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Episode 90: Saying sorry, Borderline personality, Multiple personality, politics
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today we're going to be talking about some listener questions that have to do with borderline personality disorder multiple personality obsessive compulsive we have if we can get to we have a question from one of our listeners about an episode of erectile dysfunction he had maybe the anxiety associated with it he's trying to figure out why but before that but before that I was sent an article while I was reading it on Facebook and the article is titled what to say to little kids instead of say sorry and the context of the article is this author she is talking about how she visited a playground at a kindergarten and she was she saw what a little boy accidentally stepped on this little girl's finger and the boy went up to the girl looked in their eye and instead of saying sorry he said are you okay can I get you a wet towel and she was crying but she shook her head no and then after her tears one way they went back to playing and so to this author she saw this and it to her it was saying that we shouldn't make kids say sorry and that sorry to her is essentially a way out that if you teach a kid to say sorry for anything and it's like a little hit-and-run driver where you just say sorry you let it go and then now you can just move on so so her whole article is about telling people to just say it to ask what they can do and be empathetic and bringing them together and she has a whole list of steps what was interesting dr. Lau's when I sent you this article say hey what do you think about this article you remember what she replied to me Adam ha ha that I said I thought it was ludicrous but I don't know what I said but I said I asked you as a you know interesting article what do you think for the show you said great article for you to read and then I'll bash it that's about right yeah this is a this is sort of typical of people that are thinking that you are teaching children characteristics and this is a this is just gross ignorance and of course she's got whoever wrote this article I assume it's a female the that who's interested in the childhood little issues of children and their little developmental processes and yeah this is just ridiculous you don't you don't teach your children morality you don't have to instruct it you don't have to do anything they will quickly learn what is appropriate in the social environment saying you're sorry is totally legitimate let's talk about why I hadn't even thought about it till now but let's think about this if you step on somebody's finger and you say you're sorry that that's actually very important communication that comes naturally to people it's basically saying I see that I have done something to hurt you but it was not my intention and since it wasn't my intention you don't have to worry that it's going to continue in that it's going to escalate okay that's extremely serious information extremely important information and totally natural because people are aware that they bump into people that there's that there's accidental contact between individuals on in various dimensions that we can offend we can bump into physically you know you can imagine what a difference it is if you have an auto accident and you get out of your car and you're like I'm so sorry as opposed to as opposed to hey I'm not sorry like wow big difference and so the idea that sorry isn't enough and that it's a blank check you know to mean is just a completely stupid so that this is an example of some brilliant social engineering on somebody's part saying oh no we're going to go above and beyond and really train these super citizens who will not just say sorry but instead we're going to bypass that communication and go right to you know what you can do to to help the situation ludicrous okay the the truth is is that human beings will figure that out naturally in their own good time to the extent their intelligence and maturity and personality will will cause them to make those appropriate empathic inferences and that is that so that the whole notion that we're going to coach teach etc etc and make a difference in young people's characters is just sheer stupidity but you know what are you going to do sometimes such is life in in the era you know the truth is is that there there are many many reasons for for this this misunderstanding and you know I can just you hear my frustration I'm really not particularly frustrated with the author of this article is just some pop writer that thinks that they've learned something deep and important than that they've seen something fascinating and you know important now the truth of the matter is is that the fault of this lies with courses throughout the United States on in developmental psychology and social psychology etc and the academics academic psychology is still ladened up to its gills in learning theory and but there are reasons for this and some of the reasons are legitimate and some of them are disgusting and both are at play here so I don't want to give listeners the the idea that I'm just completely and thoroughly disgusted with anybody that ever makes this kind of inferences about human nature I'm not I'm frustrated well my frustration is so let me first explain why we're in this mess learning theory began reach rule II with Ivan Pavlov and kovrov had fantastic insights and experimentation there really ushered in a whole new way of thinking about the brain so through classical conditioning colossal conditioning was a great discovery and certainly other people had talked about associative learning I mean that goes back for a long time but no one had any data and no