Speaker 1: Would a utopia be possible and would it even be desirable?
Speaker 1: Are we wired up with desires and preferences like tribalism
Speaker 1: and jealousy that make perfect societies difficult to achieve?
Speaker 2: Do we love hierarchies?
Speaker 1: Why are primate brains such excellent detectors of unfairness?
Speaker 2: Do we actually like struggle?
Speaker 1: Did the Church's disavowal of first cousin marriages lead to
Speaker 1: better politics? This week we'll talk with psychologist Paul Bloom
Speaker 1: about the possibility slash impossibility of achieving societal utopias.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford, and in these
Speaker 1: episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to
Speaker 1: understand why and how our lives and.
Speaker 2: Societies look the way they do.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about whether we humans yoked with our
Speaker 1: brains and our psychologies, whether we will ever get to
Speaker 1: a utopian society. Imagine a world where everyone has what
Speaker 1: they need, no crime, no hunger, no injustice, a place
Speaker 1: of peace and fairness and fulfillment. For as long as
Speaker 1: we have been human, we have dreamed of such a place.
Speaker 1: We've even given it a name utopia.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The word utopia was coined by Thomas Moore in fifteen sixteen.
Speaker 1: He described a fictional island society where private property didn't exist,
Speaker 1: and where everyone worked and where everyone shared equally. But
Speaker 1: even then he chose the word as a pun from
Speaker 1: the roots ooh topos, which means no place. This was
Speaker 1: his hint that such perfection might not exist anywhere or
Speaker 1: any when. But this possibility of it not coming to
Speaker 1: fruition has never stopped people from thinking about it and
Speaker 1: working toward it, and often picking up arms to try
Speaker 1: to achieve it. But again and again the road to
Speaker 1: utopia gets off ramped by human nature.
Speaker 2: One historical example.
Speaker 1: Of this comes from the French Revolution in seventeen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: It was all about liberty and equality and fraternity, and
Speaker 1: that's nothing but good stuff. It makes total sense to
Speaker 1: be on board with that. The monarchy was overthrown, they
Speaker 1: tossed out feudal privileges, they declared a new republic. But
Speaker 1: by seventeen ninety two France was tearing itself apart. He
Speaker 1: had royalists and moderates and radical factions. They were all
Speaker 1: in the fight for dominance. And so out of this chaos,
Speaker 1: in seventeen ninety three emerged the Committee of Public Safety,
Speaker 1: which was an emergency body to protect the revolution from
Speaker 1: enemies foreign and domestic, and its leading voice was Maximilian Robespierre.
Speaker 1: He was known as the Incorruptible because of his unbending
Speaker 1: devotion to revolutionary virtue.
Speaker 2: He believed all the.
Speaker 1: Way down that the revolution had to be defended militarily,
Speaker 1: of course, but also morally through purity unity. The destruction
Speaker 1: of corruption. To him, terror was justice. So they made
Speaker 1: revolutionary tribunals to accuse people of counter revolutionary activity. This
Speaker 1: was anyone noble's clergy, political opponents, former allies, and what
Speaker 1: was called the law of suspects made essentially everyone vulnerable
Speaker 1: to arrest if they were showing insufficient enthusiasm for the revolution.
Speaker 1: And as you remember from your history classes, the guillotine
Speaker 1: became the symbol of the new order because it was
Speaker 1: proposed as an egalitarian instrument of execution. So over the
Speaker 1: next two years there were seventeen thousand executions, and at
Speaker 1: least that many more who died in prisons or summary killings.
Speaker 2: So what the heck happened here?
Speaker 1: What Robespierre so desperately hoped for was what he called
Speaker 1: a republic of virtue, where citizens would be motivated by
Speaker 1: civic morality rather than self interest. But in practice, what
Speaker 1: he thought of as virtue became enforced conformity. Anybody could
Speaker 1: become a suspect. They could be labeled as corrupt, or aristocratic,
Speaker 1: or insufficiently revolutionary. So what happened is the revolution, which
Speaker 1: looked like it was aiming towards the utopia, quickly became
Speaker 1: known as the Reign of Terror. Everyone was frantic and scared.
Speaker 1: Revolutionaries turned on each other. A bunch of the early
Speaker 1: leaders were sent to the guillotine by their former ally, Robespierre.
Speaker 1: So by mid seventeen ninety four, everyone who knew Robespierre,
Speaker 1: even as close allies, everyone was in fear for their lives.
Speaker 1: So finally, in July of seventeen ninety four, he got
Speaker 1: arrested and guillotined, and the Reign of Terror finally ended.
Speaker 1: So this is just one of a gajillion examples where
Speaker 1: the pursuit of moral purity and ideal justice slips into violence.
Speaker 1: This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. The
Speaker 1: original communist revolutionaries were so clear and bright eyed on
Speaker 1: the utopia that they wanted to build. But between Lenin
Speaker 1: and star there were an estimated one million political executions.
Speaker 1: Both Lenin and Stalin believed they were creating a new
Speaker 1: purified world and egalitarian utopia free from exploitation. But just
Speaker 1: like with Robespierre, the pursuit of purity turned into the
Speaker 1: destruction of perceived impurity. Just like the French Revolution, the
Speaker 1: Soviet experiment began with a dream of equality and ended
Speaker 1: in terror. In the thousands of cases like these, utopian
Speaker 1: zeal plus human psychology, fear and rivalry and paranoia and tribalism,
Speaker 1: this combination produces the opposite of paradise. Whenever movements aim
Speaker 1: to purify human nature itself, they eventually turned the blade inward.
