Darwin
The 19th century saw a wave of theories claiming to provide the answers for everything: Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, utilitarianism, Zionism, Darwinism, and more. But what did all their creators have in common, besides impressive beards? They all seemed to have a hollowed out, psychologically primitive understanding of human nature which denatured their own theories, and which has denatured the thought of all those influenced by their theories in the process.

Today on the Truth Perspective, we look at some of these theories, with an emphasis on Darwin, with reference to excerpts from Andrew Lobaczewski's writing on schizoid personality disorder and the creation and propagation of ideologies.

Running Time: 01:33:11

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Here's the transcript of the show:

Corey: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Truth Perspective. My name is Corey Schink and joining me in the studio today are Elan Martin,

Elan: Hi everyone.

Corey: And Harrison Koehli.

Harrison: Hi everyone.

Corey: On today's show we're going to be discussing what I guess you could call the peculiar values of Darwinian evolution, but primarily how they have impacted science and culture and why so many lay people refuse to "believe" in these values and the science behind it and the psychology of some of the most vehement proponents of Darwinian theory throughout the past couple of centuries.

Just a little background. A little more than two years ago in November of 2016 there was what has been described as a "ground-breaking summit at the British Royal Society". About 300 scientists from around the world gathered to discuss a radical re-think in evolutionary theory. At the conference, a scientist from the University of Chicago presented his work on the fact that bacteria are capable of engineering their own DNA, something that we've discussed on prior shows. Now obviously this was very big news and at the conference he was panned basically by the Darwinian lobby but he was praised by numerous Nobel Prize-winning scientists.

So the basic outcome of that conference was a message that evolution has goals, organisms have goals and they actively evolve to achieve those goals. Then flash forward to last week and Darwin's birthday, February 12, and over 1,000 scientists have now signed a dissent from Darwinism...

Harrison: List.

Corey: List, yeah, a dissent from Darwinism list, part of which reads, "We are sceptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." As we discussed on our previous show, Neo-Darwinian evolution, primarily the idea that random mutations and natural selection are the sole drivers of the evolution of all living beings, has been proven to be false and a larger number of scientists are coming out in revolt against that idea.

That said, it's unlikely that Darwinian theory is just going to go down in flames since a lot of people have a vested interest in the theory above and beyond any desire to discover the truth or explain the facts that are coming up in day-to-day scientific research. Its tainted history attests to that, from social Darwinist ideas that all life is competitive, to the horrors of the eugenics movement, to the more recent outcomes of sociobiology which declares that all things that appear to be cooperative, loving and altruistic, are unreal. Even with what is a Neo-Darwinian face lift in recent decades. the fundamental values seem to remain the same even though scientific inquiry continues. And at their core these values don't seem necessarily truth-oriented and scientific as a lot of people can pick up instinctually, but they seem more like a quasi-scientific ideology or religion depending on the context.

So ideology has been defined as a collection of normative beliefs and values that an individual or a group holds for other than purely epistemic reasons other than reasons having to do with a desire to know truth, to learn about the world. This seems what Darwinian evolution is more and more every day, normative beliefs and values that, using the much vaunted name of science declare that man is nothing but a reproduction machine enslaved to selfish genes that are somehow both completely accidental and simultaneously in control of the destiny of all living beings and anything that doesn't fit into those categories, things like consciousness, altruism, religious experience, our capacity to suffer in pursuit of higher goals is just a biological error. It's condemned.

I just want to read a quote from a sociobiologist speaking plainly about what he thought of such things.

"The evolution of society fits the Darwinian paradigm in it's most individualist form. The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end. Understand that economy and how it works and the underlying reasons for social phenomena are manifest. They are the means by which one organism gains some advantage to the detriment of another. No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. The impulses that leave one animal to sacrifice himself for another turn out to have their ultimate rationale in gaining advantage over a third and acts for the good of one society turn out to be performed for the detriment of the rest. Where it is in his own interest, every organism may reasonably be expected to aid his fellows but where he has no alternative he submits to the yoke of servitude. Yet..."

And this is the most fascinating part,

"...given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering his brother, his mate, his parent or his child. Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed."

I wanted to set up the show with that quote because I thought that it delivered in its full brutality the taste and the flavour of the thinking that goes on. I'm sure it probably still goes on to this day even though in the Neo-Darwinian circles they're much more likely to be political I think because these days you can't really get away with coming out and saying that every parent is just going to murder their children. It's this attack on common decency that has lead so many people to critique Darwinian theory over the years but lacking the evidence that it's wrong, they've been at a distinct disadvantage. Even though you can point out all the different philosophical and logical errors in the arguments, there's still the fact that science has to do what science does.

So now as we're getting more information, the science part is moving forward, now we can see the disconnect between this value system, which is nihilistic, atheistic, materialistic and the actual reality of living beings. You can see it as the cartoon for what it is.

Harrison: In previous shows we've talked a bit about the intelligent design/Darwinism debate. There are several angles from which you can take a look at these kinds of ideas and criticize them. There's primarily the scientific one and I think that's what the debate should rest on, the scientific ideas, or that should be the starting point. It's not necessarily the only angle of attack but I think for this purpose it's the most important to lay the foundation because from the books that we've read and the stuff that we've been able to share, however limited, on the shows that we've done, we've shown that there are pretty solid reasons why Neo-Darwinism and Darwinism both are just bad ideas. There's no reason that anyone should actually believe them. When you actually get into the details they're fairy tales.

So we don't have to necessarily rehash those arguments. We can do that a bit if we want, but one of the main things we're going to be focusing on today is, keeping that in mind, then we can look at something else. We can look at the psychology of the Darwinist worldview because I think any scientist would argue that you can't attack an idea if it's immoral for instance, because morals have no place in science. That's at least coming from their scientific naturalistic worldview. It's atheistic, materialistic and based on a sensory theory of perception.

From their perspective there's no need and no good reason to bring psychological categories or moral categories into the debate. But if we've got the starting point that we have no good reason to believe in Darwinism, we can say "Now let's be curious about this. What is the Darwinian worldview? What is its psychology? What can we learn from that?" When you look at it from that perspective your eyes kind of get opened up. {laughter} Okay, wow, that's really kind of disturbing. Thinking about it in these terms was prompted by a quote from Stove.

Corey: Douglas Stove I think.

