The most dangerous thing a movement can endeavor to do is to purify
or create a utopia.
One of the things that I think about in this area is how
much To work.
It really requires skill.
And there's an old definition of a gentleman that I'm very partial to,
which is a gentleman, is someone is a man who has never rude by accident.
And I think one of the problems we're having is is that there are people at
very different skill levels. And so if you think about, um, you know,
the terrifying words, that one must not say, uh,
that really is sort of an admonition when everyone is now broadcasting
via social media or their, uh, you know,
podcasting or Twitter feed, whatever it is that we're now frightened,
that people have very low skill and low experience are going to start opining
at scale about things that in, in ways that are really destructive.
So for example, if you think about, um,
how far we've come from George Carlin's observations,
Carlin died right before the financial crisis. And, uh, you know,
his perspective was that there wasn't a word you can't say there are no bad
words. There are bad contexts, they're bad people. There may be bad intentions.
Um,
we're now in a world where bill Maher is lectured by a guy who
founds NWA as to what words he can't say, how does,
how does that shake out?
I think that's just a bad idea that will we'll be scrapped. Eventually.
I don't know how much damage it will do to fed a lot of these bad ideas are
repackaged and, uh, and they will cause their damage.
But hopefully because we have enough history to draw from,
hopefully, uh, they will lose their relevance. Uh,
I worry that there's this,
there's this strange movement to go back to old fashioned
collectivism.
I mean this old fashioned idea of socialism and even communism and Marxism.
And, and I, uh, I don't know what this is.
These are young people who don't, and as I really, I really pay attention to it.
They don't have a command of history. They don't know a lot. They just don't,
maybe I'm just older and I've done more living.
I lived in those socialist utopias and,
and I went to those countries when they were very earnestly,
socialist and communist.
And I'm always amazed at these ideas and they come out of academia.
They come out of these professors and I know a lot of them and I have arguments
with them on my other podcast. Um, they,
they are people who just don't have a lot of it. I don't care how smart you are.
I don't care how many books you have read you.
My friend don't make the trains run on time. You, my friend,
I've never had to make, turn a profit with a real business.
You live behind walls in a university, and those people are important,
but they can also be just as dangerous as somebody with no idea.
Very what would you point out? And just to riff off of that is that, um,
what if you have a system which effectively functions in a
cult like way,
which is very few people who are academicians have ever left,
uh, education. In other words, they start at kindergarten or pre-K,
that's what's going on. And if you leave, you are,
it's very suspicious if you return. Yeah.
You can't take five years off for most people. Now,
occasionally there are exceptions,
but the system as a system of selective pressures is selecting
specifically for people who never venture outside their initial environment.
I've talked to very smart academic all-stars people talk about them all the time
without going into names. And one didn't really realize that there were,
they were trying to raise some money for something they wanted me to host.
And he didn't,
he didn't really understand that there were agents out there that could raise
sponsorship. He just didn't live in an economic world,
but he's very happy to, and we had a big argument about it,
and he's very happy to, uh,
advocate for an 80% tax rate for anybody making over a million dollars,
because he wants to go back to what he thinks is Scandinavian like socialism,
which is wrong. Scandinavia doesn't have that kind of a tax rate,
so you're wrong. But also, um, this Hunter gatherer ideal.
Okay. All right. Uh, you know, good luck with that,
but you shouldn't be making economic policy. You're not, well.
You're bringing up something, which I think is terrifying.
What happens when the sense-making professions,
that is the people that we deputize as our experts for taking in raw
data and saying, okay,
tell us what this means and tell us what we should do next.
And you find this in education. You find this in, um,
let's say journalism and the, the,
the con the sort of talking head class,
all of these sort of institutional sense makers are caught up in
business models,
which are now selecting for people who have very little experience outside
of this world.
And I feel like if we don't come up with jobs for that class,
that pay very well,
what you're going to get is you're going to get very ideological people with
very little outside experience who are imagining
a collectivist world that functions beautifully,
but not thinking about the amount of coercion and violence that it would take to
accomplish that.
And whether or not it's something you want to even do it to begin with.
There's that idea. There's that saying? I love, which is, um,
an idea is a very dangerous thing to have. It's the only one you have.
It's a very dangerous thing. If it's the only one you have.
And I think that there, there is this orthodoxy,
this homogenous, you know,
kind of collective mind that comes out of a lot of these
places. And, and you're right. I mean, there's no room,
but I have two things to say one.
I think I worry that the, a lot of these big companies,
I mean, to express even a different point of view,
even to cite the science behind the difference between men and women
will get you fired, get you fired. I mean, it really can affect your,
your, your bottom line. So it is a form of violence, or, uh, certainly,
certainly, uh, uh, what is the word coercion in, in its in,
in a real sense, you know, you conform any Muslim, but you know what?
Americans are hard to fool and, uh,
and Americans don't like extremes. And I,
there is a shitload of pushback,
not just in this sort of this hard left kind of like mentality,
but it's a big pushback. Um, and a lot of intellectual pushback as well,
in my opinion. And it's only getting stronger. I mean, I,
there's a reason that reasonable people who are responsive to evidence
like yourself, like toward and Peterson, whoever it might be. Um,
there's a reason these people really hit a chord.
The people like to listen to them, cause they're like,
I knew this other stuff wasn't making that much sense. You know,
I feel like I'm stuck in this ideological world and I don't, I don't,
you guys are calling me racist or you're calling me,
you telling me I'm not into equality. I'm not even thinking about that.
