Quillette's Founder: Starting The Most Controversial Magazine In The World | Claire Lehmann | EP 243

You know, I have a lot of problems with establishment institutions, but you can't just attack them. What are we going to have left when we've got no institutions? Well, we could have rubble, and everyone could be equal in the rubble. That's happened many, many, many times, and that's the risk.

[Music]

Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me as a guest today Claire Lehmann, the founding editor of Quillette, and someone I've known for a while now, as much as you could know someone when you're in Canada and they're in Australia. Quillette is a non-partisan online publication that publishes long-form commentary and analysis, and specializes in ideas other outlets often appear too timid to touch. Quillette's first anthology was "Panics and Persecutions: 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age," which featured essays from those who have been targeted by mobs in academic and artistic communities. Claire is also a regular contributor to the Australian, the most widely read newspaper in Australia.

Hello, good to see you! It's been a long time since we've talked.

Hi, John! Thanks so much for having me, and it's good to see you. So let's start by talking about Quillette. Let's go back to the beginning. You were a graduate student in psychology, if I remember correctly, pursuing a master's degree at that point, and then you took a sideways move. Why?

Well, often people assumed that I left university or left academia because it was for a political reason, but that wasn't the case. The situation was simply that I had a baby at the time, and I couldn't juggle my requirement to do hundreds of hours of unpaid clinical work to complete my master's with also having a baby at home, so I just...

So you did something easy, like start the most controversial new magazine in the world, perhaps, or in the English-speaking world.

Well, it was meant to be a project to keep me occupied in between quitting my master's and finding a professional job. It wasn't ever meant to be my career, but it took off almost immediately after I launched the website and attracted quite an engaged readership. Over time, I naturally started to focus more on Quillette and less on other things, and now it's my full-time job, and it occupies my full-time mental capacity. It's a very rewarding and fulfilling occupation, that's for sure.

Well, you picked a great name, so that's a good start.

Yeah, and you've had great writers. I mean, who have you particularly enjoyed publishing, and what do you think has been most worthwhile, as far as you're concerned?

Well, the best part of the job is finding young writers. And by young, I mean very young, in their early 20s or even late teens in some cases, who are brilliant and who wouldn't be picked up by other publications because, you know, they don't know the right people in media, they're too young, they don't have the connections. I think one thing I've been really proud of with Quillette is our promotion of young talent. We have writers that come from rural areas to urban centers; we publish older people, younger people—we have a real true diversity in our writers, and that's not by design. We're not plucking people out because they fit our diversity metrics; it's just that when you select people on talent and merit, you naturally get a diverse range of voices.

Yeah, there's a truly egalitarian statement, right?

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, if you actually believe that merit is distributed throughout all human populations, let's say ethnicities, races, gender, sex, all of that, then why not just choose on merit? And what I find is that if you select on merit, you will find the diamond in the rough. You will find the writers who might not be the best self-promoters, the best at attending the right parties and sucking up to the right editors, but if you assess people's writing purely on the quality and originality of their ideas...

[Music]

You naturally get a broad range of voices, and that's something I'm really proud of. Some of our younger writers include people like Coleman Hughes. Well, he's not with us anymore, but we were the first to publish him. Rav Aviura, Rob Henderson—he's not as young as Coleman, but he's an amazingly original thinker and comes from a unique background. Another writer who I'm proud of publishing is an older writer who is an Amazon warehouse worker. He writes from a sort of blue-collar working-class perspective. He's very well-read and has a unique but important voice. You know, he can contextualize issues around class from real lived experience, which is kind of rare in journalism because journalism has become such an elite occupation, particularly in the United States.

What's his name?

Kevin Mims.

Kevin Mims. Yeah. Well, I've often found that the most interesting people to speak with are very smart people who haven't been educated, haven't pursued a complete course of higher education, and they do the reading on their own, and they think in some ways on their own. So when you encounter them, they have ideas that you don't hear from anyone else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're not affected by the manners. So, so much of education is just about internalizing the manners of the upper middle class, and when you have the ideas and the insights but they don't come with the baggage of all that upper-class etiquette, it can be quite interesting, and they can often be quite humorous as well.

Yeah, of course. So do you regard Quillette as a conservative or a right-wing publication? And, or was that your goal to begin with?

No, we're not conservative, and we're not right-wing. I'm not particularly... well, I would consider myself a centrist. I'm conservative on some issues, for sure, but I don't come in a conservative package, and I'm quite high in openness to experience, so my temperament is quite liberal.

And how about conscientiousness?

It could be higher.

Yeah, well, your room is clean, so that's part of that.

So yeah, that was a last-minute effort to just push things out.

I see, I see. Yeah, no, I'm not orderly at all. I'm industrious, but my orderliness is actually quite low. I never considered myself a conservative until I think the left became a bit hijacked by these social justice ideas.

Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me as well.

Yeah, fundamentally, I never thought I was a conservative.

Yeah, yeah. You know, who knows, right?

Yeah, but I do think there are tremendous insights in conservative philosophy, and you know, as I've grown older and become a parent and that kind of thing, I appreciate the conservative perspective a lot more than I used to when I was younger.

Yeah, well, the conservative emphasis on being very careful of unintended consequences is definitely something that is wise and a necessary counterpart to, well, too much incautious originality, let's say.

Yeah, and I think that conservatives have it right when it comes to family and relationships. You know, there's not a whole lot of experimentation that one can do with family structure without it going haywire.

Yeah, well, it's a difficult thing to manage.

So yeah, no, I just can't see how it's possible to operate as a single parent. Particularly, it's very, very difficult to do that, to work and to raise children. I mean, I know people do it, and some people do it extremely well, but man, it's quite the damn job to manage it. Well, and then you don't have someone around constantly to talk to about your kids, which is also a problem. I mean, maybe you have friends, but that's not quite the same thing.

So that doesn't necessarily say that the nuclear family is the only option, but we are pretty tightly pair-bonded as a species.

So yeah, no, I think it's hard work, but there's a big trade-off. Something that our culture is not very good at talking about is the risk to children that is presented by having unrelated adults in their household, which is something I'm very aware of being a mother. You know, when you've got little children running around and they're creating messes and dramas and they're acting up, you kind of need the male in the house to be biologically related to them to protect them from, you know, potential aggravation. It's just, you know, it seems to me a uniquely dangerous thing to do to your children to bring in men who don't have the instinct to care for them.

But that's a separate issue.

Well, it... yes, yes and no. I mean, one fact that has been pretty persistent in psychological investigation is the fact that a child is at a much higher risk for physical abuse from a stepparent. I hate to say this, but I think it's a hundredfold—it's something like that. That part might be wrong; it's been a while since I looked at it. But the fact that it's a greatly increased risk is not wrong, and that is definitely worth thinking about. I mean, children push your buttons, and that's right.

