The Darien Gap & Postmodernism | Bret Weinstein | EP 434

Hello everyone. I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

I'm not interested, as I know you are not, in a world where well-being is perfectly evenly distributed. Even if it were possible, a world in which everything is evenly distributed is a world that is punishing people who contribute more and rewarding people who contribute less.

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Hello everybody. I had the great pleasure today of speaking with Brett Weinstein, who I've talked to a fair bit and who has mediated some of the debates I had with Sam Harris. Our conversations have been very productive across the last, it's getting to be seven or eight years. We started today by talking about the Darien Gap and the problem of immigration, and we moved from that to the solution to that problem, after analyzing not least the fact that immigration conducted in this manner is very hard on the people who are immigrating, you know, traversing the jungle as they have to, being robbed and raped in consequence. It's a very haphazard way of going about whatever the hell is going on. We talked about that then in broader terms with regards to the relationship between the fact of that uncontrolled and unrestrained immigration. Like, that's a pathologization of something that's necessary, and something that's also producing a somewhat of a constitutional crisis at the moment. We talked about that in relationship to broader conceptions of multiculturalism per se and talked about the advantages and disadvantages to that diversification of society.

We went from there deeper, I would say, into a discussion of what it is that might necessarily be key to unifying a society even in the face of a diverse plurality, so that it becomes maximally productive, generous and sustainable across time. That led us into a discussion of, as Brett put it, the sacred and the shamanic as two manifestations of that which is deepest.

So, join us for the ride.

Hello, sir! It's been a while since we talked. How are you doing?

I'm doing all right. It's great to see you, Jordan, as always. Sorry to hear about your troubles up in Canada.

Oh yeah, people bring that up, and it kind of surprises me because I forget about it fairly quickly. It's so absurd and preposterous that it's hard to take it with any degree of seriousness. I think it's partly because it's more serious for other people in some ways than it is for me. I mean, there's not much they can do to me; they can damage my reputation a little bit.

Oh, I don't know. I think they're probably fueling your reputation. But you know, it's a badge of honor that they would go after you this way. It's definitely flack over the target.

Yeah, well at some point, too, it becomes necessary to stop your association with people who have deviated from the appropriate course dramatically, so I have to figure out how to negotiate that.

Tell me, Brett, what are you up to? Like, what does your life look like right now? What are you working on? What sort of problems are you and your wife trying to solve, intellectually, practically? Where are you in your life?

That's a good question. At the moment, my mind is racing, having just come back from Panama and looking at the migration coming through the Darien Gap. That was a shocking experience, even though I was pretty well-versed in the details of what was going on. Seeing it has changed a lot of things in my thinking. That's one thing. I'm also quite focused on the fact that the COVID disaster, whatever its actual nature was, is something that we've reached a lot of clarity at, great cost, but because we are not having a final discussion about what took place, the folks who made this happen, the folks who orchestrated it, seem to be building the structures that would have allowed them to defeat the dissidents, and most people are not paying attention to those changes.

I have the sense that we're being set up for a rematch, and it will not go well if we don't derail their efforts.

Okay, so you've been con- well, okay, so let's put those together a little bit. You were down in Panama with Michael Yan, if I remember correctly. I do know this; I was thinking about coming along, although that became impossible at the present time for a variety of reasons, not least because I'm trying to finish up my most recent book. But you were down there, and you took a look.

So tell me about going down there. Tell me what the advantages were of actually being there, and maybe also the potential disadvantages. I mean, looking at it from a distance obviously has its costs, but looking at it close makes it extraordinarily personal. So I'm curious about how you've concluded, how you've recalibrated your views, what you think is going on there, what you saw, and then we'll talk more perhaps about...

Well, let's start with what's going on. My understanding is that essentially the migration levels into the US from the South have doubled per year from their all-time high. So there were something like 1.3 million people coming across the border in various forms, say, 20 years ago, and that was kind of a peak. Then it declined quite precipitously for a number of years, and now it's doubled from that at least, doubled from that peak.

So is that your understanding, and what did you see?

Well, that's exactly the kind of thing that is impossible to assess based on direct observation. Obviously, you want data over a long period of time at every place where people are crossing, and I couldn't get that. The truth is I was unsure why I was going; I felt very strongly that I needed to see it, but I couldn't explain to myself what that was going to change because I had seen so much of the documentation before. What I discovered was that my intuition that I should see it in person was quite right.

What changed was not so much looking through one's own eyes versus looking through a camera lens, but the understanding of physically how things are distributed in space is not something you can even pick up from the map. You have to traverse some of these distances in order to see what's taking place.

To give you an example of what that changes, there's obviously a terminology problem. We have lots of people talking in terms of an invasion of the US, and we have other people talking about migration. What I came to understand in looking at this is that it's actually both things and not the same. There’s clearly a huge wave of people; they are fleeing poverty and the collapse of their societies. They are migrating North for economic reasons, and this becomes quite apparent when you talk to people in the camps there—these transit camps where people who have just walked out of the jungle in the Darien Gap are spending time recovering and, in large measure, accumulating enough money to buy a bus ticket.

Almost everybody gets robbed walking through the Darien Gap, and so they arrive with nothing. Anyway, they spend time in these camps, and you can walk around and speak with them. Often there are language barriers, but the interesting thing is everybody seems eager to talk, and they all say the same thing when you ask them why. It's always about money.

You know, I don't mean to trivialize it. Obviously, many of our ancestors migrated because of the poverty of their home countries and the comparative opportunity they found in the New World, but what it isn't is people seeking political asylum. That's the excuse that's used at our southern border in the US, but it's absolutely not true. Not a single person said anything remotely like the idea that they were being oppressed or targeted. They were not being persecuted.

So on the one hand, there is this large migration of people understandably looking for opportunity, and the problem is that the rules of our system say that that's not a justification for entering the country because, to the extent that people are entering the country for economic reasons, they do so at the cost to Americans who are already here.

It's obviously the obligation of our government to protect the interests of the citizens, and this is a failure in that regard. But what becomes apparent when you look at this migration, it has a certain character to it; it's recognizable and not so different from the waves of migration that we used to see come up from Central America.

But there is this other movement of large numbers of people: they are Chinese. They are housed separately. This is the thing that's really hard to understand, is that they effectively mix into this massive migration of economic refugees, having traveled a different route. Most of the Chinese migrants are actually skipping the tribulations of the Darien Gap by boat, and they are housed in different places.

When one attempts to go talk to them, there are two obstacles to getting any information. One is that the border authorities, the Senafront, forbid access to the camp where the Chinese migrants are housed. Now, some of the members of Senafront are clearly not happy about the job that they have been told to do, but nonetheless that organization...

Brett, what's that organization?

Senafront is effectively the Panamanian border authority.

Okay, the Panamanian border authority. And do you want to tell people exactly what the Darien Gap is?

Sure. The Darien Gap is a 60-mile gap in the Pan-American Highway. The Pan-American Highway runs 177,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to the southern tip of South America, and there's only one place where you can't traverse it by road, and that's in the Darien Province of Panama, where Panama meets Colombia. What exists there is a formidable jungle. It is an extremely treacherous place; even just at the physical level of crossing it, it requires a great deal of skill to get across it, and most of the migrants do not have the requisite skills. They certainly don't have the equipment, and there's a human tragedy unfolding in the Darien Gap as a result of the fact that these people are being encouraged to come across.

