Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Staring Down Blackmail: Talking RFK Jr. with Charles Eisenstein

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Staring Down Blackmail: Talking RFK Jr. with Charles Eisenstein · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast.(...) This is the Inside Rail, and I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting with Charles Eisenstein, somebody that I have been reading for a very long time, long before I was a public figure in any way.
• 0:15
  Before we get to anything else, let me just say that Charles has been called a public philosopher. I've certainly long been reading his writings. I would say he comes from a previous tradition on the left when environmentalism meant something well beyond concern over climate, when the Democratic Party wasn't so enthusiastic about war, et cetera. So Charles, welcome to DarkHorse.
• 0:46
  Hey, Bret, happy to be here.
• 0:48
  (Upbeat Music) What brings us together? Well, let me just say, as I said, I've been reading your work for quite some time. You and I ran into each other in person a few years back at a conference in Austin, and you reached out this,(...) well, in the last few days as a result of having seen a piece that I had put out talking about the possibility that RFK is being blackmailed and that accounts for his strange focus on antisemitism from his new position at the head of HHS.(...) Now you were his head speech writer during the period when he was campaigning for president. Is that right?
• 1:34
  Yeah, that's right.
• 1:35
  So you know Bobby well.(...) You and I both consider Bobby a good friend, and this is a delicate topic, the question of whether or not someone is coercing him into focusing on antisemitism and taking up other positions at a moment when you and I as fellow COVID dissidents would hope that he would be addressing issues of health that he promised to address during the campaign. Is that a fair assessment?
• 2:09
  Well, you know, I think that he is addressing issues of health.
• 2:16
  And partly, you know, on one level, this is all a huge distraction and just another way for people to trip him up, you know, and divert his attention onto other matters. But there's something deeper here as well.
• 2:34
  That's always bothered me. You know, it's no secret that I was vehemently opposed to his, what I would consider very extreme Zionist views(...) during the campaign.
• 2:48
  And for me, the whole, the polarization around the Palestine issue and the on many quarters, the collapse of something really complex into a good versus evil narrative,(...) that is at the root of the same problem that we're looking at in terms of public health.
• 3:18
  And the political transformation that we are all excited by in the Maha movement, for example, isn't about merely shifting the identity of the bad guy, but it's a fundamental paradigm shift. It's a different way of looking at the world.
• 3:38
  And that is why,(...) I mean, aside from the fact that, you know,(...) innocent men, women and children are dying,(...) I mean, that's why it's so disturbing and so seemingly incongruous with everything else that he stands for.
• 3:59
  And so that's why I think, why there's speculation, okay, because we're not the only ones who have noticed this incongruity. So I think that's why there's speculation of like, okay, what's going on here?
• 4:10
  And, oh, is it blackmail or something like that?
• 4:14
  Okay, so I want to just flag something that we're gonna come back to. I agree with you that the framing in both the context of the war in Gaza and in the case of the chronic health epidemic and Maha, which is supposed to be the remedy to it,(...) there is a whole reframing that is necessary in order to even see the landscape. And I would argue, and I think you'd probably agree with me, that at least in the case of public health,(...) the reframing is obviously evolutionary, understanding what the body is designed to do and why it's failing to do it so regularly is the key to making America healthy again. But I would argue also in the case of what you have labeled Zionism,(...) there is an evolutionary reframing that is clarifying and much less well understood.(...) But before we get there, I do have to say the term Zionist has become deeply polarizing in its own right. And it's a term I don't use because I can't get a straight answer about its definition. Its definition ranges from the belief that the state of Israel has a right to exist, a sentence that I can't even really interpret. I'm not sure what it means that any nation has a right to exist, a right to defend yourself, that I would subscribe to.(...) But it can range from Israel has a right to exist to a very aggressive posture in which Israel has special rights among nations to behave in belligerent ways as a result of the fact that it's in a bad neighborhood.
• 6:10
  So I don't use the term myself because I don't want when I say it to be signing up in somebody's mind for some team that's ill-defined.
• 6:22
  So in any case, I would just ask that we be cautious about invoking it.
• 6:26
  Yeah, that's why I say extreme pro-Zionism because I'm kind of reaching for the further edge of that range of definition. Right, of course.
• 6:35
  I would love to avoid word too. But let me say, just so I can lay out the framework that my viewers will have heard me allude to,(...) my feeling is that the relationship of the Israeli people, the citizenry of Israel to its administration is similar to the relationship between the population of the US and the Biden administration.(...) I didn't consider the Biden administration an ally to the American citizenry. And I don't consider the Netanyahu administration to be an ally to the citizens of Israel. And that creates a problem in discussing this because when we talk about Kennedy's support for Israel, I see him supporting in a very unnuanced way anything the Netanyahu administration wants to do. And I think, and I know from our brief conversation, I guess a couple of days ago, that you would agree that what the Netanyahu administration is doing is in the long term terrible for Israel and for Jews in the diaspora, which I guess you and I are both.
• 7:55
  So it is not a blindly pro-Jewish position. It is actually a dangerous position that is certain to cause antisemitism of a kind that we haven't seen in half a century.
• 8:14
  Yeah, I think that it's kind of ironic that all the things that Israel under Netanyahu are doing in the name of security and in the name of the Jewish people are actually, undermining both of those things.(...) There is rising antisemitism now, and I kind of understand why. If Israel is doing terrible things in the name of Judaism, and even saying to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew, and establishing that connection, then no wonder people are equating the actions of that administration with Judaism itself.
• 9:01
  I would say though, it's not so simple as a bad government has hijacked the nation.
• 9:07
  (...) I mean, the Netanyahu and his far right allies are expressions of attitudes that are latent within Israeli society, which is pretty divided.
• 9:22
  And I don't think that you can even say that a country is one thing or is another thing. If you had different leaders, they might bring out a different side of that nation.(...) We can't classify an entire nation as fascist or anything else, or an entire people as one thing or another.
• 9:46
  It's a relationship. And included in that relationship is the United States and the foreign policy that has been enacted using Israel as a proxy.(...) This is not like some separate thing over here.
• 10:06
  And this is this way of thinking of interconnection of what something is being a product of its relationships to all else. This is also the paradigm shift that we're looking at in health. And I would say in everything else, this is the revolution that wants to happen.
• 10:29
  So let me clean up what I was saying. I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but I still stick by my formulation. The Biden administration was supported by a substantial fraction of the American citizenry. I believe those people were dupes, that they were not being served by the Biden administration, that they were effectively responding based on a nostalgia for the color blue and a donkey, rather than looking at the transformation that had taken over the Democratic party that had the Biden administration signed up for all of the traditional positions that the Democrats you and I remember would have found in asthma,(...) right? Since when did the Democratic party become the party of big pharma, right? We would have seen through that in 1980 in a way that the Democrats couldn't see through.
• 11:27
  Yeah, and censorship and the neocons and the intelligence agencies and the Wall Street.
• 11:32
  It's the inversion of the party you and I remember, flawed as that party was.(...) So I see the Biden administration as having been hostile to the population. I see the Netanyahu administration being hostile to the Israeli population, even though you're right, Israel is fiercely divided over this. And October 7th and its aftermath effectively resurrected Netanyahu in Israel. He was in terrible trouble and as is so often the case, the outbreak of violence causes the population to look past the flaws of its leaders and rally behind them. And that has happened with Netanyahu.(...) I still think the analogy holds, but I take your point about-- We'll go with your dough.(...) Yeah.
• 12:24
  Yeah, I also wanted to go back to your point about the use of the claim of antisemitism to fend off criticism.
• 12:37
  And this is delicate, but I wanna point out that this is something like hiding weapons beneath a school or a hospital or holding hostages(...) in a place where a raid would cause carnage among civilians.(...) That by protecting Israeli foreign policy and the issues surrounding the war in Gaza, by the accusation that anybody who is troubled by it is an antisemite is like hiding weapons in an ambulance.
• 13:15
  You're taking a concept that is actually vitally important that we be careful with it and you are abusing it to cloak your own activities such that when we need, it's a case of crying wolf except that in the story about crying wolf, the little boy cries wolf and it results in nobody responding to the cry, but it doesn't create wolves. And as you point out, the abuse of the idea of antisemitism to fend off legitimate criticism creates antisemitism. It makes wolves in this case and that's a very dangerous situation.
• 13:51
  Yeah, very dangerous and ironic, tragic.
• 13:57
  It's, I say tragic in the classical sense of tragedy.
• 14:02
  Some flaw in one's thinking or character that produces the very thing that you're trying to avoid and that's what's happening to the nation of Israel too.
• 14:15
  This is not security.(...) It's not, even if you have a permanent iron dome that is impermeable, that still doesn't make you secure from the bad things that happen as a result of waging violence and carnage on those on the outside. Like they come back in, in one form or another. This happened to our country too.(...) For the last 80 years of imperialism,(...) we have caused a lot of harm all over the world, regime change, invasions,(...) hood does, coups, death squads, all the rest that the left was traditionally critical of and that seems to, those who use the logo of left seem to have abandoned.
• 15:09
  But it's been in sight, but now it's coming into even more consciousness.
• 15:15
  More people are aware of it now.
