Liberal Narcissism w/ Aydin Paladin: The J. Burden Show Ep. 413

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been dramatic footage out of Minnesota. Two ICE agents were shot in the Pacific Northwest overnight. This is continuing. So I'm curious if you could, could you describe what provoked you to make this and then you know what you found, right.

Global Terrorism Database. These are particularly the GTD Global Terrorism Database is enormous. It's like forty eight thousand cases or something like that, huge enormous data set that goes back to the nineteen seventies, and the United States one purist that goes back to the nineteen forties. So you have an enormous amount of information in these data sets, and what they include are not just Particularly the Global Terrorism Database is very good on this one. It doesn't just

include injuries and casualties. It also includes attempted terrorist attacks that didn't necessarily result in any injury or casualty, and then it categorizes them when possible along with known domestic, internet or international terrorist groups a group affiliation. And what I was able to find in going through that is that it seems that the left is because we commonly hear that the right conducts far more acts of violence.

And first of all, in order to be able to nail down what do you mean by the right is more violent than the left, I decided to narrow that down into acts of terror because I think those are the most extreme. They're also far easier to classify as an intentional political attack rather than things like street violence or prison violence, which can have all sorts of motivations, interpersonal. You know, with gangs, there's all kinds of drama and

things that are things that are involved in that. But with terrorism, it's directed and it's usually political in some way. So if I went through the when I went through the Global Terrorism Database and accounted for all of the attempted attacks that were not successful, groups that were broadly speaking left wing, and I went through and not only categorize them them myself based on you know, known affiliations,

like what do these groups represent? And they break down into things like, particularly if you look at history, environmental groups, animal rights groups, and then of course you have things like Antifa and you know, more modern sort of left wing groups versus the right wing ones. You know, your classic KKK whatever you think about that, being aligned with Democrats or not. You know, anti Islam is that one

can be a little bit iffy in some cases. But broad speaking, so like whether underground classic left leaning terrorist organization ku Klux Klan, whatever you think of them, is categorized typically as a right wing organization, went through and checked those. I also ran my personal checks of these versus what other scholars had done. My alignment and my categorizations lined up with theirs more or less identically, with

a couple of very slight variations. So I had both gone through it myself and validated it with external sources. And what I found is that people or left wing groups were as likely to attempt acts of terror. Actually they were slightly more so by about point five percent, but it was nearly identical. The difference was that when a left wing group or individual engaged in any sort of terrorism, they were far less likely to kill or injure anyone. I'm trying to find the exact statistic here

because I have it in my notes. The percentage of right wing groups being completed attacks perpetrated in twenty two and twenty nineteen in the US that resulted at least one injury was sixty four point three percent. Well, fifty nine percent of left wing completed attacks resulted in at

least one injury in that timeframe. A data further regarding deaths illustrate this difference, as of completed right wing attacks during this period, fifty percent resulted in at least one death, well, twenty nine percent of completed left wing attacks resulted in

at least one death. In total, a right wing attack is on average one point seven times one point seven two times more likely to result in a death than as a left wing attack, and a right wing attack is one point nine times more likely to result in an injury than is a left wing attack based on trends in two thousand and two, So it seems to be that the difference is not so much one of intent,

it's one of competence. The left, when it decides that anyone on the left, either groups or individuals, decide they want to engage in political terrorism, are far less efficacious at carrying it out. If the goal of terrorism is what the goal of terrorism is to terrorize people through death, injury, and violence.

think one of them. And I'm glad you brought up the prison violence, right because oftentimes in discussions of these statistics, and you see this a ton as well in the discussion around school shootings, right, there's sort of a deliberate, a calculated effort to sort of chum the waters, right, And so like, you know, some guy getting depressed and you know, painting his brains over the roof of his Honda Civic is okay, sure that is a time a gun was shot on a school property. That's not what

we're talking about. Somewhat similarly, you know, I don't pretend to have any insight into how the Arian Brotherhood works, but not really a political group per se. Any it's sort of a different thing. Like if you go in there and talk to those guys about like Francis Parker Yaki, you probably won't get a warm response. Now, that said, one of the things that you know, just upon first hearing this from you, my reaction is, well, okay, So that's when we consider the kind of like very serious

political terrorism. But what patterns do we see on the kind of lower level violence, right, not necessarily street fights, but for instance, I'm sure you saw the dramatic footage of this conservative figure in Minnesota being you know, dragged into a crowd and stabbed. How is something like that classified? And also, and I realized this has past the scope of what I was supposed to ask you, but you know.

It evolved somewhere between twenty five and sixty five million years ago. In primates, people have to be able to communicate their emotions instantaneously via non rebel cues. So as a result, it becomes very difficult even if one side ends up committing more acts of violence against the other.