one really had a feel for this tell Pavlov had run his experiments with the dogs and digestion and hitting the belt and so that ushered in a tremendous amount of research and then 30 years later 40 years later BF Skinner comes along with with operant conditioning and really takes it takes it to a whole new level and so behind truly grand discoveries in classical conditioning and operant conditioning psychologists really did feel like this this was the way of the world this is how the mind works and I know I probably said this before but man I'm gonna say it again the the Rio because it's directly germane to my disgust with this article you're just talking about and that is that the skinner by putting a pigeon in the cage or a rat in a cage and then you put them in a cage and they press a little bar and the they're only get a pellet if they do something right before before that that you want them to do so they spin to the left or they spin to the right or they get up on their hind legs or flap their wings or flap the left wing or flap the right wing etc in other words by by reinforcing with food precisely what it is that you want done you wait for them to do a behavior that you want that's uh so for example if it's spinning to the left you wait until they move to the left a little bit and then boom you present them with food and what will happen is the the organism then is sophisticated enough it isn't thinking this thing through consciously it just that the brain literally will make that movement more than it will make the movement of spinning to the right it will because if the last thing it did something it doesn't know what it did that caused the food to come but it's going to spend to the left more likely than it's going to spin to the right if the last time its punted the left food appeared and so then you do it again and then it'll start spinning to the left some more and then you do it again and then you let it spin bit you instead of waiting until it spins 30 degrees you wait until it spins 40 degrees and then you'd beat it and you keep doing this and then pretty soon you can get this thing spinning in a circle and so the the learning theorists bye-bye this is called shaping and so by being able to shape behavior in any way that they wanted with these animals they of course then made the inference that that this is why animals do what they do they came up with the inference out of this that essentially if you got an animal from the day it was born and you then were in charge of what we're going to call the reinforcement contingencies in other words you reinforce certain behaviors and you did not reinforce others then you would say well that is why then animals doing something if we could get control of its environment and we could get control of the reinforcement schedules we will be able to program that thing's behavior we will be able to predict and control its behavior well the fact that they can do that in a cage and make it be truth was extremely impressive to behaviorist and and psychology in general academic psychology and of course on the other side of the equation you got the Freudian saying look this has nothing to do with humans humans it's all about you know what happened in the edible stage of the conflict between father and son and penis and everything else of a son so they're they're completely out to lunch in a whole different area of the field the but the learning theorists are actually right in the heart of objective science and they're their achievements were impressive but what they did not understand and they did not appreciate at all was they did not appreciate that animals came in to the game with a phenomenal amount of pre-programmed decision-making this is what they didn't understand so they they didn't understand you cannot condition a cat act like a rat you can condition both of them spin to the left but you can't you're not going to condition one of them to meow and you're not going to have them stretch the way a cat would stretch and you're not going to have you're not going to be able to condition that rat to chase a string but you never have to condition the cat to chase a string it'll do it from the very for the first time it can open at us and so the behavior is basically ignored because it was inconvenient and it was way too complicated and it went a place that they they didn't have really the intellectual courage of chops to understand what they were looking at they did not understand that the organism comes of course with the ability to learn which it was a very important understand but more than anything it comes pre-programmed with a phenomenal amount of downloaded pre-programmed essentially value judgment systems this they did not understand at all and that lack of understanding it permeates the academic thinking in in psychology all the way to clinical psychology and so the and so learning theory the idea that you essentially learn to be a human that you're going to learn your morality that you're going to learn the better way to talk to somebody when you've stepped on the finger this is ludicrous this is essentially thinking that we shape these people by reinforcement into being good little people as opposed to the idea that they're a human being and if they're born a human being they're born with natural empathic mechanisms that are actually part and parcel of the existing system that it's already in the system to be this way you have to learn the specific words to communicate the thing that that you have to learn the words of that specific linguistic culture so you don't have to learn to feel sorry and to say I'm sorry but you have to in other words your brain already knows what it is that you're supposed to communicate in deep nonverbal algorithms it