We discuss Professor Edward Dutton's new theory that "woke" ideas may be eugenic or serve as a selection pressure. By pushing society in a maladaptive direction, wokeism discourages those who can't survive harsh conditions from reproducing. It selects for the highly religious, conservative, traditionalist, and ethnocentric who can endure collapse. We also cover the decline of civilization tied to declining intelligence, the "spiteful mutant" hypothesis, as well as optimism around AI and automation potentially preventing another dark age.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] if you are able to think for yourself, and you look at the data, and you just say what that data says, you will be isolated from mainstream society, and then people like us, find each other because,
and so in that way, they are hopefully sowing the seeds of their own downfall. So long as they're not rounding up like Machiavelli would, everyone who dissents and who says the true thing in the room of liars so that they can then have them. I
Edward Dutton: think, I think, I think it may come to that point, but I think we will have, we will have escaped to our various neo Byzantiums by the time they simply go through the streets with a machine gun and kill people that express any logical or reasonable ideas.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Hello everyone. Today we are joined again, we're very excited, by the Jolly Heretic, a. k. a. Edward Dutton, a. k. a. Professor Dutton. You can find his podcast or YouTube channel, The Jolly Heretic. He also authored The Native Classroom, a, sort of the mathematician's lament of science education, which is available on Amazon.
But today we're gonna talk about something a [00:01:00] little different, some research that he recently did as well as an ancient theory, taken theory he
Malcolm Collins: has. So let's start with the, the research that I wanna start with is the Rome study. Mm-Hmm. Talk a bit about what was found in this study because I think it was really cool and that it seemed to confirm a theory that a lot of us had been throwing around and
Edward Dutton: sort then it, that's sort of confirm it.
Yeah. So basically, basically the I, the i, the theory is that what causes the rise and fall of civilizations and the theory that I. been working on for a long time. Loads of people have worked on it, but I've quite associated with it in a book I did called Adolf Witzend, Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future of Michael Woodley Venny, is its intelligence.
Intelligence is the central thing. If you're under harsh Darwinian conditions and the intelligence is not particularly high, there is strong selection pressure for intelligence because intelligence gives you the competitive edge and allows you to survive. And we showed that across time, based on proxy measures such as skull size, such as capital, major innovations, such as literacy, even though sounds like it didn't change much, such as numeracy such as interest rates, which are a marker of [00:02:00] time preference.
And a number of other measures that intelligence seemed to be going up. And indeed the richer 50 percent of the population in England had based on powers records, double the completed. population and the intelligence is associated robustly with wealth. And so this indicates intelligence is going up and then you get the breakthroughs of the industrial revolution, of course.
And then you, you start to get a situation where the direct inspection pressure is reduced. So whereas what's been happening is every generation, the bottom of society have been dying out. And the top of the society have been increasing in size and moving down to fill the places vacated by those at the bottom who have died off.
Then that process kind of stops because with the innovations of medicine and better housing and industrial revolution the Darwinian selection measure is weakened. And then you find this process where it, for some reason, we don't quite know why, but I've speculated on why in my book. It goes into reverse.
You start to see a negative correlation. between [00:03:00] intelligence and how many Children you have. And we showed we show evidence of this based on again for capital major innovation based on IQ scores based on reaction times getting longer based on color discrimination getting worse based on new and based on simply genes that are associated alleles that are essentially associated with high intelligence beginning becoming less and less and less within the population.
So, and what that eventually leads to, of course, is the society becomes stupider and stupider and stupider, and it can't sustain things it used to be able to sustain, but also it degenerates into war, it splits up, it becomes impulsive and whatever, and essentially the civilization collapses. At worst, or at best, it retreats.
You get a kind of Byzantium effect where clever people that are still there kind of club together and keep it going in some smaller form as it reduces in size and so on. So intelligence becomes the motor of the rise and fall of civilization. So what we The theory is that that could be the case with Rome and there was some evidence for that because [00:04:00] they talk about in the time of Augustus, they noticed that the upper class men are not having many children.
They talk about it and they note the population is going down and they know that Augustus brings in a tax on childlessness from the upper class men and they pay the tax and all this sort of thing is going on. And so we thought we'll work and test it with ancient genomes. So, what you have is these samples.
It's true that they are small samples, but the statistical significance was maintained and all that they were representative. And you show, we find that at the beginning of the period of Rome, you know, the, the, the prevalence of these alleles is not that high. goes up, it reaches a peak in the Republican period, so this is a highly intelligent period, and then Rome starts to generate into chaos.
Rome, of course, doesn't have an industrial revolution, but it does become very rich. It has the grain laws, the dole, or whatever, it reduces, it creates its own zoo, like we did. It reduces selection pressure. What do you see? The prevalence of the alleles associated with intelligence starts to go. down. And and this goes down in parallel basically [00:05:00] with the collapse of Rome.
