You Can Rescue the Republic – Here's How | Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

You have a rally planned in Washington on September 29th. So would you walk us through, well, let's start with who's involved in exactly what this is and what its aims are, and just tell the whole story.

Sure, and I will say I struggle with the terminology. This, to me, is post-political, non-ideological. Yes, it's technically an event, but it's an event where we are hoping—it is an event in the same way that Woodstock was a music festival. We are hoping, actually, that this is a moment at which we first see a sea change in the way we conduct ourselves and interact with each other.

I think of it actually as hopefully the bookend that closes the era that opened with Woodstock and opens the next era in which we recognize just how much we have in common, just how much we have to lose if our system fails—which it seems to be doing in front of our eyes. The rally, the event, is called "Rescue the Republic."

The idea was originally framed as "Save or Defend the West." We recognize that the crisis is so charged within the U.S. that we decided to focus on the Republic—save the Republic first—in order to save the West.

And, well, you asked who is involved. I'm going to undoubtedly forget important people who have agreed to come speak on our behalf.

Where can people find the full list? Ah, they can find all the information at jointheresistance.org. They can follow us on Twitter at Rescue Republic.

Okay, so if you do miss anyone, that's where people can go for the additional information. And we'll post that in the description of the video as well.

Yes, okay, so fire away with regards to participants.

Okay, and I will also say that there are people who are in the process of agreeing to come who aren't listed yet, so stay tuned! Even somebody who's not listed today may be tomorrow.

So we have Bobby Kennedy coming to speak. We have Tulsi Gabbard. We have Laura Logan. Heather and I will be speaking. We have Russell Brand. We have Matt Taibbi. We have Jimmy Dore. We have Rob Schneider. We have several musicians.

Yeah, we have Skillet coming. We have Five Times August, who was a tremendous voice during the COVID madness. We have Tennessee Jet coming. Are they going to play? Are any of these people going to play as well as talk?

Yeah, we have speakers, we have comedians, and we have musicians. Great, great, great! That's a good approach. That multimodal approach does make it different than the standard, let's say, political rally.

Right, and I think partly what that does—we did that a bit at this Arc Alliance for Responsible Citizenship meeting in London. You know, I was very insistent on the musical and artistic element, and I think it's because the propositional has to be surrounded by the imagistic and aesthetic. That's more like the domain of dream, right?

It's like the way that I look at cognitive architecture. There is a propositional landscape, which we've actually modeled pretty well now, I would say, with large language models. But outside of that, there’s an imagistic aesthetic and dreamlike landscape. That’s the landscape of the imagination.

And outside of that is the embodied procedural realm. Right? A full event covers all three of those domains. You can't assume that the propositional alone is going to carry it. I think it’s partly because the propositional is easier, in some ways. It has flaws, and it's easier to debunk and capture than it is to capture the imagination and the procedural landscape.

Anyways, if you flesh it out with those additional sources, it's also a much richer experience for the people that are involved. So that's—it's more engaging, it's more fun. And that's not trivial.

If the fun isn't, you know, that short-term hedonistic immediate gratification that we were describing earlier, if it's allied with something like upward striving, it's a much more profound and impactful occurrence, integrated and more human and more holistic.

Because what you're calling a propositional, I might call, you know, features of the Enlightenment: the rational, the logical, the analytical. Whereas we have sort of lateral to that but no less important narrative and art and creativity.

By sort of moving between these two spaces, we have the opportunity for discovery that we may not have in either place.

Yeah, and also, what you're calling the propositional, what I think of as the, you know, the fruits of the Enlightenment, are easily made into reductionist tenets that then become metrics that are quantifiable.

And numbers are necessary and important for us to understand our world, but they are not sufficient. And they can be made to seem sufficient. And that's one of the lessons, I think, of COVID, and frankly, to some degree, of this political moment we're living in too.

That you throw enough, "These are the numbers; don't worry about it. I'm the expert; just trust me," at people, and many of them kind of go, "Okay, yeah, I'm just not educated enough to understand that. You've got the numbers, you're the expert; we'll go with that."

Well, it's also possibly the case that that also accounts for maybe why the democratic tradition or the Republican tradition works, you know, is because intellectuals are propositional experts.

But that doesn't make them wise, and wisdom, I suspect, has something to do with the alignment between the propositional and the imagistic and the procedural. So it's an embodied quality, and it's a quality of the imagination.

There's no shortage of people who aren't educated and who aren't very articulate who can still tell the difference between right and wrong, and they can do it pretty unerring. I mean, dogs can do that to some degree, right? I mean, they're not so bad at sniffing out pathological character, but they can't propositionalize and determine what's a threat and what's not.

And so my point is there are other forms of intelligence that aren't propositional. And it's very easy for those who have the advantage in the propositional space to assume that they're superior in terms of their grip on knowledge, even outside their specialized domains, but that they're also wiser and more moral.

And there's no correlation between cognitive ability and conscientiousness—zero. There's no correlation between intelligence. Intelligence looks like it's orthogonal to all the personality traits.

So it's a funny thing that there's no relationship between general cognitive ability and wisdom or morality. So if you're really smart, you can go bad very badly—very, very badly.

Well, I wonder—I wonder if that's going to hold up. Actually, there are reasons to imagine that you might start seeing a correlation between intelligence—the fly in the ointment being how good are you at actually measuring that.

We have proxies for measuring your capacity to succeed, but to succeed in a moral system, maybe it's not such a good proxy for intelligence.

But back to the earlier point, I want to point to something that Tom Stohler said about humor. He said, "Laughter is the sound of comprehension."

