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hello everybody
today i have the distinct pleasure
of speaking with dr Gad Saad
a friend of mine a colleague an early
supporter of mine when those were
few and those were few and far between
when when all the publicity emerged
initially surrounding me and the videos
i made regarding uh
bill c-16 in canada Gad was one of the
first people to interview me
and he took i would say a substantial
risk in doing so
um we stayed in contact since then
doing some podcasts together we’ve done
each other’s podcasts
um and we spoke together at a free speech rally in
toronto and that’s a couple of years ago
now three years ago i think
yeah three tumultuous years to say the least
gad has recently written the parasitic mind
how infectious ideas are killing common sense
and a number of other books as well
which you can see arrayed
behind him the consuming instinct a
contributor to the evolutionary basis of
consumption if i remember correctly no
the sole author of that one but the other one
is the edited book right and that’s evolutionary psychology
in the behavior in the business sciences exactly yeah
so we’re going to talk about god’s book today but
a variety of other things too so and i
think the conversation will naturally tend
towards the topics that are outlined in
the book and in any case
um so let’s start with that you talk
about infectious ideas anyways i should
say it’s very nice to see you guys thank
you very much for coming on to this
podcast youtube jordan it’s uh it’s so
nice to have you back
in the public sphere i can speak for
millions of fans we’ve missed you and
i’m delighted to be with you
well i tell you for me it’s a lifesaver man
to be able to come back after being sick for so long and and
to be able to jump back into doing this
i i’m certainly not at my peak by any
stretch of the imagination but it’s such a relief that
i still have a life waiting to be picked up
and that i can ask people to
come and talk to me and they will and i
can start communicating with people again
it’s literally a lifesaver and i mean
that most sincerely so
i really do appreciate you coming to
talk to me and i hope we get a long ways today
there’s lots of things i want to talk to you about um
you talk about infectious ideas and
let’s talk about that a little bit
um your book
so i’m gonna i’m gonna take a
bit of a critical stance to begin with i think
your book concentrates a lot on infectious ideas
on the left and of course that’s been a
particular preoccupation of mine in
recent years although i was
i spent a lot of my career dissecting
infectious ideas on the right
because i was very appalled as any
reasonable person would be about what happened
i mean it’s ridiculous to even have to
say it but i was preoccupied in some sense what
by what happened in germany in the 1930s and the 1940s
and the infectious ideas that possessed
that entire community
that entire country
and the devastating consequences of that
and so it’s obviously the case that
infectious ideas can emerge
across the political spectrum maybe even
in the moderate center but certainly on
the right but your book concentrates
almost solely on the excesses
the ideological excesses of the left and
i’m wondering what you think of that as a scientist
sure uh it’s a great point that you
raise and i actually address it
uh very early in the book where i argue that
it is absolutely not the case that
it’s only one side of the political
aisle that could be parasitized by bad
ideas and idea pathogens
the reason why i specifically focus on uh
ideas stemming from the left is not
because this is a political book but rather because
i operate and you you’ve operated your
entire life within an ecosystem called
the you know academia and within the
context of academia the idea pathogens that are
most likely to proliferate are those
that are stemming that are being spawned by leftist professors
this certainly does not apply that the
right could not itself be parasitized by
countless other idea pathogens so it’s
not because i was trying to take a
political position but rather
as any epidemiologic epidemiologist would do
or and or i call myself a parasitologist
at the human mind
i happen to be focusing on idea pathogens
that are the ones that define my daily reality
exactly okay i i can i can sympathize
with that because i would say as well that as a
an academic i haven’t felt the pressure
of right wing conspiratorial theories in
relationship to my work
but i would say this is this is
something that has happened is that
i started to talk about political ideas because of
the consequences of left-wing
ideological thinking in the academy
and what happened as a consequence of
that was that i was branded as you have
been as a right-wing thinker an alt-right thinker
maybe even a nazi because i was called
out on more than one occasion and i
think that might be true of you too
although you make a more a less
believable nazi than me i would say
given your background um a less
plausible nazi let’s say
so i found that when i objected to the
to the excesses of the left the people
who sprang to my defense tended
logically enough to come from the right
and and there were tendrils
feelers out from even the more radical
right to see if
because i was opposed to the radical
left that i might be a supporter say of
the radical right and
what was interesting about that to me
watching that is that
you tend to think better of people when
they come to your defense
and so i noticed uh
what would i say
it’s it’s hard to keep your centrist bearings
when you go after one side of the
political equation and you’re befriended
at least in part by the other
or the or the the feelers are there and
so i’m wondering
what you think about that do you think
that have you shifted more towards the right
as a consequence of of yeah
opposing the radical left i don’t think
so because oftentimes people ask me
you know you never espouse a particular
position about your political tribe and and
i answer them not to be coy or to be
evasive i tell them
that’s because i truly don’t believe
in sort of an all-encompassing label
that defines my political positions there are
many positions on which you would think
oh this is a conservative position so
for example when it comes to open door policy
or aka immigration policy then you would
think i’m quote conservative when it comes to
you know capital punishment for predatory serial pedophiles
i have absolutely no moral restraint in the idea of
executing someone who’s raped five
children that would be considered a conservative idea
when it comes to social issues then you
would think of me as
extremely socially liberal and quote progressive so
so really my own personal tribe is one
that is defined by examining each individual
issue and then proposing a position
based on sort of universal foundational
principles so the fact again that i
criticized largely the left says nothing
about my ability to
have most of my friends be leftist
by me believing in many of their uh positions
it’s simply that you know it’s the way i
like to compare it is
if i were an endocrinologist who specializes
in treating diabetes it would be silly
for someone to come to me and say but wait a second
dr sad how come you’re never exploring
melanoma don’t you know that melanoma is a deadly disease
well of course it is i just happen to be
someone who is studying
diabetes that doesn’t state anything about the dangers
of the endless other panel plea of
diseases that might afflict human beings
and so i think it’s really very much in that spirit that
i wrote this book it’s not at all that
the right cannot be parasitized
take for example anti-scientific reasoning
often times my leftist colleagues will
pretend as though it is the right
who engages in anti-science rhetoric now
let’s take a discipline that
i’m in evolutionary psychology well when
it comes to the rejection of evolution
it is much more likely to be people on
the right who reject evolution
when it comes to evolutionary psychology in particular though
it’s a lot more likely to be people on
the left who reject
you know evolutionary arguments for to
explain for example sex differences
so it’s not that one party is
anti-science more than the other is that
each party has its own
anti-scientific lenses and myopia
okay so i guess these questions are
particularly germane given what happened
in washington in the last two weeks and
what still might happen in the next few
days we’ll see
there’s i’ve noticed recently
among friends and family members as well as
more broadly in the culture that there is a
pronounced increase in the degree to which
conspiratorial theories in particular
and paranoid theories are propagating
on the right i think now i don’t know much about keelanon
i’ve been out of the loop and and i i
should be more on top of that but i’m not but
i do know that that it’s
popular and pervasive and i do know that
trump’s claims to have won the election are supported
by a network of conspiratorial thinking
i was speaking with douglas murray about
that and you tell me what you think
about this this is
sort of the conclusion of our discussion
was that so trump claims that he lost it
or that he won the election
and and actually that he wanted by a substantial margin
that’s the claims as far as i’ve been
able to uh understand them
and then to believe that this is what
you have to believe
you have to believe that the electoral
system in the united states is broken to
the degree that fraud is widespread and
pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to
move an election you have to believe
that people as close to trump as mike
pence have become part of a
conspiratorial network or have been shut
down by people who are able to put
sufficient pressure on him
you have to believe that the judiciary
in the united states which i believe has
ruled something like 60 times
against his claims and one time in favor
you have to believe that it’s become
uncontrollably corrupt even on the republican side
even when those republicans were
nominated by trump or
trump’s people and you have to believe
that the only person standing on moral high ground
through all of this has been trump and
each of those propositions seems to me
to be have a low probability of truth and their
combined probability is infinitesimally small
so but there’s widespread support for
trump’s claims that he
that he won the election and was robbed of it and so
so someone who is looking at your book
especially from a leftist perspective
would say well not only are you concentrating
on the wrong side of the equation with
regards to clear and present danger but um
the the omission of analysis of
conspiratorial thinking on the right
shows a blind spot that is of sufficient magnitude to threaten
the stability of society now not to say
that you’re personally responsible for
that by any stretch of the imagination but
um see i’ve really been thinking about this because
i have felt as an academic that the
greatest threat to my
scientific inquiry into my free inquiry
has clear and to my students for that
matter has clearly come from the left
but well but
there’s no doubt that conspiratorial thinking
is on the increase on the right
i mean i knew that was going to happen five years ago
and that’s partly the sorts of warnings that
i was trying to put out that
with enough cage rattling the rate was
going to wake up and
but well i’ll let you comment on that so to go back
i guess to to to reiterate what i said
earlier but in a slightly different way
uh i think what you’re this the the
argument that you’re making
is that the susceptibility to believe
the s there’s actually now a a
psychometric scale which perhaps you’re
aware of that actually
measures susceptibility to bs
uh it’s actually published i think in
the journal called judgment and
decision making and there’s been several
follow-ups of that work
uh so really looking at the
our ability to believe nonsense using a psychometric scale
uh all all i think that you are demonstrating and
the question that you’re posing is that
uh the capacity for people to think
in non-critical ways is not restricted
to a political aisle the left could be
anti-scientific the right can be
anti-scientific the left can succumb to
idea pathogens the right can succumb to
idea pathogens in chapter six of my book i talk about
a particular cognitive malady which i coined as
ostrich parasitic syndrome i think
ostrich parasitic syndrome is something that
all people can succumb to by the way not
only the left and the right can succumb
to ostrich perisic syndrome
