A two-hour conversation with Bret Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu. When I listened, I sped it up 25 percent. Although they go on several tangents, the main theme is the high level of political tension that currently threatens the country and Bret’s proposed solution, which is a third-party ticket that would involve power sharing by a liberal and a conservative, each of whom is a cut above most politicians in terms of desire to do what is best for the country and mental flexibility to work toward solutions.
I should say at the outset that while I appreciate most of what Bret Weinstein has to say on this and other podcasts, I discount his proposal, because I think that our problems are intellectual, cultural, anthropological, and psychological more than they are political. Our universities have been deformed, so that they elevate conformist mediocrity over the wisdom that comes from curiosity and open-mindedness. Our culture is too divided and antagonistic. Our individual brains and our collective norms have not adapted successfully to the communication environment that has emerged in the last decade. And the pandemic has exacerbated our individual psychological problems, leading us to be more willing to violate norms of non-violence.
From minutes 3-8, Bret and Tom discuss their fears of a civil war and what one has to do to avoid being caught up in the process that is creating sharp political division.
I look at the risk of civil war this way: what is the probability that the November election will not produce a decisive outcome within 48 hours? If the outcome is not decisive within 48 hours, what is the probability that there will be partisan street violence?
I can imagine not having a decisive outcome. We have had some close elections in recent years. Moreover, with mail-in voting, there will be a substantial number of untabulated ballots as of election eve, perhaps enough to swing the election. Finally, there may be legal challenges made by both sides. So I would put the probability of an unsettled election aftermath at 25 percent.
Next, how will people react? In the Bush-Gore conflict, people were sufficiently willing to sit back and let the Supreme Court determine the outcome. I don’t think that is likely this time. Trust in institutions and support for Constitutional processes have gone down. The smart phone and social media have made people more anxious to participate in public events by acting out, rather than simply watch things take their course. So I think that if that if the election is contested more than 48 hours afterward, the chances of extensive partisan street fighting are 40 percent.
Multiplying .25 by .40, I arrive at a 10 percent chance that we will see extensive partisan street fighting after the election. That is, I agree with Bret that civil war is a serious possibility.
At minute 10, Tom gives his philosophy of life, which is that “how you feel about yourself when you are by yourself” is most important.
At minutes 11-16, Bret criticizes conservatives for not acknowledging the real inequities in society. He criticizes the left for not wanting to end oppression but instead trying to turn the tables and turn the oppressed into oppressors. I would say that it is worse than that, in that it is the leaders of the woke religion who become the oppressors, and they were not necessarily oppressed to begin with.
They use the term “rent-seeking” to mean profit that comes from taking advantage of others rather than truly building a better mousetrap. Note that economists usually define rent-seeking more narrowly to consist of pursuing advantage from government policies. I like to say that the producers in an industry want government to subsidize demand and restrict supply (from competitors) in their industry.
At minute 19, Tom expands on his philosophy of life to say that personal fulfillment comes from translating your potential into skills and using those skills to make a better life for yourself and for others. He says that the “oppression Olympics” does the opposite. It takes away agency.
At minute 21, they talk about the need to combine individual responsibility with collective responsibility to create equal opportunity. Bret points out that conservatives focus on individual responsibility and liberals focus on collective responsibility. We need both.
At minute 23, Tom points out that we are truly helpless as children, and that when a child does not get what it wants, it throws a tantrum. The philosophy of denying individual responsibility tells adults that they are helpless and invites them to throw tantrums.
At minute 28, Bret uses the metaphor of a canoe headed toward a waterfall to defend his desperate idea for a unity ticket. You may not be able to get to shore before you reach the waterfall, but you should try as hard as you can, anyway.
At minute 33, after they have discussed how conservatives and liberals need each other and how visionaries and practical people need each other, Bret says that in academics theorists and empirical researchers need each other. But he says that the funding process favors empiricists, and theorists are being driven out.
At minute 35, Bret gives his political philosophy, which is that a radical should want to build a society that we want to conserve. Rather than try to tear down personal responsibility, we should aim for a society in which more people are able to execute personal responsibility with good results.
