The Cultural Bell Curve: Why Unlimited Tolerance Ends In Communism

0:00 everyone here that's a communist is fine and anyone that's not for communism is called a fascist and thrown off the roof hey there friends fans and foes of dad Saves America John paa here and I wanted to do something a little different this Friday we're a couple weeks out from the election it was a big cultural moment no doubt about it and I've been thinking a lot about the cultural message that has been delivered but also the challenges that

0:32 we faced in our culture so I've got an idea that I want to work through with you and get your feedback on because I think it might be neat but I also think it's probably got a lot of holes in it and I know that if I put it on the internet those of you that would like to poke holes will do so with diligence so here we go I'd like to propose that there's essentially three models of how

1:00 to think about culture when I say culture what I'm really talking about is what do we accept you know what are the behaviors that are celebrated in our society or discouraged and one way to think about this is along a graph now you know I'm a bit of an econ nerd so bear with me here I got my Sharpie the Y goes vertical the X goes horizontal and so along the the x

1:31 axis we're going to put a distribution of behaviors behaviors now and along the Y AIS up and down I'm going to call this social acceptance I think that the conflict of visions that has been going on in our culture is about what the shape of the

2:04 curve of behaviors and social acceptance should be and how to think about that now most of the world throughout human history has had a fairly rigid structure not perfectly rigid but I'm going to draw it for the sake of argument and it looks a little something like this there's this range of what's acceptable you know maybe

2:35 it's Mom and Dad and kids that's all right maybe it's a king and a queen lording over everyone telling them what to do all right and if you're not down with the program if you're not in the good graces of the the accepted did order you're chucked right off the edge that's it you're either in the

3:06 group or you're out we are group is tribal creatures it is how we evolved it is how most of human history has gone tribal Warfare a certain degree of War of all against all and we still see this in a lot of places around the world for example if you happen to gay and you live in Iran you're getting thrown off the building literally this is like a drawing of a thing that will actually

3:37 happen so I I don't like that I don't think that is great obviously a lot of people agree and so the response to this or the perception of this is a different graph so this the rigid building and and there's one variation of this right which is sometimes it's not exactly a cliff but it's a steep stair step you could call this a cast system like was in place in India or even in premodern

4:08 England right you've got the King You've Got The King's Court you've got the knights you've got the aristocracy and then you've got the Surfs this is feudalism looks something like the stair step so you're not immediately either in or out like in small tribes or in Iran um but you really feel it where you shift from high acceptance High approval to low in response to this was a movement I would say starting in the 19th century

4:36 and really coming to full flower in the 20th which said no no no no no that distribution I'm just going to put b along the bottom and sa on top this this distribution where we judge it shouldn't be like that at all it should be like this where wherever you are along the distribution of different behaviors is fine it's totally acceptable there's

5:09 actually nothing you can do that is more right or wrong than what I want to do this is moral relativism this is postmodernism this is communism communism says social acceptance can take many forms one of which is compensation one way you can think about social Acceptance in the society status is a kind of compensation there are actually a lot of areas where people

5:40 would rather have status than money um Academia is a great example of a place where status is often traded off for money although frankly they all still get paid too much relative to people who create a lot more value for others but they aren't making the most money you can make in the society and they're also frankly quite envious and jealous about that that's a big reason why academics hate people like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs

6:09 or the merchant class at large so they want to flatten out the distribution everything is fine there is no way to be that is any more right or wrong than any other way to be the problem that runs into is that while you could say it is a step in the right action as compared to being thrown off the building you know the bottom of the social acceptance axis is obviously death if you really aren't

6:39 socially accepted you get the death penalty in a lot of societies including our own so saying look we shouldn't be killing people in fact we shouldn't even be judging anyone it sounds good you know what also on here no shame no discomfort this is the graph of speech is violence of everything should be normalized that's what this

7:10 is the first problem it runs into without even talking about reality or human nature which is the biggest one but the first one is simple hypocrisy because as we've seen the people who want this they use a lot of words for it but but they all mean the same thing Justice Equity inclusion hey every behavior is included in this model of reality in the

7:40 postmodern Utopia the blank slate the problem is you can't actually do that and multiple people have pointed this out um one of which is Herbert maruza who noted that to maintain this vision you end up with the same thing you were trying to escape because you you end up back here because all

8:12 that you really have now is everyone here that's a communist is fine and anyone that's not for communism is called a fascist and thrown off the roof that's cancel culture that's the notion of repressive tolerance we can't tolerate the intolerant and the intolerant by those who most stridently seek this is anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders including Bernie Sanders himself actually so that

