Latest / Thinking Class / #094 - Lorenzo Warby - Crushing Dissent: How The Rise Of The 'Unaccountable Class' Ruined Everything
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
- 0:02SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Lorenzo Warby.
- 0:06SPEAKER_01: Lorenzo writes the Substack Lorenzo from Oz and he contributes regularly to one of Substack's recommended publications, Hallendale's Not on Your Team, but Always Fair.
- 0:15SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Lorenzo and I think out loud about the concept of institutional capture and how the institutions of Western countries have become captured by fashionable ideologies and through the emergence of the unaccountable classes within bureaucracies.
- 0:30SPEAKER_01: We also talk about how the unaccountable class influence policies and norms, both at the political and the private institutional level, what Lorenzo means when he talks about the feminization of institutions, how effective governance and accountability has been hindered, the role of dissent and the potential for change within these structures, and why dissent has been suppressed, making these structures ineffective, and how Australian political structures offer an example of how to effectively hold those in power to account and much, much more.
- 1:03SPEAKER_01: This is the fourth time Lorenzo's joined the show.
- 1:06SPEAKER_01: I always enjoy our conversations.
- 1:08SPEAKER_01: We go through many different Eddies and rabbit warrants.
- 1:13SPEAKER_01: So do strap in, listen out for lots of interesting references to Lorenzo's writings and his tangents as he seeks to make a broader point as to how we've come to end up where we are in our political and our private lives.
- 1:31SPEAKER_01: And make sure to like, subscribe, and follow this show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack.
- 1:37SPEAKER_01: Let's go thinking class together.
- 1:39SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
- 1:57SPEAKER_01: For the fourth time, you are a very, very, very good friend of the show by this point.
- 2:03SPEAKER_00: My pleasure and my privilege.
- 2:05SPEAKER_01: Well, Lorenzo, you are doing what you do best, which is writing incredibly interesting think pieces online, specifically at your Substat.
- 2:16SPEAKER_01: And one that caught my attention recently was about institutional capture.
- 2:22SPEAKER_01: And I think to unpack that very briefly for the viewers and listeners, we could probably recognize what we mean by institutional capture insofar as any public private prevalent in private sector organization, pretty much in any of the Western countries, primarily anglophone, but certainly in non-anglophone countries too, are seemingly obsessed or have been obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion up until quite recently, uh, transsexualism.
- 2:58SPEAKER_01: And um you could argue more generally a uh aggressively liberal outlook on life.
- 3:07SPEAKER_01: So you could boil that down to a kind of welcome for open borders and a diminishing of own national history, sovereignty, and indeed pride and culture.
- 3:22SPEAKER_01: So before we get into all of the reasons as to how that might have come about, why don't we start with unaccountable classes?
- 3:33SPEAKER_01: So who do you mean when you're talking about unaccountable classes?
- 3:37SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, it's a shout out.
- 3:39SPEAKER_00: I start with a shout out to uh Richard Mineter, a American um journalist, who when he was talking on trigonometry, explained his use of the term.
- 3:47SPEAKER_00: And I thought, ah, that explains a lot.
- 3:50SPEAKER_00: Um, so the unaccountable classes as he defines them, and I like this definition, is the people who are paid for turning up, right?
- 3:58SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't really matter if they have any positive income on the uh sorry, any positive effect on the world around them or other people, um, they just get paid.
- 4:09SPEAKER_00: So um obviously bureaucracies can be like that.
- 4:12SPEAKER_00: A lot of the higher education system is like that, a lot of the schooling system is like that, a lot of the nonprofits are like that.
- 4:20SPEAKER_00: Um, it's a very large group.
- 4:21SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a better way of getting at the fundamental problem than the more common term, which is the professional managerial class.
- 4:29SPEAKER_00: Because there's a lot of professionals and members of the professional managerial class whose income absolutely depends on how well they perform, in which case they're not in the unaccountable classes, they're in the accountable classes.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: Um, so I that's why I've shifted to Richard Minator's um analysis and definition, because I think it's a much, much more useful one for explaining what's going on and makes a much clearer um split in who's doing what and why, and who's lining up with whom and why.
- 5:03SPEAKER_01: So the professional managerial classes that might have uh a tighter link between their um input and performance and thus their pay, are we talking about doctors?
- 5:21SPEAKER_00: It it it varies a bit and it varies in a degree, but anyone who basically if has to deal with somebody who won't pay them or won't come back to them if they're not happy, um is in that group.
- 5:34SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so anyone who's got got to get the consent of the people they're dealing with for their income is in has got some level of accountability.
- 5:43SPEAKER_00: Now that doesn't solve that doesn't entirely solve issues of you know asymmetric information and so forth, but they're obviously in a different position than somebody who if they turn up they get paid, and that's the end of the story.
- 5:56SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 5:57SPEAKER_01: And I think most importantly, at the thrust of your think piece, it isn't just about saying, look, here are some unaccountable classes and what they believe, you know, they've ultimately led to institutional capture through their beliefs about the world.
- 6:15SPEAKER_01: But more importantly, as you say, it's not the their income that has been adversely affected.
- 6:23SPEAKER_01: But I think the other downstream impact of that, besides them sailing along, getting paid no matter what it is that they believe, and then put into some kind of institutional framework and roll that out throughout their institution, but it's happening everywhere, and so it becomes a nationwide thing, an international thing, is that it does have practical consequences for everyone else who aren't part of the unaccountable classes.
- 6:49SPEAKER_01: So let's let's start with a little bit of a um excerpt, and then you can unpack that and tell us a little bit about what has been facilitated in the name of the institutional classes.
- 7:03SPEAKER_01: So you have said the rise of the unaccountable classes has led to a shift in social and institutional dynamics that have resulted in so much institutional capture capture, not only pushing new norms and new sins, it also meant supplanting previous norms and claims about the world, especially those entailing strong sense of service to and respect for the concerns of the national citizenry in favor of new framings and patterns of action supporting the new Trumping moral projects, most obviously trans and far more consequentially mass migration.
- 7:37SPEAKER_01: What what uh what factors do you think facilitated this new social and institutional dynamic that I think we've probably all come to recognize in our day-to-day lives?
- 7:48SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um there's I want to want to distinguish between institutional capture and regulatory capture, okay?
- 7:54SPEAKER_00: So economists talk about regulatory capture, which is basically the regulate, the people being regulated have the most incentives to care about the regulation.
- 8:02SPEAKER_00: So they try and get as much influence over the regulators as possible.
- 8:06SPEAKER_00: So the economists talk about regulatory capture.
- 8:08SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about institutional capture, where the institution itself becomes captured by certain networks, which then push ideas and claims about the world that suit their interests.
- 8:23SPEAKER_00: Um, and I refer to what I call the Charlie Munger principle.
- 8:27SPEAKER_00: The late Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's partner, and he had a principle of life where he said, uh, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes.