already knows it so the but whether you have to learn is you have to learn to spit it out in English okay oran Chinese or in Hebrew or whatever languages that you have this luckily so that though is absolutely not taught okay this is uh the the feeling and the action of apology and the reason for the apology these are shaped through evolutionary time as the the natural neural circuits of humanity and so this this writer and people then whoever is that the teacher at that school or the counselor that's invoking this ludicrous program of teaching the children to be more this or that way morally is just completely wasting everybody's time and self aggrandizing scheme all behind learning theory and it's all ludicrous so that's uh that's why so you know what I didn't even tend to say anything about this thing and we we now spend 15 years 15 minutes blasting it but it deserves to be blasted not that these got that these poor people these poor saps that are uneducated trying to do this thing but essentially my ire is for is for the very often throughout the history of psychology in the 20th century the lack of intellectual honesty and courage on the part of scientists deep in the system in learning theory that that did not and would not acknowledge that their theory had a massive gaping hole and that it in fact is essentially fundamentally wrong and that if they needed a huge overhaul and that overhaul is evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychology is the correct view this always disturbs people that are more open minded and they have a hard time believing that there's such a thing as a correct view and an incorrect view there can only be one objectively correct view of psychology all other views are wrong to varying degrees evolutionary psychology is the correct view from which to view psychology that doesn't mean that there won't be debates battles empirical questions a lot of investigation to actually figure out what evolutionary psychology is but the fact that evolutionary psychology is the correct view is really not in any realistic dispute the evolutionary psychology is the is the realization that the mind and its operations were shaped by evolution and they were shaped by Lucian in a particular fashion that that human there are human universals to the motivational and psychological and emotional architecture of human beings that that are human universals in the so in the same way that you have a Grey's Anatomy of the body that you can learn medicine and anatomy and physiology at UCLA and it doesn't matter where you go on earth you are a qualified doctor if you understand that anatomy and physiology you don't have to learn Aboriginal physiology in you know to to to be able to operate effectively on those peoples you know what it is because around the world all humans are anatomically effectively identical the of course with moderate individual differences that exist not only within gene pools but between gene pools as well but there is a universal physical architecture of humans and there's a universal psychological architecture of humans and that architecture just as the physical architecture was shaped by evolution so is the psychological architecture learning theory basically says no there is no there is no universal psychological architecture of humans what there is a it's a blank slate and we learn through reinforcement what it is that we are and what it is we become and how moral we are and whether or not we learn to say what can I do instead of I'm sorry and that changes our psychology like hell it does okay and civility uh it makes it makes human seem really intelligent they can learn everything in just a few years yes actually TV and comic cosmides and Steven Pinker and others have have shown that that is it's actually would be impossible it's it's actually literally impossible you you can't possibly learn to be a you have to know too much there would be for example a young child will point at a cup and and you'll say cup and it knows intuitively that you don't mean the color and you don't mean the handle and you don't mean the hole in the middle you mean the hole you mean the whole thing that you you would be impossible for you to learn language if you did not already come pre-programmed with the knowledge that when you point to something and mom says cup that you means the whole thing that is a phenomenally important instinct okay without that instinct you could not learn language it would be impossible it would be very difficult for you to ever figure out what the hell they were talking about so there are a tremendous amount of instincts that make up what human nature is and and let me tell you you don't learn to be a human you just are one alright let's move on so you'll see got some questions yeah that's a perfect segue to talking about these little individual differences we have but I have one really quick question follow-up question about this and that is is same sorry too often does that make people perceive someone as weak weaker or careless hmm well if you're seeing things sorry let me it depends on why so a person that may be clumsy may be making a lot of mistakes and having to say I'm sorry a lot and and other people may perceive that it's like hey what if you're sorry so much how come you aren't more careful you know I'm saying and so they're going to start getting irritated and feeling like you may have the empathy to to to understand that you're screwing up but you're not seemingly having enough chops to figure out how to avoid it you know I mean so saying I'm sorry is not a blank check it it immediately gives you the benefit of a doubt and it will give you the benefit of a doubt quite often but obviously if it's if it's overused over and over again then then people