Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian Institute. Today I'm joined by the Jolly Heretic, also known as Doctor Edward Dunn. He is a professor of evolutionary psychology and the author of Making Sense of Race. Doctor Dutton, where is the best place for people to find the many books and publications you have published over the years? I suppose probably just Amazon. That's the simplest way of doing it.
Suppose you can buy it. You can buy it from the publishers if you want to, if you want to help them out. But yeah, they're all, they're all with one exception, they're, they're all available there. Terrific. What were the great intellectual contributions of Jonathan Bowden and what are some lessons that we can learn from his life?
I assume. Yeah, You're, you're asking me with reference to my new book, of course, the The Shaman of the Radical Right, The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden, which has just been published. I'm not sure he made any great intellectual contributions. I'm not sure that's what he did. That wasn't his niche. That's not his thing. I I don't think there was anything particularly original. Basically he espoused a kind of spiritual Nietzscheanism.
So it was. It was a pig, I suppose, a kind of philosophy rooted in Heraclitus and paganism and the idea that we we should strive towards glory, we should strive towards greatness, we should strive towards being one of the gods. He had an idea something he was said he wasn't a perennialist, but there's he said he wasn't.
But there's a degree to which, if you look at his philosophy, he seems to be saying something like there are certain eternal truths that are absolute and that are outside nature and that are eternal and we just know them to be true. And these eternal truths are things like that. We should that there there is a there is something non spiritual, spiritual. We should strive towards
greatness. We should do the good of our there are certain truths that are preserved certainly in Pagan religions and and therefore you should become a part of a sort of Pagan religiosity of that, that you should ride the tiger of modernity, as it were, and kind of fight against what's
happening. But at the same time, he he did advocate what you might call a kind of reactionary modernism, which was that you take, as you take the good, you don't just reject something because it's modern as some people did. Some people will argue that they reject the evolution because
it's modernist. You know, he would say we, we, we take the good things about modernism and we add to that certain Pagan or Nietzschean or whatever you want to call them, assumptions such as a respect for the past glories of our civilization, such as a mono ethnic society that looks out for its ethnic interests. And such as a striving towards glory and greatness and a rejection of, of, of wallowing and suffering and a rejection of sort of a pitiable way of, of
looking at things. That's not a philosophy original to him. There were lots of people you could highlight, I don't know, TS Eliot or whoever, Judas Evola, whatever who, who have said these kinds of things, although you could argue that perhaps he synthesizes them. It's the fact that he is able to distill them and to show the connections between different aspects of them in an original, in an insightful and in an inspiring and interesting way. That's that's his big contribution.
So you could say that if you know, Nietzsche is an original thinker, he's more like Nietzsche's bulldog or something. He's he's able to present these things in an interesting, original, intelligent, insightful way where he makes lots and lots of connections between this, that and the other. So he's an influencer. He's an influencer before there were influencers, and he is a significant posthumous influence on many people on the mainstream and more radical right today.
He's a kind of charismatic figure, a shaman that inspires people with his with his speeches and and makes them feel that that their nation and I know based ideas of what you want to say will triumph in the end. That's his big thing. What would you say is the core difference between someone on the left and someone on the right? Well, it depends what element of
the left and the right. I mean, if you look at it overall in terms of personality at the moment in a, in a broadly left wing society, people that are left wing are more mentally unstable. And this then breeds things like if you're mentally unstable, you have low self esteem and you this breeds things like resentment. And so you are resentful of power. And I'm sorry, there's a bit of an echo. You are resentful of power and things like that. And so you are resentful of history.
I'm sorry you are resentful of history. You are resentful of anything that is anything that is symbolic of power, which in many ways is the, and the essence of the left. So there's, there's this being mentally unstable in addition, and that that has a number of dimensions to it. For example, if you're mentally unstable, you'll be high in anxiety. And if you're high in anxiety, that predicts extrinsic religiousness, IE social conformity.
And so that then so you've got the kind of people that are mentally unstable and thus resentful and they're, they're left wing, the kind of people that are mentally unstable and thus they fear others and they fear what's around them. This makes the Machiavellian. And at the moment, the way that you get power to a certain degree is through are you there is through is through is through being left wing.
Another thing that will develop if you have low self esteem can perhaps be a kind of narcissism where you deal with your low self esteem by telling yourself that you're brilliant, that you're the best, that you're that you're that you're uniquely perfect and moral and entitled and grandiose and unique.
And therefore you will get, you will get narcissistic supply by being left wing in a left wing society and then and obviously socially conforming that will get you power and a sense of self esteem in a left wing society. So that's the first thing they seem to be is mentally unstable, neurotic and they don't have a feeling that life has meaning or anything like that. The second is they are they are low in agreeableness. They're just not very nice
people on average. There's two components to agreeableness. 1 is altruism, a kindness, empathy, you know, and the other is politeness. They're very low in politeness, but there's a degree to which they're also just learn more
generally in altruism. So imagine if you combine being mentally unstable like that and thus wanting power and, and to control people and all this sort of thing with being low in agreeableness, being not a very pleasant person, being individually oriented rather than group oriented, being out for yourself. Well, what you will tend to do is you will fear a fair fight because you're psychologically weak, but you will as an, as a person, that's no agreeableness.
As a person that therefore is out for themselves, that wants things for them, selfish. You will still want that power. So how do you get it? Well, you virtue signal, you play for status covertly like girls do. You virtue signal, which is a or you victim signal, both of which
are signs of being left wing. And in the case of victim signalling is a sign of sort of what's called vulnerable narcissism because a, a vulnerable narcissist rather than a grandiose narcissist is the biggest victim and he manipulates people via his victimhood. They're low in conscientiousness compared to right wing people. Conscientiousness is impulse control and rule following.