Harrison: Douglas Stove, his book Darwinian Fairy Tales. I'll just read the quote from it. He writes,

"Gwen Raverat was the daughter of Charles Darwin's son George. She wrote a wonderful book entitled Period Piece about her childhood and her numerous Darwin relatives. Late in that book she remarks that the Darwins in general were quite unable to understand the minds of the poor, the wicked or the religious. This is most profoundly true and it is true not only of Darwins or of Darwinians of the blood royal such as Galton, but of all Darwinians of what might be called the 'pure strain' of intellectual descent from Darwin, for example, Fisher, Darlington, E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. And it means of course a rather large gap in their understanding of human life. Since the poor, the wicked and the religious must make up on any estimate at least three-quarters of all human beings, but true as Gwen Raverat's remark is and as far as it goes, it does not go nearly far enough for there are many large classes of people who are neither poor nor wicked nor religious but who are still a closed book to the characteristic Darwinian cast of mind."

Essentially what he's just saying here and the observation that Raverat made was that not only did the Darwins themselves seem to have these mental handicaps in their ability to understand human nature in all its variation, but that the theory itself as it has expanded now into Neo-Darwinism and evolutionary psychology, that the theory itself can't explain certain human universals and variations in human psychology. He doesn't mention this, but when it attempts to explain those things it does so from this perspective that seems not quite human. We'll get into why I phrased it in that way in a bit.

Basically there is a worldview that you can find in people in general, on the street - they don't have to be Darwinists - but you'll meet certain people in life who seem to just not have a grasp of the richness and complexity of human experience in human life and human consciousness. So when you combine those two together, when you have an individual who doesn't have a great grasp on human nature and then they either create a theory or latch onto a scientific theory, you get this nasty combination of a theory that reinforces their worldview and then the worldview that influences the direction that the theory takes.

So not only do you get that positive feedback loop going within the theory and the theorists, that then expands outwards through the influence that educators have because the people who come up with these theories then become the professors who indoctrinate or teach younger students to adopt that framework, even if it contradicts their own experience. It's even openly acknowledged among Darwinists because one of the main justifications or reasons that Darwin's theory exists and is taught is because - they say - that because the world does look as if it's designed, it does look as if organisms are designed some way from intelligence, so the idea is that to instruct children and young minds how to realize that it only appears as if it is intelligently designed in some way.

You get children who start out with a natural intuition that complex, integrated systems of parts and add consciousness onto that, that these things are designed and must be and you just stamp that out and say "No, it just looks that way and here's why" except the reasons that they give, while convincing to many, don't actually hold up and they themselves are propped up by a series of gaps in knowledge. "Okay, we can't explain that but we're just going to assume that this happened here and then things happened for a while but then we can't explain this either but we're just going to assume that this happens there and see, it all makes sense and that's why you don't have to believe in design!"

But then a sceptical person looks at that and says, "Well wait a second! What about all those gaps there? You just assume that something has happened there but did it really?" Not only is there actual reason for scepticism, just looking at it from that perspective as I said earlier and as I've said in previous shows, there's actual scientific reasoning for rejecting those ideas in the first place. They're not even plausible ideas. They're only plausible in the sense of doing a thought experiment. "Okay, let's imagine a system where this kind of stuff can happen and see what happens." Okay, imagine all you want. Now, is that actually possible in the real world?

Well turns out no, it's not. Maybe just to sum up really quickly some of the conclusions we came to earlier for those who might have missed them, it's that at every significant point in evolutionary history, the theory is not able to account for those jumps in evolution. We can't explain the origin of life itself, and what that requires for instance, is the creation of not only a genome, not only DNA which is the code, but also for the decoding mechanisms that can replicate, but the DNA itself codes itself for the mechanisms that replicate the DNA, for the proteins, the enzymes.

So you can't have DNA without enzymes but you can't have enzymes without DNA because DNA are what produce the enzymes. The two things have to come about at the same time and no one can explain that. No one has been able to explain that. It is a universally acknowledged mystery for those that actually know what they're talking about. Some people will essentially lie and say "Oh, we know how it happened." But actually they don't. If you look at the people involved in origin of life research actually say, they admit "We have no idea. No one has any idea and if anyone says that they know, they're lying or their delusional. They think that there's an answer and that people know but no one actually does."

That's one of the first mysteries. Somehow you get these first genes. We don't know how to get from one gene to another because the way genes are, the way the possibilities of all these different proteins are set up in nature somehow, you can imagine them as mountains of possibilities. So you've got a protein family essentially. You've got all these very similarly structured and related proteins and maybe if you have random mutation you can jump from one to another because they're all pretty close. But then you've got a huge chasm between that protein family and the next protein family where you would require an astronomical amount of time and random variations going in a very specific direction to jump from that one protein family to another in order to get that new protein.

This is the research that Douglas Axe has done. It's mathematically impossible given all the resources of time and energy and materials in the universe and in the history of the universe to get from one protein to a totally new protein. It's impossible. Somehow information gets injected into DNA to go from one protein to another and you can't get new species, you can't get new life forms without a new gene. If you look at the data that we have and you look at all the genes, you can't find the pathways for them to branch out through mutation. You get these totally new genes that pop up with no idea how they mutated randomly from some ancestor DNA chain to make from the old protein. It's just mystery after mystery. And that's on the micro level.

Then when you look at the macro level you have one species to another. Well there's so much going on from one species to another that there's no series of incremental changes that can lead from one species to another and that's not how it appears in the fossil record either. They do appear to come out of nowhere, relatively. One species one minute and then the next in the fossil record you have a new species. That's universal across the fossil records, that there isn't a record of those small changes from one to another.

Then philosophically there's no way of actually justifying that kind of change. There's no way of rationalizing that kind of change using this gradual random approach. Any angle that you look at it from, it doesn't work. Primarily, the most important, as I said earlier, is the scientific because you can say "Look, this is impossible because this can't happen without this happening. We need to account for this. No one can account for this right now, at least within the current scientific worldview." That's kind of all we have to say at this point. It's really up to the Darwinists to make their case by looking at these giant, specific areas because that's what everything hinges on; looking at how to get from one protein to another. They still can't do that.

Elan: I think what's really instructive right now where everything is coming to the fore with the Neo-Darwinists challenging intelligent design and all of these new discoveries, is the responses of the Neo-Darwinists to the new research, to the work of Michael Behe and Douglas Axe and others. What guys like Michael Behe are saying is "Your arguments are not holding up. You're not even attempting to honestly address what it is we're presenting here."

We talked a little bit about this on a recent show. Behe has a new book called Darwin Devolves. Richard Lenski who is one of the leading proponents of Neo-Darwinism has been coming out to critique it. We had an article on SOTT recently and he has just followed up on his prior introductory statements on Lenski's criticisms. I just want to read a little bit from that and get into the logical fallacies and the types of thinking that guys like Lenski engage in to try to knock down these new discoveries in evolution. So Behe begins in a recent article,

"Last week Science unexpectedly published a scathing pre-publication review by Richard Lenski and two co-authors of my book Darwin Devolves. I have already posted a short, gleeful reply noting that their almost complete lack of response to the book's main argument but I had planned to say more. This lengthier post will address such points and they do make grouped into four themes: supposed counter-example they cite, stale arguments they bring up, Lenski's own evolution work and a clear conclusion to draw.

