'Racism has been redefined' Bret Weinstein on woke science & how humans succeed - BQ #31

problem is that they have redefined the term racism and in fact if you listen to them what they tell you will suggest that of course i automatically would be a racist by virtue of my skin color in fact it's an incurable condition to get brexit make america great again no no no hello this is stephen edgington for the sun and today i'm interviewing brett weinstein brett weinstein is a u.s academic biologist and evolutionary theorist he's also part of what's called the intellectual dark web we're going to be talking all about the woke movement black lives matter the u.s election and evolutionary theory brett thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me so you're part of what's called the intellectual dark web which is a really interesting bunch of intellectuals on youtube and and online can you explain how you joined that that incident in evergreen in 2017 that sort of brought you to the mainstream providence what happened well so one does not join the intellectual dark web it's an informal designation that has been applied to to me to my wife to jordan peterson ben shapiro joe rogan and quite a number of others the term was coined by my brother eric weinstein the event that catalyzed public awareness of me was a meltdown at the college where i was teaching i'd been teaching there for 14 years i was very popular with students and in 2017 there was a set of proposals advancing through the college architecture that uh basically equity and diversity proposals that as they were formulated were a terrible threat to the college's ability to continue to function and as a faculty member it was my obligation to help govern the college and i pointed out how dangerous these proposals were and that caused me to be branded a racist and some agitators at the school created a protest 50 students who i had never met showed up at my class and demanded my firing or my resignation the protests quickly descended into riots the president of the college stood down the campus police force and allowed students to patrol with weapons in what they called community patrols but what were really a bullying group that actually confronted other students in one case a student was battered in other cases students were intimidated and these events were all filmed and uploaded to youtube which brought a tremendous amount of attention to the meltdown and to my role uh as the lightning rod at the center of it what happened to those students because it's an interesting question those students probably aren't stupid i mean all around the world you've seen thousands of these what i would call kind of woke you know far left activists rise up especially in 2020 over in the uk there's a whole bunch of students from the black lives matter protests at oxford university who some of which have said some of the most abhorrent things about white people um you know they're basically marxists these people aren't idiots but somehow they got to a point where they felt like shouting at you someone who is a progressive um that you're racist so how do they basically in my view become radicalized well there are two questions there one is what happened to them after they did this and the other is how did they get where they are and i think the story of how they got where they are is similar everywhere and that is to say there are a small number of bad actors there are another group of people who are confused by um issues in the present moment and uh the two things combine to create an attractive force and what people don't seem to understand about this movement is that although what it declares what it says it believes is incredibly foolish and what it proposes is incredibly dangerous the strategy that causes it to spread is incredibly smart and so by creating a dynamic in which anybody who expresses skepticism of the movement is targeted it incentivizes people to adopt and then once they've adopted it those people rationalize these beliefs so obviously wrong-headed ideas are spreading like wildfire because people are effectively afraid to acknowledge that they don't agree and once they've failed to acknowledge it the rest is done internally by a rationalization process as for what happened to the students that's an interesting story the college pretended that they were disciplined which is not the case the college played a shell game where it took a lot of disciplinary matters that had nothing to do with the protests and riots and pretended that they had been responsive to them one of the students in fact the ringleader of the movement somebody who was involved not only in bullying fellow students and organizing the protest at my classroom but somebody who actually kidnapped on videotape administrators of the college and uh arranged to have them held against their will even to the point that the president of the college uh was unable to go to the bathroom on his own he had to have an escort to make sure i guess that he didn't escape but in any case that student was hired the summer after the riots to help rewrite the student code of conduct he was actually paid by the college to help write the rules for the rest of the student body which tells you something about just how crazy this movement is and how uh far people who are trying to uh ingratiate themselves will go in order to stay in uh in its good graces and what happened to you i know that you spoke in front of congress after this incident and you launched a lawsuit against the college can you talk about the impact it's had on your academic career in the last three years uh yeah well that's an interesting question i did testify in front of congress and the events brought a great deal of attention to me so i have started a podcast the dark horse podcast which is quite successful and i've been invited to speak all over the world the academic part of my life has been severely interrupted in fact most colleges would have very little to do with me because they are of course concerned that the stigmas that were leveled at me will be leveled at them the one exception has been princeton university where the james madison program has brought me and my wife on as visiting fellows so we're very grateful to them for their courage you as a progressive are not a trump supporter um you know you said consistently throughout your career that you're a very progressive person yet these students um at your university were calling you a racist do you think they actually believed you are a racist what's their motivation behind calling you that one of the you know one of the worst terms you could call anyone the problem is