Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 5: Stone-Age politics vs Modern-day politics
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


today we're going to be talking about psychology of politics it's a very kind of emotionally charged subject I know that you know on Facebook social media and even with friends in person with this election coming up and and everything people people really bring out a different sides of themselves and we're here to talk with dr. Doug Lyall psychologist about what's what's really going on here what's what's this whole politics thing about well politics is a is a about a lot of different things that fundamentally what politics is about is it's about conflicts of interest and so people by nature are have values that are in conflict with another so two people cannot have the same boyfriend or the same girlfriend two people two families are not going to live comfortably in the same house two people can't home the same car in other words in principle things that are valuable to people are valuable to other people and that puts those those things in conflict and so civilization is really the process of bringing people or defining rules for where there's conflicts of interests between individuals or groups and trying to not settle those by the sword and by the club and so politics is so this sort of will change the frame for you to when you understand that politics is inherently conflicted and that the alternative to politics is literally people clubbing each other over the head and killing each other and grabbing and seizing and trying to keep a hold of what it is that they have so the alternative it's much worse than what we have and what we have is pretty good in the United States we have a representative democracy which were the people really are very significant say and in how our political system plays out but at the end of the day there is still conflicts and those conflicts drive obviously the strongest feelings that there are what's striking to me is how it seems that every election people go learn more irritated with each other about certain things it isn't getting more and more it always has been if you actually study history and you go back in the United States and you study the election processes of the last 200 years you'll find that they were highly conflicted there was tremendous insults that were flung at across parties and across individuals so now this is nothing new whatsoever and if anything we are more civil now than we've been before so we've been pretty civil now for probably 70 or 80 years but before that it was even even nastier than what you see now there's like two two parties right the Republicans the Democrats also known as the conservatives and liberals can you take us through I mean that mean for the I guess the Stone Age Village is Tony's brain what's happening here is that the there's been two major coalition's that have formed and this is typical it's typical around the world and it's true in the United States and those two coalition's are one that says essentially more government taxation and more redistribution of wealth and one but is saying less taxation and less redistribution of wealth and so these these two alternative views of how things ought to be actually emanated these are derivatives of the the most ancient political problems that exists for people and that that is these took place and started in the Stone Age so what happened is if you can picture yourself in the Stone Age Village and in the stone age village people are coming together because it's in their best interests to ensure each other and protect each other against disaster so if you have ten men and they're ten women that are living with them and there's 20 little children around we've got a little Stone Age village we're going to focus for the moment on the men for good reason there's going to be a reason why we're going to focus on them the village typical economic strategy for the villages as follows that each each pair bond you know husband wife kind of situation which incidentally they weren't married and those things didn't usually last for years and years the way they do now but they could but in any any one situation what's happening is that the the woman's job is to make sure that the man is fed at the end of the day and she does this by gathering vegetable matter she does not hunt because she cannot hunt have little children running around behind you and so it was the man's job to then do the high-risk high-reward dangerous behavior going on and hunting and so now what will happen is is that if you think about these ten men in the village and let's suppose that the average man needs to make two kills a week in order to feed his family adequately so you can imagine a situation where some of the men will only average maybe one and a half kills a week but another man might average four kills a week so you have a situation where some men are going to be more competent than other men and however they are still ensuring each other against disaster so if you're a man that makes four kills a week you might say to yourself why the hell should I be in the village incidentally the way the village deals with meat they deal with it very differently than vegetables than the vegetable matter the meat is put into the middle of the the kills or put in the middle of the village and they're divided up and so the head man or the best hunter might get the choices cut but actually it's relatively evenly divided that's a standard operating procedure for stoning at religious so you can imagine that if you were the more competent hunter that you would be you would have an irritation in you that that somebody who is only making one or two kills a week is eating essentially as much as you are and so you are feeling that that they're sore freeloaders and you're irritated with this and you're going to be very quick to criticize their work ethic in fact you're going to be thinking and saying from time