2017/04/21: A Left-Wing Case for Free Speech

I thought I'd do something different today, so I haven't given this talk before. I'm going to tackle the issue of free speech from a left-wing perspective. It's actually dead simple to provide a left-wing rationale for free speech. It should be self-evident to people who are pursuing social justice that the most potent weapon in their artillery is the ability to communicate. What do people who lack power have other than their ability to speak on their own behalf? And isn't it on their behalf that the right to speak must be most jealously guarded?

Anyway, I thought I would begin with a crucial observation. There's a fundamental structural reason why our political system has developed both a left and a right wing, and that's the tendency for scarce resources to become unequally distributed. So let's discuss that. In my clinical practice, I once had a client, an older guy in his 80s. He'd come to me after his wife had died because he was lonesome but also because he was obsessed mostly with mathematical ideas. He gave me this little Go statue he'd had printed of the most beautiful mathematical equation which equates i, e, and Pi in one simultaneous equation. I showed it to a woman in our department who was also very into mathematics, and she was struck by it at the moment she saw it. It didn't really have the same effect on me because I'm not someone who sees—I'm not mathematically gifted enough to see beauty in a symbol that represents that sort of thing.

Anyway, I got to know him pretty well, and it was actually, in some sense, funny that he was paying me to come and talk to me because I certainly learned as much, or more, from him than he did from me. I did help him with his grief, and I also helped him, I think, come to terms with this mathematical obsession. He couldn't stop thinking about mathematical issues, but that was more or less just the way he was. I mean, he was wired that way, and you know, he felt bad about it in some sense.

But well, if you're an obsessive genius, that's just life. You know there are people like that, and they're not that common, and it's good that there are some of them, and he was one of them. He had been a psychology student in his youth, but then he switched into economics and tried to learn how to make his fortune, which he had been quite successful at. He introduced me to some concepts that I hadn't encountered, which shocked me. It shocked me because the concepts that he introduced me to were actually of fundamental importance, and I couldn't believe that I had gotten through so much education, and so much further education and research, and developed a certain expertise in statistics—although I'm no statistical expert—without encountering this set of ideas.

He introduced me to what has become known as the work of Vilfredo Pareto, who is an Italian economist, and also the work of Derek J. de Solla Price, who was someone who was studying scientific productivity back in the 1960s. He wrote a book called "Big Science, Little Science." I tried to get a copy of it on Amazon, so I eventually did, and I believe the first edition is out of print now. They were selling for about $630 bucks, which is quite staggering. It shows you how interested people are in that particular piece of work.

So, I'll tell you about the Price concept first, and then I'll tell you about Pareto and the Pareto distribution. Price was interested in scientific productivity, and basically, you can index scientific productivity by looking at how many scientific papers a given scientist publishes. Scientists are obsessed with their science, but they're also obsessed with their scientific publication record because, well, they like status just like the next person. Status has to be measured and tracked and communicated partly because, well, you have to promote people, and you have to assess them, and you have to hire them, and so you have to rank-order them. If you don't keep track of people's accomplishments, then you do that rather stupidly, and you don't hire or promote or place the proper people.

So, the scientific community has organized itself very well and keeps very tight track of different metrics of research potency, let's say. One of those would be the number of papers published in peer-reviewed journals, and that's a pretty good index, as it turns out. Pure numbers are actually, as it turns out, a very excellent index of scientific quality. Partly because, generally speaking, quality and quantity in a productive field are quite tightly correlated. The reason for that is, well, it's kind of obvious: the more you practice at something, the better you tend to get at it. So, quantity and quality tend to be interrelated.

But there are other indexes, like the quality of the journal that you publish in, and that's indexed by the average number of citations that a given paper might get. Citation count is an indication of impact, right? If no one cites your work, like 80% of published humanities papers have zero citations—just so you know—80%. That's absolutely appalling. People write those papers, they're publishing in journals, libraries buy them, and zero people read them. Complete scam! It's a financial scam because journals are very, very expensive, and publishers publish them because they're expensive, and libraries have to buy them—and so the libraries buy them even though no one reads them and no one cites them—and they stack the libraries with them and they increase the ratio of noise to signal.

We subsidize that. It's not very intelligent. It's one of the reasons the humanities are dying—probably not fast enough but still. I say that with a heavy heart because I'm a great admirer of, let's say, the more classical approach to the humanities. The humanities are the heart of the university, and make no mistake about it: if the humanities go, the universities are done. The tech stuff, the scientific stuff, that could be parceled out to other agencies and mechanisms—can take care of that. The humanities are the heart of the university. We lose them, we lose the university, and that's a terrible thing.

But it's not as terrible as having to continue on a path that they're on right now. So okay, so anyway, back to scientific productivity. Price was curious about who was productive and what the differences in productivity were, and he looked at the average number of publications that a PhD student had. This was in the early 60s. The rates have gone up since then, but upon graduation, the metrics have stayed the same in terms of the discussion.

The median number of publications, which is the typical number—not the average number, right?—the typical number that people would produce was one. One publication. Then you might say, "Well, okay, fine, the median person published one." How many people published two? And the answer to that was half as many as published one. Then the question was, "Well, how many people published three?" And the answer was half as many as published two. Four was half as many as three. And five was half as many as four.

What you see is a staggeringly rapid drop-off of productivity as you move upward in the number of publications. There's a side effect to that. Imagine a graph. What happens is if you're graphing the number of people at a particular number of publications, you have the vast majority of people at one, half as many at two, half as many as that at three, four, five... and then you get outliers out here that have maybe like ten or maybe twenty. Those people are well—they're super geniuses in their field, right? They're unbelievably smart, they're unbelievably fast, they're unbelievably productive, and there's hardly any of them.

Price made an observation about scientific productivity, and it's a terrible, terrible observation. It's a hate fact. He observed that if you took a domain of scientific productivity and you were trying to figure out who did the productive work, the answer was that it was the square root of the number of people who were operating in that particular specialization produced half the publications. Now it's worthwhile thinking this through.

So let's say there are ten people in a particular domain. This also implies to employee productivity in corporations, by the way—same general principle. If you got ten employees, three of them do half the work. Well, that's not surprising—people who don't do any work; you have some people who do so little work that they actually cost you money. In fact, that's the estimate for, if I remember correctly, 65% of managers add negative net value to the company. Well, it's hard to run a company, it's easy to save one, and they fail all the time.

Okay, so if you have ten do half the work, well that doesn't seem so bad. Well, if you have twenty-five, five do half the work—that's getting rough. If you have one hundred, it's ten. If you have a thousand, it's thirty. So what does that mean? It means that productivity is distributed in a manner that was described by Vilfredo Pareto, and that's the Pareto distribution.

When you look at the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth, it's Pareto distributed. This means that almost everyone has none, and a few people have a little bit—and then even fewer people have a little bit more than that. And there's some people, Bill Gates for example, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, who have more money than God. You might say, "Well, that's a consequence of improper social structuring."

And the right response to that is, "No, it's not." It's actually something more akin to a natural law. It governs the same distribution; it governs the size of cities. That's interesting. It also governs the size of planetary bodies. That's harder to blame on the patriarchy. True—it also seems to govern the distribution of every single thing that human beings produce creatively.

