Vladimir Lenin
As Jordan Peterson often says, biologists will be the next group targeted by the radical Left. But psychologists are in even more danger. In today's episode of the Truth Perspective we discuss a chapter in Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski's book Political Ponerology on the state of psychiatry and psychology under totalitarian regimes and what it means for us in the West.

Marx thought that human nature didn't exist and that 'consciousness' was solely determined by social forces. The postmodern left also believes that human nature can be shaped into their own image. They're wrong. But that won't stop them from trying to force-fit humans into their narrow ideological vision of what humanity should be like. And as history shows, the only way to attempt such folly is through the use of force and terror.

By looking at the state of psychiatry and psychology in former Communist nations, we can get a clue as to what they were trying to hide - and why psychology is so important when it comes to protecting ourselves from the terrors of mass ideological possession.

Tune in Saturday at 12 pm EDT as we take off the mask of totalitarian leftist ideology and see what lies beneath.

Running Time: 01:28:33

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Harrison: Karl Marx wrote:

It is not consciousness of men that determines their being but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

In other words, human nature doesn't exist. Everything is a social construct. Biology doesn't make a difference. Evolution doesn't make a difference. Heredity doesn't make a difference. Instead all our personality traits, our impulses and morals, our ways of thinking, feeling and interacting are arbitrary. Powerful people create society and society creates us. Anything we might think of as human nature can be changed if only you have power. Simple. Easy. Effective.

Of course it's nonsense. Humans have a nature and it can't be changed, only corrupted and damaged. But this is the reason why totalitarians hate biology so much and why they hate psychology even more. It's dangerous not only because it contradicts their ideology but also because it risks exposing their own psychopathology. This is the subject of a short chapter in Lobaczewski's book Political Ponerology which we'll be discussing today.

This is the Truth Perspective. I'm Harrison Koehli and joining me are Elan Martin and Corey Schink.

Corey: Hello everyone.

Elan: Hi everyone.

Harrison: I think it's been a year or more since we last devoted a show to ponerology on the Truth Perspective but I think the time has come and this will be the first of many more. Today we're going to be talking about what might be the shortest chapter in the book on psychiatry and psychology in pathocracy; pathocracy being a system of government ruled by people with personality disorders.

We won't be getting into a lot of the background information. Maybe at certain points we'll give a little bit of background, but if you want to find out all of the background, read the book because everything that comes later in the book is premised on parts that come before it and it's impossible to just talk about everything in the book when you're discussing a portion of the book. We'd have to read the entire book and then what would be the point.

So pathocrats or totalitarians don't like biology. We've seen a hint of this in the news in current events over the last year or so with rise to fame of Jordan Peterson, for example, and his repeated warnings that they're coming after the biologists next. What he means by that, from his perspective and the area that he focuses on, this postmodern neo-Marxism, is that these people have an ideology with certain fundamental, core, axiomatic beliefs about human nature or the lack of human nature, and that affects not only their approach to education and their own philosophy, but also the policies that they end up promoting and even writing, and the ideological battles they get into on the news, on university campuses and in newspapers and everywhere they have any sort of influence.

What Peterson would say is that the reason they don't like biology is because the biologists state certain facts that demolish their position because you can't believe in science and at the same time believe that gender is a social construct, for instance because the two are incompatible. One is right, one is wrong and the only way to believe that gender is a social construct is to not believe in the facts. So they have to attack constantly and they cannot cede any ground to what is just very basic scientific knowledge.

One of the things that Peterson doesn't talk about so much is what we're going to be focusing on today, and that is the role that psychology and psychiatry play in that because he would be just as correct to say that they're coming after the psychologists next, in general and not even with a particular reference to biology because as Lobaczewski discovered very early on in his career and for the entirety of his life living in Poland during the communist era there, psychology is the most censored and the most dangerous science, to a totalitarian ideological system. Why that is the case is something that we will be getting into.

To start out I want to ask you guys if anything jumped out at you in this chapter while you were reading it?

Elan: Well there are a number of things that he broadly gets into that I felt were directly relevant to the types of things that we're seeing, especially here in the US and in the west over these past few years and few decades. There was one quote in particular that jumped out at me that gave me food for thought. He writes,

Controls are exceptionally malicious and treacherous in the psychological sciences in particular for reasons now understandable to us. Written and unwritten lists are compiled for subjects that may not be taught.

This is what you were intimating a moment ago in your intro Harrison.

And corresponding directives are issued to appropriately distort other subjects. This list is so vast in the area of psychology that nothing remains of this science except the skeleton picked bare of anything that might be subtle or penetrating.

Elan: We're going to get into some of the biological and social lists of things that are verboten in the US a little later I think, but this paragraph definitely jumped out at me. I don't think that they exist as such. I think that there is a type of group-think - the psychological elites, who write manuals and the handbooks, the DSM books - that are unspoken but that are adhered to in a subconscious way by many of the people who hold positions of power in various institutions, like the National Institutes of Health among others.

So I do think that it's an unconscious adherence to subjects that shouldn't be looked into too closely or get poo-pooed right off the bat because they don't fit into a prescribed list of ideas that are acceptable. I think it exists very much on that level.

Harrison: Well just to take that apart a bit, we need to clarify or differentiate two different phenomena because what Lobaczewski's talking about is an actual pathocracy like the Soviet Union where written and unwritten lists exist. So there actually would be a list. It would be the same thing in a place like what used to be called the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, an actual totalitarian system that exists, that is totalitarian in nature. What you're talking about is more of this unconscious, internal censor, is more a product of hystericized society, what Lobaczewski would call it. That would be one that is at risk of becoming a pathocracy but is not yet a pathocracy, as defined by Lobaczewski.

Lobaczewski is talking about the full shebang when he's talking about a pathocracy. This would be a totalitarian system where everything is controlled, where every position of authority from your local village, your local town council and even lower than that, every neighbourhood, is occupied by a representative of the political party that rules the entire country and is this enmeshed, total network of control to the point of the person on the street where you can't walk down your sidewalk without wondering whether someone from the party is watching you and will report you to the authorities for the wrong look that you give someone. They're vastly different phenomena that will nevertheless share some characteristics in common.

For example, he gives the example later on in the chapter of the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes, for example as was used in the Soviet Union and in the satellite Soviet communist countries, the use of a psychiatric diagnosis as a way of putting away political dissidents. These would be political dissidents with no psychological abnormalities who are labeled by an official psychiatrist as being schizophrenic or some other category of mental illness and then confined to a psychiatric ward as a substitute for putting them in prison, just an excuse to get them out of the way.