For readers who don't have time to plough all the way through, here are the take-home lessons. Gene level counter-examples cited by the reviewers are shamelessly question-begging. The reviewers simple gesture at genes and assumed they were produced and/or integrated into living systems by random processes. But neither the reviewers nor anyone else has even tried to show that is possible.

Organ-level counter examples cited by the reviewers as produced by exactive processes are similarly question-begging. Criticisms of my earlier books cited by the reviewers were similarly question-begging and/or relied on vague, imaginative stories. The reviewers are either unaware of, or ignore, my many detailed replies to earlier criticisms and to papers the reviewers themselves cite. As noted in my previous post, the reviewers don't even attempt to grapple with the main argument of the book, that beneficial degradative mutations will rapidly, relentlessly, unavoidably out-compete unofficial constructive mutations at every time and population scale."

Harrison: What was that word? Degradive?

Elan: I probably mispronounced it. Degradative as in degradation. As in degraded.

Harrison: Yeah.

Elan: So what Behe is pointing out "In their begging the question is that they're using a kind of logical fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assumes the truth of the conclusion instead of supporting it. It is a type of circular reasoning, an argument that requires that the desired conclusion be true." When you see Behe's responses fleshed out a little further, what you come to understand is that folks like Lenski live inside of this kind of bubble of belief. Earlier Corey you used the descriptor of ideology where Neo-Darwinism has become a kind of ideology of sorts, a scientific one that's decidedly non-scientific because what it does is close off, seemingly by design, any further questioning, any scientific investigation that would allow anyone to draw any further conclusions.

So to me what's most interesting about this discussion in addition to what the psychological substratum of these scientists are, is the types of thinking that Neo-Darwinism completely cuts people off from - the lines of inquiry, the lines of thought and perhaps also of feeling that aren't allowed in this type of ideology. You mentioned it in your intro a little bit. Materialism doesn't allow for any kind of spiritual hierarchy. It doesn't allow for the validity of a non-physical reality. It doesn't permit the idea that information as a third property of reality in addition to matter and energy exists.

So Neo-Darwinism has all of these other implications for our worldview, how we perceive reality, what we allow ourselves to let in as what exists in the world. It has all kinds of limiting power on what we're able to acknowledge as god, religion, all of these things that don't fit into this very narrow physical universe. I used to have conversations with my father about this very thing. He would maintain that everything was biological coincidence. That was his way of saying random mutation. That was what he understood from his readings. I took the other side of the argument, intuitively. I didn't have the irreducible complexity argument or the picture of the flagella to show him that proved that intelligent design is this very valid scientifically proven idea.

He was not a bad man by any means. He was a very good man. At the same time they were using him as an example, a very limited set of ideas that he could incorporate into his worldview that I came to understand through my conversations with him. That's my person face-to-face understanding of how all of this thinking trickles down to the inter-personal with people you care about, with friends, with family. Even if I didn't ascribe to a particular religion, I did ascribe to the idea that there was a spiritual hierarchy and a non-physical reality and things that existed that weren't tangible physically through the senses.

Corey: It's rather bizarre, isn't it, that we all come into this world - and I'm imagining that most of our listeners are conscious to some degree of their experience and they have values and they're curious about things and they have this sense that there's more to life than just reproducing and maiming and killing everyone and they've never experienced anything like that in a normal human society/social situation. Of course there's horrible examples of civil war and everything where a Darwinian human situation comes about but it's not optimal and it's not normal. Maybe you can explain it by Darwinian processes but the functional and optimal way of living of striving and having a spiritual goal and sacrificing yourself for family, for friends, for community and doing things that are "altruistic" even though Darwinianism tells you that's a biological error, that those things have higher value to you than this other nonsense that that's how we're supposed to live.

Harrison: Even if you believe in Darwinism.

Corey: Even if you believe in Darwinism. The main problem is that performatory contradiction. The way you live contradicts your entire theory. But it's interesting to me that we come into this world but now we've been so indoctrinated by that way of thinking that 'it's just commons sense. Of course everything has just randomly evolved'. I remember when I went to college and I wrote a paper on oxytocin for some dumb psychology class and it wasn't like I was getting my PhD or anything, but I wrote this paper on oxytocin and I did my research and I was fascinated by it because this was a relatively new concept to me, that there's these chemicals that are correlated with certain behavioural states. I was fascinated. 'This chemical makes us behave this way'.

So I wrote this paper and then just to end it off, I wrote, 'this is all really interesting but how does this chemical know how to feel?' I was just curious. It was just a curious question. As part of this class we had to take our papers in through some sort of an auditor type individual, an editor and so I took it in. Spelling was fine. Punctuation was fine, but that sentence, that question irritated and irked this girl like none other. She could not believe I would ask such a stupid, horrible, non-scientific question. I'm not going for my PhD! This is a four-page paper! Why can't I ask that question? Do you have an answer for it?

Harrison: Can you repeat the question again Corey?

Corey: How does oxytocin know how to feel? But of course she knew that it just randomly mixed together over billions of years and then through a random mutation and natural selection it just happened to gain a goal and purpose in the entire living system that we live in that did a bunch of different things. For her, that was all explained by random mutation and natural selection but for me I just couldn't believe that this chemical interacted with consciousness in such a way that you could subjectively feel and it was an endogenous drug so that it was something that was produced within our body.

Elan: That you have the power to stimulate within yourself.

Corey: Yeah! I was just, 'Who knew that this is how it should feel?' But anyhow, I had to re-write the paper and I had to take that sentence out. I don't remember if I did take that sentence out or not. But I still remember sitting in that little office while she left. I had to just sit there and wait for her verdict and the distain and distaste and I'm sitting there thinking it's such an innocent question.

Then years later, I think it was Thomas Nagel who published a book on the subject, on how did these molecules know how to feel and the peculiar philosophy behind subjectivity and the connection between mind and body. And I'm like "God dang it, she cheated me out of that book! I could have turned that paper into a 300 page book!" {laugher} No. I was just shocked at how she shut it down so quickly and that everybody thought that that was so bizarre, such a weird thing to think.