I'm a fair minded person, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of pushback.
Well, I,
I mentioned this to Sam Harris and I think I'm going to maybe do a show on this
podcast, um, called the Hilbert problems. Uh,
the topic would be the Hilbert problems of social justice.
And so maybe the easiest one is you can't possibly understand my
experience because you don't share it.
And you must understand my experience because it's so important.
And so you just take these two things and then you say, look,
I want to discuss those. That is a couplet. I must understand.
And I cannot understand because that's your problem after all.
And what if I can actually write a screenplay?
Let's say we're doing an impression on a stage where you say that was so good,
that there's no way you could have inhabited that character without
understanding. I felt that way. For example,
if you remember Eddie Murphy is the old Jewish guy. I mean,
he does a better Jew than any shoe. Why now?
Of course he does.
He's an actor and he was around them and you know exactly right.
And so this idea that.
Again,
it goes back to what goes back to the fact that we have a lot more in common
with each other than we will.
In order to, in order to unlock that though, don't,
we have to have enough safety to,
and this is kind of this puzzle for me about the weird social justice movement.
If you create cancel culture,
you're telling me that it is not safe to open my mouth and say something that's
right. Your ideas are harmful.
Therefore I'm not going to even bring them up to a conscious level because
they're far too dangerous.
What if one of them came out of my mouth inadvertently or in a joke that went
South now, you've got a really serious problem,
which is what if some kind of bigotry and some kind of prejudice is just
it's garden variety. It's not very interesting. It's universally distributed.
Everybody has it. That's probably, I mean,
I have multiple feelings about how I feel about different people in different
circumstances. If you don't allow some of the stuff to bubble up,
come out of your mouth and look at it for the brain fart that it really is.
Yeah. Then you're, you're going to sit there weirdly guilty,
either angry that you can't say that you want to be able to say it,
or you're going to say, wow, I really am shamed that. I actually think.
I always say we all of us in my, my,
I think I ever took all of us have at least 10 thoughts an hour,
maybe a minute that would get us fired. I mean, thank God, by the way.
Thank you know, Jonathan height.
I don't know if you've heard him talk on this subject,
but he wrote the coddling of the American mind and the righteous mind.
He's just, I love him. And, and, uh, but he said that there is this.
He compares it to the, I think the Corazon of the Philippines,
I think that's who they were called, who, uh,
would gain status by killing the most people, you know,
essentially your enemy and you take their heads or you take us trophy,
maybe a piece of their hair and you gain status that way.
You got more women that way. And this is an example of a sick culture.
I don't give a shit how, how pure it is. It's a sick culture, right?
And there are a lot of examples of that.
And we seem to be in some pockets of this country, there is this,
this, uh, you gain status by finding the racist,
by finding the, the bad guy, uh, according to your orthodoxy,
according to your puritanical,
your puritanical idea of what a human being should be.
Scavenger hunt. That's gone out of control, like Pokemon for bigots.
And there aren't enough tickets.
It's new though. It's a form of the inquisition. It's not new,
or this is this again, human beings love purity. They love the idea.
You get these people who love the idea of trying to purify and create their own
utopia, which a lot of historians have written about the most dangerous thing,
a human being, because what you'll do a, and if you have any questions,
see Mao's China pull pot's Cambodia. Stalin's Russia. I mean,
Stella would have people killed because they had the wrong idea of what
communism.
And then you take whole groups because they've already been corrupted,
their brains. You can't really reeducate them. They're too old.
So they're all wearing glasses. Anybody's wearing glasses, isn't intellectual.
They read a lot.
They have a lot of this poisonous capitalist stuff in their head.
Let's just bring them out to the killing fields and let's get rid of them.
That's what happens throughout history.
That's what happens when you have ideologues running things,
because they're not smart, they're fanatics.
They don't open themselves up to other points of view. I know why nobody.
Ever talks about it. It's exactly what you're saying. This issue,
that purity is weirdly the most dangerous concept we have when people
try to purify terrible things happen.
And we have a ritual on Friday nights,
we have a weekly Shabbat dinner and in our family,
we take the Shabbat, a cup of wine, and we put two drops in it.
And there's always this question.
Why do you put two drops of water in the wine beforehand?
My interpretation is that it is us learning
to live with impurity that these two drops of water can bother your mind. Well,
now, now the wine isn't pure. It's been watered down. It's adultery.
It makes no effing difference to the wine.
And it's teaching me the way I view it as it's teaching my children to avoid
becoming fanatics about purity. When I think about the off ramp,
I don't know if you've ever seen this in Saudi Arabia, on the road to Mecca.
There's this wonderful off-ramp that says Muslims only Mecca
this way, all others, this is your offering.
And I think about that and I think, wow.
I wonder how much of the, the,
the division in Islam between the things that go towards this jihadist
craziness and the things that make for this wonderfully rich,
a welcoming culture, some in some ways they're inextricable,
but I wonder how much of it has to do with which portions of the culture have
learned to live with impurity? Well, look at our culture.
Thomas Jefferson owned 600 human beings when he wrote all men are created equal
that we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and
endowed to their creator. Certain inalienable rights among which are life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
He owned 600 human beings when he wrote that. I mean, we,
we are a peculiar institution. I mean, slavery,
we've been a country with slavery longer than we've been a country without
slavery,
but you'd be hard pressed to find a freer longer standing democracy
throughout history.
We are a modern country precisely because we continue to wrestle with that
inconsistency.