When Does The Left Go Too Far? - Part 1

[Music] thank you [Music] where the left goes wrong this will be a non-ideological look at the problems of the left and especially Progressive politics I considered myself to be extremely Progressive unfortunately however progressives rarely call out problems within their own world view because they're too busy fighting with the right with neoliberals with centrists with fascists with racists and so on and even deeper than that it's not just that they're so busy fighting it's that they don't actually have enough perspective they don't have enough distance from their own worldview they haven't self-reflected enough they're not honest enough with themselves to see the problems that exist on the left and within Progressive circles so that's what this episode will be tackling it's very important I feel that progressives call out problems on their own side because this is how we can evolve to spiral Dynamic stage turquoise or tier two politics which I've discussed before in my uh spironamic series go check out my spiral Dynamics series if you don't know what these colors like yellow and orange and blue mean which I'll be using and also check out my other episode series called conscious politics part one two three four where I talk about this stuff a lot now I've been pretty politically lately in the last five years in my content in my videos and that's because a lot of shenanigans have been going on and a lot of people have been really badly misusing ideology and group think in our culture and so part of my work is to help correct that and I get a lot of [ __ ] for criticizing the right and the right especially in America deserves a lot of criticism so it's right that I've been criticizing the right however when I do that people accuse me of bias and partisanship but of course I'm actually very unbiased and very non-partisan and so in an effort to balance things out now here we're going to be focusing on the left of course the left has its problems this is not something new to me this is not some new Awakening I've had just recently I've always seen the problems of the left but I especially see it more now because I spent the last seven years or so basically ever since Trump started running for office really deeply studying both the left wing and the right wing um in American politics and also that led me into studying World politics so I've been studying this a lot now and I have a lot of uh frankly criticisms and things that I've observed as oversights on the left so I've kind of gathered them all here together into this one episode now it's been said that it's easy to tell when the right wing goes too far but it's harder to tell when the left wing goes too far which actually makes left wing more dangerous and there is some truth to the statement the dangers of the right wing are pretty obvious although not obvious enough apparently for like 40 or 50 of the population the dangers of the right wing are not obvious which is why they need to be talked about which is why I've talked about them a lot in the past if the if the dangers of the right wing were so obvious then we wouldn't have Trump we wouldn't have Maga we wouldn't have all these right-wing nationalist quasi-fascist racist homophobic and so on political movements uh xenophobic anti-immigrant movements happening all around the world it's not just in America All Around the World in Europe and South America and elsewhere so clearly it's not so obvious however for those of us who are a little bit more developed and a little bit more intelligent and to those of us who to whom that is obvious you say okay yeah that's obvious but what about you know the problems on the left surely there must be problems on the left and of course there are problems on the left but notice this as well that if you think that the problems on the right are more obvious than the problems on the left why is that that's actually goes to to buttress the point that I've been making for a long time is that there's an asymmetry between the development levels of the left and the right they're not equally developed the right wing is less developed than the left wing now when I say that again people think I'm being biased or partisan because I I just favor the left no that's not the reason if you do an objective analysis and you do a study of the actual development stages of the ego which we've looked at in the spirodynamics series and also in my series called the nine stages of ego development the Susan Cook reuter model go check out that series of episodes as well this is all within the realm of Developmental Psychology if you actually look at developmental psychology what you'll see there is that the human mind evolves and develops it develops through various kinds of stages these stages are pretty consistent around the world they've been very well researched and tracked and we can predict where your mind is going to develop cognitively morally spiritually in terms of how you view men and women how you view morality and various kinds of political rights these things do evolve in a in a very predictable manner and you're not as original of a thinker as you think you are most people when they're doing politics they're just parroting ideas they're parroting ideas at the very level of development that they happen to be at whatever stage that is so the right wing especially in America tends to be spiral Dynamic stage blue slash Orange and the left wing in America tends to be spiral Dynamic stage orange slash green and a little bit into yellow these are generalizations this isn't always true of course you can find left Wingers who are less developed than right Wingers of course that's the case we're generalizing generally though that's the case and of course all these stages have problems so when I say that the left is more developed than the right that doesn't necessarily mean that they're a lot more developed uh and that doesn't mean that there are no problems on the left no there's a lot of problems with your standard neoliberal or Progressive who's roughly in spiral Dynamic stage orange slash green if they're very very Progressive they might be solid green but there's still many problems with solid green which I've talked about in my episode called about Dynamic stage green if you go watch that episode you'll understand all of the problems with sage green yeah there's problems with this with Stage green there's problems with Stage orange there's problems with Stage blue there's problems even with Stage yellow all these stages have their limitations and so we just want to become aware of them if you're on the left ask yourself this when does the left go too far and if you cannot think of some good points on this question that's a clue to you that you're fooling yourself and that you're lost in ideology so the rest of this episode is me answering the question when does the left go too far now I'm not going to be bashing the right so much in this episode so those of you who are lefties and progressives you might if this is the only political episode of mine that you watch you're going to come away thinking that oh my God Leo is some crypto right winger why is he supporting the right Wingers here I'm not supporting the right Wingers here I have a very balanced perspective on the right and the left and I am part of the left but in this episode I'm only focusing on the problems of the left I'm not going to be talking about any of the good redeeming qualities of the left of which there are many I'm not focusing on that at all and I'm not going to be talking about any of the obvious problems on the right all right so you have to keep that in mind so this is this episode might come off as it's very unbalanced that's by Design because we're specifically answering the question when does the left go too far that's the that's our challenge here we're not looking at anything else if you want a more broader perspective on my ideas about the right and left go check out those other episodes of mine that I've released and I'll be doing more in the future that are more balanced all right so here are all the problems with Progressive politics spiral Dynamics stage green basically the first one is not taking immigration as a serious legitimate issue progressives tend to treat immigration as though like well if you're anti-immigration if you have any concerns about immigration if you want to tighten up the Border in your country then basically your at the very least you're xenophobic and uh probably you're racist and you're fascist and that that's all there is to it that's not the case there are legitimate concerns about immigration policy in any country how many immigrants should we let in what kind of immigrants should we let in what kind of policy should we have in terms of how do we screen them what are the security threats this is not just problems that xenophobic and racist people have because you can always take it to the extreme if you completely open the border of a country and you just let anybody in willy-nilly this is going to create chaos and problems for your country at some point now it may be the case that America you know America is a large country with over 300 million citizens we can probably take in millions of uh of uh immigrants and foreigners many of them from very poor countries very underdeveloped countries but you have to admit if you're a progressive or a liberal you have to admit that at some point this is going to create problems and there's multiple levels of problems this will create some progressives and socialist types tend to fool themselves into thinking like well ideally we should have open borders now this notion of open borders a lot of right-wingers take it too far and the majority of the left and even Progressive politicians nobody out there is really advocating for open borders this would be like the most extreme position on the far far far left if you find some sort of marxist far left you know college kids they might fancy themselves so Progressive that they just want open borders everywhere well they're foolish they don't understand that the borders are there for a reason if you just let everybody in uh this is going to create problems for you it will create infrastructure problems they're not might might not be enough um you know um immigration centers to process all the people there might not be enough government facilities to process all the people there might not be enough roads not enough Bridges not enough pipelines not enough housing not enough schooling right so all these problems the system will start to get strained you have to admit this it's just a question of when you know maybe you can take in a million people but if you've taken 5 million people the system will start to get stranded if you're taking 10 million people the whole system will just collapse so there's that uh that's one issue but there's more than just that the other issue is that you have to understand that the majority of citizens in any country are very nationalistic they have a national identity they consider themselves to be Americans or Mexicans or Russians or Jews or whatever and that's their identity that's how they see themselves they also have a certain culture that they see as their mother culture they have a mother language they have a mother religion and so on and so what happens is that if you just allow one culture to get overwhelmed and inundated by another culture another ethnic group this is not just a matter of oh we don't like those smelly foreigners xenophobia type of thing no there's there's actually there's there's deeper problems here because there is going to be a cultural dilution that goes on the culture of the mother country into which the immigration is happening that culture is going to get diluted and it's going to change now you might say well Leo we should all be Multicultural and it doesn't matter you know if American culture shifts if a bunch of Spanish speaking people move in here it doesn't matter what language we speak it doesn't matter what religion we have it doesn't matter what skin color people are you know it's racist to care about those things you're not being subtle enough and you're not being realistic enough about how nationalism actually works these things actually do matter and it's not just nearly a matter of racism or purely xenophobia firstly you have to understand that virtually all human beings are xenophobic by our nature From Evolution we had to be this way because we're wired to be very tribal we have it in group we have an out group and we by our nature we tend to hate and demonize the out group and be afraid of the out group now if you doubt whether you're xenophobic or not it's very easy to prove to yourself that you're xenophobic and uh and the way that you prove that to yourself is just this little thought experiment you know if some aliens beamed you aboard a UFO you would be terrified why are you terrified are you terrified because you're a racist no it's because you're naturally afraid of the unknown when you don't know some group of people that you're going to be spending time with that's scary that's a legitimate fear that's not just an irrational fear that oh you're a racist no you don't know what these aliens are going to do to you now you might say well Leo but but you know uh well yeah that might be true with aliens but that's not true with with Mexicans or that's not true with Jews or that's not true with with with black people actually you don't know that if you're a very Cosmopolitan person who's traveled around the world and tastes of different Cuisines and study different countries and been around a different uh kinds of people with different kinds of ethnicities then you're very comfortable being around people who look different than you and have different languages than you and eat different food than you and pray to a different God than you you're comfortable but it took you time to acclimate to that and you still might not be totally comfortable you still will have cultural preferences you might prefer one culture over another culture simply because not because you're racist or xenophobic but simply because you have your preferences we all have our preferences you have a preference for what kind of Cuisine is your favorite you have a preference for um what kind of languages you want to speak and you have a preference for what kind of religious philosophies you prefer versus other ones and which customs of doing business or getting married you prefer over other ones see and so do the majority of the people in your community but the majority of the people in your community you have to understand this what progressives don't understand because they have a blind spot here is that they are not as Multicultural and open as you are they're not as experienced and they are legitimately frightened by new religions new Cuisines new languages new customs and different ways of living life it creates a culture shock it makes them feel uncomfortable and at the very least the only reason we should limit immigration is if none of the other problems are legitimate if let's say our infrastructure can handle an infinite number of immigrants what you should take seriously though is that the majority of the people and citizens of your community are not going to tolerate this rapid change in culture very well this is going to literally frighten them it's going to make them very uncomfortable and you might say well Leo so what those are racists and xenophobic people and that's their problem again you're being naive it's not merely their problem it's going to make they are going to make it your problem you see because they're not going to just sit by with all their fear and being uncomfortable with this flood of immigrants and this rapid changing in culture in their religion and in their language and so forth and in their Customs they're not just going to sit by and tolerate this this is going to piss them off and they're going to go and they are going to start fascist movements as a reaction and this is not some sort of hypothetical concern this is a legitimate very very practical concern that you should be concerned with as a progressive so as a progressive even if you feel very comfortable with immigration all this kind of stuff you have to be very careful to understand that the majority of the citizens in your community are not as developed as you they're not as open-minded as you they're not as Multicultural as you and therefore you know because when we're talking about politics we're talking about what is going to work for the majority of people not for the most developed five percent or ten percent for the majority of people and the majority of people you have to just be honest with yourself they literally are racist and xenophobic and they have pretty strong cultural preferences and they're nationalistic and now there are problems with racism of course and we should try to limit it and so forth but also you have to be realistic about how quickly you can change that and a lot of times progressives are not realistic about this and when you start to smear these people as racists and fascists and other kinds of names like this this actually worsens the problem because you're not really understanding the depth of what's going on here it's not your just standard old school style of racism although sometimes it is see this is another problem here that I see with Progressive politics is when it comes to racism this term is way overused and really you should start thinking about the problems of racism not as racism but more as ethnocentrism what's the difference and you have to be careful here because it might sound like well Leo you're it seems like you're whitewashing these racist you know why don't we just call them racists because they're racist rather than calling it ethnocentrism which seems like a less dirty word but you see the problem with the word racist is that it is such a dirty word that nobody is going to admit to themselves that they're racist you might say well Leo what's the problem with that well the problem with that there's there's look if our goal is to minimize racism we need to construct a set of systems and a pathway to get people who are racist towards being non-racists and ironically by calling everybody a racist and not having any leeway or sympathy uh for the place that they're at it makes it impossible to then change them and