- 8:37SPEAKER_00: And um, I've unpacked that a bit more using uh Bob Trivers, the evolutionary biologist's analysis of self-deception, that we're very, very good at self-deception, we're very good at match moralizing and rationalizing our self-interest.
- 8:52SPEAKER_00: And so part of what was going on is we select, we select for things to believe that suits us because that's what gets the reinforcing incentives going.
- 9:02SPEAKER_00: And of course, then you have if you have networks of people who are all in the same situation, then you get very, very strong selection pressures.
- 9:12SPEAKER_00: And then you get also remembering that we're very status-driven beings because we're very social beings.
- 9:19SPEAKER_00: So if you then are playing the same status games together, that then has further selection pressures.
- 9:27SPEAKER_00: So what happens is we got massive expansion in bureaucratization and massive expansion in higher education.
- 9:35SPEAKER_00: And the um French political economist uh uh Piketty has and has mapped how we've got this shift between what he calls the Brahmin left instead of the elect uh to against the merchant right.
- 9:49SPEAKER_00: So he's saying instead of politics being about capital versus labor, which is what it used to be, there was arguing against labor, the working classes being pushed out, and it's different forms of capital fighting each other.
- 10:00SPEAKER_00: And his Brahmin left maps pretty thoroughly to the the unaccountable classes, and the merchant right maps pretty thoroughly to the accountable classes, and so and so what you get is if something suits the increased resources and authority of an institution, and that institution is dominated by networks of the unaccountable classes, what they will do is they will push that institution in directions that suits them.
- 10:32SPEAKER_00: And of course, moral projects are a great way to increase your authority and b increase your access to resources.
- 10:41SPEAKER_00: And this creates a really big problem because uh you have things like take, for example, public health, right?
- 10:51SPEAKER_00: Take public health.
- 10:52SPEAKER_00: We say public health is there to make us healthy, but there's an incentive problem.
- 10:58SPEAKER_00: If the population gets metabolically sicker, public health gets more resources.
- 11:04SPEAKER_00: So it's not in the interest of public health that we be metabolically healthy, it's in the interest of public health that we be metabolically unhealthy.
- 11:12SPEAKER_00: Acute care, on the other hand, is different.
- 11:14SPEAKER_00: Why is acute care different?
- 11:17SPEAKER_00: Because there's a specific illness or a specific injury which has to be specifically fixed by specific people, and you either fix it or you don't.
- 11:25SPEAKER_00: And it's the same structures are very clear.
- 11:29SPEAKER_00: But with metabolic health, the we're talking about long-term things going on, the information patterns are much more obscure, and and so you don't get the same good feedback systems, so you drift towards feedback systems where uh more sickness means more money to public health.
- 11:50SPEAKER_00: So one of the one of the really odd things going on is our um our dietary, official dietary guidelines make no sense if what you are concerned with is public health.
- 12:03SPEAKER_00: Why do I say that?
- 12:04SPEAKER_00: Because the evidence base for them is really weak or even hostile and they make no evolutionary sense.
- 12:10SPEAKER_00: But we see again and again and again public health nutrition guidelines which are not structured for us to be healthy collectively as a population.
- 12:22SPEAKER_00: But if you look at them, they are structured for us to be metabolically unhealthy as a population.
- 12:27SPEAKER_00: So the selection processes were perverse.
- 12:32SPEAKER_00: And because we're very good at self-deception and very good at rationalizing and moralizing our self-interest, the that this is pushing in that direction of you know, nutrition guidelines that make no sense.
- 12:44SPEAKER_00: We were healthier as populations before we had nutrition guidelines.
- 12:48SPEAKER_01: I think you can you can see that just by going on any Twitter account or some YouTube archive channel which shows imagery from, for example, early 1900s England when there was still people down the mines.
- 13:05SPEAKER_01: I I I'm always totally taken aback when I see a picture of say Preston in Lancashire or somewhere in County Durham, and these are places where most of the population, from very young to pretty old, are down the mines, are doing some pretty backbreaking work, and their diets are probably pretty simple to say the least.
- 13:27SPEAKER_01: And I suspect there's quite a lot of calorie output going on there as well, calorie burning, and they that that you basically don't see anyone in those films that are portly, apart from perhaps those who are the mill owners or or whatever.
- 13:41SPEAKER_01: Um and what you were talking about there, um, the public health, the uh the the incentives being to actually not make us as healthy as possible because how are you going to get resources either from the population or from government subsidy and all the rest of it?
- 13:59SPEAKER_01: That's the shtick of Robert F.
- 14:01SPEAKER_01: Kennedy in uh the United States, right?
- 14:03SPEAKER_01: Make America Healthy again.
- 14:05SPEAKER_01: Is he's effectively saying we have institutional capture going on here, which has led to a very obese population, amongst other things, lots of other diseases, this, that, and the other.
- 14:18SPEAKER_01: Appreciate there's interrelational factors going on here with potentially creating dependency classes with um government handouts and all the rest of it.
- 14:26SPEAKER_01: But he's going, look at us, look at us now compared to look at us then.
- 14:31SPEAKER_01: And I'm telling you this is because corporate interests have captured things.
- 14:34SPEAKER_01: And clearly, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or that way inclined outside of America, I think if anyone was to take a look at images of the average American person, you could see that the American person has gotten particularly unhealthy and that there might actually be something there, but it's partisan interests that start pushing back heavily because these corporate interests are saying, well, we don't we don't want our resources to be diminished.
- 14:59SPEAKER_01: Shut him down.
- 15:00SPEAKER_01: You know, we have a bureaucracy, which I think stuff is coming out of the United States States Administration, where there are attempts to take down Robert F.
- 15:09SPEAKER_01: Kennedy because he's poking his nose in places he shouldn't, whether it's within the vaccination programs or whether it's within public health guidelines.
- 15:18SPEAKER_01: So it is fascinating that that's happened within that industry.
- 15:23SPEAKER_01: And yes, you can see that in supposedly the bad old days when we were also ill and malnourished and life was bad, then actually we're you know, we might have a longer life expectancy because of the pills we take, but physically, mentally, we're probably less sharp than we were there.
- 15:41SPEAKER_01: And thinking about some of the other incentives, Lorenzo, so that's public health.
- 15:46SPEAKER_01: So if we think about, for example, the uh mass adoption of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which for a time was diversity, equality, and inclusion, and then there was a bit of a sleight of hand from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome and uh within the lockdown periods.
- 16:04SPEAKER_01: Um, if we think about affirmative action programs, you're saying that things like diversity, equity, and inclusion is ultimately driven by the policies of mass migration and multiculturalism in an attempt to aggressively make host populations um accept the newcomers who've arrived en masse.
- 16:30SPEAKER_01: So there's lots of let's tamp down any potential um hostility that might come out or um or try to make sure no conflict comes up as we are imposing actually some kind of um ethnic conflict for resources in some way, uh not always ethnic, can be along religious lines and sex lines and sexuality lines too.
- 16:54SPEAKER_01: And then there's the affirmative action point in that too, which follows on from that.