And so then of course, this means they're emotional and they're not interested in the rules, the traditional rules of society. In fact, they're quite like breaking them. So that's the difference between the left and the right. Essentially. 1 is pro social, one is antisocial. But if we then look at the far right, extreme right, then that's a bit different.
Those people are where we have a dark, the dark triad of interrelated traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, which is that you're power hungry and psychopathy. And it's the psychopathy that the far right are high in because if you are in a left wing, particularly if you're in a left wing society, then you don't care about about conforming you. In fact, you quite like hurting people's feelings and you'd like danger.
Well, what is it going to be more attractive to you than the far right, which is completely socially unacceptable. So therefore, people like that that are high in psychopathy are attracted to the, to the extreme right. If the right overall are pro social, but the extreme right, that's a bit different. They're going to be much more antisocial, much higher in psychopathic traits.
And as I said, these, these do crossover them with things like narcissism and Machiavellianism. So that's, then that's the, that's the sort of the, the, the key difference that we have these five moral foundations of being, of being, of obedience to authority, of in Group loyalty and of sanctity versus disgust. And this often keeps out that which is sickly from the group or whatever. These are the group oriented
foundations. And then we have the individually oriented foundations because we have to get top of the group's past our genes in prehistory. So we want to get more of equality and harm avoidance. Now in general, the left are concerned, or they pretend to be concerned only with equality and harm avoidance, the rest not with the rest. But the right are concerned with
all 5 moral foundations. The right are concerned with all 5 moral foundations, but the far right, it would seem, are not concerned with the individually oriented foundations. You know, they're, they're, they're low in a group, they're low in a grill. They don't care about harm and they don't care about equality. They're prepared to be so group oriented that you should lay down your life for the group and, you know, go for it sort of thing.
So then see, we've got to distinguish between the right and the far right, but I think that those are the key differences. You refer to purple piled people as people who know the truth but refuse to speak it. What truths are you referring to? Well, there's many of them. I mean, the most obvious are that there are genetic, significant genetic or partly genetic racial differences in all manner of things you can think of. And you get people that of
course they know that's true. Of course they know that there are average race differences in IQ, average race differences in reaction times, average race differences in modal personality as a consequence of adaptation to different environments, and average race differences in things that we just feel it's not polite to talk about like testicle size, average race difference, or earwax composition.
And they, they, they know these things to be true and they have, they have no reason to doubt these things. I mean, I had not, there was an article reviewing the Bounden book in the Spectator the other day and the guy that wrote it rang me up to apologise ahead of time and say, look, I like you and whatever, but I'm going to have to slag you off a bit in this article because I have to play the game in a conservative rather than far right magazine. So that's play.
That's that's being purple pilled. And so he he kind of mocked the fact that I found that there were race differences. He said, Oh, you, it's crazy what you're saying race differences in penis size. I said, no, there's no, no, we don't have data on race differences in penis size, testicle size. Yes. And he and he and he and he put that in and then I found that there were race differences in the extent to which men insert things up their assholes.
There are race differences in the extent to which that happens. And East Asian men are particularly into doing so. And he and he quoted that as if it's, but it's just true. So you might, you might find it impolite to say it, but it's, it's factually true. So, so there was, it's, it's that sort of thing that they particularly the race differences in psychological traits that they, they, they fart, they know it's true, but they pretend in polite society. Oh, well, maybe the data's not
clear. Oh, well, it's been counter argued, isn't if So what? It's overwhelmingly clear. So it would be things like that. And then everything that's downstream of that, such as the immigration policy, must take those differences into account. And if it doesn't, then you end up with the kind of chaos that we see in British cities and
German cities all the time. And indeed, the studies that indicate that's clear that people are evolved to be with those who are genetically similar to themselves and they get on with those are genetically similar to themselves. And you will end up with conflict of some kind always if you place people together who are genetically dissimilar. And these ethnic groups and to a greater extent races are genetic clusters that have been separated for substantial periods of time.
And of course then if you put them together, yes, there'll be some people that will that will have have mixed race offspring or whatever, but they will be quite rare. And in general, you just get a balkanized society. Why are they so hesitant to accept a blatant reality when it comes to disparities? They have no problem saying, of course, 90% of the people who get, you know, who end up on death row are men. Men are more violent. They have higher levels of testosterone.
Younger men are more violent than older men. They'll say whites have lower incomes than Asians because Asians work harder. But anytime there's a disparity that's either in favor of whites or means that women might have a lower income, then all of a sudden they say it's really, really immoral to look at disparities. They don't openly say it's immoral, but they, but they will
use manipulative language. Yeah, basically they, they, these people have adopted a worldview in which they are, in which they deal with, as I said earlier, with their mental problems with the, the, the aspects of themselves they don't like. They haven't confronted with their feelings of anxiety and depression and whatever by telling themselves that they are morally superior to and better than other people. And you could do that in two interrelated ways. One is the moral way.
So you, you say it is, it is moral to say that there that any difference is that, that, that all sex sexes are equal, that races are equal, that we're all equal. We're all equal. That's the moral thing. We're we're all equal. I the, the, the left wing thing, I am in favour. I am a good kind person. What makes me good and kind is I'm in favour of equality and
harm avoidance. But what that ultimately means is reversing in an illogical way the system such that the person who is perceived as disempowered is always good, and the person who is perceived as as empowered is always bad. And then once this happens, then intelligent people will adopt will perceive intelligence associated with conformity.
