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EXIT Podcast Episode 19: Domestic Extremism (DegreeStudies)
681 Plays3 years ago
DegreeStudies is an EXIT member who researches "online domestic extremism" for the federales. We discuss:
- Why the deep state interprets memes as irresistible mind-control sorcery
- Which niche RW microceleb scares the bugman most, & why it is Dr Bennett
- How Islamic terrorism held the blue/red coalition together
- What the Russians are actually up to, if anything
- Remaining human in the face of cybernetic institutions
- Being in communion with history, & the beauty of LARP
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to the exit podcast.
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett joined here by degree studies.
00:00:21
Speaker
Degree studies is an exit member who roots out Russian disinformation online for the Biden administration.
00:00:27
Speaker
He analyzes your tweets for latent disloyalty or heterosexuality.
00:00:30
Speaker
He catalogs them in a database and he prepares supports for superiors to target you for gang stalking, seed oil advertisements, microwave radiation attacks, et cetera.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to the show degree studies.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:41
Speaker
And you know, just so we're clear, I work under the czar of heterosexuality enforcement.
00:00:45
Speaker
So
00:00:46
Speaker
You know, that's not my particular title, but that is my my pervia.
00:00:53
Speaker
Tell us about your actual job.
Experiences in the Middle East
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:55
Speaker
So I think it's easiest to start with travels a little bit.
00:01:01
Speaker
After college, I was trying to get better at Arabic.
00:01:05
Speaker
So I spent some time in Lebanon and Syria.
00:01:09
Speaker
And after I got back, I had like a OK network of both.
00:01:14
Speaker
friends and knowledge of sort of the players and stakeholders in the Syrian civil war.
00:01:19
Speaker
So did a bunch of things related to that, but ultimately both for private institutions and institutions that ultimately worked with the government, I was doing sort of social media analysis of jihadi content online.
00:01:35
Speaker
And that has sort of developed over time into just social media analysis of
00:01:40
Speaker
a number of political questions, you know, heterosexuality, the most important, but just, just one.
00:01:46
Speaker
Right.
00:01:47
Speaker
We have to root it out.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, I'm happy to report based on my, I mean, this is anecdotal, but my cursory review of the internet is that there's very little heterosexuality remaining.
00:01:59
Speaker
We're so close to beating it.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:01
Speaker
One day, inshallah.
00:02:06
Speaker
So tell me first about your experience with doing the analysis on jihadis.
00:02:11
Speaker
What did you find about sort of their corner of the internet?
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things I should say up front just to, I mean, I am sort of,
00:02:20
Speaker
I have a very specific background and there might be certain things I'm missing, but one important clarification is that I think the government and the private organizations that do this work, at least the parts of it that I've seen, there's a big bifurcation between the people who are working on sort of automated algorithmic capture of online content that's bad versus like human analysts who
00:02:47
Speaker
who are not even working with those tools, but are looking for very specific things.
00:02:51
Speaker
And I'm in the second group.
00:02:53
Speaker
So everything I'm going to say is sort of about this by hand analysis and what I think the challenges and problems with it are.
00:03:01
Speaker
And, you know, if there's someone listening who says like, you know, actually,
00:03:05
Speaker
we have a Palantir terminal and we can totally tell when someone's, you know, in underwear in their mom's basement versus is a real terrorist.
00:03:12
Speaker
Like for all I know that that could be true, but you know, if that is true, then I don't know why I still get paid to do what I do, but there's lots of redundancy in government.
00:03:21
Speaker
So maybe I shouldn't look into that too hard.
Critiques of Digital Warfare
00:03:24
Speaker
But yeah, so I think a big like meme in, in Washington DC that I think is, is very typical of,
00:03:33
Speaker
so many things that have gone wrong is after ISIS emerged, there were a lot of people saying like, oh, the jihadists have beat us in the digital space.
00:03:43
Speaker
The jihadis have beat us in the digital space.
00:03:44
Speaker
We need to we need to up our game to be on par with them.
00:03:49
Speaker
And I think like this basic premise
00:03:52
Speaker
is just sort of like a misunderstanding of what asymmetric warfare is.
00:03:57
Speaker
Like we would never say, you know, if some terrorists walked into a mall and shot people, we would never respond by saying like, our mall murder game is really whack.
00:04:07
Speaker
And like these guys are walking...
00:04:11
Speaker
You know, like there are certain things that we're just not going to be as good at as them.
00:04:15
Speaker
And maybe we shouldn't even try.
00:04:16
Speaker
That's the that's the basic point.
00:04:18
Speaker
So it's like, yeah, the State Department is not going to be as good as at shitposting as like Algerians in France who, whatever their ideology, are like young and funny and, you know, have this this corner of the Internet that they participate in.
00:04:31
Speaker
So I think.
00:04:33
Speaker
And also, like, you know, there's defense contractors and consultants, and they really got in the heads of, I think, the generals and other folks saying, like, if you guys were good at the Internet, you could stop this recruiting flow.
00:04:49
Speaker
And, you know, like the stuff they're doing, their graphics are so good.
00:04:53
Speaker
Like there was this.
00:04:54
Speaker
If only we had the right graphic design.
00:04:57
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:04:58
Speaker
I mean, and this is where like the, you know, the sort of, I mean, I don't want to overdo it, but you can probably already see like the sort of echoes here of how things played out in 2016, where, you know, you'd have serious people on TV being like, the potency of the frog, like, what can we do?
00:05:16
Speaker
And, you know, they were like generating probably billion dollar memes somewhere.
00:05:20
Speaker
But I always looked at it as like,
00:05:23
Speaker
yeah, like young men who are dispossessed and angry are going to be good at the internet.
00:05:30
Speaker
And like, you can't really, but I also thought like the way they were attempting to establish causality was really misguided because I think, and I sort of understand it, but it's like they were looking at sort of this dynamic,
00:05:46
Speaker
you know, language developing on the internet in like jihadist groups and saying, this is so sophisticated, like this is why they're pulling people in.
00:05:56
Speaker
And I think what they didn't want to say, what maybe some people knew is it's just like, no, like there's a critique out there of, I don't know, a global world order.
00:06:07
Speaker
And I think for young Muslims, there's like a critique that's very appealing.
00:06:11
Speaker
And the internet's capture of that critique is,
00:06:15
Speaker
is like symptom, not disease.
00:06:17
Speaker
And as with so many things, like the disease is really difficult and treating it demands answering some hard questions about yourself.
00:06:28
Speaker
So it's like treat the symptom as the disease.
00:06:31
Speaker
The symptom is they're really good at the internet.
00:06:34
Speaker
What do we do about this?
00:06:35
Speaker
Right.
00:06:36
Speaker
They're owning us online because their memes have this magic power, not because we're like stupid assholes who look stupid all the time.
00:06:44
Speaker
Right, or even on a more basic level, it's like you do encounter people who are just like, well, there's nothing fundamentally appealing about archaic religiosity.
00:06:55
Speaker
We know in a competition between... Coca-Cola.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, sincere connection with the transcendent and sexual liberalism.
00:07:06
Speaker
We win every time, so what the fuck is going on?
00:07:08
Speaker
It's like...
00:07:11
Speaker
You know, and if you have a certain perspective, you can see why that wouldn't necessarily be accurate or a good way to think about it.
00:07:21
Speaker
So I don't even know, you know, there's also like a whole counter messaging part of this that I know some people in government do, but I was much more in, and again, working for private institutions that interface with the government, I was much more on just like,
00:07:39
Speaker
observing and capturing and identifying trends.
00:07:43
Speaker
And like, I think, like, I brought this up to you when we spoke before, but I think a perfect example of sort of where all this falls down is like, I would see a meme where it'd be like a woman in a hijab
00:07:57
Speaker
and then a bunch of American college girls at spring break.
00:08:00
Speaker
And the caption would be, who is free and who is a slave?
00:08:04
Speaker
And it's like, there was no ability in the room.
00:08:08
Speaker
I always sort of just wanted to look around and be like, look, I want to win against these people too.
00:08:13
Speaker
But this is true, right?
00:08:14
Speaker
If they don't want their daughter or their sister, if they prefer the left picture to the right picture, I sort of doff my cap.
00:08:23
Speaker
I can't...
00:08:26
Speaker
Which is to say, like, don't get in an ideological confrontation with some shit that's true.
00:08:32
Speaker
Right.
00:08:34
Speaker
Because, like, choosing battle space is a lot of... And I don't know what it would mean, like, because I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about, like, how would I do this if I were actually constructing the observation mission?
00:08:49
Speaker
But I think it's like they were putting so much under the
00:08:55
Speaker
a headline of sort of like troubling jihadi content on the internet, you're capturing a lot of stuff.
00:09:01
Speaker
And I think obviously we see this as a problem with every kind of censorship the government or any institution does, which is like, if you're capturing a lot of stuff that most normal people would agree with, then you might already be in some trouble because you're sort of, you're sort of revealing that you're opposed to things
00:09:20
Speaker
And I would say like, this is sort of more broadly, this is where I can zoom out and sort of articulate a critique of the war on terror generally, which I would just say like, the US government would never call it like reforming Islam or whatever.
Misinterpretation and Terrorism
00:09:35
Speaker
But I would say like, that's what they want.
00:09:37
Speaker
Right.
00:09:38
Speaker
And this never should have been a confrontation with people's religious values.
00:09:43
Speaker
It should have been a confrontation with
00:09:46
Speaker
a form of tactics that used violence against civilians.
00:09:50
Speaker
And like, once you create a linkage between, uh, certain sincerely held religious beliefs that are extremely broad in terms of who, who considers them, uh, you know, like, uh, in line with scripture, like holy, righteous.
00:10:07
Speaker
Once you're like throwing a lot of stuff in that bin, I think you're just, you're, you're in trouble.
00:10:12
Speaker
And, and another thing we were talking about before is like,
00:10:17
Speaker
The question of who posting these memes is a real terrorist, who is a supporter, and who is just like trolling.
00:10:26
Speaker
I think that's actually a question that is not well suited to this environment.
00:10:32
Speaker
Because I think like,
00:10:33
Speaker
again, the nature of the young man on the internet is like, he is boundary testing.
00:10:38
Speaker
And the question of like, is this man capable of, of, you know, putting a pipe bomb somewhere?
00:10:44
Speaker
Or is he just a shit poster?
00:10:46
Speaker
Like, because I'm a religious person, and I believe in free will, and I don't believe in fate.
00:10:51
Speaker
It's like,
00:10:52
Speaker
That's a question that's going to be answered in his heart and in his relationship with God.
00:10:56
Speaker
That's not a question that can be answered by like an algorithmic analysis of the content of his tweets.
00:11:02
Speaker
So it's like, you know, shit poster today could be terrorist tomorrow and vice versa.
00:11:08
Speaker
And it's not going to be.
00:11:10
Speaker
And I think that they, I think there's a level of not understanding, like not, this isn't even political misunderstanding, but there's a, there's a level of,
00:11:19
Speaker
misunderstanding the role of shitposting as trying ideas on.
00:11:24
Speaker
Trying ideas on and also the psychological warfare of convincing your enemies that the ideas they're scared of are more prevalent than they would like to believe, which I think is something that jihadis love doing.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:40
Speaker
And I mean, you know, when you're, when you're, the problem maybe from their perspective is it's comparable to like,
00:11:50
Speaker
If you lived in a nation that had like legal religious freedom, but like half of the people were like Aztecs with like, they wanna roll heads and severed hearts from the steps of the temple.
00:12:11
Speaker
And like, well, I'm sorry, you just don't get to have religious freedom then, I guess.
00:12:16
Speaker
And so like from their perspective, like the whole suite of traditional sexual ethics, traditional gender ethics, even like tribalism and nationalism per se, it's like those are just sort of not acceptable things.
00:12:33
Speaker
in their, in their cosmos.
00:12:36
Speaker
And, and, and so like, they're in a really tough situation because like, yeah, it is stupid to go to war with someone's fundamental identity that when there's millions of them all around you, but that's kind of their religion too.
00:12:50
Speaker
Right.
00:12:51
Speaker
I think what you say is, is interesting.