Lobaczewski mentions that this sort of thing, accusations of someone being mentally ill and using that as a way of taking them out of regular society, is used in practically every country that has psychiatric institutions. It's a universal problem that then becomes actual government policy or even if not official and explicit policy, then an implicit and commonly agreed on but not publically acknowledged policy of putting away dissidents or using the psychiatric system. So every country would have examples of the abuse of psychiatry but not to the level and to the systematic degree that the Soviet Union would have had.

So I think that's a clarification. So when we're talking about the DSM, and the same thing in the media where you have this unconscious or unstated abiding of certain rules and biases, then has the effect of being a form of censorship but there's no government censor telling you what you can or can't say it. It's just commonly accepted. We've seen this really rise to prominence in the last year-and-a-half where you can just tell that the media is following a script that no one is necessarily given them, like the one news organization that has thousands of local subsidiaries where they literally just gave the same script to everyone. That's where you get those clips that are on the Daily Show and that show up on your social media feeds of all these different talking heads on the media saying the same sound byte, the same exact sentences, reading from a script. That's a part of the corporate nature of those enterprises.

But aside from that, when everyone is just following the same general idea, that's like this narcissistic bubble of reality that forms around certain ideas when people go crazy. It is mass hysteria. It is a social contagion that is targeted in the last year-and-a-half most primarily against Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, probably the most demonized and maligned human being on the planet, and of course Donald Trump. I'd say that at the very least Trump's behaviour and his public statements provide the hook to latch onto because he does actually do and say ridiculous things so at least that's understandable whereas with a guy like Putin or even Assad, there isn't much of a hook. The hook has to be manufactured and created either through blatant fiction - literally making things up - or by this mental gymnastics of interpretation that then creates something out of something entirely different.

Elan: And extreme repetition I would add.

Corey: I'd just like to touch on what combines the hysterical process with the pathocracy or how they blend together. Lobaczewski talks about that being a revolution. That pathocratic government will come about after the hysteria reaches such a pitch that revolutionaries end up taking power by force. I just want to talk about how these revolutionaries have two fundamental reasons, it seems to me, that they attack and completely subject the psychological and biological sciences to absolute scrutiny and eradicating any real critical thought about the psyche and human development.

It seems to me that one of the reasons is that these revolutionaries are, for the most part, probably the worst examples of human character. For the most part they're violent, paranoid, schizoidal, a lot of them. They're willing to do anything to come to power. They no doubt, looking back on the Soviet Union, Lenin, Trotsky and those various revolutionaries, different student revolutionaries, they have skeletons in their closets. They don't want anybody to analyze their power platform based on their actual character because people would probably be revolted and disgusted.

On another note, also they don't want people to have access to the information that would be required for them to grow and prosper and to evolve as a society because that would negate their power over them. So they use terror and all these different ways of controlling society because that's what they want. That's their primary goal based on numerous biological and psychological deficits that Lobaczewski attests to throughout his book; the different character defects, brain lesions and all sorts of things that for a pathocrat who has such an exalted self-image, so narcissistic that they believe they can dictate to society, to the world, to reality, what reality really is. To them, even a mere mention of them having any sort of defect could lead to your death. I think that is a fundamental biological reason they have an imperative to crush the real functioning social sciences and to divert it into their airy-fairy ideological realm where they can maintain this sense of power, of utopia, that they are kings of the universe.

Harrison: And that's the main point I think, of this chapter; the reason that pathocrats target psychology so hard is because it is within psychology that the possibility exists of, as Lobaczewski puts it, diagnosing the system and thereby potentially defeating the system because that where their greatest weakness lies of being exposed for what they are, having their ideology exposed as a mask that is covering over basic psychopathology.

If that were to be the case and if that were to be popularly understood, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. They wouldn't have their ideology as a fallback in order to give them a sense of legitimacy. It would be literally like people finding out that the mafia are ruling the country completely, not just colluding with certain elements of the government or the security services. Literally, the government is a mafia from the top to the bottom.

The way Lobaczewski approaches this idea in this chapter is to show the kind of prohibitions on the practice of psychology and then what that suggests about the system itself because of those prohibitions. Elan you read that quote to start out with, about the psychiatrist's curriculum being really limited, to read a little bit that expands on that he says that:
a psychiatrist's required curriculum contains neither the minimal knowledge from the areas of general, developmental and clinical psychology nor the basic skills in psychotherapy. As a result only mediocre scientists really get anywhere in the system and even the good ones could [because this has changed in the last 30 years] even the good psychiatrists become a psychiatrist, he says, after a course of study only a few weeks long. Or a couple of months.
So you go in for essentially what would be not even a full term of your first year of university and there you go, you've got your papers. You can practice. What better way to keep the entire psychological and psychiatric community from being truly effective than to totally limit their professionalism and their competence? They basically kept the entire field stupid in order to prevent it from progressing to the point where it could diagnose the system.

Now ironically they were successful and unsuccessful at the same time. They were successful because they managed to keep a lid on the development of these sciences to such a degree that the communist system was in operation in various countries for anywhere from 40 to 70 years before the entire system fell down. And even after that there were remnants of course but by 1990 it was pretty much done.

He continues a bit after that quote that I just read, giving some specific examples. He says that the prohibitions on psychology and psychiatry engulf depth psychology, the analysis of the human instinct of substratum together with the analysis of dreams. Just to get into those a bit, depth psychology is commonly traced back to Freud, Jung and Adler because those were the first psychiatrists to get into the issue of the unconscious. So today depth psychology would be anything dealing with the depths of the human unconscious. That has grown wider than the realm of just Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. Today we would be able to include under depth psychology, as we mentioned last week, System 1 and System 2 ideas, the idea that there are unconscious drives and motivations that are influencing human behaviour. It is not just conscious rationality. There is more to it and it's hidden in the murky depths of the subconscious mind. That gets into why analysis of dreams was outlawed in psychology because analysis of dreams is a look at that subconscious, the signals given to the conscious mind from the subconscious mind.

Then probably the most important, the analysis of the human instinctive substratum. For Lobaczewski what the instinctive substratum is, is our entire phylogenetic evolutionary history that has provided us with our human nature and that would be from the very basics of human consciousness and psychologies. That would be the way in which we have what are called associations, so the way the mind works to connect certain ideas, memories because memories are a type of association and instinctive and emotional functions like the common situations in which emotions are triggered and manifested in the body and in the human consciousness. Basically just all the things that make humans human with reference to our psychology.

