side, but disproportionately that's how it works.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: And institutions are formalised teams.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's how they're structured.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: If they become feminized, then they become more like emotional cliques.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and there's and women, of course, very much do shaming and shunning behavior.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: Because if you're the physically weaker sex, you can't be open about your aggression because you're the physically weaker sex.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, in evolutionary terms, typically you've got children in toe.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, you really can't be open about your aggression in the way men can.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the typical male aggression is physical, right?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_03: Physically stronger sex.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: Typically didn't have opposite toe, right?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but women have physically weaker sex, so you get the way female aggression is typically done, is it's typically done as relational or reputational aggression, and it's typically paraded as um uh moral concern or social concern.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: This is not aggression, this is just moral concern.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: This is not aggression, this is just social concern.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so of course that's where you get cancel culture, but it's also where you get people denying that there is cancel culture because if they're admitted they admit there is cancel culture, then they're admitting their own aggression.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and women, uh, for you know pretty obvious reasons are very reluctant to admit their own aggression.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: So you get the situation where typically women are better than men at reading other people's emotions because they're the physically weaker sex with Bobs and toe, and they really have to be able to read other people's emotions, and they're more likely to see the emotions as a threat because physically weaker sex with bobs and toe, right?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: But men are better at reading aggression because women won't admit their own aggression typically.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um so this affects how institutions work once they become feminized, but it also means that with shaming and shunning behavior, you can enforce a conformity on your networks that can actually, in one way it's corrosive, but in another way it can be a very, very effective.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's a great essay from Ms.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Magazine in 1976 called Trashing, The Dark Side of the Women's Movement, which is written by Joe Free or Jareen Freeman, where she talks about how rife shunning and shaming behavior is inside the women's movement.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um and my my cynical view is the reason why there were so many lesbians so prominent in the women's movement was that um they're the ones who were better at teamwork.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: You needed them in the women's movement to be have an effective movement.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: Now the disadvantage of that is lesbians don't have much inherent interest in productive relationships with men.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: So relying on the the lesbians who are better at teamwork to be their structure of your movement creates problems.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh and then that's actually affected the way feminism works because uh it's it's not remotely true that all feminists are lesbian, that's not even close to true, but lesbians were disproportionately important in organizing the movement, and to some degree disproportionately important in creating um the modern ideology, um, you know, Gail Rebens and Judith Butlers of the world.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and yeah, you can see how, you know, if you're a bit of a butch lesbian, you're going to be a bit alienated from the expectations of society straight off.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_03: So you're going to have, you know, you're going to be attracted to views, which elevate yourself rather than um put you off in this weird thing in the corner.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody wants to be in the weird group in the corner.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and any outlook which says, no, no, actually, this gives you a terrific advantage in understanding the world, is going to be very, very attractive.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so for all these reasons, you can get a situation where people are actually not very representative, like a large number of people, but if they're particularly good at networking and particularly good at enforcing conformity within their networking and particularly good at punishing people who speak out, then you can be um very effective.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's a great um Caleb essay called The Power of an Intolerant Minority, which is on Medium.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's also in, it became a chapter in one of his books.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and he talks about there how you have a group which will, you know, just will not bend and will just push and push and push and push and push.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: They can have a wildly disproportionate effect, particularly in a situation where most people just want to get on in their lives and they can't be bothered, and that and if they have to deal with this, it's unpleasant, so they just put their heads down and get on with it.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, then you can have biologically small networks be wildly disproportionately effective.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I remember reading, I don't think it was that essay, but it was in certainly in one of Taleb's books, and he used the example that you really only need about 5% of people to be intolerant, intolerant and intransigent.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to shift what what they say goes, and you're not going to bend them, and they can bend the whole society that way.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he used the example of at the time, um, you know, less less than it was less than 5% of the UK population was Muslim, but um, in where where there were lots of Muslims, it was typically a higher percentage than that, and that changed the food industry.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there would be halal meat um being the the primary meat type, for example, in something like a subway chain restaurant in the UK, because it was just the easiest way to go about things without getting complaints, whereas everyone else didn't pay it any mind.