• 15:18
  But none of that has actually kept violence outside of our country.(...) It's not made as secure, it just comes in in another form. Comes in in the form of domestic violence or criminal violence, but it's a perfect mirror.(...) And this is what I wish that the Trump people and Donald Trump himself would understand(...) that this basic principle of what you do to the other, you end up doing to yourself because we are connected to each other. You can look at that ecologically, you can look at that spiritually, but what we do to the other, we do to ourselves. The wellbeing of some is the wellbeing of all.
• 16:03
  In an ecosystem, if the wolves are not better off if you exterminate the foxes, the deer are not better off if you exterminate the wolves, everything contributes to the flourishing of the whole. And that's true in the human realm as well. And I think that the pattern of separating off some and dehumanizing them or mocking them,(...) writing them off in some way in a game of, we're gonna be the winners and they're gonna be the losers.
• 16:48
  That is gonna be counterproductive in any field.
• 16:55
  So, yeah. Yeah, it's self-defeating. And I would, you mentioned that you were talking about the connection to evolutionary biology that you hope to get into. And I would just point out that concepts like karma, evolved multiple times for a reason. They are exactly about this lesson, about what happens if you engage in certain kinds of behavior and what implication it has for you.(...) In the case of Dharma, I guess it's immediate. In the case of karma, it might be delayed.(...) There are many different ways for that to manifest in human mythology, but it's far too common a concept for us to ignore. And it dovetails rather exactly with the utility of guilt, which serves the same function, right? Even if you can't see that the universe is gonna haunt you for certain kinds of bad behavior, you may haunt yourself. If you're properly constructed, behaving badly causes you to punish yourself for it. And all of these things are trying to teach that lesson, which I agree we've forgotten.
• 18:06
  Yeah,(...) yeah. And we could go more into that, but do you wanna finish the part that we started with, like the whole blackmail idea and the kind of the stuff that's up politically right now?
• 18:18
  Good, and then let's make sure that we come back to the evolutionary connections. I don't think either you or I are gonna forget it, but just in case we do, let's remind ourselves.
• 18:27
  All right, you wanna start or should I?
• 18:32
  I mean, I'll just say like, I don't think that Bobby Kennedy, I'm just gonna call him Bobby because that's how we all talk about him. I don't think that his morals and his sense of himself would allow him to be blackmailed in the way that we ordinarily think of the word.
• 19:02
  Can I short stop us here just so that people who maybe don't know why we're talking about this? No. So I will say what caused you to reach out to me a couple of days ago was a segment of mine that you saw in which I reacted to the second, I had also reacted to the first, but I reacted to the second of Bobby's official tweets from his official account saying what a terrible health crisis antisemitism was.
• 19:35
  And my reaction was that feels like a hostage video. I know that Bobby has long-standing commitments to Israel and but the idea of tweeting from his official account at the moment that Maha should be firing on all cylinders and blurring the distinction between a health crisis and antisemitism of the genuine kind and antisemitism of the cloak variety is terribly unwise and Bobby's not an unwise guy. So what the heck is going on? Is somebody forcing him to tweet this way?
• 20:20
  And as you said up top, it's certainly at the very least a profound and divisive distraction at a moment that he should be focused on the things that are all of a sudden after so much work on his part, actually within range for him to do something about, it was a very strange choice.
• 20:41
  It almost seems like he was punching his ticket. You have to like punch your pro-Israel ticket every once in a while for some reason.
• 20:49
  Right, for some reason, which it hints at an architecture that the rest of us cannot see.(...) So anyway, I was speculating, I was not happy to be doing it. As I said, Bobby's a friend and I don't like talking, speculating at all about this, but the behavior is so strange in light of where he finds himself.(...) I thought it, frankly irresponsible not to.
• 21:14
  So anyway, that caused you to reach out and maybe you should just recount what it is that your reaction to what I had said.
• 21:23
  Well, the other part of what you said, you also spoke of amnesty.
• 21:28
  And that's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of what is it gonna take for disclosure to happen.(...) And your listeners probably know what I mean by disclosure. It has a capital D, it's a mythic archetype almost.
• 21:44
  Yeah, well, I think of it as, in my mind, this is actually straightforward.
• 21:52
  I'm not saying that what's going on with Bobby has anything to do with Epstein, but let's just use Epstein and his video library as a way to sort out what the chessboard looks like. Something decided to collect Compromat on a lot of important people.
• 22:15
  That the immediate person who did the collecting is presumably dead, but the library exists somewhere.
• 22:25
  And there is every reason to at least wonder if not assume that that library is serving its function, that it is having an effect on matters of policy relevant to whoever it is who collected it.(...) And so that means that we in the public ought to always be asking ourselves, do we think that that's a small influence on what narratives we know, on what policy gets made, or do we think it's a large influence or somewhere in between?(...) My instinct is it's probably a substantial influence.(...) And so when I see somebody like Bobby(...) behaving like he's in a hostage video, it makes me wonder whether or not, as many have speculated, that Compromat is just simply a major feature of the landscape of policy in 2025(...) in the US, that it's happening in front of our eyes.
• 23:23
  Yeah, okay. So yeah, I definitely have something to say about that.
• 23:28
  I'll start though by saying I am quite sure, just like on a gut level, that Bobby never went to Epstein Island.
• 23:40
  He's not a pedophile.
• 23:43
  By his own admission, he's been no schoolboy either.
• 23:48
  And there's probably, who knows what parties have, what evidence that might be very upsetting, maybe not to the public, but to his spouse. I mean, I don't know, okay? This would all be speculation.
• 24:04
  But to the larger point, at some point I kind of cracked the code for how Compromat actually works.
• 24:15
  It's not so explicit as,(...) you're a public official and someone comes to you in a trench coat and says, "Hey, look at these videos. You wouldn't want these to get out there, so you better do as we say." No one wants to feel that they're being blackmailed. So what happens is there's this kind of, this latent knowledge among a large swath of the power elite, that these kind of things are out there and that certain parties have that information.
• 24:47
  And the best way to make sure that that isn't a problem for you is to adopt the beliefs that make it unnecessary for you to be blackmailed in the first place.
• 25:01
  And so there's just a little bit of the Stockholm syndrome, where you start to sympathize with your captors.
• 25:12
  And it's a psychological protection because, so say in the case of Israel, if you convince yourself that you fully believe all of the justifications(...) for the slaughter in Gaza,(...) if you fully believe all of the justifications for everything going back to 1948 and before,(...) then you don't need to be blackmailed. It's irrelevant. I'm not being blackmailed.
• 25:42
  They're right on this issue.
• 25:47
  So I don't know in the case of Bobby Kennedy, if this is what's going on, that would be speculation. And I just don't like to speculate. I don't like to feed this drama, which ultimately takes on a flavor of casting people out, of dehumanizing them, of dividing the world into us and them.
• 26:12
  But to understand the overall situation, if Donald Trump really wants to unravel the knot of corruption, this Gordian knot that has ensnared our entire society, it will necessarily ultimately involve Israel(...) and its intelligence agencies and the neocons who have been supporting them. That is integral, integral to the knot.(...) Does that mean that Jews control the whole world?
• 26:43
  No, but they are woven in.
• 26:47
  And I'm not saying Jews necessarily, I'm saying more of Israel as a political entity.
• 26:54
  I wouldn't even say Israel.(...) Something aligned within Israel holds a lot of power that functions through cryptic mechanisms.
• 27:04
  It's an integral part of the knot. Let's just put it that way.
• 27:06
  But when you reached out, you painted a scenario that I thought had the ring of truth about how, you've just described the involvement of something psychologically analogous to Stockholm syndrome. I agree with that. And I've in fact made the argument on my podcast(...) that Stockholm syndrome is perfectly predictable from an evolutionary perspective at the point someone has taken complete control over your wellbeing.
• 27:34
  It makes sense to see the world through their eyes because it will humanize you in their eyes. It increases the likelihood you will survive. So we should expect that. Anyway, do you wanna just paint the scenario that you described about how this would happen in the case of somebody for whom Compromat had been collected, what it would sound like, instead of the guy in the trench coat saying, "We've got these videos, you'll do what we say?" Oh, it would be more like, hey, friend, we found this on the dark web, or we found this, certain parties have this information, but don't worry, we've got your back.
• 28:19
  That's all that needs to be said.
• 28:22
  And then, you know, maybe on some deep level, you recognize that this is coded blackmail, but it's not presented that way. It's presented as friendship. And boy, that psychological compulsion will be powerful to enter into friendship with that person.
• 28:44
  It will be powerful, and the story almost then writes itself.(...) So let's say that somebody approaches you,(...) and it's well known what their signature issue is.
• 28:58
  And so, you know, they put the fear of God in you that something that you've done has been captured and is owned by somebody who is now your protector.
• 29:09
  And it's all too natural that you would then essentially find all of the material that has been assembled to defend that position.(...) Right. Right? In other words, it's not hard to figure out what you're supposed to say if you are, you know, a Lekudnik defending Israel, irrespective of what it does at war, where you basically believe, you know, anything would be justified.
• 29:45
  So anyway, I found that scenario as you painted it immediately compelling. It's not to say that it is exactly what happened here, but that it would be the way, it's very hard to imagine, you know, that many people running around in trench coats, threatening other people and nobody,(...) you know, taking their own life and leaving us evidence in the world and saying, here's why I killed myself, you know, I was being blackmailed and I can't save myself, but I can save the rest of you. Here's who it is and what they're doing, right? The absence of that suggests that it is happening through a much subtler mechanism. And the one you described, I thought, it at least proof of concept demonstrates that something could easily play that role and it would much better account for the world that we see, one in which things are having the effect of blackmail, but the existence of the blackmail is murkier.
