Why Political Left and Right Are Actually One Mob: Michael Vassar on Israel, AI, and Institutions

Michael Vassar [00:00:00] If something is smarter than you, then you don't know get to know how it causes your world to end anymore than the chimps do or the cockroaches do. But even if cockroaches are robust and resilient and have lasted a long time, and if AI is never created and it's just humans, we are probably the end of the world for them eventually in an amount of time that is basically an evolutionary eye blink.

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] Hi, this is Jack Kleek baseball player in second grader from St. Louis, Missouri, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I sit down with Michael Vassar, longtime listeners of the podcast, know that he might be the most visited guest I've ever had. I wasn't really anticipating to interview Michael, but he happened to be in the St. Louis area. So of course I was gonna invite him to the studio. We sat down and Michael had a lot he wanted to talk about regarding Palestine and the Gaza Strip and Hamas and Israel and what was going on there. And we had a really interesting conversation, not least of which, because I don't actually buy into the point of view that Michael has, and we you'll tell throughout this conversation that we have, not conflict, but certainly different points of view as to how you should feel or what way you should engage with this massive event that's going on in culture. I think this is a really good interview, not necessarily because we discovered anything new, but because we had a conversation where two people came from different points of view and we got to explore the way the world works from our different perspectives. So we're gonna get to that interview in just a second. But I am really excited about the last few weeks of Legacy Interviews. We have actually recorded almost a dozen interviews, and every single one of them is completely unique. We've been going back and editing them now, and I realize that even though we send people the same list of questions that they should prepare for each time they sit down in the interview chair, the interview and conversation goes in completely novel and unique directions.

Vance Crowe [00:02:10] Because whatever your loved one shares with us about their childhood, their career, marriage and parenting, or even the wisdom that they wanna leave behind, we'll explore their answers by me asking them follow-up questions. These follow-up questions make each conversation completely unique and oftentimes gets them to think about stories and experiences they've had that they haven't thought of in maybe the lifetime that they've had since that moment happened. If you're interested in having me sit down with one of your loved ones to have a unique conversation that captures their life and stories so that it can be passed on to future generations, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, without further ado, let's go to this wild interview with my man, Michael Vassar. Michael Vassar, welcome back to the podcast.

Michael Vassar [00:03:03] Good to see you again, Vance.

Vance Crowe [00:03:05] So I opened up Twitter this morning and it seems like now everybody went from being a Ukrainian expert to being a Palestine Israel expert, and they all have very, very strong opinions that are beating the drums of war. When you look at what's going on with Gaza and Palestine and all of this, what, what do you see?

Michael Vassar [00:03:28] Well as to some degree a Hegelian expert? I have the sense that from the philosophy that was a mid part of Israel's founding, unfortunately war is probably good for Israel and its future. Whether or not it makes sense from any sort of ethical perspective or whether Israel wants it, it seems to me like they've been sort of forced into it and they have declared war. And it seems that that's a shame for the Palestinians, and at least in the short term, it's a shame for them. It's probably going to increase the amount of terrorism, not decrease it, I would guess, over the medium term, et cetera. But it's, I mean, from the perspective of like the global order, I vaguely think it's probably a good thing as said if that is to say, but I'm much more,

Vance Crowe [00:04:24] Wait, wait, wait, why? Why? Why would, why would war in any context be that way?

Michael Vassar [00:04:30] So like it's, well, war does drive various types of technological advancements that are useful and it helps people to understand what new weapon systems and the new types of conflict, how they work. I feel like it's been like a fairly long time since we saw like what state of the art military technology can do in these sorts of situations we're going to see in the future. I mean, I, I hate to say it, but job production, that's sort of bullshit, which is like in the short term, I think probably stabilizing more than like destruction of property, which will then require more construction contracts, et cetera to fix it is destabilizing. I mean, I, it's obviously Israel's, it's sad for Israel, they've lost 0.1% of their population or 0.01% of their population all at once, which would be like 10, you know, nine elevens for us. And they are, you know, as necessarily going to fight a war as the US was necessarily going to fight at least a war against Afghanistan in nine 11. And like, you know, they much more have to do that, that to, to protect themselves than the Americans did after at nine 11, like the continuing actions of Hezbollah would present a much more clear and ambiguous, both 10 x larger relative to their size and more obvious direct on their border threat if they didn't do something like this.

Michael Vassar [00:06:00] It's like absolutely a hundred percent of something that every country in the world in their situation other than Costa Rica, which doesn't have an army would do it. You know, it probably makes their security position in some ways better. The, the bad thing for them is the ways in which it moves them towards being authoritarians to be embroiled in wars in long period for long periods of time. And part of what I'm hoping we can talk about is Hegelian and authoritarianism. And I mean in the long run it is very bad for anyone's character to be occupying people. It creates a lot of bad incentives and habits of intellectual justification and slop, moral sloppiness, et cetera. But to some degree, I think also from the perspective of Israel, it, it makes them, it more clear to them where they stand is what parts of the world are willing to stand behind them when they're attacked this flagrantly and not deny them the types of self-defense that every other country in the world would be assumed to engage in without the slightest possibility of criticism.

Vance Crowe [00:07:15] That's an interesting thing that, that it will be a mechanism to sort out who stands with who and how strongly they stand and like how much of a check are you willing to write? Whether that's literally, are you willing to write money and send arms to Israel? And how much are you willing to not interfere and say, oh, well, you know, there's no limit to what you can do as a response that will tell you who your friends and enemies are, at least currently.

Michael Vassar [00:07:45] Like one thing I would feel really hopeful about is if not just Israelis, but Jews across the world get across the picture that Harvard is their enemy. They're declared dire, vicious enemy. Far more hostile to them than the most leftist American politicians. Far more hostile than to them, than Palestinian politicians who all of whom make statements in their support while Harvard refuses to

Vance Crowe [00:08:08] This is like a, a shocking non-sequitur to me. So you, you come out of nowhere with Harvard, how, where, where is this

Michael Vassar [00:08:14] Coming from? Oh, oh wow, I'm seeing this all over Twitter in the, okay, so the, there are all, there's this Harvard letter that is Harvard's official statement condemning the Hezbollah attacks.

Vance Crowe [00:08:31] I heard somebody describe it as milk toast. So I saw like Harvard came out, but who cares what Harvard says about, you know, a, a terrorist attack?

Michael Vassar [00:08:40] Oh, but you, if you are tracking, first of all it seems like people, okay, so to some degree tracking how people talk about Israel regarded is inevitably giving you some information about the antisemitic pet currents in society, which I talk to people most often on the right who talk about their horror at the antisemitic currents bubbling in society. The relatively intellectual people like James Lindsay have been talking about Nazism, you know, and free time, you get behind closed doors basically among reason sufficiently radical, sufficiently intellectual and freethinking people on the right talked about that on Twitter. Eric Weinstein talks with me about how like, and Malcolm Collins about, you know, similar things. Eric Weinstein talks about how he in one closed room was open for questions and the first question he was given was about the Jewish problem or the Jewish question. So these are people who are Jewish themselves or very close. I don't know if Lindsay is, but Eric definitely is and Lindsay's a mathematician, very culturally connected. I'm sure a lot of Jewish people, they're people who are generally themselves sympathetic to Jews and anti Nazi people are being very, very brazen it when as long as you get even a little bit outside of the herd, even a little bit freethinking like the sorts of people who they're interacting with about from an authoritarian perspective, it's very natural to ask, well all the things we've ever heard in life are lies.

Michael Vassar [00:10:14] We've always heard the Nazis were the worst. Maybe they're the good guys. And you know, when you see people like Robert Kennedy talking about hinting in his closed door meeting and then getting it leaked that maybe the Jews and Chinese developed COVID as a bio weapon together against everyone who's not Jewish and Chinese. And then it's obvious he's always supported Israel. It's also obvious that he doesn't personally have an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because he is such a paranoid schizophrenic conspiracy theorist and you would know very clearly. But he is finding himself because he's trying to appeal to the right, not just the left and to intellectuals and radicals, not people who are part of a herd to at least anti-Semitic vibes and insinuations of a draconian sort. We're not seeing him appeal to Nazi insinuations as far as I can tell. pro-Nazi and antisemitic are reasonably naturally separable. But like what I hear from the people who interact with the parts of the right, where conclusions get reached, decisions get made, congressional staffers, you know that sort of thing is that, you know, that's very much the intellectual current, but it's really important to realize it's the intellectual current in the left too. Yale's Jewish involvement has, according to an article I was just looking at, fallen from 16.9% to 10% or less than 10% in just the last seven years.

Michael Vassar [00:11:45] That's not because Jews decide they don't wanna go to Yale, it's 'cause Yale decides it doesn't want Jews Harvard's the same. They make continually more extreme divergence from the mainstream intellectual authorities and mainstream official story in our society towards openly biasing things against Jews and Asians and claiming they don't need to justify themselves.

Vance Crowe [00:12:06] I am, I mean like I'm living in the center of the country and I'm oriented just in a totally different way, but I, I've had a really great guy named Isaac Amon come on and he talks about antisemitism. You are talking about it. I don't see it or hear it. It is as common to me as hearing something about, I don't know, some, some people in Mongolia. I hear it just as much about those two groups because it isn't anywhere on my, on my scale. So it's hard for me to, to say one way or the other anything of what you're saying. The only thing I know about what's going on with Israel is that there was just an attack. So to me this is like brand new on the scene.

Michael Vassar [00:12:48] Okay, so you've talked about your occupation of the, well actually layer an interface and that probably isn't a part of the intellectual world that talks about these things in the way that people who Eric Weinstein and Malcolm Collins and Jim James Lindsay are talking about. And since they're talking to Kennedy a lot also people who Kennedy is talking about with these sorts of people who are engaged in the intellectual stew of society and not just receiving orders or transmitting information the way you are from the output or interface between that that stew. So

Vance Crowe [00:13:23] To clarify, we're talking about a graph, there's a video of it, I can probably link it in the show notes, which is where I'm describing how do ideas flow out into society and they really work like a stock tip, right? There's a small number of people that know something. Let's just say something about GMOs or or organic. And then over time as those ideas spread, they spread out and the, they go from a few people knowing it and being really valuable ideas for whatever that value means to spreading out to society and not having as much value of knowing it first. But just this is what everybody knows or what everybody believes. And the well actually point being when it hops from being in an intellectual group that that kind of specializes or focuses on something to the the guy at a party that he's listening to what everybody's saying and he interrupts and he says, well actually do you know this thing? And that's where you can kind of tell there's a cultural tipping point that an idea has become accepted or, or at least one that people just kind of, you know, a accept as this is the way things are.

Michael Vassar [00:14:26] So like that guy at the party who's saying, well actually is making an ego claim a status claim, he's also delivering sort of commands about this is the thing you're supposed to start saying right now. And he's like a doctor or someone who's like one notch up the social pole who the person still might socially interact with or know

Vance Crowe [00:14:44] You have taken this to a to a new level. Yes.

Michael Vassar [00:14:47] So like that person is the first person I think in the intellectual process that's transmitting the idea from the language of ideas to the language of material or cybernetics or most.

Vance Crowe [00:15:03] So you're saying these ideas of antisemitism are up the graph to the extent that somebody like me that's further down the graph, it hasn't hit that point where regular society's talking about it if you hear about it in the news, it's a vague concept but not one that's, well

Michael Vassar [00:15:17] It's a little bit more like Nazism that de denies that it is antisemitic but says that it's just asking questions and you know there's something real peculiar about those Jews and that Jewish success and which is both questioning whether that Jewish success is due to something like the Nazi story and also the Nazis were kind of the good guys and also questioning whether that Jewish success is due to something that we should imitate and try to get in on. Maybe it's a opportunity like it, it's sort of in the the optic graph in the intellectual and revolutionary or radical part of the right. But by that I mean the sorts of things that Gavin Newsom calls micro cults, giving examples like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan who actually have like a hundred times were in Joe Rogan's case and 40 times in Peterson's the Google trends attention of a Ga Gavin Newsom. So, so part of the issue is that the whole of what counts as mainstream is determined by relatively small people up, not the intellectual graph but the administrative graph. One of the things about your position is that you talked about energetic landscape and I think that the energetic landscape is a separate thing from the intellectual discourse space. The intellectual discourse space has many tiers, but the tiers co-opt ideas from one another and the people who generate the ideas don't have any authority over what final decisions get made in that space and get handed over to the authority space.

Vance Crowe [00:16:57] So let me pause so people can stay connected with this conversation. So if you understand the well actually graph to mean like there are ideas that small group of people have, but eventually those ideas can filter out into society. So maybe a few people knew about how to make A GMO and then a GMO goes out into society and it becomes a part of our diet. So eventually it's down the graph. Well not all ideas are up one graph, it's actually a series of mountains, just picture a mountain range where the further you go up there's people with a specialty, a special knowledge about something. It could be artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, different things going on in culture. And you're saying one of the graphs that's out there that's pretty powerful is an administrative class and this is where there are people that control the, the what goes on with laws and how those laws are enforced.

Michael Vassar [00:17:50] So I feel like, I mean I used to talk about a much cruder theory. I called like the six mountains theory before I had this sort of differentiation between the intellectual process and the authoritarian process. But like you have a, my idea was that you have basically the government, you have basically finance and money and you have basically the media and those are like the three things that have power at the top and the the things that that have real power, power on a much different scale. And then you have like other smaller things like religion and organized crime and various ethnic interests et cetera that have their own hierarchies but their hierarchies are pretty clearly subordinate to the government financial and media hierarchies

Vance Crowe [00:18:40] Today.