The reason that's so important is that it's by studying the anomalies of the instinctive substratum and where we approach the realm of psychopathology and personality disorders, because according to Lobaczewski's perspective, personality disorder would be some kind of defect in the emotional instinctive substratum of human consciousness. We can see that most prominently in psychopathy where there's this complete lack of this kind of emotional colouring of consciousness because without that emotional nature we cannot empathize or sympathize with other people. We cannot see other people as other people. Other people have no emotional significance to us.

So there's that essential part of human nature that is missing and twisted in a psychopathic individual and he of course lists his breakdowns of what we'd call personality disorders. He called them psychopathies and characteropathies. But these are different types of anomalies within the instinctive substratum. What he called schizoid psychopathy, today we'd call that schizoid personality disorder. We've got schizotypal traits and we've got Asperger's and various autistic disorders under this heading.

This would be a muted emotional nature, a kind of introversion that manifests in a particular way. So you can have these odd, strange individuals who, because of their emotional distance from ordinary people, can, in Lobaczewski's analysis, create ideologies that are slightly anti-human, that lacks something essential about human nature and the complexity of human society and individuals and those philosophies can then be manipulated and used by more ruthless individuals to take over a nation.

Just on the more local level, these kinds of individuals can be victims of intrigue and manipulation. We see this, for example, in school shootings and even in some terror attacks where you have what seems to be this easily manipulatable individual who probably has some form of autism or schizoid personality who is manipulated into this situation by a more ruthless and manipulative individual like a psychopath and who then commits an atrocity, probably most prevalent I think these days, at least in the west in the school shooter phenomenon where you look at a lot of these guys in the past 10 or 20 years have really matched the definition of schizoid as Lobaczewski gives it.

So that's the instinctive substratum. He also says that consequently even research on the psychology of mate selection is frowned upon at best. Now, we can see this very phenomenon on the left today in western culture where the whole postmodern neo-Marxist movement is frowning upon any studies that point out a biological, heritable difference between men and women. These are the kinds of results that you get when you study mate selection, for example, because mate selection studies really show that there are biological, instinctive differences between the sexes.

To give an example of one of those findings, it would be that for example, women tend to select mates that are at or above their social level and men tend to select mates that are at or below their social level. That seems to be a general trend that has been followed by humanity for as far back as we can go. Even genetics studies bear this out.

Then one other area of science that he says was banned was twin studies, the study of twins. He says that while lecturers could, at his time, refer to twin studies in a lecture, they couldn't publish anything in print. So they couldn't publish any twin studies. So he says it was a shock when he went to New York in the early '80s and he was walking down the street in Queens and he some young black man came up to him and handed him a communist newspaper.

When he looked at the newspaper, at the back there was what he calls a quite well worked out summary of investigations performed at the University of Massachusetts on identical twins raised separately. These investigations furnished empirical indications for the important role of heredity and the description contained a literary illustration of the similarity of the fates of twin pairs. Then he comments "How far ideological disoriented the editors of this paper must have been to publish something which could never have appeared in the area subjected to a supposedly communist system."

So here were these American communists talking about twin studies having no idea that if they were actually to go to a communist country, they would never be able to even read that information. He talks about that a couple of times in this chapter, the disconnect between the foreign pro-communist propaganda in the west and how far removed that was from reality and how he'd talk to people about communism and they'd be sure that in communist countries psychology and psychiatry must be flourishing and the sciences must be great and they must have good social services providing psychological care to people who need it and mentoring to young people. He'd kind of burst their bubble and say "All that stuff is banned. We're not allowed to do anything. You get taken away to a dark place for even talking about those things." All the people he talked to in New York would be shocked. "Oh, why is that?"

And that's the question that he's setting out to answer. Why is that? It's because all of these things have something in common in what they are preventing people from knowing and from coming to know and that gets to the big one. He said that the study of psychopathy, in particular, was totally verboten. You could not publish any studies on psychopathy whatsoever. It was a completely blackout on that subject. Why? Why would they ban that? It's because psychopaths in such a system rise to the top so they would not allow a description of themselves to get, first of all, into the academic world and the professional psychiatric community, and from there into the general population. That would just be too dangerous.

Corey: Well yeah. Psychopathy is what gives these systems that distinct sadistic edge that differentiates them from so many other governmental systems. That's what separates a pathocracy from a crumbling social order. But I just wanted to go back to something that you were talking about earlier when you were discussing the differences between the different character disorders and normal people.

In the book Lobaczewski discusses the fact that in this chapter he says that these pathological individuals consider themselves normal and they consider normal people abnormal. When you look at the trajectory of western society today, you look at the fact that Jordan Peterson has come out and he states the most banal, fatherly advice and society goes absolutely nuts because they think that he is the devil incarnate, that he is abnormal, the people that he's speaking to, that he's giving basic advice to, are abnormal.

I think that one of the issues that separates the normal from the pathological is the fact that normal people accept certain conditions. They accept the mundane life that we have, that we work and have families and die but we have these emotional connections. We learn as we go. We face challenges together. We find comfort and integrity in facing challenges together.

But in a mundane sort of way. It's much more gradual. You look at families that over generations go from poverty. Maybe one member of the family works his way into a better paying position and then that branch of the family is in a better economic position, but over time that's just what people do. You work and you live and it's mundane and its normal. But to the pathological individual, life lacks that dimension and everything becomes some form of activism.

They become activists, some of them for what could nominally be good causes but they are agitating based on this defective instinctive substratum that we discussed and that's all that they can do. The normal human world for them is ugly. It's disgusting. It's something to be frowned on. It's the deplorables. "They're the weirdos, the peasants. We need to go save the peasants" or "We need to educate these stupid lower classes".

That bent is what really drives that hystericization process, it seems to me, and then you end up with the kind of situation that we have today where people can't even speak about basic, fundamental psychological issues without people feeling like you're attacking the social justice movement because for so many people, that's all that they have. For a lot of people who have been indoctrinated, they've been brain damaged to a certain extent by these social justice warriors. That's their drive. That's their life. Outside of that there's no meaning. They don't have a foundation to draw on.