that they have redefined the term racism and in fact if you listen to them what they tell you will suggest that of course i automatically would be a racist by virtue of my skin color in fact it's an incurable condition which does raise the question about why they're so intent on uh engaging in these mental retraining exercises if it is in fact futile to fight white supremacy because it is ingrained in every white person's mind then um putting people through trainings is unlikely to function but if we put that aside let's just simply recognize that their definition of the term involves um both speech and silence being violence and in that circumstance there's just simply no way to win they've defined the rules of the game that way in those last three years what has changed on the university campuses have things got better things got worse and especially when we look at 2020 with the black lives matter protest the u.s election coronavirus has that just accelerated all of this kind of woke movement yes in fact the phenomenon that we saw at evergreen has now spilled over into virtually every institution in the united states and is spreading even outside of our borders this madness in almost exactly the same form that we saw at evergreen is taking over governance it is taking over corporations and it's a very dangerous phenomenon as i warned congress it would be it was inevitable that if we trained college students to believe these things that as they moved into the world eventually they would unleash these views and they would topple these institutions and now that's what we're seeing academics like yourself like to talk about thing you know identity politics and you you just mentioned there in quite vague terms um that the ideas that these students believe can we be very specific and saying what actually are these ideas what are the ideas of the work movement what is identity politics can we try and define that to understand the things that that students believe and are being taught the first thing you have to understand is that belief means different things to different people and for me as a scientist belief is a conclusion that i reach based on the evidence i see and if the evidence changes the belief will follow but emerging out of critical race theory these protesters believe that all there is is power and that these claims are simply effective or not effective at garnering power and resources so to say that they believe them is is a bit of an error what they do is wield them and to the extent that in wielding these ideas institutions um bend the knee that tells them that these ideas are correct really what it means is that the ideas are effective at uh changing people's behavior but the two are not synonymous so what do they believe it really depends if you're talking about the academics who are at the core of critical race theory well they believe in an aggressive version of post-modernism and they believe in marxism if you're talking about the rank and file who are showing up on the street and attacking buildings and neighborhoods they may not believe in critical race theory in fact they may barely have heard of it what they believe is that something is very wrong and that the solution to it involves tearing down all of the structure essentially they believe i mean i think that the whole black lives matter issue in a way can be boiled down into one belief and that is that we live in an institutionally or systemic systemically racist society how do you respond to that accusation it's complex because i do believe that there are serious long-standing race issues but i also believe that they don't function in the way that this movement is telling us they do the anarchism at the heart of this movement the belief that by tearing down this broken structure that a better one will emerge in its place is simply nonsense even for those who are the victims of racism the functioning of society is important and the correct thing to do is to fix what's wrong rather than tear it down in the hopes that a better system will emerge that kind of utopianism is going to result in an absolute disaster across the west i want to talk about that absolute disaster in the second half of the interview i read on your website um things aren't looking too great to put it lightly and i'll quote you on that later um but first of all i want to ask an interesting question i think about your own beliefs in that you call yourself a progressive yet the things that you you know come out with the things that we were talking about now about you know opposing marxism and a whole series other of critical race there and things like that that would mostly i would say be seen as i don't know a conservative position online or most people would probably suspect that's a conservative position so how can you call yourself a progressive and still um you know be against this kind of black lives matter movement or this kind of woke movement today well i don't regard the black lives matter movement or the woke movement as the least bit progressive i find them absolutely illiberal and uh certainly uh nothing if not reckless my belief that i am a progressive derives from the fact that i think the systems that we have inherited are not up to the challenge of managing society in the 21st century and although many of the values at the core of the west are the right values that the system itself needs an upgrade at many different levels in order for humanity to survive so i believe that just simply by any reasonable definition someone who imagines that we must make progress or we will perish is a progressive as for believing the things that most other progressives believe i don't share their understanding of the problems for the most part and i certainly do not believe that there is any merit whatsoever in the idea that simply destroying civilization is going to result in an improved version of it the fact is the west is a prototype of sorts and it achieved spectacular things much better than you would imagine from even a very good prototype and the right thing to do is to finish the project to figure out what the structure did not have correct and to upgrade those things the idea of uninventing the west is impossibly foolish because the effect will certainly be negative for all of the nations involved and probably for the globe as a whole it's that's a really interesting way of putting it because i'm sure many conservatives would basically agree with what you just said in terms of well let's let's take the things that the west got right let's say free market ideas of capitalism freedom of speech freedom of religion um the u.s constitution fantastic