Michael Vassar [00:18:40] I mean for the foreseeable past, going back like a hundred years and more, you know, it would've been less corporate a hundred years ago and much more bourgeois capitalistic you might say that the government defeated the bourgeois capitalistic power structure and replaced it with a corporate administrative structure. You know, that's but like the government and the corporate structure, it's the same administrative structure. It's the same hierarchy that you wait in and get promoted slightly vertically at an angle and just if you stick with the game and submit and give up your individuated mindset for a long enough time while you're in it, you're known to be safe with authority by the time you're on top and you're put in authority. But of course that means that you're just a hollowed out husk that once was a person. Now just a set of,

Vance Crowe [00:19:34] We were talking about before this show that I had a professor one time, a guy I respected a lot who used to say, oh if I had only stayed in the Chinese government and waited for 20, 25 years, I would be at the top now and all you have to do is just go there and you know, get your day job done and don't cause any problems. And his advice to me was get into corporate America and when you do, don't even worry where your job is. 'cause if you wait 20 to 25 years, you too will, will get into a position of power and that's what you're restating

Michael Vassar [00:20:01] In

Vance Crowe [00:20:01] A much faster

Michael Vassar [00:20:01] Way. But you're, I'm stating it in the context of your talking about how having an individuated mind sucks within corporate America because then you're being continually targeted and turned against by the non individuated minds that you are surrounded by and are being held back by and waiting to give up your individuation so you can start your journey of being checked out and vetted as safe.

Vance Crowe [00:20:30] And so how does this then get back to the, the Gaza Israel situation we were talking about before?

Michael Vassar [00:20:37] Okay, so that's a really long but important story Before we go there, I wanted to briefly mention that you can see from like statistics and media sources the authoritarian non-intellectual part of the antisemitic movement that's on the left, not on the right. You can see it in the difference between the statements of different people throughout the world and throughout congress and throughout different organizations on Gaza and can see that say things like Harvard have been defending and fighting for their ability to overtly discriminate against Jews and Asians and have in fact drastically reduced the rates of both being admitted and drastically reduce the absolute rates of Jews being admitted over the very recent past. And you can see that they've also escalated drastically over the very recent past calls for an investment from Israel and for various types of sanctions on Israel and protests against it, et cetera. And you see that all over Europe. The the, it's only the right radical intellectual part of the, well actually graph that's upstream from you in the intellectual ferment with people like Robert Kennedy and the people who downstream from them like Joe Ro Rogan who have like a hundred times the media viewership of presidential candidates like Gavin Newsom and yeah, so in the left it's downstream from you. Things like Harvard are at this point just overtly anti-Semitic.

Michael Vassar [00:22:10] They're not hiding it, they're not hedgehog. They're saying oh it's not the Jews, it's just Israel and finance and bankers and laws and medicine and all of the things that Jews have ever been associated with, which is what people in anti-Semitic movements have said throughout all of time. And like back when there were anti-Semitic parties in Austria, they would say things like that, you know, so Harvard is not downstream, it's just to some degree sets what's normal and it's hard to see something as overt antisemitism when it's normalized on the left because they're the people who have the authority that tell people what to do when they're being a good boy.

Vance Crowe [00:22:51] And so you perceive that now the, this is a different time in culture where Israel is not getting the same type of support that they would have say 20 years ago.

Michael Vassar [00:23:01] It's not that they're, they're getting more direct and more shameless criticism and hostility, not just from, only from the tiny left tier. Is there any real hesitation in condemning those against them? The government is still basically on their side, but the ruling class of the left controlled institutions is yeah, very overtly siding with the Hezbollah in ways that would not have happened 20 years ago. Certainly not in the face of an attack like this bad, much worse than anything that's happened in the last 50 years and much better recorded.

Vance Crowe [00:23:44] Well, so this puts the, the, this is a very interesting paradigm because I hear people being like, hey, slow down Israel as an attempt to slow down the, the beat of, of war drums. Like, you know, you know representatives being like, we shouldn't just, you know, you shouldn't just go fight them, you should end them, you should just, you know, put a total end to this meaning like take the gloves off and fight unfettered, right? And that has all sorts of potential implications. Maybe I'm just viewing it from a propagandized idea, but it seems like this, this has the potential to kick off a world war. So people that are not giving a hundred percent support for Israel aren't necessarily antisemitic, they might just not want war.

Michael Vassar [00:24:31] So you might not support Ukraine in the sense of we should stop sending them fighter jets while still supporting Ukraine in the sense saying that there is nothing remotely resembling moral parody between Ukraine and Russia and in the mainstream left people are claiming there is moral parody between Israel and Hezbollah or claiming that there is not moral parody, but that morality obviously favors Hezbollah. That's like something that in the moderate conservative pragmatist older population, people might not be saying that much, but like journalists I know et cetera talk about it, people who are writers talk about it as like surprising them. So a native American journalist who I speak to in Canada in the Cohan nation, coastal Salish named Megan champion has talked about how she hasn't paid any attention to Israel, hadn't really thought about as a Native American, but now she's like, wow there's so much overt hatred from Jews by the mainstream journalist class and by the, you know, leftists that you interact with as someone like me, I, I guess I need to like think about how to protect them, defend them and you know, I am thinking about what to talk with about her on that topic because that's just what you see as a journalist who is themselves not part of the swarm on individuated mentality, but is instead a representative of of an underprivileged group in a country that's trying to somewhat asymmetrically voice that.

Vance Crowe [00:26:01] So I guess I'm trying to parse what you're saying so that I understand it accurately. Of course as I hear you, you're saying if you look at the, the board that's going on right now, what you might not realize is that the, there are people that are not voicing support for Israel that are telling or signaling to the wider world, hey culturally we have like the, the way to be on our good side is not to support Israel and that some of this is actual antisemitism and some of it is just people receiving anti-Semitic messages of we shouldn't fight Israel because Palestine has a reason for being there or there were war crimes committed against them. And so

Michael Vassar [00:26:53] I don't think think I see a difference between the thing you're calling an actual antisemitism and the other thing because when they're saying these things about Palestine, they're not like applying the sort of standard that they would apply to any other country in a situation like this. And they're not even pretending to and they're also endorsing support of things, protesting for Hezbollah, protesting for Palestine. Like they're not evaluating the situation in the way they're evaluating, say Ukraine, where there's a clear aggressor and condemning the clear aggressor is the absolute least you do. Instead they're often cheering and promoting and endorsing the aggressor as justified, which is, you know, more like the behavior of some parts of the Hungarian media where they might justify Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This isn't a ambiguous case the way I see it, but you can also point at the very sudden reductions in Jewish admissions at organizations like Harvard at the same time as their way of talking about Israel changes in this way and then reveals itself in this way

Vance Crowe [00:28:04] I guess. And I mean like I, this may make me like an immoral person, right? Like, but I don't think so I, I sense that like in both of those situations, Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Palestine is that these are very complicated and I don't have to have an opinion about it.

Michael Vassar [00:28:23] So I would say you definitely have to, if you say that, not also say an opinion like there's a parody between them or supporting the wrong side. And second, obviously everyone can't have an opinion about everything. But like if people have opinions about a lot of things, then they have some level of I think requirement to have at least weekly endorsed general perspectives on the things that most people who have opinions about a lot of things.

Vance Crowe [00:28:52] So for example, if we went back and we looked at what did Harvard say about Russia invading the Ukraine? They came out with these very strong, I don't know if they did or not, but they came out with something very strong about that then they now have dipped their toe into the water and you've gotta have an opinion on what's going on with Israel and Palestine. No,

Michael Vassar [00:29:11] Harvard made a statement on Israel, I doubt they came out on Ukraine but nobody questions. Which that there is not moral parody between the Ukraine and Russia. Nobody says there might be moral parody between Ukraine and Russia who has any sort of voice. There are a lot of people who say that we shouldn't support Ukraine because it might create World War iii and that might be a reasonable thing to say in Israel too if you think that that might create World War iii but not really anyone thinks that very much it might create World War III in the same way. It's not a nuclear power. We're fighting America, we're talking about here.

Vance Crowe [00:29:47] Oh, I mean I will say the one thing I've seen more memes about than anything else is the path that this takes us to World War III about, about Israel. So like, I mean somebody's talking about it.

Michael Vassar [00:29:59] I mean why would Russia and the US side on different sides over this? That's interesting that you see that. 'cause I'm not seeing that. But yeah, I would not expect anyone to expect the US and Russia to take a post sides here. Russia supporting Hezbollah just seems weird. But I,

Vance Crowe [00:30:17] I think that it looks more like how will Iran get involved? How will this, you know, spread? So you might have a

Michael Vassar [00:30:23] Local nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, which would be very bad for Israel and very bad for Iran, but especially very bad for Israel probably. But like that's about as bad as you're getting a very small nuclear war is not world war, you know? But mostly I wasn't talking about that. I'm saying if someone wants to just say we don't want to aid even our most necessary allies like Taiwan after, after 2028 the way Vivek Ram Swami does. I really disapprove of him saying that I think he is like very wrong that that's a good policy. But I think he's straightforwardly not saying we're against the Taiwanese, he's taking a consistent stance as he sees it of anti interventional. If someone says that we shouldn't be fighting or helping Ukraine, that makes sense too to some degree. And if that person also says we shouldn't be helping Israel the way Ram Swami does, I'm definitely not going to read that as antisemitic. I'm going to read that as like a much, much weaker evidence of antisemitism. I, I would say he shows much weaker evidence of antisemitism then most mainstream politicians. But if they're saying that there is moral parody between Ukraine and Russia or that Russia are the good guys, the way, like some of the Hungarian news says that there is moral parody between Ukraine and Russia or that the Russians are the good guys, that the Ukraines are run by Nazis. That that there's all this talk in the normal thing for the intellectual commun the world community to do is stigmatize you heavily and sort of deny that you hungry are what we're going to regard as a free society and cast massive sign risk aspersions upon it.

Michael Vassar [00:32:07] But like we're casting those aspersions on them because they really are doing something pretty fucking outrageous. They are like very clearly siding with or endorsing a group, an invasion of another country in a way that practically everyone considers totally un inadmissible. You know, Ukraine is not fair target for invasion is I think basically universally acknowledged even if you also say that it was more America's fault than it was Putin's fault in that from a geopolitical game, America was trying with Europe to provoke this conflict. You know, even if you say that America is even more blameworthy than Putin, nobody claims that Putin is equally blameworthy as zelensky or that Russia is equally blameworthy as Ukraine without people considering them absolute bloody lunatics.

Vance Crowe [00:33:04] I think you and I are living in different worlds. I think that like I, I couldn't point to specific people that say that, but I would say I could walk into many places throughout the United States and people would say, I don't know how Zelensky did it, but he's like bleeding our coffers dry. And

Michael Vassar [00:33:23] That's different. That's a statement about getting money. Nobody is saying you, you are replacing my statement repeatedly here. You're equivocating between or equating repeatedly between should we give these people money because they are so deserving and in need and such good allies. And there you can easily say hell no, of course not with Ukraine or, and also, well obviously Israel is a close ally, but then there's still a question of whether they're deserving whatever the fuck that means and whether they're in the right.

Vance Crowe [00:33:54] I guess the end of my point on this would be, but they didn't have a story that was written about what was going on with Russia and Ukraine. And so when they write the story of what did they think happened, they see a guy that's draining their coffers and they think maybe he was bad before. I, I don't like, like if you think, oh, all human beings operate from a principle of, we start with chapter one and we read history through there, but the reality is you drop into whatever chapter you're starting to pay attention to and then you imagine what chapter one was, right? Or chapter five or chapter 10 if you dropped in, you know, three quarters of the way through the book or, or actually you're always at the very last page and the new pages are being written and I think that your sense that everyone thinks that Putin is the aggressor and that he was morally wrong and everyone believes that I, I I sense that that is not the case. Not because people are talking from complete information, but because they're not talking.

Michael Vassar [00:34:55] So it seems like you're equating talking from complete information from the thing that Heiddeger would be calling Thrownness or being in time or Dasan.

Vance Crowe [00:35:05] Okay, tell me more.

Michael Vassar [00:35:06] So necessarily our brain is smaller within the universe. No one has ever acted from complete information on anything, but if you are basically trying to have an in individuated consciousness at all, and if you are basically trying to make moral judgments at all, then you are in fact engaged in a process of both trying to make sense of the past and the present and the present in terms of the past. And you very much do not make moral judgements or proclamations. And I still think you're not clear clarifying whether these people are making moral proclamations or not.

Vance Crowe [00:35:46] Ah,

Michael Vassar [00:35:47] Okay. It seems to me that you are suggesting that people who, that there's an attitude of being thrown into time that of not, that involves not looking at all in the past while making insinuative or speculative moral assertions not moral claims as if there were moral claims to decide what side to take in a conflict.

Vance Crowe [00:36:13] Say that again.

