Speaker 1: M hmm. What's Dick and Matador's. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards and that is the intro. People requested
Speaker 1: that intro, Sophie, I don't need to hear your guff
Speaker 1: about it. I do want, you know, people's feedback, but
Speaker 1: I don't need guff. Okay, this is a noun. I
Speaker 1: don't agree with that. Alright, Well something was Inductor ZUFI.
Speaker 1: I think that was, by the standards of my recent introductions,
Speaker 1: one of the best ones I've done. I just don't
Speaker 1: like Crimes against Potatoes. Well that's actually totally fair. Um,
Speaker 1: but that introduction, uh does tie in, yeah, slightly with
Speaker 1: with today's episode. Uh so you know, first off, Jamie Loftus,
Speaker 1: you are our guest today. How you doing? Jamie co
Speaker 1: hosted the Bechel Cast the the creative mind behind Boss
Speaker 1: Whom Is Girl? Which is going to be in Edinburgh
Speaker 1: probably by the time this episode drops. The most entertaining
Speaker 1: show I've been to in like the last ten years.
Speaker 1: Fly to Edinburgh. I've several times, and if you listen
Speaker 1: to this years later and Jamie Loftus is not in Edinburgh,
Speaker 1: fly to Edinburgh and demand that they take her back,
Speaker 1: Like what happened there? Yeah, there's yeah, yeah yeah, force
Speaker 1: it upon the town fathers of Edinburgh. I mean really
Speaker 1: optimistic for you to even mention as a possibility as
Speaker 1: a time period that will exist. Yeah. Well I'm an optimist.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not well, I don't know, I'm a
Speaker 1: I'm a mix of both, I guess. So today, normally
Speaker 1: this is a show where I talk about the very
Speaker 1: worst people in all of history. But today we're doing
Speaker 1: something a little bit different. We are getting very much
Speaker 1: behind the bastards because we're going into some prehistory about
Speaker 1: where authoritarianism comes from, where fascism comes from, how it
Speaker 1: might be kind of programmed into our brains to an
Speaker 1: extent um. This is kind of a weird one, and
Speaker 1: it's based on you know, I read about primarily dictators
Speaker 1: and terrible unethical political leaders and corporate leaders, people who
Speaker 1: abuse power, uh, basically as a more than full time job,
Speaker 1: and having done that for a year and change, you
Speaker 1: start to have some ideas about the nature of power
Speaker 1: and the nature of authoritarianism and the possibilities of the
Speaker 1: human race and stuff. Um, So this is like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's not a half asked but it's maybe three quarters
Speaker 1: of an asked attempt at me putting some of that
Speaker 1: together and explaining some of the conclusions I've drawn, uh
Speaker 1: from all of this research, and uh it's not ready
Speaker 1: for public consumption, but I'm gonna put it out there
Speaker 1: anyway because I'm a hack and a fraud. So that's
Speaker 1: where we are. I've got Sophie and Jamie in the
Speaker 1: room to tear me down if if what I'm saying
Speaker 1: some nonsense, and Anderson and Anderson, this would be really
Speaker 1: fun if your conclusions were actually I was being kind
Speaker 1: of dramatic before power is actually really good and I'm
Speaker 1: going to work for cook Industries. Bye bye. This this
Speaker 1: ends on a on a pro Saddam Hussein rant, Robert
Speaker 1: you know what, leave Yeah, I've become a Stalinist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh god, I just want to hear you refer to
Speaker 1: yourself as a bit of a drama queen. Turns out
Speaker 1: this year I've just been a bit of a drama
Speaker 1: queen and things are actually fine. He's like, I've just
Speaker 1: been binging Mary Kay and Nashley. You know, that's my
Speaker 1: new life. As I learned from Mary Kay and Ashley,
Speaker 1: Everything's fine as long as you as long as you
Speaker 1: light to your wait, Mary Kay, I was too busy
Speaker 1: trying to remember exactly what had happened in uh in
Speaker 1: that movie where they trick their parents into both getting
Speaker 1: on a cruise ship with them to make their divorced
Speaker 1: mom and dad get back together. Buddy gun one, isn't
Speaker 1: that one? That that is? Isn't that uh parent trap?
Speaker 1: Parent trap? Yeah? Not Mary Kane? Actually not actually twins,
Speaker 1: that's double Lindsay Lohan. Yeah, and as I miss, wait,
Speaker 1: was that Lindsay lohunt? That wasn't even Mary Kay? And Nactually,
Speaker 1: goddamn it. I know I think about the such a
Speaker 1: that I tried to mention Ariana Grande in casual conversation
Speaker 1: last year, and you waited maybe a full ten seconds
Speaker 1: by being like, I don't know who you're talking. I
Speaker 1: actually bring that up thinking about it once a week.
Speaker 1: I bring it up constantly with salespeople when they asked
Speaker 1: me why Robert can't pronounce normal words, and I give
Speaker 1: them the explanation that he can pronounce some crazy Russian
Speaker 1: ship but cannot pronounce Ariana Grande. See this is frustrating
Speaker 1: because I feel like if you, if you add up
Speaker 1: the number of words that I read every week on
Speaker 1: this show, I have above a pronunciation rate. Someone crunched
Speaker 1: those numbers. Yeah, I mean we're talking about ten thousand
Speaker 1: ish words a week. You know, you get a couple
Speaker 1: wrong mistakes are made, but usually the words are like tree,
Speaker 1: t look we I love tries and I pronounced them route.
Speaker 1: Why did you let us come on the show together?
Speaker 1: We're not going to get anything done. I needed I
Speaker 1: needed some ship talking of my my, my philosophizing here,
Speaker 1: because if I'm going to do an episode where I
Speaker 1: unload of a half baked philosophy, somebody should be there
Speaker 1: to like point out when I've made a huge logical
Speaker 1: error or pronounce a name wrong. Okay, this actually will
Speaker 1: tie in with something we talked about later in the episode.
Speaker 1: I didn't plan that ahead of time, but it totally does.
Speaker 1: And I'm very proud of myself of now. So let's
Speaker 1: get into it. In nineteen eighty nine, Francis fuku Yama,
Speaker 1: a political scientist and author, wrote an essay titled the
Speaker 1: End of History Looking forward just a little bit. He
Speaker 1: was able to see the fall of the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: was on the very near horizon. To fuku Yama and
Speaker 1: too many. At the dawn of the nineteen nineties, it
Speaker 1: looked as if a new epoch in human society was dawning,
Speaker 1: one in which the great historical shifts between empires and
Speaker 1: modes of government that had persisted for EON's would cease,
Speaker 1: because mankind had clearly arrived at the perfect system, liberal democracy.
Speaker 1: So that's Fukuyama's thinking in like nineteen eighty nine. Now
Speaker 1: he turned his essay into a book in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: after the fall of the USSR, when he looked like
Speaker 1: he basically read the future UH in the end of history.
Speaker 1: He wrote that humanity was witnessing quote not just the
Speaker 1: passing of a particular period of post war history, but
Speaker 1: the end of history is such that is the endpoint
Speaker 1: of mankind's ideological evolution, and the universalization of Western liberal
Speaker 1: demonocracy is the final form of human government. So a
Speaker 1: bit of a bold claim to make UH and a
Speaker 1: little less than thirty years later, in the Year of
Speaker 1: Our Lord twenty nineteen, fuki Yama's theories have not aged well.
Speaker 1: Rather than living at the end of history, we now
Speaker 1: seem to be living through a period where these once
Speaker 1: in vulnerable liberal democracies are dropping faster than fat beats
Speaker 1: at a warehouse. Rave. Thank you, thank you for that, Jamie.
Speaker 1: That's proud of that one. Under Victor Orban, Hungary has
Speaker 1: transitioned to what he calls an illiberal democracy. Under tap
Speaker 1: resign uh, Turkey has moved very close to an outright dictatorship.