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: And um the network effects is interesting.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's so much in there that's interesting, but sticking with the network effects for a moment, uh does this imply that almost the only way that you could ever get any balance against um or or to try and push the tide back in any one direction, whoever it is that's the intransigent group, is for another intransigent group to pop up with their own sets of demands and ideals and um the network effects ripple the other way.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or or or does that kind of um what would typically be called the silent majority, but they kind of let things slide a little bit, they're a bit annoyed by it, they wish it didn't happen, but they're not gonna put their heads above the parapet.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do the numbers haven't end up counting for anything in the end, the ratios, as people are calling it.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yes.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that's the interesting question about mobilization.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, if you have two very committed networks, but one is pushing stuff that the big majority of people agree with, they have an obvious and huge advantage.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um and to take an example, I use the example of the Bolsheviks earlier.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, they're only a small group, however, and it's a very big, however.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: The election for the Constituent Assembly in um late 1917, early 1918, the only truly democratic election in Russian history, about 80% of the voters voted for some form of socialism.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the Bolsheviks were pushing we are the best socialists.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: So even though they did horrible things and generated a lot of opposition, they were nevertheless pushing in a direction where a lot of people bought on to them.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, one of the one of the reasons why the Whites lost is apart from not being as well coordinated, a lot big reason why they lost is they just they were pushing against general views rather than with them.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: The Bolshevik advantage was they're ruthless, they were coordinated, and they were pushing with general views, not against them.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: So if you you possibly don't need quite the as ruthlessly intransigent group on the other side, but you do need a sufficiently committed group that will just say no, no, no, and can be effective at mobilizing popular opinion on their favor.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: So if you can, you know, if you can turn it into a clear electoral issue and then mean it, then you do have a big advantage.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the Tories are in the process of destroying themselves because they won an issue where they were speaking for the majority, which is have control over migration, and they've completely and utterly betrayed their voters on this point.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um to a level which is just stunning.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, from the opposite side of the world, I can see that they're destroying themselves because they didn't keep faith for their voters on this very obvious issue.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: But still they don't.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, still they the betrayal continues, right?
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: They can't organise themselves to do anything effective, which leads to the suspicion that they don't actually want to do anything about it.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um so uh yeah, and then certainly they haven't been on the grapple with doing things with the civil service to make it actually bend to their will, which suggests um, given that, you know, given the way the British system works, if you want to bend the public service in the that country to your will, you can, because there's almost no constitutional limit into what you can pass as legislation.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um and you can certainly do the, you know, what I always thought it was the blindingly obvious thing, which is set up a separate department of education committed to border control, which is what we have in Australia, for example, um, rather than having the Home Office, which obviously doesn't believe in stopping migration, and is obviously a severely dysfunctional institution, leaving it in charge.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just idiocy.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um but the solution is that I don't care.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button.
• 41:17
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• 41:25
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• 41:29
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• 41:41
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• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, this is why I think uh the accusation has typically been level leveled at the Conservatives since um the rise of David Cameron and George Osborne, that ultimately it was the conservatives coming to terms with New Labour, the Blairite view of the world.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um when ministers break ranks and resign and say there are just orthodoxies at play there and we just didn't get it right, everyone goes, Well, why didn't you do anything?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: You were part of the government, and they don't they they uh some of them don't stop short of actually saying the reasons why.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: But as you've implied, is that they're clearly going along with a lot of the ideological assumptions, otherwise, they would have done things like repeal the various things that had taken place in those 13 years of Blair and Brown government that would have helped advance a small C conservative agenda.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: But these are, you know, economic liberals, they're left liberals, they're just slightly more right than those in the Labour Party.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, there are some that do um espouse more typically conservative traditional values, but is that the majority of the Conservative Party?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um is that the majority of people in the United Kingdom?
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: To a degree, yeah.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're probably much more balanced.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think the average voter is further to the right than Labour and Conservative, but not necessarily fully right wing.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: So whether we'll ever get those politicians, who knows?