Speaker 1: And this is where psychology and neuroscience become key parts
Speaker 1: of the analysis, because at the center of every grand
Speaker 1: political blueprint sets the human brain, a brain that evolved
Speaker 1: in survival conditions, tuned for tribalism.
Speaker 2: For hierarchy, for rivalry.
Speaker 1: This has been a topic close to my heart for years,
Speaker 1: and in fact, one of my short stories in my
Speaker 1: book Some is exactly on this topic. So to set
Speaker 1: the table for today's podcast. I'll read that story now.
Speaker 1: This is called egalitaire. In the afterlife, you discover that
Speaker 1: God understands the complexities of life.
Speaker 2: She had originally submitted to.
Speaker 1: Peer pressure when she structured her universe like all the
Speaker 1: other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into
Speaker 1: good and evil. But it didn't take long for her
Speaker 1: to realize that humans could be good in many ways
Speaker 1: and simultaneously corrupt and mean spirited in other ways. How
Speaker 1: was she to arbitrate who goes to heaven and who
Speaker 1: to hell? Might not be possible. She considered that a
Speaker 1: man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes.
Speaker 1: Might not a woman be an adulteress, but bring pleasure
Speaker 1: and security to two men's lives. Might not a child
Speaker 1: unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family. Dividing the population
Speaker 1: into two categories good and bad seemed like a more
Speaker 1: reasonable task when she was younger, but with experience these
Speaker 1: decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh
Speaker 1: hundreds of factors and ran computer programs that rolled out
Speaker 1: long strips of paper with eternal decisions, but her sensitivities
Speaker 1: revolted at this automation, and when the computer generated a
Speaker 1: decision she disagreed with, she took the opportunity to kick
Speaker 1: out the plug and rage. That afternoon, she listened to
Speaker 1: the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both
Speaker 1: sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled
Speaker 1: their cases earnestly. She covered her ears and moaned in misery.
Speaker 1: She knew her humans were multi dimensional, and she could
Speaker 1: no longer live under the rigid architecture of her youthful choices.
Speaker 1: Not all gods suffer over this. We can consider ourselves
Speaker 1: lucky that in death we answer to a god with
Speaker 1: deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts of her creations. For months,
Speaker 1: she moped around her living room in Heaven, head drooped
Speaker 1: like a bulrush while the lines piled up. Her advisers
Speaker 1: advised her to delegate the decision making, but she loved
Speaker 1: her humans too much to leave them to the care
Speaker 1: of anyone else. In a moment of desperation, the thought
Speaker 1: crossed her mind to let everyone wait online indefinitely, letting
Speaker 1: them work it out on their own. But then a
Speaker 1: better idea struck her. Generous spirit. She I can afford it.
Speaker 1: She would grant everyone, every last human a place in heaven.
Speaker 1: After all, everyone had something good inside. It was part
Speaker 1: of the design specifications. Her new plan brought back the
Speaker 1: bounce to her gait, returned the color.
Speaker 2: To her cheeks.
Speaker 1: She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the devil,
Speaker 1: and brought every last human to be by her side
Speaker 1: in Heaven, newcomers or old timers, nefarious or righteous. Under
Speaker 1: the new system, everyone gets equal time to speak with her.
Speaker 1: Most people find her a little garrulous and over solicitous,
Speaker 1: but she cannot be accused of not caring. The most
Speaker 1: important part of her new system is that everyone is
Speaker 1: treated equally. There is no longer fire for some and
Speaker 1: harp music for others. The afterlife is no longer defined
Speaker 1: by cots versus water beds, raw potatoes versus sushi, hot
Speaker 1: water versus champagne. Every everyone is a brother to all,
Speaker 1: and for the first time, an idea has been realized
Speaker 1: that never came to fruition on earth.
Speaker 2: True equality.
Speaker 1: The Communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally
Speaker 1: achieved their perfect society, but only by the help.
Speaker 2: Of a god In whom they don't want to believe.
Speaker 1: The meritocrats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in
Speaker 1: an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives
Speaker 1: have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden
Speaker 1: to promote. So God sits on the edge of her
Speaker 1: bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone
Speaker 1: can agree on is that they're all in hell. That
Speaker 1: was the story Egalitaire from my book Some. So let's
Speaker 1: get back to the human foibles that get in the
Speaker 1: way of utopias. An important clue is that these aren't
Speaker 1: learned behaviors. You can look at how predisposed we are
Speaker 1: to tribalism, for example, by looking at children. An experiment
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties took two groups of boys at
Speaker 1: summer camp and randomly separated them and gave them different
Speaker 1: team names, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and the psychologists
Speaker 1: watched closely and measured how quickly this descended into tribal hostility,
Speaker 1: hurling insults, raiding each other's cabins, burning each other's flags,
Speaker 1: breaking into physical violence.
Speaker 2: You don't need.
