Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Circling the Void with Aaron Rabinowitz
32 Plays2 years ago
M chats with Aaron Rabinowitz, of the "Embrace the Void" podcast, about the Better Way Anti-vax conference in the UK, the problem of "them" when it comes to problematic belief in conspiracy theories, and much more beside...
Listen to Aaron's podcasts here: https://voidpod.com
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Initial Frustrations
00:00:00
Speaker
Right, so ahead of this interview, I just want to get a feel for... Well, Joshua, what do you know about the state of Virginia? Oh, uh, gosh, not a lot of fun being honest. Yes, that's about what I thought. John Denver was fond of it? The worst bit of it, anyway.
00:00:17
Speaker
You're just confirming my suspicions here. You called it as mountain mama. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Yes, yes, quite. The point I'm trying to make here... Is it some sort of a sex thing? If I google mountain mama, am I going to see some stuff? If I go to mountainmama.com, will it like...
00:00:39
Speaker
Inflame things? That's quite enough. The point, which you're illustrating all too well I feel, is that I can't trust you to know even the most basic details concerning our guest, like his home state, nor can I trust you to not get distracted with popular culture references. I'm afraid I'm going to have to do this interview alone. He died in a plane crash, you know. What, our guest?
00:01:01
Speaker
John Denver. Fluor's playing into a lake. And California, though, not Virginia. Now, lots of people sing songs about California. Janice Joplin, Katy Perry, Simi Sonic, Purple Planet, Childish Gambino. Yes, yes, that's good. You just keep talking about that while I go and talk with Aaron. I'll be back in a few hours.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, Chuck Berry, Rufus Wainwright, Lenny Kravitz, Belinda Carla, The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now, they have a song and an album named after California, but there's a play on words involved.
Introducing Aaron Rabinovich and Discordianism
00:01:35
Speaker
It's somewhat random. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:52
Speaker
Our guest this week is Aaron Rabinovich, host of Embrace the Void, Philosophers in Space, and I guess in some alternative reality, could even have been a co-host of this very podcast. He is currently a PhD student in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, specialising in secular moral education and developing a pedagogy focused on the pervasiveness of luck. My notes also say not to mention any rumours about him being a member of the Rosicrucians.
00:02:18
Speaker
Anyway, hello, Aaron. I'm a Discordian. I'm just going to get this out here in the open. If you're going to, you know, assign me to a particular secret organization, let's be clear. I worship Eris and only Eris. Hail Eris. I'm about to say I actually have a copy of the Principia close to hand, but it's actually technically just slightly out of reach. But he's like,
00:02:39
Speaker
There is a copy of the Principia up on my bookshelf beside the Illuminati's trilogy, which I reread recently. They go together. They certainly do. Yeah, and the Illuminati's trilogy is a difficult read, unfortunately.
Conspiracy Theories and Cultural Discussions
00:02:55
Speaker
Some parts of me want to do like annotated versions, shortened versions of some of my favorite books like Anathim and Illuminati's trilogy, where you just like go through and cut like
00:03:04
Speaker
200 pages worth of stuff that people aren't going to care about, for the sake of like, like, I know it's the point to some extent, but I also would love for more people to be able to engage with that content. Yeah, I reread the aluminum mountess trilogy earlier this year. And
00:03:19
Speaker
It is remarkably dated, not just with respect to the references in the Illuminatus trilogy, but also some of the plotting and sexual politics, which may have looked really avant-garde in the 60s. But have you read the KLF's rewrite of the Illuminatus trilogy? I think they've only released part one, but they have been in the process of recasting the Illuminatus trilogy.
00:03:43
Speaker
trilogy. So that might be might be worth tracking down. Absolutely. I've long since hoped that somebody would do like, like Jordan Peele would get ahold of it and do a modern adaptation, all a Lovecraft country, where it's like a hag bar is played by Donald Glover or someone like that, you know, like really mess with some of the the weird some of the not
00:04:07
Speaker
as developed stuff and keep some of the more developed stuff. But yeah, you're totally right that much like a lot of the weird sci fi of that period, Heinlein and such, yes, they're progressive, but they're also misogynistic and terrible. Oh, can I can I curse on the show, by the way? You can indeed. I mean, we we use all sorts of wrong doing that, you know, let's say it's a it's a dashed, damned affair there. So, you know, use whatever language you feel is appropriate.
00:04:35
Speaker
I should apologize ahead of time. I will be throwing out the C word here at some point, by which I mean conspiracism. So I thought you meant Canadian. Oh, there we go. Well, I know I know in y'all's parts of the world, cunt isn't actually the same impact as where I come from, but.
00:04:51
Speaker
No, no. I mean, back home, you can refer to a very good friend, as you know, a good old cunt. Let's say it is a perfectly normal word. We're just waiting for politicians to start using it in the house and then it will just become almost formal speech. I want to say the Prime Minister is one of the best cunts we've got leading the country at this time. It's one of the best words that that NT on the end is just so powerful. And it's, you know, it's a shame that it's associated with patriarchy and whatnot.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, but that's another that there's a whole another topic for a whole nother
Aaron's Background and Influences
00:05:27
Speaker
time. Now the reason why we've got Aaron on the podcast is we're going to be chatting today a little bit about his coverage of the better way conference that took place a few weeks ago. So long term listeners to the podcast will be aware that I've sat through several David Ike talks
00:05:42
Speaker
I imagine sitting through the better way conferences on par at the very least with having to immerse yourself in Ike for a long period of time. But before we get to the better way conference and kind of all the ancillary issues will come out of that conversation, we probably should look at your origin story. So what is your motivating interest in these things called conspiracy theories?
00:06:06
Speaker
It's all shrouded in mystery, right? I just appeared one day and I've never actually tried to sit through a full David Icke talk. I know what David Icke argues for, obviously, but my understanding is his talks are like six hours long and difficult. Eight hours long. Eight, wow, yeah. Yeah, this was the better way one was the other direction. Every person got to speak for like three and a half minutes, as they felt like. And they spent most of that time complaining that they were running out of time, which I'm sympathetic to. I'm always running out of time when I'm doing things too.
00:06:34
Speaker
Okay, so where do I come from, right? I grew up in Virginia. I come from a kind of atheist, juboo, hippie, weirdy background. I was basically raised in the world of high weirdness, as it's sometimes called, which is the like,
00:06:52
Speaker
you know, drug counterculture, you know, mind opening from the hippies through the Timothy Leary types, the beats, all that kind of stuff. My dad is a clinical psychologist, who was very into all of those sorts of things. I grew up watching David Cronenberg and things that were really inappropriate for children. So I come from a very weird place to begin with. I also psychologically appear to be very weird from the beginning. And I've just gotten weirder as I've
00:07:20
Speaker
been trained on these things. So my interest in conspiracy theories in particular, I would say, there's probably a couple of things. Growing up in Virginia, you're sort of keenly aware of the whitewashing of the Civil War and the history of the South as being pro-slavery. So I think that's one probably beginning experience of large groups of people pretending reality is different than they say it is.
00:07:44
Speaker
So it's like an experience of actually seeing a conspiracy playing out, not just a theory. And then I was also fascinated with the Nazis, I think probably because of my Jewish background and also just because as an ethicist, even before I knew I was an ethicist, I was always really interested in moral issues. The Nazis are such a fascinating test case of immorality that was very heavily promoted in my place and time.
00:08:10
Speaker
as opposed to the other horrible people who were running our government, for example. And so I did a lot of obsessive reading about, and even like I wrote a whole, this is how nerdy I am folks, I wrote a whole call of Cthulhu, D20, World War II role-playing game campaign based around the conspiracy theories of the Nazis.
00:08:33
Speaker
Ultima Thule and, you know, the Atlantis Society and like all that stuff. I was, you know, bringing it all in, trips to Tibet, all the things. And then I would say the next phase was I got, you know, I would say in the past five or six years, I've been getting more
Conspiracism and Its Political Implications
00:08:50
Speaker
involved with both.
00:08:51
Speaker
movement atheism and movement skepticism. And as I was getting involved with that, you know, I started doing this kind of work that had just been a hobby and became these, you know, articles that I was writing about in the U.K. Skeptic Mag, the not-Shermer version, I always have to say.
00:09:06
Speaker
And I've, you know, I've gotten more and more fascinated by the current state of play of conspiracism on the right in particular, where I think the spiral is very bad. I followed James Lindsay for a while. I was one of the people who helped make it obvious that he was working as a front for Michael O'Fallon's White Christian nationalism. I was the person who predicted that he would eventually become a Christian, which I think he is at this point.
00:09:33
Speaker
So that's been the kind of stuff that I've been doing. And then the Andy Vaxer conference just came along. I was done with classes for the semester. My friend Michael Marshall at the Skeptic Society, at Merseyside Skeptics, they were doing their own in-person going to see a weird conference. So they suggested that I watch this one virtually and report on it. And it turned into four or five articles at this point on this confluence of a bunch of issues.
00:10:01
Speaker
Now, before we get onto the better way stuff, you have used that interesting C-word, conspiracism here. And behind the scenes, we've been talking about exactly what this term means. So typically in the academic literature, when we talk about conspiracism, we're kind of talking about conspiracist ideation, which is somehow going to be either related to Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style, or it's going to be linked to some kind of psychological disposition to seeing conspiracy theories where they aren't.
00:10:30
Speaker
You're not quite using conspiracism in that necessarily pejorative sense here, are you? Right. Yeah. And I know the language around this is complicated and it's in flux. I talked about conspiracism first. I first sort of got turned on to that term in particular when I did episode Embrace the Void 196 with Scott Tyson, where we talked about his work on conspiracism.