um get them to admit certain biases that they have which otherwise they might admit but as soon as you call them a racist that's it you shut down the whole conversation so you end up in a counterproductive situation but actually there's something deeper here which is that these days now in the past racism was a lot more prevalent these days I think the majority of people are not strictly racist but they are deeply ethnocentric what's the difference ethnocentric means that you're loyal and you have a deep preference for the culture that you grew up in basically that's what it means you have a preference also for your ethnicity and it's not just that you have a preference for your race per se or that you think your race is superior to other races so technically the way that I would Define racism is someone is a racist if they think that their race is superior to another race I actually think that's pretty rare the majority of people don't believe that anymore now in the past that used to be true but just because you don't think your race is superior to other races that doesn't mean that you're equally comfortable with all Races and also not just races but the cultures that come with the races you have to understand right so race and culture and ethnicity these tend to be deeply connected you may not be a racist strictly speaking but you may have pretty strong preferences for what culture what customs what language you're comfortable with what religion you're comfortable with and these all tend to come together as a group you see and so this is what a lot of progressives don't understand about the Trump supporters and Maga and conservatives is that most of these conservatives are not racists but they are ethnocentric and they do have a strong preference for their culture and they want to preserve and defend their culture because they're in love with their culture they don't want to see their culture diluted and they're threatened by the idea of multiculturalism now you might say well Leo but that's their problem you know that's because they're bigots why don't we call them bigots they're just closed-minded to different kinds of cultures and uh that's an ugly thing and we should seek to change that at the political level you might say that as a progressive but here you have to really understand the depth of our problem multiculturalism [Music] doesn't just come naturally this is something that has to be developed it doesn't happen automatically open-mindedness does not happen automatically in fact the majority of the citizens in your country or Community are extremely close-minded that's what we're dealing with here on a practical level and you have to be sensitive to that and willing to accommodate that you can't just dismiss that and think that everyone should be as open-minded as you no actually they can't be and the reason they can't be is because they haven't had the life experience you've had they haven't had the education opportunities that you've had it's no secret that the majority of progressives and people who are very passionate about stage green politics they come from universities many of them from Elite universities but you know what the majority of the citizens in your community do not have the economic opportunities to even go to universities even the basic ones never mind to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and this kind of stuff the majority of Americans don't have a college degree and even if they do it's a sort of a a low-level college degree they probably didn't get very good grades and they probably went to a university to you know a small College a small University not a big one that wasn't as ethnically diverse and culturally diverse as something like a Stanford or a Harvard and many of them didn't go at all you see and so while you had the opportunities to go to these diverse universities and to learn about different cultures and maybe your parents were wealthy enough to send you to travel around the world maybe you spent a summer in Europe or in South America or in Asia but think about what allowed you those opportunities it was only because your parents had money and it was also only because you were already open-minded enough probably because if your Cosmopolitan and Multicultural probably your parents were as well and their values rubbed off on you so when your dad suggested that you spend a summer in Europe that was already his multiculturalism influencing you but see that's not true for the majority of the people in your community and so their minds were not open to different cultures and so they are literally afraid of different cultures they don't understand Islam they don't understand Chinese culture they don't understand and they're literally frightened by the Spanish language yeah that's how basic this is and if you want to be a good politician and you want to do the best for your community really when we're talking about develop we're talking about politics what are we talking about we're talking about developing Our Community Helping everybody or as many people as possible within our community to expand their Consciousness and to grow and develop themselves right but you have to understand that human beings can only grow at a certain pace and the biggest mistake that progressives make is that they assume that everybody in their Community is willing and able to grow at the same Pace that they themselves have grown at and it's precisely because the progressives have grown faster and more than the majority of people in their community that now they're out of touch and they don't understand the challenges that the rest of people the more simple-minded people the poorer people Progressive tend to underestimate the challenges that those people have in developing a sense of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and tolerance and open-mindedness what they further underestimate is that literally they've done biological studies on this is that conservatives are literally born with brains that are wired in such a way that make them more closed-minded and more fearful just as a baseline never mind what kind of parents they have never mind if they grow up in a Cosmopolitan City like New York or San Francisco you know a city like that or whether they grow up in a little town in the middle of Alabama right never mind any of those factors just their Baseline brain chemistry as such that they're more close-minded and therefore they're more fearful of things that they haven't encountered yet that they understand right so literally what I'm telling you is that if you take a liberal or a progressive with a very Progressive mind and you beam him up into a UFO with some aliens he will be less terrified now he'll still probably be terrified but he'll be less terrified than if you take a conservative and do the exact same thing just by the wiring of the brain chemistry that's pretty amazing and to not take that into account when you're doing politics is a gross oversight and a lot of the misunderstanding between conservatives and and liberals has to do with just this simple biological fact but of course on top of this there's a lot of cultural you know programming that goes into it as well it very much matters whether you grow up in in the countryside or whether you grew up in San Francisco if you grew up in San Francisco you're going to be way more Cosmopolitan and Multicultural and open-minded than if you grew up in a small 500 person town in Alabama and that's exactly why you see that the way politics breaks down if you look you know come election time when voting is happening when the votes are being tabulated you see which parts of the country are the red votes coming from and which are the blue coming from and you can see that all the blue votes are coming from large cities even in very red States like Alabama if you take a look at the biggest Cosmos Cosmopolitan city in Alabama those are going to be a lot of blue votes and conversely if you take a look at California which is like the most Progressive State you might say if you take a look at the votes that are coming from the rural parts of California they're all red States I mean they're all red votes so really this designation of red States and blue States is a very poor way of looking at it because it's not the state that determines whether your votes are red or blue it's really Urban versus rural and that's because when you live in an urban environment you just by necessity are forced to confront people from different ethnicities of different races different cultures from all around the world speaking different languages eating different foods and you're all living in close proximity to each other whereas if you grew up in the middle of Alabama in a 500 person town it's only going to be one kind of person people like you for the most part and when you grow up in that for 30 years that's going to be like locked and cemented into your mind of what is normal and then anything that you encounter outside of that is going to seem scary and uncomfortable and this is not something that you can just fix about yourself it's not like somebody who grew up for 30 years in in the middle of Alabama in some rural part of town there can just um flip some sort of switch because you tell him to you know you tell him oh stop being racist and just open your mind you multiculturalism and he says oh yeah okay cool let me do that and then he goes into his mind and flips the switch and now all of a sudden he's just comfortable with with Chinese culture and Mexican culture and Russian culture no he can't do that that's not something he has conscious control over so repeatedly calling him a racist and a bigot and a xenophobe is not going to improve that situation that's not actually going to help him to grow in fact that's going to force him now to to become defensive because he has to defend his own culture because he's loyal to his own culture he loves his own culture because he doesn't really have anything else he knows nothing else so he's going to defend his God he's going to defend his Christian ways he's going to defend his language he's going to defend his customs and um his way of doing business that's how humans are by default so if you want to truly be a compassionate political actor you have to have compassion for people's struggles with this and that means you have to surrender calling them racists that's a difficult pill to swallow for many progressives and yet deep down you know that what I'm telling you is correct and when you start to accept this this is when you go beyond green politics into Stage yellow and above so the next problem with Progressive politics is with police especially recently we've had a lot of situations where police brutality is blown way out of proportion to the point where police as a whole are being demonized by the left I watch a lot of left-wing commentators on YouTube and the ease with which they will smear and paint all police as pigs racists um fascists and other sorts of labels like this is really troubling now of course there is systematic racism within police of course the police can be corrupt as can any institution in fact as all institutions are to various degrees um of course there is excessive brutality used by the police especially here in America the problem though is that it gets completely blown out of proportion because what you see you know this the sort of like sensational video clips that you see on YouTube or tick tock of police shooting some black man here or some unarmed black woman there or you know some mentally uh you know disabled person here in this situation you know we've all seen these clips they're tragic Clips uh of course Justice needs to be handed out in these situations but you have to distinguish this from smearing police as a whole policing is a very difficult business it's a dangerous business as well and the problem is that the police go out every single day in this country and they serve thousands of and even millions of arrest warrants and criminal cases they chase down you know uh legitimate criminals and they stop they stop all sorts of disputes and they do drug busts and all sorts of stuff that they do right they perverted preventive a lot of crime the problem is that they get almost no credit for that and then if they make one mistake and it gets caught on videotape then people lose their minds and they start to smear all of police as being this way but that's not the case 99 of the time when the police are doing their work they're doing a great job they're professional they're responsible they save lives they help people save their money from being stolen preventing property damage and crime and all sorts of ugly ugly stuff but then one percent of the time the police are corrupt you know because you have you have hundreds of thousands of police across the whole country of course some of them are going to be corrupt and I'm not just saying it's a few bad apples because people say oh Leo so you're just making a few bad apples case here which the conservatives make no I will also admit that there are systemic problems within the police there are problems with how the police are trained there are problems with perhaps how the police are over militarized maybe they get too many too many high powerful weapons there are problems within certain police departments there are certain police departments around the country which literally are racist but that doesn't mean all of them are that just means we have to identify those and fix those problems there are problems with how police are trained that needs to also be identified and changed but even admitting all those problems in 99 of the cases the police are still doing a good job now you might say well Leo but that's just it's easy for you to say that because you're white and you're affluent and you live in a good part of the country in a good part of town therefore you have not experienced the kind of you know bad police brutality and unfairness that I might have experienced if you let's say you're a minority and I'm willing to grant you that that minorities are going to by definition experience more unfairness if the police are majority White also poor people are going to experience worse encounters with the police than affluent people and that's unfair but also you have to understand that there is actually the sort of affluence thing there's actually reason for that because poor people are going to commit more crime generally speaking than affluent people just because they have more reason to now that's not that's not going to translate the same you know based on skin color um although historically the reason that black people commit more crime is because they're less affluent not so much because they're black but because they're less affluent and why are they less affluent because they were black and therefore enslaved therefore they have a lot less generational wealth so there's some complicated Dynamics going on there and some some sort of complicated correlations um but uh but look I'll grant you that minorities have it worse in terms of the police but that still doesn't mean that the police are on the whole a bad thing so one of the worst political moves that progressives have made in the last five years or so is this this slogan of defund the police abolish the police defund the FBI abolish the FBI now conservatives are saying that but they're saying that for different reasons in terms of FBI um but um this is these are these are stupid slogans these are stupid policies stupid ideas that make the left wing seem like they're stupid and actually give fuel to the right wing this empowers the right wing any time progressives go too far and do ridiculous absurd stupid things or try to defend stupid policy positions that empowers the right you understand that think about that defund the police this slogan I mean if I was into conspiracy theories I would think that the right wing came up with this slogan and fed it to the left wing just to weaken the left wing so that the right wing would win power I don't believe that actually but like if I said if I was at a conspiracy theories that would be a good one uh but of course um progressives are stupid enough to have brought this uh this damage onto themselves now moving on to the next problem with Progressive politics is the demonization and failure to properly understand the right this is we've already touched on this problem but we're going to be re retouching this problem as we go down this list of of problems with progressives because um this is sort of like a meta problem progressives are way too quick to call people racists bigots transphobes homophobes islamophobes and fascists notice that all these terms and labels sometimes they're appropriate but for the most part these are actually what are called in Psychology thought terminating cliches when you use one of these labels to dismiss somebody you no longer have to assume the burden of trying to understand where that person is coming from when you call someone a racist or a transphobe that shuts down dialogue but even worse than that it shuts down your mind's capacity to understand the Nuance in that person's point of view so for example I've seen a lot of uh Progressive YouTubers calling Joe Rogan a transphobe this is a big mistake big mistake and when they do this again this feeds into empowering the right now Joe Rogan has some very strong positions on trans people in sports and that's because he comes from Sports especially martial arts where the physical strength differences between men and women are very significant so basically Joe Rogan's position is something along the lines of that um you know he doesn't hate trans people he doesn't want to stop all trans people from being trans if that's what's right for them but his position is that when it comes to sports and especially when it comes to competitive physical sports like let's say boxing or fighting um in these cases if you take uh if you allow trans people to participate in the sport especially if you allow trans men to compete against normal women this is unfair this creates biological imbalances hormonal you know uh there's a hormonal Advantage there there's a structural Advantage just to your your bone structure and all this kind of stuff from comes from being born a biological man um that even if you transition you're still going to have a huge Advantage right so this is Joe Rogan's