00:12:53
Speaker
This is where I'm going to get a little, I don't know, tin pot or whatever, but I think in some ways, um,
00:13:00
Speaker
Part of why maybe Islam, radical Islam, was an appealing enemy for the United States as the leader of sort of a certain Western, you know, global cultural and political hegemony or empire or whatever you want to call it, is that in their case, all these ideas that we like to think of as archaic were like relined with
00:13:24
Speaker
what are in some sense, pre-modern societies.
00:13:27
Speaker
Whereas like, if you go to Asia, it's like, there could be a very modern political institutions.
00:13:31
Speaker
It's like, what do these people care about?
00:13:32
Speaker
Well, traditional gender roles and a nationalism.
00:13:36
Speaker
Oh, does that come from God?
00:13:37
Speaker
No, like they have a parliament.
00:13:39
Speaker
They just, this is what they care about.
00:13:41
Speaker
So it's like, that's sort of like a, that would be a confrontation where you can't contrast what you want.
00:13:47
Speaker
Like, I think the sort of global empire people would like to say,
00:13:51
Speaker
if you are modern in your political institutions and your technology, you will inevitably end up as untied to any sort of land or God as we have become.
00:14:02
Speaker
And there's lots of places on earth where that's not true, but in the Middle East, you can create this, uh, this strong contrast where you're sort of like, well, you can nail it all to the door of the mosque and like, and like make the sort of make that the enemy.
00:14:17
Speaker
And it's really handy because like you can go after like,
00:14:21
Speaker
There's a, there's a certain, there's that story of the English Raj officer who they told him like, you can't stop us from burning our wives with Sati, the Hindu practice of burning wives.
00:14:40
Speaker
You can't stop us from doing that because it's our, it's our custom, our national custom.
00:14:44
Speaker
And he says, well,
00:14:45
Speaker
In my national custom, we take people who burn their wives alive and we hang them and take all their property.
00:14:51
Speaker
So let's all act according to national custom.
00:14:53
Speaker
And I think there was a way of, there was a way of turning Western chauvinism and Western sort of pride in our accomplishments against sort of fundamental moral principles, gender ethics, sexual ethics in the name of like, well, it's,
00:15:13
Speaker
The problem is that those brown people have taken it too far.
00:15:17
Speaker
And so us and sort of maybe the harder line liberals were able to sort of align and they were sort of able to deploy us.
00:15:25
Speaker
And I mean, in a literal sense, deploy people like us into the desert to go fight those people.
00:15:33
Speaker
When the daylight between the grunt on the ground from Alabama or Tennessee and the jihadi is just way smaller than that we were led to believe.
Media Trust and Conspiracy Theories
00:15:44
Speaker
Right.
00:15:45
Speaker
And I also just think like,
00:15:46
Speaker
the thing that always frustrates me, I mean, I know it's a, it's a huge people on the right or young people on the right get mad about like when boomers are sort of like Democrats are the real racist.
00:15:57
Speaker
And I, I, I get that.
00:15:59
Speaker
I get like not wanting to play by the established virtues of the other team.
00:16:04
Speaker
But I also think like, I do, I have been in many conversations where I'm like, no, I am the real like at Islam respecter because it's like,
00:16:14
Speaker
Here's what I would say to, you know, my Muslim comrades.
00:16:18
Speaker
And I think that this is almost universally felt as a more respectful position where I'd say, I do not think Islam is true, but I have no desire to change the content of your religion.
00:16:31
Speaker
Whereas what's so messed up to me is like, no American official would ever say Islam isn't true.
00:16:38
Speaker
They would just attempt in all these ways to change the content of the religion.
00:16:43
Speaker
And part of my whole thing is that like that position is actually a much more belligerent, uh, position for a dominant culture than what I'm saying, which is sort of, Oh yeah.
00:16:55
Speaker
No, unambiguously like, Oh, Islam isn't false, but all of you are bad Muslims and, and you're all betraying the truth of your faith.
00:17:07
Speaker
And, and therefore like you're not entitled to, um,
00:17:13
Speaker
It's not an exercise of religious freedom for you to believe those things because those aren't really what your faith teaches.
00:17:19
Speaker
You're just using that to be whatever.
00:17:23
Speaker
Right.
00:17:23
Speaker
And I could, I'm not going to, but I could go on a rant about mainline Protestants here where, you know, their definition of religiosity is innovation.
00:17:33
Speaker
And so, of course, it makes sense to them to be like, yeah, to be the real Muslim.
00:17:38
Speaker
You just do like, you know, Thomas Jefferson Islam.
00:17:41
Speaker
But, you know, we love our mainline Protestant brothers and we won't go into that.
00:17:46
Speaker
Oh, boy.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:51
Speaker
So, and I mean, I spent some time in the Middle East myself on an internship, again, trying to hone my Arabic just like you.
00:18:03
Speaker
And one of the things that I encountered most often in that culture was conspiracy theories.
00:18:10
Speaker
And it was an element of, A, you know, because there's no...
00:18:18
Speaker
I was, I originally like at the time I thought it was because they don't have a free press because they don't have an independent media.
00:18:24
Speaker
And that's why they have all these conspiracy theories because they don't have anybody they can trust.
00:18:29
Speaker
And.
00:18:31
Speaker
I sort of started to realize as I got older that like, oh, I also don't have an independent media.
00:18:36
Speaker
We just really believed what they were selling us.
00:18:40
Speaker
And so we didn't buy conspiracy theories because we were stupid.
00:18:43
Speaker
And like, I would dearly love to go back to the Middle East and just be like, you guys are right.
00:18:51
Speaker
I was wrong.
00:18:52
Speaker
I'm an idiot.
00:18:52
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:18:53
Speaker
Like, and it's been weird to watch that phenomenon explode in my own country.
00:19:01
Speaker
because we're all schizos now.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think what our betters have been coasting off of is that the way in which both market attributes and cultural affiliations within a society distort media narratives is very different than the way a centralized regime attempts to coerce media narratives.
00:19:24
Speaker
But I think this had led us...
00:19:26
Speaker
a lot of us to the conclusion that in a, you know, in a society where the pressures on media narratives were coming from the market or from a sort of cultural allegiance felt by the journalists, that that was much less perverse than one in which the regime was directly controlling speech.
00:19:44
Speaker
And I think what we're all just getting a lesson in is that, like, if the cultural conflict dial is sufficiently dialed up,
00:19:53
Speaker
it can start to get much more perverted than you might expect.
00:19:57
Speaker
I'm also like really persuaded.
00:20:00
Speaker
I didn't know about this at all, but there's a certain perspective you encounter online where people are like, America's always been a crazy country.
00:20:07
Speaker
You know, there's all these ways in which
00:20:09
Speaker
we're more like a developing nation than a, like a, you know, post-industrial European nation.
00:20:15
Speaker
We're just rich.
00:20:15
Speaker
So people mistake us for a first world.
00:20:18
Speaker
The phrase I like is we're just a very rich third world country.
00:20:21
Speaker
And the thing they point to is that like,
00:20:25
Speaker
American media now and its interaction with politics is actually regressing to a much more normative American mean, which is like in the past, it would have been more regional differences as opposed to like cultural blocks.
00:20:39
Speaker
But that there were big parts of American history where like there was no newspaper that a lot of Americans would agree wasn't trash.
00:20:47
Speaker
And like.
00:20:48
Speaker
I think for people our age, you know, our parents, the boomers, like they were the three television channel people.
00:20:54
Speaker
So they were the Walter Cronkite people.
00:20:56
Speaker
But like pre-Walter Cronkite, there wasn't actually that kind of cultural consensus.
00:21:02
Speaker
Probably if there was a difference, it was just that even if it was this crazy before, there was also space and lack.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, you just didn't come into contact with...
00:21:12
Speaker
the, uh, the, yeah.
00:21:14
Speaker
I mean, until you did, and then there was a war, uh, right.
00:21:17
Speaker
And I actually feel very positively about like the sort of sorting that is happening in the country, like where people are moving to be more with like-minded people.
00:21:26
Speaker
Like, I don't know, you could view it two ways.
00:21:28
Speaker
You could say like, if this ever is going to become conflict, you would actually need geographical separation.
00:21:33
Speaker
So that's, I mean, you'd sure hope, I mean, otherwise it's the Balkans.
00:21:38
Speaker
Right.
00:21:38
Speaker
But I do think like it is possible that,
00:21:41
Speaker
just people, you know, I always am sort of excited about like some sort of renewed federalism where some deal could be brokered where like, you know, in, in another 50 years, like Louisiana and California are just basically different countries.
00:21:55
Speaker
You know, if we were in Europe, that would be the distance between like Greece and Scotland.
Historical Political Influences
00:22:01
Speaker
Right.
00:22:01
Speaker
So like, why don't we, uh, we, we can start thinking about it that way maybe, but I wanted to, um,
00:22:07
Speaker
piggyback on that conspiracy theories thing.
00:22:09
Speaker
I think that, um, so martyr made, did a really excellent podcast on like the early history of Zionism.
00:22:17
Speaker
And he was just sort of talking about how there were like different blocks within the British government.
00:22:23
Speaker
Some were very pro Zionist, some were very pro Palestinian and at a number of points, uh,
00:22:30
Speaker
sort of like the pro-Zionist faction within the British government ended up winning out.
00:22:35
Speaker
But how that looked on the ground to the Palestinians was the stuff that the British told them about assurances about not allowing certain levels of state development to take place
00:22:45
Speaker
they all seemed like lies in retrospect.
00:22:47
Speaker
You know, I think that there really were like British officials who were trying to advocate for the Palestinians at that time, but they lost.
00:22:55
Speaker
And so the way that history played out just looked like the British government was sort of in league with the Zionists regularly lying to the Palestinians about what was going to happen.
00:23:06
Speaker
And I think that, you know, I'm not like I don't have like a particularly woke perspective on colonialism writ large, but I do think it's fair to say that
00:23:16
Speaker
Like, you know, we get pretty conspiratorial as Americans just when it's Americans we don't like making the big decisions.
00:23:23
Speaker
So if you extend that a row further and be like, it's actually people from a totally different society making the decisions and the record they're giving you of what decisions they're going to make and why are like
00:23:35
Speaker
incredibly unreliable, then yeah, I think the people of the Middle East have a very valid basis to say, we've done some like real empiricism.
00:23:44
Speaker
We have like a sheet of shit you told us and then what happened.
00:23:48
Speaker
And those don't, you know, those don't match.
00:23:51
Speaker
So that's like an imperial... We looked at the data.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:23:57
Speaker
I think the numbers support their conspiratorial worldview.
00:24:01
Speaker
No, absolutely.
00:24:03
Speaker
We can see, and to be clear, I don't know what happened, but it's like, I lived in Lebanon for a while, I have Lebanese friends.
00:24:09
Speaker
This stuff exploded at the port.
00:24:11
Speaker
A couple hundred people died.
00:24:13
Speaker
And now what it seems like is happening is there's gunfights in the streets because the judge or whoever was selected
00:24:21
Speaker
kind of wants to blame Hezbollah for it.
00:24:24
Speaker
And Hezbollah says, if you're going to have a kangaroo court that blames us for everything that happens, we're going to start gunfights in neighborhoods.
00:24:31
Speaker
And it's like, that is not a situation where you can expect like a quote citizen, unquote, to like parse what's happening.
00:24:40
Speaker
Like the most reasonable conclusion for a Lebanese citizen in that situation is to be like, there's a lot of
00:24:48
Speaker
powerful people with guns making decisions above my pay grade.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I am like a little Adam being bounced about by the physical laws of the universe.
00:24:57
Speaker
And honestly, like, I think you were sort of getting at this.
00:25:00
Speaker
It's like we could learn from that.
00:25:02
Speaker
There's this weird, there's this weird thing in democratic societies where it's like, all we talk about all the time is what we want.
00:25:09
Speaker
and how the expression of our desires will be meted out in the political process.
00:25:14
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, that happens once a century.
00:25:17
Speaker
It's much more accurate to totally separate you and your family's desires for the society you live in from the reality of the society you live in.
00:25:27
Speaker
I think Americans are particularly brainbroken in that regard, where it's just like,
00:25:32
Speaker
well, a lot of us don't want this thing to happen, so surely it won't happen.
00:25:35
Speaker
That's not really how anything, it's like, you know, people stopped liking the wars in like 2008.
