https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hLwQu—7_kM
The online world and the real world have become so dissociated and so distinct that they don’t even look like the same place anymore. You see that with media. But you also see it with the things that are so troublesome to people online that don’t seem to make themselves manifest in the real world at all. So we’ve got this weird divorce that’s a consequence of this layer of abstraction that’s the online world. And it’s producing its own associated pathologies. That rise in self-destructive behavior, that’s absolutely… That’s cataclysmically awful. Let me add another bit of pathology to this. Tell me what you think of this. So you know, of course, that there’s been an absolute explosion in childhood gender dysphoria. And it made sense to me that that occurred because we added confusion to the definition of male and female, let’s say. And when you confuse people, you confuse the most confused the most. And that often tends to be young girls around 13. And they’re the ones that are prone to psychogenic epidemics. And they’re the ones that are experiencing much higher rates than normal of so-called gender dysphoria. Now, I’m curious about your thoughts on that in relationship to attention seeking. Because if we took that group of the more neurotic catch-up players on social media, they need a marker of uniqueness or status in order to attract attention to themselves. And it seems to me that this emphasis on multidimensional sexual identity provides an easy avenue to the kind of uniqueness that might scale well on social media. Does that… Does any of that make any sense to you? Is that a reasonable hypothesis? Well, it’s really hard because these trends are so new and we don’t yet have really solid statistics. It’s actually something that I worked on for my new book. So I’ll be able to talk about that a little bit more next year. Because that has to be the first step is we have to say, is this actually increasing? Because it certainly seems that way, but we need that data to figure that out. And then the why question is even harder one to answer. Because some, of course, have made the argument that, well, there’s more acceptance now. And so that’s why there are more people who are coming out as transgender. But there is the whole question, which I think is a good… We have to explore it at least about what is the role of the online communities in this. Because there are some folks who have said it’s a positive thing. That the thing about online communities is if you’re in a relatively unique group, you can find other people like you and then that can be beneficial. But there are some who argue that that may not be as beneficial. And it’s just so early, I think we just don’t really know. It’s probably beneficial if the group that you’re pursuing is pursuing beneficial aims that are part of your character. Like if you have a particular creative proclivity or a particular interest in a set of ideas and you can find a group that will support you in that, that’s not much different than what happens to kids who are smart when they go off to university, if universities are working properly. But if you’re anorexic and you find a community that’s devoted to ensuring that you do think that you’re fat and helping you figure out ways to restrict your food and normalizing that, then obviously that’s not helpful at all. Quite the contrary. And it is a peculiar fact that statistically unlikely proclivities can be normalized very rapidly online as a consequence of the generation of community. Because as you know, we tend to regard ourselves in relationship to the peer group, the immediate peer group that we formulate around us. And so if you’re one in 10,000 in your peculiarity, but you have 20 people around you who are the same, it’s going to feel pretty damn normal pretty quick. And if you’re truly exceptional, that’s a good thing. But a lot of what constitutes truly exceptional is manifested on the pathological side. And well, and we don’t know the consequence of community building on that front yet. I think that’s correct that in general, what the internet allows people to do is to create those communities based on some of these unique identities. And that can be used for good. So a gay kid in a small town who doesn’t know anybody else like them can find a community. But then on the other hand, someone who wants to be anorexic and encourage other young girls and young women to be anorexic, they can also find each other. And that has some pretty negative consequences. Right. Well, and there’s also the facilitation of online predation as a consequence of the irresponsibility that anonymity allows too. So if you are an isolated young person and you’re searching around for an identity group, you’re just quite nicely likely to run into somebody who’s psychopathically predacious online as well. And that happens in no small percentage of cases. I’ve known a number of adolescents who got tangled up with someone pretty damn nasty online much to their parents chagrin. And so that’s especially true on the sexual exploitation front. Yes. And that’s primarily because social media is so unregulated. So there’s no age verification, for example. You could be 36 and say that you’re 13. You can be nine and say that you’re 16 or 13 to be able to get an account. You’re supposed to be 13 to get a social media account, but it’s not enforced. So there’s very young children who are on it. And then adults and children can communicate with each other. And that has led, unfortunately, yeah, to a lot of sexual predation and other really unfortunate situations. Yeah. We can think about this from an evolutionary biology perspective, I think, for a moment or two that might be interesting. So I know that the rates of psychopathy appear to vary between about one and five percent cross-culturally. And so I talked to David Buss about various theories about that percentage. And so the first observation is it’s actually not very effective to be a power-mad psychopath, right? 95 to 97 percent of people aren’t. And the reason for that is it’s really not a very effective strategy. You even have to run away from yourself eventually if you’re a psychopath. And they tend to have itinerant lifestyles because people caught on to their narcissistic Machiavellianism sooner or later and then can identify them. Now it might be more useful, biologically speaking, to be a predatory psychopath than to be someone who’s so depressed and isolated that they never go out of the house. So you could think about it as a strategy of a reproductive strategy that doesn’t always culminate in failure. And that’s especially true because young women are less likely to be able to distinguish psychopathic predators from confident and competent males. So okay, so you open up a window for psychopathy and then the windows opened up too because most people are cooperative and productive and generous, at least in the main. But what that means is that a small percentage of people can capitalize on that by mimicking it and the psychopaths mimic that by being confident and assertive and appearing competent, even though they’re predators and parasitic in their fundamental orientation. Now those people, that 1 to 5 percent, present an unbelievable constant danger to the integrity of societies, right? It doesn’t take that many people to destabilize a complex society. And certainly 3 percent is more than enough. And normally the psychopaths are kept under some regulatory control because they get identified and isolated and punished. But I don’t think that happens online. And so I don’t know to what degree… Look, psychopaths don’t learn from punishment very well at all and they don’t learn from threat very well at all. But online, all of that’s been removed. There’s nothing but a field of opportunity for predatory psychopaths. And so I wonder to what degree virtualizing communication and opening up this hypothetically democratic front has actually magnified the degree to which our societies are susceptible to disruption by Machiavellian psychopaths. That is absolutely possible because, yeah, I mean, there’s the trolls and all of those folks who get into those situations. They too often absolutely get away with that. I think some people might argue that, well, they might get lots of negative comments and sometimes they do get punished or canceled. But it’s not usually the way it goes because, yeah, they have a lot of tricks. They can be charming and can fake their way through it. They do often get away with a lot just partially because things are so unregulated. It’s the wild, wild west. Well, they can also generate multiple identities. So even if one of their identities gets published, punished, well, first of all, they’re not likely to be very affected by negative feedback to begin with, especially not of the psychological sort because the typical psychopath doesn’t give a damn what you think. They might react with some degree of surprise if you actually hit them. But if you just said something that might disturb a person with normal conscience, let’s say, the psychopath is going to brush that off. And so… True.