Harrison: I want to make another differentiation in what you're saying because I think there are two streams of people. There are two separate phenomena that are going on there and they get intermingled. This is referencing back several chapters in the book where Lobaczewski talks about the cycle of hystericization and what happens in a society is that you get a hystericized upper class. We could think about that today. We could label them the establishment. These would be people in the media. These would be fairly well off left-leaning politicians or just citizens. You can get the same thing on the right but in the left it's really prominent and really noticeable.

It creates this kind of tribal bubble where they perceive themselves a certain way. They have their own world view and no one else really fits into it. So they have no real connection with the real working class or the people that they say that they represent or that they claim to represent and they actually treat them with a certain amount of disdain, like Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters deplorables. But at the same time you have what is exacerbating that and what is behind the surface of many of the more activist elements within that class which is actual personality disordered psychopathology.

And that's where you get this really distorted world view that forms from the bottom up, from the very nature of these people's consciousness where they are looking at the world not only from this self-hypnotic bubble of this world that they've created, but just from the very way that they see the entire world. These would be people like Samenow describes in Inside the Criminal Mind. People with a criminal mind look at normal people who are relatively or even averagely conscientious and industrious, people like you said, who build their careers, who work hard, starting a business, having some degree of success - it doesn't have to be a huge degree of success.

It's not like they necessarily go on to lead a Fortune 500 company or something, but just people who establish a career or make enough to support their family or to lift themselves out of poverty and to enter the middle class. They look at those people and there's this strange contradictory attitude that they have. On the one hand it's as if they want that for themselves. It looks as if they admire such people on the one hand but on the other hand there is a disdain and a resentment towards those people because they want all the good things that those people have but without doing any of the hard work.

Corey: They seem like suckers.

Harrison: Yeah. Those people are suckers. So for the real criminals, not necessarily just people with certain of these personality disorders, for the real criminal mind, they see those people as suckers for having to work for that whereas for the criminal, for the psychopath, they think that they deserve that just by virtue of who they are. They're so great, the world owes them. The world should give them that just because of who they are, just what a great person they are, they deserve it.

So there's this disconnect, this rift in the instinctive substratum between what a normal person does, how a normal person goes about life in general, and the self-entitled, arrogant position of the personality disordered criminal who looks at them as a sucker and as a potential victim and target because they will take what you have either through lowbrow, common criminal methods or by gaining political power where they can do it using the long arm of the state.

Elan: It just seems that everything about western culture is designed to induce the criminal mind to some degree.

Harrison: Back that up. {laughter}

Elan: Corey, you mentioned Jordan Peterson, in the sense that our priorities, just getting the basics down has become labeled as this far right cause in western culture. You're not allowed to think on the most basic levels of self-improvement because it isn't what you think it is. It's not self-improvement, it's actually a far-right cause of some sort.

Harrison: But again, that's coming from this tiny establishment class that presumes to speak for everybody when if you look at what's actually going on, on the ground, most ordinary people just live by that philosophy. They're trying to put their lives together. They're trying to be successful. They're trying to be conscientious and in general that tends to work. If you're working at some dumb job and you just put your mind to it, you'll get promoted.

You might get a better position. You'll get paid more. You'll get more responsibility. The way the world actually works is way far removed from what the people, for example criticizing Jordan Peterson, think the way the world works. They're just this tiny group of strange radicals with these weird viewpoints that happen to have all of the media on their side because they are the media.

So when you turn on the news, you'll get their perspective when it has very little in common with what normal people actually do and how they live their lives.

Elan: Absolutely. They not only have the media in control at this point but they also have academia. Academia in the US and in the west has become the platform for these very vociferous voices that are meant to shut down any kind of thought in this direction. So you have that going on. You have a lot of people like Peterson, paying attention to how academia has become this platform for liberal thinking and shutting down thought in all these different areas. It reminds me of another portion in Political Ponerology where, having gone to university, Lobaczewski experiences his first run-in with the professor who spouts nonsense for hours at a time a few times a week and ideologically brainwashes those who are brainwashable in these classes.

So this is a textbook case of how indoctrination is working in the US among those young people here who are ostensibly going to expand their view of the world and acquire self-knowledge but are being subverted by ideas that are nonsensical in the sense that they're not based on science or fact and research but are merely assertions, vociferous, emotional assertions that are telling these young people "You should think this way or you are part of the problem". "Well who wants to be part of the problem? I think I'll just start to think this way."

So this is a major cultural, societal effort in brainwashing that in large part the cause of a lot of the demonstrations and the movements that we're seeing today. And it has quickly devolved into violence and shutting down by any means necessary those voices that would seek to offer very basic explanations or points of view of the types of problems that we're viewing in the US and the west today.

Harrison: Well it's really scary because the seeds of all of what Lobaczewski is talking about have been growing for years in the states. So when you look at what's happening in the universities and the rejection and the disdain for biological science, just as one example, that is a very dangerous trajectory to be heading down. You can see more seeds, not in the sense of a directive from above, but just in the way things are organically growing. To get to that point I'm going to use an example from Solzhenitsyn. He talked about how in the Soviet Union, the criminal class was referred to by a specific phrase that the communists used for the class of just inveterate career criminals known as the Socially Friendly.

The only reason that they were criminal was because of the social construction that made them criminal. That would be the previous society, the previous non-communist society. So first of all that was the only thing that made them criminal. So second, they were redeemable because by creating the communist utopia, then they no longer had the negative effects of prior civilization that would make them criminal. So they were in essence let off the hook. While they may have been arrested, and they were arrested for various crimes, they were given the preferential treatment in the prison camps. They were the ones that ruled over the political dissidents that made up the majority of the people who were arrested.

So the criminals had this elevated status within Soviet society. There's the seeds of something like that going on today. This ties into another phenomenon that Lobaczewski talks about regarding the pseudo-diagnosis that gets applied to psychopathy. He says "One of the says that psychopathy is masked in a pathocracy is by the creation of a diagnosis that is broad enough that it combines several different mental disorders from various different causes and that is the catchall phrase that is applied to what would include the phenomenon of psychopathy."

We've seen that over the last several decades in western societies with the label of antisocial personality disorder for example. So you have this diagnosis of antisocial personality. The problem with that diagnosis is that there can be several different disorders going on or causes causing that antisocial behaviour that would lead to that diagnosis but there's no way just with that diagnosis to isolate the phenomenon of psychopathy. So psychopathy can hide within that diagnosis without being totally identified and recognized by the general population. It's like "Oh that's just an antisocial person". "Well what's hiding within that antisocial personality disorder?" "Oh well there are psychopaths there." "Oh, well what's psychopathy?" Oh there are more features to psychopathy than just anti-sociality. Even then you can get some psychopaths that don't really present with the typical antisocial personality characteristics. They're much more cool and calculating. They just don't totally resemble that diagnosis.