Public Perception and Detachment
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, no kidding.
00:25:44
Speaker
And I was, you know, 24, and it was 2011, so first Obama administration, and I was literally, like, this is embarrassing to say, but I was baffled.
00:26:01
Speaker
because all the people that I met were like Fed post level on board with Osama bin Laden.
00:26:12
Speaker
And like, don't say a bad word about Osama bin Laden.
00:26:17
Speaker
But they loved Americans.
00:26:18
Speaker
They loved all Americans.
00:26:20
Speaker
Like they were so amped to have an American friend.
00:26:24
Speaker
And like they wanted us to go to their wedding and they wanted to like, you know, come to this party.
00:26:28
Speaker
And like,
00:26:31
Speaker
Just very warm, sweet people.
00:26:35
Speaker
And I could not understand that at all.
00:26:37
Speaker
And I asked somebody about it finally.
00:26:40
Speaker
And they were like, well, I mean, you're not in charge of what Obama's doing.
00:26:44
Speaker
Like, you don't like, you don't have any to do with like Bush.
00:26:47
Speaker
Like, why would, why would I be mad at you?
00:26:48
Speaker
Like, you know, and, and, and like in my American mind, I was sort of like, well, yeah, I do.
00:26:54
Speaker
Cause I vote.
00:26:55
Speaker
And which is just like the most absurd, like the, the arrogance of that, like that you matter to any of this and like that it matters whether or not you approve, you know?
00:27:09
Speaker
I mean, I was a kid, so whatever, but I think that's a common sentiment.
00:27:13
Speaker
No, for sure.
00:27:14
Speaker
And I know that I almost had a parallel experience where when I studied abroad in Egypt undergrad, and when I was in Egypt, some poll came out that was like some crazy percentage of Egyptians support Al-Qaeda.
00:27:26
Speaker
And, you know, I just did a real quick poll with my Egyptian friends, and I was like getting confused and disturbed.
00:27:32
Speaker
And then one of them was like, oh, by the way, I think the context you're missing here is that none of us think Al-Qaeda attacked the world trade.
00:27:42
Speaker
So, you know, in my mind, I was like, oh, they're justifying this terrible attack.
00:27:49
Speaker
But that wasn't how they thought about it at all.
00:27:53
Speaker
Oh, that's a classic.
00:27:54
Speaker
Ha ha ha ha!
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, though what is interesting is like I've never been a 9-11 truth guy.
00:28:02
Speaker
And one of the reasons you can – and there's even like an Onion skit about this.
00:28:06
Speaker
But one of the reasons I've always believed Al-Qaeda did it is that you can find certain people in the middle of school who are like, yeah, we did it.
00:28:13
Speaker
Don't try to take that shit away from us.
00:28:14
Speaker
Like that was amazing.
00:28:16
Speaker
But that's a minority – that I encountered much more –
00:28:22
Speaker
when I was looking at like social media stuff from like Syria and Iraq sort of, you know, terrorist groups that they would, that it seemed clear that like the rank and file of jihadist militias, they believed, but you know, there, yeah, there could be a flip side of that, which is like, well, yeah, just accepting it at a certain point becomes like a good recruiting thing.
00:28:46
Speaker
tactic.
00:28:46
Speaker
But yeah, there was, I think like middle Eastern normies, at least back in 2008, 2009, there was a lot of skepticism that Al Qaeda had anything to do with that.
00:28:55
Speaker
And yeah.
00:28:56
Speaker
And there's a difference.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:57
Speaker
There's definitely a difference between, um, the hard edge and like the, the, the bros that you met on your internship for sure.
00:29:06
Speaker
Um, and, and I mean, you know, um, you, you find a similar phenomenon, uh,
00:29:16
Speaker
on the right, which is, it didn't happen, but it should have kind of mentality.
00:29:23
Speaker
And I suspect that, I suspect that that is also, there's, there's a level of people who are like, we definitely did it.
00:29:30
Speaker
There's a level of people who are like, we didn't do it, but it would have been cool.
00:29:34
Speaker
And there's a level of people who are like, we didn't do it at all.
00:29:37
Speaker
Right.
00:29:37
Speaker
Well, this is also, I think, sort of what we're, or I in my clumsy way, I'm trying to talk about is that like, staking out a position that is your position all the time is not actually how human beings work.
00:29:50
Speaker
You know, like if I imagine my Arab friends, they might like, maybe a news story comes on Al Jazeera and is about like Abu Ghraib or something terrible we did droning a wedding.
00:30:01
Speaker
It's like for the next 48 hours, that person is like,
00:30:04
Speaker
you know what, maybe, maybe Al Qaeda did 9-11 and I hope they did.
00:30:08
Speaker
And then maybe their media diet changes a little, they're feeling different.
00:30:11
Speaker
They interact with a Westerner and they're like, oh, I don't know, maybe that media, like we all have conspiratorial versions of ourselves.
00:30:19
Speaker
And when we're presented with evidence that encourages that subpersonality to come forward, we can indulge that.
00:30:25
Speaker
But like it actually and that's sort of where this like social media stuff gets all messed up is because like the Internet encourages you to let that voice take the wheel.
00:30:36
Speaker
But that but that doesn't necessarily tell us.
00:30:38
Speaker
Who you are.
00:30:40
Speaker
Is that your perspective as you go about your life?
00:30:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:43
Speaker
And, you know, for some people it clearly is and for some people it definitely isn't.
00:30:46
Speaker
But I don't know, you know, in a couple of years of looking at people's crazy utterances, I have not found a way to just from the text, you know, decode what kind of what kind of person they are.
00:30:58
Speaker
IRL.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:01
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about.
00:31:05
Speaker
It can't have looked the way that it looks now when you started.
00:31:09
Speaker
the political changes and the things that people are looking at have changed so dramatically in the last five years, even in the last year.
00:31:21
Speaker
Can you describe your view of that from sort of inside the belly of the beast?
Conspiracy and Political Dissatisfaction
00:31:27
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:31:27
Speaker
So probably the biggest thing was, I think like the biggest argument at the beginning of this, and I'm on one side of it, is like,
00:31:37
Speaker
Digital recruitment is a big thing for these terrorist jihadi groups.
00:31:42
Speaker
So we need to get them off the internet.
00:31:44
Speaker
And then there was another perspective that I'm more sensitive to that was saying like, whatever they're saying on here, they can say on other platforms, they can make their own platforms.
00:31:52
Speaker
So have them do it where we can watch.
00:31:54
Speaker
I very much agreed with that sentiment.
00:31:56
Speaker
And then I think that with the 2016 election, there became this fear that, um,
00:32:04
Speaker
like in the mind of the people who talked about this, you know, quote, very sophisticated communications operations from Russia primarily, but also places like China was having a huge impact on our, uh, our domestic political discourse.
00:32:20
Speaker
Um, and from the very beginning, I always thought, you know, in 2016, I was, I was pulling for, for Hillary Clinton.
00:32:27
Speaker
I had, I had not, um,
00:32:29
Speaker
face down the implications of a lot of my own political conclusions.
00:32:33
Speaker
I think I was just sort of going with the flow.
00:32:36
Speaker
Didn't think Trump could win.
00:32:37
Speaker
Hadn't given him a lot of thought.
00:32:39
Speaker
And, you know, still now I'm closer to just never voting again than supporting some some figure I'm familiar with.
00:32:47
Speaker
But at that time, even as a person who was
00:32:52
Speaker
like a DC normie in so many ways, I did know like, okay, everything they're saying the Russians and Chinese are doing are actual disputes that exist here.
00:33:04
Speaker
And like, because so much of the problem was like an inability of,
00:33:10
Speaker
sort of beltway people to conjure a perspective, a let's say I'm going to use the word legitimate, not in the sense of like an intellectual defense of Trump, but that like you could summon a coherent critique of American society where voting for Trump made sense for me.
00:33:27
Speaker
Weirdly, like having liberal education being taught about, you know, moral relativism and, you know, maybe all these crazy people around the world, we just don't understand them.
00:33:37
Speaker
with that tool set, it was very easy for me to be like, yeah, this is totally sincere.
00:33:42
Speaker
Like there's reasons people could believe this, but there is a huge emotional need to say, no, our countrymen couldn't be doing this.
00:33:50
Speaker
There must be like a
00:33:54
Speaker
you know, there must be a warehouse somewhere in Siberia where everybody's like posting racist comments, uh, under like a, a brilliant Obama tweet.
00:34:04
Speaker
And it's just, you know, like Maga, Maga man, 69, 420 is actually, uh,
00:34:09
Speaker
Igor Tchaikovsky or whatever.
00:34:11
Speaker
But like, I think if you're just like a little bit of a socially heterodox person where, you know, maybe you have family members in different places politically, maybe you have family members, it's much easier to just be like, oh, well,
00:34:26
Speaker
maybe bots are retweeting this, but like it wouldn't totally matter because this is a sentiment that Americans are totally into.
00:34:36
Speaker
So I think like I was starting from a totally different premise than a lot of the people I was working with because their premise was like, I'm trying to think of a specific example.
00:34:47
Speaker
Oh, here's maybe an example.
00:34:48
Speaker
Like, do you remember Razeeb Khan is a gold star family guy?
00:34:52
Speaker
He got in like a little bit of a tiff with Trump.
00:34:56
Speaker
And Trump said like some some mean things about it.
00:34:59
Speaker
And look, I'm I'm like enough of a still like enough of a bug man and like a typical patriot to be like, yeah, I don't really want people insulting a gold star family.
00:35:10
Speaker
But I also don't really want gold star families at political conventions.
00:35:14
Speaker
But let's leave that aside for the moment and just say that there are a lot of people around me being like, you know, when the when the regime con criticism
00:35:23
Speaker
didn't seem to, there weren't that many people on the right outside of say like Lincoln project or like McCain people.
00:35:30
Speaker
I mean, Lincoln project didn't exist then, but that type of guy.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:34
Speaker
There weren't that many people like seemingly in Trump's base, there was not a huge disgust with him saying those comments.
00:35:41
Speaker
And like, to me, that was just like, yeah, well like the politics of the street is not like the politics of television.
00:35:48
Speaker
Like people, you know, and again, maybe this is time in the middle East.
00:35:51
Speaker
I don't know, but it's like,
00:35:53
Speaker
people's ability to sort of excuse someone that they think is their champion and not excuse someone they think doesn't.
00:36:01
Speaker
Not only does that not confuse me, I think it's legitimate.
00:36:04
Speaker
But like there were other people being like, this is so out of bounds for what America is that like surely there must be hidden hands, you know, saying that they're okay with this when in fact like Americans would never do that.
00:36:18
Speaker
And you know, that's just a very like,
00:36:21
Speaker
velvet-handed, gilded view of what politics is, of what democracy is like.
00:36:27
Speaker
I don't know what other word you use, but it's instantized.
00:36:29
Speaker
Everybody that I've talked to about this who has had that critique, like how could you possibly justify X, Y, and Z?
00:36:39
Speaker
My answer is always basically we disagree about the stakes of the situation.
00:36:44
Speaker
Sure.
00:36:46
Speaker
We disagree about what we're up against and...
00:36:51
Speaker
If it was a guy with a gun holding off a mob outside your house, and then someone said, well, but he actually is mean to his dog.
00:37:10
Speaker
You know, I hate people who are mean to their dogs.
00:37:13
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:37:14
Speaker
But like where we're at, who gives a shit?
00:37:17
Speaker
Like that's like this, the situation that's not in the, that's not in this situation right now.
00:37:23
Speaker
And, and that's, I mean, you know, there was that article, the flight 93 election, which, you know, a lot of us read.
00:37:27
Speaker
And I think that, yeah, that's what they don't get is that they don't get
00:37:34
Speaker
they think of themselves as being the ones who like take this seriously and that, and that Trump is like a joke and we're sort of fought, we're sort of supporting him as a, as this really like mean spirited troll to tear down this really good thing.
00:37:48
Speaker
And that's just, that's just the complete wrong read.
00:37:52
Speaker
of the situation.
00:37:54
Speaker
There's an Adam Serwer book that I think describes this perspective and he, the author, has that perspective.
00:38:00
Speaker
It's called The Cruelty is the Point.
