https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iQ3NQAaOaOo
it’s useful to talk to people that you don’t agree with and It’s useful for a variety of reasons and one is that a lot of what determines your political orientation is Biological temperament far more than people realize so for example left-leaning people liberals, let’s say although that’s kind of miss misnomer, but We’ll keep with the terminology liberals are high in a trait called openness Which is one of the big five personality traits and it’s associated with interest in abstraction interest in aesthetics It’s the best predictor of liberal political leaning and they’re low in trait conscientiousness Which is dutifulness and and orderliness in particular Whereas the conservatives are the opposite they’re high in conscientiousness They’re dutiful and orderly and they’re low in openness and that makes them really good managers and administrators administrators and often businessmen, but not very good entrepreneurs because the entrepreneurs are almost all drawn from the liberal types and so These are really fundamental fundamentally biologically predicated differences and there you might think about them as different sets of Opportunities and limitations and and certainly different ways of screening the world and Each of those different temperamental types needs the other type so in economically speaking for example We need liberals to start businesses and we need conservatives to run them and the conservatives are too conservative So if they are running businesses, they have a bitch of a time with innovation Whereas the liberals are really good at generating new ideas and and moving laterally but they’re not very good at the level of detail and implementation and So if you start understanding that the person this is a diversity issue Let’s call this a diversity issue if you start understanding that the person that you’re talking to who doesn’t share your political views isn’t Stupid that’s the first thing necessarily they might be but so might you be no stupidity isn’t the Differences in intelligence are not the prime determinant of differences in political belief All right, so you might be talking to someone who’s more conscientious and less creative than you if you’re if you happen to be a liberal But that doesn’t mean that that person’s perspective is not valid and it doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t outperform you in some domains Because they would so one thing to remember is people actually do see the world differently It’s not merely that they that they’re possessed of ill-informed opinions So you have to first of all stretch out your hand and say look, you know Like I I get that you see the world differently than me And I also understand that there’s a place for you and a place for me, even though that isn’t the same place And then it’s necessary to also remember that well, do you want to talk to people or do you want it? Do you want to fight with them? Because fighting is not pleasant and it goes very dark places very very rapidly And so, you know the last time I was down in in Boston I talked to an old friend of mine and this person went on a relatively Solid and strong and relatively personal critique of Trump supporters calling them ill-informed and stupid and and you know an insulting and an insulting characterization and I thought well It was surprising to me because this was a Reasonable person and I think it was an indication of the polarization. But you know, you can’t Throw away 50% of the population like that It’s not reasonable and it’s the same on the right. The conservatives can’t do it to the liberals either I mean right now I think that that radical left Totalitarian proclivity is a much greater danger than radical right totalitarian proclivity Especially on the university campuses and so I’ve been mostly speaking out about the about the left-wing radicals It could have just as easily been the reverse case. It just doesn’t happen to be but you the whole point of the democracy is to Continue the dialogue between people of different temperamental types so that we don’t move so far to the right that everything becomes In stone and doesn’t move or so far to the left and everything dissolves in a kind of Mealy-mouthed chaos and the only way that you can you can navigate between those two Shoals is by is through discussion, which is why free speech is such an important value It’s the thing that keeps the temperamental types from being at each other’s throats just like in a marriage You know because there’s differences in a marriage if you can’t talk you either you’re either subservient or You fight Well, that’s just no good. So so part of it is Have some respect for people that are different than you which is of course what the radical leftists are saying But they they don’t identify the real differences You