https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Cd9J9JJnN3Q
I just rewatched Eisenhower’s speech on the military-industrial complex, his 1961 speech with my wife this week, because I was curious once again what had motivated someone who was so well-versed in the machinations of the behind-the-scenes military-industrial enterprise to put forward that warning 60 years ago. And it’s certainly the case that that situation hasn’t improved. But it is definitely the case that, as you point out, there are vested interests promoting conflict everywhere, on both sides of every conflict. I mean, we’re certainly seeing that play out on the Russia-Ukraine front at the moment. And that this is a complete… Who are they, Jim? Who are they? That’s the question. Okay, well, okay, now, I think it’s the wrong question, Majed. And here’s why I think that. So, well, there’s this idea that is deeply rooted in Christian traditional thought of the idea of principalities. And a principality, I’m going to think about it psychologically instead of religiously. So what we’re in at the moment is a war of idea networks. And an idea network has an animating essence. So you see that reflected in the use of terms such as zeitgeist, you know, the spirit of the times. And you see that, the animating nature of a set of ideas. When you look at photographs from different decades, you see how styles move and shift everybody across the decades. And that becomes very evident as you move away from the decades. People in the 60s didn’t think they looked like people in the 60s, but you can sure tell now that they did. And that’s partly because we’re all imitating each other all the time, and we’re all striving for consensus, and we’re all possessed by webs of ideas that happen to be au courant during the time and place that we happen to be born. And we have a rat’s nest of postmodern slash neo-Marxist ideas operating behind the scenes at the moment that is rooted in a corrupt enlightenment. And it’s rooted beyond that in an envious spirit of Cain-like vengefulness that’s ancient. And that system of ideas tends to act like a conspiracy. And so imagine that there’s a… So with one of my graduate students, just before I got cancelled as a professor, we undertook a formal statistical evaluation of the universe of politically correct ideas. Okay, so here were the questions we were trying to answer. The first question was, was there a coherent set of ideas that could be identified as politically correct? And the way you assess that is you gather a tremendous number of questions about political opinion, as diverse a range as you can manage, gather them everywhere. And then you give those to thousands and thousands of people and find out their opinions. And then you conduct a statistical analysis and you see if people answer question A in a particular direction, what other questions are they likely to answer in the same direction? And are there correlations between those? Does that constitute a correlation pattern across many, many people? So the question is, what ideas hang together as a set? And we found there were two domains of ideas that hung together as sets on the clearly politically correct side. And one was a kind of inclusive, compassionate liberalism. And the other was something more like an authoritarian political correctness. So imagine you took the liberal compassion, inclusive domain of ideas, and you allied that with willingness to use compulsion and force. Okay, so that set of ideas, clearly two of them hung together and those two sets were correlated. So the notion that there is a web of ideas that are part of this dialectical materialism that you described, or that would be a subset of it, that’s clearly the case. Now we also looked at what predicted that. So let’s say there is that system of ideas, who’s most likely to be possessed by it? And the answer was, well, the first, the biggest predictor was low verbal intelligence. And it’s partly because at the core of that idea is set is a very simple proposition, which is that you can understand all of human social and psychological dynamics merely by referring to the principle of power and oppression. And so it’s a radical simplification and that turns out to be attractive to people who aren’t very verbally sophisticated. Have you ever heard of data brokers? They’re the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles which includes your browsing history, online searches and location data. They then sell your profile to a company that delivers you a targeted ad. No biggie, right? Well, you might be surprised to learn that these same data brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS. So to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN. 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And the final major predictor was having ever taken a course that was overtly propagandistic on the politically correct side. And so that was all very worrisome, as you might imagine. But here’s the reason I’m telling you all this is that we’re seeing a situation where it looks like there are conspiracies at work. And sometimes there are. But what’s actually happening is that people are possessed to a greater or lesser degree by this web of ideas. They reflect that in their own perception and action as individuals. But then when they get together as groups, like imagine that a given person is 25% possessed by the politically correct web of ideas. But then you get a hundred people like that in a room, let’s say at Davos, and then you have the whole web of ideas and it has an animating ethos. Like it looks at the world in a certain way and is aiming at certain ends. And then that entire system of ideas works to promote that. And it can do that. And writes books promoting it. And writes books promoting it. And speeches promoting it. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and it also means that it can operate in a distributed manner because to the degree that any given person is possessed by some fraction of those ideas, they’ll go off into their own domain and agitate on behalf of the idea system. And that’s a principality. And that will act to further the entire catastrophe. And really the entire idea system in its most fundamental element is a, it’s an idol. It’s a false idol. It’s a false religion.