That brings me back to the idea of atheism and materialism in general. I remember reading about Richard Dawkins. He said something like "Before Darwin published the Origin of Species it would have been impossible to be an atheist" because of what we said, when you look at the world and you experience life, you have your own emotions and experiences and you see design in nature, you just see it, everywhere. You see design in how your family interacts. You see design in your social world. But you also see design in the way that the living system all seems to work. It's always been a mystery. Then after this theory of evolution came along and it had so much force, so much explanatory power to tell you that, "no, it's all dead, stupid, it's purposeless, there's no reason for any of it, there's no intelligence out there. You're crazy if you think there's intelligence. There's no altruism. What are you talking about? Your fairy tale ideas of altruism and cooperating with other people."

They simultaneously say that altruism doesn't exist but that it does exist, it's just selfishness. It's just another way of saying "You're selfish" which is just absolutely mindboggling. If you're going to put the bar that high for altruism, then there's no way that it could exist. I can't even think of how you could possibly be altruistic if saints are just acting selfishly. I think that's the primary power, isn't it, of evolutionary theory, for a lot of these materialistic, atheistic types of individuals and why it has so much power and why it's been indoctrinated in so many people is the war against religions. 'Maybe evolution isn't 100% right but we can't give it back to the bible-thumpers. We can't give it back to the creationists.'

So yeah, society's been stuck in this indoctrinated atheism for so many years that people forgot that there was a sense of wonder when you look at creation. Even die-hard scientists, these scientist who you think are going "We're going to discover the truth", but get in there and say "You just want to kill your family! That's really what you want!" "No it's not!" "Yeah it is! I wrote my PhD thesis on it!"

Harrison: With that in mind, like I said at the beginning, there seems to be this kind of blanched - there's got to be a better word for it - this worldview that sees humanity from a very low, base level, that not only is humanity uniformly of a certain type, but that type is something that is limited to what we would traditionally consider the basest of human behaviours, thoughts and impulses. So with that in mind, there are a few quotes from Ponerology that I want to bring onto the table that I think will be thought-provoking if you haven't heard them before, especially in this context. I'll offer some explanatory remarks after this first one.

"A schizoid's ponerogenic activity should be evaluated in two aspects. On the small scale, such people cause families trouble, easily turn into tools of intrigue in the hands of clever individuals and generally do a poor job of raising the younger generation. Their tendency to see human reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider proper transforms their frequently good intentions into bad results. However their ponerogenic role can take on macrosocial proportions if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions."

So he's talking here about schizoids. Now to give some background, today we'd say that they have schizoid personality disorder. You can look that up. It's got a Wikipedia page. You can read up on what our current psychological community has to say about schizoidia. But I want to give a little bit of background before we get into the implications of what Lobaczewski is saying in this and in future quotes that we'll read out.

Several months ago we had a talk here about personality disorders and the new research, the new ways of approaching looking at personality disorders and trying to figure out what they are precisely and how to diagnose them correctly, basically moving away from the DSM approach that seems scientifically invalid, doesn't work, it's not useful in a clinical setting, the diagnoses aren't reliable, etc. Basically they need to revamp the system because it hasn't worked ant it's not working. The new system that they're coming up with is this system based on the five factor model of personality, looking at personality disorders as a single dimension. You either have a personality disorder or you don't and there are various features that come along with that personality disorder factor and those have to do with the big five.

I looked through the papers and tried to categorize it for myself and how they all fit together and some different ways of looking at it. There are something like a dozen personality disorders that are talked about. Sometimes you'll see less, sometimes more. But they break down into a few different binary choices. The scientists don't call them this, but you've got what I would call the emotional versus the unemotional personality disorders for instance. There are something like seven emotional personality disorders. One of their main features is some degree of negative emotion. This could be anxiety and depression or anger, aggression, rage, that sort of thing.

But there are only two unemotional personality disorders. Those are schizoid or dissocial or psychopathic. There are also the disagreeable versus the agreeable personality disorders. The disagreeable ones are narcissism, antisocial, histrionic, psychopathy. These are the individuals who don't have any agreeableness in them. It's not part of their personality structure. But the agreeable ones are people that you would find agreeable but in personality disorder form would be called avoidant or dependent personality disorders. There are also what I would say some kind of pathological extremes on any one of these five factor personality dimensions except openness. There doesn't seem to be a pathological openness thing going on here.

For example if you've got pathological extroversion you might be diagnosed as a histrionic personality disorder if you've got some other features as well. But extroversion seems to be the essential identifying feature of histrionic personality disorder or hysterical personality disorder. If you've got pathological conscientiousness, again, these are my framing of them, the way it just seems natural to me to talk about them, if you've got pathological conscientiousness, obsessive/compulsive personality disorder.

But if we look at schizoid, the two features of schizoid personality disorder are that unemotional nature. They call it a stable personality as opposed to neurotic because if you look at that big five dimension, all people will fall somewhere on the spectrum between neurotic and stable. The more neurotic you are, the more susceptible you are to negative emotions of various kinds and the more stable you are the less susceptible you are to those kind of emotional triggerings essentially. But both psychopaths and schizoids are way at the end of low neuroticism to the point where one of the ways you refer to them is unemotional. They have unemotional traits and that's probably the defining feature of psychopaths. They seem to lack, there's a hole somewhere in their emotional makeup where they don't seem to experience at all, certain human emotions.

That's what schizoids and psychopaths have in common, that lack of emotional experience and because they lack that experience they can't see it in others either. When they look at other people who have a normal spectrum of emotions or extreme abundance of emotion, that doesn't make any sense to them because they have no frame of reference for it because they don't actually feel those emotions.

The other defining feature of schizoid personality disorder is introversion. It's a pathological introversion. The only two personality disorders that have introversion as a personality trait are schizoid and avoidant. You could think of schizoid personality disorder as pathologically introverted and lacking in emotion. In one of the next quotes we'll see that Lobaczewski talks about schizoids as being loners, as being introverts. He doesn't use the word introvert but it's in there in the description.

Probably related to this kind of introversion and lack of emotionality would be some types of autism, like Aspergers for instance. People with Aspergers don't seem to have that social awareness. They don't pick up on the social cues in ways that people without Aspergers do. That again seems related to something to do with how emotion is expressed and experienced and some kind of lack within what Lobaczewski would call the emotional instinctive substratum, the psychological substratum. For psychopathy for instance, Kent Kiehl who wrote the book The Psychopath Whisperer, his theory which I tend to like at this point, he hypothesizes that psychopath is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the entire what he calls paralimbic system in the brain.

So there's all these brain parts. Some are traditionally called the limbic system but using a certain way of looking at brain neurons and the cytoarchitecture of the brain and the similarities and differences between different parts, there's an entire system of the brain that is characterized as the paralimbic system. It includes areas that aren't traditionally thought of as being associated with traditionally limbic parts of the brain. He has found that there are problems in psychopaths in this whole region of the brain.