00:38:03
Speaker
And I think if you think the cruelty is the point, you are really ass backwards on this.
00:38:09
Speaker
Like it's not...
00:38:11
Speaker
It's not the point.
00:38:12
Speaker
I think to a lot of people, it doesn't even appear as cruel.
00:38:14
Speaker
Like one thing I've always felt, I mean, I totally agree with your comment about stakes.
00:38:21
Speaker
Like I certainly don't view people as rational.
00:38:24
Speaker
Like I have a more, a more like, like I, I sort of think,
00:38:30
Speaker
I don't know, like religiosity or spirituality or something is so present in all things humans do that I'm not going to say people are rational, but I do think that when people do something that I consider out of what I would expect them to do, I immediately try to reassess my understanding of the situation.
00:38:50
Speaker
Right.
00:38:50
Speaker
Update your model.
00:38:51
Speaker
Yeah, not move those people.
00:38:53
Speaker
Well, like, they were formerly rational, but now they're irrational.
00:38:56
Speaker
Like, I don't think... And again, this is another area where I'm saying, like, I am the hashtag real liberal.
00:39:02
Speaker
Because, like, I thought that's, you know, in my hippie college-geared high school I went to, that was certainly how they taught us to think about people outside the United States.
00:39:15
Speaker
Right.
00:39:15
Speaker
But then the minute that you...
00:39:18
Speaker
When it becomes incoherent is when you try to apply it to the past.
00:39:23
Speaker
Because when you try to say that Americans in the 1600s did things that made moral sense to them, or Germans in the 1930s did things that made moral sense to them, and they didn't spontaneously go insane,
00:39:41
Speaker
Like that is a way harder conversation to have.
00:39:45
Speaker
And that doesn't mean that you like justify what they did, but it's a totally different.
00:39:50
Speaker
It's not what you're taught in school.
00:39:52
Speaker
What you're taught in school is that they went nuts.
00:39:55
Speaker
Right.
00:39:55
Speaker
And I think that like people way overestimate like how many figures in history are leaning into playing
Moral Complexity and Perception
00:40:02
Speaker
the heel.
00:40:02
Speaker
Like I think it's virtually none.
00:40:04
Speaker
But when you see sort of like Western renderings of a lot of historical conflicts, there's always these figures like not that Django is supposed to be like a serious treatment of
00:40:16
Speaker
But the Leonardo DiCaprio slave owner character in that, it's like the perspective they project onto him is that like he knows slave owning is bad and he loves it.
00:40:27
Speaker
Like he's in league with the devil.
00:40:30
Speaker
He likes that it's bad.
00:40:31
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, I don't think...
00:40:33
Speaker
there is a much more complex, maybe equally objectionable, like sort of patrimonial perspective.
00:40:39
Speaker
It's like you don't have to read a lot of, you know, primary sources to know that that's that's a little bit different than the attitude that existed.
00:40:46
Speaker
But I think it's.
00:40:47
Speaker
Well, we're doing the same thing.
00:40:48
Speaker
We're doing the exact same thing with, you know,
00:40:53
Speaker
mom putting her kid in a dress for, for social media clout.
00:40:57
Speaker
We're like, she knows she's the devil.
00:41:01
Speaker
She knows that she's monstrous and she's psychologically destroying her son for attention.
00:41:07
Speaker
And she, and she's gonna, you know, she's going to pull the cheap heat, you know, on that because it's fun for her.
00:41:14
Speaker
And that, nope.
00:41:15
Speaker
That's not the case.
00:41:17
Speaker
Right.
00:41:17
Speaker
And I would say like, I think one, one area in which I have some trouble, uh, operating in this space or vibing with people is like, uh, I know a lot of people who believe things that I think are really destructive, who I really love and who I'm not ready to cast out as people that we can't make a country with.
00:41:42
Speaker
And like,
00:41:43
Speaker
I'm not saying that I'm in the right that I know that my more, um, you know, dovish attitude is, but in other words, like I know people, not the decision you just laid out exactly with the dress, but it's like, I know people where I think they're making the exact wrong decision, but I'm also confident they think they're doing the best thing for their child.
00:42:03
Speaker
They are not in fact being cynical or being, uh,
00:42:08
Speaker
you know, saying like, I don't care about this kid.
00:42:10
Speaker
I have this other, and like, that's much more, you know, this is, this is probably cringe, but it's like the, the soldier needs and thing is like, you can think about the world as good and bad people, or you can think that good and evil cross every human heart.
00:42:24
Speaker
And I think all scripture, Islamic, Mormon, Catholic, because the religions of the world are in some sense wise, they all go with the, across the human heart model because, you know,
00:42:37
Speaker
The identifying the bad people model is the model of, you know, infinite conflict and genocide.
00:42:43
Speaker
And the crossing the human heart model is sort of the model of personal growth and accountability.
00:42:49
Speaker
And that is at any point in history is the least popular model for how to consider morality.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely.
00:43:00
Speaker
And I mean, one of the things, you know, they talked about like, there's that quote that like, travel is the death to prejudice or something.
00:43:11
Speaker
Something like, you know, if you just traveled, you wouldn't be, you'd be liberal, you'd be progressive.
00:43:16
Speaker
And what travel did for me was that it showed me that none of my positions and none of, nobody I know's positions
00:43:27
Speaker
we're particularly extreme.
00:43:29
Speaker
Um, like, you know, if, if you're, if you're, uh, you got a good old boy uncle from, from Alabama and he's got some thoughts about race, um, they are just totally normal in China.
00:43:45
Speaker
totally normal in the Middle East.
00:43:47
Speaker
Like he would be totally at home.
00:43:50
Speaker
And, and that doesn't mean he's right.
00:43:51
Speaker
It just means like, let's, let's keep this in perspective.
00:43:56
Speaker
Right.
00:43:57
Speaker
And there's, there's a total cope that says that racism is not a sort of endemic and timeless quality of human beings, but is in fact an article of colonialism.
00:44:10
Speaker
And it's just so a historical story.
00:44:12
Speaker
Right.
00:44:13
Speaker
We made it to prop up this system.
00:44:15
Speaker
Which, like what?
00:44:17
Speaker
Right.
00:44:17
Speaker
And so, yeah, I also wanted to say about that good old boy in Alabama, I think another thing with Trump is like, I didn't realize how important manners are to people because, you know, describing this sort of heterodox social environment, I've always found myself in where I have people I love on all sides and at various extremes.
00:44:38
Speaker
One thing I had always noticed in life is like where I grew up, this lily white, nice town,
00:44:44
Speaker
no one in that town would ever say something that was clearly racially prejudiced, but there absolutely were racists in that town.
Interpersonal and Cultural Dynamics
00:44:55
Speaker
And then I know other people who just like, they are characteristically incapable of talking about race in a respectful way, but they have, they have nothing but love in their heart.
00:45:07
Speaker
And I think like part of the whole Trump thing is like,
00:45:11
Speaker
I think the upper classes really conflate manners and morality.
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:16
Speaker
They're like, if you're going to use certain language, if you're going to talk about people in a certain way, like that actually means like the content of your heart is worse.
00:45:26
Speaker
And I've just never found that to be true in my own life.
00:45:30
Speaker
And probably that was made even more extreme traveling because like, and you were sort of talking about this too.
00:45:35
Speaker
It's like you meet people who have the most wild and seemingly destructive ideologies who are like,
00:45:41
Speaker
more hospitable and family oriented and more disciplined about their religious practice than like any American you've ever met.
00:45:48
Speaker
And you're like, okay, maybe like, maybe the take on, you know, factory farming is not actually the big moral question we think it is.
00:45:58
Speaker
Maybe it's more like human beings are nuts.
00:46:00
Speaker
We're all working with limited information.
00:46:02
Speaker
But if you're like,
00:46:03
Speaker
If you're good to your parents, good to your kids, people in your community respect and trust you, like you're probably good.
00:46:08
Speaker
And maybe the ideological part is less important than we've been led to believe.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah, you have to bring it into a tighter sphere of things that you actually influence and have something to say about.
00:46:21
Speaker
Again, I think it's narcissism.
00:46:22
Speaker
I think it's narcissism to say that like, and people get in fights about it.
00:46:27
Speaker
Like I had a family that's dear friends of mine
00:46:32
Speaker
they were just torn apart over like stuff about immigration, stuff about the vaccine.
00:46:39
Speaker
And it's like, none of us are going to move the ball on any of this.
00:46:44
Speaker
Like the, the winner of this argument doesn't get to decide anything.
00:46:49
Speaker
And, and yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
And like, yeah, I don't know if this is helpful for people and like, I don't want to bring my, uh,
00:46:57
Speaker
family into things necessarily, but it's like my mom raised me by herself.
00:47:02
Speaker
I don't think we have a political overlap on anything, but there are, there are so many ways in which she's just the most generous person, uh, that I've ever known.
00:47:13
Speaker
Like what she did for me and my brother.
00:47:15
Speaker
It's just like,
00:47:16
Speaker
heroic, you know, in my view, she's she's sort of a saint.
00:47:19
Speaker
And like, I'm just not gonna I view part of victory as like not letting the insane people on TV, like change my perspective on my mother, because my mother has like succumbed to like COVID hysteria in some small degree.
00:47:34
Speaker
Like, I just think ultimately, I definitely agree with her, but I disagree with her.
00:47:39
Speaker
But like,
00:47:40
Speaker
I don't know.
00:47:40
Speaker
She's still like in every way, a more morally impressive person than me.
00:47:44
Speaker
So like, I have to just be like, what is the consequence of her?
00:47:49
Speaker
And you know, if she was running for some political position, maybe it'd be more complicated, but as it is, she's just a person and I'm just a person.
00:47:56
Speaker
So, you know, it's, I do think there's like a, there's a right wing version of like, talk to your racist uncle this Thanksgiving.
00:48:05
Speaker
I just kind of don't,
00:48:08
Speaker
I don't know.
00:48:08
Speaker
I, I'm sure people's family situations are different.
00:48:10
Speaker
I can't, I can't make a rule that'll work for everyone, but I know what I try to do, man, to keep it interesting.
00:48:16
Speaker
Like, cause I don't want, I, I want to share, you know, I want to have a real talk with my family and I want to, I don't want to like, just keep it to like, you know, how about them cowboys or whatever, you know, because, uh, because that's boring and insipid.
00:48:35
Speaker
Um, but,
00:48:38
Speaker
the way that I do it is I want to talk about like UFOs and Bigfoot.
00:48:42
Speaker
And like, I want to, I want to like go lean real hard into the schizo posting with my family, because then we're just like talking about like weird stuff.
00:48:51
Speaker
Like it's, it's orthogonal to sort of the things that we would fight about.
00:48:55
Speaker
And it, it raises fun ideas and you still get to talk and you still get to kind of,
00:49:02
Speaker
approach the questions of worldview, questions of epistemology, questions of culture.
00:49:09
Speaker
But you get to do it in a stealthy way that doesn't provoke conflict.
00:49:15
Speaker
No, and everyone has a schizo poster inside them.
00:49:18
Speaker
They do.
00:49:19
Speaker
If you just sort of go through...
00:49:22
Speaker
Like if you spend enough time with people, you will find the totally socially unacceptable thing they believe.
00:49:28
Speaker
And it's very valuable to find it because then you can, it's often a way to give each other some generosity.
00:49:34
Speaker
Because like if you're, if you discover that thing and they're a person who's sort of judgmental of you or your beliefs, you can be like, okay, but there's that thing that you're holding in, not telling your coworkers, like that's just my whole life, baby.
00:49:46
Speaker
Like, you know.
00:49:53
Speaker
Oh man.
00:49:54
Speaker
So, so going back to this question of, of narcissism, there's a, there's a belief on right-wing Twitter that our shit posts are very important to the regime, that we are sort of public enemy number one in their eyes.
00:50:09
Speaker
From your perspective, how much time do you think they actually spend thinking about like me personally, but also, you know, the wider orbit?
00:50:19
Speaker
Hmm.
00:50:19
Speaker
Well,
00:50:21
Speaker
I think that generally there is, um, there is like a disturbance in the force of, of global homo to the extent that they are, they are watching tools for narrative enforcement fail in real time.
00:50:38
Speaker
And that at a macro level is very disturbing to them.
