https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LMjdUbKCAI4
You’ve stated, quote, women are more agreeable by nature than men, and agreeable people are compassionate toward those they see as suffering. And that seems to include any minority, especially when you combine that with a kind of neo-Marxist doctrine that claims that anyone who has an advantage swiped it. Unquote. Women have been voting for a century now, and this, you suggested in a Patreon chat, may help to explain why, in the West, we’ve collectively decided that, quote, egalitarianism and conflict avoidance constitute the two highest virtues and trump everything else, including free speech. Unquote. You’ve said that in the West today we are perhaps for the first time in history seeing on the political left, or on segments of the political left, quote, what a female totalitarianism would look like. Unquote. Elaborate. I did a research project with one of my students. We haven’t published it, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons. She’s been quite ill, and I’ve been quite preoccupied, so those are the two barriers at the moment. But the first thing we wanted to do was to find out whether there was actually such a thing as political correctness. You can actually do that technically as a social scientist. So what you do is, this is what we did, is we got a group of people together and we collected a whole bunch of statements that seem to be vaguely associated with the idea of political correctness. So maybe you could think, well, it’s a media construct, and that’s fine. You can go analyze media statements, and then you can collect ideas that seem to be associated with whatever political correctness is. We collected about 400 of those. And then we asked, we turned them into questions, and we asked a thousand people for their opinions. Then you can do this statistical process called a factor analysis. It’s the same thing that pulls out a single factor of IQ from a group of questions, for example. It’s the same thing that produced the Big Five personality model. What the factor analysis does is tell you if questions group together. So let’s say you have opinion A. Well, if you have opinion A, if there’s a hundred of you, everyone who has opinion A also has opinion B and opinion C. And if that’s the case, then those clump together. There’s something about them that’s the same. Now, what we could have found was that when we analyzed these 400 questions, there was like 50 clumps. And so that would have blown the there’s such a thing as political correctness hypothesis out of the water. But that isn’t what happened. We found two clumps. One of which looked like something like moderate leftism, and the other that looked very much like totalitarian political correctness. And it was very, very robust finding. And we replicated it as well. Well, she did this for her master’s thesis, by the way. And then we looked at what predicted these beliefs. First of all, the correlation between the moderate leftist clump of questions and the radical leftist clump of questions actually wasn’t very high. And so one of the things that we surmise is that there’s an actual division on the left between the moderates and the radicals. And that’s just not played itself out. And I think you can actually see that happening by the proclivity of the radical leftists to devour themselves. Right? So which happens on a very regular basis. Or perhaps you can see it in the proclivity of the radical leftists to go after the moderates when the moderates criticize the radicals. Whatever. So there’s two clumps to political correctness. Both of them were predicted by trait agreeableness, which is one of the traits that women score higher on than men. It’s the antithesis of aggression, by the way. And by also by being female. Which was a real shock to us, because most of the… So let’s say females and males differ with regards to some outcome. You try to figure out why that is. It might be just because they’re female. But there’s all sorts of things associated with being female or male that are like second order complications. What we found almost invariably with the personality literature is if you look at differences between men and women, and then you control for personality, the differences go away. So they’re not differences between men and women per se. They’re differences between personality. But with political correctness, we found an effect of agreeableness, which was a pure personality effect, and an effect of being female. So we also found a pronounced effect of having taken at least one seminar that was politically correct in its orientation. So that had a walloping effect. So there does seem to be something about political, according to that research, which, you know, is… I try to rely on better research, but none has been done. So that’s the best that I’ve got. And the woman who did this research is very, very smart, and the study was well done. So I think it’s credible. So, and one of the things that’s interesting to me about that is that it does tie into the Freudian nightmare of the devouring mother, essentially, which was Freud’s, I think, signal contribution to psychopathology. You know, for most of Freud’s clients were people who were struggling to get out of the clutches of their family. Right? And part of that is human beings are very dependent, right? Because, well, because we have this incredibly long period of development. 