Yes, and smart, tough children particularly do that. So, well, there has to be some inhibition of that. And that... well, we don't necessarily understand exactly the relationship between the love that inhibits that sort of thing and direct genetic relationship, biological relationship; but it's not zero, that's for sure.

Yeah, so those people you listed as writers for Quillette, they've gone on to have quite the careers: Ravie Vora, Rob Henderson, Coleman Hughes.

Yeah, so it's nice to... yeah, it's exciting to be able to find young people and to put them in positions where they can succeed or to help them along that path. That's one thing I really liked about being a professor with undergrads and graduate students when that worked.

Yeah, that's definitely the most rewarding aspect of the job. And just giving people a platform, particularly when people are going through a difficult time. You know, we've published lots of articles written by people who have been, you know, for want of a better term, canceled at their university or their workplace.

And tortured is a better word, really.

Yeah, yeah. And we had an article about the similarities between cancel culture and torture a few weeks ago on Quillette, so that’s also been very rewarding—just being able to provide a bit of cover for people and a bit of moral support and giving people a voice, potentially when they’re going through a rough time in their lives.

So that comment you made about the most rewarding part of it being the ability to find promising young people and to open doors for them—that's really worth thinking about too. Because people have... it's easy for people to have a stereotypical view of, let's say, the boss in an organization, and there are unreasonable bosses and foolish ones and stupid ones, obviously, for obvious reasons; but I think that benevolent element is extremely overlooked when people are thinking about how organizations are structured. Because the good people I know in organizations think the way you do about what they're doing, that there's almost nothing more fun than finding some young person who's promising and helping them succeed in a variety of ways as people.

And there's a new sitcom—I don't know if you've seen it—it's quite interesting, called Ted Lasso. It's about an American football coach who goes to the UK to coach a soccer team, and it's a very, very positive sitcom and has very positive male and female characters, which is quite rare. But it focuses on that to a tremendous degree, and very effectively.

I think that it's sort of in loco parentis, and it makes sense that that would be a motivation, because, of course, we love our children most of the time, and we would like to facilitate their development. So why wouldn't that be a natural source of reward? It's an analog to that when you're running an organization.

Well, definitely. And you would know this as a clinical psychologist, that we often feel anxious and depressed when we're focusing on ourselves too much, and we're ruminating, and we're thinking about, you know, when we get trapped in our own mind, in our own world. And so focusing on what we can do for others is a really easy way to get out of that trap.

Yeah, well, people, depressed people, use "I" a lot.

Yeah, yeah. It's pronoun use, you know how important that is. So, but yes, that constant use of self-referential pronouns is a sign of depression. And that's an interesting observation. We really don't know how much you have to concentrate on other people to be optimally situated in terms of your emotional regulation, but too much self-focus—that is clearly associated with depression. The causal connection is hard to exactly establish, but certainly people who get depressed do tend to sever or lose a lot of their social connections, and that tends to make their depression spiral.

So yeah, I also, when I was treating people with social anxiety, you know, one of the things that I had them practice doing was paying more attention to other people. And I meant that like physically and psychologically. It's like if you start getting anxious, instead of avoiding and falling into your self-devouring thoughts, pay attention to the faces in particular of the people you're interacting with. Because you'll see with depressed and anxious people, they'll often avoid eye contact. They're trying to shield themselves from what they see as excessive evaluation, right? And they think that evaluation is going to be critical. But if they would just look, then that's generally not true. And depressed and anxious people radically overestimate the degree to which that's true.

And then the other thing that happens is that like—if I'm not looking at you, then I'm going to be awkward in my conversation with you.

Yeah, and that's going to make me anxious, but if I look at your face, well then I can see what you're doing and how you're operating. And then all the automatic mechanisms I have that, if I'm reasonably socially skilled, they just kick in. Some people lack that, but most people don't. And so, as long as they initiate it through attention, then away they go.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And it reminds me of the experience I had growing up. So I worked, before I was doing my psychology master's and before I'd been doing Quillette, I worked for 10 years from the age of 15 to 25 as a waitress. And I think that was actually probably one of the best things that I've done in my life because, I mean, for a range of reasons. I remember being in my late teens and early 20s and just having all of these interactions with people—every night—well, I wouldn't work every night, but you know, every week having hundreds of interactions, small interactions where you have to greet people, seat them, take their order, attend to them during their dinner, that kind of thing, and make sure everything's okay. I mean, they're just tiny small interactions, but any social anxieties immediately become—immediately become immediately extinct, and you learn confidence in just talking to people. Any kind of fear that you might have as a young person who sort of doesn't have high status or hasn't had much experience in the world—that all melts away just from having a service job. And I think that having a service job is one of the best things a young person can do, particularly if they suffer.

Did you enjoy it?

Oh yeah, I loved it! I worked in restaurants for years. I started when I was 14. I worked in restaurants on and off until I was probably 19 or so—for about five years. That was mostly as a short-order cook and so forth. I started as a dishwasher, but it's a tremendously social occupation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I loved it. And in one restaurant in particular, I worked there with friends, and it was a rude shock to me to graduate university and then get an office job after working in a restaurant because it was so boring by comparison.

To me, it just seemed like it wasn't real work working in an office. I worked with this guy named Scotty Kyle, and he was about 34 years old, and he had been an alcoholic, and he had most of his teeth punched out in fights. He was a rough guy, but he'd stopped drinking by the time I was working with him, and he was a great practical joker. And the best... he was always playing jokes on the waitresses, and they liked him; he wasn't mean. He was very, very funny, and so they got along with him really well. And the best joke he ever pulled, I thought, was we had a cooler that you could walk into, and in the cooler, there was a white bucket that we kept salad in, in ice water, so that we could just scoop it out and serve a fresh salad pretty straightforwardly. The waitresses would go back and do that; it was their job to serve the salads and to get them out of the cooler.

So Scotty stuffed himself into the cooler, which was only about this wide, and he put his hands in the ice water, and then the lights were off back there too. So when the waitress came back into the room where the cooler wasn't open, she put her scoop in to get the salad, and he grabbed her hands with both his hands, which were ice cold.

Well, I was about three rooms away, but you could definitely hear her scream, and I think you could hear it through the whole restaurant. It was extraordinarily funny.

And so, that's one of the things I really liked about working-class jobs, actually, is that they had a human constant.

Yeah, the constant humor that was happening.

Absolutely.

So back to Quillette. So why did Quillette succeed so well, do you think? What did you do right? I mean, timing is something right, but still you have to be in the right place. You were in the right place at the right time. So what happened, do you think?

Well, I'm pretty good at spotting talent, and so I spotted a couple of writers. I was on Twitter, and I saw people writing for their own blogs. One of them was Jamie Palmer, who's now sort of second in charge. He's a senior editor in London. He was writing for his own book, and I remember reading his prose and just thinking, “Why isn't this guy working for the Sunday Times?!” Like, his prose was so beautiful and had such a complexity that was so interesting.