00:10:55
Speaker
And I think, thinking back, he probably used it more towards the psychological side. I want there to be a catch-all term that refers to the act of doing kind of conspiracy theorizing and conspiratorial behavior that is a purely descriptive term. I don't want to assign judgment of any sort. I just want to say what these people are doing is
00:11:23
Speaker
conspiracy theorizing that goes beyond a single conspiracy theory usually, I think. And I also just want, I don't know, I just find it really awkward to just keep saying this person is conspiracy theorizing or is, you know, like using that term over and over again. So to some extent, conspiracism for me is shorthand for both the psychological and the
00:11:45
Speaker
you know the theorizing itself you're right obviously in academia we want to disambiguate those to some extent and when i talk about this stuff i definitely want to talk about the psychology debate versus the epistemic debate they are separate debates um but i feel like we need a term for you know just this kind of behavior broadly speaking
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, so when you're talking about conspiracism, you're talking not merely about theorizing about a particular conspiracy, you're talking about a kind of mode of accumulating or aggregating conspiracy after conspiracy or conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. Yeah, exactly. Now, I will sometimes I think probably just use it when I'm referring to one person engaged in one conspiracy theory. So if like
00:12:29
Speaker
Most recently, we're going to talk about Maja Nawaz and he was at the Better Way conference and he's been promoting, he promotes a lot of different conspiracy theories. But sometimes, you know, I'll say something like he's just promoting anti-vaxxer conspiracism here, by which I just mean
00:12:45
Speaker
theorizing and ideation around anti vax stuff in particular. But yeah, what I'll often talk about is to distinguish it a little bit is like the conspiracism spiral is how I see it, where it's that's what you're describing, where I see people who, you know, buy into one or two conspiracy theories, and it sort of opens them up to this spiral down into a bunch of other conspiracy theories. I don't think that happens
00:13:10
Speaker
For every person who believes a conspiracy theory or else we'd all be spiraling right now, as you and others have pointed out. But I do think it is a discernible behavior that happens to some people and that some people are at higher risk for it. And that it's not indicative as old conspiracy theory talk.
00:13:30
Speaker
You know, I think you all have done a good job criticizing, over pathologizes the kind of psychology needed to go into a spiral, right? The assumption is people who spiral are the small minority of extreme paranoid where I think we're all at high risk of spiraling and it's just bad luck about whether you get into that kind of place at the wrong time.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, I can actually see there is, we can, we can point towards people who engage in these particular spirals. I mean, I suppose what fascinates me about this kind of discourse is that we can also see this kind of spiraling in non-conspiratorial context as well.
Understanding Conspiracism and Predispositions
00:14:09
Speaker
So I think it might be, it might be that spiralization, now I'm thinking about actually getting a courgette of some kind and putting it into a spiralizer, which is a very weird
00:14:21
Speaker
weird visual analogy I've got going on there. But spiralization in a non kitchen sense is something which I think happens. Yeah, yeah, comes occurs a lot. And it would be interesting whether there's a particular predisposition that some people have with respect to conspiracies, or whether it's some kind of epiphenomena of a kind of bigger issue about the information systems or lack of trust or education systems we
00:14:50
Speaker
we have. Yeah. I mean, there are probably different versions of these things that like it's probably like a cluster of spirals that take different forms. Some of the things that likely cause them are things like pattern over matching or something. Right. Where you you find one thing that's a conspiracy theory and you start using that as your hammer for everything that starts to look more like a nail potentially, you know, and you're right. Like you can see, you know, like the spiral is like a version of
00:15:19
Speaker
Another example would be like the hyper rationalists, right? The folks who start to realize that critical thinking is good and end up in a place where they're like emotions are bad, right? And they like spiral down into a really absurd position around knowledge and sources of knowledge.
00:15:35
Speaker
I think the conspiracism spiral is particularly concerning for two reasons. One is I think it leads to a much more harmful place than a lot of other spirals. Not all spirals are equally harmful, it seems like, right? Conspiracism spiral ends with you being an occult disassociated from your family, you know, suicidal or violently, you know,
00:15:59
Speaker
you know, going on shooting sprees, right? Like those are the kind of things where the spiral ends there. The other concern is that I think the spiral is particularly easy to slide down as far as spirals go. If you are in certain conditions, right, if you are over and over again, it's not all people, but over and over again, we see that people end up starting on the spiral when they're at a bad place in their lives.
00:16:23
Speaker
as we see with people getting sucked into cults, often it's people who are in a bad situation, feel like they don't have answers and then someone provides them easy, what feels like actionable answers to them, right? And that's how that begins. And then the problems are, you know, you and I have talked about this some already, the problem of they, the big, big they, right? Where someone says, well, they don't want you to know about X or something, right? Once you buy into,
00:16:52
Speaker
conspiracies, to some degree, you have to believe there's a they, and the bigger you empower that they, the more you think that they can do, the more it's impossible to say no to any conspiracies, right? You just have to yes and everything because, well, look, if they hit aliens, they could hide the cure for AIDS, they could be hiding the cure for COVID, like whatever, all the things, right? So those things, I think, all come together to create the current situation we're in where it seems like a disproportionate number of people are
00:17:21
Speaker
conspiracism spiraling in particularly bad ways. Mason, it's interesting you bring up the they stuff, because that was something I wanted to talk about in this. So if you don't mind, you've you've got a forthcoming piece in the skeptic. And as you pointed out, it's the UK version of the skeptic, not the Michael Shermer US pub publication, which I have to say is also debunk conspiracy theories, not promote them just to be clear.
00:17:42
Speaker
For those people who aren't paying attention to Michael Schirmer at the moment, and why would you be, he seems to be going down a bit of a spiral himself at the moment. It's a little bit disturbing.
00:17:57
Speaker
that that is true. I mean, he's been trying to enter the intellectual, intellectual dark web is now in the intellectual dark web. And now he's just kind of meandering around bumping into the major figures there. And somehow through contact transmission, picking up all of their beliefs at the same time, it's almost as if it's some kind of I think it's an empty suit. Yeah.
00:18:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, he's the signifier. He just reflects what other people... Yeah, so one of the pieces you've got coming out in the UK skeptic I'd say is rather pleasingly pro-particulism. But as you note in this piece, you have a bit of a they problem. If you don't mind, I'm going to actually quote a bit of your forthcoming piece so we can talk back.
00:18:43
Speaker
How is it? Absolutely. To be fair, it is still drafty, but yes, go for it, please. In the draft I've read, and I'm not even going to pretend to do a Virginian accent here because it's going to sound atrocious if I do. I could do my world-famous Belgian accent, but then it's going to be incomprehensible, so I'll just read it in a normal voice.
00:19:04
Speaker
The problem I'm currently stuck on is how the they premise complicates the process of assessing a conspiracy theory. If we know that governments and other powerful entities keep secrets, how could we even know that we're assessing a particular conspiracy theory enough to rule it out, much less censor people for spreading it?
00:19:23
Speaker
Given this problem, it seems reasonable to adopt high levels of skepticism towards conspiracy theories that attribute significant amounts of power to them. This principle is somewhat justified if we remember that the plausibility of a conspiracy theory goes down as the number of participants goes up.
00:19:41
Speaker
Having significant power depends on having a significant number of loyal co-conspirators, so it's reasonable to be skeptical of any theory that claims the conspirators have an extreme amount of power. So that's kind of a nice summation of your concern with the them problem, isn't it?
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on this. You know, I do think this dovetails some with the piece that you just... I don't know if it's out yet or not, but the one about... Is it suspicious conspiracism? It is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. Suspicious conspiracy theories, right? Where y'all highlight things like defectability, properties that I think are in the same cluster as what I'm talking about here.
00:20:28
Speaker
here in terms of the size, the basic size of the conspiracy and the number of people involved. Those are often features that are pointed to to explain why we have at least some good reason to think that substantial conspiracies inevitably get exposed, essentially.
00:20:47
Speaker
which doesn't really help us with present conspiracies, only past conspiracies. But yes, we have this problem of they – I don't know what the solution – and you're probably going to raise objections to the solution I'm proposing there because it isn't perfect. It has absolutely problems, and I think it highlights the problem of even assessing the probability
00:21:09
Speaker
of a lot of these claims because the arguments themselves undermine the idea that we can assess the probability of them in a sense. I don't know what the solution is to that, but I am sympathetic to a lot of y'all's particularist critiques that lead us to that problem, essentially. I don't think it's an easily avoided problem, is what I'm saying.
00:21:38
Speaker
There's an interview with Aaron and myself that's going to be on Embrace the Void, which will play after this interview to
Meta Discussion on Podcasts and Time
00:21:46
Speaker
play. There's a kind of a weird timey-wimey aspect here that we're referring to a conversation which is going to be broadcast in future, but is actually happening in retrospect compared to what we're saying here.
00:21:56
Speaker
linear time is just what they want you to think. Let's just be clear. And I mean, who listens to podcasts on schedule anyway? I mean, I mean, who knows when? There could be AIs listening to this in 2056 going, ah, but isn't dentists the art generalists who in 2036 proved that all conspiracy theories are false? This all just seems rather weird.
00:22:21
Speaker
That would be cool. I would be impressed if you pulled that one off. It would be the greatest trick the devil's ever played. Anyway, but I was thinking there's actually, there were kind of two problems of them. And I think one problem of them isn't quite the big issue it might appear to be. And I think the other problem of them might be. So I think the first problem of them
00:22:42
Speaker
is that yes, some conspiracy theories refer to the mysterious they. And sometimes that's because if we think about the definition of what counts as a conspiracy, people in secret working towards some end, we can sometimes detect in our policies or in our scientific structures or the organizations that we're working in, that there is something weird going on.
00:23:06
Speaker
And we might even be able to go, well, we also kind of know why they're trying to do it. We just can't quite work out at this point who's behind it, because they've been really good at obscuring their role in the endeavor, even though we can see the marks of their action. And in that case, you can infer to the existence of a they.
00:23:27
Speaker
but you might not be able to see exactly who they are. And that seems like something which we have to bite the bullet on in those particular cases.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, if I could give an example from my time as the foremost expert on James Lindsayism, the grievance hoaxes, if you're not familiar, the thing that made him and Helen Pluckrose and Bogosian momentarily famous and popular in the anti-woke crowd is they did these hoax papers and got several of them published.
00:23:58
Speaker
that project was secretly funded by someone and we still don't know who. It's private donations. I suspect that Michael O'Fallon was probably involved. There's probably some other people and I think probably some people who are like in the Sam Harris
00:24:13
Speaker
world who may have actually potentially supported it. But, you know, we don't know and we they're not that they've never revealed their funding. I think it's fair to say, you know, if you think that it was a conspiracy, which I think it was, let's see, people working in secret with the goal of
00:24:31
Speaker
debunking what they thought was, you know, woke content or something like that. It was then revealed. And yeah, we know that there's some shady funding behind it. So yeah, there's there's your example, I guess.