being highly educated and otherwise intelligent
does not inoculate you from many of these
uh cognitive distortions and and and
you know irrational ways of thinking so
you would typically think oh well
you know while professors who are in the
business of you know
critically thinking would be the ones
who might be immune from this
and meanwhile as i described in the book
the ones who spawn all of this nonsense
are typically professors so again to
reiterate i truly don’t think that
it is a political statement to argue that people can
think irrationally i simply chose to focus
on the left because as you said uh
that’s the world that i inhabit that’s the though
the dangers come from those folks now
that doesn’t mean that listen i in 2017
when you and i
finally appeared uh at that event
in uh in toronto
i had received because of what had
happened with that journalist where she
wasn’t
invited and so on and do you remember
all that stuff jordan
sure faith goldie faith goldie exactly i
can remember where he made the
extraordinarily difficult decision to
not include her on the free speech panel right
and more than that i mean we sort of
advised the organizer what our thinking
was and then ultimately it was up to her
since she was the one who was organizing
well by simply stating that
the and the number of death threats that
i had received and i
and without being able to absolutely
know for sure i would predict that based on the
demographic profile of many of the
people who were sending me death threats
they would have been much more on the right right
so again it’s not as though i am negating the possibility
that people on the right could could be
absolutely insane in their own
unique and flowery ways all i’m doing
though in the book is
i am focusing on diabetes without
rejecting the fact that melanoma could
also be important so again
it’s really i hope that people don’t
read the book as though it is a political treatise
it just so happens that that’s the
ecosystem that i reside in
so what do you think the metaphor buys you
i mean you’re a biologically oriented
thinker you talk about
ideas in some sense as if they’re
analogous to life forms
and and so let’s explore that metaphor a
little bit what do you think that buys you
in terms of explanatory power well what
it does is it contextualizes uh
the the fact that many people slowly
walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy
in complete complicity so let me let me
give you a couple of analogies because again
in part it’s just uh prose that allows
me to draw a
powerful analogy but i actually do think that there are
literal comparisons in using those biological
metaphors so take for example the spider wasp
the spider wasp looks for a
spider to sting rendering it zombified
it’s still alive it then carries this much larger spider
into its uh burrow
and then it uh while the spider is fully alive but zombified
it lays an egg and then the offspring will
eat the spider the spider in vivo
well i argue that political correctness
is akin to the spider wasps
sting right it zombifies us into being complicit
in our silence leading us slowly into the bureau
of infinite lunacy so you could view it as just
powerful writing rhetoric or literally
the equivalent a mimetic
form equivalent of what happens
in biological systems take now when i
talk for example about parasitic ideas
well in neuroparasitology what you
typically study is how a particular parasite
will end up making its way to the brain of its host
altering its neural circuitry so that then the host
will engage in behaviors that are
maladaptive to it but adaptive for the parasite
and so when i was trying to come up with
a powerful way of explaining why do people hold on
and get infected by these alluring parasitic ideas
i thought aha the neuroparasitologic
parasitological framework is the ideal framework
to try to explain why otherwise supposedly rational people
could completely become parasitized by insanity right
why it would be that the lgbtq community
could suddenly become in favor of
queers for palestine as that this is an actual group
so it’s queers for paris time for
palestine but down down zionist pigs
so tel aviv is one of the
most welcoming spots for the lgbtq community
and so if i’m a member of that community it would make
rational sense for me to be supporting
a system a political system a country
where i could live in safety and freedom but instead
i walk around saying queers for
palestine that sounds parasitic
it sounds like the idea the framework
that would cause me to say queers for palestine rather than
tel aviv is not a good position to hold because
as someone who comes from the middle
east i can tell you that
uh lgbt community in gaza
or the west bank are not usually embraced
with infinite warmth so this is why i
thought that using a neuro person’s logical model
would be really apt in describing why we become
so intoxicated with these bad ideas okay so
a parasite takes over a host
so that the parasite can replicate
so it has an interest in the outcome so to speak
or it acts like it has an interest in
the outcome that might be a more accurate way of
of thinking about it so in order for
that parasite metaphor to hold true
the ideas the ideas which are acting as
parasites would have to have an interest
in the outcome so
are you presupposing that
ideas i guess you’re presupposing like
dawkins that ideas compete in a darwinian fashion
and those that are the best at taking over their hosts
are the ones that propagate the the difference between
and i of course i i cite dawkins work uh
yes memetic stuff the difference between
say a mimetic approach and the approach
that i take in the book is i guess
twofold one memes uh
can be negatively valenced they could be
neutral and they can be positively
valence right so memes
a jingle if i start humming a jingle and
you happen to hear me
you know humming that jingle jordan then you might
hum it as well and so my mimetic jingle has now
infected your brain so that could be a completely neutral
beam or it could be a positive beam so first the
the valence of memes can be you know all possible options
whereas the the parasitic idea passages
that i’m speaking of
i’m implicitly if not explicitly stating
that they are negative
that’s one number two uh
the mimetic framework operates as though they’re viral
whereas um there’s a unique element
to it being parasitic right so pathogens can be
viruses they could be bacteria they
could be parasites they could be fungi
and so i am the reason why i call them idea pathogens
is because pathogen is a broader term that can
incorporate viral infection or parasitic
infestation so there are a few of these types of
nuances between the approach that i’m
taking and the one that
uh dawkins took so many years ago
so a parasite tends to make a host act in ways that
that aren’t that good for the host exactly and
it seems to me that that’s potentially where the metaphor
breaks down here because it see
it also seems to me that people who are
pushing these ideas forward or who are
allowing themselves to become possessed by them
which is a metaphor i’ve used actually
gain as a consequence so they’re working
they’re working for the same purposes as the parasite
and so then you have to wonder if that
actually constitutes a parasite
i mean the people who are pushing a
given ideological position or even a given theoretical position
hypothetically benefit from pushing that position
as a consequence of the effects it has
on their success within their
broad community sorry if i interrupt no
i think i would look at it as
does the parasitizing of your mind
result in the proliferation of the idea pathogen
the idea pathogen doesn’t care about you
know your reproductive fitness so for example take
islamophobia if i can if now i’m speaking as a
uh you know islam islamic supremacist
if i want my society to become more
islamic or not my society the west to be more islamic
spreading islamophobia as a narrative is
certainly very good so if i could convince
a lot of people in intelligentsia in the
humanities and the social sciences
that it is islamophobic to ever
criticize anything about islam
so if the islamophobia memeplex to use
dawkins term or i would call it more of an idea pathogen
if i can parasitize enough minds to repeat this
then that is islamophobia memplex by
its spreading from brain to brain has an
ultimate goal of creating greater
islamic islamization of the west
i don’t care about the reproductive
fitness of the humanities professor
who is spreading that islamic
islamophobia idea pathogen do you follow
what i mean so
yeah well but it might be to your
benefit if you actually did enhance the
function of your host
if by being parasitized by the idea pathogen
it improves the reproductive fitness of the host
yes or in or in this situation maybe the
the ideological or the academic status
of the host because then
the ideas could be spread more rapidly
that it certainly does right so
if if we can create an echo chamber
where we could then spread that
idea pathogen more readily as happens
like in the in the
academic ecosystem that’s perfect but
the reality is the reason why i like the term
parasitic rather than mimetic is because by
having so go back to the example of queers for palestine
by having someone from the lgbt community
fighting hard against islamophobia and
fighting hard against the
zionist pigs and so on and it is actually
detrimental to my reproductive fitness i mean or
never mind my reproductive fitness my
survival right being someone who is a
member of the lgbt community
and standing up for a system
that would be brutal and repressing me is not
exactly a good rational strategy to pursue
and yet i pursue it precisely because i have been infected
by a parasitic idea pathogen you follow
what i’m saying all right well i follow
it but it doesn’t
it doesn’t explain to me exactly the
motivation for putting the idea forward
you know because the idea the idea isn’t literally
hijacking the nervous system of its host
in the same way that the parasitic wasp that you described
hijacks the nervous system of the spider
like there’s no direct
there’s no direct uh well there is
connection between the ideas and
and the motivations of the host and so i
guess that’s partly
i’m striving to understand that yeah so i mean
in the sense that the parasitic wasp is actually
causing a neuronal alteration a direct neuronal
alteration that causes the spider to become
uh zombified you’re right but ultimately
you know not to to be too reductionist ultimately
everything that we do including our
ideas could be translated
to neuronal firings right right but you have to
hopefully you’ll be able to specify that mechanism so
so that leads to well i mean
i i’m not suggesting that you should
have pushed your research to the point
where you could specify the neural mechanisms
but it does open up a problem i would say
maybe the problem would be
what you see in some sense in the continual debate
between right and left might be construed
in the terms that you’re using as a constant battle between
proponents of the claim that one
set of ideas is parasitical well the
other set isn’t
and so for example people who object to
a biological definition of sex
or gender would claim that the reason that
that the person who puts that claim
forward has been parasitized by an idea
in your parlance and i think this is
actually quite close to the claim that is made
um but that the true reason
for the claim so the true the true
motivation for the claim is is something
operating behind the scenes
is that the person who’s making the claims is uh
bolstering their position of power or
maintaining their position in the status
quo or attempting to put down another group
but mostly for the purposes of
maintaining the status quo within which
they have an interest
so they’re actually not putting forth an idea that has
any objective validity but
but being possessed in some sense by an idea that
has a function similar to the function
that you’re describing so
how do you using this metaphor how do you protect yourself
or protect even the entire critical game
where ideas are assessed
from degenerating into something like
claim and counter claim that
all the ideas that are arguing are
nothing but or that are competing or nothing but parasites
so at first i’m going to here maybe surprisingly
be more charitable in uh
attributing a cause to the people who originally espoused
and spawned all those idea pathogens and so
when i was looking at all those
pathogens and by the way let me just
mention them very quickly for your viewers