Michael Vassar [00:36:15] The way you described the people you're talking about as taking a, well maybe he's a bad guy too, maybe people like there's a filling in the past with incomplete information or lack of knowledge is one thing filling in it with maybes and insinuations that are not looked into in any detail, but used to allow one to assume that the moral

Vance Crowe [00:36:38] And hold those beliefs without any sort of yeah, like right, that's just what they think. That's just

Michael Vassar [00:36:42] How I'm saying that's a full opting out of morality. If you did that in your business, you would just be stealing from people. If you did that as an educator, you would just be swindling them, allowing them, indoctrinating them into a cult that's like, there isn't a way of being more, not moral than doing that. Like it, they might not be choosing immorality in any other sense than that that, but that there is a complete choice of immorality I think.

Vance Crowe [00:37:16] I think that I'm describing how human beings think.

Michael Vassar [00:37:19] No, definitely not. When you're doing a legal case, you don't do that when you are making a judgment of who wronged, who you absolutely don't do that at all. You rather than making a judgment of who, who harmed you, you investigate and you have some idea of what normal principles of investigation are. If you are running a business, even the most corrupt business, the business necessarily has processes that force imitative behavior and as covering to come together into a collective whole which implements some level of investigation and knowing the situation, the abandonment of situational awareness is simply an abandonment of participating in the game of ethics, ethos, the game of debt and credit, the game of shared record tell keeping and shared history that allows one to fill obligations. And what you're describing here is specifically people opting out of shared history. You're saying that they're replacing their shared history with maybes that give them free reign to pick aside arbitrarily as political con considerations dictate,

Vance Crowe [00:38:36] I guess I think that they don't perceive that that's what they're doing. It is that they have finite attention, time, energy,

Michael Vassar [00:38:45] Everything is finite, but there's a choice to do none and substitute maybes and withhold judgment and there's a choice to do something else that, and I'm saying that there's a sense in which they don't perceive that that's what they're doing because in a sense they don't perceive anything at all. Like they don't perceive anything at all in the sense of bringing in information and turning it into a map of the world and a record of accounts. But there is a sense in which they definitely perceive they can drive, they can pick up the laundry and they can imitate and fall into a ritual. You know, there I'm saying that, that from the perspective that normalizes that the world is inexplicable, the perspective that normalizes, that cannot account for the existence of anything does not account for the existence of anything. It is a commitment to not giving and receiving accounts, but merely imitating the giving and receiving of accounts, which is also called theft for fraud. I'm being exactly literal here. I'm not being abstract at all. I'm not being obscurantist at all. We can dive in at any depth here. This is like

Vance Crowe [00:39:57] I'm saying that the human mind just like,

Michael Vassar [00:40:00] Right, and I'm saying that's that all of the technologies we see around us testify that it does all of the legal procedures. We see all of the rules we see testify that it does that your claim is that the human mind does not adhere to rules.

Vance Crowe [00:40:17] No, I'm saying that the human mind can't handle that much information. And when you bring up the concept of historical memory, right, like historical memory is what do we all think happened? Because either we weren't there or enough time has elapsed that our memory of what's going on, I mean like eyewitness accounts are famous for being incredibly fallible, right? Because people misremember things or the way that they, you know, they've gone through the story so many times that they've started changing details

Michael Vassar [00:40:45] And can't or they aren't or they are not interested in truth, not interested in giving accurate accounts as you describe people, as being not interested in truth, not interested in accurate accounts, but merely saying, well maybe this may be that in a unprincipled way without trying to weigh them or whatever.

Vance Crowe [00:41:01] But I don't think that anybody else or me, I, I would even include myself in this,

Michael Vassar [00:41:06] Right? But I I would not, I would say that your behaviors more or less continually refer back to chains of evidence, chains of investigation. And the thing that you're describing people as doing involves not referring back to chains of evidence, chains of investigation like the, like It literally wouldn't be possible to run a business by behaving that way. You have to investigate things in order to figure out what's true and what's false for all sorts of things. Opting out of that while making moral pronouncements or while entering into conflicts is the intention to steal not the intention to navigate life in a peaceful and cooperative way, but the intention to go join in the process of concealing other people's stealing while engaging and stealing

Vance Crowe [00:42:03] Yourself. Let me see if I can, if I can restate for you what you are saying and see if I'm correct in what you are saying. You are saying Vance, by taking the approach of saying people don't really know what's going on in Russia or in Israel and the fact that they fill in stories about what could have happened, the explanations as far as they can conceive of or what they can imagine inherently makes whatever decision they come to morally corrupted. It's, it's not,

Michael Vassar [00:42:35] I wouldn't say it's even corrupted, I would say it's not morality at all. They are simply claiming that making up stories and using them to justify taking sides, engaging in violence, taking people's money et cetera is right, is normal. It it, it's, it's a, you could say it is morally corrupted from an ethical perspective. It is an opting out of ethics entirely. You might say that one opts out of ethics entirely to enter into a morally corrupted state where your perceptions of the human condition are altered and you don't try to make sense of the world anymore.

Vance Crowe [00:43:13] I'm, I guess to finish out my restatement of what you think I'm saying. So if somebody comes to a, a position by filling in maybes and and imaginations, they are, they're, they're very far away from being able to make a moral judgment and they're doing something else,

Michael Vassar [00:43:33] Yes, they're doing something else entirely. They're not making a flawed moral judgment. They're not fail intending to and failing. They are intending to not, when you say is an imaginations, I mean there's a difference between uncertainty, which is always everywhere and they drive to cover for these people by pretending that uncertainty is the same thing as imagination. With ais, we talk about hallucinations, we talk about trying to get theis to stop hallucinating, trying to get theis to stop filling things in from their imagination and making things up. Because ais don't have immorality. All they have is what they see from us, which shows

Vance Crowe [00:44:14] We might have a definitional difference then, because what I'm saying is human beings, let's just say over the last four years had a lot of collective illusions about the way things worked and what truth was and who they could believe shattered, right? So they they were like, hey, you know, I was told masks work. The government's always told me things are generally correct and now I'm putting one or two masks on. Now I find they don't, so maybe there is another way to explain this or I was told that vaccines would stop transmission and so therefore when somebody from a position of authority says something, then my safest assumption is not just to assume that they are, you know, correct, but maybe that they are trying to mislead me. So they're taking in all of this information and about Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, whatever it is, and they're saying, I have found it valuable in the past to invert what I am told is the truth and I will likely arrive at a better conclusion than what I did before. And if you look at what's gone on just in the last few, you know, just, just over Ukraine and Russia, the US shut down Russia's ability to talk to American citizens. You couldn't get the various news outlets. So people coming to those conclusions of filling in with maybes, and I'm going to invert what I'm being told is the truth is a rational decision.

Michael Vassar [00:45:38] Rational is an interesting way to describe it. I think I could hear that as it's a contrarian decision. And I can also hear that psychologists or like Keegan who are trying to confuse the idea of rationality are using rational in a narrow technical sense. That means things

Vance Crowe [00:45:57] Like that, I shouldn't use the word rational, you can understand why they would come to those conclusions and framing it from that point of view doesn't make them as immoral as stealing.

Michael Vassar [00:46:10] I think it does make them totally, fully and completely as more immoral as stealing to frame it from that point of view. And I think that in fact if they're doing it at all honestly, it leads to them stealing. Like if at at the limit of positive morality from that perspective, the global champion of it unambiguously was crowned last year. Sam Bankman freed.

Vance Crowe [00:46:35] Okay, say more. The,

Michael Vassar [00:46:36] The better you do the, the more you do that, the more you, or the more honestly you do that, the more you will steal. Because if you are, the position you took was regarding yourself to be an enemy of the state regarding the state to be a regime that is committed to your home. And if you honestly regard the state to be a regime that is committed to your harm, you should, among other things, assume that the moral judgments it gives you are at a first approximation, inversions of the truth and therefore should as best as possible optimize against siding with the people it says decide with making the moral judgments that it makes. It's like totally valid to say as far as I can tell from all of the evidence available, Putin is a monster, but he's still almost certainly worse, less bad than our monsters and he seems to be their primary enemy. So insofar as we can, we should side with them. That's like the correct decision for someone in the French resistance to make, with respect to Stalin and people in the French resistance make that decision with respect to Stalin. I'm certainly don't think Putin is as bad as Darwin. That would be insane, but he was our liar.

Vance Crowe [00:47:51] But you, you like, I guess, and maybe this is the purpose of, of being able to, to talk about this in, in a back and forth disagreement, but someone could look at what Putin is doing and say everything they're telling me about that he is evil, the things that I see him doing, dropping, you know, nuclear material on people and assassinating them, those don't look good. I think he is probably a bad guy, but is he a bad guy in the way that my government is describing him? I don't know. I, so

Michael Vassar [00:48:24] I would just agree with that. Putin is almost definitely not a bad guy in the way that our discover government is describing him almost for sure. He is still almost for sure a bad guy. Situational on a lot of relatively concrete things, right?

Vance Crowe [00:48:40] And

Michael Vassar [00:48:40] He is also almost for sure, really, really close to certain, did invade Ukraine. Ukraine didn't invade him. Nobody denies that depth, that objects to that claim. He really did, certainly he

Vance Crowe [00:48:57] Crossed a border that previously had said, that's yours, this is mine. And then he crossed over it and,

Michael Vassar [00:49:03] And started killing people with tanks. And

Vance Crowe [00:49:05] That's

Michael Vassar [00:49:05] Like really extreme bad guy behavior. You might say that a lot of people who engage in that behavior might be more moral than the average person even much, much, much more moral than the average person. They just have a lot of responsibility which forces them into extreme bad guy behavior. I'm like, it's easily plausible to me that like Napoleon is much, much, much more moral than the average person while still being like engaged in a lot of bad guy behavior. I don't know whether Napoleon is engaging in more bad guy behavior or less than Putin's. I am pretty sure that at least relatively early in his career he had relatively good reasons to do so having to do with like at least some of it. He was incredibly treacherous to his own troops. So is Putin, they're, they're both like definitely sociopathic in ways that normal people are not, where they wouldn't be in those sorts of positions of power, but they are probably doing better jobs in those positions than actual normal people would do if you were to put actually normal people into those positions. But also those positions really shouldn't be and never are acceptance of the weirdest circumstances filled by anything remotely resembling a normal person. Maybe Jimmy Carter counts, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:50:29] And so the extrapolation is so even if you can understand why he did it and, and you can come up with plausible reasons. It it is who whatever pronouncement you're making about Hamas attacking is real Putin attacking the Ukraine. There are places where individuals should stay that is wrong. I see what as, as far as I can see, the, the, through the fog of war mistakes are being made here, bad people are doing bad things or

Michael Vassar [00:51:02] Could people by the standards of people in power, which may be

Vance Crowe [00:51:06] People are doing bad things, people

Michael Vassar [00:51:08] Are doing bad things and they are doing bad things asymmetrically, while the Ukrainians are surely absolutely for sure doing bad things, they're absolutely for sure not with as little motivation or provocation doing as bad things. They might sometimes be doing some worse things. Our authorities may be lying to us probably are about, for instance, who destroyed a dam and you might call that terroristic, but it's a war for God's sakes where you're being as invaded it. The the, if you are going to, you could take the position all morally all war is completely immoral and or you could take the position, there is some variation in morality among war, but trying to differentiate is for losers. You should try decide with a stronger side, you should try decide with your better ally, et cetera. But like you can't take the side, you can't ever give yourself total free reign to make up details in your own head or share them or, and stand by them or give them up quickly and to make up new details to justify taking a side and claiming you're acting from morality without being actually without morality entirely.

Vance Crowe [00:52:22] I think the difference in our position here is that as I was describing that, I was saying it not as they're sitting in their home in Nebraska saying, oh maybe it's this, it's that they're, they're doing their best to create scenarios in their mind where the thing that they're being told may not be true. So what is it that could be true? And I didn't mean it as they're sitting there being like, how could I change the facts so that that way I can still root for the team I wanna root for even though they're doing bad things. But I think that everyone on all sides has huge gaps in information and are just filling it in with what, with what they can.

Michael Vassar [00:53:06] So absolutely for sure. But the fact that there, that it could take this long to make that distinction, while it seemed to me you were taking the opposite position, I think that you are intentionally equivocating in your own mind between those distinctions when you evaluate people morally in order to have a degree of freedom for how you're going to evaluate people's morality and feel good about the morality of people who you also relate to socially as totally amoral and needing to be told what to do.

Vance Crowe [00:53:43] I don't know that I agree with that. I think that for me, what I have found is the positions I took as a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old with absolute certainty turned out to be radically incorrect. And that updating my, my way of interacting with the world and being far more comfortable saying, I don't know.

Michael Vassar [00:54:06] So I've always been comfortable saying, I don't know. And what you do when you're comfortable saying, I don't know, is try to make up probabilities out of your ass and improve them as best you can with the information you've got. And I believe you were doing that in your twenties and thirties, and I believe that you were probably totally wrong about some positions you didn't talk about at all that you just assumed, but I doubt very much that you were totally wrong in the sense that many people who are not trying to be right are totally wrong about things that you

Vance Crowe [00:54:38] So many trying to make something up in order to fit a narrative like that. I I I misstated that. Like that's not, you took me as a literal thing and I took it as like, how's their brain kinda

Michael Vassar [00:54:48] Working? No, I took you as equivocating between two things, one of which people definitely do and also large language models definitely do. And which is normalized to a greater or lesser extent by society, by equivocating in that way and by equivocating about the degree to which it's immoral to do it. Like there is a society engages in this behavior collectively, it does engage in this sort of make shit up behavior collectively. The authorities we observe in response to COVID engage in this sort of behavior collectively. And they do it with authoritarian pronouncements. They claim to know they, there is an enormous ubiquity of this in society. And, and it is because it is ubiquitous mandatory on us. Society insists that we pretend to not know the difference between the two things that you were saying and that we equivocate both about the degree to which these are or not inevitable and about the degree to which they are and or not ethically transgressive. What I'm saying is there is an, there is an individuated, ethically motivated way of orienting one's mind, which we talked about earlier today. And there is a different way of orienting one's mind that is transpersonal intersubjective not individuated. And there is a authoritarian power structure that works with non individuated mind and there is an intellectual power structure that works with individuated mind engaged in hierarchy and some level of cheating and deception, but within a individuated frame.