So, it, it does, it does fit the data. Now, the theory, the counter argument, sorry, is that there is a change in the composition of the people living in Rome so that you have more genes, more bodies that are from outside Rome itself that are from other parts of Italy or of the Mediterranean. So that's a compound.
But, but, but otherwise it does kind of, it is what we would predict. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember in the study as a point of clarification. They're not looking at IQ, they're looking at the polygenic risk scores that today would be associated with educational attainment.
Yeah, that,
Edward Dutton: with high, polygenic risk scores associated with high, very high educational attainment, which is a very good proxy for IQ.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, no, it's a good proxy, but I think a lot of people might be like, well IQ, whatever, it's like, look, they're not even looking at that, they're looking at like, Functionally, like the types of people who, when our society would get PhDs, just started to disappear from the society.
And, and this is fascinating because this theory existed prior to, [00:06:00] you know, looking at these historic bodies. And it aligns with something that we've noted in some of our work. that if you look at renaissances in a region, they typically last for no longer than three generations and they almost never bloom twice within the same population.
So if you, whether it's the, you know, the Scottish enlightenment or the renaissance in Italy or you know, the American renaissance in the original 13 colonies, or you, you rarely will see A renaissance lasting longer than three generations are happening twice because renaissances seem to be genetically exhaustive of whatever is their precursor.
And this also aligns with some of the theories I've seen of why you saw civilization bloom in places that previously were more barbarian. Where when a place was particularly barbarian. During a previous phase of large, large civilization that they were likely to become the nexus of the next civilization.
Edward Dutton: And, and yeah, I think that's a very good point. So you've got a [00:07:00] situation where civilization will move because it will start in a place where there is an optimum relationship between the genetics and the environment. And it will which will, which will allow. The, the, the, the civilization to spread and whatever and grow, and it will perhaps move, let's say, further north to a place where the environmental selection pressures are harsher which means that in, in sort of theory, there's, let's say, harsher, more selection for something like intelligence or there could be, there could be.
If let's say something like farming went there. Yeah. So in the absence of farming, farming is a selection event, farming selections for intelligence. And so if you, if you, if you take farming from the Mediterranean or whatever, so from the Nile up to where, to the North, then the selection pressures are very, it will become very harsh for them.
A lot of them will be wiped out. And so then you'd expect the center of civilization to move North because there's suddenly as harsh a selection for intelligence further North and it would carry on like that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I'm arguing more that like barbarism. is, is the precursor of, of, of [00:08:00] civilization or intelligence, because keep in mind that Rome wasn't replaced by, you know, Northern European civilization.
It was replaced by Islamic civilization. And, and that came out of a region of extreme barbarism. And then if you look at the Roman empire, the next places of large civilization were like the German territories and the English territories, which were two of the most, like the least tamed during the Roman empire.
Hold on. So you
Simone Collins: don't really mean barbarism, which is really just being foreign or different. You mean like harsh living, right?
Malcolm Collins: Harsh living.
Edward Dutton: Yeah. That's an interesting possibility. It would make sense that they're under harsher conditions. And because they're under harsher conditions, they're sort of more up against it.
So there's less possibility to experiment there's less access, and so they can't innovate these kinds of things themselves. But once they get hold of the rubric of the innovation, then because their harsh conditions are more selective for intelligence, let's say then they can [00:09:00] take it and they can run with it and they can do fantastically well.
Now, the, the, the possible problem with that, and my colleague on that paper, the Rome paper, is looking at this at the moment, is that there's some evidence that the really, really important thing is farming. That's, that's, it's, it's crucial. And it, and once you get farming, it massively elevates IQ. And because it creates this competition where anyone that doesn't take up farming is wiped out.
And it's much more cognitively demanding to pursue farming than to pursue hunter gathering or farming.
Simone Collins: So is it farming or is it technology adoption? Because
Edward Dutton: farming is a form of technology. Well, he's arguing that form of technology. Huh. Now I don't know if he's right, but that's what he's suggesting.
So he's arguing that possibly based on apologetic scores people, the reason why agriculture was developed in Iraq. was because at that time they were just the most intelligent people. And, and and, and so it might, it might not, that, that theory is the one I used to hold. It might not [00:10:00] be right.
We'll see.
Malcolm Collins: Interesting. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see. Yeah. I was just thinking in my head. Okay. So the, the, the times that I'm thinking what a big civilization is like when I was like, okay, civilization died, civilization rose. You had a Greek civilization, which rose after the bronze age. As a result of Egyptian civilization and and the Bronze Age civilizations leaving the scene.