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you're right, there has been some seriously crazy stuff going on here.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I I I have to show my colours on this.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think you know, it's a historically unprecedented thing that we're seeing with regards to the immigration numbers.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's changed the fabric of the country and will continue to do so in the generations to come.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And clearly, no one's ever run this experiment before at those numbers, a country of this size and density of population.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: And um, we're probably only just seeing the beginning of it, but um, that is uh at least another hour podcast uh somewhere else.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but but let let's let's switch a little bit to impacts on on.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Men and masculinity.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you've talked a little bit about how education society has become feminized.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: You also spoke in your essays that there has been a cultural degradation of the masculine.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: What did you mean by that?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what evidence do we see of that?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, well, well, being a person of a certain age, the um uh most obvious thing is what's been done to Star Wars.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: There's been a cultural degradation of the masculine in what's been done to Star Wars.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh and particularly the characters of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, particularly Luke Skywalker.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um the Kennedy Star Wars, the Disney Star Wars, has been a massive degradation of the franchise.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the the Luke Skywalker of the second well, the second film of the you know, the new trilogy, it wasn't a continuation of the character in the original trilogy, you know, episodes four, five, and six.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: It was a complete degradation of that character.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um we have somebody who I mean think about the scene uh towards the end of uh The Return of the Jedi.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: There's Luke Skywalker who's allowed himself to be deliberately captured to protect his friends.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: He's alone uh in every sense.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um he's in the hands of the emperor, who he knows is an incredibly powerful figure, and Dar Feder, who he also knows is incredibly powerful.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, he's a f he's he knows now he's his father, but he's his father on the other side, right?
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: And he deliberately sacrifices himself, and he's offered this so he's physically brave, and he um is offered all the power he wants, and he turns it down in that position of um you know you know he can join his father, or he can replace his father, even um, and so he's morally brave, he's a physically brave character, he's a morally brave character.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: And what are we offered in um the second uh the second neutrilogy?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody who so betrayed everything that on the basis of a mere vision was gonna kill his own nephew and disciple.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's a nonsense, nonsense claim.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's an offensively stupid claim.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_03: And it's there clearly to degrade the masculine.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to take the male heroes away.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you see this cultural pattern again and again and again, and it's why Hollywood's uh numbers are are crunching.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they they're having flop after flop after flop because they cannot deal in a resonant way with positive masculinity.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: You get, you know, the occasional um breakout.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um but you know, Dennis Dittle Gelouv or uh uh oh I'm having trouble today.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_03: The guy who did Dunkirk and um Batman and um English director.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_03: Uh oh, Christopher Nolan.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_03: Christopher Nolan, right.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: One's English, one's French, right?
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_03: They're not Hollywood people, even though they're doing Hollywood movies, right?
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_03: They have no problem with powerful and positive masculine figures, one notices.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the Hollywood stuff, the degradation of the masculine and the culture is just um striking and a box office failure.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, uh the Disney Star Wars, Disney has lost money on that.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: They paid so much for that franchise, and they've spent so much on films that have either flopped or simply done way worse than they otherwise would have.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in the the new trilogy, every film makes substantially less than the film before, which is not how a successful franchise operates.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so you get this cultural degradation of the masculine.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you get this you know pushing up of Mary Sue's.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: And Ray is such a Mary Sue character, everything bends around her, the universe bends to her benefit.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, in the third film, they sort of kind of tried to put in a training sequence, but it was way too little, too, way too late.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, she could, you know.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: That scene in the first in the trilogy where she, who had no idea she had force abilities, no training in the lightsaber at all, is a woman so physically weaker, nevertheless beats um emo adolescent Darth Vader, um, who's had years of training and is physically strong.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, he's wounded.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: And also, force is one of those things that you can say, well, males and females, it sort of counteracts the maybe.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but it was just an it was a nonsense.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, training doesn't count, she's just great because she's a woman.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, training doesn't count, he's just going to lose because he's a man.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, so there's you get this again and again and again, you get this degradation of the masculine.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and to the to the you know commercial detriment of the people doing it.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and this is why things for what you can see happening, for example, is why East Asian dramas are really, really taking off.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because you know, the K dramas from Korea and the C dramas from China and so forth have no problem providing you know strong male characters.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_03: I would point out they have no problem providing strong female characters either.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they don't feel the need to degrade either, they just present you with great stories.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: And they're being really, really successful.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Japanese comics are displacing American comics because, again, they have no problem with, you know, strong male characters, just like they have no problem with strong female characters either.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so they there's no feel for the degradation, lead to the degradation of the masculine.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm actually very fond of Chinese dramas.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_03: I watch them quite a lot.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_03: And you you absolutely see that the female audience is very important in Japan and and China, right?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: You can tell the way they present things.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_03: But um they, you know, you have good book men and you have bad men.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: You have good women and you have bad women.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the men are bad in the way men are bad, and the women are bad in the way women are bad, right?
