The Rebirth of God: Pathology and Promise | Jamie Wheal | EP 485

And I think we're on the cusp of this. We're going to see that our theological presuppositions and our biological presuppositions are pointing in precisely the same direction. Well, that feels like the sort of implicit theme of our conversation so far, right? We've been talking about the monad and we've been talking about, you know, high te heroes, right? Is it that our science will finally catch up to our philosophy and theology, or is it that we write convenient just-so stories to explain what is actually being dictated at a more primal-based level?

I don't think they're convenient just-so stories because I think they're as correct as anything can be. [Music]

Correct. Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak with Jamie Wheel, who's the author of "Recapture the Rapture," and we talked about his book and his thoughts, and my thoughts on my new book as well today. I have a book coming out in November called "We Who Wrestle with God." Jamie and I are walking parallel paths in many ways, and that's not surprising because every historical moment has its Zeitgeist, right? Its spirit, and that speaks through many people simultaneously.

We talked about exactly what that might mean. Jamie concentrates, for example, in this book on what's come to be known as the meaning crisis and associates that with Nietzsche and the death of God, which is the appropriate association: the demolition of the higher unity that held Western culture together and gave it its enthusiastic impetus over the last 2,000 years.

We've exhausted that in a sense, and because of that, people are hedonistic and nihilistic and hopeless and anxious and lost. That's not a wonderful condition. Now, one of the consequences of such conditions mythologically speaking is that it's at those times when something new is born. That's why Christ is born at the darkest point of the year, for example. It's a very common mythological motif, and we examined today what it is that died, I would say, and also what it is that's in the difficult process of being born, and what beneficial and monstrous forms that might take and how that's making itself manifest in the popular and intellectual culture. So join us for that inquiry.

One of the centerpieces of the argument that you make in this book, "Recapture the Rapture," is derived from Nietzsche's famous observation about the death of God. So I thought maybe we could start by talking about that. It seems to me that if you wanted to secularize that discussion you'd do it in something approximating the following manner: you'd assume that there's only two possibilities. One possibility would be that our perceptions and our thoughts and our goal-directed striving move towards something approximating a higher-order transcendental unity or it doesn't. Those are the only two options as far as I can tell.

The idea of a monotheistic God at the bottom of everything, or at the top, is an elaboration of the idea that all the things human beings are oriented towards come together in a unity. The problem with questioning that hypothesis is that you fall into the problem that there's no organizing principle at all—that's the problem of nihilism. Alternatively, you fall into the problem that if there's nothing that unites our striving at the highest level, then we have to live in psychological and social conflict because the various things that drive us will be antagonistic to one another. So you fall into the problem of nihilism or a disunified plurality.

Another problem emerges too, and both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky pointed to this because they were thinking along parallel tracks, which is that if the hypothesis that has served as the highest unity disappears and a unity is psychologically and socially necessary, then other forms of unity will emerge to replace the dead value. I would say, and this also follows Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's thought, that one of the things that we've seen happening in consequence of the death of God, apart from nihilism and plurality, is the insistence that power, for example, unifies. That's a Marxist insistence or a post-modern insistence that the only unifying narrative is one of power.

The unity problem looks to me like it's inescapable whether you approach it from a religious perspective or a secular perspective, and that's the landscape of the problem, as far as I can tell. All of those different consequences, let's say, of the death of God are problematic to say the least.

I'll close with one other observation because it's in some ways what you're striving towards as far as I can tell in this book. If there's a unity at the pinnacle, let's say, then what is its nature, and also what should be its nature? I would say for example that attempting to unify yourself or a society on the basis of power is a counterproductive enterprise. That's not a principle that's going to produce an iterable game, a continually playable game, an expandable game, or a desirable game.

Well, those are some of my thoughts that came to mind. So I guess I'd be interested in your thoughts on those issues.

Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing just to clarify is that everybody knows the "God is dead" bumper sticker slogan, but not everybody knows the rest of that paragraph. So people think of it as sort of like tap dancing on the grave of belief of piety, that this is a move to modernity and atheism. But it was actually a caution. Nietzsche was saying, "Hey, modernity is killing our gods, but be careful when you kill your God because when you kill your God, you rip out the entire social and moral construct that underpins faith, devotion, and belief," which I think is what you're speaking about—about the ultimate truth.

When you rip away something that is demanding reverence or submission, union, and you replace it with merely politicized power games, that can be hell to pay. So we could start by talking about [Music] depression. Depressed people are sad and frustrated and disappointed. They tend to feel all negative emotions simultaneously in a manner that's paralyzing. Depression is fundamentally a biochemical disorder.

One of the things I tried to determine as a good behaviorist was whether the person who was suffering was suffering because they were ill in the strictly physiological sense, or whether they were suffering from the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of life. The probability that tossing an antidepressant into the mix is all of a sudden going to fix your life that are absolutely catastrophically out of order is zero.

The more unstable your life is, the less serotonin your brain produces, and that makes you hypersensitive to negative emotion, and suppresses positive emotion. You take the problem I'm suffering, and then you think, "Well, why are you suffering?" It's exposure therapy, and then you can practice encountering the obstacles that are stopping you, and it'll make you braver, and it'll help you deal with your problems. Voluntary confrontation with the forces of darkness and chaos is the fundamental story of [Music] life.

Yeah, well, Nietzsche foresaw that directly, right? Claiming that millions of people would die in consequence of the rise of replacement ideologies, let's say. This death of God idea, although Nietzsche in some ways pronounced that as a novel occurrence, you know, once in human history occurrence—that's not true. So, Meridith Elata, who's perhaps the world's greatest historian of religions, has documented this occurrence repetitively throughout history. It's a recurring theme: the collapse of the highest unifying order.

It's what destroys cultures; they lose faith in their own presuppositions and can't undertake the effort necessary to sustain themselves. In consequence, this is so old. It's the oldest story we know that we have. It's called the Enuma Elish, and it's a Mesopotamian creation myth. It's part of a collection of myths that emerged around the same time as the Genesis story did, and has many of the same narrative themes. You mentioned this in your chat with Elon.

Yeah, well, one of the insistences in that story is that careless and fractious sub deities—that's a good way of thinking about it. You could think about them as motivational states or emotional states, powerful driving forces. If they are careless and disintegrated, and they lack reverence, they kill the principle upon which they're founded and attempt to live on its corpse. That's a direct pronouncement in the Enuma Elish; it's one of the major plot lines, and it's the prologue to the return of the goddess of chaos fundamentally, who returns in that story irritated beyond belief that her consort, her orderly consort, has been carelessly dispensed with and determined to produce something akin to the flood of Noah.

That's another good analog. This is a very old problem; the idea that there is a central unifying theme that has to be attended to and followed by people who want to organize themselves psychologically and socially, and then if that's treated improperly, that would be a lack of respect for your mother and father, let's say, from a Commandments perspective or irreverence with regards to the highest value—that there's a pattern to the cataclysm that follows in the wake of that.

It's surprising to me in some ways that that's not more widely known because Eliade wasn't an unknown thinker, and he documented this extraordinarily carefully. You know, I talked to Camille Paglia about this at one point; she said something that I found quite striking. So I had familiarized myself with the work of a gentleman named Eric Neumann. Neumann was Carl Jung's greatest student, which is really saying quite something, and he wrote two very profound books; one called "The Great Mother," which is a study of the symbolism of chaos.