position this is a legitimate position to have this does not make him a transpho but a lot of times what I see is that progressives are so eager just to call somebody a transphobe who might have a slightly different view of of trans issues and doesn't you know toe the Progressive Party Line doesn't just buy into all the group think automatically they just dismiss that person oh he's just a trans vote no he's not a transphobe it's just that you're stuck in group think and anything outside your group think you have no explanation for and you don't want to engage in that you don't want to take responsibility for understanding that because maybe there's some good points there that Joe Rogan is making but you don't want to consider those so you just dismiss them as a trans vote this was one example I only used Joe Rogan here because he's like the most well-known guy but I see this kind of problem happening over and over again not just with the label transphogue but homophobe islamophobe fascist racist bigot and other sorts of labels like this and this is just a more General problem that stage green does one of the characteristic problems of stage any stage below stage yellow any tier one stage is that stage green does not have a proper understanding of the stages below it it does not have a proper understanding of stage orange and of stage blue likewise stage orange does not have a proper retaining of stage green and Stage blue and likewise stage blue does not have a proper understanding of sage orange and Stage green so the stages are misunderstanding each other and in order to move to Stage yellow tier two or above to really have a conscious politics which is what we're trying to move towards here which is the whole objective of this conversation to get there we need the stages understanding each other fundamentally progressives do not understand conservatives this is a true statement they think they understand they think they're better than they think they're more evolved they think they don't need to understand because they're already more evolved this is a mistake this is a huge mistake you need to understand the conservative mind if you're a progressive and you need an accurate understanding of the conservative mind and you should care if you have an inaccurate understanding of the conservative mind that's a huge point think about why what I'm telling you is important I'm not going to give you the answer I want you to think about that I'm just telling you that it is the case that if you're a progressive and you do not care about the accuracy of your understanding of the conservative worldview that is going to come back and hurt you it's going to hurt you in many ways I want you to contemplate what those ways are I'll just give you a couple of pointers here it'll hurt you in two ways at least one way it'll hurt you is it'll simply hurt you in your ability to actually win elections because a lot of people at least half the people in your country are conservative if you don't accurately understand the world view how are you going to win elections so this is just a purely you know selfish reason to care about why you should have an accurate understanding of your opponent's worldview it's not like we're saying that conservatives are like 10 of the population if conservatives are only 10 of the population maybe you wouldn't matter you know how accurately you understood the worldview no conservatives are like at least half of the population so it's pretty important don't you think if you are not able to understand the world view of half the world's population that's pretty important foreign that should worry you and I guarantee you as a progressive you do not have an accurate understanding of the conservative world to you you tell yourself that you do but you don't what you have is you have a demonized straw man version of it which is not the same thing now again you might say here oh but Leo but but conservatives are even worse conservatives don't understand the progressive worldview yes of course they don't of course they don't of course they're even worse at this of course conservatives demonize and straw man the progressive worldview but we're not talking about that in this episode remember I told you this is going to be an imbalanced episode we're only talking about your problems as a progressive I don't care about the conservatives problems here they have a lot of problems even more than you but we're talking about you see at some point you have to stop pointing your finger at the conservatives and all of their problems and you have to ask yourself but what about my problems because ultimately you're responsible for you you can't serve you can't um fix the conservatives problems for them only they can solve their own problems and only you can solve your problems as a progressive so in this episode I don't care what the conservative problems are it doesn't matter what matters if you're a progressive is your problems your blind spots your weaknesses that's what we're working on that's what it means to take responsibility and to develop yourself one of the biggest problems we have in politics is that everybody is pointing out somebody else's problems but nobody is taking responsibility for solving their own internal problems therefore how can we all develop and grow for example if I'm trying to give advice to men about how to improve their relations with women it's pointless to me talking about the problems that women have now if I'm talking to women about improving their relationships with men then I'm going to be talking about women's problems and if I'm talking to Men I'm gonna be talking about men's problems because only the men can fix their problems and only the women can fix their own problems you see there's no point in me making an advice video for men about being better with women and the whole video is just me criticizing women that doesn't solve anything you see so it's like that with politics too so one reason you should care about misunderstanding the the right is because um just for winning elections it'll help you to win elections but the second reason is because look you're gonna have to live with these people for the rest of your life conservatives are not going anywhere you're not going to kill half the country they're not going anywhere and you're not going to brainwash them out of their conservativism you're not gonna you're not gonna wake them up out of it maybe you will with a few people but for the most part the percentage of conservatives to liberals left to right in this country is not going to change throughout your entire lifetime it's going to be the same percentage for the most part so you're gonna have to you know live with these people work with these people and ultimately you're gonna have to make peace with these people because if you don't make peace with these people in your own mind you're going to be at war with them forever don't you think that's a problem now see a rabid Progressive here would say well Leo but I don't want to make peace with them they need to be fought and defeated think a little bit deeper about what you're actually saying do you want peace in the world or not if you're a progressive supposedly you're Pro piece yet the only version of Pro piece that you're for is the piece that comes after you exterminate half the population that's a problem I'm not saying you're going to exterminate half the population but think about how your worldview is working the only way you will have peace of mind as a progressive is if half the world is dead that's literally your position I'm suggesting to you that's a problem I'm suggesting to you that that is not How We Do conscious politics and that there is a better way to go about doing politics so think about that real hard and stop using these thought terminating cliches stop calling people just in a knee-jerk way calling them racists and bigots and homophobes and transphobes actually engage with them stop calling people fascists engage with them try to really understand their worldview this will be really good for you now one objection that a progressive could raise here is like well Leo but if I want to open my mind to fascist ideas and homophobic and transforming ideas isn't that like opening my mind to the wrong things and that in this way I'm going to somehow compromise with the Devil by opening my mind to the Devil by trying to understand the devil no that's incorrect understanding the devil fully is actually how you defeat the Devil you cannot defeat the Devil by demonizing the devil there's actually much deeper spiritual reasons for why that's the case I won't go into that here but you cannot defeat Evil by fighting evil that has never worked and it will never work the only way you can defeat evil is by loving it to death which requires you understanding it to death which requires opening your mind to it all right moving on to the next point the next problem with Progressive politics is excessive forms of what I call idiot compassion what is idiot compassion idiot compassion is when you place compassion for the suffering of others above everything else so one example of this might be a sort of a naive pacifism where you say like let's abolish the military entirely let's disarm all our nuclear weapons let's disarm uh and destroy all our guns and we're just going to live happily all together with no weapons in the sort of utopia you know because we don't want war you know war is not very compassionate and violence is not very good so therefore the solution to violence is just to eliminate all the all the weapons this is sort of an idiot companion this would be a policy that comes from idiot compassion and progressives tend to be more prone to errors of idiot compassion because they tend to have more compassion than conservatives the problem with conservatives they don't have enough compassion the problem with progressives they have too much compassion they have so much compassion it makes them so idealistic that they don't realize that life and survival are brutal things and that sometimes by taking an overly compassionate approach to some situation you actually make it worse not better a classic example of this in your personal life is for example when you're trying to break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend if you're very compassionate you can empathize with how much you're going to break this person's heart by breaking up with them but you also know deep down that this person is not right for you so what do you do well out of compassion you hold it off and hold it off and hold it off for years you don't tell them that you're going to break up with them because you don't want to break their heart but of course the more years go by where you don't tell them the worse it gets and eventually it's going to break up anyways because you already know they're not right for you you guys are not compatible so you're just um you're delaying the inevitable and out of compassion actually you're going to end up breaking this person's heart even more because if you told them right off the bat and did a clean break with them yeah you would hurt their heart but they would move on and you would move on and they would be able to find a partner and you'd be able to find a new partner and things would go fine but when you start um you know that would be like the honest sort of like the you know you're taking the Band-Aid or you're just ripping the Band-Aid off in one clean swipe but when you're slowly peeling that Band-Aid out of compassion you know it actually makes the total pain worse so I noticed that progressives tend to fall into this problem idiot compassion we have to understand is that good intentions and compassion are not enough to fix many of the world's systemic problems this is especially true when it comes to war progressives and have sort of a blind spot when it comes to war and violence because they just instinctively progressives don't like war and violence and so we want to just do anything possible to minimize it as quickly as possible but actually sometimes War violence and conflict are necessary for a greater good and that by delaying this war conflict you actually out of compassion you're delaying it you're trying to avoid it but actually you're going to cause more misery by doing so okay the next point the next problem is it's a big one it's this naive ideological obsession with socialism and Marxism that we see amongst progressives this is such a huge topic I could have a separate episode just about this I've been observing a lot of debates between capitalists Libertarians socialists communists tankies marxists I see a lot of a lot of blind spots here and a lot of the ways in which marxists argue they're talking points are very problematic so I'm going to point some of these out now that does not mean that I'm pro-capitalist here um again this is going to be one-sided I'm just criticizing the ways in which socialism and Marxism are argued for by the left all right so the first problem here is I see a lot of parroting of socialists and Marsh's talking points parroting like people say well you know in Marx in Das Capital you know on this page here he said this and he said that this is the definition of exploitation and this is the definition of Labor and capital and like they just use these Marxist definitions these are just talking points this doesn't mean that they have anything um to do with with reality or that it's going to lead to a better Society first of all understand that the next problem is some socialists and marxists go so far as to advocate for full-on socialism and full-on Marxist Revolution even sometimes through violence this is very dangerous and very problematic they don't understand what they're you know advocating for or what kind of consequences they could have again this is sort of coming from like an idiot compassion because look any reasonable person sees the evils of capitalism and the very many problems and injustices that come with a capitalist system however that does not mean that socialism and Marxism is automatically going to be a better system and just because you are compassionate for the poor and the exploited workers under capitalism does not mean that that compassion and those good intentions of yours will translate over into a better system after a socialist Revolution you have to consider that your socialist Revolution might actually lead to a worse system after all is said and done even though it came from very good intentions in fact we have a long history the whole 20th century is a history of this now I am not being as naive as many right Wingers are that just because you know we had the 20th century and we've tried socialism and Marxism let's say within within Russia within China South America and Cuba and other places Venezuela and so forth that just because it hasn't worked or there's been problems with it that now we need to forget about socialism and that now socialism is dead no there are good ideas within socialism there are many valid critiques of capitalism within Marxism we can acknowledge all that and yet still we can also understand that staging a socialist or Marsh's Revolution can be extremely problematic and that you can easily make things worse than they are a lot of the problem is that to get one of these social systems socialist systems in place you're going to have to use authoritarian means to do so at least historically that's how it's always gone down now you might say Leo but but the socialism of the 21st century will be implemented without any authoritarian means oh yeah where has that ever worked I mean of course your intentions are to implement socialism in the most peaceful way possible but the reality is socialism especially when you're trying to actually implement it through some kind of revolution this is happening through deep ideology and groupthink the only way you're going to Stage your Revolution is through ideology and groupthink you're going to have to raise hordes and masses of people to Stage your Revolution and as you do that the people become stupider and stupider and they commit all the evils that humans commit when they are organized into a mob under some ideology doesn't even matter what the ideology is just the fact that you have millions of people organize under some ideology they're not thinking independently for themselves this is going to create a lot of evil even if the ideology is very good and it's going to lead to all sorts of corruption and abuses of power and authority so even though you might be the leader of a peaceful socialist Revolution once it actually gets going it's going to get out of control see you're going to create a Frankenstein monster and then this monster will eat you alive and then this monster will become power hungry and it will go on without you in authoritarian ways to try to survive because we're talking about survival here we're talking about Collective systems of survival see my episode called Collective ego which talks all about this kind of stuff other problems I see within this domain is also tankies tankies are basically socialists or marxists who whitewash communism who actually believe that oh you know Leo Soviet Soviet communism wasn't so bad and Chinese communism wasn't so bad there's a lot of problems with that I won't even get into that here um you have to acknowledge to yourself if you're a Marxist or a socialist that actually Marxism in socialism these are dogmas this is groupthink you didn't develop these ideas on your own you probably didn't even read these ideas from Marx himself you probably got this mostly from hearsay and group think in the University you went to or the people you hung out with when you were young it's a Dogma now there are some valid points within Marxism but there's also a lot of Wrong Stuff within Marxism I'll be explaining some of that here and in the future I'll have an episode just purely about the problems with socialism Marxism versus capitalism and to admit that there are problems within Marxism does not mean that you have to ignore all the problems with capitalism it's not an either or so you're just because I'm criticizing socialism Marxism here does not make me some sort of arch capitalist libertarian neoliberal you have to be careful as you're listening to me making these points I'm speaking from tier two it's probably Dynamics tier two right I'm speaking from a non-ideological place