to time that they are lazy and that they don't pull their weight on the other hand if you're the guy that makes one kill a week and you work very hard and you're just not as skilled and you see another person who makes four kills a week and you see that he is irritated with you and he's not too wild about sharing and he might even sneak and not share all the time then your attitude is is that he's stingy and so stingy versus lazy wind up being incidentally the two biggest insults that are found in Stone Age villages now fast-forward a hundred thousand years in modern America modern America you will absolutely find that the following is is the case on average there's huge overlap here so this is uh this is not this is in no way a clean-cut picture but there is most definitely a decided trend towards higher income people being more conservative and lower-income people being more liberal so on the liberal side of the coin the ideology is that they quote rich or high-income people are stingy and they should share more and the people the attitude of people on the higher socioeconomic status is that they share enough already and that they should they should be sharing less they've that they feel like the people at the lower end although needy are not working hard enough and so this this is we are seeing the dynamic tension of the Stone Age village played out in three hundred and thirty million people but it is it is actually an ancient tension and you know it's not going anywhere this is but this is where it comes from for the for the people that live in the big cities who tend to be more liberal although they're making a lot of money is this just an anomaly oh yeah I mean there's going to be plenty of people that are going to make a lot of money the liberal okay there's uh there was a time however sometime in the last 20 years I think of the Forbes 100 they I believe that were the over the top the the CEOs of the Forbes 400 or of the top fortune 50 or whatever was that every single one of them was a Republican except one of them was a libertarian like that that actually took place now that would no longer be the case ever since the Internet arena and we have some of these young geniuses out of Harvard inventing some new thing like Facebook or whatever and and they wind up so there's there's many more liberal folk in the top echelon now but they tend to be younger folks that that came out of the internet arena they were not they didn't go through the same process that these conservative folks went through when they got to the top so 20 years ago you didn't flash dance your way to the top on a brilliant idea what you did was you you worked your way you got to top grades you went to Harvard MBA school you fought your way through the 20 years you got to CEO and at CEO your track record was you know you got there because of one little step at a time where you made good decisions basically and so as a result of that your attitude toward sharing is not very generous and that's going to tend to make you a conservative whereas it's going to be it's going to be a little different if if the money that you make is a little bit capricious and has a luck quality so we're going to go back here and explain why this can work this way the imagine that actually dr. Asthana a village where the were the dynamic tension the actual issue on the table here is how variables does the food supply seem so if you are a person that only makes one or two kills a week the food supply seems highly variable you know one day you hit the next three days you miss you might hit two days in a row then you're out of luck for a week the whole thing feels very very gently whereas if let's suppose you're a guy that can make seven kills a week it feels very very stable to you feels like all you have to do is go out and apply yourself and you will surely be successful okay so you can you can imagine that the inferences about the variances in food supply are going to have a strong tendency to filter their way down into the political inclinations of those individuals so an individual for whom the food supply seems capricious is going to want to have the village share an individual who feels like the food supply is very steady is going to feel like we don't need to be sharing that much and so as a result now now as you move from one hundred gather society actually into an agricultural society you're going to find out that people are are less interested in sharing so people move a hunter-gatherer society is very communistic in its orientation but as you go towards an agricultural society where a person has to plant and then oversee their crops and then see them all the way to harvest and then see them to market and essentially has to oversee a tremendous amount of issues in order to gather the the result of their labors those societies are going to not be very interested in sharing and what they will find that they're sharing gets limited to Kin even difficult to share among friends ok in such societies so as as humanity moved away from a hunter-gatherer very interdependent group of people that were living very very communistical II they drifted increasingly towards a private property yours as yours and mine is mine and non sharing and they drifted in a conservative direction so the so as a result if you come from a place in life where the the the income seems highly variable and capricious it's very likely that you're going to you're likely to be more liberal and I think that this is one of the reasons you see this in Hollywood Hollywood you can do your best work as an actor and have a be a flop and the next year you do some shitty little movie that that is some of your worst work and you make five million dollars off of it the whole thing seems like unbelievably unpredictable and so the world economically actually seems unfair to you and you actually feel like we should be in a more share situation because you know that you feel kind of guilty over how easy it has been for you to make