And we know that that region has recently undergone a near total ethnic replacement. That's what we saw was like the erasure of, so there was really heavy conflict in that region. We know that it's Islamic civilization came out of a really, really high conflict region. Rome, pre Roman history, was really high conflict, but did have farming.
None of the other ones I knew had a lot of farming. I didn't ancient Athens, I'm thinking pre, pre, like, bronze age collapse, sea people time, they might have had agriculture Small scale, at the very least. Small scale
Edward Dutton: agriculture. They had agriculture, yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think that, your theory that you're founding is what I think.
Myself founded in various things I've written and it may well be right, but I'm just, I'm just wondering at the moment, I will wait to see my colleagues research on this. If [00:11:00] there is
Malcolm Collins: your other theory, no, I also want
Simone Collins: to, well, hold on. There's one question I want to ask, and this is to both of you. And this is just because my understanding of this period of history, especially when it comes to falling birth rates is imperfect.
Obviously what people give as excuses for not having kids is different from why they're not actually having kids, but was there some taxation or inheritance policy or thing other than just. hedonism, which is always the answer people give when society stopped, you know, producing as many kids that would explain why especially upper class men were not having as many kids
Edward Dutton: at that time.
The opposite. I mean, they were, they were trying to encourage upper class men to have more kids. Right. But
Simone Collins: why weren't, why weren't they despite encouragement?
Edward Dutton: We don't really know. My. theory which I've expounded in various places is that, is that basically, well, the evidence is that mortality salience and threat of mortality and death that's what makes you want to have kids.
That's our evolutionary match. So if you take that [00:12:00] away, then it becomes a selection event for the, just the genetics of pronatalism. And, and, and that is what is taken away to some extent anyway. Okay, there was high mortality in Rome compared to now, but that is what is particularly among the upper class, that is what is taken away.
And, and so they just stop having, they don't, the, the, the instinct doesn't hit in. And I think that's what we're seeing now, people that are more intelligent are more environmentally sensitive. There's a number of lines of evidence for that. And so they're more sensitive to the environment if they're in an evolutionary mismatch They're just basically less instinctive.
And so they just don't have kids And
Malcolm Collins: we also need to think about what what does hedonism mean? Like what is a society have to look like for it to estole Hedonism as a virtue and to not severely punish members from engaging in hedonism cultural groups that didn't punish hedonism historically are typically Out competed really quickly because it's really bad for the elites in your society to be overly hedonistic unless you massively are out competing your [00:13:00] neighbors.
And this is why if you look at the periods right before various civilizational collapses, whether it's the Athenian civilization, the Roman civilization, or the Muslim civilization, All of them had extreme hedonism, particularly sexual hedonism, right before their collapse started. And you can read a lot about this I think people would be surprised.
And the reason why I always include the Muslim civilization one, because I think a lot of people ignore that in their data sets. But it gives you an additional data set in an area where we already don't have that many data sets. Yeah,
Edward Dutton: Pasha Glub in his book, The Fate of Empires, looks into the Islamic situation, of course.
He was amazed by parallels between 8th century Islam, let's say, and what was going on in Rome 800 years earlier. Yeah, it
Malcolm Collins: was very aligned. Yeah, and I have something I also want to compliment Ed Dutton on saying here, because this is not the way the opponents of ours think, is he had a theory, he was committed to the theory, he had written on the theory, he had somebody else agree with the theory, and he said, well, I'm actually aware of some counter [00:14:00] evidence that's currently being developed, and so I want to see if it disconfirms my presumptions.
Yeah. This is a really important, in the way that people should think and engage with ideas. And is not often seen in our society right now. And I think it needs to be specifically called out. It's a good thing to say when somebody says, I might be disproven, here's somebody who's working on this. But let's now go to your next theory, the new one you're working on now.
Yes, very
Edward Dutton: fun. So, I'm known for a theory of spiteful mutants which was
Malcolm Collins: Can you talk a bit about spiteful mutants first?
Edward Dutton: Including the idea that if If if there's a collapse in harsh Darwinian selection pressure, then you get a buildup of mutation. The mu the mutation will relate of course to the body.
It will make people physically less healthy, but it, but also make people mentally less healthy. And the people that are men and those things are player typically related. Mm-Hmm, . And so if people are mentally less healthy, then they will tend to. adaptation, they tend to have basically ways of thinking for genetic reasons that are [00:15:00] unhealthy, that are maladaptive as opposed to adaptive.
So what have we been selecting for across time? We've been selecting for intelligence, we've been selecting for pro social personality, we've been selecting for obviously wanting to have children, natalisms, basic thing. We've got religiosity, because religiosity seems to take that which is adaptive and make it the will of God.