There's this whole middle layer of the brain where something seems to have gone wrong in psychopaths at that level in their brain and for all these parts. There is probably a biological reason for why this is all happening. We still don't know exactly even why it happens in the first place though. Adrian Raine hypothesizes that it's neurodevelopmental in some ways so that it's a mixture of genetics and in utero experiences that solidifies. "Okay, you've got this brain now and that will affect your experience, the way you experience the world and the way you interact with the world." Essentially psychopaths and schizoids are lacking something that, to the rest of humanity, is seen as some kind of fundamental part of being human, part of the human experience.

Right away we can see that that description from that first quote from Darwin's granddaughter, that they seemed not to be able to intuit certain things about human reality. I couldn't diagnose for sure even if I did know a lot more. I could make a guess. But at least there's a...

Elan: Suggestion.

Harrison: Yeah, a suggestion and a comparison to be made because even if you're not diagnosable as a schizoid for instance, you meet people in everyday life that for whatever reason, seem to just not be able to get certain things and seem to not be able to understand certain people, not necessarily because they have personality disorders, but there's some suggestion there. So with that in mind I'll read one or two of these next quotes. Lobaczewski goes on,

"Schizoid characters aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups using relatively controlled pathological egotism [arrogance] and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature. [They basically have a hyperactivity to them.] They are thus eventually able to overpower another's individual personality, which causes the latter's behaviour to turn desperately illogical.

They may also exert a similar influence upon the group of people they have joined. They are psychological loaners who feel better in some human organization wherein they become zealots for some ideology, religious bigots, materialists or adherents of an ideology with Satanic features. If their activities consist of direct contact on a small social scale, their acquaintances easily perceive them to be eccentric which limits their ponerogenic role. However if they manage to hide their own personality behind the written word, their influence may poison the minds of a society in a wide scale and for a long time."

Skipping a bit and going to the next quote,

"The 19th century, especially its latter half, appears to have been a time of exceptional activity on the part of schizoidal individuals, often but not always of Jewish descent. After all, we have to remember that 97% of all Jews do not manifest this anomaly and it also appears among all European nations, albeit to a markedly lesser extent. Our inheritance from this period includes world images, scientific traditions and legal concepts flavoured with the shoddy ingredients of a schizoidal apprehension of reality."

There are a few more but I think we can focus on those ones for now. I'm going to approach it from a side angle. There were a couple of similar things that I read. One was a poll of people in Russia and what their approach to politics was. Something like 90% of Russians were not involved or getting involved in politics in an active way, joining a political party or running for office. I read something similar elsewhere. Actually this was a previous supporter of the Bolivarian revolution, Chavismo in Venezuela and he was talking about direct democracy and the actual experience of direct democracy and how from his perspective now after seeing how it works, he basically says that he doesn't even necessarily agree with the concept because when it actually gets put into practice, direct democracy is a lot of work.

You actually have to be involved in the democratic process and you have to learn a whole bunch of new skills and put them into practice and it's something that most people actually don't want to do. They want someone else to take care of that because they've got other things to do. They want to spend time with their families. They want to work at their jobs and do their hobbies. They don't want to attend party meetings and get involved in the decision-making process and be on committees and do all this stuff. They're not interested in it.

The vast majority of people are like that in more than one way. They're not interested in writing books for instance. They're not interested in coming up with grand theories about everything and why things exist and how things should work, etc. It's a very small percentage of the population that will write books. But the problem is that one subset of the type of people that will write books are like Lobaczewski is talking about, people with certain personality disorders, but people with certain personality disorders who, for them, have a naturally simplistic doctrinaire, unrealistic view of humanity. They know what they experience which is stunted in a certain way but they project that onto all of humanity because they can't get into the mind of an ordinary person. They can't understand a really religious person or a agreeable emotional person, etc. So they come up with these grand theories that, at the basic root of things, have this starved perception of humanity that has bleached out most of the things that ordinary people think of as essentially human.

Lobaczewski's talking about this. The advantage is that usually if someone like this is coming up with a grand theory and is actually interacting with people, people will naturally see that this person seems a bit eccentric and weird. I think we've all met people like this, especially if you've dealt with the public for instance. I worked in retail for a while. I had a book store and there were certain people who would come in who were just weird. I would talk to them and let them talk to me and they'd tell me all their ideas, for a half hour or an hour at a time. They'd just go off and I'd smile and nod. Sometimes I wouldn't even be listening to what they were saying because I was doing other things but they wouldn't even notice. Then I'd say "Okay, I've got to get back to work now" and they'd say "Okay, great. Bye" and head out. There are always people like that. That made me remember one other guy who was just really weird.

So in real life you meet these people and you can't really take them seriously because they do seem so eccentric. 'There's obviously something not quite right with this guy in the head but I'm still going to be pleasant and polite with this person.' But when they write a book and they put it out and you don't have that interaction with them, all of a sudden, their words can acquire a kind of power they don't have when you're just interacting with them in person. This is essentially what Lobaczewski's saying happened a lot in the 19th century. A lot of people who had a very pathological and uni-level view of humanity had their works spread all over the place. I've got some examples.

Several years ago I started reading a book by Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate-The Modern Denial of Human Nature. I'm not really a fan of Steven Pinker, for one reason he's a Neo-Darwinist materialist but at least he knows a lot and he can share a bunch of data. This book is about the intellectual history of the view that humanity doesn't have a nature, that we have a blank slate. Also other views of human nature that have happened over the centuries. It starts in the 17th century with John Locke who introduced this idea of the tabula rasa. Then also Thomas Hobbs. I want to read a quote from Thomas Hobbs. For those of you who have read Ponerology you might be able to see where I'm going with this one. This is what Hobbs wrote in the 1600s.

"Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war and such a war as is of every man against every man. In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society and worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death. And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short. That is what human life is without the leviathan of the state, a controlling governing body."

So Pinker writes,

"Hobbs believed that people could escape this hellish existence only by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He called it leviathan, the Hebrew word for monstrous sea creature subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation."

Basically here's this guy who developed a grand theory and sure, you can look at the theory and you can probably find a whole lot of interesting things that he had to say but at the root of it, there seems to be this view of human nature that is just wrong in some way. Most people would look at it and say "It's just wrong". It's the same thing that Corey was bringing up earlier about certain Darwinist conceptions and how they just seem to be at odds with our direct experience of what we actually are, of our own human nature.

Moving on, also in the 17th century Descartes reacted to this view of human nature with what Pinker calls the ghost in the machine, this dualism of mind and matter. That split off the material world from the conscious, spiritual world which had some disastrous results. But then in the 18th century you get Rousseau who had this vision of the noble savage. In the 19th century finally, we finally get to John Stuart Mill/Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. You get the early economic theories of Marx but also the Adam Smith types. You also get social Darwinism, Freud, Marx. You look at all these theories and they're all based on this very simplistic view of human nature that can be summed up in a sentence, for utilitarianism, maximizing self-interest, that people are basically self-interested and you just extrapolate up from that and you figure out human nature.