• 30:43
  Yeah, and so there's two levels that are even more subtle, okay?(...) Even in the absence of any compromise,(...) there's another kind of blackmail, which is simply the stigma of being associated with antisemitism, of being adjacent to the black male to people who have odious beliefs and who are socially unacceptable.
• 31:10
  So in order not to be tainted by that, you have to say and actually believe certain things. It's the same thing. You can't in good conscience say things that you don't believe. So you have to make yourself believe the things that you need to say in order to avoid that level of blackmail. You don't wanna be labeled an antisemite, do you? You know very well what you have to say in order to elude that epithet.
• 31:44
  So it's kind of the same psychological mechanism though. You don't wanna feel like you are, I mean, this happened with the woke craze as well.
• 31:55
  You have to actually take on the beliefs that are necessary to say in good faith the things that you need to say in order to be acceptable.
• 32:04
  Yes, and in fact, you and I know that being Jewish does not protect you from this. The accusation of antisemitism will come your way anyway.
• 32:17
  Well, you're just not hating Jew, obviously.
• 32:18
  Right, self-hating Jew, that's the obvious label. But for somebody who isn't Jewish and is making their way in public, the threat that you will be publicly labeled as an antisemite because you're troubled by something going on in the Middle East, that's a very potent threat.
• 32:36
  So I wouldn't call it blackmail, but it's certainly some kind of industrial strength coercion that happens on certain topics. They're just certain labels you can't afford to have pointed at you whether they're credible or not.
• 32:53
  Yeah, I mean, psychologically, it does operate similarly to blackmail.
• 32:57
  And this is, it gets down to a basic character of the human being in society.(...) We're always looking out for who's the in group, who's the out group, how do I be acceptable?
• 33:11
  How do I avoid being cast into a dehumanized subcategory that when social tensions rise will be excluded, will be sacrificed even.
• 33:25
  This is something I wrote a lot about during COVID in the context of the unvaccinated and their demonization and ostracism from society.
• 33:35
  And I said, this is the same pattern where that cast witches or Jews or heretics into the ranks of the unacceptable, the untouchable. And made them convenience scapegoats for everything bad. And you started to see it happening with the unvaccinated. Oh, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Oh, they're endangering grandma.
• 34:05
  They're endangering everybody. Like it was the same basic pattern.
• 34:09
  I pointed that out in COVID and ironically enough got accused of antisemitism for that.
• 34:15
  (Laughing) Of course you did.
• 34:16
  Yeah.
• 34:18
  But there's one other aspect I wanted to touch on here to get back to the power elite and the way that they behave.
• 34:26
  Another way that this blackmail operates,(...) it's if you have an in-group that colludes in some kind of taboo act,(...) it could be a heinous act. Like something that if we were found out doing this, we would all be-- We're all finished and we're all in on it together.(...) So, yeah.
• 34:54
  So without anybody saying it, you know that basically everybody is blackmailing everybody else. And the same dynamic operates where you have to sincerely believe the ideology of the group.(...) And if you don't, there's this thing hanging over your head.
• 35:16
  So, and again, it's a sincere, maybe on the deepest level, people sense their own hypocrisy and many of them wanna get out of this bargain, of this arrangement that they have made(...) with the others of the club.
• 35:31
  The cognitive dissonance is unbearable and there's a ready-made solution to it which is to embrace this alternative worldview.
• 35:39
  And so they do. Yeah, I absolutely agree that this is an important phenomenon and I've even started to wonder, maybe this is too far afield, but we're seeing an awful lot of like explicit devil worship kind of stuff bleeding into mainstream entertainment, for example.
• 36:01
  Yeah.
• 36:01
  Right?(...) And on the one hand, I get it, you know, edgy has always sold cause the kids like to freak their parents out or something, but it seems to go beyond that, right? There's an awful lot of it.
• 36:13
  And I wonder if the idea is that there's a threshold. Once you have people participating(...) in some kind of shared shameful behavior that none of them can afford to emerge into public,(...) then effectively they're embracing the inverse of the normal moral view. In some sense, they have signed up with the devil and they begin to see through the devil's eyes and I wonder if it doesn't become like a sophistication to them.
• 36:47
  Yeah, it enforces group discipline also. Yes, to be sure.
• 36:55
  Yeah, and what, it's a kind of a worldview of, it's like this deep cynicism where everybody knows on some level that they don't believe in what they're doing,(...) but you have to pretend to believe, but like there's this deep understanding(...) of, you know, we're actually in it for power.
• 37:22
  And-- Yes, but my guess, I mean, I've never been in such a circle, so I don't know, but my guess would be that it arrives as a sophistication. It's that the part where your story is harder for me to accept is that they basically know it's wrong.(...) My guess is, you know how, and I don't mean to give them a hard time, I understand their point and it's not a completely fictional one, but you know how Anne Randians have this sophistication surrounding greed being good. Yeah.(...) And I think you and I would acknowledge(...) that even if we're not Anne Randians, that they are right, that the desire to better your own state drives lots of positive innovation, it creates wealth, it also creates a huge amount of carnage and all of that, which is why you and I would likely depart from it. But you know if you walk into a room of Randians, when they say greed is good, that they are not in their minds elevating people who are petty and backstabbing, what they're doing is they are referencing a sophistication about the creation of wealth(...) and it just becomes kind of a bedrock belief.
• 38:53
  Right, I mean what they would probably argue is that in order to be effectively greedy and to benefit in a free market, you have to produce things that other people want and need so you will be rewarded for doing that and the better able you are to produce things that other people want and need, the more richly rewarded you will be.(...) Right. But you know-- So imagine-- Yeah.
• 39:17
  Imagine that the devil worshipers have some speech like that, that you and I would have a harder time reproducing because we know Randians,(...) we can put ourselves in the mindset enough to defend their position. Imagine that there's something that circulates among these devil worshiping types, but you and I would have a harder time imagining what it sounds like because it doesn't get discussed in public.
• 39:45
  Yeah, the thing is though, I mean I have never been in such circles either.
• 39:53
  Of course. Of course if I were, would I admit it on your podcast?
• 39:58
  Yeah, some people are probably gonna make something of what I just said, but you know I have talked to people who were victimized by such things and had first hand dealings with people who were conducting satanic ritual abuse and things like that.
• 40:17
  And from what they say, there is not any kind of rationalization of it.
• 40:24
  It's just this, it's kind of like a descent into a kind of addiction, an addiction to control, an addiction to power,(...) an addiction to domination.(...) And like any addiction, no amount of it is enough. You need a higher and higher dose.
• 40:44
  And, yeah, so I don't think, but here's the delusion that I think affects Randians and Libertarians.
• 41:01
  And this is actually connected to evolutionary biology too. It's the delusion of a discrete and separate self, that there is a coherent unit of greed.
• 41:16
  And so in genetics, this idea had its heyday, in the idea of the selfish gene, where you have a well-defined discrete unit of selection of reproductive self-interest.
• 41:33
  And over the years,(...) when first horizontal gene transfer and epigenetics and then organisms self-editing their own DNA and higher directed mutation rates in times of stress towards certain evolutionary beneficial outcomes, like the genes don't even preserve themselves and game theoretic stuff of your own interest is inseparable from the interests of the ecology around you. Like in many, many ways, this paradigm broke down.
• 42:10
  I remember in the early 2000s, I would try to tweak biologists when I encountered them by saying I was a Lamarckian.(...) And last time I tried that, it didn't work because the biologists were like, "Oh, everybody's a Lamarckian now." You know, there is no separate self really in genetic biology, nor in society. So the separate selfish gene, the neoliberal self, the soul encased in flesh, the Cartesian mode of consciousness in a meat machine, all of them seeking to maximize reproductive self-interest or financial self-interest, all of this is based on a delusion. And this is the same delusion that I think is operating in a MAGA world where we think that we can become better off, America can be great at the expense of everybody else, that we can flourish at the expense of the environment, that we can prosper at the expense of other nations going into poverty. Like this, and it leads to an erosion of compassion(...) that shows up in the immigration issue.
• 43:28
  And I think that this will be the undoing and it shows up especially on the Israel-Palestine issue. And I think this will be the undoing of the MAGA revolution unless it can change and evolve.(...) And if I were on the Trump team, I would say,(...) man, just acknowledge that, okay, like you're talking about trans issues, okay, maybe a lot of it is a social craze where ordinarily insecure young people who are questioning their identity get irreversible,(...) you know, chemical or surgical interventions, that's not good, you know, and there's a whole psychological industry on, okay, you can acknowledge that, but you can also acknowledge that for some people, like they've gone through a big process and they're like, yeah, I'm really in the wrong body here, you know, like, or you can acknowledge that, yeah, like Venezuela and other countries did send a lot of criminals into our country.(...) And the other 99% of those immigrants are people who are fleeing desperate conditions caused in part by our own imperialist and neoliberal policies over decades.
