How GDP Was Redesigned to Control the Economy (Not Measure It)

Michael Vassar [00:00:00] So they know something's up. They know something is deeply wrong and fake about their society. And when I say kids, I'm being biased here. I mean boys 'cause girls have always known this.

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with Michael Vassar. He is a profound intellectual and we have an entire conversation that whipsaws me up and down about the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie thoughts that people have, social coercion, and really some up the graph ideas that I have to say in the middle of it. I put my head in my hands and said, you're blowing my mind. I, I don't even know what to do here. So you are in for a great time. If you have been listening to the podcast and you enjoy how I interact with people, you might be interested in me interviewing one of your loved ones to tell their family stories. We can do it here in the, the podcast studio in St. Louis, Missouri, or we can do it online. If you're interested in having me record their childhood stories of their career, where marriage, parenting, and the legacy that they wanna leave behind, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to learn more. All right, without further ado, let's head into my interview with the very interesting Michael Vassar. Michael Vassar, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Vassar [00:01:34] Nice to meet you Vance.

Vance Crowe [00:01:36] So let's start off, what do you think the state of the economy is right now?

Michael Vassar [00:01:42] So I think there are a really, really large number of misconceptions widespread about the economy making it. I mean, I think when people normally think about the economy, what they are thinking about is their state religion. They're not really thinking about the production and distribution of goods and services, but rather like the gods being angry or happy as announced by the priests through the proper temples and newspapers. And so like right now it seems like the economic statistics are really good and the production and distribution of goods and services are like really bad. And it seems like the American public are like being fooled to a lesser degree than they have been fooled for a really long time about the difference between their lying eyes and the official facts on that. But of course when we say the economic statistics are good, we mean things like GDP rising to a high degree and these choices of what statistics we're going to measure and how we're measure going to measure them are like very far from well understood by almost all professional economists even, and are like, they're just not actually the sorts of statistics you would naturally start to measure if your goal was to measure the production and distribution of goods and services.

Michael Vassar [00:03:21] And in fact, that's just not what they are really measuring itself. And so, so that's tricky. Like the life expectancy correlates pretty strongly across countries with GDP, but historically US life expectancy has risen much faster during the time when the GDP was rising slowly or falling even and has risen slowly or fallen while GDP has risen quite frequently, these, these are anti-correlated and quite strongly anti-correlated. So the correlation at the international level as opposed to the temporal level between life expectancy and GDP mostly has to do with GB DP tending to rise in time and like broad big geopolitical blocks like the communists and capitalists both tending to win, tending to win political conflicts and put themselves higher in a dominance hierarchy, which gets reflected in the GDP to some degree.

Vance Crowe [00:04:22] Yeah, GDP has become such an odd way to measure the health of an economy in the sense that once we went online and so much money was produced by advertisements to ourselves in this kind of very weird, not just Google but Facebook and you know, people are putting these ads out to sell more products and so much of the GDP is now made up of, of things that are not actually goods and services in the way that we had thought of them before, that it makes it. And because it's made up such a large portion of the growth that we've had over the last 15 years, it makes it a very weird thing to calculate. Now

Michael Vassar [00:05:03] It's a very weird thing. There are other points like it's natural to count to measure national wealth rather than GDP, which is what they did before the second World War, which means you use an accounting type metric where you can't depreciation against your GDP. But since the second World War, they switched from national income or national wealth to a measure of mobilization basically. So they dropped the depreciation from the GDP metrics, which basically gears the entire economy towards producing goods that depreciate faster and regards that as economic progress.

Vance Crowe [00:05:42] Now I am, I'm when you say depreciation, this is a thing I kind of understand 'cause you know you have capital goods and then the value of it goes down. But how does that work and why does it even matter?

Michael Vassar [00:05:52] Like if you have a company, your profits get to write off the depreciation of your capital goods from your revenues when estimating how your company is doing.

Vance Crowe [00:06:04] Meaning if I have a computer and the computer is slowly getting more tired because I've got more stuff on it and it's getting out of date, then I can lower the amount that that thing is worth.

Michael Vassar [00:06:16] Right? And by lowering the amount that that thing is worth, you're lowering your measurement of the corporations or the company's profits. We say that the company is less profitable if it's capital based is declining in quality. While with GDP after the second World wars, you don't do that, which means that you are, since you, the whole economy grows more if people buy replacements for your capital continually within the measurement of the GDP, we end up in a situation where, where maintaining a constant capital base implies a higher GDP, the more rapidly that g that capital base needs to be replaced, the more rapidly it wears down. This is like a very intentional economic engineering decision, not a the sort of thing that someone could possibly do by accident. It's a movement away from measuring your economy the way you would measure a business towards measuring your economy basically as a cybernetic control system. So like you have Samuelson introducing a total reconceptualization of capitalism, which at that point some people called late stage capitalism, and which people have recently started talking about late stage capitalism as if they meant the last couple decades. But actually it has a proper meaning it refers to like the fifties and on.

Michael Vassar [00:07:49] And rather than conceiving of the economy is basically consisting of a lot of agreements between people that are supported by an exogenous law and order. It was thinking of the economy as a lot of springs, a lot of forces pushing against one another with energy dumped into the system by the Federal Reserve and by the process of financial planners, investors trying to hedge one investment against another while dealing with a rapidly inflating fiat currency and a extremely complicated tax code, which was effectively telling them where to move their investments from and to where to move their investments.

Vance Crowe [00:08:47] I I'm totally in agreement with you about how much the government has controlled the way our economy is set up through the weirdness of the tax code. And you need only to talk with somebody that thinks of themselves as a clever accountant to be able to figure out like th this is how they're pushing you to move from one investment section to another. But before we go further into that, you used a word that I think you un means a lot to you, but is very nebulous in my mind. Cybernetic, what, what did you mean by that and and how did that switch take place from the old way of viewing things to this new way?

Michael Vassar [00:09:24] So a cybernetic system means a system when when we hear words like feedback, this is cybernetic terminology, when we hear that someone is taking feedback from their boss that is regarding the person as a spring in a machine, not really a car in the machine. And if you were talking about them as a person, you would say they learn something from their boss. If you were talking about them as a general reasoner, you might say they updated, but if you are talking about them as a spring in a machine, you, you would call that feedback cybernetics is thinking of systems as largely consisting of processes that self regulates through positive and negative feedback loops. So when we talk about disrupting an OODA loop that's about disrupting a feedback system in the forties, this guy Norbert Wier used this word cyber, which means steering or to suggest how basically the US military could steer millions of people in a fog of war type situation to do all sorts of different roles both within the actual European and Asian conflicts and within the domestic production machinery and everywhere in between it provided a unifying ontology of interaction that what that bridged between people and machines and bridged between people acting under rule of law, law and people acting outside of rule of law.

Michael Vassar [00:11:09] It was the, it was cybernetics was the unifying descriptive system way of characterizing things that brought the people in the field and the people at home doing work under one system of planning. It was a very different way of running a war from how people had thought of war previously. And it was like, it meant that you are thinking of the continual innovation that goes on in factories as something like a component in a machine. So you have things like Six Sigma manufacturing, that Six Sigma manufacturing is like thinking of the inspection process of your machines as itself a machine where outliers outlier data from the inspection process goes to driving engineers to investigate and eliminate whatever was causing that outlier data. And so you can, you can push your economy pretty far. You, you can improve how you do things quite a lot while minimizing how surprised you are, how much things happen that you weren't expecting by doing that. So like another term for cybernetics is control systems or control theory.

Michael Vassar [00:12:43] So like rather than people inventing a million competitors to big companies, the war effort wanted people working for big companies doing real important innovation, but doing it in specific ways that were planned ahead of time in the aggregate, you know, millions and billions of small clever hacks to production processes, extra inspection steps, things that could make machinery more reliable while increasing its complexity.