who may not have yet read the book so
post-modernism would be the grand daddy of all
idea pathogens cultural relativism
identity politics biophobia the fear of using biology
to explain human affairs militant feminism uh
you know critical race theory each of
these is an idea pathogen
so as i was trying to think of
some common thread that runs through all
these ideal pathogens very much like if
i were an oncologist
i may be someone specializing in pancreatic cancer
which is very different than melanoma
and yet of course all cancers
at least share the one mechanism of unchecked
cell division right so even though they
might manifest themselves and project through different trajectories
there is some consilient commonality across
all cancers and so i was trying to look for a similar
synthetic explanation for what do all these idea pathogens
have in common and here’s where i’m
going to be charitable
i think that these idea pathogens start off
from a noble place and they start off
from a uh a desire to pursue a noble cause
but regrettably in the pursuit of that noble cause
then they end up then they meaning the
the proponents of those idea pathogens
end up willing to murder truth
in the service of pursuing that otherwise noble goal
right so for example if we take equity feminism
most people who are going to be watching this show
are probably equity feminists i’m an
equity feminist and if i can speak for
you i bet you’re an equity feminist
which means basically what
we are you know men and women should be
equal under law under the law
there should not be any institutional uh sexism or misogyny
against one sex or the other so the christina huff summer
position so we can start off with that
being a great idea
right well we could even push that a
little bit further and say that if we had any sense
we’d want the the sexes to be open up to
equal exploitation so to speak
because everybody has something to offer
and that only a fool would
want to restrict half the population
from offering what they have to offer
even if he was driven by nothing but self-interest
fair enough great and so the problem
then arises when militant
feminism comes in they argue that in the service
of that original goal and the desire to
squash the patriarchy and the status quo and so on
we must now espouse a position
that rejects the possibility that men and women
are distinguishable from one another not better not worse
but there are evolutionary trajectory
that would have resulted in
recurring sex differences that are fully
explained by biology and by evolution
while militant feminists will reject
that and hence they’ll have they’ll suffer from biophobia
another idea pathogen in the service of that
original noble goal so think first i’ll
just do one more if i may
cultural relativism the idea that who
you know there are no
human universals each culture has to be
identified based on its own merits and so on
again it starts off with a kernel of
truth it seems to make sense
the gentleman who first espoused this franz boaz
the anthropologist out of colombia was trying to
uh stop the possibility that people might use
biology in explaining differences
between cultures and so on and therefore
and justify them that way
exactly and right the biologists would
say this is how it is and therefore
that’s how it should be
exactly so in the service of that original
noble goal they then end up building edifices of
evidence for the next 100 years where
the word biology is never uttered right
i mean and that’s been my whole career right which is
i go into a business school and i look
at organizational behavior and consumer
behavior and personnel psychology
and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest
our human nature in a business context
and never do we ever mention the word
biology well how could you study
all of these purposes of important behaviors
without recognizing that humans might be
privy to their hormonal fluctuations
to me it seems like a trivial trivially obvious statement
to most economists this is hearsay what
does what the hormones have to do with the economy
so again you start off with franz boaz
having a noble cause
but then it metamorphosizes into complete lunacy
in the service of that original noble
goal so i think
if i were to look for a consilient
explanation as to why all these idea pathogens arise
it’s because they start off with a kernel of truth
with a noble cause but then they metamorphosize into
all right so here’s another way that
they might be conceptualized as parasites too
um imagine that the academy has built up
a reputation which is like a reputation
is like a storehouse of value
in some sense so you get a good
reputation if you trade equitably with people
and then your ability to trade equitably is
relatively assured in the future right
you’ll be invited to trade and so
reputation is like a storehouse
in some sense now academia at least in
principle or the intellectual exercise
has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill
which is indicated by the fact that
people will pay to go to universities to be educated
and the hypothesis there is that the
universities have something to offer
that’s a
practical utility of of sufficient magnitude so that
the cost is justifiable you go to
university and you come out more productive
and the reason you come out more
productive is because the intellectual
enterprise that the university has been engaged in
has had actual practical relevance and
you you might justify that claim by
pointing to the fact that
um the technological improvements that have been
generated in no small part by raw research have
radically improved the standard of
living of people everywhere in the world
and some of that’s a consequence of pure
academic research a fair bit of it
pure scientific research now what
happens is that other ideas come along
that don’t have the same functional utility
but have the same appearance and so
they’re not so much
parasite they don’t so much parasitize individuals
let’s say as they they they parasitize the entire system
the system has has built up a reputation because it was
offering solutions of pragmatic utility
even training students to think clearly
and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly
has tremendous economic value if you do
it appropriately because that means they
can operate more efficiently when
they’re solving problems
now but once that system is in place
with its academic divisions and its
modes of proof and all of that it can be
mimicked by um by systems that
that perform the same functions putatively but
don’t have the same pragmatic uh
they don’t have the same history of
demonstrating practical utility well let
me give you an example
um the idea of peer review
a peer review works in the sciences because
there’s a scientific method and because you can
bring scientists together and you can ask them to
adjudicate how stringently the
scientific method was adhered to
in a given research program but then you
can take the idea of peer review and you
can translate it into us
a field like let’s say sociology
and you can mimic the
uh academic writing style that’s
characteristic of the sciences
and you can make claims that look on the
surface of them to have been
generated using the same technologies
that the sciences use
but all it is is a facade yeah
and it’s the so that’s where the it’s that
it’s at that level where the parasitic
metaphor seems to me to be
most appropriate and so so let me let me
that you raised a great point uh
so a couple of things to mention here number one
i i reside in a business school
it’s and if i were residing in an
engineering school i would probably say
the exact same thing that i’m about to say which is
the idea pathogens that i discuss in the parasitic mind
have simply not proliferated in the business school
and in the engineering school for
exactly the reasons that you
began enunciating at the start of your
of your of the current comment right
because those disciplines are
coupled with reality i cannot build
a good economic model using
postmodernist economics i cannot build a
econometric model of consumer choice
that literally that predicts well
you know how you know that develops an
ai model that learns
what i should prefer on amazon using feminist
glaciology so i cannot build a bridge
using postmodernist physics so because those disciplines
are intimately coupled with reality
it becomes a lot more difficult for their
epistemology to be parasitized by idea patterns yes okay
okay so so now
this brings up some questions about
exactly what constitutes a claim to truth and
and i think engineering is actually a
really good place to start because
scientists often claim and i’ve had
discussions with sam harris about this a lot and
we never did get to the bottom of it
partly because it’s too damn complicated but
you know i tend to adopt a pragmatic
theory of truth even in the scientific domain and
what that essentially means is that your
theory predicts the consequences of a
set of actions in the world
and if you undertake those set of actions and that
consequence emerges then your theory is true enough
so what what it’s done is it’s just
demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions
now whether it can predict outside
that’s a different question hopefully it
could it would be generalizable but it’s at least
it’s true enough to have predicted that outcome and so
in engineering and i would say also in business
maybe not in business schools but
certainly in business in engineering
and you build when you build a bridge
there’s a simple question which is
does the bridge stand up to the load
that it needs to
uh it needs to be resistant to
um and if the answer to that is yes then
your theory was good enough to build that bridge
now maybe you could have built it more
efficiently and maybe there’s a more
uh you could have got more strength for
less use of materials and time that’s certainly possible but
there is that there’s the bottom line
there that’s that’s very very close and
in business it’s the same thing which is
part of the advantage of a market economy is that
your idea can be killed very rapidly and
that’s actually an advantage because it
helps you determine what
a valid idea is in that domain and what
a valid idea isn’t
and it does seem like the closer that
disciplines in the universities have
adhered to the scientific methodology
the more resistant they have been to
these parasitic ideas in your terminology
we should go over again exactly what those ideas are
right um just just so that everybody’s
clear about it when i start with post
modernism since this is one that you’ve
uh tackled all so many times yeah you
want to define it and do you want to
uh let’s let everybody know exactly what
we’re talking about at its most
basic level post-modernism begins with
the tenet that you know there is no
objective truth that we are completely
shackled by subjectivity we’re shackled by a
wide range of biases and so to argue about absolute truths
is silly and so maybe okay so so
sorry let me add a bit to that so we can flesh it out
so the post-modernists also seem to
claim and i’m going to be as charitable
as i possibly can in this description
because i don’t want to build up a straw man
um they’re very very concerned with the
effect that language has on defining reality
yes and the french postmodernist thinkers in particular
seem to have come to the conclusion that
reality is defined in totality by
language there’s no getting outside of
the language game there isn’t anything outside of language
so that’s where they differ would be
exactly that right deconstructionism
language creates reality is exactly what
you just described correct right and
it’s it’s a weak theory in some sense
because it doesn’t abide by its own principles so
for example and this is one of its
fundamental weaknesses as far as i’m concerned is that
daradah says that but then he acts as if and also
explicitly claims that power exists right
right right and so that language so if
you’re building realities with language
the question arises of
why you would do that and the answer
seems to be for the post-modernists is that it’s power
and that’s a quasi-marxism in right
right okay so you do you think that that
seems fair don’t you think
what would someone who was a
post-modernist agree with that definition
uh i mean yes the
the problem though is that postmodernism allows
for a complete breakdown of reality as
understood by a three-year-old it is a form
of this is why by the way in the book i
i refer to it as intellectual terrorism
and i don’t use these terms just to kind