• 44:43
  Can we acknowledge that? Can we acknowledge that the problem isn't those horrible people out there and admit some complexity and deprogram ourselves from the solution template of find the bad thing and eradicate it. That doesn't work, it doesn't work in health, it doesn't work in crime, it doesn't work in foreign policy, it doesn't work because it conflicts with the basic nature of reality, which is interdependent and inter-existent.
• 45:19
  All right. All right, sorry. There are, yes, you have just introduced a series of 11 podcasts that would have to be done in order to unpack everything you just said about evolutionary biology, about the MAGA movement.
• 45:35
  So anyway, I wanna say a couple things in response, but I think probably we're gonna have to revisit especially the evolutionary stuff you said because if I can just be frank, I think you are intuiting something correct about what you're seeing as the brokenness of the selfish gene paradigm, but I think you're actually focused on the wrong error.(...) I think you're intuiting that the paradigm doesn't predict reality, but that the reason it doesn't predict reality is not on the list of the ones that you named.
• 46:12
  So I would argue, and I have my own struggles with Dawkins, he refuses to acknowledge what I would call lineage selection, which is a much longer term process than the version of it that he subscribes to, which is called kin selection. And it actually has everything to do with the question of what's taking place in the Middle East.
• 46:39
  So we are gonna return to lineage selection and probably just simply put Dawkins view aside(...) in order to make progress with it. With respect to what you say will be the end of the MAGA movement, I agree that in the absence of a credible progressive party that the MAGA revolution, wow, I said MAGA, I don't usually say that, the MAGA revolution, as I think it should be pronounced, is in danger of overreach in multiple areas, one of them being a kind of stinginess that I think the right correctly understands that communism is a dead on arrival ideology, that it cannot work.(...) And I would say that the reason that it cannot work is that inherently it rewards the unproductive and punishes the productive. And no system built that way ends up producing very much. So you end up, even if it worked, you would end up dividing a small pie in a arguably fair way. But what you really want is a system,(...) our system is very unfair, but it produces a hell of a lot of wealth.(...) And so dividing a very big pie unfairly may put most people at great advantage over where they'd be with an evenly divided tiny pie. So anyway, the punchline of that riff is that it is a stinginess on the right and a failure to acknowledge that there's unevenness and distribution that is natural, that is actually a part of the reason that the system works, that you want a bigger slice of pie, right? That's a productive kind of uneven distribution.
• 48:44
  And then you have a whole hell of a lot of rent seeking(...) that isn't fair at all and is destructive of the pie.(...) And people who are downstream of that rent seeking have an incentive to overthrow the system and they end up settling on communist solutions and that that dynamic is gonna keep playing out until the right realizes that what it needs to do is focus obsessively on driving the unfairness from the system while not driving the unequalness of the rewards from the system. The unequalness of the rewards is a feature, the unfairness is a bug and that separating those things is what allows a system like ours to be highly productive and to continue indefinitely.
• 49:33
  So I agree with you on that front and I think we're gonna have to table the evolutionary point that you're making for another podcast when we can hash it out more fully.
• 49:45
  But I do wanna give you a room to respond to anything I just said before we get back to the issue of black man.
• 49:49
  We'll skip the evolutionary stuff and we can geek out on that another time.
• 49:54
  (...) The rent seeking though, that's, I think what you're saying is really significant.
• 50:00
  And this problem was seen and very clearly(...) in the 19th century by Henry George,(...) the economist Henry George and then some of his followers, most notably Silvio Gosel, who was an Austrian or German economist.
• 50:22
  And basically they were like, okay, how can we separate the profits that you create by using capital well from those that accrue to you simply because you own capital?
• 50:38
  And they devised ways to do that attacks on not just land but the increase in value of real estate that is a function usually of the increase in value of all the real estate around you. This becomes a good area. It's not necessarily because you put, so that you can profit by making improvements to the land but not simply by owning the land. And then the same thing can be done with financial capital(...) by having essentially a negative interest rate on currency which would take the form of a liquidity fee on central bank reserves in our current time. And that's the hall of the rapid hall. But people have thought about this and the whole idea, the whole debate about capitalism versus communism,(...) capitalism depends on what capital is.
• 51:33
  Capital is nothing but a set of agreements(...) that give value to symbols.
• 51:40
  Money is just symbols. It's just zeros and ones right now. It's not even on paper. It's just symbols in computers.
• 51:47
  (...) It's a set of agreements and property also. I mean, your property is not attached to you. It's yours because you have a deed or a title or in the case of most of our personal property just because everybody agrees that it's your property because you bought it. It's a set of agreements. When those agreements change, capital changes. And when capital changes, capitalism changes.
• 52:11
  So in places like Sweden, you cannot keep trespassers off your land.(...) Property does not mean the same there as it does here. Anybody can go hiking on any land.
• 52:23
  So the thing about communism, it does tap into a authentic spiritual realization.
• 52:37
  The slogan of communism is from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
• 52:43
  And when you really look at why am I here on earth, it's because I've got something that I want to give.(...) Oh, there's something I want to create. I'm here, I'm a creator. I want to give something to the world.
• 52:58
  And I also have needs that I must meet in order to be able to give.
• 53:06
  And these needs aren't just enough to eat and enough, you know, a house, we have aesthetic needs. We have relational needs.
• 53:15
  And the more richly met these needs are, the more capable we are as givers. So I think that communism, as we have seen it, seeks to impose by force a principle of the human being that we need to arrive at through spiritual practice, through the, I mean, really what enlightens most people is the, you know, is mortality.
• 53:50
  When you, you know, near that time and you're, I mean, we're starting to get to that stage where, you know, our parents pass away or certain of our cousins or siblings, you know, friends, they start to pass away. And you're like, oh gosh, I'm not gonna, none of my self-interest that I've accrued, I'm gonna be able to take with me. The only thing that outlasts me is what I've created and what I've given. So I think that there's a genuine spiritual insight inside of communism,(...) but like so much else, we're trying to impose by force something that is an organic expression of life.
• 54:28
  Well, I would disagree with you there in a sense. I think communism unfortunately has this relationship in our mind to Marx and that Marx is really giving voice to a canonical false insight.
• 54:46
  And the problem with it is that it's prescriptive. The solution to the problem you're talking about is again, lineage.
• 54:55
  Once you understand that you as an individual are a temporary structure at best, but that you are part of a lineage, you are in fact a part of a nested set of lineages that are indefinitely long lasting.(...) And that what your genes are actually trying to do for both better and worse is get into the future.
• 55:19
  And getting into the future by creating well-being that enhances other members of your lineage and that lineage can be anything from your family to humanity as a whole.
• 55:37
  That that is a productive activity and that it is actually,(...) what you are describing can be well done through a so-called capitalist structure(...) in light of certain corrections. And you pointed to Georgeism, land value taxation.
• 55:54
  I would point to Pigou as another version of a corrective that has been considered before. Pigou was like I am obsessed with externalities.(...) And the idea was that essentially punishing negative externalities and leaving the market to otherwise reward unevenly based on productive behavior(...) produces a system I would argue. I don't think you can, it's very hard to implement well because you have to be able to define an externality. But if you could properly define externalities and you could punish all the behavior that shrinks the pie and you could allow the behavior that it increases the size of the pie to be rewarded, if you did that, you would literally have to do almost nothing else governance wise. At any scale that you can do that, the system is self-correcting because it evolves in the direction of producing genuine productivity, not pseudo productivity that's actually mortgaging the future or any of the things that you and I would hate.
• 57:04
  And I do think that these things are, it is important for the ascendant right to level up with respect to things like market failure, including negative externalities.
• 57:20
  And that it won't do it without a credible competitor and the Democratic Party does not provide one. The Democratic Party is just an agent of corruption.
• 57:32
  All of that said, maybe I will add one element that I think we need evolutionarily to get back to the questions surrounding antisemitism, false accusations of antisemitism, blackmail, compromise, Bobby Kennedy, all of the things that you and I wanted to discuss.
• 57:52
  So the one element that I would add to this is, this is my own model.
• 58:01
  So you probably will not have encountered it.
• 58:04
  There are two bases for cooperation that are evolutionarily valid. In other words, ones that our genes or whatever it is that is evolving within us would recognize as meaningful.(...) One of them has to do with shared inherited material.
• 58:25
  I would say genes for shorthand.
• 58:28
  Right, you can collaborate with people based on the fact that they are expected to share your genes. This is why close family works.(...) We know how closely related we are. A full sibling is a 50% relative on average, but 50%.
• 58:43
  A child is an obligate 50%(...) relative as is a parent.(...) And so the kind of altruism that we see within families is very straightforward to explain at an evolutionary level.
• 58:57
  But that also scales up. This is where Dawkins and I depart from each other. And I would say, and I have said to Dawkins, and he refuses to acknowledge it,(...) that actually there is no limit to the genes'(...) ability(...) to optimize for shared genes just because the population in question is larger than gives us an ability to name how related we are to people. So in other words, there is something that will cause, you know, an Irishman and a Scotsman to come to blows(...) and then to unite to fend off a Russian.
• 59:37
  And that that process has only one competitor in terms of reasons to collaborate. And the competitor is reciprocity.
