https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HMJJQD3gbTY
Equity is a word that really disturbs me because equity fundamentally means equality of outcome. And equality of outcome is a very bad idea because there’s no difference between inequality of outcome and ownership. Like if you own something, that means that you have an unequal access to it in relationship to someone else. And there’s no way of eradicating inequality without eradicating ownership per se. And the notion that we can calculate the fairness of our society by dividing people, subdividing people into their group identities and checking every single enterprise to make sure that proportionality exists, which would be impossible in any case, definitely puts the cart before the horse. And I also see in the term equity, and of course Christopher Ruffo is concentrated on this too, that’s the place that I see the most radical form of quasi-Marxist ideation invading the democratic discussion. So that’s a concern. I both agree with you and disagree with you on this point. I think if you, well, the way I disagree with you is equity, equality, they mean a lot of different things. Back to my whenever, well, ask me, are you a socialist? I don’t know, what do you mean? Equity and equality are the same, kind of the same way. They can mean a lot of different things. If you just say I’m for equity or I’m against equity, you haven’t added anything to the conversation whatsoever. Now where it is true is what you’ve said, there is a certain segment of the left-wing political world that is defined equity in a very specific way that has sort of got them wrapped up in a lot of confusion because when you get past the point where it’s okay, you can certainly focus, I mean, okay, I’m not getting myself in trouble here. The two most discriminated groups in America, broadly speaking, are black people and Native Americans. Okay. If you wanted to start somewhere in terms of who America has treated poorly, that’s a pretty good place to start. But it goes beyond that. Okay, well, what about recent immigrants? How do you salami slice it past a certain point? Let’s say, okay, you’ve improved equity, you have more people of color in your office, but you don’t have any Asian Americans. Okay. Or you could go right down further. Okay, you’ve got a bunch of people from India, but you don’t have many people from South East. I mean, you can go down that road to the point where it’s impossible to achieve that. And I think that has in many instances happened. And that is a challenge. However, I don’t think equity and equality are, well, irrelevant. I think equity and equality are things that we need to work towards. Okay, not in the sense that you just described, where equity means absolutely everybody, regardless of anything, has everything the same. That’s ridiculous. Okay. But if you simply go the equality of outcome route, then you’re leaving out a whole bunch of stuff that comes before you get a chance to have that outcome. Yeah, well, that’s for sure. So we need to think about that. And we need to think about, in that case, historical racism, historical discrimination, redlining, okay, a whole bunch of different things do factor into what the outcome is today. This is very difficult. There’s no simple way to do this. There’s no formula that you’re going to come up with. In fact, one of the big things that I frequently say, a problem we have in the world, if you are after perfect justice, then you are going to be any permanent state of war. I have this vivid image in my mind of Milosevic back in 1988, when on what I think was the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, where, long story short, the Serbs got their asses kicked by somebody, and they’ve been bitter about it ever since. And they were going to write that wrong 600 years later. a number of people got slaughtered over the course of that fight. If you’re constantly focused on everything has to be equitable, then you’re in a bad place. If on the other hand, you just sort of shrug and go, well, you know, not anything we need to worry about, you’re also going to be in trouble. And I just think that the human mind is in fact capable of striking that balance without having to choose one side or the other. We can work and say, okay, here’s a group of people that don’t seem to be achieving. Is it the case that they’re somehow just inferior? No. Okay, so let’s think creatively. How can we be more inclusive? How can we help them get to a better outcome, knowing that it’s never going to be perfectly equal? It seems to me, certainly in American politics, I don’t know anything about Canadian politics, so I will not speak to that, that we’ve just set up this false choice. You know, either you have to be a full on equity identity politics far left person, or you have to be on the right and not care about it at all. You know, and, you know, that dynamic is something that I’m trying to fight is to get to people say, no, we can find a more reasonable place in between here. It doesn’t have to be this death match between two extreme ideologies. Yeah, well, you make a constant case in your conversation with me today for differentiation and diagnosis. I mean, one of the problems is that it’s easy for us, for everyone to abstract a problem way too far up the abstraction hierarchy and to talk about such things, for example, as health care, when in fact, there’s no such thing as health care. There’s 10,000 different variants of caring for people, each of which is a complex problem on its own. And you can understand why people would rather have a one size fits all solution because, well, if you could have that, it would be wonderful. And it certainly decreases the cognitive complexity, but it is necessary and challenging to differentiate. I wanted to turn to something. Can I ask you one question before we move off? It’s an interesting your cognitive take on this because, you know, my shorthand, all of this, you know, that’s a quote that I quote in my book. I always misquote it because I prefer it this way. But Sue Grafton, who was a mystery writer, she wrote the A to Z. The Kinsey Mahone mysteries. She wanted one of her books. She said, thinking’s hard work. That’s why most people don’t do it. You know, I’m sort of torn between that and also a passionate belief that if we engage and take on difficult problems, we get more joy out of it. OK, yeah, that we don’t have to accept the fact, well, let’s dumb everything down because nobody wants to work hard. I just don’t I don’t I don’t really believe that. And actually, there’s a professor at Yale University. I think it’s Dr. Santos, who teaches a class on happiness. It’s the most highly subscribed class, apparently, in the history of Yale. And her big point is what makes us happy is to be productive. But our basic instinct is to not be productive. So we have we have to work, work through that. And I just from someone like yourself who has much more medical background than I do, why can’t we get the human brain to embrace that a little bit more? Well, you take on to see complexity is a good thing, not a bad thing. That’s what I’m trying to say. Well, you you you put your finger on a fundamental problem, the problem of complexity. The problem of complexity is essentially that there’s there’s far more entropy in the cosmos in the world than there is organizational capacity in the psyche. Right. Because things overwhelm us. And that’s actually a technical problem, because if you’re exposed involuntarily to a situation that’s complex, you will manifest a stress response. And that’s accompanied by an increase, for example, in the production of cortisol. And what that does is start to have you burn up resources that you could be saving for future use now. And if if you’re chronically stressed, you will age. There’s very little difference between those two things. And so if you’re exposed to too much complexity, especially involuntarily, it will it will take you out physiologically, psychophysiologically. And so people are very motivated to avoid it. Now, then, well, let me add one more detail to that, because while it’s the rest of the answer to your question. So then you might ask yourself, well, how do you calibrate the optimal amount of exposure to complexity? And the answer to that technically seems to be by moving towards something approximating the spirit of voluntary play. So now you and I, like we have agreements and disagreements in the way that we map the world. And what we’re doing, and I think we’ve done this successfully so far in this conversation, is to push each other in an optimized manner that enables something approximating the spirit of cooperative and competitive play to emerge. Right. And you can tell that’s happening because to the degree that we’re successful at it, we’re deeply engrossed in the conversation and we’re developing as a consequence of doing that. And so I believe that the instinct of meaning and it manifests itself, for example, in play, the instinct of meaning is exactly the instinct that tells you when you’re optimizing your confrontation with complexity.