We've been groups which are we've been selecting for ethnocentrism, positive negative ethnocentrism, obedience to authority, all these kinds of group oriented things. We've been selecting for all this whole bundle of stuff that is all bundled together and tends to manifest in certain kinds of religious group.
And so you would expect a deviation from that, and that deviation would be associated with mutational load. And you would get these these, these mutants, they'd be identifiable by sights to some extent because of the relationship between what you look like and mutational load. Who would just have maladaptive ideas.
Because we're a highly pro social species and we're meant to be surrounded by genetically healthy people, we would be influenced by them. And so therefore they would spread maladaptive ideas around the society. These would be ideas like Andrea Dworkin or whatever, you [00:16:00] know, all sex, obvious spiteful mutants.
ugly, disgusting woman. Um, all, all, all sex is rape. And, and, and, you know, the basically we should just allow humanity to die out. So that was the idea. You have these, these spiteful mutants, and if they are reasonably intelligent and they, they reach the middle class, then they will be able to push society.
in a maladaptive direction and, and just destroy it basically. And, you know, lead, lead to its end. So they're spiteful, they're, they're bad for society. And then more recently, myself and a colleague have been think, have been revising this idea and thinking actually, no. Like what, what, what actually, perhaps they're altruistic.
I mean, what are they doing? They are going to bring about a people who are basically Very religious, very conservative, very pro natalist, very genetically healthy, very able to surv If some kind of massive natural disaster happens, like happened with the Bron with the Late Bronze Age Collapse, very able to survive that.[00:17:00]
But if they weren't there, potentially we'd just get unhealthier and unhealthier and unhealthier, and when inevitably there's a big natural disaster, then just everybody would die out.
Simone Collins: So are you saying they're like a mousetrap, like, catching
Malcolm Collins: So it's, it's very interesting. I I'll give my thoughts on
Edward Dutton: this.
Well, I'll just summarize what I've said. So the idea, what they are doing, what they are doing, what woke is doing, is it has taken over the culture of society, and it is pushing society In a matter, it is whereas you are used to being pushed along the adaptive roadmap of life, which says you think life has meaning, which says that you should believe in God, which says that you should have children, which says that you should eventually be men and women should be women, whatever.
All of, all of the, which says that you should live in relatively monocultural society, everything all of this is. utterly subverted. All of this is turned on its head. Instead, you are pushed along a maladaptive roadmap of life where you are told you shouldn't have children. You should mutilate your body.
You should be gay. You, you should, you should welcome the destruction of your society. You should just everything. [00:18:00] Bad. So who, and therefore people don't have children, who is resistant to this onslaught, which says don't have children, or which pushes you towards not having children, which, you know, feminism or whatever, which pushes you towards not having children, it makes it more difficult, or fat acceptance, pushes you, who is resistant to this?
It's going to be people that, for genetic reasons, are going to be highly ethnocentric, conservative religious, and those all correlate with being healthy. So basically it's a selection event, and the woke people are altruistic. They are bringing, they are, they are eugenicists. They are bringing about the removal of all but the most genetically healthy, and the most basically conservative and right wing
that's what they're, that's what they're bringing about. And so from the perspective of those that are right wing, one could kind of argue that they're altruistic, aren't they? I mean, they're a good thing. They're a group level adaptation, and the group that doesn't have it could be in trouble and could, and could die out.
What they're also doing is they're bringing [00:19:00] down civilization. And if they're bringing down civilization back to harsher Darwinian conditions, then of course we need to be able to survive these harsher Darwinian conditions. But they're also ensuring that there are going to be people that will survive these conditions, because they're discouraging those that wouldn't survive it from breeding.
So, and then you get group selection, and their group is the strong group. So they're purging their own group of the unhealthy. That's what wokeness could be argued to be doing.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I said, I want to dig into this. This is really cool. And it goes on some of the things that we've talked about where Wokus, you know, through any avenue that they preach their, you know, mimetic sterilization, they are primarily sterilizing people who are pregnant.
genetically susceptible and open to these progressive ideas. Now, I actually think that it is potentially scary how good they are at this from a genetic level. Like, they're doing a very good job of removing pro sociality from the human species. Which, which, you know, it isn't all good. But it is [00:20:00] definitely a real phenomenon that we are really seeing.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm hearing like, drawing out mental illness like a sponge. Okay. Drawing out a bunch of other problems, but then also like drawing out openness to outside ideas. I mean,
Malcolm Collins: who's being killed? Who do fat activists kill? You know, they kill, you know, people who are susceptible to these ideas. Who do pro abortion advocates kill?
They, they are aborting progressive fetuses. Who are you know, who, when, when people are open to sexual practices that lead to lower fertility rates you know, who is being attracted by this? It is typically people who are more susceptible to these ideas. The downside is of all of this, so of the first series, I don't know if the mutants would know that they were mutants, or know to be spiteful, like there would be no genetic real reward for them to do this.