At minute 42-44 they actually get into the unity ticket idea, but they don’t get very far into it. The discussion continues through about minute 60.
At minute 63, Tom says that he is most scared by the #ShutDownStem movement. He says that the country is threatened by a bad narrative. At minute 66, Tom says that a “faceless idea” of a unity ticket will not get far. It needs charismatic individuals to sell it. This goes along with my view that the problems are intellectual, cultural, anthropological, and psychological.
At minute 1:17, they get back to the issue that #ShutDownStem is dangerous. Bret talks about it as a naked desire for power that will end badly.
At minute 1:20 Bret says that the U.S. is remarkable because it found a way to achieve cooperation beyond kin level. But the social justice activists are would reverse this progress by reinvigorating racial hatred.
My own view is that progress toward large-scale social peace and cooperation took place in many stages over about 15,000 years. Religion played a role. Markets played a role. Nationalism played a role. At various points, religion and nationalism produced large-scale conflict rather than social peace.
At minute 1:37 Tom asks Bret for an evolutionary biologist’s perspective on sex. This is mostly just a tangent.
At minute 1:47 Tom mentions the “success sequence” of high school graduation, job, and marriage before having a child. He also praises Thomas Sowell as an intellectual mentor.
At minute 1:50 Bret notes that the Black Lives Matter movement wants to abolish the nuclear family, which he thinks is crazy from an evolutionary biology perspective. My guess is that most of the people putting up “black lives matter” signs on their lawns or their business windows are not aware of the Marxist anti-family doctrines held by the organizers of BLM.
At minute 1:53 Bret alleges that the reason that bad schools exist is that deep down the well-off people want to protect their own children from competition. Think of “opportunity hoarding,” which is an expression that came up earlier in the podcast. I wonder how you would test this explanation against what I call the Null Hypothesis.
Equality of opportunity is beyond human ability to deliver. People will always have unequal starting points – intelligence, beauty, health, parents, culture, location, and so endlessly on. The best we can hope to provide is equality under the law. But we have declared that to be racist.
Well said: “The best we can hope to provide is equality under the law”
I will focus on the election and the probability of a civil war. Everything else is interesting but a diversion and evasion of the high political tensions that may explode in the next 6 months. Civil war is not just a serious possibility but also probable. We can discuss either why and how Americans are reaching that point or what can be done to prevent the explosion. To be frank, as of today a civil war will be canceled if and only if Trump wins both the Presidency and Congress (both the House and the Senate). Even if he wins all that, there will be violence for a few months but not a civil war (contrary to what many neutral people think, I bet that Trump will claim the authority to handle much effective than so far).
Under any other outcome –within or beyond 48 hours– the probability of civil war will soon be at least 50%. To explain why we can look at the other extreme: Biden-Harris wins both the Presidency and Congress. Under this scenario, radical leftists will quickly occupy all public spaces to gain many positions in the new Administration and Congress, so by January 20, they will be able to mount a full atack to impose their agenda and crush the Dems’ Old Guard. Indeed, opposition to the winners will also start immediately and will not be limited to legal arguments about what radical leftists do, so civil war will be delayed a few months, but by February its probability will be much higher than 50%.
Are you crazy?
I would place the chance of a civil war at 0%. Anyone would a significantly higher number I would seriously question their judgement.
Right, 0%. There might be a few rumbles here and there by some people wanting to LARP / cosplay and produce some photogenic selfies for their team on social media (which will just get censored anyway). But I am willing to publicly bet against anything more than a handful of casualties, no matter what happens.
There have been more than a few dumb articles moaning about the “collapse of authority” or “absence of the law”, which is the total opposite of reality. The disorder and vandalzism and arson and small scale personal violence is happening because it is being allowed to happen by people who possess orders of magnitude more capacity to stop it in an instant if the political authorities in charge decide to throw that switch.
And they have, for themselves, which is why there is a “Fort Lori” in the Logan Square neighborhood where the Chicago mayor lives, where any protestor, peaceful or otherwise, will be immediately arrested. That is so she can be secure, but the citizens of Chicago will not be secure.
