Joe Rogan & Jordan Peterson - The Evolutionary Basis for Good vs. Evil Conflict

Hello freak bitches. I'm not sure anyone who's outside of it is a predatory snake. It's something like that. And so you're seeing that manifest itself in a political doctrine. Well, you're clearly seeing that today with what's going on with these, like say, the Berkeley Milo rally, where people who are on the left, who you would think of as being pro-woman, pro anti-violence are more than capable of committing violence against women who support Trump because then they categorize them as Nazis. And we're supposed to punch Nazis. And I mean, there's been a bunch of instances where you've seen video footage of people getting pepper sprayed and hit with sticks because they were wearing the wrong, you know, they're wearing a, it wasn't even a Make America Great Again hat. It was actually a Make Bitcoin Great Again hat. There's a very famous video of a girl getting pepper sprayed. Yeah, I think I've seen that one. It's fucking crazy. And by the left and by people who are supposed to be, you know, quote unquote, progressive and people are supposed to be pro-women's rights, you know, anti-violence against women, anti-domestic violence, but yet they have no problem doing it to this other person because this person becomes the other because they're on the other side. Yeah. Well, this, I was talking about this line between good and evil, you know, that runs down people's hearts. It's well, it's a terrible fault line and it can be shocking to see that it's the case. And so it's much more convenient for people to divide the world into the righteous and the damned, let's say, and then to persecute the damned. Right. Well, it's convenient too because whatever resentment and hatred and bitterness you have in your heart, and you have plenty of that, generally speaking, if you're a social justice type because you regard yourself as oppressed. And then like, that's a great starting point for resentment and hatred, right? To be a victim. We know that one of the precursors to genocide, and I'm not saying at all that we're near that state. I'm not saying that. But one of the precursors to genocide in a genocidal state or in a pre-genocidal state is the acceptance of victim status by the eventual perpetrators because the idea is, well, like we're innocent, we're being persecuted, those people are going to get us. Eventually that becomes, well, we'll get them first. And it gives you, so you have a target for all your resentment and your hatred, and it's a justifiable moral target. And so all the part of yourself that you don't recognize as contributing to whatever problem you think now pollutes the world, you can ignore all that. You're on the side of the good. There's no moral effort required. And then you have someone to conveniently hate and hit and hurt. And all the while you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I'm on the side of the good. I'm just punching Nazis. Right. Right. Or hitting them with bike locks while you dart out behind a woman who's conveniently standing in front of you. Is there an evolutionary origin for what we were talking about in regards to a soldier being able to commit these horrible atrocities in the name of war to these people that are able to look at someone who has a differing ideology as the other and attack them as almost like a subhuman? Is there some sort of an evolutionary origin for this disassociative sort of thinking and behavior that some people seem to... I mean, it seems like a very common thing throughout history. Sure. Anything that isn't part of your dominance hierarchy is a snake. It's that. And it actually makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. I mean, first of all, we are tribal primates. Right. And our optimal group size seems to be something like 250. We can keep track of about that many social relationships. And that's also... Dunmar's number. Dunmar's number. That's right. Exactly. And that's correlated with brain size. Right. Yeah. So, all right. And so you might say, well, why that size? And then you might say, well, a hierarchy has to be optimized for two functions. And one is, well, you want to be able to climb the damn thing. So if it's really, really big, the probability that you're going to climb it is really low. And if it's too small, well, who cares if you climb it? Oh, that's fascinating. So you want it somewhere that's big enough to climb and powerful enough to make the climb worthwhile. And so there's some optimization there. Now, so you might think of everything within that hierarchy as explored territory. And the reason for that is that explored territory is where, when you do something, you get what you want. So think about the conditions under which the limits of your knowledge manifest themselves. I mean, there's all sorts of things you don't know, you know, a trillion things, but you're not sitting there like torturing yourself to death because there's a trillion things you don't know. But then if you go out in the world and you act something out and the outcome isn't what you desired, then that registers an error. So let's say you're at a party and you tell a joke and no one laughs. Well, the party. See, think about what happens to the space around the party. When you tell the joke, the second before you tell the joke, you're in one place. And the second after you tell the joke, when there's an awkward silence and everybody's looking embarrassed, you are no longer in the same place. You've stepped outside the protective embrace of that particular hierarchy and you've made yourself an alien. And the thing that people use to process the alien is the snake detector, the serpent detector, the dragon detector. And it's always been that way because anything that's outside the hierarchy is a threat. Any stranger, any strange idea, any animal manifestation, any noise, any spirit, it's a threat to the integrity of the dominance hierarchy and in many, many ways. So for example, it's deeply rooted because that was your question. What's the evolutionary basis? There was a great paper published in a journal called Plause One, P-L-O-S One, about five or six years ago looking at something absolutely terrifying in my estimation, which was there's this idea that part of what motivates the authoritarian end of political conservatism, so let's say the right-wing fascist end, is associated not with fear but with disgust. Disgust is an entirely different emotion. And so these researchers did this fascinating study where they went to a number of different countries and also looked at states within the same country, looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious disease and authoritarian attitudes at the individual level. The higher the infectious disease rate, the more authoritarian the political views. And the correlation was really high. It wasn't like point one. It was point seven. It's one of the highest correlations between two phenomena I've ever seen in the social sciences. And you might say, well, why? Well, here's one reason. I said that the strange idea and the stranger and the pathogen, let's say, are all the same thing. Well, because there are external threats to the structure of the dominance hierarchy. When the Spaniards came to the New World, 95% of the natives died. They died from smallpox. They died from measles. They died from mumps. They died from chickenpox. Because you don't know what the hell is coming at you when you let something new inside the dominance hierarchy, whether it's an idea or a disease. Words are a virus. I think that was Laurie. No, that was that heroin addict author. Burroughs? Burroughs, yeah, that was his phrase. Laurie Anderson made a nice video about that. Words are a virus. And so we respond to them with the same circuitry that we use to detect pathogens. And I'll tell you something even more frightening when we were working this out, because it's associated with this trait called orderliness, which is actually a good predictor of right-wing political belief. I went back and looked at Hitler's Table Talk. It's a book, Hitler's Table Talk. And he wrote that. It was derived from notes that were taken by his secretaries between 1939 and 1942, when he was eating dinner and spontaneously expounding on the structure of reality. He was very open, Hitler, a very creative person, but also extremely orderly. And I looked at the metaphors that he was using to describe the Jews and the gypsies and all the other people that he burned and destroyed. And it was all pathogen. It's all pathogen metaphor. The Aryan race is a body. It's a pure body. The blood is pure. The Jews are rats or insects or lice or disease. And so are the gypsies and everyone else. And they need to be eradicated and burned out, essentially. And here's something even more frightening. So when Hitler first took over Germany, he was kind of a public health freak. He also washed his hands a lot every day. And he was also a worshipper of willpower. So he was a really orderly guy. He started this public health campaign in Germany. And he put together these vans that would go around like screening people for tuberculosis, which was a perfectly fine idea. But then they started a beautification program of the factories, because he didn't like how messy the factories were in Germany. So he had people clean them up, sweep them out and plant flowers out front and fumigate them for rats and insects, parasites. Oh, and the Jews were always compared to rats and insects as well. They used Zyclon B to do the insecticide. Well, Zyclon B, that was the gas that was used in the death camps. So it went like pathogen, insect, rats. Then it went into the asylums, you know, so that people who were mentally deficient, they were like parasites and rats. And then it was Jews and gypsies and parasites and rats. They were using Zyclon B and not Zyclon A? I believe they were using Zyclon B. I don't know. I know that the gas was Zyclon. Zyclon A was the gas that was formulated with a very extreme smell, so that people would smell it and know because it was extremely toxic. Zyclon B, it all came from Fritz Haber. Haber was the guy who created the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen that we use for fertilizer today. Haber created Zyclon A and made it extremely toxic smelling, so that you would know to avoid it. Zyclon B, whatever element was removed from the smell, so that it would be used in gas chambers, they'd have no idea that they were being gassed. Haber, who was a Jew, ironically, did not know that his Zyclon A was eventually going to be used on his own people. Yeah, well I suspect they probably used Zyclon A in doing the fumigations, you know. But the thing is that, well, so you said what's the biological basis, and the biological basis is that we're basically wired in some sense also for the domain of order or the domain of chaos. That's another way of thinking about it. The domain of order, once again, is where you are when what you're doing is working. Because, see, because our environment isn't just natural, it's also social, so not only do you have to deal with the vagaries of the natural world properly, so that it gives you what you're aiming at. That's how you know if you're right, it gives you what you're aiming at. But you have to do it in a way that other people approve of and support. That's a very tight constraint. We talked about that as a constraint on the interpretation of the world. But then, now and then, something happens to disrupt that stability. So that's like the white circle, that's the black circle in the white serpent in the yin-yang symbol. You know how the white one, that's order. The white one has a black dot in it, and that's because chaos can come pouring through into order at any moment. And you have a circuit that detects that, and that's the same circuit that detects snakes or predators. And obviously, why wouldn't it be? You know, an intruding force, an intruding force has to be responded to right now. Right, so there's a need for a demand, an instantaneous response. Instantaneous, because... And almost like you were saying of those kids, like almost an unhuman or a disassociative, sort of the ability to act almost as if like something other than a person, without reason or logic. Yes, well that's dehumanization, right, and the dehumanization. The thing is, another thing that's so funny is that we think that the natural response to looking at a human being is humanization. And that isn't right. The default person, in some sense, isn't human. The default member of your tribe is human. I mean, most tribes around the world, the name for their tribe is the people, implying that they're the people, and all those other things out there are barbarians, right? They're forces of chaos. They're the stranger. They bring disease and trouble. Now, I don't want to be too bleak about it, because this is the basic debate between conservatives and liberals to some degree. Is the conservatives take the stranger equals pathogen route more frequently, and they're less attracted to the idea of the free... Or they work conventionally, that trade with the foreigner has benefits that outweigh the risks. And generally speaking, liberals