But that piece of road has never been completed, in part because the jungle is difficult, but in large measure because that part of Panama is effectively ungoverned. It's a no-man's land, in addition to being an ecological treasure, unique on Earth, and even more special because much of the more accessible jungle in the Neotropics has been devastated by various processes, mining, illegal lumber extraction, etc.

Well, you were talking about the Chinese migration, which sounds to me like a complete bloody mystery. So like, what scale is this occurring? Why are the Chinese housed differently? Who are they? Why are you forbidden? You said there were obstacles to talking to them; one was the Panamanian border authorities. You had made illusion to another obstacle, so let's continue with the discussion of the Chinese.

So the other obstacle is the Chinese themselves, who are absolutely not forthcoming in a way that is utterly conspicuous. Now, I've been to many places on Earth, some of them dangerous. I've encountered people who were reluctant to talk because they feared some authority would get wind of what they had said, and that they would be punished. This did not feel like that at all. These were people who were not interested in conveying information about why they were migrating, and in fact, their tone, to the extent that one interacted with them at all, was mocking of us for our interest. In fact, there was one incident where Michael Yan, who has spent time in China and all over the world, was trying to strike up a conversation, and this one gentleman pretended to be Korean and not Chinese, and Michael caught him. He induced him to say something in Chinese, and there was laughter among all of the folks sitting there. They thought this was quite funny, but nonetheless, the Chinese migration is not entirely men, but it is heavily biased in favor of men. They appear to be young and fit, military age for the most part.

The Chinese camp, I realized only after I left, that I did not see children there. That's very different than the other migrants, many of whom have children, and they were everywhere in the other camps. So there's something very special about whatever is going on with the Chinese migrants, and it is very odd that the very same border authority that would not allow us into the Chinese camp, a place called San Viente, were perfectly happy to have us walk around the other camp. We were free to walk around and take photographs.

It was night and day different how they treated the two groups, and for no obvious reason.

Is there any sense, do you have any sense of comparative numbers, say, of the economic migrants versus the mysterious Chinese migrants, and any sense of why this difference exists? And what does Michael Yan think about that difference, just out of curiosity?

That is a great question. Michael is obviously quite concerned about the meaning of the Chinese migration as a separate matter. You know, I must say, just for the benefit of clarity to your audience, my view is one of compassion for the Chinese people, who I view as living under an oppressive regime. To the extent that that oppressive regime is an enemy of my country, I view people who are being oppressed by it sympathetically, but I did not have the sense that I was looking at people fleeing that regime. I had the sense that I was looking at people who were migrating at the encouragement of that regime.

Now, I can't say that that's definitely true, but that was definitely the flavor of it as we were attempting to understand what we were seeing. I don't know what the comparative numbers are. I know that we're talking about thousands of people a day, sometimes 10,000—that's a number that I heard described by people in a position to know.

I also know it's very clear on the ground that the expectation is for those numbers to rise considerably. There are elaborations of these camps being constructed.

Even what do 'considerably' mean, do you suppose? Because that's about... we bandied around the figure of about three, three and a half million earlier in the program, and my understanding at the moment is that that's the case. I've looked into the data to some degree and tried to update myself, and to also view this in some historical perspective. So what do you think substantive increase means? And do you have any real idea what percentage of those so-called migrants are the Chinese that you described?

I don't, and I also find it fascinating that the two migrations appear to fuse in Darien, Panama. There's no obvious reason for that to the extent that the Chinese are coming in by boat. It's almost to me, it feels like the familiar economic migration is cloaking something else. There's a deliberate choice to blend these two things, so that people trying to discuss what's taking place will mistake one for the other.

Now, I hope that's just my imagination, but the distinction in the demeanor of the migrants and the behavior of those in charge of these camps was unmistakable.

Right, well, so what you have there for hard data, so to speak, is the fact of the difference in the response of the authorities to the presence of the two types of camp, right? Because that begs an obvious question; it's like, well, if it's nothing but one thing, why are there two processes?

Right, and I should also, just for the sake of completeness, say that we did see some Chinese folks in the main camps. Now, I don't know what the meaning of that exactly is; we saw signs that were in Chinese, and the migrants in the main camps were not forthcoming either, so I can't say what's taking place. But I can say that one of these migrations appears to be highly organized and careful, and the other one is so disorganized as to be tragic.

The number of people who are being beckoned to cross the Darien Gap, who are being robbed—that's virtually all of them—raped, which is a large fraction of the women crossing through, and dying in the Gap because they were unprepared or victims of violence, it's really an unspeakable horror that anybody would be encouraging people to join that migration.

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Okay, okay, so let's concentrate on that for a sec. I want to leap up the ladder a bit conceptually here. So, as you pointed out, the United States has been an immigrant country. It isn't obvious what its carrying capacity is. That's a very complicated problem; it isn't obvious at all how much immigration is too little, optimal, or too much.

It's certainly the case that it's a straightforward thing to be sympathetic for people who are moving merely because they want better economic opportunities for themselves and their children. I mean, that's a very compelling reason; it's not something to be made light of.

It's interesting that you observed there were very... there was almost no claim of necessity for political asylum. Now, what you would hope possibly is that we could have an intelligent discussion about an optimized rate of migration. Now, you pointed out that a rapid influx of poverty-stricken people into a stable society potentially produces a situation where those people compete, especially with the people who are struggling hardest in the current state for relative economic opportunity.

That migration is typically not a detriment to people who are in established positions of hierarchical advantage, but you can make the strongest case that they are genuine competitors for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic distribution. Now, we seem to be experiencing something akin to that in Canada. We have the highest migration rate in the world at the moment, if I have my figures correct, or at least in the Western world, which is where people generally want to immigrate.

And one of the consequences of that apparently is an absolute explosion in housing prices, and obviously that's going to hurt people who are poorest the most.

Okay, but there is some utility in migration, let's say, and it is also the case that the US economy depends to some degree on the availability of low-cost labor. All right, now, what you would hope, in my estimation, is that that would be handled with some degree of forethought and intelligence, and that it wouldn't be the kind of handling that would result in a constitutional crisis in the US, which seems to be unfolding in a manner that's absolutely jaw-dropping. But even perhaps more directly relevant to your story is, well, if we're being driven by sympathy with those who are struggling to be free and to pursue economic opportunity in the spirit of the Great American Dream, it's still immoral to have those people enter the country, first illegally, and second, at great risk to themselves in this haphazard manner, and third, in a manner that's absolutely in 100% clear benefit to cartel criminals.

So, what the hell, Brett? And this opens up an even wider topic of discussion. I mean, I would say from our discussions previously that your political views, such as they are, were likely to the more liberal than mine have become. I never regarded myself as a particularly conservative person till whatever's happened in the last 10 years happened. But I do believe that on some issues at least you're on the more progressive side than me. Now, you've been battered around in all sorts of interesting ways over the last decade, and you've seen some very strange things transpire, and it's clearly the case that your trip to the Darien Gap was one of those experiences.