00:50:42
Speaker
But I think that, uh,
00:50:46
Speaker
again, like, you know, schizo posting, right-wing schizo posting is art.
00:50:51
Speaker
And I, far be it from me to, I'm a lover of art.
00:50:54
Speaker
So I think it's very important sort of on its own aesthetic merits.
00:50:59
Speaker
But I would also say that,
00:51:01
Speaker
like this is going to make me sound like totally normie con or whatever, but it's like people posting frogs matter much less than like moms who thought McAuliffe was bullshit and went out and voted for Youngkin.
00:51:14
Speaker
And like, I'm not even saying Youngkin is like an important figure.
00:51:18
Speaker
I'm just saying like the communications failures that are betters need to be really worried about are happening at a massive scale so that like,
00:51:29
Speaker
I think those of us who have like a non-accounts and post crazy shit, they think of us as like lost to them.
00:51:35
Speaker
And if they worry about us at all, it's because they would tie us to some violent potential.
00:51:43
Speaker
And certainly as a person who's at the nexus of those two things, I think they don't need to worry about that.
00:51:50
Speaker
They need to worry about the much more normal people who either don't have accounts or on Facebook, who just sort of like every day have a little less confidence in the things they're hearing.
00:52:02
Speaker
And this is why like...
00:52:03
Speaker
I get very confused.
00:52:05
Speaker
This is why I could never be a Marxist, right?
00:52:07
Speaker
Because I think if you're a straightforward materialist, it's pretty easy to be like, okay, well, as a rich, fancy person, you want to undermine the chuds.
00:52:18
Speaker
But you can't do a full-out, multi-pronged assault on everything they like simultaneously because it's just bad for business.
00:52:26
Speaker
But that's what they're doing.
00:52:29
Speaker
So I can only...
00:52:30
Speaker
I can only explain it by being like, yeah, they really don't like this and they're really attacking the people they don't like out of sort of cultural animosity.
00:52:42
Speaker
There's no strategy here.
00:52:43
Speaker
And again, I would say people in government who are smart, I'm sure they're aware that like...
Media Influence and Sincerity
00:52:51
Speaker
in any political coalition building, there's always going to be antagonism.
00:52:55
Speaker
But like a lot of mainstream institutions are leaning into antagonism and even seeing mass public unhappiness as sort of like evidence of their righteousness or whatever.
00:53:07
Speaker
And like, that's the real problem.
00:53:09
Speaker
You know, like I can't go into that as evidence of their righteousness.
00:53:13
Speaker
What do you mean by that?
00:53:15
Speaker
Well, I think like the New York Times, for example, it's like I see writers at the New York Times sort of like proudly retweeting people talking about the Times being bullshit because they sort of see it as like
00:53:28
Speaker
Yes, like we're making people unhappy, right?
00:53:30
Speaker
Because that's the whole like 60s ethos thing, right?
00:53:33
Speaker
Like uncomfortable conversations.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:35
Speaker
But like the thing is like that's not politics.
00:53:39
Speaker
Like that's some nonsense process that you think people should go through but no one else does.
00:53:44
Speaker
Like politics is just a dipstick of where people are at.
00:53:48
Speaker
So like –
00:53:49
Speaker
Yeah, like making people angry is not a positive indicator.
00:53:53
Speaker
And so like, I just think what they're not acknowledging is like, like, I've even seen people post and I wish I could remember a name, but they've been like, you know, if readership drops from 3 million to 1 million, but...
00:54:06
Speaker
like we lose the racist, then like, so be it.
00:54:09
Speaker
But it's like, okay, the other way to say that is you used to be a narrative setter for lots and lots of people.
00:54:18
Speaker
And now you're a narrative setter for far fewer people.
00:54:21
Speaker
And I think ultimately like that is...
00:54:24
Speaker
That is the real concern.
00:54:26
Speaker
And I think they would like to link sort of liars on Twitter and on... It's the same thing with the Russia thing, right?
00:54:35
Speaker
It's like they want someone to blame...
00:54:39
Speaker
for mass unhappiness besides their own failed worldview and policies.
00:54:44
Speaker
And so if that's Russian bots that are fooling the people, that's a good answer.
00:54:49
Speaker
Or if it's Pepe posters spreading disinformation, that's a good answer too.
00:54:54
Speaker
It's like anything to distract from just all their ideas being pretty unpopular.
00:55:01
Speaker
So like...
00:55:02
Speaker
but so I don't have a clear view, like, but then if someone asked me like, but does it help, you know, uh, like for instance, you know, at the beginning of COVID there were a bunch of, um, right wing accounts that were just sort of like ahead of the curve in terms of what this was going to look like, how big a deal it was going to be.
00:55:21
Speaker
And that definitely made its way into the media, uh,
00:55:26
Speaker
And like that would be an instance where like clearly not only did crazy accounts have an influence, but they sort of were ultimately vindicated.
00:55:35
Speaker
But I would just say like, again, as a, you know, as a lover of art and a believer in God, like do it for the love of the game.
00:55:43
Speaker
Like don't think that, because like part of what's, you know, people talk about the nudge now and it's like, I think part of what is so, uh,
00:55:52
Speaker
grotesque and inhuman about our contemporary culture is like the amount of communication that has been rendered wholly strategic.
00:56:01
Speaker
Like the things that are written and the things that are said are always done with in mind some sort of semi-coercive persuasion.
00:56:09
Speaker
And I would really encourage people to like not even entertain questions of what kind of influence they have, but just to be like,
00:56:16
Speaker
There's value in placing what I think is true on the internet.
00:56:21
Speaker
And, you know, whatever happens with that, like, that's cool.
00:56:25
Speaker
But if it's true, like, that'll be my guidepost and I'll be happy with the things I said.
00:56:29
Speaker
But that's also... You hear it here first.
00:56:33
Speaker
Dr. Bennett, public enemy number one.
00:56:35
Speaker
They do fear me.
00:56:37
Speaker
They are aware of me.
00:56:40
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:40
Speaker
I mean, if you're asking, like, is there, you know, somewhere in Reston, is there a, you know, is there a cork board with a bunch of pictures and your Twitter avi is like, you know, there's a circle of yarn around it and it, you know, connects to a picture of Soleimani's corpse or something.
00:56:57
Speaker
I can't, I can't confirm that there aren't people that stupid in government, but I have not seen the cork board.
00:57:04
Speaker
Also cannot deny.
00:57:05
Speaker
He didn't, yeah, I just want to make that clear.
00:57:09
Speaker
Um...
00:57:12
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:57:14
Speaker
Sorry, I just want to add.
00:57:15
Speaker
I think if anyone has gotten under their skin, it's probably BAP.
00:57:19
Speaker
Oh, no kidding.
00:57:20
Speaker
No kidding.
00:57:21
Speaker
It's got to be BAP.
00:57:22
Speaker
Right.
00:57:22
Speaker
That's just like a guess.
00:57:24
Speaker
But in a way, I think they – this is a weird side note.
00:57:28
Speaker
But I think they're much more disturbed by the defection of people that they might have once invited to a party.
00:57:36
Speaker
Like, I think, I think the thing that people in DC lose the most sleep over is Claremont.
00:57:42
Speaker
And, you know, like probably from our perspective, Claremont's like still towing a lot of pretty respectable lines, you know, in terms of like fealty to the constitution and not bailing on liberalism or, you know, all of these things like, so that, so from my perspective, they're like pretty unradical.
00:57:59
Speaker
And I'd say that in a good way, I like them, but I think like,
00:58:03
Speaker
people really hate that an institution they might've once called respectable is sort of, uh, amplifying people like BAP or, you know, talking to Yarvin or whatever.
00:58:13
Speaker
And I think that's a funny story because I actually was just published in Claremont.
00:58:18
Speaker
Oh, nice.
00:58:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:19
Speaker
I wrote a thing for a response to James Paulus's human forever book.
00:58:26
Speaker
Go check it out.
00:58:26
Speaker
I'll put a link in the, in the podcast description.
00:58:29
Speaker
Yeah, he is.
00:58:29
Speaker
I mean, I like all those guys, but,
00:58:31
Speaker
Poulos is definitely my favorite.
00:58:33
Speaker
And I think his, his sort of analysis of how technology is central in all of these issues is, is pretty on, but, but yeah, like I said, I do think like the sort of more like right-wing Marxist guys, like I don't, I don't ultimately share the worldview, but I do think in all of this stuff, it is pretty useful to try to think of it as class conflict.
00:58:56
Speaker
Whereas like,
00:58:58
Speaker
They never are mad that the unwashed masses disagree with them because they have always thought of those people as trash and they want to manage them, but those people disagreeing with them is par for the course.
00:59:11
Speaker
What really makes them mad is someone that they went to school with being like, maybe the Chuds have a point.
00:59:19
Speaker
Because that's like, you know, that's like Omerta.
00:59:21
Speaker
It's like you keep your problems with the mob inside the mob.
00:59:24
Speaker
You don't go to the cops.
00:59:26
Speaker
You don't take sides against the family ever.
00:59:29
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:59:30
Speaker
So.
00:59:32
Speaker
Right.
00:59:33
Speaker
So.
00:59:33
Speaker
So what do you think that the Chinese and the Russians are actually doing online?
International Influence and Soft Power
00:59:40
Speaker
Like from what you can see, do you think that they actually have some kind of disinformation or sort of a social disruption agenda that they're pursuing?
00:59:53
Speaker
Well,
00:59:55
Speaker
It would not be correct for me to say that none of that stuff ever happens.
01:00:00
Speaker
But if I had to guess, I would say that they're experimenting with it to no particular end.
01:00:06
Speaker
Because one of the assumptions that's buried in this process that I just don't agree with from the start is that the Russians or Chinese have a clear perspective on who it would be better for them to have as president.
01:00:19
Speaker
There was this whole thing.
01:00:20
Speaker
The Russian thing was really interesting because...
01:00:25
Speaker
like Trump pretty quickly, he like sent some stuff that the Obama administration wasn't giving to Ukrainian nationalists and then like bombed some mercenaries in Syria that later turned out to be Russian.
01:00:37
Speaker
And it's like, so if this guy is...
01:00:40
Speaker
you know, if him and Putin are in league, they made like some really sophisticated choices about what kind of policies to implement to hide the ball.
01:00:49
Speaker
And so like, because I think if I was Russia, for instance, it would be a pretty complicated question to be like, okay, Hillary Clinton is sort of like bellicose.
01:00:59
Speaker
But you know, she's, she's a known quantity.
01:01:01
Speaker
And we have files on her and what she thinks will do.
01:01:05
Speaker
But like Trump,
01:01:05
Speaker
is a total question mark.
01:01:07
Speaker
I would think in that situation that there would be a sizable block within like Russian state officials or whatever who would think that Trump was the more dangerous option in that instance.
01:01:19
Speaker
And so like, I just don't buy into the fact that for China or Russia, it's always a clear question who they would prefer as president.
01:01:27
Speaker
I actually think that's like an incredibly complex question.
01:01:30
Speaker
And I suspect it has factions on both sides in both those
01:01:35
Speaker
But maybe there's a broader task of just sort of... Well, because the cultural cachet of the American media and Hollywood and the intelligence community overseas and their ability to sort of project influence, soft power type influence...
01:01:59
Speaker
is a real problem for those people.
01:02:01
Speaker
And if there's massive discontent at home and massive distrust of all those institutions, they become harder to deploy.
01:02:10
Speaker
Well, that's interesting.
01:02:11
Speaker
And I think a much more... Yeah, the better plausible argument for why they might be doing this is to just say, to the extent that there is social discord in the United States, that's good for us.
01:02:25
Speaker
It keeps the sort of American Leviathan with its eyes on its own people and not messing with us.
01:02:32
Speaker
But I think even there...
01:02:34
Speaker
there are questions of like, what exactly would they want to accomplish?
01:02:41
Speaker
And I don't know if I think it actually makes it harder to deploy our soft power.
01:02:47
Speaker
I think one of the things that's so weird is like American soft power, like there's a, there's a bunch of ways in which it's insulated from sort of like cultural disturbances within the United States.
01:02:59
Speaker
And I do think that like,
01:03:02
Speaker
China would probably like, clearly would like to have less American and Western influence on their youth, whether it's video games or clothes or LGBT stuff.