document is a great example of that and let's cherish those things and let's keep those things so what how do you respond to that well i again i think the values are right and what's more i think that a focus on liberty is an excellent focus this is something that conservatives have been uh way ahead on in recent decades the reason that a focus on liberty is so useful is that in order to be truly liberated you have to solve all of the other problems you can't be truly liberated in a system that's wildly unfair or that creates tremendous risk for you if you have a medical catastrophe in order to be liberated you have to address all of those other issues so it's a great goal to shoot for and the progress we've made on it is simply stunning so to the extent that that progress is not fairly distributed the obvious correct objective is the one that the civil rights movement had which is to make sure that the distribution of well-being is fair which is not to say perfectly equal what we have in this woke movement though is not even a proper marxist belief in the equivalent distribution of well-being it's actually arguing for an inversion of past oppression and some of the past depression that it is arguing about is actually imaginary so to reverse the tables of oppression as a remedy is a very dangerous path to go down it will not result in a stable system going forward it will not result in a desirable distribution of well-being and it will in fact so hobble the west that we will not be able to move forward if we begin to attempt it what do the work people say about these sciences now this is an area that you're obviously interested in it's the area that you study and and teach what do they say about sciences what do they say about the stem subjects the first time i heard them on this topic i was so shocked to hear anybody make the claims that they were making that i i almost had to wonder whether i was perhaps in a dream because what they say is that science itself is racist and that therefore we need not credit anything that it has come up with in fact we need some sort of substitute for it which is an incredible thing to argue because if science has a primary purpose it is to correct for human biases science is not a simple process it is in many ways not the most efficient way to get from a to b but the reason that it has surpassed all other systems is that no matter how strong your belief is in something science will tell you if it's wrong if you do the science correctly so to the extent that this movement is challenging human biases the best tool in the arsenal is science and to the extent that science has been done imperfectly the remedy for it is more and better science do you see them as anti-science i know that many people would talk about the idea of a man and a woman being biologically different some some of those on on the woke side would say that that's not right um you know and there's other um arguments that they make which people say well actually hang on scientifically that's not right or you know and you've talked about the unconscious bias argument as well donald trump recently has just banned these kind of unconscious bias training within the federal government that's an interesting topic to talk about as well so do you think overall these people just don't they just don't want to believe in the in this sort of concept of science because it goes against their fundamental values it will be hard to accept what i'm going to say on this topic but i don't even think anti-science captures it it's almost like an allergy to science anything that has any consistency with science is understood to be incorrect and really i think we just ought to take them at their word when they tell you things that you know have to be false like um some men menstruate right or two plus two can equal five they're telling you what they think about logic and reason and any sort of uh systematic process by which you might determine what's true and what isn't true they are attacking the very foundation of our ability to reason and to communicate they have a lot of anger and you know a lot of people are angry and you can see that in the streets in america and in europe as well with the black lives matter riots this year in many places um shops were burnt down there's a lot of looting people died unfortunately they were killed there's a lot of anger being built up and it feels like for a movement that loves to talk so much about love and acceptance um they sure do have a lot of anger and also you know we talk about cancer culture what happened to you and evergreen in 2017 where they basically harassed you and many many other people people being driven out of their jobs for holding the wrong opinions people have been um you know driven out of their jobs for doing things that just so seem to everyone else so and utterly meaningless and just um completely normal and yet um to these people that you know it's some kind of aggression or whatever it is so where does this anger where does this emotion come from well this is the place where i might depart from others who are so critical of this movement i think the anger is actually genuine in most cases and people are being their anger is being weaponized they are being captured because they are angry and they don't know exactly what they are angry about they are easy prey for a movement that claims to have all the answers claims to know who the villains are and is ready to go after them with pitchforks and torches and so i do think in some sense the the problem is that the indifference that has been displayed especially in the us to those at the bottom of the economic ladder is so extreme that it has created a moment in which a movement was ready to be born and unfortunately what captured that energy is absolutely incoherent self-serving and lethal which means it threatens to upend the american project for nothing it's interesting you you describe the woke movement like that because you could flip it on its head and you say well actually many trump supporters feel like they've been left behind feel like they've been ignored you know and these people are a lot of them aren't rich people but in the uk we would describe them probably as working class and the exact same thing happened in in britain with brexit and um following that a vote for boris johnson the conservative prime minister who won a big election last year and many people say this is because of the left behind voters those people who have been ignored for 20 30 years by establishment figures how would you respond to this kind of argument that you could flip it both ways oh i think this is exactly what happened in the