That's a good way of thinking of productive chaos; it's a study of the symbolism of productive chaos, and another book called "The History of Consciousness," which is an elaboration of the hero myth, although much deeper than the sort of treatments, say, Meade laid out by Joseph Campbell. Paglia said straightforwardly that had the academy, the literary critics in particulars returned to Neumann, Eliade, Jung instead of Derrida and Foucault, that the entire intellectual history of the last 50 years would be profoundly different.

We wouldn't be in the culture war that we're in now. Now that was very striking to me because she was the only person that I had come across who is a very astute literary critic who knew Neumann's work deeply and the associated works that surrounded it, including Eliade's work. But we know that Joseph Campbell's work, for example, had quite a cultural effect. And I would say one that's been at least to some degree reunifying. All of that work exists in contradistinction to the postmodern insistence that there's no higher order narrative, because that's the fundamental claim of postmodernism, right? Is there is no unifying metanarrative?

That's another reflection of this idea of the death of God. Well, I mean, to be fair though to that movement right, it was critiques of the middlemen wielding narratives in unclear, unjust, or unilateral ways. So when you hold out the monad, you're like, there is some ultimate unifying ordering truth or principle by which we should all come together, perhaps, right? Perhaps. Super interesting point of inquiry. But the trick is the priest class and who gets to position themselves as privileged or preferred intermediaries.

Well, because those guys haven't always done a great job. Well, see that dynamic in the gospels. Because part of the underlying structure of the passion story is the persecution and then crucifixion of Christ at the hands of—really, there are more actors, but three of the central actors are the class of Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers. The Pharisees are religious hypocrites, and they're exactly the ones who employ the idea of a higher order value to do nothing but further their own status and power, right?

Christ criticizes the Pharisees constantly, pointing out that their religious devotion, so to speak, did absolutely nothing at all except provide for them the highest positions of status and power. The scribes, as far as I can tell in the biblical narrative, are akin to the modern academics who attempt to substitute intellectual inquiry for—what would you say?—for exploration and reverence. That's a good way of thinking about it. Lawyers?

Yeah, exactly. Well, and they're also self-serving, but they're self-serving in a more Luciferian manner, I would say, because the proclivity of the Pharisees is to use the religious enterprise to foster their own social status. The proclivity of the intellectual scribe types is to place their own intellect, worship of their own intellect, in the highest possible position. Then you have the lawyers, and they're the ones who use legalism again in the service of their own narrow and self-focused ends.

That postmodern dilemma that you point to, which is the proclivity of the sacred enterprise to be captured by the power seekers, that's also a very ancient problem. You see that in ancient Egyptian mythology, for example. So the figure of Seth, who's the evil brother of the king, is the Luciferian figure; that's always the shadow of the holy proper authority. Yeah, exactly. Or like Lucifer and Mephistopheles.

The idea there, it's a valid idea, obviously, is that as you produce a sociological hierarchy, say on the masculine side, the so-called patriarchy, is that some of that's going to be valid and rule as a consequence of authority and ability, but some of it's going to devolve into a power game. The problem as far as I can tell with the postmodernists, one of many, is that they concluded that there was no other game than power, and that's an unbelievably dangerous presumption. You can understand its logic; you laid it out to some degree.

There's no shortage of corruption wherever you look, inside and out, but that doesn't mean that everything is corrupt, and it also doesn't mean that power is the fundamental principle that should unite everything. Of course, the question emerges—and you are exploring this in your book—if it's not nothing, nihilism and disunity, and it's not power, compulsion and force, then what should be at the pinnacle?

Well, that's the fundamental question. Yeah, I mean, hopefully, it's gnosis. Hopefully, it's direct connection to that which is greater than our knowing and a submission to that, but a willing submission with autonomy, not mediated by corruptible middlemen. So you were speaking, you know, bring all of this down because this also sounds very Abrahamic to me. You feel like you're sourcing from the Old Testament code-based, right? Deference to unifying power authority, and I'm more curious about the New Testament.

So for instance, like just recently, let's just bring it down for listeners, right? Recently, Louisiana, I think maybe Tennessee, but definitely Louisiana has talked about mandating Ten Commandments classrooms, things like that. And there's a whole, you know, chunk of America that feels like, "Yes, that is an important return to definitive values," right? Versus this choose-your-own-adventure mishmash of whatever feels good for me.

And that tends to be an Evangelical proclivity. It's kind of interesting because they’re Protestants. You know, it's interesting to see that particular branch of Christianity develop this insistence on a return to those fundamental stated values, let's say. Yeah, but it is super interesting. Do you know what's his name? Wrot Fantasy Land? Fantasy Land: 500 years of how America went haywire. Kurt Anderson, he was at Harvard, and then he did Studio 360. But he's a sort of popular intellectual historian, and he talks about how, in some respects, the Southern Baptist, evangelical, Pentecostal movement, right? He uses the Scopes Monkey Trial as kind of a pivot point.

Almost became a pre-Reformation retrenchment of Christian faith because the mainline Protestant faiths—the Anglican, Episcopalian, Lutheran, etc.—were oriented with the North. Those faiths, from the Scots-Irish Appalachian migrations and all the sort of history that had led to it, became, there was a sort of schism. The Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of that, you know, evolution versus creationism that was partly intellectual and partly geographical. Yes, and basically the sort of aftershocks of the Civil War. That was when we got this break.

And that is how you have, you know, what was the UGV survey? It was something like 56% of Americans believe in demonic possession. Like America? Because they watch their politician, right? America is a uniquely profoundly faith-based place compared to Western Europe, compared to all these other places, and characterized by continual revivals of that spirit, right?

Yeah, but we go back to Louisiana and the Ten Commandments and the clash: why are we posting a deeply ancient, quite anachronistic, almost Hammurabic code-level Abrahamic thing? Not the Sermon on the Mount. Not that turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor. Not the blessed are the meek and humble, for they shall inherit the earth, right? There is a New Testament, right? Gospel, good news, that is being eclipsed.

So it almost feels like the posting of the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments these days, is almost a shibboleth, right? It's almost a sorting mechanism, which is if you are pre-Reformation, and Sam Harris talks about this with Islam, right? That's his main critique of Islam, is they never went through a Reformation, right? So you’ve got medieval sentiments that haven't been updated.

Well, the danger of that, I suppose, is the reduction of morality to abiding by a code.

Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. I mean I have some sympathy for the literalism of the Protestants, even in so far as that might have produced phenomena like the Monkey Trial that you referred to because what the evangelists have been concerned about—and rightly so—is that an unthinking Darwinism poses a tremendous threat to the integrity of the moral code that the West is predicated on, and there's absolutely no doubt about that.

Now, what that means about Darwinism—that's a whole other complicated question—but specifically biological Darwinism, not social Darwinism.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s very difficult to reconcile the claims of the, especially the more naive claims, you might say, of the evolutionary biologists with the Genesis account, for example. It's a very difficult thing to do.

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Well, it's not as if our biological Darwinism has cracked the problem of life. It's a theory that isn't complete, and the details of it are still being worked out, and that's very damaging often. So, for example, you have this—this is just one example—you have claims of people like Dawkins that reproduction can be reduced to sex, and that sex can be reproduced to the proclivity of genetic material to replicate itself, and that has all sorts of metaphysical implications.

