If they bring up the nuances,
if they try to bring the conversation a little
bit toward a compromise,
they will get skewered by the people
by their own people.
One thing that I'm fascinated by, maybe we'll come back to,
this is what is the force that makes the middle so
difficult to hold that pushes more and more people to,
towards either being sort of what I've termed troglodytes or dupes.
And it makes it very difficult to, to.
Mmm.
I guess what my model is that you had an,
a frame roof as the A-frame roof gets more and more
peaked.
There are a fewer number of fiddlers who can stay on the A-frame roof without
falling over to the left or to the right.
And so that right now I think that the skill level needed to inhabit a
sensible position is priced out of almost all of our abilities.
I mean, this is
what leads you from a position where 50 years
ago, where we had, again, people on the extremes,
we had people who favored segregation,
people who favored desegregation
we had,
we had serious disagreements before,
but there were many people in society
who held positions had
strong opinions,
but all so felt that the people on the other
side we're humans
were well-meaning right,
and could be parties to a conversation and you could compromise
with them.
So when you picked up the New York times after some vote in Congress,
50 years ago,
there would be a list of Democrats voting for Democrats voting against
Republicans, voting for Republicans, voting against them.
There were lots of people in all four of those groups and all four of those
groups were considered legitimate.
Even the people who had voted yes,
considered the people who had voted no in their party.
They considered them as legitimate senators
or legitimate Congress people.
And they on some other bills,
they cooperated with them. So this was,
and of course you just mentioned a skill set.
There's a skill set that went with that. The skill set was that you could,
you and I could disagree on issue a and, and,
and debate for days and days and days and far your,
I could say that your thing is going to lead to disaster along this front.
And you could say the same thing about me at the same at the end of the day,
one of us would win. The bill would either pass or lose, or there would be,
this would go into some conference. We would have some kind of compromise,
right? You and I would accept that compromise as legitimate.
And so we would,
we develop the skills as we did this,
we develop the skills of compromise.
The whole political system developed this and society saw
this and accepted the people,
Republicans and Democrats is both legitimate,
representing legitimate sides of
legitimate positions on issues,
subject to screaming. We gradually have moved.
It's a cascade that has moved this gradually,
that has expanded the area,
an area of
absolutes positions on which we have apps issues on which we have absolute
positions and that are not subject to discussion. And what's happening.
What has happened in the last few decades is
that the number of such issues has grown as
this has happened.
We have the number of issues on which we no longer discuss.
We just have absolute positions. We're pro choice pro life. We don't discuss,
we don't have conferences where we discuss what kind of bringing people from
both sides and saying, what kind of compromise can we.
Well, there's compromise at a political level,
but then I think there's also a question about the intellectual basis of our
conversation. So let's just take pro-life and pro tools.
I talk about sometimes dining Allah cart, intellectually,
where I can't get my needs met in a low
resolution world any place.
And so I sort of pick and choose which bits of things I need.
And I sorta think of this as political flatland that people are trapped in
pro-life versus pro choice.
And my real position is a plague on both your houses.
I'm not pro choice to the extent that I'm willing to call a child four
minutes before its birth fetal tissue,
nor am I pro-life to the extent that I'm going to call a blast to sphere a baby.
Both of those seem patently insane to me and
no, where do I get to discuss Carnegie stages and embryonic development,
which would be sort of a kind of more scientific approach to what
quality of is it that we're trying to preserve.
And yet I caucus if you will,
with the pro choice community,
not because I hold the idea that it's simply a woman's right to choose,
because obviously there's something else that's going on inside of her.
And there's the whole miracle of, of, of gestation and reproduction.
But if people see that I caucus pro choice, then they say, okay,
you're willing to sit with somebody who's willing to terminate a third trimester
pregnancy frivolously because they're ideologically committed to it. Ergo,
your evil ergo. We can no longer be friends. And my key point is,
look, I'll drop these people in a heartbeat.
If you give me some nuanced room in which to maneuver,
let's talk about the neural tube formation.
Let's talk about what we think of his life.
Is that the emotional connection to seeing something one recognizes as human?
Is it the quality of, of the, of the brain?
Is it something mystical and ineffable?
Are you coming from a religious tradition?
The key point is to make it impossible, to have a discussion. And, you know,
I remember being beaten up on a picket line and not picket line. We were,
there was a group that was picketing a an abortion clinic and I
was demonstrating for the right to keep it open.
And I got beat up and Rhode Island on camera.
And after this incident,
I think I had a chance to talk to the person.