01:03:13
Speaker
But I think that it's harder to say that they think that would be an easier...
01:03:19
Speaker
job if the United States was like a more socially chaotic place.
01:03:24
Speaker
Like, I'm not sure that those two things are exactly linked.
01:03:27
Speaker
And the things that people don't talk about enough is that I think the United States and China have sort of made the same decision.
01:03:34
Speaker
I don't know if it's fair to call it an error, but like one of the reasons I'm sort of like a non non hysterical about US China conflict, but I'm also not particularly impressed by the things she has done to try and protect Chinese culture is that like both these governments made a deal with the devil about global production and commerce.
01:03:54
Speaker
and like the technological changes that that brings about and requires.
01:03:58
Speaker
So like, it's all well and good for, for she to yell about, uh, LGBT brainwashing and like make a law, but like China is not the same kind of authoritarian country as, uh, Syria.
01:04:12
Speaker
You know, there's over a billion people, their ability to, uh,
01:04:15
Speaker
impact the daily decisions of, you know, millions of youths who have basically you get a VPN and you you have a non firewall internet, though, apparently, they're getting better at that.
01:04:24
Speaker
But it's like,
01:04:26
Speaker
I get sort of frustrated sometimes when I see right wing or sort of like American dissidents being like, look, they're doing all the stuff that were too brave not to do.
01:04:36
Speaker
And it's like, what do you really mean?
01:04:38
Speaker
It's like, yes, they disappear some billionaires and then they still have tech and real estate oligarchs who are screwing over their people.
01:04:46
Speaker
It's like, look, I don't begrudge them their effort to rein some of these things in.
01:04:51
Speaker
But I would say that
01:04:53
Speaker
our governance and their governance represent two models that is sort of failing to stem the influence of technology and global culture.
01:05:01
Speaker
And like,
01:05:02
Speaker
Maybe there is something to say for a government that's willing to be more directly coercive and confrontational with those forces.
01:05:08
Speaker
But I wouldn't say that she is succeeding.
01:05:11
Speaker
And all of that is just to get back around to saying, I'm not sure how messed up she would want to make America because I think we still are in some sense their golden goose.
01:05:23
Speaker
So like, yeah, I think I think like a little bit of chaos around the edges is probably always
01:05:31
Speaker
something they like just to know like, okay, if we press a button, something happens.
01:05:35
Speaker
But I really don't think they would want to, for instance, like they don't have the ability to sort of and I think they know that.
01:05:42
Speaker
So maybe it's irrelevant.
01:05:44
Speaker
But like if China had technological tools,
01:05:46
Speaker
to foment civil conflict in the United States.
01:05:49
Speaker
I don't think they'd use them.
01:05:50
Speaker
No, I think they, they need us to buy things.
01:05:53
Speaker
They need us, uh, you know, they, they need us to, uh, send crazy gain of function research their way when we, when we won't do it in our, like, like when I get, you look at, you look at how crazy and, and,
01:06:09
Speaker
misguided their overt propaganda attempts are.
01:06:13
Speaker
I don't know if you follow Chen Weihua.
01:06:17
Speaker
He's like a People's Daily Bureau chief and he tweets in English.
01:06:24
Speaker
His attempts to own the US are so clumsy.
01:06:32
Speaker
As far as I know, he's the best they got.
01:06:34
Speaker
He's their top guy.
01:06:36
Speaker
And I look at sort of the quality of like what they're doing above board.
01:06:42
Speaker
And I'm like, unless they're running like some kind of like deep cover op, I don't believe that like the dudes in the basements, you know, who are creating the misinformation are like way more informed than have their fingers on the pulse of like American popular culture in a way that they can like imperceptibly, you know, screw it up.
01:07:03
Speaker
Yeah, and I think just on some of these things you have to go, I mean, maybe my inclination is always to be suspicious of our government first, but it's like someone actually needs to explain to me in an intelligent way, like,
01:07:21
Speaker
30% of American boomers to be vaccine skeptic instead of 20%.
01:07:26
Speaker
Like what's, what's in that for them?
01:07:28
Speaker
I mean, again, like maybe they're pushing around the edges to see what kind of effect they can have.
01:07:33
Speaker
But again, talking about those whole conceptions of good and evil, I think Democrats have really adopted this view that like,
01:07:41
Speaker
Russia in particular would just fuck shit up in America because like they're in league with the devil and they like watching the world burn.
01:07:50
Speaker
And that's just not my impression of how Russia makes decisions or it's in.
01:07:55
Speaker
So like, you know, so I'm just much more open to the idea that like, if there was weird stories spreading, let's say about stuff happening in, you know, there's so much weird stuff that went on with Crimea and like the news around that.
01:08:10
Speaker
And I would be,
01:08:11
Speaker
But the complicated factor there is that I think our own news covering that conflict is also fake.
01:08:17
Speaker
But if someone wanted to say to me, like, Russian influence in Western ideas about what's happening in Ukraine were actually like fairly effectively manipulated, I'd be like, OK, I get the interest.
01:08:31
Speaker
They actually have like the ability to capture narratives on the ground and disseminate them in sophisticated ways.
01:08:38
Speaker
Like maybe that happened.
01:08:39
Speaker
And it's a small enough narrative ecosystem that they could potentially budget.
01:08:44
Speaker
And like you're saying, they're so much more in control of the facts on the ground there.
Technology and Governance Challenges
01:08:49
Speaker
So yeah, you can see why they would and why they'd want to.
01:08:53
Speaker
But yeah, this sort of like great game type, it's very silly.
01:08:59
Speaker
And I wanted to go back to...
01:09:02
Speaker
to BAP and the vaccine stuff.
01:09:05
Speaker
And frankly, people who would go to parties with DC people.
01:09:13
Speaker
I can still remember a conversation that I had.
01:09:16
Speaker
I can't remember when my business school locked down.
01:09:21
Speaker
but it was fairly late into the process and I was sitting with my friends.
01:09:26
Speaker
And so we were like a couple of weeks in to COVID being a domestic thing.
01:09:33
Speaker
And I was telling him like what I was hearing from, what I was hearing from right-wing bodybuilder Twitter.
01:09:39
Speaker
And I was like, look, I'm,
01:09:41
Speaker
I'm pretty sure it's from the, it's pretty sure it's from gain of function research.
01:09:46
Speaker
I'm pretty sure that it's, that it's man-made because the bats don't come, they're not native to that region.
01:09:52
Speaker
And the wet market was like a block away from the Wuhan Institute.
01:09:56
Speaker
And, you know, I'm, I'm pretty sure that this is all man-made and, and, and like, yeah,
01:10:02
Speaker
talking about like the vindication and the power that creates, like there was, there was five guys in there who are, you know, respectable people.
01:10:09
Speaker
And I know that every one of them remembers that conversation.
01:10:12
Speaker
Um, and, and, and so like, you know, they want so much for it not to be an own goal.
01:10:21
Speaker
They want so much to believe that like someone is poisoning the American people against the, against their righteous, like truth.
01:10:30
Speaker
And it's like, no, you're just bullshitting all the time.
01:10:33
Speaker
And people are noticing.
01:10:36
Speaker
And like, you know, there's no conspiracy.
01:10:40
Speaker
It's just noticing.
01:10:42
Speaker
And man, it's reaching higher and higher up the chain.
01:10:48
Speaker
I do think that like, you know, I don't want to have a naive perspective on the past.
01:10:53
Speaker
But I do think like, to the extent that...
01:10:57
Speaker
the United States had some novel things to say, or like when the United States was most compliant with its own stated vision of governance, I think what was genius about it was it was like, well, don't coerce people, actually reflect what they want and don't fight with reality, like reflect reality.
01:11:16
Speaker
And that's actually making your job as governance incredibly easier because then you can just, you can start with like a,
01:11:24
Speaker
manageable scenario.
01:11:25
Speaker
But like we are very clearly down a road where, yeah, they want to fight with reality all the time.
01:11:30
Speaker
And that's that's really weird for me because studying political science and stuff like the whole thing they said is like a primary factor of instability in these regimes is like they continue to insist on propagating implausible claims.
01:11:46
Speaker
And I think I I think there was a time in the United States where at least within my lifetime where like
01:11:53
Speaker
Yes, there were always liars.
01:11:54
Speaker
Yes, there was always propaganda.
01:11:59
Speaker
But there were more people calling balls and strikes.
01:12:01
Speaker
And there were more media people willing to back off when the balls and strikes got called against them.
01:12:06
Speaker
I think what they're doing now that's very bad from their perspective is just like refusing to... You know, there's like...
01:12:15
Speaker
people that I thought were smart, that I thought had like analytical firepower, who will just sort of, you know, who work at big institutions, who will just be sort of like, yeah, just going to say it again.
01:12:25
Speaker
Like Russia collusion was never a hoax.
01:12:27
Speaker
If you actually read the Miller report, like it's all real.
01:12:30
Speaker
And I don't know why you've all moved on.
01:12:33
Speaker
It's like, I feel like that block,
01:12:35
Speaker
in the past, like would have been silenced or something.
01:12:37
Speaker
Or maybe it's just none of us had Twitter accounts, but it's like there are so many people who just persist antagonistically in their unreality.
01:12:46
Speaker
It's like and that's a losing hand for them.
01:12:49
Speaker
I mean, I'll be real with you.
01:12:50
Speaker
I think it's because we have Twitter accounts.
01:12:55
Speaker
I think it's I think it's because I think it's because they have no.
01:13:03
Speaker
They have no psychic vocabulary for getting called out in a public way that they can't suppress.
01:13:12
Speaker
Because, I mean, it used to be that if someone had something to say that they didn't like, they just didn't give them a mic.
01:13:19
Speaker
Simple.
01:13:20
Speaker
No, yeah, and I guess they are in the unenviable position of like, I do try to...
01:13:26
Speaker
manage my own social media as like, there's things I know a little bit about that I'm going to weigh in on.
01:13:33
Speaker
But a lot of these people are, you know, quote, generalists, unquote.
01:13:36
Speaker
So like, they aren't allowed to bow out.
01:13:39
Speaker
And definitely like in my own life, if I had to react in real time to everything instead of sleeping on it and being like, yeah, I was having a stupid reaction to that, you know, I'd get so much dumber.
01:13:50
Speaker
And then being like emotionally compelled to defend it.
01:13:53
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like, because I think this is another weird, like, part of the American ideology that nobody talks about is there's just an underlying assumption that technological progress is good, and that if it's messing with us,
01:14:08
Speaker
that's like our failure to work out how... But if you just said like, there might be things we come up with that are just bad and can't be managed.
01:14:17
Speaker
Like they're just bad for us.
01:14:19
Speaker
This is like a thought that Americans like can't hear.
01:14:23
Speaker
Like I kind of feel this way about the pornography conversation.
01:14:26
Speaker
It's like if you talk to most people on earth and say like pornography is bad, they'll just be like, yeah, obviously.
01:14:33
Speaker
But Americans are so...
01:14:37
Speaker
Americans really feel like, I think what we were taught is that our lack of resistance to the future is part of what made us great.
01:14:45
Speaker
And so we don't want to be limited in the way we think other societies are limited, like closed off afraid, but it's like, there's just going to be bad things.
01:14:55
Speaker
Like you don't, you don't have to, um,
01:14:57
Speaker
You don't have to always find a way that it can be okay.
01:15:02
Speaker
That was actually the topic of the Claremont piece was it was about cybernetic institutions and how these things that historically were tools that we use to conquer nature have become sort of a component of nature.
01:15:18
Speaker
And because we're so used to
01:15:22
Speaker
having nature under wraps.
01:15:24
Speaker
I use the analogy of like a tiger in the jungle when you're like naked and you have like a sharp stick.
01:15:31
Speaker
Because like we're so used to thinking of like tigers in the jungle and floods and plagues and all that as things that maybe not plagues anymore, but as things that we have more or less under control.
01:15:43
Speaker
And so like, yeah, it's a problem, but it's not like an existential problem, a terrifying problem.
01:15:48
Speaker
And, and cybernetics, I think, is the return of nature as a scary, like quasi religious terror, something that we can't control and can't understand and can just can just squash you, you know, without, without even noticing or caring.