• 59:48
  And the point is the world is always debating between these two forms.(...) And one of them is simply vastly better according to the values that we consciously spell out,(...) the things that we honor.(...) From the point of view of creating a fairer, more productive, safer,(...) more beautiful, more compassionate system,(...) reciprocity is the only game in town. You wanna be part of a system where you don't care that somebody comes from a different continent than you and you collaborate with them because they have stuff to bring to the table that's valuable in collaboration, right? That cosmopolitan agreement to put aside genes(...) and collaborate because collaboration is good is so far and away more productive than the genetic alternative that it beats the pants off of it when times are good.(...) But the bitter pill that comes with that is that when reciprocity breaks down, it breaks down into lineage against lineage violence.(...) And so my concern is that Israel is a society caught in a battle between the Old Testament, which is a document of lineage against lineage violence. If you read it, you'll see that this is the wisdom that is being dispensed.
• 1:01:19
  And Israel is caught between that and a more modern understanding of itself in which it wishes to be peaceable with its neighbors and productive and a member of the global community.
• 1:01:36
  The latter version has to win. It has to win. If it does not win, if it does not win across the entire Middle East, I would also argue that Islam is effectively a lineage against lineage, that the religious doctrine of Islam is just like the Torah,(...) a document of lineage against lineage, competition and violence.(...) And that one of the parts of the story of the Middle East that we don't tell is that when Muslim populations have attempted to modernize and become cosmopolitan and to embrace reciprocity with the rest of the world, they have often been derailed by the West for reasons of resources and power.(...) So I'm not arguing that any population is inherently bent on lineage against lineage violence. I don't think they are.
• 1:02:30
  But where we find ourselves in the 2020s is in a battle between the old lineage against lineage violence and the new cosmopolitan way. And we don't understand that what's going on in Israel and Gaza threatens to drag Israel backward into lineage against lineage violence in a permanent way and to drag the world backwards.(...) If Israel manages to coerce the United States to join it in a war against Iran, for example, we are effectively all signing up for lineage against lineage violence.
• 1:03:11
  And I don't think humanity survives that.
• 1:03:13
  So I will just say upfront, one of the things that is motivating me to level criticisms that frankly, I find frightening to level in public is that I think humanity's fate rests on how we deal with the problems of the Middle East in this particular moment.
• 1:03:32
  (...) And I don't think people understand that.
• 1:03:37
  Yeah, it's not an issue that can be separated from everything else. It can't be cordoned off. It can't be sequestered away. What's your position on Israel?
• 1:03:48
  What's your position on climate change?
• 1:03:50
  What's your position on Ukraine?
• 1:03:56
  It's significant, I think, that we call it the Holy Land.
• 1:04:02
  It's a mirror for the whole world.(...) If peace is possible in Israel and Palestine, there is no conflict anywhere on earth where you could say, well, peace isn't possible here.
• 1:04:17
  It creates a precedent, a template, or a morphogenetic seed for the entire planet.
• 1:04:33
  Yeah, if we...
• 1:04:37
  See, also,(...) when you speak of dire consequences for everybody, partly that is because of technology and the power that it has given us to destroy each other. I mean, this goes back to 1945, when really total war became obsolete.
• 1:05:02
  Or at least when the Soviet Union developed the atomic bomb, what was that, 1949, the hydrogen bomb, 1953, somewhere around there.
• 1:05:13
  Amid all this talk about missile defenses and things like that, if one country with enough nuclear warheads, I mean, even Israel has 500 nuclear warheads, if they just set them off on their own territory,(...) most of humanity would die because of the nuclear winter in the radioactive fallout.
• 1:05:36
  So we're still under this delusion that this lineage-based cooperation slash competition that we could win.
• 1:05:51
  And climate change also, for all of its deficiencies as a theory, is also getting at a fundamental truth that what we do to the other, we do to ourselves, that the damage to the other visits ourselves as well.(...) This is the fulcrum that can swing us into a new era.
• 1:06:20
  And that's why Bobby's views on the issue and the Trump administration's views on it,(...) which frankly are not much better than the Biden administration's views on it. I mean, this is pretty bipartisan. That's why these are all so disturbing to me.
• 1:06:39
  Yes, I think you have drawn the connection rather perfectly, that the lineage against lineage mindset is incompatible with the weaponry at our disposal. It is incompatible with a world in which we share an atmosphere and oceans and elements of our food supply.
• 1:07:03
  Really,(...) I mean, one thing that's true about evolution is that evolution is about genes trying to get into the future.(...) But genes have liberated human beings to reinterpret the landscape. The genes can't figure out what to do about novel people that they haven't encountered before, but a human mind can. And so we have been given a gift, which is the ability to take the genes out of a position of control.(...) And here's the greatest irony of all in that story.
• 1:07:45
  If the genes could see, could understand, could comprehend the way human beings can,(...) they would know that the only way to get into the distant future(...) is to put lineage against lineage violence aside completely.
• 1:08:03
  If we continue to play that lineage against lineage violence game, we will exterminate ourselves far sooner(...) than we will blink out if we collaborate on trying to preserve our position here in the universe.
• 1:08:20
  So the genes would want us, if the genes could understand, they would want us to overcome our lineage against lineage instincts because they are in the end going to be our destruction at this point, even if they were, I hesitate to use the term, but even if they were in a sense wise, 2,000, 3,000 years ago.
• 1:08:44
  So really this is the point, I think of it as the moment, well, in an emergency in aviation, there's a point at which the pilot takes the control from the autopilot. He says, my aircraft, right? This is my aircraft.
• 1:09:03
  And that sidelines the autopilot because the autopilot doesn't know what's going on, doesn't have a program for the particular emergency. And this is that moment where we have to take our fate as humans and say, my aircraft, right? This is the point at which we are going to take controls over this thing because our chances are far better(...) if we do this consciously, than if we allow our instincts to drive. Our instincts are going to end up in a frankly global genocidal conflict that benefits absolutely no one.
• 1:09:38
  You always had a thought actually, a new thought while you were talking, conventional selfish gene thinking says that, or tries to explain altruism in terms of a simple misapplication of genetic programs that are meant to serve your close kin.
• 1:10:00
  But then they get misapplied, and they end up serving sometimes total strangers or two babies who aren't related to you, adopted babies, things like that.
• 1:10:10
  And that from a genetic standpoint, this misapplication is worth it because it's better to be over nurturing, it's better to err on the side of broadness rather than narrowness.
• 1:10:28
  But maybe this, maybe it's not a over application of something that's only meant for close kin in the kin based selection model.(...) Maybe this is actually a latent genetic program that actually, now I know that conventionally you would say that there's no selection pressure to develop genetic programs that would, I mean, even the word genetic programs is problematic, but I'm just gonna use it anyway, genetic programs that would extend over periods of thousands of years.(...) I wouldn't say that.
• 1:11:20
  My colleagues would say that, but I wouldn't. You're right on the right track here incidentally.
• 1:11:29
  But so maybe, it's not that,(...) and I don't think you were actually quite saying this, but it's not that we have to take over from the autopilot of our genes, but that actually there are capabilities, there are capacities of our genes that have maybe been not fully expressed, but that are now coming to their time as our destructive capabilities reach this point. And that are being turned on perhaps by various environmental, various, maybe you don't like to go there, but I do, various psychic, psycho-spiritual triggers that are turning on these latent altruism programs at this moment in history.
• 1:12:25
  I believe we could rephrase everything you've just said. So there's 95% overlap with what I'm arguing.
• 1:12:35
  And if you look at,(...) I've recently been in Europe looking at cathedrals that have taken three or 400 years to build.
• 1:12:44
  (...) And when you think about why a person would initiate a project to build a building that they will not see completed, a building that does not produce wealth, it's not a factory, you begin to understand that actually the story, our evolutionary story(...) has needed an upgrade. Frankly, I'm a big fan of The Selfish Gene. It's a great book, but it's stuck in 1976 and it needs a massive update to understand the next chapter, right? So it's sort of, it's the kind of thing we will look back at and cringe, not because it wasn't brilliant when it was written, but because it was halfway to a story that's much more interesting and predictive.
• 1:13:36
  So I do believe, I'm fond of the following puzzle. My colleagues will tell you evolution cannot look forward.
• 1:13:46
  And I know exactly why they say that and I agree with the logic as far as it goes, but it's not true.
• 1:13:52
  How do we know this?(...) Because you and I can look forward and we are products of evolution. So evolution built a mechanism that can look forward. So when you say evolution can't look forward,(...) right?
• 1:14:04
  I mean, that's like saying, we can't see through walls. Well, that's why we put windows in them, right? So evolution has built a mechanism that does allow it to look forward and we are it.
• 1:14:17
  And the idea that we have latent programming and frankly, the problem with the picture you paint is that it's only half of it. We have latent programming that goes in both directions.(...) And so at that moment where you're supposed to put all of that negativity aside and all row together because you're not going over the waterfall depends on it, those characteristics are there.
• 1:14:44
  But at the moment that one lineage is in a position to displace another from planet earth and to take all of its stuff,(...) there's a genocidal program in there too.(...) And so what I'm trying to alert people to(...) is take a look at your own values and understand that they are on the menu of possibilities, but they are not automatic. And if you want those values to win out, we have to actively choose them. And when we go around demonizing people for criticizing Israel for what it's doing in Gaza, we are choosing a genocidal future.