And so, what do you make of the immigration issue? What do you make of how it's handled? And then, what do you think is going on and why, and what has this done in the long sequence of things that have exposed you to the kinds of information that might require people at least at some level to modify their views?

All right, I'll try to remember all those questions! I'll try to remember them. The first thing to say is there is some rate of immigration that makes sense. I don't really see this as an issue of carrying capacity because the number of migrants that might well that is desirable might well vary with the economic era. But the problem here is that, a, we never had the discussion, and we are simultaneously facilitating this migration.

The American flag is visible on projects in this migration in the Darien of Panama; we're facilitating it. The International Community is facilitating it through the International Organization of Migration, an entity that appears to believe that migration is simply, in and of itself, a good thing.

What's the organization?

The International Organization of Migration.

The idea that these presumably well-intended people are inviting people into the horror of the Darien Gap is mind-blowing. But nonetheless, if we were to decide that some level of migration was desirable at this moment in history, you certainly wouldn't go about it this way. For one thing, we are, in effect, repeating the error that we've seen in Europe, where a huge wave of migration arrived, and nobody thought to ask the question of the migrants if they wanted to be European.

And so, a large number of people entered Europe who appeared absolutely hostile to the values of the West. My feeling is if you're going to bring people in, then you bring people in who want to be part of your society. It's the obvious question, and not asking it is such a dangerous mistake to make. I can't believe we would repeat that error, but we are absolutely doing it!

Now, I did not see the migration at the southern border, but many others have, and they report that nobody is being asked anything. People are effectively asked their identity, their name, and their birth date, and no one checks!

Now, that is certain, even if the majority of people arriving at our southern border are simply people looking for a better way of life who are disproportionately likely to be hardworking and to behave themselves. That is certainly going to provide a mechanism for people who are not going to behave and don’t want to be part of the US to arrive unannounced. There’s no way that doesn't turn into a disaster in the near term.

So, and a disaster of what form?

A disaster of what form, apart from…?

Now, you pointed to one thing, which is the general problem of integration. And that brings up a whole wealth of potential issues, like are we contemplating this through the lens of something like the classic melting pot? Are we making the assumptions that there is a core set of Western values—and even more specifically American values—that must and should be abided by people who come? Are we abandoning the radical multicultural project that proclaims in the postmodern way that there is no superordinate set of values?

And so, that's more on the side of just the issue of integration per se and the issue of national unity. But then there's the darker part of that too, which is it's one thing to want to maintain your own culture; it's another thing to be actively hostile to the culture that you are migrating to or in or invading. Right? I mean, those are very different people.

Even at the worst, the former people are xenophobic. At the worst, the latter people are armed enemies of your society, right? And it's relatively—or psychopathic adventurers who are out to cause as much bloody mayhem for their own personal satisfaction, including sadism, as they can possibly manage.

And if you don't think there are people like that, you're exactly the kind of idiot they like to prey on!

So, okay, so you have concerns. It sounds like you have concerns on both those fronts. And I'm curious about, I mean, this is grounds for the deepest part of this discussion potentially: what might constitute the core values of the identity that people who would want to come into the United States and be Americans—like, what is that core identity?

Because it's certainly the case that it doesn't look like Americans can come to any agreement about that amongst themselves anymore. And, you know, I'm not saying that as someone who isn't from a country where exactly the same problems are making themselves manifest.

So, okay, so let's back up a little bit. You see two problems here: there's a problem of unregulated and badly planned economic migration, and then there's a parallel problem of just exactly who is using that opportunity to do whatever it is that they're doing. Two separate categories of people seems like at least a reasonable proposition or something to be apprehensive about.

A subsidiary problem, which is even if migration is good—and as I said, historically, the allowance has been about a million people a year in the illegal route, let's say—triple that is a lot...

We haven't had a chance to discuss that. It looks like it's increasing, and that brings us forward to the problem of integration.

And so you pointed to this International Organization of Migration. Is that the prop... yeah, you said it is apparent to you and perhaps to them that unrestricted migration—and so that would be like economic mobility—is what's driving us; it's a philosophy of economic mobility, and that unrestricted migration is just a good thing in and of itself, and there are what, a variety of organizations who are pushing that proposition forward and facilitating this movement?

And are they, like, advertising in the countries where these people are coming from? How is this actually occurring, and how is it organized?

All right, so there's a bunch there. I want to come back to the question of what are American values, what this has to do with political left and right, but I also want to address the question you just asked.

And so there's a structure to this migration which is not apparent to an outsider. Most of the migrants are arriving in Quito, Ecuador. It's not obvious why that should be. Geographically, it's not the right place to start because Ecuador does not border Panama.

It happens that Ecuador has a policy of not requiring visas. So when people come from the Middle East—and there are many migrants in this migration coming from the Middle East, odd as that sounds—they arrive in Quito, Ecuador. They migrate through Colombia, they enter the Darien Gap, and they cross over into Panama, at which point their journey north is facilitated by these organizations very directly.

There are large buses, a huge fleet of them that is constantly circulating, and migrants are—again, as I've mentioned—they're almost always robbed as they cross the Darien. It takes time for them to earn enough money to buy a bus ticket.

If they don't earn enough money to buy a bus ticket—though this is not widely publicized—they are given a ticket in order to speed them north. And then the strangest thing happens, which is all of the country between Panama and the United States passed them along now.

Heather and I crossed through all of those borders except the last one between Panama and Costa Rica in 1991. Every one of those borders was tightly controlled—nobody crosses, nobody gets waved through. But now, if you're going north and you're in one of these buses, all of these countries seem to have agreed that, as long as you keep going, they're not going to say anything about it.

That's an odd fact, and it suggests a kind of international coercion in order to establish this route and to keep it open. The information about how to make the journey is being circulated such that people know where to fly and where to go from there.

You know, this is a modern migration. Although I met a young woman, Jennifer, who had just crossed through the Darien Gap, she had a horrifying story to tell. She's Venezuelan, and she was a college student, and she was fleeing the collapse of Venezuela.

She, in fact, said that she was headed to Costa Rica, where she intended to stop. She was going to settle in Costa Rica. But in any case, the fact is she...

She had all of her money taken. I did not ask her, though we spoke in oblique terms. I'm quite convinced that she was raped while she was in the gap, and she was waiting to accumulate the money to get a bus ticket north.

I'm hoping that she will contact me and tell me how her journey is going.

But nonetheless, yes, international organizations are creating the route and distributing information about how to move these people, starting with cell phones that they're able to get up-to-date information. The migration involves strange partners. The Chinese camps, San Viente, apparently involves lots of people having money wired to them from family back in China via Western Union.

So anyway, this is a different... this is a hybrid between the most low tech slogging through the jungle and high tech contact and exchange of funds and things that allows people to these buses which are then spirited north.

But yes, it's an open secret. I mean, most Panamanians that I talked to, people in Panama City, were aware that there was some migration but did not have very good information about it.

So let's go back to the question you asked about political orientation and what the values are. I've done a lot of thinking about this long before I went to Panama to see this, and I've come to the conclusion that we've been sold a bill of goods, and the bill of goods was called multiculturalism.