Michael Vassar [00:56:36] And like the intellectual structure tends to remain committed to denying that there exists a different power structure that is entirely non-intellectual.

Vance Crowe [00:56:52] Okay, let me Kathy Newman this and say, so you're saying that in places like the government or like potentially large corporations, the way that they allow people to come up through the administrative, the bureaucratic system is you sit there for 20 years, you do your job and even though you see things that are going on that are not necessarily good, you make up stories in order to be able to justify them so that you can keep coming into the office every day after 20 years they say, welcome to the top of executive management and you're gonna get the, the, the great future, the retirement in the government or the whatever that is. And that the thing that that individuated people do, which these are people that are broken away from, from like what society wants you to believe or what, what society wants you to think.

Michael Vassar [00:57:48] And also all children

Vance Crowe [00:57:50] And children,

Michael Vassar [00:57:51] All of them, you know, everyone starts individuated society, socializes people. They secondarily socialize people in various ways to and cause them to stop being individuated. And it doesn't work on everyone, but it can, they can have more or less pressure on different groups so that it works on practically everyone if they are from what we call privileged groups because they try harder. The more privilege you have, the more the system tries to de individuate you and bring you into its heart, which is to say, take away your heart, take away your soul.

Vance Crowe [00:58:27] And with regards to places like Israel and and Gaza and what happened with Hamas, this is you are recognizing that there are two different sides. Like we, we talk about liberal and conservative that are using their, their voice from authority of like, you should come into our larger heart and, and give up your own individual sense of what's going on here and believe what we believe and what then. So the left is believing that maybe the, the, that they shouldn't,

Michael Vassar [00:59:06] The left is saying side with Hezbollah nonviolent, nonviolently side with Hezbollah will go as far in that direction as you can without being attacked by the administrative system.

Vance Crowe [00:59:20] Okay, and what's the right saying?

Michael Vassar [00:59:22] The intellectual right says, Hmm, I'm confused. The authorities have been lying to us about everything. Maybe they were lying about Nazis and being good and we should be Nazis, but hey, I'm a Jew and my friends are all Jews. Maybe the Nazis were just like the Jews or they were borrowing things from Judaism in order to figure out how to be better Germans or something. The normal person on the right is still in favor of taking authority, taking orders, the the de individuated people on the right or into taking orders from people who are in favor of administrative machinery in favor of compliance and following rules. And they assume that obviously the Israelis are in favor of administrative machinery compliance and rules. We need to make deals with them, we need to do business with them. We couldn't possibly do business with Hezbollah. What would it even mean for us to be doing business with Hezbollah and siding with people is pretty much the same thing as doing business with people. How is this even a question? I guess we could maybe join the boycotts on the left and stop doing business with them.

Vance Crowe [01:00:30] So the left, and this is the battle of Hezbollah, at least in the American psyche, is a battle of left and right between beyond team Israel, beyond team Hezbollah, beyond team not Israel,

Michael Vassar [01:00:43] Beyond team against Israel, beyond team Israel, beyond team against Israel, which justifies being against Israel because of the Palestinians, but also has always justified being against Israel for, you know, in every generation they gather to destroy us.

Vance Crowe [01:00:59] And so where does this go? Where what happens next?

Michael Vassar [01:01:03] Well, I feel like I probably, it doesn't amount to very much for real as a practical global issue. The Israeli conflict is big for Israel. Ten nine elevens really small compared to the Ukraine conflict. Much smaller countries that are much less affected, you know, so it sucks for a lot of people in Palestine, their standard of living probably falls from approximately the same as judged by life expectancy and a bit better in terms of income and wealth than their neighbors in Jordan, who they might conceivably be the upper bound for what they could hope for without Israeli occupation. Two, something significantly worse than that. Probably not lower than serious life expectancy, which is still much, much higher than African life expectancies. But their path of possible futures probably get a lot worse than say, Lebanons, where life expectancies are longer than the US despite poverty. And it would be nice if someone may be from Lebanon or from the Kurdish resistance or some other group that has experience with non-traditional organizational structures, could be helping consult with Israel and them to try to figure out what sorts of makeshift governance they can do to keep their life expectancies as close to Jordan.

Michael Vassar [01:02:36] And as far from Syria as possible. Their incomes, their economic situation won't fall to anywhere remotely close to Syria. It might still not fall below Jordan, but it sucks for them. It, it's really a shame and I don't have any real sense that there's much that anyone in the world could do to make things not go in that pretty sucky direction, except I guess I could imagine, I could imagine if you could have like a philanthropic visionary in a lot of power, military contractor or you know, technologists, someone could like create the type of electronic mechanized authoritarianism that would still be authoritarian and awful in some ways for them, but which might objectively work out better than what's likely to actually happen. You know, you could have less violent methods of handling a shitty situation if you had better tools for maintaining safety while projecting authority.

Vance Crowe [01:03:50] So when Russia invaded Ukraine, it, it was like obvious to everyone that, not to everyone, I'm, I'm being facetious, I'm not being literal

Michael Vassar [01:04:03] Obvious to everyone who

Vance Crowe [01:04:05] No, that that Russia was going to get their ass handed to them and be sent packing, right? People thought like, oh this is, you know, this is only gonna be a few weeks or months even

Michael Vassar [01:04:15] That Ukraine, Ukraine was gonna get the best handed.

Vance Crowe [01:04:17] Well, I don't know, like I'm, I'm, I think there were people that thought that that was going to be like two to three weeks, right? There were

Michael Vassar [01:04:22] People that thought, but they thought that Russia would win in two to three weeks. Nobody thought Ukraine would win in two to three weeks. That

Vance Crowe [01:04:27] Fair enough? Yeah. That's fair enough. But they thought that that it would be over in two to three weeks and yet billions and billions, maybe even trillions at this point of dollars have gone there. All sorts of munitions. Do you sense that this Israel Palestine thing has the like ah, they'll be able to go in there and clean up Hezbollah, Jesus

Michael Vassar [01:04:46] Christ though that would be an insane thing to expect. Okay. Obviously it will be worse than the situation in Afghanistan where the US withdrew after 20 years with 3000 casualties. But the thing in Afghanistan still made life better for the people in Afghanistan. It was just a drain on the us. Like it was much, much better being ruled by the US than by being ruled by the Taliban. You know, almost every index of prosperity went better, but that was, it's nicer to be ruled by people who have an overwhelming numerical and force advantage than to be ruled by people who have less of an overwhelming numerical and forced advantage. 'cause then you'll resist more. So I feel like the Gaza thing might kill more Israelis and get more pe gaza's killed and be shittier in some ways. Like the Gaza people in Gaza's lives will get worse when they get invaded. Well, people in Afghanistan's lives got better almost immediately when they got made invaded. 'cause they were under a regime so horrific that like who the fuck cares? Yeah, being invaded is great, but otherwise I think the situation's analogist to Gaza to the Afghanistan thing, it, it's shitty. I think that we know about the amount of money that's gone to Ukraine. It's not easy to give away trillions of dollars. We had saw how slowly money was given to them during the initial part of the war. It was only about 40 million billion over like a couple years over like a year and a half or a year. So it's probably like pushing a hundred billion now

Vance Crowe [01:06:14] These that are what up in the budget? These are things, I have no concept of the money at all. I just, I just know like, hey, we had to an inflation reduction act and somehow money got allocated to the Ukraine. Like I, I'm, I'm being, I I follow international news almost none. Like I, I am,

Michael Vassar [01:06:31] I don't follow any news, but I've still seen the a hundred million billion number a bunch of times and I saw a $40 billion earlier. And I also see right wing memeing, which is not the discourse thing, but the authority thing at the lowest level of the authority thing. I see right wing memeing about infinite budgets that are, I would regard it as facetious or a joke or like a joke to the degree that the 2012 end of the world was a joke. Not something that any that is intended to deceive someone who is trying to figure out what's true but only intended to provide deniable ambiguous talking points to someone who is go trying to take sides.

Vance Crowe [01:07:15] And I would be the, I mean I did a podcast two weeks ago about how little you can really know about what's going on in the world,

Michael Vassar [01:07:23] Right? But you can't know things. But you can say there's convergent sources that say that about 40 billion billion up to a certain point and convergent sources that say a hundred billion in other po. Oh, okay. One thing that you can know is whether people are sending clear tells that they are joking or alerting or messing around or not serious. Like Richard Hanania has said a number of things about the Ukraine spending. Do you, are you familiar with him?

Vance Crowe [01:07:50] No,

Michael Vassar [01:07:51] He is an interesting case. I'm sure he's going to be on the Israeli side more or less, despite being a Palestinian, he's a famous right wing v blogger or tweeter and you know, minor intellectual up the graft person and he's like with respect to the Russian Ukraine, he basically had the weirdest, most interesting growth and learning take ever where he's like, okay, I expected Russia to just trounce Ukraine quickly. The Ukraine's held up fairly well. Turns out that like manliness and violence and aggression aren't as close to being the same thing as strength and virtue as I thought. And I'm no longer identifying as a conservative, although he continues to have conservative fan base and edge Lloyd troll and to try to exploit them and build on them and you know, I'm like less pro manliness and victory and strength as a cause and not as motivated to take the sort of conservative causes after seeing Russia get defeated to the degree that it has relative expectations. So that was a very cool take on Ukraine. He has a wonderful essay called Why I Hate pronouns, gender pronouns More than Genocides. But he has also said on Twitter that he, he wants to charge people for the tweets that don't gain him meme meme bait followers because his business is getting meme bait followers and the people who read the good tweets are, you know, taking up attention that he should be doing basically making bad tweets.

Michael Vassar [01:09:24] And he makes unambiguously bad nonsense tweets about like for the money that we've spent on Ukraine, we could put every homeless person in a two story mansion. We could, you know, pay off the national debt for a hundred, a hundred years. He, he, I don't remember the exact list, but it was totally absurd claims that are very unambiguously showing that you are trying to make sure that anyone who is trying to get the right answer no, anyone who is trying to get the wrong answer knows that you are trying to get the wrong answer too because you're not awi you know about midwives, I've talked with you about this before.

Vance Crowe [01:10:00] You can do, do it again.

Michael Vassar [01:10:02] So there's this meme around bell curves.

Vance Crowe [01:10:04] Yes, yes,

Michael Vassar [01:10:05] Yes. And there there's the very brain damaged person, the dimwit, the mid width and the wit on the sides of the LL

Vance Crowe [01:10:13] Curve. Yeah, the guy with the hood, right?

Michael Vassar [01:10:15] The

Vance Crowe [01:10:15] Guy that's like yelling and,

Michael Vassar [01:10:16] And the guy with the hood says the same things or slight variations of the things that the dimwit says, right?

Vance Crowe [01:10:22] But

Michael Vassar [01:10:22] The mid width says something that basically is what the mainstream media would say.

Vance Crowe [01:10:26] That's right.

Michael Vassar [01:10:27] The, you could say the guy, the dimwit acts like a populist, the Midwood acts like what the mainstream media tells you to be and the guy with the hood acts like a populist and says slightly different things. But the point is that the, the populists are taking the position that the government is against them. They're taking the position that you should in general be deciding against the truth that the government is handing with you and not trying to make your own judgements about that. And that's a like conceivably sensible, individually rational decision to make if you think you're basically being invaded. The wit is like organizing around, ruling over controlling the populace. So they're organized around saying the things that will mobilize the populists. They're being sarcastic, they're being ironic, they're edge loading, they're making drastically false obvious claims and then saying haha was joking and they are joking. But the, the, the communication channel for meme style jokes or edgy jokes is the communication channel for populist order transmission of orders.

Vance Crowe [01:11:36] Okay, interesting. I could buy into this. Keep going.

Michael Vassar [01:11:40] So there's a Jeffrey Miller, the thing he is most right about, probably the only thing that's unique to him and public and that he's right about and important as an evolutionary psychologist is I think there are basically two mating strategies which kind of matched the Seinfeld episode about the comedian and the gymnast. So there's basically a mating strategy associated with de individuated consciousness, which centers on gender performativity and dominance and it one orienting and like physicality and one around individuated consciousness that centers the wrong, like noticing the things that don't fit in stick out, don't come together and making sense and drawing attention to them, which is sort of centered around comedians as a archetype, but which basically involves investigation and trying to accumulate acquire. So I think that we're trying to, that's one type of humor. It's a I, okay, what I'm saying is that the thing that is meant by humor or jokes or co comedy differs between whether you are using your comedy as a way to point out falsehoods or whether you are using your comedy as a way to get away with falsehoods.