And those metaphysical implications are very damaging. They promote a certain kind of hopeless nihilism in the sense of it being all just random creation, destruction—no point of purpose, no teleological output. Partly that, and partly or, and partly the notion that even within that we're pawns of these massive forces that are reducible, let's say, to something approximating the desire of genes—that desire, I know that's improper terminology, to replicate themselves. Although Dawkins would say that the genes have no desire, but that's not the point. Because his book, "The Selfish Gene," what would you say—the sense that that desire is there is implicit in the text, and so that has very troublesome metaphysical implications. Because people can't live in the absence of some relationship with transcendent meaning, and they need that meaning to help them bear the suffering of their life without becoming demoralized, without becoming corrupt. This isn't optional.

No, and I think one of the things the new atheists did very badly wrong was fail to take the problem they were addressing with due seriousness. So either, either as an existential problem, you know, although Sam Harris wrestles with that to some degree because Harris definitely believes in the existence of something approximating transcendent evil, right? Which is a religious stance, all things considered. But the problem of meaning can't just be dispensed with by reference to something like our deterministic relationship to a set of selfish genes.

So basically, are you saying that in the "God is dead" moment, and in the rise of the new atheist and them sort of thinking that the battle had been won, that they neglected to replace it with a sufficiently robust and inspiring alternate story? Because random selection of selfish genes is inadequate to guide culture and the human—well, it's also not random. There's sexual selection. Darwin concentrated on sexual selection to a large degree, although for about a hundred years after Darwin, the evolutionary biologists tended to avoid the topic of sexual selection because it didn't fit so nicely in with the notion of random evolution.

There's nothing bloody random about sexual selection. Butterflies can detect departures from symmetry on the part of their partners at one part in a million. Their selection for beauty is by no means accidental, and it's certainly the case that conscious choice has selected human morphology down to its finest details. That's not random at all. Now, the mutation process is random, and I know Dawkins knows perfectly well.

So you're suggesting there's a bias towards selection of goodness, truth, and beauty, for instance? Something along the lines—I would actually say that there's likely a selection towards something approximating the embodiment of that higher order unity that we've been speaking of. So, I mean, I can give you an example of that. It's like that William Blake quote: "Tiger, tiger, burning bright, thy fearful symmetry," right? Fearful symmetry is noticeable, the patterns, the harmonics.

Well, you can think about that relationship to something like the hero myth. I mean, you could—it's certainly no stretch of the imagination to presume that men who embody the heroism that's part and parcel of the hero narrative are much more attractive to women, obviously. I mean, that's the basis of every romantic adventure story that's ever been written. And so there is something like selection bias in the direction of the same patterns that are portrayed in our most fundamental narratives, and none of that is accidental.

And I would say that does imply something like a relationship between sexual selection and the embodiment of the virtues that are part of our deepest stories, because part of the pattern of the hero is the portrayal, the embodiment of existential courage in the face of life's catastrophes.

Okay, so this is a beautiful point here because to me this distills your exact role in the information and influence space. Because we've talked about two things so far, right? One was the erosion of the monad, a unifying truth, right? And then you've also just talked about kind of, in some respects, not biological determinism, but sort of the way things are, right? The Chad, high testosterone, heroic male being true and just right, the natural outcome; it would be natural that women swoon; it would be natural that he leads his people—those kind of things.

So you are holding in my understanding of your work a deep, Western Judeo-Christian and sort of Enlightenment value space. Would that feel accurate to you? And you’re saying, "Hey, there are important things here," but how do you, for instance, speak these and not end up as a battering ram in the culture wars, right? Not a useful idiot, a useful genius, right? To Christian ethno-nationalists, playing the finite game—so can you.

Never mind the woke social justice folks; they can't organize their way out of a goddamn paper bag. In this at this moment, they are not actually a threat; they're a pain in the ass, but they're not a threat. Militant Christian ethnonationalism, being inflamed by Putin, right? KGBs continuation of the Stalin lineage being undermined and eroded by Christianity—like if you could police your own side of the culture war more and call those folks up to truly Christian values, not weaponized ethnonationalism, then you would unlock something in the culture war debates that we're not getting when you get positioned against the audience capture and echo chambers as just beating on.

Well, people have tried to throw me in with that lot fairly regularly over the last ten years, and it hasn't been very successful. I mean, I would say a lot of the activity on that front right now has been coming out of what you would say the Nick Fuentes crowd online and all the people who are associated with that, you know—absolutely pathological movement.

Yeah, tenant media, right? They've just gone...

Yeah, yeah. Well, so what does that imply?

Well, it implies that the pharaonic danger is always with us, which is that the highest possible virtues can be weaponized by the worst possible actors. In fact, that's exactly what they'll do. I mean, one of the things you see, for example, with the dark tetrad types is that one of their employs is victimization. So yes, either I'm special, or I'm vulnerable, or I'm righteous, or then I'm vindictive. Like it's a cascade.

Yeah, yeah.

But they're extremely good at, they're extremely good by temperament at playing the victim card. Yes. And so that's an extraordinarily effective ploy when you're dealing with conscientious people because you can make them feel guilty, or agreeable people because you can make them feel sorry for you, and so that kind of covers the political spectrum.

You capture the psychopaths, capture the liberals with agreeableness and they capture the conservatives with conscientiousness because they tell the conservatives, "Well, you know you're more racist. You're more prejudiced. You're more sexist than you should be," and they try to guilt them into that.

Yeah, yeah. They use guilt, yeah.

They use empathy for the left and they use guilt for the right. And the agreeableness is on the part of the audience; like I play the victim so I'm agreeable so I'm going to try and help you, absolutely. And it's particularly easy to capture women in that manner because they tend to be more agreeable, so they're much more susceptible to victimization ploys. And it's not surprising, I mean, because women are in a very complicated situation because when they have infants, at least for the first eight months of the infant's life, they have to be 100% empathic.

So you have to be able to do that. Now, the problem with having an orientation to the world that's fundamentally predicated on empathy is that the psychopaths can game it. Yes. I mean, that is the fundamental problem; it's also why we know, for example, that young women are much more susceptible to the blandishments of the dark tetrad types because they can be manipulated in consequence of their empathy, and they don't have the worldly experience to tell the difference between people who are in trouble and people who use claims that they're in trouble to do nothing but manipulate.

And this is a massive—like the problem that you laid out of the dark tetrad actors, let's say—this is a civilization-challenging problem. It's not some side effect of the culture wars. It's like whenever society is in a situation where the dark tetrad types get the upper hand, everything is gone; they demolish everything. Arthur Brooks wrote about this, I think, in The Atlantic a few months ago, but it was sort of one in fourteen people are testing that way.

So if you got just a group of thirty, you've got two in that crowd that are likely…

It's a continuum, right?

And given the social norms these days, let's just say sort of educated, you know, knowledge worker economy types, right? We're all trained in nonviolent communication. Everybody's voice has an opinion. There's no bad ideas, right? There's a very flat egalitarian sort of social space.

We… there—that's right, there's no intervening hierarchies. So actually, call that early and stop it when some—when a dark tetrad person is playing those gambits.