01:16:10
Speaker
And I think that that's what we're up against with pornography.
01:16:14
Speaker
Frankly, I think it's everything, every consumer product that can be made addictive is being made addictive.
01:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, and again, to go back to scripture, I think if you read scripture, it's very clear that our scripture indicates to me that it will be harder to remain human over time.
01:16:34
Speaker
That it's almost like a conception of religious history is almost the reverse of Whig history, where it's like, you know, I feel like from the Bible's perspective in the year 500, it was maybe a little bit easy to be an okay human being who emphasized the right things, but that...
01:16:51
Speaker
Lots of passages suggest that as time goes on, human beings are going to have to fight harder and harder to retain what is important about being human.
01:17:00
Speaker
And I think Americans often have the opposite instinct, like that this stuff is almost always a good.
01:17:06
Speaker
And this is probably like really stupid, but I always think like one example I like to use with people just because it's totally unobjectionable is like when GPS came out and I was in college, I'd drive around my hometown and literally as the GPS...
01:17:21
Speaker
told me where to go.
01:17:22
Speaker
I was like, there was a map of my hometown in my head that was being erased because it had been like reinforced and like, it's a stupid example, but like knowledge of the layout of my hometown is something that was like somehow spiritually important to me that like being able to like draw that or conjure it in my mind made me feel more connected to the place, whatever.
01:17:44
Speaker
And so I would always ask people, especially people who worked on technology, like,
01:17:49
Speaker
is there a version of GPS that could actually make me closer to my geography?
01:17:52
Speaker
Like it uses mnemonics or something else to like reinforce my human understanding of the layout as opposed to diminishing it.
01:18:03
Speaker
And like everybody's always just like, oh, people wouldn't buy it.
01:18:06
Speaker
And so it's like, maybe, maybe that's as simple as it.
01:18:09
Speaker
Cause you do always like encounter these people who are, you know, there's people who don't watch nonsense politics on YouTube.
01:18:16
Speaker
They watch like jujitsu videos and like practice like that.
01:18:19
Speaker
There are individuals who are using technology to increase their human capacity rather than diminish it.
01:18:26
Speaker
But definitely like without,
01:18:28
Speaker
just the average human and like the American marketplace without, you know, instruction from a family member or some other institution, like they're not going to know to do that because that's not the, you know, I don't know if this is some version of like Cthulhu always swims left, but it's like the Cthulhu that is technology always swims towards diminishing human capacity.
01:18:47
Speaker
Well, I mean, if you think about it, if you think about, if you think about, uh, tools as, um,
01:18:57
Speaker
machine extensions of the body.
01:19:00
Speaker
And as your tools become able to reach farther and farther outside your natural human reach, like the system that is you using the machine becomes more and more machine and less and less you.
01:19:19
Speaker
And so now you're this tiny human, um,
01:19:24
Speaker
neuron in the middle of this vast organism that's drawing, that's drawing resources and information from literally all over the planet and into the, and into space, you know, you're connected to all these things, this system, and you are increasingly, you know, if it was easier to be a human being in 500 AD, it's because you were,
01:19:53
Speaker
you were so big relative to your environment.
01:19:56
Speaker
You were so like your hands were reaching out and touching everything that you went and got or people you knew were doing it.
01:20:06
Speaker
And like, there just wasn't this enormous system.
01:20:09
Speaker
And now it's, you're literally, you know, it's like the sci-fi story where the cyborg has like a little tiny piece of brain tissue still in it and everything else is robots.
01:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I think we can often detect on like a very primordial level that God's creations have God in them and our creations often don't.
01:20:30
Speaker
So it's like if you're interacting with something that he made, it's like it just stands to reason that, you know, interacting with the earth would like at some subconscious level,
01:20:44
Speaker
contain affirming truths about, like, it makes so much sense to me that like technology sort of allows for and reinforces atheism, because it's like, yes, in the little in the steel, like loveless, cold world that you build, there is no God, but like, that's not, that's not actually the world you were born into, you have to sort of exit that environment and reengage with like, I was at a
01:21:14
Speaker
just a catechism class the other day.
01:21:16
Speaker
And we were talking about like death or something.
01:21:17
Speaker
And a guy asked, he's like, I feel like in modern life, death isn't present.
01:21:22
Speaker
And as a Catholic, you're supposed to think about death and how to die.
01:21:25
Speaker
And he's like, how do I keep that at the front of mind?
01:21:28
Speaker
And I was like, just go into nature.
01:21:30
Speaker
It's everywhere.
01:21:31
Speaker
Like you deal with animals.
01:21:32
Speaker
It's like sickness.
01:21:34
Speaker
And because that's how I think about it, right?
01:21:36
Speaker
It's like God gave us
01:21:38
Speaker
what we need to think about the world in a way that will be ultimately acceptable and affirming to us.
01:21:45
Speaker
But when we spend all of our time in our own creations, it's like, oh, like watching eight seasons of Friends this weekend didn't prepare me to like confront my own mortality.
01:21:57
Speaker
It's like, yeah, why would it?
01:21:59
Speaker
Well, honestly, I think it might.
01:22:02
Speaker
Yeah, it might make you happy to shuffle off the mortal coil, but...
01:22:07
Speaker
Well, I mean, you know, I think that there is the one thing, the one thing that I think the cybernetic world can teach you is just what we're
Religion and Technological Impact
01:22:20
Speaker
saying.
01:22:20
Speaker
Like it can, it can give you that sense of surfeit and that sense of disgust.
01:22:26
Speaker
And I wonder if, I wonder if part of the reason why so many people are being drawn into like,
01:22:37
Speaker
online orthodoxy or online Catholicism, and you're not seeing as many like online evangelicals, like extremely online.
01:22:45
Speaker
Like I, you know, I don't even know what like Roger Williams or whatever they would get like real excited about.
01:22:54
Speaker
You know, apologies to my Protestant friends.
01:22:56
Speaker
It's not, it's nothing personal.
01:22:57
Speaker
I'm talking about ideas here, but, but I think that there is,
01:23:02
Speaker
a sense in which the world that we are in reflects a very Protestant view of man's creation, which is sort of that it's, um, sort of that it's, it's, it's dominion and it's like, it's good to exercise dominion and it's good to conquer the, the, the creation.
01:23:22
Speaker
And, um, and so these, these tools, um,
01:23:28
Speaker
And here's the truth, which is that they're not actually separate from the creation.
01:23:35
Speaker
They're just things that we've done with the creation.
01:23:39
Speaker
Like nothing is really artificial, but yeah, this idea of infinite progress in Whig history, I think is fundamentally a Protestant idea.
01:23:52
Speaker
And maybe part of the reason why you're not seeing
01:23:59
Speaker
extremely online Protestantism as a reaction to all this is because it's kind of a reaction to Protestantism.
01:24:06
Speaker
Sure, that definitely could be.
01:24:07
Speaker
I mean, I think I want to separate what I'm about to say from Protestantism, but I think maybe what's happened is that
01:24:17
Speaker
You have a certain Protestant idea about dominion, as you said, but that's actually constrained at some level just by the contents of the religion.
01:24:28
Speaker
But if you get sort of people who are existing in that milieu but give up on the concept of God, I think it's not that long a skip and a jump.
01:24:39
Speaker
to be like, well, then the project is just infinitely enhancing like humans resemblance to something like a God or, you know, I think that's exactly right.
01:24:48
Speaker
I think it's I think it's not Protestantism, but it is a Protestant heresy.
01:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's like what what secular people do with what's in the air.
01:24:57
Speaker
And like, I guess one way in which I've always felt
01:25:01
Speaker
a little un-American or like a little just out of place with with certain attitudes that are that are very prevalent with both secular and religious people is like, I am always comforted by being like, you know, if this if this the universe is a movie like I'm not Al Pacino, God is Al Pacino.
01:25:21
Speaker
I'm like a guy who gets shot in the first frame or whatever.
01:25:23
Speaker
Like, you know, I'm I'm a bit player.
01:25:26
Speaker
So like, it's not actually
01:25:28
Speaker
it's not like I build a big tower that's like almost as glorious as God.
01:25:32
Speaker
And that's how I love God.
01:25:33
Speaker
Like, no, I, I'm more, I more am constantly reminded of like my finitude and weakness in contrast with God.
01:25:42
Speaker
And like, that's okay.
01:25:43
Speaker
As long as you're trying to do right and, you know, avoid sin and temptation and everything.
01:25:48
Speaker
And so it's not, um, I've always had a hard time understanding, like,
01:25:53
Speaker
the sort of, and again, I would, I would say like, I think scripture supports my view, but obviously that's, that's something people have debated, but like, I don't read the Bible and think like, yes, God wants us to take these beliefs and build a glorious civilization that like excels in technology and wealth.
01:26:14
Speaker
Like, that's not what I see at all.
01:26:16
Speaker
I, I much more see like an idea that's sort of like,
01:26:21
Speaker
There are contexts in which those human pursuits are okay, but confusing them with the transcendent is an ever-present risk and one humans are particularly prone to.
01:26:32
Speaker
And I think the sort of hysteria I detect
01:26:37
Speaker
in secular people is often they're like, you know, they'll get obsessed with the singularity or something.
01:26:41
Speaker
Yeah, they'll be like, what has to be really it has to be that we can cure all diseases and radical life extension, because then what else has this all been for?
01:26:50
Speaker
And it's like, to me, that's so clearly like this pale shadow of God that they're building post hoc because they just refuse to engage with
01:27:02
Speaker
you know, and to be fair, like there are some atheists like John Gray in England would be one of them who I think like confront the actual implications of their worldview in a real way without defaulting to these sort of nonsense technological stand-ins for the divine.
01:27:18
Speaker
But I feel like I encounter that a lot where like people who are like very militantly anti-God have some other thing that they think is going to create a utopian.
01:27:30
Speaker
This is why I always say like,
01:27:33
Speaker
The sort of new atheist perspective of like God as infantile childish belief is like exactly backward because it's like, okay, maybe on some level believing in God is implausible, but you know what's more implausible?
01:27:47
Speaker
That we're going to like solve mortality ourselves.
01:27:50
Speaker
Like that's more childish.
01:27:52
Speaker
So it's like of all the fantasies, I feel like I have the most adult fantasy.
01:27:56
Speaker
Because I don't think like the UN is going to solve world hunger.
01:27:59
Speaker
You know, I think that's significantly dumber than believing in God.
01:28:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:07
Speaker
So and the challenge.
01:28:09
Speaker
So the challenge with dialing it back.
01:28:12
Speaker
And this is a little bit of a troll question I recognize.
01:28:16
Speaker
But the challenge with returning with a V. Is always returning to what?
01:28:23
Speaker
And like, you know, a lot of guys' response to that troll is to lean into it and agree and amplify with it and say like, well, eco-fash, we're going to go back to like eating raw meat in caves.
01:28:40
Speaker
And so I'm interested to know what kind of what your take on that is.
01:28:43
Speaker
Like how much cybernetics, how much machine is too much?
01:28:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's
Family and Cultural Norms
01:28:49
Speaker
interesting.
01:28:49
Speaker
Yeah, because I always do find myself like,
01:28:52
Speaker
There's people in my family, again, like I have a aunt who I really love who raised her kids without TV and was like really anti-screen.
01:29:01
Speaker
And she was sort of like a crunchy con person.
01:29:04
Speaker
She's not even possible to really...
01:29:07
Speaker
to really plot on a American political spectrum.
01:29:10
Speaker
But the point is she was really committed to protecting her children from a certain technological innovations that in retrospect, I totally understand why she was afraid of.
01:29:22
Speaker
And it's sort of interesting because I think ultimately her children are like very interesting people and benefited from the type of life she built
01:29:34
Speaker
adopted normative technological practices.
01:29:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:38
Speaker
So in other words, it's like she went to this great effort and then even having done that, having sort of executed this very difficult task, it sort of dropped back to the American mean as soon as she took her foot off the pedal or just the kids moved out or whatever.
01:29:55
Speaker
So I still am sort of like struggling with how I feel about that.
01:30:00
Speaker
The other thing that's weird here is that like I almost think
01:30:05
Speaker
you know, maybe this isn't true anymore, but the very liberal high school that I went to still was at that time really engaged in giving people the tools for critical thinking.