some of your money and as a result of that I have a feeling that some of that is happening with our young internet tycoons that you know three years out of Harvard with your brilliant idea you may have worked hard but really do you really deserve a billion dollar net worth I think it's very likely that you don't think that you do and so as a result I think you're going to see that tendency is going to be in some of our some of our the the fancy fancy kids in the fancy cities Arthur Brooks wrote a book called who really cares and he does right he basically did did a lot of research in this in this entire book and he basically said that conservative households in America donate about 30% more to charity each year than liberal hospice even if you have lower average incomes yes I hear you you know there's a little bit of a different situation that's going on there the issue is is that the there are there are differences there's a lot of differences that run between conservatives and liberals just in general and liberals for example are far more open to experience so if we if we start looking at personality characteristics we're gonna find it you know if we ask 50 year olds who's doing yoga we're gonna find out that liberals are far more likely to be doing yoga than conservatives if we we ask you know who has ever smoked pot of their life there's going to be no comparison so liberals tend to be very open to experience they also tend to be less conscientious and so by conscientious that they have less anxiety and tension about quote doing the right thing the so as a result they're going to probably have those credit scores they're going to have and one of the things that you're going to see is that conscientiousness is the Conservatives likelihood of giving to charity remember they're not giving to the government to redistribute the wealth they're actually feeling a responsibility to do the right thing with respect to a specific set of individuals or individual that they're looking to help so there there's a little difference there in these dimensions the Liberals tend to be more agreeable as people interestingly enough although Fox News people wouldn't say so but it is that true and for a culture to [Laughter] be a little bit more disagreeable so a conservative if you think in your head about what they look like psychologically on average they can to be less open to experience a bit more conscientious and a little bit more disagreeable okay ie not share okay so this is part of the of the picture where as though the liberal is going to be more open to experience less conscientious and and more agreeable and so these are some some characteristics that filter their way through so some political behavior winds up being explainable through this and so the liberal greater agreeableness becomes part and parcel also of the let's all just share and be friendly and that that piggybacks its way on into this share not share underlying dynamic political processes in in any complex society like ours are an amalgam of a lot of different issues so you have the abortion issue in here and you've got environmental issues etc etc but these are all actually totally what I'm going to call non ideological issues they they do not run a mean through human nature really all so the the theme that runs through human nature is politics those things are actually historical accidents who wound up on what side of what the there's nothing inherent about conservatism that would lead them to be less protected the environment the Liberals that's not an ideological derivative the but an idle ideological derivative that runs through this is in fact sure not share and and here's what I would point out to people so that you can can get a perspective on this I have I have friends of mine over the years that have been very conservative or economically conservative libertarians and they are adamant that we're sharing too much we shouldn't share and that in fact they will elevate this to the level of the principle morality but in fact we should not share now the truth of the matter is is that this is fundamentally incorrect the you can put yourself in a situation where the only reasonable course of action is communism you know give you one right now so on Sir Ernest Shackleton took a expedition on a boat called the endurance across attempting to reach the South Pole in early 1900s and they their ship got stuck in the ice and they had no no way to survive and they were had to get out of there or they're all going to die and they had to leave a group of them on a beach and they had a little boat that they that he had to pick the very best men that could get that little boat across a thousand miles of open ocean to hit a little island I think called st. George's Island you know somewhere down in hell a little whaling outpost was there anyway so he takes I call it seven guys on the boat so who does he take he takes the best swordsman he takes the best guy with a fishing line he takes the best guy that can run the sex bent he takes the best sailor he takes the best athletes in other words it was in everybody's best interest of the 25 men that he picked those seven best people that he could possibly pick that would be the best combination to actually make this thing survival then they go out on the open ocean and they they manage through a miracle to actually pull this off but I want to match I want everybody to think about the following suppose one little guy there's the great guy that has great touch with the fishing line and he pulls in a fish now a theoretical conservative argument would say hey I pulled in the fish so she guys take your own luck with the fishing line and go to hell it's mine okay now that would actually not be in anybody's best interest including the guy with the fish because the truth is he can't get out of that situation without everybody else's help so you might say well maybe he should serve more and the answer should be again no this is actually not the correct