Speaker 1: Decades of history to divide two groups. The division can
Speaker 1: happen in days or hours because group identity us versus them,
Speaker 1: lives deep in our circuitry. And by the way, the
Speaker 1: things that get in our way with building utopias aren't
Speaker 1: limited to humans. You can see the general elements throughout
Speaker 1: the animal kingdom. In one study, all Link in the
Speaker 1: show notes, you have capuchin monkeys trained to do a
Speaker 1: little task for a slice of queer, and they're perfectly
Speaker 1: happy with that payment until they see the monkey next
Speaker 1: to them get a nice, juicy grape which is better
Speaker 1: for the same amount of work. And suddenly the cucumber
Speaker 1: becomes an insult. The monkeys fling it back at the
Speaker 1: researcher and pound.
Speaker 2: The cage in outrage.
Speaker 1: Because even for our cousins in the animal kingdom, they
Speaker 1: are keenly attuned to others getting more than them. This
Speaker 1: insults a very deep seated root of fairness. So what
Speaker 1: does this mean when you have societies with millions of
Speaker 1: humans and everyone is looking at their neighbors to see
Speaker 1: if they feel anyone is getting something better than they are.
Speaker 1: So the question I want to explore today is if
Speaker 1: children fracture into tribes with just some labels and monkeys
Speaker 1: riot when they feel like they're not getting enough, and
Speaker 1: every adult human attempt at rebooting the system seems to
Speaker 1: end up in a reign of terror and political executions.
Speaker 1: What chance does utopia stand? Are humans fundamentally incompatible with
Speaker 1: paradise or are these drives flexible and capable of being reshaped?
Speaker 1: So this is what I want to explore today with
Speaker 1: my guest psychologist, Paul Bloom.
Speaker 2: He has thought deeply about human.
Speaker 1: Nature, our capacities for kindness and cruelty, our hunger for fairness,
Speaker 1: our appetite for meaning. We're going to talk about whether
Speaker 1: utopia is politically possible or do our flawed, ambitious, competitive
Speaker 1: brains always going to get in the way, or are
Speaker 1: there ways we might at least move in the right directions.
Speaker 1: Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University
Speaker 1: of Toronto and Professor Emeritis at Yale. He's the author
Speaker 1: of psych The Story of the Human Mind, and many
Speaker 1: other influential books. So let's jump into this conversation at
Speaker 1: the crossroads of psychology and society. So, Paul, almost all
Speaker 1: thinkers have thought about the issue of utopia and whether
Speaker 1: it's possible, and most political movements are trying to get
Speaker 1: themselves in that direction. But you're a little less hopeful
Speaker 1: about the possibility of reaching utopia because of human nature,
Speaker 1: So tell us about that.
Speaker 3: So I find the idea of utopia really interesting. It's
Speaker 3: not such a practical concern. I mean, if you and
Speaker 3: I were to talk about the troubles of today, we
Speaker 3: probably wouldn't settle on when we ever reach utopia or not.
Speaker 3: We'll be talking about, you know, local improvements, and maybe
Speaker 3: things suck in certain ways, let's it must make them better.
Speaker 3: But Nick Monstrom said it really nicely describe utopias as
Speaker 3: a thought experiment, as a way of exploring what we
Speaker 3: want and what we're capable of. And I think the
Speaker 3: idea of utopia is an excellent way to think about
Speaker 3: human nature. And in particular, if you think deeply about utopia,
Speaker 3: you'll come to see that certain aspects of our nature,
Speaker 3: of human nature that make it untenable, that we are
Speaker 3: not suited for a perfect world, that certain aspects of
Speaker 3: how we are mean perfection will be forever out of reach.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean we can't make things better. It doesn't
Speaker 3: mean near utopias aren't possible, but a perfect world unless
Speaker 3: you radically reconfigure human nature so that we're not human anymore,
Speaker 3: will be forever unattainable.
Speaker 1: And give us a sense of those facets of human
Speaker 1: nature like self interest and envy.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, Well take this particular case. In every utopia
Speaker 3: people have thought of, there's some degree of equality and
Speaker 3: a sort of mutual love where people care about everybody
Speaker 3: else within this utopian community. You to see why that
Speaker 3: would make sense. You think about tribes and families, and
Speaker 3: they push against each other and our interests get torn apart.
Speaker 3: And there are utopian thinkers, you know, such as Maw
Speaker 3: who thought we simply dissolved these special ties now would
Speaker 3: force people from different social classes to marry one another,
Speaker 3: you know, taking away old choice and say well, this
Speaker 3: will bring people together. A lot more benign example is
Speaker 3: the Israeli kibbutz. When I was a teenager, I spent
Speaker 3: a summer in the kibbutz in Israeli desert, and this
Speaker 3: is a traditional kibbutz where their children were raised communally.
Speaker 3: People have a baby, the baby was was sort of
Speaker 3: given to sort of general daycare area where it would
Speaker 3: be taken care of, and babies ended up ultimately knowing
Speaker 3: who their biological parents were. But there was nothing, No
Speaker 3: big deal was made of it. The idea would be
Speaker 3: the bonds of family could easily be dissolved. Now his
Speaker 3: experiment was a failure. The kibbutz was a failure. People
Speaker 3: love their children, children love their parents. People have greater
Speaker 3: ties to their siblings and their parents and their aunts
Speaker 3: and uncles than they do to strangers. And there's every
Speaker 3: indication that this is part of how we're wired up
Speaker 3: to be. It's, to some extent it's evolutionary biology one
Speaker 3: oh one, which is, you know, the forces that guided
Speaker 3: the evolution of our desires and our preferences were highly
Speaker 3: sensitive to whether or not other entities shared your gams.