And the problem with multiculturalism is that it sounds like something that those of us who like to interact with people from many different cultures should appreciate, but it's in fact the opposite of the thing that we—the value that we actually hold. The value that we actually hold I would call Western cosmopolitanism. It's the opposite, right?

Multiculturalism is the idea that people should not join our societies, but they should maintain their own traditions in an isolated pocket, and that we should effectively reject the idea of becoming one people in the West.

It's just a reduplication of the situation that obtains in the world at large with no appreciation for the fact that if you bring people together and reduplicate the situation of the world at large with no uniting meta-narrative, let's say, you also bring in all of the conflict.

Like obviously, because the delusion seems to be that now just because they—I think it maybe is fueled by this underlying materialism, so maybe the notion is if you bring diverse people from all over the world, regardless of their culture, and you provide them with sufficient economic opportunity, given that conflict is driven fundamentally by economic need, let’s say, or economic differences, that that will just vanish somehow magically.

Now, I'm not saying anyone necessarily thought this through, but my sense is this: the systems of ideas that are motivating these mass occurrences, they have their own internal spirit and forward-moving impetus, and they can be full of internal conflict, and no one really sorts that out.

But that's what it seems to be. It's got to be something like, well, we bring everyone together like they are where they already are, but now because they're rich, it's going to work out fine.

And there isn't any universal system of values that needs to be proffered other than the plenitude of economic opportunity.

And so why do you think there's something to that? Right? Because I would say you could make a case, although it's not obvious, that people who are in comparative poverty are perhaps more likely to turn to conflict, although I don't think the relationship is one-to-one.

What do you think? What do you think is wrong with that theory of peace bequeathed by economic opportunity?

And why?

Well let me put it in biological terms. There are two basic reasons for any creature, but especially humans, to collaborate. The most primary reason is genetic relatedness. The second reason is the value that is created through reciprocity.

If you allow me to paint with a broad brush, what we call the West, I believe, is most fundamentally about the agreement to put aside our lineages and collaborate because there's wealth to be produced.

This notion, which has its roots in antiquity, was accidentally invented in its current form by the American Founding Fathers. In essence, in order to confederate the colonies, they built a set of rules that didn't put anybody at particular advantage.

Now, they did it imperfectly. There are obviously some glaring defects in our founding documents and things, but in general, they solved this tremendous problem, and over the course of the next couple hundred years, that system was so unbelievably productive by putting the people who were in the best position to collaborate into contact and facilitating their putting their racial differences aside.

We became a powerhouse, and the American experiment became contagious because once people saw how dynamic it was and what a high price they had been paying for putting their genetic relatedness first, everybody wanted to join it.

So, that is to me the West, and although I am a patriotic American, I'm also a patriot of that idea. I think it is the thing that we should rally around, and what it means is that we should take on this cosmopolitan notion that you can partner with anybody.

It's really a question of whether they have the right insights and values, not a question of what God they pray to. And that is now under attack.

That is under attack from people who would fetishize our differences and make it impossible for that kind of collaboration to happen.

So, I do see the West as back on its heels and in need of vigorous defense, which is part of why I'm doing what I'm doing. I think the world is in great danger if that idea is lost, even for a brief period.

Okay, so let me ask you about that. And I do also want to return to, I guess we're probably approaching it obliquely anyways, to the transformation of your ideas about political and economic structure.

But there's an argument that you just formulated that I can't easily distinguish from the proposition that mere material opportunity will bring peace.

So let me walk through your argument and summarize it. Tell me if I've got any of it wrong, and then let's delve more deeply into that possible paradox.

The first thing you posited is that the default social organization for human beings is kin relation, right? And the word "kind" itself comes from kin. And so we are by nature more likely to extend our sense of self to those who are genetically related to us.

And there's great utility in that, not least on the reproductive front, if you think about it across time. But also, it enables us to form the tight blood-based bonds, so to speak, that are least likely to be broken with the ravages of time.

Now, there is a transformation in viewpoint, which you associated most particularly with the founding of the United States, that's transformed that idea into something like a more general appreciation for the possibilities of radical altruistic reciprocity regardless of kin relation.

I wouldn't say altruistic; the thing that drives us is that we are at advantage by collaborating.

That's fine—that's a perfectly reasonable restatement.

So the notion is that there's tremendous comparative advantage to be gained as a consequence of collaboration independent of kinship. And that's partly because you can draw on a more diverse range of talents and abilities.

And developing that argument, it might suggest that a more diverse multicultural population would be useful because of the diversity of opinion, if you buy that sort of thing.

But then, so I would take issue with two of your propositions. One is that the core of that is somehow American, and also, although I think the Americans elaborated that very well, I don't see how to distinguish that from the proposition that mere economic success will guarantee something approximating peace independent of any other overarching framework.

Now, it seems to me... so let me give you one more minute to elaborate on this, and then I'd like to love to let you respond.

I think there are preconditions that have to be met for the idea that non-kin reciprocally altruistic relationships can be established. I think those are metaphysical presumptions.

I think they're encoded generally in what strikes us as religious language, which is a reflection of their depth and necessity. And those, among those, are, as far as I can tell, those presumptions that are axiomatic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I think those are a precondition for the development of that attitude of radical reciprocal altruism to non-kin participants, that characterizes in its highest form the United States.

But I think it's a... even though that flowered madly with the establishment of the US, its roots are much, much deeper than that.

Certainly, you have to give some credit to Great Britain, and then to the entire Western tradition behind that, and then it seems to me to the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions from which that arose.

So why stop with the US? I know you don't, in some fundamental sense, but also, what do you make of the need for extending that notion of culture beyond the merely economic and pragmatic, or the self-evidently economic and pragmatic?

All right, first, of course, reciprocity as the engine of collaboration isn't invented by the American founders. I mean, in fact, every mutualism that exists in nature is of exactly this sort, so it's not that they invented it.

What they did was they invented a set of rules that made it the basis for a society.

Right, so they codified it more effectively in a manner that could be implemented politically and economically.

Yeah, in fact, I would say they codified it well enough for it to be a functional prototype. But that prototype created an unbelievable period of dynamism. When you think of the number of inventions that are American in origin—from the airplane to the computer to plastics—it's mind-boggling how many things Americans accomplished in a short period of time.

My contention is if we had a society in which you were fundamentally predisposed to collaborate with those who came from the same place you did, most of that wouldn't have happened.

That this happens only when you're liberated to collaborate with anyone because they are the right partners.

So that idea has a tremendous amount of power in it. I also believe that it becomes the nature of a functional, stable globe that does not rip itself apart in conflict.

Now, I take your challenge: how do we know that simply distributing the spread of economic well-being won't cause peace to break out?

And the reason is that it doesn’t really anywhere absent this agreement. What you want, if in the end you start realizing that you are closely related to this set of people, and at the moment, whatever group you have is in a position to get the jump on some other group who's less closely related to you, then that game—the game of lineage versus lineage competition and violence, which has characterized virtually all of history until the last couple hundred years—that game is constant.

This is the only alternative we have to it. And the hope is that it is the best. I'm not interested, as I know you are not, in a world where well-being is perfectly evenly distributed.