What I see happening in the leftist activist movement is a similar excuse-making for the criminal class, for the criminal elements within their own movement. There are a couple of examples of this, one I just saw recently. It was one of those funny little clips of someone going around a big protest and interviewing people and asking them what they think and trying to poke holes in their beliefs. So this one was about immigration. This guy was interviewing, asking questions to a couple of the people in this protest and he asked something to the effect of "So should MS13 be let in the country?" and the guy says "Everyone should come". So he says "Should ISIS be let in the country?" and the guy says "Everyone should be allowed in".

So this guy was saying that ISIS and MS 13 should be allowed in because it's bad to not let immigrants come to the country. So this guy in particular was letting his ideological beliefs take on more importance than identifying a very dangerous criminal class who causes absolute mayhem in people's lives through murder, torture, kidnapping and drugs smuggling and everything that just makes life miserable for the people around them. That's just written off, not even acknowledged as being a problem.

You see that as well in the protest movement itself where violence and the radical activist revolutionary approach is excused because of the great cause that the people are fighting for. So that's why people on the left will make excuses for Antifa and for punching Nazis and for going to protests in masks with flag poles and other weapons and causing - again - violence and mayhem and flattening out the bell curve where everyone is perceived as just these blank slate personalities and given the same social status within the movement, without making the differentiation that some of these people are psychopaths or just criminals who are dangerous, not only to society in general but to their fellow protestors. Because if they get what they want, it's that kind of person that is then going to turn on the people within the movement who aren't like them.

So that guy that was saying "OH bring MS13. Bring ISIS in", he'd be one of the first people to be executed if there were an Antifa revolution that took over the country. He'd be thrown to the wolves in short time. He'd be thinking "Oh well jeez, what didn't I see? How didn't I see this coming?" Well it's because you're a total freakin' idiot! It doesn't require much common sense to be able to see that happening, to look at the guy next to you and to say "That guy is scary. Maybe I should avoid that person. Maybe we should do something to get people like that out of our movement." But no. It's that kind of person that is inspiring the movement in the first place and turning it in that direction.

And that's what the people in the movement can't see because they are ideologically possessed and because they think that the great inspiration for why they're doing this is more important than cleaning out their own house and their own protest movement and realizing that within that flock of sheep, there is a wolf and several wolves and those are the ones running the show.

Corey: That's really fascinating when you bring up the topic of ideological possession because I've been reading about a psychologist who is actually a physiologist and people probably know his name, Ivan Pavlov and his research on dogs. He gets an honorable mention in Lobaczewski's book. When you read about what he was doing, a lot of his studies could be read as allegories for the social chaos that led up to and followed the Russian Revolution that led to the eventual instalment of Lenin in power and then Stalin butchering everyone and cementing his own power.

But he began his work on dogs in terms of understanding their physiology and their temperaments in around 1900. He continued that work for pretty much the rest of his life. He kept developing and developing his theories even as all society was going to pot all around him. He had one son die in a war against the Reds and then he had another son who had to flee into exile. His family was ruined. But he established that dogs had numerous different temperaments. He did do a lot of research on dogs but it's clear that his goal was not to understand dogs but was to understand the human psychical experience, as he put it. He won a Nobel prize in 1903 for these experiments which actually helped save him from the Soviet machine.

But he developed the theory of transmarginal inhibition which basically is a step-by-step process of ideological possession. It begins with establishing that dogs subjected to numerous amounts of stresses would succumb to ideological possession depending on their type and on their physical condition. He named these three different stages the equivalent phase, the paradoxical phase and the ultra paradoxical phase, which if you think about it in the allegorical terms of people going crazy all around you, it makes a lot of sense.

So in the equivalent phase, all stimuli of whatever strength, results only in the same amounts of saliva being produced. In the human being a similar phenomenon is observed when a normal person is in a state of extreme fatigue. They report that there is very little difference between their emotional reactions to either trivial or important experiences. Now if you look at this and you think of stimuli in terms of the stimuli from reality, from your own senses or the stimuli from your ideology, then you start to read a little bit in between the lines of what he's talking about.

In the paradoxical phase he says when even stronger stresses are applied, the equivalent phase passes into the paradoxical phase. In this state weak stimuli or lies that are emerge in your head, they don't actually come from reality, can produce a stronger reaction than a strong stimuli, than reality itself. The reason for this is that the strong stimuli only increase the state of protective inhibition while the weak stimuli can still produce positive responses. When a human being is in this stage their behaviour can reverse in a way that seems totally irrational to an outside observer.

Then the ultra paradoxical phase is where these conditioned responses just reverse to negative responses and negative ones to positive ones, or if you look at it ideologically, reality takes a back seat completely to your ideology and now you're accepting MS13 into the country, ISIS. "Let's go hold hands with ISIS and go for a stroll in the park. I'll bring my kids. Maybe ISIS can babysit for me sometime." Then the dog or person may suddenly find that they like what they formerly detested and loathe what they formerly loved. In this stage the organism's response becomes opposed to all its previous conditioning, which was based on reality. Ever since you were brought up you were conditioned in certain ways and a lot of it could have contributed to psychopathological conditions which he wrote on for his entire life; trying to figure out how people could be conditioned in such a way that they became these paranoid maniacs like Lenin and that lead the country to ruin.

It's really fascinating reading about his life because he says that his unvarying goal was "To bring the obtained objective results of physiological experiments to our subjective world. Only one thing in life is of essential interest for us, our psychical experience" and understanding that experience and then also being able to really rally the public behind this completely objective reality that was behind the illusionary ideological mess that they'd gotten into and that he railed against his entire life until he died and was protected due to the Nobel prize.

Harrison: His prominence.

Corey: His prominence. He was the father of Russian physiology and he was the first Russian to win the Nobel prize so neither Lenin nor Stalin could do anything to harm him. For them he was just another part of the mask.

Harrison: I want to comment a bit on those stages, the equivalent, paradoxical and ultra paradoxical, to bring in some of the things we've just been discussing over the past few weeks. One would be the normal encounter of reality is as Peterson would describe, in the forum of action we are seeing not objects but valences of value. So we're seeing things that are more important, more valant to our consciousness than others. In a normal example, for example we use going through the woods and seeing a snake. That snake is an immediate threat. It presents itself as extremely valuable in the negative sense because it is a threat.

