https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=W2u62u4entc
Good morning boys, girls and interested others. I said a couple of days ago last week that I was going to produce three videos on political correctness and that the third one would be about tactics. So that’s what I’m doing this morning. I’ll probably produce a number of relatively short videos on tactics because I think that that might be a more effective way to disseminate them. And so by tactics what I’m trying to figure out is how the rhetoric surrounding these issues can be translated into effective action at the individual level. So I’m hoping that people who want to play a tactical game with the PC extremists take it upon themselves as individuals to stand up against this and to hopefully do something about it. And that’s not going to be an easy thing to do. And hopefully we can do it with some good humour and a light touch and a bit of detachment. And in a peaceful and thoughtful and rational way. And so I’m going to propose a game today that I’ve designed with some of the people who are helping me think this through. And I’m going to walk you through that. Alright, so we’re going to start by talking about the PC game. And the PC game is a form of ideology. And what an ideology does is attempt to simplify the world in a very radical way so that it indicates to its holders that they have understanding even when they don’t. And that way it reduces uncertainty and anxiety. And it also helps them improve their short-term regulation because if they can view themselves, ideologues can view themselves as proper game players, then they can feel good about their position in the world. And so the purpose of the PC game, which I think is technically a biased compression algorithm, what it does is it takes the complexity of the world and compresses it to a few simple axioms. And it does that. It’s a biased impression algorithm, I think, because it doesn’t accurately represent the complexity of the world across the full array of detail necessary to deal with it effectively. Alright, so here are the rules of the PC game. And this is, I think, what’s taught to students en masse in universities now as an alternative to actual critical thinking and the development of a comprehensive and powerful and functional individual philosophy. It’s the alternative to wisdom. That’s one way of looking at it. Okay, so here are the rules of the PC game. First of all, what you do is identify an area of human activity. It could be any area of human activity. It could be sports. It could be writing. It could be socioeconomic status. It could be the garnering of wealth. It doesn’t matter. Anywhere where people are doing something that can be identifiably measured in terms of its outcome and evaluate along that way. Then the next thing you do is you note that there’s a distribution of success. And of course, there is a distribution of success in any human creative activity. And it’s partly because in most human domains of activity, their winner take all games. That’s called a Pareto distribution. You can look that up if you want. P-A-R-E-T-O. But most domains of human creative achievement follow a Pareto distribution. And that’s why, for example, that a very small minority of people have most of the money. It’s also true that a small minority of authors write most of the books and a small minority of those who sell books have the biggest bestsellers. And why a very small number of recordings, for example, audio recordings, become successful. And why a very small number of players dominate each game. It’s very common. So there’s definitely a distribution of success in any domain of human activity. So you note that. Then what you do is identify the people who are being successful as winners and the people who are being relatively unsuccessful as losers. And then you claim that the losers are losing only because they are oppressed by the winners. So you can dispense with things like competence and quality when you’re doing that. And that’s really useful if you’re an enemy of competence and quality. So anyways, you claim that the losers are losing because they’re oppressed by the winners. Then you claim allegiance with the losers. And so you put yourself on the side of those that you define as unfairly victimized. Then that allows you to do two things. One is to feel secure in your comprehensive explanation of the world. And it also helps if you surround yourself with people who think exactly the same way you do. Because then that oversimplified and actually rather pathetic comprehensive explanation of the world never goes unchallenged. Then the next thing you do is revel in your moral superiority. Because what you’ve done as well as oversimplifying the world is placed yourself forever on the side of the morally righteous. And you’ve been able to do that with a minimum of cognitive effort. And no actual expertise and no real desire to make or no commitment to making a positive change in the world. Because that’s a very, very difficult thing. It takes years to make a positive change even at a kind of a minute level of the social structure. So you’ve oversimplified the world. You get to revel in your moral superiority. And this is the real dark side of such movements. Whatever resentment you might have as a consequence of construing yourself as a victim or because of identifying with victims. That’s generated a fair bit of resentment. You can then