I'll read a quote of John Stuart Mill from Pinker. This is what Mill writes:

"I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all of the marked distinctions of human nature as innate and in the main indelible and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races or sexes, are such as not only might, but naturally would be, produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions and one of the greatest stumbling blocks in human improvement. This tendency is so agreeable to human indolence as well as to conservative interests generally that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure to be carried to even greater lengths than is really justified by the more moderate form of intuitional philosophy."

I don't really know why I wrote that one. I had it in my notes but it doesn't seem like I actually needed to read that one. Just forget that I was talking about Mill. I'm sure there was something that I wanted to say.

You can see how these views of human nature have influenced us for the last 150 years. We see that even in modern game theory and modern economics, not everyone, but there is this really simplistic view of human nature that's often "Okay, people are in conflict with one another. They are self-interested and are always looking for the upper hand. Life is a zero sum game." All those ideas were, at their root, in these late 19th century writers.

There was one more ideology that rose up around that time that I wanted to talk about. That's political Zionism. I want to read a quote from the Jewish virtual library on Theodor Herzl who was one of the ideological founders of the Zionist movement.

"Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society which assimilation did not solve. He mulled over the idea of Jewish sovereignty and despite ridicule from Jewish leaders, published The Jewish State, Der Judenstaat. Herzl argued that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. He declared that the Jews could gain acceptance in the world only if they ceased being a national anomaly. 'The Jews are one people' he said and their plight can be transformed into a positive force by the establishment of a Jewish state with the consent of the great powers. He saw the Jewish question as an international political question to be dealt with in the arena of international politics."

Another quote from Marxists.org. This is from a Marxist website. It's a Marxist critique of Zionism, if you can imagine that.

"Rather, Zionism declared minority persecution is inherent in human nature. There is thus no point in trying to combat it. Instead one must accept it and accommodate as well as one can to this inevitable, eternal evil."

Then quoting something Herzl said, which I summarized before:

"This pessimistic starting point, which postulates an immutable, inherently evil human nature, is often toned down by official Zionist spokesmen but it is voiced loud and clear by those who do not have to make allowances for diplomacy. J. Bar-Josef is typical of the more extreme position. 'The generation in which Zionism was born had great faith in human progress and fraternity. It accepted Rousseau's theory that human nature is basically good. Let people live decently and human society will become an angel society. The minority must realize that human nature is basically evil, that the majority will always treat the minority according to its whims. Occasional waves of liberalism have only a temporary character. No education, progress, liberalism, humanism can save the minority when the terrible hour comes.'"

So even in Zionism you have this simplistic view of humanity as essentially evil and that initial premise then leads out to all of the policies essentially, of the overall worldview. For Herzl and a lot of the early Zionists it was the idea that humanity is essentially anti-Semitic, always is, always will be. There's no other explanation for it. On the face of it, that's just absurd because anti-Semitism itself can't be this giant, immutable thing that has existed for all time, even before Jews as a race existed. There has to be some kind of historical contingency going on, some kind of historical analysis and some kind of individual analysis too because like that first quote said, Herzl didn't think it was an individual problem on either end of the spectrum, it was a collective problem. It was something that all Jews had in common and all goyim had in common. It's this immutable feature of humanity.

That in itself reveals not only a kind of naïveté but really a kind of pathology of experience and of what you see when you look in the world. It's a conclusion that the facts don't warrant, essentially. That is what all of these theories have in common. What they come down to is that they are conclusions that should have argumentation that leads to that conclusion but they start with what should be the conclusion of one of their main arguments as the basis, the starting point of their philosophy from which everything else comes. But they haven't established their main premise. Usually when that happens, from my experience, if someone has come to this conclusion, it usually says more about them and their own psychology and inner landscape than it says about their reasoning or the reasons that they came up with their theory in the first place.

Corey: You think about how dangerous these schizoidal ideologies are and you look back on the 20th century and you see that this view of human nature informed by social Darwinism, written by - as Lobaczewski says - these schizoid who could have good intentions and even if Darwin was a complete schizoid he could have had good intentions. He could have just been somewhat colour-blind in the area of emotions but it was that theory and then the actual schizoids and then all the other types of pathological individuals who went full bore on it and used social Darwinism to inform the national socialists social policy.

Then you see the combination of that and the schizoid way of viewing humanity that led to Adolph Hitler and then the combination of that with this Zionist schizoid ideology and it's just a time bomb that's still ticking to this day. We're still faced with fascist Nazi type thinking although not nearly as bad as it was but it's still a spectre used against us by other schizoids. There's not a day goes by that you don't hear about some new Nazi, by an actual Nazi and then the time bomb in the Middle East. It's these ideologies. The individuals who put them into practice, like Lobaczewski said, they think they're so brilliant but they're just tools in the hands of the top psychopathic vampire type individuals who use these ideas, their books, the ideologies, as weapons and then chaos ensues.

Elan: This reminds me of the statement that was made in our last show on ideology which is that the schizoidal types and the pathological types need an ideology. So it's as though if they hadn't come up with it, it would have had to have been invented for them or they would have to come up with it in order to justify their own being or lack thereof.

Listening to you a few minutes ago Harrison - I'm trying to formulate the question here, it's kind of bubbling up from back there a little bit at a time. So we have all of these ideologies, all of these ideas that have formed over the past 100 to 150 years that have informed the thinking and the narrowing of the mind in western society in particular for so long, along the paradigm or spectrum of materialist thinking I would say - that's my understanding - that doesn't think in terms of spiritual values or religion in any kind of rigorous or object way in the types of ways I think we generally tend to acknowledge here in this ongoing conversation.

Now alongside of all of those thinkers has been a strain of people who have practiced spiritualism, gotten into the occult and the new age and parapsychology and all of these other disciplines and pursuits that do acknowledge non-physical reality and validate it even if they too have swerved off into the pathological. A good example of that would be what we discussed on the show on Jung where ostensibly you had these giants of metaphysical thinking on religion and growth who unfortunately had been influenced by and influence others with pathological ideas.

Now we have intelligent design that in some way is attempting to, if not bridge the gap between religion and the non-physical reality through a study of information, at least saying that Darwinism is wrong. And it's separating itself from creationism. Many of these thinkers are not saying "Well if the Neo-Darwinists are incorrect then it has to be a creationist idea". But they're at least saying, "Look, this is what we can begin to objectively rule out". That's certainly a very valuable thing for us right now.