So you've got Intel, basically, intelligent people who are mentally unstable, but those people will perceive the current way of things, the way the wind's blowing. They will adopt it, and then they will play for status. You know, sort of runaway leftism signalling. Until you get into a crazy situation where you're saying I'm more moral than the last person because I think that men can become women or, or whatever it happens to be.
And the other thing that you you do is you adopt what you might call luxury beliefs or but high status beliefs. So if you feel insecure about your social status, then you adopt the state of the beliefs of higher status people in order to make your reassure you that you're important.
And so if somebody confronts you, those two things, the status issue and the morality issue are allowing you to cocoon yourself from an understanding of what you know is true of you deep down, which is that you're just pathetic, lying, sad, unhappy person. And so if somebody then attacks that ideology, then what they are confronting you with is, is is the you, the you deep down, and this is very, very painful. You have to make that person go away.
You're now feeling cognitive dissonance. You have a perception of yourself as moral. Because you hold these beliefs, these beliefs are undermined. And it was intelligent as well. Because you hold these beliefs, these beliefs are undermined. You're being shown as being stupid, as being, as being pathetic, as being a virtue signal, as being hollow, as being shallow. And that's horrible to have to deal with.
And so then you're going to react in a highly emotional way to people like that in order to, to get to go away. I mean, and remember, if you're that anxious, you could think to yourself, if this you're you. Franklin Roosevelt talked about fear itself. Imagine fearing fear. Imagine fearing that this person could make me so scared I could kill myself. That's that, that's, that's the kind of level we're talking about when they talk about
feeling literally unsafe. So, so that's what you're dealing with very unstable people. Whereas the opposite, the people that are on the, not the far right, I think there's elements of the far right that have very similar psychology to the far left. And, and they will purity signal. And the way they deal with it is by saying, well, you know, I might not be doing very well in life, but at least I know the truth about the world and I, I, I know the truth.
What is the truth? Oh, with the truth is it's all the Jews. The Jews are responsible for everything. So you, you, you may have thought that it was the dinosaurs were wiped out 65,000,000 years ago by a meteorite or an asteroid. No, it was the Jews and that and that and that and that. And that gives you again, a sense of important, a sense of being somebody. And if someone challenges that, then again, you react with this narcissistic rage.
It's the it's the conservatives in the middle really who are the stable ones. These people it's associated with. These people are high in conscientiousness, they are high in agreeableness. They are pro social traits. They are high in religiosity. They believe in God. They believe life has meaning. They believe they have even if they don't. This is the problem. They believe they have a sense of agency and they believe they have a sense of control over the
world. And this is a problem because they kind of if you, if you like that way of thinking means you believe you have power, you believe you have self efficacy, you believe you have power even if you don't. Whereas the left believe they don't have power and they are constantly fighting against the evil conservatives even when they do have total power. And so that's why. And that is one of the reasons why things tend to shift towards
the left. The other reason is that, as we said, as I said earlier, the conservatives are interested in all 5 moral foundations, whereas the liberal are interested in two. So there's asymmetrical empathy.
So the conservatives will give way to the liberals and we will move leftwards and leftwards and leftwards and leftwards until you there's so little concern with in Group loyalty and with obedience to authority and sanctity that you just get chaos, absolute chaos, and lots and lots of people feeling unhappy and lots and lots of people feeling the dysphoria. And that at that point you get a right wing backlash, a conservative backlash. I think we're going through one
now. We weren't going through one in 2022. And I predicted one would happen. In my book, the part as a future country, the common conservative demographic revolution. And we're not going through the Demographic 1, which is going to be, I think, a massive backlash towards the right.
But we're going in the 80s was a right wing backlash against the liberal excesses of the 70s, where it got to a point where you have people in positions of power arguing that, you know, legalized sex with children and God knows what and socialism and nothing working. And now we're seeing a backlash against the consequences of DEI, the vote for Trump, followed very quickly by the insanity of the fires in Los Angeles that that presented for everyone to see.
This is the hell, this is the inferno the DI leads to and other things as well, the assassination attempt on Trump, which was probably partly down to just DI incompetence and and such like. So we are seeing a backlash now, but I think it's a it's a periodic one rather than the major one, which I think will happen. What is evolutionary psychology? Evolutionary psychology is basically the study of, of, of man as an advanced form of ape.
So you whereas the, the kind of leftist that you look at earlier, they have this blank slate view. In the most extreme case, people like Margaret Mead or whatever that we are a black slate. There's nothing built into us. It's all to do with environment. We know from twin studies and twin adoption studies. That's nonsense.
There is, there is a genetic component to pretty much everything you can think of. And so it's looking at those, our evolved instincts, our evolved psychological adaptations and how they have, how they have occurred and why and how they are continuing to occur. When it comes to what evolutionary psychology can teach us about the seeking of social status, what are some
lessons that come to mind? Something evolutionary psychology can teach us. Well, we know from our evolution that we are evolved to live in polygamous mating systems and we were living in polygamous mating systems until really quite recently in evolutionary time. And this is very important because what it means is that there's a sort of 0 sum game dimension built into, there's all kinds of things. This is built into us. So the situation is the male,
the male wants sex. The female has something to risk from the sexual encounter. I shouldn't get pregnant and have children. So she wants investment. So then she will sexually select for the high status male, the high status male, both physically I, he can protect her and things like this, that's why. And mentally I he can reach high status. So there's 2 dimensions in prehistory to status. 1 is that
you can literally win fights. And the other is that you're intelligent and you're socially skilled and you're whatever and, and you can hunt well and you can, which is predicted by intelligence and you can get to the top of the group. And This is why intelligence is part of a fitness factor associated with other genetic signs of health, including height in men but not women. Intelligence is genetically
associated with height. Intelligence is also genetically associated with physical health, with mental health, with basically everything that they would have selected for. You're selecting for a fitness factor. Now, of course, there's, I'm not saying it's a strong correlation. I mean, there's all kinds of deviations from that. And in of course, in recent history, being muscular and in particular has been less necessary. But it's still the case among
women. And it's built into them to be sexually attracted to tall, at least relatively tall men. Too tall and they're a freak with mutant genes that might have other problems, but up to about sort of 6 foot 2. And, and This is why men that are short, that are really short, that's sort of five foot 6 or less will, will, will, will have trouble. But so, so that's the kind of thing. So then this is then the, the, the, the quid pro quo that is engaged in.