So I could see unexploited talent, and I mean, when I created Quillette, it was in late 2015. It was just before, or happened simultaneously with, the creation of the Heterodox Academy. And I was actually, you know, I was a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt prior to beginning Quillette, and I had met a psychologist called Lee Jussim who had come out to Australia to give a talk at a psychology symposium. And I went to meet him and talk to him, and we talked a lot about the left-wing bias in psychology, in particular social psychology.

And that was... we should talk more about that.

Yeah, so that was fascinating to me because, you know, I had been studying psychology for a long time. I loved psychology; my favorite aspects of psychology are the sort of things that you look at, such as personality and individual differences. But it was really amazing to me to discover that social psychology might have a huge replication problem because they had this political bias sort of baked into their studies.

So I went to talk to Lee Jussim about this. I mean, this was six years ago, but it was before the problems in academia had become very widely known and talked about. And I was fascinated by this idea that a particular area of science could be corrupted by political bias, and then I wanted to write an article about this particular topic, and I thought there's no publication that will have me because the publications that focus on science, such as Scientific American or even The Guardian, they publish on scientific topics—they're overly linked. And then publications that might be interested in publishing articles that contest some left-wing narratives, they're not going to be particularly interested in science.

So I needed a publication that was interested in analysis and scientific rigor, but was also going to challenge left-wing narratives, and I thought such a publication didn't actually exist, so I had to create my own. And some of the first articles that I published were by academics who, in either their research or in their career, come up against left-wing ideology in academia.

Or either...

So I had a particular interest in sex differences. So, sex differences in psychology, you know, as you know, there's a lot of empirical evidence that men and women are the same psychologically—we have different career preferences, we have different sexual psychology—but it's difficult to talk about these issues in mainstream journalism.

Yeah, of course.

And so I wanted a publication that would explore these issues, and I invited academics to... I knew who had interests in either evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics to come and write for me. A couple of the early essays that I published were just very good, and they kind of went viral, as much as, you know, viral for a high intellectual publication. And it just took off from there. We just built up a social media following.

Okay, so you point to two factors, say. So one is that you like to spot talent and you actually can do it, and you also believe that talent exists, so that's kind of helpful for that. If it does happen to be the case that talent does exist, and then when talented people are having difficulty, let's say, being published somewhere because of their tenor of their viewpoint, whatever that happens to be, that does create exactly the kind of opportunity that you just described, right?

Because then you have this pool of talent that isn't being utilized that you can capitalize on, so to speak, while also aiding in the development of those people. Then that issue that you brought up there—that's part of your ability to spot what's not right. You know, the fact that you caught on to that bias in psychology so early in your psychological progression. I mean, you happen to talk to people who knew this, but still, that's quite the realization.

You know, I really didn't understand that until I had been a psychologist probably for at least 15 years. A professor—now I did my PhD in a more biological area, and then I was a personality psychologist, and it doesn't have the same kind of bias, but then I started looking into the literature on authoritarian personality and authoritarianism, and all I found was this insistence that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism.

Yeah.

And I thought, "What the hell is this? How can we possibly assume, as a science, social psychology, which is not much of a science as far as I'm concerned, by the way? But how can we state so bluntly that there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism?"

And this the authoritarian scale that had been used by social psychologists was only right-wing authoritarianism, and I thought, "What about the communists? I mean, did nobody notice in social psychology that there were communist dictators? What were those people?"

Well, and then it's worse than that. That's bad enough! Now, I had a graduate student who we started to do research on left-wing authoritarianism, but by the time that got off the ground, fundamentally, things exploded around me, and I stopped working as a professor. I couldn't do that anymore.

But the other thing that's really horrible, horrible, horrible, is the implicit association test.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Now, and that left-wing issue is dead relevant here. So, you know, I'll tell you a story. This is a good story, I think. Okay, so Mazarin Banaji, who is one of the inventors of the IAT and who hasn't protested against its misuse to the degree that the other creators of the IAT have, and also nowhere near as much, is quite left in her viewpoint. So, that's point number one. Point number two: I saw her when I was at Harvard. She came to deliver a talk. She's there now, but she wasn't when I was there. She came to deliver a talk about the IAT. She talked about bias, implicit bias.

And so, I think I asked her this question; she was delivering a talk to the faculty and the graduate students. So, I said, "What's the difference between implicit bias and categorization?" And she didn't really have an answer to that. And I thought, "Wait a second, this is an important issue. You're equating categorization with implicit bias?"

Yeah.

Well, let's call that a pregnant sin on the left. And here's the fundamental idea, as far as I can tell, is that, well, it isn't obvious how we categorize. That's partly Foucault's criticism of category structures, and there's something to that because categorization is extremely difficult.

But to leap from that to say that categorization as such is, say, nothing but bias, is...

Yeah, it's insane.

It's so shallow and so wrong and so dangerously wrong.

Well, it's not surprising that the IAT has gone out into the world from social psychology and just wreaked devastating havoc. And I should also say, as a research and clinical psychologist, that if a clinical psychologist used that test in a clinical setting, they would be in deep trouble because it's nowhere near valid enough or reliable enough to be used for diagnostic purposes, period. The end.

Well, I mean, you would think there'd be some sanctions on Harvard or the academics putting... making the test available to the public on their web...

So the IAT is available on a Harvard web...

Not diagnosis, yeah.

So there's some disclaimer that, you know, it can't be used for research, can't be used as a diagnostic tool because it doesn't have validity and reliability, but it's available on a Harvard website. So that all of these consultants who are paid...

Yes, absolutely, per hour, can have their workers take it.

And you know...

Yes, it comes with the prestige of Harvard.

Yeah. And so, de facto, de facto, it's a clinical diagnostic test, but it's not... it's not promoted directly as such, right?

And it isn't licensed clinicians that are using it.

Yeah, it's extraordinarily horrible. Shameful.

Now, I think it should be used for research purposes because the question of to what degree implicit bias power differential even might affect categorization is a perfectly reasonable question. But to equate them thoughtlessly is absolutely inexcusable intellectually.

What I find interesting is the research on stereotype accuracy, and from the reading that I've done—this is Lee Jussim's work—he has found that stereotypes do tend to be reasonably accurate.

They're not... it's just a heuristic we have.

Yeah, well, that's the issue—the heuristic issue is exactly the issue! Almost all our perceptions and categories are heuristics. They're shortcuts because we can't see everything. So everything we perceive is a heuristic. I mean, the very objects we see are perceptual heuristics, exactly.

But what's really interesting about Jussim's work is that he finds that we, because of our mental shortcuts and heuristics, we can make snap judgments about an individual or about a person, but according to the group that they belong to. But as soon as we get more data about that individual, the stereotype drops away.

So we're very good at updating our perceptions of individuals according to the data that comes in.

And that makes sense.