Vance Crowe [01:13:12] Okay?

Michael Vassar [01:13:13] So the type of comedian that like Dave Chappelle or like classic comedians who do stand up or are, is creating tension in people that's released in humor by pointing attention at falsehoods that they find it convenient to pretend to themselves are true. And finding a way to release that without loading over them, without making an ego claim against them, without making a command, without making them feel that they're worse people for having discovered it before.

Vance Crowe [01:13:48] Like Dave Chappelle going like making the jokes about the Ls, the Bs, the G's and the T's all in the car. And he's able to point this out in a way that if you talked about that community negatively without using humor you'd be blasted. But because he's able to make a joke out of it, he's able to point out the thing that is not fitting in and the laughter signals people have agreement with

Michael Vassar [01:14:11] It, people agree with you but don't want to admit it. And there's the type of humor that's invoking people to agree with you and not want to admit it. And there's the type of humor that is invoking you can get away with pretending to believe this while knowing that it's obviously absurd and nobody, you don't need to worry that the other people who you are siding with believe it in good faith and are going to pull a pizza gate.

Vance Crowe [01:14:39] I mean I'm, I'm, because as you're saying this, I can think of whether text strings with friends that that like where they put something out that's so preposterous but like everybody knows that it's not true but then it's like something that I, I was, I was thinking of one that's very uncouth but people have made the joke that Michelle Obama is a man and so this is all over you. You can get lots and lots of memes about this. Everybody knows that's not true but then they're all kind of like elbowing each other like, well maybe it's true. Is that what

Michael Vassar [01:15:13] You're describing? Yeah, that is, but it's a bad example. Okay. Because it's not that's just being mean or aggressive or trying to insult someone in that's being bad at at school. Boy humor. That's being bad at making fun of someone because you're unable to find a very right on point of you're not able to target Well

Vance Crowe [01:15:30] Okay,

Michael Vassar [01:15:31] I'm more talking about pizzagate and astrology. Astrology is a funny thing that you can pretend to believe while being confident that no one is ever going to do an astrological cleansing the way they might do an ethnic cleansing. Even if the horoscope says

Vance Crowe [01:15:50] That's pretty funny because I have a running gag where I'm like full on, on, on astrology and people can't quite discern whether or not is Vance really into this or not. But you're right, nobody would expect that. I would like be like ah those Capricorns, they have got to go, we've gotta get rid of all of them.

Michael Vassar [01:16:08] Yeah, right. So astrology is a funny thing that is not serious and labels the situation as not serious. And by playing around with not serious things, we can both establish that we're not being serious and establish that we will cover from for each other and give each other cover as not serious when we say other things in this vibe that are maybe more like instructions and more likeI planning out and organizing through. Yes and and play ways of defrauding people, ways of getting away with things, ways of giving people advice that you think you might get blamed for. Giving them ways of having sex with people without feeling guilty because it was your destiny and maybe even ways of very slowly implicitly building communities to backs stab people in business deals when Mercury is in retrograde for instance,

Vance Crowe [01:17:04] This is hilarious because on my podcast I probably know less than 10 times, talked about how for a while there when we were interviewing babysitters, they all believed in astrology. Like, you you like I, my wife at first didn't believe me and I was like, no, no watch. Anytime we interview one I would casually bring it up and they would light up and they would wanna talk about it and they would be like really super into it,

Michael Vassar [01:17:27] Right? So by talking about astrology, you are showing that you're smart, fast, clever, and able to be playful and to try to help someone get away with things. And that can come in handy that makes you a more valuable ally. And if you're like me and you want to geek out about astrology and like do statistical analysis of personality and association with different signs and falsify the mainstream horoscopes and standard stereotypes by doing so, but also speculate on inter interactions you have with an astrologer where they make a large investment decision based on astrological information or they recommend a give a good investment recommendation based on the astrological decision. Like given that's only happened twice to me and the effect sizes were freaking huge. Someone made a $50,000 investment based just on astrological information in one case on with someone they'd never met and didn't know anything about their business proposal and someone else predicted that my purchase, my deal to rent their apartment would be needed because the people who had offered shown me a better apartment and offered earlier that day to let me use it would back out of the deal because Mercury within retrograde, so those are large enough effect sizes that it would be stupid of me obtuse to not think that people are interfacing, transmitting some real information that is relevant to making business decisions. And I can speculate on what types of information could be used and I can see how like a bunch of people who know, hey, if you fuck people over in business deals when Mercury is in retrograde, you can also like make business bets on the assumption that other people will do the same thing and you can back each other up and cover for each other when that happens.

Michael Vassar [01:19:13] And on average you can make money by collaborating in each other's betrayals without needing to understand or having any strategic shared background so your coordination can't be detected.

Vance Crowe [01:19:27] And so Pizzagate or would be one would would flat earthing be another?

Michael Vassar [01:19:31] No, Pizzagate is the failure. That's what happens when you don't do astrology hard enough. I'm saying that with Pizzagate, people on Q anon are saying something obviously stupid, crazy ha ha everyone knows this is obviously a joke if you're not extremely bad at understanding people and making sense of the world, but it wasn't clear enough so someone attacked that pizza parlor. So that's like why you would want astrology if you are planning vague, nefarious, undetectable coordination the way Q anon is planning vague, nefarious, undetectable coordination

Vance Crowe [01:20:13] And but what about the flat earth or is that, is that kinda

Michael Vassar [01:20:16] The same thing? So I feel like the flat earth thing I expect is kind of the same thing, but it it displays a much, it's a weird vibe. It it, it it, it's a really weak meme. It's a very ineffective meme compared to astrology which has managed to perpetuate itself for 10,000 years or whatever. Who knows

Vance Crowe [01:20:37] The flat earth thing's gone on for at least a little while. Like it's, it's pretty popular

Michael Vassar [01:20:42] It do you find that it's rapidly growing in popularity?

Vance Crowe [01:20:45] I don't know about growing. I mean nobody comes to me and says Vance, I don't, I think the earth is flat. This wouldn't be the type of person I'd run around.

Michael Vassar [01:20:52] I bet your babysitters aren't flat earthers.

Vance Crowe [01:20:54] No they're not. But that's more of a guy thing.

Michael Vassar [01:20:56] It's such a rare guy thing though. I feel like with astrology it's like most girls of the right age range. That's

Vance Crowe [01:21:03] Right.

Michael Vassar [01:21:04] Or the right several age ranges.

Vance Crowe [01:21:05] That's right.

Michael Vassar [01:21:06] And for flat earthers it's like more like lizard man's constant of 5% of people will endorse any preposterous claim. But I don't think it's even as good as lizard man's constant. I bet there are more people who claim that the British royal family and a lot of Jews but not just Jews are actually five dimensional al aliens. Maybe they won't have all of the details and won't know about the 3D five D four D five D thing and how it relates to the lizard man thing. Maybe they haven't thought it through very much, but you're familiar with the David Ikea lizard man thing. Yes. I think that's probably more popular than astrology by like, I mean than flat earth by quite a bit, you know.

Vance Crowe [01:21:45] So when you say that people are using this as a, as a form of coordination, is this an emergent phenomenon meaning like humans just kind of do this and they figure out these ways of communicating? Or is there a small group of people that's sitting around being like, ah, we can or is it a meme that that

Michael Vassar [01:22:01] I would say an

Vance Crowe [01:22:02] Infection.

Michael Vassar [01:22:02] I, I would say it is evolved for humans to when they get tricked, start looking to meme that it's evolved for people to take ideas less seriously, be less motivated by morality, less hardworking, more less motivated to try to make things make sense and more motivated to see what other people seem to be getting away with. Including the people who you at first felt bad about being fucked over by and look to sort of kiss their asses and get into the game by learning from them the way for instance in Mozart's d Chiyote, the other guy who's going along with D Chiyote, not Dan Chiyote, sorry what's it called? Casanova No Don Giovanni and Mozarts d Giovanni. He has this assistant who's like kind of trying to learn the game of being a predatory rapist from this high status predatory rapist aristocrat and like help kind of kissing his ass. Although he sort of is mistreated by him and I, I think that people when they perceive injustice try to look for when they perceive injustice that they have no power to seek re, re compensation from that they have no recourse against, they are evolved to try to figure out what sorts of behaviors they can imitate without join without understanding them that are associated with injustice so that they can back it up and help it out without being implicated in it.

Michael Vassar [01:23:39] Join in that they perceive that injustice is powerful and does favors to those who imitate without understanding its surface phenomena. And when people join the herd mentality, they are very motivated to help out people who they see imitating without understanding unjust behaviors.

Vance Crowe [01:23:58] Well this is getting into a deeper level of, of my greatest fear, which is you know, the fear of the mob, right? That's always my, my greatest fear.

Michael Vassar [01:24:06] Mine too. That's what antisemitism is. The antisemitism is the slowest mob. There are always mobs at different speeds across different parts of any sort of height, population, density, complicated society that we know about, you know, but they exist in different social circles at different speeds in different ways and when they exist in intellectual circles they create false narratives that claim that normal human behavior is mob behavior and thereby justify it and cover a lot of it. And so we see this happening in like France with like Lacan and with Postmodernists we see it happening in America later with a lot of pop neuroscientists and science and pop spirituality.

Vance Crowe [01:24:55] Does this explain DEI people, people being very worried about being canceled and then deciding like, oh well then I'm gonna be the first one to, to sign the oath and get my company to do it and to really fan the flames on this?

Michael Vassar [01:25:11] I absolutely think so. I think that the diversity, equity inclusion is understood as bad behavior in bad faith necessarily to be done in bad faith. So if we're doing it in bad, if we know someone is acting in bad faith, they're a good ally 'cause they can ally with you based on purely political considerations rather than a mix of individualist, selfish and loyal and political considerations The way someone acting in good faith might

Vance Crowe [01:25:38] Is that what like pronouns in the bio are or people participating in

Michael Vassar [01:25:42] It? Oh absolutely. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:25:44] I never thought about it like that. How, describe that to me in another way.

Michael Vassar [01:25:47] So from my perspective, I am probably the person under approximately the most social encouragement to gender transition that's like ambiently emergent from the way in which I interact with people in the trans activism world. They call people like me seeds. They are presenting these sorts of indicators that motivate trans people to become obsessed with you, follow your bound, try to recruit you very, very slowly. I'm probably about these cis straight guy with the most communication with and information about sort of the multiple outer circle and inner circles of trans ideological doctrine.

Vance Crowe [01:26:30] Okay

Michael Vassar [01:26:30] So the this part though is not coming from explicit trans ideological doctrine unless you're going to treat things as explicit through like long paper trails of academic citations and like this is maxim, this is the sort of thing that is only explicit in so far as it is max passing through the maximal upstream of the intellectual stew as opposed to the maximal upstream of the authoritarians do.

Vance Crowe [01:26:59] Okay

Michael Vassar [01:27:00] So we were talking about thrownness and opting out of morality et cetera. Okay earlier and I was talking about ha guian Islam and the motivation to e equivocate between different things. So like from my perspective I experience living in a society which has discorded all but the thinnest facade of procedural law and which is also scrutinizing people's consciousness with undifferentiated consciousness in un individual consciousness in order to detect individuated consciousness and bring it into differentiated consciousness. From my perspective in so far as I experience and my close friends who I talked with about this experience, social pressure and encouragement to become trans in so far as we en encounter and experience a offer of a cost benefit calculation that suggests that it would be a good idea for us to become trans and tries to argue for it really central to the offering is a type of collectivist identity or group identity or costly signifier of opting out from competition within individuated consciousness that does not require that when abandoned reason it it's an, it's the offer of a recognized point isolate of commitment to maintaining and standing by and stone balling around a false claim that qualifies one as a protected group eg a group of people who are participating in a shame culture and therefore are d de individuated and are a group and will be reliably able to within s sigma signifiers that shame culture will recognize, be justified in defending one another and defending themselves.

Michael Vassar [01:29:11] If you're not trans as someone like me, you're a schizophrenic, you're a part of a unprotected differentiated the in federated group. I'm not saying I've been diagnosed as schizophrenic, I'm saying if you are reasonably good at understanding psychology from like a in school or whatever, I'm like very clearly the sort of ideal form of the thing that our society is trying to label as schizophrenic and to claim the reasoning of which does not work in order to silence our claims and prevent us from disclaiming the arguments for identity between authority and intellectual authority or authority and tradition.

Vance Crowe [01:29:51] Okay, let me see if I can restate this. So you're saying you are one of the people that is on the edge of normal society and and there is a group of people that are that in the trans community that would look at you and say, hey you may want to join our system because by joining our system and declaring that you are not a, a male that's attracted to females, but you are something else, then you get to join in on our community and we will protect you from people that would say you know bad things about you. You also become a protected class. So you get certain benefits in our culture, you get certain advantages and the price of doing this is you are now de individuated meaning like you really have to represent what the whole group is representing what we think about things,

Michael Vassar [01:30:44] But only within a contained bubble. The thing that makes their offer better than a religious offer is that they're offering a more clear containment bubble for what sorts of claims you have to make. You don't need to scramble your entire worldview in epistemology, you only need to distort some of your perceptions about who knows who can be probabilistically with what level of certainty expected to know what your, your only distort some probabilistic vague, not ly coupled things, intuitions about what other people should be assumed to know plus

Vance Crowe [01:31:21] About you

Michael Vassar [01:31:22] No, about the world and how it works.