I don't want it perfectly evenly distributed because it's impossible in any case. But yes, even if it were possible, a world in which everything is evenly distributed is a world that is punishing people who contribute more and rewarding people who contribute less.

It also forestalls any possibility of trade because if there are no differences between you and then of economic significance across the multiple dimensions of potential economic comparison, there's no motivation whatsoever for us to collaborate, right?

Because we can't rise out of our radical equality anyways. Plus, everything we have is exactly the same, so it just makes a mockery of the notion of progress.

And trade—that means that we're now unable to capitalize on our differences.

So that is the antithesis of this diversity that's being put forward as a panacea. This is why communism is so closely associated with scarcity; it demotivates exactly the thing that makes a society function.

So I don't want that. If we'll get back to the question of why I still see myself as a liberal, I do want to see something as evenly distributed as possible.

And that is opportunity, right? The market works best when somebody who has the potential to contribute something wonderful is not sidelined, cleaning someone else's toilet.

So to the extent that everybody has access to the market, and that they are rewarded when they bring something to humanity that makes us better off, you get a system in which wealth is not perfectly evenly distributed—in fact, maybe you would expect a kind of Pareto principle distribution—but that nobody is frozen out.

If you're down in the low quadrant according to the Pareto principle, but you have the ability to find your way out by contributing something good, then your motivation to do it is maximal.

So anyway, that to me is what a hard-headed liberal would see as desirable.

So if I understand you correctly, you see the limit case to multiculturalism as something like the fundamental antagonism between a kin-based ethical system and a more abstracted system based on the notion of abstracted reciprocal altruism.

It's something like that. So what you're basically saying is that those two orientations cannot coexist peacefully; they are in essence antithetical to one another.

And so then that begs the question, the next question then would be something like: are there cultures that are more tilted in their ideological proclivities towards the kin-based allegiance system, and others that are more tilted, like the European countries, towards a more abstract formulation of what constitutes productive and generous reciprocal altruism?

Look, you know, here's a thought, Brett.

So with these large language models, we now have the opportunity to map out semantic space.

So let me give you an example of this: one of my employees, a former student, has mapped out the semantic network of the concept of God. Now, the way he did that was to find the smallest possible set of words that can be substituted in discourse for the idea of God—it's a substitutability issue.

Okay, so imagine this: there are ten words or concepts that are most likely to exist in the same cloud of conceptual space as the idea of God. You could dispense with that central idea and just use that conation of ten subsidiary ideas as a replacement.

Then you can imagine each of those ideas has a cloud of associated ideas around it, right? And this is literally encoded in semantic space; it's a statistical relationship.

Now, you could imagine that there's a semantic web around the conceptualizations of kin-based ethical systems and a center as well. My brother before anyone else—that might be the concept at the center, something like that, right?

But that could be mapped, then you could imagine that this other cloud of concepts that is associated with abstract reciprocal altruism and its formulation also has a center.

What that should mean, if you did the same mapping for cultures, is that you should be able to place cultures on a continuum from kin-based orientation to this more abstract formulation that frees up economic resources, right?

And then the hypothesis you would derive from that is that the most difficult problems of integration would arise as a consequence of trying to integrate the most kin-based systems.

You could further hypothesize that it might even be worse than that; it might be that the most difficult people to integrate would be the psychopaths who take advantage for themselves of the ethos of the kin-based system, right?

Because we always have the psychopath problem, right? And people don't like that problem, but it's a world-destroying problem, so...

Okay, so what do you think of that idea, generally speaking?

Let's put the psychopath part of it aside for a moment in the end, decisive. But let's just take your basic premise.

I fully agree with this, and I think we also see it as a progression in these divine texts. We can read very clearly that the story of the Good Samaritan is a story about increasing the size of the circle of collaboration.

And I would argue that there's an overarching trajectory—that as societies become larger, the mythology that fuels them encompasses this idea.

And so you keep getting...

What it's probably... yeah, go ahead.

Well, you know, Sam Harris, with whom I know you've had your differences, one of Sam's motivations was to ground an ethos in the objective that could serve as an irrefutable counterposition to the problem of evil, and he thought that could only be done empirically, right?

And that's partly why he is loath to consider any such superstitious representation as might be encoded in religion.

But I've been thinking along lines parallel to you, and it seems to me that he's looking in the wrong objective space.

Because the hypothesis that you're putting forward—you correct me if I've got this wrong—is that there's a pattern, might even be partially mapped already by tit-for-tat competitions, but there's a pattern of complex social interaction that iterates best across time in an uphill direction, that viewed over a sufficiently long period of time can be seen to have a stable and emergent structure that would be its intrinsic ethos.

And that's the intrinsic ethos that's captured, let's say, most effectively in relationship to political and economic organization by the founding documents of the US.

But it's real! It's real! It's real. Like your relationship with me and my relationship with you is dependent on our willingness to tell each other the truth, to aim at a mutually desirable goal, and to continue doing that across time. That's a pattern; it's real; it's objectively real.

Now, I'm finishing up a book at the moment called "We Who Wrestle with God," and it's an elaborated analysis of the proclivity of foundational narratives to encode that pattern of radical reciprocity and to expand its purview and its depth of representation across time.

And that looks to me like a place where the findings of evolutionary psychology and biology can be seen to dovetail with the claims of the metaphysical stories upon which our culture is based.

Now, let me... I'll let you comment on that because I obviously can see the parallel between the way that we're approaching this problem.

So I haven't concentrated as much in my thinking on the difference between the kin-based allegiance systems and the more abstract systems, although I can see that that seems like a clear part of the story, right?

Of the story of the progression towards a more productive universalism.

So how is this?

Okay, so first of all, why don't you comment on that, and then I want to know what these realizations have done to the way that you've been thinking. And then maybe we'll return to the immigration issue.

Sure. Well, the first thing to say is, you know, I come from a weird discipline, and I've departed from its mainstream in order to be able to be productive in thinking about humans.

Because although humans are an evolved creature like every other, they are a very special creature in the way they actually function. But I could tell the story that you just told in what I believe are rigorous evolutionary terms, and it would have certain advantages to be able to see certain subtleties, but it would be pretty close to useless from the point of view of operationalizing it as the basis of a society.

Far better, if you are going to operationalize something for society, to encode it in a narrative that is memorable and transmissible and resistant to being corrupted—motivating, stabilizing, comprehensible by everyone, regardless of level of abstract intellectual capacity.

100%.

So, you know, there’s a moment during the debate you had with Sam, the two-night debate you had with Sam in Vancouver, which I had the privilege and honor of moderating, where Sam confronted you and asked if you really believed that Jesus had been resurrected.

And I remember this moment like it was yesterday. You thought, you must have thought for a few seconds, and you said, "I behave as if I do." And I heard that, and I thought that is the slam dunk answer to this question!

Sam didn't get it! In fact, he doesn't get it to this day! But what you said is the way an evolutionist would think about this, because culture is a means to an end. What is that end?

It is to get your genes, unfortunately, lodged as far into the future as you can possibly arrange from your current position, and to keep them there—to hand the ball off as far into the future as you can, and you want to hand off the motivation for those who receive that ball in the future to do it again.

Right?

And eventually that will fail.