Okay, so partly what we do—like we have all of us have complete maps of the world, you might say. Well, how can we? Because we don't know everything. Well, the answer is we just use low-resolution representations. And so like there's, you know that Mongolia exists, but if I asked you everything you knew about Mongolia, it would—unless you're a specialist—it wouldn't take you long to exhaust your knowledge.

So you have a representation just like the representation you have of a helicopter. You know, you could draw your representation of a helicopter; it would be like a circle with a couple of lines on it and a rotor. You know, that's a helicopter. It's like, "No, it's not! Not at all!" You know? But, okay, so... And what happens is that when we use a low-resolution representation when a high-res representation is necessary, we hit errors.

Yeah, and then we update, and we differentiate the map.

Yeah, and that's... there isn't any difference between that and thinking—essentially, that's what you do when you're thinking. But, because you have to have shorthand when you're ignorant, you have to rely on something.

Yeah, and so...

And you know, I think there are times when people refuse to update their stereotypes, you know, because it takes effort.

That’s right.

Yeah.

So the lack of left-wing authoritarianism is interesting. I wonder if that body of research has been updated in the last couple of years. I haven't looked at it for a while, but when I did look at it, I remember an academic at I think maybe NYU called John Jost. He was very resistant to the idea that there was such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism.

Yeah, and I think he argued that conservativism was almost a form of false consciousness.

Oh yes, they have, yes, yes! That's the scale—it's something like system justification.

Yeah, that's the one.

That's it, yeah.

Yeah, so if you... that's exactly it! And it's, again, social psychologists playing at clinical pathologization.

Yeah, that's deeply embedded in that system justification theory literature. It's like, well, if you're patriotic, well, there's something wrong with you.

Yeah, no, yes, yeah.

So I don't think that anything has been updated on this—on the end of investigation into left-wing authoritarianism. And it's too bad, you know, because it isn't exactly obvious to me that when the left goes wrong, it goes wrong exactly the same way the right goes wrong when it goes wrong.

Yeah, so I think the right might have more of a proclivity to clump together in a unitary fashion partly because I think it's easier to do that on the right. You know, if it's true that those on the right are more conscientious and dutiful and lower in openness, that means they're not as diverse in their opinions and range of interests, let's say. And so, in principle, it would be easier to unite them, and that might be an advantage.

You know, there's an advantage to rapid unification just like there's an advantage to diversity of ideation, which covers more territory, but is slower and harder to organize. So, and the fact that the research isn't balanced to investigate both ends means, well, that we're ignorant about these things when we shouldn't be.

Yes, and we should be studying it, and we should be studying the impact or the relationship of social media, particularly to both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.

I have a—there's an article that Rob Henderson wrote with another grad student called Vincent Haran. We published it a couple of years ago, and it's called "Political Moderates Are Lying." And the thesis was that in our online groups and online tribes over time, those who are more fanatical or those who are more dogmatic in their views come to dominate the discussion.

And they intimidate the moderates in the group, and the effect that that has is over time it pulls the moderates over to the more extreme pole of the group or the more extreme pole of the ideology that is held.

And this is similar to what Jonathan Haidt was—you suppose it's because... is it because the more extreme types are more willing to use punishment in service of their certainty, so that would be hard on the moderates, right?

Yeah, I think that would be part of it. And certainly, there's... and the more extreme voices do more. So you get into this moral grandstanding and this performative sort of behavior, and they impose more costly signals on themselves than others. And this happens in groups that are both left-wing and right-wing, and I'm more familiar with the dynamics on the left because we've covered it a lot at Quillette, but if you've got like an artistic community, and so we published an article about the implosion of the Boston Pride Parade.

So there's an organization that is pro-LGBT, etc., and a group of young activists come in and say, "We're going to take over your organization." Now your Boston Pride Parade has to be about Black trans lives mattering. It's going to be about Black trans lives, not just about LGBT.

So they want to narrow the issue down to something very tiny and specific, and then they want to impose that belief system on the rest of the group. And now the moderates in the group are thinking, "Well, I want to support—I want to be part of the Boston Pride group. I want to go and march for LGBT people and lesbian and gay rights and transgender rights. I want to be involved in that."

But I can't sign on to these quite extreme demands.

And this group of activists wanted to sort of pivot the Pride march away from just LGBT and towards Black trans lives, had a suite of demands where they had to acknowledge that the white people of the group had to acknowledge that they were colonialists and they had stolen from the native peoples, and they had to rally against gentrification.

So all this whole suite of sort of pseudo-Marxist demands which came along in this package. And the moderates just give up; they're either intimidated or powered into silence, leave the group, or just cave in.

And I can kind of... you might also wonder if the moderates have better things to do on average? You know what I mean? If you're so—imagine you're moderate in your life and you're kind of distributed—your interests are kind of distributed around a number of things: your family, you have a job, etc., etc. And so you're tangentially or involved with the group, but when push comes to shove, well, if someone's getting hostile and it's starting to cause you a lot of grief and misery, then it's easy enough to bow out.

Absolutely! That's exactly right! And the concern I have is that I'm seeing so... this is sort of like a deranging dynamic that is now happening where tiny minorities of fanatics are pulling their respective communities and their ideological tribes away from the center, and it's not just happening on the left; I'm seeing it more and more happening on the right.

Do you think social media is speeding that up and making it easier?

Right? Yeah, because it's not that easy if you're a bully, let's say, and ideologically committed to bully to actually find people and bully them. But online, you can do that because it's so efficient. You can do that extremely quickly and with very many people, and you can unite.

That's the other thing is you can unite fanatics even if they're rare statistically, so you know, in a small town, maybe you could find two fanatics, and what the hell are they going to do? But online, well then there's a group. And then that would also mean that the fanatics are more likely to overestimate how popular their ideas actually are because there's a biased sampling issue, for example, we'll say.

Yeah, and but also fanatics can attract quite large followings on social media, particularly if they focus on one issue. So if you're—so a very, very effective strategy for being an activist on social media, using social media as one of your main or your main tool of engagement is to just pick one issue and focus on it and just repeat it over and over and over again.

And that is—I mean, I'm not saying all activism is bad, by any means, but it can create a community that can become fanatical, basically.

Which is not—I’m not so sure that that activism isn’t just bad altogether, you know.

Well, it obviously—the idea that you need to pay attention to your institutions and that sometimes they need criticism and reform is like, obviously, institutions ossify, and they become corrupt and everyone has to be alert to that, and there are steps you can and should take and are morally obligated, I think, to take.

But the thing about activism is that it's almost always predicated on the idea that you're right, you're morally superior, and you've identified the people who are wrong. And to me, that's one step away from mob and it's one step away from punishment.

And one of the things that upholds me and makes me ashamed in relationship to the universities is that universities are pretty good at teaching young people that being an activist is a good thing, and I'm not so sure at all that it's a good thing. I think it's pseudo-responsibility, especially because it always comes with the easy identification of just who the enemy is.