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_03: So uh they don't feel the need to degrade either.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh uh, but and and in fact, uh, when you look at it, I only do the costume dramas.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: I can't comment on uh contemporary C dramas, so I only watch the costume dramas.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_03: But um they yeah, okay, they've got a censorship regime, so you know you can't have sex scenes, and there definitely won't be any boys implying they have sex with each other, that's not gonna happen.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but um but they don't have installed commissars.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: The censorship is um, you know, known, but it's not pervasive.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_03: That's one of the reasons I like them.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you're not being propagandized at.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but you go to um so much of the products of Hollywood, you are absolutely being propagandized at.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and of course, they do have commissars.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: They call them diversity officers and intimacy consultants, and so forth and so forth, right?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, um and various other terms.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: But they're commissars, they're political officers.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, they affect how um what is presented, and it's got to protect, you know, it's got to push what the critical drinker calls the message.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and you just get annoyed with it, and you say, I'm not gonna watch this rubbish.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, oh look, over here I've got a I've got uh Chinese dramas that still have a powerful sense of beauty and tell stories which are based in character and don't try and preach at you.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's very sad when you watch the products of a communist tyranny because it's not preaching at you, and you avoid the products of the American democracy because it is preaching at you.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: Very sad.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's definitely a cruel, cruel irony in that, really, isn't there?
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um staying staying on on men.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: There was a particular um uh part within your essays where you talked about uh how our society may have come to be because of men and and male coordination.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: So um I'm I'm gonna read a quote out to you, and maybe it says everything that you would need it to say, but it'd be good to hear you unpack it a little bit more.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: So um perhaps you can tell us why it is, and in your words, um highly likely that patriarchy, coordinated male power, is what made us Homo sapiens.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is, made us the most gracile and only surviving species of the genus Homo.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: Along with chimpanzees, the pantroglodytes, we are the equal most proactively, i.e., deliberately aggressive primate.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yet we are the least reactively aggressive primate.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: The hypothesis is that as we evolved from Homo erectus, teams of beta males able to communicate because we had developed language systematically killed off the alpha males.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because the two forms of aggression used different brain circuits, we used our proactive aggression to systematically select against reactive aggression, murdering our way to niceness.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: Many, though not all, foraging societies seem to have been quite gender egalitarian, being mobile with fluid groups.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: They actively suppressed dominance behavior that got in the way of our increasingly cooperative reproduction and subsistence strategies.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: Such suppression included systematically killing off the alpha males.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that important to us today?
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we need to understand that?
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so this is me rewriting, well, rephrasing Richard Graham, who's a very famous Harvard anthropologist, right?
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_03: So this is his thesis, um, which I'm just relaying.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um what's why is it important?
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's important to realize that teamwork is what made us the way we are.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_03: Suppression of dominance behavior was what made us the way we are.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it was male teamwork by light.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it was males suppressing dominance behavior by other males.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_03: Now, that had a lot of consequences.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: One is that it became much more important to express emotions, which is that way our features are the most gracile of all the genus Hammer.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_03: We had the most emotionally aggressive of expressive faces, but also the least robust faces, because we're not thumping each other all the time, right?