- 16:58SPEAKER_01: But you've also made the point that there's been a feminization of institutions.
- 17:02SPEAKER_01: Um we'll unpack that in just a moment, actually, because I think it's important that people understand what the differences are between a female typical and a male typical behavior on on average, and how that maps onto institutional leadership.
- 17:18SPEAKER_01: So perhaps you can tell us what what you mean by feminization of institutions and what those behavior patterns usually are.
- 17:24SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 17:24SPEAKER_00: Okay, so uh just to backtrack slightly, one of the one of the mistakes I think Robert Um Kennedy makes is he overemptromises corporate interests, which are real, I don't deny it, and underemphasizes the just the problems of bureaucracy itself.
- 17:41SPEAKER_00: So I think a lot of the public health problem is yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 17:45SPEAKER_00: There's some very perverse incentives for big food and big pharma, don't deny that.
- 17:49SPEAKER_00: And they push on the regulations and their own interests, don't deny that either.
- 17:53SPEAKER_00: But a big part of the problem is they're pushing it open doors because the bureaucracy itself has perverse incentives.
- 18:01SPEAKER_00: Um and the idea that the bureaucracy is just the just the instrument of public policy, and it just transparently puts public policy into practice, I think is one of the big delusions that has allowed the accountable class, unaccountable classes to get so large and get so much control over resources.
- 18:19SPEAKER_00: Um and and in fact, um uh before I go into the feminization, it's clear that one of the huge problems that UK is suffering is as the historian David Starkey points out, Blair, when he was prime minister, and this Brown followed this, moved a lot of the decision making away from anyone who was elected, apart from the BM.
- 18:42SPEAKER_00: And what you're doing is you're moving things to Quangos, full of people who aren't accountable, with the with the uh expansion in human rights, you move things to judges who you know are not accountable to anyone elected, and then you move things to the EU, which is you know whose accountability mechan um structures are pretty awful.
- 19:05SPEAKER_00: Now, okay, you've the Britain has left the EU, but the other two problems haven't been fixed.
- 19:10SPEAKER_00: The Tories did nothing about them, and if anything, they doubled down on them.
- 19:13SPEAKER_00: So that's that's going back to what are the incentive structures, who's accountable, who's not accountable, what are the information flows?
- 19:20SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's so yeah.
- 19:22SPEAKER_00: Now, uh with feminization, okay, so uh humans are a sexually reproducing species, and the um the evolutionary pressures on the male expression of genes and the female expression of genes are not the same.
- 19:40SPEAKER_00: And um, so when we look, for example, at personality traits, um, and the classic one is uh the set of you know openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, uh, agreeability, and neuroticism, um, that that's that's ocean.
- 19:58SPEAKER_00: That's been replaced by hexago.
- 20:00SPEAKER_00: Um, but there are identifiable, because I've added honesty and humility, um, but there are identifiable traits.
- 20:06SPEAKER_00: So just going with ocean, right?
- 20:08SPEAKER_00: So that's that's the five big traits, but they've got subtraits to defend them that aren't ready to be there, though, right?
- 20:14SPEAKER_00: And if you map people by that, uh about 70% of either sex has a pattern of cognitive traits that doesn't appear in the other sex.
- 20:27SPEAKER_00: Now, to be fair, you only have to have one outside for it, right?
- 20:32SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, we are clearly cognitively distinguishable species.
- 20:38SPEAKER_00: So one of our dimorphisms between our two sexes is a cognitive dimorphism.
- 20:42SPEAKER_00: And of course, if you stop and think about how evolutionary works, how it works, obviously this is going to be true because the what works to have male expression of genes reproduce themselves, and what works to have female expression of genes reproduce themselves, aren't the same thing.
- 20:57SPEAKER_00: So the selection pressures will not be the same.
- 21:00SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 21:00SPEAKER_00: Now, Homo sapiens are unusual because our children are so biologically expensive that the convergence between male and female interests is unusually high, but nevertheless, they're not the same.
- 21:12SPEAKER_00: And the classic way they're not the same is teamwork and risk management.
- 21:18SPEAKER_00: So there has been very strong selection on the male expression of teams for teamwork, and in fact, at one stage that that selection was absolutely brutal.
- 21:30SPEAKER_00: Um, there is the thing called the Neolithic Y chromosome bottleneck, which after the invention of farming and the development of animal herding, you got two things happening.
- 21:40SPEAKER_00: The populations went up a lot because you know you're making your own food essentially, rather than just taking it.
- 21:47SPEAKER_00: And you'll suddenly you had assets, you had to pretend protect farmland and animal herds.
- 21:53SPEAKER_00: And what happened is you got massively intensive um struggle over resources.
- 21:59SPEAKER_00: So That only about one in 17 male lineages make it through that bottleneck.
- 22:04SPEAKER_00: That is brutal, def uh brutal, brutal uh selection for teamwork.
- 22:08SPEAKER_00: Because basically, successful male teams propagated and unsuccessful male teams died.
- 22:13SPEAKER_00: Now, there is no such bottleneck amongst female lineages.
- 22:18SPEAKER_00: So clearly, what happened is the unsexual male teams got killed, and their women got were the were the spores of war.
- 22:30SPEAKER_00: Now, this is sort of unutterably grim because it meant, of course, that you had generations of women who bred with their male rapists who killed all their male relatives.
- 22:41SPEAKER_00: It's just incredibly grim to think about.
- 22:44SPEAKER_00: But it does mean there's really different selection for teamwork.
- 22:48SPEAKER_00: And just as an aside, it makes you wonder about romance novels too.
- 22:52SPEAKER_00: Because what's the pattern in romance novels?
- 22:55SPEAKER_00: The woman falls in love with this male brute who she then pacifies.
- 23:02SPEAKER_00: And you think, no wonder what's going on there.
- 23:04SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so but you get selection for male teamwork, and institutions are formalized teams.
- 23:12SPEAKER_00: That's what an institution is, really.
- 23:14SPEAKER_00: And one way you can see the really big difference is it's just you get these cases where every so often a um a teenage sporting team will play the m the female national teams.
- 23:29SPEAKER_00: A teenage boy sporting team will play the male teenage boy sporting team will play the male national females, women's sporting team, and they will just run right over them.
- 23:43SPEAKER_00: Now I used to think that was mainly because you know boys are stronger, but I then realized that if you take a case in Switzerland, Richard, and I cannot remember the sport, I think it was soccer, I'm not sure.
- 23:54SPEAKER_00: But under-14s, so a cantonal under 15 teams, so no boy was older than 14, defeated their women's national team 7-1.
- 24:05SPEAKER_00: Wasn't even remotely close.
- 24:07SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're a fit woman, you're about the same physical strength as a 14-year-old boy.
- 24:12SPEAKER_00: That's not about strength, that's about teamwork.
- 24:16SPEAKER_00: The boys are just better because there's been this brutal systematic back in our past, and it never entirely went away, um, selection for teamwork.
