https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zUbbDBU-PCo
I had a son basically around the first year I started streaming. As I started to go through life and I went from kind of being in this like working poor position to making a lot of money, especially through the lens of my child, I saw how different life was when I had more money versus less. And I guess like the differences between what was available to me and then my child as I made more money, while I was really wealthy versus not as wealthy, it kind of started to change the way that I… So you got more attuned to the consequences of inequality? Basically I would say, yeah. Okay, and so that… Okay, how did that lead you to develop more sympathy for left-leaning ideas, particularly? I guess my core beliefs have never really changed, but I think the way that those become applied kind of change. So much the same way that you might think that everybody deserves a shot to go to school and have an education, that might be like a core belief where as a libertarian or conservative, I might think that as long as a school is available, everybody’s got the opportunity to go and study. But maybe now as like a liberal or progressive or whatever you’d call me, I might say, okay, well, we need to make sure that there is enough, you know, maybe like food in the household or household or some kind of funding program to make sure the kid can actually go to school and study basically. So like the core drive is the same, but I think the applied principle ends up changing a bit based on what you think… Right, so is your concern essentially something like the observation that if people are bereft enough of substance, let’s say, that it’s difficult for them to take advantage of equal opportunities even if they are presented to them, let’s say? Yeah, essentially, yeah. And you have some belief, and correct me if I’m wrong, you have some belief that there is room for state intervention at the level of basic provision to make those opportunities more manifest. Yeah, to varying degrees, yeah. Okay, okay. Okay, so let’s start talking more broadly than on the political side. So how would you characterize the difference in your opinion between the left and the conservative political viewpoints? On a very, very, very broad level, if there’s some, I would say if there’s some like good world that we’re all aiming for, I think people on the left seem to think that a collection of taxes from a large population that goes into a government that’s able to precisely kind of dole out where that tax money goes, you’re basically able to take the problems of society, you’re able to scrape off hopefully a not super significant amount of money from people that can afford to give a lot of money, and then through government programs and redistribution, you target those taxes essentially to people that kind of need whatever bare minimum to take advantage of opportunities in society. Okay, okay. And then on the conservative end, I guess a conservative would generally think that why would the government take my money? I think from a community point of view, through churches, through community action, through families, we can better allocate our own dollars to our own friends and family to help them and give them the things that they need so that they can better participate in a thriving society basically. Okay, so one of the things that I’ve always found a mystery, I mean I think there’s an equal of mystery on the left and on the right in this regard, is that the more conservative types tend to be very skeptical of big government, and the leftist types tend to be more skeptical of big corporations. Right, well you, okay, so following through the logic that you just laid out, you made the suggestion that one of the things that characterizes people on the left is the belief that government can act as an agent of distribution, can and should act as an agent of distribution. Okay, a potential problem for that is the gigantism of the government that does that. Now the conservatives are skeptical of that gigantism, and likewise the liberals, the progressives in particular, we’ll call them progressives, are skeptical of the reach of gigantic corporations, and I’ve always seen a commonality in those two in that both of them are skeptical of gigantism, and so one of the things that I’m concerned about generally speaking with regard to the potential for the rise of tyranny is the emergence of giants, and one potential problem with the view that the government can and should act as an agent of redistribution is that there is an incentive put in place, two kinds of incentives, number one, a major league incentive towards gigantism and tyranny, and number two, an incentive for psychopaths who use compassion to justify their grip on power, to take money and to claim that they’re doing good, and I see that happening everywhere now, particularly in the name of compassion, and it’s one of the things that’s made me very skeptical in particular about the left, and at least about the progressive edge of the left, so I’m curious about what you think about those two. First of all, it’s a paradox to me that the conservatives and the leftists face off each other with regard to their concern about different forms of gigantism and don’t seem to notice that the thing that unites them is some antipathy, this is especially true for the libertarians, some antipathy towards gigantic structures per se, and so then I would say with regards to your antithesis between liberalism and conservatives, the conservatives are pointing to the fact that there are intermediary forms of distribution that can be utilized to solve the social problems that you’re describing, that don’t bring with them the associated problem of gigantism, and like this is, it’s been shocking to me to watch the left, especially in the last six years, ally itself for example with pharmaceutical companies, which was something I’d never thought I would see in my lifetime, I mean for decades, the only gigantic corporations the left was more skeptical of than the fossil fuel companies were the pharmaceutical companies, and that all seemed to vanish overnight around the COVID time, so I know the story, that’s a lot of things to throw at you, but it sort of outlines the territory that we could probably investigate productively. Yeah, so a couple things, I would say that the current political landscape we have I think is less, I understand the concept of conservatives supporting corporations and liberals supporting like large government, I think today the divide we’re starting to see more and more is more of like a populist, anti-populist rise, or even like an institutional or anti-institutional rise, so for instance I think conservatives today in the United States are largely characterized with, I would say with populism, and that they’re supporting like certain figures, namely right now Donald Trump, who they think alone can kind of like lead them against the corrupt institutions, be them corporate or government, I feel like most conservatives today are not as trustful of big corporations as they were back in like the Bush era, where we would, you know, conservatives would champion big corporations. Yeah, I think that’s right. That’s a strange thing because it makes the modern conservatives a lot more like the 60s leftists. Potentially, yeah. I mean that brings us into the issue too of whether the left-right divide is actually a reasonable way of construing the current political landscape at all, and I’m not sure it is, but… Right now it kind of is, but only because so many conservatives are following Trump, so like your populist, anti-populist thing kind of maps on kind of cleanly to the left and right. It doesn’t work with progressives though, or the far left, because they’re also anti-large everything, so in a surprising way on very very far left people you might find them having a bit more in common with kind of like a mega Trump supporter, than like a center-left liberal, so for instance like both of these groups of people on the very far left will be very dovish on foreign policy, probably a little bit more isolationist, they’re not a big fan of like a ton of immigration or a ton of trade with other countries. They might think that there’s a lot of institutional capture of both government and corporations, so both all of the mega supporters and the far far left might think that corporations don’t have our best interest at heart, and the government is corrupt and captured by lobbyists. Yeah, you’ll see a lot of overlap there. Right. I think that sometimes there’s a couple things. One, this is something I feel like I’ve discovered, people have no principles. I think that people are largely guided by whatever is kind of satisfying them or making them feel good at the time. I think it’s a really important thing to understand because people’s beliefs will seem to change at random. If you’re trying to imagine that a belief is coming from some underlying principle or is governed by some internal, you know, like moral or reasonable code or whatever, I think generally there are large social groups and people kind of follow them along from thing to thing, which is why you end up in strange worlds sometimes where, you know, like the position on vaccines and being an anti-vaxxer might have been seen as something, you know, 10 years ago, it was kind of like a hippie leftist, and now maybe it’s more like a conservative or it’s associated more with like mega Trump supporters or whatever, I think as a result of how the social groups move around. When it comes to the, you mentioned this like, gigantism thing. That’s another thing where I’m not sure if people actually care about gigantism or if they’re using it as a proxy for other things that they don’t like. Like I could totally imagine- Well, I care about it. Sure, yeah, you might. Yeah, sorry. That’s okay. Because like I could imagine somebody saying that like they don’t trust like a large government, they think there’s too much, you know, prone to tyranny or something like that, but also be supportive of an institution like the Catholic Church, which is literally, you know, one guy who is a direct- Right, but they can’t tax. And they don’t have a military. They can’t conscript you. True, yeah. And they can’t throw you in jail.