solution there is only one correct solution to this problem and the correct solution is is that you need to divide the food in such a way that optimizes the likelihood of all seven surviving so if our fisherman needs half as much food to survive as our big burly horsemen then the big boards Lee horsemen should get twice as much out of that fish as our little as our little fisherman so this literally becomes karl marx's manifesto from each according to his ability to each according to his need that you you can conjure up a situation in human life that looks an awful lot like an interdependent Stone Age village where that is literally the only and optimal solution to political problem as soon as those guys hit the beach in England and their national heroes it's a whole different story because now they are not in an interdependent situation and now it's it's all about you know what chicks and fame and cool shit can I get for me okay and so now they're an entirely different situation and now they all spontaneously are no longer little communists they've all become little capitalists okay and so and I can take tale believe I was in academia and there's a lot of far-left people in academia and you know I've asked more than one academic if they were so convinced that the world ought to be sharing you know I knew that they were making seventy two thousand dollars here as it was printed they're as government employees uc-berkeley that's what they're making but then the national mean the United States wages at the time we're about you know twenty three thousand so why aren't they phoning up their fifty thousand dollars and dividing it back into the pot okay and nobody wants to give me an answer I roll discuss cetera no I said hey listen why not just twenty thousand just take yourself down to fifty for God's sake you're still make it twice as much no oh okay what about 10,000 no what about 2,000 no no no no no no okay so nobody's interested in sharing and that's because despite their ideology there they are sitting in a situation where they recognize that the correct fundamental solution to the political problem is not share okay and so this is so what I'm trying to say here is there is no quote correct answer to the problem of Baltics the correct answer actually depends upon your personal view of how variable the resources are and how difficult they are to get so if you happen to be someone who by virtue of your history and your circumstances and your abilities find find the economic world very difficult to navigate as you see people with phenomenal resources you can't help but infer that it should be a share situation whereas if you're someone who has you know through your own abilities and your own effort has ground your way dollar by dollars to a million dollar network you know over 30 years you're not interested in sharing and your attitude is a I made it you can to you know punch you know beat get to the get to the car wash then become manager the car wash save all your money work double time in one day you can own a car wash and then maybe you could be rich okay and they see they have that attitude and you're not going to talk them out of it but the point is is that the vitriol that you will see in the society around any election time is two different groups of people looking at the problem from different perspectives and the left look at the light and says how can you be such stingy and heartless and the right looks the left and say how can you be so so ineffective and lazy and and and basically be beads and the two of them are looking at each other through very different glasses and they cannot agree and they want now for for the Libertarians among you know are they just the most antisocial you know I wouldn't do it all myself kind of thing okay is actually it's actually a fundamentally a economic conservative but they're an economic conservative that cannot stand the the Big Brother government politics that that come along with the conservative party so so as a result they actually sound like liberals when you talk about social issues so libertarians are the slightest bit interested in arresting anybody for smoking dope they don't think it's a mortal sin or anything else the they are they are not interested in in government intervening in moral issues for example libertarians would instantaneously legalize prostitution nothing nothing makes less sense to a libertarian than then illegal izing drugs or prostitution beyond so the we could we could talk about other issues as well but so a libertarian is it has you know funny-looking views to people's on either side but they have a fundamental view that runs runs through the core of their thinking which is the minimal possible amount of government that that we can stand because essentially they don't like the idea of of actually government force forcing anybody to do anything so that that's the fundamental principle there but they are not mischaracterized by the left as being fascists which is you know insane the left walls so characterize conservatives as fascists which is absolutely not true anybody that says that has no idea what a fascist government looks like fascist governments are totalitarian dictatorships that use violence in order to intimidate those citizens and take their property and so that we I mean that is an extreme insult from the left to our conservative right but it has it is no truth in it whatsoever the America is actually a magnificent place politically it is a place where this deep stone-age divide between conservatives and liberals literally ends at the level of insults it's like well how great is that I mean what a fantastic situation to have where what we do also if you think about this conceptually think about the that the average individual in the United States sits between two poles of share and not share so think about share not share on one end that we're going to call that the left end pick the bell curve and on the very far end at the very left end of this