- 24:27SPEAKER_00: So if if um if men and the male expression of genes are selected for teamwork and institutions are um formalized teams, which they are, then you will get men being quite good at running institutions, which is clearly true.
- 24:48SPEAKER_00: They've been running institutions for thousands and thousands of years, and male-dominated institutions brought us, you know, the Industrial Revolution, the scientific revolution, democratization, mass prosperity, right?
- 24:59SPEAKER_00: Lots of good things happened, and lots of bad things happen too, because you know, men have all their negative quality characteristics, and teams can, you know, absolutely magnify the negative characteristics too, but they can make institutions work damn strongly or daunstily.
- 25:12SPEAKER_00: Now, with women, then not being the same selection for teamwork at all.
- 25:19SPEAKER_00: Women are not as good at teams, and you can actually see there's now scholarship on this, that for example, even amongst elite um female athletes, they will display significantly higher levels of aggression against their own teammates during a game than men.
- 25:40SPEAKER_00: Because men interesting men are they know what teams are and how they're supposed to work, right?
- 25:45SPEAKER_00: And women just are not as good at it.
- 25:48SPEAKER_00: And um, and of course, you get some these are you always get outliers, you can get men who are just hopeless at teams, and you get women good quite good at it.
- 25:56SPEAKER_00: But as a group, men are much better than team at teams than women are at teams, and that affects how institutions operate.
- 26:04SPEAKER_00: And so what you tend to get is that you get female teams, they female institutions, their ability to act coherently starts to decay.
- 26:14SPEAKER_00: Because, for example, how do men establish trust?
- 26:19SPEAKER_00: Some of the ways they establish trust of doing things like saying absolutely outrageous things, making outrageous jokes, um, even being a bit pushy, because all that's about if I say an outrageous thing, will you still support me?
- 26:34SPEAKER_00: If I push, will you fault?
- 26:36SPEAKER_00: It's testing.
- 26:37SPEAKER_00: And now, I mean, everyone knows that in particularly dangerous occupations, men can be, you know, they can make the most outrageous jokes and make the most outrageous comments about each other, right?
- 26:49SPEAKER_00: Yeah, soldiers and and drill work and people on ocean drilling trains, right?
- 26:53SPEAKER_00: They they're notoriously pushy about all that.
- 26:56SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 26:57SPEAKER_00: Women are physically weaker, just systematically, and they're more agreeable.
- 27:03SPEAKER_00: So all that sort of thing starts looking like threat.
- 27:08SPEAKER_00: Because to be blunt, they are physically weaker, and it is a problem, right?
- 27:11SPEAKER_00: And and men can be shits.
- 27:13SPEAKER_00: Um and uh, you know, um, you know, there's all something to keep in mind.
- 27:19SPEAKER_00: Now there's plenty of map bad male behavior, and most the the worst part of bad male behavior is criminal, right?
- 27:26SPEAKER_00: Women dominate violent crime, they dominate sexual crime.
- 27:30SPEAKER_00: Okay, there is such a thing as bad male behavior.
- 27:32SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, um trying to establish trust in a situation where women, for entirely understandable reasons, want to tone police is a problem.
- 27:46SPEAKER_00: You don't get the same trust within the organization.
- 27:50SPEAKER_00: They are much more likely to police emotional expression generally.
- 27:54SPEAKER_00: It becomes much harder to strongly disagree with somebody.
- 27:58SPEAKER_00: They are more conformist, they are more so they're more likely, particularly teenage girls, uh, to suffer from social contagions.
- 28:06SPEAKER_00: So if you get a situation where you get less trust, more emotional policing of tone, more reluctant to deal with disagreement, right?
- 28:17SPEAKER_00: You're starting to get institutions which become more dysfunctional and less coherent, and to be blunt, more cowardly and more averse to dealing with conflict.
- 28:29SPEAKER_00: And one of the problems that people have been constantly saying is why aren't our institutions why are institutions so cowardly?
- 28:35SPEAKER_00: Why aren't they standing up for stuff?
- 28:37SPEAKER_00: And you think, uh, well, part of the reason that's not the only reason by any means, but part of the reason for that is they're more feminized.
- 28:42SPEAKER_00: And women will just be rest less reluctant to engage in certain sort of aggression and more likely to be conformist, um, and less likely to trust each other in groups, they're much more clicky, which are about emotional investment.
- 28:57SPEAKER_00: And you say you begin to get a problem with institutions.
- 29:01SPEAKER_00: Now, this is, I want to make a big distinction here between gender egalitarian societies, which are by far the best societies to live in.
- 29:11SPEAKER_00: Um, if you read the anthropology, if you read the history, you want to live in a gender egalitarian society.
- 29:18SPEAKER_00: Because A, they don't put all these resources into keeping women down, and B, you can use the talents of women a lot better.
- 29:26SPEAKER_00: Um, in fact, one of the big advantages Western civilization had, and particularly Northwestern Europe had, is it was much, much better at using the talents of women than other civilizations were.
- 29:38SPEAKER_00: Much better.
- 29:39SPEAKER_00: So gender egalitary is fine.
- 29:41SPEAKER_00: I'm not I'm not critiquing that at all.
- 29:45SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying is if you're going to make institutions work, then a certain amount of male wisdom is necessary to make them work.
- 29:56SPEAKER_00: Um, and if you start feminizing them, so you start pushing out everything women are uncomfortable with and start going in patterns which are not based on teamwork, but which are based on conformity, strong notions of propriety.
- 30:11SPEAKER_00: You can't say that that'll offend somebody, um, you can't say that upsets people.
- 30:16SPEAKER_00: Uh, no, you've got to go along to say that you're, you know, a safe person to deal with, then you're going to get increasingly dysfunctional institutions.
- 30:25SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's just a sadly problem.
- 30:27SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't think it's an utterly insoluble problem, but, and it's a very big but, if you're in a situation where, for example, if you criticize men with feminism, and if you criticize women, it's misogyny, then you can't talk about bad female behavior.
- 30:41SPEAKER_00: And you need to be able to talk about mad female behavior and stop it.
- 30:45SPEAKER_00: Because the other way that women behave is uh, and it's not this is not restricted to women, but they're more likely to do this, it's relational aggression.
- 30:55SPEAKER_00: To express their aggression by attacking people's emotions, uh, social connections and so forth.
- 31:01SPEAKER_00: And the way you do that is by expressing moral and social concern, because if you're the physically weaker sex, obviously you don't want to be openly aggressive because the physically strong sex might just hit you.
- 31:12SPEAKER_00: So, and also um it's it's a it's much less effective form of aggression, it's very obvious.
- 31:18SPEAKER_00: With physical aggression, you actually want to puff up and threaten because that makes the physical aggression more effective.
- 31:23SPEAKER_00: But with emotional and social and relational aggression, you want to hide the aggression because that makes it more effective.
- 31:28SPEAKER_00: And remember, as a species, we're very good at self-deception, so you get more relational aggression, which is addressed as moral and social concern.