so whenever I'm criticizing capitalism or socialism or progressivism or whatever um it's not because I'm defending it's opposite and it's also not because I'm just some sort of third way neoliberal you might say oh Leo well Leo is just sitting here and he just wants to split everything down the middle he doesn't want to be too far right and he doesn't want to be too far left so what is he he's just some neoliberal Centrist some sort of like Bill Clinton type of person right wrong that's actually a huge mistake that progressives make which we'll get to further down the list this is a huge point but a lot of times what progressives do is in order to maintain their ideological position of progressivism and to not have a challenge um what they do is they will demonize anybody I mean obviously they demonize anyone who's on the far right but they will even demonize anyone who's even remotely giving the appearance of being Centrist because you know progressives will demonize centrists as well um and then that makes them just completely stuck in their bubble of progressivism but what you have to understand is that not only is there the far right and the moderate right and then there's the centrism and moderate left and then there's progressivism there's even something beyond all of those categories which is tier two tier two can smell like centrism but it's not you don't even know what tier two is yet and many progressives are so simple-minded and so so quick to demonize that not only will they demonize tier 2. they will even deny the um of course they will demonize centrism and they will even deny the existence of moderate conservativism they will say there's no such thing as a modern conservative all conservatives are right-wing extremists and fascists just the moderate ones are just pretending so see this gets extremely tricky um we'll get to that point further down I want to stay on the on the Marxism track for a bit more here so Progressive socialists and marxists have a problem admitting where socialism has truly failed where it's been truly tried and truly failed so there's a sort of a sleight of hand here sort of a new no true Scotsman argument it's called Uh this kind of bit of logic which says that well yeah I mean socialism has been tried in the Soviet era and in Venezuela and in in China it's been tried but that wasn't that wasn't the real socialism the real socialism is the socialism we're going to start in the 21st century that'll be the real socialism that will work but the other ones weren't real therefore they failed I'm not saying that you can't have better forms of socialism I think you can I think that socialism failed in the past but maybe in the future it actually could work but you have to be very honest with yourself about holding your own feet to the fire and admitting when real socialism has been tried and failed because you see the problem here is that in being so idealistic about your socialism you could be implementing and advocating for socialism but then when it every time it fails you could fool yourself into saying that oh well it failed because capitalism made it fail not because of the inherent problems within socialism but what if it's failing not because of capitalism but actually because of the inherent problems within socialism how would you know that you have to keep your mind open to that possibility because it could be possible that socialism as a system as a whole will never ever work anywhere that is possible you want to keep your mind open to that possibility now I'm not saying that's true necessarily I'm saying it's possible I'm saying that these systems capitalism socialism libertarian whatever it is these systems are so complicated that no human being actually can predict whether they will work or not it has to be tested and tried and also what matters is not just your ideals of it but how it works in practice right there's an ideal of capitalism in theory and then there's what capitalism looks like in practice likewise there's an ideal of what Socialism or Marxism is in theory the Utopia of it where it's all perfect and then there's how it actually looks when selfish egotistical ignorant people implemented and you see it doesn't really matter that Socialism or Marxism works great in your mind's eye where egotistical people are not implementing it because in the real world we're dealing with very egotistical people even Progressive people are very egotistical closed-minded biased selfish ignorant people and that's the best case scenario is that those people will be implementing your socialist system but in reality even lower kinds of people will be implementing your system even lower than progressives stage Orange and blue and even red so what's going to happen with your Marxist Utopia when stage red gets a a hold of it this is something that most socialists and marxists are not prepared to answer for also you have to recognize that it may be the case that Society right now is not developed enough to sustain socialism have you considered that possibility after all how would you know how would you know that mankind right now is developed enough maybe in three to five hundred years mankind will be developed enough and selfless enough and conscious enough and compassionate enough and objective enough to create and sustain a socialist system but not today and if you take a look at the percentages of spiral development and ego development stages red blue orange green when you look at those percentages that'll be very sobering for you because you'll realize that the majority of mankind on this planet is stage blue and lower not even stage orange yet most people in America are stage blue or orange and they are just struggling to get a handle on blue and orange they're struggling it'll take them their whole lives just to master Orange that's the reality of our situation the problem is that progressives tend to overestimate the general level of development of most human beings on the planet and their fellow citizens and the reason that is is because when you are one of the most developed groups in the world if you grew up in a first world democracy in America in a blue state in a big city like La New York San Francisco Seattle and you went to a good University and you had a bunch of liberal professors and Friends and you traveled around the world and all of this you did because you had the money to do it understand this without money none of this would have been possible for you you were so lucky to be born into that ninety percent of the population in this world will never experience that they are nowhere close to experiencing that because they simply don't have the financial resources to do it and the opportunity and they were just born in the wrong place at the wrong time so it's very easy to get your sense of the world skewed by the fact that you grew up and were educated in these stage green Progressive bubbles which are the universities for the most part in these blue States and blue cities uh but the majority of the citizens on whom your government and economy must depend um are not at that stage of development they have a very different value set than you very different world view than you they have different fears and concerns than you they have a different culture than you they have different biases and preferences than you progressives don't understand that it's going to take the majority of mankind a couple hundred years just to reach the point of where some wealthy you know Berkeley students or UCLA student is at today that's the reality of our situation here's another point about socialism you have to admit to yourself as a socialist that there's a great disparity in value between people's work the majority of people are lazy uncreative and uninnovative in their work and there is a correlation between value creation and wealth wealthy people are not just wealthy because they stole that money through some sort of exploitative capitalist system wealthy people generally speaking are wealthy because they've generated more value for the world but be careful here because I'm not denying that there are inherent inequalities within capitalism and that capitalism is not strictly meritocratic so it might be it might sound like I'm just arguing for meritocracy here that's not the case I fully recognize that in capitalism there's a lot of um exploitation going on a lot of abuse of power abuse of hierarchy and that some capitalists become very very wealthy even though they are a net negative to society or they do some sort of unethical practices like they sell drugs or they sell weapons or they do pollution or whatever that definitely goes on for sure and it's definitely the case that under the capitalist system we have right now workers are not being fairly compensated they are being exploited in many cases when a CEO of some giant Corporation is earning you know 50 million dollars a year in stock options but his secretary isn't even able to afford you know health care for her children that's a problem and that's not fair and that needs to be addressed in the future and it will be addressed in the future but that does not mean that a simple socialist system will actually address this problem because what I see is that a lot of socialists tend to just assume that everybody tends to kind of work about the same and they all deserve roughly the same amount of compensation that's not the case um there are some people who are born with extraordinary talents and uh creative abilities or intelligence or whatever and also not just born with but also how they're shaped by their environment such that they become much greater value creators than your typical employee in fact your typical employee is actually quite lazy quite lazy quite dumb quite uninterested in taking responsibility for doing business a lot of people rather than taking on the burdens of Entrepreneurship which requires extraordinary responsibility and that comes with stress emotional labor and stress comes with being responsible for employing a hundred people and making sure that you can meet all their paychecks come Christmas time that takes an enormous amount of responsibility the average worker does not want anything to do with this kind of responsibility they just want to show up be told what to do how to do it and then receive a paycheck guaranteed there's a cost for that the cost for that is that you don't earn very much and the reason that is because you don't take on the creative responsibilities that come with generating a lot of value for the world uh socialist tend to fall into this trap of thinking that well wealthy people are wealthy people just because they've exploited a lot through the capitalist system sometimes that's true but that's not always true you have to admit as a socialist that a lot of wealthy people genuinely create a million percent more value than your average employee not because they work more hours see that's too simplistic because if you take a simplistic calculation of how many hours a CEO Works versus how many hours an employee works you know like the Starbucks of CEO does not work that many more hours than the typical employee of uh you know the Barista at Starbucks um maybe maybe let's say the CEO Works twice as many hours the Barista Works 40 and he works 80. okay well does that justify him earning a thousand times more of course not but what we have to understand is that it's not just about the hours you work it's not even how about how hard you were it's about how smart you work and different kinds of work generates value in very different degrees see just because you work let's say a hundred hours a week pouring coffee as a barista you might work really hard and you might please all your customers and you might pour every cup of coffee perfectly and you might think well that that justifies this Barista getting as much as the CEO no it doesn't because in the end you're just pouring [ __ ] coffee which has almost zero value to anybody in the world you know Leah but coffee is valuable yeah it's a little bit valuable but compared to actually managing a company like Starbucks pouring cups of coffee is worth nothing you have to understand that there is such an enormous value discrepancy between managing a logistics chain of a hundred thousand people around the entire world versus pouring a few cups of coffee even pouring about what is how many cups of coffee does a barista pour per week a thousand let's say you might say that's a lot of coffee yeah but it's it's nothing compared to managing the the logistics chain of Starbucks for the entire planet this is something that I see a lot of marxists and socialists not understand and not really appreciate because there's a sort of demonization of wealthy people CEOs Executives capitalists and look a lot of these people are scumbags I'll grant you that uh many of these top tier CEOs and capitalists they're literally sociopaths and Psychopaths clinically so um many of them are very greedy many of them will exploit their workers and not give a [ __ ] about their workers but still percentage of them that's not all of them that's still a minority of them actually if you're honest the majority of the world's top CEOs capitalists millionaires billionaires people who run giant businesses in a very successful manner the majority of these people are actually extremely responsible extremely diligent extremely hard working polite kind they care about their employees they care about their customers they care about not cheating and exploiting their customers and their employees you know within within certain tolerances and within certain bounds I'm not saying they're Saints and the reason they have to be that way is because if they weren't that way then they couldn't be as successful as they are sometimes you can get a sociopath that gets really high up and is able to you know dominate people but especially these days the way that most companies are run these days you can't be a sociopath and successfully manage a company with 10 000 people in it a lot of times that just won't fly you're going to piss off way too many people and they're going to kick you out the board of directors will just fire you you know it's not like the CEO is like a tyrant of a corporation most CEOs will easily get fired by the board of directors or by the stockholders if they act out or act like an [ __ ] or create public relations nightmares for their for you know for their companies or for the investors so it's not like there's not accountability there is accountability it's not perfect but you have to understand that the reason that these sociopaths if a sociopath is able to climb high up in the corporate hierarchy and is able to amass a lot of power and wealth the reason that is is actually because that sociopath is actually generating an enormous amount of value for people you may not like him personally you may think he's an [ __ ] you may think he's a racist and a sexist and uh and you know maybe he's even raped a few people and you might be horrified by all this but the reality is that if he's still in power the reason he's still in power is because the investors and even the employees the majority of them who are working under him need him because he's generating so much [ __ ] value for the whole organization you might say well Leo this is kind of a sick way to think about it you know surely if some employee some some you know some some CEO raped a few people he should be fired for that it doesn't matter how many people he's helped how many customers he's helped it doesn't matter how many products he sold how much money he's made because just you know on moral principle you know if he raped a couple of people then he should be fired see this is where you have to be very careful because that's your that's your sort of idiot compassion kicking in right because you're not really realistically looking at how survival works see in the progressives mind if a guy raped a few people nothing can ever redeem him in reality the way it works is that if a guy raped a few people but on the other hand let's say he employs 10 000 people and he's able to provide them with paychecks every single month consistently for decades that counterbalances any people he'll ever be able to rape in his entire life you might say well that's a very sick way to think about things yeah but you know uh the way the world works is it works on Survival not on your moral principles and virtues and progressives have this problem with with being way too moralistic and too idealistic about life and the reason that is usually because their survival is secured see when your survival is secured let's say your parents pay for your education and they pay for your rent and they bought you your car all this it's very easy to be a socialist and an idealist under this situation because you now actually have to [ __ ] kill anybody for survival the majority of people in the world have to kill others to survive survival is literally life and death for them so for them they can't be too moralistic about it when you're not able to pay your bills when you don't have money this changes the entire dynamic let's say nobody will give you a job in this economy and nobody will pay your bills except one guy this one entrepreneur you can work for him and he will provide you with a consistent paycheck and a great job but he's also a rapist and you know it what do you do do you take that job you might say no Leo I'm too moral I would never take that job okay but what about the millions of other people who are in poverty who would benefit from having that job you say well they shouldn't take it either okay but what if you have children let's say you know there's a mother who has a family of three young children who need Dental Care Child Care Medical Care education school you know healthy food all that can she take this job working for this rapist you say no Leo she can't either okay well then you're you're see out of idiot compassion you're making her children suffer because her children now are going to be poor they're not going to get the education and they themselves being poor are going to turn to theft and perhaps violence and perhaps rape so who's to say what the net neg the net positive and that negative are it's it's not so simple as you think you see these are the realities of survival you have to also admit as a socialist that self-made wealth is such there is such a thing as