u.s we saw it very clearly on both sides of the political aisle we saw two insurgent candidacies we saw donald trump in 2016 on the right and we saw bernie sanders on the left both of these were clearly challenges to the party orthodoxy in trump's case he defeated the party he decapitated it in sanders case he nearly did and dnc skullduggery upended him uh in the final phase but clearly the american electorate was livid with the parties as it should be and it was ready to throw them overboard so the problem is if you had coherent answers to the question that energy might be moving us in a positive direction but the parties in the us have been very effective at preventing any reasonable alternative from emerging so in some sense very justifiable anger has resulted in the election of a strangely anti-establishment candidate in trump but it's not a good answer in fact it's a very dangerous answer so the what you have is a movement ready to happen that could do very positive things but in a on a menu of incoherent answers it's going to pick one of those incoherent answers and we're going to bounce around from one kind of nonsense to the other could joe biden solve all these issues in november that is the most preposterous idea i think i've ever heard and i know you're you're not offering it in earnest but i i find it incredible that anybody imagines that joe biden is the solution to any problem in fact he's almost an empty set now he wasn't always that way at one point he was a very effective machine politician but he's so old at this point and his decrepitude is so obvious that it is almost like we would literally be electing an empty shirt so you're not a fan of trump and you're not a fan of biden let's talk about unity 2020 what is that unity 2020 was my emergency proposal for what to do when both parties have handed you non-viable answers to how to govern the nation and it was constructed so as to defeat the main objection to any offering outside of the major parties in the u.s whenever you propose that somebody might run outside of the major parties you are told you can't possibly do that because to the extent that your values might be over here and you might propose a solution that's over here you will draw support away from whichever of the major parties is closer to you and thereby elect the greater evil so that lesser evil greater evil paradox prevents people from ever marshaling a credible third party option so my proposal was that we build something that structurally does not risk spoiling the election and therefore can be contemplated by people who wish to move out of the the duopoly structure and what i proposed is that we draft two people one from the left one from the right that they would have three characteristics as a requirement they would have to be capable they would have to be courageous and they would have to be patriotic that we would draft them together under the agreement that they would govern as a team by consensus except where that was impossible hopefully we would choose people who would be able to govern by consensus and therefore would not need to depart from that structure who would run at the top of the ticket would be chosen by a coin flip and then after four years whoever had inhabited the role of the president would revert to the role of vice president and vice versa and this could go on until one party had inhabited the presidency twice at which point they would be replaced and this could go on indefinitely and what happened to that project that project is alive and well and actually we have done remarkable things we have nominated two people to draft so this is always formulated as a draft right we have to provide the ground swell that would justify people of the caliber we're talking about joining our movement and running on our ticket and our movement it advanced six names three from the left three from the right and then we hold we held a ranked choice vote of the nine possible tickets of those individuals and we came up with a what i believe is a marvelous ticket tulsi gabbard and dan crenshaw were the top pick of our supporters and second was andrew yang and admiral william mcraven i think either of those tickets would be absolutely excellent and i don't think there's a person on earth crazy enough in their private moment not to think that either of those tickets would be better than the major party offerings what kind of response have you had so far from this this idea i mean and also in practical terms what's going to happen next can you put can you put these two candidates up for election are they actually up for it tulsi gabbard and dan crenshaw well it is late and there are pathways to their election that go right up to election day but we have promised our supporters that we will pull the plug on the plan if we get to a point that it is clear that the ticket is not viable and so we are in a middle ground position where we have achieved a ranked choice vote we have established that we can generate tickets that catalyze the imagination that bring people hope and the problem is that the electorate is still so traumatized by the claim that if you do anything outside the major parties that you will elect the greater evil that even though americans are fiercely divided over who that greater evil might be they are too timid um to engage unity 2020 at the level that would be necessary in order to make it work and so we are hoping that people will realize as they are watching the biden campaign fail to um to gain momentum and they are actually watching what support it has the blue no matter who um uh coalition is actually beginning to evaporate it's evaporating because people are watching uh the cities american cities torn apart they are watching the democratic party uh actually humor the movement that's doing all of this destructive stuff and so what that is doing is it's creating support for trump amongst people who never thought they would contemplate voting for him so in light of that dangerous situation you would imagine that many people would begin to contemplate something that they never thought they would which is is there another option on the table that might be capable of averting that disaster i want to talk about something on that's on your website that sounds like it could could have come out of the mayans in 2012 or uh you know someone on the street shouting we're all doomed um but i want to chat about why you think that that might be the case now i've got a quote here it says if humanity continues down our current path we will not survive why won't we survive well this is actually fairly straightforward i mean if you just simply extrapolate from