00:24:44
Speaker
Or the other recent example, which is that very large amount of money Alex Jones got recently, who we don't know who the money came from. But we also know that when Alex Jones talks about the financial elites, the global elites, the political elites, there are certain people he always praises, and there are certain people he always criticizes. And you might go,
Connections and Conspiracy Theories
00:25:09
Speaker
He's talking a lot about Peter Thiel at the moment, which suggests that maybe he or one of his companies is behind the donation. But we don't actually know whether they're responsible for that donation. We simply know something weird has gone on. Someone's willing to fund Alex Jones.
00:25:31
Speaker
And we know why they're trying to fund Alex Jones. We just don't know who's trying to fund. It might be one person, it might be a consortium. So in those cases, we can infer to a they, and it's a frustrating they, because we know they're doing something. We just don't know who they are.
00:25:49
Speaker
Yeah, and this is, you know, oftentimes when I'm doing this work, I get a vibe of like, I'm becoming the devil and I'm fighting, you know, like, am I any different from these people? Because just to give the example here, right, you mentioned Peter Thiel, I currently have up on my desktop as part of my prep for this stuff, an article in Vanity Fair called Inside the New Right where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest bets.
00:26:10
Speaker
And it's about Peter Thiel, you know, like rubbing elbows with folks like Curtis Yavin, who if folks aren't familiar, Google the dark enlightenment and find out about the neo-monarchical technocratic douchebags who think that like they're going to, they basically want to make Warhammer 40K our reality. They want to like, they really do, I think, want Peter Thiel as a god emperor, like sitting on a throne of technology.
00:26:34
Speaker
And, you know, you need sacrificing 40,000 people a day to the Emperor. People forget about 40K, the huge amount of sacrifice that goes on to keep the eternal Emperor alive on his golden throne.
00:26:48
Speaker
Yeah, and those sacrifices don't have to literally be on an altar, right? Having Del Big Tree, you know, promoting anti-vaxxerism so we have a measles epidemic is good enough, right? The God King accepts various kinds of sacrifices. Yeah, but like when you talk about this stuff, it can be hard not to feel like you're doing conspiracy theorizing because you're taking out your yarn and you're tying Alex Jones and Peter Teagle and all these people together.
00:27:13
Speaker
And it's hard because like, they are connected and it is a problem. And like, Elon Musk does listen to these people and believe this bullshit. And that's a huge issue. Yeah, so yeah, obviously, there's one issue of they which is just a bullet, we have to buy it. But of course, I think the issue of they which you're, you're concerned about, and I'm concerned about it too, is the evidential move people make where you provide evidence for your conspiracy theory isn't very good, because oh, no, but there's a there's a second
00:27:42
Speaker
or third or fourth layer. So there are the conspirators behind the conspirators. So you end up going, well, look, we can show that this activity wasn't the result of the conspiracy. And then they go, oh, no. No, I mean, that's what they want you to think. They've set it up in such a way that there are patsies or shell corporations that can take the blame for this activity. And there's actually a further set of masterminds we're going to appeal to.
00:28:11
Speaker
And what I worry about in that case is obviously for the sincere believer in a conspiracy theory, that's finding a kind of escape clause. But for the insincere promoter of a conspiracy theory, that's just a way to keep their grift going. Yeah, and let me tweak that slightly. My concern isn't so much a, there's always another curtain with another wizard behind the curtain.
00:28:38
Speaker
My concern is a little more granular where it's like for every piece of evidence or attempted a debunking of a specific claim that they can always be referenced in a version of they want, that's what they want you to think. But, you know, it's something like, oh, well, we have these pictures. Oh, well, they doctored those pictures.
00:28:59
Speaker
we have these other pictures. Oh, well, they doctored reality. Like, eventually, you'll end up at a point where they'll be like, well, yeah, but they got the alien technology that allows them to control particle physics. So like, of course, our scientists are getting x reading when the reality is this fifth dimensional lizard people reality or something, right? So the power of the they allows you
00:29:22
Speaker
And this is, you know, there are many versions of the conspiracy theory deflection, you know, it's a common and this is a common problem with the like, do your own research idea, is that first of all, it's too much work, because there's always more detail. And if you do it,
00:29:39
Speaker
it doesn't matter because for every piece of detail that you knock down there are it's like a hydra there are two more details that they're gonna pop up two more anomaly hunters or whatever and so there's never there's never an end to that work because if you really like even if you got them locked
00:29:59
Speaker
down as hard as you possibly could, the they still provides an out. At the end of the day, there's just some power that the they have that we haven't conceived of yet that is allowing this outcome to happen rather than the one that would
The Better Way Conference and Anti-Vaxxer Tactics
00:30:12
Speaker
confirm your theory.
00:30:13
Speaker
Now talking about those, we should probably actually talk about the better way or better they conference that you attended back in the way. So I've got a two part question here. One, what is the better way conference? And two, should we be bettering our ways as a consequence of it?
00:30:32
Speaker
Yes, and yes, right. The Better Way conference is a full on and I distinguish between full on versus COVID is a full on anti-vaxxer conference masquerading as a COVID anti-vaxxer conference masquerading as a medical concern conference.
00:30:53
Speaker
Right. So, you know, it's like, like with a lot of these things, if you look at the web page, initially, if you don't know the people involved, you will have no idea what this is about. It's about sovereignty in medicine or something. Right. But if you know the people like Del Big Tree, you know, Brett Weinstein, Malone, McCullough, Nawaz, all these folks,
00:31:13
Speaker
you'll realize, at first you might think, well, this is just a conspiracism conference of some sort. But then if you watch the conference, you will realize that it is, in my opinion, a deliberate attempt by Del Bigtree, who for folks who aren't familiar with him, he's the guy who produced Andrew Wakefield's anti-vaxxer movie, which is probably the most impactful anti-vaxxer content out there. I think you and I were discussing this, it was like one of those things.
00:31:40
Speaker
I believe Robert De Niro said it was the most powerful film he'd ever seen. And that's because Del Big Tree talked him into putting it into Tribeca, getting it pushed into Tribeca. And the Big Tree says, you know, having that happen and then having Tribeca have to pull the video under pressure from doctors,
00:32:00
Speaker
was hugely impactful in promoting anti-vaxxerism. Essentially, it was a Streisand effect kind of situation. How do we have to do better going forward? One of the ways we have to do better going forward is
00:32:15
Speaker
please do not platform someone you're gonna have to deplatform later. Do your research before you platform somebody because deplatforming is much worse, right? If you have someone on and then drop them, it gives them way, way more attention as far as I can tell than if you just say no to them from the beginning. You say no to lots of people, that's fine.
00:32:34
Speaker
Right yeah that's what happened there so the conference essentially you have a bunch of these mostly American headliners like Weinstein and Malone and McCall all the people who were made famous by Joe Rogan who gets referenced constantly at this conference and
00:32:54
Speaker
Big Tree has brought them along as far as I can tell to pull in their audiences who are more on the side of the like COVID anti vax or people who got skeptical got nervous got conspiracism a little bit in the past two years, where you and I are still curious to see the data but I'm
00:33:10
Speaker
I lean towards the hypothesis that the pandemic has been a boon for conspiracism, that lots of people have spiraled to some degree or another in understandable kinds of ways, given the situation. And what this conference was about, I think, is getting as many of those people sucked into the full-on anti-vaxxer movement
00:33:27
Speaker
as they possibly could and i don't know how successful they were i haven't seen a lot of sort of fallout necessarily one way or the other yet i'm but i do see noah you know jordan peterson promoting the laws from you know talking openly about cloud swabs you know dangerous anti-vaxxers stuff like it's really really bad how quickly i think it's mainstreaming.
00:33:49
Speaker
Now, this conference took place in the UK, which seems like an odd location for a largely American-led conference to occur. Yeah, it's complicated, I think. So there's a couple things going on there. First, I think it's an attempt to try to open up the, to like expose the American
00:34:12
Speaker
conspiracism folks to the UK audience, similar in some ways, I think, to, you know, I started following James and sovereign nations very closely when Michael O'Fallon hosted a sovereign nations conference in the UK for the Grievance hoaxers. It was basically a Grievance hoaxers coming out party.
00:34:34
Speaker
in the UK. This feels similar in some ways, but I also think this is probably an attempt to push real anti-vaxxerism in the UK in a way that it hasn't, as far as I can tell, hasn't been to the same degree. Like America has for a longer period had
00:34:54
Speaker
You know, you're lefty naturalist anti-vaxxers. We've got our Hasidic anti-vaxxers, of which Del Big Tree is actually connected. He's funded. We're talking about conspiracism. Del Big Tree is funded by an anti-vaxxer Jewish billionaire. So that complicates it. That is a very, very unfortunate thing.
00:35:15
Speaker
It really adds another layer of fucks to all of this. So, yeah. So the reason I think it was in the UK is because they used Tess Lowry, who is a, you know, plays as a COVID anti-vaxxer, but is actually, if you watch the conference, a full on anti-vaxxer. But she has more. She doesn't have like the same reputation as Big Tree does. So it's like her organization, she was the like cover
00:35:42
Speaker
for this. And she's in the UK. And then you have like Nawaz was there and like a few other UK people there. And I think the goal is to try to seed as much full anti-vaxxerism into UK society, you know, so that it's, it's again, just like with other conspiracism stuff, America is exporting so much of the worst shit right now, and is finding, you know, common ground with
00:36:09
Speaker
people in the UK and other countries and like feeding them really, you know, bad talking points, really dangerous content. Yeah, there's something to be said about the cross-contamination of particular theories between the UK and the US, which we'll get onto in a minute when we talk about the, as you point out, the lack of trans-agenda conspiracy theories.
00:36:29
Speaker
at this particular conference, but I was thinking more, you were talking in the first article that you're going to have in the UK skeptic, how I think at the end of the first day, Del Big Tree kind of made everyone come up on stage and basically make pledges of fealty towards anti-vax, not just COVID skepticism, but actually going, no, you look, you need to commit brother, you need to commit to the power of the anti-vax Lord.
00:36:57
Speaker
Right. Yeah. It was funny. The first day, purely by coincidence happened right around the time we were trying to get some, this is going to be a weird side tangent for a second. We're trying to get some windows replaced in our house because they're like old and drafty and we need to do windows and like, you know, you're talking to different windows salespeople and they do the like, you know, three hour long pitch where they wear you down, like a, you know, like timeshare kind of vibe. And then they're like really pressuring you to sign on the spot kind of situation.