Speaker 3: You know. So parents love their children because parents who
Speaker 3: don't didn't love their children, didn't reproduce as much as
Speaker 3: parents who did, and that causes that the bonds of
Speaker 3: family push against somebody who'd say, well, you just want
Speaker 3: a good society. You want people to just care about
Speaker 3: societies care about friends and strangers the same way. So
Speaker 3: too with the bonds of friendship. So two of the
Speaker 3: bonds of romantic love, and romantic love sets up other
Speaker 3: problems like jealousy. If I'm really attracted to somebody and
Speaker 3: I want them, if they don't choose to be with me,
Speaker 3: it could be very painful for me. And if they
Speaker 3: do choose to be with me, often I want them
Speaker 3: to only choose to be with me, and they want
Speaker 3: me to only be with them, and that could be
Speaker 3: painful too. And in fact, every utopia has had problems
Speaker 3: with sex. Either on the one extreme, either what they
Speaker 3: say is no sex except for procreation, trying to make
Speaker 3: a problem go away that way, or everybody has sex
Speaker 3: with everybody else communal marriage, and those don't work out either.
Speaker 3: So I mean, short version, human nature is messy.
Speaker 1: So we have things like tribalism, we have rivalry, and
Speaker 1: your point is these are hardwired in and they are
Speaker 1: adaptive generally, but they're also destructive to.
Speaker 2: The to the concept of a utopia.
Speaker 1: So your take is that a world without conflict or
Speaker 1: competition would actually run counter to how our motivations work.
Speaker 3: So we talked a little bit about the bonds of
Speaker 3: family and friendship and love. Another feature of our nature
Speaker 3: is we are hierarchical beings. We are you know, ultimately primates,
Speaker 3: and we care about how we stand relative to other people,
Speaker 3: so you know, we want them. We don't want an
Speaker 3: equal world, for instance. We want a world where merit
Speaker 3: is corresponds to results, at least to some extent, and
Speaker 3: so we chafe against pure equality. There's been a series
Speaker 3: of studies that have been done, some of them from
Speaker 3: my lab of children. And despite where you sometimes here,
Speaker 3: we're not natural born egalitarians. If you work twice as
Speaker 3: hard as me, even like a four year old things,
Speaker 3: you should get more than me for your work. And
Speaker 3: a situation where we if we were to get the
Speaker 3: same would be you know, considered unfair. And this sort
Speaker 3: of this idea that marriage should be rewarded again means
Speaker 3: the ideal world from a psychological point of view is
Speaker 3: an unequal one. But the unequal one leads to resentments
Speaker 3: and frustration and so on. And you know, existing political
Speaker 3: systems like communism and socialism and capitalism try to deal
Speaker 3: with us through some complicated set of compromises. And I
Speaker 3: think the compromises are kind of the best we're going
Speaker 3: to get. It'll be kind of equal in this way
Speaker 3: and unequal in this way. We'll reward in this way,
Speaker 3: but not in this way. We'll set up limits in
Speaker 3: this way, not in that way. But the idea of
Speaker 3: a perfectly smooth world where we're all the same. Maybe
Speaker 3: it could be imposed, but people be very unhappy with it.
Speaker 1: What's an example of a piece of legislation that finds
Speaker 1: a compromise.
Speaker 3: Well, i'll say the tax system. So you can imagine
Speaker 3: a tax system which treated the rich and poor identical.
Speaker 3: The billionaire has to pay a percentage and the pauper
Speaker 3: had to pay a percentage. That seems absurd. Just the
Speaker 3: idea of sort of marginal utility would say that these
Speaker 3: people should be treated differently. You should tax the millionaire more.
Speaker 3: On the flip side, a system that entirely confiscated the
Speaker 3: money of the rich would also discourage the accumulation of wealth,
Speaker 3: discourage businesses, discouraged creation. So what you have in most society,
Speaker 3: isn't it a progressive tax system? So and so you know,
Speaker 3: the poor pay nothing. Are five percent and as ten
Speaker 3: percent and it is fifteen percent, and and nobody's happy
Speaker 3: with us because well everybody says, oh, it should be
Speaker 3: higher here or lower here. And I certainly have no
Speaker 3: ideal solution. But the point is, there isn't going to
Speaker 3: be an ideal solution, just some sort of rough and
Speaker 3: ready compromise. So too with the balances between individual freedom
Speaker 3: and the safety of other people. So every society is
Speaker 3: going to have some constraints on free speech. You know,
Speaker 3: you can't you can't threaten to kill somebody. You can't
Speaker 3: do insider trading, you can't blackmail people or extort people
Speaker 3: if it gets too onerous. And political speeches block people
Speaker 3: push back, and most so many of our political debates
Speaker 3: right now struggle with as the margins you know, right now,
Speaker 3: right now in the United States, you know, some people
Speaker 3: want flag burning band either business or flag burning speech.
