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Episode 37: Election 2016- Psychology of Trump, Clinton and the rest of politics
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hi there everybody this is dr. Doug Lyall and we are live it's a Wednesday evening on the date of the final and third and final presidential debate and Nate gee is not with us right this minute he's having a few technical difficulties so I am going to be on my own flying solo here for a few minutes and what we were had planned to talk about this evening was politics and so what we're going to do is we're going to look at the current political situation but in order to understand politics we want to actually take a broader view then then people generally do and that is usually taken in political science classes what we're going to do is we're going to step back and take a very wide angle deep historical view of where politics comes about you know why it exists and why it is do we have essentially the political processes and actually positions that we have today so most political scientists of course don't understand this as we would expect they don't they don't see politics as a as an issue or as a process that is being orchestrated by the genetic code never occurs to them they they don't take biology classes and they don't think in terms of human behavior as being genetically driven but evolutionary psychology of course has a different view and so if we were to look at the political process and try to take it back to its roots this is what we're going to find the the roots of politics start in the Stone Age and so if we were going to go back and to look at a Stone Age environmental situation what we're going to see is we're going to see a small group of people maybe 30 or 40 people that live together and it is this band of people essentially against the hostile forces of nature they warn each other against predators and they help defend each other against that they help defend each other against starvation by doing food sharing they also ensure each other against tragedy in the ways that that friends do you know across history but in the Stone Age it was it was probably more dramatic and constant that in any other time in history because you didn't have any market economies you didn't have any specialists like you know doctors any kind of insurance process these people essentially survived or died with respect to their the resources that were available in that in that group so the if we were to look then at what happens within the group and and try to figure out what the roots of politics are the fundamental roots of politics are about a single dimension and that dimension is how much we're going to share so if you think back about what it would look like to be in a small hunter-gatherer group what we're going to find is that there's going to be a dynamic tension within that group that is that people are going to be trying to figure out what is optimal for me with respect to how this group's social expectations work with respect to people's expectations about help from other people so sharing winds up being a very useful process that winds up supporting and thriving a human success for the following reason that if you were to to be let's suppose you are an antelope on the African savannah you're a Thomson's gazelle if you stick your foot in a snake hole your best friend who you've been running alongside for the past three years cannot possibly help you there's really nothing that they can do so if a cheetah comes and gets you you're your quote friends best option is just to run as fast as you can and get out of there and so as a result of the inability of your friend to actually give you very much aid it's going to turn out that that species will be unable to do to evolve mental structures that will result in close friendships and the possibility of biologically advantageous self-sacrifice so let's look now at how different it is for human beings at how how humans evolved extraordinary self sacrificial capabilities because they wind up being in their own best interests so let's look at this if you were living on your own in a hostile environment you would you would be your you your personal abilities against the hostile forces of nature you could have an injury that would be a temporary injury that could be devastating to your prospects for survival let's suppose we're looking at a broken leg so if you were to break your leg the Predators would spot this you would be unable to secure food you might have to damage the leg further and very badly just to struggle as much as you possibly could until you probably would get picked off so as a result a broken leg would likely mean death which is what it does mean for for most animals but for human beings what they were able to do was they were able to evolve friendship mechanisms by which they could ensure each other against this kind of tragedy so if you had a friend a single friend then you have this bond between you psychological bond being driven by the hormone oxytocin where you care about them and they care about you and if it turns out that you broke your leg your friend would not just run along the savanna and and bid you goodbye they care about you and they would stick around and invest some percentage of their likelihood of their own survival in the in investing in the possibility of you surviving so the way the math would look like would be this your friend might reduce his own his or her own likelihood of survival by maybe 5% by eating less and giving you some of what it is that they are gathering pushing themselves a little bit further going without sleep as they guard you more vigilantly against predators reduce their their forays into the wild looking for mates and trying to reproduce in other words they would impose costs on themselves in order to benefit you now let's see why this would make sense and how it could possibly evolve let's suppose that they reduce their own likelihood of survival by five percent but they increase your likelihood of survival by 50 percent so let's say there was a close to a 50/50 chance that you would have been dead had they not aided you but there's a nearly a hundred percent chance that you will survive if they do spend their five percent in order to increase your likelihood of survival this means that there has been an extraordinary biological profit here so there's been a ten-to-one payoff in terms of the total net benefit of this behavior the problem is that the benefit is had by you not by them so how it is that nature could get them to be willing to extend you that credit to extend you the credit of a five percent chance of their own death how that could evolve is is very problematic so it's gonna it's what what obviously evolved one little tiny bit at a time so at first people may have extended each other a 1% benefit and for some degree of increased likelihood of survival so maybe the friend gave a little than a benefit in order to increase your likely to survival