Right, that's good. My point would be that the comedians—this will become less and less true the more they leverage AI to figure out what people will laugh at; it will become a self-referential land of nonsense.

But for the moment, while AI is decidedly not funny, and it’s really terrible at being funny so far, the comedian is traversing an edge between what we are conscious of and what we are barely conscious of.

And when the comedian delivers a joke that causes the room to erupt in laughter, the comedian has found something that everybody in the room is aware of, but they are not aware that everybody else is aware of it.

And so the room comes to understand itself as of like mind all at once, right? That's an extremely powerful property—often of like mind about something forbidden.

I think of that as often the translation of the procedural or imagistic into the explicit because that's the comedian gives words—they give words to something inchoate.

It's like it’s captured in the relationship between the ideas that already exist, right? And then the comedian puts his finger on it just like someone who coins a word does. You know, all of a sudden words pop up, and we need them, and they spread like mad because they've specified something that was a gap in our propositionalization, and everyone recognizes it. It's implicit.

Yeah, and it's funny too, because—and this is a strange thing—it isn't obvious at all that that capacity for spontaneous laughter can be gamed. You know, I mean, you can get—are there cruel forms of laughter? There are.

But it's such an unconscious response, right? It’s pre—you laugh despite yourself often. Yeah, you certainly laugh before you think about whether you should laugh. So there's something—if you think about whether you should laugh, then you will commit a humor sin, which is laughing at the wrong moment.

It's interesting that there's a cost to laughing when the punchline hasn't been delivered or after everybody else is laughing, and it's like you're trying to cover the fact that you're really not—you're not one of us.

Yeah, that inappropriate laughter has been pointed out as one of the critiques of Kamala Harris consistently, right? For better or for worse, she's tagged with the brush of inappropriate laughter.

And you're pointing out that that's the gaming of something—that's an evolutionarily designed marker of something like cognitive integrity.

Laughter itself has been gamed, and I would say that actually one of the most troubling inventions that human beings have devised—this is going to sound preposterous—but one of the most laugh tracks.

Yeah, no kidding. The idea that you can be induced to believe that something was humorous that you did not find humorous on your own actually starts leading the population in the direction of believing things very deeply that they would never have accepted in the first place.

So it may be used just to sell, you know, deodorant and cereal on some trivial sitcom, but the capacity to induce humans to come to conclusions they wouldn't otherwise reach by making it sound as if they are in a room full of people laughing in agreement—that's a very troubling thing.

Right, right, right! Heather, to go back to your quote from Stoller, the brilliant Tom Stoller: "Laughter is the sound of comprehension."

Is that it? I think I agree, but I think in your telling of the story of what happens as comedians talk, actually conflates two things, both of which are important.

And we’ve been talking about the individual coming to consciousness—the comedian says something in the individual brain, they go, "Oh! I didn't know that was subconscious until now, and now it's explicit, now it's conscious. I didn't know."

Um, but then there's also the population level, and you alluded to this in what you said, but I think it's no less important, maybe exactly what a rally, for instance, is meant to do, and exactly what we need right now.

And you know, I'm sure you experienced this, Jordan; we certainly experienced this where people will come up to us and say, "You know, thank you for saying the things that you say. I don't feel alone. I couldn't say—it’s not that I didn’t know, or that I couldn’t say it. I had come to understand this, but I thought I was the only one in the universe."

Yeah, and so you, taking it back to comedy—in a group of anonymous people, a large group of anonymous people—if everyone laughs at the same moment, not only did that maybe bring yourself to consciousness of that thing at that moment, or maybe you already knew it, but if everyone laughs, you know, I am not alone!

I am in sync! We are synchronized! We are seeing the same things, the lens through, even with regard to the unspeakable, even with regard to the unspeakable.

And so right away that gives you a momentum and an opportunity for action that maybe you did not know was possible before. So I think that's an additional layer: the individual and the population are not the same.

Oh, absolutely! And I think comedy potentially activates both.

Yeah, it's the power of the room or the population that comes to understand itself as aligned. And I would point out it's a little harder to describe this with respect to music.

I would say music has been radically distorted by technology, beginning at the player piano. But the ability to listen to music and have it be the same no matter how many times you play it is a very unnatural way for music to exist.

Music used to be a living entity! Even, you know, a tribe that was singing the same song that had been sung a thousand times—it was different every single time!

And it was therefore capable of adapting to the changing mood of the people who were participating in it. So what we moderns, who are drenched in music all the time, we don't even notice it sometimes.

It's soundtracking some story we're watching, and we're not thinking about the fact that there's music. But what we miss—being so thoroughly surrounded by music—is the incredibly powerful and rarified experience when the band, or whatever it is—the musician or the band—is actually in some indescribable way tied into the audience, and the room is electric.

And everybody is synced, and everybody is feeling a powerful emotion, and they know they are feeling it together!

Right, they are being stimulated by the same thing, and they are feeling the same way. And even if you record that thing and you play it for somebody, and you say, "Look at how great this was," they don't get the same feeling of discovery that that room had.

And it's like the comedy, and it’s important—and it's part of why "Rescue the Republic" is structured around, you know, yes, the propositional. It has to be there; we have to articulate what it is that we fear and what it is that we hope.

But comedy and music are much deeper mechanisms of conveying the sense of unity, which is really what this is about. It's not a political rally. This is about the unity movement discovering that actually we value Western civilization.

We fear that it is coming apart, and we are going to put our differences aside in order to participate in protecting it from what threatens it and putting it back on the course that was—that we were set upon by the founding fathers.