• 1:15:25
  Irrespective of whether or not you consider what's going on in Gaza a genocide, what we are doing is we are choosing a lineage against lineage worldview.(...) And it's gonna drag us in and sooner or later that what's going on in Gaza is going to manifest as a need for the United States to sign up in whatever way for a war against Iran. And the point is every step we take in that direction(...) limits our options for actually getting ourselves into the next chapter of history. We have to choose actively. And you can say that that's our programming waking up. I'm cool with that interpretation. Or you can say that that's the moment at which we have to take over from the autopilot. I'm obviously also cool with that interpretation, but either way, we gotta choose.
• 1:16:11
  Yeah, I don't think we're actually saying anything different.
• 1:16:14
  Obviously both programs are there.
• 1:16:17
  Our genes enable us to kill each other(...) and commit genocide. They also allow us to forgive and to cooperate. And the question is what turns on one set of capabilities and turns off another. And one of the things is narratives. You know, these activate latent tendencies.
• 1:16:48
  And maybe, you know, narratives, so narratives we all know are very powerful,(...) but there's other things too that get into, you know, the realm of, I mean, I guess you could even say spiritual teachings, religious teachings, those are narratives as well, that are not merely intellectual constructs,(...) but are part of a larger way of being, a state of being, a state of consciousness.
• 1:17:23
  And, you know, I look at what, you know, when I have those moments of, you know, wanting to, wishing somebody harm, you know, wanting them to feel sorry, wanting to be vindicated.
• 1:17:43
  These are kind of dilute versions of what's happening in Gaza, you know.
• 1:17:54
  And so I look at what tips me from one to the other.
• 1:17:59
  What would it take to tip all of us from one to the other?(...) And that's why I think so much of the, the attitudes of the messaging around MAGA, around immigration, around LGBTQ stuff,(...) is actually counterproductive to where the movement on the deepest level really wants to go.
• 1:18:28
  I don't think that they're fundamentally motivated by hate.(...) I don't think that Donald Trump is fundamentally motivated by hate.(...) That pattern of explaining the actions of those that you disagree with,(...) in terms of they are just horrible people, that is part of the same, the same complex that dehumanizes Palestinians or Jews or Blacks or Whites, or you know, liberals or conservatives,(...) that's the pattern.
• 1:19:03
  It's the pattern of, and it's a simplistic pattern that denies the nonlinear nature of causality that is applied also. I mean, that's why, I think that's why COVID messaging was so effective, because here we have this decades long increase in chronic illness.
• 1:19:33
  People are less and less healthy and they don't know what to do about it and there's no identifiable cause. And then all of a sudden the virus comes along and the authorities say, here is a target for all of your anxiety and all of your fear.
• 1:19:46
  Here's something, a bad thing that if you control this, then you will be healthy again. So that's another example of the pattern. Find the bad thing and control it and all will be well.
• 1:19:57
  Find the immigrants, control it. Vladimir Putin, control it.(...) Radical Islam, control it. Whatever it is,(...) a satanic cabal in the highest levels of government, that's the bad thing.
• 1:20:11
  Get rid of that virus and all will be well.
• 1:20:14
  So, yeah.
• 1:20:16
  Well, I wanna step into your trap there actually. I know you didn't mean to set one and I in the end resonate with your point. Your point is the us and them framing is in the end, it carries the seeds of our destruction.
• 1:20:33
  Even though it was the seeds of our creation, that's kind of my point about lineage. It brought us here, but we have to stop.(...) We won't survive it if we don't because the weaponry has changed and the number of us have changed.
• 1:20:48
  It's time to move into a new drama. That was the drama that carried us to where we are. Right.
• 1:20:52
  I agree. But here's the problem. In the end, I do actually think this is a battle between us and them.
• 1:20:59
  And I draw it differently.
• 1:21:03
  The us is everybody who understands that the battle between us and them has to stop. And the them is anybody who is committed to continuing that battle. And the reason that I don't feel bad about drawing this as an us and them is that essentially it's an invitation.
• 1:21:21
  If you can understand that our long-term survival, even our medium-term survival,(...) depends on sidelining the us and them paradigm, then it's a battle between us and them and there shouldn't be anybody in the them category. Everybody should be on board with wanting to do that, which allows us to survive.
• 1:21:39
  And so I wanna see the them category vaporize because nobody's committed to it anymore because frankly, we are all vastly better off to say, you know what, we're not gonna be able to go back and figure out who actually owns each piece of land based on historical first claim, nor would it be coherent to try.
• 1:22:00
  We could descend into that rabbit hole.
• 1:22:03
  But the basic point is, I don't know that any nation has a right to exist.
• 1:22:08
  Nations are gonna have to have a right to defend themselves. Hopefully they will have very little need to defend themselves, that we can stand down the features of our human nature that cause the requirement to defend our nations with ferocious weaponry. But I wouldn't wanna see those weapons removed unless and until we reach to state where they were truly unnecessary. And that's nowhere on the horizon.
• 1:22:37
  But in any case, it's us and them where them is anybody who's committed to lineage against lineage violence.
• 1:22:43
  Yeah, but in that case, Bret, I start to wonder which side I'm on. I'm on to them because yeah, I can profess all the things that I've been saying, but there are ways that I still behave in lineage versus lineage behavior,(...) where I'm like, you know, to try to figure out who the cool kid is and saying mean things about somebody because it kind of establishes in us and there's a- No, no.
• 1:23:08
  I don't think that what you're talking about is lineage versus lineage.
• 1:23:12
  And in order to get to why, I wanted to know given all of the thinking you've done, maybe you're familiar with the ecological distinction between what's called exploitation competition and interference competition.
• 1:23:25
  I think you'll need to explain that briefly.
• 1:23:30
  Okay, yeah, I mean, I would anyway, because most of the audience won't know it.(...) Imagine a hummingbird defending a patch of flowers.
• 1:23:45
  The hummingbird can exploit that patch of flowers by drinking nectar in an efficient way from them. And that nectar will not be there for the competitor when the competitor arrives because the first hummingbird has exploited the resource well.(...) Or the hummingbird can fight competitors that arrive and displace them so that they are not able to drink nectar from his patch of flowers.(...) So the first of these is exploitation competition and the second is interference competition.
• 1:24:20
  And my point is exploitation competition is not something we can get rid of and it's not something we should want to get rid of. That in effect, when people compete by trying to capture a place in the market, that they are doing us a service by doing themselves a service. And that this happens, it can work at every scale.
• 1:24:49
  Two nations that are competing to become the manufacturing center for an industry are involved in exploitation competition.
• 1:24:59
  But once they start sabotaging each other or they go to war with each other, that's interference competition. And interference competition is destructive of wealth. So what you're reporting about your own failure to treat all people the same is actually, in my opinion, a feature, not a bug, that you should want to prioritize those people who you find have values that are noble, who have capacities that are valuable(...) and you should want to win out over those whose values are defective(...) or who are profiting at the expense of others.(...) And so anyway, I don't really want us all to treat everyone the same. I want us to treat people in a way that rewards things we want to see more of. That's how the system gets better over time.
• 1:26:01
  I agree with that. That's not quite what I was trying to say though.(...) It's more like noticing the motives of wanting to establish belonging by casting aspersions on somebody else, whether or not those are fair judgments.
• 1:26:19
  So it's not so much about, okay, let me rationally, objectively decide whether this person is somebody I want to associate with. It's more of like this kind of conspiratorial feeling of, oh, look at that person over there.
• 1:26:30
  And to disentangle those two very different motives, for me, requires quite a lot of attention and introspection.(...) And I would say that the one motive of, oh, look at those people over there, don't want to have anything to do with them, that is more of a lineage competition impulse.
• 1:26:54
  Whereas saying, okay, that person holds different values and is acting in a really unfair way. And that is something I need to know in order to be effective and to take care of myself.
• 1:27:19
  (...) So I think that there's a distinction to be made there.
• 1:27:23
  Yeah, I mean, I see it, although I would just say, the thing that we need to worry about is the genes reasserting the lineage against lineage structure. And that's really a structure in which the reason that you are discounting people or deriding them has to do with their origin, which you are deducing presumably through superficial characteristics, skin color, language they speak, things like that, which I suspect you just don't do.
• 1:27:59
  I hope not.
• 1:28:01
  You know, I guess the impulse is strong.
• 1:28:03
  Like I took a deep dive into René Girard during the pandemic, and the social dynamics of scapegoating.
• 1:28:14
  And you see it in, it's ubiquitous in society. It's in the elementary school classroom.(...) Somebody points to some kid in my fourth grade class, it was Kent, Kent's a weirdo, Kent's got cuties.
• 1:28:30
  And all of a sudden, like everybody is excluding and ostracizing Kent and anybody who associates with Kent.
• 1:28:37
  And it's not because we have any good reason to think that, I mean, it's not that he's harmed anybody or that he's a bad kid, or this is not based on anything real.(...) It's simply what you say about Kent becomes your badge of acceptability or unacceptability.
• 1:29:03
  Well, you know whose fault that is.
• 1:29:05
  No, whose fault is that?
• 1:29:08
  I don't know, I was gonna say J. Edgar, but I was just really making a joke.
• 1:29:13
  All right, here's the thing. You're gonna have to go here shortly. I think it is vital that we return ourselves to the central question that brought us into this conversation. Okay. There's something about Bobby Kennedy, who we both hold in high regard and have high expectations of what he's going to do.
• 1:29:33
  There's something about what he's doing in office.