That's exactly right! No, I think you're right. And I think that if you're going to attack, if you're going to be on the attack, you have to also build. It's your responsibility and it's your duty to build.

So I, you know, well, you built an alternative; that's what you did!

Yeah, and I think, you know, if you're going to attack our institutions... You know, I have a lot of problems with establishment institutions, but you can't just attack them. What are we going to have left when we've got no institutions? We've got to have new institutions; you've got to start building them now.

Well, we could have rubble and everyone could be equal in the rubble. That's happened many, many, many times, and that's the risk that's rising.

That's why I think attacking institutions has to go hand in hand with building new ones. And lots of people... you know, I know quite a few people who are trying to build new institutions, but...

Yeah, I agree that there's something about social media and social media-enabled activism that makes finding an out-group, dehumanizing the out-group and attacking them very easy.

Well, okay, let's dive into that for a minute. Okay, so how many times have you sworn at somebody when you're walking down the street versus how many times have you sworn at someone when you're in your car and they're in their car?

I don't think I've sworn at anyone ever.

Okay, well, okay, well then you're very much more polite than me, let's say. But it's much more probable when there's a barrier like that that people will manifest aggressive behavior.

You know, we don't know exactly what inhibits aggressive behavior, but one thing that does is rather close personal proximity— real proximity. Now, when you take the person and you place them in a shell, let's say—that's a car—you place yourself in the shell; well, all of those cues, those subtle and complex cues, aren't there.

And so online, well, every—you don't even have an avatar; you only have your hypothetical fantasy about the person that you're attacking. You don't even know them!

So, and we don't know what that does to people at all. I mean, we see some of that on Twitter, and we have no... if this hypothesis that you laid out is true, you know, is if there's a tendency for those who are more committed to dominate certain types of institutions because the moderates bail out, and then if it's also true that that's sped along by social media, which is a possibility—not a certainty, but it could be—and then it's also easier to dehumanize people in social media circles, particularly if you're so inclined, and maybe even if you're not, then, well, that can be a perfect storm.

I mean, I just read an article by Jonathan Haidt today where he—I’ve been noticing what seems to be developing into something like a runaway positive feedback loop in the political landscape, particularly in the U.S. And, you know, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what a mental disorder actually was. And the most common description now, I think it's from Wakefield, I think, is that it's the deviation of a complex mental function from its evolutionarily signified path.

And I don't like that at all because it's very difficult to specify the evolutionarily signified path, and it violates the is-ought distinction. Just because that's how it evolved assuming—why did the hand evolve? You know, it does a lot of things—and yeah, okay.

But one of the things I did notice is that a lot of mental disorders are positive feedback loops. Depression's a good example. So you start feeling bad; well, and then you reduce your social contacts, and you're less effective at work. Well, that makes you feel worse. Well, then you're more irritable, so you start fighting with your wife or your husband. That makes you feel worse, and then away it goes—down spiraling downhill.

Anxiety, you start to avoid; that's how agoraphobia develops. Alcoholism, you drink to get rid of your hangover. Well, now—positive feedback loop.

Now, not every mental disorder is a positive feedback loop, but plenty of them seem to; they have that element, and you have to fight—figure out how to stop that spiral from continuing.

Well, we're getting into a situation—imagine this domination of the radical groups on both sides, and they have an outsized voice—an outsized ability to utilize punishment effectively, and now they're upsetting the hell out of each other.

Yeah, and so they're more and more set in their ways, and now the moderates are pulling over to that side. This is the process Haidt outlines. It in part—in this article that I believe he released today—it's October 30th, by the way. This will be put up later.

And he thinks that, at least in part, this was driven by Facebook: the like and Twitter adoption of... like, you know, this is—we were talking about conservatism and liberalism. And you know one of the things conservatives always say to liberals is, "Don't be thinking that your stupid invention is only doing what you think it is."

I am!

Yeah, right? That's the justification-spence concept. Yes! And if you've done any sort of laboratory experiments, you get very, very sensitive to that because things don't go the way you predict they will, right? You're with your stupid hypothesis.

And so who knows what the like button did? Facebook is a—it's not nothing, right?

Oh, it's just a like button? No! No, it's like 300 million like buttons!

Yeah!

Oh, I think we vastly underestimate the impact that social media is having on our societies and political culture. And, you know, people will say, "Oh, it's simply magnifying what's already there." And that might be true; but what if what's already there is quite fragile?

What if the United States was on the pathway to extreme political polarization? I mean, it's not a small thing to speed that up. Like, it's a very dangerous thing to speed that process up.

Yeah, well, it's harder to think—it's harder to think things through and put on the brakes when it's happening really, really fast, and you're not sure why. You know, like I put a fair bit of the responsibility for this mess that we're in on faculty members at universities who let the administrators take over by cow-towing 300 times over a 30-year period.

So, and then what happened? So the administrators took over the universities, and then the DEI people took over the administrators.

Yeah, well, I know that's an oversimplification, but...

Yeah, and then these ideas, these poisonous ideas just away they go out into the culture.

And yeah, and I think Haidt is probably correct when he says that these bad ideas—so we're talking about the postmodernism, the you know, intersectionality, all of that—those rubbish ideas, they would have stayed enclosed within the walls of these quite marginalized university departments.

They would have stayed enclosed at captioning...

Not available tool.

Where they could go into institutions and claim, "Hey, we can ferret out your prejudice." It's like, "Yeah, yeah!"

I mean, it’s not entirely... but, it’s not only because of social media, but it's certainly allowed bad ideas to spread very quickly. And we could see that with—I mean, there's so many...

Yeah, there's the pandemic; we should really be worried about it.

Yeah, I mean, so one example of bad ideas... So there are... there's two things that I'll talk about. I'll mention bad ideas spreading, but also social contagion of mental disorders. So, I mean, and I guess they're both—they're fairly similar.

So, you know, when George Floyd died in the United States, there were riots that spread across the United States. You know, I think the more damage was done in the riots that occurred in 2020 that had been—the worst riots in 50 years or something like that in the United States. It barely had any mainstream media coverage, if any coverage at all.

And I think there hasn't even been a thorough investigation of how these riots occurred, how much damage was done, how many people died as a result because the murder rate has spiked in the U.S. The police have pulled back from their policing.

So, you know, this outrage that occurred from a single video clip of someone—you know, obviously, the murder was horrific, and you know it was a horrifying thing to view. I remember feeling absolutely disgusted—like just horrified watching the footage.

But it's gone viral, and it sparked these riots around a whole nation.

Well, we also—you know, you think about what's happening with regard to our heuristics as a consequence of that. You know, because we're kind of wired to assume that if we see something violent, that means that the probability of violence in our local environment is quite high, because otherwise we wouldn't see it.