Quick intervention here because we should turn to this because it's equally salient—it's a point equally salient to the one that you just described in my discussion with Sam.

That's what the story of Abraham represents, because what God promises Abraham is that if he maintains a certain pattern of orientation and conduct, that not only will he have a son, which was an impossibility for him and his wife, but that he will literally be the father of nations.

And so what that story is encoding is a pattern of sacrificial attitude that most optimally ensures the preservation of genetic material across the broadest range of possible situations as indefinitely into the future as can be imagined.

And that's what it means mythologically to act in the light of eternity, right? Is that you're not—and this is also, I think, where people like Dawkins go seriously wrong and evolutionary biologists in general, people like Sigmund Freud even—is that reproduction is not sex.

Sex is a fragment of reproduction.

Like reproduction is sex for mosquitoes. Reproduction is sex for psychopaths. But it's not reproduction.

Sex is not reproduction for people who are engaged in this higher-order process of maximally inclusive reciprocal altruism.

Okay, so, anyway, it took me a long time to understand this about the story of Abraham in particular, right?

Now I've got to add one more thing to that because I think this is equally revolutionary. So Abraham's behavior is characterized by a particular sacrificial attitude, and that's famously obvious. And that's a form of work.

Sacrifice is a form of work. You're sacrificing the hedonic delights of the present and perhaps even your orientation towards immediate power for something approximating a long-term gain, and maybe a joint psychological and communal long-term gain.

That's sacrifice!

Now, human sacrifice—we work! And once we know that and that's established in the story of Cain and Abel, by the way, it starts with Adam and Eve because they're doomed to work after the Fall.

Cain and Abel establish two patterns of sacrificial behavior. Abraham is a manifestation of one of those patterns of sacrifice. The idea of the sacrifice of that which you love best to facilitate further adaptation is developed extensively in the story of Abraham with this story of the potential necessity of the sacrifice of Isaac.

And that's played out in its full manifestation in the gospel stories.

And the culmination of this—and I can't see how it can be any other way, frankly, is that the most appropriate form of sacrifice that guarantees the best possible outcome All Things Considered is the full and radical voluntary sacrifice of the self in relationship to the highest possible good.

And I think that's what's encoded in the Christian narrative.

That's what it looks like to me. It's a limit story, right? Of sorts—because it investigates the nooks and crannies of all the dimensions of potential self-sacrifice in service of the highest and integrates them.

And so anyways, that's partly what this new book is about. But that's where my thought has gone further with regard to the point that you made about what happened in Vancouver.

I knew then what you just said, which was that I answered that because I knew that that was the biologically appropriate answer.

Right, that's where the rubber hits the road, man.

That's what this whole experiment is, and all of the architecture, all of the language we have and the structures—the belief structures that we carry and the stories that we transmit, the architecture—it's about something that we can't see and didn't even have a hint existed until a couple hundred years ago.

So, that's a tough pill to swallow. And as you point out, most people don't have the background to see.

Yeah, but I would also point out, though, that if you compare the difference between what you said, "I behave as if I do," it wouldn't matter if you spoke as if you did, as long as you behaved as if you did; and it wouldn't matter.

Somebody who speaks as if they believe it but doesn't behave that way is the inverse. The point is, this is all about modifying behavior, which brings, I would say, too, Brett, also, to attention.

It's become increasingly clear in the last decade that the notion of perception independent of action is a falsehood, right? Because your eyes are moving in accordance with what you value so that you can pick up the relevant sense data all the time.

And so your orientation of ethos in action extends to perception itself—to the way the world makes itself manifest to you as a consequence of the choice that you make with every glance about how you're going to interact with it.

That also demolishes the empirical—the Enlightenment empirical story.

It's done! Because the empirical story was predicated on the assumption that there was a value-free perception, and the postmodernists critique that, and they were right!

Now I would actually challenge you on this because although at one level you’re correct, there’s no way to free yourself from perceptual bias entirely.

I would argue that science, properly practiced—that is to say, practiced carefully according to the underlying philosophy, not just the motions, but the actual philosophy of science that makes it work—is, at the end of the day, a slow tool that has one major advantage, which is that it is capable of telling you that which you don't expect and don't want to hear, right?

It tells you things that you are not predisposed to see, but it has to be wielded in the proper manner. The fact that it takes place in a laboratory isn't good enough. The fact that it's reported in a scientific paper doesn't do it.

You have to do the method correctly, and then it can tell you what you wouldn't have happened on through the process you're describing.

Yes, but I would say yes—but I think it's yes-but for the reason you already outlined, at least in part, in your discussion of the relationship between kin orientation and this more abstract orientation.

So I would say that what science allows you to do is to circumvent, transcend your own particularized biases, but it can't happen at all in the absence of an orientation that's encapsulated within this reciprocally altruistic broader abstract ethos.

Because, for example, imagine you're a cancer researcher. So you're accepting an ethos axiomatically before you analyze the data, and the ethos is something like, 'It would be better if there was less suffering; it would be better if there were fewer cancer victims. It would be better if we knew more about disease in general, and the results of my truthful investigation will be of benefit to people regardless of their relatedness to me.'

And all of those are intellectual pre-commitments that have to occur before you can even face the data in your spreadsheets properly.

If your ethos is, 'I'm going to extract from this spreadsheet the patterns in this spreadsheet, the story that will maximally benefit me and my family economically in the short term,' then you instantly become a careerist scientist and you pollute the entire enterprise.

And so I would say that science only works if it's embedded in the ethos towards which we're developing.

I mean, I've tried to break that argument into bits, but I can't move that argument.

No, you're entirely right, and as much as my argument earlier about the value of opportunity being as broadly distributed as possible runs counter to this one advantage of the glory period of science, where it was done by gentleman scientists, was that they did not have the perverse careerist incentives.

They served their interest by being right in the long run. That's how they became immortal, and that is a good motivator.

And what we have now has taken something that looks exactly like science and turned it on its head; it's just obscene!

You know, I think COVID taught us this lesson in spades. We saw for the first time the level at which this is just a distilled form of corruption that is so pernicious that it can, you know, it can actually take a poison and label it as a cure, and it can take the cure and label it as a poison. It doesn't even blink!

So that's what happens if the other incentives are allowed to pervade the system, and we have to rescue ourselves from it because that's where we are across the board.

As far as we should...

Well, we should note too, historically speaking, that the scientists of the type that you described—so the genuine scientists—were very much akin to monks in a monastery, and I mean their universities were monasteries to begin with.

And they were saturated, whether they knew that or not, by that ethos. Now, they had a hard time distinguishing between the descriptions they generated as a consequence of their objectifying process and the narratives that structured the ethos within which they operated.

Right? They confused the motivating dream with the material objective facts, and this is still what people like Dawkins and Harris are doing.

They don't understand that there's a difference between the structure of the maps of meaning that organize our perceptions, structure our attention and our actions, and the facts that present themselves to us as a consequence of this process of objective comparison that emerges as a consequence of the scientific process.

Well, you know, in both of their cases—and I don't mean to take them to task specifically, but they've sort of volunteered for that job—the most glaring example of the blindness that this creates is their failure to recognize that religious belief is every bit as deserving of an evolutionary explanation as a wing or an eye or a pigment, any of these structures.