• 1:29:38
  Tweeting about antisemitism that is alarming because it suggests coercion.
• 1:29:46
  You've put a very, I think, high quality model of how that would unfold on the table. A friend approaches you says, "We found this stuff, but don't worry, it's in our hands and we'll protect you." And that causes the victim of the blackmail to start seeing the world through the eyes of that person who presents as a friend.
• 1:30:09
  Or I also posed the idea that it's more of a guilt thing. What do I have to do and believe in order not to be in the category of anti-semite?
• 1:30:23
  It could be operating on that level, either or both.
• 1:30:28
  Yeah.
• 1:30:29
  And you also put together another mechanism, an analogous mechanism by which a credible threat that you will be stigmatized as, for example, an antisemite causes you to figure out what sorts of things you need to say in order to neutralize that threat. And I think those two things actually are very credibly connected in the sense that the threat of being stigmatized as an antisemite or a racist or some other kind of bigot gets ratcheted up and then at the point that it fails to motivate you to say the right kinds of things,(...) the compromise is sort of the next phase. So you can imagine a person being marched down the road to a rather radical perspective through this gentle slope that starts with the vague hint that you might wanna say some things so people know you're not an antisemite. And then there's the threat that actually, you know, you've said some things that make us think maybe you are, so you ratchet up what you're saying so it's even more direct. And then eventually it comes down to the compromise that's held by people who portrayed themselves as your friends.
• 1:31:44
  (...) That all sounds-- Yeah, it could be. All too plausible.
• 1:31:51
  Yeah, I don't think that it's actually that important to figure out what's actually going on with Bobby Kennedy.
• 1:31:59
  I think he's doing a great job at HHS.
• 1:32:02
  He's navigating minefield after minefield,(...) so much hostility, like I think he's doing a great job.
• 1:32:10
  And yeah, I mean, it's a shame that he's distracting from us sometimes with these tweets. What bothers me about those isn't that it's gonna compromise his effectiveness as a reader at HHS. There's more of as a symptom of this larger inconsistency, this like fatal inconsistency in the belief systems that could, if we're not for this inconsistency, could really transform our world.
• 1:32:52
  Yeah.
• 1:32:53
  All right, well, I have a more concentrated concern here, which is that to the extent that Bobby is anomalously tweeting about antisemitism at this moment, that the purpose of that is to disempower him, that his base is so divided over issues about what's taking place in the Middle East, that for him to be in an unnuanced way, and I would say almost beyond unnuanced, in a preposterous way, to be signing up on one side and not the other, that the purpose of that, whoever's driving it, is succeeding in reducing the chances of maha, occurring.
• 1:33:52
  This brings us to the question that caused you to call me, I think, which is I mentioned amnesty, and you had already been thinking along these lines.(...) And so this is really what I think we need to unpack.
• 1:34:07
  There is something about a world(...) that whether you think it's a smaller or larger contributor is being shaped by people who have power through illegitimate means, that they are using compromise to drive material changes in policy.
• 1:34:32
  And that's bad for us. Those of us who believe in the consent of the governed ought to be irate that our system is being driven by people who are entrapping or disproportionately scrutinizing our leaders and forcing them into stances they wouldn't otherwise take.
• 1:34:58
  So the question becomes, how do we diffuse their weapon? And my point was, we have to make it possible for people like Bobby to go back to work rather than be concerned about accusations of antisemitism or be concerned about the release of materials by people who are obsessed with that accusation.
• 1:35:36
  Right, this was all related to the Nuzi affair.
• 1:35:42
  And this is why this has resurfaced in the news, which those who believe that there's overt blackmail going on think that it's some kind of sexual blackmail.
• 1:35:56
  And that's why, like I said at the beginning, I don't think he's been to Epstein Island. I don't think he's a pedophile. I know that he's not actually. And I think that's why we're not going to be able to know that he's not actually.
• 1:36:04
  But you know, so what would be so shocking?
• 1:36:09
  Well, the general public might not care too much, but if this is true, his wife would probably care a lot.
• 1:36:21
  And so it could work on that level.
• 1:36:24
  And so to your point though, what would neutralize that blackmail? It would be if his wife gave him amnesty and said, doesn't matter what comes out, I forgive you. Then there's no leverage over him anymore.
• 1:36:42
  If the public said, yeah, you know what, we're not going to be scandalized by this because we understand you're human and we're human and none of us is better than anybody else. And so then the blackmail provided that it is what's happening, which I'm not going to claim, then it would have no leverage.
• 1:37:07
  But then you get to the stuff that when you go down these conspiracy rabbit holes to the really heinous stuff(...) where,(...) as you said in our conversation, like there's some things that are, if not unforgivable, require almost a Christ-like level of non-judgment in order to apprehend those and not want to punish those who have victimized children.
• 1:37:41
  And so for me, the question is, okay, let's just assume that all of the Epstein's done all of the Diddy, the Diddy Coombs stuff, like all that stuff is just the tip of the iceberg and that the core of the power elite is all implicated and usually hostage to each other and to certain external powers because of this compromising material.
• 1:38:21
  Where is the hope?
• 1:38:23
  How can they defect?
• 1:38:26
  And I think that the only way,(...) this is what I've been thinking about, is a kind of a bargain of disclosure in exchange for amnesty,(...) which means that we say, you will not be punished.
• 1:38:41
  You will be exposed.
• 1:38:44
  Everything you do from henceforth will be transparent.
• 1:38:48
  You will not be in a position of trust anymore, but you will not be punished.
• 1:38:56
  Then you create an incentive for people to defect because I think a lot of the people, they stepped in into this horrible world.
• 1:39:14
  I mean, if you look at some of the testimonies from people who have been trafficked, you understand why it hasn't entered public consciousness more than it has because it is so shocking and so violently opposed to a worldview of normal(...) that you just cannot take it in. The cognitive dissonance is too great.
• 1:39:37
  So a lot of people, I believe, feel trapped in that world and would love it to exit it if there were an exit(...) and would then defect and reveal the other ones going on. And that's the way out, I think.(...) And on like a deeper level too, the mentality of punishment is part of the whole control apparatus to find the bad thing.
• 1:40:15
  And anyway, I have a lot more. I even have a screenplay in mind around this whole idea.
• 1:40:24
  Well, hold on. I wanna make sure we separate the two issues that you put on the table.
• 1:40:30
  The first one is in the case of Bobby Kennedy, if in fact there is something blackmail-like going on, it is you and I both agree that the person we know is unlikely to have engaged in something illegal like the abuse of children.
• 1:40:55
  So I'm just going to assume that that's not what's going on and imagine therefore that the fact that we know, and Bobby acknowledges that he's got lots of skeletons in his closet, the idea that he is a flawed Kennedy man who has, I don't wanna use the term womanizing because I don't know what the nature of what he's been doing is, but he's not been perfectly faithful to his wife.
• 1:41:25
  That's not gonna be a surprise to anyone, including her.(...) But at an evolutionary level, I think it is possible to imagine that the fact that she knows that there is stuff and will now be aware of this particular story if she wasn't before is not the sum total of it. That put yourself in her shoes.
• 1:41:51
  Suddenly the world around her is yet again talking about her husband involved in some whatever the scenario would be.
• 1:42:07
  At the very least, that is profoundly humiliating.
• 1:42:12
  And I don't think it's hard to understand why not wanting to humiliate his wife might motivate Kennedy.
• 1:42:25
  So in part, I would just say the amnesty that we both agree is inherently part of this blackmail problems solution is that we have to think in holistic human terms.
• 1:42:41
  (...) If protecting one's marriage is enough to get people to embrace things that prevent them from doing what they should be doing, then that also is a problem that has to be solved.
• 1:42:58
  And I would say in this case, Cheryl is obviously someone who has accepted Bobby with his flaws, but is still vulnerable to the humiliation and its effect on her life. And that the recognition that if she gives him amnesty that she is in fact a hero of the Maha movement. Because of course the real point of all of this is that people like you and me and all of the others who helped elect Trump in large measure because he promised to put Bobby in a position to make America healthy again, that for us, she would be a hero because this would allow Maha to fire on all cylinders, which is the point of the exercise in the first place.
• 1:43:59
  So in other words, turning the tables on those who would use the threat against his marriage by saying, you know what,(...) this isn't a question of Bobby. This is a question in large measure of Cheryl(...) and her willingness to accept a situation that none of us would be comfortable in because of the benefit to the health of Americans, especially children.
• 1:44:33
  And we also need to look at why it would be humiliating.
• 1:44:37
  And it comes down again to this in-group experience this in-group out-group dynamics, these Gerardian dynamics where, okay,(...) if Bobby's been publicly outed as an unacceptable person who's violated a certain taboo and oh, you're gonna stay associated with him, well, then you are tainted with the unacceptability.(...) So really what we're talking about here is a fundamental social transformation where we stop doing that anymore. We stop dividing the world, cleaning it into half with the good people, the acceptable people on the one half and the unacceptable people on the other half.
• 1:45:16
  And you might say, as we kind of touched on before, well, maybe we do need to not associate with certain people because they are unethical and dangerous and so forth.
• 1:45:27
  But both sides always think that about the other side.
• 1:45:31
  And one thing that really became apparent to me when I was with the Kennedy campaign, I was like, where are all the bad people?
