Joe Rogan & Steven Pinker - The Intelligence of the Alt-Right

You bring up some really fascinating subjects and we were talking right before the podcast about social media and how weird it is that you got lumped in with the alt-right for a comment saying something along the lines of that you find, what was the exact quote, something along highly intelligent people seemed to, which is not saying they're good people. No, that's right. And I think a lot of people who are ignorant of the alt-right equate them with the skinheads and the neo-Nazis carrying the tiki torches. But when I was referring strictly to the alt-right from its origin in internet discussion groups, and I know some of them, some of them are former students and some of them are highly intelligent and highly read. But that's not what people often think of when they think of the alt-right. And that's what I was referring to. There are people in tech, there are some people in universities who stay undercover, and I made some remarks on how to starve that movement, not how to feed it. But so many people jumped on it as if you were endorsing the alt-right. What was the exact quote? You were just basically saying something along the lines of there's a lot of intelligent people that are involved in this. Well, it wasn't so much that. It was also that because of the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture, because of political correctness, there are certain things that are just kind of not discussable. But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered. Like, we are now privy to the truth that the establishment can't handle. You can't handle the truth. And since it was never discussed in the open, there are no counter-arguments to some of the most toxic interpretations. And so the alt-right can run with the—never having been in a forum where these things are debated and criticized and put into context, they take like one fact and then they draw the most extreme conclusions. If these things were debated in the first place, then you'd realize that those conclusions are not warranted. Oh, an example is there are average differences between men and women in a lot of psychological traits. Now, if that's—and that's often quite taboo in intellectual circles for, I think, bizarre reasons. I think there are people who think that somehow women's rights depend on men and women being indistinguishable, which I think is a bad equation in the first place. But as soon as you come across the fact that men and women on average are different, you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits, that whatever trait you name that men on average are better at than women or vice versa. There are a lot of women who are better than a lot of men or vice versa. And so you can't really judge an individual from the average of their sex. Also, even though there are some traits where men score a little better than women, there are some traits where women score a little better than men. And that's the complete picture. But the thing is that if the entire subject is out of bounds, you never get to present the complete picture, and some people run away with, oh, men and women are totally different. What are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds? Because it's very confusing to me that certain subjects like the differences between genders are so taboo when they seem so obvious. I mean, you just could go to a mall and just look at the way the men dress and the women dress, and you go, well, there's some obvious distinctions here. There's a history to it. Because there were a lot of cockamamie theories in the 19th century and a lot of the 20th century that men were intellectual and women were not, and women were governed by their emotions and if women thought too much, it would take blood away from their ovaries and their womb, and they wouldn't be fertile, and then they'd be all miserable. I mean, really, like crazy stuff. And as a reaction to that, in the 70s, when the second wave of feminism became prominent, it became almost an article of faith that there were no differences between men and women. And so if you say that there are differences between men and women, you're sending women back to the kitchen and the nursery. Now, this is a total non sequitur because fairness is not the same as sameness. So obviously, women should have equal rights to men, whether or not they're exact copies of men or have a distinctive profile, as men have a distinct profile. So I think it was just a mistake to conflate the issue of women's rights with men and women being identical. But that's the way it kind of shook out and it became kind of an article of faith in a lot of, in some feminists, some kind of left liberal circles that men and women have to be identical and if they aren't, that means you're a traitor to women's equality. Yeah, and articles of faith are always dangerous. Always dangerous. It's an article of fairness, it's an article of fairness, it's an article of fairness that's always important. I mean, being fair to each other. But being fair is also recognizing differences. That's right, and not assuming that any difference is a deficiency. I mean, you know, if you're really doing an honest comparison of the differences between men and women, men wouldn't come out looking so good. Yeah, right. And yeah, I have a whole bit about that in my act. When we're looking at the reaction to this though, what was strange to me was how many people seemed like they wanted to jump on board and criticize you and I think a lot of it is almost like to take away some of the potential criticism of themselves. Like, it's instant claiming of the moral high ground, virtue signaling, and it's just very disappointing when you see this from intellectuals and college professors and people that should know better. I mean, to be fair, I did not get into much trouble from, you know, my peers and among professors and grad students and so on. There are a couple of trolls who ran with it, but by and large, the mainstream reaction was that this is almost a sign of, as the New York Times put it, that social media is making us stupid. Yeah, that was the article, the name of the article, the title of the article in the Times. Yeah, so it was, so by and large, you know, I came out of it okay, but it was a real indication of how these mobs of outrage can corrupt any kind of intelligent discourse. Yeah, well subtle discussions, discussions that involve nuance, like complicated issues, the issues that are, they're complex. They require a long sort of description of the issue and a very complex sort of take on these various differences between men and women and the alt-right and the left and political correct. These are long discussions. I mean, these aren't something that you can smash into a very short sound bite and completely cover your take on things. All the more reason that they shouldn't be taboo because if you can't discuss them, then the only interpretation you're going to have is the simplistic one. If you bring them out in the open, then you can start to have that discussion.