And so, to dismiss religious belief as a pathology is so shirking the most fundamental responsibility that a scientifically minded person has to look at a pattern and say, 'I can tell that that means something, but I don't yet know what it is.'

Right? I'm not going to dismiss it just because I don't get it yet.

Right, absolutely!

That's exactly right!

Is that they're not...

I looked at the religious landscape like a biologist! It's like, what the hell is going on here?

Right? What is happening here? It's no more rational than what would you say the morphology of a platypus, right?

It's strange and paradoxical and dreamlike and peculiar, like most manifestations of nature.

Okay, here I've got another proposition for you. Tell me what you think about this because I've been trying to define the religious.

Okay, so imagine this: let's take a... let's think about that semantic network of meaning again. Now, some of the concepts that you have are more dependent on some concepts than on other concepts.

So now imagine your conceptions aren't just an aggregation of words, and they're not just a network of words; they're a hierarchy of concepts.

And here's how you define a hierarchy: some things that you believe are more dependent on other things than on a set of different things.

So here's an example: one of the fundamental predicates of a marriage is fidelity.

And so what that means is that when the presumption of fidelity is violated, the marriage shakes and trembles.

It isn't generally the case that whether or not your wife washes the dishes as quickly as you might like is a fundamental predicate of your marriage because not very much depends on that.

So there's a network of dependents, and I think we track that emotionally, by the way, Brett.

I think we track that emotionally such that our emotions know where in the hierarchy of dependency a given concept sits, and if that's threatened, it produces both more excitement in the exploratory sense and more apprehension because entropy is released.

And the best models of anxiety now are entropy release models, by the way.

So there's a hierarchy of dependency.

Okay, that's the depth. When we say that an idea is deep, what we mean is that a very large number of other propositions depend for their validity on the validity of that idea.

Now there's a hierarchy, and there’s something at the bottom or at the apex; you can use either metaphorical structure.

And we've been inferring for centuries what that core foundation or apex piece might be.

Right?

And so what is religious is what is most deep; that's a definition.

It's a definition, and what is deep is that which much relies.

Right?

And so the first thing I'd like—and you know, you can see the same thing in science.

We know that there are fundamental theorems in science upon which whole disciplines rest.

There's no difference!

We know that there are contributors to the scientific enterprise who are very vastly cited, and we presume that their ideas are deep, not least because the consequence of that mass citation is the embeddedness of those ideas in almost every other idea in the discipline.

So, okay, so the first question would be, what do you think of that idea of depth, technically speaking?

And then imagine that the emotions that are elicited when things move in the depths are the array of emotions that have been ever associated with religious phenomenology since time immemorial.

Well, that's quite interesting. I'm recognizing... you know, I'm sort of the odd man out in a lot of the circles that I travel in these days, I’m shocked, but I spend a lot of time with conservatives.

There are a lot more religious people in my life than I would have expected; maybe they outnumber the secularists considerably at this point.

But I've been thinking about why that might be, and what I'm realizing is that there is, let's say among the COVID dissidents, there are quite a number of religious people who stood up at great personal cost and said what needed to be said in order to break the spell.

And I think the reason for that is because if you have a religious structuring to what you're doing—I've forgotten what term you used, but I would say that we have this hierarchy—you call it a hierarchy, I would say it's a model which we take in; we build it based on what works and what doesn't work.

We build up a model over a lifetime, and we're very reluctant to pull a piece out on which much depends because then suddenly our model doesn't work, right?

So people who have a religious model of the universe where they actually believe they're not just going through the motions have a motivational structure that upends the game theory that causes so many people to falter.

Right? If you believe that you are being watched and perhaps guided by an intelligence that if you do the right thing, then whatever pain your enemies may inflict upon you will be dwarfed by the reward that you will get—eternal reward!

Mhm, the eternal reward, exactly!

Then the point is you're in a lot better position to stare down tyrants and bullies than somebody who is trapped in their somatic experience of the moment.

Absolutely! Or their desire for power for that matter, right?

So there are lots of traps that people who have a deep relationship with this sort of thinking can avoid.

But the number of... let’s put it this way: every religious scientist has an utterly idiosyncratic way of holding those beliefs in the mind so that they don't trip over the parts that conflict with what they know from the laboratory.

Right?

So it's a very odd landscape, and mostly, you know, there's something about it that actually reminds me of the way Jews often hold religious belief, which is that its purpose isn't really to be pushed on all that much.

No one—the congregation holds their belief structure at a great range of distances from themselves.

Some people absolutely believe this is the literal word of God. Other people have a very remote relationship with it, but it's not a zero relationship.

It's just one in which it doesn't impinge directly on, you know, their analytical thinking.

So that freedom to hold that relationship in a uniquely generated fashion that doesn't conflict with the rest of the model one uses to deal with the universe is, I think, necessary.

And it again speaks to a strength of the West, right? That we are not about separation of church and state allows that to some degree.

Right?

Because what you're pointing to, to some degree, is the optimization of stability and play, right?

And some people are going to vie for more stability and less play, probably in accordance with their temperament and perhaps their intellectual capabilities.

And others are going to, as a consequence of that distancing, let’s say, allow for a wider range of experimentation within what is still a walled enclosure, right?

At some distance, the territory that they're allowed to range through is broader.

Now, the price they might pay for that is a little more entropy in the system, right? A little more existential anxiety.

But the advantage would be that they can experiment.

I've got something cool to tell you, biologically. Tell me what you think about this: this was only discovered in November of 2022.

So you know that, for all intents and purposes, the molecular alterations that facilitate mutation are random, and there are real good reasons for that randomness, partly because, to the degree that mutations are caused by radiation, the striking point of the radiation is random.

However, there is a hierarchy of repairability.

So the more...

Yes! Yes, there is!

Exactly! This is a deadly finding!

So what that means is—and I haven't been able to reconcile this entirely with my understanding of evolutionary biology—but that means there is a core set of principles by which the system operates.

And then out on the fringe, there's allowable room for variation and experimentation, right?

And I think that that's the pattern of all conceptual structures. There's a core set of foundational principles and those are religious principles.

And I don't care if you're religious or not, is that they serve the function of the deepest mechanisms of orientation, so I don't care what you call that; it doesn't matter because they're there.

And then experimentation can take place on the fringe.

Now, temperamentally some people would be inclined to experiment at deeper levels, right?

And that would be the difference between someone who's less or more fundamentalist in their orientation.

So what do you think of that as an analogy on the biological side?

Well, I've been playing with that analogy from the biological side, and I have a framework built up.

So I refer to these two poles as the sacred and the shamanistic.

And the idea is that even within a religious tradition, right, there is the sacred, which are the things that one is most loathe to upend because they are most fundamental, and then there's the shamanistic, where, you know, depending on the tradition, the monks may be experimenting with, I don't know, genic substances, right?

And the point is we don't ask them too much what they're doing, and if they find something important, they report it out in a way that we can disavow it, if need be.

The point is both of these processes are there for a reason, and the fact is we see exactly this in the genome, and it even extends beyond what you've suggested.

It's not just a repairability issue.