the kinds of processes that we now routinely engage and you project forward the fact is the earth can't handle it and if you imagine that there will always be some sort of technological fix for the harm that we are causing to all of these complex processes then maybe you don't believe that but if you realize that sometimes the fix that you need is there and oftentimes it isn't and therefore it is incumbent on us as humans to build a system that does not constantly throw us into existential danger then you know our current trajectory is lethal and probably in the short term so it is true people are always claiming that the world is coming to an end and they are always wrong or at least they have been what's different here is that we actually have the tools to know what the consequences of the processes we are engaged in will be and we can see we keep having um these near misses they're not at the right scale to take out the the population but they begin to tell us that we are approaching that place right we've seen a triple meltdown at fukushima we've seen the alizo canyon disaster in southern california where a reservoir of natural gas sprung a leak we saw the deep water horizon we saw the financial crisis of 2008 nearly throw the world economy into absolute chaos and we've now seen um covid spread across the globe in a matter of weeks now is kovit gonna drive humanity extinct it is not right is the deepwater horizon going to kill humanity it will not but we are playing with processes at a scale that was absolutely unimaginable to the people who built the protections into our system and it is time for us to level up can you talk specifics i mean in my mind what pops up as soon as you mention um you know the end of humanity i think well the biggest thing that people talk about is climate change is that what you're talking about or is there something else is it social political what exactly is it that's leading down us you know down this terrible path well there are a number of things for one thing it doesn't have to be one cause climate change can make things very bad it can degrade the quality of life for humans but it won't drive human beings extinct there will be habitable places left that is if it unfolds in isolation but all of our systems are linked together and so a catastrophic event of one kind can trigger instability of many others for example climate change could trigger a massive refugee crisis and be politically very unstabilizing in a world in which there's plenty of nuclear firepower to drive humanity extinct how would that unfold nobody can say with precision but is it dangerous i think we all know that it is but much closer to home let's just simply talk about the fact that we have the risk of what would be called a carrington event that could at any moment trigger the failure of large swaths of the electrical grid you could have a solar storm take out a third of the north american electrical power in a way that it can't be restored for many months what's hooked to that electrical power nuclear reactors many of them what happens to those nuclear reactors if they fail to get power over a period of days they melt down now there are of course contingency plans diesel fuel is the primary one that will keep nuclear reactors running in the event of a carrington event but that assumes that the source of diesel power is not also interrupted so we are constantly running the risk that these systems that we have hooked together will fail one at a time and that our backup plans will function but in the case of um carrington event and its connection to the grid and therefore to nuclear power plants we've left ourselves a huge vulnerability and for no reason the fact is it would be very simple and cheap to fix the problem with the the grid we could have backup generator not generators backup transformers ready to go this would cost a few billion dollars to do but it would not be an amount of money that would actually be difficult to raise in light of the in light of the major hazard posed by a carrington event and yet we don't do it because the hazard is not high enough on people's radar speaking as a complete layman in evolutionary theory um you know please correct me on this if this is completely off piece but um my sort of hypothesis in my in my head is that isn't one of the one of the the lessons of evolution uh and biology just how adaptable animals human beings are and how brilliant we are at inventing solutions to potential problems and isn't it the case that humans have faced absolutely absolute catastrophe over hundreds and thousands of years and we've all managed to survive and even thrive you know we've i'm thinking of the black death that killed half a population in europe and that led to actually a lot of good positive social changes um and there's plenty of other you know we had the 2019 29 wall street crash you know that was absolutely disastrous we've had world war ii we're on the brink of the nuclear war in the cuban missile crisis but we still somehow managed to sort of muddle through all that so isn't it the case that we're sort of adaptable i we are the most adaptable species that has ever been and were we playing with processes where adaptation was the proper response then i would be very hopeful the problem is that our industrial world is playing with processes for which there is no conceivable mode of adaptation i mean the fact is uh massive releases of radiation are a hazard and if the if that radiation is coming from uh spent fuel and nuclear reactors you're talking about isotopes that have half-lives in the hundreds of thousands of years there's there's no way around it and so we have to see those things coming and frankly the best tool that we have as creatures who are built to adapt is foresight at some point you have to realize that your ancestors were playing with processes that put a certain amount at risk yes but never the entire project and that now we are playing with processes that could destroy the species and at the point you're playing with processes at that scale one has to take on a different view of risk i want to talk about some of your solutions again quoting from your website right now you talk about three different solutions uh given similar circumstances people are basically alike that's what you say number one an excellent world is possible but perfection is not an option the future cannot be cannot be designed it will have to be discovered can you go through each of those points and explain what they mean sure i'm trying to remember which one you quoted first given similar circumstances people are basically alike yeah this is a hypothesis i'm quite