In terms of street violence, it's usually not planned. So when I was specifically looking at the terrorism information, that was to try and find a way to operationalize who does violence and why is it that there is this pervasive narrative that the right is overwhelmingly violent comparatively to the left. And the reason why you're able to get those kinds of findings from the data is again a

confidence issue, not a confidence issue. The left seems just as confident in doing violence, and that's why they will go out into the streets and stab somebody, particularly when they're in these highly emotional, emotionally contagious environments. And funnily enough, it links back to something that leftists themselves tend to

tout as their number one virtue, which is empathy. Ultimately, that behavior, the street violence, the crowd violence, is driven by those mirror neuron responses that are evolutionary adapted, evolutionarily adapted and allow them to translate these emotions amongst each other. They do organize, but it doesn't have to be organized. The violence can erupt simultaneous or spontaneously, and it becomes difficult to then pull apart well who started what was

this ideologically driven or was this emotionally driven? And where do you draw the line there? And I think it is difficult to delineate the two.

their attachments. People generally described as conservative place the most weight on their immediate connections with kind of a slow taper off, whereas liberals, and again this is stated instead of revealed, but place a much higher level of pull or sway on these sort of universal bonds towards humanity writ large or the universe, these these kind of more abstract concepts. And so I'm curious, right when we talk

about empathy, what do you see going on there? And you mentioned that you have at least some issues with that term suicidal empathy, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on it.

so overarmed with emotions all the time. Empathy emotions are intrinsically discriminatory. You have to choose what to care about and what not to care about, otherwise you couldn't function.

So what I think the weights that all analysis actually reveals, and I've made statements about this before, is that in terms of where to select the empathy, leftists put it out in this very far concentric ring, I think it is the centers around about twelve or ten out very distantly, and that's all of humanity, all animals, all things in existence. The fourteenth concentric ring is all things in an existence.

That's where their lo ki of care is concerned, whereas yes, with conservatives, their loki of care is friends, family, nation. When you talk about how much empathy that you have, because it is a limited resource, what this means in practice is not so much I care about all things in existence because you only have so much. That means it has to be divided by all things in it existence. Functionally, that means I don't care about anything except one thing.

I care about how I am perceived by others. In claiming to care about anything and everything, that is narcissism. That's which, as it turns out, is the only one of the dark triad traits tetrad traits that is not negatively linked to any measure of empathy. Narcissists are actually very good at wielding and using empathy. And by narcissists, I don't just mean people with clinical pathological levels of narcissism.

I mean with subclinical narcissistic traits. What seems to be the overwhelming factor here that drives a leftist empathy is actually narcissism. It's self enhancement, and it's making the self look good. So when the leftist answered the weights at all analysis there, they weren't thinking, no, I really care

about everything in an existence. They were thinking, I want to look good to the researchers reading this page, reading my response to this, or it is what he is like a good person say yes, you know yes.

shot of a burning trash can. The other shot from a christ across the street shows a bunch of guys with cameras standing in a largely empty city square with a burning trash can. And they're right to make fun of that because it is ridiculous. But on the same to look at it another way, No, that's the power of it, yes, right, Because what matters in this instance isn't actually the mechanics of a protest, right, It isn't actually how many people there. It is the sort of the memetic impact of it.

an iconic moment. You know, you can think of the you know, the rather you know, rotund woman, you know, standing out in imitation of that famous photo of you know, the Chinese guy who has run over by tanks, and of course that didn't happen, right, She wasn't actually ground a pulp, and she did not become you know, one of these iconic images like the students placing flowers into the barrels of the rifle.

gaining attention, it's about creating, yes, these powerful images. Also because that spreads the emotional contagion that spreads the message. When other people see something that is emotionally evocative, like a sad film, well you might think, why would anyone want to watch a sad film if it's spreading negative emotions?

Feeling negative emotions is inherently unpleasant. However, people report consistently that when they watch a sad movie, they enjoy it when they in fact, there's a specific study on this, let me find it here in film where this is Hanich and colleagues Hannich at All twenty fourteen that were specifically scenes where someone was told about the death of a friend or relative, and when people said that the scene made them feel sad, they had greater express greater

intention to watch the movie again if they had seen it before, or to watch it if they'd never seen it. So there is a positive emotional experience, a vicarious emotional experience that's gained by feeling sad negative emotions because it's very powerful, So it is potent, a potent political tool to evoke negative emotions in other people. It doesn't necessarily actually make them feel bad because they're feeling these emotions from a safe distance.

a common emotional experience. And there's a kind of quip that runs around right where it's like liberals don't actually know things, they've just seen a couple of TV shows and they base their opinions on the world on well those TV shows.

