Dr. James Lindsay

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161 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. James Lindsay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay · 5 May 2025 podcast
Especially, we could talk about anonymity, because I can understand why people defend it, but by the same token, it allows you to escape from your well-deserved reputation.
Right.
Yes, yes.
It's particularly true because it's literally cost-free. Yeah. Right. So you might imagine that any storehouse of value is likely to be parasitized to the degree that you can invade it for no cost.
Okay, so this is what I think happened to the universities, right? Is that they're whale carcasses, and they've been invaded by parasites. And the whale carcass idea is a very old one. It's a huge storehouse of value, right? So since World War II, the West was on a pretty productive trajectory, and we generated massive storehouses of value in many, many places.
Those would be financial storehouses, but reputational storehouses even more, that's even more germane. Like Harvard has both. It did have both, right? 53 billion dollars plus a stellar reputation.
Next to Disney.
Right, which is another storehouse of value that's been severely parasitized. Okay, so now, so that's two things. There's 5% of the population, oh yes, the dark tetrad types are narcissistic, Machiavellian. So they use language only as a means to manipulate towards instrumental ends. There's no communicative intent. It's all essentially status gaming.
They're psychopathic, and that means they're predatory parasites. And then they had to top it all off with sadism. And I think that's what changed the dark triad to the dark tetrad. I think the reason for that is that if you have a dark triad orientation towards the world. And the world turns against you.
It makes you so angry because you're rejected and unsuccessful that that expresses itself in positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Right? So this is dark material. Now, There's no reason to assume that the cluster B dark tetrad types would do anything other than gravitate towards storehouses of value. First of all, the parasite problem is a very deep problem biologically, right?
It's so deep that some people think sex evolved to solve it. As you mix the genes, it's harder for parasites to move down the generations, right? So that's actually one of the canonical theories for the evolution of sex itself. Why would you take a 50% hit in terms of genetic transmission, when you could just clone yourself.
Well, the parasites can breed, multiply faster than you can, and so they have the upper edge in a lengthy battle. So you mix up the genes, and anyways, the parasite problem is a very old problem. Okay, so I want to add one more thing to that. So imagine that a system of knowledge as a way of representing the world and navigating in it, okay?
So that would be like a scientific theory or an engineering theory, right? And so you might be able to assess that theory on the grounds of objective fact, say. Okay, but then imagine that there's a different form of language game. And that is that you orient yourself with a lot of, you bring a number of people together and you lay out some game rules. They could be religious axioms.
In fact, I think religious axioms are game rules. I think that's the right way to think about it. But it could be political, right? So communism, a pseudo-religion, has game rules, axioms that you have to accept. And so does conservatism. These are games that can integrate a large number of people. Okay, so that's a slightly different function, right? Because now...
It's like if you and I decide to play basketball, we're going to produce a hierarchy within that set of rules, right? Whatever set of rules you lay out, people are going to be differentially able at implementing.
Right? Any set of rules.
So, for example, if you were in a gym and you had schoolchildren roll and you had a competition, you'd get a hierarchy of rules. rolling speed and then the top rollers would be the high status people within that game. You can organize systems of knowledge so that they're ground rules for a game and then you produce a hierarchy. Now, hierarchical position has value.
So the higher you are in a social hierarchy, the more positive emotion you feel and the less negative emotion and the less likely you are to perish.
Partly because you have social capital and social support. So people will compete for... status within the confines of any given hierarchical game. That's a whole different function than representation of the world. Now, maybe you'd hope that your game represents the world too, which I suppose that would be something like competition in a scientific lab? Right, because- Yeah, something like that.
Something like that. Or yeah, competition within a game that's actually productive and self-sustaining. Yeah. Right, and the axioms of Western culture seem to be a game like that.
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