For example—and I mean everything—it's really quite staggering. So it applies to the number of hockey goals scored, for example, such that someone like Wayne Gretzky, I read, if you took away all his actual goals he'd still have more points than any hockey player that ever lived. In the NHL, that's really interesting, because the NHL is 1%. No, it's not. It's like one of 1/1 of 1% of all the people who play hockey get into the NHL. Like, no one, right? Give it up, it's not happening.

If it does happen and you're like the average NHL guy, like you're a superstar, and then there's some son of a gun like Gretzky that's so much better than you, you might as well just stay home. And that's the case in all of these domains of creative production. I can tell you some other people who are kind of Gretzky-like in their own fashion, so we can talk about Pablo Picasso. He's an interesting character. He had a very long, productive life, right? He lived, if I remember correctly, into his nineties.

One day, I looked up how many works of art Picasso produced, and you might think these are just sketches that he was like just throwing off—but don't think that. Go onto the Online Picasso Archive where 15,000 of them have been documented. Well now I've given away my punchline. But so, I found that, and then I did some research to find out how many artworks this crazy character had produced, and the answer was 65,000—three a day, every single day for 65 years.

So, I tried that. He had a life too, right? I mean he wasn't just obsessively producing artworks, although he was—and like a huge proportion of those things were masterpieces, right? This guy—he was something else. And then Bach is a good example, J.S. Bach as well. He wrote so much music that it would take a copyist 45 years of 8-hour days just to copy what he had produced.

So these people are—they're off the scale with regards to what they do, you know? You see the same thing if you're looking at pack numbers or that sort of thing. And so the question is, this is a really interesting problem. The question is two questions: why in the world is the world set up like that? That's the first question. And the second question is, well, it makes things radically unfair in a sense, at least with regards to distribution.

I mean, maybe it's good because those people are producing things like mad and the rest of us, at least in principle, get to enjoy them. But nonetheless, there's a big problem in terms of inequality of distribution and ability and all of these things. Why is that the case? Well, here's one reason.

And this is something I worked out, at least in part, with my client, who also had a theory on societal revolutions which I think was quite an intelligent theory. He introduced me to a field of inquiry that I'd never heard about before called econophysics. I didn't know there were econophysicists, but they're—and some of them are very productive. The econophysicists figured out that you could model the distribution of money in a population using the same equations that you could model the distribution of a gas into a vacuum.

So there's a deep entropy-like phenomena driving the distribution of money. And here's how it works. Well, you guys have all played Monopoly, right? Monopoly is basically a random walk. I mean, you know how to play Monopoly: you buy everything you can as fast as you can, and the person who's the luckiest wins—that's basically how it works. You know, there's a— I wouldn't say a skill. There's sort of a mount of stupidity. If you're stupid enough while you play, you lose. But mostly, barring that, it's random walk, and you know that because if you play ten Monopoly games, it's very unlikely that you're going to win more than your random share of them.

So think about what happens in Monopoly. The first thing that happens is you start from a position of equity. Everybody has exactly the same amount of money, and then you engage in random trading. Essentially, you shake the dice, right? And so what happens? Well, what happens is—so here's the graph. There’s one bar, and here's the number of people. Four people are playing—they all have exactly the same amount of money. I think it's like $2,000 to begin with or something like that.

Then you start shaking the dice, and then what starts to happen is a few people start to win a bit more, and a few people start to lose a bit more. And what happens to the winners is that they become more resilient, right? They can take more losses than the people who are starting to lose. And so what happens is the distribution flattens out. A couple of people get more and more money, one person pulls out into the lead, and some people get less money, and losers start to develop. And you keep shaking the dice, and soon what happens is bang! Someone hits zero.

Now, zero is a terrible number, and you can see this in all sorts of ways. For example, if you're trying to start a business, zero customers is really the wrong number of customers to have. It's way harder to get your first customer than to get your second customer. You know, it's way easier to get your 102nd customer than your third customer—massively easier, partly because who the hell wants to buy something from you if you haven't sold something to someone else?

You know, people use social proof. And you might say, “Well, I'm new and revolutionary,” and they think, “Well, that's all well good for you, but there's no damn way I'm going to take the risk of being wrong buying your product. If a hundred other people bought it, then I can say, ‘Well, these other hundred people bought it, so I thought it was okay,’” which is a reasonable justification. But, you know, otherwise, they have to say, “Well, you know, I went out on a limb, and this looked exciting,” and it's like, “Yeah, you're fired.”

So, it's hard. It's very very difficult to get away from zero. Now, in Monopoly, it's impossible because as soon as you hit zero, you run into a problem that you don't have when you even have $2. And the problem is you can't invest zero to make any more money. You're done. You stack up zero, you're done. So zero is a rough number.

Well, you keep playing the game, and what happens is someone walks away with all the money. Now, you can complain about the rules of the game, but you know the funny thing is people will play you if they know that what the damn outcome is going to be. You know—who the crap walks away with all the money? Everyone else is poverty-stricken and oppressed. Not everyone plays, and but then what you also notice is that if you recast the game and play it once more, the tables will turn.

Now, my client's hypothesis, which I thought was a very good one, was that that's what happens in society. That's why they move towards revolution, and it's kind of a Marxist idea in some sense, which is that you play the game long enough—you can assume it's a random trading game. It's not exactly a random trading game, but you can model it quite nicely as a random trading game. What happens is eventually some people have everything, and almost everyone stacks up at zero.

And the problem with zero is that you've got nothing to lose. You might as well flip the damn board over and start a new game. That's especially true if you're male. And the reason it's true if you're male is because males need status. And the reason they need status is because females don’t like men with no status. So that's a fundamental rule.

The correlation between male socioeconomic status and access to partners is roughly about .6, which is a staggeringly high correlation for the social sciences. Massive correlation! You hardly see—that's the only correlation I've ever seen higher than that is the relationship between inequality and male-on-male homicide, which is about .8—which accounts for all of it. So as inequality cranks up, men start to kill each other. And they're young men, and they kill other young men, and they do it in status disputes, and they do it within race, right?

It's you say something rude to me. I say something rude back. We're trying to save face. We're trying to crank up a little status soon if we're not careful because we're impulsive. Because our future isn't that bright, we have a short time horizon. All we've got is our reputation. It's like, “It's you or me, buddy!” And so you end up dead or maybe I end up dead. It's a toss-up.

What happens? You get charged with second-degree murder. There's not enough prosecutors to go after you, so you plead bargain down to manslaughter. You can argue self-defense. You're put in prison for three years. You serve 18 months, and when you come out, no bloody one messes with you, right? It's a hard economics calculation, and it's an effective one. And so, but it's one of the consequences of inequality.

So, we did research using this instrument called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, and I did that with a student of mine named Shelley Carson when I was teaching in Boston. It's become quite a popular measure when you're thinking about creativity. There are two ways to think about it. You can think about creativity as a process, you know, and that would be how creatively can you think? And that would be associated, to some degree, with your IQ—especially your verbal IQ—and also with this trait, this big five personality trait known as openness, which is a fundamental, deeply biologically-rooted personality trait.