- 31:37SPEAKER_00: And of course, DEI is perfect for all this because it creates moral projects that expand the ambit of the bureaucracy, and because they're moral projects, they shield the bureaucracy against accountability.
- 31:53SPEAKER_00: So if you say DEI is about, you know, for example, stopping bigotry, then you get what I call the activist fallacy, right?
- 32:00SPEAKER_00: We're doing X for the achieve Y purpose.
- 32:04SPEAKER_00: You're against us doing X, therefore you're against Y, right?
- 32:07SPEAKER_00: We're doing DEI to stop bigotry, you're against DEI, therefore you're in favor of bigotry, which of course doesn't follow at all, but rhetorically is very effective, we're very effective.
- 32:17SPEAKER_00: So you so DEI expands your ambit of action, undermines your accountability, and allows much more uh use of moral uh relational aggression, moral aggression, social aggression, reputational aggression.
- 32:33SPEAKER_00: And it's just and it's just perfect for management, for example, because they get this moral project, they um expand their ambitious, they extend their authority, and you can't criticize them because that makes you a bad person.
- 32:46SPEAKER_00: And of course, in feminized institutions, that's really powerful because if you look at the way um humans work, we've got most social species, their dominant form of uh status is dominance.
- 33:03SPEAKER_00: Do this or I'll hit you, thump you, right?
- 33:05SPEAKER_00: The alpha male chip, do this or I'll thump you, right?
- 33:08SPEAKER_00: Uh we uh we appear to have systematically killed off our alpha males uh because our beta males could talk to each other, and they systematically killed off the alpha males.
- 33:21SPEAKER_00: Um, this is Richard Rangham's argument, which I think is a very powerful one because there's a lot of evidence for it.
- 33:27SPEAKER_00: Um but okay, so that got rid of that sort of aggression, all good.
- 33:30SPEAKER_00: So we we come we but we then are very good at cooperative aggression.
- 33:36SPEAKER_00: Um and so, and um sorry, women are as aggressive as men, they just do their aggression differently.
- 33:47SPEAKER_00: So, and yes, and so you got this the eye becomes a way of pushing out authority by blocking or aggression, uh blocking accountability and yet being able to use it aggressively against people who disagree.
- 34:04SPEAKER_00: So, um so this gets back to you've got bureaucracies which are expanding, which are unaccountable.
- 34:11SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to impose accountability on state bureaucracies, because let's face it, most states in the world have been predatory.
- 34:20SPEAKER_00: Their citizens have not had mechanisms to force accountability on them.
- 34:23SPEAKER_00: But the larger the bureaucracy gets, the harder it is to enforce accountability on them because no accountability mechanism is infinitely flexible.
- 34:30SPEAKER_00: You've got feminization, which is pushing for conformity and making them less functional, and you've got DEI, etc., which gives them moral authority and also undermines their accountability.
- 34:45SPEAKER_00: So you've got all these things working together, and then you've got the problem is in a welfare state, if the if if if you've got a bureaucracy in the welfare state who, if there is more social pathology, they get more resources, then you've got completely perverse incentives.
- 35:04SPEAKER_00: And this sort of works together as a sort of um perverse structure of bad incentives and bad patterns.
- 35:13SPEAKER_00: Um, and if we can't talk about it, if you can't say um, women, you've got to stop doing this, you've got to stop doing this relational aggression, you've got to think more uh more clearfully about what you're gonna have to put up with that might make you all that uncomfortable, but is necessary to make institutions work.
- 35:33SPEAKER_00: But you can't talk about that because that's man's claim, or that's patriarchy, or if you criticize women as misogyny, which are all mechanisms I would point out for emotional safety.
- 35:43SPEAKER_00: These are all claims for emotional safety.
- 35:46SPEAKER_00: And women, as a physically weaker sex, who, you know, in evolutionary terms have bubs in toe, is obviously more concerned for emotional safety than men are.
- 35:57SPEAKER_00: And if you look, for example, at the polling data on free speech, men are notably more in favor of free speech than women are.
- 36:07SPEAKER_00: Because they're the physically strongest sex and they are much less threatened by disagreement.
- 36:14SPEAKER_00: The physically weaker sex with the bubs and toe, which relies on emotional connections to make things work for them, because that's how female friendships work, but also that's how their families work, right?
- 36:26SPEAKER_00: You want your partner to have a strong emotional connection to you so that you're and you want your children to have spinal children so it connected to you so everything works, right?
- 36:34SPEAKER_00: So you get in this drift away from free speech, but of course, that cuts off your feedback mechanisms.
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- 37:17SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
- 37:23SPEAKER_01: Yes.
- 37:24SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's probably a good segue into what should be the final piece of this puzzle to unpack, which is where we go from here in a world where dissent has ultimately been eradicated or at least been strangled to the point of being ineffective.
- 37:45SPEAKER_01: So you referenced a journalist and podcaster, Tanya De Greenwald, who talked about how all of these issues, uh, these ideological movements, this expression of uh behavior that is now so pervasive in institutions has actually started to drive away critical thinkers, those people who would ordinarily provide dissent.
- 38:09SPEAKER_01: And so actually, those people having gone off and left the corporate world and now no longer being able to provide any checks and balances.
- 38:18SPEAKER_01: So you're left with lots of nodding dogs, uh, you refer to them as.
- 38:22SPEAKER_01: And it makes me wonder about how complete this insulation of the unaccountable classes is, not just from the consequences of those status-driven beliefs you've talked about, um, but I suppose from the dissent that is now clearly rising outside of these institutions.
- 38:42SPEAKER_01: So, to bring a few contemporary examples in my country, specifically in England, of which I am English and then I'm British, we see St.
- 38:52SPEAKER_01: George's flags and Union Jacks going up on the lampposts, almost as a do you know what?
- 38:58SPEAKER_01: This is our pre-political loyalty.
- 39:00SPEAKER_01: This is what we're about.
- 39:01SPEAKER_01: And for years and years, you've told us that this is something to be ashamed of, and that we must celebrate every other flag.
- 39:09SPEAKER_01: Uh, you have purposefully uh gone and invited in a new working class over time that has undercut us, and we're not putting it up for that anymore.
- 39:21SPEAKER_01: And so it's it's put as an expression of patriotism, but it's also all of those things, too.
- 39:27SPEAKER_01: In Australia, there's also been some pretty big protests, as far as I can see, in Sydney and Melbourne, lots of Australian flags out there.
- 39:36SPEAKER_01: There have been uh similar protests going on in New Zealand.
- 39:40SPEAKER_01: So the Anglophone countries are typically moving in this direction.
- 39:43SPEAKER_01: This is a way of dissenting now that it seems you can't vote your way out of this.
- 39:49SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter how many times you say you want less of it, you get more of it.
- 39:53SPEAKER_01: And so I suppose my question is, um Lorenzo, is how do we see that overton window change that seems to have happened so quickly outside of the institution?