by 10% so they didn't care that much about you but they did extend themselves a little bit if that worked and the only reason that would work was number one of course their behavior will work for you but the question is whether or not it works for them so what's going to happen is this the ability for this to evolve depends upon your willingness to reciprocate when the shoe is on the other foot so the question is is there a greater than 1% net benefit to them for the 1% benefit that they are extending you to increase your likelihood of survival it's going to turn out that this is exactly what did happen in our species in other words it wound up being very advantageous for human beings to extend themselves to increase the statistical likelihood of people close to them surviving this is the roots of self-sacrifice and this the roots of the self-sacrifice are are being generated by a ruthless mathematical program that essentially says that self sacrificial behavior under certain conditions is well worth it to the person who's doing the self sacrificing the now fast forward away from a single condition where there's two friends in the woods and now we're going to do something else we're going to turn them into ten friends so we're going to have a little village so now think about how advantageous it is for a little village if one person breaks their leg and reduces their otherwise likelihood survival by 50% if they were on their own but now they have 10 friends and as a result of having 10 friends the 10 friends do not need to each reduce their own likelihood of survival by 5% we can divide that 5% by 10 because there's 10 people so now these 10 people each pitch in a tiny little bit and they risk about 1/2 of a percent of their own likelihood of survival in order to increase the likelihood of your survival by 50% so the total cost is at 5% total cost 10 people times 1/2 a percent and the total benefit is you have an official like lotus survival increased 50% it's the same ten to one pay off which is a fantastic payoff but it's going to turn out that we distribute that risk among a larger group of people now this is an important principle about why it is that human beings evolved in groups and why it is that the nature of that group process in people is to have caring for other individuals and behind this we're going to see the human beings actually develop what we're going to call empathy and empathy is going to be something that you're going to very rarely see in the animal kingdom and you're going to see it in very limited degrees but it humans it is absolutely reached its evolutionary apex human beings can watch a movie of people that they've never met and that they don't know and those people go through processes on the screen of some substantial losses and they feel empathy like they want to be helpful toward towards those people this shows you just how deep this runs in this species which doesn't mean that we are this great wonderful you know beautiful creation where this happens what it shows you is the engineering of a novel successful biological concept and that concept is insurance so the it's going to turn out that insurance is so useful and so important in the world that as soon as we were able to make it into third-party transactions between individuals that don't even know or care about each other it winds up being 15% of the world's economy so insurance is a large portion of your own personal life's budget right now and that's because of its extraordinary value okay so if you drive a car now you have the possibility of being badly injured Benja lenders by someone else who's driving another car badly entering somebody else having great damage to your own vehicle that would be expensive you essentially reduce the net possibility of all those risks and behind those behind your insurance policy that costs you you know maybe a few percent of your annual income or less behind that you're able to drive that vehicle behind that stands you know people with extraordinary capabilities at medicine at emergency medicine to actually help you and other people survive should there be a tragedy as a result of using that automobile that is something that no other animal in the world could pull off they could never pull off an insurance system and they couldn't do it because they couldn't they did evolve these empathy mechanisms that would result in the the non-kin helping behavior that you see in human banks now it turns out that this is this is the roots of politics so it sounds good that we would help other people if they're in trouble but the question is who should we be helping and how much should we be helping them and to what what degree should we go go forth with behavior that is costly to ourselves and so in the Stone Age Village it's going to turn out but these questions are paramount importance and the village will have disputes on these issues as to how much helping there should be going on and who should be doing the helping and what should they be getting in return for it etc etc as you would expect because this behavior helping behavior and insurance behavior is not free it's expensive and therefore you would expect that there would be some disputes horse-trading misunderstandings and and different differences of perspective as to how this should take place this folks is the roots of politics so in the Stone Age there's going to be a a problem that the village is trying to solve and the problem is as follows the a group of people so let's let's say in principle let's keep it very simple let's suppose it's 10 so we have 10 people in the village and we're going to act for a moment like we're we don't even have men or women we're just going to look at these as organisms so you have 10 10 people in the village and the problem is is that they are trying to insure themselves against problems and what we're going to do for the moment is we're going to eliminate accidents so we're going to forget about the idea broken legs and short-term temporary altruistic behavior on the part of one person or to help the other person through this tragedy we're going to set that aside and we're going to look at a different problem a problem that was recurrent and we're current even in Stone Age villages today and that's the problem of calories so the the first place that human beings probably evolved the kind of helping behavior that is characteristic of our species almost certainly had to do with hunting so it's going to turn out that hunting is going to be one of these behaviors that is going to be very it's going to be feast and famine so there's going to be a situation where a guy makes a kill and that kill might have a tremendous amount of calories it might have more calories than he needs but that he can actually use might be enough calories for a month but the food is going to spoil there's no way to preserve it so in this case what's going to happen is he needs to figure out is there some possibility for him to get any use out of this kill beyond