Yeah, you seem like the authoritarian.

Yeah, right.

But you kind of be like, "No, no, not my first rodeo. I've seen this before," and we're nipping this in the bud because, like you said, it only takes one person at the seminar to queer the deal.

So I watched Mark Zuckerberg at Congress, and you know he's a kind of a convenient whipping boy, let's say, for the conservatives. And, you know, no doubt he's made his errors, and some of those he's publicly admitted, although I have some sympathy for him because my suspicions are that the typical person, including the typical corporate magnate, when they're approached by high order governmental agencies and asked to comply because of reasons of national security, especially five years ago, would have listened.

You might think you're the one person who would have withstood that pressure, but it's like I don't think so. And asking Mark to do that, I think that's too much to ask for someone, especially under those circumstances because he didn't understand the full extent of his social media enterprise or how to regulate it, and he certainly didn't understand that he was being asked to do corrupt things by a government that was hell-bent on a certain form of censorship.

Having said all that, it's not like we know how to deal with this. We have these new communication technologies—Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and X—and the narcissistic psychopaths have free reign, and that’s embedded by their anonymity and by the algorithmic expansion of their troublemaking. But it's not like anyone knows what to do about that.

Right, because when you tilt towards control, well then you have the problem of the suppression of free speech, which is a real problem. Like that's not trivial. And if you just let there be a free-for-all, well then the bad actors have a disproportionate effect, and we don't know what to do about that.

Like one of the things I've thought through, for what it's worth, is that I think it's a big mistake to put the anonymous people with the real people.

You mean like trolls? Or just faceless accounts?

Like faceless. I think that social media networks should separate the faceless accounts from the verified identities.

Well, it blows out millions of years of primate reciprocity in tribal dynamics.

Yeah, that's what it does. And that actually turns out to be quite a problem, right? If I can’t hold you accountable in any manner for what you do, all that does is—precisely what it does—say it to my face, right?

Right, well, people are much more civilized face to face for exactly those reasons. All those mechanisms kick in. I mean, we know perfectly well—this is actually valid social psychological research—if you anonymize ordinary people, the worst sides of their character come forward.

And like a lot of what regulates us is that implicit requirement, signified even by facial expression in face-to-face contact, that's indicative of the desire for reciprocity. There have been studies on that with dating apps, right? That people are ghosting and doing all sorts of atrocious behaviors to each other on Tinder because it's a random dating pool of data points.

In the past, I went on a date with you because you were my best friend's sister, or we met at church, or there was something in our neighborhood or region, and relational networks. And I didn't want to pee in that pool.

Yes, precisely!

Versus just swipe for another one.

It's also the case, see, we also overestimate the degree to which moral control is internalized. You know, we like to think that if we're good people, it's because we control ourselves. It's not right, really. It's more subtle than that. There's some of that that's correct in that people do have a conscience and sometimes abide by it, but the reason that the typical good person is good is because they're socialized enough to be socially acceptable or even desirable.

What that means is that a ring of people surround them constantly, and that means they can outsource the problem of the regulation of their behavior to the crowd. So, for example, while you and I are talking, it's but it's an external, instead of the super ego, because while I'm talking to you, for example, I'm watching your eyes, I'm watching your face.

You're signaling to me constantly whether you're still engaged in the conversation, whether you're thinking of something else, if we're turn-taking properly, and if I’m attentive and you’re there, then I can use those moment-to-moment operations or observations to regulate my behavior. That's not internal; it's a dynamic that's playing out between us.

And much of the manner with—when you socialize them—is between the ages of two and four because at two they’re still basically narrowly egocentric, impulsive-based. They want whatever it is they want to be granted now, regardless of consequences for themselves and the future or other people.

That's classy!

Yeah, Maria Montessori! That goes from individual, you know, basically acquisitive play to then parallel play —we'll be doing our things beside each other—to collaborative play and then potentially to competitive play. Right? Like once we've got collaborative play, we’ll be doing our things beside each other—to then increase the stakes and make this more fun?

Right, exactly!

Yeah, right, exactly! So actually, that competitive play is actually an intensification of cooperative play, right? Because you set out the rules.

Are you suggesting that just baked into—take your pick, it could be any— primate, whatever, but some level of our existence there is an implicit desire for fairness, for reciprocity, and for some moral director?

It is the moral direction. I mean, you see that in conversation.

I mean, because what happens in a conversation is that each person makes an offering, and the goal of the offering is mutual expansion of apprehension, but also the desire to continue the interaction. Well, that's very tightly bounded.

So I can give you an example of that. So we ran a seminar. This works with any seminar: you only need—in a seminar, you only need one person who's playing a power game to bring the seminar to a halt.

Yes, right!

So, you have a punch bowl man—it only takes one.

Absolutely!

So the rule for a seminar should be, "Well, here's the question we're trying to address," and then you offer your suggestions as to a solution, and I listen, and I offer mine, and we allow those ideas to wrestle with one another, hopefully aiming at something like a synthesis.

And you're not doing that because you want to appear smart or dominant; you're not doing it for some reason other than the direction of the conversation. And everybody in the circle is playing that same game. And then you get an incredibly productive conversation; that's a logos-centered conversation.

So, you know, that emergent logos lies in truth—in truth, in word. Well, it's redemptive truth. You know, Christ said in the gospels that wherever two or more were gathered in his name, he was there.

Well, that's what that means.

And all the valid members of the psychotherapeutic community understand this, even from a scientific perspective, because one of the things Carl Rogers probably did more to detail this than any other great therapist—his notion and Freud's as well—was that untrammeled communication oriented towards something like improvement was redemptive and it was healing, and that's exactly right.

Charles Limb did work at Hopkins on MRIs with jazz musicians. Keith Sawyer has done stuff at Chapel Hill on group flow, right? The emergence of something that can only be presented as we gather.

Right, right!

Well, you see musicians doing that all the time, for sure! Jazz! Steph Curry basketball! You know, comebacks! You know, Patriots in the Super Bowl. There are those emergent moments where there is a co-creative emergence that supersedes anything that anybody else singularly brought to the table.

Right, right!

And your point is that you can mark that electrophysiologically.

Well, that it has neurophysiological correlates for sure—chicken and egg TBD.

Yeah, sure!

And the interesting way—and this was one of Keith Sawyer's students—but they then went to prove that, you know, let's say the autotelic nature, the self-driving motivational nature of these things—you get like, you know, 100 points if you do it by yourself, but you get 300 points if you do it in conjunction with others.

It is three times more rewarding to co-create that experience than it is to have it in isolation.

In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace. But here's the thing: prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind—it's a skill that needs to be developed. That's where Hallow comes in. As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series called "How to Pray."

Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launchpad for profound conversations with God. How to properly enter into imaginative prayer, and how to incorporate prayers reaching far back in church history. This isn't your average guided meditation; it's a comprehensive two-part journey into the heart of prayer, led by some of the most respected spiritual leaders of our time.

From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi—known for his role as Jesus in the hit series "The Chosen." You'll discover prayer techniques that have stood the test of time while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's challenges with renewed strength.

Ready to revolutionize your prayer life? You can check out the new series, as well as an extensive catalog of prayers, when you download the Hallow app. Just go to hallow.com/jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month trial. That's hallow.com/jordan. Elevate your prayer life today!