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: So we have to be able to express emotion, and um we we don't have to worry about being hit.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_03: Now, interestingly enough, of course, Homo sapien women's faces are more grace-style than males, which means that they clearly particularly needed to express emotion, but also implies they don't have to be all that robust, um, which is an interesting thing to think about.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but also it's a way, of course, of expressing your fertility, which is you know, obviously an issue in this situation, particularly when you know children are your pension plan.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, yeah, you better breed or else.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um anyway, so uh yes, so that matters because we're looking at it how how we operate, what makes us the way we are.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_03: Now, of course, male teamwork can be positive, it can also be deeply negative.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so that's why it's a sort of balancing act going on all the time.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_03: And what it also meant is that we generated two other forms of status.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_03: We're we're primates, we worry about status.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, we're very status-driven species.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_03: If you suppress dominance, you end up with other forms of status.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_03: So you end up with prestige.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_03: Look at me, I'm clever, look at me, I took this risk and it paid off.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, which is one currency of social cooperation, and the other one's propriety.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_03: Look at me, I keep to the rules.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_03: Look at me, I can be relied on in that way.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh what's very important about prestige is it it's an exploring and discovering form of safe of status.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: Propriety is much more a safety and conformity form of status, and balancing those two has a big impact on how societies operate.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_03: Williams, Will Storr argues very, I think, plausibly and correctly, that um it was the creating the prestige in discovery which leads to the scientific revolution and the technological takeoff.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know, otherwise men got prestige from discovering things, from inventing things.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_03: So orthodoxies began to unravel under this pressure.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: And the thing is, prestige is disproportionately male because once again, they're the physically stronger sex who don't have bubs in tow.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: So they're more able to do the riskier discovery processes.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so, yeah, that's very useful.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_03: But women are more disproportionately propriety operated because they're the physically weak and sexual bubs in toe.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_03: So they want the rules to protect them.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um when we look at honor killings, for example, uh, yes, the men usually do the honor killing, but often they're incited by the women because the women want the protection of the norms of their society, particularly in highly patriarchal societies where they're otherwise exposed.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_03: So propriety and prestige have this tension between them, and what's going on in our society at the moment is a really aggressive imperial form of propriety pushed disproportionately by women, um is overwhelming prestige.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's a lot of what's happening, for example, in the decay of science in the universities, where the pressure against um you know not conforming to the gender word is very strong.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's a that's an aggressive propriety suppressing a disproportionately female propriety, suppressing a disproportionately male prestige.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so yeah, those there's a whole lot of knock-on effects from this male teamwork suppressing dominance.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and if you want a you know key moment in the cultural history, shirtgate.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_03: That moment where that literally a rocket scientist had um supervised the very, very, very clever thing of landing a probe on a comet, which is extremely hard to do, and we've never managed to do it before.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_03: And he, you know, he's very happy, he's announced this great achievement.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_03: And he gets shredded online because of his shirt, because it's got semi-naked women on it, right?
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_03: He's got a Hawaiian shirt with semi-naked women on it, right?
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_03: Which it turns out had been given to him by a female friend, right?
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_03: Just to make the moment perfectly ridiculous.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_03: But that, right?
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_03: So that is a self-righteous propriety, new propriety, because you know, before then, no one would have ever worried about the fact that his Hawaiian shirt had they weren't naked women, they had bikinis on, but there were semi-naked women, right?
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, no one would have ever cared.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: It wouldn't have been an issue.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well, maybe back in the 20s, with the, you know, well, not even the 20s, no, not the 20s, maybe in the 30s they might have cared.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe possibly in the 50s, maybe, but you know, not for decades.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_03: No one would have cared.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_03: And suddenly something for which you crucify the man and he's forced into a tearful, um, a tearful apology, right?
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_03: For something that was no sort of offense five minutes earlier.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's yeah, that's the sort of emblematic thing that's been going on.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and that's why, for example, you know, biology is being corrupted, medicine's being corrupted, you have to push the gender woo, otherwise you're a bad person.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a whole lot of conformity, which is mobilizing this aggressive reputational destruction through this imperial propriety, which is, you know, very much mobilizing our evolutionary heritage, but in a very negative and corrosive way.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's creating a really, really, really unbalanced situation where prestige and propriety aren't balanced against each other at all.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_03: Prestige is being suppressed in favor of this aggressive, imperial, disproportionately female propriety.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the disproportionately male, less though desproportion because of the way our societies have changed, uh, prestige is being suppressed.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, um, going back to Luke Skywalker, what does a hero do?