I thought he would hit me with a picket sign and it
turned out that we could come to, we couldn't get all the way there,
but there was at least a partial rapprochement where we could say, well,
I see where you're coming from. I see where you're coming from. Maybe we can,
we can understand that we're both motivated by the best interests that we,
as we perceive them that has gone away in large
measure, because what we've taken,
or at least this is my understanding as our institutional media and our
sense-making apparatus.
And they've become complicit in making the center.
That is the sensible and analytics center.
Absolutely uninhabitable does that match. I think.
This has happened. And I think this has happened in a growing
range on a growing range of, of issues,
which is why.
Now we go back to New York times lists
of who, in which party voted,
which way sometimes that list doesn't appear because it's simply
party, they say is just a party line vote. And this is a reflection of,
of society that,
and it's not that within the Republican party or within the
democratic party, you don't have people on whatever the issue is.
You don't have people in, in the middle, but that if.
They take,
if they bring up the nuances,
if they try to bring the conversation a little
bit toward a compromise,
they will get skewered by the people
by their own people on the other side, right?
And the other side will not come to their defense. And in fact,
if the other side does come to their defense,
that's a terrible signal for them and they'll be skewered by their own.
So what concerns me here though, is,
is that we are dependent on people of integrity who
risked everything when it was least popular to do it so that we can sort
of hold these people in reserve. So when the madness becomes too great,
we can turn to them. Let me just take a couple of examples that mattered to me.
One of which was the Patriot act. And then when the Patriot act was voted in,
in the wake of nine 11,
and there was this sort of mob hysteria to do something because something very
significant had happened to us. Only one person,
only one Senator voted against it. And that was Russ Finegold.
And so I don't have a clear memory of the other names in the Senate at that
time, but I will always remember Russ Finegold for the courage to stand alone,
a different sort of a version of that.
I think about as Katherine Hepburn who is the sort of
the most love of all, all Hollywood actresses.
I think she had four Academy awards that she used as doorstops for her bathrooms
because she didn't seem to give a wit what other people thought of her.
And she went and did if I recall correctly, you know,
Connecticut community theater theater during the McCarthy era,
because she was just going to wait out the stupidity,
the excess and the idiocy of the movement,
whereas a Humphrey Bogart who organized an
artists' push to fight back against this was immediately cowed by an article in
film fair magazine. If I recall correctly you said, well,
sorry. He had to write an article saying, Hey, you know,
don't call me red. I'll, you know, I'll never do that again.
And the great Humphrey Bogart,
the tough guy of movies crumbled under this pressure,
whereas Katherine Hepburn is CoStar you know,
sort of stood tall and waited it out.
Do we have these hyper individuals,
these incredibly disagreeable people in the sense of the agreeable
component of the big five personality inventory who, where we know who they are.
And we know to whom we can look in times of crisis, well,
on particular issues,
you will find people who
write books that advocate a mental
position that identify all the nuances, portray both.
Sides as ho having
legitimate goals. They don't necessarily get attention.
So they, they write a book,
whether the issue is abortion or immigration,
it takes some kind of middle position.
It doesn't get the play in the media, right?
That it,
that a book that takes a very strong position,
a very absolute disposition does. So
so yes, they're due on any, on any given issue. There are some,
some people who you,
you can find people who are trying to start a dialogue.
You can find here,
are there little associations that are nonprofit
organizations that are trying to start a dialogue doing so,
but they just don't,
that's not where the what the media pays,
pays attention to so effectively they don't exist.
And the,
the groups that increasingly the groups that
get attention are the groups
that
pigeonhole people and the ones that are your either for us or against us
And the two sides, the two extremes,
both of we're playing this game of you're you're with us or against us,
they're actually reinforcing each other. They're fried.
They're completely agreed on that.
There is no middle position and having a middle position and having the media
pay attention to the people in the middle would hurt them both.
Yeah. I don't think it's the middle. I mean, I really think,
and for those of you who are watching rather than listening,
I think that there's this very flat,
low dimensional plane where these positions live and that what we're calling the
middle is not the thing between these it's in a higher dimensional space that
combines these crappy low resolution moronic
positions and it projects to the middle, but it isn't the middle.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
There are many more dimensions that they skip these it's simply
that these simple position position side, no,
I completely agree with that. And, and the middle is,
is often is more complex,
involves many more dimensions.
And these dimensions to go back now to these
extreme groups that don't want these dimensions to be brought into the
picture. So for the pro-life group, the issue is,
are you going to terminate the life or not? And for the pro choice group is,
do you respect a woman's right to choose?
And so each one of them for each one of them is just a one dimensional thing.
There's a yes, no answer. There's no answer.
And there's no bringing in some
other dimension.
Is it immediately gets you in trouble?
[Inaudible].