Authority is there and ready to strike at any time. It is “Selectively Applied Authority” which is the opposite of “rule of law” and “equal justice under law”. The head-knocking wing of Authority is ordered to let certain people get away with certain things, but other people will not be allowed to get away with anything.
Civil war, true mass street fighting, or Latin American-style decentralized cells of paramilitary tit-for-tat violence are all impossibilities when there is an overwhelming strong and capable state apparatus ready and eager to totally crush one side.
Yes, I may be wrong, very wrong. But. But I have spent too much time in the past 70 years observing, thinking, and discussing how political conflicts and tensions escalate or slow down and their economic consequences. I have lived in countries that in the past 100 years have seen too much violence. In only one country that I lived for more than a year, the U.S., where I spent four long periods (3, 2, 9, 2 years), there has been limited violence (my first visit and long stay started in the Summer of 1967 in Minneapolis).
I certainly wouldn’t bet on violence at even odds, but I think that absent Trump in the White House all it will take is a single tweet by someone like Trump to get conservatives in arms to do what the police are not doing today in Portland, Chicago and to various statues nationwide.
If violent mobs can destroy and terrorize without Democrat authorities addressing it, then it isn’t a big step to see violent conservatives taking matters in their own hands.
Again, I think it is a long shot, but it is possible that absent Trump in the White House, we will see violence in the most progressive cities. I think the most likely scenario is that once the democrats are in control that they will immediately put a stop to the shenanigans.
Do you mean the same democrats that have stopped shenanigans and killings in the large American cities they have controlled and plundered for the past 50 years?
I’m agree but would say under 1% instead of 0%. Kling’s “street fighting” may happen but that is light years away from a civil war.
Are you crazy? Get out of your Facebook Groups! Biden a radical leftist? He’s more a Republican.
Please read again what I wrote. If Biden wins the Presidency and Congress, he will be the first Old Guard to be crushed by the radical leftists, likely before January 20. And Harris will hardly finish her term. Biden is already a zombie (check The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/30/clinton-era-politics-joe-biden )
Thanks for making this type of post. I enjoy Bret’s podcast, but would balk at watching/listening to this video which I don’t think is in podcast format.
Regarding partisan street fighting, I’d originally thought there was a 10% chance for conflict more intense than the BLM protests this summer, in the event of a contested election. But one side of the BLM protests, the police, at least in theory had a goal of tamping down violence. If the election is contested and both the left and the right take to the streets, neither side will have much incentive to de-escalate conflict.
I’m revising my estimate up slightly to 25% chance for extensive violence, and I’m roughly in agreement with the 25% chance for a contested election. A ~6% chance for significant conflict is pretty grim.
Protip: If the YouTube video has subtitles, you can generate the whole transcript at youtube-subs. You can then read it, or send it to one of those programs which reads it aloud for you.
Ooh, that’s handy. Thanks!
I think there may be street violence, but not civil war, as Arnold suggests (perhaps he’s using the term somewhat rhetorically). I think, institutionally, whoever wins officially will take over, even if the Secret Service had to escort the loser off the premises; politicians will be outraged and use militant language, but won’t organize paramilitary resistance. There’s no chance of an actual ‘governmental’ civil war, imo.
The lesson of 2020 (and history more generally) is that anything can happen. Recency bias is real.
What happened?
+1 on the thankyou. I appreciate the annotated script very much.
Our individual brains and our collective norms have not adapted successfully to the communication environment that has emerged in the last decade.
Yes, and even worse is the fact that nobody is talking about this because media companies, tech companies, and political organizations all believe they benefit from this maladaptation.
At minute 1:53 Bret alleges that the reason that bad schools exist is that deep down the well-off people want to protect their own children from competition.
Well-off people may well want to protect their children from competition but the reason bad schools exist is a lot simpler–and a lot harder to accept. Students at bad schools are on average less intelligent, less able to defer gratification, and less socialized to value school. If you could take the students from New Trier High School (often called “the best in the country) and move them to one of the worst performing schools in Chicago, and move the Chicago students to NTHS, the Chicago school will immediately become high performing and NTHS will be characterized by discipline problems and poor test scores.