what it is that he can use for his own caloric benefit and it's going to turn out that there is a use for that and the use is going to be feeding somebody else that has been less fortunate at this time period with respect to their own kill so you can imagine if we could in your own mind think of 10 men and just forget about women or you could think that each of these men has a little family where there's a women and children that's more realistic but I want you to think about the psychology of 10 men who are hunters in 100 gather tribe now let's suppose that each of these men needs to make on average 2 kills a week and let's suppose that on average these men are actually better than that so they're not teetering right on the edge that the average guy makes about two and a half kills a week but he needs two kills a week to feed himself in his family so there is a net excess amount of calories in the village being generated by these hunters on average again we're going to get rid of the concept of somebody going down with an injury we're just going to say that okay on average this village is churning out two and a half times two and a half kills times ten people 25 kills week and they need 20 kills a week now instead of a typical animal that makes its own kill and eat it these are going to be humans and they're going to ensure each other against trouble so let's suppose that we have one individual we're going to call him I don't know you know big Pete okay so big Pete has the ability typically to make four kills a week you can make more kills than he needs and we're going to have another little guy named little Stu okay and a little stew typically makes one kill a week so big Pete is going to consistently out produce what his needs are but the needs of the village or for him to produce about two he produces about four and so between the two of them they produced two and a half kills a week on average but Pete is a neck net hunting producer and little Stu's in trouble he actually is not successful enough for him to survive now what's interesting about this is that Pete does not kill four kills a week sometimes you get six sometimes he gets two sometimes he gives a zero sometimes he gets ten okay we don't know all we know that on average this guy is very good and he gets four kills a week little stew also does not always get one killed very often he may get zero but sometimes he may get three and so as a result he also has variance with respect to his abilities now this being the case what's going to happen here is as follows that that big Pete is very often going to be subsidizing a little stew so he's got two extra kills typically in a given week and given week yes four kills he needs to little Stu has one kill and he needs two so big Pete goes in hand to kill over to little Stu and therefore it makes certain that little Stu survives now you might say well what's the point why would he do this well why not do it he doesn't have anything else necessarily as productive to do at this time as to make sure that little Stu survives little Stu indicates his gratitude he says thank you which is going to be stone-age talk for saying that I owe you so in this way big Pete gets a signal from little Stu that essentially says that big Pete has credit with little Stu and that little Stu recognizes that big Pete is very valuable and therefore you can bet that if big Pete gets into trouble little Stu if he can will attempt to keep big Pete alive not because he owes him and not because he loves him or he admires him but simply because big Pete is extremely valuable and has demonstrated a willingness to share that capability with little Stu so we can forget about any warmth about the feelings but of course there are feelings here that are driving feelings very consistent with what exactly what we would expect but if you think about these as machines if you think about them as a Tama Don's with behavioral programs in them we would expect that little Stu would be highly motivated to make sure that big Pete survives and he's going to let big Pete actually know this big it's important that he signals this to big Pete because if he does not signal that to big Pete then big Pete might choose to invest in somebody else that gives that signal so it's going to turn out that giving those signals of gratitude is going to be shaped by evolution and you better not fake it because if you fake it if you actually act like you are feeling gratitude but you don't feel gratitude then it's going to turn out that somebody else is going to be the recipient of somebody else favors rather than you so it's going to turn out that human beings are going to evolve on us gratitude signals and admiration signals for people that help them now so here we have now the situation where big Pete is going about his business and little Stu's going about his business but I think what what would be valuable for you to think about is it as this goes on week after week and month after month and year after year what would be some things that would be in the heads of these two people with respect to village process and now we're going to expand this out to ten people instead of two and just for the sake of argument we're going to we're going to say but there are five people called the peeps and all of them average four kills a week and we're going to say there's five people called the little stews and they average one killer week so it's going to be very typical that the the big Pete's are almost always subsidizing the little stews and the little stews feel gratitude towards this etc now what is going to evolve here is going to be the big Pete's feeling like that they are overpaying for the insurance that they get from the little stews so it's going to be the case that they're going to be signaling to the little stews but the little stews ought to be hustling a little bit more and that they ought to be working harder than they are and then they ought to be trying to figure out how to be more effective because it's expensive to insure them against their own incompetence okay it's going to be the case that the little stews taking the signal from the big Pete's are going to feel anxious but they're also likely to feel resentful of these kinds of signals and so what we're going to find out is when we look at the Stone Age village we're going to find out that in Stone Age villages that have been examined by anthropologists that one of the chief central insults that goes on in a Stone Age village today which obviously has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years is that the most competent hunters feel that the least competent hunters are lazy and it's going to turn out that the least competent hunters are going to feel like the most competent hunters are stingy and those are going to be the two chief insults that are at the heart of strife within Stone Age villages today now this is precisely analogous to the left and right wing in the United States and elsewhere so when you have democracies what