confident of it having visited numerous different cultures and interacted with people over long periods of time but the the hypothesis is that if you were to raise people in similar circumstances they would end up seeing the world similarly their values would be approximately alike and to the extent that we see people valuing very different things it's the result of different different developmental environments and this is of course difficult to test because there are so many different environments in play that it's a very uh noisy situation in order to in which to see pattern but nonetheless i see no evidence whatsoever to expect otherwise people want the same sorts of things and that means that generating a world that provides desirable things to everyone and that provides incentives that motivate us all in the same direction is not inconceivable number two perfection is not an option yeah this is simple straightforward uh engineering logic that you can see in complex systems there is a trade-off i would argue between every two desirable characteristics of some mechanism or creature and that means that very frequently we're stuck with a situation in which you can have most of something you can have eighty percent of something but as you push towards a hundred percent you cause every other value to crash and therefore if we're going to build a society that functions very very well we have to accept that having most of all of our values met is what we want and that anybody who is selling an idea in which we pursue a hundred percent on any possible value is actually sowing the seeds of our destruction and finally the future cannot be designed it must be discovered the idea here is that we are talking about a complex system and that means we're talking about something in which the parts are interrelated in ways that we cannot fully model so we can define what we want the structure to accomplish but it's not like a bridge or a building where we can define tolerances and and map it out what we have to do is have a process that heads us in the direction of that which we wish to accomplish and then evaluates how well we succeeded what were the um the consequences that we didn't foresee that are negative that we wish to hedge out because every proposal that attempts to achieve something desirable and new has unintended consequences and so this iterated prototyping process is the only rational way that we could get to a system that would function much better than ours and if somebody tells you they know how to get there directly they know how to blueprint it um they're either delusional or lying now correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that these let's talk let's call them three solutions to the problems that you talk about aren't just aimed at governments or big businesses um but they're also aimed at the ordinary person what can the average person watching this video at home now do to prevent this catastrophe well i think frankly the only thing that we can do is recognize that it's coming and attempt to coordinate our resistance to it that is to say we need to halt the process by which people are becoming captured and that's not a simple thing to do because as i pointed out before the stigma that people fear is a very powerful motivator but if we can get people to recognize the hazard if we can get them to listen to what the movement is advocating enough to understand that there's no desirable system that could possibly be built by people who believe there's any disagreement or basis for one over whether two plus two equals four or whether men and women are fundamentally different that people who are telling you that these things are somehow open to debate are not in a position to build a society and we have to resist them which means we have a society to the extent there are things wrong with it we should address them but we should not overreact so in terms of applying these quite abstract ideas that you talk about it to the real world um you know let's take the woke movement which i think is basically what you're talking about uh in the last answer that you gave you talk about for example you know people can't go for 100 perfection and a lot of these woke types would say we need to end racism we need to live in this kind of new utopia society we've got to tear down what we have so in terms of you know applying this in practical practical terms in people's lives what what do you suggest for people to do is it more critical thinking more reading um what is it well you know this this is going to sound i fear too vague but i'm pretty sure it's the right answer people need to approach each other with more curiosity more imagination and more generosity of spirit if you go into the world imagining that there's vile racism around every corner and that every nuance is potentially a microaggression then you will no doubt find things to validate that perspective on the other hand if you give people a chance to tell you what they really think how they feel what world they want you might well be surprised at how much we are alike and the thing i fear most is that the process that is unfolding is doing a very good job of making us understandable to each other when i talk about the unity movement this is really about bridging a gap that i see growing every day recognizing that the people across the political aisle are not monsters that they see things differently undoubtedly they have things wrong but surely you do as well and figuring out what those things are is in all of our interest this is the right process and it always has been and it is time for us to return to it immediately because frankly we're much closer to the precipice than we should have allowed ourselves to get that first point about people basically being alike is a really interesting one let's talk a little bit about that there's two contrasting ideas of society today and they're so contrasting it just it's so strange to me that they could even you know that both ideas are so prominent the first is that as you say we live in a systemically racist society microaggressions lie behind you know behind every corner um if you're a white person you know there's a lot of problems with you inherently and you've got to sort out your racist issues um basically things aren't great and for minorities they're oppressed and there's huge injustices in the world and i'm sure you know there's some truth to that the opposite uh way of looking at things is that actually we live in the best society that's ever been created there's no better time ever to be a human being um poverty is down wealth is up we've got the internet you know in my pocket