8:43 that's problem number one with uh the blank slate postmodern utopians that are really the uh the moral philosophical core of wokeism and cancel culture and all the stuff that I think we've been beaten over the head with ad nauseum to the point of majorities of basically every single group voting for Donald Trump in 2024 I think that that's the message I got from that is you know what you people talk about this but really

9:14 you're throwing us off the roof and we're sick of it we don't want this this leads me to the idea that I think we have to really confront that comports with reality I think it's best understood as the cultural bell curve and that is to say that for any activity there is going to be a a distribution of what is and is not

9:44 normal that's where the idea of normalize comes from what is accepted what is the norm we everything can't be the norm by definition I think we have to confront the reality that we end up with something that looks like this this is the cultural bell curve there is a set of activities up here that are the majority of behavior

10:15 that we admire that we celebrate that we reward and then there's stuff out here that we say no not you know don't do that and in the middle ground here is stuff that's like more like you get the side eye you know you do have a cost imposed you are a little weird you're a little different you're a little awkward you're the you're the cooky cousin so what am I talking about well

10:46 let's think of a couple different examples all of which are going to be offensive to somebody so buckle up the first one I think is obvious sexual behavior at the top is the thing that continues to make procreation possible that is Mom Dad get married first then have kids and stay

11:16 together top of the social acceptance bell curve it happens to also be the top of the human flourishing bell curve if you do that you will be happier than if you don't thems the facts that is the most well-studied social science thing around and a lot of the people that have studied it are Lefty types who don't like the patriarchy and they're forced to confront the fact that if you want happy healthy kids having mom and dad is

11:49 optimal where does that leave everybody else that's not fitting into that well you you know you used to say if you didn't get married and you were a woman you were a spinster and you're over here in the side eye C category if you were gay or if you fell in love with someone of A different race you used to be over here you know you used to be in the like ostracized maybe even physically assaulted side of the

12:12 spectrum now over time these Norms change and frankly that's where all the action is in Social Evolution you could call it progress or not but that is the battle we all face that is even the battle that the blank Slaters have asserted see that's what they were going after they were going after hey you want to change your gender you w to marry your dog I'm not going to judge it's all good man that's in the best

12:44 kind of version of that what they're going after no one should feel shame for the thing they want to do the problem is some people should feel shame for the thing they want to do that's the facts you're either going to have shame or you're going to have tyranny that's the choice we face that's what's so difficult about living in a diverse Society of actual real human beings because for starters real human beings actually end up looking something like

13:15 this we've got the norm and then we've got the outliers we've got you know polygamy and we've got divorce and we've got gay marriage which is not right at the top it's a little you know it used to be down here now it's more like here now of course if you work at OG and Ma or you watch typical commercials on television for some reason I don't know why anybody's still doing that well well then you know these two they're all

13:45 they're at the top man they're every Jaguar ad you watch and look that's a kind of progress but this is what reality actually looks like and it's actually the way reality kind of should work because so much of reality works that way before I move on from sexual mors I got to address the worst example the one that frankly as a uh sometimes UNC South Philly guy sends my head to Dark Places and that is out

14:19 here is pedopilia out here is people who are truly deranged to the point of wanting things that are criminal rapists murderers but but in the sexual domain rapists and they're out here and what's creeped so many people out is that these folks have decided under the guise of things like queer theory that that should be looked at

14:51 differently that we should even talk about it differently that they're not child Predators they're minor attracted persons this is what has been ripping our society apart is delusion I'm not saying we should lock this in stone I'm just saying we shouldn't pretend it can't exist couple more examples before we wrap things up in the domain of Health it's pretty obvious and we've seen the example of the blank slate utopians going to war on

15:23 reality behaviors social acceptance what is this well in the realm of Health at the center here is fit and thin fit and thin that's the facts that's healthier it's healthy to be thinner it's healthy to be fit I realize that people have all kinds of genetic forces at work that

15:54 make it harder for some than others but them's the facts right here is where the health is at and it used to be where the social acceptability was at there's two sides to this one which is why I put this in the middle at the sort of median the norm on one side you've got I would say too thin right over here this is anorexia this is obsessive compulsive

16:25 problems this is all the creepy models that you see in Fashion Week that it's like is this the whose vision of attractiveness is this it's men who don't like women who who put that together that's what's going on with that so that's on one side it's working out to the point of having such a low BMI that you're really unhealthy and on the other side is obesity this is another example of

16:57 where these people have screwed our society over and wrecked the culture I understand why it doesn't feel good to be shamed for being overweight or for and and as someone who has dear loved ones who have suffered with eating disorders it doesn't feel great to have your body image be a mess and to hate yourself I don't want you to hate yourself I don't want you to be dealing as with kids who are struggling with