Speaker 1: The elections of JayR. Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo du
Speaker 1: Terte in the Philippines hardly bode any better, But the
Speaker 1: situation is actually even worse than it looks. Based on
Speaker 1: all that, researchers with a German institute, Bertelsman stiff Tong
Speaker 1: published a study back in March of two eighteen that
Speaker 1: analyzed the quality of democracy, the market, economy, and leadership
Speaker 1: of some hundred and twenty nine nations. They use this
Speaker 1: to put together what they called a transformation Index that
Speaker 1: roughly analyze the overall levels of freedom, authoritarianism, and inequality
Speaker 1: in those societies. They found that roughly one billion more
Speaker 1: people live under dictatorships now than did fifteen years ago. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's insane. Yeah, it's not a great statistic. I don't
Speaker 1: like that. M hmm. That's all I have to say
Speaker 1: about it. That's my only comment. Not into it. Okay, Sophie,
Speaker 1: not a dictatorship fan, bold stance to take considering honestly,
Speaker 1: brave of you. I mean we can add to that
Speaker 1: because I feel like our relationship Robert is a dictatorship
Speaker 1: and I am that dictator. Yes, in which direction nothing
Speaker 1: would surprise me. And like Stalin, you regularly throw oranges
Speaker 1: at me and make me watch Cowboy movies while you drink.
Speaker 1: I've seen it. Yeah, absolutely, I hate to see it
Speaker 1: and I see it. Yeah, but you are I mean
Speaker 1: that you are my son, and I accept you for
Speaker 1: who you are. Yeah, except for when I don't want
Speaker 1: to watch Cowboy movies. Yeah, not acceptable. Then that's not acceptable.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah. So these guys look into the number
Speaker 1: of people living in dictatorships and how that's changed, and
Speaker 1: they find out that there's a billion more people living
Speaker 1: under such regimes now than we're fifteen years ago. I've
Speaker 1: had a write up of this study in the Local,
Speaker 1: which is a German newspaper. Quote. Well, the researchers concluded
Speaker 1: that the number of people living in democracies rose from
Speaker 1: four billion to four point two billion between two thousand
Speaker 1: and three and two thousand seventeen. They also found that
Speaker 1: three point three billion people lived under dictatorship last year
Speaker 1: compared to two point three billion in two thousand three.
Speaker 1: So the trends aren't good. Uh. It is said that
Speaker 1: the number of countries classified as having exemplary standards of
Speaker 1: free and fair elections had dropped from one in six
Speaker 1: and two thousand six to one in fourteen last year.
Speaker 1: And while seventeen of the hundred and twenty nine countries
Speaker 1: were considered to have completely unrestricted freedom of press and
Speaker 1: opinion in two thousand six, that was the case for
Speaker 1: just ten countries last year. Okay, so we're not We're
Speaker 1: not on a great trend line if you you want
Speaker 1: to look at history that way. Um. Now, in every
Speaker 1: era there are philosophers whose purpose seems to be to
Speaker 1: reinforce in the minds of the great and good that
Speaker 1: whatever systems put them in their lofty place are right
Speaker 1: and decent and perfect. What would you, Francis fuki Yama
Speaker 1: was that man cheering the victors of the Cold War
Speaker 1: on and assuring them that their world order would persist
Speaker 1: for all time, And now that mankind seems to be
Speaker 1: sinking into a darker and more authoritarian era. A new
Speaker 1: philosopher has arrived to praise the righteousness of this shift.
Speaker 1: His name is Dr Jordan Peterson. Stand about, I was
Speaker 1: having a perfectly lovely conversation. Yeah, we were having a
Speaker 1: conversation while you were talking, and then I got the
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson momo and I had just had a sharp pain.
Speaker 1: But before we get into that sharp pain, what would
Speaker 1: all what would what would you sell the Lofty Place?
Speaker 1: What would you sell at the Lofty Place with a
Speaker 1: whole sorts of ship? I mean it would be and
Speaker 1: also none of it would be It would be I
Speaker 1: think probably a front for something else. Like it would
Speaker 1: be mostly I don't even know. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: a very good consumerwards, So yeah, it would be a
Speaker 1: shop for Okay, no, it's just supposed to be a shop,
Speaker 1: but it's actually a trap. Um so i'll, you know,
Speaker 1: like lure in like sword guys and capture Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: like guys who own swords. And then it's really kind
Speaker 1: of like a re education kind of thing, and the
Speaker 1: doors snap and then I teach the sword guys a
Speaker 1: thing or two about a thing or two, and then
Speaker 1: they leave mentally healthier. I can respect that. Back to
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson, well, I mean speaking of sword guys, he
Speaker 1: kind of ties in there. But he also ties into
Speaker 1: authoritarianism because in his best selling book Twelve Rules for
Speaker 1: Life and Antidote to Chaos, Dr Peterson argues that strict
Speaker 1: hierarchies are natural and healthy, at least to some extent,
Speaker 1: according to a write up in the conversation quote. To
Speaker 1: prove his point, Peterson uses the example of lobsters, which
Speaker 1: humans share a common evolutionary ancestor with. Peterson argues that,
Speaker 1: like humans, lobsters exist in hierarchies and have a nervous
Speaker 1: system attuned to status, which runs on serotonin, a brain
Speaker 1: chemical often associated with feelings of happiness. But higher up
Speaker 1: a hierarchy of lobster climbs, This brain mechanism helps to
Speaker 1: make more serotonin available. The more defeat it suffers, the
Speaker 1: more restricted the serotonin supply. Lower serotonin is in turn
Speaker 1: associated with more negative emotions, perhaps making it harder to
Speaker 1: climb back up the ladder. According to Peterson, hierarchies and
Speaker 1: humans work in a similar way. We are wired to
Speaker 1: live in them. So that's Dr Peterson, And as much
Speaker 1: as I might personally find him frustrating a disagreeable. He's
Speaker 1: not the only person making arguments like this, do we
Speaker 1: have a sea? Do we have a second source? I
Speaker 1: just don't like his We've got other sources and and yeah,
Speaker 1: unfortunately we have other sources. Uh. There's a distressing amount
Speaker 1: of data that reinforces the idea that strict hierarchy may
Speaker 1: be more natural to humankind than the egalitarian future those
Speaker 1: of us who grew up watching Star Trek the next
Speaker 1: generation might prefer. In two thousand eight, a scientific study
Speaker 1: on a hierarchy and the human brains started making the rounds.
Speaker 1: Online websites like PBS News Hour summarize it with headlines
Speaker 1: like this, social status is hardwired into the brain, study
Speaker 1: shows The research this article and others like it discussed
Speaker 1: was based on a study conducted by the National Institute
Speaker 1: of Mental Health using an FMR I to measure the
Speaker 1: brain activity of seventy two people playing a computer game
Speaker 1: with financial rewards on the line. According to the press
Speaker 1: release quote, there were assigned a status that they were
Speaker 1: told was based on their playing skill. In fact, the
Speaker 1: game outcomes were predetermined by the other players simulated by
Speaker 1: computer participants intermittently saw pictures and scores of an inferior
Speaker 1: and a superior player they thought were simultaneously playing in
Speaker 1: other rooms. Although they knew the perceived players scores would
Speaker 1: not affect their own outcomes a reward, and were instructed
Speaker 1: to ignore them. Participants brain activity and behavior were highly
Speaker 1: influenced by their position in the implied hierarchy. Now I
Speaker 1: found a more detailed breakdown of that study by an
Speaker 1: actual scientist, Dr. Kabiz Kamrani, writing on anthropology dot net,
Speaker 1: and he notes quote Overall, this observation implies that social
Speaker 1: status is highly valued in our subconscious minds, even as
Speaker 1: much as money. The press is gorging itself on the
Speaker 1: sound bite they just love it when something is complex
Speaker 1: as social hierarchy and brain functions are reduced to something
Speaker 1: as simple as gaining money. Another interesting observation involved subjects
Speaker 1: that were presented a superior competitor in the game. When
Speaker 1: that happened at triggered activity in quote, an area near
Speaker 1: the front of the brain that appears to size people up,
Speaker 1: making interpersonal judgments and assessing social status. A circuit involving
Speaker 1: the midfront part of the brain that processes the intentions
Speaker 1: and most motives of others and emotion processing areas deep
Speaker 1: in the brain activated when the hierarchy became unstable, allowing
Speaker 1: for upward and downward nobility. That it is the prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex is the judge bitch cortex. Y Dr Camrani goes
Speaker 1: on to write, these results kind of thwart any utopian
Speaker 1: anarchists out there. This data shows that are hierarchical consciousness
Speaker 1: seems to be ingrained in the human brains so much
Speaker 1: so that there are distinct circuits activated by concerns over
Speaker 1: social rank. So like, so like, what what kind of
Speaker 1: a study is this? Like did he how many? It's
Speaker 1: an f M r I studies. So they're doing these
Speaker 1: sort of things to try to make put people in
Speaker 1: situations where they would be specifically like maybe lad to
Speaker 1: think about their rank in a hierarchy, and they're also
Speaker 1: measuring their brains at the same time, and they're finding that, like,
Speaker 1: because of the way that people's brains react in these studies,
Speaker 1: it suggests that parts of our brain are hardwired um
Speaker 1: to view ourselves in part of a social hierarchy, as
Speaker 1: opposed to like human beings inherently being egalitarian and social
Speaker 1: hierarchy being something that's falsely imposed on us from outside,
Speaker 1: Like the structure of our brain, uh, seems to reinforce hierarchy.