Basically, people who are creative are good at generating exemplars, either of a category or between categories. I can test your creativity right now. It's actually quite straightforward. So, for example, if I got you guys to pull out a piece of paper and write down as many words as you could that began with the letter “S” in three minutes, the number of words you generated would be correlated with your creative capacity about .3 or .4. You think, “Well, that's not very high,” but actually, that's higher than is generated in about 95% of social science studies, so it's plenty. Well, small effect sizes have a lot more effect than you think for a variety of reasons, partly because the extremes matter. The middle doesn't matter so much.

And I could do a better job if I said, “Write down as many uses as you can for a brick in three minutes,” and then I scored it not only in terms of how many uses you came up with but how comparatively rare your uses were compared to the rest of the population that was being scored. Now, you know it had to be sensible—it had to be a plausible use for a brick. But rarity and fluency seem to make up a lot of what constitutes creativity, so that had to be measured pretty well.

But—and that's kind of normally distributed like intelligence. We were interested in something else because creativity can be defined in different ways. So, we were interested in creative achievement, accomplishment, right? So not only could you think creatively, but you actually produced something in the world as a consequence. You can debate about which is the better definition of creativity; it doesn't matter. You can have both definitions, and they're useful for different purposes, and we chose the creative achievement definition because that's what we were curious about.

What we did was we thought of as many dimensions as we thought were reasonable of being creative, and so that was like dance, music, theater, inventions, cooking, you know, novel cooking, architectural innovation, fiction writing, non-fiction writing. I don't remember all 13 of them, but you get the picture. And then we developed an 80-scale of levels of achievement, and we had them generated by experts, and then we rank-ordered them in terms of their improbability.

So category zero was, “I have no training or talent in this area.” And category eight was like, “Well, I have an international reputation.” So then we had people fill out the questionnaire, and we looked at the distribution. And what we got was a Pareto distribution. Now that was before I knew what Pareto distributions were. I thought we must have followed up in making the scale in some sense because everyone who's a social scientist basically learns that everything is normally distributed, which is wrong. Many things are Pareto distributed, as I'm pointing out. Everything that people produce creatively is Pareto distributed, and that is really, really, really, really important.

Because you see, one of the things it shows you is that whatever's going on with income distribution doesn't just characterize income distribution. So you can't just blame it stupidly on unfair social circumstances. It's also the case that every society, every state, every study has a Pareto distribution of income. Now, how steep it is—that varies to some degree as a consequence of things like social policy. It's very very difficult to get away from the Pareto distribution. In fact, we don't know how to get away from it. That's the real truth.

You don't know how to get away from it. Anyway, with the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, what we found was that I think it was 60% of people had a score of zero. Zero— they hadn't done anything creative in any of the 13 dimensions. Look, it's not that surprising. Like how many of you have written a book? Well, n. And if you have written it, you certainly didn't publish it. And if you did publish it, no one bought it. Serious—like no one writes books. It's really hard. And then you write them. The rejection rate for trying to get published is like 99%.

And then there's like a million books published a year, and I think I can't remember—it's like 2,500 sell more than 10,000 copies or something horrible like that. You know, Stephen King gets all the money, right? And you see, and this brings us to the reasons for such things. I have a friend who's a novelist, and he's not well-known, but he does pretty well. He's written a novel a year for about 20 years. A couple of them have, like, landed bestsellers.

Like he's breaking the edge of the radical Pareto distribution. He hasn't really hit the big time yet, but he's pushing, you know. Whereas most novelists just—they just starve to death, like artists—they just starve to death. So we talk about this. It's like, well, what the hell is going on here? Why does all the money flow to like five people? And he said, “Well, think about this. Think about it geographically.” Although in a strange manner, think about real estate territory in relationship to books.

And then think about going to an airport, and then think about going to an airport bookstore, and then think about the bestseller stand—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—you know, down to maybe 50. The top five, everyone buys them. And then think, well, there isn't just one of those stands; there's like a million of them. And that's like 70% of the selling real estate territory. And it's overwhelmingly dominated by the person up in the left-hand corner who is very often Stephen King, whose name everyone knows, whose work everyone can predict.

It makes the choice easy. You know? You're preoccupied, man. You're on a flight somewhere. You don't want to spend 10 minutes figuring out what you're going to read. It's like, “Oh God, I want to play ‘Whack-a-mole’.” And that’s how he makes his tens of millions of dollars. And that's how it goes for everything. So here's another example. Think about composers. Turns out that five composers: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin—I think I got them—compose the works that make up 95% of the performed classical repertoire. Because how many damn composers do you need, right?

There's a dominant hierarchy of composers. Some of them are really good. You learn them good enough, you don't have to worry about all the rest. You go—all the classical music you can listen to, right? And then you look at those people's musical compositions, and what you find out is that 5% of what they composed gets 95% of the playtime. So it’s like hardly any composers at all compose all the music that everyone listens to, and that was hardly any of the music that they composed. And that's life. That's life.

And so the economists who know about this sort of thing call it the Matthew principle, which is an interesting nomenclature. It’s from a statement by Christ in the New Testament. I don't think he has many economically-related statements, but this is one of them. It's a vicious, vicious—he says some very vicious things in the New Testament. You know, which is one of the things that lends a bit of credence in my estimation if you think that those things would have been edited out.

You know, but here's one of them: “To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.” It's like, that's the Matthew principle. That's the Pareto principle—success breeds success. And that's how the world works. Now, what's the problem with that? The problem is that people stack up at zero! And maybe that's not even too much of a problem if it isn't like actually zero, but it's close to zero, you know?

There's an article in the Atlantic a few months ago. A reporter decided to go out, and he didn't do an overwhelmingly complex survey, but he surveyed a bunch of people to see what proportion of people could come up with $500 in an emergency. And the answer was a shockingly low number of people. They're overextended. They don't have any excess money at hand. And these were people who were, they were like zero—which is a very rough place to be. Well, you don't want people to stack up at zero, because one of the things that happens is that the male violence levels start to climb.

So you think young men, they need status. They also need opportunity. They also need something to aim for, right? They need all of that. And if they're in a place where inequality is really steep, it gets hard for them to move out of the zero position, and they're desperate to do it. So they'll do it by any means whatsoever. And so what seems to happen is that as society becomes more and more unequal, the pressure on young men grows.

And you can imagine, well, what sort of young man becomes violent first? And this—this is where you can add any of the other, what do you call them? variables that predict violence—maybe the impulsive guy; maybe the guy who drinks too much; maybe the guy whose father swarmed him against the wall three or four times when he was drunk when he was three and damaged his brain. You know, anybody who's impulsive and liable to discount the future is going to be even more hyper-motivated by impulsive violence as the levels of inequality climb.

And they are climbing economically speaking. Now we got—like if you go back to 1895, you know, in 1895, the average person in the western world lived on $1 a day. And you might think, “Well, a dollar bought a lot more back then.” It's like, no, no, no! Today's dollars, like back then, everyone had nothing, and a few people had some. I mean, even the rich back then didn't live like any of you live now, right?