Speaker 3: We shouldn't we shouldn't ban it. Yeah, my point isn't
Speaker 3: the same thing, but these particular debates. But to say
Speaker 3: this is our fate, we are, oh, he's going to
Speaker 3: be arguing at these at these basic things because there's
Speaker 3: no optimal solution.
Speaker 1: So, Paul, you and I did a podcast a while
Speaker 1: ago when we talked about loneliness and the question of
Speaker 1: whether if somebody isn't working at all the painful stuff
Speaker 1: about relationships, maybe they won't get better at them, and
Speaker 1: maybe that will actually be a disservice to them. By
Speaker 1: the same token. I think you feel that if all
Speaker 1: struggle were removed in let's say a utopia of the
Speaker 1: future where AI and machines and other things could take
Speaker 1: care of everything for us, we would lose something about
Speaker 1: meaning in our lives.
Speaker 2: Tell us your take on that we would.
Speaker 3: I wrote about this in my books The Sweet Spot,
Speaker 3: where I argued that there's an optimal level of struggle,
Speaker 3: of difficulty that's important for a meaningful and good life.
Speaker 3: And then Nick Mostron recently wrote a book on utopia
Speaker 3: where you took up this issue and talked about a
Speaker 3: possible sort of post scarcity world where we have everything
Speaker 3: we need. We have all the food we need, all
Speaker 3: the shelter we need, anything we want that have, and
Speaker 3: so there need not be any struggle. Maybe there'll be
Speaker 3: no disease by then. And I have two thoughts of this.
Speaker 3: One thought is that that would be a boring world,
Speaker 3: a frustrating world, one that we would find we will
Speaker 3: lead to an wi and misery. We like struggle, I mean,
Speaker 3: too much struggle is miserable, but too little struggle is
Speaker 3: bad too, And so the first thought is that world
Speaker 3: will be terrible. The second thought is a world with
Speaker 3: no conflict and no struggle is not I think possible,
Speaker 3: because maybe we'll have enough food and maybe we'll have
Speaker 3: enough shelter, enough resources. But you know, there will always
Speaker 3: be a case as long as we're people that somebody
Speaker 3: will love somebody and they won't love them back. There
Speaker 3: will always be the case so long as we're people
Speaker 3: that you will want an award, a prize and honor
Speaker 3: and I will want it too, and there's just one
Speaker 3: to go around.
Speaker 2: And to follow up on that point.
Speaker 1: Your view, also, I think is that inequality is structurally unavoidable,
Speaker 1: because even if you had a society where everyone had everything,
Speaker 1: people will seek new markers of status and distinction.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 3: I mean we see this in sort of artificial societies
Speaker 3: like communes or even academic departments where everyone is an
Speaker 3: assistant professor and was a full professor. The people jockey
Speaker 3: for a position, a jockey for status. I could easily
Speaker 3: imagine a world, and I think it would be a
Speaker 3: nice world where the status didn't translate into access for
Speaker 3: resources that we desperately need. You know, where you know
Speaker 3: either you will have enough food, eat our eye will
Speaker 3: but not both. Much better to avoid such a world.
Speaker 3: But we're never going to have a world where everybody
Speaker 3: gets to matter of respect they think they deserve, because
Speaker 3: many of us at certain times think we deserve more
Speaker 3: respect than other people. So you know, if you want
Speaker 3: your voice to be heard, you want to have sway
Speaker 3: over things and to be maximum respected, and I want
Speaker 3: this two and so too for the five other people
Speaker 3: around us. There is a clash and some things, some
Speaker 3: resources like respect, love, often sexual attraction, friendship, are inherently limited.
Speaker 3: And so in some way the worry that we have
Speaker 3: that oh what do we do with a world of
Speaker 3: no conflict? How will we survive? It isn't going to
Speaker 3: happen because there will always be some sort of conflict.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And so your view is that the competition for recognition
Speaker 1: and influence and prestige is always going to reintroduce hierarchy
Speaker 1: and undermine this utopian ideal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I gave a talk on utopia for the first
Speaker 3: time in this wonderful festival in Wales called How the
Speaker 3: Light Gets In And they have a little poster that
Speaker 3: they put up saying this is our festival and everything,
Speaker 3: and they list all the names of the luminaries who
Speaker 3: are presenting at the festival and I was fifteenth on
Speaker 3: a list, so it's things like that, you know. Now,
Speaker 3: now the people in front of me were like you
Speaker 3: Jaijack and Steven Pinker a great name, so you know,
Speaker 3: it's fine. But still I think everybody on that list
Speaker 3: would have said, I kind of like to be first
Speaker 3: or second or third. And that's a tiny example, but
Speaker 3: so much of life is like that. You know.
Speaker 1: I just heard a routine from Sarah Silverman, the comedian,
Speaker 1: and she she said that she checked into a hotel
Speaker 1: and the person said, wow, Sarah Silverman, you're in my
Speaker 1: top four comedians. And she immediately felt like, okay, well
Speaker 1: that means I'm number four then, right, because that was
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have phrased it that way, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And you see this in kids. You know, I've seen
Speaker 3: kids and I had to have two sons and they
Speaker 3: were little. You know, I've seen them fight over a sock,
Speaker 3: you know, because you know, they were playing a socks
Speaker 3: they could have each played with, but they each wanted
Speaker 3: that sock. You know, one of one kids jumps onto
Speaker 3: a chair that kind of wants to sit in the
Speaker 3: same chair. Certainly they're fighting for her parents' attention. And
Speaker 3: this is you know, this is just how people work,
Speaker 3: and you know I. So we're never going to have this,
Speaker 3: this frictionless world. Back to the idea of friction, back
Speaker 3: to the idea of some sort of suffering a conflict.