00:37:24
Speaker
that's what the first day of this conference felt like it felt because it was supposed to be you know three hours it was five and a half and this big tree thing happens in the last hour so you're already like an hour and a half hour hour hour and a half over your time and yeah he brings out all of these first day people who were the big headliners the big the first day was all the big people it's like you know some of them carried over but like that was the most
00:37:48
Speaker
star name kind of stuff. And many of those people are the like, COVID anti vaxxer. So you had Noah, you had Noah's wasn't back. And weirdly enough, I think the was his full anti vaxxer at this point. But he didn't sort of
00:38:03
Speaker
Say as much in the conference he said it on other places recently anyway you had wine stein melone and geert van der Bosch we haven't talked about who's another kovat anti-vaxxer has been concerned about his specific weird separate concern about
00:38:22
Speaker
the vaccines producing super covid, which some folks have suggested is identical to Wakefield's own concerns about broader anti-vax stuff. So he gets them all up on stage and he starts this. He pretends it's not a planned pitch, but it's absolutely a planned pitch, in my opinion. And he does the like, do we think that vaccines should ever be allowed in the future in this movement show of hands and like the covid anti-vaxxers raise their hands because they're not full anti-vaxxers and the other ones don't, including Tess.
00:38:52
Speaker
And then he launches into the like, well, did you know, you know, vaccines killed this puppy or, you know, vaccines murdered everyone on this planet, like all these like, you know, liability stuff, all the standard anti vaxxer talking points, and he really is specifically sometimes by name,
00:39:11
Speaker
pressuring folks like Geert to kind of admit that there are these problems and to feel pressured into adopting this larger project of, well, you're not against the vaccines, but maybe we should wait on them until we have more evidence, softer versions of the anti-vaxxer position.
00:39:28
Speaker
but it gets really awkward and heated because Geert is getting increasingly pissed off and like at some point is basically shouting at them that like you are if you go this way you are killing people like you are causing another measles epidemic and that's way worse than the vaccine harm and big trees response which has been his response for a long time is basically well measles measles isn't that bad actually it doesn't kill that many people it's better to have the epidemic basically than to have the
00:39:57
Speaker
That was the most interesting fucked up piece of the conference, I think, and drives home my point that this is what this was about. It was about, you know, pulling these people in, pressuring them. And I think it'll be interesting to see to what degrees folks like Weinstein take the bait. I think you're not so much given how angry he was. I think there's a pretty good chance that Weinstein starts to increasingly promote full on anti-vaxxerism.
00:40:25
Speaker
Now, this is engaging a bit of folk psychology here, but do you think Big Tree is sincere in his views? Or... I mean, you've already pointed out there are moneyed interests in the background. And I mean, also, he's a film producer, so he has a kind of interest in establishing the narratives around the documentaries he makes.
00:40:50
Speaker
Is this conference an example of just really good PR for the kind of business I do? Or is there actually a sincerity to this? He really does believe that a measles pandemic or even just even a low level epidemic in a location is better than the supposed harms?
00:41:11
Speaker
which are overstated of the vaccination schedule. Yeah, and this is tricky. You know, we talk about this stuff a lot in terms of like, there's concerns about diagnosing at a distance, there's concerns. And usually I will try to avoid, I mean, I'm happy to have this conversation, but like usually when I'm actually talking about this stuff or writing about it, as I say in one of my articles, I'm not really interested in trying to diagnose who actually believes what, because obviously we can't.
00:41:36
Speaker
Um, and it doesn't matter for the most part. It's the consequences of the actions that matters for the most part, but it is, you know, it is interesting to understand because you want to try to understand the spiral, right? The computers has them spiral. Um, and I think big trees spiraled basically high, you know, from the time I've spent watching his stuff, it reminds me a lot of the James Lindsay stuff. And this is actually true of a lot of the people we're talking about. Um, I would say Nawaz Weinstein, many of these folks, and again, not a psychologist, just a philosopher.
00:42:06
Speaker
you know, armchair diagnosis at a distance opinion, I think they're all suffering from forms of malignant narcissism. And I think malignant narcissism is a really, really complicated psychology that people don't often well understand. They think it's just being really self-centered and egocentric, where it's actually a lot more
00:42:27
Speaker
fear of being exposed as a fraud and a lot of harmful behavior about protecting yourself from that. You see it with Donald Trump, for example. And I often find that narcissists spend a lot of energy doing what the people around them want to be liked because they really desperately want to be liked. It's when they don't
00:42:50
Speaker
feel like they're being liked that they turn into the dangerous monsters, essentially. And so, for example, James Lindsay, I think,
00:42:59
Speaker
didn't originally believe in white Christian nationalism. He has shifted his views, and he shifted his views because he's an empty person. There's nothing inside of him except the desire to be viewed as smart. And he found that he could be seen as more smart amongst a bunch of people who are
00:43:20
Speaker
less educated and more prone to conspiracism, essentially. And so he got filled up by Michael O'Fallon. I would say probably with Big Tree, you know, he was before the anti-vaxxer stuff, he was doing like the spin off show of it's called The Doctors. It was the spin off show from from Dr. Phil. He doesn't work on Dr. Phil, too. Right. So he was like a producer, but like not
00:43:45
Speaker
like a hugely successful one. I mean, you can argue that he was successful at making garbage, but it was somewhat successful garbage or something like that. But with the anti-vaxxer stuff, he got famous. He got big. He has a huge community of people who love him, who support him, who follow him, who repeat his every word and stuff like that. I think that's more valuable than money to these people.
00:44:11
Speaker
If I were if I were to guess right, I think the not the driving motivation is the pleasure of being the hero of a movement like this. I think I see the same thing. You know, we didn't mention trans stuff with glitter and the anti trans stuff, you know, he I think.
00:44:27
Speaker
People want to feel like you don't want to be white knight right they want to be the hero writing in to save the marginalized and again. That mirror problem i also want to help marginalized people and i also derived pleasure from it and i do this work to protect marginalized people and so.
00:44:44
Speaker
You know, you can turn around and say, well, Aaron, you're a narcissist, too, right? You're doing all the same things. And maybe I am. I don't know. But yeah, that's that's my kind of armchair psychologizing. And then what do they then epistemically believe? I think the easiest thing if you're doing a griff long enough is just to believe it.
00:45:01
Speaker
Right. You're a more effective grifter the more you believe what you're saying. And if you're one of these sorts of people there's nothing stopping you from just being fully absorbed into believing what you are saying. And I think that comes through if I had to present evidence for this in the fact that Dell is not a strategic
00:45:19
Speaker
anti-vaxxer very well, right? He gets the Streisand effect. He gets pissing people off to get attention. But he doesn't get that it's a bad idea to take your, what I would call your on-ramps, right? Your people who are COVID anti-vaxxers and who are allowed to be on YouTube because they're not promoting full-on anti-vaxxerism. For some reason, they're allowed to be on YouTube. And they provide an open door for people to walk into your movement. But if you make them
00:45:44
Speaker
pledge fealty to full-on anti-vaxxerism they could get deplatformed and Brett Weinstein made this point to him he argued with him about it not about the content but just about the strategy of let your on-ramps pretend hide their power levels and such but Big Tree I think wants everyone to agree with him he's the kind of narcissist where he's like I need you to be openly in agreement with my position even if that's not strategically sound
00:46:08
Speaker
Yeah, no, that is a good answer. I mean, I kind of struggle with the folk psychology around this as to whether people are deliberately engaging in the promotion of these theories, or they are the product of their surroundings, or there's a kind of systemic feedback thing, because it's very convenient
Sincerity Among Conspiracy Proponents
00:46:27
Speaker
to go, oh, these people have elected to promote these theories insincerely. And of course, the complicating factor there, even with that kind of analysis, is that you can convince yourself you're right with time. I mean, there's good psychological literature that if you repeat the same idea to yourself, you will come to believe it as something you had originally and not something that you've adopted for pragmatic rationales.
00:46:54
Speaker
But it's always a very awkward conversation to have because most people aren't mustachioed villains when it comes to that. They're not kicking away, waxing their mustaches. They are the product of some kind of system, whether they're aware of this or not. And as you say, most people also are the heroes of their own stories. They just often don't realize that they're also the villain of someone else's.
00:47:22
Speaker
Now, I mentioned before, there's a kind of weird cross-pollinization between the US and the UK. So as you point out, what appears to be going on with the Better Way Conference is you've got the Americans saying, look, we need to export our anti-vax sentiment to the UK, for you are a verdant, Virginia land with only a few anti-vaxxers, but we can plant the seeds of doubt there.
00:47:47
Speaker
Reverse colonialism. I think we call that right which I mean I've got a slight sympathy towards Recolonizing the colonizers, but not this way. This seems like a really bad. Not like this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not like this Oh, and we should put a pin in the colonialism stuff because colonialism comes up a lot at this conference But yeah, go ahead. Let's do transfers. But as as you
00:48:08
Speaker
point out there's something really weird in that there's there's a high degree of similarity with the kind of stuff they're talking about and the transgender or trans panic conspiracy theories. And given this is a conference occurring in the UK, it's kind of odd that it doesn't come up. So I suppose I should ask you, can you explain explain to people why it's odd it wouldn't come up in a context like this?
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah, and if I was more conspiratorily minded, I would think that they had deliberately told their speakers not to bring it up, given this profound absence. We don't go to engage in conspiracy theorizing like that. I mean, that just sounds like abject conspiracism.
00:48:51
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, it's a good question. And I'll just mention before I dive into the trans stuff, I, you know, in talking about malignant narcissism, I am not diagnosing in a individualistic sense. To me, you know, pathological psychology is, you know, a part of one's is connected to one's environment. And I, for folks who don't know my other work,
00:49:12
Speaker
I don't believe in free will, I don't believe in moral responsibility, I don't believe in just desserts. I think everything is luck all the way down. And so when I say this about these people, I'm not saying this person, and none of these people in my mind are mustachio twirling monsters. They all believe something that makes them think they're the heroes. And even if they say things they don't always believe, they think it's in the service of that. And we are all there but for the grace of the void.
00:49:35
Speaker
not that person, right? We could all slide that way. And I think the most important thing that I like about the particularism stuff that y'all do is that it really does highlight that it is epistemic luck, both environmental and personal, that puts one in these places, not particular individuals just choosing to be evil or a rare kind of paranoia. So I just wanted to lay that out there. So it doesn't sound again, like I'm slipping back into the pathologizing stuff too much, at least.