I mean, you've got running water, you've got central heating, you've got reliable shelter, you've got an infinite amount of information at your fingertips at every moment. It's like you're filthy rich. Now you are! You're filthy rich. Money has bought everything that you can have except status, because that's comparative. So, but it's a good thing to know because, well, otherwise you might think of yourself as poor.

And you might be relatively poor, which usually means you have to wait three years to get the thing that the rich guys have. Now it's like, no, it's just not that big of a catastrophe. So anyway, okay, so we got this problem that societies, with regards to creative products, tend to tilt so that people stack up at the low end, and a few people stack up at the high end. And then things start to destabilize—that's the big problem.

So my client's hypothesis was, well, societies run out their abandoned trading game until most people have zero and a few people have everything, and then the revolution comes, and the boards flip, and everybody gets to start again. It's like assuming that there's anything left in the rubble, right? And so there's a Marxist flavor to that. And of course, Marx pointed out that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

The thing he got wrong—and this is an important thing to understand—is that although there is the 1% and even more, there's the 1/1 of 1% who have almost all the resources that the 1% have, right? That exists, and it's always there, but it's not the same people. That's one of the things Marx got seriously wrong. It's not the same people. Most family fortunes only last three generations, right?

Because I don't know if you guys have had money. Sometimes you keep it? I doubt it. Did you invest it wisely? No, probably not. Did other people want it? Yes! Yes, they were willing to get it from you as fast as possible. In all likelihood, you were willing to blow it out just that quickly. If you have a lot of money, you just spend large amounts of money equally stupidly unless you're somebody who really knows how to deal with money, and those people are really quite rare.

And so family fortunes disperse very, very rapidly, and the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts about 30 years. So although the distribution is the way that I describe, the constituent elements of the distribution turn over quite rapidly. So I think if you're—I think you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life on average, and a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year on average. So you know, and people move up and down throughout life.

And another thing to keep in mind, which is very important and no one ever talks about this, is that most of the reason that people have money is because they're old, right? Because young people don't have any money. But they're young. Old people—old women, in particular—because old men die. Old women have most of the money right now, by the way, because old men die conveniently. And now you know the problem with being old with money is that you're old.

And so if you ask the old person with money if they'd rather be young and poor, the answer would be, “Well, yes.” You can think about that yourself if you're young. It's like, “Okay, you can have $20 million, but you have to be 85.” It's like, “What are you going to take?” So, you know, to some degree, it depends on how you calculate wealth.

So, okay, so what's the point of all that? Inequality exists, and it's actually a fundamental problem. And even if you're a conservative person, you might say, “Well, it's a fundamental problem because if the inequality gets out of hand too badly, then the society starts to destabilize.” You know, you want that. Conservatives—Republicans say they're tough on crime, progressive conservatives for that matter—tough on crime. It's like, “Well, what drives the worst kind of crime? Male-on-male violent homicide, let's say.” We know what it is.

It's inequality. The correlation is, like I said, .8. It's all of it. It's all of it—that's what drives it. Status competition. I just interviewed Dr. Martin D. who’s an evolutionary psychologist at McMaster in this place, and he did all the groundwork for this sort of research. So I’m going to release that in about a week, and he wrote a book recently called "Killing the Competition." Very nice book. He talks about male-on-male violence as a rational strategy for an uncertain environment where there’s a lot of chaos and a lot of inequality.

It’s worth reading. You know, he’s very strongly biologically-oriented. Evolutionary psychologist—very, very highly credible in my estimation. The last two chapters deal with social contributors to inequality, and I don’t think that that’s a particularly powerful part of his book because I don’t think it deals with the fundamental issue. I’m trying to tell you what the fundamental issue is: there’s something going on here that’s like a natural law that produces these wide disparities in outcome.

Now, the question is, well, what should we do about it? And the answer isn’t nothing. Because if you let it run to its conclusion, then all hell breaks loose, and you end up, even if you're rich, like you think, “Okay, you're rich. You're down in Central America. You live in Colombia. You want to be rich in Colombia? Great. You don’t get to go outside except inside the confines of your compound.”

You’re in a jail. So nice jail, you know? You're the only people in there, your family, but fundamentally, it's a jail. You’ve got a huge house—way more clean as far as I can—and you got this big fence around you with barb wire. You’ve got guards everywhere. And you know if your kids happen to go out, they can be kidnapped. It’s like, “Are you rich?” Well, I don’t think so.

I lived in Montreal. I was poor comparatively speaking. I just had a student’s—got a student’s—stink, and I didn’t spend much time in my apartment because it was an okay place. But Montreal was peaceful, right? Great infrastructure, great street life. You're safe there, man. 3:00 in the morning, you can go anywhere in the city. There's always something going on. It's often very low cost. You live out in public, essentially, like in many European cities. Hell, you're rich.

Well, part of the reason you're under circumstances like that is because the inequality hasn't gotten out of control. And so we need to figure out how to define wealth too, because wealth is not just what you happen to possess. That might be status, and status is useful, but status and wealth are not the same thing. Okay, so now the issue is: well there's a problem. The problem is inequality. Goods are unequally distributed, and that's not fair.

Now, there's additional problems that go along with that, because one problem is that if you happen to be in the 2% percentile, it's easier for your children to also climb up the socioeconomic ladder. Now, it's not as easy as people think, and there's a reasonable probability that you'll fall. And some of it is actually due to intelligence, because it turns out that, on average, intelligent people have more money than unintelligent people—which hardly comes as a surprise—and conscientious people have more money than unconscientious people—which also hardly comes as a surprise.

If you have intelligent parents, then you’re more likely to be intelligent yourself—not as intelligent as them, of course you regress to the mean—but even the unequal distribution of intelligence sorts itself out across time. But you still have what you might describe as a technically unfair advantage.

Okay, so you got a distribution problem; you got a technically unfair opportunity problem, and it's reasonable to point those out, and that's what the left does, right? That's what the left does when it's functioning properly. It says, “Look, we got to keep the damn inequality—the Gini coefficient, let’s say. We got to keep the inequality flattened out because we won't have a civil society without it. And we'll leave people at the bottom who could be productive and useful, and they won't get an opportunity, and then we won't get to enjoy all the cool things they might have made or invented.” And that's fine. That's a good point.

And you know, the right-wing people say, “Yeah, but if you flatten the damn distribution too much, then you remove people's incentives, and you don't want to do that too much.” It's like, “Yeah, that's right. True enough.” So you got truth A, and you got truth B. And the question then is, well, which truth rings right?

Well, that rings us to the next point. So I'm going to tell you some things about right-wingers, and I'm going to tell you some things about left-wingers. And the first thing I'm going to do is tell you about why people are like that. We've been—and other labs, other labs first—in fact, have been investigating the relationship between the fundamental biological temperaments, including intelligence, and political, let’s call it, viewpoint. Now it's better than opinion or attitude—the idea of a viewpoint—because you see, when you guys look at the world, you don’t see the world. You just see that tiny little fragment of the world that you find valuable, right?