are going to get frustrated that's if you're making mistakes now what if someone is essentially being unbelievably submissive then then they're essentially trying to trying to get any little thing that they they they're sorry that they didn't pick up all the people's trash they're sorry that they you know they didn't clean up the lunchroom their saw etc people can read what that is that's a that's a very scared person worried about getting kicked out of the coalition and so people pick up on that too and that is definitely a potential sign of weakness so and that will not be mistreated by reasonable people but it will also potentially be exploited by others and so that's you know that's part of the price of having a little bit of a distorted nervous system that may be essentially overly agreeable and overly conscientious okay all right so we're going to move on to these questions excellent so a perfect segue through all the little individual differences and our first question is about banana about borderline personality disorder okay alright so this listener is actually describing borderline personality disorder and asking because saying is borderline personality a mental illness or simply an undesirable personality where the affected individual has extreme disagreeable emotional emotionally unstable and low in conscientiousness she's asking because her mother-in-law has been I was borderline personality disorder and I feel like she's ruining my husband's life when he interacts with her he becomes physically and mentally ill with headaches digestion difficulties and depression and anxiety her outrageous and disgusting behavior puts both of us in bad moods and has strained our relationship and robbed us of much of life's joys done some reading a borderline personality disorder and understand that her specific type is the wife is a waif borderline she's constantly playing the helpless victim card and shows no desire to develop any healthy habits or seek therapy she's deceptive manipulative gross temper tantrums and then uses threats of self-harm and suicide to get away the intensity of the situation is heightened as my husband is helping her move into a new home and community to facilitate the ideal circumstances for her to live a healthy and happy life but we both realized that changing her environment will not fix her my husband's more involved than I would like but he says he needs to do this for his own conscience I'm respectful and sympathetic because his father committed suicide a few years ago and he continues to live with the guilt that he did not do enough to stop it he tells me that he'll be pulling back his involvement once she's settled into this new home but at this point I'm ready to have no contact with her and he's getting pretty close to that as well I've always held my tongue and let him deal with these issues but I've reached my limit what are your thoughts oh my what a question let's see I think well we're going to begin with the notion of is this a quote mental illness or an undesirable personality characteristic the I'm not really sure the difference in a lot of in most cases when people are when people talk about personality disorders there really isn't any difference you can call it a mental illness if you want that's a convenient that's extremely convenient for psychiatry because then there's some pill that somebody made up it's supposed to help it which is of course not true the mental illness I personally my I don't consider an anxiety disorder mental illness I don't even consider depression and mental illness bipolar disorder I consider a mental illness and schizophrenia I consider a mental illness not because there's anything that we can do you know anyway the long and short of is there's people that have some some circuits that are resulting in very distorted views of reality and the extent that those distorted views of reality are are crippling then we can if we want we can call this a quote mental illness the particularly when we feel like it is it is innate to the system and there and that there may be no possible way to change it or significantly influence it which is usually the case at this point in history so borderline personality disorder is not some illness as a result of some virus that eats up somebody part of somebody's brain this is a very undesirable personality I wasn't aware that they had quote waist type versus probably the aggressive type I'm sure as the other other one the yeah border lines are are very disagreeable and emotionally unstable that's what it is that you're seeing it's a combination of those two characteristics and I in my you know I don't have data for this but I effectively believe that it's a it's a much more female-oriented look at that combination I typically I think females tend to want to be connected and invited and included and be part of the pack males are more desirous of being in the head of the pack disagreeable and unstable and males is more likely to be considered narcissism and and so I think it's actually very similar genetically to a narcissistic personality disorder I think it I think it's manifesting itself a little different in female the vast majority of borderlines are females incidentally so anyway the that's what it is very disagreeable very emotionally unstable not fixable and so the solution is to get as far from these people as you can this this the husband and it sounds like you had a father who was you know had had its own tough situation and the Sun sounds like a saint and he is you know has obviously incredible patience to be trying to take care of his mother and getting her settled and so on and so forth you want to do this it's not the borderlines fault that they are hell on wheels that they didn't they didn't