• 1:45:41
  I'd interact with lefties and right people and libertarians and Black Lives Matter and energy company executives. I spoke with the CEO of a vaccine company.
• 1:45:57
  I'm not finding these horrible people anywhere.
• 1:46:02
  It's like a bunch of-- I could point you to a few. Okay, I will qualify that. I actually did meet one person who made my blood run cold.
• 1:46:11
  Won't say who he is.
• 1:46:14
  But generally speaking, like the explanatory framework of organizations do horrible things because they're staffed with horrible people just does not meet my experience.
• 1:46:29
  Yeah, it's not typically how it works.
• 1:46:34
  I did wanna touch on the question you raised, which at least when you first raised it, puts you and me in a different place. I think we both agree amnesty is the right way to think about this.(...) Seems like you agree that providing a mechanism for Cheryl's sacrifice to be recognized is probably a key to her giving him amnesty and that that would be a good thing. Where you and I might disagree, you present a model in which even people who have crossed what I would call unforgivable lines, people who have participated in the trafficking or the harm of children, where they would be given a kind of limited amnesty in exchange for them coming clean. On the one hand, I completely get the game theory. The game theory makes perfect sense. This is how prosecution works,(...) where prosecutors will give somebody a plea deal in order to get information on somebody who's done something even worse.
• 1:47:42
  This would function in that mode. I get that.(...) I also get that a lot of these people likely did something a little over the line and having stepped into that realm were dragged farther and farther until finally they're doing things that are in the unforgivable category. And that what that means is they didn't necessarily start out as irredeemable people. And therefore,(...) what I hear you saying sounds a lot like truth and reconciliation to me.
• 1:48:17
  I have a hard time accepting truth and reconciliation, even given the game theory for people who continued down that road to the point of injuring kids or behaving in a way that caused them to continue to be trafficked or whatever it is. It's just, I think for a lot of people, it's gonna be hard to accept, even if it's necessary for the democracy to work, that we could offer even a limited amnesty to such people. But again, as I hear myself say it, I get exactly why you said what you said, which is you want this to end,(...) even from the point of view of preventing future harm to children, allowing people who have been inside that world to come clean and not be punished for it might be the way to end the trafficking.(...) And therefore, the commitment that I'm sure you and I both have to make sure no further kids get trafficked might be served by that.
• 1:49:24
  Yeah, I mean, it's not just people who injured children. I mean, some of the things that would be revealed are so shocking that it makes you just wanna leave the planet.
• 1:49:38
  It's so sickening, just like.
• 1:49:41
  And some of the people are like, just kind of as you said, stepped into it step by step.
• 1:49:52
  And then there are those who are profoundly psychopathic.
• 1:49:59
  Yep.
• 1:50:00
  The thing is, so just to pick up on what you were saying, the most important thing, like if you have a choice, just imagine you had a choice. Either you can out all of these people and see that they are punished, or this will never happen to another child again. What would you choose?
• 1:50:24
  Yeah, it's gotta be the second life.
• 1:50:27
  It's gotta be the last. And this question comes up, I mean, it came up in Rwanda, you know? Where people committed horrific acts, murdering children in front of their parents. I mean, horrible, horrible things.(...) And the society had to decide, do we want to get revenge on those people, or do we want the cycle to end?
• 1:50:51
  And maybe it was kind of messy, but the cycle ended.
• 1:50:56
  It's not perfect in Rwanda, but compared to what it could have been, continued bloodbath, they chose for the cycle to end.
• 1:51:06
  And the key though is, see, people think, oh, you're letting them off the hook.
• 1:51:14
  The important thing is to make sure that it doesn't happen again. So part of it, it's not like, okay, you know, yeah, you said you were sorry, bye.
• 1:51:22
  If you're sincere, maybe you have an addiction, maybe you've got a problem, you have to agree to intense transparency.(...) And this transparency is what follows amnesty, and it is the future of the democratic society(...) where like not just in this, but just in terms of politics in general, it's the substitute, it's the next incarnation of punishment, radical transparency, because evil thrives in the shadows.(...) It requires secrets and lies.(...) When everything is exposed to the light, you can't do these things anymore.
• 1:52:07
  So that's my, you know, yeah, and I don't think we're ready for it actually, for that level of forgiveness or even close, but now we can begin to lay down the foundation for it, even in our political lives, but even in our personal lives, to stop orienting toward who are we gonna punish? Who are we gonna blame?
• 1:52:36
  And it's not safe to blame, okay? Like I am not naive. The stories of corruption, like it's not just corrupt organizations, they encourage, they corrupt individuals to rise within them,(...) and those people need to be removed from positions of trust and power.
• 1:52:58
  Yeah.
• 1:52:59
  Well, I guess what I would say is, in this way, not well served by our evolutionary programming, because we didn't evolve in gigantic societies like the ones we live in, where corruption of our governance apparatus does far more harm than even a crazed psychopath with a weapon who creates a massacre.
• 1:53:31
  So in effect, we are easily distracted by narratives that we understand, which obscure harms of a totally different scale that we can't quite fathom, right?
• 1:53:47
  So in other words, the human drama surrounding Bobby Kennedy,(...) sexual indiscretions, a marriage, separate sentence, Epstein Island, people abusing children, et cetera, those stories cause us to lose focus that the whole reason for the compromise apparatus is policy. Yeah.
• 1:54:13
  It's affecting policy, and that policy adjusts where hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars end up. It adjusts where there will be warfare.(...) It affects whether or not your children will have access to food that sustains them versus poisons them, whether they will be required to take medical treatments that disable them.
• 1:54:40
  All of those things are on the table, and they are downstream of narratives from which we cannot look away. And so I will say years ago, I wrote a piece on, I think it was published in Salon, if I'm remembering correctly. My point was terrorism is a trick that plays on defects of the evolved mind, where an enemy is not in a position to harm you at a particular level, but they are in a position to scare you so that you harm yourself at a level they couldn't, then that's terrorism. And my point is this is analogous to that in the sense that if we focus on the human details that are so hard for us to look away from, and we fail to understand that whatever's going on, the purpose may be to derail the movement to make America healthy again, because pharma, for example, doesn't interest in us not doing that. We are harming ourselves.(...) We should do what makes it most likely that Bobby Kennedy can do what we put him in office to do, which is to confront the chronic health epidemic.
• 1:56:02
  And to the extent that something about Israel, Palestine, antisemitism, and all of that is causing him to put things into public that are distracting from that mission, that is somebody engaged in a magic trick in which we are the mark.
• 1:56:26
  Yeah, it would be speculation to say that that was a deliberate trick, but whether or not it was deliberate, if it plays out that way, it still is working.
• 1:56:43
  Yes, I guess I would ask you, I know you're gonna have to go here in a second, but I would also ask you this. One of the things, as you and I have apparently separately been mulling over questions of amnesty, how to get back on track and all of that, one of the things that has occurred to me is, and it dovetails very well with the scenario that you painted where somebody who claims to be your friend approaches you and lets you know that there's material that you can't afford to have emerge.
• 1:57:16
  There are Jews who are selling a very unnuanced story about any critique at all of Israel or the war in Gaza is antisemitism. And I saw as of yesterday, a video in which somebody, a Jewish guy was testifying to Congress, and he literally said that it's not enough for American universities to not be antisemitic. They have to be anti-antisemitic, which is an exact echo of Ibram X. Kendi and his preposterous formulation.(...) So we are back there where this level of stupidity has overcome the question of-- You raised this, you have to be anti-racist.
• 1:57:59
  Exactly, it is that insane formulation that is now suddenly being portrayed in Congress as if it made some kind of sense all of a sudden. So in light of that, one thing I feel pretty sure about is that Bobby's support, and I think very genuine concern about antisemitism, has to be coupled with some Jews in his environment who are capable of nuance on this issue.
• 1:58:34
  That people who are gonna reflexively react to any criticism of Israel or the war in Gaza as if it is tantamount to antisemitism are not doing him any favors.
• 1:58:45
  And he needs some better Jews.
• 1:58:49
  Well, it's not gonna be me.
• 1:58:58
  Why do you say that? Well, we've had many conversations about it, and I've been unable to, influence his beliefs even to the slightest degree as far as I can tell.
• 1:59:14
  Well, you know what that sounds like.
• 1:59:18
  What?(...) It sounds like it's downstream of the leverage that you and I both think may be affecting his decision making.
• 1:59:29
  As the saying goes, you cannot reason a man out of a belief that he didn't reason himself into to begin with.
• 1:59:35
  I've never heard that, but I like it.
• 1:59:38
  All right, well, nonetheless, maybe the idea of amnesty catches on,(...) the idea of honoring the sacrifice of somebody like Cheryl catches on, and we can find our way to a place where the blackmailers are left without their toolkit.
• 2:00:01
  Yeah, that would be a profound change in society and in our collective consciousness for that to happen.
• 2:00:14
  It sure would.
• 2:00:15
  All right, well, I know you have to go.
• 2:00:18
  Charles Eisenstein, it's been,(...) I don't wanna say a pleasure because some of this stuff is just awful, but I've really enjoyed talking to you about it.
• 2:00:26
  You are a truly independent thinker, and I have long appreciated that, and I appreciate it even more now. So, Charles, thanks for coming to Darkwood. Thanks, Greg. Yeah, thanks.
• 2:00:39
  All right, appreciate it.