Because the world's too complicated. I don’t know how many of you have seen the famous Invisible Gorilla video, but you know there’s a bunch of people playing basketball. One team of whites, three of them; one team of blacks, three of them. They pass the basketballs back and forth between them. You're supposed to count the number of times the white team passes the basketball. They fill a video screen. These six people are dancing around, bouncing the basketball. You're counting. You’re thinking you’re pretty damn smart because you can count. And then comes a 6-foot gorilla, stands in the middle of the screen, beats his chest for like 15 seconds, and then strolls off.

And then the experiment asks you, “Did you notice anything strange?” And you say, “No.” And he says, “Well, how many passes did you say?” “16.” And you think, “Nailed that.” And then he says, “Did you see the gorilla?” And you say, “What gorilla?” Or half of you say, “What gorilla?” And so, then you rerun the tape, and sure enough, while counting basketballs, "Man, there’s a gorilla right in the middle of the screen!" You are just not very bright! That's right; you’re really blind.

But we are so blind, and we’re so focused. You know, we’re kind of like a think of a pen on a piece of paper. You know, human consciousness is like the ballpoint point of that pen. It's writing, but it's just barely making contact. Now, it's enough to write and move on, which is not trivial. But that’s how focused we are. And we’re focused on the things that we find important.

And then the question is: why do we find the things we find important important? And the answer to that is, at least in part, temperament filters for you. So for example, if you're high in openness, you're going to be attracted to beauty; you're going to be attracted to arts; you're going to be attracted to ideas. If you're extroverted, it's like the whole world's a party and you're the entertainer. If you're neurotic, it's like keep things that are dangerous away from me. If you're agreeable, it's relationships. You want to take care of things; you want to form intimate relationships. If you're conscientious, it's like being away, away, going dutiful, diligent, industrious, orderly.

And not only does that cover your attitudes, but it also filters things for you. So, you see the world through your temperament. You even filter news through your temperament, right? And so, well, part of that is because there’s different niches in the world. It’s like you know, maybe you're an entertainer, so people like to invite you to parties, and maybe you can be relied on, so people ask you to help them move—which is annoying for you.

And you know, maybe you're agreeable, so you know if someone needs to have a talk about something that's bothering them, you're there. Maybe you're disagreeable, and if someone wants the blunt truth, then they'll come and talk to you. So these are all places that you can fit in the social structure and in the world, and so that's why there's that variability.

And you know, more power to it. It's great. It's people coming equipped in the world with different tools, and the tools allow to do different things. And that's diversity. It's real diversity—not that idiot diversity that keeps getting pushed on us all right in place of real diversity.

All right, so you're the way you are. Now, you know temperament is highly heritable. Now, it can be moved. So for example, if you have a child who's high in neuroticism, let’s say, and you can tell if you have a child like that—CU—they're more fussy, it's harder to calm them down, they startle more easily to a noise, they're more cautious around strangers. If something new, the famous study by Jerome Kagan used like little mobile robots to test to see how neurotic they were, although he didn't describe it that way precisely. You know, some roll this little robot into the room; these were like two-year-olds.

And it beeping away with lights flashing and some of the kids—the extroverted non-neurotic ones—would just get right up and interact with the damn robot, and the more timid ones would hide behind their parents, mothers usually—legs, you know, peek out. Now, that was evident as early as six months. Now, what Kagan found was that if the people who had what he called inhibited children were diligent in encouraging them to get out and explore the world, that their level of negative emotion could move towards normalization over a number of years.

But they never became truly fearless people. You could modify it, and of course, if you have a kid like that and you mistreat them and you make their environment very uncertain and you take away all the security from them, then you can turn that into a complete neurotic wreck, and they'll never recover. And so, you know, and the same applies for extraversion, and the same applies for conscientiousness, and for agreeableness. These things are deeply rooted in people.

Now, you can move them around to some degree, but first of all, why would you? Except maybe it’s nice to have the kid be a little more emotionally stable. It's okay that that diversity exists, and it's useful to know that it can't be easily modulated. That's partly the reason that's useful to know, is because one of the things you want to know if you want to be successful is find a damn job that suits your temperament because it's easier than changing your temperament to suit the job.

So if you’re introverted and high in negative emotion, I would say sales? No, probably not. Right? And if you’re like a radical extrovert—it's like computer programming? Probably not. You're going to be the guy that's wandering around chatting with all the other programmers, annoying the hell out of them because they're introverted. And all they want to do is be alone and work. So, go away! Like, don't wander around.

So, okay, so back to politics. Well, it turns out that temperament predicts political belief very nicely. Now at the level of only predicting, say, party affiliation or voting behavior, you can get about 10% of the variance in political belief, which doesn't sound like much—which is plenty to throw an election, right? Because, you know, they hinge on tiny tiny margins, especially in places like the U.S. But if you do a detailed analysis of people's political beliefs, so you differentiate them much farther than you would with your voting behavior, you could get like 30% of the variance.

It starts to get viciously powerful—powerful enough to make the assumption that the primary determinant of political belief is temperament, and the primary determinant temperament is biology. And so, you're biologically predisposed to be whatever party you are.

Now you might say, “Well, what about the well-known phenomena where young people tend to be more liberal, left-leaning, and young people—and older people tend to be, you know, more conservative.” Part of the reason for that is that people get more conscientious as they age, and so that doesn't destroy the hypothesis at all.

Now the reason that's useful to know is that you know, if you’re a lefty and you're talking to someone who's right-wing, you’re not just talking to some blind idiot who can't see the obvious truth. You're talking to someone who is different than you. And there are reasons that they're different. There’s a different niche; they occupy a different niche. And that's a real niche. It’s real.

So here's an example. I've been trying to predict entrepreneurial behavior for a long time, and I've learned to do it quite successfully. And it's not obvious who entrepreneurs are. You know, are they the same as executives? Are they the same as managers? Are they the same as administrators? Are they the same as university professors? Or are artists? None of that's obvious.

Turns out that they're the same as artists. So entrepreneurs are creative people. They're high in openness. Now what that means is they’re pretty damn good at coming up with new ideas and moving sideways—really moving sideways if they have to—but they generally aren't very good at all at running companies. What you want to run the company is someone who's conscientious, and conscientious people—they'll do what they're supposed to do if they know what it is. They’re not jumping all over the place. They want a track to walk down, right?

So if you have someone installing gas pipes where there’s not supposed to be any leaks, 'cause otherwise they explode, you want some obsessive conscientious guy who wants to get it exactly right. You don’t want some creative guy who wants to make like a screw out of the height.

So, entrepreneurs are on the creative end; they're liberals, and managers and administrators are on the conservative end. And so that’s kind of nice, you know? Now how many creative types you need compared to how many managerial types is the same problem as how many liberals you need in the political sphere versus how many conservatives. The answer to that is it depends on the circumstances.

Okay, so now we'll go into it a little more deeply. So here's the predictors—the fundamental predictors of political belief, just liberal and conservative for now. Or, let's say that just left and right. I’ll tell you about the psychometric types in a moment, but we'll just say the conventional left-to-right distribution. The right-wingers are low in openness—that’s the creativity dimension, right? They can’t think of very many uses for a brick. If you ask them, the use is, “Well, you can’t do anything with one brick; you need a bunch of them, and then you build, like, a chimney,” right?