target towards your newly discovered enemies. And resentment fueled targeting is a very dangerous phenomena. It’s the sort of thing that, well suffice it to say that it’s a very dangerous phenomena. Then what you do is repeat the game forever everywhere. And it’s a very good game in that regard because you can continually identify new domains of human achievement. And you can continually multiply the categories of winners and losers. And you can do that ad infinitum essentially. So that it’s a game that you can never, it’s a game that will never end. Which is part of the reason why I’m doing what I can to try to put a stop to it. Or at least put a stop to its perceived validity. It’s really, look, I mean you can learn to play this game in about two hours. And that’s what people are taught to do in many, many university departments now. And I think it’s absolutely pathetic. I think it’s morally reprehensible. I think it abandons the principle of individual responsibility. I think it’s intellectually specious. I think it’s hollow. I think it’s badly motivated. There’s almost no end to the number of bad things that can be said about this game. Okay, and I think it’s got out of hand. So why has it become necessary to do something about this now? Well, as I said already, I think it’s gone too far. Of course, that’s only my own personal opinion. But I’m trying to stay attentive to the psychological underpinnings of the political landscape. And it is my opinion that this has gone too far. And, you know, the PC movement was quite powerful in the 1990s, although it disappeared back into the underworld from which it emerged. And I thought maybe at that point we were done with it. But that was wrong because it’s come back with a vengeance, especially in the last five years. And I’ve been trying to sort out why that is. And here’s what I think is happening. I think that the universities, especially the radical left-leaning departments, and those would be the women’s studies departments and those sorts of places. There’s other departments that I think are also primarily responsible. There are estimates that about 20 percent of social scientists identify themselves, to use a cursed phrase, as Marxists. And, you know, I don’t think that’s a very good idea because Marxism produced the death of millions of people in the 20th century. And if you don’t think that Marxism was directly responsible for that, then I would recommend that you read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Of course, it’s 2,700 pages long, and it’s extraordinarily emotionally draining to read. But Solzhenitsyn does an unbelievably good job of detailing out his argument for why the murderous excesses of places like the Stalinist Soviet Union, and Maoist China, and Vietnam, and Cambodia, and all the other places where Marxist murders took place, weren’t aberrations in relationship to Marxist ideas, but the purest expression of the philosophy that was embodied inside that doctrine. So you can read that if you want. It’s one of the seminal books of the 20th century, and I don’t think that you can actually have a reasonable dialogue about this sort of thing if you’re not familiar with it, partly because Solzhenitsyn’s book was one of the major causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He eradicated any shreds of intellectual respectability that the doctrine upon which the Soviet Union had been built still maintained after its decades of unbelievable murderous existence. So I’d recommend that you read that before you enter into this kind of argument. But one of the things I’m going to do is to start to make some videos about Solzhenitsyn and his writings so that everybody has a chance to understand what it was that he was talking about, because 2,700 pages is a pretty long slog. So anyways, there have been many, many radical left-leaning departments training people over the last 30 years, not only in how to think, they’ve taught them how to play the PC game, but they explicitly train them how to become effective activists. And if you go on Women’s Studies websites, for example, I’ve done this with many such websites, they proudly trumpet their training of radical leftist activists, and they’re very, very good at it, make no mistake. And so I think the universities have probably trained, I don’t know exactly how to generate the estimates, I think the lower bound is about 300,000 people, and the upper bound might be 10 times that, trained them over the last 30 years. And now they exist at many levels of the social hierarchy, and you know, so at the top level of the social hierarchy, there’s our political structures, and then you can fragment that into major organizations and fragment that into minor sub-organizations and put the individuals at the bottom of that. I think that the PC game players have infiltrated our institutions at many, many levels of the hierarchy, and they’re also now writing legislation at the top, and now we’ve got a positive feedback loop going between the legislative activities at the top and the people who are acting as essentially insurgents for this movement at all the levels of the social hierarchy, and it’s producing an increasingly rigidifying positive feedback loop. I think it’s also, you could also think about it as an example of what has been described as the Long March through the institutions. You can look this up on Wikipedia, the Long March through the institutions, but we’ll look first to see what Herbert Marcuse said about it. Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is a neo-Marxist school of thought. He commented about this idea of the Long March through the institutions, which was a student named Rudi Duczki in the 1960s generated this idea. And here’s the idea. We have to work against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by boring from within, rather by doing the job, learning how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, etc., and at the same time preserve our consciousness in working with others, and that means our political consciousness. So, you know, this has happened, and it’s happened at least in part as a consequence of conscious planning. And so to me that seems potentially very dangerous because it doesn’t take that many committed people, it doesn’t take that large of a committed minority to produce substantive changes in a society. So, and we see those changes happening now, and I think they’re very detrimental to such things as free speech, and I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words and the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that’s acceptable and why it’s acceptable that people’s feelings get hurt during that combat is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat, and it’s also the only alternative because people have genuine disagreements, and if you don’t let them talk them out and reach some sort of consensus, some kind of negotiated settlement, then they can either swallow their opinions and become enraged, or they can engage in actual combat. And so I think anything that threatens freedom of speech threatens the stability of the society, and I think the PC excesses threaten freedom of speech, and I think they threaten it quite severely. I already know people, for example, at the universities, who are loathe to teach anything to do with gender or sexual identity because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, and that puts a pall over free discussion at the university on a whole array of vital issues. So, all right, so having said that, I’ve identified the PC game. I’ve identified why I think it’s dangerous and why it’s spread so rapidly. I think that now we need, at least in part, we need tactics to fight back, and so one of the things I’m going to propose is a counter game, and here’s the principles that I think the counter game has to be able to… here’s the features that the counter game has to have. It has to be playable everywhere, because obviously the PC game is playable everywhere. It has to make the point, and the point is that there is widespread opposition to these PC ideas, and that the opposition is important and needs to be attended to carefully. It has to spread fast, and it would help if it was a bit humorous, because it would be good if we could do this with a bit of detachment and some rationality and some careful argumentation and some playfulness and some… well, all of that would be real good. It’s not an easy thing to manage because it’s a serious business, but you have to keep a light touch when you’re doing this sort of thing. That’s one of the indications that you’ve actually attained some mastery over it, so keep that in mind if you’re interested in this sort of thing. So I’m going to announce Pokemon PC, and I’d like to first say that, of course, the good people who’ve produced the Pokemon artifacts in the past and products have nothing to do with this, and so they can’t be blamed for it, and I hope they’ll forgive me for using their terminology in a satirical and political manner. Everyone can play. It’s all the rage. It’s spreading like wildfire. Here are the rules to Pokemon PC. First, purchase your starter pack of Pokemon PC stickers. So I’ve put them on eBay. I’ve ordered about 5,000 of them. You can buy a starter pack of 50 or 100, and if you feel like doing that, then I would encourage you to do it. I don’t know if people will be interested in this, but it’s an experiment, considered an experiment. If you’re interested in Pokemon PC stickers, then it’s fantastic. Buy a couple of them. Give them to your friends. Advanced players can purchase the accessory packs, too. The accessory packs are larger stickers, at least to begin with, and I’ll post them relatively quickly. So here’s the sticker. So here’s the design principles. We didn’t want it to be black, red, and white, like the anti-smoking stickers, you know, it’s not an in-your-face sort of thing, and this doesn’t have to be an in-your-face sort of thing. I like the design. Some of the people who are advising and helping me have been working on that. That’s what the PC stickers look like. They’re 2 inches by 2 inches, and we’ve designed them. Well, I’ll continue with the rules of the Pokemon PC game. Okay, so there’s the starter packs. They’re eBay item 122167-023-413. I’ll, of course, post that on this YouTube website. There’s a snipply, like a bit.ly URL for that particular item. The 100 sticker item is 122167-001902. So you can buy 50 sticker packs or 100 sticker packs, and then you can start using them to play PC Pokemon. And here are the rules. First, take your starter pack of 50 to 100 stickers to school or work. It can be carried conveniently, and you can start using them to play PC Pokemon. Then, wander the halls of your institution or workplace. Be stealthful, and if you need to, whistle nonchalantly so that people don’t know what you’re up to. You