Speaker 2: I don't think this is some sort of horrible fate.
Speaker 3: I think it's just part of our lot, that that
Speaker 3: by a time you know, you and I, you know,
Speaker 3: pass away, we will have had our share of disappointments,
Speaker 3: of unrequited love, of awards, we didn't receive honors we
Speaker 3: felt we deserved, and we didn't get moments of lack
Speaker 3: of respect. But you know, if we're lucky, we've also found,
Speaker 3: you know, occasional flashes of true love and surprise honors
Speaker 3: and and winning the you know it. It's this again,
Speaker 3: this messiness is what we're condemned to, but it's not
Speaker 3: a terrible fate.
Speaker 2: Here's a question.
Speaker 1: So history often shows that attempts at utopia end in authoritarianism.
Speaker 1: Let's think, you know, communism in the twentieth century or something.
Speaker 1: How would did you tie that to psychology.
Speaker 3: I think the move to authoritarianism comes because we not
Speaker 3: only have preferences. It's not only true to say I
Speaker 3: want to be able to spend time with my children.
Speaker 3: I want to be able to marry somebody who I
Speaker 3: love and who loves me. I want to be free
Speaker 3: to sell things to people who want to buy them
Speaker 3: from me. I want to be free to have property.
Speaker 3: Not only that, but we also have an appetite for
Speaker 3: what you can call autonomy, even for his own sake.
Speaker 3: We want to be able to within the limits possible,
Speaker 3: get our way, and we don't like constraints on it.
Speaker 3: There's actually a really interesting body of work in social
Speaker 3: psychology that finds that if you tell people you can't
Speaker 3: do something, all of a sudden, it becomes immensely desirable.
Speaker 3: I mean, the classic case of this is Eve, you know,
Speaker 3: in the Garden of Eden, doing the one thing she
Speaker 3: was told she couldn't do. There's any incredible human about that.
Speaker 3: You know, if I told you, David, don't press that button,
Speaker 3: I demand you don't, resident you will find yourself an
Speaker 3: urge press that button. And so this urge for autonomy,
Speaker 3: sometimes for perversity, is within I think all of us,
Speaker 3: to different degrees, and then you need to just you know,
Speaker 3: a state needs to stomp it down. And if a
Speaker 3: state wants to tell you you can love who you
Speaker 3: want to love, You can't live where you want to live,
Speaker 3: you can't say what you want to say. Well, they
Speaker 3: often have to use force because people will, in an
Speaker 3: ideal world not quietly go along with us, and so
Speaker 3: utopian ideas typically end up. You know, honestly, I end
Speaker 3: up in concentration camp, stand up with mass starvation because
Speaker 3: because people are not suited for the utopian plans and
Speaker 3: all push back.
Speaker 1: Now you're not opposed to seeking progress in societies affect
Speaker 1: you very much for that. So tell us how you
Speaker 1: balance that in your head about utopia. Maybe impossible, but
Speaker 1: we should be making progress.
Speaker 3: I think you should certainly make progress. And you know,
Speaker 3: to some extent I will. I'll conceive the obvious, which
Speaker 3: is progress often involves force. If you say, well, here's
Speaker 3: our new law, and the new law says such and so,
Speaker 3: and it gives people more freedom and more rights. But
Speaker 3: people may violate law, and in order to do that,
Speaker 3: to stop them violent law, you might need to provide force.
Speaker 3: You know, there's no just thing as a voluntary tax system.
Speaker 3: I'm a believer in free speech, and I think if
Speaker 3: somebody comes to campus and they're invited to give a talk,
Speaker 3: they should be able to give a talk uninterrupted. But
Speaker 3: that means that somebody might have to threaten, or to punish,
Speaker 3: or even drag away people who would violently protest against them.
Speaker 3: You're not going to find a decent war without the
Speaker 3: possibility of force, even in the simplest infantiations. I think
Speaker 3: that ideas of change, I think there's all sorts of
Speaker 3: waste this world could be better, all sorts of ways
Speaker 3: of this world has been better. You know, just take
Speaker 3: a simple example of marriage to gay people. Seems to
Speaker 3: be something that has had a million pluses and turned
Speaker 3: out to have almost no minuses besides some people being
Speaker 3: unhappy with it. But I think we want to be
Speaker 3: very conscious about having changes that go too much against
Speaker 3: the way people are having. Changes for instance, that that
Speaker 3: you know, try to destroy ties of family, ties of love,
Speaker 3: ties of friendship, even tribal ties. I think, for instance,
Speaker 3: people of the same ethnicity who feel a kinship towards
Speaker 3: their ethnicity, I don't think the States should try to
Speaker 3: sort of stop them from the States should try to
Speaker 3: stop people from worshiping or from practicing their sort of
Speaker 3: communal customs. I think that runs deep, and if you
Speaker 3: underestimate how deep it runs, often you end up with
Speaker 3: kind of a terrible rebellious population, all sorts of trouble.