bell curve there's going to be a thing we call share and that's pure communism now the far right we're going to have very far end it's going to be not share and that's less a fair capitalism and in the middle you're going to see the average brain of the average human being in the United States they sit right between sharing on chair they don't want to see poor little people that you know some some lady that got kicked out of her house by her drunken husband and needs a shelter and she's got her three little kids that have been abused and they don't say too bad you should have been in church and then you would have had an insurance policy I don't say that average American says we need social services for people so that when tragedy strikes and their interpersonal relationships or their and their health they have a safety net under them were plenty wealthier to provide that the average citizen believes that that should be there okay and it should I don't think that I can show to my wacko far-right libertarian - friends I can show them always a deaf dumb blind schizophrenic that has no family that absolutely is in not any position to survive without help and it would be insane to be in a society as wealthy as we are but we didn't extend that help and you know what the average American has their own little moral compass that sniffs this and it puts them right in the middle of these two polls and the political epicenters of the left and the right have to be then a big notch over from the center and so the left the ideology of the left sits between the middle of this board and the far left and that means they're pretty left-wing and the ideological right has to sit between the middle of the board and the far right and that puts them pretty right-wing and so the ideological difference between those two is pretty far apart but here's here's the beauty of the United States and its political setup the fact is is that let's suppose that you are sitting on this bell curve that goes from zero percentile to 100 percentile with 50 in the middle and the ideological left sits a center of the Democratic Party sits at the 23rd percentile now what it tries to do is it's trying to capture the fat meetings oh so it actually wants to move a little bit to the right to try to grasp those DUHS rich people right the rich population is sitting at the 51st 52nd percentile if they can move just a little bit to the right to the middle and not lose their people on the far left that's where they want to be this is the dilemma of Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton sits right there if she moves too far to the middle then the very far left clear over there at the full-share start saying no you're not representing us bernie is representing us and that's where Bernie Sanders said Bernie Sanders sits all the way at the far left of the poll Hillary sits at the 25th percentile and she doesn't dare move too far the center too early because she will lose the people at the far left which is an important core those people are important because they will never vote for the person on the right so but they might vote in protest for for Bernie Sanders and so therefore Hillary is in in a trap it's a dilemma of the Democrat which is how far to the center can you get without losing the left the exact same thing is happening on the right side of the equation whoever's at the right side of the equation you know they're trying to sit at the 75th percentile of this distribution but if they they want to move to the middle that if they move a little bit to the middle they piss off the people on the far right and they lose them okay so as a result each party has a problem but they sit in a dynamic tension with each other and they all play the following game they try to signal to the middle that they're to the middle but as soon as they start hearing squawks from there from the far core of the constituency they move back and sound more conservative this is why they are lying all the time they are constantly showing two faces okay and so both parties are constantly showing two faces and the system of government itself in the United States cannot really move very far to the left or to the right because the the ideological epicenter the United States it's between these two poles now is there is there any way to tell if people are happier in a slightly more conservative government or a slightly less conservative or I mean slightly more liberal government oh yeah there is i world wide research has actually been done on these issues and it's a little muddy perhaps but here's ears they're really here's the bottom line it's work people knowing it turns out that a huge predictor of human happiness is actually income so people like to think that you know the people living in I don't know Biafra people living in Ecuador are happy and cetera et cetera because they go down there and they see some smiling faces and they think it's all cool well I'm not saying that darn happy people everywhere and happiness is a natural consequence of people doing well and people did well in the Stone Age on on subsistence income so happiness is quite possible at low incomes but it turns out that happiness gets easier and easier and easier as material problems are solved so people get happier as their country gets wealthier and they personally get wealthier and as the world gets wealthier and it's obvious as to why if you've got three little kids and one of them has a rotting tooth and you can't afford to take them to a dentist there's a lot of misery in this okay so the is it so it turns out that as human beings get wealthier it takes burdens and burdens and burdens off of people's backs so it turns out that countries that that they keep incentives in place for poor people to be productive and creative and in a competitive situation those countries are are more economically efficient and their citizens tend to be happier so so the United States is is quite high on the list for human life satisfaction