lose points if you get caught too early in the game. Pay careful attention while you’re doing this. And I would say always pay careful attention. So this is the Eye of Horus, by the way. It’s an old Egyptian game. And then you can start using it to play the Pokemon game. So this is the Eye of Horus, by the way. It’s an old Egyptian god, and the Egyptians worshiped attention as their highest deity. They regarded the careful attention that individuals paid as the antidote to the corruption and stagnation of the state. So Horus was an open-eyed god who rescued his father from the underworld. And so he’s the god of attention. I guess I could think about him as the patron saint of the PC Pokemon movement. Okay, now you’re in your institution or your workplace or your school and you’re wandering around and you’re looking for posters that advertise the PC game. Now I already described what the PC game is. So you can use your judgement about what posters are designed to support that game. And I would say do it carefully. Think about it. And don’t just put the stickers everywhere, because that reduces their utility. Look at a poster. Think and consider to see if it is playing the game that I described. And if it is, then stealthily remove one of your Pokemon PCs stickers from your starter pack. Remove the backing. If you need eye protection while you’re doing that because you’re concerned about the danger, make sure that you wear it. Handle the sticker reverently. Then strike like the Cobra. That’s the sticker Cobra, by the way. And I found this guy on the right here, Mono. Mono is a Canadian hero. Mono the Air Cobra. So I guess he could be another… Superhero, I guess. Mono the Air Cobra. So you strike like Mono the Air Cobra. Canadian superheroes, by the way, are pretty rare. So it’s hard… Alright, so take your Pokemon PC sticker and carefully place it on the lower right side of the poster. I’ve put an example down here. You can see there’s an example of proper placement right there. Put the PC sticker on the lower right part of the PC game poster. Be a little subtle, okay? Don’t stick it obviously and boneheadedly in the middle. You want to let the PC game poster continue to broadcast its evil message. But you want to register your opposition. And more importantly, you want to show that someone’s paying attention. Okay, because we need to show that people are paying attention to this sort of things. I don’t think the people who are playing these games are particularly brave. And so I think if proper attention is called to what they’re doing they might wander back into the darkness that initially spawned them. Alright, and then next thing you do, I would like you to do is strike like the Cobra. Alright, and then next thing you do, I would like you to do is photograph. Use your cell phone to photograph the newly modified poster. And then I want you to prepare to upload that photo when what I hope will be the Pokemon PC app arrives. And later in the video I’m going to call for an app designer because I would like volunteers to help me design an app that has a certain number of features. And more features, if you have ideas for more features, it’s welcome. So I would ask the app producers to send me a proposal. You could either do it as volunteers or you could send me a budget. And I’ll see if I can scrounge up the money to pay for it. I can certainly use whatever revenue might be generated with the Pokemon PC stickers to generate enough revenue maybe to develop the app. So there’s an example of proper placement. Be nice and careful. Stick it on the lower right hand side. If more than one of you come across the same poster I suppose you could put another sticker on there beside it. That would register a vote, but another vote, say, against the content of that poster. But don’t use a bunch of stickers from your starter packs on the same poster. So be subtle and intelligent about all this. And careful and awake and tough. And all of the things that you should be if you’re a well-functioning individual. Alright. Then you disappear stealthily into the night like Zoro, I guess. Or maybe someone else. You can pick your stealthily disappear and emulate them. And it’s a good thing to emulate people that you admire. So pick somebody you admire and emulate that sucker. And that would be a good idea. So then, 10, play again with another poster. Yeah, and again. And then again. And then again. And then again. As long as necessary. For years if necessary. Because this is a long haul process. And this is only the starting place as far as I can tell. So I’m going to call for an app designer for all you people out there who have computer ability. I’d like you to design a Pokemon PC app that can be used as a mobile application. I would like it to be able to upload photos of Pokemon PC stickered posters. And then I want it to link to Google Maps. I don’t know how that might be done. And what I would like to have happen is that we can get a comprehensive library of PC posters. So that’s why I want you to be very careful in what you select to sticker. And that we could also make a map now of the distribution of these posters. Because then we can find out where the layers of the PC game players are. And then we can go on to the next version of Pokemon PC. Which I have to think through and which I’ll announce later. And so I would say, thanks for playing kids. And always remember, play Pokemon PC safely. Over and out.