you have is a group of people who are working together to ensure each other against tragedies and they are they are operating under the rule that we don't steal from each other which is exactly what goes on in a stone-age village we're a group in it's our group against the hostile forces in nature and so we have agreement that we don't steal each other's food you know steal each other's moccasins and so on and so forth and we're all on actively the same general team we have competitions between us with respect to reproductive successes but when it comes to some very important things like survival you know it you're if if I am big Pete and another person is little Stu I am still interested in little Stu survival I do not want him to be compromised I want him to actually be effective and healthy because he's part of my insurance coalition and so as a result of that that's how people in countries feel they can treat keep compete with each other for reproductively relevant resources in other words they want to be fancy and be able to show off their good genes to pop possible mates and they want to they want to essentially provision their children more than other people or provisioning their children so that their children can have advantages in mating competitions with in the next generation and so on and so forth so it's going to turn out that of course within the coalition there's competition however there is also cooperation and so politics is the inevitable uneasy dance that goes on within a village over disputes as to what is a reasonable and fair way to mutually ensure each other and so it's going to turn out that the the biggest earning most competent people in in a society are typically going to be resentful against though the least competent least earning people of a society because they see them as effective effectively net resource costly in other words they are they're essentially they take more out of the coalition they put into it much like little Stu however they are members of the society and little Stu has his place and his value to big Pete yet it sort of widens the coalition it gives stability the fact that little Stu is there and healthy gives stability there could be a day rarely though it could be where little stew makes three kills and big Pete made one kill and big Pete is short and so once in a blue moon big Pete needs the insurance that comes from having little Stu there and so in this way there is an uneasy dance that is taking place and what we're going to see in a stone-age village is we're going to see that these people are going to have very similar views of this situation they're going to be very close to each other because they're actually looking at a very very similar adaptive landscape so big Pete is not 10 times more competent then then little stew and and little stew is not you know essentially he's not completely incompetent and they are both looking at the same environment and they are seeing very very similar adaptive problems however we can see that that a little Stu sees the environment as considerably more risky and considerably more problematic and more variable with respect to the food supply so from the standpoint of little Stu operating in a stone-age village he is looking at the food supply as very capricious and very scary and he's in a great deal of need of insurance that comes from being in the village big Pete is actually going to be much less intimidated by the environment from for him there is variance in the food supply but the variance is not so scary so on a bad you know in a relatively poor week he makes three kills on a very bad week he makes two kills but two kills was all he needed so would be extremely rare for him to only make one kill out of that environment and if he did he's got enough fat stores on him that he would probably survive in order for P to be in trouble he'd have to maybe making one kill repetitively and from his standpoint that doesn't appear to be very likely and so he's not feeling very intimidated by his environmental circumstances in the way the little sioux is now in your mind's eye what I what you might do is to essentially draw a line segment just a line horizontally and on one far side of the line one on the left endpoint you can put high variable food supply so from this standpoint of the subjective view of an individual there would be there would be a eka logical set of circumstances where they would be seeing the environment as having very high variance in the food supply which would be a very dangerous situation to live and because if it if it hits you hit a bad period of poor caloric production you're going to be dead so high high variable food supply is going to be a problem now as we move the line segment to the right on the far right we're going to put very stable food supply okay so so now we have two different very graphically different ways of an organism analyzing their situation in this case humans that you might have an environment that looks very capricious with respect to food supply on the left and then you have environments in the middle which seems sort of neither high variance nor low variance just sort of in the middle and somewhat risky and then you have an environment on the far right where the food supply seems extremely stable and therefore very very predictable now it's going to turn out that our hunter-gatherer ancestors saw their environments as a very high variable of food supply so the entire village in their psychology is actually down on the left end of our graph so I want you to think about this and then I want you to move a little bit in from the far left and move it a little bit to the right so we're going to move it one tiny little notch to the right now the little notch to the right we're going to call that say 10% of the way between the very far left end of our bar line and the very far end of our line in other words it's almost to the far left of the graph but it's not quite that that is going to represent big Pete big Pete sees the environmental caloric variance as more stable than little Stu little Stu is at the very far left of our graph he's in a lot of anxiety he sees the world as very capricious and he understands that he does not have the chops to survive on his own and so the is very difficult for him to get enough calories and so he's living in a lot of fear big Pete isn't is also living in a reasonable amount of fear because the environment does appear to be pretty capricious but it's less capricious to him than it is to little Stu now this graph as we move to the right and the caloric flow becomes more and more consistent what we're going to find out is that it's in humans best interests to start changing their behavior so at the far left of the graph the correct decision is going to be what we're going to call share so it's the right decision for these individuals on the left side of the graph to have communal processes where they reduce each other's exposure to the high variance of the environment by sharing