At the same time, you look back over the last 150 years and there has been so little development or growth or any kind of real objective study of the science of the soul. We did that book Consciousness-Anatomy of the Soul several weeks ago and of course there are the books by Broad on parapsychology and there are a number of other works but they come so far in many cases to explain and account for the types of things that we would like to affirm with any kind of objective rationalization. That's probably not a good word, but understanding and thought. It just seems like all of these materialist thinkers have taken a much greater place in the minds of people who don't believe in religion or who have faith or who are trying to better themselves in the way that good psychology and good people like Jordan Peterson have come out to nurture in people.

So I guess what I'm saying is, as great an accomplishment as I think these recent developments have been in intelligent design, we're still so hungry and lacking for better explanations as to why we're here and what we're made of and what reality is and what our place in it is and what it is we're supposed to do as human beings in all our complexity and what a truly constructive way of thinking might be. I suppose the best we can do is, like you were doing with the quotes by Lobaczewski, it's very good to rule out what things shouldn't be, but we're still ahead of us looking towards those ideas that are valid, that are things to be working towards. In some ways we're groping in the dark. In some ways I think we are making some progress. But we still have a long way to go.

Corey: I think the intelligent design field of study seems to me it could be a quantum leap in terms of awareness for individuals who are willing to entertain the idea of intelligence in the universe. If you don't go in it with "Jesus Christ made every caterpillar" an idea some of them have, but the really good ones don't but they still have the scientific credentials in order to make their claims and give them some weight. But when you pose that question, when you look at the sheer amount of weight and power behind the study of genetics, so many people studying genes, studying DNA, mapping it out, trying to figure out what it is and then you combine that with the intelligence that's capable of deciphering what's going on, reading the code so to speak, then I think that you have the potential for this quantum leap in terms of your awareness of the universe, of what it is, what it's for, higher intelligence, lower intelligence.

Maybe the code isn't written in there, like "This is why you were created" but if there is intelligence in the universe and in the creation of mankind, then reading the code that's responsible for it, to me that would be just unbelievably phenomenal, when that book comes out and says "We found some message! We're learning the language of this computer code" of whatever quantum crazy code is going on. The time that we're in right now, having people who are intelligent and using actual science to investigate these questions, not just new age philosophy, not just me sitting in my armchair and philosophizing about what the universe means but to actually be out there being able to read and have some sort of a dialogue even if you're like a 3-year-old child and you're trying to have a dialogue with your parent or whatever, there's still information that's being transferred. You're still learning something even if you can't possibly understand what it is that he's saying to you. But I think there's still hope in that area.

Harrison: It made me think about something. One of the things that Jordan Peterson says is that when he's talking to people, he says the vast majority of people who come to his talks have one of two responses, either they were in a bad place and hearing what he had to say got them to turn their lives around and things have been great since then or things are getting better. The other response is "You're saying things that I always knew at some level but could never put into words myself".

I want to talk about that second one for a second because there seems to be something about people where we do have certain ideas, however vaguely formulated in our minds, it's like they're lying there in potential. They haven't met their partner out in the world. Once you make that connection it says, "Oh yeah! You just said what I'm actually thinking" but for a lot of people no one actually says what they're thinking so they're never able to affirm that part of their thought for themselves and they don't actually develop it because they don't know how.

So there's this process that goes on where you provide that alternative. It's like what you were saying Elan. We can take down Darwinism, we can take down all these ideologies and all these belief systems, but there's still a lot of work that goes into building a replacement, building something to fill that hole. The hole is there waiting to be filled and people have some awareness of that, at least some people, for whatever reason, have some awareness that there is some yearning in them for something more. Then when they encounter it, there's that moment of recognition. "Yeah! That's what I actually believe and I didn't even realize I believed it until I heard you say it."

With that in mind, I want to read some more of the Lobaczewski quotes because he's talking about the influence of these bad ideologies but I think there's a connection to be made with that phenomenon that I just talked about. So Lobaczewski writes,

"In spite of the fact that the writings of schizoidal authors contain the above-described deficiency or even an openly formulated schizoidal declaration which constitutes sufficient warning to specialists, the average reader accepts them not as a view of reality warped by this anomaly but rather as an idea to which he should assume an attitude based on his convictions and reason."

Just a bit on that. We didn't talk about the schizoidal declaration yet today. We've talked about it on previous shows. It's basically what Hobbs said, essentially human nature is so bad that you need a strong authority to keep them in line. According to Lobaczewski that seems to be a common belief among schizoidal authors, that 'because human nature is so bad - that's their simplistic perception of human nature - that the only solution is that people need to control them and I know the kind of people that need to control them. They have to believe in my ideology' essentially'.

But when normal people encounter writings like this they don't automatically recognize that it's the product of someone with a personality disorder. They look at the ideas and they assume that they should interpret them in their own categories of thought using their own natural way of thinking. So he goes on and says,

"That is the first mistake. The over-simplified pattern devoid of psychological colour and based on easily available data exerts an intense influence upon individuals who are insufficiently critical, frequently frustrated as a result of downward social adjustment, culturally neglected or characterized by some psychological deficiencies. Other are provoked to criticism based on their healthy common sense. Also they fail to grasp this essential cause of the error."

Right there he's talking about the types of people that react to this. He gives a few examples. People who aren't very critical, who just believe anything that they read - which is a lot of people - and people who are frustrated for reasons of what he calls downward social adjustment. This would be people who are over-qualified for the work they're doing. They're stuck in a low position when their potential is actually much greater and that leads to an inner frustration, a lack of meaning in your life. 'There's something more I could be doing and I should be doing but I can't do it'. So there's a hopelessness that gets instilled in that sense.

People who are culturally neglected might be downtrodden minorities in some sense and in some places but also people with similar and other psychological deficiencies, people with other personality disorders or other trauma-based reactions to either pathological individuals or life circumstances, etc. So he goes on and says,

"Societal interpretation of such activities is broken down into the main trifurcations engendering divisiveness and conflict. The first branch is the path of aversion based on rejection of the contents of the work due to personal motivations, differing convictions or moral revulsion. This already contains the component of a moralizing interpretation of pathological phenomena."

These would be people who read it and they're morally turned off. They're morally repulsed by the things that they read. They just see it as wrong. They might not know why. They don't necessarily understand the psychology behind it. It rubs them the wrong way for whatever reason and they reject it. He goes on,

"We can distinguish two distinctly apperception types among those persons who accept the contents of such works, the critically corrective and the pathological. People whose feel for psychological reality is normal tend to incorporate chiefly the more valuable elements of the work. They trivialize the obvious errors and compliment the schizoid deficiencies by means of their own richer world view. This gives rise to a more sensible, measured and creative interpretation but is not free from the influence of the error frequently adduced above."