And then the male says, OK, well, if I have to invest in you, I want evidence that the offspring are mine. So I need to be able to control your sexuality. And so from there you develop patriarchy and from there you develop a situation where the females will be evolved, will be adapted to live in a patriarchy in which important decisions are made for them. So you have therefore selection
under parental choice. So you might get a situation where the parents will want to select for a partner for the daughter who is in their genetic interests, and she'll want who is similar to them, and she'll want to select for somebody that's similar to her. So therefore, the way she'll get what she wants, like the compromise will be ironically to select for someone that's quite unsuitable. And then she gets the balance in the end.
So you can see that if you take her away from that system, she'll start making all kinds of mistakes because she's in an evolutionary mismatch. And this is the problem that we are our evolutionary match at best is basically farming. To live in an Agricultural Society surrounded by people that are evolution, that are genetically very, very similar to us. That's our match.
And to be surrounded by death. I mean, child mortality was about 50% until 1800. And it seems that if we are surrounded by those things, our instincts hit in. We want to have children. We want to have lots of children. Take That's why if you pride people with mortality sentence, they want to have children. And it's why if you if you put them in a war, you get, you tend to get a baby boom after the war because we're we're we're surrounded by death. Take those things away and then
people stop wanting children. They're in an evolutionary mismatch. Their instincts don't hit in and you select for people that are highly instinctive. And it seems that people that have low intelligence are highly instinctive because an element of intelligence is the ability to rise above your instincts and logically solve the problems that follow. The intelligent people would basically be lower in inbuilt hardware and higher in software
and, and just less instinctive. And this seems to be why in advanced societies to a significant degree. Well, it's a small correlation, but it's there. Intelligent people are less likely to have children and the most intelligent women are the least likely to have any children. So there's all kinds of areas that you can, you can pursue to try to understand how people behave. For example, rape gangs.
What was, which would be a problem in the UK with these foreign, these Muslim Pakistanis. Well, it's absolutely predictable because if you're in an environment in which most among the hunter gatherers of the Kalahari, among the Bushmen, I've been totally report on reservations, there were studies of them and 60% of the males don't breed. So what do those males do? Those low, saddest males? The answer is they gang together and they try and find a woman and they gang rape her and they
let sperm selection do the rest. And This is why or part of the reason why there is a fusion between sex and violence. That's why pseudo masochism is such a common fetish, because sex is fused to violence in that in that context, it's why men, when they are masturbating over pseudo masochistic porn rather than vanilla porn, produce more sperm and ejaculate.
Further, because because this is in a book called Natural History of Rape, which you should read where where because they are in that situation where they're watching. There's other men involved if they're watching rape porn, particularly where it puts them in that evolutionary mindset of being in a rape gang. And if you're in a rape gang, you're in sperm competition. So you've got to produce more sperm and you've got you've got to ejaculate further in.
So and they get larger erections as well in response to this form for the same reasons. And they're further in. So there's all kinds of areas and a lot of it for some people is, is rather they have a sort of prurient, they don't like talking about it because it's sort of not very nice. It's sort of a bit taboo, but it's, it's our nature.
We are an advanced form of ape. And it's interesting that they're prepared to accept that they're, they're highly critical of you saying anything is other than to do with environment. It's all to do with environment, not to do with genes. This is, this is nonsense, this is an exaggeration. This is pseudoscience except sexuality and and the studies on homosexuality indicate that that is actually highly environmental. Among women about 20% genetic
and among men about 40% genetic. So the majority of the variants in sexual orientation is to do with environmental factors, including environmental factors in utero. The environmental factors nonetheless, rather than genetic factors. I wanted to go through a number of statements and see how you would go through falsifying these statements or verifying them or critiquing them, because they're things we hear quite a bit. I actually want to start with that one.
If I say homosexuality is purely genetic, how would you go about falsifying that or disproving it? Well. With anything to do with genetics, what the best thing is twin studies and preferably identical twin studies and preferably identical twin
adoption studies. And then what you can do is you can see, you can what you can calculate based on that, the degree to which something is heritable and the degree to which it's to do with shared environment and the degree to which it's to do with different environment. And on that basis we can say that the heritability of female sexuality is approximately 20%. Why? It's much more adaptive for women to become less pernicious.
They are in, they are in these harems in which the male is going to concentrate on the newest, youngest, most most fertile wife any given time. So then they they had to deal with that by creating a certain what they call aloe parents. The female friendships are different from male friendships,
right? Female friendships involve a small number of the clique, a small Sex in the City, a small number of friends which are a specific gang, which have borders and where they share secret, personal, vulnerable information, things like that. That's how the friendship works. And it's a situation of complete equality. Why? Because they're trusting each other with each other's children.
