https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MVj-eZSkkz8
I’m going to bring the discussion, if you don’t mind, back to something that we were touching on earlier, that your initial objection when you were at Evergreen to whatever it was that was developing in the background. And now we’ve had four years to see whatever it is manifesting itself. And so you what is it? What is it that’s happening? Do you think in our politicized landscape? Well, I have a guess and it’s it’s right up your alley. It’s something I’m intending to explore at greater length. But the basics are this, I suspect. You and I, I think, would share the opinion that psychological development is among the most important phenomena for understanding human beings. And it is underrated. We tend to look at the behavior of adults and study it. But we should spend more time thinking about how those adults ended up the way they did in order to to really understand them. And I think for. You know, for each generation. You have a developmental landscape and what the governing forces are in that developmental landscape has a lot to say about both the insights and the blind spots of the people who emerge from it. And so I would say that for Americans of my generation, I’m a Gen X, the market played too much of a role developmentally. And it has created a kind of lens through which we can’t help but look. It is, you know, commodified things in a way that is quite unhealthy for born when I was born in 1969. OK. For millennials and maybe even more so for Gen Z, I suspect that there is a pivot to something else. And many people, you know, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have certainly talked about I.GEN, the Internet generation. But what I suspect is really going on is that if you are sufficiently plugged into the Internet early enough, there comes a point at which the. Your persona on the Internet takes primacy. It is more important than your actual physical life. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. I would say from personal experience, there is more of me on the Internet than there is in me. My electronic avatars are far more powerful than me. Personally, you know, and I can watch this because I’ve been away for a year and a half. And yet my Internet presence has steadily increased during that time. And I look online now and it’s. Seven hundred million views. Something like that. Now, now imagine that as the developmental environment for children. Now, here’s here’s the connection I want to draw. My contention is that the online landscape is postmodern. Right. That if we were just to simply describe it, the rules, the physics of online life are postmodern. Because it’s abstracted from the environment. Right. So, for example, like living in a dictionary. If I decided tomorrow that I was a woman. Right. I could change my life. Right. I could change my Internet presence such that I would present in a female way. I could say, hey, anybody who doesn’t treat me as female is a jerk. And the point is, I have transitioned completely. Right. Now, obviously, there is no such thing in the physical world. You can transition. You can take hormones or blockers. You can get surgeries. But no, no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way. Right. So the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology, which do not translate to the online world. And for people like you and me, for whom the online world is an add on world. We think, well, obviously, real life is the important one. And then the online thing has some interface with it, which is frightening. But we understand how they relate. But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation that its problem solving mind says, actually, of course, you can transition. You can transition. And then it is everybody’s obligation to live by who you’ve told us you are. And anybody who doesn’t is a bad person. And what has to be true for that to be the case? Right. You know, I had I had a fantasy a long while ago that people would end up wearing glasses like the Google glasses that would be illegal to take off. And that you’d be mandated to see what people wanted you to see. It was their right to be presented to you in the manner that they chose to present themselves. You know, and I’m not saying that’s a particularly brilliant vision, but it’s very much in keeping with what you’re describing. So. Yep, I think it’s I think it’s close. But if you imagine then that an online world in which effectively we can all be equal tomorrow, as long as we say that that’s the objective. And we can all present as we want and others can be forced to adhere to it or be thrown off of whatever discussion. Then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense. And so I’m wondering if we are not in effect. In a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the online world has primacy. And if that’s not the fundamental nature of the battle. Have you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito mode? It says that your activity might still be visible to your employer, your school or your Internet service provider to actually stop people from monitoring your online activity. You need Express VPN. Think about all the times you’ve used Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, hotel or even a friend’s house without Express VPN. Every site you visit can be logged by the admin of that network. That’s still true even when you’re in incognito mode. Express VPN is an app that encrypts all of your network data and reroutes it through a network of secure servers so that your private online activity stays private. Express VPN works on all your devices and is super easy to use. The app has one button. You tap it to connect and your browsing activity is secure. Stop letting strangers invade your online privacy by visiting expressvpn.com slash Jordan. That’s EXP-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Jordan and get three extra months free. Expressvpn.com slash Jordan. Well, I think it could be the fundamental nature of part of the battle. I mean, part obviously part of what’s going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid rate of technological transformation is doing to us. I mean, my daughter and some people of approximately her age, so late 20s, are helping me with managed social media, let’s say. She’s noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly developed forms of social media that she’s already outside of. And so that process of being hooked into the web and that being the determining factor for your worldview is probably accelerating. I mean, it’s going to accelerate. Obviously, it’s going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more dominant and machines are becoming more and more intelligent. So they abstract themselves away from the world. And then the question is, well, what’s the consequence of that abstraction? But it’s funny that it’s postmodern. That doesn’t. There’s more going on with whatever it is that’s happening than technological transformation. But you think that’s the fundamental driving factor? Well, I think there are a lot of ways you can look at it. Obviously, I don’t think this is a real battle. Obviously, the Internet runs on hardware in the real world and everybody, you know, when the power goes out, we are all reduced to our biological self. So I don’t think there is actually anything to fight over. One of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add on. And this is not debatable. But my point is really about the mental confusion that arises from for most people. I mean, if you think about the lives that most people are living, right, most people at best are working a job in which they trade their labor for money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures. And the part of their life that is interesting and compelling is, you know, the Internet over which they range freely and engage in battle and, you know, they fall in love increasingly and whatever else they do. And so my point is that that is a distortion developmentally. It misleads the mind into misunderstanding what is necessary. If you take the postmodern rules of the Internet and you now impose them on politics in the real world, you get crises. You get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of our eyes, which I really believe that it is right with the homelessness crisis in the U.S., for example, is jaw dropping. And we have a particularly acute crisis on the West Coast in the U.S. that appears to be the result of people being utterly compelled of their own political beliefs to an extent that even as those beliefs are failing around them visibly, they just double down. So imagining that people who think the Internet has primacy are now exerting a force to correct the real world in the direction of their naive Internet understanding of things are in danger of crashing the aircraft. And in some sense, people like you and me are responding to what they’re saying about how we should restructure the real world and saying that doesn’t make sense. It won’t work. It is going to put us in grave danger. It is going to disrupt essential things. And, you know, there are those who can hear us and we are popular with those who can hear us. And then there are those who regard our pointing out the obvious as a danger to their program who are intent on silencing us.