Speaker 3: So I'm all for human progress. I just think and
Speaker 3: maybe this is that's that's the liberal progressive side. The
Speaker 3: conservative side is is don't push too much again the
Speaker 3: way people are.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to this issue about in
Speaker 1: groups and outgroups. You may know that we did these
Speaker 1: studies in my lab a while ago where you're in
Speaker 1: the brain scanner fMRI and you see six hands arrayed
Speaker 1: on the screen, and the computer randomly picks one of
Speaker 1: those hands, and you see it gets stabbed.
Speaker 2: With a syringe needle.
Speaker 1: And so what happens is your brain has an empathy response. Essentially,
Speaker 1: your pain matrix lights up. It's not your hand getting stabbed,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless you have this reaction of lighting up these
Speaker 1: pain networks as though it maybe it was your hand.
Speaker 1: That's presumably the neural basis of empathy. But what we
Speaker 1: did then is added a one word label to each
Speaker 1: hand Christian, Jewish, Muslim, scientologist, Hindu, atheist. And now the
Speaker 1: goes around, picks a hand, you see the handget stabbed,
Speaker 1: and the question is depending on what your in group is,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about the out groups? And it
Speaker 1: turns out across all religions, everyone cares more about their
Speaker 1: in group. This very fast neural response, this first neural
Speaker 1: response is much larger if you see your in group
Speaker 1: get stabbed, and much smaller when you see a member
Speaker 1: of your outgroup get stabbed. And by the way, this
Speaker 1: was true for atheists as well. They cared more when
Speaker 1: they see an atheist's hand gets stabbed. So it's not
Speaker 1: even an indictment of religion. It's just about in groups
Speaker 1: and out groups. And so what's cool is that people
Speaker 1: can have all kinds of cognitive layers on top of
Speaker 1: that so that they can still continue to do the
Speaker 1: right thing in their societies. But fundamentally we're yoked with
Speaker 1: that kind of bias.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that work. I'm familiar with our word.
Speaker 3: Just similar study showing more of a reaction if you're
Speaker 3: white to seeing a white hand stab and a black
Speaker 3: hand stab, and vice versia if you're black. There's some
Speaker 3: studies in Europe with soccer fans where you know, you
Speaker 3: watch somebody be shocked and if they're a member of
Speaker 3: a different soccer team, are a fan of a different
Speaker 3: soccer team, you feel pleasure instead of instead of pain.
Speaker 3: In some way, I take that as a challenge to
Speaker 3: what I just said. So I said that you kind
Speaker 3: of have to accept human nature as it is, but
Speaker 3: I think there are times where you do have to
Speaker 3: push back a little bit, and our tremendously strong favoring
Speaker 3: in group kind of has to go a little bit.
Speaker 3: In a healthy democratic society, it's really good for people
Speaker 3: of one ethnicity to care about people from another ethnicity.
Speaker 3: It's really good, you know, for the atheists to care
Speaker 3: about the religious person, for the Catholic to care about
Speaker 3: a Protestant, and so on. And I wouldn't be so
Speaker 3: conservative as I say, well, Lise, are natures to care
Speaker 3: about our own, so leave it alone. I think to
Speaker 3: some extent societies will push towards some sort of cosmopolitanism.
Speaker 3: So I would draw a distinction. I would grow have
Speaker 3: a stinction when me caring about my fellow Canadians way
Speaker 3: more than Americans, which is I think something which you
Speaker 3: should sort of try to tap down. Maybe you could
Speaker 3: try to try to ameliorate a little bit versus me
Speaker 3: caring about my children versus other people's children, where I
Speaker 3: think to some extent, you have to take that kind
Speaker 3: of as a given. You'd want to construct a good
Speaker 3: society and more lang which it, except we are stuck
Speaker 3: with that and we cannot mess with that. So some
Speaker 3: parts of human nature are sort of so tightly weaved
Speaker 3: in that you just you know, you should take it
Speaker 3: as a premise. Other parts and you're you're, and you're
Speaker 3: good to point us out. You may want to push
Speaker 3: back on a bit.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: You know, we often do this in legislation. This in
Speaker 1: some sense represents our longest term thinking. So for example,
Speaker 1: anti discrimination housing laws is a way of saying, look,
Speaker 1: we get it, we know that you like people who
Speaker 1: look like you better, but we're going to establish us
Speaker 1: as a rule in our society that you can't do
Speaker 1: that anymore.
Speaker 3: That's right, I mean. Joe Henrich made the argument in
Speaker 3: this wonderful book The Weirdest People in the World that
Speaker 3: one of the great moral revolutions of our time of
Speaker 3: human history happened when the Church disavowed cousin marriage. And
Speaker 3: as a result of this, it rippled through and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden the bounds of family became less salient
Speaker 3: in our political culture, and people became more individualistic, less
Speaker 3: less kin less blood related, and then the world was
Speaker 3: transformed as a result. And right now we have you know,
Speaker 3: I say you shouldn't push back upon the bounds of family,
Speaker 3: but we do in a little bit. We have anti
Speaker 3: nepotism laws. If I'm looking for a research assistant to hire,
Speaker 3: I can't hire my wife, are my sons or my cousin,
Speaker 3: you know? And I think those are good lots. And I
Speaker 3: think we accept that in the realm of the sort
Speaker 3: of world of the market and world of universities, these
Speaker 3: kinship bonds should not matter.