Now you can see in that context in which it would make sense that the bond between them should be very, very strong to the And if it were to become sexual, then it would become very, very strong. And that seems to be why female
sexuality is highly plastic. And females will be much more likely to go through a phase where they're a little bit less pernicious, where they're a little bit experimental in gayness, because it, it makes sense as a, as a, it's a, it's a consequence of them developing such close friendships, which is
adaptive. That an element to that could be that it's even more adaptive if, if they're sexual because then they're strongly bonded or just that, that that's a, a flip side, an unnecessary flip side, but a flip side of intense, very intense friendship. Males tend to be, they might go through a phase of being prison gay or something, or gay at a, at a public, what we call a public school where it's all boys and they're living together and things like that.
And you do get that indeed, in tribal analysis that they go through these rites of pathlage where they're away from the tribe for a few years becoming men and they and they go through gay phases. But in general it's there are they just make a decision and they're either they're, they're either gay or they're not. They're either straight or they're homosexual. You get some men that are bisexual. This tends to be associated with psychopathy and dominance and things like that, bisexuality.
But in general, they're they're either gay or they're or they're straight. There are theories as to why there is male homosexuality. One thing that you get is a very strong the robust birth order effect. So the more sons a woman has, the more likely the more older brothers you have, the more likely you ought to be gay.
And the suggestion is that this helps to reduce into male conflict in the community so that the the tribe that will survive against the other tribe will be externally hostile and internally cooperative. Positively and negatively ethnocentric. If you have too many unmarried men that can't get women, IE in cells, then this is going to create social conflict which is going to be damaging in fighting the other tribe. So therefore you don't want too
many men. And so therefore if you have a system whereby for what, by whatever mechanism homosexuality becomes more likely the more sons you have, then you reduce into male conflict. So that's one theory. But anyway, that's how you would prove that sexuality, indeed almost anything you can think of, is partly genetic. If someone says poverty causes crime, how would you go about falsifying this? Or is this true?
Well, yeah, I think it's probably true that poverty causes crime in the sense that if you're absolutely desperate for food, if you're starving, you might go out and steal it. But again, with twin studies and and family studies, we can show that there is a significant heritability to criminality. Criminality runs in families and again you can engage in adoption studies and you can have and you can have people from criminal parents that are brought up by very, very middle class,
educated, intelligent parents. And there's what's called a Wilson effect, IE the genetic traits will hit in later. And what you find is that in terms of their behaviour, their criminality, for example, they will be much more similar to their biological parents who will often be drug addicts and things like that than they will be to they're adoptive parents.
So this is showing you that there is a significant genetic element to criminality and indeed you can calculate what elements it is and it's probably about 50% using twin adoption studies. Not only that, but if you look at the traits that cause criminality, IE low intelligence, low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, being psychopathic, whatever, these
are all at least 50% genetic. And indeed I think I'm right in saying we've even highlighted specific alleels that are associated with just with criminal like behaviour. So criminal criminality is significantly like anything like that. It's it's significantly genetic in origin. There are certain kinds of people that will just be criminally inclined no matter
what their circumstances. That makes much more sense because the left will constantly say the only reason that people commit crimes in the 1st place is because the system has pushed them into poverty and left them no other. Yeah, then that's another thing then. So socio economic status is significantly genetic. And indeed it's been fascinating. Oh, you're poor. Well, you're why are you poor?
The the heritability of socio economic status across time has been found to be something like 70%. So it's it's very, very strongly genetic. There is a degree to which social classes are separate, so they marry each other. The the people that are that are that are poor genetically select for other people that are genetically similar to them for things that cause crime. Low intelligence people are sexually attracted to other
stupid people. People with low with psychopathic traits are sexually attracted to other people with psychopathic traits and so on. And so these traits that that that precipitate or that predict crime are being sexually selected for. So that's why the heritability of socio economic status is so high. I mean, you know, there was a study in England in the 80s. It's been replicated. The average blood types of different social classes in England are different, right?
This is this is these are genetic, these are significant. I guess it's movement by genetic chance or whatever, but these are significantly genetic casts. Intelligence is associated not just with socioeconomic status achieved, but with socioeconomic status born into and the genetic component of intelligence, which is a big predictor of crime. Negative predictor is 80%. Someone says diversity is our strength. How do you go about verifying if that's true?
What? Does that mean, I mean, it's just such a black and white thing to say. You could argue that in terms of producing a functioning society, there are not Diversity is a bad thing. People are evolved to be with people that are directly similar to them. People will cooperate with people that are directly similar to them. People will trust people that are directly similar to them.
This will result in a Society of high social trust, a society in which which then leads to all kinds of shared goods. You know, shared public goods which you wouldn't bother a Civic Society basically, which you wouldn't bother with if there was no social trust. I mean, society with very low social trust can't produce functioning societies because there's so much crime and so much distrust.
No one trusts anyone else. And in order to build something up, I mean to build a business together or to build anything together, you have to be able to trust each other. And if social trust is low, you can't do that. And a diverse society militates against social trust.