01:30:17
Speaker
So like, I'm sure a lot of my favorite teachers would be horrified at the political conclusions I've come to, but like, it's their fault.
01:30:25
Speaker
Kind of, you know, they told me to read Homer or whatever.
01:30:28
Speaker
So like,
01:30:29
Speaker
What did they think was going to happen?
01:30:32
Speaker
You know, it's like, what I mean to say is like, I have a harder time being like, oh, I need to homeschool because I know that I was in this incredibly liberal environment.
01:30:42
Speaker
And in some ways that's, at least with my story, that's directly tied to the aspects of it I've ended up rejecting.
01:30:49
Speaker
But of course, I'm also not saying that that's a reliable path.
01:30:54
Speaker
You know, all this stuff is contingent and weird.
01:30:56
Speaker
And I certainly don't begrudge anybody who
01:31:00
Speaker
wants to homeschool or something like that.
01:31:02
Speaker
I do think it's, what's clear is one of the difficulties about living in a modern society is just that the amount you have to compromise just to participate just goes up and up.
01:31:17
Speaker
I think that's mostly driven by technology, but maybe reinforced by technology.
01:31:23
Speaker
you know, certain attitudes that are prevailing in the upper echelons of society.
01:31:27
Speaker
And I think that the question of like, how important is it to be interacting with and participating with the main community in our society versus taking control over the values that are expressed in my day-to-day life?
01:31:43
Speaker
I mean, that is the question.
01:31:46
Speaker
And I don't have the answer to that.
01:31:49
Speaker
I will say with the whole like,
01:31:52
Speaker
return with a V thing.
01:31:53
Speaker
I will just say that like, I am such a product of modernity in my habits and behaviors that for me, like, it's very obvious to me that like, you know, to any of my great grandfathers, like I am and will remain probably like, you know, way too buggish, unmasculine, don't know how to fix shit in my house.
01:32:16
Speaker
But it's like,
01:32:17
Speaker
my goal is not to become something they would recognize as a man.
01:32:23
Speaker
It's just to reach greater balance.
01:32:26
Speaker
And so like, you know, I think...
01:32:29
Speaker
And in some ways it's like, because of our weird political moment, I think in some ways, like just trying to be responsible can be characterized as reactionary, but like, yeah, the things I'm trying to do, whether it's about like physical strength or taking up responsibility, I think it is possible to justify them on entirely non-reactionary grounds.
01:32:52
Speaker
if one wants to, like, you know, I don't know if, I think it is part of the cultural conflict is why people like saying, yes, I'm lifting blocks of wood because people did that in 1200.
01:33:03
Speaker
And I think they were right about everything and we're wrong about everything.
01:33:07
Speaker
And again, like I support that as a, as I think, yeah, as a fun mode of communication that has several secondary effects that I enjoy.
01:33:18
Speaker
But I think if I'm just being honest about my own approach, it's like,
01:33:23
Speaker
You know, there are other modern people who have just always done the things I'm now trying to do.
01:33:28
Speaker
And they don't think of themselves as like trying to return to the caves.
01:33:31
Speaker
Frankly, they were just more responsible, better put together people than me.
01:33:36
Speaker
And for me, it's helpful to engage with these corners of the internet in pursuing a more balanced and healthy life.
01:33:44
Speaker
But like...
01:33:46
Speaker
Even if you don't have a coherent ideal in mind or like a utopian, like, you know, 1380, that was when people had it really figured out.
01:33:57
Speaker
That was the sweet spot.
01:34:00
Speaker
I think even if you don't have that...
01:34:04
Speaker
just as a matter of orientation to say, like, I'm not going to participate in everything that society is doing.
01:34:12
Speaker
I'm going to look backwards and I'm going to try to identify things that are better.
01:34:17
Speaker
I'm going to be in communion with history is hugely valuable.
01:34:24
Speaker
And yeah, definitely gets you branded as reactionary because, I mean, you know, it is, I mean, literally reactionary.
01:34:32
Speaker
You're sort of...
01:34:34
Speaker
you're looking to the past, to a golden age, or at least the case you're making is that this world is not monotonically better on every domain, on every axis.
01:34:50
Speaker
than historical arrangements.
01:34:54
Speaker
No, and I think even within a liberal Whig history framework, it is only in the past 20 years that people would not in these words, but implicitly make the argument that the past has nothing to teach us.
01:35:07
Speaker
No historical liberal or progressive ever thought that.
01:35:10
Speaker
And I think the idea that you can sort of say like,
01:35:15
Speaker
The idea that there are people walking around who it's not odd to say, okay, for all of human history, after a certain point of development, it was very typical for people to comfortably adopt a monotheistic faith.
01:35:29
Speaker
And now suddenly that feels extremely uncomfortable to me.
01:35:34
Speaker
And rather than think that that suggests there might be something wrong with my environment, I'm going to conclude that we are the first smart people to have ever existed.
01:35:43
Speaker
Like that's nonsense.
Modern Trust and Historical Wisdom
01:35:45
Speaker
Then like no one smart from history would have respected it as an attitude or so.
01:35:50
Speaker
Like, I don't know exactly why we've ended up there, but it's like, yeah, I think there's a judicious way to say this, which is like, I am going to weigh the opinions and practices of people in the past as maybe like slightly diminished due to lack of knowledge.
01:36:07
Speaker
when compared with contemporary people.
01:36:09
Speaker
But there's also more of the past.
01:36:11
Speaker
So, you know, in some sense, it might even out.
01:36:13
Speaker
But the idea that it's like only a people alive now know anything about anything.
01:36:17
Speaker
I don't get that at all.
01:36:19
Speaker
Well, and I think what you're seeing right now is pre-modern people lived in a...
01:36:29
Speaker
very crude map that had sea monsters and dragons in the margins and, and goblins in the woods and fairies.
01:36:37
Speaker
And, um, you can argue that that's because they knew less than we know.
01:36:47
Speaker
Um, but I think that what's happening now is we are realizing that all of the, um,
01:36:56
Speaker
again, the cybernetic infrastructure that we were using to draw conclusions about what's in the woods and what's on the edge of the map, turn out not to be as flawlessly reliable as we thought they were.
01:37:10
Speaker
And, and
01:37:12
Speaker
And I think progressives are viewing that as a crisis because they're saying people don't trust science.
01:37:19
Speaker
They don't trust, they're out of touch with reality.
01:37:21
Speaker
They're starting to believe in spooks and conspiracy theories and they're going off the rails.
01:37:27
Speaker
But I mean, my take on that basically is that no, the, the, the,
01:37:38
Speaker
mon monolithic vision of of of reality that we all agreed on was an illusion it was fake and it was because there was a couple people in charge of the megaphones and now we're realizing that we've always lived in kind of the dark forest and there's always been the sea monsters on the edge of the map and that's like it's better to know that than not to know that right and again i i think there's sort of like a
01:38:03
Speaker
a class element here where it's like for most people in most periods of history, the metaphor is going to be more useful.
01:38:10
Speaker
And I would say here useful as a synonym for true than the stark material description.
01:38:16
Speaker
And I think one of the things that's been
01:38:19
Speaker
discredited is there sort of this idea of like if we start looking at people in real terms and not as like say spooky enemy barbarians stand in for monsters in the forest like violence will go away you know I think after World War II people thought like oh these massive conflagrations were sort of reliant upon the ghosts created by nationalism and religion but now we've dispensed with all that and like we'll only fight over like real things it's like well no I mean you know
01:38:49
Speaker
like, terrorism is both real and a specter that haunts your dreams is both and it may motivate you to blow up a wedding.
01:38:58
Speaker
And like, you will have to talk to God about that and account for it.
01:39:02
Speaker
When you go meet him.
01:39:03
Speaker
And like, if you think
01:39:06
Speaker
That, you know, getting a bunch of intelligence reports that tell you like statistical likelihoods of of who's in that car you're about to blow up, that that's totally different from some like Viking who's thinking his enemies are like subhuman.
01:39:20
Speaker
I think those are very similar experiences.
01:39:22
Speaker
I know people don't want.
01:39:25
Speaker
They don't like the idea that history is sort of like consistent in that way.
01:39:29
Speaker
But again, to me, it's it's comforting because you just sort of you contextualize your own weakness and fallibility in in the context of all these these great and brave people who came before who also made errors.
01:39:42
Speaker
But I'd also say with with the other return thing that the discourse that I get very frustrated with is, you know, some guy will be
01:39:49
Speaker
posting about how he wants to change his life with reference to the past.
01:39:53
Speaker
And someone will be like, oh, you know, like if, if you got in a time machine, like those people would think you're a bitch.
01:39:59
Speaker
And like, to me, that's a much less interesting question than like, okay, but like, did his BMI go down?
01:40:06
Speaker
It's, it's, you know, it's like, it's like inspiration is inspiration.
01:40:09
Speaker
I don't think you actually have to,
01:40:12
Speaker
indulge in the idea of like, I'm going to live a life where if I had to meet Genghis Khan, he would agree like we're equals on the field of bat.
01:40:18
Speaker
Like, I don't actually, I don't actually think, I don't actually think any of these raw egg posters believe that.
01:40:25
Speaker
I think they, they have found practical reasons to use this as a source of inspiration.
01:40:31
Speaker
And also like it pisses off some of the right people.
01:40:34
Speaker
So like, whatever, get into it.
01:40:35
Speaker
But yeah, I think my measure of the behaviors would be like, you know,
01:40:40
Speaker
Is it improving your health?
01:40:42
Speaker
Is it improving your relationships?
01:40:44
Speaker
And, you know, draw inspiration from wherever you want is only in such a stupid and defensive political moment that we would object to people finding inspiration, you know, from wherever.
01:40:53
Speaker
Yeah.
Inspiration and Personal Improvement
01:40:56
Speaker
I wrote that article about addiction and how everything is becoming addictive.
01:41:01
Speaker
And my mother-in-law lives with us and she threw out all the junk food in the house.
01:41:09
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, it's a lot easier to lose weight when you're picturing like a grappler.
01:41:15
Speaker
You're picturing like an enemy who's trying to poison you rather than just sort of I make bad decisions and the enemy is me.
01:41:23
Speaker
And I know you were talking about sort of the line that goes through every human heart.
01:41:30
Speaker
And I think that it is useful sometimes for there to be an enemy.
01:41:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:36
Speaker
And it depends on how you deploy that mentality.
01:41:39
Speaker
But, but, you know, I think that's, that's totally right.
01:41:44
Speaker
And I don't know how to account for the incoherence in my own strategy, but like, I'm very pro, like, you know, when, when Bernie talks about like millionaires and billionaires, like, I don't think it's a real thing, but I think it is potentially a,
01:42:03
Speaker
like an okay category for the public to indulge in hating.
01:42:07
Speaker
Now, like, obviously, I don't, I don't want, I don't want a Bolshevik revolution in the United States, to be clear.
01:42:14
Speaker
But I think there is maybe some gray area where you can be like, yeah, like vilify a group that doesn't even really exist, or that people move in and out of for the purpose of like some broad economic solidarity.
01:42:27
Speaker
And like, maybe this is a slightly different example.
01:42:29
Speaker
But it's like,
01:42:30
Speaker
if all the people all over the world who are trying to get their kids to eat vegetables are like, there's someone at Monsanto who wants my son to be like fat and have an endocrine disorder.
01:42:41
Speaker
And like, I will defeat him.
01:42:43
Speaker
Like as long as you don't go to Monsanto, you know, as long as that conflict stays within your house and the grocery aisle, I think you're good to go.
Conclusion and Invitation
01:42:56
Speaker
Oh, well, listen, man, I got to prep for our meeting tonight.
01:42:59
Speaker
This was a great call.
01:43:00
Speaker
I really appreciate you taking the time.
01:43:03
Speaker
So Degree Studies is an exit member.
01:43:06
Speaker
You can get to have more fascinating conversations like this one by joining Exit Group, exitgroup.us.
01:43:13
Speaker
You can also follow him on Twitter at Degree Studies.
01:43:16
Speaker
Thanks a lot for coming out.
01:43:17
Speaker
This was a great time.
01:43:18
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Dr. Bennett.
01:43:19
Speaker
I appreciate it.