Well-off people are more likely to have children who will do well in school, no matter what school they go to. Perhaps the way they “protect their own children from competition” is by allowing and encouraging “diploma privilege”. Employers are not just allowed but encouraged to give more opportunities to people with more schooling. People with less schooling are encouraged to see themselves as less worthy of success and less able to achieve success. In the words of the old PSAs, “to get a good job, get a good education.”
Bret also thinks IQ and Charles Murray are wrong. Once you decide that, conspiracy theories like “opportunity hoarding” become the only plausible explanation for differences. It’s one of the reason denying genetics is so evil, its denial demands totalitarian intervention to fix inequality, which is presumed to have a malevolent source (even if unconscious, systematic, etc).
There are only three possible explanations for why whites (on average) do better than blacks in America.
1) There are genetic differences. Perhaps, to steal Bryan Caplan’s unholy trinity, whites are (on average) more intelligent, conscientious, and conformist. Most Americans reject this, and consider anyone who considers it to be an awful person.
2) There are things about black people’s environment/upbringing that make it harder for them to take advantage of the opportunities that there are in America. The “bad schools” explanation goes here and it is socially acceptable, as long as “bad” is something inherent in the school and thus can be fixed and is not “blaming the victim”. The Null Hypothesis in Education (In America, there is no scalable change that will result in a substantial, lasting increase in student achievement) implicitly blames the victim and must be rejected. Any explanation that does involve blaming the victim is probably on the wrong side of respectability. So no Thomas Sowell explanations like “less respect for education” in “black culture”. Certainly nothing like higher rates of births outside of marriage, “culture of poverty”, etc.
3) If those two are rejected, the only possibility is “it’s white people’s fault.” They may say they’re not racist, and they may not even feel racist, but it’s all caused by what they are doing and what they have done. That the gap has narrowed so little since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says that “white privilege” is strong and entrenched, and only strong, painful measures can fix things. If neither one nor two is true, morality demands that you be woke.
I cannot see a way out of this conundrum.
Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” defines racism, not at a belief about racial inferiority, but as a social order under which different groups of people experience different outcomes. (By this definition, every social order that ever has been or ever will be is racist.)
According to Kendi, an action or a policy is “racist” if it leads to or exacerbates unequal outcomes, while an action or policy is “antiracist” if it leads to equal outcomes. The author is quick to caution, though, that individual behavior is not to be questioned, and that doing so is racist.
Because any discussion of behavior is out of bounds, antiracism requires race-based discrimination. Low achieving people of color must be promoted ahead of high achievers, especially if the high achievers are white or Asian.
Not mentioned is the need to hide the facts of this discrimination lest anyone be either offended by, or resentful, of the truth. The easiest way to accomplish this is to eliminate standards, standardized testing, and any other objective means of determining knowledge, skill, and performance. All such measures must be banished because they lead to disparate results and are therefore racist.
In addition, any moral standards must be either eliminated or attacked as racist. Thus, the so-called “bourgeois virtues” of self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility are now disparaged as “acting white.”
The insanity of this thinking is in its demand for the impossible: That two different individuals who think and act differently must end up in the same place; and that society must change so that people can keep thinking the same self-destructive thoughts and keep doing the same self-destructive things but can expect different results.
Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” defines racism, not at a belief about racial inferiority, but as a social order under which different groups of people experience different outcomes.
If you assume that “absent discrimination (today or in the past), all groups would be equally successful”, then that definition has moral resonance. Thus, the many non-crazy people who go along with it.
Only under two circumstances does it not have moral resonance:
1) you believe it is false;
2) you believe it is true but “race conscious remedies” will make things worse rather than better.
Many fewer people will argue for 2) today.
Check out this Wikipedia entry that lists U.S. median household income by ethnicity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
Incomes vary wildly between white and non-white ethnic groups and between different white ethnic groups. Accidents of geography account for a lot of differences (see Thomas Sowell’s “Culture” trilogy and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”). For example, people who live, or whose ancestors lived, in remote areas, tend to be culturally backward, while people who lived at or near natural crossroads tend to be entrepreneurial.