17:29 body image but in pursuit of a world with no shame we entered a world where during the pandemic people felt uncomfortable talking about the fact that the overweight were more at risk from dying of covid that we could be healthy at any size that's false it's always going to be an open question what should should be the norm this graph I've put together here this

18:01 social acceptance this cultural bell curve has a lot of opportunity for us to fight and disagree about what should be socially accepted but what we have to do I think is make peace with the fact that there are things that should be socially acceptable and things that shouldn't be this is what all of ethics and philosophy are about this is what the Great religions struggle and grapple with trying to teach us what

18:33 should we do and what shouldn't we do and it can't all be legislated when you get into the world of we are going to resolve all these things we're going to turn our culture into this into no shame no Norms everything's fine whatever floats your boat that if that's our culture our governance looks like this that's what actually happens because when it doesn't work the reaction to the

19:04 failure ain't good one more idea before we wrap it up and that is a little different but I think it's equally important and that is not so much about behaviors as ideas now I very much believe in the Battle of ideas that we should be able to entertain any idea even even the most atrocious ones that's what free speech is all about but there is I think a

19:35 distribution here of what should be should be socially acceptable or not and my proposition is for a curve that looks something like this on the left my left is all things communism it's all things communism we tried it it's Mass murderous it doesn't work communism zero zero communism

20:05 fascism is actually has fewer dead bodies associated with it than communism communism should be right here we should be mostly exploring that in terms of why did this idea take hold why is it attractive even though it's manifestly wrong and murderous even though it can't work economically even in theory because of the problems of information and incentives that are baked into how we coordinate in a

20:36 society all of that stuff should mean the communism is over here on the Other Extreme is anarchism now why is anarchism not down to zero well for me anarchism at least acknowledges that knowledge is decentralized and dispersed and that there is some fundamental sense in which people deserve to be left alone and make decisions for themselves anarchism says there should be no rulers we should be

21:08 free to decide for ourselves what what we do where we live who we marry or not all of it everything everything should be decided voluntarily nobody's allowed to point a gun in your face and say don't do that now it should be at The Fringe because there's never been a large scale Anarchist Society and yes we have Global Anarchy there's no Global government but what we really have is global panarchy because we have a planet of governments even so still better than

21:39 communism and at the center Classical liberalism this is fundamentally properly understood americanism it is the ideas that underpin the Bill of Rights and the Constitution that all men are created equal that we have rights that mean we should be treated equally by the state but that we should also treat each other as having dignity and therefore shouldn't intrude in each other's lives um and commit acts of

22:12 aggression against each other and the state exists to protect us from the worst angels of our nature I think that that should be the most socially acceptable sort of political philosophy and in a sane academic Universe most academics would would be classical liberals and communism would be studied as something akin to the theories of where fire comes from before science figured that out and anarchism would be something for philosophy class to

22:44 imagine a world that was perfectly morally voluntary in which Free Will and moral choice guided everything that's what I got that's what I've been struggling with I am someone who really deeply values individual liberty as an essential virtue and so individual liberty actually can push you into a world that's kind of like this and there is a world in which this is a better model that world is what I call the rule of law how should our government treat

23:16 us as individuals and I think equality under the law is great I don't want our government treating each of us differently based on our characteristics I think our government should look at us as citizens and as human beings and treat us all the same but how we treat each other how we talk to our kids about what is and is not right and acceptable we're living in this world this is what Humanity looks like men and

23:47 women on average are different they're not different in ways that make us impossible to get along we need each other we are complimentary to each other in fact we our different differences don't separate us so much that great men and great women can't swap roles you can have very masculine women that achieve incredible things and very feminine men that achieve incredible things in the domains that on average men and women tend to dominate but pretending that the Sexes are this is

24:21 going to turn us into something horrible and so I think we have to live in this world we have to to be comfortable with it I don't want the Baseline of this to be death I think a good Society holds this to be true and says no no no no no what are you doing over there what are you doing with kids get out of here into the prison you go oh stealing from people robbing from people hurting

24:48 people killing people off to the Box treating people Fair treating people right doing the right thing being honest we reward that we reward those things what do you think what am I missing where does all of this fall apart help me understand this cuz I think we have lost some of our shared understanding of right and wrong in this country and we have a moment right now to to Grapple with it I think and to

25:19 maybe find some new consensus and I think our politics has rejected the blank slate I think it has I hope it has it might be the best thing to come out of 2024 and I think we should take advantage of that to reset the conversation so have at me in the comments you know I'll be there waiting for you and I hope you have a great weekend