and this is exactly what you see in stone age villages with the big piece and the little Stu's what they will typically do is the men will go out and hunt it hunting is a high variable you know risk reward ratio for getting food it's it's worth it because you can kill an awful lot of calories with one animal and as a result you can feed a whole village one kill if you're lucky but at the same time you may not get that kill so by communally bringing their talents together men will will then kill animals and then there will be a distribution of the meat throughout the village now you can imagine that in this high variance environment there's going to be effectively what you're seeing is something akin to communism the the phrase that describes communism is from each according to his ability and to each according to his need this is essentially what is happening in a Stone Age village that the notion is is that if you are very competent go out and use that competent competence and bring in as much calories as you can if it turns out that little stew needs some of your calories then you need to keep him alive and so go ahead and give him those calories and of course it's going to turn out that when we really look at these situations we're going to find out that big Pete gets the better cut of the meat the big Pete gets to brag about the kills and little Stu has to choke it down and it's going to turn out that the women obviously are going to value big Pete more than they are going to be little Stu all things being equal and so as a result big Pete is going to be in better reproductive circumstances than little Stu and those genes will tend to get reproduced more than little Stu genes which of course makes perfect sense so there are going to be reasons why big Pete is still going to put out a lot of energy in order to do this but at the end of the day this is going to be a community where there's going to be a tremendous amount of sharing but because Pete is actually at a different location on this graph of high variance versus low variance food supply peace inferences about how much sharing should be going on are very different than little Stu's on the left side of the graph it's going to be share on the very right side of the graph we could label it not share so in situations where the food supply is very stable so I want you to imagine a farming community where everybody that it's so benign that everybody simply goes out there and plants their potatoes and their corn and they pick the fruit off their fruit trees that everybody can survive anybody that's at all competent if you could chew gum and walk you can make enough calories out of your farm that you should be fine in that case it doesn't make nearly as much sense to have these mutual insurance processes to essentially have a communal situation what you want at that point is you would want something more akin to lace a fair capitalism where people are only going to be helping and sharing with kin that's pretty much what they're going to do and they're going to essentially not want to share with the rest of the group now no such environment exists in other words you don't have a situation where everybody in a local environment feels completely that the food supply is stable that there's no Attila the Hun that's going to attack us and take our food and our women etc so in other words you're going to find that all human societies will picture themselves and every member of a human society pictures themselves somewhere in this situation from the far left to the far right just by accident and I happen to label these on the left and the right of these graphs and it just turns out coincidentally that's what we happen to call it today the right side of the graph is not shared those are your the far right Republicans on the far left of the graph this is going to be your Communists your far far left sort of interventionist Democrats so these are these are the for the far end points the total conceptual projections of where these two views of how much sharing and mutually insuring that a society should be doing now it's going to turn out that individuals have a tendency to think that their political position is correct and it's going to turn out that they are sometimes incensed and very disturbed by other people's opinions about what is quote correct and what would be right and what would be fair it's going to turn out that of course reasons for this is going to be that the individuals themselves are going to largely differ tremendously about their inferences about how high variable their environment is with respect to food versus how stable it is so if you come from an environment where you've never missed a meal there's been nothing other than a steady food supply and that you can't really imagine any threat to that then you're going to have very little incentive to be thinking about how you should be sharing and the fact that the government that you live under is going to be essentially forcing you to share quite a bit of your income it's going to be very irritating and you are going to look at people who have a more variable resource base than you ie people that don't do as well as you financially and you are going to see them as essentially little stews that are taking more than they're worth often and you're going to be very irritated with them and you're thinking that they should be working harder and that they're lazy on the other hand if you happen to be on the left side of the graph that you find the market processes in front of you very challenging and difficult that you see the food supply is effectively highly variable and threatening you are going to look at people and on with greater means than you and you're going to be resentful and you were going to feel like that they're not sharing nearly enough and you're going to consider them very stingy okay and so this is effectively the difference between the left and the right wing today now there are other issues that that color American politics so you have novel issues like abortion and whether or not that should be legal and under what circumstances etc and you have other issues about you know global warming and how we ought to be thinking about that and what should be done and you know what should we do about the pollution in the rivers and how much you know carbon dioxide or monoxide or anything else ought to be allowed with respect to what kinds of production you have all sorts of issues that get piled onto here that have often completely a theoretical roots to who wound up where in terms of a political party on what issue however there is one fundamental issue that stays the same and the fundamental issue is there's always a party that wants to take resources from the well-to-do members of the society and redistribute those the resources to people that have lesser means and there are people that want to do less of that redistribution and keep more of the resources that they earn and not give to people of lesser means now you might say