Add individual differences (e.g., intelligence, beauty, strength, and health) to these contingent cultural differences and it’s all but impossible to imagine equal outcomes for every person, much less group. That’s why I believe that Kendi has defined “racism” in a way that makes it universal. He might as well have defined “racist” as anyone who is alive.
#2 is unsustainable. It was the “right wing acceptable” explanation in the 1990s, which a lot of people think we can revive. We can’t.
First, its way to close to “blaming the victim”.
Second, education reform failed. We spent the last few decades trying to “fix” K-12 (and before) with no results.
Third, the minority vote bank client base is bigger and can therefore demand more with even less rationalization.
Fourth, just time itself. It becomes more ridiculous to believe “XYZ” will close the gap the longer it goes on. Inevitably, you will have to either give up on closing the gap or reach for more radical means.
@Richard W Fulmer, If you believe that there are no meaningful genetic differences between groups, then if follows logically that any different outcomes must be caused by discrimination (now or in the past) or by accident (e.g., living in a remote area). Differences within a group (e.g., “intelligence, beauty, strength, and health”) would be expected to cancel out.
Then, the only question becomes what to do about it. Today, the cool kids say, “smash white privilege.”
Yes, this makes “racism” universal but also suggests an obvious course of action. Take from the groups who have more and give to the groups that have less.
(If this were ever official policy, many difficult decisions would have to be made. Obviously, you would discriminate against whites in college admissions. But what about “Asians”? Do you discriminate against all of them as an “over-represented minority” or do you only discriminate against Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans while discriminating in favor of Filipinos, Hmong, and other “under-represented minorities”? The second seems to be the preferred policy today in admissions offices.)
The Asian attitude shows why racism is necessary.
Asians don’t believe in this nonsense, but Asian attitudes about affirmative action line up almost entirely based on whether you’ve been admitted to the Ivy League or not. If yes, you sell out your people to be in the cool kids club. If not, you push for meritocracy so you can get in.
The idea of a united front is absent, only individual self interest.
As such those that do act based on a united tribal front (brown people) get what they want. Those that choose “individualism” get discriminated against.
People are tribal because tribalism works. Individualism can’t even defend individuals.
There is indeed some truth to trying to escape the malthusian competitive pressures of the admissions rat race and need to compete with grinds and tiger parents. Though, that is hardly a sinister goal. But “Opportunity Hoarding” for is pure “Discourse in the Shadow of the Guillotine” nonsense in the desperate attempt to find a socially acceptable way to talk about the real problem, that is forced upon by the reign of intimidation of the cancel culture.
there are bad schools because kids at those schools increasingly have unstable environments. Something like 65% of african american children are born out of wedlock, 50% of latinos, and 25% of whites. That’s half the resources, discipline, attention, etc. For reference, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “the plight of the negro (ed: his words not mine) family” between 25-30% of african-american children were born out of wedlock. That was intended as an alarm.
This is written like there is no such thing as “correcting for” in statistics or regression analysis. That is, it is in fact easy and standard to estimate the impact of the correlation between ‘unstable environments’ and illegitimacy and test scores, and that this has actually been done by schoalrs in the related fields for generations. As bad as it is, the impact is still not even not in the same ballpark as other factors, and that’s on top of the issue of the appropriate direction of causality.
Consider: what causes ‘unstable environments’ and illegitimacy, after all? If these things are the causes of very different scores and life outcomes, then they are a good target to make radical improvement. If they can be changed, why have we been changing it very much for the worse in the last 60 years? How would we change it back? If some people are resisting those cultural changes, why aren’t they being blamed for these devastating amounts of social injustice? If it can’t be changed, then ‘unstable environment’ is not a cause, but caused, by the same upstream thing which causes bad schools.
Again, this is why Speech Is Special. We cannot address our problems if we are not allowed to talk about the problems, to express our honest sentiments about their causes without fear of crushing personal consequences. So long as the cancel jihadists maintain their air dominance over the terrain of our discourse and intellectual culture, there will be a thriving market for alternative socially acceptable and orthodoxy-compliant “explanations” for why things are the way they are, and all of the proposed attemps will, by unavoidable necessity, be ludicrous, incoherent. and fundamentally dishonest. That’s how things were in the Soviet Union, and that’s how they are here and now.
which is a third-party ticket that would involve power sharing by a liberal and a conservative, each of whom is a cut above most politicians in terms of desire to do what is best for the country and mental flexibility to work toward solutions.