It's obvious. You know, where the creative guys think about all sorts of like, “It’s a hack.” You know, for the creative end. So, the conservatives are low in openness and high in conscientiousness, and conscientiousness fractionates into industriousness and orderliness, and they’re particularly high in orderliness. So that's the conservative—not very creative, orderly and, you know, conventional.

Here are some other things about them, let's say: orderly, traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful, hygienic, puritanical, conventional, narrow, predictable. Now, some of those things, especially if you’re liberal, you think, “Oh no, none of that for us!” You know, but traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful—it’s like, well, do you want things in order or not? You know? You want the traffic lights working? You want the trains to run on time, so to speak? You want things to do what they're supposed to do? It’s like, well, let the orderly people out. You know? If you want to go do something exciting, then get the hell away from them.

But they have the damn point! Now, you can get to order, that's for sure, and you can get to anything. That’s the thing: there are catastrophes at the end of the temperamental distributions, too. Neurotic: not good. Too conscientious, you get a little on the obsessive side; maybe you develop an eating disorder. Too agreeable: “Oh, I love everyone, I'm sacrificing myself for everybody.” It’s like you’re resentful and bitter because you can't stand up for yourself—that's right, that's what happens.

Too disagreeable: prison for you. The best predictor of incarceration is disagreeableness. Like extroverted—it's like, “Well, then you're wrong, Williams,” right? You're mad; you go off the rails because people think, “Wow, we want to be happy.” It's like, “Well, how happy do you want to be?” Happiness, positive emotion makes you impulsive.

And there's no one crazier than someone who's manic. They spend all the money. Why? Because the world's such a wonderful place. “I should buy this, and I should buy that.” Like, happy people are impulsive, as you may have noticed if you're one of those people who likes to drink because it energizes you. And you know there's probably 10% of the people in here like that.

It's like, you drink, you get energized. Most of you just get relaxed, but some of you get energized. It's like you make good decisions when you're in that happy state. No. Happiness means grab what you can grab now, and sometimes that's a good idea, but sometimes it's really not a good idea.

So, don't be thinking that, you know, you can't be too happy. It's like, yeah, right, you can be too happy. So, you know, there are excessive virtues—it becomes a vice. And that's why the damn liberals and the damn conservatives have to talk, right?

Okay, so you think you go to a company; you want to figure out how many managers versus how many entrepreneurs you need, and the answer to that is, it depends on the circumstances. There isn't an answer. You can't say, “Well, you need like 40% creative people and 60% conscientious people.” And the reason you can't say that is because the environment is a giant snake, and it continues its giant eternal serpent, and you're on its back, and you don't know which way it's going to move.

And if you fall off, you die. You fall off the left side, you die. You fall off the right side, you die. And so, what you want to do is stay approximately in the middle, and so what you need is a conservative guy on one side pulling you and a liberal guy on the other pulling you. And what you hope is that by pulling each other, you stay in the middle of the damn snake.

And then you think, well, how do you decide how to pull? And the answer is, well, you can figure it out if you want, but then maybe you kill the other person, or a bunch of them, or maybe they kill you, and maybe you need them. As it turns out, or maybe you’re dead, that doesn’t seem like a very good solution given that that's actually the problem you're trying to solve.

So you can become slaves to the other side; you can oppress the other side; you can fight with the other side, or you can talk—that's the alternative. You can talk. You’re going to talk to those annoying people who aren’t like you. One of the advantages to that is those annoying people who aren’t like you know things you don’t know. All those people you get along with so well, they're already like you.

You can't learn anything from them. They just know the same things you know. Now, that’s fine if you know everything you need to know. So then you might ask yourself, well, how do you know whether or not you need—whether or not you know everything you need to know? And the answer is, well, you don’t suffer. So if you're suffering—and you are—then I would suggest you probably have something to learn, because maybe if you learned it, you wouldn't have to suffer.

'Cause that's actually why you learn. And then I would say, well, since if you learn, you don’t suffer so much, you should talk to someone who knows some things you don’t, because then they’ll tell you some things you don’t know, and then maybe you won’t suffer so much—and that’s fundamentally the purpose of free speech.

Okay, so let's retract a little bit now. Human beings have problems. Obviously, life is tragic and short. We have problems. Everyone has problems. Poor people have problems. Rich people have problems. One of the things that's actually quite sad about socialists—and perhaps about capitalists as well—is that both radically overestimate the degree to which money can solve fundamental human existential problems.

It actually can't. A moment's thought will convince you of that. You just have to think about it. But the research literature is quite clear on that too. Once you make enough money so you're not suffering from absolute privation, which means that bill collectors aren't chasing you around and making your life miserable, then additional money has no effect on the quality of your life. And so you hit that maybe at midway up the working class—maybe a little higher than that.

You know, you might still be resentful because there are other people who are richer than you, but if you get more money, it doesn't help you. Why? Well, why would it? Like you still die. Maybe a little— you live a little longer? Maybe they can hook you to the ventilator for an extra year? That's a good deal. You know, what about divorce? Well, it doesn’t help you get along with your wife. It doesn’t help you necessarily get along with your kids.

You know, it doesn’t prevent you from dying from falling prey to various diseases. It doesn’t make your life simpler. Well, sometimes it does, but lots of times it doesn’t. You know, once you solve your basic economic problems—which you do, just to repeat—once you have running water, heat, shelter, not food, and access to an infinite amount of information, you’re about as rich as you can be—except to be comparatively rich, right? Your basic problems are solved.

You’ve already hit the 90th percentile, and maybe you want to hit the 99th. And like, more power to you, but you've already solved most of the problems that money's going to solve. Anyway, people’s lives are problematic, right? Life is suffering. That's a fundamental rule.

And another fundamental rule is accepting that helps you transcend it, which is a very strange, very, very strange state. We won’t talk about that. Why do you think? Okay, so here's how animals think. They actually really don’t, but here's the equivalent. I mean, they're not stupid. Hunting animals are unbelievably intelligent.

It's not the same kind of intelligence that we have, though. So the mosquitoes are riding the giant serpent too; it's flipping everywhere. So the mosquitoes are trying not to die. And so how do they manage that? Well, their idea is, well, let’s make and produce a whole slew of mosquitoes. Like a million of them, million eggs, and they'll all hatch into mosquitoes, and they'll all die except for one.

And it'll live on, produce another million mosquitoes. That's how mosquitoes keep going. And so, like many many mosquito eggs are the mosquitoes' way of thinking, right? Because what the mosquito is doing is producing small variants of itself, has no idea which of those are going to survive. They're slightly different.

And then mother nature, in all her wonderfulness, wipes all of them out except one mosquito. And you know that because otherwise, we’d be knee-deep in mosquitoes. And I mean we are in Canada, but I mean—there's no time. So mosquitoes produce a bunch of variants of themselves, and then most of them die. But you know, one mosquito lives. Hooray!