- 40:06SPEAKER_01: So if you think about the criticism of mass immigration, the cultural impacts of it, the economic impacts of it, the general downgrading of a host population, that could never take root in institutions because it was driven out.
- 40:22SPEAKER_01: Any criticism of any policies that were uh effectively dealing with those particular governmental, supranational institutional ideals have been rolled out to such effect that no one's allowed to criticize otherwise you're out.
- 40:38SPEAKER_01: Is that insulation so complete now that ultimately there won't be an organic, you know, come to Jesus moment where everyone within these institutions goes, oh, do you know what?
- 40:50SPEAKER_01: We've maybe pushed these policies too hard.
- 40:53SPEAKER_01: Do we need to see, as Nima Parvini, author of The Populist Delusion, has highlighted, which is actually doesn't usually come from organic uh bottom-up change, these discourse changes?
- 41:06SPEAKER_01: It comes from top down.
- 41:07SPEAKER_01: It's when basically some elite starts to counter signal.
- 41:12SPEAKER_01: It's usually the guys with the gold who make the rules.
- 41:15SPEAKER_01: So I suppose that the question is do we see a preference cascade um normally within these institutions and the capture that has uh taken place?
- 41:25SPEAKER_01: Or do we effectively have to wait until the the money holders, the money brokers, uh and I know that sounds a bit conspiratorial, but you know what I mean.
- 41:35SPEAKER_01: If you're if you're a CEO of an institution, you go, right, enough, we're not playing these games anymore, uh scrap the lock.
- 41:41SPEAKER_01: What what do you think institutional capture is so complete that it can't be organic preference cascade, or is it something more?
- 41:51SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I think from within these institutions, you can't expect much.
- 41:56SPEAKER_00: So I can't don't think you can expect much from the universities, from the public service, and so forth, from the nonprofits, because the incentive structure is just too bad.
- 42:06SPEAKER_00: Um, and they're they're too institutionally captured.
- 42:10SPEAKER_00: Uh that, however, doesn't mean that we're frozen in that situation because that's not everybody, it's not even close to everybody.
- 42:18SPEAKER_00: Now, I'll point out a two examples.
- 42:22SPEAKER_00: One is an old example, which is the dissolution of the monasteries in your country.
- 42:28SPEAKER_00: Um, right?
- 42:29SPEAKER_00: So they were rich, they were powerful, they've been around for centuries, they looked like they were a fixture, and they disappeared in less than five years.
- 42:37SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 42:38SPEAKER_00: Um, because enough power holders elsewhere thought, yeah, you see on all that wealth in Europe, you're useless.
- 42:44SPEAKER_00: Why don't we just get rid of you?
- 42:46SPEAKER_00: And they did, and they did, right?
- 42:48SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh, that's not the only case in history, by the way, of that happening of power holders just going, yeah, you monasteries, we're getting rid of you.
- 42:56SPEAKER_00: Um, it also happened at least once in China um during the Tang Dynasty.
- 43:01SPEAKER_00: So, so that's a case of, and of people, there's an interesting shift happened in sort of certain circles where people moved from how do we fix the universities to how do we close the universities, and the dissolution of the monasteries of the monasteries is being openly touted as an example, which shows that there's just a level of alienation going on and anger that the universities, and I'm I'm sort of a university fringe dweller because I go to various seminars and so forth, and I can tell you they have no idea what what's going on in the wider society, and they have no idea, this is the academics, what a complete bubble they're in.
- 43:40SPEAKER_00: No idea at all.
- 43:42SPEAKER_00: So, one one thing is you get an outside force that just goes gone.
- 43:47SPEAKER_00: I mean, suppose you get a reformed government, right?
- 43:51SPEAKER_00: If reform closed every single British universities except the 12 of the Russell group, would they lose a single vote?
- 44:00SPEAKER_00: No.
- 44:01SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 44:02SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they wouldn't.
- 44:04SPEAKER_00: Would they solve much of their budgetary problem?
- 44:08SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 44:10SPEAKER_00: Is there anyone there in there in reform who's committed to any of those universities?
- 44:15SPEAKER_00: No.
- 44:15SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 44:16SPEAKER_00: So you can absolutely see a Nigel Farage government going, yes, the solution of the monasteries.
- 44:22SPEAKER_00: We have a new version, right?
- 44:23SPEAKER_00: We can get rid of all these people who hate us, none of which are going to vote for us, and we can solve, we can say, we can say billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, right?
- 44:34SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's an outside force.
- 44:37SPEAKER_00: Now, another example I will give is a much more contemporary one, which is the way Silicon Valley, which had been a Democrat mainstream, isn't anymore.
- 44:49SPEAKER_00: There's been a very conspicuous movement of Silicon Valley types into MAGA.
- 44:56SPEAKER_00: Now, why?
- 44:58SPEAKER_00: Well, because the unaccountable classes came for them.
- 45:02SPEAKER_00: They came for them through regulation, they came for them through debanking.
- 45:07SPEAKER_00: Um, a friend of mine was at the um Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference recently in London, and he was certainly talking to one of the he was talking to one of the senior tech bros, and to use a colloquialism, and they are still hopping mad over the debanking.
- 45:24SPEAKER_00: Just to explain to people, the Biden administration uh was trying to force AI into a basically folk company cartel, and they were using debank, driving people out of the banking system into trying to force that cartelization.
- 45:43SPEAKER_00: Now, why did they want a cartel?
- 45:45SPEAKER_00: Because AI is not what it looks like on the tent.
- 45:49SPEAKER_00: Um, and you can manipulate both the algorithm and a source material to bias its responses in a particular direction.
- 45:58SPEAKER_00: And obviously, if you've got a strong ideological and institutional control paradigm, you want to do that.
- 46:05SPEAKER_00: Who's absolutely doing that?
- 46:07SPEAKER_00: The CCP, right?
- 46:09SPEAKER_00: So the model or exists.
- 46:12SPEAKER_00: Okay, so but also a lot of the tech bros had worked out that um the regulation uh way regulation had been strangling manufacturing was starting to push in their direction.
- 46:28SPEAKER_00: And so what do they say?
- 46:29SPEAKER_00: Right, we can't do this.
- 46:31SPEAKER_00: Who can we talk to?
- 46:32SPEAKER_00: Ah, this Trump broke, right?
- 46:34SPEAKER_00: Um, so you I mean, Elon Musk was the most prominent example of this, and you know, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are both formidable egos, and so it was a bit of a rocky interaction.
- 46:45SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, if you look more broadly, there was a massive shift in the monster tech pros to go, ah, now we've seen the Democrats up close.
- 46:55SPEAKER_00: Um, uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, so no, we're gonna help the other side, right?
- 47:01SPEAKER_00: And and this is where you get an interesting division because uh migration serves private capital, broadly speaking, but not the working class.
- 47:12SPEAKER_00: But if the merchant right are going to hold off the Brahman left, they've got to mobilize working class voters, they've got to make an alliance with working class voters, and they're going to have to give up mass migration as part of that alliance.