And so it isn't obvious that our emotional systems can look at something like that and simultaneously say, "Well, remember this is a pool of 300 million." It's like 300 million, how many is that? Like...

Yeah, you don't know. You're kind of wired for 200, not 300 million.

Exactly!

Yeah, but the remarkable thing was how huge demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter happened all over Europe.

And there were even—there were some matches even in Australia in the middle of a pandemic.

Yes!

And you had tens of thousands of people marching in the middle of a pandemic in support of Black Lives Matter—in the UK, they had Black Lives Matter marches where people were chanting, "Hands up, don't shoot!" Now, the police in the UK don't have guns, right?

So we could look at that psychologically, you know, and we could say, "Well, on the positive side, you watched the George Floyd video, and you had an empathic reaction and a reaction of disgust."

And, you know, we could say kudos for that because it's an indication of the operation of a moral instinct.

And we could also say the same thing about, you know, beyond cynicism about these demonstrations—one thing you can say about that is well, people are concerned enough about inequality—like genuinely oppressive inequality so that even something like that will trigger it.

And so, but then we have to detail out the other side of the argument, which is, "Well, how do you separate that from the kind of overreaction that will tear down structures that are actually helpful to people?"

And so, well, now it's "defund the police."

Yeah.

And you know, maybe not. Maybe that's not the right response to that video.

And it's certainly not obviously the right response.

And were more people killed by "defund the police?" Like, how many people are killed by "defund the police?" We don't know!

We don't know, but it's certainly not zero.

That's right!

I mean, I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t suggest that marching in support of—I don’t think you were. I think that the point I was trying to make was simply that the political movements can go viral and they can spread out—like, you know, it’s obviously an American issue: police brutality and the race issues that are inherent in American culture.

You know, that's obviously very specific to America, and you know you can't—you just simply cannot graft American race relations onto a country like Australia or the UK or Europe. You know, we don’t have the same history. We haven't had slavery—completely different cultures.

So it was quite eye-opening and surprising to me to see how easily this political movement spread and how this Americanization occurred. All over the world, without much... you know, people just got swept up in it with this sort of mood affiliation.

You even had epidemiologists joining, didn’t it happen in Australia? But I know in the United States, even epidemiologists came down and joined the movement to support Black Lives Matter and said, "You know, these marches—racism is a public health crisis. It's worse than the western COVID," which is just... that’s like temporary insanity for an epidemiologist to say that.

So, I mean it's also frightening because it means that certain political viewpoints are acceptable during a pandemic, and others aren't.

And because they're of such critical importance, you see that happening in the UK right now with climate change summits.

Yeah, yeah, exactly! They've liberalized travel restrictions on so-called red countries as long as you're an attendee of the climate change summit.

And that's absolutely horrifying to me. It's like, "Oh, I see! So because you share—you all share a particular political take on a particular issue that's so important, all of a sudden you're in a different legal category."

And you don't think that's a—that's a dangerous precedent or you don't care?

You know, I don't like to use such harsh words, but that's not acceptable, period!

That's right! Yeah, absolutely!

And, you know, when we've got such low trust in institutions as it is, to be coming out with double standards according to political affiliation is just ridiculous.

But then the other thing that is scary about social media is the social contagion of mental disorders.

So we know, we're aware now that a certain proportion of young girls who are identifying as gender dysphoric and trying, attempting to become transgender. We're aware now that there is such a thing as rapid onset gender dysphoria.

And there's a book called "Discovery of the Unconscious" which is a great book. Henry Ellenberger—it's—I was given that book by a psychiatrist at the Douglas Hospital who was my supervisor, a French guy: Maurice Dancier, a very distinguished psychiatrist. And he said, "This is the psychoanalytic Bible: Discovery of the Unconscious."

And the first—it's about that thick—and it covers Jung, Freud, Adler—it's a great book. And, but the first 300 pages is a history of pre-psychoanalytic thought, and part of that is a historical survey of contagion.

Right.

And so the multiple personality disorder, for example, has cycled through about 300 years. And there are people who are temperamentally susceptible to such contagion. They're likely the same people who are relatively easily hypnotizable.

Yeah, it’s likely associated with high openness, by the way.

Okay.

And you could also imagine that if you're high in openness, it's harder for you to catalyze and specify an identity, and you're more diverse in your inner life; maybe even your emotional life.

And so... right.

And then there's confusion here too that we should talk about as psychologists: sex and gender. You know, and I've been accused of just saying this—that those are identical—but I know they're not because there is a lot of personality variability on top of biological sex.

And it isn't like—it isn't a particularly rare woman who has essentially the same temperament as the average man. My suspicions are it's probably about one woman in 10.

Now, it would depend on exactly how you made the cutoffs, you know, but I don't—if it's not 10, maybe it's 5. I don't care; it's somewhere in that range.

And the same can be said for men. And so it’s perfectly possible for a boy to have a temperament that's more like a girl, but that does not mean that he's in the wrong body.

That's the raw—like, that's a pretty radical solution for a problem that's essentially a consequence of normal temperamental variability.

And so there is some utility in separating out gender from sex if you think of gender as personality, which I think is the appropriate way to think about it scientifically.

But I knew back when I got entangled in my first political conflict that I thought all this mucking about with gender categories is going to confuse and hurt way more people than it's going to help.

And part of this is this problem of contagion of confusion.

Yes, so all adolescents really need—that's really what they need—is more confusion about sex and gender when they're 13.

That's just perfect!

Yeah, it's freedom. Yes, like...

Yeah, right?

Yeah!

And it wouldn't be—it wouldn't be an issue. I mean, there's nothing—androgyny has been around for hundreds, thousands of years. I mean, there's ancient sculptures of androgynous figures.

I mean, ancient cultures understood androgyny, and there's plenty of historical precedent for the idea that androgynous personality is actually more of an ideal. There's lots of speculation in Christian mysticism about the androgyny of Christ.

Yeah, that's right.

And, you know, I'm not—I, when I was a teenager, I used to look up to androgynous celebrities, like—well, David Bowie was a little bit before my time, but he was androgynous. I used to—and yeah, I mean, it wasn't—it was an ideal to emulate.

And to be a tomboy was considered cool. But you would never consider medical intervention. You would never consider hormone treatment or modifying your body to—how about mastectomy? Or how about attempting to make a penis out of the musculature in your arm? You know, penises are actually quite complex. It's not that easy to take your arm and turn it into one, and certainly not without a tremendous amount of cost and trouble, and then—well, and then let's just imagine that you were wrong and confused, just for a moment, you know.

And the contrary argument is, "Well, you better deal with this early." It's like, "Yeah, you really know that, do you? You're so bloody sure about that?"

Well, they can— the emotional blackmail that activists have used has been, you know, this argument that if kids don't get this early intervention, then they're at higher risk of suicide.