self-made wealth it is possible for you to just be extraordinarily creative and hardworking and to create wealth basically out of nothing that does not mean that capitalist systems don't exist and that a lot of wealth is not generated through the exploitation of various kinds of sneaky capitalist systems in reality that is how the majority of the world's wealth is created is through exploitation of various sorts of capitalistic systems that is true however that's not exclusively true it is possible to do capitalism in more conscious ways in ways that do not exploit others exploitation is not inherent to capitalism this is a big um point of contention between myself and marxists is Marxist will say that no Leo exploitation the way you know you don't understand the technical definition of exploitation the way Marx defined it is that you know capitalists have to exploit workers this is a this is actually something that someone like a Richard wolf um a professor of socialism talks about um actually he's wrong about this so let's let's talk about this for a second so there's something that socialists don't acknowledge is that socialists don't acknowledge that making a profit of employees is not exploitation it's absolutely necessary yes employers make profit off of employees but if this didn't happen there couldn't be a business there couldn't be a corporation the boss of a corporation has to look out for the survival of the corporation that's his number one priority a corporation cannot survive without profit so the boss's number one priority is to make sure that there's profit for the corporation because if there's not profit for the corporation he can't pay his employees and if he can't pay his employees he's failed everybody everybody's worse off right so um so this Marxist definition that any amount of profit made off employees like no it can't work that way because you see corporations are themselves entities that have to care about survival you have to think of a corporation as a organism as a living organism that is competing against other corporations it needs to have some sort of buffer or profit margin or basically a savings that savings is its Lifeline if a corporation loses all of its savings and it's not making a profit then it's dead and then of course anyone who depends upon that Corporation to pay for child care and so forth they're also dead you get this and corporations are always competing with each other in a global Marketplace it's actually very difficult to start a business and to sustain that business for decade after decade after decade most businesses go out of business because it's so hard to survive as a corporation even even giant corporations like General Motors or General Electric or you might even take a corporation like Amazon you might think well Leo Amazon you know Amazon is making so many billions of dollars it's it's the best of its kind at what it does you know online retail it's corner of the market it's a monopoly effectively it has over 50 of all internet sales and so forth and therefore and it's making billions of dollars and therefore it has nothing to worry about but the reality the reality this is just the reality is that if the managers and Executives of Amazon stopped worrying every single night about the survival of Amazon after 20 to 50 years Amazon would die it would be out-competed by somebody else that's the reality so the executives and managers of Amazon are staying up late every single night they're not able to sleep every single night because they're so afraid of somebody stealing their business that's the reality of a giant Corporation it's not so easy these giant corporations go out of business all the time they get sued for billions of dollars all the time a recession could come along and could wipe out entire businesses you know covet came lots of businesses were killed by covid why because they didn't have enough reserves they didn't have enough profit margins they weren't thinking far enough ahead and then they had to get subsidies from the government the entire airline industry was basically nearly not knocked out and killed if not for government subsidies probably all the airlines would be out of business by now thanks to covet why is that because business is extremely difficult remember business is not just business business is not just making a bunch of money so you can drive a Lamborghini business is about survival never forget that so making profit off employees yeah that's absolutely necessary now Richard Wolff could counter argue and say well but Leo companies make way too much profit of off employees and here I would agree that sometimes they do but who's to say when they are making too much you see how relative and subjective this is who's to say what's too much of a profit that's not easy to say and if the company should ever go out of business then actually that's proof that they weren't making enough profit off their employees and you know that's also possible one of the things that Richard Wolff does not admit is this is that a lot of companies they see because you see when you're an employee at a company they they your paycheck is guaranteed pretty much no matter whether the project you're working on succeeds or doesn't you're going to get your money but that's not the case for the company as a whole it's very often the case that a company will hire an employee the employee will work on them on some project for five years the project will fail the company will lose a bunch of money but the employees still come out ahead with profit so what is that worth to you that guarantee of a paycheck that's worth something to the employee that justifies the employer taking a profit off the top and even an excessive profit off the top of your wage because the reality is is that there's no guarantee like for example when Elon Musk starts SpaceX to launch rockets he has to pay I think his investment in SpaceX was like a hundred million just to get it off the ground for that first hundred million dollars they were not even able to launch one successful rocket that's how much investment it took just to create the first successful rocket and you know if they can't launch even one successful rocket that means they can't get a single client if they can't get a single client the company is dead but the employees who are working on those rockets for like the first five or ten years before they launched the first successful one those employees they all had to they all had to get a guaranteed paycheck Elon Musk you know whatever [ __ ] he is you know whatever your opinions about him might be I don't have a very high opinion of his political positions or you know sometimes he's the troll online or something like that but but here's one thing you can't fault Elon Musk for is that all the employees who worked under him in SpaceX they all got their paycheck and they were all able to feed their children I'm I'm sure there were some exceptions but for the most part like 99 of his employees they got paid and they were able to feed their children that's not a small thing that's a huge thing don't take that for granted that's not guaranteed it didn't have to happen that way he mismanaged that company they would not have launched that first rocket and uh they would have gone out of business they almost went out of business they were so close to going out of business that the last rocket they launched before they launched the successful one if it failed that's it that would have been the end and all of the employees would have been fired and that's why nowadays Elon Musk takes a huge profit off the top of all of his employees wages is because he risked a hundred million dollars of his own money to to gamble on this working out and it just so happened that it did but it easily might not have and in fact most businesses who try to do this they fail and they lose their money but when the business loses its money the employees don't lose anything for the most part they could lose their jobs but for the most part they get their paychecks occasionally they don't get paid but that's technically illegal so keep that in mind a lot of the problem is that guys like Richard Wolff and other markets and socialists they don't acknowledge that Capital itself has enormous value capital investment takes serious risk and basically it's not possible to create anything of deep value in the world without a capital investment and you might say well yeah Leo but that's just the capitalist system no no no no the requirement of capital to create amazing products is not a product of capitalism as a system it's way more fundamental than that before there was capitalism as a system Capital was still required to create great things for example let's say we have uh two people living in the forest uh one person is kind of lazy and only works 20 hours a day the other person is really ambitious and hardworking and works 80 hours a day then you know 10 years goes by the first person in those 10 years working 20 hours a day kind of being lazy about it and not being very intelligent either right because it's not just how hard you work it's also how smart you work he's not very smart so he works in a kind of a piss-poor way and he's able to build a little Shack for himself that's his capital that's all the value he has that's his whole life savings his little Shack the other guy who was working way harder and way smarter managing a whole group of people he was able to build like a whole you know castle for himself in the same amount of time now the guy who built a shack might look at the guy with the castle and say well but that's not fair how come that guy has a castle and I only have a shack but in this case the situation is perfectly Fair there was no capitalist system that prevented you from building a castle you just didn't work as hard and as smart as the other guy now here's a further point though for the wrinkle let's say that that now both of these guys want to start some new project some new kind of like you know business venture we might say to create something good for the world let's say they want to build let's say they want to build um a temple a religious Temple so people could come and worship let's say they believe in the same God okay can you see though that the guy with the castle is in a much better position to build that Temple than the guy with the shack because the guy with the shack his Shack can only hold him and maybe his his small family of wife and child that's all his Shack can support whereas the guy with the whole [ __ ] Castle he can support and pay for the for the livelihoods of like uh you know a hundred other people it's a lot easier to build a temple with 100 people than it is with a wife and a child in fact it's impossible to build a temple with three people but it is with a hundred so this guy who worked much harder he has more Capital he's developed more Capital that he can actually use to create new projects and that is extremely powerful and valuable and the problem is that people like Richard wolf will dismiss the value of that and yet in reality to create new businesses new products new technologies you need a buildup of capital and now of course the question is where does that Capital come from I mean nowadays most Capital does not come from you just working really hard most Capital comes from getting loans from Banks so in that sense that's correct but you have to understand where did Capital originally come from all capital originally came from Human labor someone had to build it someone had to create it and people don't work at the same rates and they don't work with the same intelligence some people are way more productive than others therefore they generate a lot more Capital also some people it's also a question of how do you manage your Capital because look if you have two people who are equally hard working equally smart working let's say this guy builds a castle and this guy builds a castle now they have equal Capital they can go build the temple but let's say this guy is a gambler and a drunk and he wastes his capital on um you know on prostitutes and Lamborghinis and other things and this guy is very responsible and he saves all his capital in fact he makes very wise Investments he makes investments into other kinds of businesses you know because he's got a a Savvy business mind he knows which kind of businesses are going to be good and this guy here he doesn't he invests in all the wrong businesses well you know 10 years later what happens this guy is broke he has no more capital and this guy has 10 times more Capital than he started with that's not a mistake that's exactly how it should be the problem with marxists and socialists is that they tend to say they tend to like treat this as some kind of mistake this inequality is not a mistake the guy who's a gambler and a drunk and makes all wrong Investments he should lose all of his capital and there's a lot of value created by using your Capital responsibly and if you actually try to go do some investing yourself in the stock market or in some businesses you'll notice how difficult it is most investments in businesses they fail the way Venture capitalism works is that you invest in a hundred businesses 95 percent of them fail five percent of them succeed and you hope that those five that do succeed end up making more money than all those 95 that went out of business that's venture capital for you and knowing how to pick the right businesses this is not easy knowing how to make good Investments with your Capital very difficult most people are piss-poor investors they will invest their money into some stupid crap coin Bitcoin [ __ ] that loses all its value it takes a lot of intelligence to know how to invest resources allocate resources in the right ways that actually generate jobs and Technology and success for people not just for yourself but for others around you see this is not just about personally making money for yourself because when you make wise Investments this doesn't just help you it helps Society it helps other people get jobs it helps mothers to pay for their child's health care so you need to appreciate that boss's executive Executives capitalists and investors these are not just greedy evil people they assume a lot of risk and responsibility as leaders and it's way harder to do their jobs than you think now are they sometimes corrupt yes do they sometimes exploit their employees definitely do they sometimes do evil things like pollute the environment and cause Wars and things like this yes definitely and those all need to be addressed um but still what I see is generally that most marxists and socialists do not appreciate the difficulty of being a great business leader and the kind of responsibility that comes with that and therefore the kind of rewards that are necessary you know to compensate people for that still this is not a justification for earning excessive amounts of profit we should think about maybe capping how much you can earn or um you know adjusting our tax system and so forth these are all fair game need to be considered um but just like be careful under your socialist Marxist system you just got to ask yourself how are you going to determine who's earning how much is there going to be some human that determines this who gets to determine this if the Market's not determining it because because you think the Market's unfair okay fine so the market won't be determining the salaries who will be who gets to determine what's a healthy um Fair salary for a Starbucks barista versus a Starbucks CEO how many times more should a Starbucks CEO earn than the Starbucks Barista 10 times 100 times what are you going to say is fair versus unfair and how are you going to create a consensus of the around this across the entire economy for every type of job how are you going to get everybody to agree with you is that even possible um I also notice a lot of demonization just outright demonization and smearing of capitalism and capitalists and people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and so forth um you have to be careful about that and I'm not saying these are good people some of these people could be scumbags and [ __ ] and and whatnot but you have to be careful about demonizing this stuff there's also a failure to acknowledge that capitalism is the default way that humans do business they might say technically capitalism hasn't existed for very long it's only exists for a couple hundred years you know the modern banking system is basically what defines modern capitalism but actually cap there's something within capitalism that's much more fundamental than that um which is again if we go back to a simple kind of like two people living in the forest which is a kind of silly example because humans never lived in the forest just in groups of two we've always lived in large tribes um which ironically were very socialistic but anyways or communistic but anyways um if you just kind of take a look at a tribe of people or two tribes of people of 100 people living near each other you know let's say they're on friendly terms they trade with each other which is basically capitalism you don't have modern Banks and you don't have modern governments and you don't have modern economic systems and so forth you might not even have cash or coin yet but in this system still the spirit of capitalism and Entrepreneurship still exists even at this most fundamental level at the most fundamental level when you're a caveman living in the forest um you can be a very lazy stupid caveman that doesn't generate a lot or you can be very entrepreneurial caveman where you go out there you chop down trees you use those trees to create Lumber you sell that or you trade that Lumber to other fellow cavemen and help them to build their their shelters and you build a big shelter for yourself because you develop a better method for cutting down this and processing this Lumber you develop a better saw you pay somebody some other caveman to invent a better saw for you so that you could saw your wood better that you need to pay some other caveman to invent some rope that you can use to lash the wood together with then you can use those to build a boat and you can paint some other caveman to learn how to navigate on that boat and travel up or Downstream and trade with other cavemen tribes up or Downstream of you and you know trade them for their you know you know uh supplies