Okay? We have the ability—for example, let's take immunity—the way immunity develops when you encounter a disease is something called clonal selection, in which a subset of your cells literally evolves on the scale of hours to days in order to defeat that pathogen, right?

So this is a part of the body that has become genetically experimental because it is necessary to do so in order to fight an enemy that your body has never seen.

Right?

So anyway, yes, the sacred to the shamanistic that exists in the genome exists in religious traditions, and we are messing this up!

We are not realizing that much of that is basically culture is a means to an end—that genes have produced a mind that is fundamentally cultural because it can evolve more rapidly than genes can!

Right?

But the problem with that is that much of the stuff that is generated in the moment is noise, right?

You can look at long-standing genes and say, "I know they must have served the interests of the lineage that carried them because they stood the test of time," right?

They have a cost, and yet they stood the test of time, but culture, you don't know that something is useful until it's lasted for at least hundreds of years.

Which means that most of the new stuff that we see is probably bad for us, and we don't have enough skepticism of it!

Yeah, well, that's actually why I think there's variability in trait openness. It's like some of the new stuff is absolutely vital, more of it is deadly, and most of it is noise.

Now, if you're high in openness, it's a high-risk, high-return strategy. You're very, very likely to fail, which is generally the fate of most would-be entrepreneurs, unless they repeat the experiment multiple times.

If you do succeed, you can succeed unbelievably radically, right?

And then you might say, well, to hell with openness, so that would be no shamanic tradition, let's say.

But the problem with that is then there's no variability or experimentation, and that doesn't work either because the future is actually different from the past!

Right?

So there has to be experimentation because otherwise you can't keep up.

So, this is also—so this, as far as I can tell, Brett—this seems to be a place where the evolutionary biology and these new models of theological thinking can dovetail perfectly.

We can say something like, well, the relationship between ideas is akin to the relationship that obtains that governs mutation.

It's the same thing!

It's logically enough because idea proliferation is the analog to mutation.

So why wouldn't it be the same thing?

And it implies that, on both those levels, there's a core set of axiomatic principles that you violate very rarely and at your extreme danger.

This is, by the way, the reason that Uzzah dies when he touches the Ark of the Covenant, right?

So the Israelites are packing the Ark of the Covenant across the desert, and they trip a little bit, and this soldier reaches out to steady the Ark, and God strikes him dead.

And David is unhappy about that, believing it to be unjust.

But the moral of the story is there are certain things that you touch at your peril, regardless of the potential benevolence of your motivations.

That's fascinating.

So I have one thing. This is probably not going to make a tremendous amount of sense yet, but we'll have to unpack it another time because it's a deep discussion.

But it's not really that culture is like the genome; it does have a superficial resemblance in the way it evolves.

But the way to see it most clearly is that culture is one of several epigenetic mechanisms; and as much as it is strange to think of it this way, all the epigenetic mechanisms seem to abide by the same set of rules.

And the rule—I’ll just distill it for you—we call it the Omega principle.

The idea is that epigenetic phenomena are more powerful than genes because they are more rapidly adapting, but they are subservient to the genes’ motivation—at least historically.

Now, I do wonder, and one of the things I worry about in the revival of religious belief that we are watching—the thing I'm concerned about is that actually we are at a unique moment in history where we have to turn the tables on the genes.

The genes are utterly immoral; they've produced a mental structure which is capable of morality, but they've done that as a means to an end.

And my feeling is that what is best about humans, what distinguishes us from all of the other creatures, is not our morphology; it's what we are cognitively capable of.

It's the goodness; it's the insight; the compassion—those are the things which should be in the driver's seat, but they're not!

And you and I have talked before about the danger of tragedies in history reoccurring—that these are spasms that tap into predispositions inside the human character that people don't expect because they grow up during times when they're not visible, and then suddenly they emerge.

And I'm not... there's no way that it can be safe to experiment with such a fundamental change, but I'm concerned that if we don't figure out how to put our better angels in charge, that we are going to be condemned to that same pattern reoccurring with ever more ferocious weaponry.

Yeah, yeah!

Yep! Yep!

Well, that is the issue of the moment—not only weaponry, not only...

I mean that term generally: technology!

Exactly! Well, this is—see, one of the things that really—maybe we can close with this because we're at the right time to do that.

One of the things that Carl Jung pointed out at the end of the Second World War, I think actually it was when the hydrogen bomb was developed, to tell you the truth.

And this is what he was pointing to in his work on alchemy, by the way, which is why he delved into alchemy. He was trying to understand the substrate of intrinsic value that even guides the scientific endeavor.

So that’s what he was up to.

Now, the reason he was doing that was because he believed that we had rapidly expanded our technological capacity since the dawn of the scientific revolution, but had failed to do the same with our understanding of our underlying ethos.

And so now we were as primitive ethically as we were in 1450 with the tools of the 21st century.

And there is no...

If you're going to have big toys, you better be a wise player!

And we're at that moment, and my sense is that—and I would say the positive consequence of this, this hypothetical revival that you're describing would be that I think we can actually become conscious of these things explicitly in a way that wasn't possible before.

I think that's right at hand before us.

I think that’s what's making itself manifest to people like Ian Heryali, and like Neil Ferguson, and like Douglas Murray, and like you.

And we can see a shift, a tectonic shift at the level of conceptualization.

It might even be that the entire culture war is a manifestation of that emerging shift, right?

Because we're at war to some degree with the idea that there isn't anything other than hedonism and power, right?

And that's the radical proposition—the certainly the postmodernist proposition was that, especially emanating from people like Foucault and Derrida, was that there wasn't anything other than power.

And power is always utilized in the service of a short-term hedonism because why the hell else would you bother with the power?

So, let maybe let me try to summarize those things because I think we've arrived somewhere very... we start even with the Darien Gap.

Oh, that's going to be an interesting trick! Let’s see if I can find a way.

What you're pointing to—

We are somewhere new in history because of the power of our technology, which takes off the table the traditional way that terrible problems like this have been solved by evolution.

Evolution was a process in which people whose belief structures or orientation or models were dangerously off could go extinct, leaving behind those whose models weren't so broken.

We can't do that now!

That tool, as terrible as it was, at least worked. What we have now is a system where we are all tied together such that the bad folks may get what they deserve, but we're also going to get what they deserve!

And the tool for thinking your way out of such a puzzle without actually having to go through extinctions of various populations is consciousness.

Consciousness evolved, I would argue, for this exact purpose— for addressing novelty and being able to see to follow through what will happen if I behave in a certain way so that you don't have to suffer that consequence.

Sacrifice your stupidity, right?

And I guess this does bring us back to the question of the Darien Gap, because what we see going on in Panama really looks like an old model that is now taking on tremendous new power and putting us in global jeopardy by deciding to move people and resources to dispense with the consent of the governed.

And that is going to end very badly!

So the message to us is that the peril we detect in places like Darien, it's telling us something which is that we need to rise to a kind of collective consciousness.

We need to realize that what is binding us together is not genetic relatedness; it is common purpose.

That we all, if we think clearly, should want to bequeath to our descendants a marvelous world!

And instead, we are going to give them a world that is greatly diminished, even to the one that we were given!

So I think it is that moment