It also reduces social trust among the natives because the natives start to become concerned that other natives will collaborate against the foreigners against them with the foreigners, which they do, or that that they will get angry and blame other natives for letting this happen. So it reduces social trust even among the natives, but variously
people. E pluribus Unum by Robert Putnam on this, which he suppressed for about 10 years once he voted because he was so appalled by the results. But multiculturalism produces a collapsing social trust. It's associated at .66 with the degree of social conflict and civil war in a society. If if beat by diversity you mean that it's bad, you could argue that a small element of diversity may be good, a small number of foreigners, because those foreigners will bring an interesting outsider
perspective. Those foreigners, if they're a specific kind of foreigner that's as or more intelligent than the country into which they come, then they, the Ashkenazi Jews would be an example. Then they will bring solve problems and bring in innovations that the society wouldn't otherwise have. That, that or the Asians in Uganda would be another example. As I say, interesting outsider perspective. And it's just sort of stimulating to have a bit of difference.
So perhaps you could argue that a very small amount of diversity, an optimum level of diversity is good. OK. It's a total simplification to say diversity is our strength because there's all kinds of downsides to it. Final one on the falsification
attempts here. Problems with mass migration do exist and that's why governments need to drastically increase the amount of money they spend on food, housing, schooling and healthcare for immigrants and we need to have anti bigotry training for the domestic population. How would you go about verifying as to whether or not that should be pursued or that's something that would work in reality? Well. I don't think, I mean to what extent is anti bigot. I don't know.
I don't even understand what they're trying to say. They're saying they should have. That's what all of us are required to do. What does that, what does that even mean? If mass migration, you have to set out philosophically what you regard as the good that you want to achieve. What is it? If you're saying, if you're saying that mass migration is a good in itself because it creates diversity, you're basically saying diversity creates diversity.
It's a circular argument. That's that's just a form of fanaticism. That's that's meaningless. If what you're saying is you want workers and people with a high standard of living, you, you want the people that live in a country to have a high standard of living, if that's what you're saying, if you're saying what you want is relative equality, whereby everybody has a reasonably high standard of living, is that what you're saying?
I don't know what you're saying. If that's what they're saying, then you have to ask them, does mass migration assist that? And the answer is obviously no, because one, it undercuts the wages of the working class, so it reduces the extent to which they can have a good standard of living relative to other classes. 2, the infrastructure, it's very hard for the infrastructure to keep up with it. And three, it undermines social trust.
And social trust is very important and all kinds of things are downwind of social trust, like innovation. I mean, think about a person that is a genius type who is highly intelligent and who has problems to solve right here.
There's only 24 hours in a day. If he's got to be worrying about whether his house is secure, about whether his car might be stolen, about whether his house might be broken into, about whether it might be mugged in the street, about whether he can get a doctor's appointment, about whether he can get his child into a school. That's all intellectual energy and time that is taken away from him being able to produce his,
his, his genius innovation. An extent to there's an extent to which it aids innovation to cooperate with other people. If you have a broad society where lots of other people are concerned about all these things as well, and trust is anyway lowered because people increasingly don't don't trust each other because of diversity, you're creating a situation where there's less innovation, there's less an ability to solve, ability to solve problems.
And then you get a terrible situation where the degree to which population increases, the only way we have a civilization is that innovation takes place faster than population increase, that we can increase resources faster than we can population increase. If that difference is narrowed, then standards of living start to kind of go down. And, and, and so it seems to me all of these things bring together, I tell you that mass migration is a terrible idea.
I don't believe in mass migration. I believe in mass re migration. I think my country, England elected a thoroughly anti British government. It came to power on the 2nd of May 1997. It revolutionized the country. It revolutionized all traditional English liberties. It revolutionized everything and it started mass migration in order to undercut the cost of labour and in order because they just believed in it, just to rub the right to nose in diversity. That's what they said to make
sure that. So I I think there should be anyone that has been born in England since the 2nd of May 1990. Anyone that's come to England since the 2nd of May 1997, unless they have married an English person, I should be deported. When it comes to intelligence, is there a general litmus test? You have to see if you're speaking with an intelligent person or someone who is rather feeble minded. Me personally, yes. Is there a litmus test? You how how quickly do they talk?
Talking speed is the robust call of intelligence that correlates with intelligence is about .3. And you can you can judge it very quickly. People that are low in intelligence will speak slowly into a big part of intelligence is basically just processing the big judgement is how quickly do they speak. It's not a perfect judgement.
You're going to get some people that are highly intelligent that speak slowly and you're going to get some people that are that are very intelligent that can speak quickly. But that's a big judgement. How how quickly do they speak?
And then the second one, again, it's not perfect because you're going to get the tongue tied physicist or you're going to get the not that bright sort of postmodern philosopher is the kind of vocabulary, if they're native speakers, the kind of the kind of vocabulary that they that they employ certain words they employ indicating high vocabulary. Yeah, I think talking speed is a pretty robust 1.
You would say that you are a scientist and we have scientists in America called Tony Fauci who claimed that they also like science. How can we differentiate good science from bad science considering you are very often labeled a hater and someone who uses selective science and pseudoscience? How do we differentiate good science from bad if you if you call? It pseudoscience. That's an appeal to insult.
So that's a fallacy. So anyone that called anything pseudoscience rather than saying, OK, we'll hear the problems with it. If you call it pseudoscience, that's that's an appeal to insult. That's a fallacy and that shows you're a bad scientist. Just the quick just using that term, because you shouldn't do that. You should say, here are the
problems with this research. What you're doing is labeling it and dismissing it. Secondly, if you say, oh, he's cherry picking his data, we'll show that. Otherwise you're just lying. So I I I would say that our good distinction is do they do they use those kinds of facts? Science should be about logically interrogating the data. You should never, ever use fallacious argumentation such as calling your opponents views pseudoscience. That's an obvious one.