I, I think that the second theory is closer to the truth and that it definitely is having this effect on populations. Unfortunately, they suppress fertility, particularly in the midwit population[00:21:00] that is susceptible to their ideas. They don't do a good job of suppressing fertility in the idiots or in the severe upper class.
And I think that this could lead to speciation. Yeah.
Edward Dutton: Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. So I, well, I think what, no, no, I just. Let's put it a different way. I'm not sure about that because I think that what you what you have with the the the low intelligent people what what the woke are doing as well is bringing down civilization and those those that have you know, it's the south africanization of the west basically and those those that have low iq Yeah, you're right in on a certain level.
They're not suppressing their fertility, but those people are Genetically very unhealthy and are increasingly completely reliant on complex systems, national health service or whatever in, in order to survive. Those people are more morbid. So, so when, when, when civilization starts to decline and there's, there's, you know, there's bringing about, remember, they're bringing that about by massive verbal immigration, by, by, by encouraging the midwits not to breed, by, by whatever, they're bringing that about, [00:22:00] then these people that have low IQ, they're just going to die off.
So, so you're, you're, the, the, the, the midwits, the midwits, the midwits which aren't resigned from the gene pool, the low IQ people are unable to survive.
And also remember that one of the things they're bringing about. is a in, in, in bringing about, in selecting people that are more religious and conservative is a much higher level of disgust. And this, this, this has an interesting effect because it has the kind of effect that you have in Victorian England where they talked, where was a massive problem with disease and whatever, which is why they were so conservative which is that they saw the working classes like vectors of disease that were dangerous and you had to keep away from them.
And I think you're going to get the spread of these kinds of ideas increasingly, that they're almost another people, that we just don't, you don't go near them, that's just, no.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and where we would have the biggest disagreement on this is, is I would actually argue that they are holding off the collapse of our society.
through immigration policies that bring in a large portion of people who are still genetically healthy and haven't been ravaged as much in, as, as [00:23:00] centers of, of, of long term urban wealth. I think that whenever a place enters like stagnant long term urban wealth, you begin to see a pretty big dysgenic effects and that they are keeping society like broadly alive.
This is in America more than Europe. On the other
Edward Dutton: hand, on the other hand, on the other hand, couldn't you argue that what they're, what they're doing as they do this increasingly and increasingly is creating a growing sense of sort of almost like native, a subculture of native identity almost whereby, whereby with their woke policies.
If basically, if you dissent from their ideas, then you know, you are evil which, which inclines people who do dissent from their ideas to increasingly come together into, into a subgroup and breed with, and breed with each other in a way they wouldn't previously probably have done. Or needed to do which therefore increases a sense of separation between the, the, the surviving native conservative population and, and everybody else.
So, so, so, so they're, they're, they're bringing, they're bringing about this [00:24:00] sort of genetic similarity process, but via exclusion, via excluding us from their party. bar excluding us from their social networks. That's what, that's what they're, that's what they're doing. That's how you, us three met. So, so I think that on that, on that level, they're helping to create that.
I mean, it's true that the, the, the, I think it's unsustainable. Ultimately, it gets to a point where there is a, there is a growing reaction, I think, against this, this, this high immigration. But when, but when that happens, if you don't have the high immigration and you don't improve the birth rate, Then what you ultimately will have is economic collapse.
So
Malcolm Collins: yeah, and I should also point out that there's very different types of immigration within different countries and and for different communities when you have what I would call high barrier immigration you're typically going to actually get the best and the brightest from a country and when you have low barrier immigration or you're getting the final squeeze, like Venezuela is a good example here.
The early Venezuelan immigrants would that notice things happening and came when it was, you know, it's still difficult to come, but now you're sort of getting the [00:25:00] final squeeze of the vine of the country. And so you're getting lower quality immigrants than you would in the first few waves of immigration, but this has, as bad as the effects are within the United States, you need to consider what effects we're having on these developing countries when we do siphon off their best and the brightest.
I mean, look at a place like Africa and, and generations and generations of siphoning off their best and brightest is definitely going to have an effect on these countries. If we continue to maintain this as a policy, like genetics exist and genetics are real and so we will destroy not just our own country, but their country, you know, you bring them over, then you medically sterilize them and then you have to bring the next over and and iterationally, this is going to have huge genetic effects around the world and people are underestimating how quickly really strong selective pressures like this can have an effect.
on things like baseline IQ in a
Edward Dutton: population. They do because they don't understand that the, it's not just, it's something like schooling. It's, it's not just, okay, the IQ of the population is [00:26:00] going down. So the, the IQ of school kids goes down. No, it, what's the IQ of the teachers that has environmental effects on the IQ of the children?