In normal society we would see that in our interactions with other people. Some people would put up some red flags and make us suspicious or fearful for them, for good reason, because there are dangerous snakes that live among us and that we should be afraid of because they can do terrible things and they do do terrible things. So through this process of transmarginal inhibition, like you said, an analogy or perhaps a direct connection can be made to what Lobaczewski talks about with the hystericization cycle where there are a few processes and ideas that go together.

So there's the hystericization. There's hypnotism and suggestion and mental illness. These all seem to be connected to the point where that encounter with reality slowly gets turned upside down. Like Gurdjieff would say, turns topsy-turvy, upside down and we see reality upside down. So through this process where first of all, the dangerous elements within society would be seen as threatening and as not beneficial or you wouldn't want them in your life, it gets to the point where that big threat has less of an effect on your nervous system. So you're seeing it as less of a threat to the point where - how did he describe it? - a minor stimulus provokes an increased reaction. So you're no longer reacting in a heightened way to the actually dangerous parts of society. You're reacting to something that is in fact benign and harmless.

So for example Jordan Peterson, societally he is harmless. He is actually beneficial for society and for what he does for individuals to get their lives together. He shouldn't even be a blip on people's radars because he is no personality-disordered threat. He is not one of the things that naturally we would be reacting to in such a negative way. So we have this paradoxical reaction where it's blowing things way out of proportion. You see that on the left all the time. They're making mountains out of molehills all of the time. In every area of whatever they look at, they're finding mountains and pretty much all the time, there's nothing there.

Then it gets to the point where the ultra paradoxical might be - correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't really internalized the ideas yet - but where you would see this revolutionary figure, for example, and then you would see that person as the good person. So then you would be idolizing a guy like Lenin or Stalin, or in a more minor way, idolizing the violent people at Antifa rallies, where your perception of reality has been turned completely upside down and you're seeing threats as gifts and the true gifts in society as total threats. That is how societies fail.

Elan: It's still remarkable to me that those people who supported Hillary Clinton for the presidential election refuse to see all the mounting data of how criminally she behaved.

Harrison: Literally. She is a criminal.

Elan: She's an arch-criminal of the worst kind and it wasn't only in the goal of enriching herself, she was arguably one of the architects of destroying Libya, of destroying Syria. At a very basic level, political intervention, military intervention into these countries is evil. And yet she, the liberal, the champion of women's rights, of minorities, of economic equality, very superficial kind of assessment of what she's all about and you have a whole percentage of the population of people who just can't go there.

Rather than assign responsibility and guilt to her and her behaviour, would project all of these negative attributes to Trump who is trying to go in the other direction, all appearances aside. Like you were saying Harrison, the term snowflake to describe many liberals in the US pretty much describes it well. These people are hypersensitive to minor perceived insults to their being and they're not developing any kind of natural skin that would enable them to exist in the world in any kind of functional or normal sense.

Just getting back to what you were saying earlier Corey, it's very interesting. Pavlov's research brings up the question of what are those stresses that are creating this transmarginal inhibition? What are the things that are breaking down the resiliency, natural, normal responses to things? I would say a lot of it has to do with the wholesale lies on virtually everything {laughter} that we're being exposed to, that we're being told about in the news. This creates a cognitive dissonance among many people where they're being trained to no longer recognize what truth is, or being told that there is no truth. That's the answer. There is no truth so why even try to find it?

Corey: Right. I think there's definitely that. He was writing about after the collapse of the Russian empire which was a multi-ethnic empire. It had class issues. It was trying to industrialize and modernize after the Crimean War, which was just a profound failure to the Czar. He decided that it was time to institute great grand reforms in order to catch up with the rest of the world.

In 1920 Pavlov wrote that one of his assistants demonstrated empirically that conditioned reflexes could produce experimental neurosis, specifically saying that "Life situations that excite us to a great degree, for example in the case of cruel insults and terrible grief, while also requiring us to inhibit, to suppress natural reactions to them, often lead to a profound and long-lived disturbance of nervous and psychic balance."

He was writing about a black box, the nervous system, the structure of the brain, the neurotransmitters. There were advances in that direction but it was still pretty much a black box. You weren't quite sure what was going on in there. But at the same time he was observing that these basic life issues can cripple weak-willed or unhealthy animals that have what he termed a poor temperament or poor conditioning.

So all of those issues that come with a large society have the capability of producing this kind of ultra paradoxical type event but it's also when you add that criminal element that we were talking about, that you get people who are actively adding to the chaos and who are actively manipulating it and who are actively seeking to institute their own delusions on everybody else, that you get that revolutionary fervour that only leads to that pathocracy that we were talking about.

So I think that the lies are a big part of it because, as he wrote, in the case of cruel insults that require us to inhibit and suppress natural reaction because it's society or it's what we have to do in order to go to work or whatever and we know that this war is based on lies or anything, that can have an effect. But that's only one of innumerable types of insults.

Harrison: I want to read one little paragraph from Ponerology where he talks about Pavlov. So he says,

Ivan Pavlov comprehended all kinds of paranoid states in a manner similar to this functional model [that Lobaczewski described above] without being aware of this basic and primary cause.

I'll speak to that after I finish reading.

He nevertheless provided a vivid description of paranoid characters and the above-mentioned ease with which paranoid individuals suddenly tear away from factual discipline and proper thought processes. Those readers of his work on the subject were sufficiently familiar with Soviet conditions gleaned yet another historical meaning from his little book.

Basically that he was talking about Lenin a lot of the time through his description of these paranoid dogs because Corey and I have been reading this book Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science by Daniel P. Todes which is the first comprehensive biography on Pavlov ever written in English and it's really good. In one small anecdote Todes says,

One of Pavlov's lifelong metaphorical habits was to view dogs as people and people as dogs. Pavlov's thinking featured the constant conceptual interplay between experiences with and understandings of, dogs and people. Thus he designed and interpreted lab experiments by reference not only to broader social and political issues but also to his own personality and inner life. As he once put it, 'that which I see in dogs, I immediately transfer to myself since, you know, the basics are identical'. By the same logic he also frequently transferred to dogs that which he saw or sensed in himself and the people around him.