Yeah, well that's probably—that's probably an indication of something like the relative payoff. Because it's definitely the case this is partly too why the injunction to love your enemies is necessary. Because the biggest payoff you're going to get from a genuine discussion is one that you have with someone whose views are maximally different than your own but who is playing an honest communicative game.

Yes!

And so why is that an enemy? Well, you tend to presume that anybody who varies in their fundamental presumptions from you is on the other side of the fence, but they're also the people that have the most to offer if they're playing a straight game.

Yes, and so can we try that?

Well, hopefully we're doing that at least as much as we can.

Yeah, well I was thinking about that, you know, because there was a fair amount of travel. I came down out of the mountains yesterday; you know, it's a bit of a pilgrimage to come up here. I was thinking of every person who's ever asked me about your work, my thoughts on it, me tracking it, us getting to see you when I was with Adrian Grer, and when you came to Austin.

And getting to—that was a crazy experience, by the way. Even just walking to that stadium at UT, the throngs of people convening on that stadium. The way everyone was holding themselves, the way they were walking down the streets—stopping together.

There were so many couples; all the young men were wearing blazers, the women were wearing floral long skirts. I said, "What the hell is going on here? Is this double-scheduled with prom? Is graduation happening?"

It literally had that vibe!

And the last time I had been to that stadium and seen anything like that—the just that amount of kind of magnetic draw—was when John Mayer and the Grateful Dead played there.

So I was like, "What on Earth is about to happen?" And happened! And we went into the stadium, and you launched into a very professorial opening.

It was n; it was Jung; it was all these things. And I could sense the kind of Texas crowd not necessarily having their footing, and it wasn't until you shifted into the Cain and Abel story that you could feel a palpable drop.

And all of these wonderful Texans who had been gathered were like, "Ah, it's Sunday school! We're going to get a Bible story!"

Right, right!

And so speaking of, you know, the infinite—which if anybody's curious, that's James C's concept of finite and infinite games—finite games are win-lose, right? And have a victor and a victim, and infinite games are win-win, right? Friendship is an infinite game, for sure.

And, you know, I'm sure you've seen the study on like dark triad folks on both sides of the political spectrum, right? That, that fundamentally anybody in the moderate middle, the sort of 90% middle, don't test, don't score for dark triad narcissism, Machiavellianism, sociopathy, or authoritarianism.

But sadism...

I've known they had to add that one because it was lurking at the edges. Totally! Just the idea you get off on doing those shitty things.

But that 5% on the far left and 5% on the far right do score off the charts for those, yeah.

And then you, you map that with Triston Harris's research, right? The Center for Humane Technology, those guys—that 90% of all social media is governed by 10% of posters.

So you break those—that 10% in half and you've got the triad folks, the 5% and 5% posting 90% of what we see.

And believe each other are about. Absolutely!

Well, that's a much better way of construing the political landscape than the political manner of construal.

Like, the large part of the pathology of the culture war is actually the parasitic predators on the edges. What would you say? Massive amplification?

Algorithmic amplification, yeah.

And the protection of anonymity—right? That's really bad. And so you've got Silicon Valley business interests amplifying it algorithmically to sell ads.

Yeah, but you've also got bad international actors.

Oh yeah, you've got Iran, Russia, and China all looking to crack the edifice of this liberal democratic experiment.

Yeah, enabling the psychopaths; that's a good way to put it.

Right!

So the risk I'd like to take and ask you, which is my experience, is that you are taking a stand for the most deeply Western traditional expression of the infinite game, and you’re saying, "Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, there's something profoundly valuable here in both the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition, theological tradition, as well as the emergence of Western liberalism."

Right?

Because that—that's your whole hyperallegoric reaction to Stalinism, right? You're saying there's something precious here, and it is under threat from all sides.

It's under threat from precisely the odds you describe most. And you're taking a stand for the infinite game, but you are becoming a weaponized battering ram for Christian ethno-nationalists playing the finite game.

So can you—never mind the woke social justice folks; they can’t organize their way out of a goddamn paper bag. In this—in this moment they are not actually a threat.

They're a pain in the ass!

Yeah!

But they're not a threat. Militant Christian ethnonationalism, being inflamed by Putin, right? KGB’s continuation of the Stalin lineage, being undermined and eroded by Christianity.

Like if you could police your own side of the culture war more and call those folks up to truly Christian values—not weaponized ethnonationalism—then you would unlock something in the culture war debates that we're not getting when you get positioned against the audience capture and echo chambers as just beating on.

Well, people have tried to throw me in with that lot fairly regularly over the last ten years, and it hasn't been very successful. I mean, I would say a lot of the activity on that front right now has been coming out of what you would say the Nick Fuentes crowd online and all the people who are associated with that, you know—absolutely pathological movement.

Tenant media, right? They've just gone…

Yeah, yeah.

Well, so what does that imply?

Well, it implies that the phalanx danger is always with us, which is that the highest possible virtues can be weaponized by the worst possible actors. In fact, that's exactly what they'll do.

I mean, one of the things you see, for example, with the dark tetrad types is that one of their employees is victimization. So yes, either I'm special or I'm vulnerable or I'm righteous, or then I'm vindictive. Like it's a cascade.

Yeah, yeah.

But they're extremely good at, they're extremely good by temperament at playing the victim card. Yes.

And so that's an extraordinarily effective ploy when you're dealing with conscientious people because you can make them feel guilty or agreeable people because you can make them feel sorry for you.

And so that kind of covers the political spectrum. You capture the psychopaths, capture the liberals with agreeableness, and they capture the conservatives with conscientiousness because they tell the conservatives, "Well, you know you're more racist. You're more prejudiced. You're more sexist than you should be," and they try to guilt them into that.

Yeah, yeah.

They use guilt, yeah.

They use empathy for the left and they use guilt for the right. And the agreeableness is on the part of the audience; like I play the victim so I'm agreeable so I'm going to try and help you. Absolutely!

And it's particularly easy to capture women in that matter because they tend to be more agreeable, so they're much more susceptible to victimization.

Ploys and it's not surprising.

I mean, because women are in a very complicated situation because when they have infants at least for the first eight months of the infant's life, they have to be 100% empathic. So you have to be able to do that.

Now the problem with having an orientation to the world that's fundamentally predicated on empathy is that the psychopaths can game it. Yes.

I mean that is the fundamental problem is also why we know for example that young women are much more susceptible to the blandishments of the dark tetrad types because they can be manipulated in consequence of their empathy, and they don't have the worldly experience to tell the difference between people who are in trouble and people who use claims that they're in trouble to do nothing but manipulate.

And this is a massive—like the problem that you laid out of the dark tetrad actors, let's say—this is a civilization-challenging problem—it’s not some side effect of the culture wars. It's like whenever society is in a situation where the dark tetrad types get the upper hand, everything is gone; they demolish everything.

Arthur Brooks wrote about this, I think, in the Atlantic a few months ago, but it was sort of one in fourteen people are testing that way.

So if you got just a group of thirty, you've got two in that crowd that are likely…

It's a continuum, right?

And given the social norms these days, let's just say sort of educated, you know, knowledge worker economy types, right? We're all trained in nonviolent communication.

Everybody's voice has an opinion. There's no bad ideas, right?