of come up with
poetic prose i genuinely mean so i i
compare post-modernism
to the 911 hijackers who flew
planes onto buildings uh i
i argue that the postmodernists fly buildings
of into our edifices of reason
and maybe if i could share
a couple of personal interactions that i’ve had
with postmodernists that capture the
extent to which they depart from reality
may i do that sure and then we’ll get back to
elucidating the list of ideas that
you’ve you’ve defined as as parasitic
fantastic so in 2002 and i think this story might be
particularly relevant to you jordan because of course
you you know you broke through in the in the public conscience
because of the gender pronoun stuff well
you’ll see that this 2002 story
was prophetic in predicting what would
eventually happen so in 2002
one of my doctoral students had just uh defended his dissertation
and we were going out for a celebratory
dinner it was myself my wife
uh him and his date for the evening
and so he contacts me before the
the we you know we go out for the dinner and he
kind of gives me a heads up and he says
well you know my date is a
graduate student in cultural anthropology
radical feminism and post-modernism kind of the
holy trinity of and so i
basically the reason why he was telling
me this is he’s basically saying
hopefully please be on your best
behavior let’s not
yes and you recount this in the book
yeah okay so yeah
that’s okay no go ahead i’m just letting
everybody know yes yes exactly
and so uh i said oh yeah don’t worry i’m
you know i get it i get you this is your
night i’m gonna be on my best behavior
of course that wasn’t completely true
because i couldn’t resist
trying to at least get a sense what this woman
what her positions were so at one point
i said oh i hear that you are a
postmodernist yes do you mind so i’m an evolutionary psychologist
i i do believe that there are certain human universals
that serve as kind of a a bedrock of
uh similarities that we share whether we
are peruvian nigerian or
or japanese do you mind if i maybe
propose what i consider to be human
universal and then you can tell me
how that you don’t think that that’s the
case because absolutely go for it
is it not the case that within homo sapiens only women
bear children is that not a human
universal so then she
she scoffs at my stupidity at my narrow mindedness at my
misogyny says absolutely not no
it’s not true that women bear children
she said no because in
some japanese tribe in their mythical folklore
it is the men who bear children and so
by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm
that’s how you you know keep us barefoot and pregnant
so once i kind of recovered from hearing such a position
i then said okay well let me take a less
maybe less controversial or contentious
uh example is it not true from any
vantage point on earth
sailors since time immemorial have
relied on the premise that the sign
sun rises in the east and sets in the
west and here jordan she used the kind
of language creates reality the derida position
she goes well what do you mean by east
and west those are arbitrary labels
and what do you mean by the sun that
which you call the sun
i might call dancing hyena exact words
i said okay well the dancing hyena rises
in the east assets in the west
and she said well i don’t play those
label games so the reason why this
is a powerful story that i continuously recount and
hence included in the book is because
she wasn’t some
you know psychiatric patient who escaped
from the psychiatric institute she was
exactly aping what postmodernists
espouse on a daily basis to their
thousands of adoring students
when we can’t agree that only women bear children
and that there is such a thing as east
and west and that there is such a thing as the sun
then it’s intellectual terrorism
all right so back back to the the parasite idea
so sure okay no no let’s not do that
let’s finish listing the ideas that
you’d describe in your book as
as having this commonality so there’s post-modernism
and we already defined that as the hypothesis that
reality is constituted by language
right which by the way is a close as a close
ally to another idea pathogen social
constructivism or if you want
social constructivism on steroids which
basically and the reason why i add the on steroids because
social constructivism the idea that we
are prone to socialization no
serious behavioral scientists would
disagree with that and no avowed evolutionary behavioral
scientists would disagree with the idea that
socialization is is an important force
in shaping who we are
okay no no serious intellectual would
deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality
exactly right so the issue is degree
exactly the problem and hence the steroid part
is where you argue that everything that we are
is due to social constructivity right
it’s the collapse of a multivariate
scenario into a univariate scenario inappropriate collapse
and that’s by the way i remember your brilliant uh
chat with the woman from the british
woman that you know i don’t remember her name the
the the lobster stuff where cathy newman
cathy newman thank you
where you made exactly that point about
multifactorial right where you were
she was arguing everything related to the gender gap
must be due to misogyny when the reality
is that of course there might be 17
other factors with greater explanatory power that explains
why we’re there but she can’t see the
world in a in a multifactorial way she
only sees it as due to a single look
but this might that might have some
bearing on on the attractiveness of
of certain sets of ideas we might even
see if it’s the attractiveness of the
so-called parasitic ideas
i think it was einstein who said that it
probably wasn’t i probably got the
source wrong but it doesn’t matter that
a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible
but no simpler right right and so
and and that’s an occam’s razor exactly
with a bit of a modification there and you want to
a good theory buys you a lot and and
you want your theory to buy you as much
as possible because it means you only have to learn
a limited number of principles and you
can explain a very large number of
phenomena so um but
there’s there’s the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of
the complex landscape into its simplified
counterpart whereby you you rid yourself
of complexity that’s actually necessary and inevitable
what that means is that you couldn’t
make progress employing your theory in a
pragmatic way but if you don’t ever test it
in a way that it could be killed you’ll
never find that out right
and so it’s it’s very easy in my new book
which is called beyond order i wrote a
chapter called abandon ideology and
i’m making the point in there that um
you it’s it’s very tempting to collapse
the world into um to collapse the world such that
one explanatory mechanism can account for everything
and that it’s a game that intellectuals
are particularly good at because
their intellectual function enables them to generate
plausible causal hypotheses and so
you can take something like power or sexuality
or relative economic status or economics for that matter
or love or hate or resentment and you can
generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything
relying on only one of those factors and
that’s because virtually everything that human beings do
are is affected by those factors and so
that that that that’s that pro
is it it’s that it’s the attractiveness
of that simplification that accounts for
the attractiveness of these
is it the attractiveness of that
simplification that accounts for the
attractiveness of these parasitic ideas
so i would say the the idea of you or the the
the process of finding a simple
explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon
maybe could be linked to i don’t know if
you’re familiar with the work do you know
are you familiar with gert gigarenzer yes right so
so if you remember in his work which by
the way i love the fact that he roots it
in an evolutionary framework
yes i like his work a lot great i actually had gone
uh many years ago he he his group had
invited me to spend some time at the max planck institute
and so he’s got the idea of fast and frugal
heuristics right yes right it’s a
pragmatic theory essentially exactly
because it basically says look uh
you know economists think that
before we choose a given car
we engage in these elaborate laborious
calculations because we’re seeking to maximize our utility
because otherwise we we won’t pick the
optimal car if we don’t engage in utility maximization
of course while that’s a beautiful
normative theory it doesn’t describe
what consumers actually do because
you and i when we chose our last car we
didn’t look at all available options
on all available attributes before we
make a choice rather we couldn’t
we couldn’t we used too many exactly we
used a simplifying strategy
and in the backlash of digerenzer it would be a
fast and frugal heuristic because we’ve evolved i mean
if i sit there and calculate all of the
distribution functions of what happens
if i hear a rustling behind me that the
tiger will eat me before i finish all of the
distributions right the calculations all the distributions
therefore in many cases when i deploy a fast and frugal heuristic
it makes perfect adaptive sense but the downside of that
so to go back to your point is that
oftentimes i will apply
a fast and frugal heuristic when i
shouldn’t have done so
right so for certain complex phenomena my
innate pension to want to seek that
one causal mechanism is actually in this case suboptimal so
knowing when i should deploy the fast
and frugal heuristic and when i should
rely on more complex multifactorial reasoning
is the real challenge here okay so
so let’s say that a robust discipline
offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful
okay and then being a
um developing mastery in the application of those heuristics
boosts you up the hierarchy that is
built around their utilization
okay so you have a theory that allows
you to get a grip on the world
and and to do things in the world like build bridges
and then if you’re good at applying that
theory you become good at building bridges and that
and because people value that that gives
you a certain amount of status and
and authority and maybe even power but
we’ll go for status and authority
so you have the simultaneous
construction of a system that allows you
to act in the world in a manner that
is productive but also organizes a social
organized society now it seems to me the
post-modernists get rid of the
application to the world side of things
so they really have constructed
a language game that actually operates
according to their principles of reality
it isn’t it isn’t hemmed in by the
constraints of the actual world except
in so far as that world
consists of a struggle for academic power
and endless definitions of reality
within the confines of a
of a language game i’ve actually argued
exactly for what you just said and
speculatively trying to explain why
otherwise intelligent people like michel
foucault and jacques lacan and jack derida
would have espoused all the nonsense
that they did and i argue
and i think there is some evidence to
support my otherwise speculative hypothesis
so let me let me put it in colloquial
terms so i am one of those
post-modernists i’m jacques laca or i’m
you know jack derida and i’m looking with envy at
the physicist and the biologists yeah
and the neuroscientists and the mathematicians
getting all the glory they’re the hot quarterbacks on campus
getting all the pretty uh women right uh
why aren’t we getting any attention well
you know what if i
create a world of full profundity where
i appear as though i’m saying something
deeply profound and meaningful
whereas in reality i’m uttering complete gibberish
then maybe my pros can be as impenetrable
as those hottie mathematicians right they are physicists
yep exactly i happen to be generally if
you do iq ranking among the disciplines
the physicists are the smartest surprise surprise
and so so we have physics envy exactly so
our physicist envy economists have physics envy
and that’s why they’ve created now sub
disciplines of economics that are
completely mathematical but fully devoid
from any real world applications it all stemmed originally from
wanting to be accepted in the in the at the table
of serious scientists right you’re
making two arguments now i think
i i think one is that
in the example you just gave it’s actually the
thinker that’s the parasite right because the thinker
wants to ratchet him or herself up the