well what's right you know is there a right position in turn it turns out there is not a right position because we are no longer living in a Stone Age village where we're all looking at essentially the same ecological problems and that we have very very similar abilities that we can look close hand at how hard everybody is working and figure out how much sharing we need to do that optimizes our own best interests we no longer live in that situation so I want you to consider our little graph and consider that at the far left of the graph between the very far left which is little sue and then a little inch in from there it's going to be big Pete those people those two people who represent the highest income and lowest income earners and in that society those two people are close friends looking at very similar problems and they are part of a mutual insurance pool and they all understand what sort of the risk/reward ratios are of their relative situations big Pete does not consider loo little stew to be without effort and without some competence and without value okay and little stew does not consider big Pete to be anything more than a little bit ornery and a little bit judgmental with respect to his own lack of abilities he does not see big Pete as being essentially a glory hog that is that essentially steals from him in any way so as a result these people actually have pretty similar political views they find themselves at a little bit different location within the Stone Age village but they are actually looking pretty similarly now what I want you to do is think about this line that we've drawn that goes all the way from high variable food supplies all the way to very very stable food supplies on the other side and what I'd like you to do is draw a bell curve where the apex of the bell curve is right in the middle of these two polls and what we're going to find out when we draw this is that typically in a society we are no longer looking at food is the variable we look at all resources as the variable so people you know the left-wing talks about how people are starving in America etc etc this is ludicrous people are not starving in America people are overfed in America if you look at the lowest income people in the United States their leading cause of death is overconsumption of calories okay so there is absolutely no lack of food in the United States but that doesn't stop this process from happening okay this process gets widened psychologically not to food variability but resource variability and at that point what we're going to find is that the difference between big Pete and little Stu with respect to resources in the Stone Age was very very small those people had very very similar resources today the difference between somebody on the the low ascent of our society versus the high ascent of our society is an absolutely extraordinary completely unnatural difference in the staggering amount of resource differences that they have they literally have more than a billion to one differences in resources okay so it's going to turn out that with a millions to one potentially and certainly very often thousands to one difference that these people are actually located psychologically at very different places on this bell curve that so instead of being close to each other the people on the far right are way over in the capitalistic arena essentially saying let's not share the people on the far left or in a much more Stone Age kind of a mentality saying absolutely we should share tremendously look at the enormous you know stress that I have with far less resources than other people it's going to turn out that in our society what we have decided collectively among 300 million people is that we believe that the quote the closest thing that the truth is somewhere in the middle so if you actually think about where the society is you're going to turn out that it's right down the center but the psychological epicenter of the United States politically is that people sort of think it's about right and that the average person feels like it's pretty close okay you can see this by if you track how it is that we elect our officials we at we elect about half Republicans and about half Democrats which tells you that the psychological epicenter is very very close to the middle of these two concepts and what I want to then further point out is that the Democrats are actually the they must locate their ideological position halfway between the middle of the graph and way over on the far left of the graph that is where they are they're essentially what you would call that say the twenty-fifth percentile that is where they have to be ideologically so ideologically they are very much solidly on the side of the graph that says there ought to be much more sharing if you the Republicans then have to locate their ideological position halfway between the middle of the graph and the far right so their ideological position is there should be far less sharing if you think about this graph you think about how far these these two psychological epicenters are they are quite far apart so they they are they represent ideologies about what would be fair that are considerably apart and as a result the vitriol that you will see between the two is extraordinary the the the Republican or right position sees the left as unbelievably pandering to incompetence and laziness and is disgusted and wants to cut the government's budget and essentially tighten the belt of the society and get to keep more of their own money the people on the Left see the extraordinary grandiosity of the money on the people on the right particularly at the high end and consider it to be grossly unfair and immoral and believe that it should be absolutely heavily redistributed okay so we see that in the Stone Age those two individuals have a political problem but their viewpoints are pretty close because they live in very similar circumstances today we have 300 million people living in diversely different circumstances and the psychological epicenters of the two positions are very far apart and as a result people are talking at each other and actually screaming and it becomes the ultimate of you are immoral okay both sides see the other side is literally immoral the average voter doesn't see it that way they see it down the middle but this is where we get the the never-ending mess that you see in terms of how does the people look at these problems so that that is the the evolution of politics okay now I'm ready for a question all right here we have a caller here yes caller what's your name Nate can you hear me yeah I can hear you Nate please when the genius of Doug Lyall is going on a rant explaining something never interrupt him just because some idiot calls it well said God nate is it okay if I swear no good go for it we are not censored here yeah I just want to say Doug Lyall is the fucking genius first of all Doug you need to write a book about this relationship stuff because you know there's no one out there like