Or appeal to emotion. Saying you're you're someone else's usable will cause problems or appeal to authority. Oh, this person has a degree in linguistics rather than a degree in science. And so I'm going to dismiss what they're saying out of hand. For God's sake. Thomas Edwards, the Aberdeenshire Shoemaker, was a world expert on molluscs. Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin had nothing more than a degree in theology. So that's obviously a fallacy. So do they use those kinds of
fallacies? And if they do, that is a that is a an ideologue dressed up in the cloak of science. That is not do they call racist. I mean, there's a guy called Adam Rutherford that's written about what the word racist is inflammatory. It's insulting. It's a shut up word. It's vague. It's stretched as a means of reproving people back onto the path of orthodoxy. It's no ordinary word.
So if you write a book as a scientist called How to Argue with a racist, and yet he calls me a racist but won't come on and talk to me, this is showing you that's not a real science. That's not, that's OK. He's qualified in science. He has a PhD in science, so he doesn't publish very much. But, but, but that's a person who is an ideologue dressed up in the cloak of science, and he's interested in science because of the status that science accrues for you.
He's not interested. He's basically using science as a means of espousing in an extreme way the current ideology. He's not interested in actually solving problems because you should be interested in, if you're a genuine scientist in solving problems that will get you into trouble for solving them. The truth should be your one thing, the truth, the empirical method, logic and the use of of a quantitative method.
That's the essence of science. And if you're using fallacious arguments, that's the key thing that for me is just obvious. They use fallacious argument at all. That's a degree to which are they really? A scientist like Richard Dawkins, he uses terribly fallacious arguments. So I see him as a person that's motivated by some sort of anti religious fervor rather than by actually solving problems. You studied the anthropology of religion. What is anthropology?
Anthropology it's there's two kinds of anthropologies, physical anthropology, which is the study of the human body, essentially forensic anthropology and there's social anthropology, which is the study of essentially of cultures normally via immersion. So you go and live with them and spend time with them and observe them as you would a group of monkeys in some ways and, and then you study them and that was more what I, that was the side of anthropology.
I looked at social anthropology, so I spent being, you know, being among fundamentalist Christians at universities. Were there any significant findings that you came away with in your studies on the anthropology of religion that you feel are very valuable for people to understand? No, that's why I moved over into other things because because it's it's, it's it's, I mean, I spoke only only in so much as I found that there were different in in my own field work.
You mean I found that there were different structures of university and there were universities which were much more transitional than others and the much more involved a rite of passage and things like that and a change from childhood to adulthood and extreme change. And that's what Oxford was like. And Aberdeen was much less like that and lied and even less so lied and just like living at home and going to school.
And it wasn't transitional. So, and the, it seemed to be related to it, that if you're in transitional phase, it's psychologically difficult and you're under stress. And if you're psychologically difficult and under stress, you're more likely to become religious because your instincts hit in if you're under stress. And so I found that the the presence of fundamentalist Christianity was much more prevalent at Oxford than Aberdeen and in turn than at Lydon. That was basically what I found.
If I'd done that again, I'd have looked at it from a more psychological perspective and looked at more what was the cause and what was the effect? Because it could be that the kind of personality traits that make you religious are you being highly pro social when you control for intelligence will make you more academic and that's more likely to get into Oxford. And so therefore we just get people that are genetically more religious that go to Oxford for
that reason. So that's, that's something I've thought about since, but we weren't taught any of that side of things, the genetic side of things when we did the study of religion in theology departments. Do you think it's almost necessary for purposes of social cohesion for people to embrace a myth that is extremely unlikely to be true? For example, if a lot of Muslims just said be kind to one another, our religion is about, you know, building beautiful mosques and doing the right
thing. That might not inspire people. It might not show allegiance if you believe something like that. But if you believe that Muhammad rode a horse into heaven, that is such a stretch of the imagination that you're really signaling loyalty. And is this why religion might be necessary for social cohesion? I think as a rule, religion, I mean, you could argue that there's been an evolutionary battle of different kinds of religion across history. I mean, the the Shakers said you
shouldn't have children. Well, they're not going to last very long, are they? And they didn't. But in general, religion tends to take that which is adaptive and make it into the will of God. So it places a cloak of the eternal and the unquestionable on essentially that which is adaptive at the individual and particularly at the group level. That's what it does. And there are different ecologies which then produce
different kinds of religiosity. So you get once you get cities and people have to cooperate, but they don't know. It's interesting that at that stage you get the development of what's called big gods, IE moral gods, gods that are concerned with individual morality. Because the only way you can be sure that a stranger, you can trust him, that he won't mess you around if he worships the same God as you and thus believes in the same morality as you.
So you, you get these even these developments. But I think that's basically what religion is doing. And so therefore it has to have that eternal element. And luckily we have evolved at times of stress and things like this and mortality salience to feel that God is present in a very real way, whether he is or he isn't.
And then religions encourage you to go to these religious services which to varying degrees depending on the kind of religion, attempt to induce the presence, a feeling of the presence of God, attempt to to induce them through hymns, through prayer, through whatever, a feeling of something greater, as Durkheim put it in his analysis.
So and I think that that so yeah, I think that that is it seems to be the case that that's what religion does and that groups which are high in ethnos in in positive and negative ethnocentrism and those that correlates very strongly with religiosity. I'll have high they work. They just got they will they will dominate. They have higher fertility that they have high fertility. They have higher genetic mental health. They have higher genetic physical health.
And it seems to me that a process is occurring at the moment. I look at this in my book work Eugenics, that if you control, Yeah, OK, we're getting stupider, We're all getting stupid. Society is going down in IQ by about a point per decade. But if for genetic reasons, But if you control for intelligence, the big predictor of sterility is that you are left wing and you are an atheist. And the big predictor of fertility is that you are right wing and you are a conservative.