ask for this they are essentially raw nervous systems that feel like that others are not treating and fairly they're totally puzzled as to why this is and they're incredibly upset and so they're just basically living in a Hell a hell of a lot of psychological pain the fact they that they inflict this pain on others is you know fair in other words they're just another organism out there the essentially think of it as a rabid dog in other words we might shoot that rabid dog in the middle of our driveway because that that's the the reasonable thing for us to do and that it seems reasonable for all concerned but to the rabid dog it doesn't seem that way this is not to say I can now I can now hear a complaint to the board of psychology okay you should know please keep it in context the the truth is is that a borderline you know and all border lines are not the same they are very different and it's not that they have a couple of types they have you know infinite ranges of variation as all people do and so so when we label them as a borderline this is just a convenient way to to encapsulate this more generalized idea that these are very disagreeable and very unstable people and they suffer and and people around them suffer and people that care about them suffer and people that are under under their psychological force so for one reason another their children or this is no day at the beach having a borderline mother and it's no day in the beach having a borderline mother when you're a kid and it's no day at the beach when when you're an adult and they're an adult and so what you want to do is you want to humanely as possible get your life is much divorced from their life as you possibly can and this is an ultimate example of what I call the disagreeable distance if you think about disagreeable people and yourself and the relationships with them that you are in think of in terms of Venn diagrams circle and circle be if you must be interacting with them you want that intersection to be as small as possible and ideally no intersection but you know there's times when so did this this gal here can have the intersection be unbelievably minimal and the husband is going to have to have it just a little bit more and but certainly drawing lines drawing boundaries and keeping boundaries firm this is a problem with this is that the border lines will escalate into a crisis and you will feel like you must step in and solve that crisis but when you do you reinforce that behavior and so we have to have some simple solutions sometimes for border lines like if they're going to threaten suicide it's like well you know who to call and it's not me okay so if you call me again I'm not going to talk to you until you tell me your location and then I will be calling 9-1-1 for you oh no no don't do that okay well then find the next time this phone rings and you're on the other end of it and you're telling me you might kill yourself that's what I'm going to do so I'm just warning you but that's what's going to happen okay you know I care about you but that is what is the right thing for me to do done okay and you have to and then if they call back and they start whining you call 9-1-1 I've called 911 disorders and have them go through the embarrassment of the cops banging on their door and taking them outside bla bla bla bla oh no problem I've had people hauled away and hauled down to the county and held for a while etc too bad okay this is you you punish me with your personality disorder I'm going to make sure that I sleep at night and I know that I did you know you cried wolf and I I responded and that's how it's going to be okay so that's what you do that's how you set the boundaries and you you sleep at night you keep the boundaries up and you don't reinforce any of the crazy crap and you get your life as far as little interaction as you could possibly get that's how you handle that all right let's go onto the network all right we got another question we've got a caller on hold just for a couple of minutes so you want to go over the multiple personality question first and then take the color or winter or at first yep well let's take multiple pretty good that should be first okay so dear dr. Lila always expect a personality disorder would simply a tactic used by narcissists to manipulate people for example that angry personality arises in response to being told to do something that the person doesn't want to do what are your thoughts on this and follow-up question will be after okay at this point in my career I don't believe that there is such a thing as a multiple personality disorder I don't believe there's ever been such a thing I believe that there's been very funny looking pathologies you've got temporal lobe epilepsy that can look really weird you can you can have some very strange things happening but the notion of multiple personality disorder people might have to read about this I I read that that the people that invented this some psychiatrists that said that he in mid 20th century that he had seen such a thing got famous and then late late late in his life and he's like 93 years old he recanted and said he made up the whole thing haha apparently like this had ever been found in the literature until he quote discovered it and has made him famous and all this sort of gel so I think I'm telling this story right yeah I don't I don't really see how this type of process that people are suggest exist could ever evolve doesn't make any sense to me the I have I've had psychologists all bunch of mediocre people said that the oh yeah they've seen one this is like a badge of a Badge of Courage or you know it's kind of like coming back from the ward you got a Medal of Honor you know like yeah I've seen to multiple yeah Wow let me tell you