Speaker 1: And so your view as a psychologist is that the
Speaker 1: point is not to give up on moving in the
Speaker 1: direction of a utopia, but instead to replace utopian dreams
Speaker 1: with reforms that are achievable given the way we are
Speaker 1: given our wiring.
Speaker 3: That's a beautiful way of putting, I mean, a sort
Speaker 3: of even more sort of constructive way of putting. It
Speaker 3: is people who want to make the world a better place,
Speaker 3: and we should all be such people as we embark
Speaker 3: on this project. We should think deeply about human nature.
Speaker 3: That'll tell us what changes will come easy. It'll tell
Speaker 3: us what changes will be difficult, but worthwhile, and what
Speaker 3: changes we shouldn't even try to go near. And I
Speaker 3: think that that's really useful.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Paul Bloom. So where does
Speaker 1: that leave us. If there's one very critical lesson from history,
Speaker 1: it's that grand designs for perfection tend to unravel. Utopia
Speaker 1: is very often kernel into dystopias. We've seen that all
Speaker 1: throughout history, where paradises very quickly become prisons. And this
Speaker 1: is because the human brain, for all its massive success,
Speaker 1: gives a tricky foundation for building heaven on Earth. But
Speaker 1: the hope that I think Paul and I both share
Speaker 1: is that maybe a close study of psychology, combined with
Speaker 1: a close read of history can carry forward the seeds
Speaker 1: of progress. In other words, the right way to move
Speaker 1: in the direction of utopia isn't to try to erase
Speaker 1: human drives, but instead figure out how to channel them.
Speaker 2: So let me just say a couple of things. First.
Speaker 1: It's important to note that these instincts we have are
Speaker 1: often double edged. For example, I told you at the
Speaker 1: beginning about the experiment of dividing summer camp kids into
Speaker 1: teams and watching them polarize. But the thing to note
Speaker 1: is that the same grouping reflex. This team reflex is
Speaker 1: what binds neighbors in the communities. The capacity for division
Speaker 1: is also the capacity for belonging. It's double edged and
Speaker 1: it always has been. And that leads us to a
Speaker 1: deeper question, which is how can you take our tribal instincts,
Speaker 1: which probably aren't going away, and find ways to widen
Speaker 1: the circle of what counts as us. As I've talked
Speaker 1: about in other episodes, I think the Internet actually gives
Speaker 1: us a powerful tool to do this, because the algorithms,
Speaker 1: if programmed correctly, can complexify relationships by surfacing the things
Speaker 1: that we have in common. And some years ago I
Speaker 1: wrote about this in an article in The Economist called
Speaker 1: does your brain care about other people? It depends, And
Speaker 1: that article was all about how our brains are predisposed
Speaker 1: for in groups and outgroups. And one of the things
Speaker 1: this does is make it very easy for governments to
Speaker 1: leverage propaganda. But as it turns out, one of the
Speaker 1: most effective things we can do as a society is
Speaker 1: to learn the basic tricks of propaganda. For example, calling
Speaker 1: the other group of people animals or viruses or insects
Speaker 1: or anything other than other humans what propaganda does is
Speaker 1: it dials down particular networks in our brain that are
Speaker 1: involved in understanding other people, and that makes violent polarization
Speaker 1: much easier, because now you're taking up arms against some
Speaker 1: group that your brain has come to view as subhuman. So,
Speaker 1: as I said, the way to get societal immunity against
Speaker 1: this basic psychological trick is to put it on the
Speaker 1: table as.
Speaker 2: Part of our education, so that the next.
Speaker 1: Time you hear a muckraker or pundit or official say
Speaker 1: these things like there are a bunch of animals, you.
Speaker 2: Can immediately see through the magic trick instead of falling
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 1: Now zooming back out, I want to note that when
Speaker 1: we look at the long arc of history and we
Speaker 1: see massive declines in poverty and rises in literacy and
Speaker 1: fewer wars between great powers, we can see that something
Speaker 1: is working directionally. It's very imperfect, but things are on
Speaker 1: the timescale of decades or centuries working, and given the
Speaker 1: brains were yoked with this may be the best we
Speaker 1: can do. The lesson that surfaces from psychology and history
Speaker 1: is that utopia is probably not a destination but a direction.
Speaker 1: I mentioned at the outset that Thomas Moore coined the
Speaker 1: word utopia from the root words which mean no place utopia.
Speaker 1: That was pretty prescient. Margaret Atwood put it this way,
Speaker 1: Utopia is not one place, but many, always receding ahead
Speaker 1: of us. And I would say that's the point of
Speaker 1: today's episode. We're probably never going to reach it, but
Speaker 1: the point is the endless act of reaching. So without
Speaker 1: being delusional, let's keep making progress, building up a world
Speaker 1: where tomorrow is just a little kinder, a little fairer,
Speaker 1: and even more abundant than today. Go to eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
Speaker 1: and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
Speaker 1: each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
Speaker 1: David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.