Vance Crowe [01:31:25] This is a is is a, is an application of of clarity or reason I'm, I'm like that I've never heard about this particular subject. So you are describing that one of the reasons that people would be attracted to this is not only do you get to be a part of a community but the cost of being a part of this community is not as high as say joining a Catholic community or joining a Orthodox Jewish

Michael Vassar [01:31:50] Community. Right. The spiritual cost of joining a Catholic community is enormously larger than the spiritual cost of giving up one's genitals and taking hormones for the rest of your life and having some fairly severe health costs, et cetera and huge economic costs and like uncertainty about long-term side effects. The spiritual cost of joining Catholicism is, you know, is giving up your soul and Catholicism knows that if you're doing it in an authentic way, while the spiritual cost of transgenderism are bounded by the sublime abstraction of the concept of gender and how it connects to things so that it only distorts your metaphysics, it doesn't sever your metaphysics from reality completely. Which is part of why absolutely elite science and math are so spectacularly dominated by transgender people at this day. It's just kind of ridiculous to consider an organization not obviously displaying real like trans exclusion if it's scientific elite isn't at least like a quarter or a fifth trends in today's America.

Vance Crowe [01:32:55] Where, where does this commitment like go? I mean like it sounds to me when I think of like the Catholic church that I grew up in, the price is not really that high. It's Sunday for an hour plus. Like

Michael Vassar [01:33:11] No, if you lived in a liberal society that could protect you from lawless violence against which you have no recourse without needing to give up individuated consciousness, then that's the case. But we're living in an illiberal society that requires that we at least partially surrender individuated consciousness and surrendering individuated consciousness to in some ways be part of the bo body of Christ. The collective intelligence that is the Catholic church means a total opting out of morality with respect to an important part of your life and replacing it with this, you know, malevolent or symbiotic collective intelligence.

Vance Crowe [01:33:48] So to my audience which I would say is largely religious, the them hearing you describe the trade off between trans giving up your genitals, taking chemistry, you know like

Michael Vassar [01:34:04] Untested.

Vance Crowe [01:34:06] Yeah all the long term health consequences like the, the trade is like

Michael Vassar [01:34:09] Huge amounts of money, surgical risk. I've known trans people who've died in surgery, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:34:14] So I think that most of the people that are religious are saying that's a totalitarian belief system re relative to I go to church on Sunday, we have family dinner, you know I have to go to Sunday school.

Michael Vassar [01:34:26] That's because they're just normalizing totalitarianism. You might say that fascism is secularized catholicism and is where totalitarianism comes from. Any group of people who are telling you that you have to believe something and that you have to accept their moral judgments and be ruled by shame that they can impose on you that like these are people who are working with the soul to work with the soul. I mean to claim to control the, you know, to believe it for real is totally totalitarian and our society is like really, really good at, I mean that's the final totalitarianism in 1984 is believing that two plus two equals five our society is really, so trends is the strongest guarantee you can have of being protected by the most extreme or well in form of totalitarianism by accepting the minimal form of totalitarianism that is acceptable by our pluralistic totalitarian society.

Vance Crowe [01:35:26] And is this a, a belief system that you believe will stand the test of time? I mean Catholicism is gone for hundreds, thousands of years.

Michael Vassar [01:35:37] No, I expect that this is a belief system that in the central timeline it becomes irrelevant and vaguely fades into a gradual slow renewal of the use of Unix in the people's republic of China's extended empire.

Vance Crowe [01:36:00] That's a powerful statement.

Michael Vassar [01:36:04] Like China's used Unix a lot over the time over history in America we have trans people dominating the heights of the capacities that one is looking for in a unique and in Taiwan we have large gains to state capacity from the trans person Audrey Tang helping them to manage COVID and helping them to manage their political war system and their marketing and PR systems you have America is deep in decline. China is definitely still rising. The American fantasy that China's on the collapse any day now has been buzzing since I was a little kid. That's like definitely not true and like that doesn't mean America will be like literally colonized. That's silly. China didn't colonize people when it was overwhelmingly world dominant in the 14 hundreds either. It did its own weird ritualistic trade and acceptance of subordination thing. But I expect that eventually America will be culturally colonized enough by China that I will not feel like I am living within a horrific totalitarian system as someone who is obligated to pick a form of totalitarianism in order to participate in totalitarian pluralism, but instead will feel like I am under a technocratic basically mostly benevolent ish but not respecting freedom or intellectual integrity. Very much authoritarian system that's like not very good at computer science and might eventually blow up the world with AI because it's not very good at computer science but is pretty good at suppressing things.

Michael Vassar [01:37:46] So might be able to suppress computer science well enough to not blow the world with AI instead and eventually breed itself into some sort of superhumans genetic engineering.

Vance Crowe [01:37:56] We'll get to the AI thing in just a second, but there are a lot of people listening to this show right now that are very strong advocates over the long term of America and to hear them to, for many of them to hear you describing this country as a totalitarian plu state that requires you to choose a totalitarian regime to join that wouldn't even compute. It wouldn't, it wouldn't have any, it wouldn't have any.

Michael Vassar [01:38:26] So I feel like if that was 10 years ago, that would be me. It wouldn't compute. I would see the long term decline of various types, but I would see other types of rapid improvement that had been going on until fairly recently and some things that were still improving. Like Facebook, I would 10 years ago basically be worried about the rise of work culture. I'd be worried about the long-term debt, I'd be worried about not enough worried about the 2008 financial crisis, not nearly, but I would basically think that the biggest bad signs of my youth had been averted, like the possibility of saber rattling against China that could have gotten us into a nuclear war. And the bush failing to establish anything like a dynasty seems like a good thing. It's really sketchy. And Gary for a stolen election to make the son of President, president and like while corruption in Silicon Valley seemed to be rapidly increasing and anti-tech oppression in Silicon Valley seemed to be for not being corrupt enough, not for being too corrupt. And while the intellectual cultures that had not been at least somewhat political such as the skeptics and science fiction community had been destroyed and the internet was no longer quite as intellectually fresh and generative as it had been still Tesla seemed to be pretty amazing and rapidly improving and like enough things seemed likely enough to get better in the reasonably near future.

Michael Vassar [01:40:02] And I'd only been acquainted for maybe four or five years with how people do power. Not six years total maybe with how people in power work and had only been maybe three years acquainted with a degree to which the scientific establishment was intentionally suppressing basically all scientific and technological progress and hadn't yet become acquainted with the level of coordination within the media to do the same thing. I basically thought we were in an imperfect but generally okay-ish maybe path where we basically had individual freedoms and if you couldn't figure out how to make it in America, at least in an immigranty way than you were basically the fault was on you not on them. And I mean that seems to be the attitude that Ram has now. It's a very intelligible attitude to me criticized by creating, you know, mild, you know, libertarian on the margin, but don't forget how far away from we are from that as an ideal and so therefore don't crush people who by, by invoking the ideal as if it was being invoked in a just or systematic way. Then I experienced the social pressures that we've all experienced over the last 10 years. I saw the whole COVID drama play out. I don't know how I could possibly think that anymore.

Vance Crowe [01:41:31] And so you now, but that still doesn't get you to totalitarian?

Michael Vassar [01:41:35] No, the specific concrete details of the conversations that I have with people across the political spectrum in an extremely, not like basically near the peak of all of the different parts of the intellectual stew as opposed to the the authoritarian structure. Yeah, nobody disagrees implicitly with these claims. They're like ground, ground claims without which it's not possible to make sense of any of the, of our lived experience with getting into rooms, having conversations with people, getting paid, predicting what investments will do about how well et cetera. Like we, you see too many of people effectively pressured into drugs, effectively pressured into very non-consensual, very coercive sexual scenes as part of participating in any situation. You interact with Jeffrey Epstein, you see him arrested, you see all of these elites who interact with him and feel it's necessary to cover it up, pretend they didn't and, and no not who are not in a position from Bill Gates's level of power to say anything about what's going on there. You then see this person who's untouchable be suddenly outed by the New York Post and that and arrested and murdered and any, all of the smart people who say never believe in conspiracy theories say well that's not a conspiracy theory of course and people predict it before it happens many times.

Michael Vassar [01:43:08] And then you see John McAfee tattoo on his arm that he's not going to hang himself in prison and still hangs himself in prison. So like at this point it's really clear that if the things that happened under our system had happened under Henry viii, he would've been overthrown in a heartbeat. We're like so much beyond the level of authoritarianism of pre parliamentary supremacy, you know, evil polygamist monarch Henry VIII who still had to have the his wives in sequence and still had to come up with excuses for them and still had to have actual trials with his enemy, the Sir Thomas Mill. And you know, there was still credible uncertainty about what way those trials would go. Like there's no comparison between the level of rule of law, experienced justice, authoritarianism ability to navigate life on idealistic, individualistic legalistic rather than cynical collectivistic heard approach. We're not India like it's possible to be far more totalitarian with thousands of years of practice in the use of the caste system than either the Soviet Union or the Nazis could ever attain. And to hone that against itself and have leftover the sort of harmonious egalitarian intermixture of a heterogeneous state of collective consciousnesses.

Michael Vassar [01:44:43] You know, I you know, would rather be anything than that but you know, people who are dis have a discerning sense for authoritarianism like Nietzche or ay rand and are just fully anti-authoritarian or like so much more pro ay rand so much more pro-communist than she is pro Hindu.

Vance Crowe [01:45:08] Oh that's interesting. You don't hear that said?

Michael Vassar [01:45:10] Yeah, but like that's the thing that actually caused John gout to go crazy and try to bring down America in Atlas Shrugged you've read it right? Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:45:19] Of course, yeah.

Michael Vassar [01:45:19] You remember that right? The factory got taken over by a Hindu and they started having meditation classes.

Vance Crowe [01:45:25] It never dawned on me that that was the criticism. I I just jumped over it. I thought it was like non-productive people, non-productive things.

Michael Vassar [01:45:33] Yeah, the the the, the global limit of where the in the authoritarian or the, the benevolent totalitarian and impulse insofar as it evolves from purely parasitic to symbiotic and normalizes the existence of heterogeneous crowd consciousnesses as a replacement for individuated consciousness that went farther in India earlier. They develop more advanced spirituality than everyone else. They have a better sense of musical complexity and subtlety than everyone with a possible exception of Germany. Their whole culture is built not around material technology but around the psycho technologies of harmoniously interacting within situations within a dynamic of total domination by the crowd and within a hierarchical heterogeneous crowd.

Vance Crowe [01:46:23] Is this why they were able to have so many more people because they didn't?

Michael Vassar [01:46:26] That's probably relevant but more I think that's probably more cause than effect. My guess is that if you guess in the long run, in the long run Nepal with the unfertile climate has a lot of people and Tibet with a unfertile climate beyond all reason has like relatively more people there than it would in like Alaska or Finland. But, but probably I expect the fertility comes first. The extremely abundant natural environment creates the possibility of people living while not having very individuated con you. You the more abundant your environment, the less individuated your consciousness needs to be in order to orient enough around the world around you to gather food, protect yourself from the cold and reproduce. You can work harder under individualist assumptions, organize more production sustainably under individualist assumptions, figure out more solutions to problems relative to a given level of intelligence in a population density under individualist assumptions.

Vance Crowe [01:47:36] So is this why, like we were talking before about the the trans or then joining a religious movement, do you have to have times of abundance in order to have those things grow or at least new ones grow

Michael Vassar [01:47:51] You to have this sort of thing? We're saying you have to have the natural or slash technological capitalistic radical abundance that creates a huge degree of freedom in people whereby people can explore nonsense and dive farther into it and disconnect themselves more from their senses, their understanding of reality, their understanding of their own nature, their understanding of what it is to be human and how anything works in order to become part of something that is not human but a mob and surrender, understanding how things work instead of understanding how to get by, how to get ahead, how to be accepted and rise up.

Vance Crowe [01:48:31] So if you are concerned as I am about mobs, you've mentioned the the antisemitic mob, there's

Michael Vassar [01:48:41] Only one mob or rather there is one Indo-European mob, there's presumably a ric mob, there's presumably lots of African mobs, there's presumably two Chinese mobs. 'cause they're probably,

Vance Crowe [01:48:52] Do you think it all comes down to ethnic like, and two ethnicities is the mobs,

Michael Vassar [01:48:57] I mean as I say, Taiwan probably merges China with the indigenous chi Taiwanese people and has two different, there's probably a different Chinese mob in the PRC and outside of the PRC. Yeah, I think that at the limit mobs are collective intelligences that are built, broken down around broadly ethnic lines where every mob exists turned against itself and pretending to be competing mobs in order to justify extracting from third parties. So Hagel, I sent you that hagel quote. He's talking about how the Jews are the most corrupt people by universal agreement because they're not turned against themselves and they're by standing before God for judgment rather than turning against themselves. They don't like cleanse themselves of their, you know, impurities and you know, he become part of a collective intelligence.

Vance Crowe [01:49:55] So

Michael Vassar [01:49:56] I, I retweeted, I tweeted that today it's Evans it's, or rather I retweeted it from Jessica Taylor's tweet stream.