Vance Crowe [00:13:16] Let me see if I can repeat this and see if it's what you're saying. So Six Sigma would be like kind of like a, like a Japanese style of innovation where what you're doing is you have a factory, you're trying to produce cars and what you find out is, hey, these people that are putting in this headlamp for some reason every fifth time they go to put a headlamp in, something goes wrong. So let's figure out why it takes them so much longer. Oh it's because they have to turn left so many times that their arm gets tired so we're gonna actually replace where they get this bolt from to put this headlamp in and that's gonna make this thing improve. And you do that over and over and over again about every part of the manufacturing process, then you improve it. Whereas the other innovation model, maybe the model that I think of is the US model or kind of the Monsanto model, which is like you put teams of people to work on a problem, you don't give them very much guidance, you don't really tell them what they should or shouldn't do. You just say resolve this problem and they innovate and come up with it. But the problem with integrating those solutions is it doesn't fit into the larger system. So instead of just fixing one little thing like the headlamp and keeping that production thing line moving or in in fact accelerating it, the innovation model of the Monsanto like hey, we've just come up with this new product now we're going to, that's gonna throw ripples into all of the other products that we are trying to sell and whichever one is the most advantageous is the one that we'll use.

Vance Crowe [00:14:47] And you're saying one is that the way that you, you think of it and two, that the government or the military industrial complex was saying it'd be better to go towards the six Sigma way as opposed to the explosive innovation way.

Michael Vassar [00:15:02] Yes, that is right. That was extremely articulate. Thank you for clarifying all of that. And I think a critical point is, so the way they did this is they reconceptualized money itself from being a obligation between one person and another to being a force applied by the Federal Reserve to the aggregate behavior of investors who were trying to hold onto capital under conditions where the amount money supply was continually increasing and increasing fairly rapidly and therefore they would lose most of the value of their investments if they held it as cash or even if they held it as bonds or if they held it as anything really that wasn't a tax favored investment structure because the, say if you have a 7% target rate of inflation and then your top tax rate is 87%, that means you only keep 13% of your profits and that th so you would need that 13% of your profits to make up for 7%. Okay, holding onto your value actually not gaining or losing any value would be measured as a 7% profit. And then you need, and then you only keep 13% of that, which is to say the government takes away 6% of the value of your assets every year if they're tax favored.

Michael Vassar [00:16:43] And in order to hold onto your value, you would need to produce not 6% but about 36% because whatever profit you made would be taken away. So the, there was just an enormous amount of push into favored classes of investment and you and

Vance Crowe [00:17:04] To, to hold on for like, so I was just talking with a guy named Nicholas Bartlett the other day. He had a fascinating point about how, you know, the reality of a market is I have a good that I'm particularly good at producing, let's say it's popcorn and you have something that I want a flashlight and as long as we could make a trade for, it's this much popcorn for that flashlight and we swap those two things, but that what money did was it made it so we could have an amount of time that could elapse, maybe you need that popcorn now and I don't necessarily need that flashlight now. So instead we can kind of disaggregate the, we need to make that bond or that trade right now and instead we can sell these things for money and buy them when we want. But when the fed gets involved and they start saying, hey we're gonna gonna, we're gonna separate gold from the dollars and now it's just a matter of like the, the amount of dollars that are there, how many ever dollars we put there. So if they add more into the system, then that trust that you have between two people that were originally making popcorn and flashlights is completely broken because now holding that money has a different relationship than it did when we were trying to barter just in time.

Michael Vassar [00:18:16] Right? And this is incredibly subtle and like a lot of the people who were developing the ideas were like actively hostile to the accumulation of capital as like representing like lowly bourgeois materialistic values. And so you have like people like John Manard Kings saying things like the surest way to turn to undermine like the US is to debase its currency system. This can turn all of the mechanisms of production to destruction and not one person in a million will be equipped to notice. And so you have these wonderful quotes that are like in the king saying like in the long run we're all dead but, and this is the long run from his perspective. And that's actually what we're se seeing is we're actually seeing the planned obsolescence of our whole political economic, military integrated production system.

Vance Crowe [00:19:19] But it seems like suicide. Why would somebody design and execute this if they didn't hate us? I mean it's presumably the people that are designing it and executing are us, right? It's, it's Americans just like you or I.

Michael Vassar [00:19:33] So I mean, well Cains isn't an American and like Samuel sin who designed the system was definitely of the opinion that communism would inevitably win was a superior more powerful system. Cybernetics was to some degree a materialist reconceptualization of capitalism. It was an ontology that was integrated that that could be mapped onto capitalism but that it was unnatural and difficult to do. So basically Milton Friedman's work, neoclassical economics was the reconstruction of capitalism within the new Samuel Sonian cybernetic ontology. So that you can still talk about the same many of, although not all of the same things that people would've talked about casually, but now you need to do it by building a conceptual tower of assumptions that within the new system sound sketchy or dubious. So you can see like Noah, Noah Smith making fun of Milton Friedman's claims and the, I feel like what the discussion by Noah Smith of Milton Friedman's claims provides a really good pointer at the rhetorical power of defining your legal and administrative ontology. You can like the, the concepts that he is pointing about, he, he's able to make fun of the extreme specificity of Milton Friedman's idea that people want to standardize or smooth their consumption across time.

Michael Vassar [00:21:17] Like the idea of trying to smooth your consumption across time is an extremely natural idea for the old sense of classical economics. Basically it's just like you want to own productive things that produce things that you can consume, but once you've gotten rid at a conceptual level of ownership, really you have to reconstruct it in terms of smoothing consumption over time. And it, it still works but it's easy to make fun of and it's hiding what's going on. But you asked about the people and what they thought, why did they hate us? Like there's this two things going on. One is there was a war to web and a lot of people were willing to give up in broad strokes are systems of social organization or legal and economic and political foundations and pretend that we were not doing so because a lot of people believed that the, the new ascendant, legal, economic and political foundations of all of these serious regimes in the world, which were basic basically built on some variation of Marxism were very, things very close to Marxism. Like Nazi-ism was national socialism, everyone was basically all intellectuals who were at all serious had long ago got board with the machinery of capital of classical economics because it was a nifty but basically complete description of a system that had exogenous property rights, which wasn't that realistic an assumption.

Michael Vassar [00:23:11] And it's not that fun to keep thinking about further refinements to a not that realistic system. So they've all pretty much accepted in one form or another, some sort of either materialist or spiritual in the sense that a Marxist or Hegelian would use the terms materialist or spiritual ways of thinking about people because those are a more powerful for thinking about, about people in bulk being driven to fight other people in distant land. They're not doing that within a system of rule of law. They're not doing it as rational self-interested actors. They're just incredibly, incredibly, incredibly far from being modelable as a bunch of rational self-interested agents storm the features of Normandy. That's just not what happens. So like you have not a lot of really smart, thoughtful people continuing to try to refine and therefore continuing to really learn and get experienced using the old systems. People still understand them but they don't fight for them that hard because they don't see how those old systems could actually win this war and it seems like they really might have to win this war. It was everything and there were always people who were more interested in conflicts and who didn't like the people who weren't interested in conflicts.

Michael Vassar [00:24:50] When we say the people who created these systems were Americans, were they us, I mean it's thinking of us in terms of nation rather than thinking of us in terms of species or thinking of us in terms of family or thinking of us in terms of class is like a pretty weird invention. It's some way in which our natural territorial instance are manipulated in order to distort our sense of family and identity and truth into kind of a shell of its natural form. And like a couple hundred years ago, very few thought of us in terms of nation, you know, religion would've been much more natural, family would've been much more natural and the most serious highest caliber of thinkers have basically never done so probably because it's basically not imposs not possible to do the highest caliber of thought with the sort of broken remnants of a mind that is involved in really deeply thinking of yourselves in terms of nations rather than more natural things. And a, an awful lot of people who combine to being smart and powerful have tended to think of us in terms of a mix of clan and class, you know, where all of the aristocrats are unified in actual hostility towards the lower classes but of a moderate sort discussed towards the lower classes discussed for the discussed with the lower classes, getting what they want, thinking of the lower class's desires and preferences as unclean and, and that that sort of attitude, while it was that of a minority of the population and even in of a minority of the population weighted by wealth and power, especially in places like England or America where the bourgeois revolution had transferred a lot of power to relatively ordinary people, people that attitude is incredibly hard to understand, relate to think about or even intend to defend yourself against for the people.

Vance Crowe [00:27:14] Yeah, I mean like as you're saying it, like I even find myself really struggling to, to entertain it as an idea, right? So when you say that the aristocracy of different societies find themselves, even though they may not be related to one another, they say, hey we have business relationships together, we are clients of one another and we share the fact that we are in this upper class and they also share a general disdain or a dislike for people of the lower classes I that like you'd have to make a really compelling case because that's such a strong indictment.

Michael Vassar [00:27:51] So yeah. Okay. So I feel like we, because we haven't had aristocrats in America for a long time in a formal sense, we tend to like remember the nice parts, the shiny clothes and the social graces. And I mean even when you are living under aristocrats, it's really hard to focus on anything but the nice clothes and the social graces because the clothes are so nice and the social graces are so polished and they've been polished for centuries and centuries under ever more extreme forms of abuse. Like when you think about it, it princess is a child sex trafficking victim, but we don't think of princesses as child sex trafficking victim. So even though that like there is no sense in which they're not and it's not even slightly confusing, they're literally pimped off for political military advantage.

Vance Crowe [00:28:46] I mean, I gotta give you, i, I gotta give it to you. So we just, I we run a book club on from this podcast and the one we just read was the count of Monte Cristo. And like a significant portion of that book is about the, the entire book is about the aristocracy and how they treated people, but a huge portion of it is sex trafficking young women to assure alliances that will, that will generate wealth in the future. So I I can concede that point.

Michael Vassar [00:29:14] So like it's very easy from a like, I mean what, what is aristocratic value? It's like in some sense it's whatever it works, it's some set of things that must have been selected for amongst a bunch of competing groups of people who were in the absence of a system of law or a shared system of ethics that what could be adhered to unironically holding other people as subjects, which basically is a very polite way of saying slaves. And then like the details of what sense they were held in as subjects depends a lot from country to country and from time to time. But it wasn't necessarily a it there was not necessarily a moral arc of history bending towards progress in Russia. Surfs were like had quite meaningful real rights in 1600 questionably questionable real rights under in 1700 and under Catherine the Great had their rights formally abolished and you know, were couldn't be bought and sold independent of the land they lived on, sold down the river as they used to say. But were still basically equivalent to slaves other than that that LI limitation. So you can watch a movie like Gordon with the wit, which is a depiction of aristocratic values from a perspective that regards them as self evidently the good values.

Michael Vassar [00:30:52] And you can see that it is playing with the idea of what would it even look like to have a virtuous self-interested person. And like that's sort of what RET Butler and Scarlett O'Hara are that the world of being against yourself and being against everyone else to the degree that they are to the extent that they do not seem to be against themselves, which is the heart of aristocratic value. That's like what it is to be a good southerner is to restrain your economic benefit, restrain your reproductive freedom, restrain your body with an extremely tight corset to like in every way make yourself uncomfortable and learn to make other people comfort comfortable with you being very uncomfortable and to look down at them in insofar as they're not making themselves uncomfortable but never like eat if you could starve rather than getting your hands dirty that that's like the value system that gone with the wind is depicting as self evidently, right? But beginning to but beginning to accept that hey we got conquered by these other people who have these different, more self-interest sympathetic values. Maybe we can imagine some paragon of virtue who remains virtuous despite the fact that they're willing to work with their hands rather than star.

Vance Crowe [00:32:25] So let's think about this in the modern context, right? Like if you're not talking about, you know, the southern values and the, the women that, that keep themselves from eating in order that they can be beautiful so other people can look on them and they look down on people that don't have that level of self-discipline. Where are we at right now with regards to our society and having an aristocracy and how they view themselves relative to the rest of the world? Is that the political ruling class right now?

Michael Vassar [00:32:59] It's much bigger. It's like basically people with college degrees and jobs in the sense that our society would normally understand a college degree and job like the productivity revolutions of the last few centuries have created weird transformations in the aristocracy where it used to be the case that only one person in, you know, like 10 to a hundred is like even gentry and only one person in like a thousand is like titled nobility and like only one person in tens of thousands or more is the sort of high nobility like that they get names like count or graph, which means writing. So the sort of person so exalted that they can read and write even though they're not a priest, they're some sort of a somewhat holy magical thing that can both fight and read and write like, you know, and we, we actually give them a title that says that you know, you can count your account, you can write your graph and that's really unusual thing for a person who isn't a merchant or a priest to be able to do and it's like really suspect it you, you you, it's an enormous status claim or a claim to not be part of the aristocracy at all. So I guess who is the aristocracy? One way of thinking about it is people who in their most habitual mental state don't notice if you give them GPT two written text rather than written text pe people are that that's I think basically our equivalent of not being able to read or write, having the sort of aristocratic mindset where you are not paying attention and bridging your visual and auditory modalities and looking, connecting things across time to the degree that's necessary to like follow a plot.

Michael Vassar [00:35:02] Know whether the story that you are enacting makes sense. This is a really, lemme

Vance Crowe [00:35:08] See if I understand that. Yeah, so you're saying people that are in the aristocracy, if they were, okay, so, so for somebody that doesn't know GPT, you're talking about three, you can put in a few lines of an author's writing and you can say construct for me a story and it will, I I did it one with the pious saw bird, which is this famous drawing over here in Missouri. And it constructed this entire narrative that if you've just read it and you weren't worried about there being like a beginning and a rising action and a climax and a drop off, you wouldn't know. You would just say, Hey, look at these compelling words and these sentences and they feel good and it sounds good. And only when you step back do you say like, oh, that that's not actually a story 'cause there's nothing that got completed there. There was no objective, there was no journey. You're saying the aristocracy are the people that read that and don't notice that it's not really a story. Yeah. So well explain that. Why.

Michael Vassar [00:36:04] So like, I mean at the heart of it you can, it is a very, very surprising fact about the world that supply and demand come together, the way supply and demand come together. It's a very surprising fact about the world that you need water to live, but diamonds are very expensive because they're rare and there is some desire for them and water is abundant enough that it doesn't cost practically anything. So that that's a, and practically everyone in our society thinks they learn that supply and demand causes prices. But remember when we talk about something like the GDP, we're talking about the price in money of all of the goods exchanged back and forth across our society. And yet we tend to assume that if more goods are exchanged back and forth, that would imply a higher GDP which is like society going well, the economy going well from a bourgeois or a peasant perspective. But actually if most goods are normal goods so that they have a price elasticity of demand in the long run of less than of, of greater than one, that is to say if you decrease their production by 10%, the price goes up by more than 10%.

Michael Vassar [00:37:36] Then in the long run you have rising GDP by having a falling amount of goods produced. This is really central to understanding what our society is, the language we speak, the concepts we use, the sense of good and evil that does not cash out as like the categorical imperative, which is a formalization of something that's not quite the golden rule. But for common sense for people often think of it as something like the Gordon rule, but the sense of good that we are using when we talk about a good economy is good from the perspective the of the people who structure the way we talk about things. That is to say good for the social classes that produce or that are paid for, that are paid when you buy things. So it means basically good prices going up is basically good for the GDP, not bad for the GDP but like if we call it, if we complain about it, we call it inflation. That's basically our noticing that there is a difference in interests between our consumers and the ruling classes. So like there's a tendency to conceal that in a million different ways, but most importantly by increasing the extension of credit and by increasing the population which allow you to draw the GDP while like increasing purchasing power in the short run, but putting more people into more debt with time.

Vance Crowe [00:39:13] Yeah, I think that you, like a years ago, even before Coronavirus, I had a guy on from Zimbabwe and at the time it was Rhodesia and he was telling me about what w it was like to be in an, in a hyperinflationary environment. And I remember asking him, I was like, well why in the world would the people at the top with the money printers do that? That seems crazy to me. He's like, look, if you are right outside of where the money gets printed, if you're the first one that the money gets handed to, the money's the most valuable. So you take that and turn it into a good, you buy bullets most of the time and the people that are in a hyperinflationary environment get as close as they can to then be able to buy the military goods that then can escape down from there. And it strikes me that that puts you in the aristocracy and and really truly the people in this current economy that are okay with the amount of money being printed are the ones that get handed that money the first and loan it out or, or put it out, put it out to work because then they're the ones that get the, the value of it extracted as soon as it is. And and the faster it drops it doesn't really matter 'cause they're gonna get replenished.

Michael Vassar [00:40:23] Yeah, but who are those people? Actually what it basically means is people who work for companies that have a moat like Monsanto, so like the people who are working for a company that has a moat the way Monsanto has are effectively their jobs are protected by the extension of money for as debt to their companies the way in which

Vance Crowe [00:40:48] Money. So let's explain this because that's gonna seem like that's gonna seem like a non-sequitur. So we were talking before the podcast got started about how I used to work at Monsanto and we talked about how once a company gets to a certain size, they effectively become a part of the government. And the way that they do that is they make it so whatever technology they were producing, they now make it so the, they cooperate with the government to regulate it such that nobody else can get in. So for example, with the GMO people think that Monsanto didn't want all of these regulations on them to, to make it so you could bring a new GMO to market, but what they really wanted was for it to be so expensive and it did, it became $10 million per year and you took 13 years to get it through. So it's $130 million just in regulatory costs alone. So if you have any new entrant to the market, if they can't get their hands on $130 million after r and d, they have to sell it to a company like Monsanto. And so for them, Monsanto loves the moat there because they know that it's gonna be so difficult for anybody to come in and compete with them that they now have just smoothed out those, their, their problems and they can go, they get to make money as long as their patents keep them distant from everybody else.

Michael Vassar [00:42:05] Yeah. So that's a very great example. And to a non-trivial degree also in practice navigating that administrative back and forth of getting those patents is going to cost 130,000,004 Monsanto. For people who aren't insiders, it will cost vastly more and possibly just to be impossible.

Vance Crowe [00:42:25] Yeah, that's, I would make the case that that is what Bayer bought when they were buying Monsanto. What they wanted was the system that Monsanto had built to work with the government to be able to say, Hey, this is, we're gonna bring a new product to market, how do we get this so that it's the lowest cost for us? But if somebody else came in and they didn't have all the people that talk to the government and the lobbyists and the people that write the laws and the people that do all the formulas and the, the white papers to put together, then it's gonna cost infinitely more. So bearer said, it'd be really expensive for us to go out and do this on our own, so why don't we just go buy that regulatory apparatus?

Michael Vassar [00:43:01] Yeah, that seems true, except I want to question whether it would be really expensive for them to do it on their own or rather whether it would be priceless, whether it would not work no matter how much money you spent. Because actually what we're calling a system is actually just a crowd of aristocrats engaging in aristocratic clustering at one another. They're not workers doing jobs who are paid based on metrics of their productivity. They are not entrepreneurs running a business. The the thing that we are calling a system is anything but a system. It's a bureaucracy that will claim that you need to be more detail oriented while ignoring the details pretty much all the time that will lose your papers and slow things down, have unavoidable delays that are vastly different based on who you know, who you are past track record and are also vastly different based on what attitudes of loyalty you subtly indicate in ways that you can't legitimately conceal. I mean you can legitimately conceal witch aristocratic faction you are for if they're both within the same language, but you can't legitimately conceal being basically having a basic set of assumptions that assume literal truth is a thing and that rule of law is a thing or have from versus having a basic set of assumptions that assume that law is, as Plato would say, the interest Plato is three concepts of justice.

Michael Vassar [00:44:38] Tell the truth and pay your debts is the first. Second is help your friends and hurt your enemies. Third is to give the advantage to those in power. And fourth is the organization of the Forbes that he builds the republic as a extended metaphor on the soul and not as a proposed way of living to explain. But the third one to the advantage of the stronger is not something that you can actually buy. You know, if you are trying to play by the rules with a regulatorily captured administrative system, you are just a sucker and you will eventually stop playing by those rules. And it's not until you have learned how to not play those rules while ironically affecting some sort of meticulous precision that you will get anywhere. And now it costs 130 million once you've done that because you have learned to not try, but just be a certain sort of person and be endorsed by the right sort of people. Now you're like, once you've learned to stop revealing your intentions with your breathing patterns, with your eye tracking, with the ways in which you take pauses or rather, once you've learned to not reveal having any intentions, once you've learned nonchalance learned to be cool, learned to act as a system that a, a as a thing that is better predicted by referring to its identity than by referring to its interests.

Michael Vassar [00:46:27] You are part of a methodologically not impersonal. Like when people talk about methodological individualism, they're saying you treat a system as made up of people. And neoclassical economics and classical economics are both meth, methodologically, individualistic. They think of people as being motivated by their wants, their needs, their desires, their values. If you try to understand an army that way, you will fail. You will not in fact understand an army. The the armies are under controlled by their training, their conditioning, their feedback. They're controlled by all of the different ways in which they are threatened into doing things that are not in their personal interest. And that that difference between the basically commercial attitude of rational, prudent self-interest and basically being controlled by threats is the core difference between the classes. And when you're being controlled by threats of sticking out even a little bit for being uncool because you are excited and sincere and you know, authentic or earnest even a little bit. And therefore we'll never get a promotion no matter what the numbers say. That's basically what we mean by being a aristocrat in a historical sense.

Michael Vassar [00:48:04] The difference is that now everyone's trying to be cool instead of it being illegal for anyone who didn't have the right birth to try to be cool. And the people who are cool think of themselves as serving the greater good by trying to make force and enable other people to be cool rather than understanding that coolness is a strategy whereby those who are in the ruling class prey on those who are not in the ruling class. So they've been trying to force everyone to be a member of the ruling class leading to mass mental health crises and much more total collapse of trust and predictability.

Vance Crowe [00:48:51] Michael Vassar, I think you have just described something to me that has been so apparent in, in the world around me that I have never been able to isolate and I, well, so I worked in, in, in the World Bank and I remember realizing like something here like is categorically wrong, like the, the the things that people say that they're there to do, they're not doing at all. The people that are succeeding and and amassing higher volumes of power aren't aren't just corrupt. Like they aren't just cheating, they are being rewarded for obviously cheating. And, and and the, the friendships and the relationships that I would see there and, and I would say this happened in the World Bank and then every single successive other large group I've ever been a part of where you start to say like, can't you guys see what's going on here? Like can't. And now I'm realizing yes they can, but they're playing a very different game than the earnest game. And I would say, you know, highly individualized emotional approach that I think that I probably take on things.

Michael Vassar [00:50:03] Yeah, you would probably find things were a little bit better, but still basically like that, but like enough better that the earnest way of doing things wouldn't be totally hopeless if you were in a large organization that was still part of a highly competitive market without that much brand loyalty. So like, and especially without that much prestige associated with the organization. So you could probably be upper management at McDonald's and make it by being earnest. It wouldn't be the best way to make it, but it wouldn't be totally hopeless the way it would be totally hopeless at the World Bank. You could probably be upper management at Koch Industries and actually be rewarded by for the, for that attitude if you were also hardworking and covering your ass and being very diligent. You know, the, when an industry is very competitive, when it doesn't have huge market share or huge barriers to entry when it doesn't have a big moat. When I said Coke, I meant KOCH, not COKE when, you know, they make a little bit of an awful lot of different things, but they're not monopolistic in most of the places where they work that, you know, and they're privately held and have very super normal profits. So I would look for private, private ownership, super normal profits being a new organization, being a small organization, being un prestigious or taboo. All of these things would be evidence that you're working in a context where a bourgeois set of values where you are trying to work hard, tell the truth, fulfill your commitments, maintain a reputation for telling the truth and fulfilling your commitments and make money that that's,

Vance Crowe [00:51:49] I feel like I, I feel like you're telling me. So we had a guy on named Zach Stein and he did a, an entire thing on propaganda and it was very, it like, it, it melted my brain and I feel like that's happening again here because the, my immediate reaction is to say, yeah, but doesn't the aristocracy always get overthrown? Like, don't, don't they always get pushed off, but maybe that's the, the movies like the, the fairytale explanation of it. Because I think about this and I think like, ah, the good old boy network, I I don't want to go join it, I want to go burn it down. Like my, my sense is like fuck those guys. And so

Michael Vassar [00:52:27] Word of Liberia.

Vance Crowe [00:52:28] Yeah, yeah, sure.

Michael Vassar [00:52:31] So it seems that when people have been in enslaved in pretty much any sense, they want to be free, but they want to be masters more than they want to be free. And if you put them in a new context where they, if you give them a choice between being freeing themselves and becoming the masters, some of them will choose one thing and some of them will choose the other thing. But like the majority of the power will end up being in the hands of the people who try to become masters rather than in the people who try to become free. So like Edmund Burke considered the French Revolution the most astonishing thing that had ever happened. And like most of the time when there's a revolution, the leaders of the revolution are aristocrats and they're rebelling against the bourgeoisie. So like lenon is an aristocrat rallying against the bourgeoisie. He's not a ah, okay, I, I think I'm going to mention monarchs are another thing. Like you don't need to be an aristocrat or a bourgeois or a peasant. There are lots of other things you can be, you could be a gypsy or a Jew, all sorts of outsiders who the holocaust happens because a totally aristocratic value system wants to get rid of everything that doesn't fit into the system. You can be a monarch, which is actually a pretty different thing from the aristocrat. I mean I think that when we think about the enlightenment, we tend to pretend that this was invented the, that the modern intellectual world was invented by people who believed in democracy the way we tend to believe in democracy.

Michael Vassar [00:54:13] But it's more accurate to say that Cardinal Vlu and you know, the French mathematicians of his era with Louis XIII invented absolute monarchy as an alternative to feudal monarchy and absolute monarchy is different from feudal monarchy rather than the king being sort of the top of the p pecking order, but still first among equals who might conceivably be overthrown by a duke. And where prestige is like partly about the size of your land and partly the size of your armies, just you are the king, you are in charge. The state is me as Louis the 14th said. And absolute monarchy has values in general that favor enforcing accuracy, precision, truth, honesty, that sort of thing. And you know, the king is not kissing the asses of the aristocrats. He's trying to get them in line, trying to get them to deliver tax revenues that they don't want to deliver by a combination of carrots and stitch. But mostly through the control of prestige and law, he's able to cause them to need certain types of signals of his approval to fit in and to not be torn apart by their neighbors. And he is able to cause other people, the professional army, the priestly trained administrative classes to report on one another and report things in a truth tracking way and set up basically good incentives for a hierarchy of bureaucrats.

Michael Vassar [00:56:00] So what I think happened with the enlightenment is Kings just tried to extend their power over the aristocrats part of that involved training more and better people to administer in like long priestly educations with like pointing at telling the truth and fulfilling commitments and enforcing the law. When you train a lot of smart people to tell the truth and only say things or only endorse claims, if those claims can be justified, the king's claims of divine right and that he should be the special person who's in charge are not going to be that credible for that many of them for that law. So they'll eventually start thinking about what does it look like to have law without a king, but none of them want democracy. They just want rule of law and to not buy men, which is what the founders of the United States would've said, they want it, they don't want a person in charge, but they certainly don't want the people in charge. That would be so much worse. It's just that once you start trying to engineer rule of law and not by men, you're sort of looking for an abstract mathematical object, natural law that will like tie together all of the interests in society and make it possible to have incentives that that's really hard. It's a enormous intellectual engineering project that you couldn't possibly expect people no matter how bright to invent de novo.

Michael Vassar [00:57:35] So they're just trying, trying to like start from the assumption that things are, that the way you enforce the monarch's power is kind of a starting place and then incrementally improve it. It's sort of like trying to incrementally improve the Wright brothers plane into a spaceship and like at some point you're really gonna have to start over. So I think that you, you ended up with like experiments in rule of law that got taken over by democracy and rewrote their history as experiments in democracy in places like the United States.

Vance Crowe [00:58:15] So I, you know, I think of some of the things that, you know, it's around the 4th of July, we're talking about independence and the constitution and you see people fighting tooth and nail that the electoral college should go away or it should stay. So the people that are living out in places like Montana or even the state of Missouri say, Hey, no, the electoral college keeps it from being mob rule of the masses in the city. You know, determining what, you know, where the country goes and how we're all ruled. And the people in the city are like, Hey, why do these people get vast over representation? Is as I'm hearing you describe this, is this the type of fight that benefits ultimately the aristocracy because the two groups, the people at the bottom are, are divided and they fight against one another? Or is this something together altogether different? Was the electoral college a genius move by the founding fathers that were breaking, or like the British that used to come in and and intentionally divide people in order that they would be able to not get enough power together to overthrow them?

Michael Vassar [00:59:23] So that's an interesting question. Okay, so the Americans were, when they did the revolution basically still planning to have a monarchy, but they were trying to ex increase the degree of rule of law above the already high level of rule of law in the British constitutional monarchy. But like George Washington decided he didn't want to be king, he wanted to be an elected exec, elected executive instead out of personal sentiment. That was not really the leading intellectual sentiment of the day. And we ended up with this presidential office instead. That doesn't fit in that well with the idea of rule of law and which is really much more of a aristocratic sort of thing in the first place. Like aristocrats basically assume there is no law and that executive power is the real power that, and people who basically, how do I put it? If you are basically a small business owner, paying attention to laws as if they were intended to be followed is actually the way to get ahead. And if you are basically part of an elite, it's not so like rule of law. Absolute monarchy is a threat to the existence of aristocratic values. Absolute monarchy is the king threatening to impose his law over the nobility and the nobility get mad about that and they rise up and try to overthrow the king.

Michael Vassar [01:01:05] In the US you have two groups of nobility. You have southern gentlemen, farmers who are nobility in the normal sets, so they don't follow laws, they have slaves, they fight, they are woodsy and it are putting on errors in an extreme way if they read and write in a complicated way and try to make things make sense with the things that they write, that's like claiming to be the highest sort of nobility. But they're the, they have. And then in the north you have these weird calvinists, and then in between you have Quakers and Catholics. So the Calvinists are the sort of like anti nobility. They're not like in the way that no nobles like have contempt for normal people and their needs Calvinists have that sort of contempt for nobles. They're like, they have the attitude that you guys with your good manners and glitzy clothing, everyone wants to fuck. You're very wicked and damped and you, it is not even your fault that you're damned, it's just that you are totally depraved and God hates you and it's an inevitable fact of your existence that you be damned unless God decides that he loves you, which he would do not for reasons, but against reason because he is all powerful and gets to do everything.

Michael Vassar [01:02:36] So the the Calvinist attitude is probably if you're wearing fancy clothes, you're gonna burn, burn forever. And we should all be in favor of that because whatever God says is good. So they're like way more against the nobility than nobility or against Pepsis, but they're

Vance Crowe [01:02:54] Also like, I'm finding myself being like, I'm kind of a Calvinist here. Maybe those fancy clothes wear.

Michael Vassar [01:03:02] Yeah. So IIII get where they're coming from. You understand why the French revolution happened after you work at the World Bank or something because yeah, what are you gonna do with those people without a guillotine? But like if you are looking at history, realistically gi attending them didn't necessarily work out well, although it didn't necessarily work out badly. It ended up with a dictatorship by Napoleon and that was probably better for some people and worse for some people than the monarchy that was replaced by it. And, but it didn't produce the hope of like universal freedom and reason that people, people were wrong to hope that if they killed the people whose basic moral alignment was against freedom and reason that would bring freedom and reason. It turns out that freedom and reason at in small groups, like amongst hunter gatherer tribes is actually something that emerges pretty easily and can be maintained pretty easily. But freedom and reason at scale is really hard to maintain.

Vance Crowe [01:04:06] So what do you think, like where are we headed in in today's, you know, wildly inflationary environment? You have people that are, you know, believing that the end of the country has just occurred with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, you know, like where are we at right now? Does the world always feel chaotic and dangerous and like a moment like this, or are we in something special?

Michael Vassar [01:04:33] So I think that probably history almost never feels like this. But another way of saying that is most people are not part of history. Most people are in times and places where nothing gets written down and when things do get written down, there's no scholarship trying to distill it into a shared story made up of verifiable and consistent with one another offense. Most people live in mythology. So we, we have a biased source when we are highly literate people who make a distinction between fiction and nonfiction. We are getting very influenced by those times and places where there were relatively strong scholarly values where there were communities of people who thought it was important to contribute to a collective, but not by producing more stuff, but by producing more accurate maps of the world. And that's like more diametrically opposed to Aris aristocratic values than you know, basically anything else can be. So you have a, what's common? It's common to be in history, it's common to be outside of history. It's pretty uncommon to be at the threshold where history is becoming mythology. I feel like the Indian culture has the best take on that. They have this idea of a colleague yuga a like age of darkness where the only thing that avails a person is to repeat buzzwords.

Michael Vassar [01:06:10] That's the world that India has been in for thousands of years and that the rest of the world has finally fallen into as our levels of technology and social organization and cultural homogeneity matched and then far exceeded the levels of technology and cultural homogeneity and productivity that was possible in the much more fertile in this valley area. You know, like basically people are reasonable if reality, if reality is going to hit them over the head with a hammer if they're unreasonable. And if people are outside of a constraint where reality is gonna hit them over the head for being unreasonable groups of people learn that they can band together to cover for other, for unreasonable people and ask for cover for being unreasonable. First covering people when they're being authentically and unreasonable, but coming together eventually to in, but being intentionally unreasonable and showing that their identity is the sort of person who ought to be covered for. And that's like creating the basic raw material for these sorts of aristocratic systems. So it's not entirely true that hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times in good times, create hard soft men and hard times.

Michael Vassar [01:07:45] But it's not entirely false either. And it's certainly been observed by many people in many cultural complexes over the years and well, we're just coming out of the best times that have ever existed for any large number of people and we're coming out of them existing simultaneously for basically the majority of humanity. And we're doing so where we are living within institutions and within theories, within humanistic and scientific theories for understanding our relationship to one another, that were intentionally built as short-term solutions to very short-term problems. And then we're not replaced. And so we're reaching the end of the viability of the basically short term post World War II social science tech stack, which was not built to last that long. And it seems to me like we're under situations like this, you have like some sort of mass synchronizations of performative behavior where people perform ever greater, more ostentatious feats of denying reality and demanding that other people deny reality in unison and synchronize into pretend opposing camps that gesture and posture and pretend to oppose one another while actually opposing everyone who isn't joining one of the camps and incorporating everyone into those camps.

Michael Vassar [01:09:23] So it's kind of a ghost dance scenario all along where we're all around, where we're moving away from, you know, producing food and stuff like that. And one important question is to what degree? So a large part of the population implicitly thinks or explicitly thinks we're going to die soon. And they project strong viscerally lived sensitivity to the fact that the whole world around them is trying to hurt us towards dying sometime around 2028 or 2029. And I think that's basically the situation is there is a very elaborate process of synchronizing and targeting a date stigmatizing and taboo, any sort of sincere, serious, coherent efforts to make sense of the world past that date. And I think that that date has been in the late 2020s, probably 2028 or 2029 for actually about 30 or 40 years, probably about 40 years. But it's been like the spread has been decreasing the center of mass for when it is disreputable to think seriously about the future. Like in ancient civilizations, people were supposed to think seriously about the very long-term future. They built infrastructure that lasts a very long time.

Michael Vassar [01:10:55] They maintained royal suggestions for a very long time. They hoped for their children and grandchildren to be in better situations than them through very slow accumulation. The, the post has been stigmatizing long with ever increasing strength and for an ever shorter term definition of the long term. And when you stigmatize things that were previously part of the mainstream, you get a reactionary backlash. So we have effective altruism talking about long-termism. No one would need to talk about long-termism if there wasn't an enormous amount of social pressure against long-termism. People didn't talk about long-termism until recently. But the machinery that creates these sorts of social backlash also turns those sorts of social backlash into more of the machinery of opposing sides dialectic opposition, which is itself the machinery of short-termism. So what happens when you have people endorse long-termism is that very quickly they end up thinking that the thing that matters in the long term is that long-term must have the power. And in order to have power, you have to do the things that get your power in the short term. And so you have a very quick inversion of a long termist philosophy. So like basically if you don't understand, if you adopt an ideological stance and you don't understand what the, how, how the conditions change to make it seem like a good idea now, but not in the past to adopt this ideological stance, then you're ignorant about the conflict environment and your stance is going to be undermined into its dialectical opposition in order to add fuel onto the fire of class war regardless of your intentions.

Vance Crowe [01:12:47] Your, so you have a small child, four months old, what do you think the world holds for a child where much of the world is, is aiming towards a focal point of 2008 or 2028 or 2029 as the distant future that people can't see beyond?

Michael Vassar [01:13:06] So China and Africa are not, they're really separate. So that's nice. There are indigenous peoples everywhere and you know, I talk to people and try to figure out what sorts of plans might be available in central Australia or what have you. There is a pretty large Hispanic world where things don't change nearly as quickly as in the more central European world. And Spanish is pretty easy to learn just broadly. Hispanic culture is in some sense for the, with respect to the typical person's preferences better than other cultures. Like you have higher self-reported happiness and much higher life expectancy and all sorts of better family data than you have in the broad than almost other groups. So this is more or less the white person apocalypse, not the apocalypse, but like the idea of the apocalypse was always a white person thing. I mean the Chinese have their version of it and there are native cultural versions of it, especially in Mesoamerica. You have apocalypses every week. But the, I mean, one thing that I do is I pay a lot of attention to the best parts of the lower class culture. The places where people don't have what folks or social justice people would call privilege and which means are not aristocrats or are not aspiring aristocrats.

Michael Vassar [01:14:42] It's, there are a lot of people who are still just workers and essential workers in general will probably continue to be fine. We find out that our whole society is organized under very different legal principles than the explicit legal principles during COVID when we a have a lockdown for a couple weeks, which is legally dubious, but maybe okay, and then have it extended for years without cost benefit analysis. And B, we find out that the FDA regulations are a matter of political prudence and C we find out above all that the f that the treasury can buy and sell individual corporate bonds. Who knew they could do that? That certainly not policy before, but d we end up having essential workers as a thing. And like that's really so incredibly straightforwardly having overt law, legal, you know, representation of class. It's kind of like, I don't know what to say to people who think we're still under the rule of law, not rule by men, Anglo-American constitutional system once you expressly divide the society up into classes like that. So it seems on the one hand, like the explicit death of law for people to respond to Roe v. Wade by saying we should just disobey the Supreme Court and enforce the laws as if the laws are something other than what the Supreme Court says or a literal interpretation.

Michael Vassar [01:16:23] And clearly they're not a literal interpretation or really we'd have to be doing some, like ignore what the Supreme Court says and do what the, what the law says could at least conceivably mean a thing, but ignore what the Supreme Court says and do. What the Supreme Court said 50 years ago is like just saying, okay, we're against the law. We're we're going to be against law in the name of law in the same way that the New York Times is saying free speech is apartheid philosophy. It's like, oh wow, we seem to have reversed our explicit ideological commitments. So, so it seems like all of the rhetoric right now assumes tru truthfully that the legal, ethical, moral system within which people you and my age were raised, or at least people, you and my age and with certain sorts of educational and social advantages were raised that that system is dead. And also the nature of the successor system is to deny the existence of a knowable past, to not deny the existence of knowability in a fairly radical sense, but very particularly while denying the existence of knowability. Assume that the basic metaphysical assumptions of the successor system, that is to say aristocratic assumptions have always been in play. So woke is like, okay, we are definitely a futile system now we are definitely not in any sense a enlightenment part of the Western Enlightenment tradition.

Michael Vassar [01:18:02] So we're, we're going to understand that power is against the enlightenment tradition, therefore we should be against acknowledging that there ever was an enlightenment tradition. And so our society is basically divided between, from the perspective of mainstream politics today, two different types of aristocracy. One that is basically inevitably a racial aristocracy and the other one which is a weird anti-racial aristocracy because these things have to define themselves in opposition to one another. And there are small and rapidly diminishing number of people who are more connected basically to books more than 30 years old than they are to their local economic and political circumstances in terms of their sense of reality and who are still like holding onto weight. But I remember that there was a time when we could try to understand other people's perspectives and I remember there was a time when we could try to know about history in a non-ideological way. And I still believe despite the fact that the science has come in that I shouldn't trust my memory, I still believe in my memory. So, and when I look at the details, it turns out that the science that says you shouldn't trust your memory was invented by sex offenders to silence their daughter, a psychiatrist Jennifer, afraid for outing them.

Michael Vassar [01:19:37] Yeah, like a awful law. And then you start looking at where our intellectual tradition consists of not bourgeois, but aristocratic things. And you hear about things like

Vance Crowe [01:19:50] Let's, you've, you've used this like differentiation a couple of times, but I'm not sure I could describe the difference between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.

Michael Vassar [01:20:01] Okay, so like in a traditional world, if you are, if you are a metje, you're a bourgeois. And if you are a count, you're a est threat. You know, if you have ships and your mo, if your money and power mostly depends on ships and people transporting spices and ship like that, you're probably part of the hot bourgeoisie. And if your money and power depends on owning a lot of people and land, you're probably part of the Arista aristocracy. And if your money and power depends on putting up wayfairs for the night and keeping a clean room and getting them food and beer, then you're part of the peti bourgeoisie and the, basically if someone suppresses the aristocratic patterns of behavior, it's crazy fucking profitable to be petite bourgeois. And like it's also, you've got this wonderful moat, which is that the aristocrats won't. So like if you want to start a coffee shop, you can almost certainly make a lot of money running a coffee shop. And this is true in most times and places because like the sort of person who runs a coffee shop as an aristocratic affectation can't try to make money that wouldn't be be following an aristocratic affectation.

Michael Vassar [01:21:35] And the kind of person who is just thinking about money in a dollars and cents way and isn't culturally influenced by an aristocratic thing, can't create an appealing environment for the people who have the majority of the money who are basically aristocratic. So like if you are like, if you are willing to work hard and be honest and follow the rules and have decent taste and like accept that you are not going to be one of the cool people because you want to work hard, you can like build old a small business and that's the hot bourgeoisie. You get like a lot of money really quickly, but you're like cut out of good information circles, you have no idea what's going on in the world. You read the newspapers, but you never go to world bank meetings so you have no idea what the things in the newspapers are referring to. And you assume that when they talk about a good economy, it means good for people like you not good for aristocrats. So your lived experience is kind of confused and you, you think that the Republicans are trying to help you, for instance. So okay, what we were talking about,

Vance Crowe [01:22:51] Let me, let me jump in because I like, I like where this has gone, but I, I wanna bring it to a practical question. So I just, the other day I got a note from one of my neighbors that said, hey, in the the, in the local school district and I live in a, in what's considered one of the best school districts, not just in Missouri but in all of the Midwest, they have redesigned the bathrooms and they are going to make them all one gender. And so the parents are getting together to, to talk about this because boys and girls are gonna be sharing the same bathroom. What in the hell is going on with that and does one show up to a meeting to try and you know, sway that decision one way or another? Or is this smoke and mirrors and it doesn't matter,

Michael Vassar [01:23:40] It matter. Okay, so it matters a lot. What is going on with that? Well, contemporary gender ideology is part of the continental European tradition, not part of the analytic European tradition, which is to say it's part of the tradition that is about appealing to cratic values for tastefully pointing at the how things appear rather than analytic values for digging in logically to what makes sense and how how do things fit together. It's coming out of people like Judith Butler and these people are, do you know, okay, there's a word dialogue that means something obvious to people talking back and forth and there's a word dialectic that gets thrown around a lot, which is sort of vague and is sort of leaving it open to people who are looking at it through a bourgeois lens that it just means dialogue and is pretentious. But these pretentious technical words are actually usually words that are designed to sound like something innocuous from a bourgeois mindset but actually refer to something very precise and malevolent. So dialogue is two people trying to share an understanding. Basically dialectic is people performing disagreement as part of a process for re recruiting the interest and attention of society away from things that they can agree about towards things that they can't agree about.

Michael Vassar [01:25:29] And increasing the power through control over information and narrative that the people who are engaging in the disagreement wield. So like there's a sense in which you can think of the Cold War as southern aristocratic military traditions got together with Russian aristocratic military traditions to posture at one another and threaten one another and make both of those military traditions a much bigger deal at the expense of non-military traditions in those societies. Like that's basically what armies do is they posture threat in threateningly at one another in order to recruit more funding for both of them. But armies are always in some really important sense on the same side against the people. Like probably the founders didn't want there to be an army, you know, they said we should regulate ourselves with militia probably even today there's enough gun owners in the United States to fend off any foreign invasion that could possibly happen without really needing a centralized army. But like there's a lot of money to be made in distributing military con contracts.

Vance Crowe [01:27:02] And so with this particular argument you could say, well the reason this is such an important argument is that it is a dialectic. It's getting people to focus on gendered bathrooms as opposed to focusing on some other thing. And by doing that you're creating so much discourse and conflict among those people that they become collectively weaker.

Michael Vassar [01:27:26] You're not just doing that, you're also signaling to those people that creating conflicts and not clarifying anything, creating conflicts that obs obscure and obfuscate and that push people to violate what they thought were their principles, their norms, and especially to organize together around some claims that they don't actually believe to be true is necessary. You're teaching people that they live in a society organized around covert concealment and deception rather than clarity and revelation. In other words, you're, you're teaching them to be aristocrats. Remember you become a aristocrat. The ideal way to become aristocrat is like being a sex trafficking victim like a princess. And like basically anywhere you see people excited about sex trafficking either for, for or against, they're actually for it because they're trying to recruit people into an aristocracy. Likewise, anywhere you see people excited about gender, they are trying to recruit people into an aristocracy. Like in Chinese, they don't have a gender word, they just have tot means he or she, either one is fine. You know, the concept of gender as our society has it is definitely different from the concept of biological sex.

Michael Vassar [01:29:03] Like the concept of dialectic is different from dialogue. It's part of a whole intellectual world consisting of concepts that are concealed as correlated but distinct concepts. So gender is to sex as dialectic is to dialogue is a pretty good analogy, but there's like many, many more of these things. The a healthy economy is to the exchange of large number increasing numbers of higher quality goods and services. The people who see that they're supposed to, people who see that if they try to clarify issues and and make communication happen within a conflict, they will be in trouble. And if they try to keep their head down and not say what they think they will like be accepted that are learning to participate in a classier way of life. And by learning to participate in a classier way of life, they, their attention changes from their tendency to integrate their actions. Cortically increases at the expense of their tendency to integrate their actions. Limbically their, they they, their amygdala grows, their hippocampus shrinks, they transition in how there's a transition in how time is represented, basically from the hippocampal linear time to the cortical graft region time that it's relatively natural to think of as circular, but which is a spatial analogy and they, you know, break rules and don't like math and are more against being selfish and have more disposition to be trying to figure out whose side is going to win and who their allies are.

Michael Vassar [01:31:13] And less disposition to be trying to figure out what's going on.

Vance Crowe [01:31:20] And so the, the act of showing up to a school board meeting like this, what value does it bring if people are just trying to increase their own social status by joining into an argument that is obviously wrong to them but they're signaling that this is the way that they will participate in the upper aspects of society?

Michael Vassar [01:31:43] Yeah, so my pretty strong guess is that there's still a pretty strong reserve of people who have relatively lower class values and most of them are like not very well educated and are kept on a pretty tight leash financially and don't have a lot of trust for anything and that's a problem. But like there's still quite a lot of them numerically and the worse our educational system is the more of them are going to be smart, you know? So like, okay, there's no point in yelling, there's no point in keeping your head down. You need to talk to people who are analytically motivated and confused and like want to understand what's going on rather than taking sides and in a sense not afraid. So like I think the school board is going to be basically too old, too far from the issue and too corrupt already. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the slack to be on the school board for the most part.

Michael Vassar [01:33:14] But like there are going to be kids in the school and most of those kids will be pretty chill with it because it doesn't seem that obvious that it matters that much. But some of them will be upset and like a lot of kids, if the school is doing that this then a lot of kids will be like quite anxious about and uncertain about what's going on with gender because the school has probably been trying really hard to make them pay a lot of attention to gender and telling them a lot about how they ought to behave and giving them very clar little clarity about what is being claimed. Like the, the school is, the school is making commands, not giving instructions and explanations. The school is telling them how to be safe, not what the map is. And there are probably still some kids in the school who feel safe and don't feel they need to hide and still want to make maps rather than cowering. And those kids need to talk to the tiny number of like extremely smart and analytically motivated and articulate and clear about gender ideology people out there so that they can like get the inside scoop rather than the propaganda version.

Michael Vassar [01:34:54] So like a kid who feels un probab that hey, it's probably okay, it's probably just progress to go to the bathroom, but I don't like having to claim that I, that I believe someone is whatever gender they claim to me. A kid like that who's like also very good at math needs to be acquainting themselves with the extremely, extremely threatening but distant impersonal threats that, that these facts are evidence of. Like it doesn't actually endanger the Matthew analytical, like curious kids to have to go along with saying things that they don't feel. But it psychologically gives them really strong reason to think that they are, that people are coercing them and coercing them to say things that go against their feelings and coercing them to not talk about this facts that's not possible to investigate, to try in there. And so they know something's up, they know something is deeply wrong and fake about their society.

Michael Vassar [01:36:26] And when I say kids, I'm being biased here. I mean boys 'cause girls have always known this, this is actually not a new thing from a f female perspective in the same way, and it's not a new thing from an upper class perspective, but like a much, much larger fraction of like middle class boys a couple generations ago did not have the experiences that would enable them to know that there was something that they were under intense coercion to falsify their beliefs. Experiences preferences.