hierarchy and attack who’s the thinker is it
yes exactly exactly the originators of
these of these theories
in your in your example they want to
accrue to themselves the meritorious
status that a true scientist or engineer
would have generated yes okay and so and
they do that by setting up a
false system that looks like the true system
but doesn’t have any of this real world practicality
and they justify that by eliminating the
notion of the real world
yes and so in that case going back to our earlier conversation
in that case the originator of the parasite
is actually getting i mean literally reproductive fitness
right well but it’s also acting as a
parasite on a system that’s functional
but then you could say on top of that
now he’s allowing ideas to enter his consciousness
and some of those will
some of those will fulfill the function
of producing this faux
reality in which he can rise and so it’s it’s
it’s a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy
yes yes i like it and by the way for it
for this particular parasitic sleight of hand
to work it relies actually on a
principle that you and i probably teach
in sort of the introductory psychology course so
fundamental attribution error the the idea
of that that people sometimes attribute
uh this dispositional traits to
otherwise for example situational
variables or vice versa right
i did well on the exam because i’m smart
rather than because the exam was easy right
well they jacques de vida being the brilliant
parasite that he was he was relying on
exactly that and let me explain how
if i get up in front of an audience so
now i’m jacques de vida
or jacqueline and i espouse a never-ending
concatenation of of syllables that are
completely void of semantic meaning
but that sound extraordinarily profound
two things can happen
the audience member can either say i
don’t understand what jacques laconte is saying
because i’m too dumb and he’s very profound
or i don’t understand what jack lacroix is saying
because he’s a charlatan who’s engaging in full profundity
well guess what most people in the
audience go for the former
right when i when i explained this to my
wife by the way she said you know what
you just liberated me
from a sense of feeling that i was inadequate in college
when i did it’s really a complicated problem like
look my assumption generally is that if i don’t
it’s not always this that i can’t read
physics papers in physics journals um
i’m not mathematically gifted and so there are
all sorts of scientific and mathematical claims that i can’t
evaluate yeah but most of the time when i read a book
if i don’t understand it
i believe that the author hasn’t made it clear
and and i’ve read some difficult people
i’ve read jung who’s unbelievably difficult um
nietzsche uh and neuroscience texts
jacques pancep jeffrey gray gray’s book neuropsychology of anxiety
that bloody book took me six months to
read it’s a tough book it’s 1500
references something like that and
an idea pretty much in every sentence
very very carefully written but a very
complicated book but i
hit the i read foucault and i could
understand him but i thought most of
what he said was trivial
of course power plays a role in human
behavior but it doesn’t play the only role
of course mental illness definitions are
socially constructed in part
every psychiatrist worth his salt knows
that it’s hardly a radical claim
um when i hit lacan and derek i was like no
sorry what you guys are saying it’s not
that i’m stupid it’s that you’re playing a game
you had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities
that you didn’t succumb to their
fundamental attribution sleight of hand right
so you you’re one of those rare animals
that said wait a minute
he’s saying because i know that i can think
and i’m not getting him the problem is
that most people that are sitting
passively in the audience
didn’t come with your confidence well
maybe that’s it maybe it’s that they
also didn’t have a good alternative like
i was fortunate eh because by the time i started reading
that sort of thing i’d always already established
something approximating a career path in
in psychology in clinical psychology
with that with a heavy biological
basis and so but if i was a student who
had encountered nothing but
that kind of theorizing and i i was interested in
in having an academic career i might well believe that
learning how to play that particular language game
was valid and also the only route to
success i mean one of the things that
really staggers me about
the post-modernist types that i read and encounter
is that they they have absolutely no exposure to biology
as a science whatsoever they don’t know anything about
evolutionary theory by the way not just post-modernists
most social scientists yes certainly the
ones walking around in the business school
think that biology is some nazi vulgar
oh it’s the same it’s the same in
psychology to some degree and but my
my sense has been that psychology has managed to steer
clear of the worst excesses of let’s call it this
this degeneration into
this abandonment of pragmatic yeah
necessity they’ve managed to steer clear
to that to the degree that they’re
that these sub-disciplines have been rooted in biology
it’s actually been a corrective it’s
interesting you say this because i
i and i discussed this briefly in the book i gave once
uh when my first book was released this
this one right here evolutionary basis of consumption
uh this is a book where i try to explain
how you can apply evolutionary thinking
to understand our consumatory nature
uh i had given two talks at uh university of michigan
the first day on i think it was a thursday i gave
uh the exact same thought in the so i
was giving the exact same talk
in two different buildings two different audiences
on one day it was in the psychology department and as
for your viewers who don’t know
university of michigan has consistently
always ranked in you know the top three
to five psychology departments in
the united states my former doctoral
supervisor got his phd in psychology
in university of michigan uh he actually overlapped with amos
versky by the way just a little bit of a historical uh
you know uh parenthesis uh so i give the talk
on thursday in front of the psychology department
and because as you said
many of them are neuroscientists
biological psychologists and so on
they’re listening to it and they’re like
oh yeah this is gorgeous good stuff god love it
the exact same talk the next day at the business school
which again you would think based on
what we said earlier they should be very
pragmatic in their theoretical orientations if
if something explains behavior then i should accept it
but because they were so bereft of biological based thinking
jordan i couldn’t get through a single sentence it was
as if i was metaphorically dodging
tomatoes being thrown at me i couldn’t
get through maybe five or six slides of my
talk because they were so aghast and
and felt such disdain for my
arguing that consumers are driven by
biological mechanisms and so
business schools can drift away from the real world
um i think more effectively than the
engineering schools can or or the biologists
and you’d hope that the necessity of
contending with free market realities
would protect the business school to some degree
but my experience with business schools
while often positive has often been that
um the theorizers couldn’t necessarily
produce a business right well it’s interesting because
i found that when i give a talk in front of
business practitioners then it’s always very well received
when i give that same talk in front of business school professors
depending on how vested they are in their aquari paradigms
it either goes well or not so if they
are hardcore social constructivists
then i am a nazi i am a biological
vulgarizer it’s it’s grotesque what are
you talking about with all this hormone business
so the practitioners are not vested
in a paradigm if i can offer them some
guidelines for how to design advertising
messages that are maximally effective
using an evolutionary lens
they go sure sign me up i don’t care
right right because there’s a there’s a
practical problem to me
so everybody has two practical problems we might say
broadly speaking one is contending with the actual world
so because you have to get enough to eat
that that’s the world of biological necessity
and then there’s the world of
sociological necessity which is
which is produced by the fact that you
have to be with others while you
solve your biological problems and you
can solve your biological problems by
adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world
as long as the sociological world has
its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems so
you can be a postmodernist and believe
that there’s nothing in the world except
language as long as the university is
nested in a system that’s dealing with
the world well enough to feed you
and that isn’t your immediate problem so
you lose the corrective
okay so let’s continue with the list of
let me give you another one that i think
you’re particularly i think sensitive to
it you’ve probably also opined on
so the die religion which stems from
identity politics another idea pattern die
is the acronym for diversity inclusion and equity
that is such a dreadfully bad
parasitic idea because it really removes
so let’s again speak in the context of
academia but it could apply to other contacts that
apply to hr departments human resources department
yes i i think before i start
are you you’re out of your position at
the university of toronto now jordan are you or
leave you’re on leave okay well maybe
it’s a good thing because
since you were last at the university environment
the thai religion has only proliferated with much greater
alacrity so that now when you apply to grants
for grants uh you know with all of the
major grants the equivalent
for our american viewers the equivalent
of say an nsf grant the national science foundation
we have similar grants for people in engineering
or social sciences or natural sciences in canada
you have to have a a die statement that basically says
you know you know what have you done in
the past to to advance
die causes what will you do if you get
this grant if you if
this grant were granted to you how would you uphold
die principles and there is a colleague of mine
a physical that’s for sure
oh my god exactly so yeah that’s unbelievable
a physical chemist at one of our mutual
alma maters mcgill university maybe i’ve
given too much information here
was denied a grant because
it didn’t pass the die threshold right in other words
it didn’t matter what was what was the substantive content
of his grant application the scientific content
he just wasn’t sufficiently conv by the way right so
so that’s an indication that’s a situation where
the elevation of that particular ideological game
that’s been elevated over the game of science
exactly now that would be fine if they were both games
but science isn’t a game
right it’s a technique for solving it’s
a technique for solving genuine problems
science is what allows you and i friends
that haven’t otherwise seen each other physically
for many years to reconnect today and
have a fantastic conversation
as if we were sitting next to each other
it’s science that did that it’s not postmodernism
it’s not bugabooga it’s not indigenous knowledge
now again people think let me mention
what i just said now indigenous knowledge
yeah people will think oh oh that’s
racist that’s that’s that’s hateful
if i want to study something about the flora or
fauna of an indigenous territory where
indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years
i can defer to their domain specific knowledge
because they’ve lived within that ecosystem so
specific knowledge about a particular
phenomenon could be attributed to group a knowing
more than group b that’s what ethnobotanists do
exactly but the epistemology
of how i study the flora or
fauna how i adjudicate scientific issues
within that ecosystem there isn’t a
competition between the scientific method
and indigenous way of knowing there is
only one game in town it’s called the scientific method
yeah well that’s what knowing is that’s
the thing that’s why there’s only one game is because
there there’s there
as soon as we use the word knowing and we
apply it in a domain that would pertain
to indigenous knowledge and a domain
that would pertain to science as soon as we use the
uniting word knowledge we’re
presupposing that knowledge is one
thing and knowledge is knowledge has to be something like