Speaker 1: And do we know is there like are we pulling
Speaker 1: from like a wide group of yeah, a sample, yeah,
Speaker 1: not samples. This is this is just one study, um,
Speaker 1: but there are other studies that have found similar things
Speaker 1: that its specific study does, say the sample size of
Speaker 1: the group that he did. Yeah, this one's I think
Speaker 1: a seventy two persons study, this most recent one here. Um.
Speaker 1: But there's like this is this is like sort of
Speaker 1: emblematic of one sort of strain of research, and there's
Speaker 1: a couple of other studies in it that talk about, um,
Speaker 1: hierarchy and stuff. So it's not I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: present this as like the end all be all, but
Speaker 1: it is kind of a bummer to read stuff like that, um,
Speaker 1: because it, Yeah, it would seem to push the conclusion
Speaker 1: that we are to some extent, at least irrevocably chain
Speaker 1: to hierarchy, to systems of inequality, uh and in other words,
Speaker 1: to a world dominated by bastards. And while that would
Speaker 1: mean eternal job security for Sophie and I, it's not
Speaker 1: a worry that a world that I want to live
Speaker 1: in particularly, so I dug a little bit deeper with
Speaker 1: a little bit of desperation to it. Um, And I
Speaker 1: found evidence to suggest that our primate ants sestors, or
Speaker 1: at least many of our primate ancestors, would have been
Speaker 1: beings with strict social hierarchies. Scientists think this is plausible
Speaker 1: because many of our modern ape and monkey relatives show
Speaker 1: evidence of this too. Gibbons are strictly monogamous, Chimpanzees have
Speaker 1: elaborate sexual hierarchies, Silverback guerrillas don't exactly work out their
Speaker 1: differences in mutual self criticism sessions. UM. I'm trying not
Speaker 1: to be too absolutist with anything here, but I think
Speaker 1: it's it's fair to say, based on a lot of
Speaker 1: anthropological research, that many of the pre human primates we
Speaker 1: descended from would have behaved in similar ways, which is
Speaker 1: probably why we have brains that are to some extent
Speaker 1: hardwired for hierarchy. UM. Now, this gets more complicated when
Speaker 1: you also slot in the fact that an increasing body
Speaker 1: of anthropological research suggests that many of our hunter gatherer
Speaker 1: ancestors would have lived in egalitarian communities. Which is the
Speaker 1: conclusion that scientists increasingly make as they study ancient man
Speaker 1: and modern hunter gatherers, who sort of are seen as
Speaker 1: kind of a stand in for our ancestors. Um. Which
Speaker 1: kind of suggests that tens of thousands of years in
Speaker 1: our past, at some point, you know, we sort of
Speaker 1: evolved with this this like structures in our brain that
Speaker 1: kind of function the same way as like an addiction
Speaker 1: to hierarchy, and at some point in our past we
Speaker 1: got over it for a period of like thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of years. UM. So yeah, that's interesting
Speaker 1: to me. Now. In two thousan twelve researchers writing for
Speaker 1: the Journal of Human Nature published the results of a
Speaker 1: study into a sample of fifty three human societies in
Speaker 1: which polyandrous unions were common. Um, I see where we're
Speaker 1: going here, Robert. I don't know. This is just a
Speaker 1: little bit but not for the most part, nack is
Speaker 1: just just a little bit, just a little bit rounded
Speaker 1: your lifestyle. I can't believe this. Now we demonstrate that
Speaker 1: although polyandry is rare, it is not as rare as
Speaker 1: commonly believed as found worldwide it and is in most
Speaker 1: common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely
Speaker 1: existed during yeah early human history and should be examined
Speaker 1: from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may
Speaker 1: be a predictable response. Okay, here's the thing. It's a
Speaker 1: predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males,
Speaker 1: and may also be a response to high rates of
Speaker 1: male mortality and possibly male absenteees. Longer makes sense. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's not what it is. Because men in ancient societies
Speaker 1: would have died so often, it didn't make sense for
Speaker 1: people to be strictly monogamous. So you should if you're
Speaker 1: going to have men dying at a high rate because
Speaker 1: they're out hunting stuff. It makes sense if everyone in
Speaker 1: the tribe raises all of the kids, and if people
Speaker 1: don't have strong bonds of monogamy. That's what they're saying. Um,
Speaker 1: ancient people weren't polyandrous because they were making an ethical
Speaker 1: choice about it being more ethical than monogamy. It's just
Speaker 1: if there's a hundred and fifty of you and your
Speaker 1: tribe and people are dropping all the time because they're
Speaker 1: out fucking hunting wool and ship it doesn't make sense
Speaker 1: to like have oh his her husband died, so now
Speaker 1: her kids don't get food. Like, that's not a great
Speaker 1: way to if there's not that many of you, you
Speaker 1: just can't live that way. You gotta stay hornies, stay
Speaker 1: frothy all the time. Yeah, Or it's it's more that like, uh,
Speaker 1: Like one of the things that's really common in particularly
Speaker 1: a lot of Latin American tribal societies is they have
Speaker 1: these beliefs about sperm that once a woman gets pregnant,
Speaker 1: every guy she has sex with after the pregnancy has
Speaker 1: started contribute sperm that helps build the child. And so
Speaker 1: kids have multiple fathers in the tribe and that means
Speaker 1: that like if two or three of them die, you
Speaker 1: still got three or four dads, and like they're all
Speaker 1: responsible for teaching the kids certain things, which is a
Speaker 1: really logical way to have a society if there's if
Speaker 1: you're a hunter gatherer tribe, it makes sense logic. I've
Speaker 1: never found more daddies to be I don't need there
Speaker 1: to be like girls that have or boys that have
Speaker 1: like more than one dad daddy, unless we're talking about
Speaker 1: sugar daddy culture, in which case you do you Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think you guys and your reaction when I started
Speaker 1: talking about polyandry does make sense to me because like
Speaker 1: I'm I'm polyamorous, and I'm I'm familiar with a lot
Speaker 1: of frustrating people in that community who will make claims
Speaker 1: that like, oh, it's more natural. Um, it's more ethical
Speaker 1: because our ancestors did it, And it's important to not
Speaker 1: that Like, No, our ancestors, to the extent that they
Speaker 1: were polyandrous, didn't do it for ethical reasons. They did
Speaker 1: it because it was like made logical sense for the
Speaker 1: world that they lived in. Yeah, it's it's when it's
Speaker 1: just something to tweet about. I love when I see
Speaker 1: my polyamorous friends and I and uh, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: they asked me how my monogamous relationship is going, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, it's good, and they're like, well, wow,
Speaker 1: you're missing out over here, and I was like, okay, gang,
Speaker 1: let's just play the board game, all right, just do
Speaker 1: this front, just respectful of each other. And the other
Speaker 1: thing that is important here is if we're talking about
Speaker 1: like this book Sex at Dawn, which is a really
Speaker 1: interesting book focuses a lot on one of like the
Speaker 1: polyandrous species of monkeys bnobos, but ignores that there are
Speaker 1: a lot of monogygamous species as well, So it's it's
Speaker 1: entirely possible that, like, we descend more from monogamous types
Speaker 1: of primates than we do from polyandrous types of primates.
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, then this period of time
Speaker 1: in which most human beings were polyandrous isn't a return
Speaker 1: to It wasn't like natural for them. It was something
Speaker 1: that they evolved to do, and no more natural than
Speaker 1: like a cell phone, and like a cell phone was
Speaker 1: essentially like an adaptation people developed over time in order
Speaker 1: to increase their odds of survival, which is what I'm
Speaker 1: getting to here. It is a bigger point than polyandry.
Speaker 1: What else can increase your chances of survival? Products and
Speaker 1: services it's an ad break, Damn they will, especially if
Speaker 1: it's dick Pills, which fits right into what we're talking
Speaker 1: about God, but also fun cook Industries, Fox News right, yeah, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck like monkeys. Thanks to Dick Pills products, we're back,
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm continuing to build to my larger point,
Speaker 1: which is gonna keep going on. So there's a two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen study by the University College of London, which
Speaker 1: put forward the same suggestion that men and women in
Speaker 1: pre agricultural human society has likely lived in relative equality.