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_03: A hero takes risks.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_03: A hero does, does the brave thing.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_03: The hero does.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, he's supposed to keep to the rules and subsets, so there's propriety there, but there's also prestige.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so, yes, so that's so that from suppressing dominance behavior, we shifted to new forms of status, status, prestige, and dominance of propriety, one of which is disproportionately male, one of which is disproportionately female.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_03: And what we're living in with this feminization of institutions is shaming and shunning becoming going over the top, this imperial aggressive propriety going over the top, and you know, mobilizing our evolutionary heritage in a way that's quite corrosive and destructive.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: Follow-on question from that.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't my intention to ask this, but it made me think when you were talking about propriety and um holding up symbols of the moral caste-based order, as it were, to show that you're on message, so you're not excluded.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: It reminded me of um the the former Czech dissident, um Vaclav Havel, who ended up becoming the the prime minister and then the president of the country when it was uh when it was democratically able to do so following its uh the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote um in The Power of the Powerless about the parable of the green grocer and um how there was a greengrocer and he had a workers of the world unite sign in the window.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then he goes on to start asking questions.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: Does he really believe in this statement and everything that it it holds, or is he doing it just to keep the authorities off his bat because they're going around checking to see who's on message?
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I suppose what struck me, Lorenzo, is the Soviet Union um uh seems to be dominated by males, and I guess there was a lot of prestige stuff in there.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: People rose to the top of the ranks by showing they were on message.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um I know that I know I know there definitely were women involved in it too.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um was there were women actually quite behind that movement as well?
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, or was this just an example of men's um desire for prestige and the the kind of aping of that kind of radical egalitarianism in word only, um, turning into a political system?
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or was it was there that kind of push the the female propriety behind it?
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, propriety is not only female, of course.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_03: Every priesthood in in existence ever pushes propriety very, very strongly.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh but, and here's a big but, often in alliance with women.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_03: Women are a major vector of religious change.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so what you get is a new form of propriety pushed by, you know, in the past always male, like all many male priesthoods, but often in a convergence with women.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_03: When you look at early Christianity, it's really clear that even though Christianity in some ways reduced the status of women and the legal standing of women, uh at least compared to what Roman citizen women had had, nevertheless, there was this alliance between Christian priests and monks and women.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um what did women get out of all that?
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well, apart from the promise of salvation, they also got, oddly enough, a feminization of sexuality.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because what does Christianity say?
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_03: Men aren't allowed to play around either.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_03: You have to have sex within a committed relationship, which is you know the preferred female option when you know sex leads you to get impregnant, you don't have much shit control over that.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_03: You really, really sex within the Relationship is you know the classic thing that women want.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_03: Now, back to your question about the Soviet Union.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_03: This was in a situation where organized politics was still overwhelmingly male.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh so while the while the the comments were very explicit about, for example, women having full fertility rights.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_03: So um, and that in the modern world, control over your own fertility is desperately important to women.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_03: So that simply offering that was a big deal.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_03: But when you look at the structure of the party, it's it's a male-dominated party.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um there aren't a lot of women um in senior positions.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and that's also true in the Chinese Communist Party, by the way.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's really striking how male-dominated the Chinese Communist Party is.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_03: Even though that's a society, when you look at its social patterns, has become in certain key ways very female-dominated.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um because the one child policy led to an excess of men, because they, you know, too many people wanted sons.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you know, with modern technology, you can get a son if you abort all the daughters.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh yes, so that leads to women having the value of scarcity, right?
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_03: A larger group of men are competing for a smaller group of women, which puts the boot on the female foot in that situation.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so when you look at the social dynamics of China, fairly clearly it's in that sense a female-dominated society.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_03: But uh when you look at the political structure, very much still male-dominated.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_03: So, yes, the the imperial propriety of communism is not one where this male or female thing operates.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_03: But if you go down the society and look at the pattern, then yes, female concepts of propriety are very much driving the interaction between the sexes.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, a man basically has to be able to promise a house before he can get married.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's the the whole there's a whole structure of expectations there, which are driven by women are in short supply, so they have the advantage of scarcity, right?