Well, we have absolutely no idea whether, you know, suicidal ideation or distress is not easily disentangled from confusion around your identity. It's not clear that it's simply transphobia or being trapped.

No, no! It's clear that it's—no, it's clear that it's simply not. It's not simple, first of all, as you just pointed out—it's actually unbelievably complicated, so difficult things!

Yep!

Yeah, well, there's a paper that's been recently published by Lisa Litman, who did the original exploratory research on rapid onset gender dysphoria.

And she's gone and interviewed a hundred detransitioners, which is a lot of... I think she just talked to Barry Weiss about that.

Okay, yeah, well, her paper—well, she interviewed detransitioners. So people who have transitioned gender and who now regret it. And there's a couple of patterns that stand out. One pattern that stands out is that often people felt the need to transition after some trauma had happened to them.

So they experienced the trauma, and then another pattern that stands out is that these individuals were sort of sold transgender transition as a solution to all of their problems.

Yeah, I think I read the paper. I think that one of the most common claims of the detransitioners was that they were tremendously ill-informed about the full consequences of their actions by the relevant medical professionals.

And then we could also say it's certainly possible that the relevant medical professionals are too terrified to fully inform them.

Well, it's their job! I mean...

Yeah, I know it's not an excuse, but it is, but it—but it’s... it’s... it’s... it's still worth noting because you can understand sexual transition in children. I mean, his life was torn into shreds, and he's an apolitical guy; he's just a researcher, and he's a good one as well.

Yeah, and so this fear, you know, you can say, "Well, you're a professional; it's your duty to stand up regardless of the fear." But when there's that much pressure, even people who stand up are going to be inclined to speak a lot less than they might otherwise.

Yeah, I had—I’ve had a press council complaint made against me before in an article I wrote for The Australian on transgender issues, and it wasn't upheld, but anytime a journalist in Australia wants to write about issues particularly to do with medical intervention and gender dysphoric kids, they are subject to complaints— press council complaints!

Well, if you're an MD or a psychologist, if someone takes a complaint against you to your college, especially if that college has been increasingly dominated by activists, you are so screwed!

Like, I had one client who just caused me just an unbelievable amount of misery and—well, because you can hijack the whole bureaucracy as a weapon!

Yeah, and so...

Yeah, and that's what these activists do, and they're very good at it, and they—you know, they only need to have a couple of successes under their belt, and they have a whole system for attacking people.

Well, we have human rights commissions in Canada, which are a quasi-judicial entity with increasing power, and that's a perfect weapon for any activist who's motivated to use it.

And that—whoever the target of the human rights commission is, you can kiss five years of their life goodbye, and there's a high probability that they're going to be found guilty, regardless of what they did!

It's really... it's truly appalling! Especially given that it's happening under the aegis, hypothetically, of human rights and the ability to give informed consent.

[Music]

And this is just one—this is an example of how fanatics hijack institutions, which you would have previously thought were fairly centrist and moderate. So it's, you know, this... the transgender activism issue is a perfect example because it's a tiny... like, transgender activists are a minority of transgender people who are a tiny minority anyway.

So it's just like the smallest number of people creating an extreme amount of havoc, and it's a perfect example of how a tiny intolerant minority can basically dominate others using all of the new tools that we have today: social media, you know, bureaucratic complaints, mobbing—that type of thing.

So, to let's go back to Quillette directly for a bit. What's the growth pattern like? Are you still in an ascending... on an ascending trajectory? How is Quillette doing, and what are your plans for the future?

Our revenue is growing, but our traffic has been steady for the last couple of years or so. So our revenue is increasing, and our subscriptions are increasing, but our traffic isn't.

Our plan for next year is to broaden into publishing physical books, and I want to focus more on the academic audience. I want to recruit more heterodox because what I've noticed in the past five years since doing Quillette is that media has diversified a bit.

So when I started, you know, the mainstream media was quite stale. There were just, you know, these big corporate entities that were too timid to touch controversial issues. I feel like the media landscape is much more diverse and varied now, and that's got a lot to do with Substack and the innovations of that newsletter technology.

So I think there's more heterodoxy, more variety, more diversity in media. However, I don't think one can say the same thing about academia. Academia is still stuck in this stagnant, sort of decaying... kind of needs rejuvenation.

It means—well, if you're right, there should be an opportunity there just like there was with Quillette.

So yeah, and I feel like academic publishing is ripe for disruption. And I don't want to become an academic publisher per se, but I would like to publish books written by interesting scholars who may find it difficult to get published by traditional academic publishers because their ideas are too challenging or potentially too controversial.

Great! Maybe you'll find a psychologist who can publish a good book with some research in it about left-wing authoritarianism!

Yeah, that would be ideal!

Yeah, so that's what I'd like to do. I feel like, you know, media is on the right path. There's a lot of brave journalists like Barry Weiss is one. There are others who are really pushing back against the groupthink that has existed in journalism, but I think there's more work to be done in academia. And I can’t—I’m not an academic; I’m not going to go into the universities, but I can at least give a platform to renegade or dissident academics who find it difficult to get their ideas out to a broader public—get published and that type of thing. So that's where I'm moving.

So sort of... I never really wanted Quillette to become like a mass market product. Our interest isn't necessarily to capture the largest audience possible, but we do want to provide high-quality content for a niche audience, and I feel like our niche is very engaged.

How would you define that niche, do you think?

Well, certainly our readers—it's interesting—if you look at the demographic sort of—I don't do a lot of digital analytics, but you can see some demographic variables. And somehow Google can pick up where people trend politically, and the majority of our readers describe themselves as independents.

So, and then I would also describe our readers as being more analytical than the average.

Is there a sex difference?

Yes! So our audience is 70-30 male to female.

Yeah, well, I wonder if that's actually reflective of Quillette or reflective of the gender difference in preference for fiction versus non-fiction, because females prefer fiction and males prefer non-fiction on average. And I don't know if maybe that would account for a pretty decent chunk of that 70-30.

Probably. And we don’t publish lifestyle content, and I think women must be overwhelmingly the main consumers of lifestyle content.

So, I mean, it's interesting what you were saying about variations in personality. So, you know, I'm overwhelmingly interested in politics and sort of big philosophical ideas, which—and that, you know, I tend to find writers and readers who are interested in those things tend to be more male than female.

So it—you know, well, you see an openness—there's a gender difference too, is that men are more—are higher in intellect, which is interesting; ideas. And women are higher in propensity—proper—which is a subset of openness to experience, and that has more to do with the more...

Yeah, exactly. Exactly!

The more artistic end, let's say, of that intellectual predilection. Now, the gender difference there isn't huge, and women and men don't differ that much in openness total, but if you break it down into its two major aspects, you do get that difference. So it's interesting.

Yeah, yeah. Yes, that probably goes along a little bit with that male proclivity to be more interested in things than people compared to women, and so that might be a manifestation of that in the openness domain.