Speaker 1: Mark Dibble, lead author and the study, said sexual equality
Speaker 1: is one of the important changes that distinguishes humans. It
Speaker 1: hasn't really been highlighted before. So again, this guy is
Speaker 1: saying this is a change it was. It's not a
Speaker 1: thing that came naturally to us. It's something that we
Speaker 1: adapted to for specific benefits. So these two studies are
Speaker 1: part of an surprisingly large, to me, pretty convincing body
Speaker 1: of research which makes the case both at the now
Speaker 1: standard nuclear family has not been the norm for much
Speaker 1: of human history, and that human society in the days
Speaker 1: when life was nasty, brutish and short was also a
Speaker 1: lot more equal and less exploitative than it does today,
Speaker 1: not just for reasons of the kind of sexual bonds
Speaker 1: people had. I'm gonna quote from a Guardian report on
Speaker 1: the matter. The first real splash in this arena came
Speaker 1: from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan and his book Ancient Society.
Speaker 1: In the book, Morgan presented the results of his study
Speaker 1: of the Iroquois, a Native American hunter gatherer society, and
Speaker 1: upstate New York. The Iroquois Morgan observed lived in large
Speaker 1: family units based on polyamorous relationships, in which men and
Speaker 1: women lived in general equality. Morgan's work had a broader
Speaker 1: audience when it was taken up by Friedrich Ingle's, most
Speaker 1: famous for being the co author of the Communist Manifesto.
Speaker 1: In his book The Origin of Family Private Property in
Speaker 1: the State, Ingles drew on Morgan's data, as well as
Speaker 1: evidence from around the world, to argue that prehistoric society
Speaker 1: has lived in what he called primitive communism. Other anthropologists
Speaker 1: now called this fierce egalitarianism, societies where families were based
Speaker 1: on polyamory, in which in would people lived in active equality,
Speaker 1: i e. Equality is enforced. And that's the key part here.
Speaker 1: Enforced In our society, rules are enforced unevenly and imperfectly
Speaker 1: by law enforcement of varying stripes. But we all accept
Speaker 1: that most of the things we consider crimes will not
Speaker 1: be punished. Most drug users won't be busted, most men
Speaker 1: who beat their wives won't go to jail. Roughly of
Speaker 1: murderers get away with their crimes. And I probably don't
Speaker 1: need to point out to this audience that the number
Speaker 1: of rapists who don't get punished for their crimes is
Speaker 1: way higher than UM. So we can understand that statistic,
Speaker 1: and that's you can. You can you can have a
Speaker 1: society that more or less functions with those statistics when
Speaker 1: there's hundreds of millions of you, and there's way more
Speaker 1: food than everyone needs to eat, and the margins of
Speaker 1: survival for our social groups are pretty wide. Primitive hunter
Speaker 1: gatherer humans, however, lived in small bands of several dozen
Speaker 1: to perhaps a hundred and fifty or so at the
Speaker 1: large end of things. They lived in a world in
Speaker 1: a time in which the margins of life and death
Speaker 1: were much thinner. Their tribes could not survive people stealing
Speaker 1: food from each other or committing multiple murders. This is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why some scientists suspect polyamory was
Speaker 1: so common among humans in this period. And um or
Speaker 1: do I miss it? Did you say the average lifespan
Speaker 1: around this time? That's not a super useful statistic because
Speaker 1: of of of infant mortality. Like one of the mistakes
Speaker 1: a lot of people make when they think about the
Speaker 1: past is like, oh, the average lifespan was thirty five.
Speaker 1: That means that thirty year an old man. No, if
Speaker 1: you make it to thirty, you're probably gonna live to
Speaker 1: fifty or sixty at least, and seventy wouldn't even be crazy.
Speaker 1: It's just that so many fucking babies are dying back
Speaker 1: then that it drops the average a lot. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not at all weird for people who make it
Speaker 1: to thirty to live to like sixty even back then.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe fifty would be a lot more common.
Speaker 1: Sixties still really old then, but people aren't. It's not
Speaker 1: the norm to die at thirty. It's the norm to
Speaker 1: die as a baby. I mean, yeah, it's like I mean,
Speaker 1: by the time you're thirty, you're on a roll in
Speaker 1: terms of being alive. Yes, you're probably a pretty tough
Speaker 1: son of a bitch if you make it to thirty
Speaker 1: in that kind of world, or daughter of a bastard um,
Speaker 1: although there would not have been a lot of bastards
Speaker 1: back then because societies couldn't survive them, which is the
Speaker 1: point I'm building too. So yeah, So, ancient tribal people
Speaker 1: had a huge number of what are called leveling mechanisms
Speaker 1: that's the anthropological term, to defend themselves against dangerous members
Speaker 1: of the group and This is where I get to
Speaker 1: tell you, guys, one of my very very very very
Speaker 1: very favorite stories. Have you ever heard of the shaming
Speaker 1: of the meat? No? No, it doesn't has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with sex. It has something to do with gender,
Speaker 1: but nothing to do with sex whatever. Richard borche Lee
Speaker 1: is a Canadian anthropologist who has spent a huge amount
Speaker 1: of time living with and studying and writing about modern
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer people's like the and the ju Juanci, both
Speaker 1: of which I'm sure I've mispronounced the names of. Like
Speaker 1: the you have to do like a weird I I can't.
Speaker 1: I just I'm not gonna be able to. But they're
Speaker 1: the Ekong people. Uh. These are people who exist today
Speaker 1: in our modern, connected world, but the rhythms of their
Speaker 1: lives and tactics of their societies are seen by anthropologists
Speaker 1: as sort of a window into the human past. Uh.
Speaker 1: Studying them is not a perfect look at our ancestors,
Speaker 1: but it's about as good as we can get. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, Richard spent time living with the Kong,
Speaker 1: and near the end of this period embedded with them.
Speaker 1: It just so happened to coincide with Christmas and out
Speaker 1: of a sense of festivity and a desire to express
Speaker 1: his gratitude towards the tribe for hosting him. Richard Lee
Speaker 1: bought a gigantic ox to present them so that everybody
Speaker 1: could have a sweet ass feast. Now, the ox he
Speaker 1: picked weighed twelve hundred pounds, which meant that it was
Speaker 1: enough meat for every man, woman and child among the
Speaker 1: tribues with to get like four pounds of meat. So
Speaker 1: he's like, this is fucking awesome, Like I've made this
Speaker 1: is gonna be a great gift. This is a great
Speaker 1: way to show my gratitude to them. They're gonna love
Speaker 1: this ship. So I go a quote now from what
Speaker 1: he wrote about this experience, which is a basically an
Speaker 1: article titled Eating Christmas in the Kalahari, which you can
Speaker 1: find online. It will be in the source notes. It's
Speaker 1: a great read quote. The next morning, words spread among
Speaker 1: the people that the big solid black one was was
Speaker 1: the ox chosen by Unta my bushman name. It means
Speaker 1: roughly whitey for the Christmas feast. That afternoon, I received
Speaker 1: the first delegation. Binnah, an outspoken sixty year old mother
Speaker 1: of five, came to the point slowly where were you
Speaker 1: planning to eat Christmas right here, I replied, a loner
Speaker 1: with others, I expect to invite all the people to
Speaker 1: eat Christmas with me. Eat what I have purchased. You
Speaker 1: have as black ox, and I am going to slaughter
Speaker 1: and cook it. That's what we were told at the well,
Speaker 1: but refused to believe it until we heard it from yourself. Well,
Speaker 1: it's the black one, I replied expansively, although wondering what
Speaker 1: she was driving at. Oh no, ben A groaned, turning
Speaker 1: to her group. They were right. Turning back to me,
Speaker 1: she asked, do you expect us to eat that bag
Speaker 1: of bones? Bag of bones? It's the biggest ox here, big, yes,
Speaker 1: but old and fin. Everybody knows there's no meat on
Speaker 1: that old ox. What did you expect us to eat?
Speaker 1: Off it? The horns? Everybody chuckled at ben as one
Speaker 1: liner as they walked away. But all I can manage
Speaker 1: was a weak grin. Are you wondering where this is going?