There's a very flat egalitarian sort of social space.

We—there—that's right, there's no intervening hierarchies! So actually, call that early and stop it when some—when a dark tetrad person is playing those gambits!

Yeah, you seem like the authoritarian!

Yeah, right!

But you kind of be like, "No, no, not my first rodeo. I've seen this before," and we're nipping this in the bud because, like you said, it only takes one person at the seminar to queer the deal.

So I watched Mark Zuckerberg at Congress, and you know he's a kind of a convenient whipping boy, let's say, for the conservatives. And, you know, no doubt he's made his errors, and some of those he's publicly admitted, although I have some sympathy for him because my suspicions are that the typical person, including the typical corporate magnate, when they're approached by high order governmental agencies and asked to comply because of reasons of national security especially five years ago, would have listened.

You might think you're the one person who would have withstood that pressure, but it's like I don't think so! And asking Mark to do that, I think that's too much to ask for someone especially under those circumstances because he didn't understand the full extent of his social media enterprise or how to regulate it, and he certainly didn't understand that he was being asked to do corrupt things by a government that was hell-bent on a certain form of censorship.

Having said all that, it’s not like we know how to deal with this. We have these new communication technologies, Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and X, and the narcissistic psychopaths have free reign, and that’s embedded by their anonymity and by the algorithmic expansion of their troublemaking. But it’s not like anyone knows what to do about that.

Right, because when you tilt towards control, well then you have the problem of the suppression of free speech, which is a real problem. Like that’s not trivial, and if you just let there be a free-for-all, well then the bad actors have a disproportionate effect, and we don't know what to do about that.

Like one of the things I’ve thought through for what it's worth is that I think it’s a big mistake to put the anonymous people with the real people.

You mean like trolls or just faceless accounts?

Like Facebook. I think that social media networks should separate the faceless accounts from the verified identities.

Well, it blows out millions of years of primate reciprocity in tribal dynamics.

Yeah, and that actually turns out to be quite a problem. Right? If I can't hold you accountable in any manner for what you do, all that does is—precisely what it does—say it to my face.

Right!

Well, people are much more civilized face to face for exactly those reasons—all those mechanisms kick in.

I mean, we know perfectly well—this is actually valid social psychological research—if you anonymize ordinary people, the worst sides of their character come forward.

And like a lot of what regulates us is that implicit requirement, signified even by facial expressions in face-to-face contact, that’s indicative of the desire for reciprocity.

There have been studies on that with dating apps, right? That people are ghosting and doing all sorts of atrocious behaviors to each other on Tinder because it's a random dating pool of data points.

In the past, I went on a date with you because you were my best friend's sister or we met at church or there was something in our neighborhood or region, and relational networks. And I didn't want to pee in that pool.

Yes, precisely!

Versus just swipe for another one.

It’s also the case, see, we also overestimate the degree to which moral control is internalized. You know, we like to think that if we’re good people, it’s because we control ourselves. It’s not right, really.

It’s more subtle than that. There’s some of that that’s correct in that people do have a conscience and sometimes abide by it, but the reason that the typical good person is good is that they’re socialized enough to be socially acceptable or even desirable.

What that means is that a ring of people surrounds them constantly, and that means they can outsource the problem of the regulation of their behavior to the crowd.

So for example, while you and I are talking, it’s but it’s an external, instead of the super ego, because while I’m talking to you for example, I’m watching your eyes, I'm watching your face.

You’re signaling to me constantly whether you’re still engaged in the conversation, whether you’re thinking of something else, if we’re turn-taking properly, and if I’m attentive and you’re there, then I can use those moment-to-moment operations or observations to regulate my behavior.

That's not internal; it’s a dynamic that’s playing out between us.

And much of the manner with— when you socialize them—between the ages of two and four, because at two, they’re still basically narrowly egocentric, impulsive-based. They want whatever it is they want to be granted now, regardless of consequences for themselves and the future of other people.

That's classy!

Yeah, Maria Montessori! That goes from individual, you know, basically, acquisitive play to then parallel play— we'll be doing our things beside each other—to collaborative play and then potentially to competitive play. Right? Like once we've got collaborative play, we’ll be doing our things beside each other—to then increase the stakes and make this more fun?

Right, exactly!

Yeah, right, exactly! So actually, that competitive play is actually an intensification of cooperative play, right? Because you set out the rules.

Are you suggesting that just baked into—take your pick, it could be any— primate, whatever, but some level of our existence there is an implicit desire for fairness, for reciprocity, and for some moral director?

It is the moral direction. I mean, you see that in conversation.

I mean, because what happens in a conversation is that each person makes an offering, and the goal of the offering is mutual expansion of apprehension, but also the desire to continue the interaction.

Well, that's very tightly bounded.

So I can give you an example of that. So we ran a seminar. This works with any seminar: you only need—in a seminar, you only need one person who's playing a power game to bring the seminar to a halt.

Yes, right!

So, you have a punch bowl man—it only takes one.

Absolutely!

So the rule for a seminar should be, "Well, here's the question we're trying to address," and then you offer your suggestions as to a solution, and I listen, and I offer mine, and we allow those ideas to wrestle with one another, hopefully aiming at something like a synthesis.

And you're not doing that because you want to appear smart or dominant; you're not doing it for some reason other than the direction of the conversation.

And everybody in the circle is playing that same game. And then you get an incredibly productive conversation; that's a logos-centered conversation.

So, you know, that emergent logos lies in truth—in truth, in word.

Well, it's redemptive truth. You know, Christ said in the gospels that wherever two or more were gathered in his name, he was there.

Well, that's what that means.

And all the valid members of the psychotherapeutic community understand this, even from a scientific perspective, because one of the things Carl Rogers probably did more to detail this than any other great therapist—his notion and Freud's as well—was that untrammeled communication oriented towards something like improvement was redemptive and healing, and that's exactly right.

Charles Limb did work at Hopkins on MRIs with jazz musicians. Keith Sawyer has done stuff at Chapel Hill on group flow, right? The emergence of something that can only be presented as we gather.

Right, right!

Well, you see musicians doing that all the time, for sure! Jazz! Steph Curry basketball! You know, comebacks! You know, Patriots in the Super Bowl. There are those emergent moments where there is a co-creative emergence that supersedes anything that anybody else singularly brought to the table.

Right, right!

And your point is that you can mark that electrophysiologically.

Well, that it has neurophysiological correlates for sure—chicken and egg TBD.

Yeah, sure!

And the interesting way—and this was one of Keith Sawyer's students—but they then went to prove that, you know, let's say the autotelic nature, the self-driving motivational nature of these things—you get like, you know, 100 points if you do it by yourself, but you get 300 points if you do it in conjunction with others.

It is three times more rewarding to co-create that experience than it is to have it in isolation.

In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace. But here's the thing: prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind—it's a skill that needs to be developed. That's where Hallow comes in. As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series called "How to Pray."

Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launchpad for profound conversations with God. How to properly enter into imaginative prayer, and how to incorporate prayers reaching far back in church history. This isn't your average guided meditation; it's a comprehensive two-part journey into the heart of prayer, led by some of the most respected spiritual leaders of our time.

From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi—known for his role as Jesus in the hit series "The Chosen." You'll discover prayer techniques that have stood the test of time while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's challenges with renewed strength.