because we're quite high on the list in terms of economic per capita success if you if you socialize this country and and redistributed wealth there significantly you would disincentivize the creativity and also the work ethic of the not share streak that lives within the United States economic system and as a result you would reduce economic general economic success people would have less there would be more people unable to have their kids tooth build and you would have people less happy so you you want to be compassionate in terms of providing the really the fundamental reason for human civilization at all is for us to ensure each other against tragedy that's why people get gathered together in Stone Age villages because you're a whole lot better off living in the village than you are by yourself you by yourself if you break your leg you're pretty well dead so we you see you want to have the benefits of a society that has a capacitance structure but you do not want to de incentivize that that economic system to the point where you seriously hamper economic success and so that's the that's the tension that we sit under so what role does the population size play in the way the politics swings for instance like with Norway there's five million people versus in the USA three hundred thirty million people yeah you know I'm not sure this the size at that level by the time you have five million people you you uh if you have a share a share structure you've got kind of the disincentivize mess because because as soon as you get I mean anybody that's ever run a business with a partner knows instantly how much conflict of interest you have with that partner like you thought you're going to equally work hard share the profits and pretty soon you're feeling like you stop working very hard and now you're irritated as hell so as soon as you as soon as you wind up with the share structure you're in trouble however I believe Norway is you can you can have these sort of hybrid systems I think Norway's a system where I think they get a hell of a lot of money on it will I I believe that's true and so their personal taxes their personal income taxes are about fifty five percent and as that may explain so that's a that's a share shit more predominantly more of a share system right right right and I think that you're going to find I think you don't want to necessarily look to to a single data point to try to make inferences about this like Norway's could have you could have a relatively homogenous population doesn't have such a racial tensions and history around that and where where a lot of money is being made a lot of the money of may be made quite easily by pumping oil reserves out of the ground and so essentially somewhere along the line they wound up with a fairly shared situation where that money is sort of distributed half-assed equally around the country and and as a result you could have sort of a hybrid fairly disincentivized system that that works pretty well because it's pretty wealthy the UH I think you're in worse shape if you have a country like this where you essentially are inhibiting economic growth and innovation where they are not wealthy okay so Norway has reached a level of wealth where the average person can have their dentistry and can have a warm blanket it can have to eat on by virtue of natural resources not their innovation in the worldwide free market or if you are if you tried to pull that same stunt in Taiwan you'd have a mess on your hands so there are going to be e there is going to be you know individual variation how this plays out but the truth of the matter is people are better off free they're better off with free enterprise incentives the possibility to get rich the possibility to say I'm going to work pretty hard and get pretty rich and the possibility is saying I'm not going to work that hard and I'm going to take less I'm going to enjoy myself and my free time in my family more that's assault fine but when you when you take away the incentives with pretty onerous taxes you very quickly find out that as they do in England and in Ireland when you have fairly onerous taxes the standard of living takes a real hit and the and the satisfaction that people have in life takes a hit as well now it's not huge it's hard to see it but if you look at it carefully with good science you'll find that it's there now so it's ok let's let's change topics a little bit because Europe this is this is kind of opened my eyes a little bit I remember the very first time I heard you talk about politics this was maybe six seven eight years ago and it kind of changed changed me a little bit because I would go around trying to argue with people and and what was at the basis of this argument was that I could somehow change their mind it changed the country and everyone would you know run around with holding hands and everyone's happy because you know they've got a good system right from what you're telling me now and from what I remember before is this is kind of how people are and it may be either genetic or it may just be ingrained or might be situational based on the current may be like a five-year average of finances needs wants etc then I might gain that right yet absolutely so the question I have is you know with went now for the next what is it six months or so Oh friends are going to be trying to engage us in the political discussions and probably trying to bait us to decide whether we are share or not share right what I know what are some ways to approach this these type of situations a little waste of time the address it you are knowledgeable about this and you actually understand I actually did not understand this myself I was very interested in economics as a young man and I learned a great deal about it and but then I it was all the way to might have been ten years ago that I read discussions by the the brilliant evolutionary husband-and-wife team and UC Santa Barbara john tooby and leda cosmides who outlined this argument of share