Speaker 1: You're gonna fucking you. You're gonna fucking love it. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm excited great. Over the next several days, tribesmen and
Speaker 1: women and children would make repeated mocking gibes to Richard
Speaker 1: about the scrawny size of the enormous ox that he
Speaker 1: bought them. No, I don't know, Lee, but reading his
Speaker 1: writing you get the fielding. He's a very open minded,
Speaker 1: friendly and hard to rattle sort of dude, which you'd
Speaker 1: expect from an anthropologist who spent his whole life like
Speaker 1: living among different tribal groups around the world. But even
Speaker 1: he started meat story, yeah, it's it's frustrating. Will they
Speaker 1: keep harping on him? Dozens and dozens of of Like
Speaker 1: everyone in the tribe is making fun of him for
Speaker 1: days about this, So he starts to get frustrated and
Speaker 1: even angry as this goes on, and eventually some of
Speaker 1: his good friends among the tribe explained to him that
Speaker 1: this was common behavior, particularly from other members of the
Speaker 1: tribe towards their young hunters. You you just make fun
Speaker 1: of people for the shittiness of whatever they hunt, regardless
Speaker 1: of how big it is, when it's time to like
Speaker 1: help them clean and cook it. So, in frustration and confusion,
Speaker 1: Lee asked one of his friends, why insult a man
Speaker 1: after he has gone to all that trouble to track
Speaker 1: and kill an animal, and when he is going to
Speaker 1: share the meat with you so that your children will
Speaker 1: have something to eat. Arrogance was his cryptic answer. Arrogance. Yes,
Speaker 1: when a young man kills much meat, he comes to
Speaker 1: think of himself as a chief or a big man,
Speaker 1: and he thinks of the rest of us as his
Speaker 1: servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one
Speaker 1: who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody,
Speaker 1: So we always speak of his meat is worthless. This
Speaker 1: way we cool his heart and make him gentle. So
Speaker 1: this is like the meat version of like humility. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is how you enforce humility among a hunter gathered. Try.
Speaker 1: This is how you attack and fight the male ego
Speaker 1: when you can't afford to let it go out of
Speaker 1: control like it gets to do in our society. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of beautiful. I mean, you like to text
Speaker 1: me all the time telling me that you're embarrassed by
Speaker 1: your gender, which I just wanted to bring up for
Speaker 1: no reason. I get frustrating a lot. That's nice, I mean,
Speaker 1: I do think it is also funny that it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: how do we get through to the men. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: let's just rap a moral and a bunch of meat
Speaker 1: and maybe they won't taste it on the way down.
Speaker 1: This is kind of very Texas by any means necessary.
Speaker 1: I like dream texts. This story is so Robert. Now.
Speaker 1: There are some scientists who theorize that sarcasm and humor
Speaker 1: itself evolved in human culture as a leveling mechanism, as
Speaker 1: a way to cool the hearts of arrogant young men
Speaker 1: before they went mad with power. So that's like why
Speaker 1: we have humor. That's why we have deadpools things, things
Speaker 1: have gotten mutated, but like that was its initial purpose,
Speaker 1: is to allow us to because like humor is a
Speaker 1: making fun of somebody, Insulting somebody is a way to
Speaker 1: attack them without physically fighting and getting into a physical
Speaker 1: battle where people die and are injured. So that's sort
Speaker 1: of the theory that like maybe this is kind of
Speaker 1: the evolutionary use of a sense of humor or at
Speaker 1: least one of them. If being good at insults is
Speaker 1: just uh not attacking someone I'm a you know, fucking samurai.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean there's a reason why in so
Speaker 1: many cultures around the world, like it's pretty common for
Speaker 1: people's grandmas to be like both kind of in charge
Speaker 1: of the family and also talking shit about everybody all
Speaker 1: the time, like, um, yeah, we the evolution of sarcasm
Speaker 1: is what what a what a dark road to go down?
Speaker 1: Target the other day, I said, sarcasm, it's how I hug.
Speaker 1: I think it really speaks to your point. Uh. And
Speaker 1: also a funk that shirt and anyone that's ever worn it.
Speaker 1: It's gotten out of hand end in the modern era,
Speaker 1: but we can see where it started. Yeah, dead Pool
Speaker 1: Robert mistakes are made. Yeah. So there's a body of
Speaker 1: scientific research that suggests possessing power impacts the brain and
Speaker 1: manner similar to brain damage. Dr Keltner, a psychology professor
Speaker 1: at u C. Berkeley, is one of the scientists on
Speaker 1: the forefront of this field of study. From the Atlantic quote,
Speaker 1: subjects under the influence of power, he found, in studies
Speaker 1: spanning two decades acted as if they had suffered a
Speaker 1: traumatic brain injury, becoming more impulsive, less risk aware, and
Speaker 1: crucially less adept at seeing things from other people's point
Speaker 1: of view. Uh. Suke Vender Opie, a neuroscientistic master University
Speaker 1: in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors,
Speaker 1: Opie studies brains, and when he put the heads of
Speaker 1: the powerful and the not so powerful under a transcranial
Speaker 1: magnetic stimulation machine, he found that power in fact impairs
Speaker 1: a specific neural process, mirroring that maybe a cornerstone of empathy. Now,
Speaker 1: before we take too much out of this, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of debate about the validity of this research and
Speaker 1: the extent to which it can tell us anything about
Speaker 1: the real world. I found an interesting neuroskeptic article that
Speaker 1: points out that power priming, which is the kind of
Speaker 1: studies that were conducted to get these results, power priming
Speaker 1: studies have real flaws when we try to apply their
Speaker 1: lessons outside of a research context. But I think the
Speaker 1: lived experience of the I Kung and other hunter gatherers
Speaker 1: seems to support at least the conclusion that a lot
Speaker 1: of people who live on like traditional more hunter gatherers
Speaker 1: societies kind of understood that power was bad for people
Speaker 1: and it made them more dangerous to themselves and others,
Speaker 1: and that they needed to be like egalitarianism was then again,
Speaker 1: not an ethical decision. It's a defensive reaction to the
Speaker 1: dangers of power. So I find it that interesting. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that definitely tracks with a lot of That's part
Speaker 1: of why I do think that like powerful people using
Speaker 1: social media is so extremely interesting, as you can almost
Speaker 1: like see the rot on the edges of their brain.
Speaker 1: And like even like Trump aside, there's like there's so
Speaker 1: many examples of just like you can just see in
Speaker 1: real time the brain rot forming the famous people. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean just like influential people who have too
Speaker 1: much money for your own good, Like you can even
Speaker 1: like social media influencers your corrosion. Well, they're chaotic, evil.
Speaker 1: I don't even include them. But like I think, like
Speaker 1: the best example of that I've seen recently is Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's bizarre crusade against crediting artists, which is like if
Speaker 1: you had sat down with him, if he'd never gotten
Speaker 1: on Twitter, and you just sat down with him be like, oh,
Speaker 1: if you share the work of an artist you like,
Speaker 1: you should add their name to it, he would have
Speaker 1: been like, oh, yeah, of course that makes total sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but because of the way social media works, somebody says
Speaker 1: that on Twitter and he just immediately attacks them. It's
Speaker 1: like this, why are you having this fight? Elon Musk?
Speaker 1: I mean, his entire online presence like it should be
Speaker 1: there should be a thesis paper on it, because it is.
Speaker 1: It's like you you can just see his brain turning
Speaker 1: to dust its very eyes, yeah, like and interest seeing.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that that's an extension of things that
Speaker 1: have been going on, you know, since the beginning of time,
Speaker 1: but like actually getting to observe it and having people
Speaker 1: volunteer that information to you is fascinating. I suspect I
Speaker 1: don't I can't know this, but like, if we can
Speaker 1: imagine a world in which Donald Trump never had Twitter
Speaker 1: but also still got elected president, my suspicion is that
Speaker 1: he'd suck less. Not I don't think you would have
Speaker 1: been elected without never without Twitter, But yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's been bad for him. Yeah, I think that I
Speaker 1: had worked in his favor during the election, and then
Speaker 1: during his presidency it's been just like a giant Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: You're welcome swners for that sound effect. Back to my
Speaker 1: my theory here that I'm still building towards. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of like I'm taking you on, like the journey
Speaker 1: of just ship I've been thinking about for the last
Speaker 1: year and a half. So this is kind of like
Speaker 1: the pattern my brain has taken it as best as
Speaker 1: I can recreate my brain rot that's what we're touring.