What's, what, what's the, what's the IQ of the environment that these teachers can create. And so similarly, you've got to think about the effect that it has at the right. tail. What if you have the force of the population that have an IQ above 145, it doesn't take much to do that. Then you are, you are, you are halving the force of the population that are creating an environment that is bringing the rest of the population environmentally to its phenotypic maximum intelligence.
And, and, and so they're becoming, they can become rapidly stupider. And I think we, we see that, that's what, it's the cultural effect that's very important. If you think about, if you just watch on YouTube, the quality of programs that were put out, documentaries that were put out in the 80s. The assumption of the intelligence level of the population.
Compared to the nonsense that is, that is that is put out now, then then that, that, that is a case in point. So, yeah, it's what's, it's what's done [00:27:00] in the smart fraction that is, I think, as important as what's going on in the population.
Malcolm Collins: And I would encourage if people haven't done this, because we had to do this when we were doing channel research.
Is sort on YouTube by most of use for different types of search terms are just for channels and you will see that the most views by far are videos that seem to appeal to almost a toddler like intelligence. Yeah this is. I, I think a lot of people, and this is a big problem with like the effective altruist community and stuff like that and a lot of people who live, like, in upper class or middle upper class communities or creative communities and urban centers, they just don't interact with average people, so they don't know how bad it's gotten and how far down the slippery slope we are already.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like slapstick. Like, imagine like a family of people of different sizes jumping over a tire that's rolling toward them, like down a back alleyway.
Edward Dutton: Like Charles Murray said that we get this cognitive stratification and and you, you don't, you don't interact. I, I particularly don't, cause I spend my time in [00:28:00] Finland and I, and I speak in Finnish and I, or I speak in English and you think, well, the fact that they can speak English means that's a bit intelligent or I'm speaking in Finnish.
And so you're not getting the nuances of, of, Low iq. Some people might be, when I go back to England, as I have in increasingly am as part of my YouTube show and whatever, I am shocked. Like I was at, I was at Heathrow Airport of Terminal three, and the guy that was in charge, in charge of the security baggage thing, right.
And I was, I complained about how the ness of one particular one particular baggage checker and, and, and, and the guy said, he's what was the word? He, he used, he completely mixed up the, the, the me the meaning of two words. He, he, he, he, he mixed up something being abl. Yeah. He said, well, he's not entitled, he's not entitled to bushel bag along the carousel.
He's not entitled to, no, he's not, he's not entitled to bushel bag along the carousel. I said, what do you mean he's not allowed to? No, no, he's not entitled to. I said, do you mean he's not obliged to? And he's like, yeah, yeah. [00:29:00] He's not obliged to, so, right. You've mixed up, obliged and entitled. They're, they're quite different things.
And that implies, that's a level of stupidity. He's learned this, this high order word somewhere, entitled, or oblige, he doesn't know what it means, but he's trying to sound clever to the customer that's complaining, and so he misuses it. I was like, how can you not know the meaning of the word entitled?
Simone Collins: I think you're still profoundly on, oh, sorry, overestimating intelligence, if that's what your complaint is.
Like, do what
Malcolm Collins: Malcolm said. Your quote earlier that I thought was better, of what number of politicians can't judge, like if a coin flips twice, what's the probability?
Edward Dutton: People have complained. People on Twitter have complained to me about this. And they've said it is unreasonable. They've said, oh, I didn't get it.
And I'm perfectly intelligent. No, you're not. It's, it's, it's, how can you think, well, if you flip it forever, for eternity, it's just going to be one in two. You flip it a hundred times it's one and two. How can you [00:30:00] think if it's once it's one and two, that if it's twice it's one and two, if it's three times it's one and two, if it's four times it's one and two.
It's mad! It's just Well
Simone Collins: that's, I mean, I, I, I, with that particular issue, I think a lot of that comes back to your book, The Naked Classroom, where we have not we've not been taught how to engage with logic on our own. We've been taught to memorize things. And I would even argue that the majority of the people who have the right answer for that have the right answer because someone in a classroom told them to go through this exercise and they were wrong and then they were proven wrong and they felt dumb about it and now they'll never forget it again.
But I think that when it comes to actually like the proportion of the population that is. gone through industrial schooling that would answer correctly. That question is incredibly low because of the way that we've been taught math because
Edward Dutton: of the way it was 25%. It was half among MPs. And I think I'm right in saying it was 25 percent of them.
Simone Collins: That doesn't surprise me at all though, because look at how we're taught. [00:31:00] We're not taught to reason for ourselves to actually think through it. We're taught to memorize basic things.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and I think that this is really interesting, this point here, and it comes to something he was saying earlier, is, is we are to some extent blessed that the woke mobs, because if you are able to think for yourself, and you look at the data, and you just say what that data says, you will be isolated from mainstream society, from the portions of society that the woke mob controls, and then people like us, find each other because, you know, just saying truth removes you, sorry, removes you from positions of power in our society today.