I just thought that was funny. So we wonder what kind of dog Lenin was. But the reference that Lobaczewski made about the process that he's talking about, this would be another reason for how this kind of transmarginal inhibition plays out and this wouldn't be necessarily a societal influence but really on the personal/interpersonal level, because he's talking about functional paranoia which is acquired through the influence of say, paranoid parents.

So the way that Lobaczewski describes it, when you have a parent with a paranoid personality disorder or paranoia that has been passed on from their parents, that will have an effect on the child and while he doesn't use the term, it sounds to me as if he's describing post-traumatic stress disorder. I think PTSD would fall really closely in line with transmarginal inhibition as Pavlov described it. So there's this intergenerational effect on people that creates this hampering of their thought processes and their emotional response that then would be visible in mass social movements.

So a lot of the people that we might see in protest movements, for example, might be the way they are, not necessarily because of things going on in the world and in the news - of course that would have an effect - but because of their childhoods. Not only that, other effects like Adrian Raine describes; all the things that contribute to or have an effect on your brain's functioning and how that has its effect on the way you behave and on criminality.

Corey: I'd just like to add that that reminds me of what Pavlov wrote in the paradoxical phase; when strong stimuli only increase the state of protective inhibition while weak stimuli can still produce positive responses. If you think about strong stimuli in terms of the reality that's facing you, then it's easier to turn to illusions that are comforting, that are protecting your nervous system from shut down in the face of a reality that's just too complex. There are social issues that are out of control. This illusionary ideology that comes up is a palliative for your nervous system.

Harrison: Before we move on, just to flush out that PTSD comment I made, the reason I see that correspondence would be like a soldier with PTSD responding to a backfiring car, for instance. If it was really a gun, he would have that fear response to the real stimuli but he also has a paradoxical response - I think I'm using the word correctly - to a stimulus that isn't really a threat. Someone who doesn't understand what the person is going through would say "Oh, you're overreacting. You're seeing something that's not there. That stimulus shouldn't be provoking the response that we see happening in you."

Well it's because something fundamentally has been mis-wired in their nervous systems where, like Pavlov saw with his dogs, they are responding to minimal stimuli with an over-strengthened response.

Elan: Well I think that would be a good point to talk a little bit about Adrian Raine and his research. He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. He had been looking into all of the various types of biological, neurological influences that go into creating a violent person who may present as a psychopath or antisocial and it's a really fascinating book because there are all kinds of considerations that he presents with a lot of data that seems to be coming to the fore right now in awareness among some who are open to facts and science and are willing to question what creates an antisocial person, what creates the impetus to commit violence among some.

It's not nearly as black and white as one would suspect. You can't merely dismiss somebody with the designation of psychopath. There are a lot of conditions that exist genetically. You can be influenced by a certain amount of toxification through heavy metals that might influence your thinking. You mentioned before a preverbal kind of PTSD Harrison. There are things that we're affected by at a very early stage in childhood that may go on to affect how much attention we're able to give certain things, what our level of arousal is. He points to the idea that there is a lot that occurs at a very young age that may shape the behaviour of a person to seek high levels of arousal. What that means is in order to feel stimulated, in order to feel alive in some sense, you have teenagers who are acting out in certain ways, who are behaving violently, who are finding outlets in destructive behaviour. So really a fascinating look at all those things. He poses a lot of good questions.

I thought there was one interesting quote that suggested how he came against a pathocracy in the medical establishment when he was trying to put forth some of these ideas in the mid-'90s. He writes,
In 1994 I presented my research findings from Denmark at the annual meeting in San Francisco of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I showed that a combination of birth complications interacted with early maternal rejection in predisposing babies to be violent offenders 18 years later.
He and other researchers have followed the lives of people after a number of years to see how they were behaving and why. So this is backed up by a lot of his research. He goes on to say,
An article in Science in March that year published a figure illustrating my main findings under the headline "War of Words Continues in Violence Research". It reported my own hope that this new biosocial research could lead to 'feasible, practical and benign way' of preventing violence. Nevertheless, as Science reported, it was subjected to 'a unified and outspoken assault' by other scientists at the meeting who characterized my findings as 'racist and ideologically motivated'. My sample was all white so targeting minorities was not the issue. Instead, the findings suggested that biology worked in concert with social influences and that was tolerable.

Twelve years earlier in 1982 I had to take a chapter on biosocial influences out of my thesis at the insistence of the external examiner in order to obtain my PhD. even though I had published that work two years earlier in a scientific peer-reviewed journal.
So this is somebody who has come right up against establishment thinking who had to edit himself in order appease the scientific and psychiatric gods of the establishment. By the end of the book he's beseeching the reader, if not to completely acknowledge his data, but at least to question things, which seems to be what he was at fault of doing - just questioning things - and got accused of being ideological when in fact it seems as though the real people who were ideologically possessed were those who were accusing him of being ideologically possessed! They were projecting their own biases on his science, on his studies. So that's really fascinating.

There's another interesting bit in here where he discusses neurofeedback and biofeedback as a modality for treating antisocial behaviour among teenagers and how successful that mode of treatment has shown itself to be. It's not a miracle cure by any stretch. There is also some therapy involved.

But it has clearly been very successful for some teenagers. If you listened to the Health and Wellness Show a couple of weeks ago, Gaby and Doug interviewed Valdeane Brown who developed the NeurOptimal neurofeedback technology which is helping a lot of people; not only people who have these overt issues of antisocial behaviour, but of people who may just experience a lot of physical pain or stresses. But this kind of development has been decades in the making.

Jim Robbins put out a book called A Symphony in the Brain and the types of resistance that neurofeedback has come up against in the establishment was pretty strong. The irony of it all or rather a catch 22 is you need the scientific medical establishment to some degree, to legitimize this type of technology or healing but if you have a lot of scientists and doctors poo-pooing it from the outset, then they refuse to give the money that would go into researching it and validating it and doing double blind studies and all those things that in science, would be required to legitimize such research.

Very interesting stuff. Highly recommend The Anatomy of Violence where he gets into neurofeedback a little bit. It's just fascinating in terms of how long it has taken for this technology to have its day where we can point, at least anecdotally but through a number of studies that were finally able to occur and prove its efficacy.

Corey: You know, when you're discussing all of the roadblocks to psychological and biological research that really paves the way to a better understanding of how to treat crime and cure otherwise incurable brain disorders, I'm reminded of this quote from the chapter that the show is based on in Political Ponerology where Lobaczewski says, "We return once more to this system's peculiar psychological 'genius' and its self-knowledge. One might admire how the above-mentioned definitions of psychopathy effectively block the ability to comprehend phenomena covered therein."