Speaker 1: So there's a tendency and progressive thought, and it's something
Speaker 1: that I fight against a lot to look at groups
Speaker 1: like the Iroquois and other research into our egalitarian ancestors
Speaker 1: and make the point that such forms of social organization
Speaker 1: are more natural and thus healthier than the supremely hierarchical
Speaker 1: societies we live in today. But I tend to think
Speaker 1: the evolution of leveling mechanisms like the shaming of the
Speaker 1: meat suggests kind of the opposite, well, at least not
Speaker 1: about the healthy thing, but about it being natural. Hierarchy
Speaker 1: is natural for human beings. It's something our brains slide
Speaker 1: into without careful vigilance. Our ancestors were not egalitarian because
Speaker 1: it felt natural. They evolved to enforce egalitarianism with great
Speaker 1: vigilance as a defense mechanism against the dangers of power.
Speaker 1: And this presents perhaps a less utopian view of man's
Speaker 1: inherent nature, but I think it also posits a more
Speaker 1: optimistic picture of our future, because if Homo sapiens beat
Speaker 1: the problems of ingrained hierarchy once, then we can fucking
Speaker 1: well do it again. Yeah, thank you. And that leads
Speaker 1: pretty naturally to my next question. If our ancestors once
Speaker 1: lived free, fucking egalitarian lives, sleeping under the stars, probably
Speaker 1: taking hell of mushrooms and not enforcing strict gender hierarchy,
Speaker 1: wh whoa who went wrong? How did we go from
Speaker 1: all that to the last you know, ten thousand years
Speaker 1: or whatever of human history, which you know has kind
Speaker 1: of been a ship show. But but do you know
Speaker 1: what is not a ship show? Ship the products and
Speaker 1: services that support the show. Oh I was I was
Speaker 1: about to drop the ball yet again and be like,
Speaker 1: how do you mean? What do you mean? I'm Robert,
Speaker 1: thank you, product X. We're back. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: why this egalitarian order of the human race that seems
Speaker 1: to have existed at a point in the distant past,
Speaker 1: what made it fall apart? Uh? And I found a
Speaker 1: good rite up on this subject in New Scientist magazine
Speaker 1: by a researcher named Deborah Rodgers. She cites social anthropologist
Speaker 1: Christopher Bohm, who believes the suppression of the dominance hierarchies
Speaker 1: of our primate ancestors was a quote central adaptation of
Speaker 1: human evolution. Bom thinks we would not have spread across
Speaker 1: the world without the adaptation of egalitarianism. He notes, inequality
Speaker 1: did not spread because it is a better system for
Speaker 1: our survival. So why then, did inequality eat the world? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a question that's been posed by a number of histories.
Speaker 1: Great thinkers. Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized in seventeen fifty four
Speaker 1: that inequality started with the idea of prime at property.
Speaker 1: Social Darwinists in the eighteen hundreds thought that inequality was
Speaker 1: the inevitable result of the struggle of survival of the fittest,
Speaker 1: in which the more fit and almost inevitably white people
Speaker 1: formed a natural aristocracy by dint of their evolutionary success.
Speaker 1: But this thinking has continued to evolve in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: According to Deborah Rogers quote, by the mid twentieth century,
Speaker 1: a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward,
Speaker 1: Leslie White, and Robert Carniro offered a slightly different versions
Speaker 1: of this following story. Population growth mean we needed more food,
Speaker 1: so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and
Speaker 1: the need for managers and specialized roles, which in turn
Speaker 1: led to corresponding social classes. Meanwhile, we began to use
Speaker 1: up natural resources and needed to venture ever further afield
Speaker 1: to seek them out. This expansion bread conflict and conquest,
Speaker 1: with a conquered becoming the underclass. The more recent explanations
Speaker 1: have expanded on these ideas. One line of reasoning suggests
Speaker 1: that self aggrandizing individuals who lived in lands of plenty
Speaker 1: ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus, first through
Speaker 1: feasts or gift giving, and later by outright dominance at
Speaker 1: the group level, argues and argue anthropologist Peter Richardson and
Speaker 1: Robert Boyd. Improved coordination and division of labor allowed more
Speaker 1: complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies from
Speaker 1: a mechanistic perspective. Others argued that once inequality took hold,
Speaker 1: is when uneven resource distribution benefited one family more than others,
Speaker 1: it's simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture
Speaker 1: and trade resulted in private property inheritance and larger trade networks,
Speaker 1: which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages. So it's like when
Speaker 1: you're in college and you have to do a group
Speaker 1: project and you have some people that are either like
Speaker 1: not available or like bad or and then you have
Speaker 1: the people that are busy bodies and want to do everything.
Speaker 1: And then you have the people that you know, have
Speaker 1: the special tutors, so they know how to do everything
Speaker 1: because they have help. And then you people get a
Speaker 1: better grade and then things, people get jobs, people don't
Speaker 1: get's like college. It's like college. It's a group. Or
Speaker 1: do you leave sad and in debt and you may
Speaker 1: or may not get a job, and you probably are
Speaker 1: not getting a job in the thing you studied. Or
Speaker 1: it's like college, and that the people who didn't go
Speaker 1: wound up without tens of thousands of dollars in debt,
Speaker 1: and so uh wind up a lot wealthier again, so
Speaker 1: they benefit from the fruits of the labor of others.
Speaker 1: And then the higher I see, Okay, it's so it's college.
Speaker 1: It's like college. Yeah. Now, if we find this new
Speaker 1: school of thought credible, then hierarchy and authoritarianism itself seemed
Speaker 1: not like the natural order of things, but more like
Speaker 1: a virus, one that was forcibly beaten down and almost
Speaker 1: wiped out for thousands of years, but persisted in some
Speaker 1: isolated corners until the development of agriculture and the evolution
Speaker 1: into larger, more organized societies provided it with a chance
Speaker 1: to escape and replicate on a mass scale. Once more so,
Speaker 1: we always has had these sort of tendencies towards hierarchy
Speaker 1: and authoritarianism programmed into our brains, and for a long
Speaker 1: time we fought it in these tiny societies. But once
Speaker 1: we started building these larger societies, it's sort of escapes
Speaker 1: and kind of runs wild. It's almost like how measles
Speaker 1: was nearly wiped out by vaccines until enough dumb people
Speaker 1: stopped vaccinating their kids that it was able to spread
Speaker 1: and get a toe hold again. Thank you, Jessica Bille,
Speaker 1: Thank you Jessica Bile. Some people might argue that hierarchy
Speaker 1: and authoritarianism and Jessica Bile make for stronger and more
Speaker 1: competitive societies, and that's why these forms of organizations spread
Speaker 1: across the globe. Yeah, that's certainly an arguable point. Deborah
Speaker 1: Rodgers and other researchers, however, have found in their research
Speaker 1: some data that would seem to argue against that point.
Speaker 1: Quote in a demographic simulation that ohm Car desh Pondi,
Speaker 1: Marcus Feldman, and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we
Speaker 1: found that rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal
Speaker 1: access to resources is inherently to stab realizing and greatly
Speaker 1: raises the chance of group extinction and stable environments. This
Speaker 1: was true whether we modeled inequality as a multi tiered
Speaker 1: class society or what economists call a Peretto wealth distribution,
Speaker 1: in which as with the one percent, the rich get,
Speaker 1: the lions share. Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so
Speaker 1: destabilized and caused these societies to spread by creating an
Speaker 1: incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules
Speaker 1: in our simulation did not allow from migration to already
Speaker 1: occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have
Speaker 1: happened in the real world, leading a conquest of the
Speaker 1: more stable egalitarian societies, exactly what we see as we
Speaker 1: look back in history. In other words, inequality did not
Speaker 1: spread from group to group because it is an inherently
Speaker 1: better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability,
Speaker 1: which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural
Speaker 1: or physical extinction of egalitarian societies. And it's interesting if
Speaker 1: you look into like who a lot of the Europeans
Speaker 1: who sailed to the New World, as they called it,
Speaker 1: were there were a lot of second and third and
Speaker 1: fourth sons of wealthier emilies who like weren't going to
Speaker 1: inherit the family wealth and so had to go make
Speaker 1: their fortune elsewhere. So like this seems like a really
Speaker 1: strongly arguable point to me. And it also it also
Speaker 1: feels more like this comparison that I keep making to
Speaker 1: a virus, because like the way virus is spread, they're
Speaker 1: not viruses aren't sustainable, they're not stable. They need to
Speaker 1: continually like destroy populations of of living things and need
Speaker 1: to spread to new populations in order to stay alive.
Speaker 1: So like I think authoritarianism, comparing it to a virus,
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of Uh. I think it's
Speaker 1: a useful way to look at it. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's kind of weird that, Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: really hear like social movements or trends ever referred to
Speaker 1: as a virus. I mean, I've never heard that comparison before.
