https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2s9Pkfva9oU
When I talked about hierarchies, now it’s very important where you are in your hierarchical position with regards to other people in relationship to your mental health. And this is a really important thing to understand because you have an ancient counter in your brain. And that was the point of the biological comparisons, lobsters being one set of comparisons. But not only lobsters, we know perfectly well animal behaviorists, people who know their neuropsychopharmacology, know perfectly well that the serotonergic system operates quite similarly across most animals with complex nervous systems. And one of the things that it does is track relative status position. And in birds, wrens, which is another example I used, a lot of it is power. You know, a wren is a little bird. It’s quite a cute bird. It sings very nicely. And you think it’s harmless, but it’s not. It’s a vicious little character. And I used to sit in my backyard and record wren songs on my tape recorder. And the wren that lived in our backyard would dive-bomb it, you know, four inches away. And it was very brave of him. And he had a little nest that was up in a tree. And there were some nests that we had built, birdhouses in the neighborhoods nearby, in the yards nearby. And he would go, like half his day, he spent stuffing those other birdhouses with sticks. So full that no bird could get in them. It was like, this is my damn yard, which is what he was saying when he was singing so beautifully. And you better look the hell out, because if you build, I’m going to stuff your damn house with sticks. And if I see you sitting on a branch, I’m going to dive-bomb you and knock you off. And that’s power. And that’s what wrens do, despite the fact that they’re cute. And chickens do the same thing. There are pecking orders among chickens. And virtually every animal, wolf packs organize themselves into hierarchies, and chimpanzees organize themselves into hierarchies. And like, there are rat hierarchies. And hierarchical organization is the rule among animals that live somewhat socially. And even those who don’t, that occupy the same geographical territory, there has to be some way of organizing access to relatively scarce resources that doesn’t result in chronic combat. Because chronic combat, well look, you’re Wren A and you’re Wren B, and you decide to have it out, so you peck yourselves half to death. And you’re Wren C, and so you’ve got a little bit more patience. You just wait until those two wrens beat each other to death, and then you move in. It’s like it’s a stupid solution. It doesn’t even work for wrens, let alone people. So, you know, the wrens announce their prowess, and they do that with the quality of their song and their displays, and they indicate to one another who shouldn’t be messed with. And then there’s a minimum of combat. And you could make a pretty good case that that’s power. But it’s not like wrens get together and build like wren apartment houses, and then go out on collective worm hunt insects, I guess, collective insect hunting expeditions, and bring them all back and distribute them, or make insect farms so that there’s more insects for all the wrens. They haven’t got that far, you know. They’re competing in a zero-sum game. And that isn’t what human beings do. We figured out how to not have zero-sum games a very, very long time ago. And it turns out that if the game you’re playing isn’t zero-sum, right, which means that there’s only a finite number of resources and everybody has to fight to the death for them, and some are going to get the lion’s share and others are going to starve, if you’re not playing a zero-sum game, then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent, civilized manner, and all of a sudden, there’s more than enough for everyone. Now, still, some people are going to have more than others, you know, but there’s nothing. How are you going to stop that? And do you want to? Like, do you want to only know what, do you want to only be allowed to know what everyone else knows? You don’t get to know anything that no one, that anyone else knows, because it’s got to be equal. You want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive, you know, which, and if you averaged attractiveness overall, and you only allowed each person to be as attractive as the average person, there’d be not much attractiveness left in the world. And it seems to me that that would be quite the loss, you know, and strength, you’re not allowed to have any additional strength or ambition or talent, or let’s say, athletic ability, it’s like, or artistic ability, I mean, aren’t we kind of happy that there’s massive inequality in the distribution of talent? I know it’s harsh and hard, but you can’t expect everybody to have every talent that there is, and it would be a hell of a sacrifice if no one got to have any talent, because it wouldn’t be fair. And so I don’t get the whole equality of outcome thing. It isn’t going to work. There aren’t that many geniuses, you know? We want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us. And if the price is that somebody has more than you do of something, well, suck it up for Christ’s sake. Well, Jesus, seriously, man, it’s like, look, how much more do you have than most people have? You know, you need to make $30,000 a year to be in the top 1% of the socioeconomic distribution worldwide. You know, you always hear about the 1%, right, the evil 1%, and they churn, by the way, because it’s not the same people all the time. It’s like all of you here are in the evil 1%, and you think, well, that’s not very fair, because I was really only talking about within my country. Well, that’s convenient for you, you know? It makes it really convenient argument for you. It’s like, well, all those other people, those foreigners, they don’t count. If they’re poor, who the hell cares? It’s the Australians that matter, you know? And so, no, that’s a non-starter, you know? And by historical standards, you’re doing a hell of a lot better than the top 1%, I can tell you that. I read a nice article by a coalition called Human Progress the other day, and they were comparing the typical middle-class person who lives now with Rockefellers in the 1919s, and say, well, would you rather be a middle-class person now or Nelson Rockefeller in 1919? And the answer seemed pretty damn clear that, well, you know, if you were Nelson Rockefeller, then you would have been richer than anyone else. And there’s something to be said for that status, right? Because people do like to have more than others. It’s a… I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but it is one of the things that we like. And so you’d have that. You’d be richer than everyone else. But there’d be all sorts of things that you have that now that Nelson Rockefeller wouldn’t have had a hope of purchasing, like the antibiotics that he would have needed to stop his son from dying, for example, you know, just as a start. And so I think this complaint about inequality… Look, no one likes inequality exactly. You walk down the street. This is why I always get a kick out of people who protest, I’m against poverty. It’s like, really? You’re against poverty. And you think that’s a unique enough attribute so that it was worth your time to make a sign that said that you were against poverty and show other people. It’s like, I’ve never met anyone that was for poverty, you know? You walk down the street with someone who’s pretty well off, you know, and they’ve got 1920s spats on and a bowler, and they’re feeling pretty damn rich and the Stokesters certificate sticking out of their back pocket. And, you know, there’s a homeless person there and they give them a good kick and they say, the more poverty, the better. It’s like, no. You know, when people walk down the street and you see homeless people, and they’re often… Homelessness is a complex problem. Like, you think, well, homeless people are poor. It’s like, yeah, yeah, man. That’s like one problem they have out of 50. And like, I’ve worked with poor people, you know, in my clinical practice and poor in multiple dimensions. And many of them, you gave them money, they were just done. Especially if they were like alcoholics and cocaine addicts. As long as they were broke, they had some hope of living through the next month. But as soon as their unemployment check showed up, man, they were face down in the ditch three days later, right? Nothing but cocaine and alcohol with all their idiot friends for three days. And then they’d show up back in my practice saying, you know, God, I relapsed again. I said, well, what happened? Well, my money came in. It’s like, yeah, money is really going to do you a hell of a lot of good. It’ll just kill you faster than poverty. Not that there’s anything good about poverty, but it’s not like these are simple problems. You know, walk down the street and you see someone who’s been an alcoholic for 20 years, and maybe they’re addicted to methamphetamines as well, or maybe they’re schizophrenic. It’s like, it isn’t an equal distribution of monetary resources that is the primary cause for that problem. And it isn’t going to be some sort of straightforward redistribution that’s going to fix it because it’s way more complicated than that. And so and then the whole power thing, too. It’s like, look, I get it. I get the left wing. I get the left wing issue, and I really do. And I think I get it better than the damn left wingers get it because, you know, most of the radical types, they follow Marx. And they say, well, one of Marx’s dictums was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.