like metal or chickens or seeds or whatever and then you can do that and you can you can build a whole [ __ ] Village one very industrious caveman can organize and build a whole village in 20 years whereas another caveman could just sit around Naval gazing and jerking off and living in a [ __ ] cave those are the beginnings of capitalism and once that very industrious creative caveman entrepreneurial caveman starts this little village he can leverage that Village in the capital he's built and also all the people he's helped to uplift out of poverty let's say he can leverage that to um go and build other powerful technology whereas the guy living in a cave jerking off all day and smoking weed he has no capital and no resource should do anything with and this situation is not unfair this is precisely how it should be this is fairness this is perfectly Fair speaking of demonization there's a lot of demonization of Corporations not seeing that corporations actually do a lot of good now of course there's the the evils of corporations are so obvious that they almost don't need to be said but um a lot of what's overlooked when you're demonizing corporations is all the good that they do also progressives and liberals tend to not see that corporations are like living organisms and they actually do act like agents and like people that doesn't mean that a corporation should have as much like you know moral worth as a person I'm not equating a corporation with a person but um a corporation is also not just some abstract legal entity a corporation is something way beyond that a corporation is like a a hyper organism and it functions as such and if you don't respect that you're not gonna have a good understanding of how to manage these corporations also realize that these corporations meet the survival needs of many employees working under them and also they satisfy many customers with the services that they need so for example you can sit around all day and [ __ ] on companies like Comcast Comcast one of those companies that people love to [ __ ] on because you know they charge extra hidden fees on their internet service and their internet service might not be so reliable or whatever but the bottom line is that you still do business with Comcast because Comcast fundamentally still provides you with a really good service Comcast you know with some exceptions for the most part Comcast gives you a broadband internet connection that connects you to all the favorite stuff you love on the internet now you might hate Comcast because they charge you too much and some hidden fees and they do some evil stuff here and there but fundamentally you love the internet service that Comcast gives you and if you had a choice between Comcast and nothing you would you would pay five times more than you're currently paying just to get Comcast if there was no other alternative you would gladly pay a thousand dollars a month for Comcast if there was no other alternative that's the reality of it which shows you how much value Comcast is adding to your life even though they might be [ __ ] in other ways so be careful jumping on this bandwagon of groupthink that just demonizes corporations yes the reality of business is that there's a lot of collateral damage that business does in fact it's impossible to survive without creating a trail of collateral damage this is true of every organism and it's true of course of every business every business causes pollution waste and other sort of externalities now we need to have better methods and laws and regulations for how to deal with these externalities however um you have to be much more mature and adult about how these externalities work the fact that there are always going to be some degree of externalities you can't survive otherwise and the way that you survive and the way that you do business also causes externalities you have to realize that it's not just the giant oil companies and the defense contractors that have externalities you do too your business your life for example if you're a YouTuber on YouTube making videos and he went so well Lee I don't have any externalities my business doesn't have any externalities yes it does you know how many children get abused because of the internet you're part of that whole ecosystem as a YouTuber for example you create content for YouTube that content attracts many people to YouTube and of course many children and then these children they will get groomed abused sexually financially and in many other ways through the internet and it might have been your content that attracted those people there in the first place maybe you didn't personally abuse these children but you lured them in you were part of the ecosystem but see you don't take any responsibility for that the simple reality is it's very hard to do any kind of business or invent any kind of powerful new technology without some serious externalities as great as the internet is as a technology there's a lot of ugly stuff on the internet that's very very toxic and harmful that's like an externality of the internet that's true of almost every technology so as long as you want to live in a society that creates new technologies all the time and we are all addicted to new technology new gadgets phones computers games all this kind of stuff cars right all of this will come with externalities so it's just a question of how to manage them don't demonize businesses for externalities another important point that progressives and liberals tend to make or to overlook is that they don't acknowledge that there's no such thing as rights you don't have a right to free health care you don't have a right to Free Shelter you don't have a right to food you don't have a right to exist there is no right in the universe for existence let alone for happiness now in certain more developed countries like in the Scandinavian countries maybe in Canada and elsewhere um they've been developing more of this sort of idea of of you know right you have a right to Health Care you have a right to shelter you have to understand that these are we might call these virtual rights or pseudo rights they're not really rights they're pseudo rights they're invented and they can only exist as long as our society is able to sustain it and pay for it somehow a lot of progressives get too entitled uh about things like free health care shelter food and so forth that these should just be standard across the board for everybody you know sort of the progressive Utopia is this you know you're born and you're guaranteed health care you're guaranteed shelter you're guaranteed food you're guarantee a stable family you're guaranteed a good education and you're even guaranteed University and that kind of like sets you up that creates the Baseline everybody gets that everybody is on the same equal field and then beyond that if if you want to work a little bit harder or if you want to excel a little bit more then you can you know you can earn more but fundamentally we all have that Baseline and that should that's like the just that would be the just Society that's good I I like that idea personally to me that sounds great but you have to ask yourself what is it really going to take to create that because that ain't guaranteed anywhere in nature creating that required the struggle War genocide and suffering and slavery of people for over ten thousand years and we still have not reached a point where we have created that consistently in any country that shows you how difficult that is now maybe one day we can create that and I think it's a it's a laudable goal to work to create that but also I'm not naive enough to think that we should already have that or that we can create that in the next 50 years it might take a little bit more than that it may it might take more patience in general what I see is that progressives are not very patient when it comes to this they act as though this should already be in place it's like Leo America is the richest country in the history of the world we should already have this we can afford this Maybe how do you know Maybe Maybe but maybe not it's not so obvious I mean if you just do the pure math can we technically afford it yes if we restructure our entire Society and we equalize and redistribute resources in radical ways yes we can afford it but what you're not considering is that in the process of restructuring Society to make all this affordable and work that in that process you have to change society and business and culture and regulations and Taxation in such radical ways that the majority of people are going to be so upset by this and so shocked and terrified by this that they're going to revolt against you and kick you out of office or even kill you because you're [ __ ] with people's livelihoods here you're [ __ ] with their culture you're [ __ ] with their norms and standards the way they've been taught reality works and how things should be distributed people have an innate sense of fairness you know when you go to people and you start taxing them in excessive ways or in sort of unequal ways when one person in society is getting taxed ten percent another person's side is getting taxed 90 this is going to create tension animosity hostility you see now I'm not saying that we can't change these things gradually over time but that's gradually over time and progressives they generally don't like this idea of anything gradual over time they want everything to have been already done yesterday how about you work towards socialism and your time Horizon is the next 300 years so you're a socialist but 300 years from now we'll have socialism and we're working towards it slowly how about that it's like no see no socialist accepts that you want it done tomorrow but that assumes that Society can change at that rate what if it can't what if there is a maximum rate at which culture can change and if you go beyond that rate you actually end up creating a self-sabotaging situation because the human mind needs to be reprogrammed when you're talking about changing culture you're talking about reprogramming people's minds but changing someone's mind is difficult it doesn't happen overnight it happens over Generations generations of people have to die of natural causes before their minds can change sufficiently enough to allow for a new type of culture which that enables things like trans rights gay rights women's rights feminism socialism environmentalism and other sorts of things like this veganism for you vegans the reality for most humans on this planet is that they don't have the material luxury of being vegans the reality for most humans is that they have to wake up every morning and go to grind and work doing manual labor which requires a lot of calories which you simply can't get enough of from eating carrots and lettuce and things like this that's not to say veganism is bad it's again veganism has sort of a laudable goals and ideals The Compassion the ethics of veganism all great but the reality if you're just realistic is that most humans are not materially wealthy enough to afford a vegan diet because they wouldn't have enough calories but that's not the only Factor the other factor is the cultural Factor most human Cuisine is deeply cultural every part of the world has its own favorite cuisines people have their own you know recipes that have been passed down through generations for the Thanksgiving Day turkey or for the way they make sushi or for the the way they make their you know their Peking duck in China or whatever every culture has their own cuisines all of it has meat in it because all of our ancestors had to survive on meat basically um in one form or another well you know with a few exceptions maybe in in parts of India and so forth but for the most part it's all meat eaters um and so there's a lot of meat in these cultures and so when you talk about you know transitioning the world to veganism for ethical purposes and for environmental purposes do you realize that that this this terrifies 90 of the population why is that this is why on Fox news they actually run they run fear-mongering campaigns about how the Democrats want to take away your hamburgers and this terrifies people because you're talking about changing their culture right people are used to doing their fourth of July barbecue with the hamburgers and you know in Texas they're used to doing their you know their pork rib barbecue and uh you know those baby back ribs and then um you know maybe in New York they're used to Buffalo Wings and in China they're used to peeking duck and so and so forth and um and here you come along and you tell them that they're all gonna eat um you know tofu burgers this not only terrifies people it also pisses them off and progressives are not very smart about they're not very wise about this they don't appreciate this you have to appreciate that culture requires evolution that's really what we're talking about here we're talking about cultural evolution if socialism will exist 300 years from now it will exist because culture has evolved to that level so the question you should be asking yourself is how does culture evolve what does it take to evolve culture I have actually an episode a really good episode that's all about this it's called how societies evolve go watch that one it presents a lot of interesting studies and facts about the evolution of culture and evolution of human values and human psychology human morality evolves did you know that most people don't know that most progressives don't know this one of the mistakes progressives make is they try to apply today's moral system which is relatively High evolved two previous generations to which it does not evolve nor should it evolve for example when you are judging Thomas Jefferson or George Washington for being slave owners you're using today's highly evolved moral system which says that slavery is wrong and you're applying it to 250 years ago where that system did not exist it's funny I posted on my forum or on my blog and my foreign basic guy posted I made a post about the marvels of ancient Egyptian civilization I said you know Asian Egyptian civilization is one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind you know 10 it goes back 10 000 years it's incredible uh I posted this and then somebody on the Forum um counter posted and kind of was arguing with me and saying that you know oh Leo why is Leo um cherishing this ancient Egyptian civilization when you know weren't the pyramids built by slaves which actually by the way um latest scientific research suggests an historical research suggests that the pyramids actually were not built by slaves but but let's say they were let's say they were built by slaves um even then it's like by today's Progressive standards uh I am not even allowed to appreciate the Egyptian pyramids because they were built by slave labor so like by today's Progressive standards like we should destroy the pyramids because slaves built them and that's you know Politically Incorrect and and awful it's this kind of nonsense right it's when progressivism goes to this level that it becomes nonsense you have to really appreciate that the morality we have today especially the progressive stage green value system which is where all your morals you know Progressive morals are coming from this did not exist 50 years ago and before that it didn't exist we had to invent it and the only way we could invent It Is by going through all the lower stages of the Spiral and we had to go through slavery War genocide gas Chambers um uh nuclear Holocaust and and torture and many other evil things had to happen to get you to the point where now you could go to UC Berkeley and um hang out with other people smoking weed you know just chilling eating your your you know your Edibles edible brownies uh tripping balls and stuff and talking about philosophy and talking about gay rights and talking about trans rights none of this [ __ ] could exist 100 years ago appreciate that appreciate how difficult it was to get to this point to develop all this stuff another problem with Progressive politics is when progressives act like deficits don't matter and that we can just print money and spend money endlessly I've noticed this um for example with uh you know Sam Cedar the majority report I actually think Sam Cedar is one of the most reasonable and wisest Progressive YouTube commentators he's a little bit more older than other younger commentators he's like in his 50s he's more mature he's got some very solid political takes but one of the takes of his that I like the least is his position where he says that like oh deficit spending doesn't matter we can just print money because in the end um you know running a government his his sort of like positions that running the government budget is not the same thing as running your personal family budget because your personal family budget you can't print more money but the government can print more money and um you know supposedly there's some economic studies you could cite that say that you know a little bit of deficit spending is actually good for for government and it's actually a net positive and so forth um I I really don't agree with this I think this is problematic taking this kind of attitude that because just because the government can print money that that means that we don't have to manage our finances very carefully I think this is very problematic and I I think we're seeing some of the consequences of that with inflation although of course there's there's many factors with inflation right now it's not just the fact that we're printing money um but um in general what I don't like to see Within Democrat and Progressive politics is there complete dismissal of the idea that we need to be careful with our finances as a as a government as a civilization I think this is deeply problematic that whole philosophy and attitude it's way too liberal uh I'm very sympathetic to being very conservative with money um because I think if you aren't it can lead into a lot of serious problems and I think that in the future our economy and even the dollar itself as a global Reserve currency will suffer greatly for the flippant and overly liberal manner with which we treat our finances the amount of debt that we're racking up is atrocious and it's not Democrats who are just responsible for this I mean Republicans and conservatives are of course they're Hypocrites about this you know they're