Speaker 1: We talk about virility a lot when we talk about ideas,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think looking at authoritaryianism virally um can
Speaker 1: spread much like a meme of a cat. Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1: It spreads just like a cat mame. Yeah, fascist dictatorships
Speaker 1: spread like a cat mat a dictatorship. Right. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: uh obviously, like you know, we could try to like
Speaker 1: argue at which points in history authoritarianism hit its peak.
Speaker 1: It's probably more apt to say that it ebbed and
Speaker 1: flowed in different places across distance and time, and every
Speaker 1: now and then individual societies would evolve like ancient Athens
Speaker 1: or the Iroquois, who established, you know, cultures that were
Speaker 1: more egalitarian than those around them, but in a global sense,
Speaker 1: strict hierarchy and authoritarian means of rule where the order
Speaker 1: of the day for the majority of people across the
Speaker 1: last several thousand years. And again I'm I'm gonna oversimplify
Speaker 1: here because I'm not a historian and like this is
Speaker 1: not a historic like like like an academic paper, but
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to say broadly that the last
Speaker 1: eight hundred years or so have seen a major push
Speaker 1: back towards egalitarianism and against authoritarian means of control across
Speaker 1: the globe. And if you're going to pick an arbitrary
Speaker 1: start point for this, you might choose the signing of
Speaker 1: the Magna Carta in June of twelve fifteen, and there
Speaker 1: would be a variety of other dates that would be important,
Speaker 1: like seventeen seventy six, uh, like eighteen sixty five, like
Speaker 1: nineteen really patriotic for a second there. And my my
Speaker 1: dates picked are very Western centric because I don't know
Speaker 1: as much about like Chinese history, Japanese history. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think nineteen seventeen the Russian Revolution would be another
Speaker 1: point in that. Uh. And of course nineteen forty five
Speaker 1: would be another big moment in the sort of eight
Speaker 1: hundred year or so push back against authoritarianism. Um. And
Speaker 1: if we're going to keep rolling with my viral authoritarianism analogy,
Speaker 1: we might look at the global defeat of the ACCESS
Speaker 1: in World War two is equivalent to a max backs
Speaker 1: in mass vaccination campaign. Uh. And if we want to
Speaker 1: extend the analogy even further, we could compare people like
Speaker 1: Cia or actor Alan Dulas and has been shant for
Speaker 1: authoritarian regime changes in Latin America to the anti vaxers
Speaker 1: like Jessica Bial people who saw socialism. Yeah. So Jessica
Speaker 1: Bill and Allan Dulas, who're the same fucking guy. Yeah damn.
Speaker 1: I would read that piece on medium dot com. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. Medium dot com is where it would put
Speaker 1: this if I weren't such a narcissist with a podcast.
Speaker 1: Um but he's dictatorship. You must put your call. You
Speaker 1: guys got to shame my meat. I'm calling hr Anderson. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you've got like this. Uh so. Yeah. The last
Speaker 1: several decades of creeping authoritarianism in our own society have
Speaker 1: been driven in large part by the fact that decades
Speaker 1: of American leaders have supported dictators and strongman across places
Speaker 1: like Latin America. The crisis of the Border, which provided
Speaker 1: such fuel to the American right, has been driven largely
Speaker 1: by refugees fleeing from places like Guatemala and El Salvador. Well,
Speaker 1: the US supported and trained death squads and assassinated democratically
Speaker 1: elected leaders. Um you could also make a point about
Speaker 1: our failure to intervene in Syria, all the refugees who
Speaker 1: fled from Bashar al Assad's fascistic campaign of extermination, and
Speaker 1: how that fueled the far right in Europe and in
Speaker 1: the United States. Um So, the plight of those refugees,
Speaker 1: in their decision to flee the safety of the US,
Speaker 1: has invigorated a right wing movement that has grown stronger
Speaker 1: and more dangerous over the decades, starting with KKK border
Speaker 1: patrols in the nineteen seventies and ending with concentration camps
Speaker 1: in Texas and Donald Trump in the White House. Um, now,
Speaker 1: I'm not the only person thinking along lines similar to
Speaker 1: this when I was doing my final research for the
Speaker 1: War on Everyone. The audio book that I swear is
Speaker 1: coming out soon. I just finished reading it. It's being edited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's being edited right now by the audio people. So, Daniel, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is coming out. I came across this, Hey, Daniel,
Speaker 1: this It actually might be up at the time people
Speaker 1: listen to this episode. I don't know. Um. I came
Speaker 1: across a study of how fascists were using the internet
Speaker 1: back in the late nineties and early two thousands to
Speaker 1: keep their movement alive. The starting study was written up
Speaker 1: by a researcher named Less Black, and in it he
Speaker 1: cites a book called A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Speaker 1: from six Now, the book was written by a pair
Speaker 1: of philosophers to Lose and Guitari and I don't pretend
Speaker 1: to understand the overall thrust of the text because I
Speaker 1: am so bad at reading political theory. But Black cites
Speaker 1: a piece of that book that seems to be making
Speaker 1: a similar argument to the one I've been making, albeit
Speaker 1: with a slightly different analogy. Quote delusing Guitari argue that
Speaker 1: part of the nature of fascism is a proliferation of
Speaker 1: molecular focuses in interaction which skipped from point to point
Speaker 1: before beginning to resonate together. This comment might well have
Speaker 1: been made about the lateral connectedness found in cyberspace, rather
Speaker 1: than seeing fascism and shrined in a totalitarian bureaucracy. They
Speaker 1: argue that fascism was and is manifest in the micro
Speaker 1: organization of everyday life. The power of fascist culture here
Speaker 1: is in its molecular and supple segmentarity, with flows capable
Speaker 1: of suffusing every cell. What makes fascism dangerous is its
Speaker 1: molecular or micro political power, for it is a mass
Speaker 1: movement of cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: m all right, So I don't even really want to
Speaker 1: comment on that. I think it's it's deep. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: that's what I got so far. Robert presented your worldviews
Speaker 1: very suctinct. This was like Robert's ideology on life more
Speaker 1: or less Yeah, it's a fascism isn't something that's imposed
Speaker 1: from the top down. It's something that bubbles up from
Speaker 1: within groups of human beings. And if you're going to
Speaker 1: stop it, it requires constant vigilance, like the vigilance of say,
Speaker 1: a group of kung who makes sure to keep an
Speaker 1: eye out for a young man who gets too big
Speaker 1: of an idea of his own importance because it brought
Speaker 1: down a fucking gazelle. And like a virus can move
Speaker 1: and change and and and go away, but you can
Speaker 1: come back, I mean, and you can you can basically
Speaker 1: erase the metaphor at that point of like, how like
Speaker 1: fascism is spreading like a virus now, because it's spreading
Speaker 1: like a virus in the Internet sense, to like it
Speaker 1: is truly one and the same. I think I will. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Robert, how do we how do we fix it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And uh, not hearing any answers. Well you know I didn't,
Speaker 1: you know, I only had so much time to comprehensive Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it does. That is a little bit of it, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Like one lesson we can take out of human prehistory
Speaker 1: in terms of how we fight fascism is that It's
Speaker 1: not something we fight by voting for the right person.
Speaker 1: It's something we fight on a day to day basis
Speaker 1: in our daily lives. It's something we fight not just
Speaker 1: by keeping an eye out on other people, but by
Speaker 1: fighting the fascists within our own cell, by fighting like
Speaker 1: those authoritarian impulses and urges that we all have because
Speaker 1: it's coated into our brain. Um, it's it's a constant
Speaker 1: battle that starts at the bottom. And if it doesn't persist,
Speaker 1: and if there isn't discipline at every level of society
Speaker 1: to watch against it, it will come back terrifying. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the call has been coming from inside the house
Speaker 1: the whole time. Call the fascism has been coming from
Speaker 1: inside your brain this whole time. Yeah, Okay, good gat
Speaker 1: good by, bolt Cutters. It's one tool that you can
Speaker 1: use against fascism, only brain out. I think that's really
Speaker 1: a good answer. Yeah, if we could just yank out
Speaker 1: the judge bitch cortex from our brain, Cutters, that's you're
Speaker 1: pretty close to some things. Kurt Vonnegutt was theorizing about
Speaker 1: near the end of his life. There he was like,
Speaker 1: if we were all just dumber, this would work so
Speaker 1: much better. Yeah, it's like it's just everyone, just us
Speaker 1: to just get a light bother me. Yeah, being smart
Speaker 1: is not worth it. I don't happen to hold to
Speaker 1: that idea, but I'm willing to admit that Kurt Vonnegutt
Speaker 1: was way smarter than I will ever be, and he
Speaker 1: might have been right. So it's I mean, base level.