the use of abstractions to predict and control
the use of abstractions to predict and
control it’s as simple as that and
you could be predicting and controlling
all sorts of things but
you act in a way you act in a manner
that is intended to produce the outcome that you desire
and the better you are at that the more knowledge you have
right so imagine if now in the university
you’re the dye principles are not only
being used to determine who gets a shared professorship
who gets a grant uh who do we hire as an assistant professor
uh but it’s also used to make the point
that there isn’t a singular epistemology
for seeking truth which by the way i
would love later to talk about chapter
seven in my book where i talk about
how to seek truth which is maybe relevant to
the many conversations that you and sam
have had because i introduced
i think a a a very powerful way
of adjudicating different claims of
truth and we can talk about that as soon
as that’s the nominological network
exactly thank you jordan so we can talk
about that if you want later
but i mean imagine how grotesque it is
to teach students that i mean is there a lebanese
jewish way of knowing is there a green
eyed people way of knowing is there an indigenous way
the distribution of prime numbers is the
distribution of prime numbers
irrespective of the identity of the
person who is studying the distribution of prime numbers
isn’t that what liberates us from the
shackles of our personal identity you
know when you can say that
and you can still say that people use
knowledge to obtain power
that’s a primary that’s a primary post-modernist
claim people use knowledge to obtain
power now that gets
exaggerated into the statement that people
only use knowledge to obtain power and
that’s all that’s worth
obtaining and then of course that
becomes wrong because both of those
claims are too extreme
but even in science you can criticize
science and the manner in which science is
practiced by saying well scientists are biased
just and self-interested just like all other people
and they’re going to use their theories
to advance themselves in the sociological world
yes and and and then you can be
skeptical of their theories for exactly that reason
but then you also have to point out that
well scientists have recognized this and just like
the wise founders of the american state
put in a balance a system of checks and balances
scientists have done the same thing and said well because
we’re likely to be blinded
even when making the most objective
claims about reality that we can we’re
likely to be blinded by our
self-interest so we’ll put scientists into
verbal competition with one another to help
determine who’s playing a straight game
and so the checks are already there and and
which which is to say that you can adopt
much of the criticism
that the postmodernists level against
the scientific game without throwing the
baby out with the bathwater
you still say well despite all that
despite the human nature
despite the primate nature of the
scientific endeavor and the jockeying
for position that goes along with it
there’s still a residual that constitutes
progressive um what progressive
expansion of the domain of knowledge
well so when you’re talking about the checks and balances
that replication is something that is
central to the scientific method
that is second nature in physics or
chemistry or biology but not in the social sciences
is where the social sciences fail now
obviously you know about the reproducibility
crisis and so on i mean i i yeah i was
always less pessimistic than
about that than everyone else because i
or not everyone but most people because
i always assumed that
95 of what i was reading wasn’t
reproducible and that we were bloody
fortunate if we ever got
five percent of our research findings
right it’s still five percent
five percent improvement in knowledge if
that’s an annual rate let’s say that’s
an unbelievably rapid rate of knowledge accrual and
if ninety-five percent of it is noise well
c’est la vie it it’s not a hundred percent but
but by the way that’s one of the things
that i love so much about evolutionary psychology which
might allow us to segue eventually into neurological networks
is uh many of the phenomena
that evolutionists study by the very nature of
for example them there being human universals
it forces you to either engage in a
conceptual replication or rather a direct replication
of that phenomenon so for example if you want to demonstrate
that facial symmetry is one of the
markers that are used when deciding that someone is beautiful
i can demonstrate that in 73 different cultures
right right we could talk about the
normal logical networks a little bit so
this is a this is a way to establish let
me let me introduce it a bit
okay because i think this is a simple
way of introducing it
what you want to do to demonstrate that
something is real you sort of triangulate
except you use more than three positions
of reference so for example
we’ve evolved our senses are a normal logical
network system so we say that something is real
if we can see it taste it smell it
touch it and hear it now each of those senses
relies on a different set of physical phenomena
so they’re unlikely to be correlated randomly
and we’ve evolved five senses because
it’s been our experience evolutionarily
that unless you can
identify something with certainty across five independent dimensions
it’s not necessarily real but we go even
farther than that in our attempts to
define what’s real outside of our conceptions
once we’ve established the reality of
something using our five senses
then we consult with other people to see
if we can find agreement on the
phenomenon and then we assume that if my five senses
and your five senses report the same
thing especially if there’s 50 of us and not just two
and that and across repeated occasions
then probably that thing is real and a
normal logical network is sort of the
formalization of that idea
across measurement techniques in the
sciences yeah i i love the way you use the census to
introduce this because there is a term
that i didn’t i didn’t describe this
phenomenon in the parasitic mind but
i’ve discussed it in other contexts
i call it sensorial convergence so for
example there’s a classic study in evolutionary psychology
by uh two folks that i know well one of whom is
a friend of mine randy thornhill where they
asked women to rate the pleasantness
of t-shirts that were worn by men
and it turns out that the one that they judge as
most pleasing of olfactorially speaking
is the one that is also identifying the guy
who is the most symmetric yes so in other words
there is sensorial convergence so that
two independent senses are arriving
at the same final product in this case
the product being the optimal mail
for me to choose and it would make
perfect evolutionary sense for there to
be that sensorial conversion so
right and in the in the book you
introduced the nomological network which
isn’t discussed
very frequently in books that are that are written
popularly right that’s an idea that that
hasn’t been discussed much
yes outside of specialty courses say in
in methodology in psychology i actually
think the psychologist came up with the
idea of normal logical network
so i’m going to describe what you just
said and tell you how my
approach of neurological answers is if
is grander if you’d like
so the the folks who came up with the
term normal logical networks and psychology
were coming up with a homological
network of triangulated evidence
when establishing the validity of a psychological construct right
so you’re establishing convergent
validity and discriminant validity right
uh the the campbell and fisk stuff which
by the way if there are any graduate
students in psychology what
never mind graduate students psychology
any any student should read the 1959 paper
the multi-trait multi-method matrix by campbell and fix
it’s one of the most right and there’s
an earlier one as well by cronbach and
meal in 1955.
struck validity and psychological tests
exactly right and it was part of the
american psychological association’s
efforts to develop standards for
psychological testing so it is
in fact a method of defining what’s real
how do you know that something’s real
and that’s what a normal
so if each of these validity constructs points to
ticking off this this construct as being valid
then i’ve now in a normal logical
network sense establish the
the veracity of that construct the
validity of that construct right and
that’s actually something a bit different than
maybe than a pragmatic uh a proof of truth because
from the pragmatic perspective the the theory is evaluated
with regards to its utility as a tool this is more
more like an analogy to sensory reality exactly
if something registers across multiple different
methods of detecting it it’s probably real
detecting it across cultures
across space across time
across methodologies across paradigms so
it’s really the grand daddy
of nomological networks if cronbach and
campbell and fisk were talking in a more
limited sense of how do you validate
a psychological contra construct this is
saying how do you
validate the veracity of a phenomenon
how do i establish that toy preferences
are not singularly socially constructed
how can i establish that
so maybe right and you do that by
studying primates for example you study
prime so not here i’m doing a cross
species now i’m gonna do across cultures
now i’m gonna do a cross time period and
then you might look at
androgenized versus non-androgenized
children and you can look across
a variation in hormonal status i am so delighted by how
closely you’ve read the book i am
honored my good man uh
that you’re exactly right and so if
one box within my pneumological network
did not convince you
often times the the data in that one box
is sufficient to convince you
but if it isn’t then by assiduously
building that entire network
i’m gonna drown you in a tsunami of evidence
and so i i consider this an incredibly powerful way
to adjudicate between competing by the
way this is why
in the book i demonstrate that it is not
only used for scientific phenomena or evolutionary phenomena
by building a normal logical for the question of
is islam a peaceful religion or not in other words
i could use this this grand epistemological tool
to tackle important phenomena even if
they are outside the realm of science
does that make sense yes definitely well
it’s a matter of
it so to to put it simply it’s a matter of collecting evid
okay um if you study us
if if you approach a phenomenon from
one perspective you might see a pattern
there but then the question is
are you seeing that pattern because of
your method or are you seeing that pattern
like are you reading into the data or
the data revealing the pattern
and the answer to that is with one
methodology you don’t
know exactly so what you want to do is
use multiple methodologies and
and the more separate they are in their approach
the better and so when i wrote my when i
wrote maps of meaning which was my first book
i wanted i was looking for patterns and
but i was skeptical of it i wanted to ensure that
the patterns i was looking at
sociologically and in literature
and were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience
and i thought that that was ford that gave me
the ability to use four dimensions
of triangulation so to speak right and the claim
was well if the pattern emerges across these disparate
modes of approach it’s probably it there’s more
there’s a higher probability that it’s
real and so a psychology that’s
biologically informed is going to be
richer than one that isn’t because
your theory has to not only account for
behavior let’s say in the instance
but it also has to be in accord with
what’s currently known about the
function of the brain
exactly and that’s the approach that
you’re taking to analysis of business problems
exactly and by the way it it is truly a
liberating way to view the world because
it allows you in a sense to
so if you have epistemic humility you’re able to say
you know if now you jordan you were to
ask me hey you know in canada
justin trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis
what do you think of those laws well
then i would say you know what i have
epistemic humility i simply don’t know enough
i haven’t built the requisite normal logical network
to pronounce a definitive position on
this on the other hand
if you ask me a question on a phenomenon
for which i have built my nomological network
then i can enter that debate at that conversation