Only an academic could come up with a proposal so completely devoid of practical value or possibility. People with no practical, non-academic experience trying to effect real-world policy can be added to the growing list of failures in our academic system.
A more realistic solution than a ‘unity ticket’ is to de-politicize things that aren’t political (sports, TV, science, etc.). We should cultivate a negative stereotype of people who try to infuse politics into everything, and cut them off when they do so, rather than applauding their supposed bravery for “starting conversations.” If people spent less time thinking about politics (and why they hate each other) temperaments would cool, fewer people would probably follow politics closely, and those who do would tend to be less driven by popular passion.
Unfortunately, it seems everyone’s dream job is to be a political commentator, and so even physicists and movie reviewers leap at every chance they get to play Rachel Maddow for 15 minutes. This is my psychological explanation for ‘ShutDownSTEM.’ Scientists are smarter, do more useful, constructive work, and should (sometimes do) enjoy higher status than activists or ‘politicized’ academics. Their attitude should be “we have more important things to do than politics.” But for some reason even they largely seem to accept that politics is the most important thing ever, and that you can help the world more by holding a sign at a rally than by discovering a malaria vaccine.
Putting aside the question of how in the world one can ‘cultivate a negative stereotype’ without one’s hands on the megaphone, and while those hands are working hard cultivating the opposite negative stereotypes, the recent Goodyear scandal demonstrates why that kind of ‘depoliticization’ is impossible in the current environment. The wokester reeducators there simply defined BLM as “not political”, i.e., trans-political, as objective and universal as the ideal of justice itself, and so logically exempt from the ‘zero tolerance’ policy of political messages and symbols, wereas ALM is not exempt. Note, in most places, even the American Flag is considered objectionable and political, not as neutral, universal, and transpolitical as BLM.
This is part of the higher level general problem with any tactical moves that don’t fundamentally and radically alter the nature of our system of government and social organization. This is fundamental problem of sovereignty, that is, the true distribution of power and influence.
Even if by some miracle a non-progressive movement is able to win or accomplish anything, there is always another higher level ‘upstream’ in the hierarchy of sovereignty at which it is possible to neutralize that win. Rules are made of words, but words have vague meanings, and so human decisions must be made on how to pick the meaning and apply the rule in a particular instance. Humans making important decisions affecting other humans is called “power”, and since personnel is policy, “who decides” answers the question of “Who rules over Whom?”
In complexity theory, there is the term “NP-complete” which was the basis for “AI-complete” problems in artificial intelligence.
There are political problems that are not only likely to be neutralized at the level immediately higher, but at each level all the way upstream. That is, they are literally impossible to solve unless you get to a level with no higher level. But there is always the potential of such a level, though if you aim at the King, you best not miss. If you don’t miss and it prosper, none dare call it treason.
Such challenges are “Regime Change Complete” problems. Not even cleverly accomplished marginal gains here and there can be securely stabilized and will all be reversed in due time (see, e.g., the recent situation in NYC). The only answer to those problems for an underdog is to take over all levers of sovereignty in one fell swoop.
Lawfare is a good example of upstream neutralization, so long as people still obey the courts and thus judges rule (probably not for much longer). Unless one can explain how one’s measures will survive appeal to a judiciary run amok, then one’s policies and proposals are either naive or mere cynical theater, boob bait for bubba.
Real change requires real change. If you can’t stop the wind, spitting in it is only going to be counterproductive.
In better times, there are few RC-Complete problems, and the benefits of solving them are far outweighed by the costs of seizing control. In our times, there are lots and lots of big problems, and almost every single one of them is RC-Complete. And the relative cost of *not* putting a quick end to the current madness is looking bigger all the time.
Mark Z — Yay. I agree, and wish it were possible to do that.
Ive thought what Mark Z wrote for the past few years as I’m sure many have. This cutting off of discussions with obsessive politicization can happen but will take time. I think the momentum for this started last year but this year was a temporary setback.