not share dimension and the importance in the stone age of the variance in food supply and determining where individuals stood on this dimension so I as soon as I put those glasses on once again wasn't the first time the tooby and cosmides educated me about something important and hopefully not the last and but any rate this this made me quickly see that this is a little you know economics is complicated subject and personality is a complicated subject and and evolutionary psychology is a complicated subject so by the time we have a triangulation of general principles of psychology than principles of individual differences in psychology and then we have situational differences in people's economic circumstances and what's in their personal best interests you essentially have something that's far to to complex complicated to actually take an individual from A to Z and to talk them out of an antenna bus' ition so I don't bother I recognize that whatever whatever history of circumstances gave rise to their per current political situation of what they feel they're there for reasons that I'm not going to untangle and I'm not gonna I'm not going to bother myself with it I'm just act lessons and and ignore the whole thing that's the best solution I love it you know ever since this was actually a little longer than eight years ago that I heard you talk about this this was maybe 10 years ago or so yeah nine years ago and since then I have tried to stay away from political conversations and I've been way happier as a result very bad oh yes but it's very it's very difficult not to infer a essentially dangerous and expensive motivation on the part of anybody who disagrees with you you were designed into it with a stone-age brain that says you're either with me or against me on the share not chair dimension and if you're against me you are morally wrong okay and that that that characteristic being part of human nature if we recognize that that's what's sitting on the other side behind those eyeballs you'll realize you just take a pass on the whole discussion so this brings us to the next question is let's say for our people listening they did not understand this for many years and they just argued right and left about politics with everybody they could come in contact with which you can imagine them maybe let's say they've offended somebody where are some ways to kind of suit that and make up for it maybe this is a broader topic but yeah actually the way the way you you do things is as follows that all you need to do is you need to signal that you're not in an entrenched position and so if ever any discussion comes the the it's very easy to signal that you know I I see that you know I'm not so sure like whoever if you're identified with the right or the left and you've offended somebody in your family about this or whatever it's very simple matter of any discussions come up just signal but you know you're not so sure about about the that anybody's really got this figured out now if you signal that you are you are you're unclear about who do you think's got it all figured out you don't really think that maybe anybody's got it all figured out that that is a and a willingness to signal that the people that you may be most comfortable with ideologically hearing you're not sure sure they got all the answers okay if you signal that that is a that's a big that's drawing essentially it's like an octopus we put ink in the water so that people can't quite see where it is that we are and that's what we want okay we we want them to not be viewing us from an entrenched position we want them to view us as someone who's more flexible and open and then if they get all encouraged by that and they try to keep you feverishly sell us on their position because they smell a potential convert we say yeah I'm not so sure about your guy either you know and man I'm kind of muddy about the whole thing I don't know I'm not sure what I think about it okay and but you know I mean one way or the other but I'm not I'm not fix that's the that's the right way to do it and and that'll keep you that can actually repair a lot of fences I did this been the in I tell people in the vegan world when they've offended everybody in their in their brother behind they're theoretically superior diet I tell them listen you tell them I'm not so sure that doctor schmoes right about everything and that one signal is enough to put relief throughout a family system and so these are these are the things we can do it's the physical albey octopus the octopus strategy kind of muddy the waters yeah yeah see I've tried this in and in it does work except there's always some people who say well how can you not care about the political system of our country you have to make up my mind and they kind of just game you or try to I'm assuming it's the very conscientious very disagreeable people who say yeah you know you live in this country you know your ancestors work hard get here so you better like come up with some opinion yeah actually I look at the I look at the United States political system as actually a marvel the I I think it is you know we give lip service to it in political speeches but the people that are doing those political speeches have got oratorical skills they say that but really I don't believe that they really think it and feel it I think that they're they're determined to try to I don't want to push their position but the truth is is that the United States political system is absolutely ingenious and and the concept of a check and balanced system is phenomenal I forget who is is it said it I can't remember I think it it might have been Oscar Wilde but we could look it up somebody said to cheers for democracy and in other words you can't give it three cheers because you're going to be pissed off and there's going to be a lot of things that are going to happen that you're not going to like no matter where you are in the political spectrum but you got to give it to cheers because it's a this