with all the epistemic swagger that i’m afforded
by the protection of having built that gnomological network
so it’s a really wonderful way to view
the world because it allows me to exactly know
when i can engage an issue with with
with well-deserved self-assuredness
and where and when i should say you know
i really just don’t know enough about this topic
and by the way and someone like you
who’s of course also been a professor for many years
if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students
it’s actually quite powerful because if
an undergraduate student asks me a
question and in front of everyone i say
wow you really stumped me with that
question you know what why don’t you
send me an email and let me look into it
what that does is it builds trust with
those students because it’s saying
this guy is not standing up in front of
us pretending to know everything as a matter of fact
he was willing to admit that he was
stumped by the student of a 20 year old
okay so so let’s let let me ask you something about that
epistemic humility in relate because we
want to tie this back
you defined a number of um intellectual subfields as
included in this parasitic network let’s say
um under the parasitic rubric
and it be reasonable to say that one of the
then you’re left with a question which
is how do you identify valid
theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge
it seems to me that post-modernism has
to deny biological science because
biological science keeps producing
facts claims keeps making claims that are
incommensurate with the post-modernists
now it seems to me that a reasonable approach
would be to say well the claim can’t be real unless it
meets the tenets of the postmodernist theory but also
manifests itself in the biological sciences
it has to do both
it can’t just do one or the other
now maybe that wouldn’t work for the
biologists but the fact that the postmodernists
tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that sheds
disrepute on their intellectual endeavor
as far as i’m concerned because
if they were honest theorists
they’d look for what was solid in
biology and ensure that the theories
that they’re constructing were in
accordance with that rather than having to throw the
the entire science out the window either
by omission not knowing anything about
it or by defining it as
politically suspect and so so i’ll
introduce here another term i didn’t discuss this
much in in this book in the parasitic
mind but i certainly have discussed it
in some of my other words
so the the notion of conciliance
which is so let me let me introduce this
term for for your viewers who don’t know it
the the term was reintroduced into the
vernacular by e.o wilson
the the harvard biologist uh
who wrote a book in the late 1990s of
that title conciliance unity of knowledge
so conciliance is very much related to
the idea of neurological networks because
consilience is basically saying that can you put
a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric so
physics is more consistent than sociology
not necessarily although notwithstanding
what you said earlier about the iq of physicists
it’s not because physicists are smart
and sociologists are dumb
it’s because physicists operate using
a conciliant tree of knowledge
which by the way evolutionary theorists
also do you start with a
meta theory that then goes
into mid-level theories which then goes
into universal phenomena which then generates hypotheses
so that the field becomes very organized
the problem with postmodernists
is that they exist in a leaf node of right
it is perfectly unrelated to any
consilient tree of knowledge
therefore they could never advance
anything because as you said earlier
they exist within an ecosystem where they
reward one another but they can never build
coherence right that’s why physics and
biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious
it’s not because they are necessarily
more scientific than sociology
it’s because they take conciliance at heart
does that make sense
yes it it i mean i think to some degree too that
you know you also have to note that the
phenomena that physicists deal with
are in some sense simpler than the
phenomena that sociologists deal with right so
the physicists and the chemists and even
the biologists to some degree have
plucked the low-hanging fruit
that’s augusto cult by the way who said
this right august cult
created a hierarchy of the sciences and
perhaps because he was a sociologist inclined
he he placed sociology at the apex of the
sciences precisely arguing what you just said which is
it’s a lot easier to study the crystallography
of a diamond than it is to study the
rich complexity of humans within a social system
right although it that doesn’t make it
simple it’s still really complicated so
so i you know it still requires a
tremendous amount of intelligence to be a physicist
and to manage the mathematics because although the
theories have tremendous explanatory
power they’re still very sophisticated so okay so
i i’ve been trying to think about this
from the perspective of a postmodernist to say
well we’re making the claim that biology
and chemistry and physics all these this multitude
of pragmatic disciplines engineering um
to some degree psychology and business
they’re valid enterprises and they need
to take each other’s findings into account
so the post-modernist might say well these
variant various disciplines don’t take
our findings into account
and so they’re being just as exclusionary
as we are right now is that a valid argument
no because there are no useful uh
findings that they’ve come up with and
if you annoy any please tell me about them
i actually challenged are they useful in restructuring
society so that it’s fairer
no why not that’s the claim right and no no no
no but it’s not that straightforward because
it’s not like so let’s let’s make the
presumption for a moment that these are
essentially left-wing theories it’s
it’s the case that it’s not the case
that the left wing politically has had nothing to offer
the improvement of society right you see
all sorts of ideas that are
generated initially by the left that
move into the mainstream that
have have made society a more civil
place i mean maybe that’s the
introduction of the eight-hour workday
or the 40-hour workweek or
universal pension or at least in canada and
and most other countries apart from the united states
universal health care and i mean almost
everybody now presumes that those things are
um that they’ve improved the quality of
life for everyone rich and poor alike
and and i think
i think that that’s a reasonable claim
is the is the
is the are the claims of the
post-modernists justified by the
political effects of their actions
can you give me an example of a postmodernist
nugget that had it not been espoused
specifically by a postmodernist the world would be
a poorer place whether it be practically theoretically
epistemologically can you think of one
off the top of your head jordan
i can only do it generally like in the
manner that i just did to say that well
it’s it’s part of it’s part of the the
the domain of left-wing thought and it’s
not reasonable to assume that nothing of
any benefit has come out of the domain of
left-wing thought it’s i mean that’s a very general
it’s a very general analysis i’m not
pointing to a particular theorem
for example right but see take for example
in your field of clinical psychology we can say
okay cognitive behavior therapy by
studying that process and then by
testing it using the scientific method
in terms of its efficacy in reducing
anxiety symptoms in in patients
if i say nothing more i’ve just offered
a single example of a valuable
insight coming from clinical psychology
whether it be theoretical
or in the practice of therapy and of
course there are many more than that singular
cbd example that i just gave it would
not be hyperbolic for me to say
and maybe i don’t know enough about
post-modernism but i think i do
you can’t even come up with one i don’t
mean you i mean in general yeah
no one can come up with a single example
as simple as me just enunciating the
the value of cognitive behavior therapy
at that level you can’t come up with one postmodernist insight
the only insight that we have is that we
are shackled by subjectivity
we are shackled by our personal biases
and that is true
and any human being with a functioning
brain could have told you that
so do we need to build that kind of criticism
has been leveled within fields by the
practitioners in those fields many times
including by the postmodernist to their field
i i i would hesitate to say i would say you know
reflexively i would say no because if
everything’s a language game then why
play the post-modernist game
you know why does it why does it obtain
privileged status in the hierarchy of of truth claims if
if if if there’s nothing more than the
world that’s produced by language
well i i i think i mean because some of
your viewers might be saying well why
are they spending so much time on postmodernism and
there are other idea practices the
reason why actually it’s important to
talk about post-modernism because it’s
it’s a fundamental attack on the epistemology of truth
that’s right and that is something we
need to point out why that’s right
exactly right so so i had a a a very
good friend of mine who actually happens
to be a clinical psychologist
also just a lovely guy uh who
once asked me very politely he said you know god
do you mind if i ask you a personal
question i said go ahead
he said how come you are such a truth
defender and so on
and you’re perfectly happy to criticize
all these leftist idea pathogens
very much along the lines of what how
you started our conversation today jordan
and yet you’re not as critical of donald trump’s
attacks on truth and so let me answer
that question here because in a second
that’s a good one right so trump
attacks specific truth statements
i have the biggest penis all women have
told me that i’m the greatest lover
ever there’s never been a president who is
as great as me i have the biggest audiences
at my rallies each of these might be demonstrably
false and lies and therefore they are
attacks on a particular truth statement
that to me is a lot less problematic while
it is reprehensible i disagree with any form of lying
that is a lot less concerning to me than
a group of folks that are devoted
to attacking the epistemology of truth
okay define that and and define the epistemology of truth
so that we can get right down for the body is a way
of tackling truth the normological
networks that we spoke about earlier
is a way of adjudicating between
competing statements as to what is true or not
those are so the scientific method and
and all of its offshoots are ways by which
we’ve agreed that that’s the epistemology by which
we create core knowledge and then build
that front right okay so so let’s let’s
outline that a little bit so
so that’s that’s a really good point i
so there are there are degrees
there are degrees of assault on truth
yes and the more fundamental the axiom that you’re
assaulting the more dangerous your assault bingo
okay so so the non-postmodernist claim
so maybe this is the enlightenment claim
perhaps is that there is a reality
i think it’s deeper than that because i
think it’s that’s actually grounded in
in judeo-christian christianity and and even
and and grounded far beyond that
probably grounded in biology itself
but it doesn’t matter for the sake of
this discussion there is an objective world
there is a knowable reality yes
okay there’s a no knowable reality that
multiple people can have access to
there’s a noble reality but our biases and
and limitations intellectually and and physiologically
make it difficult for us to to know it
it’s complex and we’re limited
there’s a method by which we can overcome that
the method is the nomological method
which you just described
essentially which is the the use of multiple
um lines of evidence yes
lines of evidence derived from multiple sources multiple people
multiple places across time that enables us to determine
with some certainty what that objective reality is
that enables us to predict and control things
for our benefit beautiful okay
and the post the post modernists
the postmodern attack is on all of that
everything it’s that’s
and that’s why now i hope you might
agree that it’s not too
harsh for me to say they are
intellectual terrorists because they put
these little bombs of bs that blow up the
pneumological network that blows up the epistemology of truth
right and so you’re making a claim even