And these things correlate by the word about .6. And the heritability of conservatism and of religiosity is between .6 and .7. It's pretty high. So essentially we are selecting among the more intelligent for religious people and conservative people. The left are becoming the right are becoming stupider, but the left are becoming stupider more quickly among the native
population. And what this should lead to eventually is a switch among the elite, Where the elite of, of Gen. Z or whatever become right wing and then you see the ascension upwards into positions of power and all these Nick Fuentes types. And so, so that's what, yeah, I think you, you do have to have a
metaphysical element. That's why religion has survived, I think, because you have to have this metaphysical element to, to fire people up, people of some kind, even if it's quite vague, but but it has to be there. And that's why Buddhism almost never exists as pure Buddhism, because Buddhism doesn't have a God. It's always Buddhism in synchronization with local Pagan ideas and things like that. I have two more questions for you. Thank you so much for your time.
When it comes to finding happiness, a lot of people in my generation thought it was a result of acquiring large amounts of material goods. And it seems like a lot of times when once people acquire the material goods they sought after, there's still a great amount of loneliness. It's generally referred to in America as the loneliness epidemic, that people are experiencing increased rates and
suicide and the like. When it comes to what makes people happy from an evolutionary psychologist or an anthropological perspective, what is it that makes someone happy? Well, first of all, I should say again, your question assumes the sort of typical environmental view, doesn't it? You're going to get, you could get a person that's genetically happy. What is it to be genetically happy? It's basically you're high in extroversion, you feel positive
feelings strongly. You're a happy person. And you could get a happy person and you could take all their money away and they'd be a happy person and they'd be poor. Or you could get a person that's genetically unhappy, I learn extroversion and high neuroticism and give them £1,000,000 and they'd be a rich unhappy person. So an, an element of it is just genetics. But but putting that aside, I think a very big part of it is living in, is living in your evolutionary is relative wealth.
So people are happier the wealthier they are. This is, this is true relative wealth, but that that's not enough. And another big part of it is just living in your evolutionary match. That's what makes us happy. Put a dog in his evolutionary match, which is running around in the outside, he's happy, right? Put a cat in his evolutionary match outside hunting or whatever, he's happy.
Put a human in their evolutionary match, which is to live in a small scale countryside community where he knows everybody and everyone's very similar to him and there's lots of social trust. He's happy. And it's been found that as I said, wealth does make you happy because we are evolved to want to be the top of the pack. We are evolved to want to be successful. We are therefore evolved to want wealth. And there was a study which found that over a certain level
of wealth, it doesn't matter. But the person that published that study has now said no, he was wrong. The richer you are in general, the happier you are. So if people that are the CEO all are all else controlled for, I mean, so people that are CEOs of large companies are quite happy. But who do you think in America who is not really rich, has a level of subjective happiness
which is as high as that CEOs? I would guess it's people in the South who are a little more isolated and closer to their families. Further north. Further north. Further north, it would be people in New England who are in Ivy Leagues.
No, it's the Amish. No, the Amish because, because they, because they are living in their evolutionary match, which is small scale communities, small scale religious communities where they relate to everybody and they know everybody and they and they, they have the, the kind of work where they can see their results. It's meaningful and they are extremely happy people. So that's, that seems to be now that partly could be a genetic
effect. Are you the ones that are pissed off of being Amish leaving Room Springer or something? But the degree to which they are leading in Roomspring was going down, so they now have an 80% retention rate. So it could be it could be a genetic effect. It's probably is partly genetic effect, but it's also I think that they're just living in their evolutionary match. You wrote a book titled Churchill's Headmaster. What were some of the lessons you learned from researching
this topic? Well, the main, the key thing was that a lot of what Churchill and his supporters say is lies. And so I thought to myself, well, Eve Churchill, this thing that he has this headmaster, who was this evil sadist. Is that true? Let's check that. And I went through all the records and I tracked down people that were just the descendants of his pupils and kept Diaries and things at the time. And the degree to which he was this evil sadist was very, very,
very heavily exaggerated. He wasn't. He was a severe flogger even by the stands of the time. But there are others like him. And there was another side to him. And a lot of people really liked him and thought he was great. So it just shows you there is a mythology based around Winston Churchill. I'm afraid I've got a boomer truth, as my friend academic agent calls it, that oh, he's this great guy, he's perfect, He's wonderful. No, he was a warmongering
alcoholic. Money spending, wasteful, dishonest aristocrat who took his country into a wasteful, completely pointless war that was nothing to do with us because of the because the people that were funding him wanted there to be a war and he needed their funding because he had this lavish lifestyle. And then in order to get America to come on board once we're deep in that war, he basically had to give away all our resources to America bankrupt, which which he
did. And then America got involved in the war. And by the way, if we're going to, if we're going to say that Franklin D Roosevelt, is he some kind of Saint? No, Franklin D Roosevelt had numerous affairs. That's why him and his wife were married on paper only by the time of World War 2. And during World War 2, it seems he was having a relationship with the Crown Princess of Norway.
And this is what this pressure from her persuaded him to let to lend the British equipment, which then resulted in the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbour. So, you know, think about him as well. But Churchill basically, I'm saying is much blacker than he's painted. That was the key take away. And his headmaster?
Not as black as he's painted. Thank you to everyone for watching Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today's guest, Doctor Edward Dutton, check him out at the Jolly Heretic. Links will be in the description below. Doctor Dutton, thank you so much for your time. Pleasure to talk to you. Bye bye.