you who explains in the way you do and what I love about you is go to the root of it like in your motivational triad why did the chicken cross the road people say to get the other side but why does he want to get to the other side just like with them and you absolutely destroyed in debunks exit dawned with by Chris Ryan that's absolutely a brilliant crip clip I want to actually cut it out and upload it to YouTube and title it Doug Lyall destroys debunk sex at dawn that was brilliant but by us it was my question I got it here my question was by the way on the topic of what's on the show the politics Doug already addressed is a few episodes back where he said that the president doesn't really matter all that much there are some things that the president can do like as far as executive action but you know so I don't know if anyone remembers that but um no I look great shown les alright so I'll just get to my questions shut up my question is uh Doug you talk a lot about people's ratings which I agree with and you're absolutely right because it's extremely highly competitive in the world as far as looks and ratings go yeah but my question is what did why did nature allow so many mutations with so-called fives because most people aren't 9 and 10 today right most people are probably like sevens or eights so why are the essentially like you said science doesn't care about people's feelings so it's kind of harsh politically incorrect thing to say but essentially why are there so many ugly people to nature how that happen yeah that's actually a really good question it yeah it turns out that the way I look at this just so that people understand how I look at numbers I would consider a five to be absolutely average and and then so I consider five to be at the 50th percentile a six at the 60th percentile 7 at the 70th so when I use those numbers I'm not using them impressionistic aliy I'm actually using them right down the line statistically so the average person is a five and the superb question is you know what why didn't you just keep scrubbing away at these mutation problems and wind up with a lot of great looking people okay the answer is is that in the nature of reproduction and genetic recombination the and the way the organism is defended against radiation there is going to be mutations in the genetic code and you can't stop it okay so the so essentially organisms are as perfect as you can make them and it turns out that you know what nature is doing is their nature is throwing spaghetti at the wall as fast as they can and some of that spaghetti is is better than others so the so it's going to turn out that the way that way nature seems to have this thing organized is that the lower mutation loads are going to be far more sexually attractive and they're going to out reproduce the higher mutation loads so the higher mutation load specimens basically take their lousy mutations with them to the grave and they're gone okay and so nature keeps trying to reduce the amount of mutations that would be in a given gene pool but it gets stopped by the fact that mutations are going to happen spontaneously because there's only a certain degree of fidelity in the reproduction of DNA and there's also radiation that's constantly pounding away at the DNA and that's going to cause mutations so they would call this black rain in other words there's always trouble when you are reproducing things so if you're trying to make cars in Japan you're trying to make Honda's you know you can you can have unbelievably good stuff machinery but somewhere along the line a little screw doesn't get doesn't get quite turned right and it gets vibrated away when it gets transported to Kansas City and then it turns out that some little part gets loose and you got a problem in your Honda so no matter how well you you know work at this thing there's going to be mistakes and and so that is why the world is full of fives there you go oh okay good question very good question all right yeah thank you very much for calling you bet so dr. Lyle so can you explain some of this like ecology of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton yes I don't I don't know a lot the let's see Dom Donald Trump I can't explain a lot Donald Trump is a is a is a very he's a very interesting character I don't consider Hillary Clinton that interesting she's a she's a very conventional very very smart you know political figure and obviously an extremely competent human being I don't think anybody would reasonably argue that the Donald Trump is a very novel kind of figure that is using an argument politically that is rarely used in the United States but it is used around the world it's called before in hand and so what Trump now what what motivates Trump is is anybody's guess I think he's uh I find him personally fascinating and and I think that I have no idea I have sort of a I feel like with Hillary Clinton personally I think you sort of know what it is that you're going to get and with Donald Trump you don't know what you're going to get so I think that variance that I see is something that is reflected in a lot of people's feelings you could get something very very interesting and potentially beneficial with Trump or you could get something pretty terrible that you don't know okay and so I think that this is what that what people are trying to assess and probably people's risk tolerance with respect to that issue sort of makes for how it is that they may feel towards him but but what what it's interesting to me probably the most interesting to me other than the candidates has been the strategy so Clinton strategy has been a standard political strategy which is to essentially get if you think about if you're sitting on this this curve that I talked about and you're sitting at the 25th percentile which is where the position should be it should be right in the middle of the far left position in the middle position that is exactly where you want to be you actually want to be slightly towards the middle from there because you want to take one percentile over the midline and so you're willing to sacrifice a little bit at the far left because there's more area under the curve at the middle of the graph and there is at the far left okay and so as a result that is the correct position to try to take 51% of the popular vote or to take the vote and that would win at the same time the Republican view is to try to get just a little bit to the to the left of the 75th percentile line so that the person in the middle feels like you're a little closer to them than the person on the left is closer to them and so this is the game the game is to make sure that you have you solidly don't lose the people that are the extremists of you that are nearby you you don't want to lose those to a third party but you want and you want to march as close to the middle as you can now now Trump despite all of the potential liabilities in his candidacy he actually marched closer to the center than Clinton did and he used the technique called