beyond that though in in the book which is
and this is the claim that i want to get
right to which is that
they put forward that theory in order to
benefit from being theorists
that that benefit accrues to them
personally as they ratchet themselves up their
respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status
and power that goes along with that and
the fact that it does
damage to the entire system of knowledge itself
is irrelevant that’s that’s
that’s that’s uh
what do you call that damage that you
don’t mean when you bomb something
collateral damage collateral damage
right so they’re willing to
sacrifice the entire game of truth seeking
to the promotion of their own individual careers within this
within the language hierarchy that that
that they’ve built and by the way that you you hit
on a wonderful segue to another i think
important point in the book
and that is the distinction between deontological ethics
and consequentialist ethics right
deontological ethics for the viewers who don’t know
if i say it is always wrong to lie
that’s an absolute statement right if i say
it is okay to lie if i’m trying to spare
my spouse’s feelings that’s a consequential statement
well it turns out in many cases
the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens
are engaging their consequentialist
ethical system right because what they’re saying is
if i murder truth in the service of this more important
noble social justice goal so be it
right whereas if you are an absolutist a deontological
you’re positing an objective reality
even in the domain of ethics
well that’s another place where the the postmodern
effort fails is that it can’t help but
refer to things that are outside of
the language game so by relying on consequentialist
ethics and i’d have to i haven’t been
able to think it through
just figure out whether i agree with
your claim that the postmodernists tend
to be consequentialists it makes sense to me
and i think that their emphasis on hurt
feelings is an indication of that
right never because there’s no objective
reality you can’t sacrifice people’s
feelings or lived experience
to any claim about objective reality
but by doing that they elevate the subjective
to the position of ultimate authority
and you know maybe that’s maybe that’s
part of the driving motivation
is the the the desire to elevate the subjective
to omniscience exactly and and this is why
and so i know you’re not mathematically
uh you know minded
but if i can just divert into my background of mathematics
in the book i talk about the field of operations research
which is the field where you try to
xamaritize if you’d like to to put in axiomatic form
the objective function that you’re
trying to maximize or minimize right
so for example when i was a a research
assistant when i was a
undergrad and a graduate student i
worked on a problem called the
two-dimensional cutting stock problem
so if you have for example rectangles of metal
and you get an order to produce
20 x by y sub sheets within that broader metal
how should i do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal
so operations research is a field that
is commonly applied for example in
in business problems where you’re trying
to minimize the queue time that consumers weight
or maximize profits right so it’s a very
very complicated mathematical field applied mathematics field
to solve real world problems so now
let’s apply it to this consequentialist story
in the old days the objective function of a university
was maximize maximize intellectual growth
maximize uh human knowledge
today it is on the idea that there was knowledge
that was that was genuine there was a difference between
forms of knowledge some were better than
others some are more valid than others
right so that’s part of the claim that
you can have knowledge at all
exactly whereas now the objective function is
minimize hurt feelings or it might be maximize
learning whilst minimizing her feelings well you know
i wouldn’t mind that so much if if the claim that
feelings were ultimately real was made
tangible because then at least we’d have
an ultimate reality that was outside of words but
you can’t say that the world is a
construct of words and then
say at the same time but there’s nothing
more real than my subjective feelings
like i have some sympathy for that
because i’m not sure that there is anything more real than pain
all things considered like pain seems really real to me
and it’s fundamentally subjective
and i think that a lot of what we consider ethical behavior
is an attempt to minimize pain given its fundamental reality
so it’s not like i don’t believe that
subjective feelings are real and important
but i’m willing to claim that there is such a thing
as real and important and true and so
it’s so it’s it’s logically coherent for me to
to to to make that claim it’s the
incoherence of the claims that bothers me
well it’s part of what bothers me well
we should we should probably sum up to some degree
because we’ve been i know i know i but
i’m starting to get
i’m starting to get tired and and i’m
starting to lose my train of
concentration and so i don’t
i don’t want to do anything but a top
rate job on this let me summarize for a
second what we’ve discussed and then
if you have other things to add that we
haven’t talked about then we can go there so
we talked about ideas as parasites and
and then we spent some time
unraveling what parasite might meant might mean and
the conversation moved so that we kind
of built a two-dimensional
or a two-strata model of paracitation of
a parasitical idea there’d be the
parasitical behavior of the theorist who puts forth
a theory that mimics a practically useful theory
in a in in the attempt to accrue to himself
or herself goods that have been produced
by theories that actually have broad practical utility
so there’s that and then there’s the parasitical idea that
serves that function for the person
who’s using it in a parasitical way okay so
and then we talked about um
postmodern ideas in particular as examples of that
and i guess the one one of the things we
haven’t tied together there is
exactly how the why is it necessary or
why has it happened that the
ontological and epistemological claims of the postmodernists
aid and abet the parasitical function
that’s that’s a tough one like
why did they take the
the shape they actually took yeah that’s
i actually i
i make an attempt to explain that and let
me know if if you buy it so remember
earlier i was talking about
what are some of the commonalities
across the idea pathogens
yeah and i said that they they kind of
start off with a kernel of truth and they
start off with some noble original goal
the other thing that i would say which i think
answers the question that you just posed
is that each of those idea pathogens
frees us from the pesky shackles of reality
right so in a sense they are liberating right so postmodernism
yes liberates me from capital t
truth there is my truth there is my lived experience
the prefix liberates me
from the shackles of my biology and my
genitalia so it’s the attractiveness of that
liberation that that provides the
that provides the motive at least in
part of the parasite
exactly right i if biology is useless i
don’t need to know anything about it
and people do that a lot people do that
a lot look social constructivism another
one of those idea pathogens
frees me from the shackles of
realizing that i will never be nor will
my son be the next michael jordan
because social constructivism as
espoused originally in by
behaviorism right the the famous quote
which i i cite in the book
give me 12 children and i can make
anyone a beggar or a surgeon or whatever
that is basically saying that it’s only the
unique socialization forces that
constrain you in life
that don’t turn you into the next
michael jordan there is nothing
a priery that didn’t start us all
with equal potentiality well that’s a lovely message
well it’s two now you got two messages
there is my subjective reality is the only reality
that’s the first thing and the second
thing is socialization can produce any outcome
so that’s a huge that’s a huge exp
that’s a huge expansion of my potential power
right i’m right by dint of my existence
and my ability to modify the nature of reality is
without without restriction yeah exactly
exactly and therefore it is hopeful
because it frees me from the shackles
of the constraints of reality right i
want to believe that
any child that i could have produced
could have genuinely had
an equal probability of being the next
albert einstein or michael jordan that’s
hopeful that’s wonderful
it’s also rooted in right so i
think all of these idea pathogens
share the the common desire for people to
believe hopeful messages that are rooted in nonsense
well that’s probably a good place to start
hey jordan so nice to see you we’ve been
discussing the parasitic mind
by Gad Saad and
when was it published uh october 6
of this past year so it’s just a bit
more than three months how is it doing
it’s if it’s do if you’re comparing it to all possible
books it’s a match smashing success if
we compare it to jordan peterson’s last book
then it’s not doing very well so it’s life is about
i don’t want to compare my next book to that book so
but it’s been doing well eh it’s doing
very well thank you oh good i’m i’m glad
to hear it i’m glad to hear it so
do you think we did we miss anything in our discussion
well i like what we did but is was the
discussion sufficiently complete so that
you’re satisfied with it i i
more than anything i’m just satisfied
that you’re feeling better that
your family’s doing well that you’re
back into this on the saddle
and that hopefully will have your voice
and i’ve been trying to hold the fort but
having someone like you missing makes it
that much tougher so i’m i’m so glad you’re back
big e hug to you and thank you so much
for inviting me jordan thank you it um
thank you very much for
for talking with me i found it very
enjoyable and i i felt that i
i got i know something more than i did when i started
the conversation which is always the
hallmark of a good conversation and
um i mean we can dig into these things
the things we discussed today endlessly
we never get to the bottom of them fully but
but maybe a little bit farther with each genuine conversation
and and maybe maybe the next when your book comes out
you’ll be sure to come on my uh show so
that we can decide yes well if i if i have the wherewithal
and the energy i’d be happy to do that and
maybe we can discuss some of the things
that where we haven’t established any
concordance i know that
i i’ll just i noticed that you had talked
admiringly about role theory in the parasitic mind and
i kind of and i’ve noticed before that
you’re not very fond of the idea of
archetypes and i thought
without something we could talk about at
some point because let’s do it i think
archetypes are biologically instantiated roles and so
it seems to me that we could probably
come to some agreement on that front
i actually agree with you if we leave it
within the biological realm
then an analysis of archetypes works
well for me when we start
introducing a bit of the kind of mythological
occultist stuff that regrettably one of your heroes engages
in that’s when i start yeah well that’s
something that we could profitably discuss
because i i think there’s a much stronger biological
um well look at it this way god if you imagined
imagine a culture imagined an ideal
and then imagine that approximations to that ideal
people who approximated that ideal were
more biologically fit as a consequence
they were more attractive
which you would be if you embodied a true ideal
well so what that would mean is that
over time the society would come to
evolve towards its imagined ideal
yes so that makes a biologically
instantiated archetype a very complicated thing
because it starts in imagination but it ends
instantiated in biology and and no one’s
ever come up with a real mechanism for that
right it doesn’t but but that works you
you posit an ideal
then if you manifest it you’re more
attractive then the ideal starts to become
something that evolution tilts toward
so i’m in agreement with everything you
said so maybe we won’t have much to disagree about
yeah well we’ll we should be able to
clear things up anyways and sometimes
that’s a good way of resolving disagreements
i look forward to adjourning so okay
okay god thanks very much hey
my pleasure all right bye bye bye
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[END.]
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