happy to to go into crazy deficit spending when it comes to Wars and when it comes to tax cuts and so forth uh personally my preference is that we need to have a balanced budget I would like to see a government which has a balanced budget to the point where we don't have to worry about ever going bankrupt as a country or ever defaulting on our loans these shouldn't even be concerns because even having these as concerns and having the inflation as a concern even the idea that maybe next year we're going to have 10 inflation or 20 inflation even that as a fear even if it never comes about just having that as a fear in people's minds is already going to um destabilize the economy create needless worries and instability it's going to cause people to um you know to not invest as heavily into their businesses because you don't know what's going to happen in the next 10 years what if the dollar you know inflates by by 20 next year that's a huge problem so uh I think there is there is validity to fiscal conservativism now do conservatives misuse this and use it in very kind of like hypocritical ways yes they do a lot of times what conservatives will do is they will just say you know in the name of fiscal conservativism they just won't want to pass any kind of helpful policies that had that that help a broad swath of people they just refuse it all you know all together in the name of like fiscal conservativism but then when it comes to uh allocating funds for their pet projects they're all for it that's hypocrisy I think we need to be fiscally conservative across the board and I don't really see you know conservatives used to speak out speak up for that not anymore you know George W bush and Donald Trump have have gone into more deficit spending than ever if at least conservatives could be relied upon to um to balance the budget and to not waste money on stupid Wars and stupid tax tax cuts and so forth there would be a lot more sense in voting conservative but these days almost no conservative can be relied upon to do that they can't even do that that was like one of the most redeeming qualities of a conservative is like yeah let's say they're homophobic and they're racist and um they're not very compassionate and they're [ __ ] and they're very religious like okay we can look over all that as long as they're fiscally conservative but it's like they're not they're not fiscally conservative foreign I think Democrats would benefit from being more fiscally conservative another thing that socialists need to admit to themselves is that profit motive in the private sector Spurs competition and innovation unlike government-run bureaucracies and this is a very positive thing so even though profit motive can be a toxic form of motivation it can definitely go too far and become way too toxic like it has on Wall Street for example uh still overall it's a good thing to have profit motive it's better than like being stuck in some government-run organization where there is no profit motive and where ambitious people don't even want to go to work there because you know ambitious people do want to experience decent profits maybe not obscene profits but decent profits like if I'm going to work hard on my business I want to be able to see a decent profit from that and I want to be able to you know buy myself a decent house if I'm going to work for 10 years to build a great business and provide a lot of value to people a lot of amazing content at the end of those 10 years I want to be able to like buy myself a decent house if I was working in a government bureaucracy I couldn't expect that and that means that the best most ambitious most Innovative and competitive people don't go into government this is a problem we actually want our government to be lean efficient and competitive and innovative and so conservatives do have a legitimate point about making sure that government doesn't get too bloated now conservatives go way too overboard with that and they basically criticize any kind of expansion of government that's a problem the size of the government itself doesn't matter what matters is is your government responsive effective efficient creative and high quality it's the quality of the government that is important not its size and to have a quality government you need high quality people to want to enter into the government how are you going to get high quality people to get entered into the government when all the best rewards for creativity and Innovation and ambition lie outside of government you see so it would be nice if we could somehow tune the government bureaucracies in such a way that they would reflect better the reward incentives of business but we have to be very careful about that because we don't want to turn government into just people doing things purely for profit that would also be a problem so it's a very delicate Balancing Act to get that one right but um profit motive is a good motivating factor for organizing a society we want to create our society such that people who rise towards the top of the hierarchy if we're gonna have a hierarchy which we have to some degree the people who are going to be towards the top we want to make sure that those are the most intelligent the most hard-working the most creative people and they are well compensated but not to the point where it becomes so outrageously corrupt that they can use that profit to undermine the entire system which is what we have now with all the money and lobbying that goes on in politics another problem I see with progressives is not acknowledging that democratically run corporations or co-ops can be problematic and uncompetitive so people like Richard Wolff who's a Marxist uh basically he talks about you know democracy at the workplace why can't we have more democracy at the workplace where the employees get to determine what the next project is we're going to be working on and where the employees determine how much money everybody gets and they get to determine how much vacation we take and they get to determine all these things democracy at the workplace in general I like that idea that's a good idea but you also have to wonder is a corporation that is structured in this way going to be as successful and competitive as the traditionally more hierarchical top-down organizations and corporations immediately obvious to me that it will be because like I said before if you assume that the majority of your employees are really hard-working intelligent and creative then yeah you can create a Cooperative structure with a flat hierarchy and it can work well however I think that's a false assumption I think the majority of employees are actually deadbeats they don't work really hard they're lazy they're not creative they're not interested in going to work and being very passionate and ambitious they're just there for a paycheck that's the majority of employees now I ask you why should such employees get to have a democratic say in the big picture vision and plans for that Corporation what happens when you take those unintelligent lazy unambitious employees and you ask them to help formulate the vision for your company you might say that's going to be a good thing because you know those employees that they will ask for better benefits more pay they will ask for more vacation time a four hour work week or I mean a four day work week and and this kind of stuff but you know what those employees will end up shooting themselves in the foot because if you create a corporation like that which gives a bunch of vacation days and a four day work week and it's not very ambitious it doesn't put a lot of pressure on people to work and innovate hard what happens is that that Co-op it'll be Democratic and great for a while but eventually it'll get out competed by other businesses which are much more bloodthirsty and harder working work twice as hard twice as smart because they're run by management who is very very ambitious rather than a bunch of lazy employees who just want to go home and smoke weed another problem with progressives is not acknowledging that tax cuts are not equivalent to tax hikes so sometimes you know progressives will frame things in such a way that a tax cut like let's say a tax cut you know let's take the Trump tax cuts Trump's tax cuts created a huge deficit uh in the budget but it's a little bit unfair to characterize that way because tax cuts do give money back to you that you yourself generated see there's an asymmetry between doing a tax hike versus a tax cut because the tax hike is taking money away from you that you generated whereas a tax cut gives you that money back so these are not quite symmetrical even though I do believe in a progressive tax system I think progressives are a little bit too sloppy about how they treat taxes that they treat taxes in a way where you're not quite respecting the fact that the money that you're taxing that this is labor fundamentally you're basically taxing the labor of somebody and um when you do that you have to have a good justification for it and then when you do a tax cut that's that should be easier to justify because um you're just basically giving back the person the labor that they that they did for that year it's a small minor Point not a very big point but anyways um here's another one when it comes to taxes uh progressives had not acknowledged that tax hikes cause Capital flight and your system must be competitive with neighboring systems because you're not gonna have a monopoly on your system so for example actually in the United States this is this is a there's a great real life example of this which is like um state income taxes every state in the country 50 States has their own income tax rate California is on the higher end and for example Nevada where I live has zero income tax rate Texas Nevada uh Washington's Florida they have zero state income tax uh the problem is that a state like California or New York if they have high taxes they're going to start losing people companies and people are going to move out of California in New York to those places where there's zero taxes or very low taxes and that's been happening lately um but likewise the same situation can happen with your country for example if American taxes become way way high then you're going to see a capital flight people will be moving out of America to live other places in the world companies will be started not in America but other places in the world now I don't think we're really at a serious risk of that right now I think we could raise our corporate taxes significantly in America and companies would still stay here and new companies will still be founded here but there is a limit and every time you can raise the taxes by another 10 you're going to be causing and incentivizing more and more people to move abroad or move to a different state or to start a company in a different place and eventually that's gonna you know end up partying the country so sometimes I see that progressives aren't um aren't aren't sensitive to this topic but again it's all a matter of degree I think we can still raise taxes significantly and avoid this problem but you do have to keep it in mind uh I think that progress I mean conservatives have a legitimate point in wanting to keep bureaucracy lean and efficient and to eliminate too much regulation and too much red tape there is a legitimate function to that now conservatives grossly abuse this and they are just completely anti-regulation or they want to eliminate important regulations there is an important function for regulation so I'm not anti-regulation at all but we do need a mechanism for reevaluating regulations periodically and eliminating those regulations which become um outdated or unnecessary or just make business and Life to cumbersome because that does eat into the economy and the efficiency of starting new businesses and doing certain you know Technologies and so forth but we still need a lot of regulations on you know pollution on gas Emissions on oil drilling we need a lot of regulations but also we need a mechanism for removing regulations too um liberals and leftists can falter on this issue of globalization in fact this has been a real source of fuel for the right wing recently in the last 10 years with Trump and so forth is that the excessive globalization that has ha that has happened in the last let's say 20 to 30 years especially in America has led to a lot of Outsourcing of jobs and Manufacturing and factories and so forth to the point where um a lot of the middle class has been gutted and lost their jobs and then this leads to a lot of destabilization of society and resentment and honestly it leads to a fuel and fodder for fascist movements which is what's been happening with Maga so um globalization cannot be taken lightly globalization is is a force that is happening you can't stop it you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube Outsourcing is going to happen on the other hand there needs to also be an appreciation for the role of nationalism national identity and sort of a protectionism protecting national interests I think that liberals leftists progressives have been somewhat a little bit too flippant and um negligent in this area and um that's why Trump's message of America First has been so appealing to many is because sometimes what happens is that leftists kind of like take a globalist perspective to the point where they stop putting their country first and of course ultimately that's a good thing you don't want to put your country first um you want to put the whole globe first but if you put the whole globe first ahead of your own country what's going to happen is that the um the majority of your people are nationalists the majority of your citizens citizens are nationalistic they're not globalists and so what's going to happen is that eventually they're going to get so pissed off at you they're going to think that you're betraying them and they're gonna um they're gonna turn on you and kick you out of office and start a nationalist government and they're going to basically go fascist on you which is exactly what's been happening and part of that is because there's been some excessive uh globalization happening through the 90s and 2000s now of course some there are progressives who are very Pro defending um you know national interests like for example um Bernie Sanders you know Bernie Sanders will talk about the excess of globalization he will talk about the need to um create manufacturing jobs at home and this kind of stuff and that's why he's very appealing a lot of trump supporters actually appreciate Bernie Sanders um because of that um but there are leftists who also go too far with the globalization and they fundamentally there's a failure to appreciate the role of nationalism nationalism is seen as just a purely negative thing actually nationalism is not a purely negative thing nationalism is a necessary stage of development within civilization you have civilizations start with just tribalism then they evolve into nationalism then beyond nationalism it evolves to globalism and all those are important stages they all need to be balanced out together um if you have globalism at the expense of nationalism this becomes a problem because in the end uh most of the citizens in your country have a national identity right and this national identity should not be taken for granted has to be created nobody is born with a national identity and in fact the majority of the national identities that exist today they didn't exist a couple hundred years ago most nations are very modern Nations America is 300 years old uh Italy is like 100 years old Germany is like 100 or 200 years old these are these are these countries you think these countries have existed for thousands of years no um you know what we see with Iraq for example just creating an Iraqi national identity this has proven way more difficult than anybody thought because in Iraq in the Middle East these people are not involved enough to have an Iraqi identity what they have is they have a Sunni or a Shiite Identity or a Kurdish Identity or you know some local little tribe that you've never even heard of they have very tribal identities so the way human civilizations evolve is that first you have Tribal identities then a lot of conflict and evolution has to happen in order to unify all those tribal identities into one national identity this usually requires a lot of war and killing and raping and slavery and genocide to create just to create a national identity like an Iraqi identity then once you get the Iraqi money going that's good but the problem with that is that it can this nationalism can go overboard it can turn into Nazism basically this is when nationalism goes too far it turns into a sort of Nazism um but that doesn't mean nationalism is bad it just needs to be moderated then you evolve past nationalism and now you develop a world perspective now you start to see yourself not as an American or as an Iraqi or as a German or as a Jew now you see yourself as a global citizen as a human but just because now you see yourself as a human that doesn't also still mean that you're not an American or an Iraqi you still are you still are a German you still are a Jew too and you have Jewish interests or you have Israeli interests or you have American interests so balancing all this is very very tricky and uh as a progressive you will tend to overlook the importance of nationalism because you'll demonize it as just fascism or Nazism that's not technically correct there's healthy and unhealthy forms of nationalism another problem I see with progressives that they tend to generally assume that they can mandate top-down solutions to complex systemic problems which tends to backfire go see my episode on systems thinking called intro to systems thinking where I talk about the trickeries are dealing with complex systems the challenge with government and politics is that most of these systems are so [ __ ] complicated that nobody knows the answers we literally do not know what our economic system will be 100 years from now we do not know what the best government system will be 100 years from now will it be Chinese the Chinese system the American system uh the Middle Eastern system we don't actually know the only way we learn this is by actually going through an evolutionary trial and error process of testing stuff out and seeing what works and what doesn't work and