- 47:26SPEAKER_00: Uh now, the fact that there were those demonstrations in Australia was fascinating because migration is much left of a bit of issue bitter issue here.
- 47:35SPEAKER_00: It is become a bit of an issue because the Albanese government has over over-enthusiastic.
- 47:42SPEAKER_00: It's let too many people in too quickly.
- 47:44SPEAKER_00: But it's nowhere near being the bitter issue it has been in Britain or in Canada, because we or even the United States, because A, Australia controls its borders.
- 47:54SPEAKER_00: Um, and we're a whole continent of with you know less than half the population of Britain.
- 47:59SPEAKER_00: We can control our borders.
- 48:01SPEAKER_00: There you are, right?
- 48:02SPEAKER_00: So we control our borders, but the other is that we're much more selective with our migration, right?
- 48:08SPEAKER_00: Even though we are a high migrant country, um, about a quarter of our population is foreign-born, right?
- 48:14SPEAKER_00: Which, you know, much higher than the in in the United States, for example, which is about 15%.
- 48:20SPEAKER_00: Um, but we do migration very differently, where we have very strong selection for the educated.
- 48:26SPEAKER_00: So we high school migration.
- 48:28SPEAKER_00: So, for example, I live in western Melbourne, it's full of migrants, and as a result of being full of migrants, it has, I think I'm right in this, uh the highest or close to the highest rate of university educated residents in any local government area.
- 48:46SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 48:47SPEAKER_00: Not despite the fact it's got so many migrants, but because it's got so many migrants, which is not exactly the experience in Britain, for example.
- 48:56SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 48:57SPEAKER_00: So, and that means that the issue of migration in Australia is almost entirely congestion.
- 49:04SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 49:04SPEAKER_00: Yeah, infrastructure hasn't kept up, housing hasn't kept up, right?
- 49:08SPEAKER_00: So housing prices and rents are going up and up and up and up, congestion, trafficking congestion is getting up and up and up and up, and that's what's driving the you please turn off the tap, right?
- 49:18SPEAKER_00: It's not downward pressure on wages, because we don't have downward pressure on wages, because if you if you're disproportionately bringing in more capital than labor, because remembering skills are also a form of capital, and a lot of these people have other capital they're bringing with them, you're actually making capital more plentiful relative to labor, marginally at least.
- 49:36SPEAKER_00: So that doesn't put any downward pressure on labor, right?
- 49:40SPEAKER_00: So wages aren't in Australia, aren't being downwardly pressured by migration.
- 49:44SPEAKER_00: How can we tell that when migration stopped during COVID, there was no rise in wages?
- 49:50SPEAKER_00: Unlike Britain, unlike in the United States, right?
- 49:54SPEAKER_00: Because we're not playing stupid games with capital and labor.
- 49:58SPEAKER_00: Why not?
- 49:59SPEAKER_00: Because we've got compulsory preferential voting.
- 50:01SPEAKER_00: If you don't get the working class happy enough, they don't vote for you.
- 50:05SPEAKER_00: And you can't drive them away from the polls.
- 50:08SPEAKER_00: So there's a big difference between the Albanese government and the Starmer government.
- 50:12SPEAKER_00: They're both Labour governments.
- 50:13SPEAKER_00: They both got elected on 34% of the vote.
- 50:17SPEAKER_00: But there are two huge differences.
- 50:19SPEAKER_00: Albo, as we affectionate call him, is a much better politician and prime minister than Starmer.
- 50:25SPEAKER_00: There were three differences.
- 50:26SPEAKER_00: One, he's a much better, he's just much better at his job.
- 50:29SPEAKER_00: Secondly, he's a genuine patriot.
- 50:31SPEAKER_00: He's a left-wing patriot, to be sure, but he's a genuine patriot in the way Star McClelly isn't.
- 50:36SPEAKER_00: And the third thing is we have preferential voting.
- 50:40SPEAKER_00: He wasn't elected by 34% of the vote, even that's the primary vote that the Labour Party got, which is the same as Starmer's, right?
- 50:47SPEAKER_00: He was elected by that 20% of the popular electorate and gave him their second preferences.
- 50:53SPEAKER_00: And if that 20% falls to 16%, or fit rather 15%, he's not in office anymore.
- 51:00SPEAKER_00: So he has to look at that 20% and keep them happy in a way Starmer just doesn't.
- 51:07SPEAKER_00: And that really changes the prof the the incentive structure.
- 51:11SPEAKER_00: And also our upper house is proportional representation.
- 51:14SPEAKER_00: So you've got to have a sense, you've got to yes, we have single member lower houses, so we generally speak we have majority governments mostly.
- 51:21SPEAKER_00: But they've got to negotiate with a proportional representative upper house, which is powerful, and with committees, grill public servants, if you want to watch politics as a blood sport, Australian Senate Estimates Committees, which are televised, and you can watch them.
- 51:37SPEAKER_00: That's politics as a blood sport, right?
- 51:39SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a character-forming experience to you know sit in front of them.
- 51:44SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, so they're yeah, but it's purely a congestion issue.
- 51:47SPEAKER_00: And the other issue, of course, we don't take any big lumps.
- 51:50SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 51:51SPEAKER_00: Yes, I'm in a high migration area, and so you see Muslims of varying varieties, not mostly not from the Middle East, mostly they've come from South Asia and and uh the Malay world.
- 52:01SPEAKER_00: There's some from the Middle East, but not huge numbers.
- 52:04SPEAKER_00: Um, so you see Muslims, you see Hindus, you see Sikhs, you see Pacific Islanders, you see Chinese, you see Koreans, you see uh East Africans, you see everything under the sun, right?
- 52:19SPEAKER_00: So Anglo-Celts are almost certainly not a majority around here, but everyone follows Anglo-Celtic norms because Anglo-Celts are by far the biggest group.
- 52:27SPEAKER_00: Even though we've got three quarter, you know, a quarter of our population is foreign-born, 75% of our population is Anglo-Celts, and the other 25% is 2% of this and 2% of that, and 3% of that, and 4% of that.
- 52:43SPEAKER_00: So they all have to conform effectively to the Anglo-Celtic norms.
- 52:47SPEAKER_00: But so it's pure congestion.
- 52:50SPEAKER_00: In Britain, you've got a whole lot of other problems.
- 52:53SPEAKER_00: You've got low-skilled immigration, which is driving up your welfare costs, suppressing wages.
- 53:00SPEAKER_00: You've got big lumps of people who don't integrate, you've got breaking up local connections, so that everything you can do wrong with migration, you're not controlling your borders.
- 53:14SPEAKER_00: One of the things that happened when we went firmly for border control.
- 53:19SPEAKER_00: One of the things that happened is support for migration went up.
- 53:23SPEAKER_00: Why?
- 53:24SPEAKER_00: Because people no longer felt they had no say.