And so in that way, they are hopefully sowing the seeds of their own downfall. So long as they're not rounding up like Machiavelli would, everyone who dissents and who says the true thing in the room of liars so that they can then have them. I
Edward Dutton: think, I think, I think it may come to that point, but I think we will have, we will have escaped to our various neo Byzantiums by the time they simply go through the streets with a machine gun and [00:32:00] kill people that express any logical or reasonable ideas.
But I do want to argue
Simone Collins: that there's, there's a difference between people who've been ruined by the industrial education system. In people who are just inherently kind of speciating and like what they are, like the way that they engage with the world, the things that entertain them, the things that they like, the fundamental way that they think.
Edward Dutton: yEah. Okay.
Simone Collins: I mean, I, I just, I want to argue that like, there are more redeemable from a perspective of like, Oh, these people can like get us off planet. These people can build great things, people out there. Then we might otherwise
Malcolm Collins: argue that no, there's not a lot of people. This is always, you think that there's a lot of smart people in the world.
I think that there's a handful. I think there's like maybe 50, 000, maybe a hundred thousand.
Edward Dutton: I wonder if what Simone is arguing is that there are people out there that even if they're not that smart are in the right circumstances, useful to building up a society. Maybe,
Simone Collins: I mean, at least I'm arguing that. A huge proportion of the people [00:33:00] that right now are not going to be able to build anything meaningful, make any difference in society that we personally would value in terms of like advancing civilization could have had they gone through, had they existed in a different type of society and gone through a different form of education.
So they've been robbed. I
Malcolm Collins: agree with that. You, you might be. You might be able to create more independent thinking, like real people if they were educated differently. Not might be, you almost certainly would. Because there's a portion of people, and this is particularly true among women, where if no matter how smart they are, if they see something as shamed by society or they're like, this is what's normative in my society, that's what they're going to do.
Edward Dutton: Yeah, I mean, the basic argument against the lab leak theory is that the wrong kind of people believe it. Yes. That's it. That's the argument.
Malcolm Collins: It is funny when you mentioned you know, people walking around and, like, like, shooting people in the streets. I'm like, well, we didn't come far from that recently with the whole vaccine thing.
Like, they have shown that they're willing [00:34:00] to do this kind of stuff. They've shown with, like, the trucker protest in Canada, when they would go through and, like, cancel these people's bank accounts, that they're willing to go to really, I think, much more extreme levels than we were aware that they were willing to go.
Edward Dutton: Yeah, they're too cowardly to open fire. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a more, it's a more, it's a more, it's a more pusillanimous way of doing things. Counseling bank accounts, making people's lives very difficult. At least, at least a hundred years ago, you knew where you were. A dictatorship would just open fire.
You risk your life. That's it. No, no, no. You risk social ostracism and social difficulties like, like being excluded from a gang of girls.
Malcolm Collins: An economic ostracism, which is the more damaging thing. You know, we've met guys, one guy, very like mainstream sort of guy, just sort of called out efficacy around vaccine stuff.
And he's been debanked, debanked, like, like you can't use mainstream banks anymore. He's not like going out there spouting racist stuff. He's not like going out there, just [00:35:00] said, Hey, this, this COVID narrative seems off to me. And that's wild to me when they. felt that they had power, how far they ran with it.
Edward Dutton: Well, it doesn't, it doesn't seem surprising to me, the COVID, they, they had to give the impression from a Machiavellian perspective of just being in control, being in control. And the COVID thing illustrated very clearly. The total lack of control. They had no idea what they were doing. And so much was much worse to, to question what they were doing in terms of COVID than racism or transphobia or whatever way worse, because it was fundamentally, this was, this, this could be revolution.
I mean, this is the government showing they don't know what they're doing. I
Malcolm Collins: mean, just to what you were saying earlier, in case any of our audience don't know this yet, or they haven't stayed up with the research, like the lab leak theory thing, the amount of evidence there is for the lab leak theory being accurate is.
Overwhelming. It was definitely a lab leak. Like, this is, to say it wasn't a lab [00:36:00] leak is literally, you know, almost equivalent to like, the moon landing was a hoax level like just grasping at straws. And yet, people were getting deplatformed for saying that in the early days.
Simone Collins: Well, now, I mean, people were being de platformed for anything that the mainstream, like, government or media establishment was not advocating for, including the efficacy of masks, right?
You would get in huge trouble if you questioned that. And, of course, even in the beginning of the pandemic, people were saying, no, no, no, no, don't wear masks, because one, they're not effective, and two, they're not effective. Like the good ones we need for actual
Malcolm Collins: healthcare. We are so blessed that we were not public figures when COVID was happening.