That's how they propagate themselves through time. So human beings, we do the opposite thing. We produce very tiny replicants of ourselves, very few, very number-limited replicas of ourselves, and we put a lot of effort into educating them. And we do that because our children are capable of producing variants of themselves internally. That's what our brains look for.

So you know, you play video games; you have an avatar. You can send the avatar off, pack—the avatar dies, you know, you get a little pain and give—but you're not dead! So hooray! Well, that's what an idea is: an idea is an avatar of you in the world. And you can even think about this from an evolutionary perspective, because the prefrontal cortex—which is the home of your capacity to think abstractly—grew out of the motor cortex.

And the motor cortex is the thing that enables you to voluntarily move through the world. And so what you do when you think is generate abstract versions of yourself, test them in a fictional environment, figure out which ones are stupid and likely to die, and then don't act those out. Now, some of you are better than that at that than others, but nonetheless, the typical person doesn't act out their stupidest ideas.

And so we've internalized the Darwinian process. We think we produce variants of ourselves; we kill them off ourselves, and then we implement the ones that we think are most likely to survive. Pretty damn smart, so we are. But thinking has limitations. What are the limitations?

Well, we talk about one camera B, you know, if you're a low person with low in openness. This is one of the things that drives me crazy about conservatives. So conservatives are blind to beauty. They're so blind. Like I remember Harper—this is going to be one of the dumbest things he said. He was talking about artists; he made some speech about "limousine artists" that were what, sponging off the public purse.

You know, these rich artists? Like there's like three rich artists in Canada. The probability that you're going to get rich as an artist is so low that I don't know—you’re like an “X-Man.” If you're—if you're an artist, who's even making enough money to survive, it's impossible. There's no rich artists. So, but the conservatives, they don't—they don't see that because they don’t see the contribution that artists make.

They're blind to it. And so I can give you an example how open people work and how they contribute to the public good. If you live in a large city like most of you do, you know these trashy areas that are kind of cool, and the open people go there. And the reason they go there is because that's the frontier. And that's where open people go. They go to the frontier. They're the creative types; that's their niche is the frontier.

There's frontiers everywhere. There's frontiers in science, there's frontiers in mathematics, there's frontiers in literature, there's frontiers in cities. And the frontier in cities is where there’s a little more chaos than order, but there's potential. And artistic types sniff that out. Now, it's partly because they can only afford rent there, but that's not the only reason. They don't just go hang out in any old rough neighborhood; they go hang out in a rough neighborhood thinking, “Hey, this place has potential.”

They can sniff out potential. And then they start to build galleries, and then they start to build coffee shops, and then they start to do things, and it starts to get cool. And then the less open people who are still kind of open go there and hang out. They think that's cool. And then the entrepreneurial capitalist types start to notice, and they start to buy up the real estate, and then the place gentrifies, and like the artists get chased away because they don't have any money.

Because they don’t know how to do anything. And then they go off and improve some other part of the city. And so that’s what creative people do. You know? And beauty has incredible, incredible value. Think about Europe! I mean, Canadians are blind to beauty, too, as a people. I mean, our cities are to goddamn ugly compared to European cities. Man, like we're barbarians!

And you know, you think about the hundreds of millions of billions of dollars that those damn Europeans spent unifying those cities. You think about the return on investment that they gather. You know, I mean places like France and Spain have more tourists than people all the time because people are going there from all over the world to bathe in the beauty.

So, you know, it's useful to talk to them open types and to appreciate what they have to offer. So, anyways, you're blinded by your temperament. Conservatives can’t see beauty. Liberal types, especially if they're low in order, can’t see the value of diligence or duty. So I read you the right-wingers: traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful, hygienic, puritanical, conventional, narrow, and predictable.

The hygienic and puritanical thing can really get out of hand. That's associated with disgust. And ordinary people are very sensitive to disgust, and part of the reason that the hyper-conservative types are exclusionary is because they build walls around themselves to prevent contamination. And we’ll get back to that, and there are reasons for that. It’s not arbitrary prejudice, although it can be arbitrary prejudice, unfortunately.

It's more complicated than that. Left-wingers are radical, fluid, mercurial, caress, chaotic, unsanitary, and promiscuous. All right? Well, some of that’s good. Maybe even the promiscuity is good, it depends on your perspective. It’s a little hard on the old sexually transmitted disease problem, but, you know, and how many people did AIDS kill? It’s about 400 million, I think. That's a very high price to pay, I would say.

So it's not like there’s nothing serious at the bottom of these. There’s something damn serious at the bottom of them, and there's room for a range of opinions. All right, so you got the conservative types, low in openness, high in conscientiousness. You want something down? There are people to do it. They're reliable. They're traditional. They're hierarchical. They have value structures. They're diligent. They make good soldiers. It's a great predictor of military accomplishment.

Conscientiousness is a good predictor of growth, it's a good predictor of managerial ability. It's not as good as IQ, but it's the next f thing. But it doesn't predict creativity. Production openness is actually slightly negatively correlated with scientific productivity, as far as we can tell. Scientists are mostly diligent rather than artistic because science is a diligent process, you know?

It's a factory. You can grind it out, which is part of why it's so damn powerful. So, then I was thinking, well, why would openness and conscientiousness go together to determine political belief? Because they're not correlated. Those traits—doesn't seem to be any real reason why they should clump together to determine political—determine political opinion or viewpoint.

I was thinking about this a lot, and I thought, well, you know, the open people, they like the jack-in-the-box to jump out of the box. You know, they don’t want the box to stay closed. They want all the possibility in the box to spring out, and so they can do cool things with it. And if they're low in conscientiousness, they're low in disgust sensitivity, so they don't care if there are borders between things.

So on the one hand, they're not afraid of the absence of borders—and, on the other hand, they like the exciting things that happen when borders are transgressed against. And then I was thinking, well, the conservative types, they're high in conscientiousness. It's like they like borders—that's order! They like to be protected from contamination, and they're low openness, so they don't get any thrill when the jack-in-the-box jumps out of the box. They just think, "That thing should stay in the box where it belongs."

So then I thought, well, that's interesting. I bet that works at every single level of analysis. It's like the conservative types like the border around concepts to remain tied—Identities—sexual identities, homes, private property, towns, provinces, states. I thought, well, that's what happened in the last election. That's what happened with Trump because what did he say? “Let’s build a wall.” It's about the borders.

Well, that’s what’s happening in Europe too. It’s about the borders. And then I thought, yeah, that’s right, that's exactly right—that's what politics is about—it's about borders between things. And the fundamental argument is, well, should the borders be open or closed? And the answer to that is, it depends on the circumstances, because we’re driving a giant serpent, and we don’t know which way it's going to turn.

And sometimes, here’s what happens: if you open the borders, right? Let’s say you open them accidentally. So this is what happened to the Native Americans. They opened the borders, let’s say, and the Spaniards showed up. Well, you know, the Spaniards who showed up were a little on the antisocial side, and they happened to come at a particularly rough time for the Native Americans.