I know that we're not talking about a pathocracy but we're talking about something that seems like it's an embryo of this attempt to shut out this knowledge or to prevent this knowledge and this awareness by people who you otherwise would think it would be their job to analyze this data. Like he said, it's a 'peculiar psychological genius' that he discusses that it seems we come up against time and time again when we're reading about all the strange resistance against understanding psychology and all of its aspects.

Elan: Well you know you grow up in the West - and I've thought about this a lot - you go to school, you take classes in math, science, English, social studies, home economics, physical education. There is very little to nothing that gets into how we think, how we come to understand ourselves, emotions, just at a very basic level. It's not until college that you might take a psychology 101 class that doesn't even really get into a lot of these topics.

So right off the bat, the west has been neutered. It's been deprived of psychological knowledge, of self knowledge. Unless you personally have an interest in reading books about psychology or self-help or truth, there's nothing there. What was the quote Corey? This 'clever genius'.

Corey: Peculiar psychological 'genius'.

Elan: It's for decades, by virtue of its eliminating, or taking out of the equation these topics as a very subject for study at an early age. It's completely Machiavellian in a sense. Don't even broach the subject. It's not worth thinking about unless you're taking a 101 class in college, unless you're going to pursue psychology as a major and go into the field.

Corey: If you want to actually do the research you want to do, you're going to have to become tenured and risk losing your professional reputation. Lobaczewski wrote that under these kinds of conditions people just become morally derailed. For a lot of people it's easier to just go with what's easy, just take the easy route and do the research that is going to get you paid and that is going to enable you to live a comfortable life.

You can't say there's anything wrong with that. Not everybody can become heroic, but that produces this wasteland for people who have to work in isolation a lot of times in order to produce this knowledge. So the fact that we have these books and the information that we do, is thanks to warriors really within these professions who went through a lot of risky situations in order to get it to us.

Harrison: A lot of what we have today I think is a sign that our society hasn't completely gone to hell yet, the fact that these people have been able to do this kind of research. If we just look at the example of Robert Hare who followed the work of Hervey Cleckley in the study of psychopathy, he has managed to bring psychopathy to such a level of prominence that his psychopathy checklist is used in court systems all over the world, not only in North America and he has published best-sellers and popular accounts of what psychopathy is. And Adrian Raine as well. This research is going on. We are not in a system that destroys this kind of research before researchers are able begin research on it, let alone get it published.

Elan: Well by the same token, it's fascinating to see these other kinds of forces at work that are in contradiction to the work of Hare and Raine and Cleckley.

Harrison: Well I think a lot of that comes down to just the way science works. Science is a very clique-based phenomenon where there are paradigms that are abided by the majority of people in the field and we see these swings back and forth. It used to be in the psychiatric community that all mental illness was seen as hereditary and passed on congenitally from father to son and daughter. There was a reaction against that. That was the nature perspective. Then the nurture perspective took over and we're kind of getting into the tail end of that, at least with a lot of the research that's coming about, like with Raine.

Any time that you have a consensus and then people going against the consensus you're going to get friction, regardless of whether there's a hidden agenda going on. It's just the natural response, just the way scientists work because scientists are humans and all humans think they're right and think their perspective is right and the vast majority will react negatively to information that contradicts their previously held paradigm of what it is they study because their careers depend on them being right otherwise they have no legitimacy and they are worthless as human beings and as scientists in their choice of profession.

So what we have today is access to all kinds of information, but the society and the culture of the science that we have is not immune. There is such an amount of information that it would seem to be immune because of the inertia of all of that data. It seems hard to imagine how all of that could just be wiped off the face of the earth in future bad scenarios. But there are weaknesses and there are powerful forces in the universities that don't want to see this kind of thing come to prominence. Primarily this is coming from the Marxists in the humanities departments in colleges all across North America and not limited to North America.

What society in general really needs if we want to avoid a worst-case-scenario, is to get more research along these lines and to get it more popularized, to get it to the point where we do have educational systems in place where young people are exposed to psychological knowledge, where you learn about psychology from an early age. To end today's show I think I'll just read the first couple of paragraphs of this chapter in Ponerology that we've been discussing. Lobaczewski writes,
If there were ever such a thing as a country with a communist structure as envisaged by Karl Marx wherein the working people's leftist ideology would be the basis for government, which I believe would be stern but not bereft of healthy humanist thought, the contemporary social, bio humanistic and medical sciences would be considered valuable and be appropriately developed and used for the good of the working people. Psychological advice for youth and for persons with various personal problems would naturally be the concern of the authorities and of society as a whole. Seriously ill patients would have the advantage of correspondingly skillful care.

However quite the opposite is the case within a pathocratic structure. When I came to the west I met people with leftist views who unquestioningly believed that communist countries existed in more or less the form expounded by American versions of communist political doctrines. These persons were almost certain that psychology and psychiatry must enjoy freedom in those countries referred to as communist and that matters were similar to what was mentioned above. When I contradicted them they refused to believe me and kept asking why. "Why isn't it like that? What can politics have to do with psychiatry?"
So I think as a final thought we should be thinking about that thing that will never come to pass, the true Marxist/communist society where if that were to work, you would think it has these things like psychological advice for youth and for people who just need help in their everyday lives, that should be something that is promoted and given to people at all stages in life and for all problems that arise. We don't have that yet in our non-Marxist, non-utopian society, but it's something that I think we should be striving for.

To bring it back again to Jordan Peterson, I think that's why he's so popular and why he has gotten such a big response. He's providing that kind of psychological insight and knowledge to people that are thirsting for it and something that they haven't had in their lives. He's always shocked that just the small bit of encouragement he can give someone can produce such a strong response. Maybe this is like the opposite of transmarginal inhibition.

This is getting back to what reality should be like, where we respond to a thing of value like that in the way that we should. But the thing is, that value should be provided. We should have people in our lives, not just Jordan Peterson on YouTube, but people in our lives that are providing support and that are guiding youths especially, through the vicissitudes and harsh realities of life because life is suffering and if we don't have a method of confronting that and guiding us through that scary forest of dangers, then what will be we become? Not very much.

So I think that's something to think about and try to instill in our lives and maybe we can do something for the next generation.

Corey: I like that.

Harrison: Alright. Well with that said, thanks everyone for tuning in this week. We will be back next week.

Corey: Bye-bye.

Elan: Take care.