Ready to revolutionize your prayer life? You can check out the new series, as well as an extensive catalog of prayers, when you download the Hallow app. Just go to hallow.com/jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month trial. That's hallow.com/jordan. Elevate your prayer life today!

Yeah, well that's probably—that's probably an indication of something like the relative payoff. Because it's definitely the case this is partly too why the injunction to love your enemies is necessary. Because the biggest payoff you're going to get from a genuine discussion is one that you have with someone whose views are maximally different than your own but who is playing an honest communicative game.

Yes!

And so why is that an enemy? Well, you tend to presume that anybody who varies in their fundamental presumptions from you is on the other side of the fence, but they're also the people that have the most to offer if they're playing a straight game.

Yes, and so can we try that?

Well, hopefully we're doing that at least as much as we can.

Yeah, well I was thinking about that, you know, because there was a fair amount of travel. I came down out of the mountains yesterday; you know, it's a bit of a pilgrimage to come up here. I was thinking of every person who's ever asked me about your work, my thoughts on it, me tracking it, us getting to see you when I was with Adrian Grer, and when you came to Austin.

And getting to—that was a crazy experience, by the way. Even just walking to that stadium at UT, the throngs of people convening on that stadium. The way everyone was holding themselves, the way they were walking down the streets—stopping together.

There were so many couples; all the young men were wearing blazers, the women were wearing floral long skirts. I said, "What the hell is going on here? Is this double-scheduled with prom? Is graduation happening?"

It literally had that vibe!

And the last time I had been to that stadium and seen anything like that—the just that amount of kind of magnetic draw—was when John Mayer and the Grateful Dead played there.

So I was like, "What on Earth is about to happen?" And happened! And we went into the stadium, and you launched into a very professorial opening.

It was n; it was Jung; it was all these things. And I could sense the kind of Texas crowd not necessarily having their footing, and it wasn't until you shifted into the Cain and Abel story that you could feel a palpable drop.

And all of these wonderful Texans who had been gathered were like, "Ah, it's Sunday school! We're going to get a Bible story!"

Right, right!

And so speaking of, you know, the infinite—which if anybody's curious, that's James C's concept of finite and infinite games—finite games are win-lose, right? And have a victor and a victim, and infinite games are win-win, right? Friendship is an infinite game, for sure.

And, you know, I'm sure you've seen the study on like dark triad folks on both sides of the political spectrum, right? That, that fundamentally anybody in the moderate middle, the sort of 90% middle, don't test, don't score for dark triad narcissism, Machiavellianism, sociopathy, or authoritarianism.

But sadism...

I've known they had to add that one because it was lurking at the edges. Totally! Just the idea you get off on doing those shitty things.

But that 5% on the far left and 5% on the far right do score off the charts for those, yeah.

And then you, you map that with Triston Harris's research, right? The Center for Humane Technology, those guys—that 90% of all social media is governed by 10% of posters.

So you break those—that 10% in half and you've got the triad folks, the 5% and 5% posting 90% of what we see.

And believe each other are about. Absolutely!

Well, that's a much better way of construing the political landscape than the political manner of construal.

Like, the large part of the pathology of the culture war is actually the parasitic predators on the edges. What would you say? Massive amplification?

Algorithmic amplification, yeah.

And the protection of anonymity—right? That's really bad. And so you've got Silicon Valley business interests amplifying it algorithmically to sell ads.

Yeah, but you've also got bad international actors.

Oh yeah, you've got Iran, Russia, and China all looking to crack the edifice of this liberal democratic experiment.

Yeah, enabling the psychopaths; that's a good way to put it.

Right!

So the risk I'd like to take and ask you, which is my experience, is that you are taking a stand for the most deeply Western traditional expression of the infinite game, and you’re saying, "Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, there's something profoundly valuable here in both the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition, theological tradition, as well as the emergence of Western liberalism."

Right?

Because that—that's your whole hyperallegoric reaction to Stalinism, right? You're saying there's something precious here, and it is under threat from all sides.

It's under threat from precisely the odds you describe most. And you're taking a stand for the infinite game, but you are becoming a weaponized battering ram for Christian ethno-nationalists playing the finite game.

So can you—never mind the woke social justice folks; they can’t organize their way out of a goddamn paper bag. In this—in this moment they are not actually a threat.

They're a pain in the ass!

Yeah!

But they're not a threat. Militant Christian ethnonationalism, being inflamed by Putin, right? KGB’s continuation of the Stalin lineage, being undermined and eroded by Christianity.

Like if you could police your own side of the culture war more and call those folks up to truly Christian values—not weaponized ethnonationalism—then you would unlock something in the culture war debates that we're not getting when you get positioned against the audience capture and echo chambers as just beating on.

Well, people have tried to throw me in with that lot fairly regularly over the last ten years, and it hasn't been very successful.

I mean, I would say a lot of the activity on that front right now has been coming out of what you would say the Nick Fuentes crowd online and all the people who are associated with that, you know—absolutely pathological movement.

Tenant media, right?

They've just gone...

Yeah, yeah.

Well, so what does that imply?

Well, it implies that the phalanx danger is always with us, which is that the highest possible virtues can be weaponized by the worst possible actors. In fact, that's exactly what they'll do.

I mean, one of the things you see, for example, with the dark tetrad types is that their one of their employees is victimization. So yes, either I'm special or I'm vulnerable or I'm righteous or then I'm vindictive.

Like it's a cascade.

Yeah, yeah.

But they're extremely good at, they're extremely good by temperament at playing the victim card.

Yes.

And so that's an extraordinarily effective ploy when you're dealing with conscientious people because you can make them feel guilty or agreeable people because you can make them feel sorry for you and so that kind of covers the political spectrum you capture the psychopaths capture the Liberals with agreeableness and they capture the conservatives with conscientiousness because they tell the conservatives well you know you're more racist you're more prejudiced you're more sexist than you should be and they try to guilt them into that

Yeah yeah they use guilt yeah they use empathy for the left and they use guilt for the right oh and the agreeableness is on the part of the audience like I play the victim so I'm agreeable so I'm going to try and help you absolutely absolutely

And it's particularly easy to capture women in that manner because they tend to be more agreeable so they’re much more susceptible to victimization PLO and it’s not surprising I mean because women are in a very complicated situation because when they have infants at least for the first eight months of the infant's life they have to be 100% empathic and so you have to be able to do that

Now the problem with having an orientation to the world that's fundamentally predicated on empathy is that the Psychopaths can game it yes and I mean that is the fundamental problem it's also why we know for example that young women are much more susceptible to the blandishments of the dark tetrad types because they can be manipulated in consequence of their empathy and they don't have the worldly experience to tell the difference between people who are in trouble and people who use claims that they're in trouble to do nothing but manipulate

And this is a massive like the problem that you laid out of the dark tetrad actors let's say this is a civilization challenging problem it's not some side effect of the culture wars it's like whenever society is in a situation where the dark tetrad types get the upper hand everything is gone they demolish everything