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_03: So uh, but yes, no uh communism is not in any useful sense a female activity.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's a what that one's a male.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_03: You can't blame anyone else but the men for that one.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's that's well, I I know as well that time is kicking on there.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're probably gonna be wanting to get your dinner on the other side of the world in Australia.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wanting to go and get my breakfast.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: But before we go, Lorenzo, I wanted to trial out a new question that I'm gonna ask all of my guests at the end of the show, um, which is what have you changed your mind on recently or ever, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, okay, so two things I can nominate.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_03: One, um, I used to be very, very in favor of um legalization of narcotics because I really, really hate black markets and particularly criminal environment black markets.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um the way that America has screwed up cannabis legalization has made me rather more cautious on that matter.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_03: The other area where I've very much changed my mind in recent years is um I've become much, much more aware of the negative and downsides of migration.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_03: Now, part of that is I'm Australian.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_03: We basically do migration policy way better than almost anyone else in the Western world.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_03: Canada, at least recently, was the only one who was close.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um we have a much, much, much, much higher rate of migration as a percentage of population than um K or United States, Western Europe.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it's nowhere near as politically fraught because we do it, we do have border control.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I would point out that that's a case of mobilizing public opinion.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_03: Because John Howard broke ranks on that and the public were in favour, right?
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_03: So we've got border control because the Labour Party has learnt that it's got to be in favour of it, otherwise it won't get elected.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but uh because the way we did it was so different from elsewhere, uh I was not as aware of the downsides that that migration could have.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Having done a lot more reading and a lot more thinking about how differently it's done elsewhere, um, I think migration has been a um massive debt bad thing on balance for Western Europe, for the United Kingdom, the United States, because of the way it's been done.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's not necessarily going to be a bad thing, um, but because of the way it's done, it's become much, much more disruptive and therefore much more politically fraught than it needs to be.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm my I'm very simple view is that in the United States, in Britain, and Western Europe, migration policy has been used as an elite weapon against the local working class in the way that's just not true in Australia.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_03: Partly because we have preferential voting and compulsory voting, and you can't drive the working class away from the polls.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_03: So you have to take their view into consideration because they do turn up and vote because they have to.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um so yeah, the ability to screw over the working class becomes much, much less in that situation.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_03: Now, there is still one way we do that, which is our land use policies, which mean we drive up rents and um housing costs uh through our migration policy, which is one way we still do screw over our working class.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_03: But um uh, which you know also is done in Britain, of course, and also done in Canada, and also done in coastal United States.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh, but we, you know, the other ways in which you screw up, we don't screw up.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so I've become much, much more aware that migration policy can be done very badly and very destructively.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_03: And that's led into um, as long with along with my reading into evolutionary leans, I've become much less impressed by mainstream economics than I used to be.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um I have no trouble with markets as such, I have no trouble with commerce as such, I have no trouble with private property as such.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_03: So the normal reason why people don't like market mainstream economics is they don't like markets, they don't like commerce, they don't like private property.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_03: I've got no long probability of that.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_03: My concern is I've actually come to the conclusion it's just not very good science, um, that it makes assumptions about people that are just clearly not true.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_03: And in particular, analyzing migration policy as if migrants are just interchangeable widgets is clearly false.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, demonstrably false.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um and of course, this is a problem like that economics has in general, uh treating people as at some level optimizing interchangeable widgets when it's clear that culture matters are like, for example.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_03: And the Glenn Lowry principle, which is relations before transactions, that is, economic transactions are embedded in all sorts of connections, cultural assumptions, and so forth, uh that is true.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_03: And uh mainstream economics does not grapple with the truth of the Lowry principle anywhere near enough.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um so that's that's three things actually.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_03: One is I'm less impressed by drug legalization than it used to be.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_03: Secondly, I'm much more aware of uh the downsides of migration policy.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_03: I would point out that if you read um Robert Fogel's Without Consent or Contract, he analyzes how mass migration fractured the American Republic along the fault line of slavery.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_03: So the Civil War is about slavery.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_03: No argument.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_03: If you read the Confederate Constitution, if you read the Convention secession convention debates, it's about slavery.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_03: But mass migration, which occurred because we now had railway and steamships, meant that most of the migrants went to the free states, which pushed up their House of Representative numbers, pushed up their electoral numbers, made it more and more likely they'd have more free states.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, it also added people, though far less, to the slave states who weren't committed to the slave system because it was disadvantaging them.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_03: And what makes Lincoln the breakpoint is the Republican manifesto.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't that Lincoln was anti-slavery.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_03: There had been anti-slavery presidents before Lincoln.