- 53:28SPEAKER_00: When when the federal government, the politics went back and forth on best, but when it became really clear that if you didn't control the borders, you weren't going to win an election.
- 53:38SPEAKER_00: We got border control firmly established, and support for migration actually went up.
- 53:44SPEAKER_00: Even though we were running the least Eurocentric migration policy in our history, it was quite a high rate of migration.
- 53:50SPEAKER_00: People felt they had a say, because well, they did, because their insistence that no, we've got to control the borders was expressed politically.
- 53:58SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 53:58SPEAKER_00: Um and yes, so but yes, there are clear congestion issues.
- 54:03SPEAKER_00: We're uh with we're over using migration.
- 54:07SPEAKER_00: My expectation is the Albanesian government will understand that there is an issue and start to wind back migration somewhat.
- 54:16SPEAKER_00: Um so, but um, so I suspect that the effect on Australian politics will be milder, but simply because our structure is such that if enough voters get annoyed, um, you've got a problem.
- 54:30SPEAKER_00: Um you can't drive people away from the polls, you can't drive working-class people away from polls.
- 54:35SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that forcing low engagement voters to vote is in fact a good thing because low engagement voters means they've got other things in their lives.
- 54:47SPEAKER_00: They don't actually care about politics all that much, which makes them sane, right?
- 54:51SPEAKER_00: So you actually want the sane voters to be forced to vote.
- 54:56SPEAKER_00: Um, you don't want you don't want the driven by the obsessives.
- 54:59SPEAKER_00: Um, so actually forcing low engagement voters to vote is a good thing.
- 55:05SPEAKER_00: And of course, with preferential voting, right, you have to get, I mean, we very occasionally, because of yeah, single members odd things, seats, odd things, very occasionally we've had um people elected who got a minor uh didn't get a majority of the two-party preferred.
- 55:20SPEAKER_00: But overwhelmingly, the pattern is you've got to get a majority of two-party of the third vote in order to win government, and which forces you attention to the center, and you can't drive people away from the polls.
- 55:32SPEAKER_00: So it means you can't drive the working class away from the polls.
- 55:35SPEAKER_00: So you get a migration policy that's much less hostile to the working class than you do in Britain and so forth.
- 55:41SPEAKER_00: Um, so yes.
- 55:43SPEAKER_00: Uh, but yes, congestion is becoming an issue, people are getting irritated, and if we follow past pattern, that will mean that the government will sniff the wind, realize it's an issue here, and cut back on migration, which we can do relatively simply because, hey, we can enforce our borders.
- 55:59SPEAKER_00: Now, if you look at Canada and the United Kingdom, for example, the Trudeau government just went mad with its migration policy.
- 56:10SPEAKER_00: Uh ridiculous numbers of people and ridiculously concentrated in South Asians.
- 56:17SPEAKER_00: Now, South Asians aren't as the same issue that Middle Eastern Muslims are, but yeah, they're still a big lump.
- 56:23SPEAKER_00: And if you bring any big lump in, the integration will be much worse than if you have lots of small lumps.
- 56:29SPEAKER_00: Now, and with Middle Eastern Muslims, I'm afraid the statistics are really clear.
- 56:33SPEAKER_00: They just collectively make bad migrants.
- 56:37SPEAKER_00: Um, they collectively make bad migrants because they're not very skilled.
- 56:41SPEAKER_00: Islam is not very digestible, particularly not in a big group.
- 56:45SPEAKER_00: And to be absolutely blunt, they've been marrying their cousins for 1400 years, and that means they drive up your health costs and increase your clan their clannishness, which increases their not integrated in problem.
- 56:59SPEAKER_00: Um people of Pakistani origin are about three to four percent of British uh births, and they're somewhere around 30% of British birth defects.
- 57:11SPEAKER_00: Why Pakistanis are marrying their cousins at 1400 years and they have one of the highest rates of cousin marriage in the world.
- 57:18SPEAKER_00: And you know, if you do it one or two generations, it doesn't matter.
- 57:20SPEAKER_00: You do it for 1400 years, it absolutely matters.
- 57:24SPEAKER_00: Um, and if you want a real case, it's an extreme case to be for, sure.
- 57:29SPEAKER_00: But if you want a case of, yeah, don't marry your cousins continually.
- 57:34SPEAKER_00: Um, I suggest people look up Carlos the Cursed, the last Habsburg monarch of Spain.
- 57:41SPEAKER_01: Yes, the Habsburg lip.
- 57:45SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all and and the rest of it, and the rest of it, right?
- 57:50SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all the Habsburg lips played together.
- 57:53SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of his and one of his uh marriages he was descended from was an uncle and niece marrying, which you absolutely shouldn't do.
- 57:59SPEAKER_00: Um, but yes, yes.
- 58:02SPEAKER_00: Um, if you go through his his ancestry at the at the level back where he should have 16 different women as his ancestors, nine of those places were held by Joanna the Mad.
- 58:15SPEAKER_00: Nine out of the right.
- 58:18SPEAKER_00: And you know, not good to have Joanna the Mad as nine out of the nine places where there shouldn't be 16 different women.
- 58:27SPEAKER_00: Um I just understand it when they when they did his DNA, he was more inbred than if his mother the parents would be my brother and sister.
- 58:33SPEAKER_00: Um just marsh me.
- 58:35SPEAKER_00: So yeah, but he's an extreme case, but you know, it's just not a good idea to keep marrying your cousins.
- 58:40SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one generation it doesn't matter, two generations more than that, 1400 years, it's an issue.
- 58:47SPEAKER_01: Well, I think if there are any bullet point summaries we can uh deduce from this conversation, don't let unaccountable classes form in your society.
- 58:56SPEAKER_01: Um don't don't don't marry and procreate with your cousins, uh, don't import large numbers of people all at once uh without actually thinking about human nature.
- 59:11SPEAKER_01: Um, and um I suppose democracy, um there are things you can do to attune it that might actually have these cascade effects um that actually does check power and all of these moral projects and all the rest of it, should you have a bit of a uh a brain fart, as it were, and decide that you're gonna change everything, and before you know it, you you you have pressure coming from those low engagement people.
- 59:40SPEAKER_01: So uh more power to the hoi polloi and no sex with your cousins.
- 59:45SPEAKER_01: Um Lorenzo, it's been an absolute pleasure.
- 59:49SPEAKER_01: Uh this this um will be, I'm sure, the fourth part of many more parts to come.
- 59:56SPEAKER_01: Keep fighting the good fight, writing that interesting stuff.
- 59:59SPEAKER_01: And I hope everyone goes and checks out Lorenzo's Substack, Lorenzo from Oz.
- 1:00:04SPEAKER_01: He's also writes frequently on Helen Dales, which is not on your team but always fair Substack, which has been one of the more popular Substacks, and Lorenzo is a huge part of that.
- 1:00:14SPEAKER_01: So, Lorenzo, thank you so much for sharing what you've been thinking about and writing about.
- 1:00:20SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
- 1:00:21SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
- 1:00:22SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
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