What an excellent annotation. I feel guiltiest than usual burdening this comment section with yet another prolix screed.
“I think that our problems are intellectual, cultural, anthropological, and psychological more than they are political. Our universities have been deformed, so that they elevate conformist mediocrity over the wisdom that comes from curiosity and open-mindedness. Our culture is too divided and antagonistic. Our individual brains and our collective norms have not adapted successfully to the communication environment that has emerged in the last decade.”
This seems like a uniquely USA problem. If we compare and contrast with Japan, the third largest economy in the world and 11th most populous, perhaps we can build some causal density around why Japan seems so much better off in the dimensions described above than the USA.
Japan has one major advantage over the USA in that multiple sources agree its population has an average IQ of around 105 to 106 placing it among the top 3 countries. The USA, with a 98, doesn’t crack the top 25.
Although both countries are buried in mountains of debt, Deloitte’s current outlook paints a fairly positive picture of Japan: “Disposable incomes for workers’ households jumped 13.4% from a year earlier in May;13 furlough schemes kept the unemployment rate below 3%; and central bank purchases have propped up the stock market. At the same time, interest rates and inflation remain low.”
Japan can also be seen as a libertarian country, ticking the boxes for many USA libertarians . Prostitution is legal. Recently average tariffs were lower than those in the USA, 1.2 percent compared to 1.5. Japan comes in at 15th on the 2019 World Justice Rule of Law Index, above the USA. It has a sufficiently large Supreme Court with enough justices divided into different benches that representation of business, bureaucracy, the lower courts, and academics is possible, and, one sees none of the pathetic efforts to write opinions that will put the justices’-name in the history books that characterize the USA Supreme Court.
But more importantly identitarianism taxes are minimal or non-existent and associational liberties have not been extirpated. Per Human Rights Watch, Japan: “has no law against racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination, or discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and accepts an extremely small number of refugees each year. Japan also has no national human rights institutions.”
Although Shinzo Abe is a right-wing nationalist, perhaps because of his devotion to quantitative easing, he does not usually get lumped in with the USA elites’ consensus on the 4 worst men in world history as Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, and Oban. Perhaps too Japan benefits from the stereotype that it’s people are submissive, giving less urgency to the international drive to Islamify it.
Japanese citizens still retain bonds of mutual care, perhaps best evidenced by
the 22 new coal power plants under construction there. Nothing is more humanistic than assuring that rich and poor alike can benefit from affordable and reliable electricity. Moreover the Japanese Meteorological Agency has retained its integrity and not undertaken to rewrite historical climate measurements in order to promote their status and flame hysteria. Japan’s climate has been remarkably stable.
As one would expect given Arendt Lijphart’s work comparing and contrasting consensus democracies with majoritarian states, the Pew Satisfaction with Democracy Index shows Japan more satisfied than the USA. The Japanese are not overly satisfied, perhaps because of LDP dominance, and perhaps because their parallel voting system retains a first-past the-post gerrymandering feature in the lower legislative house that rivals even the USA in promoting safe incumbency corruption.
The Japanese House of Councillors, a US Senate equivalent with 6 year terms and an older age requirement, is larger and thus less corruptible, with 121 members subject to election , 73 are elected from the 47 prefectural districts by single non-transferable vote and 48 are elected from a nationwide list by proportional representation with open lists.
In Japan too the lower House of Representatives has powers that make the legislative process less hierarchical and less elitist. For example, If the two houses disagree on matters of the budget, treaties, or designation of the prime minister, the House of Representatives can insist on its decision.
Such a system would of course be far beyond the capacity of the mediocre elite class in the USA to fathom given their long immersion in the Manichæism of the USA two party system.
The wide variety of parties that have seats in the Diet don’t include a USA style libertarian party. Perhaps because of the higher average IQ, the Liberal Party which mirrored USA-style libertarianism went defunct a few years back.
Like the USA, education credentialism is rampant. Like in the USA, the academy was Marxist territory in the 60s and 70’s and for a while Anti-Japaneseism, very similar to today’s USA progressivism flourished. But Japan matured beyond that. Why? One explanation is that Burke-ist sympathy for home, family, and friends had the political space to counter elitist oikophobia. Cosmopolitanism was unable to establish identitarian grievance processing as the basis of the economy and therefore was unable to insist upon open borders to continuously expand the client base of Big Identitarianism Inc.
