Real knowledge I think has become too
dangerous to transmit and real knowledge
doesn't know what a social norms are.
No,
I've seen this in terms of certain us
policies where people create a policy for
reasons that nobody's really
understanding and a short time later,
nobody even knows why the
policy was created. The real
reason and to begin with,
do you see that this kind of a world,
I think that's actually one
of the meaningful dynamics
and institutional decay
and then civilizational decay, is that
a new civilization is formed coming out,
coming out of a war or after migration
or through a famine or after like some
really difficult thing. And
to really be able to build
something new, took real capacities,
what you would call the contact
with the unforgiving, right.
Like real empirical capacities.
And so I studied my lingo, sir.
A bit. Yeah. And I think that's
really good lingo because like the,
I can't, I can't lie to physics and
have it reward me for it, right?
Like either I can grow
corn or I can't grow corn.
Either I can win at a war or I
can't. But there's a real situation.
And so oftentimes when we go from non
wartime or the generals or politicians to
wartime, where the politician
generals who may be suck at war,
start losing battles and we cycle through
looking for ones who are good at it,
then we get some who are
actually good at war.
Those difficult situations select
for real empirical capacity.
But when you don't have
those difficult situations,
then you're actually selecting
for who can do politics best,
which means convince everyone of
something, whether it's true or not.
This is what I call sharp minds
versus sharp elbows. But yeah,
and so you have the people who are at
the beginning of figuring out how to do
some new civilization.
And those people had some capacity to
be in direct contact with reality and
figure stuff out.
And then oftentimes what they pass
on is to stuff they figured out,
but not the psychology in them.
And the capacities to figure stuff
out to the generator function of the
civilizational models lost.
And so now we start getting copying errors
and people are hopefully trying to at
least copy it earnestly.
So now we've got a constitution or a set
of law or a set of market practices or
whatever it is,
but we don't really understand how
we generated that effective thing.
And so that also means that
as the environment changes,
we won't be able to adapt it adequately.
And that also means that we're not going
to know how to deal with failures of
it.
So then some people recognizing that
start realizing that they can do better by
defecting on the system and
kind of praying on it then
by participating with the
system. And so, and this is what
we think of as corruption, right?
Where they can start maximizing their own
bonus structure or do a back in dealer
or whatever. And so long
as it's adequately hidden,
they can get away with it.
And now that collapses the
civilization even further.
So it goes from loss of generator
function to copying errors,
to incentive for internal
defection and disinformation.
And you know, like, I think that
every civilization has faced this,
a loss of intergenerational
knowledge transfer.
Cause it's not just the knowledge,
it's the generator function of how,
But it's also the case that
real knowledge I think has become too
dangerous to transmit and real knowledge
doesn't know what the social norms are.
And certainly the biological
world is so disturbing.
I mean there's no corner of the biological
world and you can look at where and
not come away thinking, wow,
that's incredibly distressed.
And what we're seeing right now,
a situation in which we can't cope
with any discussion of biology,
every single attempt to have a real
biological discussion given all of the
social issues that it would bring
up immediately ends in madness.
I, I've just seen no ability
to talk real biology in public.
And so this is the earliest place where
I can see here's a subject of science
that actually can't be discussed. I don't
have anything in particular in mind.
It's just, you know, like, you know, Bob
Trevor's work on parent child conflict.
If we have a beautiful story about how
mothers would do anything for their
children and somebody
comes along and says, no,
it's actually a struggle where mothers
want to hold onto their resources because
they're going to have many children
and the child attempts to gain as much
resource as possible without
regard for the mother.
That's so against the hallmark
card version of motherhood
for mother's day that
we can't have a discussion about
parent child conflict in biology.
It's not that one isn't about gender.
It's not about race. It's not about,
you know, power dynamics. It's about,
it just immediately runs into one of our
cherished nonsensical points of view.
Or is it the market is self correcting.
The market is always self-correcting
and knows best that the leading thinkers
are all sitting in institutional chairs
That every previous civilization
was the Hobbs and bias, brutish,
nasty, short, dreadful lives.
And that everything is awesome just
in the last little bit because of this
system. So don't criticize the system.
So this is the weird thing that I'm,
I'm finding is that you can't
start interesting conversations.
Not only about the pessimism of the
impending collapse if we keep this up,
but about the optimism about,
well, what might we do differently?
Like we can't get energized
to actually use period of time
To do something novel and interesting
and hope. Okay. So think about this. The,
you know,
the definition of infidel for kind of a
jihadist ideology is anybody that's not
supporting the jihadist ideology,
the definition of which to the crusaders
was kind of a similar thing, right?
The, I have a friend who
went and looked at a bunch
of the intelligence agency
documents in Yugoslavia
and some of the Baltic nations that
had been declassified after the USSR
collapsed specifically regarding how
the intelligence agencies influenced the
definition of psychiatry and
their equivalent of the DSM.
And so there were something like their
definition of diagnostic and statistical
manual for a psychology,
which tells you when somebody is
meant to be as a personality disorder,
a neurosis.
You remember the previous definition
of female mania during the Victorian
period, right? Which basically
translated to, she had a sex drive.
And so that was like a
mental illness. And but
so they, their definition of something
that translated to schizophrenia,
the first symptom was had negative
feelings about the state and the second
symptoms might take a while to show up.
And so what I think happens is that
the dominant system ends up eating
psychology and saying that the psychology
that supports the dominant system is
healthy psychology and anything that
is dissenting to it's not healthy.
It ends up eating spirituality and virtue
and ethics and academia and whatever
to basically say the F the behaviors
that support the system are good.
So the thinking that supports
those behaviors is good.
And anything that's
descending is bad. And like,
it's so easy to see it in the crusades
or in jihadism or even in Victorian time
period. It's just very hard for
us to see it about ourselves now.
But I think that's actually like one of
these fundamental things in terms of,
you're saying like,
why don't we have group sense-making
is because you have a S you have a self
perpetuating system that includes the
self perpetuation of the memes that
support the system.