Simone Collins: Oh, we would have been so screwed. That's right. Yeah.
Edward Dutton: I was, but I just felt it best to shut up about it. Smart,
Simone Collins: very, very
Edward Dutton: smart. I could see that this, this was the one thing that just know
Simone Collins: the third rail. Oh my goodness. What I like about your theory [00:37:00] though, in general is that it is broadly optimistic. You're, you're taking a theory that was.
quIte pessimistic originally and now you're like, Oh no, everything is going to be okay. Think things are working out the way that they're supposed to. I
Edward Dutton: mean, it'll be okay in the end. We'll have to, we'll have to go through hell. First I was at Churchill said, if you're going through hell, keep on going.
Yeah. And there'll be, there'll be a lot of unpleasantness first, but yeah, it seems to be that what I originally thought was that it's just the collapse of society and there'll be a very, very long, dark age. And maybe, maybe
that will just collapse and that will be a very long dark age. But the more I've looked into it, the more I'm thinking, no, we, we, first of all, there was a Byzantium last time that, that held out. And so. that there should be this time. Secondly, we have higher, much more technology this time so that if we can if we can create these separate states that are useful using this technology, then we can start at a higher level.
And so the renaissance, you know, and so therefore we could potentially go further. And thirdly, I can't even begin [00:38:00] to predict what effect AI would have on this because it's a new thing in, in, in terms of good or bad things. I mean, the bad thing is that it would just keep society on, on sort of life support as it farms out all work to machines.
And the humans are just these sort of sort of farm animals, really. There's a sort of milk. by a, by a, by a great big machine and, and, and go into greater and greater dysgenics. And I, I, I don't know, that could be terrible.
Malcolm Collins: Actually this, this is where the wokes are doing us enormous favor is because of AI.
If they weren't pushing such strong pressure on us to all conglomerate together. We likely wouldn't. Because of AI, because AI doesn't. force civilization to collapse in the same way it has in the past, if they weren't doing this themselves, we wouldn't be building these parallel economies. Well, and isn't there an
Simone Collins: argument to be made that because of AI there may not even be a dark age because one, it will accelerate the extermination of any group that will basically fall into like, hedonic pleasure box because AI will facilitate that.
Those people won't have kids and then those [00:39:00] people won't be in the future at all. Leaving only like really industrious, hardworking, non hedonically motivated people left and AI to
Edward Dutton: empower them. Imagine if it can, if it could, if it can make, I mean, the pornography is a problem even now. So if you've got pornography that is utterly sating, I'm not, but an ersatz relationship, which seems real.
Right. Then, then you can see how it's going to be a, it's a selection event, even more so than I had previously said. And so it's, it's selects out all these men, all but the most high quality men, all but the most high quality women out and and, and you just have this this, this group of, of gold, golden platonic golden people who Well, so then is
Simone Collins: this maybe as bad as it gets?
Perhaps we are at the lowest
Malcolm Collins: point? No, no, no. You, you definitely will have an economic collapse after this. Oh, well I think
Edward Dutton: we will. I think we're so We're so We're so If you look at sort of Strauss Howell or whatever, or the various theories on this, we're so [00:40:00] Jewish. I mean we really, we're so due economic collapse and war where it's, it's, we, is it happening and I don't notice it or what?
I don't know, but was it, we're just so rich we're not noticing it, but we are absolutely, in terms of this cycle I told you about, this Finnish guy, this idea of cycles of hormones and whatever, we are so, we are so due something any time now. That would be
Malcolm Collins: a collage. This conversation has been fantastic, we're really glad we had you on again and I hope that you have a spectacular day, and guys, do check out his book, the, the education book on Amazon, and the Johnny Heritage podcast.
Simone Collins: The Naked
Malcolm Collins: Classroom, and The Jolly Heretic, and,
Edward Dutton: And my book on this subject we were just discussing is called The Past as a Future Country, The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, and I've got another one called Breeding the Human Herd, Eugenics, Hygienics, and the Future of the Species, and I'm working on one on the altruistic mutants, so this is a new, new thing I'm working on.
Malcolm Collins: Ooh, very fun and, well, and I love it, I, [00:41:00] I love it because it's such a great thing to throw in our opponents faces. One of my favorite tweets was something like feminists and anti natalists are the only cultural groups that think that they can out compete their rivals by having fewer kids.
You know, and it's just so silly on its face when you think about it. But have a spectacular
Simone Collins: day. Yes, thank you so much
Edward Dutton: for coming on. Great. Great to talk to you both. Okay. Well, I hope you had a great Christmas, everybody, and happy new year and all
Malcolm Collins: that.