i can look up anything i want you know even 20 years ago you couldn't do that so how did we get to this point where you've got one half the population i'm being very you know generalistic saying that um who believe that we live in this terrible hell of a society and the other half that said actually this is the best society we've ever lived in well the folks who say it's the best society we've ever lived in if we speak broadly they're right the fact is we have accomplished the impossible and the most important thing we've accomplished is a society in a in which we are actually largely in agreement that we do not want structural unfairness to favor one population over another that's new and we've done very well we have not done perfectly and unfortunately evolution handed us a major liability it made humans very sensitive to inequity and the reason that it did that is very straightforward in my opinion the reason that we became more sensitive to inequity than we are to our absolute level of well-being is that if you let's say that you were a hunter-gatherer ancestor and you're living in the kalahari and you look at another population of hunter-gatherers also living in the kalahari and they're doing much better than you it means they know something that you don't and therefore paying attention to the fact that they're doing much better becoming obsessed with it is probably in your interest because you might figure out what it is that they know and be able to do it yourself but in a world in which your understanding of how your neighbors are doing is a polluted by the fact that you're seeing it through screens in which they are advancing a very particular brand that may be deceptive and the fact is they're not really your neighbors in the same sense that another population of hunter-gatherers are they may have profited from different opportunities that you don't have so the fact that they're out competing you doesn't mean you're doing something wrong or that you're missing something so what we have is people very sensitive to inequality in a world in which inequality is extreme they're obsessed with it now there's an awful lot of that inequality that probably isn't productive that is the result of rent-seeking behavior that is to say people hoarding opportunity and so as i said earlier i think much of the anger is justified and that there is something to remedy but if you think that what is causing opportunity to concentrate is people's racism that there are mad they're they're imagining things that they're not saying then you'll be wrong very frequently that's not the mechanism at all and the mechanism doesn't require them to be racist even if it is a racial inequality it can happen through the fact that our system tends to reproduce and amplify whatever uh imbalances existed in the prior state and so to the extent that there was historical racism that has people from a disadvantaged group in a given zip code and that zip code collects taxes which can't compete with some other zip code and then those taxes are used to generate schools well that will tend to reproduce low quality schools in places uh where people have been previously disadvantaged by racism without anybody being racist so we have to be more nuanced about this we have to be open to the possibility that there are problems that need to be addressed without assuming without leaping to the conclusion that the explanation for those problems is the most obvious capitalism the west freedom all the things that that brought us to this point where as you say we're i mean statistically you can't really disprove this that human beings are in the best position they've ever been this has produced huge amounts of inequality and you know many people especially on the right would argue well in a way this is justified inequality in that capitalism will always produce vast amounts of inequality but what it does is it lifts everyone up um from poverty and gives everyone you know a huge huge amount of wealth but unfortunately it does get concentrated at the top and people like jordan peterson would say well that's just a natural part of being a human being this is about hierarchies and capitalism basically encapsulates hierarchies and and magnifies it and then that confl that sort of idea of hierarchies and huge amounts of inequality as you say there are many sort of irrational moral hazard um problems with that where you know things aren't distributed fairly and there's problems that need to be regulated and sorted out so that's a whole another issue but this whole conflict between hierarchy inequality and the essential human uh nature of what i might call jealousy maybe that's too harsh but where as you mentioned earlier looking over at the other tribes seeing an inequality and being angry about that has that conflict basically created um the anger that we see today and as you mentioned in the first part of your answer relative to 200 years to 200 years ago these black lives matter protesters um are in a fantastic place but they still say that we live in in a hell of a society well this is one of these places where i think um both the left and the right have it tragically wrong but they each have a part of the truth um we are very well positioned in absolute terms i mean as you point out we're all carrying in our pocket a device that allows us to access something far greater than the library of alexandria without ever getting out of our seat that's an amazing bit of wealth that we all have access to on the other hand the right tends to see all of the inequality as desirable because some of the inequality is necessary in order to incentivize the production of the marvelous things from which we all profit but we have to ask the question what fraction what is the ideal amount of inequality to drive the system and i suspect if we did ask that question we'd find that we have excessive inequality what's more the fact that some inequality is necessary in order to get people to strive does not mean that we have to let people fall off the bottom of the ladder into conditions from which they cannot recover it becomes a permanent state of poverty so were we to fix the safety net so that people were not wiped out by bad luck and provide proper incentives and most importantly were we to seek to distribute opportunity as evenly as possible wealth can concentrate to an extent and that's fine but opportunity should never concentrate and so if we were to focus on the question that way i think we would get much farther because we would realize that it's almost impossible to make an argument in favor of the concentration of opportunity and yet anybody who's paying attention