Speaker 1: I haven't revisited that phase of Kurt Kurt Vonnegut in
Speaker 1: a while, but sounds fun. But Robert, you wouldn't agree
Speaker 1: with that because you are not a judge bitch. Well,
Speaker 1: I try not to be, but I will admit that
Speaker 1: I think when Kurt Vonnegutt was a judge bitch, he
Speaker 1: was right to be a judge bitch. Fair. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I choose your moments. I'm constantly yeah, I mean constant
Speaker 1: suppression of the judge bitch within is necessary. I keep
Speaker 1: her loressed up. Yeah, I keep her locked up until necessary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But there are moments where it's like, oh, there she is. There,
Speaker 1: she's coming out wearing that outfit sometimes right, and doing
Speaker 1: that superhero pose, ready to save the fucking day. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like she has bolk cutters, she's got
Speaker 1: bold cutters. Yeah, they can be used for good or evil.
Speaker 1: Much like authoritarianism. It's not always the wrong thing like
Speaker 1: we have it. Like, it's useful in certain situations. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, if you've got well, if you've got like
Speaker 1: a wildfire, you need one person being like okay, you
Speaker 1: go here, you go here, you go here, Like this
Speaker 1: is what we're going to try to do, like our podcast,
Speaker 1: like our podcast, or like a military unit, where to
Speaker 1: some extent there's certain kinds of hierarchy that you want
Speaker 1: in a military unit like our podcast, like our podcast,
Speaker 1: or like uh uh, that's that's about it. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's useful nearly as often as we use it,
Speaker 1: but it's not useless, but it has to be carefully controlled.
Speaker 1: Yeah okay, yeah, so like maybe if we're going to
Speaker 1: keep having presidents, we execute every president after they finish
Speaker 1: their term of office, and that way only people who
Speaker 1: are truly selfless take the job. Now we're out in
Speaker 1: the crazy crazy town. Yeah, it was like, well, now
Speaker 1: we're just shull. It's not the Hunger Games if you're
Speaker 1: just killing the person at the top. True true, true,
Speaker 1: still not still not. Um, I've only seen the first
Speaker 1: one does it end well, that's right. Are the Hunger Games?
Speaker 1: A good idea for society is that the conclusion should
Speaker 1: get a shot, should give a shot, should be hunger
Speaker 1: someome games, but instead of children, it's like members of
Speaker 1: the cabinet sick love it great? Oh now that would
Speaker 1: be amazing and at the end of like a presidential
Speaker 1: because like then I'd be really excited about some of
Speaker 1: the people who have been in Trump's cabinet because I
Speaker 1: would love to see Steven Miller and Steve Bannon fighting
Speaker 1: with like homemade spears over a pit of lava. Like
Speaker 1: it would be a blast. That would be the fucking greatest.
Speaker 1: Jared Pushner would hide the whole time, and then somehow
Speaker 1: Win would hide the whole time five ft beneath the
Speaker 1: ground and which is zombie out of just a Banka
Speaker 1: Trump and the Betsy Divos just throttle each other with
Speaker 1: like fucking scarves or something. Yeah. That that that's fun.
Speaker 1: That's fun to think about. Reference It's almost like he's
Speaker 1: already got the graphic novel storyboarded. Yeah. I don't have
Speaker 1: more detailed solutions than that, but this is where my
Speaker 1: thinking's gone in the last eighteen months or so. Of
Speaker 1: doing this podcast. So now you all have to deal
Speaker 1: with it too. Sorry, I know I think it's good.
Speaker 1: I think, well not the takeaways are dire. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never heard it put succinctly like that. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know if i'd call it succinctly. I've been talking
Speaker 1: for fifty nine minutes or so. But I did my best.
Speaker 1: It was only one part. Yeah, it was only one part.
Speaker 1: Only one part. Well, I would not agree to do
Speaker 1: two parts, Jamie. Wow. Yeah, no, I was forced into
Speaker 1: doing this one part. Well, I'm glad that you were
Speaker 1: unlike too, because this is just a whole new experience
Speaker 1: of Sophie've never had were we can just make eye
Speaker 1: rolls to each other directly and then say what we're thinking.
Speaker 1: I know, can you measure if Robert was here, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'd be I'd be I rolled into a coma by
Speaker 1: this unconscious. You would just be tied up. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: would have gone out onto the the Poisonous spell cat
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, the poison room. I would have cracked
Speaker 1: it open with my podcasting machete, can't Yeah, you do
Speaker 1: have a machete. That's like that has says podcasting on
Speaker 1: the Blade. I am wearing my throwing Bagels behind the
Speaker 1: massa T shirt right now, so I need to get
Speaker 1: one of those. I have one for you. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm wearing my what if Fraser were a part of
Speaker 1: the Fantastic four T shirt today? I love what if
Speaker 1: Frasier were a part of the Fantastic Four. Well, that's
Speaker 1: the very question this T shirt explores. Everyone think about that,
Speaker 1: and also, how do we fight against the monster coated
Speaker 1: into our brains? Hitler is almost inevitable? Yeah, both of
Speaker 1: those things, Yeah, in that order. Please have have the
Speaker 1: answers on my desk by Monday. If there's a better
Speaker 1: symbol for creeping authoritarianism in the human spirit than the
Speaker 1: television show Frasier, I haven't found it. Yeah, all right, Jamie,
Speaker 1: you want to plug your plug doubles. Sure you can
Speaker 1: listen to the Bechdel Cast every Thursday Feminist Movie podcast,
Speaker 1: or follow me on Twitter at Jamie Loft His Help,
Speaker 1: or come see my show at Edinburgh Fringe Fest in
Speaker 1: Scotland all August. Yeah, and uh, Sophie, you want to
Speaker 1: plug my plug doubles because you're on the thing too
Speaker 1: and we have the same podcast. Well, um, I didn't
Speaker 1: agree to that in my contract, but follow Robert on Twitter,
Speaker 1: I write, Okay, thank you didn't discussing. I mean, I
Speaker 1: just think we could have titled it better. Um at
Speaker 1: bastards Pod on Twitter and Instagram behind the Bastard's dot
Speaker 1: com for the sources for this pod t public. We
Speaker 1: have t shirts, we have totes, we have phone cases,
Speaker 1: we have um not bolt cutters but soon to be
Speaker 1: bolt cutters. We have we have, we have, we have
Speaker 1: a couple. We have a couple of new new designs
Speaker 1: up there, so check it out. Good stuff and they
Speaker 1: have sales like all the time. Yeah, and you can
Speaker 1: find Sophie on Twitter at at Bastard's pod because she
Speaker 1: runs the Twitter So if you want to tell her
Speaker 1: to be less or more mean to me, you can
Speaker 1: let her know the direct channel. But in reality, don't
Speaker 1: do that. Don't do that. Uh and but do yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe get some bolt cutters, um. Certainly keep an eye
Speaker 1: out for creeping authoritarianism in your own daily life and
Speaker 1: try to shame some meat on your way home. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to humble Robert, please find me on Instagram
Speaker 1: at so underscore right Underscore up Underscore Sunshine and let
Speaker 1: me know your opinions on Robert, so I can tell
Speaker 1: it to him to its face and make sure that's
Speaker 1: great that he doesn't know the size of his I
Speaker 1: don't want to say meat because I don't instagram and
Speaker 1: get or shame shame. Let's go shame, Let's go shame.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say I don't like I just
Speaker 1: don't enjoy the phrase size of meat in general. No,
Speaker 1: I think that a meat shaming T shirt is called
Speaker 1: for at this point. Yeah, yeah, there was serious Robert
Speaker 1: influences here. The meat shaming story really is? That is
Speaker 1: gonna so Texas. It's fucking amazing. Yeah. Yeah, one of
Speaker 1: those things I read a while back and has stuck
Speaker 1: with me ever since. They should turn it into a
Speaker 1: children's book. They should the shame of the meat with uh,
Speaker 1: what's that? What's that? Curious chimpanzee? He seems like the
Speaker 1: right character for that. Yeah, are you referring to George? Yeah, George,
Speaker 1: if you'd like to keep my meat big, please message
Speaker 1: me and tell me how cute my dog is there.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, this has been a rambling enough exit
Speaker 1: the episodes done, go yeah, buy it? I love you.