00:50:04
Speaker
though I do think those things are part of the picture to some extent. All right, so the trans stuff. Very weird, because again, I actually spent the first several months of this year arguing with UK TERFs, or I guess we'll use the gender critical terminology for, you know, for their sake, I guess, if any of them are listening for some reason. I very much doubt they're listening to a podcast, which is one of the co-hosts, a non-binary person, but you never know. You never know.
00:50:33
Speaker
Some of them may still be hate following me, who knows? It started out with a letter wiki, which is a website that's now gone and defunct, but was like a website for long form discourse with a guy named Andy, who some folks might know as the really annoying black duck on Twitter. He's a UK skeptic, used to be close friends with some of my skeptic friends in the UK who now are not friends with him because he spiraled into
00:51:01
Speaker
anti-trans conspiracism, essentially. And so I did this letter with him, one skeptic to another, debating the trans stuff. It got picked up by Glinner, Graham Linehan, for folks who aren't familiar with the anti-trans world. Unfortunately, the co-author of formerly one of my favourite sitcoms, Father Ted,
00:51:23
Speaker
a show which is now being stricken from my memory. From the records. And it's hard. I'll have a whole separate conversation if you want about art by terrible people. I often talk about Lovecraft and he was fucking the worst. Can you ever ask what his cat's name was?
00:51:41
Speaker
Right. Yeah, that's just like just the beginning. So yeah, I do think so. Yeah. So it gets picked up by these folks. I spend several months getting harassed by like, you know, I love to argue when I'm not here chatting with you pleasantly. I'm off debating anybody about much of any things. I'm a debate bro. I'm whatever. I'll self identify that way. It's fine.
00:52:02
Speaker
And I have never had to block anybody before on Twitter before this year where I had to block many, many, many gender critical people because it just got so fucking exhausting. So I did all of that. And in the process of that, as I was doing the research around it, work around it and stuff, I started to uncover work and find work that had been done by folks like Krista Peterson about anti-Semitic
00:52:33
Speaker
transhumanist conspiracism that was making its way into the gender critical world. And I wrote a skeptic mag article about this, about how transhumanism is, I think, becoming an increasingly common background.
00:52:49
Speaker
motif, let's say, within conspiracism, where lots of different kinds of conspiracy theories are pointing towards, you know, like the old version of globalist is now the transhumanist globalist, right? They're not just Jews. They're Jews who want technology that gives us functional immortality in this world. And they're testing it out on the lower populations, the lower classes or whatever. And transgenderism is just that.
00:53:16
Speaker
being used, you know, being tested on our children kind of stuff. A lot of this comes from specific work by one lady who has then been picked up by a bunch of the mainstream people. So it's a really painful example of like,
00:53:32
Speaker
She's getting it from like overt Nazis, people who really self identify as Nazis. And she's turning it into, well, they're just globalists. And it's interesting that there's a lot of Jewish stuff here, but like, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it does. And then everyone else is just like, well, they're just mainstream, you know, billionaires and stuff. And they don't realize that they've just kind of mainstreamed anti-Semitism, you know, through through wandering, essentially laundering it down to something that the public will not immediately be triggered by.
00:54:02
Speaker
All of the exact so i was keyed up on all of these kinds of arguments right and then i watch this conference where they make. Again not similar arguments the exact same arguments right it's cloud swab it's the same people doing the same trans human is an experimentation on us.
00:54:23
Speaker
for profit and other weirder personal gain and totalitarian rule and all of these things. And they trot out the victims of vaccines and they are treated exactly like detransitioners. One of the articles I'm writing is just going to be a list of all of the ways in which these things are identical. And yet,
00:54:46
Speaker
There was not any throwaway lines about transgender. There was not any references to it. It was not, look at this other thing that appears to be the exact same problem we're having over here. Isn't that interesting? And I don't know why. I don't have a good answer other than my conspiracism. I, you know, maybe it's because like they're a community where there are some transgender
00:55:08
Speaker
individuals and so they didn't want them to feel isolated or something? I don't know. I believe that if you were to survey the community, you would find a lot of gender critical people. I would guess a large majority, but I could be wrong. Given the likely demographics of who probably attended this convention, I would say it's pretty likely there's not a lot of pro-trans people in this group. So it's very weird that it wasn't part of this conversation.
00:55:36
Speaker
And it wasn't even being dog whistled? Not that I could hear. And again, it was 25 hours at 2x speed, so there's a chance I missed something. But again, I was pretty keyed up for it, especially when they, in the first day, are trotting out Klaus Schwab and the WEF and stuff, which is the exact same people that these people are also complaining about.
00:56:00
Speaker
I was really listening for it. I was looking for it because it's interesting to me to see. I was essentially testing a hypothesis of mine, which is transhumanism concerns are one of the ways in which it becomes easier to slide from one kind of conspiracism to another. It's a plausible, I think, hypothesis that
00:56:21
Speaker
you go from being gender critical to anti-transhumanist and then you see, oh, the transhumanists are also doing the vaccines. Well, now I'm anti-vaxxer as well, right? That's a concern I have. And at this point, you know, this is like not a not a knockdown data point, but it's at least a confounding data point for me in terms of
00:56:41
Speaker
why is there more overlap in the language here? There was more overlap between these people in the QAnonners than there was between them and the gender critical folks. And that just seems very surprising to me, especially, again, in the UK, where they're currently having a moment about gender issues and gender transition stuff. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know why. I'm very curious if anybody else has any other theories. Yeah.
00:57:06
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, on one level, you might just be right that it was a keep on message thing that we're very much focused on vaccines and this particular kind of medical misadventure. We're not going to talk about other forms of medical misadventure in search trans panic here. And yet at the same time, if you're right about there being a hierarchy of similarity or even just exact one to one match between these claims and the other claims.
00:57:34
Speaker
The fact that it wasn't even being apparently dog whistled seems like a really, really interesting data point here. So yes, surveying these people, which actually sounds horrific. As soon as I said surveying these people, that actually sounds horrific. And also might also be quite difficult to do because you need to design a survey. We've got self-identified gender critical people.
00:58:00
Speaker
And the problem, of course, with the gender critical crowd or the turf crowd is they'll go, oh no, that's a label you apply to me. That's not, because I mean, as we're seeing in the movement now, the turfs didn't like being called turfs. They wanted to call themselves gender critical instead. They've now discovered that actually all that's happened is the pejorative has transitioned from turf to gender critical. And they're like, oh, no, no, no.
00:58:23
Speaker
We're not gender critical either. So this is going to be a continual goalpost moving of some kind. But yeah, that's a really interesting data point. And I also don't quite know what to make of it, other than maybe they really are very good at sticking on message. And that actually might be slightly more disturbing as a consequence.
00:58:50
Speaker
Yeah, it really does feel like it has to have been deliberate and, you know, like the non conspiratorial sense, it could just be, you know, like you're saying sort of staying on message though. I'm also skeptical of that because if you watch this full thing, it wasn't that on message, you know, like the second half of it was a basically an open mic night for any kind of conspiracism.
00:59:11
Speaker
vaguely related to the medical world. You had a Qigong person get up and talk about the healing benefits of Qigong at one point. It wasn't strictly organized. And also, if you're worried about organization, let me tell you, you do not need to be that worried. Maybe they'll get their shit together, but this was a mess of a conference. They had so many technical issues and other problems. But yeah, I think
00:59:37
Speaker
And again, it's very, very weird because it's not just similar. So some other some other overlaps, right? When they talk when they have their day of women troubles, because they had a whole basic day about like, here are all the ways this is particularly bad for women. They went through like, you know, fear of sterility kind of stuff, which is, you know, they go they start with the like, this changes your period. And they move from that to and we don't know what it's doing to your long term fertility, right?
01:00:07
Speaker
That is one of the most common concerns raised by gender-critical people about gender-affirming care, that if a detransitioner will be sterilized and will never be able to have children, essentially. So again, so many spots in which it would have been so easy to compare these things, and yet it never ever happens.
01:00:28
Speaker
And yeah, I don't know why. I'm gonna go back and force myself to listen to a little bit. I've listened to some parts of the show, of the conference multiple times, especially the first day, but I may put it on in the background a bit just to double check myself on this because it is incredibly weird, right? It seems implausible on its face that it would be this way and that it would be consistent, right? Not that it would be not there on one day and maybe a little bit on another day, but that I never saw any of it.
01:00:58
Speaker
is just very, very strange to me. So yeah, more research needed. And you're right about the research also, I should add. You're talking about two communities that are averse to admitting they are members of that community, right? And that's a common problem when you're surveying marginalized. And let's be clear, these are also marginalized communities.
01:01:20
Speaker
That's something people will not like me saying because they are marginalizers. They for sure harm other people as well. But they are also, generally speaking, I would say, filled with marginalized individuals. They are often filled with people who have been harmed in legitimate ways. And again, like I said at the beginning, they were in a crisis, and this was their way out. And now this is the battle they fight to feel like they have agency in response to the harms that they have experienced.
01:01:50
Speaker
And that also is the colonialism stuff. There was so much talk of how much people in these communities have been marginalized by modern science and medicine and Western culture and stuff. And maybe that's why, one other hypothetical here is that this was maybe a slightly higher than average Wokeness conference, because there were so many people of color from marginalized communities talking about colonialism.
Historical Context and Systemic Issues
01:02:17
Speaker
It's possible that there is a higher amount of more leaning left on other issues kind of folks there. From what I understand, the anti-vaxxer crowd in the UK tends to be more conservative generally speaking. So it could have been like, we're a mixed company, let's not talk about that one issue kind of thing, maybe.
01:02:39
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose what strikes me about this, and you've kind of hinted towards this, is if you really believe there's some kind of large-scale medical conspiracy going on around the vaccination stuff,
01:02:56
Speaker
And it kind of entails that medical misadventures going on elsewhere as well. You can't really think of, oh, the medical fraternity is only bad when it comes to vaccines. Everything else is fine. So you would think there would be a, well, we can draw a strong comparison between the anti-vaxxer and also the medical misadventure they're doing towards these poor, deluded souls who think they've got some kind of confused gender thing. So once again, it's almost as if they're not suffering.