knows that opportunity is far from evenly distributed as someone who studies evolution you have an absolutely fantastic advantage i think in life to historians in that you can what i think this phrase in america is very popular but you can sort of take a 30 000 foot view of history of human history and of human beings and you can look at a really really really big picture of how we have progressed what is it in your view what are the driving factors behind the fantastic amounts of wealth and prosperity that we've seen in the last few hundred years in humanity and how can you link that in with um how human beings behave and why we haven't had this huge amount of progress until relatively very very recently well um it's a marvelous question i should say i think there are a couple of things that are contributing to it some of them are arbitrary so our discovery of fossil fuels allowed us to unleash a huge amount of energy literal energy into the system and that energy has led to an awful lot of wealth creation now it has come at a price to be sure but nonetheless we are profiting from that one-time uh liberation of all of that energy into our economic system that's one thing second thing is i think a bit more hopeful which is the american experiment which i take to have been largely globalized so many countries have followed our example and set up their own versions of it but that experiment trades on the idea that we are much better off collaborating with each other for reasons that have nothing to do with relatedness than we are to stick to our tribes and it turns out that's a very profitable idea it allows you to exchange concepts with people you would not otherwise collaborate with and the magic that comes from the breadth of contribution of different cultures to our overarching culture is staggering so this is one of the things that frightens me most about this moment is that we are taking this hidden engine of progress the ability to collaborate with people and not worry about whether or not you're closely related to them we're going to take that idea and we are going to return to a prior state in which we view everybody as kin or not kin and proceed from there and that's really um a great example of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs there's an interesting um debate among historians post-modernists about human progress in general and i think from that uh answer you've implied there that you know a huge amount of progress which is you know we can look at this statistically i'm sure this is true that a huge amount of progress has happened since um the 18th century for example let's put it let's put the pinpoint there but i don't necessarily like to subscribe to the view that you know everything before um you know american the american constitution or fossil fuels or wherever you want to put the um the pinpoint in history wasn't necessarily progress is it your view that you know 300 400 500 years ago we had this huge you know huge amount of progress um economically socially politically et cetera you can see that in population statistics you can see that in you know material things of technology development and everything like that but before this huge area of enlightenment what lessons can we learn from humanity there was there a progression throughout for that throughout that historical period of thousands of years you know before the enlightenment period absolutely although i do think we should focus on the enlightenment because in part the enlightenment uh did proceed from a relaxation of the intense competition that preceded the dark ages so the um the fact of people being effectively economically well positioned because europe was suddenly less populous and there was therefore more resource per person was a generative and i think we've seen if we look for this evidence i think we will see it all over the place in various different forms so in europe it was an accident in mesoamerica we see numerous examples of incredibly impressive societies having emerged over a very short number of millennia from hunter-gatherers who came into north america at the end of the last ice age and these societies somehow managed to prevent the internal competition that might have been expected to tear them apart from doing so and it would be very valuable if we understood what those processes were at a level that allowed us to actually generate them for ourselves and i suspect if humanity survives long enough we will come to understand that there is essentially a formula for creating stable well-being and that our job at all moments is to seek to seek that formula so that we can provide liberty to as many people as possible you've predicted my final question there so i suspect you might not have an answer to it but i'm going to ask it anyway um what is it that it's innate what is it that is innate in us that makes us progress what makes us as you say you know you're progressive what has made humanity progress in such a way what is it in our evolution that has driven this well in one way we're like every other creature we seek increases in well-being that frequently then manifest in increases in population now that's a tragic connection because in general it means that when a creature has found some sort of burst of what i would call growth that they squander it on more mouths to feed but in the human case there's also something special going on which is that the mechanism by which we search for opportunity is conscious and because we are conscious we are capable of choosing what path to take we are capable of foreseeing catastrophe and avoiding it we are capable of deciding to prioritize values that other creatures must discount and we are all too prone to revert to a lower state a prior more animal state and neglect our greatest gift but we do so at our peril the fact is human beings have consciousness and it frees us to understand where we are headed and to do so uh with intention and on that semi-positive note thank you so much brett for joining us thanks for having me you

Channel: The Sun

Views: 621,552

Keywords: The Sun, news, breaking news, woke, intellectual dark web, bret weinstein, jordan peterson, eric weinstein, idw, ben shapiro, free speech, current events, stay woke, trump, critical thinking, politics, political news, liberal, 2020, unity 2020, trump 2016, political, gender, university, progressive talk, higher education, fake news, richard dawkins, new media, us news, social justice, brett weinstein, black lives matter, trump supporter

Id: k1YZkAdn3Ls

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Isn't he a fence-sitter like Rogan? At least Tim Pool picked a side.