a story there's all kinds of narcissistic people out there there's all kinds of they're quite frankly they're schizophrenic that are very odd that they will have very odd dialog etc so there's a lot of strange people in unusual pathology out there but multiple personality disorder I believe is a fiction and and you know probably somewhere somebody will call me up and say oh no my sister was a multiple you know fine you know I've heard it all I have I have seen thousands of humans I've seen people who who were sort of bluffing multiple in the criminal justice system one of the one of the most famous cases of theoretical multiple personality disorder was was Kenneth Bianchi the hillside strangler in Los Angeles and I believe in the 1970s Bianchi and his cousin beau know I think it was murdered some people and then they got caught and then Bianchi you know basically sold some psychologists that he was a multiple oh boy did that he eat that up and and the cops knew the district ronnie knew that their case was going on toilet behind this because the psychologists were all buying this and they're all excited about it and reporting to each other how many multiples they'd seen and this was going to make them famous because you know they they were they were the psychologists who who figured out that Kenneth Bianchi was a multiple you know this is the whole there was some movie with Richard Gere and Ed Norton about the same same almost a remake of the hillside strangler case same notion of the guy pretending he's multiple men it turns out he's just sociopaths well again Bianchi was just a sociopath and so the the prosecution called in one of the great psychologist of the 20th century Martin Horne out of the University of Pennsylvania dr. Horne very easily trapped Kenneth Bianchi was uh he was trivial to do this basically stuck stuck stuck information about what a what a multiple is like under Bianchi's nose and in other words gave him basically false data on what what does like him and Bianchi immediately starts manifesting the characteristics it was hilarious to watch this yeah it was it was literally child's play for Martin ORN to make a shambles of this case so given the fact that about how eager psychologists are to to diagnose this I don't trust anybody I've never seen anything even remotely like it I've certainly seen hod pathology but I've in many many psychotic people with very bizarre very bizarre personalities but I have never seen anything that is a multiple and quite frankly I can't like I said understand how such a thing would ever be constructed so yeah I think it's bogus all right I tend to go on do we got a call yeah we got a caller all right okay call it what's your name what are you calling from and welcome to the show hey name dr. Lao can you hear me yeah I can hey it's Rob saw your daughter's lost I know uh I don't know how I don't know how the Stone Age I don't know how the Stone Age brain is taking taking that but well I don't really watch soccer so it you know it's not very good okay alright what's up Rob sure well I think I have a pretty a pretty juicy question but um okay so they're you know doctor dr. Lyle is a vegan who just a few weeks so when asked about living in a commune said that's hippie nonsense and communism and socialism are bad ideas so I mean this is classic Doug Lyall and shows how brilliant he is because he sees the intelligence and you know eating like a vegan diet mcdougal style true noir style diet whatever to avoid heart disease but on the same time he's saying here you're communist hippie nonsense and you know communism socialism bad ideas so and you know you recommend a book how I found freedom in on free world by a libertarian which you know yeah so I'm wondering if you could since you easily debunk everything else just like you did in the show you did you debunk all this stuff in psychology pop psychology and say it's all not yeah could you give a brief like overview of your basic political philosophy to just demolish people's stupid political opinions with you no all right we'll do that I guess shall be our final question the the issue is that so let me I've described this before on a previous podcast probably last a year ago when we're talking about the we're talking more about politics and so I described the nature of politics in its evolution the so so what you have fundamentally is you have a political problem and the political problem of human beings is to negotiate the fact that there are benefits to living in groups and there are also costs and so the the problem the political problem is how do we optimize the benefits and minimize the costs that is the problem and it's going to turn out that a major portion of that problem is going to be economics and the reason why that's true is that animal behavior is going to be directed at securing resources and protecting resources in order to survive and reproduce so what the the fundamental problem of life is the problem of the transformation of energy into DNA so for plants they just sit there they take in the solar energy if another plant comes and overgrows them and takes their Sun too bad for you okay there's nothing you can do about it but if you are an animal which you have is a brain and a brain is attached to muscles and those muscles can now move you so you have a sensory system that brings in information in or give you data about both opportunities and threats in the environmental space so that you can then move or contract muscles in a way to put yourself in a position to optimize your opportunities and minimize your threats and those opportunities and threats are all directly related to gene survival so the job of the organism is to actually move most economically in ways that will ultimately reproduce