I think that one of the things that has gone wrong with journalism up until very recently is a lack of analysis and a lack of rigor. So if you look at, if you look at a paper like The New York Times—I mean, I'm not a scholar, I'm not a historian of The New York Times, I don't really know what their articles were like 30 years ago, but at least in the last 10 years, since I've been reading them, the last 15 years, you see more arguments made from—uh—you see more emotional reasoning and more sort of narrative storytelling.

And I mean, this might be great for fiction, but it's not great for objective—for journalism, which is meant to be an objective empirical profession.

And I think you know—I mean, I don't know what the gender ratio is of journalists, but probably there are more women now in journalism than there ever has been.

You are not afraid of causing trouble, are you?

I just—I am, but I think about this. I think about how, you know, in certain occupations, you might have had a gender imbalance before where there has been more men than women. But what happens when there's more women than men? Like, what—we don't have—we also don't know what happens to the political structure when women are hyper-involved—we have absolutely no idea because that's only been happening for--well, a hundred years at the maximum. But let's say 50, really, since the Second World War. I think that's when it really took off, and we have no idea.

And so, you know, we don't know what particular forms of political pathology are unique to women. We have some sense of what those are.

I don't think it's pathology, but what I—one thing I've been thinking about is moral reasoning.

So you would be familiar with Kohlberg's work, right?

In the stages of moral development?

And then remember Carol Gilligan came out?

I remember Carol Gilligan, yeah.

So she—so what happened was Kohlberg measured stages of moral development in children, and the highest stage of moral development was this universalism where we have principles that can be applied to where everybody fit.

You know, and basically I'm probably mangling the concept, but there was a bit of controversy because girls were not scoring as high or not as many girls were scoring—reaching that level of moral development as boys.

So Carol Gilligan's theory was that girls and women have a different way of reasoning about moral problems than boys and men, and she wrote a book called "In a Different Voice," and she came up with this concept of care ethics.

Well, you know, it makes a certain degree of sense because women are higher in agreeableness, which is the empathy and politeness dimension. And it's particularly—if you break it down into the aspects—which are compassion and politeness—the biggest gender difference is in compassion per se, and that makes a certain amount of sense, I would say, from a biological perspective, given that women are the primary caretakers for infants, and they need nothing but empathy for the first nine months, pretty much.

Empathy is the whole deal there!

Yeah, and so I think it makes a lot of sense, and I remember being at university and, you know, you have to do these trolley problems where you're trying to work out, you know, what is the most moral thing to do.

And I think it's a measure of utilitarianism or something like that. And there’s one version of the trolley problem where you're in an attic and you've got a baby—you've got to make a choice between smothering a baby—you're presumably your own baby, who's going to cry. So you're—you’re hiding out from the Nazis in an attic. You're up there with a bunch of people who will be killed if they're discovered by the Nazis, and you have a baby and you have to smother the baby to death.

That's how the famous sitcom MASH ended. That was the last—that dilemma was exactly the last episode of MASH.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I know that. I remember reading this moral dilemma at university, and I was sort of offended that anyone would even ask me. Like, of course, I would never smother my own baby! I couldn't. You know, I know I've got my own children now.

Abstractions be damned—it's like how dare you even ask me? I would never do that to my own child.

And you could—I mean, I’m sure fathers feel the same way as well, but as a mother, you would let other people be harmed to protect your own. You just would!

I mean, I would. I would protect my child before any other consideration, and so I understand Carol Gilligan's theory, and I think it makes a lot of sense, and it intuitively corresponds with the way with how I feel and think.

But I can also see that that kind of oral reasoning works for a family environment and works for a mother and her children.

It's not probably not going to work at a governmental level.

Well, that is—that is a question, isn't it? And that's the question of the limits of empathy, per se.

Yeah, you know, and we're trying to elevate empathy to the prime virtue. And you know, one of the things I really appreciated about Freud and the psychoanalysts in particular was their insistence that the good mother fails.

Okay, right.

Because you protect your infant at all costs, but by two, you don't have an infant; you have someone who needs to go out into the world.

And so you have to control—like, my daughter-in-law, and to her great credit, her son is now—he's 18 months old and he's going to daycare.

And she handled that beautifully. She took him to daycare for an hour a day, and she—just with three kids, and for the first week, and then two hours a day for a week, and then the whole eight hours. And she—the first day that he stayed there, she just dropped him off and left.

No drama! Gone!

And then she went home and cried. It was hard for her because she'd been with this child for 18 months, 24 hours a day, and now this was the first real separation.

And she had to be tough about it despite the emotion, you know? And because she did it properly, he had virtually no trouble whatsoever making the transition.

But that's not—that's not exactly that kind of empathy, that reflexive empathy that you just described, right? That's something different. That's the ability to abstract yourself away from protecting this creature that's with you at all costs right now and to think into the future about what's more important—the facilitation, let's say, of this drive to explore and to separate from that maternal environment.

And that's a—that's an ethic as well, and it's not identical with reflexive empathy.

Yeah, yeah, well I think—I think the ins—the difference in moral reasoning, and of course, you know, I'm simply referring to averages, and I honestly don't even know if there are great sex differences in moral reasoning between men and women.

But if we're thinking about government bureaucracies and thinking about imposing moral frameworks on a very large number of people, in the entire population, you want something that's not going to be engaging in any kind of favoritism—you're going to want something that's very cold and analytical.

Which way you get the sort of utilitarian moral framework, which is there...

Well, it's a good question; it's a good question, isn’t it?

You know, at what level of social organization does empathy—and, you know, that would facilitate nepotism? How would it not?

Yeah!

And so... yeah, and I think it potentially facilitates aggression because...

Yeah, well, that's the dark side. That's the dark side of it.

Well, of course, one of the things empathy does, obviously, is tighten in-group relationships for the empathetic circle.

And so who's outside the empathetic circle? Well, snakes and vipers, obviously.

And that is a danger that—that's the dark side of empathy—that's part of the devouring mother pathology that the psychoanalysts were so good at delineating.

Yeah, and so...

That dark—the dark side of that...

So, well, Claire, I'm coming to Australia, I think, next fall.

Oh, wonderful!

I think that's the plan. So, I'm doing a tour next year by the looks of things, if I can manage to stay on my feet.

So I would really like to see you again when we...

Yeah, that would be... that would be brilliant!

And congratulations on Quillette and your success at finding that niche and also on your encouragement of these young writers.

And that's such a great accomplishment to manage that! And good luck with your academic publishing plans—that's—that's a killer idea, I think.

Oh yeah, I'd be interested to see if you can manage that and manage to monetize it successfully because that's the topic.

That's the challenge!

You bet, man, that's a real challenge!

So, yeah, and thanks very much for talking to me today!

Yeah, no, thank you, Jordan! It's a pleasure!

Yeah, it's really good to see you.

[Music]

[Music]