01:03:25
Speaker
from a form of conspiracism there by not making those links. That just seems like a really interesting data point, but as we've discussed,
01:03:40
Speaker
mean, there are a variety of different explanations that could explain it. And more trying to get to the root of it is actually going to be quite difficult. Yeah. And so yeah, one explanation. And so I want to highlight, they did make those exact kinds of arguments for other things besides the
01:04:01
Speaker
you know, like MMR vaccine, essentially, right? So big trees attack on geared. And it's actually not a false attack. If you read your arguments, it's not clear why they don't apply to all vaccines, right? It's not clear where they only apply to the COVID vaccines and his answers were not good on that front.
01:04:18
Speaker
But yeah, what other folks like Tess argued, Tess, for example, argued for a precautionary principle towards all vaccines until we have double-blind placebo studies, which would be very dangerous and harmful to do. And also pretty much impossible to get ethics committee approval for, but... Oh yeah, and we'll put a pin in that because they actually complain extensively about
01:04:46
Speaker
the pharma using ethics to get away with unethical things. That's a really important issue, actually. But yeah, just this broader point of there is a slide in these communities from one kind of medical conspiracism to another. You do see them saying, you know, if we, we don't, there was a lady on stage who always arguing against fluoridation of the water, like straight up bertcher,
01:05:08
Speaker
you know, no mixing it up kind of thing, right? You had a sovereign, like an overt sovereign citizen on stage at one point who is currently wanted by the government for violating COVID vaccine rules, you know, arguing that full on sovereign citizen kind of stuff. So like, they were open for business on all kinds of conspiracies. And yet, and yet it didn't spread to that one particular area for reasons that are very curious, I would love to know,
01:05:37
Speaker
You'd have to do some sort of like snowball study where it was like you find someone who's willing to talk to you and you get them to recruit their other anti vaxxer friends, but it's very very it is very difficult, especially if they think that you're going to end up writing an article.
01:05:50
Speaker
sort of deriding their community, right? This is a major problem. Yeah, so I think that was pretty much it. Yeah, I mean, it's actually a systemic issue in the social psychology where when we're studying the attitudes of conspiracy theorists, it's actually very hard to survey conspiracy theorists because most of them don't self identify as conspiracy theorists. So you then look for
01:06:13
Speaker
psychological predispositions in populations. And then you go, well, that's the kind of thing we think conspiracy theorists have. So these people must be conspiracy theorists in case of they might not be, they might just be. That's making the question. Yeah, they might be just normal members of the population who also have these predispositions as well. So surveying conspiracy theorists is quite difficult because A, people don't self identify and B, if they do, they're not going to want to answer your questions because
01:06:43
Speaker
you're presumably not on their side, given the pejorative gloss of conspiracy theorists in the literature. They seem to put a pin in the in the ethics stuff. And I think this is a really interesting topic here, because I mean, we all know about medical misadventure and big pharma misadventure over the 20th century, the 21st century. I mean, terrible things in the 19th century as well. And actually, the history of medicine
01:07:13
Speaker
really not a great history. So you were saying they were bringing up that kind of history in these talks? Yeah, in an annoyingly contradictory way for someone like me who has actually taught bioethics to medical students amongst the kinds of ethics that I've taught.
01:07:36
Speaker
The so yeah, when you teach medical ethics, you basically teach it as here's the history of medicine. We were fucking monsters, just horrible, horrible monsters until like yesterday. And now we're like barely constrained monsters.
01:07:54
Speaker
So the classic examples you point to are things like the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi doctors, Tuskegee, to a lesser extent, things like the Stanford Prison Experiment. And also things like Pfizer themselves doing illegal or questionable trials on people in Africa, all these sorts of things. But specifically things like Tuskegee lead to
01:08:20
Speaker
the rise of modern medical ethics. So we're essentially like so horrified by these things when they come out that we force ourselves because before there was a really genuinely problematic deference to doctors essentially, right? That we as a society were too keen to sort of trust people in lab coats in a substantial kind of way. Oddly enough, especially given that we are really weirdly individualistic country as well, speaking just for America here.
01:08:50
Speaker
So you have the rise of basic medical rules, including things like if there is a treatment available already for something that is known to work, you are not allowed to do a double blind placebo controlled study unless you can really prove there's an important reason to do so. It's a very, very high bar, I think, if it's even possible at all.
01:09:11
Speaker
And the reason being, stuff like Tuskegee, if you have a treatment, you can't deny it to people for the sake of scientific research. You need to compare the two treatments, which is the way it's often done now, where you have current approach versus new potential approach. And how do they compare? There are statistical problems with that. There are complications compared to a double-blind placebo study that make it less perfect. But it's a reality that we accept for ethical reasons.
01:09:40
Speaker
Now, the Better Way conference, they talked a lot about Tuskegee and all these other kinds of things as proof that pharma is dangerous and unreliable. But then they turned around and said, we want to have pharma violate all of the rules that have been put in place post Tuskegee for the sake of our pet interest, right? And what they said was,
01:10:03
Speaker
pharma actually and look there may be cases of this actually being the case I'm not saying that this never ever happens but their argument goes like this pharma knows about the new ethics rules and they now use them to get away with promoting unsafe
01:10:19
Speaker
science, unsafe medicine by saying, well, look, we can't do a double blind study. We have to do this other kind of study where it's easier for us to fudge the data and prove that our thing works and then get it put out into the world, essentially. So on their view, pharma hides behind that ethical protection now as a way to promote more and more dangerous medicine.
01:10:45
Speaker
So there's no fucking winning with these people, right? If pharma imagined, right, if pharma had done placebo controlled double blind studies, then the complaint would have been pharma violated these historic ethical rules to test this untested dangerous vaccine on some people and deny it to other people. And there'd be all sorts of inconsistencies that they wouldn't care about in their arguments. And at the end of the day,
01:11:11
Speaker
they want you to do something you're not allowed to do and even if you did it, it wouldn't be sufficient proof for them and you'd probably have killed some children in the process. So that's the situation and that's on the policy side why I think we're very fucked because there isn't a like way to satisfy these people policy wise besides like removing mandates and letting them have their measles epidemics.
01:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, so they say, look, Tuskegee is bad. What we need to do is Tuskegee again. And that does seem like, yeah. It always strikes me when I see these kinds of arguments, there's something which I can kind of understand from their perspective. So when you read books, say, by Ben Goldacre, looking at the problems in the pharmaceutical industry,
01:11:54
Speaker
where because we don't publish null or negative findings, we only publish positive findings due to a systemic issue in the journal system. Cross academia, right? Yeah, there is this realization that actually there's quite a lot of testing of the same drugs again and again and again, because the test, the initial test that shows actually this drug doesn't work, doesn't get published, because there's no impetus there. And I think people are
01:12:24
Speaker
aware at a kind of residual level that there are problems of this kind, which then leads them to the suspicion that, oh, the pharmaceutical companies are keeping something from us deliberately, without realizing that, I mean, it looks, it may look deliberate from the outside, but it's actually, it's actually the result of a systemic process. And it's a process which is broken.
01:12:48
Speaker
But it's broken not by design, it's broken because no one really thought through or what's going to be the consequences of the kind of publication prestige system that we have here. And so it contributes to the suspicion that there is something untoward going on, which then suggests that it's intended. But of course, actually,
01:13:09
Speaker
therein lies the issue it's not a hidden hand it's an invisible hand explanation and we don't tend to like invisible hand explanations because we like to be able to point the finger and blame people for things
01:13:23
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of good points in there. As you were talking, I was thinking, and I think you might actually be sympathetic to me on this. I think that we want, for the problem of they kind of reasons, we want to be generalists or some sort of sophisticated generalists, but we live in a particularist world. You know, like we live in a world where there's too many reasons for someone to slide into conspiracy for us, you know, to not have to acknowledge the problem of particularism, I think.
01:13:53
Speaker
And there are other examples that came up frequently at the conference, one that I wasn't even aware of until they talked about it. And that's another thing that I think is worth noting. Folks often, I think, start on the spiral because they get red-pilled in the classic sense. Before red-pilled just means radicalized to the alt-right. Red-pilled meant
01:14:13
Speaker
because you become aware of something you weren't aware of before, it cracks open your idea of what is possible, essentially, right? Finding out about a conspiracy that is real, you didn't know happened, or an event like, for example, the Tulsa Massacre, right, can really upend your perspective on what is possible out there in the world. And so one example that kept coming up was to catch Osama bin Laden,
01:14:38
Speaker
The CIA piggybacked on a polio vaccination program in Pakistan to use that for DNA testing to find the family members of Osama bin Laden. And I cannot say enough how fucking terrible that choice was and how everyone involved.
01:14:56
Speaker
Absolutely. It was not worth it. Fuck you. You know, like I would rather not be alive right now than you having done that. Absolutely the worst choice because you literally took all the worst things. You took the CIA. You took vaccinations. You took, you know, overreach in the war on terror. You just go on and you just put them all together into a real actual conspiracy. And you did so much fucking damage by doing that.
01:15:23
Speaker
And it makes me really angry. And it makes it impossible to do the kind of work that I think folks like us are trying to do in a functional way. Because once you've acknowledged all of that stuff, it's much harder to be like, and then you shouldn't believe the current conspiracy theory that we're talking about. It's just that much more challenging. And another point you mentioned that I think is worth talking about.
01:15:47
Speaker
sort of non-conspiracy conspiracies, right? A conspiratorial ideation that doesn't necessarily claim there's a conspiracy of actual people. So this gets into the stuff about woke conspiracism, I think.
01:16:05
Speaker
A lot of folks have argued, sometimes defensively because they're James Lindsay and they're conspiracy theorists, they've argued that the woke are also conspiracy theorists, that talk of white supremacy is a conspiracy theory, right? Like colonialism, decolonialism, all that stuff, conspiratorial kinds of thinking, essentially, which is interesting. There was so much decolonialism at this conference.
01:16:27
Speaker
And there are some things you can point to like Derrick Bell's silent covenants, which is it points to real. It's exactly the problem we're talking about. You know, he points to real conspiracies that happened to, you know, to harm black people. The ending of Reconstruction in America being the most famous example and also talks about the systemic, you know, invisible hand kinds of problems and.
01:16:54
Speaker
You know, those two things, I think what happens a lot of times, not all the time, but sometimes for people on the left, they adopt the kind of postmodern view of power where there's no shadowy room, smoky room full of particular people, but they still get into a conspiratorial ideation place when they talk about white supremacy. They make it seem like a kind of all-powerful they.