And you know, they conquered an entire territory with no, man. They had horses and armor, and the Indians were having a crisis at the time. And so, you know, that was bad luck. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem is that the Spaniards were filthy—absolutely filthy—like all the European city dwellers of the time, packed into these filthy cities living with animals, rife with disease. Now they developed immunity to the diseases.

So, you know, you got smallpox, but you probably didn’t die. It just made you look really horrible. You know, you could live through chickenpox, and you could live through measles, and you could live through lumps and like filthy you were, but you were well armed against pathogens—well, not the North Americans—not at all. There was hardly any disease here.

So the Spaniards showed up, and 95% of the Native Americans died. Think about that! So many of them died that when the Puritans showed up, which is a long time after this, many of the Native Americans were happy to see them—because they didn’t have enough people to take off their crops. They decimated like a third of Europeans died in the Black Death. That was a border issue too, right? Because the rats came in off the ships that had sailed somewhere else; 30% of the Europeans died in the Black Death.

Well, that's nothing compared to 95%. It's like open the borders and see what the hell happens. It's dangerous. You know, the liberal types say, oh no, it's all wonderful. It's like, it's not all wonderful! Now the liberals will say, “Well, just hold on a minute.” It's like, yeah, yeah, there's some danger in opened doors.

The liberals say, “Oh, but let's think of all the advantages to open borders." It's like, yeah, man fluency and thought. We already talked about the relationship between fluency and thought and the ability to think divergently and creativity. It's like, well, without open borders between things, between concepts, between people, between towns, we're not going to have any new ideas. We're not going to get anything new happening.

We're not going to go find the stranger from another culture and welcome them in, find out what the hell they're up to and trade with them and get all their cool stuff. That's a big problem. And if we close the borders too tightly, then what's going to happen is we're going to stay the same. We're going to stay the same! We're all going to look the same, talk the same—and then the damn snake is going to move, and every single one of us is going to fall off. It's like damn well!

So the conservatives say, yeah, well, you know, open the borders? Death! And the liberals say, close the borders? Death! And they're right, both of them are right. That's the thing! They’re both right. And that's why we need to talk to each other, you see? Because we cannot figure out how to stay on the center of the snake without talking.

Now, you’ve got your biases—your cognitive biases—they're built into you. And so you're blind to almost all the world, and so you're going to sit there and think. And if you're thinking, you actually break yourself into avatars, and you give all those avatars a voice, and then you let them hash it out and the one that wins, you go with.

So even when you’re thinking, you’re basically engaged in dialogue. It's just that you’re doing it internally. But you have limits on that because unless you're very good at thinking—and you're probably not because people aren't very good at thinking—they're really good at jumping to predetermined conclusions and very bad at thinking, because it’s hard to think.

It's annoying, it's stressful, it’s technically difficult, it requires training. You have to be able to write, you have to be able to think clearly, you have to be able to formulate an argument. You have to have read. It’s like, it’s really hard to think! So it's much easier just to rely on your built-in a priori temperamental filters, which is what people do to a great degree.

But let’s say you could think to some degree. Well, good! So that means there are forms of death and misery that you can avoid with some degree of utility. But you’re full of biases; you’re going to miss things, man! This is partly why married people live longer. You marry someone, they’re annoying because they think differently than you. But that’s so helpful if you listen to them because they have two brains.

And two brains actually get you through the world better than one brain if the brains are communicating and if they have some differences, right? Because then they’re not just producing the same output. So if I open myself up to someone else and talk to them, engage in dialogue, then they can correct the errors in my thinking, and then perhaps both of us have less chance of suffering and dying. And so the reason that you have to engage in dialogue is because that lifts you out of your parochial viewpoint and helps you clarify the world and clarify how to act in the world with all these different people that you have to get along with—that's part of it.

But also to survive just in the world. I make a little sidebar here; this is something I'm going to talk about more in the future. I've been thinking about those damn postmodernists, and they have this idea—this pernicious, horrible idea—that any text has an infinite number of potential interpretations and that therefore there’s no way of determining which interpretation is correct. Now the problem with that interpretation is that in some perverse sense it’s true, because there are so many phenomena that lay themselves out before you in the world that you can construe them in multiple different ways.

But here’s where they’re wrong: They say you can interpret a text any way, and therefore you can interpret the world any way because the world is like a text, and that has multiple potential interpretations. But here you’re wrong: some of those interpretations will kill you. Some of those interpretations will make you suffer. Some of those interpretations will make people around you suffer. Some of those interpretations will make people hate you. Some of those interpretations will make people refuse to cooperate with you.

So then you say, well, there’s this multiplicity of interpretations. But it's constrained by the necessity of preserving yourself, preserving dyadic relationships, preserving the broader social context so acting in a manner so that pursuing your own selfish interest doesn't destabilize the whole damn game. And also that when you act in the actual world, it doesn’t slap you so hard across the face that you perish.

And so yes, there are a multiplicity of interpretations, but there is a very tiny fraction of them that actually have any functional utility. So that undermines completely the nihilistic argument related to multiplicity that's at the basis of postmodernism.

Now they know it’s at the basis of postmodernism because that’s why they turn to Marxism to orient themselves. Because you can’t do anything if you’re a postmodernist because there’s no proper solution. So anyways, back to free speech: you have to think because if you don’t think, you die. But you’re too stupid to think properly, so you have to talk to other people because they tell you why you’re stupid, and then if you listen, you’re not quite so stupid, and you don’t die so often.

So that’s the bottom line. And then you might say, well, who should you talk to? And the answer is, well, if you talk to the people that you agree with, you don’t learn anything because they already think the same way you do. And unless you’re 100% correct—and I would be very, very hesitant about concluding that if you’re still suffering—unless you’re 100% correct, then you better go find out an enemy to talk to because maybe they’ll point something out to you that you seriously, seriously need to know.

And so, like you know, our culture, Western civilization, let’s say roughly speaking, is a good culture man! You know, like I’m no utopian. It’s got its problems. If you compare it to a hypothetical utopia, it’s hell on earth. Except when that hypothetical utopia actually tries to manifest itself because then you find out what hell on earth really is. But that isn’t how you compare a society. What you do is you take a society and you say, well, how does it compare to other societies?

And the answer is, well, here, all the immigrants go because like they can go wherever they want. And so where do they go? Well, they go to that tiny handful of countries that have the legacy that's tightly associated with free speech. Why? Because basically we can solve our problems. That doesn’t mean we don’t have any. We got lots, but we can solve them. Why? Because we figured something out.

We figured out that there’s nothing more important than free speech because that’s what thinking is. That’s the loose that sits at the bottom of our culture, right, the divine word that transforms chaos into order continually. And, but you partake in that—not individually, precisely, although you do as an individual. You participate in that by engaging in conversation, communication with other souls. And those souls set you straight. And if you're not straight, then you suffer and die.

And so do people around you, and maybe you're aiming at that because lots of people aim at that. But if you’re not aiming at that—and if you're aiming at that, you should really think it through. Some people have thought it through and concluded that it’s like being is a catastrophe. I’m going to work to bring it to an end.

You make a very strong case for that. I think it’s a terrible case. I think it’s a profoundly flawed case because it’s predicated on the idea that you’ve already done everything you could