DNA so the animal of course has no insight into this needed humans doesn't make any difference the truth of the matter is is that's how they're shaped by evolution to be very efficient at this so human beings figured out as many animals have figured out that there is a advantage to being in groups there are also conflicts and so political process in humans and in chimpanzees and in other animals is to to deal with the fact that this is not all going to be harmonious that there are there are going to be problems as a result of group living now for human beings that the the problem ultimately like I said a great many of the problems of human cohabitation are going to involve economics and so one of the great values of living in the group is that you can you can essentially reduce the risk of being an isolated individual by by pooling resources in other words we're going to all join in and produce resources then we're going to share them so we've essentially become an insurance pool so the very same process that leads to state farm insurance on your car is exactly the various and process that led human beings to be a group oriented animal now so it's going to turn out that within a communal sharing of the situation where we go out there and try to grab energy ie food from the environment and also to put in a certain amount of energy to protect our resources ie let's make sure children don't get eaten and that we don't get eaten these these kinds of problems are going to result in essentially rules that are going to be they're going to come up and so animals have instinctual rules and human beings have many instinctual rules I you step on my foot you say I'm sorry okay unless you unless you meant to step on my foot which point we got a big problem now so what's going to happen is that that in situations where the food supply is going to be highly variable it's going to be much more conducive to everybody's survival to have more sharing and when the food supply is going to be extremely stable it's going to be more conducive for people to not share so it's going to turn out that early man in in in situations where they were literally insuring each other for survival and hunting would have been a highly variable resource so people some people in the tribe could have starved to death while other people had a bounty by using a communistic sort of the situation partially communistic situation they wind up with everybody better off now even in those situations we find today that when we study those people we find that there is a that the people who are the most effective in hunting those people are irritated with the people who are less effective they are irritated at the fact that they are essentially subsidizing the less competent we find competent are irritated with the attitude of the people who are more competent and they consider them stingy because there's always a fight over who gets the most and who gets the best cut it's etc so this is very much the the kind of problems that you're always going to have whenever you essentially have a union so if you have a union and everybody's getting paid the same there's people that are producing more and people that are producing less and there's some irritation you know over this issue this is a problem fundamentally with communism so communism is is a big problem because it's conceptually the idea that we're all going to basically divide things up equally completely disincentivizes individuals to try to make the most of their movements and to try to be as efficient and effective as they can personally be the pure capitalism on the other hand basically says we're not going to share anything we're not insuring anybody etc and this this is going to be a situation that is potentially problematic because you're going to have problems when you get that extreme that are going to start disturbing a lot of people and so that that's going to have it's going to have its own stability challenges so this is why it's going to turn out but there is no actually correct place on a dimension where on one on the far left of a line we could call it pure communism and on the far right of the line we could call it pure capitalism in other words the dimension here is share on the left and not share on the right the share not share dynamic is going to be somewhere along that line is going to be the optimal place for a given society at a given place in time with a given talent energy circumstances etc and to to a lot of my libertarian friends they think that the correct place is always on the right very far right side of one and to my communistic friends of which I have few and it the idea is that the correct places on the far left side of one I will submit that there is not a correct place on the line the correct place can only be judged in the context of what the variant situation is with respect to particularly survival resources so I give an example that if that if you are a bunch of Englishmen on a boat in the Antarctic on a and your ship called endurance as frozen in the ice since 1912 and you are trying to get the hell out of there and survive then it's going to turn out that if you're on a little boat sailing in that in those waters hoping to hit st. George's Island in a thousand miles of open ocean the roughest ocean in the world and you've got eight people on that boat one of them is great at the sextant and one of them is great fishing one of them is tremendous at the oars one of them is outstanding as a sail and sails sailing if you ate Englishmen interdependent on that boat and every single one of them is absolutely you know we don't know which one is going to be the most important because we don't know we're going to be facing in the next 15 minutes if the fisherman catches a