have the opposite attitude. So, but that's because those two things are both true. One is that, man, it's really useful to trade with strangers because they have all sorts of cool things you don't have. But B, well, it might be real dangerous because you don't know what those things are infected with, like realistically speaking, let's say, but then also metaphorically speaking. You know, here's an example of how an object can be a virus. Think about the automobile. Like if you wanted to introduce something into a communist country that screamed the paramount status of the individual, you couldn't possibly create something that broadcast that more clearly than a car. Right. The car is driven by one person. The person is completely autonomous. They're completely sealed off. They don't need any state support or sanction whatsoever to move around in the car. It's like if you wanted to if you wanted to rescue the communists from their collective pathology, the best thing to do would be to parachute in automobiles because the automobile just screams individual autonomy. And so when you when you get a an artifact from a foreigner, you don't know what that's contaminated with. Let's put it that way. And so we have a circuit for dealing with that. And it's a it's a it's the thing that associates the foreigner with the force that eats the sun when it sets at night. That's the most archaic way of thinking about it. But it's the snake or the predator. So and what do you do with a snake or a predator? Man, you burn it, you kill it, you crush it. It's like there's a there's a destructive force that comes along with it with that. That's absolutely what's morally righteous because, yeah, you know, if it's a poisonous snake and it's threatening the village, obviously you kill it and then you're celebrated for it. So in a sense, the same dehumanizing force that allows people to act that way in war also allows people to disassociate between anyone who doesn't agree with their ideology in a school setting in a university like what happened at McBastres. That's why I don't like that's why I don't like ideologies because the ideology divides the world into those safely ensconced within our dominance hierarchy and serpents. And so that's dangerous. And the reason that this doctrine that I described about the line between good and evil running down the individual's heart. I mean, I got that particular line mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But it's also a it's a it's an idea that's been developed intensively in the West for thousands and thousands of years. I mean, maybe it's been developed since far before we we invented the stories in Genesis because, of course, the serpent see in Genesis, of course, Genesis is like a paradise, right? So you can think about it as a well functioning hierarchy. It's also a balance between chaos and order. It's got walls and it's a garden. So but there's a snake that pops its head in. And that's the same as that, as I said, that black dot inside the white serpent in the yin yang symbol. It's that no matter how it doesn't matter how perfect the the environment is set up, something that doesn't fit is going to make its way inside. It's one of the oldest stories of mankind. And you see the thing that makes itself manifest inside in the Genesis story is a snake. Now, that snake turns out to be Satan, which is like, how the hell does that happen? It's a snake. Like, what? Where does that come from? It's it's not actually in the biblical writings to any degree. It's part of the surrounding mythology. Well, it's partly because people started to figure out that the worst snake wasn't a snake. The worst snake was the snake that was inside a person, because a malevolent person is way more of a threat than just a snake. Like a snake wants to bite you and it wants to eat you and all of that. And and they were hell on our extremely primordial ancestors. But the human race has been trying to figure out where the threat is forever. Well, first of all, it was external, right? It was all external. It was the snake. It was the barbarian. But then it got localized to some degree inside the individuals like that's a bad person. That person has a snake in them. And then the idea kind of came out. This is so cool. The idea is that, well, the snake that's inside bad person A and the snake that's inside bad person B is somehow the same. So that's where the idea of an articulated morality starts to come from, is there's an equivalence of evil across individuals. So then the idea of evil itself starts to become abstracted at the same time that the idea of good does. Well, evil gets associated with Satan and Satan gets associated with the snake. It's it's mind boggling. I mean, these are how these see we were chimps for Christ's sake. You know, it took us a long time to develop up, say an ideal just to say the word an ideal implies a counter ideal. Say, well, those things were embodied way before they were ideas. And after they were embodied first, not as bad, but as a bad thing or a bad person. Bad had to be extracted out of that. And even that was extracted as a drama first. You know, it's like the bad guy in a movie. He isn't a bad guy. He's a composite bad guy. You know, he's he's a literary bad guy. And the good guy isn't just a good guy. He's a literary good guy. He's a hero. He's got way more heroic attributes than the typical person. And that's where abstract ideas are born. So anyways, back to your question. You said you said what's the evolutionary basis for that sort of dissociative behavior and thinking? Yeah, so I'm afraid that that was a big rabbit hole, man. No, it's a great rabbit hole. And it makes a whole lot of sense that there's an actual that there. And I knew you probably knew this, which is why I asked you. I knew you had an answer rather that there is some sort of an evolutionary basis for that sort of that ability that people have to look at someone as the other. You bet. Well, also, how the hell are you going to respond more if you don't have that? Right. And that was always an issue with people with invading tribes. And like you said, with other external threats, whether it was animals or insects or snakes or anything, they could kill you. Yeah. Well, I mean, in a primordial situation, I mean, guys are in warrior mode, a good part of the time. And modern people don't even know what that's like. That's why they go out and they go into warrior mode and they get post-traumatic stress disorder because it's so unlike the way they configure themselves that they can't even bridge the gap between the two identities.