Arthur Brooks wrote about this to think in the Atlantic a few a few months ago but it was sort of one in 14 one in 14 people are testing that way so if you got just a group of 30 you've got two in that crowd that are likely it’s a Continuum right and given the social norms the days let's just say sort of educated you know knowledge worker economy types right we're all trained in nonviolent communication everybody's voice has an opinion there's no bad ideas right there's a very flat egalitarian sort of social space we we there that's right there's no intervening hierarchies so actually call that early and stop it when some when when a dark tetrad person is playing those Gambit yeah you seem like the authoritarian yeah right but he kind of be like no no not my first rodeo I've seen this before and we're nipping this in the bud because like you said it only takes one person at the seminar to quer the deal so I watched Mark Zuckerberg at Congress and you know he's a kind of a convenient Whipping Boy let's say for the conservatives and you know no doubt he's made his errors and some of those he's publicly admitted although I have some sympathy for him because my suspicions are that the typical person including the typical corporate magnet when they're approached by high order governmental agencies and asked to comply because of reasons of National Security especially 5 years ago would have listened

You might think you're the one person who would have withstood that pressure but it's like I don't think so and asking Mark to do that I think that's too much to ask for someone especially under those circumstances because he didn't understand the full extent of his social media Enterprise or how to regulate it and he certainly didn't understand that he was being asked to do corrupt things by a government that was hellbent on a certain form of censorship having said all that it's not like we know how to deal with this we have these new communication Technologies Facebook and Instagram and Tik Tok and x and the narcissistic Psychopaths have free reign and that’s embedded by their anonymity and by the algorithmic expansion of their of their troublemaking but it's not like anyone knows what to do about that right because when you tilt towards control well then you have the problem of the suppression of free speech which is a real problem like that's not trivial and if you just let there be a free for all well then the Bad actors have a disproportionate effect and we don't know what to do about that

Like one of the things I've thought through for what it's worth is that I think it's a big mistake to put the anonymous people with the real people you mean like trolls or just faceless accounts like B faceless I think that social media networks should separate the faceless accounts from the verified identities well it blows out you blows out millions of years of primate reciprocity in tribal dynamics

And that actually turns out to be quite a problem right if I can't hold you accountable in any manner for what you do all that does is precisely what it does say it to my face right right well people are much more civilized face to face for exactly those reasons all those mechanisms kick in I mean we know we know perfectly well this is actually valid social psychological research if you anonymize Ordinary People the worst sides of their character come forward and like a lot of what regulates us is that implicit require M signified even by facial expression in face to face contact that's indicative of the desire for reciprocity

There have been studies on that with dating apps right that people are ghosting and doing all sorts of atrocious behaviors to each other on Tinder because it's a random dating pool of data points in the past I went on a date with you because you were my best friend sister or we met at church or there was something in our neighborhood or region and relational networks and I didn't want to pee in that pool

Yes precisely well versus just Swip for another one it's also the case see we also overestimate the degree to which moral control is internalized you know we like to think that she's back to n we like to think that if we're good people it's because we control ourselves it's like that's not right really it it it's more subtle than that there's some of that that's correct in that people do have a conscience and sometimes abide by it but the reason that the typical good person is good is because they're socialized enough to be so socially acceptable or even desirable and what that means is that a ring of people surround them constantly and that means they can Outsource the problem of the regulation of their behavior to the crowd so for example while you and I are talking it's but it's an exter instead of the super ego because while I'm talking to you for example I'm watching your eyes I'm watching your face you're signaling to me constantly whether you're still engaged in the conversation whether you're thinking of something else if we're were turn-taking properly and if I'm attentive and you're there then I can use those momentto moment operations or observations to regulate my behavior that's not internal right it's a dynamic that's playing out between us and much of the manner with with mirror neurons and micro muscles of the face and affect and and B things all all of that right it's deeply mirrored right and so the upshot of that is that I don't have to undertake a tremendous amount of the complex problem of regulating my own behavior as long as people can stand having me around because they'll do that for me and all I have to do is pay attention and so we do Outsource a lot of moral regulation to the community and that's fine but what it does imply is that so you're suggesting that sort of voty and Scaffolding of our of our good behavior is is each other and and well it's also part of the demand of course it's partly the demand for the continuation let's say of the infinite game you know I mean if I have a friend and I'm a kid and I'm playing one-on-one basketball with him you could say that each basketball bout is a finite game in that I could win it or lose it but the Friendship at least in part could be a sequence of those games and the rule for a sequence is something more like well try being a good sport and fun to play with which is a well that's way different than win right it includes winning because if I if we're going to play I would like you to try to win because part of being a good sport is playing full out ex exactly exactly in a fair game in a fair game and the fair part of it is a nod to that higher order morality that's part of say an infinite game rather than a finite game but but all of that's embedded and embodied in all of our social communicative practices all the time the psychopathic types and the narcissistic types they just use that to manipulate right not using it to play a finite game and or to play an infinite game and this is interesting too they use which bit well they whatever information they derive from the social interaction they just put to their own self-serving purposes right they're just using it to facilitate manipulation and you might ask this is a perfectly good question well why not do that this is why people like Andrew Tate are attractive let's say to the incel crowd it’s like if I can manipulate you and I can get what I want then why the hell shouldn't I do it?

That's just Will To Power 101.

Yeah precisely! Why shouldn't I take advantage of that? Why shouldn't I lie and cheat and steal if that means I get my way? Well, part of the answer to that is, well, that might work momentarily, but you're also playing an infinite game with yourself. And we know perfectly well that the typical outcome of the psychopathic pattern of interaction is negative for the psychopath himself. They're incapable of learning from experience for example, so they repeat their errors. They don’t modify their own behavior and so if you're a psychopath and a narcissist, and Machiavellian, you can optimize certain forms of short-term return, but it's a really bad medium to long-term game.

So even if you don’t include other people in the purview of your moral sentiment, if you're a psychopath, you dispense with your future self. That's why so many of them end up in prison. Well okay so you probably know these stats stone-cold but right so so large numbers of psychopaths end up in prison than also what one in three fortune 500 CEOs are I doubt that but doubt it yeah No I don't believe that I don't believe that I think that's overblown and I think there's a lot of implicit leftist anti-capitalist idiocy in those studies that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of Machiavellian people some of whom occupy positions of power but the problem is it's not a to become you know this you know this to become successful in any enterprise that iterates you can't screw people over not very well because they remember and people have evolved modules for remembering cheaters like we're very good at remembering cheaters and so most people who are engaged in reciprocal complex reciprocal social interactions can't be psychopathic because they get caught.

So now can I can I ask you a question on the capitalist thing that you just men yeah because I've heard you say a couple of things in I don't know however long the last couple of years one was I think it might have been in your conversation with Elon talking about any sort of neo-Malthusian we've got too many people question right and that being sort of what you were describing as sociopathic, and then something along the lines of capitalism and individual achievement attainment, right, being a noble and virtuous good, right? And therefore, you know, high net worth CEOs, billionaires, etc., should be valorized, you know, not kneecapped, right? Which in reading of you I took to be sort of against leftist poppy gets whacked socialism, right?

You're saying, hey, you have to you have to preserve space and valorize humanity; we can't hate ourselves, right? That on the population question, and if there is somebody who is ingenious, creative, you know, bringing value to society, they shouldn't be kneecapped or, you know, regressive taxation put them in positions where you can exploit them.

No, I'm serious! This is the reason for meritocracy in places like Harvard. Because the reverse view is, well, um, everybody deserves a chance,