01:17:17
Speaker
that it isn't so yeah I think there's some complexities there as well and that some of those people then do spiral into overt conspiracism so yeah just a couple of thoughts based on some good points you had there I think which actually ties in quite nicely to a conversation we'll be having in July about wokeness and conspiracism on your podcast so once again this is a bit of a timey-wimey conversation now
Philosophical Insights on Belief and Morality
01:17:44
Speaker
One thing I do want to talk about before we go is your research work, because one of the things that we kind of have to recognize is that we actually appear to be quite epistemically lucky in that we know a certain amount about how the world works. We've been lucky to be educated in particular ways. Now, you think it's luck all the way down. Tell me about your theory of luck.
01:18:10
Speaker
Yeah, and this is a whole other hour, but let me give you the shortest version possible. I was luck-pilled by a guy named Thomas Nagel who wrote this paper, Moral Luck, which essentially argues if you take into account all the kinds of luck, not just the luck of how things turn out and the luck of the circumstances that you're born into, but the constitutive luck most of all, the luck that makes you who you are, including your epistemic luck, the beliefs you were taught, the ways of thinking that you were taught,
01:18:40
Speaker
what information, media, etc. you were exposed to, if you really take seriously how much all of that is beyond your control in the kind of sense of control that would be necessary to hold you accountable for any of it in a moral sense, we can't. It's just it doesn't work. It's it is genuinely all luck all the way down. And I, I talk about this a lot and I use I'm developing this pedagogy because I think
01:19:08
Speaker
our assumptions about free will, which the evidence suggests is just a proxy for moral responsibility. Like you said, we want to hold people accountable. There's a strong pleasure to holding people accountable that is actually disproportionately experienced by conservatives. It's a more common feature amongst conservatives, which is somewhat connected to them being more likely to believe in free will.
01:19:34
Speaker
You know this allows us I think this causes a lot of harms essentially I think it leads to arrogance and pride and survivor bias fallacies and on the flip side it leads to
01:19:49
Speaker
you know, abusive, retributive style punishment of criminals. It leads to the demonizing of conspiracy theorists and other communities that are both marginalized and marginalizers like poor rural whites. And so my goal is to luck pill everybody into believing that it's luck all the way down in a sufficiently scaffolded way. It's really important to say that because if you take this view seriously without
01:20:19
Speaker
adding some other things in, it's easy to spiral into a nihilistic, fatalistic kind of place. I don't think you have to go there. I think the place that my goal is for you to end up is a place of greater humility about your own beliefs and behavior and greater compassion towards people who are more unlucky than you are. And also, hopefully a little more
01:20:44
Speaker
uncertainty, right? I don't want it to be this sort of situation where it leads to like complete abdication of belief, but like I do think the more, so this is psychologically, we all I think very strongly identify with our beliefs. When you ask someone who they are, it's their beliefs and their actions, right? And often heavily their beliefs.
01:21:05
Speaker
But the more you help someone see, you're not your beliefs. Your beliefs are luck that was imposed upon you. You don't have to identify with them. The easier it gets to actually weed out bad beliefs because you're less emotionally, psychologically attached to them, you can recognize, oh man, I had really bad fucking luck believing that particular thing. Let's drop that and move on or something. You'll have some embarrassment still, but I think it also lowers embarrassment.
01:21:34
Speaker
right, because we're all at risk of bad luck, and we all experience bad luck, and we all make bad choices sometimes. And yeah, it can help us all to feel, you know, the compassion part extends not just to others, but to yourself, right, more humility, but also more compassion for your own because, you know, as you all as a particular to a point out, we're all probably believe maybe at least one conspiracy theory or we're likely to be at risk for believing conspiracy theories.
01:22:02
Speaker
And so we should, you know, help the people who had slightly worse luck and ended up actually believing them. Yeah, I mean, the luck thing really does fascinate me because I mean, I've stressed for a long time and kind of interpersonal communications, the reason why I ended up getting into philosophy and being interested about arguing about things.
01:22:21
Speaker
was because I had speech disfluency, so I have a stutter and a stammer. I went through large amounts of speech therapy as a child, which didn't work. So the speech therapist said, well, look, speech therapy doesn't work for this particular child.
01:22:37
Speaker
take them to speech and drama instead. And so I got into debating and that then lead me in my high school career going actually, I quite like arguing with people, which meant that I was more sympathetic towards going into philosophy rather than actually following what my grades indicated I should have done, which was to economics. There's a version of history where I don't have speech disfluency and I'm a mediocre
01:23:05
Speaker
economists working in a government department somewhere. And so economics is a different kind of conspiracism, right? Economics is just conspiracy by another name. Oh, believe you me, you start looking at Adam Smith's work and its conspiracies all the way down. And don't even add in the German economists because it markets very...
01:23:26
Speaker
It's an interesting conversation about how much Marxism is a conspiracy theory, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so that luck tells a lot of things in the same respect. Now, I was brought up Roman Catholic. I was a very good practicing Catholic for quite some time. But the luck of doing philosophy, I mean, I wrote a EMA on the comparison of Hegel's work with Pieterhard de Chidin's work.
01:23:50
Speaker
And through luck, that MA destroyed my faith. I went, this doesn't seem to actually work as a system. It turns out I can just do this in the God concept thing. And so luck seems like it's playing a really, really big role there. And I like the fact that you bring in that you have to you have to scaffold this talk, because otherwise you do get into kind of really nihilistic position of, well, no one's responsible for their beliefs in any way, shape or form.
01:24:20
Speaker
what can you do? And of course if you're having moral responsibility discussions rather than say free will discussions we still want there to be some mode of talking about well you can do something which also gets us into the awkwardness of the free will debate.
01:24:37
Speaker
Right, and this is why I disambiguate a couple of things here. You know, in terms of control, right, there are two kinds of control at least, the kind of control that can ground moral responsibility and the kind that can't. I think we have kinds of control that can't ground moral responsibility, but we have them, right? I can pick up this glass, I can argue with you and change your mind about something maybe, and that really does... You can try.
01:24:59
Speaker
I can try. Right. Right. But it really does. You know, your mind can actually be changed. Right. So it's not like you're locked in kind of luck. It's whether or not you happen to encounter me and we interact and you change your mind. That's the luck. Right. But we still have causal influence.
01:25:17
Speaker
What we don't have is the kind of dominance over the chain of causality that leads to us as a person that would be needed for us to have robust moral responsibility. The other key thing is the loss of moral responsibility doesn't mean the loss of moral truths.
01:25:34
Speaker
And this is counterintuitive for some folks, but it's very easy to think of because there are lots of situations where everybody acknowledges someone did something wrong, but they're not responsible for it, right? We all accept that there are some situations where someone could cause harm because unintentionally, for example, and they still caused harm and did something wrong, but didn't mean to. And that resolves them in our minds of their moral responsibility. My point is just that's all situations.
01:26:03
Speaker
to some for some reason or another to some level or another every situation the person doesn't have moral responsibility but their actions are still moral or immoral and we still ought this is this work gets very weird we still ought to do the right thing right and we can do the right thing if we're lucky
01:26:23
Speaker
And we ought to try to help people be as lucky as possible in terms of their moral character so that they can do the right thing as often as possible. So you can, this is how I get out of the fatalism, is you can improve the world still by doing things like teaching people about luck and changing their approach to other people. And that will change their behavior, which will improve quality of life for people, which is a real valuable impact.
01:26:49
Speaker
even if it's ultimately true that my success in convincing people comes down to luck, and my ability to do this thing comes down to luck. And so I shouldn't be arrogant or proud about the fact that I'm helping people, right? I should be thankful. I should feel lucky that I am lucky enough to be able to pay this luck forward.
Societal Solutions to Conspiracism
01:27:07
Speaker
So that kind of brings us to the final question here, which is, under your account, what do we do about the unlucky conspiracists?
01:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, you know, we have upstream solutions and downstream solutions, insofar as those aren't just like, it's really just a big ocean of problems, but let's pretend it's linear in some way. You know, upstream solutions get not enough attention, in my opinion, right? We all, I think, know
01:27:35
Speaker
that conspiracism is a symptom, not the cause, in my opinion. It's a symptom of things like loss, and traditionally it's been associated with things like poverty and ignorance, but that's not exactly right. It is true that some people who are poor and ignorant are also conspiracy theorists, and it probably is the case that lack of
01:27:57
Speaker
education could potentially put somebody at higher risk, but really those two things are only causes I think insofar as they are leading to the real cause, which is a feeling of powerlessness and a feeling of loss of self-importance of some sort.
01:28:15
Speaker
Right. So you see two kinds of things you see and like specifically you could talk about like white Christian nationalists, for example, right? They feel like they're losing control of society and they feel like they're the meaning that they do imbibe into their lives as being sucked out by secularism, essentially. And so conspiracism is a way for people to reinvest themselves with agency and meaning by fighting this holy war against the they, right?
01:28:43
Speaker
Alex Jones is a perfect fucking example of this, right? He's very clearly constantly driven by that. And so how do you help those people? Well, you help them find better ways to feel agency and meaning, right? And how do you do that? Well, you overthrow neoliberal capitalism, right? You radically redistribute wealth. You create societies that have functioning healthcare systems instead of America's
01:29:10
Speaker
horrible dystopian healthcare nightmare. And that's why I think, one of the reasons I think anti-vaxxerism gained more clout in America first is because it's not just big pharma, it's people constantly suffering from real problems. In that article, I'm writing for the better way, I tie this also to the Buffalo shooter who had a toothache and he couldn't get his tooth fixed. And he wanted to be in jail so that he could get proper dental care. Like that's the level of dystopia that America is dealing with.
01:29:40
Speaker
So you have to fix shit like that. Otherwise – and that's why actually I think the GOP is more at risk of this is because the GOP as a conservative, regressive party feels the fear of loss of power and meaning more than the neoliberal Democrats do. That's why you get things like January 6 and stop the steal and stuff like that. The downstream things in the meantime, since we're not going to be able to successfully overthrow capitalism anytime soon it seems,
01:30:08
Speaker
is stuff like content moderation. And I am generally pro-content moderation because I think it's better than nothing. It does cause problems. It does create more concentrated bubbles as people move to sites that won't kick them off.