fish and three other guys were also fishing at the same time and the best fisherman catches the fish the right way to divide the fish is in eight equal parts it's actually from each according to his ability to each according to his need so even if I caught that fish what I really want is I want to divide that fish in a way that optimizes the statistical likelihood of all people surviving it doesn't do me a damn bit of good to make sure to eat my fill and have any one of those guys get into trouble because I don't know which one is going to be critical for my survival this is the checkmate to Strait lays a fair capitalism and this is why this species didn't evolve a straight lays a pure capitalism psychology this species actually evolved under conditions much more like pure communism than it did pure capitalism but it's actually somewhere in the middle and it's going to turn out that I think a problem that the world has today politically is that they've got a lot of a Stone Age brain has a lot of Communists exert sin it it's not fair that somebody has more that disturbs people but at the same time we live in a world with actually very consistent resources for food so that in the United States nobody's hungry if you're hungry in the United States you don't have any help getting down to the food bank because there's plenty of food there ok so people are needy in other ways but they're not needy for that and the extreme neediness is far less than it has been in in decades past and it's getting course better by the day as technology and economic capability get greater and greater I'm not saying that there isn't some serious need and some legitimate poverty there is but it's not at the same level that it was in 1960 and so what what's fading over the horizon is the anxiety about literal survival and so now the label is a fair capitalist position looks more and more defensible and basically says look we don't need to be so worried about sharing in fact it seems to me like the right thing to do is to not share at all the this is still not true we do not live in a situation where all this is even you know that it's easy enough for every individual to access what they need for even basic survival if you're a deaf dumb blind schizophrenic without a good mother you're in trouble and you're going to need help and and it would be absurd to construct a society as wealthy as this one without some sharing so a libertarian positions would say well we should do it all privately and nobody should be taxed cetera this starts to be get gets to to the level of ridiculous so my my overarching political position is that our job is to figure out what is the the optimal set of circumstances as best we can determine to try to figure out how optimize people's happiness functioning in the society that that is likely going to be a limited constitutional government you know not sharing a hell of a lot sharing is as much as we need to but as little as necessary this is very Jeffersonian in its view it's the notion that there's an underlying principle that underlines my political philosophy which is that ultimately we want to maximize voluntary transactions between individuals this is the maximization of freedom and this this simply makes intuitive sense to me and it it it's interesting that a lot of people are very disturbed by this they they want to limit other people's freedoms for various and sundry reasons because of those freedoms disturb them this is I think a mistake in other words I think that I agree with the in this view general view of the philosopher Sam Harris and that is that there are there are superior objectively superior political circumstances and there are objectively inferior ones and so this is ultimately could be in principle an empirical question if anybody was ever interested and I think that we can already see that freer societies are both wealthier and the people are happier that does not mean that everybody's really happy and everybody's really wealthy and everybody's happy about the situation and that there isn't some disturbing problems that come as a result of sometimes the striking inequalities that result from a free free society that that can can be striking however the I still believe that in general that is the the compass that you want to aim for you want to aim for essentially the vision of Thomas Jefferson which is the government that governs least governs best in general we maximize transactions and freedom from individuals we swallow the fact that that some people are going to be spectacularly wealthy and other people will be poor but we want to make sure that we we also in that bounty in that wealth this is created by the ingenuity and the incentive and the protection of private property we also want to make sure that we do enough sharing that we don't have people actually in trouble and so that's that's my view of the thing and I laugh at hippies in the commune because they are they are thinking their their hearts are in an interesting place they are they are trying to be kind and wise and they are trying to return to something simpler which is all fine and a very interesting experiment for anyone to do and possibly a good one but the notion that you're going to get 40 people on a few acres and that you're everybody's going to contribute equally we're going to divide it equally is a riot exact that is a fiasco and the individuals that that are going to try to create some little enclave of communistic nirvana are in for a rude awakening by about their fourth week so that's that's simply not going to be consistent with human nature Wow Rob there are much for the for the call for the great question trade issue on record dr. Lowe with your politics
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