the foreign hand so let me just briefly explain so this will help people understand why he has been has had the extraordinary popularity has has despite a lot of other potential liabilities that he has the Trump has has essentially said this is not the rich against the poor Hillary's has been absolutely a standard rich against the poor Democratic position this is there's no question that this is true you know this this is this is in fact the the effective responsibility the Democratic Party is to to essentially put beat that drum and that's the drum that they beat on the other side the the Ronald Reagan right side drum is to say hey the government is taking too much we're sharing too much you shot to keep your own money the he blames the government but really what we mean is less money being redistributed to people that make less than you so that is the Republican side of the argument has said I'm not about rich against the poor I'm about stopping the foreigners from stealing the money okay this is the foreign hand and nobody in American politics the best of my knowledge has ever played the foreign hand as brilliantly as Trump has plated and so when I first saw him in last summer they were asking him a question and this guy answered the problems China and he went on about China and I was amazed that the question didn't have anything to do with China and then I saw it asked him asked another question and he went again to China and so I I could see that this guy was going to play the foreign hand so he's played the foreign hand against China and he's played it against Mexico obviously and he's played it against Muslim and so he has done this they have said oh this is racist etcetera this is not racist this is it just so happens that you know there's there can be racial issues here but he's that is not actually the play the play is the foreign hand the play is to say I'm for the people of America against the outsiders as opposed to the standard position for the Republican Party of we need to cut that government ie distributions to the poor so this is this is a very very different election and for that reason and we will see how it plays out and so I you know it's despite what anybody says this thing is pretty close and this thing could move either way and I anybody could win obviously Clinton probably has a 70% chance of winning statistically at this point where it may be better but the foreign hand has been a brilliant play I have no idea whether Trump believes it I can't imagine that he does but it is a but it was an extraordinary play out of the political playbook and we are watching it on the world stage and it's it's interesting so that's that's my that's my look at this thing that in the previous podcast on stone age politics and modern-day politics yeah you mentioned that all politicians are basically lot they lie a lot because you have to be straight down so so in your thinking that Trump may just have mapped this all out and just said okay I'm gonna play this strategy and then go from there yeah and then you know we're learning more about the Clinton corruption and all that stuff now she's lying but but from what I'm sensing is you're saying this is all normal on both sides yes is the word kind of lie and Crabb solutely everybody is lying everybody is is pandering two bases everybody is attempting to get just a slightly bigger coalition than the other guy and you have no idea you know necessarily what these people think but you do know who it is that they who it is that they are effectively sort of owing in the end and and you know what it's a it's an interesting game and I don't consider it to be important at all just because I see the American Constitution in the American political system as unbelievably robust and and I see politics as the evidence would indicate is really quite you're relevant to almost anything in American life so there would be probably people objecting to that and I'm not saying it's completely irrelevant I'm just saying it's largely irrelevant so if anybody is all upset about what could happen in this election you need to understand one thing but the major key to your better future is you and that's that's from a James around one of the one of the very fine motivational speakers of our time from adventures and achievement and this is this is something to keep in mind no matter who wins who loses this this silly election the major key to your better future is you it doesn't have anything to do with Washington they I want to read you a quick excerpt from one of my Facebook friends who's just you know been posting every day about the Trump Clinton saga that we see yes and he basically says so here goes guys if you actually vote for Trump to become the president please be sure to unfriend me I don't care how long we do whether your friend or family once you cast that vote regardless of the elections outcome we will never have anything to say to one another ever again there you go here's a guy who's willing to give up all of his friends you know half of his friends and family right for this very more what he believes is a moral decision yes yeah he's believing it's a moral decision and and he's making a mistake but if it would take a fair amount of Education for him to think his way around that you don't know why somebody is sitting in the position they are seeing in terms of share not share kind of issues and a given politician can hit can basically resonate with their personal view and their personal view is just you know could be easily fundamentally different than you everybody knows that is that is old enough to drive a car everybody knows that there are people opposite in terms of your position that are very bright honorable decent people doesn't matter what your position is there are people that disagree with you VM le that are superb human beings that should give you pause if that doesn't give you pause you should realize that there are people that agree with you vehemently that are absolute total sleaze balls okay so I don't care where you are on this dimension you have your own reasons for sort of have intuiting what you think is fair but the truth of the matter is is that to think that a person's political beliefs about a given candidate are some kind of litmus test to their character is a really hugely mistaken inference and it's born of some rather profound ignorance listen I think that's enough for one night but I want to thank thank the caller that was a it was wonderful feedback and it was a always a pleasure to hear it my peacock feathers you know perked up a little bit I've learned a lesson not to interrupt the genius dr. Lyle yeah but just just to let that just in keeping with our program had it been a sultry female voice with with a little bit of a French accent I would have liked it ten times better but I really did like it just the way it was [Laughter] very good thank you dr. la that's that's I love that very good all right so thank you Nate
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