a lot of times the things we think will work end up backfiring which is exactly what happened with Marxism and with socialism and communism in the 20th century we thought that we could re-engineer our old complex systems and economy into a Marxist soviet-style you know Communist economy and what we saw is that a lot of it backfired and it ended up being even worse than capitalism foreign but I'll stress again tend to overestimate human development and what we can realistically sustain there's also a failure to understand why progressives lose elections I see this common mistake amongst Progressive political commentators is that they tend to they keep saying that you know the majority of of the citizenry is Progressive because they agree with Progressive policies for example if you go and you pull to people and you ask them are you for or against weed legalization they will say that they're for it are you for or against uh taxing the rich they will say they're for it are you for or against some you know foreign war and they'll say we're against it and so in this sense like you go down the list and um you know are you for or against free health care and they'll say they're they're for it um this gives you a false perspective though because if you pull that way purely on policy what you see is that holy [ __ ] the majority of the country is Progressive but that doesn't square with how elections are run because the majority of the country seems Progressive but then elections why why are there so few uh progressives winning elections why didn't Bernie Sanders win the election and then progressives will make up stories that like oh well Bernie Sanders it was stolen from him no it wasn't stolen from him the reason Bernie Sanders didn't win an election his his nomination to you know to the presidency and so forth is uh is simply because uh progressives are in the minority but how can that be if most people are for lead weed legalization free health care and anti-war and um you know protaxing the rich how come they're not progressives how come most people are conservatives or moderates progressives don't understand this point because what you have to understand about people's political identifications is that it's not based on policy see you are a [ __ ] policy wonk I'm talking to you uh Kyle Kolinski you're a policy wonk you think of politics in terms of policy and most of us who follow politics seriously and were progressives we are policy wonks and we care about the policies we care about tax cuts we care about getting money out of politics we care about um you know stopping corruption and stopping lobbying we care about legalization of certain drugs and these kinds of prison reform and this kind of like we care about these things ninety percent of people who go vote they don't vote based on policy they vote based on their feelings and who they identify with and they vote based on their spiral stage of development and their moral stage of development and their ego stage of development so it's very simple a spiral Dynamic stage blue person is going to go vote for the most spiral Dynamic stage blue politician in a spiral Dynamic stage orange person is going to go vote for the most spiral Dynamics looking stage orange politician and it's by the name of stage green person is going to go vote for a stage green politician that's it it's as simple as that and your policies don't matter so even though if you ask policy by policy in a poll many people will support Progressive legislation you're failing to appreciate the importance that culture plays in how people vote so even though many people would say that yeah we should legalize weed and we should tax the rich when it comes to but who are you going to vote for I'm a capitalist and I'm gonna I I'm an American you know I'm a good old-fashioned American and uh I want America first and so I go and vote for Trump even though Trump is not gonna do any of these things for me but Trump says America First and he presents the image of loving America and being a patriot and you know grilling burgers on the fourth of July and eating my barbecue ribs and driving my my pickup truck that's who I'm gonna vote for I'm gonna vote for who I like who represents my values not my policies and based on this the progressives are losing the progressives are losing the culture War because the progressives have some some outlandish and wacky cultural ideas and basically the progressive ideas are like a new culture that hasn't even materialized yet progressives are building a new culture the culture that will exist 100 years from now but people today are attached to today's culture and to last Generations culture they don't care about what culture will will be like 100 years from now they're not that forward-thinking and progressives get this wrong because uh progressives think that everybody is as Forward Thinking as they are no people vote selfishly they're very myopic and they're not thinking about where should human rights be 50 years from now no they're just defending the culture they grew up with it's just as simple as that people aren't as smart as you think they are progressives don't appreciate that most people are simply not educated or wealthy enough to be stage green that's it it's just as simple as that if you want to end racism and homophobia and Fascism and transphobia the most reliable way to do that is to shower people with a lot of money make them economically successful and put them through education and I don't mean indoctrination just educate them well give them the opportunity to go to a nice four-year University and get an engineering degree or whatever I don't mean some gender studies degree I mean just an old old school simple degree non-political educate them and give them the money to educate themselves into want that kind of Education and then you'll see that these people become stage green don't Badger them about being racist and not being fascists and call them names and stuff like that and argue and debate with them fundamentally it's about meeting their material needs meet people's material needs help them meet their material needs and then they will naturally evolve in their morality and in their culture they will become more Multicultural they will become more Cosmopolitan they will become more open to globalism they will become more open to gay rights and trans rights progressives because they grew up relatively privileged you know speaking of privilege yeah progressives love to talk about recognizing Your Privilege but funnily enough progressives themselves don't appreciate the privilege of growing up in a first world democracy in an urban area with relative material wealth that allowed them to become progressives this is a privilege for the majority life is brutally difficult for many people living in the countryside life is a lot harder it's a lot simpler than it is for you living in an urban environment where your food is taken care of your policing is taken care of your fire department's taken care of all this [ __ ] is taken care of in the countryside you have to do more of these things yourself it's a lot more challenging you gotta provide your own security because there's no police around you got to be able to put out your own fires because there's no fire department around you got to be able to hunt you got to be able to cook you got to be able to just like live a simple life and it's very challenging so a lot of progressives are out of touch with blue collar workers and Rural people and especially the way that the electoral system is structured in America rural people even though there's less of them they have more power just by the structure of our system and that's why conservatives tend to win a lot more elections in America than they really should because they are outnumbered by Urban people but uh just yeah the structure of the system is such that uh every rural person has more of a vote than every Urban person now maybe we've got to change that but that's the system we have and also the cultural issues they care about are supremely important you can't win over these rural people through policies because see the progressive here would argue with me now and say Leo but you know you say we're out of touch with the blue collar people and you say were for like globalization stuff like that but no Leo you know like uh I'm a progressive populist I want to help and you know as a socialist I want to help these rural people I want to help Blue Collar people you know I wanna I wanna make sure that those those blue-collar people these rural people who are working these you know manual labor jobs I want to make sure they get paid better and that they don't get exploited by capitalists and so forth so Leo I'm on their side with my policies this is where you're being stupid yeah you're on their side with your policies but you're not on their side culturally and that's what trumps everything it doesn't matter that your socialism promises these rural blue-collar people that they're going to have more negotiating power against their capitalist employer that doesn't matter as long as culturally you're presenting the veneer and smell of all the lgbtq sjw snowflake vegan hippie weed smoking type of vibe people are voting for you based on Vibe people are aligning with your politics based on Vibe the vibe they get from you not what your policies will technically do for them that's the irony of it here you know people wonder somehow sometimes progressives Wonder like how could these how could these rural um you know blue-collar Mega people vote against their interests because Trump comes into power and then he passes tax cuts for the rich so don't they see that Trump is actually passing policies against their own interests of course that's what Trump is doing but these people cannot see it because they're operating based on culture and vibe what they like about Trump is not his policies they don't know what his policies are they don't care they're too dumb to care they just feel his vibe he presents them with that old-schooled old-fashioned good old red blooded American vibe grilling burgers on the 4th of July while shooting your gun that kind of vibe whereas someone like an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders or whatever gives him the kind of like Vibe of a pot smoking elitist nagging bitching um uh you know Urban college professor Vibe talking down to them that's it that's as far as this goes it doesn't matter whether Elizabeth Warren is going to actually uh pass some legislation it's going to earn them a little bit more money past the minimum wage that'll help them or something it doesn't [ __ ] matter they're voting on vibe whether somebody likes you or not it's based mostly on vibe and values alignment also what progressives fail to appreciate is how much people fear change growth and evolution like seriously sit down and really think about this people are scared to death change growth and evolution and that's why they resist and that's why they demonize and straw man the other side look at our civilization I don't just mean American government I mean look at the human civilization the history of human civilization has been what it's been the history of never-ending growth change and evolution resisted all the way through it's like we've been pulling a stubborn mule uphill and the mule doesn't want to go but we're we're pulling him with all our might it's like progressives are pulling this [ __ ] mule uphill and this mule uh is kicking and screaming and eating and Hauling and biting that has been the last 10 000 years of human evolution and that's exactly what's happening today with progressives and with conservatives so really if you want to help Society evolve and you want to do conscious politics then you have to be a little bit wiser about how to navigate and manage this mule this mule is not a rational creature this mule does not have a high IQ this mule is not [ __ ] care what promises you may come you could tell the mule hey you know just follow me up the hill and up the hill there's going to be a a giant basket of carrots for you the mule can't think that far but maybe if you take a carrot and you wiggle in front of his face and you let him bite a piece of it now the mule can understand that that might be enough to get the mule to take one step forward but then as you move one step forward he gets scared and he gets stubborn again and he takes two steps backward that's what you're dealing with here that's what most people are like they don't like change they don't like growth they don't like Evolution they don't like development we're talking about Social Development but Social Development requires individual development so when you study your own challenges with your own individual development notice how difficult it is for you for example to change your poor watching habits or your junk food eating habits or your drug taking habits or other kinds of lazy bad habits your weed smoking habits that you have um notice how difficult it is for you to evolve beyond all that watching television being addicted to social media flipping through the phone non-stop right so you're addicted to all these things now for you to become a very developed spiritual human being you'd have to give all that up or learn to significantly moderate all that change your relationship to all that change your relationship to sex to food to drugs to money uh but notice how difficult that is for you in your own life how difficult it is for you to change your emotional system right you're depressed you're anxious you're angry you have these emotional problems how difficult it is for you to change that very difficult you backslide you have ego backlashes you resist you resist learning new information you exist you resist seeing New Perspectives so all that is happening for you personally but then you expect Society to just evolve rapidly towards your ideal you know utopian fantasies of what Society should be no because you have to get everybody in society to come along with you for the ride to evolve together and that is not so easy okay we're going to take a pause here this episode has run on way too long um I thought it would go faster but apparently I have a lot to say so this was going to be a one-part series but hey now we're gonna have two parts so this is half I still have a lot more information to to say so I guess there's a lot a lot a lot more wrong with the left than um well I knew all this but I just didn't know how to uh how long it would take to articulate it all so anyways there's gonna be a part two so stick around next week for part two where we will finish list this list off and I'll give you a lot more examples of what's wrong with the left uh clearly you can see that there's a lot a lot of things wrong with the left remember just because there's a lot of stuff on this list does not mean that there's not a lot of good stuff about the left there is and also it does not mean that the list of all the stuff wrong with the right is not bigger than this list it actually is I could make a four-part series about all the [ __ ] that's wrong with the with the right but you know I've actually already covered many of those topics in the past all right that's it I'm done here stick around for part two and um come check out actualize.org that's my website down you can find the link on the website look if you like my content and you are not following my blog you're you're a [ __ ] fool you're missing out on so much free content that I'm putting out of my blog I put a lot of effort and attention into my blog follow that a lot of resources a lot of videos a lot of insights a lot of interesting stuff uh some wacky zany kind of off the off the wall kind of stuff lately um I'm experimenting with how to express myself more freely and more authentically so check out that you can also find me on Instagram I have an Instagram account where I also express myself very uh authentically maybe a little too authentically in a raw manner check that out you might be interested uh check out my book list check out the life purpose course come to the actualized Forum join a community of like-minded people we have some interesting discussions there if you'd like you can support me on patreon.com actualized and um that is that the final point I'll end on is this I'm really disappointed with the quality of our politics you might wonder Leo why are you talking about politics it seems like it's not has nothing to do with spirituality because fundamentally to me politics is about understanding perspectives and that's my forte that's my bread and butter and that's what all of my spirituality boils down to is the ability to see radically New Perspectives and to be very very open-minded so one of the greatest gifts that I can teach you is how to be radically open-minded and how to see completely New Perspectives in ways that you didn't think was possible and so one of my objectives with this episode in this series is to help you to see progressivism in a new light and also to help you to see conservativism in a new light because progressives do not really see conservatives they don't really understand the conservative worldview they're too close-minded and vice versa and so that's just one example of how we can use the power of epistemology and relativity and uh um construct awareness right is to realize this and then we're going to go beyond that way Beyond politics and we're going to apply this to really deconstruct all of reality that's what I'm most passionate about is looking at reality in such radical ways that you can see that something like physics itself imagine that physics Science Biology Evolution history imagine that these are just perspectives that you can see through and you can also see beyond and then the question is what is beyond those perspectives what is beyond the human perspective that's where things get really interesting that's where we get into the Deep spirituality that I teach but also I want you to see how this and that are connected together make sure you stay tuned for part two next week

Channel: Actualized.org

Views: 52,004

Keywords: politics, left wing, leftism, progressives, liberals, self help, self actualization, psychology, wisdom, actualized.org, leo gura, philosophy, spirituality, conscious politics, society

Id: xAKThCSh5Hs

Length: 181min 12sec (10872 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2022