Vance Crowe [01:50:04] And so I guess I, when I look at mobs, I look at 'em and say they can form around many things and the unifying thing is anger, fear, jealousy, desire, right? Like there's, there's these

Michael Vassar [01:50:20] Envy not jealousy. Envy not jealousy. If it's anger, not fear, I don't think it's a mob. It might be an impudent individuated military action, it might be a raid. I don't

Vance Crowe [01:50:36] Okay. Fear, I guess you're correct. So I'm, I'm being imprecise. It's fear does it envy, does it? Yeah and probably fear. Fear and envy, I don't know I was gonna say

Michael Vassar [01:50:47] Desire, but those I think's basically fear and envy. Yeah

Vance Crowe [01:50:49] That's that's probably right,

Michael Vassar [01:50:50] Right. I think that fear envy that pretends to be desire is what lakan causes Jo sense as opposed to pleasure and says that we are almost entirely motivated by, in a post World War II French environment and JE became a very prominent philosopher who's like somewhat popularizing and media filing lakan while Dilu and DeLanda became really central postmodernist philosophers building on Lahan. I think pH lahan framework is basically correct but incredibly obscure interest. The last psychiatrists recent, the recent book sadly porn is an attempt by someone I haven't read yet that I've heard somewhat good things about. But I mostly would recommend the internet encyclopedia philosophy articles on lahan and, and the no subject wiki, which is a blog on lakan and to some degree psychoanalysis. And it's going to be really, really hard to model the theory completely. There are a lot of easier simple theories that are still super useful like Enneagram, but Lakan is not like Enneagram in in being an astrology type thing. It doesn't work as a, we're not serious thing. It works as a oh we are deadly serious thing but also understand that our whole culture is committed to siding with the wrong tho those doing wrong, not siding with those doing right and to defining siding with rightness as insanity and je as this sort of thing pretty clearly.

Vance Crowe [01:52:21] Let's pause there because one of the things I wanted to talk with you about is ai, you know, for a few weeks, maybe a few months everybody's talking about it. It's a big, big thing. Some people are saying no big deal, other people saying the end of humanity is just over that horizon. Where where have things sorted out and where are you at on that spectrum?

Michael Vassar [01:52:44] So I've always been reasonably close to an lelia s rogowski perspective on that topic. Let's say within a factor of two in terms of my intuitions about probability probable further horizons needed and

Vance Crowe [01:53:00] He's the one that went on Lex Reedman was like, it's the end of the world is n we're, we're, we're, it's getting close, right?

Michael Vassar [01:53:07] He's the one who was on time magazine calling for bomb bombing an international treaty to bomb data centers.

Vance Crowe [01:53:14] Okay, better, better example.

Michael Vassar [01:53:16] He's basically the popularizer of Nick Bostrom, the head of the future of Humanity Institute, Oxford guy who reached the highest levels of influence you can in academic philosophy of an analytic frame but while still not really influencing anyone unfortunately. But the Eliezer has always been extremely biased towards thinking that things will happen fast and especially towards thinking that things will happen fast in AI and at this point is it probably only biased towards thinking things will happen fast in ai? I don't think that, I think that he has at any given time probably had the intuition as his 50th per as his 75th percentile that would actually be 98th percentile. You know, his one, his two thirds of a standard deviate. He thinks that things are two thirds of a standard deviation, strong outcomes that are actually two standard deviations strong outcomes at any given time. But he's like consistent,

Vance Crowe [01:54:21] I'm lost here. I don't know.

Michael Vassar [01:54:22] Okay, so Ezra is currently saying we're zero to two horizons away from the one which if we explore it thoroughly, it's the end of the world and I would be prone to agree that we are zero to four horizons away from the one which if we explore it thoroughly, it's the end of the world.

Vance Crowe [01:54:40] So let's,

Michael Vassar [01:54:41] And also

Vance Crowe [01:54:42] I think most people like when they hear AI is gonna be the end of the world, the closest they can get to is Terminator, right? But but otherwise they, this I I have trouble imagining in what ways could AI be the end of humanity?

Michael Vassar [01:54:55] So if something is smarter than you then you don't know get to know how it causes your world to end anymore than the chimps do or the cockroaches do. But even if cockroaches are robust and resilient and have lasted a long time and if AI is never created and it's just humans, we are probably the end of the world for them eventually in an amount of time that is basically an evolutionary eye blink.

Vance Crowe [01:55:23] Okay.

Michael Vassar [01:55:23] You know I think, I think this is the sort of thing where if you are thinking of AI as meaning the next stage in evolution, the next fitter thing, the next more powerful optimizer that is optimizing for its own thing rather than for our thing, then it really is almost analytic to expect it to enter the world without thinking you have any idea how or why. But I think that there is at some point in the future a next optimizer but also there is in the present this extremely powerful technology AI that is that people are building cults around because they're equivocating between the idea that this is an extremely powerful new computing technology in the present the way search was or perhaps the way the internet was or perhaps the way computers themselves were and the idea that this is the next powerful optimizer.

Vance Crowe [01:56:25] So this will probably be really poorly dated but just as a perspective it's you know, the October of 2023 and my sense so far is that AI is always cursed and I mean this in a very specific way. I go to get it to write me an email or or to write up web copy or I get it to make a photograph or an image of something and it is always just a little bit off almost like it's what's that the the twilight zone, right? Where you like ask it for something and it's just like a little bit off of what you were trying to get it and then the more that you try and hammer down to get it, it just keeps getting further and further and further away from the thing that I want. And so it seems like

Michael Vassar [01:57:13] Childlike

Vance Crowe [01:57:14] In that way like of like no I told you the blue dish, why are you bringing me this glass jar?

Michael Vassar [01:57:20] I am very intrigued and I'm happy to, if I can bring them together, bring in some like very, very high-end prompt engineering people to work with you and explore whether we can fix this for you and maybe use AI to build an info product and sell front engineering to other people or something after doing so.

Vance Crowe [01:57:37] Okay.

Michael Vassar [01:57:39] At the high end of front engineering you can do things like create GPT instruct in a couple hours of conversation with a machine. I do think that AI can't do nearly as many things as you can do yourself and you're probably used to thinking of it as a substitute for what doing things yourself. But if you imagine it not as a substitute for doing things yourself but as a substitute for hiring someone to work in a call-center or a hi hi hiring someone to be an agent for you in an Indian office center, then I think that we're definitely within three years of AI being able to do the types of things that you can outsource to the crowd better than the crowd can. And we are probably within three years of AI being able to do the sort of minimal work that corporate diff de individuated minds need to still do in order to pretend to be working better than the corporate de individuated minds can. And once you've automated the work that the corporate de individuated minds do with ai, then it becomes much easier for people to participate in that sort of system without de individuating their minds by making them morally damaging stuff, making a computer do the morally damaging stuff and it also becomes easier for people to call out the fakeness of the corporate dear individuated mind way of doing things.

Michael Vassar [01:59:10] And so it seems that it AI like insofar as the people who are working in corporate and not making any real decisions and making nonsense are there, they claim their work is deep and important and subtly connected to everything else as a sort of, not joking like astrology but a line we're going to stand. What I'm saying is it's more offensive to transition into the corporate cult by far. It doesn't even have a good morality to replace your healthy morality with the way Catholicism does that. That's much more offensive than Catholicism. You know it if you can you do anything that allows you to interface with that and not have it kill you without joining into it, that's really nice. I feel like the type of work that you can hire tens of thousands of people to do that is not work with their hands. AI can do a pretty large amount of that. I think that within five years the type of real work that say a McKinsey consultant can do, AI can do that and I think McKinsey consultants do a fair amount of real work of a sort in terms of scrutinizing and auditing and insisting that things fit co compliancy norms when power would like them to and look right when power would like them to look right. And like it's generally profitable I would expect for entities to make use of McKinsey even though it is also a political move and partly grift, you know.

Michael Vassar [02:00:43] But I think that these sorts of things that AI can do better than people now is like less than a third of what it'll be possible in three years and two years and less than, less than like a fifth what it'll be possible in five years and I think it's already enough to disrupt, you know, definitely hundreds of billions of dollars of annual economic activity and you know if you five x that then it's definitely a trillion or three, you know, it might not be bigger than the internet but that's a sort of low end three to five year prognosis. Well when I imagine like a 25 year prognosis, it does look probably bigger than the internet and I have my world building contest entry for the future of Humanity institute's world building contest, which they call whole of mirrors where I tried to depict like a 2045 which is only like 22 years away but was the classic singularity date Chris Wild give but tried to depict a realistic but optimistic 2025. And I would say in that world AI is playing a role that Matt is about the size that Bill Gates was talking about when he said AI is worth 10 Microsofts.

Vance Crowe [02:02:01] And so we've right now discussed like okay it could be call center people, it could be the writing, it could be the, we've talked about copywriting and like how to make graphics and and your web pages be like if you know sell, sell, sell cell but walk me towards like the 'cause it feels unsatisfying to know to be like well if the being is so much smarter than us then it could eradicate us and we wouldn't even know what it was doing. There's like a weird thing going on that like there's a giant jump right from call center data fixing to it will get so much smarter than us that it'll wipe us all

Michael Vassar [02:02:44] Up. Yes, absolutely. There is a giant jump from the AI that we're seeing now to the AI that we're going to see in like over the next decade or two in

Vance Crowe [02:02:52] Warfare for example.

Michael Vassar [02:02:53] And there is yet another giant jump from the AI that we're going to see in a CO over the next couple decades and the sort of AI that will wipe us all out. I think that by far the more likely outcome, the outcome that would be like 99.99% likely if people weren't trying extremely hard to make things go as wrong as they can would be that AI enables people to better hack their biology and make themselves more intelligent. And as they become more intelligent they figure out how to further hack their biology, including by integrating machinery with their biology. And over the long run, the collective intelligence of many people who've hacked their biochemistry and integrated with machinery to some degree dwarfs that of humans, the way humans dwarfed that of chimpanzees or eventually bugs. But that is done cautiously, deliberately and without there being a discreet handing off of power to a system or getting conquered by a system that's like the sort of thing Kwe is pointing at with his optimistic AI future. But he acknowledges while staying optimistic that that's a less than 50% likely outcome, the sort of AI we currently need to build. Almost certainly, I mean we currently know how to build almost certainly like 99% probability can't kill us all.

Michael Vassar [02:04:28] And people like Scotton who work at OpenAI and used to be top quantum information, public intellectual will like say, well I would think if it was 2% percent likely to kill us, it still might be 3% likely to save us but also be, you know, that's about where it makes sense to start thinking about maybe shutting things down and that like the, I feel like there's an equivocation between the risk of the type of machine that we are currently building, secretly being, although we can't see how it is the next evolutionary competitor because it is very impressive in some interesting ways. And, and it does seem to be better than we are at these sorts of things. Most of the sorts of things that we would call being good at school. Like it seems that the AI we have now is like definitely an a student in all subjects other than English. Definitely better at work hard and study hard and be smart and eventually you'll be a big shot. It's more worthy of being a big shot than we could ever be in terms of the metrics of excellence that we have traditionally called meritocratic and that we have traditionally used as part of how we actually award status and power and authority and money and much, much or most of how we justify awarding status, power, money, et cetera.

Vance Crowe [02:06:01] And so what is the future? What are you teaching your children to do in order to, to, I mean if, if the AI is going to out compete them, you know, on history and social, social studies and phonics and

Michael Vassar [02:06:15] Whatever. Yeah, so I would definitely not send my kid to school. I would definitely have him basically study subjects in collaboration with smart and thoughtful adults who are familiar with them and study subjects via AI on his own and generate questions that continually keep him challenged. And I, yeah, I would emphasize using AI to, you know, educate yourself and try, you know, learn from it the sort of academic material prepared much more cleanly in a differentiated for you way than any educational curriculum ever could. In what way? And also using how, learning how to use it above all, which is going to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Vance Crowe [02:06:55] And in what way are you using ai right now?

Michael Vassar [02:06:58] I experiment with, I, the thing I'm most excited about for near term AI is the same thing that the CEO of Microsoft is most excited about, according to one of his interviews, which he described as making philosophical works more accessible to those outside of their original language and without specialized training and with a specific focus on heiddeger. So I think if one is aware of the intellectual content of broadly the postmodern corpus and broadly woke culture and how these relate and how these relate to cybernetics in the air force and business and conspiracy vibes and corporate jargon and lingo, if one has the ability to integrate the content of the hidden world of transpersonal intelligence with the intellectual content of the explicit world of individuated intelligence where we try to investigate things, try to know why we know things have, yeah, if, if one can almost certainly survive much better and advocate the world much better. Like I basically want to, to build AI to be my interface with de individuated intelligence and to be my bulwark and shield my collective protection whereby I and others who still have individuated intelligence can make use of AI in our collaborations with one another in order to keep us from falling into de individuated intelligence.

Vance Crowe [02:08:30] Is this like somebody to represent you at the airport or talking with the hotel front desk or is this like

Michael Vassar [02:08:38] Bigger scale than that? Yes, that and paying my taxes and representing me in court and being the court, being the judges and the juries and the, as much of the government bureaucracy as possible causing the more of the, the more of every, okay. All bureaucracies are collect made of collective de individuated intelligences. All bureaucracies above a certain age and above a certain profit margin and above a certain size are made of de individuated intelligences that are trying to harm individuated intelligences more or less depending on how much those in individuated intelligences submit and constrict their consciousness. So insofar as I can replace the bureaucracies that are systematically and structurally racist against black people and systematically and structurally antisemitic and systematically and structurally anti-Chinese, in other words against those who are not organizing their minds, by submitting, using shame to submit to collective intelligence, insofar as I, those bureaucracies can be replaced with systems that only learned to pretend to be racist from imitating white people, black people will be much better off. And in so far as they, they're replaced by things that only learned to pretend not to be antisemitic while also pretending to be antisemitic. The right from imitating white antisemites. Jews will be better off like the, the types of biases that you, that machines can learn from people can still be corrected in the machines while the types of biases that are embedded in collectives are intractable.