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_03: He was not the first anti-slavery president.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_03: But the Republican manifesto said we're going to have tariffs and we're going to open out the West to homesteading.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's just catniped to the disillusioned, alienated white males mainly, of the South, and the prospect of an alliance between the slaves and the poor white trash, which Lincoln's election presaged, because he could now appoint Republican organizers to all the federal positions in the South, including the postmasters, who would stop, who allow abolition literature to be spread around, and he could mobilize the people to vote.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_03: That was an existential threat to the slave system.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_03: So the combination of migration and the slavery, the fraction, fractured the United States.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_03: And you can see that migration is once again putting the US under enormous pressure.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_03: The gap between the metropolitan and provincial areas, which is a is a we can also see in Britain and you can also see in France.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's how do migration potentially disastrously.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the third thing was mainstream economics and losing faith in that.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that was connected to A, all the ready on evolutionary anthropology, but also thinking about, yeah, this idea about interchangeable widgets, you're analyzing migration if you're dealing with interchangeable widgets.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's just ribbus rubbish.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's just flatly not true.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um so uh yeah, I mean, so so for example, there's a thing called the Bumole effect, which is uh you've got increasing productivity here, so the next group round have to bid more for the wages, the next group down have to bid more for wages because of the product.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_03: So you pull wages up because of the increasing productivity at the top end.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_03: So the custody thing is um why are hairdressers paid far more now than they are in 1960?
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_03: There's nothing's changed about hairdressing.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_03: It is as productive now as it is in 1960.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Well, because productivity with the top end has gone up, so you've got to, yeah, you won't get any hairdressers unless you pay them a certain amount.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_03: So if you want somebody to cut your hair, you have to pay them.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_03: So they they've gone up because you're pulled up, right?
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_03: What if you put a whole lot of people of low skills at the bottom end?
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_03: You suppress the barn all effect, right?
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_03: I've never seen an uh economist talking about migration to think that through.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, why why did lower end wages suddenly go up during the pandemic?
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because you stopped importing low-skilled people.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_03: So low-skilled to get the truck drivers, you had to pay them all, right?
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, pay all these people more.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, this didn't happen in Australia because the way we do um our system, we're not having that effect.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Because the point system says leads to a situation where, for example, the migrants are on average slightly more educated than the local people.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_03: So we're actually pulling up your capital effect, right?
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_03: I live in a very high migrant area.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's got one of the highest rates of university education in the country.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_03: That's not the British experience of migration.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's not the American experience of migration, unless you're in Silicon Valley.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's not the French experience of migration.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_03: If you live in a high migrant area, you're not living in a disproportionately high educated area.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_03: You're disproportionately the other way around.
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, Lorenzo, you've been so generous with your time and your thoughts today.
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's been one of my favourite conversations.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think your reading lists might be in high demand at some point.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and um, and I'm certainly going to keep close to your work.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to stay in touch, I'd love to have more conversations in the future.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it's important that people are able to try and analyse these things.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there's just no, there seems to be no substitute for uh a kind of a depth of reading across subjects.
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you you have effectively encapsulated the benefits of trying to be a self-taught polymath in some way, because it allows you to get out of silos and not just focus on things in just a single-minded ideological or in a certain um fields uh perspective.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I thank you for it.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope everyone goes and checks out your Substack.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Lorenzo, just before you go, where people can people find you?
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: What are the various handles on social media and Substack?
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_03: So uh Lorenzo from Oz.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_03: So um I think on Twitter I'm Lorenzo from, I think.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_03: But um Lorenzo from Oz is my Substack, but I also write on Helen Dale's Substack, which is um not on your team.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, not sorry, not on your team, yes.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's her substack.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So great.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when can we expect the book that you referenced in the podcast?
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the marriage book is going to take quite a while.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_03: The worshipping in the future book, um uh, although the the essay list keeps getting longer, I am getting towards the end of it.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_03: So when I'm towards the when I've finished writing those essays, um, it will be yeah, we will stop shopping for a publisher.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll keep an eye out for it.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, keep fighting the good fight, and we'll speak again in the future.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Take care, Lorenzo.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful, thank you very much.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:20:52
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• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.