is a remarkably robust battleship that that all the hits that come from the vicissitudes of history of the last 200 years have really not come close to defeating it the actually the closest we've certainly had the civil war which that's a whole long discussion about the political situations civil wars isn't what people think it was and so that a whole different issue but the other than the Civil War if you talk about you know all the dissonance and tension throughout all the years that you know the Vietnam era and the Great Depression all the things that have happened the United States over the last 200 years this is a remarkably robust system and with its check and balances is a fantastic place and my attitude is I really don't care very much one way or the other who the hell is the president because the beauty of the current United States is that it doesn't really matter very much the truth is it's so robust with so many course correction capabilities within the system that it is it is it's like a big battleship that's very hard to give it any serious damage to and that's and anybody that actually looks at history and looks at be for example by any measure I mean it can certainly matter do we think that Barry Goldwater would have put us in the Vietnam War probably would not have so we would have had a different outcome you can and you can go back and name other presidents and and decisions that they made would would a al gore have put us into Iraq in the way that George w did maybe maybe not so who knows and we can't really we can't take an ideological position on good bad or there we could just say what we think looking through the lens of history but the truth of the matter is this is a remarkably robust system and the beauty of it is that for the average person on the street and the average person living their life the beauty of it is we don't really fundamentally need to care about who's king because the king is not the king the way they were in medieval times where they had phenomenal control of these existence the president doesn't really matter very much one way or the other and that is the beautiful thing about America I think we can we can we can vote comfortably and no in in November or not right [Laughter] one last question before before before we go you know with with the share not share this is this has actually given me a question about the third-party candidates and I'm sure you know there's a number of different third-party candidates out there but a recent poll came out to that about 37% of Republican voters would consider a third party candidate if Trump gets the nomination and another poll came out saying that 33 percent of the Democratic voters won't vote for Clinton for Hillary if she gets a nomination yeah so now the third-party candidates might have a little boost in there do you think you know given all what we talked about the psychology politics how likely is that to happen yeah I I don't think it's likely at all the this is at the fundamentals fundamentally it gets down to share not share and people come down on one side of that or the other and so there are third parties in the United States the the most I think the most successful third party maybe ever was might have been Ross Perot and and he you know he was coming and he managed to dig enough votes out of there to to have certainly he pulled more votes from from George seniors than he did from Clinton and so it wound up giving Clinton the presidency third parties can be very important in terms of pushing both of the major parties keeping them in their little locked in their little silos that they can't move that far out of Ralph Nader actually as though as a warning to the far left Ralph Nader actually resulted his small tiny little candidacy resulted in in George W defeating Al Gore okay had Ralph Nader not been campaigning at the far left those those very few little votes that resulted in in Al Gore losing Florida would have gone to Al Gore and he would have easily defeated Bush and forth and that would have been the election so third parties have influence in the United States and tricky funny little ways but no no where are you ever going to get a third party but there's going to mount any serious challenge never going to happen okay interesting interesting I like I love it politics is a fun subject for me but but it's fun to think about it not so much fun to argue about it but I know one last question if we can if we can go there one thing I was thinking about is can we infer about the prosperity of a country based on whether it's you know people are electing more conservative government versus a more liberal government not not in not an in in democracies like the United States because the liberal versus conservative doesn't move the needle very much in terms of policy in other places it would so if you had a poor example a communist a country that actually voted was able to get in a major capitalistic regime that was you know that was actually a free-market regime you would improve that country's economics but that generally will never happen because you you can't move you can't move ideology and infrastructure that fast the United States is magnificent because it started out with a lot of really smart people trying to figure this out in an early time when things would move slowly and we got a chance to build this fantastic system brick by brick and other other places can't do that so this is a great experiment in human nature and we were all blessed with it well so everybody is going out there to argue I guess the message is don't waste your time you got it well thank you again very much for for coming in and kind of explaining this explaining why some of our closest friends can have such different views on politics despite getting along with everything else that we discuss so it's been very very informative really really appreciated great my pleasure Nate pleasure to be with you again
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist