Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
sheldon solomon
a social psychologist a philosopher
co-developer of terror management theory
and co-author of the warm at the core
on the role of death and life he further
carried the ideas of ernest
becker that can crudely summarize as the
idea that our fear of death
is at the core of the human condition
and
the driver of most of the creations of
human civilization
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let me say as a side note that ernest
becker's book
denial of death had a big impact on my
thinking about human cognition
consciousness and the deep ocean
currents of our mind
that are behind the surface behaviors we
observe
many people have told me that they think
about death or don't think about death
fear death or don't fear death but i
think not many people think about this
topic
deeply rigorously in the way that
nietzsche suggested
this topic like many that lead to deep
personal self-reflection frankly is
dangerous for the mind
as all first principles thinking about
the human condition is
if you gaze long into the abyss like
nietzsche said the abyss will gaze back
into you
i've been recently reading a lot about
world war ii
stalin and hitler it feels to me that
there's some fundamental truth there to
be discovered
in the moments of history that changed
everything the suffering
the triumphs if i bring up donald trump
or vladimir putin in these conversations
it is never through a political lens i'm
not left
nor right i think for myself deeply
and often question everything changing
my mind as often as is needed
i ask for your patience empathy and
rigorous thinking
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i ask that you unsubscribe and don't
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i think we can only make progress toward
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and now here's my conversation with
sheldon
solomon what is the role of death and
fear of death and life
well from our perspective the uniquely
human awareness of death and
our unwillingness to accept that fact
we would argue is the primary
motivational impetus for almost
everything that people do
whether they're aware of it or not so
that's kind of been your life work
your view of the human condition is that
death you've written the book warm with
the core that death is at the core of
our
consciousness of everything of how we
see the world of what drives us
maybe can you can you
elaborate like what how you see
death fitting in what does it mean to be
at the core
of our being so i think that's a great
question
and you know to be pedantic i usually
start you know my psychology classes
and i say to the students okay you know
let's define our terms and the ology
part
they get right away you know it's the
study of
and then we get to the psyche part
and understandably you know the students
are like oh that means mind
and i'm like well no that's a modern
interpretation but in a in ancient greek
it means soul but not in the
cartesian dualistic sense that most of
us
in the west think when that word comes
to mind and so
you hear the word soul and you're like
well all right that's the
non-physical part of me
that's potentially detachable from my
corporal container when i'm no longer
here
but aristotle's who
coined the word psyche i think um
he was uh not a dualist he was a monist
he thought that the soul
was inextricably connected to the body
and he defined soul as the essence of a
natural body
that is alive and then he goes on and he
says all right
but let me give you an example if
um if an
axe was alive the soul of an axe would
be to chop
and if you can pluck your eyeball out of
your head
and it was still functioning
then the soul of the eyeball would be to
see
you know and then he's like all right
the soul of a grasshopper
is to hop the soul of a woodpecker is to
peck
which raises the question of course what
is the essence
of what it means to be human and
here of course there is no one
universally accepted conception of the
essence of our humanity
all right aristotle uh you know gives us
the idea of humans as rational animals
you know we're
homo sapiens but
not the only game in town got joseph
hoisinger an anthropologist in the 20th
century he called us homo ludens
that were basically fundamentally
playful creatures
and i think it was hannah arendt uh homo
faber we're tool making creatures
uh another woman ellen dizzinayake wrote
a book called homo aestheticus
and following aristotle and his poetics
she's like well we're not only rational
animals we're also aesthetic creatures
that appreciate
beauty there's another take on humans i
think they call us homo naratans
we're all we're storytelling creatures
and i i think
all of those uh designations of what it
means to be human
are quite useful heuristically and
certainly worthy of our collective
cogitation
but what what garnered my attention
when i was a young punk was just a
single line
in an essay by a scottish guy it was
alexander smith
in in a book called dreamthwarp i think
it's written in the 1860s
he just says right in the middle of an
essay it is our knowledge
that we have to die that makes us human
and i remember reading that and i in my
gut i was like oh man i don't like that
but i think you're on to something and
then william james the the
great harvard philosopher and arguably
the first
academic psychologist he referred to
death as the worm at the core of the
human condition so that's where the worm
at the core idea comes in
and that's just an illusion to the story
of genesis
back in the proverbial old days in the
garden of eden uh
everything was going tremendously well
until the serpent tempts eve to
take a chop out of the apple of the tree
of knowledge and
adam partakes also and
this is according to the bible what
brings
death into the world and from our
vantage point
the story of genesis is a remarkable
allegorical
uh recount of the origin of
consciousness where we
get to the point where by virtue
of our vast intelligence we come to
realize
the inevitability of death and so
uh you know the apple is beautiful and
it's tasty
but when you get right into the middle
of it there's that ugly reality which is
our finitude and then fast forward a bit
and
uh i was a young professor at skidmore
college in 1980 um my phd is in
experimental social psychology and i i
mainly did studies
with clinical psychologists evaluating
the efficacy of non-pharmacological
interventions to reduce
stress and that was good work and i
found it interesting but
in my first week as a professor at
skidmore i i'm just walking up and down
the shelves of the library
saw some books by a guy i had never
heard of ernest becker
a cultural anthropologist recently
deceased he died in 1974
after um weeks before
actually he was posthumously uh awarded
the pulitzer prize and non-fiction for
his book the denial of death
and and that was his last book it's
actually his next to last
book i don't know how you pulled this
off but he had one more after he died
called escape from
evil and evidently it was supposed to
originally the denial of death was
supposed to be this giant
thousand page book that was both
and they split it up and the what became
escape from evil
uh his wife marie becker finished
well be that as it may in it is in the
denial of death
where becker just says it in the first
paragraph i i i believe uh that the
terror of death
and the way that human beings respond to
it or decline to respond to it is
primarily responsible for almost
everything we do whether we're
aware of it or not and mostly
we're not and so i read that first
paragraph lex and i was like wow okay
this dude you're on to something
you're on to something it's the same
thing it's the same thing
and then it reminded me i think um
not to play psychologists but you know
let's face it
i believe there's a reason why we end up
drifting
where we ultimately come to so i'm in my
mid-20s
i got ernest becker's book in my hand
and the next thing i know i'm
remembering uh when i'm eight years old
the day that my grandmother died
and you know the day before my mom
said oh say goodbye to grandma she's
not well and okay so i was like okay
grandma
and i knew she wasn't well but i didn't
really appreciate the magnitude
of her illness well she dies the next
day
and it's in the evening and i'm just
sitting there
looking at my stamp collection and i'm
like wow i'm gonna
miss my grandmother and then i'm like no
wait a minute
that means my mother's gonna die and
after she gets old
and that's even worse after all who's
gonna make me dinner
and that bothered me for a while but
then i'm looking at the stamps all the
dead american presidents
and i'm like there's george washington
he's dead there's thomas jefferson
he's dead my mom's gonna be dead
oh i'm gonna get old
and be dead someday and at eight years
old that was my
first explicit existential crisis i
remember it being
you know one of these blood curdling
realizations that i
tried my best to ignore
for the most of the time i was
subsequently growing up
but fast forward back to skidmore
college
mid-20s you know reading becker's book
in the
1980s thinking to myself
wow one of the reasons why i'm finding
this so compelling is that it squares
with my own personal experience
and then to make a short story long and
i'll i'll shut up lex but
what what grabbed me about becker and
this is in part
uh because i read a lot of his other
books um
there's another book the birth and death
of meaning uh which is
framed um in from an evolutionary
perspective
and and then the denial of death is
really more
framed from an existential psychodynamic
vantage point and as a a
young um academic uh i was
really taken by what i found to be
a very potent juxtaposition
that you really don't see that often yet
usually evolutionary types
are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic
types
and vice versa and maybe only john bolby
you know there's there's other folks but
the attachment theorist
john bolby was really one of the first
serious academics
to say these um these ways
of thinking about things are quite
compatible and can you comment on what's
what a psychodynamics view of the world
is versus an evolutionary view of the
world just in case people are not oh
yeah absolutely that's that's a fine
question
well for the evolutionary types um
in general are interested
in um how it is and
why it is that we
have adapted to our surroundings in the
service of persisting over time
and being represented in the gene pool
thereafter you used to be a fish
yes we used to be a fish and also yeah
and i ended up
uh talking on a podcast yeah how we came
to be that way how we came to be that
way
and so whereas the existential
psychodynamic types
i would say are more interested in
development across
a single lifespan and
but but the evolutionary types dismiss
the psychodynamic types as overly
speculative
and devoid of empirical support for
their views
well they um you know they'll just say
these guys are talking shit if you'll
pardon the expression
and of course uh you can turn right
around and
say the same about the evolutionary
types that they are often and rightfully
criticized evolutionary psychologists
for what are called the just so stories
where it's like oh this is probably
why fill in the blank is potentially
adaptive and my thought
again early on was i didn't see any
um intrinsic antithesis
between these viewpoints i just found
them dialectically
compatible and uh very powerful when
combined
so one question i would ask here is um
about a science being speculative you
know we understand so a little about the
human mind
you said you picked up becker's book and
you know it felt like it was onto
something that's the same thing i felt
when i picked up becker's book uh
probably also
in my early 20s uh you know i read a lot
of philosophy but it felt like
the question of the meaning of life kind
of
you know this seemed to be the most uh
the closest to the truth somehow
it was on to something so i i guess the
question that i want to ask also is like
how speculative is psychology how like
all of your lives work
um how do you feel how confident do you
feel about the whole thing
about understanding our mind i feel
confidently unconfident to have it
both ways like what do we make of
psychology you want to make starting
with freud's
you know starting um just just our
or even just philosophy uh even
uh the aspects of uh the sciences
like uh you know my field of artificial
intelligence but also physics
you know it often feels like man we
don't really understand
most of what's going on here and
certainly that's true
with uh the human mind yeah well to me
that's the proper epistemological stance
i don't know anything well uh it's the
socratic
uh i know that i don't know which is the
first step
on the path to wisdom i i would argue
forcefully that we know a lot more
than we used to i would argue
equally forcefully uh not that i have a
phd in the philosophy of science but i i
believe that the
thomas coons of the world are right
when they point out that change is not
necessarily progress and
so on the one hand i i do think we know
a lot more
than we did back in the day when if you
wanted to fly you put on some wax wings
and
jumped off a mountain yeah on the other
hand
i think it's quite arrogant when
scientists i'll just speak about
psychological scientists um when
they have the audacity to mistake
statistical precision for
knowledge and insight
and when they make the mistake in my
estimation
that einstein bemoaned and that's this
idea
that the mere accumulation of data
uh will necessarily result in
conceptual breakthroughs and so i i like
the um well we're all i hope
appreciative of the people who trained
us but i remember my first day in
graduate school at the university of
kansas
uh they brought us into a room and on
one side of the board was a quote by
kurt lewin or levine famous german
uh social psychologist and there was
nothing and the quote is there's nothing
more useful than a good theory
and then on the other side was another
quote by german physicist his name
eludes me
and it was all theories are wrong and
i'm like
uh which is it and of course the point
is that it's both our theories
are i believe powerful ways to direct
our attention
to aspects of human affairs
that might render us
better able to understand ourselves in
the world around us
now i also as
an experimental psychologist i adhere to
the view
that theories are essentially hypothesis
generating devices and that at its best
science is a dialectical interplay where
you have theoretical assertions
that yield testable hypotheses
and that either results in the
corroboration of the theory
the rejection of it or the modification
thereafter if we look at the
existentialists
or even like uh modern philosopher
psychology types like jordan peterson
i'm not sure if you're familiar with it
i know jordan pretty well
we go way back actually if he were here
with us today we would
he would be jumping in and i believe
very interesting and important ways but
yeah we go back 30 years ago
he was uh basically saying our work
is nonsense let's get into this i'm sure
i'll talk to jordan
uh eventually on this thing yeah going
through some rough times right now
oh absolutely and i and i wish him well
um
jordan was working on his maps of
meaning
and we were publishing our work
and i i think jordan at the time
um was concerned about
our vague claims to the effect that
all meaning is arbitrary
he takes a more jungian
as well as evolutionary view that i
don't think is wrong by the way
which is that um there are certain
kinds of meanings
that are more important let's say
religious types and that we didn't pay
sufficient attention to that um
in our early days so uh can you try to
uh lose a day like what his world view
is because he's also a religious man
uh so what uh what was this what was uh
some of the interesting aspects of the
disagreements
that then yeah well back in the day i
just said you know jordan was a young
punk uh we were young
punks he was just kind of flailing in an
animated way at some conferences saying
that
um we you're still both kind of punks
yeah we are
kind of punks so i saw him three or four
years ago we spoke on a
it was an awesome day we were in canada
at uh the ontario shakespeare festival
where we were asked to be on a canadian
broadcast
system program i think we were talking
about macbeth
from a psychodynamic
perspective and i hadn't seen him in a
ton of years and we spent two days
together
had a great time you know we had just
written our book
uh the worm at the core and he's like
you know you you
you're missing a big opportunity every
time you say something
you have to have your phone yeah and you
have to film yourself
and then you have to put it on youtube
yeah uh he was onto something that uh
you know that
just as a small tangent yeah uh it's
it's almost sad to look at jordan
peterson somebody like yourself
after having done this podcast i've
realized that there is
really brilliant people in this world
and oftentimes
especially like when they're um
i mean it would love are a little bit
like punks that's right
they they kind of do their own thing and
like the world doesn't
know they exist as much as they should
and it's so interesting because most
people
are kind of boring
and then the interesting ones kind of go
on their own and there's not a
smartphone
that's that's so interesting he was on
to something that um
i mean it's interesting that he i don't
think he was thinking from a money
perspective
but he was probably thinking of like
connecting with people or sharing his
knowledge
but uh people don't often think that way
that's right so
maybe we can try to get back to you're
both brilliant
people and i'd love to get some
interesting disagreements
earlier and later about in your
psychological work in your world views
well our disagreements
today would be uh
along two dimensions uh one is he is
and again i wish he was here to correct
me
yes um when i say that he is
more committed to
the virtues of the judeo-christian
tradition
particularly christianity and in a sense
is a
contemporary kierkegaard of sorts when
he's saying there's only one
way to leap into faith
and i would take ardent issue with that
claim on the grounds that that is
one but by no means not the
only way uh to
find meaning and value in life and so
and i see his what's his warm at the
core
what is like uh so we're talking about a
little bit of a higher level of
discovering meaning yeah what's his uh
what does he make of death oh i don't
know and this is
where it would be nice to uh have him
here
he has you know from a distance
criticized our work as misguided having
said that though when we were together
he said something along the lines that
there is no
theoretical body of work in academic
psychology
right now for which there is more
empirical evidence
and so i i appreciated that he's a great
uh
researcher he's a good clinician the
other thing that we will agree
to disagree about uh rather vociferously
is ultimately political
slash economic so i remember being at
dinner with him
telling him that the next book that i
wanted to write
was going to be called why left and
right or both beside the point
and my argument was going to be and it
is going to be that both liberal and
political liberal and conservative
political philosophy
are each intellectually and morally
bankrupt because they're
both framed in terms of assumptions
about human nature that are demonstrably
false
and jordan didn't mind me uh knocking
liberal political philosophy on those
grounds that would basically be like
stephen pinker's
blank slate but he took issue
when i pointed out that
actually it's conservative political
philosophy
which starts with john locke's
assumption that in a state of nature
there are no societies just
autonomous individuals who
are striving for survival
that's one of the most obviously
patently wrong assertions in the history
of intellectual thought and locke uses
that to justify
his claims about the individual right to
acquire
unlimited amounts of property which is
ultimately
uh the justification for neo-liberal
economics and can you look around a
little bit
uh what's the uh can you describe his
philosophy again
as view of the world sure and what uh
uh neoliberal economics is yeah let me
translate it in english so basically all
all these days anybody who says i'm a
i i'm a conservative free-market type
you're following john locke and adam
smith
whether you're aware of it or not so
here's john locke
who by the way all of these guys are
great so
for me to appear to criticize any of
these folks it is with the highest
regard
and also we need to understand in my
estimation
how important their ideas are lock is
working in a time
where all rule was top down by
divine right and he's trying desperately
to come up
with a philosophical justification to
shift power and autonomy
to individuals and
he starts in his second treatise on
government 1690 or so
he he just he says okay let's start with
a state of nature
and he's like in a state of nature
there's no societies
there's just individuals and
in a perfect universe there wouldn't be
any societies
there would just be individuals who by
the law of nature have a right to
survive
and uh in the service of survival
they have the right to acquire and
preserve
the fruits of their own labor uh um
but his point is and it's actually a
good one you know he's following hobbs
here
he's like well the problem with that is
that people are assholes
and um if they would let each other
alone
then we would still be living in a state
of nature everybody
just doing what they did to get by each
day
but it's a whole lot easier you know if
i see like an
apple tree a mile away well i can go
over and pick an
apple but if you're 10 meters away with
an apple in your hand it's a lot easier
if i
pick up a rock and crack your head and
take the apple
and his point was that
the problem is that people can't be
counted on to behave
they will they will take each other's
property
moreover he argued
if someone takes your property you have
the right
to you have the right to retribution
in proportion to the degree of the
magnitude of the transgression
english translation if i take your apple
you have the right to take an apple back
you don't have the right to kill my
firstborn
but people being people they're apt to
escalate retaliatory behavior thus
creating
what law called a state of war so he
said
in order to avoid a state of war people
reluctantly give up
their freedom in exchange for security
they agree to obey the law and that the
sole function of government
is to keep domestic tranquility and to
ward off foreign evasion
in order to protect our right to
property
all right so now here's the okay
property thing
all right so uh lock says
if you look in the bible and in nature
there is no
private property um
but lock says well surely
you if there's anything that you own
it's your body
and surely you have a right by nature
to stay alive and then by extension
anything that you do where you exert
effort or labor that becomes your
private property
so back to the apple tree if i walk over
to an apple tree
that's everybody's apples until i pick
one
and the minute i do that is my apple
right and then he says you can have as
many apples as you want
as long as you don't waste them and as
long as you don't
impinge on somebody else's right
to get apples right so far so good yep
and then he says
well okay
in the early days you you could only eat
so many apples and or you could only
trade so many apples with somebody else
so he was like well if you put a fence
around
a bunch of apple trees those become your
apples that's your
property if somebody else wants to put a
fence around nebraska
that's their property
and everybody can have as much property
as they want
because the world is so big
that there is no limit to what you can
have
if you pursue it by virtue of your own
effort
but then he says money came into the
picture
and this is important because it's a he
noticed
long before anybody before the freud's
of the world
that money is funky because it has no
intrinsic value
he's like ooh look at that shiny piece
of metal
that actually has if you're hungry
and you have a choice between a carrot
and a lump of gold in the desert most
people are going to go for the carrot
but his point is is that uh the allure
of money
is that it's basically a concentrated
symbol
of wealth but because it doesn't spoil
locke said you're entitled to have as
much money
as you're able to garner right
then he says well the reality is
is that some people are more the word
that he used was industrious
he said some people more industrious
than others
all right today we would say smarter
less lazy
more ambitious he just said that's
natural it's also true
therefore he argued uh over time
some people are gonna have a whole lot
of property
and other people not much at all
inequality for luck
is natural and beneficial
for everyone his argument was that you
know the rising tide lifts all boats
and that the truly creative and
innovative
are entitled to relatively unlimited
worth because we're all better off
as a result so the point very
simply is that well that's basically and
then you have adam smith the you know
in the next century with the invisible
hand where adam smith says
everyone pursuing their own selfish
that's not
necessarily pejorative if everyone
pursues their own
selfish interests we will all be better
off as a result and what do you think is
the flawed in that way
well there's two flaws one is is that um
well one flaw is
first of all that that it is based on an
erroneous assumption to begin with which
is that there never was a time in human
history when we were in a social
species in a sense you don't feel like
that where there's uh
this emphasis of uh individual autonomy
is a flawed premise like where there's a
there's something
fundamentally deeply uh interconnected
between us i do
i think that plato and socrates uh
you know in the crito were closer to the
truth
uh when they started with the assumption
that we were
interdependent and they derived
individual
autonomy as a manifestation of a
functional
social system that's fascinating so when
margaret thatcher
you're too young uh you know in the
1980s she said societies
there's no such thing as societies
there's just
individuals pursuing their self-interest
so uh so that's one point where i would
take issue respectfully with john locke
point number two
is when locke says in 1690 well
england's filled up um
so if you want some land just go to
america it's empty
or maybe there's a few savages there
just kill them
so and and melville does the same thing
in moby dick where he
he thinks about will there ever come a
time where we run out of whales
and he says no but we have run out of
whales
and so locke was right maybe
in 1690 that the world was large
and had infinite resources he's
certainly
wronged today in in my opinion
also wrong is the claim uh
that the unlimited pursuit of personal
wealth does not harm those around us
there is no doubt
uh that radical inequality is tragic
psychologically and physically it's
poverty is not that terrible it's easy
for me to say because i have a place to
stay and something to eat
but as long as you're not starving and
have a place to be poverty's not as
challenging as being having the
impoverished and close
proximity to those who are obscenely
wealthy
so it's not the any absolute measure of
your well-being it's the inequality of
that well-being
is quite frantically painful um so maybe
just to uh link on the jordan peterson
thing
in terms of your uh disagreement on his
worldview so he went
through quite a bit it you know there's
been quite a bit of fire right in
in his defense or maybe his opposition
of the idea of equality of outcomes
so looking at the inequality that's in
our world
looking at you know certain groups
measurably having an outcome that's
different than other groups
and then drawing conclusions about
fundamental
uh unfairness injustice inequality in
the system so like
systematic racism systematic sexism
systematic anything else that creates
inequality
and he's been kind of uh saying pretty
simple things
uh to say that uh you know the system
for the most part
is not broken or flawed yeah
that the inequalities part the um the
inequality of outcomes as part of our
world
what we should strive for is the uh you
know equality of opportunity yeah and i
i
do not dispute that as an abstraction
but again to back up for a second i i do
take issue with jordan's
uh fervent devotion to the free market
and his cavalier dismissal of
marxist ideas which he has uh
in my estimation uh mischaracterized
in his public depictions let's get into
it so he he just seems to
really not like um uh socialism marxism
communism
yeah uh historically speaking sort of
uh i mean how would i characterize it
i'm not exactly sure
i don't want to again he's yeah he'll
eventually be here to defend himself
john locke unfortunately not here to
defend exactly
but what's what's your sense uh about
marxism and and uh the
uh the way jordan talks about the way
you think about it
from the economics from the
philosophical perspective yeah well like
if we were all here together i'd say we
need to start
with marx's economic and philosophical
manuscripts of 1844
before marx became more of a polemicist
and i would argue that marx's
political philosophy he's a crappy
economist i don't
dispute that but his arguments about
human nature
his arguments about the inevitably
catastrophic
psychological and environmental
and economic effects of capitalism i
would argue
every one of those has proven quite
right
marx maybe did not have the answer
but he saw in the
18 whenever he was writing um
that inevitably capitalism
um would lead to massive inequity
that it was ultimately
based on uh the need to denigrate
and dehumanize labor to render them in
his language a fleshy cog
in a giant machine and that
it would create a tension and conflict
between those who own
things and those who made things
that over time would always you know the
thomas pickerty guy who writes about
capital
and just makes the point that return on
investment will always be greater
than wages that means the people with
money are going to have a lot more
that means there's going to come a point
where the economic house of cards
falls apart now the joseph shumpters of
the world they're like that's creative
destruction
bring it that's great so i think it's
niles ferguson
he was he's a historian he may be at
stanford now he was at harvard
you know he writes about the history of
money and he's like
yeah there's been 20 or whatever
depressions and big recessions
uh in the last several hundred years and
when that happens half of the population
or
whatever is catastrophically
inconvenienced
but that's the price that we pay
for progress other people would argue
and i
would agree with them
that i will happily sacrifice
the rate of progress in order to flatten
the curve
of economic destruction to put that in
plainer english um i
would um direct our attention
to the social democracies that
forgetting for the moment of whether
it's possible
to do this on a scale in a country as
big
as ours on all of the things that
really matter you know gross domestic
gdp
or whatever that's just an abstraction
but when you look at
whatever the united nations says how we
measure
quality of life uh you know life
expectancy
education you know rates of alcoholism
suicide
and so on the countries that do better
are the mixed economies they're market
economies
that have high tax rates in exchange
for the provision of services that
come as a right for citizens yeah so i
mean i guess the question is
you've kind of mentioned that uh you
know like as marx described a capitalism
with a slippery slope eventually things
go awry in some kind of way so that's
the question is when you have when you
implement a system yeah how does it go
wrong eventually
you know the you know eventually we'll
all be dead that's exactly right
no no no that's right so
and then the criticism i mean i think
these days uh unfortunately marxism as
like
is a dirty word i i say unfortunately
because even if you
disagree with the philosophy it should
you should
uh like calling somebody a marxist yeah
should not be a thing that uh shuts down
all conversation
no that's right and and the fact is i'm
sympathetic
with uh jordan's dismissal of the folks
and
popular the talking heads these days who
spew
marxist words um
to me it's like fashionable nonsense do
you know that book that the physicist
wrote
mocking uh you're too young so in the uh
20 or so years we're all pretty young
really yeah that's right but they're i
think they're with these nyu physicists
they wrote a paper just mocking the uh
kind of literary uh post-modern types
you know yes oh those kinds of yeah yeah
it was just nonsense and of course it
was made the lead article
um and and you know my poor is marx
wouldn't be a marxist
true i've read and listened to some of
the work of
uh richard wolff he speaks pretty
eloquently about marxism i like him
uh he's uh one of the only uh
you know one of the only people speaking
about a lot about marxism and the way we
are now
in in a serious way in it in a sort of
saying you know uh what are the flaws of
capitalism
not saying like yeah basically sounding
very different and people should check
out his work
no i it's all this kind of work this
kind of
outrage mob culture
of uh sort of demanding equality
equality of outcome
that's not marxism it is not marxism he
he didn't say that you know he literally
said each
what was it like each according to their
needs and each according to their
abilities or something like that
so the question is the implementation
like absolutely humans are messy so how
does it go wrong
like it just met there you go brilliant
it's
messy and this gets back to my rant
about
the book that i want to try if i don't
stroke out why left and right
are both beside the point you know the
the
people conservatives are
right when they condemn liberals
for being simple-minded by assuming that
a modification of external conditions
will yield
changes in human nature you know
you know again that's where marx and
skinner are
odd bedfellows you know here they are
just saying oh
let's change the surroundings and
things will inevitably get better on the
other hand
when um conservatives
say that people are innately
selfish and they use that as the
justification for glorifying
the unbridled pursuit of wealth well
they're only half right
because it turns out that we can be
innately selfish
but we are also innately generous
and reciprocating creatures there's
remarkable studies i think they've been
done at yale
of you know babies 14 month old babies
um if someone hands them a toy
and then wants something in return
babies before they can walk and talk
will reciprocate
all right fine if
someone if they want a toy let's say or
a bottle of water
baby wants a bottle of water and
i look like i'm trying to give it to the
baby
but i dropped the bottle so the baby
doesn't get what she or he wanted
when given a chance to reciprocate
little babies will reciprocate
because they're aware of and are
responding to intention
similarly if they see somebody
um behaving unfairly to to someone
they will not help that person in return
so so my point is is yeah we are
selfish creatures at times
but we are also simultaneously
uber social creatures who are
eager to reciprocate and in fact we're
congenitally prepared to be
reciprocators to the point where
uh we will reciprocate on the basis of
intentions
above and beyond what actually happened
how so
i mean your work is on the fundamental
role of the fear of mortality yeah
in ourselves how fundamental is this
reciprocation this human connection to
other
humans well i think it's really innate
yeah i think it's because
yeah bats reciprocate uh not by
intention but
uh you know this i'm going here from
richard dawkins
uh the selfish gene you know to
i love the early dawkins i'm less
enamored
like the early beat yeah no no again i
say this
with great respect but uh you know
dawkins
just points out that uh you know
reciprocation is
just fundamental cooperation is
fundamental you know it is the it's a
one-sided view
of evolutionary takes on thanks when we
see it solely in terms of individual
competition
it's it's almost from a game theoretic
perspective too it's just easier to see
the world that way
it's it's easier to i don't know i i
mean you see this in physics uh
there's a whole field of folks like
complexity yeah
that kind of embrace the fact that it's
all an intricately connected mess
and it's just very difficult to do
anything uh with that kind of science
but it seems to be much closer to
actually representing what the world is
like
so like you put it earlier lex it's
messy
so yeah left and right you mentioned
you're thinking of maybe actually
putting
it down on paper or something yeah i
would like to because what i would
what i would like to point out again in
admiration of all the people that i will
then
try and have the gall to criticize this
look these are all geniuses
um lock genius adam smith
genius when he uses the notion that
we're bartering
creatures so he uses that reciprocation
idea
as the basis of his way of thinking
about things but that's not at the core
the murdering is not at the core of
human nature it's not a well
he says it is he says we're
fundamentally bartering creatures
well that doesn't even make sense then
because then what how
how can we then be autonomous
individuals
well because we're going to barter with
an eye on on on for self
for ourselves self yeah but all right so
but back to adam smith for a second lex
is like adam smith here's he's got the
invisible hand
and my conservative friends i'm like you
need to read
his books because he is a big fan
of the free market and this is my other
uh gripe with folks who support
just unbridled markets adam smith
understood that there was a role for
government for two reasons
one is is that just like locke people
are not going to behave with integrity
and he understood that one role of
government
is to maintain a proverbial
you know even playing field and
then the other thing smith said was that
there's some things that can't be done
well for a profit
and i believe he talked about education
and public health
and infrastructure as things that are
best done by governments
uh because you can't you can make a
profit but that doesn't mean that the
institutions themselves will be
maximally beneficial
yeah so i i would uh i'm just eager
to engage people by saying
let's start with our most contemporary
understanding
of human nature which is
that we are both selfish and
tend to cooperate and
we also can be heroically
helpful to folks
in our own tribe and
of course how you define one's tribe
becomes critically important but what
some people say
is look we let what would then be
what kind of political institutions and
what kind of economic organization
can we think about to kind of hit that
sweet spot
and that that would be in my opinion uh
how do we maximize individual autonomy
in a way that fosters uh
creativity and innovation and the
self-regard that comes from
creative expression while
engaging our more cooperative
and reciprocal tendencies
in order to come up with a system that
is potentially stable over time because
the other thing about
all capital-based systems is the
stability
is it fundamentally and unstable yeah
because it's based on infinite growth
and you know it's a positive feedback
loop uh to be silly infinite growth is
only good for
malignant cancer cells and compound
interest
otherwise uh you know we want to seek a
steady state
and um that would be you know so when
stephen pinker writes for example again
great scholar but i'm gonna disagree
when he says the world
has never been better and all we need to
do
is keep making stuff and buying stuff
so your sense is the world
sort of in disagreement with stephen
pinker that the world is
um like facing a potential catastrophic
collapse in multiple directions
yes and the fact that there are certain
like the
the rate of violence and aggregate is
decreasing the
death you know the quality of life all
those kinds of measures that you can
plot across centuries that it's
improving that doesn't capture the fact
that our world might be this
we might destroy ourselves in very
painful ways
uh in the in the in the next century so
i'm with jared diamond
you know in the book collapse where he
points out
studying um the collapse of major
civilizations that it
often happens right after things appear
to never have been better
and in that regard i mean there are more
uh known voices that have taken issue
uh with uh dr pinker i'm thinking of
john gray who's a british philosopher
and
here in the states i don't know where he
is these days but robert j
lifton the psycho historian yeah they're
both
of my view and which i hope is
by the way wrong uh me too yeah no
but you know between um
you know ongoing ethnic tensions
environmental degradation economic
instability
and the fact that you know the world has
become a petri dish of psychopathology
like what what really worries me is the
the quiet economic pain that people are
going through the
businesses that are closed your dreams
that are broken because
you can no longer do the thing that
you've wanted to do and how
i mentioned to you off camera that i've
been reading uh
the the rise and fall of the third reich
and
i mean the amount
of anger and hatred
and on the flip side of that sort of
nationalist pride that can arise from
deep economic pain like what happens
with
economic pain is you become bitter yeah
you start to find
the other whether it's other european
nations that mistreated you
whether it's other groups that
mistreated you it always ends up being
the jews
uh somehow somehow our fault here yep
that's what worries me is where this
quiet anger and pain goes
in 2021 2022 2030.
if you look no sorry i'm sorry to see
the parallels no no no
rise and fall the third reich but you
know what happens 10
15 years from now from what's because of
the coved
pandemic yeah that's happening now and
lex you make a
i think a really profoundly important
point you know back to our work for
a bitter ernest becker rather you know
his point is
is that the way that we manage
existential terror
is to embrace culturally constructed
belief
systems that give us a sense that life
has meaning that we have value
and in the form of self-esteem which we
get from perceiving that we meet or
exceed the expectations associated with
the role that we
play in society well here we are right
now
in a world where first of all if you
have nothing you are nothing
and secondly as you were saying before
we got started today
a lot of jobs are gone and they're not
coming back
and that's the where the self-esteem
that's where the self-esteem and
identity come in
where people it's not only that you
don't have anything to eat
you don't even have a self anymore to
speak of
because the we typically define
ourselves you know as marx put it you
are what you do
and now who are you when
your way of life as well as your way of
earning a living is no longer available
yeah and it feels like that uh yearning
for self-esteem that we could talk a
little bit more because sure
you about defining self-esteem is
quite interesting the more i've read so
warm with the core and just
in general you're thinking
it made me realize i haven't thought
enough about the idea of self-esteem but
the thing i want to say is uh it feels
like when you lose your job
then it's easy to find it's
it's tempting to find that self-esteem
in a tribe
that's not somehow often positive
that's exactly it's like a tribe that
defines itself on the hatred of somebody
else so that's brilliant and
and this is what john gray the
philosopher
in the 1990s he predicted what's
happening today
he wrote a book about globalism and
actually hannah arendt
in the 1950s said the same thing in her
book about totalitarianism
when she said that you know that
economics has reached the point where
most money is made not by actually
making stuff
you know you use money to make money
and that uh therefore
what happens is money chases money
across national boundaries
ultimately governments become
subordinate
to the corporate entities whose sole
function is to generate money
and what john gray said is that that
will inevitably
produce economic upheaval in
local areas which
will not be attributed to
the economic order it will be
misattributed
to who whoever the scapegoat du jour
is and the anger what
and the distress associated with that
uncertainty uh will be picked up on
by ideological demagogues who will
transform that
into rage so both hannah aren't as well
as john gray
they they just said uh watch out
we're gonna have right-wingish populist
movements uh where demagogues
who are the alchemists of hate what
makes them brilliant
is they don't they don't the hate's
already there
but they take the fears and they
expertly redirect them to who it is that
i need to hate and kill in order to feel
good about myself so back to your point
lex that's right
so the self-regard that used to come
from having a job and doing it well
and as a result of that having adequate
resources to provide a decent life for
your family
well those opportunities are gone
and yeah what's left so max weber
german sociologist at the beginning of
the 20th century
um he said in times of historical
upheaval
um we are apt to embrace he was the one
who coined the term charismatic leader
right
seemingly larger than life individuals
who often believe or their followers
believe are divinely ordained to rid the
world of evil
yeah all right now ernest becker he used
weber's ideas in order to account
for the rise of hitler hitler was
elected
and he was elected when germans were an
extraordinary
state of existential distress
and he said i'm going to make germany
great again all right now what becker
adds
to the equation is his claim that what
underlies our affection for
charismatic populist leaders good and
bad
is death anxiety all right now here's
where we come in
where egghead experimental
researchers you know becker wrote this
book the denial of death and he couldn't
get a job
people just dismissed these ideas as
fanciful speculation
for which there's no evidence and
and you've done some good experiments
yeah and here's where
here's where i can be more cavalier and
where what i would urge
people i like what you said lex is
ignore
my histrionic and polemic language
if possible