01:30:25
Speaker
Those are concerns, but it is still, in my opinion, much better a world when Alex Jones is not on Twitter spreading conspiracism. It's not perfect, but it's better. It means that he has to get funded by not Peter Thiel with his not million Bitcoin, but it doesn't fix the problem, right? It will never fix the problem. It will only slow the spread if you don't fix the upstream problems. And I don't think we're in a good position to fix them as why I think we're going to see this get much, much worse.
01:30:55
Speaker
I don't think we're pulling the GOP out of their spiral. I think they're going to pull us in with them. What a very depressing way. Very voidy. I know. Well, let me say one positive thing again, and this goes back to the luck stuff.
01:31:09
Speaker
As hard as it is, you have to stop making fun of the anti-vaxxers as much as you can. It's not going to be perfect. We all have to vent our frustrations a little bit. But one of the most common refrains I heard at the conference was people feeling made fun of and derided.
01:31:28
Speaker
And this is, you know, this is true across the board for the luck stuff, right? If you're deriding poor white people for being racist and backwards, you're not helping. It may feel good, but it's just making it worse. It's just driving them into those spaces. And also, I just wanted to add
01:31:45
Speaker
policy-wise, these folks do not understand that their real concern is capitalism for some reason. Despite all of their very cogent criticisms of capitalism, and especially medical capitalism, one of them promoted the privatizing of the NHS. They don't see what the issue is. And therefore, more open free market capitalism, as far as I can tell, they sort of want to even deregulate this stuff further. So it's like,
01:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, they don't. They're not seeing the problem. And I'm not sure they would see the solutions as being the actual solutions, even if you presented it to them. I mean, I sometimes think that this is the classic look versus Hobbes issue in that.
01:32:29
Speaker
I think a lot of the people at things like the Better Way Conference are individualistic. They go, look, as long as I'm not restricted or fettered by government, everything I do will be good and it will lead to the flourishing of human society. So it's government and institutions and organizations which are bad.
01:32:51
Speaker
which is a kind of lock in, you know, in our, in our natural state, the world would be great. We're really in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Russo as well. And then you get Hobbes and Hobbes is, you know, life is nasty, shortish and brute, which is a quote, which is misattributed to the wrong problems all the time. But it's still a fairly useful summation of the kinds of things that Hobbes talks about in the Leviathan. And Hobbes is going, well, look,
01:33:18
Speaker
Turns out, you let human beings do what they do, and it produces some really adverse outcomes. You kind of need some kind of structure. And it always strikes me that there's a bit of that kind of problem going on there. Some people think the solution is simply, let's all just be nice to one another. And other people are going, yeah, but that's, I mean, that would be great.
01:33:45
Speaker
But there's also something slightly more, because we live in a very complicated society now, where being nice to one another is fine, but it doesn't get rid of the sewage.
Critiques of Anti-Structuralist Sentiments
01:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess what I would say is, similarly, I think there's something at this conference going on called something like free rider naturalism. Right. Alan Levinovitz in his book on natural talks about this as you as well when it comes to pregnancy that like, the only reason you have a revival of natural birth pregnancy is because unnatural birth
01:34:16
Speaker
has been so wildly successful in reducing the harms caused by pregnancy and birth essentially, right? It essentially creates a protective safety net for people who want to dabble in weird naturalism stuff because when it comes to worse, they can go to the hospital essentially sort of situation.
01:34:35
Speaker
Similarly, I think you see that with anti-vaxxer naturalism, right? It's only because so much of the population has adopted this anti-naturalist, quote, unquote, approach to taking vaccines that it's even reasonably possible for some individuals to adopt this kind of anti-vaxxer, pro-nature mindset. And in that sense, they are basically like what you're saying, like naturalists
01:35:00
Speaker
But they are free riding on the Hobbesian structure that is motivating most of our behaviors, essentially. That and then, you know, you see this again with the colonialism stuff. I think you're right that like a lot of these folks are anti Hobbesian because they see
01:35:20
Speaker
the colonizer, the white center as being the Leviathan. And what they want is a kind of back to nature, back to community kind of approach where everyone goes back into like smaller tribal level, I think, kinds of arrangements. And as you say, their view is once you do that, people will just naturally act better. And you should also add in that like amongst the conspiracies they promote are things like
01:35:49
Speaker
anti-depressants cause mass shootings. So like these folks think that a lot of, and Del Big Tree himself is a dysgenesis in the sense that he thinks modern society is making us dumber, which, you know, I don't think it actually is. But again, it's been a classic argument for a long time amongst progressives and conservatives that like it is making everybody dumber.
01:36:10
Speaker
by taking us out of natural selection. He actually is very Darwin, what do you call it, social Darwinism kind of guy, where he thinks that the week should be cold for the sake of the species kind of approach. Oh, good old eugenics. I'm glad that's coming back in style. Yeah, there's definitely a eugenics vibe going on with him for sure. Oddly enough, given that, again, he claims to be of native heritage and whatnot.
01:36:36
Speaker
So yeah, I do think, sorry, what we were talking about, the tie-ins, what we're talking about here, we're talking about the conspiracism and... Oh, wait, the... Yeah, so the kind of rampant individualism which goes...
01:36:52
Speaker
everything we find as long as long as we're unfettered by structures, everything is going to be fine, which is their return to naturalism, as you say. Right. And yeah, and separate from whether that's bullshit, which it is, it's also important to note it's dangerously plausible bullshit to a lot of people, especially if it's framed in terms of anti mandates. So this is the most common one of the more common talking points I saw coming out of the conference was focus on attacking the mandates.
01:37:21
Speaker
not the vaccines because the mandates are governmental, even if they're never going to be a mandate or the mandates don't even exist, there's going to be governmental overreach and you can claim that it's dangerous and that's all you're against.
Promoting Podcasts and Pop Culture Analysis
01:37:34
Speaker
And that, yeah, does play into that kind of anti Hobbesian mindset. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's there's so much more we could say, but we've probably also now said quite enough for the listeners to digest. So is there anything you want to promote?
01:37:51
Speaker
Yes, I most of all want to promote the UK skeptic mag, which made this possible by paying for the tiny virtual fee and giving me space to write these articles. I was on their podcast as well, Skeptics with a K, which was a really great chat. I also was on a show called Cogdys talking about this. If you're curious to hear different versions, that's the more American dick jokes version.
01:38:17
Speaker
And let's see, I guess I have my own podcast, right? Embrace the Void, Philosophers in Space. If you want to hear me ramble slash talk to other people about things like conspiracy theories and stuff. Yeah, I guess that's pretty much it. Yeah, I'm going to heartily recommend listening to both of your podcasts because they're kind of the delightfully
01:38:36
Speaker
different in scope. So Embrace the Void is very much one on one in interviews. And people who like this podcast, I think very much here, not just for the talk about conspiracy theories, but the fact that Josh and I often end up doing pop culture discussions along the way anyway, and philosophers in space is kind of it's that in a nutshell, talking about pop culture phenomena, and then applying a philosophical lens to the kind of
01:39:03
Speaker
issues. Your recent issue on Tremors was an absolute delight to listen to. Especially the, is this film problematic? No, it's not problematic.
01:39:18
Speaker
it might be no no it's fine it's one of my favorite films yes all of our kill all your faves they're all problematic have no faves uh yeah that was a really fun chat we both you know enjoyed tremors growing up and it was just it was very fascinating to me to come back to it after all these years of studying conspiracism and realize holy shit this is the first movie i ever saw that had a prepper in it and i didn't even know what that was or what the hell would any of this meant and now it's like so central to our world
01:39:47
Speaker
And as you point out, they talk about mixing explosives with the correct proportions in a way which seems awfully prescient given events that are going to happen four or five years after that film was made.
01:40:04
Speaker
It is a weird film. I think not. It is a weird character in that it really does predict so much and it doesn't have a lot of very obvious precursors to it. And it brought it into the mainstream in a big kind of way, I think. Yeah. And of course, he ended up becoming the main character of that sequence of films after. That's right. So you get film one and two, Fred Ward's back for film two. Fred Ward's alone for film two, yes.
01:40:30
Speaker
And then is it the TV series and then the third film or is it the third film? I haven't made it be on the second one yet. We do a bonus content on Philosophers in Space called NASA, where we make fun of terrible things. So it's very likely that we will do a later Tremors movie at some point. Maybe even Tremors 2 for starters, because it's got some really, really funny shit in it. But yeah, I
01:40:54
Speaker
I don't know the order of them, I just know that he's in almost all of them and they get increasingly terrible. It's one of those franchises like the Hellraiser franchise where at some point they're actually not making trimmers films, they're making a film where they've slapped the word trimmers on top.
01:41:18
Speaker
The only question for me is when they eventually reveal what the tremors are, are they going to be aliens or government created monsters? Right. These seem like the only two options. So I was curious to see where that was going to go. But yeah, I. Yeah. Yeah.
01:41:35
Speaker
I'm not quite sure I know they keep on finding tremors in different parts of the world, but I'm not quite sure whether they've ever quite explained why they're there. And I suspect by this point in time the audience doesn't care. Probably not, but I will probably end up going and watching them because I'm a freak and I care about things like that when I'm not watching 25 hours of anti-vaxxers.
01:41:58
Speaker
I rewatched all of the Saw sequence recently because I also do weird things like that for no particularly good reason. It's fair. I'm rewatching Hannibal right now because it's the best show. Oh, I really, really hope they get to make a continuation movie or miniseries at some point because it was astounding from beginning to end and it was just so sad. It had to end and not get a continuation.
01:42:25
Speaker
I don't know how they're going to do a continuation, given how it ends. But yes, I would I'll be happy to watch more of it. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We need to. We we need to know what happened to Jillian Anderson. Does it mean? I mean, that that final scene is very suggestive, very suggestive, indeed. Anyway, we now, as is usual for the podcast as guide to the conspiracy dovetailing off into pop culture. This is probably where the the episode should end. Aaron, thank you very much for being so generous with your time.
01:42:55
Speaker
Thanks very much. And thanks again for reaching out and turning me on to more of the philosophy of conspiracism stuff that I didn't know existed because I assumed, I think somewhat correctly, that this was beneath actual philosophers to talk about. But I really appreciate the work that y'all are doing. So thank you. Thank you. The podcasters guide to the conspiracy is Josh Anderson and me Dr. M. R. X. Denterth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com
01:43:22
Speaker
and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, it's just a step to the left.