There is really no chance of a civil war in the USA because the bourgeoisie is docile and servile, far more willing to endure beat downs in the street and burning small businesses, than less effeminate cultures.
When the USA is finally ground down to a state of equality and the socialists finish ruining everything, perhaps then suburbanites will peak out from the new shadows of new mid rises packed into their formerly nice neighborhoods and put aside their scorn for the rural and blue collar, and see a way forward in the example of Japan.
Interestingly the Japanese constitution was written by the Americans during the immediate post war period. Wikipedia has a nice description of both the constitution and its history.
Thank you very much for the pointer. Very interesting indeed. The stability and durability of the Peace Constitution of Japan is most remarkable. I am eager to learn more about Milo Rowell, Courtney Whitney, and the others that McArthur assigned to draft it. They would certainly seem to merit much higher status.
One wonders if it is possible to attribute the general lack of poverty in Japan to this constitution. The 2019 Credit-Suisse Wealth report says that only 5 percent of Japanese adults have net wealth of less than $10,000USA and 3 percent greater than $1 million USA. In contrast, the USA has 27 percent at less than 10k and 8 percent over a million. Fifty percent of Japanese fall into the $100,000 to $1 million quartile versus only 35 percent for the USA. Given how many people purport to be concerned with income inequality, one might think that there would be more interest in Japan, no? Especially since total government expenditure per capita (PPP) is so much less in Japan than in the USA: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gov-expenditure-percapita-oecd?time=2009..2015&country=USA~OECD%20-%20Average~JPN
At minute 19, Tom expands on his philosophy of life to say that personal fulfillment comes from translating your potential into skills and using those skills to make a better life for yourself and for others. He says that the “oppression Olympics” does the opposite. It takes away agency.
Here’s a hypothesis that I wish someone would pose to Bret Weinstein at some point, because he seems to be a really sharp guy who repeatedly avoids saying anything dangerous about evolution (despite already being exiled from the academy) by pleading ignorance, and it bothers me:
1. Rates of alcoholism in a given population seem to largely be a function of how long ago the ancestors of that population began practicing agriculture, with longer periods permitting more adaptation and selection for traits which protect individuals from alcohol dependency.
2. Modern, post-industrial societies are highly novel environments, in evolutionary terms. Modern America, for example, has almost next to nothing in common with the US of just 200 hundred years ago. One of the most important and highly novel features of this environment is the degree to which physical labor has become non-remunerative and abstract reasoning skills and the ability to recall and apply technical information has become highly remunerative. This is novel even compared to a few decades ago.
4. Different populations of humans, having adapted to their ancestral environments, possess these now highly-remunerative skills to greater and lesser degrees. E.g., people of Western and Central European descent largely invented modern industrial or post-industrial society. It is therefore not unreasonable to posit that this group of people is fairly well-adapted to this novel environment, or maybe the least mal-adapted to it might be a better description.
5. There is likely a mechanism, similar to alcoholism in #1, that determines the degree to which one population or another possesses these highly remunerative traits, perhaps something like, say, population urbanization, with the idea being that only large urban centers created the conditions where abstract reasoning and technical skill development were rewarded in ancestral environments. I am speculating here, of course.
6. Humans are highly attuned to indicators of social status. As the novel features of our environment have changed, this has caused some groups to rise or fall in status, as they appear to be more or less well-adapted to its demands. The Oppression Olympics is a psychological coping mechanism used by members of various groups who have fallen in status in recent decades to alleviate the stress caused by this decline. This is why there is such vague chatter about “systemic racism” (because it’s less falsifiable that way) and so few concrete policy proposals other than the transfer of resources to the oppressed group.
BLM strikes me as race-obsessed, not Marxist.
“We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others.
We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.” —from BLM website.
This is an entirely different view point from that of class struggle. This may explain why fantastically wealthy athletes are able to say they support BLM.
Now, suppose BLM proposed that NBA players receive average wages for middle class employees…