This is the reason that schizoid ideologies are actually able to spread. People will look at some of the ideas included in there and think "Oh those are good ideas. I agree with that. That other stuff, I don't really understand that or it's not that important or here's another interpretation for it." But in that process they end up taking in some of that pathological material for themselves. I'm guessing this might be the factor that was applicable in your situation Corey when you were talking to...

Corey: The editor? The editing assistant?

Harrison: Yeah.

Corey: She was pure evil. {laughter}

Harrison: It's part of the indoctrination process. You come to it and you believe it and you adopt those ideas for yourself. You tone it down, essentially. In your everyday life you're not going to turn into a total social Darwinist but you're going to have these beliefs that are going to affect your life in some way, even if you contradict them in the way you behave. People who believe in any of these theories, if they're normal to any degree, are going to be engaging in some kind of performative contradiction, like you said. They're going to believe one thing but they're going to act another way.

You'll even get Darwinists who admit this and you get materialists of all sorts who admit this. They say "Well when I'm in my office and I'm being a blank" - a mathematician or a physicist or biologist - "I think one way and when I'm at home with my family I have a different worldview, essentially". So there's this contradiction between the way they think the world works completely and absolutely and the way they actually live their lives, which should be a hint that maybe their theory is wrong but you don't get many people who will actually go that far.

So then he goes on to the third category which is pathological acceptance. He says,

"It is manifested by individuals with diverse deviations, whether inherited or acquired, as well as by many people bearing personality malformations who have been injured by social injustice. That explains why this scope is wider than the circle drawn by direct action of pathological factors. This apperception often brutalizes the author's concepts and leads to acceptance of forceful methods and revolutionary means."

So these people actually take the schizoid ideology and transform it and make it even more brutal and more pathological. Like he said, schizoids tend to have good intentions. They're not totally evil in what they're saying. They're often utopians. They say "Here's the problem in the world. Here's my simplistic idea of the reason for the problem and here's my solution for how to fix it." People will often grab onto that because, as we were saying last week about ideologies and the example of Right Sector, you have all these ideologies and a few weeks before that on Salafi jihadism, you have these overly simplistic ideologies devoid of common sense and knowledge of human nature and you get a whole bunch of disaffected youths, people who have a grudge to bear, people who do have a grievance of some sort who can get behind the idea that the world really is messed up. And here's this person saying "Here's the reason it's messed up and here's how to fix it." That is a source of meaning for them.

Unfortunately it happens to be based on at least one false premise so then they usually get caught up in a revolutionary social movement which then gets hijacked by even more pathological types. We saw last week where that goes and what that develops into. And then there's one last quote from Lobaczewski.

"In the ponerogenic process of the pathocratic phenomenon, characteropathic individuals adopt ideologies created by doctrinaire, often schizoidal people, recast them into an active propaganda form and disseminate it with pathological egotism and paranoid intolerance for any philosophies which may differ from their own. They also inspire further transformation of this ideology into its pathological counterpart. Something which had a doctrinaire character and circulated in numerically limited groups is now activated at a societal level thanks to their spellbinding possibilities."

So even there we can see at least an analogy to be made with Darwinism. First of all, it has been recast because Darwin himself believed in god. Darwin believed that god created the world and that god even created, I believe, either the first life forms or humans, the human mind. Darwin still had a place for god in his worldview and contrary to what a lot of Neo-Darwinists believe, he actually did believe that until the end of his life. He didn't become a total atheist. He always had a belief in god.

The problem was that the basic assumptions in his theory didn't leave any room for god so the natural logical conclusion of his theory was to move towards a more Neo-Darwinist perspective, which was totally atheistic materialistic in nature.

Corey: Yeah, and that conception of human nature was basically psychopathic. When it morphed completely into this social Darwinism and the national socialism, then that view of nature was completely different obviously. That was just the elevation of the psychopath to the top, to the ideal, what everyone should want to be is this Hitlerian eugenics individual.

Harrison: So now today, like we've seen if you read Matt Leisola's book Heretic on his experiences in Switzerland and Finland, how did Lobaczewski put it here? "Disseminated with pathological egotism", so extreme arrogance and a paranoid intolerance for philosophies which may differ from their own. That is essentially a perfect definition for Darwinists today, someone who has a paranoid intolerance for philosophies that differ from their own. For the most part, if you're a Neo-Darwinist, that just comes with the territory, that you are going to be intolerantly paranoid and that's just the way the cookie crumbles unfortunately.

We've actually gone for an hour-and-a-half. Did we want to go anywhere else with that or have we said what we wanted to say.

Corey: No, I think that we've come pretty far through all the material. I guess the only ting that I could think of is just this idea of how many lies there are out there and how many lies have been circulating and how important it is to always be vigilant because if you're following this conversation, obviously we're talking about intelligence out in the universe. We're talking about individuals who have good intentions but they put their thoughts to paper and they contaminate everyone's minds. We've all got minds that have been contaminated by material that we've absorbed and we have assumptions we don't even know that we have.

So we need to just be on constant guard with how we think, how we behave and constantly absorbing new information otherwise there's no way that we would have come across most of the material that we do this show on. It's by constantly sharing this information, reading it, thinking about it and then striving to hammer out the chinks in our own armour because that's what it really comes down to, is the defence. It's our only protection. This world is not ever going to be a utopia. The really bad people make it to the top and when you go out there just hoping that it's going to be a utopia or you see people trying to change things in order to make it better, to make it a utopia, lying to one another, they're just food for these real nasty types.

We can't change that. The best thing that we can do is watch one another's backs, learn as much as we can, keep our eyes to the sky, the higher things in life, the things to really hope for and to strive for and to be on guard. That's all I have to say.

Elan: Good summation Corey and the flip side to part of what you were saying I think gets back to what Harrison was alluding to a little earlier when he mentioned that sometimes we just have this intuitive understanding of something that we can't yet articulate or don't have the information yet to explain to ourselves and make whole, make knowledge, to solidify a particular understanding that we were only grasping at. Like you were saying, this is an ongoing process. It's work. But it makes us stronger and I think it creates the firmament within ourselves to continue to grow and add to our body of knowledge. It does require a bit of rigour but there is a payoff. There is a substance that we're adding to ourselves that I think can be experienced in a kind of way. So encouraging all to keep on rooting, keep on thinking and keep on listening to us. {laughter}

Corey: Yes, keep on tuning in. That does it for us today. Tune in next week and maybe some time we'll get some video footage up. You all can see what we look like when we're Jabber John. But thank you for tuning in everybody. It's been a great conversation. Hope you enjoyed it. You have a great week and we will see you again next time.

Harrison: See you everyone.

Elan: Bye.