30 years, maybe, but certainly 18 years. And so it’s hard to struggle up from infancy, mature, and leave as an independent creature. And lots of people, you see this, and if you’re a clinician, you see this all the time. People are so tangled up in their families that they can’t get away from them. And that’s the Oedipal situation that Freud described so brilliantly. And Jung also elaborated on it. A lot of that’s a consequence of hyperdependence, right? It’s the danger of overprotection. Now, there’s a rule if you’re dealing with elderly people, say, in an elder care institution, and the rule is something like, don’t do anything for your charges that they can do themselves. It’s kind of a harsh rule. You know, if you see someone struggling with their buttons, maybe they’re three years old. You want to rush over and help. It’s like, well, maybe you don’t. Because they need to learn how to do up their damn buttons. Or if they’re 85, they need to maintain their independence as much as possible without your compassion stealing it from them. Okay, well, we could hypothesize that there would be no pathology as a consequence of the female rise to political power. But given that females are human beings too, and we’re pretty much rife with pathology, the probability that there’ll be a downside is like there is to male participation, which would be more aggressive and hypercompetit- aggressiveness and hypercompetition. The probability that there would be a downside is extraordinarily high. Well, why wouldn’t it be a downside associated with hyperprotectiveness? It’s exactly what you’d expect. And then what you see playing out in the political landscape, as far as I’m- as far as I can tell, and maybe I’m wrong, is wherever there’s an inequality, there’s an oppressor-oppression narrative. And so anyone who’s stacks up at the bottom of a hierarchy is a victim slash infant, and anyone at the top is an oppressor slash predator. And I think confusing the hierarchical structure, especially when it’s based on competence, and Western structures of hierarchy are based in large part, although not entirely on competence, confusing that with a predator-infant or oppressor-oppression relationship is a very bad idea. Now, having said that, it’s obvious that every social structure has a tyrannical element. Like, nobody in their right mind is going to say, well, our cultural structures are 100% fair and just. Obviously they’re not, and every single person in this room, and some far more than others, have been brutalized by the social structure, which takes you around the neck, shakes the hell out of you, and says, you better be like everyone else, or else. Right? That’s the tyrannical aspect of the social structure. So you have to be naive not to think that there’s some oppressor-oppression dynamic in a social structure. But to make that the only element of the discussion is extraordinarily dangerous. One of the things that looking at terrible things has done for me is make me a very grateful person. Like, when I walk out on the street and I see that people aren’t at each other’s throats, I really think that that’s a miracle. Like, I was just in Manhattan for a week. You know, if your eyes are open, that place is an absolute miracle. I mean, there’s way too many people there. Seven million people come in a day, right? There’s way too many people. They’re just stacked on top of each other. There’s all these massive skyscrapers, and they all stand up. There they are, all standing up. All the traffic lights work. All the electricity works. The buildings aren’t blowing up one after another because of natural gas leaks. They just don’t blow up. And people aren’t, like, beating each other to death with clubs in the street. It’s like, so when I go outside in New York, I think, my God, how did we manage this? Because I’m a Hobbesian by nature. You know, I think, and it’s not like I’m entirely pessimistic, but I think that you’re naive if you don’t think that the natural state of human beings is one of brutality. All you have to do is look at history, and you’d be convinced of that very rapidly. And so the fact that, look at us, we can all sit in here. We don’t know who, we don’t know each other. And we’re having a contentious political discussion. And, like, nothing terrible is happening. And if you don’t see that as a miracle, then you’re way too protected for your own good. So, well, so back to the, back to the agreeableness issue. There are tyrannies of care. The psychoanalyst said the good mother fails. And what that means is that when your kid is three years old, two years old, and stumbling around, making mistakes, you back the hell off. And you let them make mistakes. And you don’t view the world as infant and predator. And you don’t project that onto the political system. Because it’s not a good idea. Especially if those who, especially for those who you’re misdiagnosing as predators.