Vance Crowe [01:37:02] And why do girls know that? Why have they been tapped into this?

Michael Vassar [01:37:06] So girls know that they are told they have to protect themselves from sexual predation in ways that do not make sense if society overall works more or less the way that they are told society works and they are told that they are, that various things that are direct threats against them reputationally and socially and in terms of their long-term outcomes that are being made for their own interest don't make a lot of sense for them. Like one way of thinking about this is for the most part men live in a world where they are trauma tally confused about what female sexual needs and preferences and feelings are. Like women do not live in a symmetrically confused state. They are not symmetrically confused about male sexual needs and preferences and feelings. They are instead in a state where they are coerced into keeping the men confused about their feelings and preferences.

Vance Crowe [01:38:20] I'm totally intrigued why

Michael Vassar [01:38:22] Like almost all men are totally confused about what women are thinking and feeling. This is not happening at a by accident. This is happening because women are as a block coercing one another into keeping men confused. Just like if almost everyone now is confused about gender, this is not happening by accident. This is happening because almost everyone is as a block coercing people into keeping one another confused.

Vance Crowe [01:38:51] And so you're saying that women from a much younger age or said don't talk about your sexuality and what it is that you want or need. This is not something that's proper, it's something that it makes you a bad woman. Some people won't like you if you do this. So if you do this, it's bad for you. So those women have been tapped into the fact that there are facts that are true and then there are things that you are and aren't allowed to talk about. And those two things are separate and it, and that coercion goes against what they naturally maybe want to do and boys don't have that they, they're living in this world where the, they are not exposed to the truth about the other, the other sex because nobody has to tell them, Hey, you have to watch out for girls, they're going to prey on you, they're gonna desire you and instead they're just not told very much about the world. And so in some sense they're more, not, not innocent, but maybe naive, like not informed, is that what you're saying?

Michael Vassar [01:39:53] Yeah, yeah. They just have less information about what's going on there. It's being, having a large part of the world concealed from you doesn't feel like anything in particular except a lot of confusion and anxiety and surprised that things are this complicated and resentment of the fact that some, it seems to be so easy for some people have being com coerced into concealing, going along with a program of concealing a large part of the world, even for the people you love most. If they're the opposite sex through like amorphous threats from even the people you mo love most of your own sex is like intrinsically traumatizing in the language of the day. And I, I do like the trauma language, we can also talk about moral injury. There's or institutional betrayal trauma. But like the language of trauma, as I say, it refers to well, well-defined symptoms, well-defined neuro anatomical changes. And it's ubiquitous in the technical sense of among a large distraction of the people. Like fortunately the military hurt enough people enough with Vietnam in particular to force mass acceptance of the fact that lived experiences can change people's phenomenology of time and their understanding of what past and future and want and a lot of other very basic concepts mean and that this, this needs to be medically recognized.

Michael Vassar [01:41:34] You can't coerce them into just growing up and being a man about it. And that opened a door towards acknowledging that enormous swats of the population have been hurt in ways that have similar sets of symptoms, similar sets of underlying neurological changes.

Vance Crowe [01:41:56] Well man, I could go all day talking with you. I, but I think I better wrap this up. So I'm gonna end with my last question. I don't ask everybody this, but we call it the Peter Teal paradox, which is, what is one thing that you believe that almost no one you know agrees with you on?

Michael Vassar [01:42:18] So I don't know, I know a lot of people, it makes it a little bit hard. I, I know a lot of people that makes it a little bit hard. I feel like there's a lot of things that I am the poster boy for, but there are usually at least like a few people.

Vance Crowe [01:42:44] Well then maybe a better question would be tell me a book that you think would rattle people's minds. So, oh sorry, you froze. Sorry you froze there. So let's start there again. I know a lot of people,

Michael Vassar [01:43:00] Alright, I'll be super specific in terms of their actions. People, a lot of people express interest, but not a lot of people get real excited about this. And I think it's about the most exciting thing. So it probably counts. I think that while we are almost definitely not very close to creating machines that can mentally do all of the things that we can do, we already have the technology to build machines that can do quite a lot of the things that we can do. And there are really important classes of behavior where simply the assurance of neutrality that comes from something, being a machine rather than being a person, means that machines can do the thing collectively much better than humans can, even if they don't have human ability yet. So like we don't necessarily have full self-driving, as in we don't have cars that can drive as well as a person can. But certainly if all of our cars were self-driving cars, that would be much safer. We could right now in install self-driving systems on all of our cars. And this would like enormously increase the safety of the population, save an enormous number of lives, produce an enormous amount of injuries, and, you know, have all sorts of wide ranging effects.

Michael Vassar [01:44:37] There's, there are places where the impact could be much larger though. So when there are broadly political questions, broadly political questions, mean questions where the socially dominant strategy is to maintain obscurity about what is being discussed while signaling to people your disposition to help them and, and around broadly political questions. So like most attempts to get at truth are halted by the fact that, for instance, filibustering is possible. If you want to figure out what someone knows and you don't have the course of apparatus of a court and a skilled judge and prosecutor, then if they, because of trauma or interest don't want to tell you, they can almost certainly fail to meet you where you are and take up time, go into too much detail or go into too little detail there. It, it's basically impossible to extract information from people if there's some le significant level of trauma or interest preventing them from releasing it. And not a very precisely set up machine to change that.

Michael Vassar [01:46:09] But even in Congress, why do we have filibustering? It's not a law, it's not a policy, it's not a tradition. We call it a tradition. What we mean is we don't know how to prevent people from filibustering. Like in actual practice we don't know how to set up procedural norms that the desire to filibuster would not just derail at a more meta level. You know, the, if people want to slow things down and you can't get rid of those people or penalize them, then they can. But like you could build a machine that could tell when people were filibustering probabilistically and kick them off the stage or create interruptions or whatever, create common knowledge of that fact and that would make it possible to have a no field buster role.

Vance Crowe [01:47:00] Well, that was unexpected. Michael, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I'm really glad you came on. We didn't even talk about any of the work you've done, any of your projects or anything. So I will undoubtedly have you on again. But if people wanted to learn more about you, read things that you've put together, where would you send them?

Michael Vassar [01:47:19] So there's a Spencer Greenberg podcast that a lot of people find out about me from, and there is a Less wrong podcast where a famous psychiatrist named Scott Siskin claims that they shouldn't, people shouldn't receive information from me because receiving information from me causes people to be crazy. And this is the most commented on less wrong podcast ever because he's trying to silence a incredibly intellectually generative and intellectually important trans girl on the ground that she talks to me. And that is a interesting thing for a super famous psychologist, you know, who runs probably one of the most important contemporary media sources to have done and inve investigating that whole discourse ought to bring people to the blogs of Ben Hoffman, of Sarah Constantine, of Jessica Taylor of v Markowitz, and a number of other interesting voices who show up in the comments threads. And if you look at around there, you can discover in microcosm what political coverups look like, how coercion to abuse power, but going directly against your stated principles in, in the name of those principles looks like when people really deeply feel like they are doing something that feels bad and awkward and they want, don't want to do it, but feel that they are forced to do it by concrete facts, except the concrete facts don't add up and don't hold up when investigated that sort of phenomenon.

Michael Vassar [01:49:09] So I, I think that broadly, if you want to get more information about stuff that people want not to talk about, you should look at the places where they most clearly reveal that they're willing to break from script and give up their cover as someone who would never try to prevent people from talking in order to suppress speech. And I, I think that if you look there and you go into the associated literature, that's probably like, my guess is that if 1,001 in 10,000 middle school kids were to, you know, in terms of academic abilities were to look at that sort of thing, at the level of like getting really into it, they, they would get, they, they would basically be able to unpack the key for understanding why they are under an enormous amount of social coercion and what the social coercion is to do. Oh, another place to work is the Debtor Revoked by Ben Hoffman in particular. That's a particularly central case of explaining how finance works and how it relates to our lives.

Vance Crowe [01:50:30] Well, it is obvious to me. I gotta have you back on. Thank you so much for, for doing this. This was a blast and I've got a lot more to talk with you about. So thanks so much, Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar [01:50:40] Great. Was fun. Talk to you later. Bye. Bye Vince.