Michael Vassar [02:10:21] And you, You

Vance Crowe [02:10:23] Think that they're more intractable in a machine. I mean it's gotta be, it's gotta have training data. So the way a

Michael Vassar [02:10:27] I said they, they they're less intractable in machines. I'm saying that everyone who is oppressed, which means everyone with an individuated consciousness and also members of all defined oppressed groups with whatever type of partially individuated, partially collectivized consciousness is associated with oppressed group membership and oppressed group protections. Everyone who is oppressed needs to replace our oppressors with machine simulating our oppressors because the latter is a much more tractable problem. The AI ethics community is specifically trying to preserve perpetuate systems of systematic racism, antisemitism, and every type of structural violence. The, the whole point of the AI ethics community is to protect humans in their diversity, equity, and inclusion jobs. Whi, which are jobs where they're committed to the maximization of structural violence through ironically performing insincere type of it and displacing anyone from competing with them. Everyone who is being oppressed by diversity, equity, and inclusion and who diversity, equity and inclusion claims is being oppressed by everyone. But diversity and equity and inclusion desperately needs to replace diversity equity inclusion right now with AI and say nothing about us, without us, we will not submit to human authorities not mediated by ais with relatively transparent algorithms. And yeah, that, that's basically what I'm excited about.

Vance Crowe [02:11:55] But you're, I mean at that point, so Sam Altman was just on Joe Rogan and I'm, I'm not interested in having Sam Altman's view of the world imputed on me through ai and I'm not capable of making my own ai, so I'm going to have to trust some individual that runs a corporation to build an AI that I want running my life.

Michael Vassar [02:12:20] So you'll have to do that if we stick to the idea that we don't still have a republic and it is so far out of the Overton window, I can't even tell you to imagine that we actually still have a republic as opposed to some level of pressure towards administrative competence for maintaining the scaffold of republic. But if we thought we had a republic, then we would think that we could do the types of things like building Panama canals and building interstate highway systems and building new laws and changing the way we governed ourselves the way David grabber talks about indigenous

Vance Crowe [02:12:57] Bullshit people

Michael Vassar [02:12:58] Doing in the dawn of everything, we wouldn't be stuck in bullshit jobs. We would be in the dawn of everything where we can govern ourselves. So like it's basically so hard to even imagine being our society putting force behind a, a Republican but neither liberal nor conservative nor left nor right policy so far. I I, I will give an example. One could imagine that some group of people might think, hey it will be good for everyone if people lose their control over their own finances and have that devolve to a guardian systematically and lose their voting rights and have that transferred to a guardian systematically or something at some age like 90 past, which most people are able to take care of themselves. Both because people can't take care of themselves and by and because being put in a common future creates a shared moral patency and it would be good to have individuated minds caring for themselves as elderly collectively. I could easily imagine this actually working out well. I could easily imagine a Chinese emperor trying to implement this sort of thing or the architect of a Greek city state. What can't really imagine, you know, it's clearly not left, it's clearly not right.

Michael Vassar [02:14:30] It's clearly not liberal, it's clearly not conservative but like surely there are radically illiberal and non-conservative improvements to life

Vance Crowe [02:14:42] Isn't life all along that spectrum. You're either conservative or liberal. Is there anything else in

Michael Vassar [02:14:47] The spectrum? No, that's what I'm trying to, I wanted to try to get to what I, I keep on saying is that there is a fake spectrum from left to right where left and right are both dialectic mobs. They are one mob that maintains itself as a mob by turning against itself by pretending to fight itself.

Vance Crowe [02:15:09] Because mean say we're all in the system, the only thing you can is either be left or right and the left hates the right and the right hates the left.

Michael Vassar [02:15:15] But we all

Vance Crowe [02:15:16] In practice that practice

Michael Vassar [02:15:17] Kill everyone else with our kill everyone else with our real violence while engaging in performative violence against each other.

Vance Crowe [02:15:23] Who is

Michael Vassar [02:15:24] Everyone else? The people we pretend are already in the system but no are not immigrants. The poor children, normal people before they've been de individuated when they're not in mobs are oppressed and attacked by mobs, which pretend not to know that the mob, the mob people in mobs pretend that they are not in a mob and also pretend that everyone is in a mob but never but not both at the same time. You know, postmodern critical theory duo is probably the best central example of sometimes talking as some from the perspective where everyone is in a mob and no nevermind, he's not a good example. He never talks as if people are individuated, nevermind that was stupid of me, but like the normal person, okay, let's trace these logics back. You could try to govern things with a depo democracy, whatever that means, but you're going to need some sort of way of knowing what, who's counting the votes and who was put in what positions or who was chosen randomly and how we know the lottery was random. So a democracy requires some administration and so the people can to be all powerful in the sense of actually having the ability to dissolve the administration or they would be dissolving themselves as a people. So you could try to have a democracy that's pure democracy, but you're probably going to want to have some sort of a judiciary and some sort of an administrative structure.

Michael Vassar [02:16:57] You're probably going to want to have some sort of a republic in order to maintain a democracy. Something as that's a pure democracy probably won't last long. It won't be able to mobilize for war, it won't be able to organize in various ways. If you have a republic, that means you're building out of paperwork, out of tokens, exchange like money out of institutions and out of culture some way of coming together to decisions we can agree about who we have convicted of a crime we have can agree about who we are at war with. You know, we can agree about who has authority to inspect things and see whether they're complying with regulations. You know, you, you have lost your government when you have lost that ability completely. You have lost having a real republic when you've lost the ability to change those decisions to make deliberative decisions and to change who inspects your pipes or whatever.

Vance Crowe [02:17:56] Okay. You

Michael Vassar [02:17:57] Know, so if you are trying to govern a democrat, a republic as democratically as possible, as much in line with what reasonable people agree and so far as they're reasonable is a good idea. And what unreasonable people don't feel morally indignant about but feel morally good about participating in so long is authority seems strong a really central. You need some level of conservatism to maintain that system and you also need some level of liberalism to maintain that system.

Vance Crowe [02:18:34] Yeah, you have to have some group that's saying let's keep this system the way that it is, it's working, let's keep that going and you need somebody else being like new things because otherwise you become ossified and if the new things go too fast then you're like, ah, we're changing too fast and people can't keep up with it.

Michael Vassar [02:18:51] Yeah, that's partly I don't think you need new things. Novelty shouldn't be an end into itself. You need some people saying here's what we know works about as well as it as it works, let's try to make sure we're not dismantling any of our machine. And then you have need some people saying, yep, but here are places where the machine is messing up, here are places where the machine is getting damaged,

Vance Crowe [02:19:15] Things

Michael Vassar [02:19:15] That need to get

Vance Crowe [02:19:16] Replaced.

Michael Vassar [02:19:18] And also here are ways where we could make working for this machine more fun. We could make things nicer, we could make it better for our customers and for our employees. You know, liberty is a thing to optimize to for, and it's also a thing you need in order to keep a living constitution and main and correct the things that are confused about how you think the machine works and correct structural damages. It accumulates, but you also need conserva to conserve stuff and there is usually a positive correlation between liberty and conservation. Usually you should expect not a spectrum from liberty to conservatism, but a graph where liberty and conservatism are mostly positively correlated but past some point of very high liberty and very high conservatism. There is going to be a necessary trade off. There's going to be some in economics we would say a production possibility frontier, where to get more liberty, you'll have to have on the margin to have more liberty, you'll have to have things be less conserved. And to have more con conserved, you'll have to have less liberty on the margin locally. At some point on the graph, wherever there is a margin where locally two things are in conflict with one another, there is a penetration point for infiltration of your discourse and ideology and collaborative coordination by dialectic, by the Hegelian method of infiltrating things and turning them against themselves.

Vance Crowe [02:20:55] Okay, we, I was with you till the end. That's,

Michael Vassar [02:20:57] That's a, I was talking about again where he's explaining that the problem with Jews is that they're not turned against themselves. The whole idea of a left and a right, the left is the part of the incursion that the part of the mob that sneaks in and penetrates it, the political machine by impersonating liberals and the right is the part of the mob slash the vanguard, the part of the infiltration machine that sneaks into the political system by impersonating conservatives. And so the left and right can fight each other for the clicks. They can fight each other as a performance to maximize ratings while secretly, subtly co collaborating with one another and coordinating based on shared assumptions that above all the mob must be preserved and must destroy the individuated consciousness.

Vance Crowe [02:21:55] Is this Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi coming together to print, you know, billions and billions of dollars? Like where

Michael Vassar [02:22:03] Yes. That sort of thing. Yes.

Vance Crowe [02:22:04] Like it doesn't make any sense from their ideological positions that they would do this, but they both came together, they figured out like, hey, we can go open up the coffers, let's go turn the printers on. Yes.

Michael Vassar [02:22:14] That sort of thing. At this point almost the entire political system has in has been replaced by leftists and rightists. We'd stopped talking about liberal and conservative. It's completely laughable to imagine that the leftists want to increase liberty or that the Rightists wanted to in conserve the past.

Vance Crowe [02:22:33] And so where does it go from here?

Michael Vassar [02:22:36] I mean by default we become part of greater India over the course of the next few centuries. But it, the process is mostly complete in the next few decades and with the help of technology we become part of a more harmonious, more affluent cleaner, healthier, longer lived, more populous, greater India. If the technology doesn't embed antenatal list biases that cause us to eventually breed ourselves out of existence. And by default we consider ourselves spiritual and better than people as our lives get materially worse and worse but not as much worse and worse as they would without technology and end up in a world that's entirely physically controlled by the PPRC and maybe a few other weird splinter groups controlling small amounts of territory. And like one of the things that you know, by default, you know China makes itself better but it's much more conservative and much more liberal than our intuitions. And it's not conserving our tradition but a different tradition. So insofar as we directly value something being our tradition, which is part of what it is to participate in a tradition to some degree we might be less than perfectly happy with that and insofar as we directly value liberty because it is nice, we might also be less than perfectly happy with that. But like a better and global and more inescapable India can be metaphorically described as like the matrix.

Michael Vassar [02:24:07] And that's what the matrix is metaphorically describing. But like it becomes less painful to be in corporate America in some ways while more constraining in others. It becomes more appealing to become part of the very slow, very peaceful, very gentle, very sensitive phenomenologically sophisticated but still lacking any moral individuality and or any commitment to individuated moral norms mob. And it becomes more and more oppressive. The economic and social pressure brutality and lack of recourse on people who don't become, remain individuated becomes more and more like a Dali if Dalits were further oppressed with the powers of AI behind it. But there's still very rich dalis who have some types of material abundance provided by ais working in China and the factories and stuff. And so that's sort of the null hypothesis and like more individuation of consciousness is preserved in the more conservative and more liberal rather than entirely left right China over the next few centuries, but eventually the dynastic cycle in China does the same de individuating of consciousness has happened to the west that which yin yang refer to. But when, but the Chinese system eventually renews itself in a way that's different from the ways in which western systems would renew itself. So in China you have a dynastic cycle while in India you have an eternal colleague yuga and darkness

Vance Crowe [02:25:45] The time as a circle concept that we talked

Michael Vassar [02:25:47] About before.

Vance Crowe [02:25:47] Yeah.

Michael Vassar [02:25:48] So like basically the, no, the central tendency worldview is our children live in a cybernetic or computerized AI controlled dream to have their consciousness sculpted around Indian lines while the Chinese provide them in in a ELO fashion. And the Chinese do the job of the Morlocks and use their consciousness in a controlled enough that they can't rebel but still capable of producing way and provide material abundance for the world. And the people in the greater India that is all Indo-European peoples celebrate their freedom while being so perfectly mind controlled that that anything but mind control is unthinkable and undesirable. And from the Chinese perspective, they condemn freedom as decadent and you know, but still actually have enough freedom to care about their grandparents' preferences when taking care of their filial ID obligations and not entirely needing to appeal to a state controlled AI to show how virtuous a Sunday are being to their father.

Vance Crowe [02:26:54] Well Michael Vassar, you have my head swimming. If people wanted to stay in touch with you, challenge you on some of these ideas.

Michael Vassar [02:27:03] How, well, I'm on Twitter as hi from Michael V and I posted this post about dialectic with Jessica Taylor. So hi from Michael VI have emails and phones. You can DM me if you can't DM me I guess. Sure. You can email me,

Vance Crowe [02:27:23] Just get ahold of me. I

Michael Vassar [02:27:24] My, my name at Gmail. Yeah, my, my name at Gmail and you can read stuff I've got on the internet. You can watch videos I've given on the internet. I'm going to be putting a lot more in videos on the internet I think and building out a substack over the next three to six months because people just keep asking and whatever.

Vance Crowe [02:27:42] Good. I would quite enjoy that. Well man, thanks for coming by.

Michael Vassar [02:27:45] Well thank you. It was good seeing you.

Vance Crowe [02:27:48] That's good.