I grew up in. But you can almost tell when and you know, Devin Stack of Black Pilt has talked about this, and you know, I may disagree with him on certain things, but he's completely right here where he talks about the Boomer speech right where you can tell in their head they're running through that moment from Field of Dreams or that moment in Dead Poe Society. It's like the TV has taken over them, has possessed them. And in much the same way, right, these incredibly powerful,

in some cases negative experiences. You could argue, there's something you know, similar around a prominent twentieth century as a religious political disaster. Right, people speak around it for the whichever Indian is running YouTube, but it becomes this incredibly powerful political force, that kind of emotional outpour. But aiden you said you had actual science to back that up.

had no relationship to any form of indirect relational aggression. Indirect relational aggression are things like social exclusion, malicious humor, and guilt tripping. So the people who post the spider Man would vote the way I do are not necessarily dark triad, but they are more likely to engage in interpersonal aggression towards other people to force them via guilt tripping, to force them via social exclusion and other tactics to

agree with them. It's social austracization and its aggression. All that empathizing with fictional character stuff actually leads to exclusionary behaviors.

to engage in. Like, for instance, you've literally ever worked in an academic setting, you see this all the time, that there is this sort of jockeying behind the scenes using kind of you know, progressive politics, right, because that is a secondary you know, I guess you'd say, method of advancement, and when that becomes the kind of one of the primary methods for sorting yourself, and that becomes sort of like a known exploit, even aside from the

other things you're talking about, where these behaviors in particular are associated with certain aspects or certain left wing political views. So when you were now adding an additional layer of selection on top, right, adding a sort of like ruthless game, yes, side by side to select for these sort of dark tech trad personality traits.

that we can pass over you. It's required within their collective mindset that if you don't engage in this performative empathy, tactical empathy, whatever you want to call it, therefore you are unempathetic, and more specifically, you are unhuman. The dehumanization factor that occurs with this, I mean, I think it's why, like many things, obviously the overuse of terms like nazi, fascist,

those are all intended to dehumanize. And the reason for that is, as I mentioned, it's because empathy need be selective, because you can't care for all the people all the time. So in order to divest themselves of caring for people, they have to give them labels like nazi or fascist. That makes them unhuman. And that's been linked by the way to grandiose and to vulnerable narcissism. That specific type of dehumanization in political ideology specifically.

who will tell me Charlie Kirk wasn't shot. But in all seriousness, right, when you look at in figures like you know Tiler Kyler Robbins, Yeah, the the Kirk shooter, or you know these other kind of you know, lone wolf attackers, the guy who shot three quadmalins trying to hit Ice agents. Again going back to your thesis of confidence. But to me, and this has been remarked upon, even going back to oh who is the assassin?

of you know, all of these variables coming together. It seems that it's almost a miracle that we've only had, you know, one successful and another attempted assassination in the last couple of years, because it seems as if this is sort of a perfect storm for you know, narcissists to lash out.

shooting of Charlie Kirk. Was that even at that time it was the first year ever since the nineties that labeled left wing violence had surpassed right wing violence. And that year was according to from terrorist affiliated groups, it was zero from the right to five on the left.

I think that the left is so activated now. These are things that have always existed, and particularly this pathological in some cases but oftentimes not pathological just trait like narcissism that is raised up by the left because whoever can be the biggest performative activist in some way or

another is given the most attention. It gains so much social capital, so much social credit for them to behave this way, particularly in the age of social media where everything is put online, that it causes people who may have some narcissistic tendencies to actively go out and engage in violence and dangerous activity, people like Rene Good that they wouldn't do in any other circumstance because they're just focused on the social capital and they see examples of

how much social capital can be gained. Who's the guy that a lot of like the Hassan Piker crowd, are obsessed with who shot the not call written how although they certainly hate him? Short the healthcare ceo.

It's because the gain that they perceive of from that they will get from doing these behaviors enter that's what calculates first, rather than the possibility, because a narcissist or someone with narcissisic traits doesn't consider the alternative that they could be hurt, that they could die, because they're great, They're so perfect. There is such an awesome person. There's no way anything bad could happen to me. So they

don't calculate for that. They just and even if it's calculated sort of in the back of their heads, it's like, well, if I'm martyred, I'll be even more celebrated, I'll gain even more social capital. Doesn't you can't use it if you're dead. But that part doesn't compute. I don't think.

It was discipline and punished, and the execution was of Robert Francois Domienne, who attempted to assassinate King Lewis king Lee the heat very gruesome execution. Interesting book. Not the biggest fan of Fucou, but there's a lot there. Conversation for another day. I just wanted to correct that point.

Is I think that that that aspect of sort of internally minimizing the consequences is is kind of interesting, especially when you combine this with and you see this in you know, Robinson Crooks, you know many of these kind of you know, mass shooters right even before them, who have this kind of you know, incredible I guess you could say incredible uh you know nihilism about them. It's

the idea that you know, effectively nothing matters. And let's be honest, you know, nihilism and narcissism are linked.

political violence. A lot of it is teenage edge lord stuff, but they do keep producing these killers, like I'm not sure if you remember the black Graper who shot up a school. Oh yeah, you're odd guy. But these sort of unfortunate individuals tend to sort into these communities. But again, right there is this repeat and you can see it. There's a woman on substack b X I think b

X rights. She does some interesting work on it, talking about this sort of one vast minimization of consequences, where the idea is, you know you will die in a hail of glory, you know you will be able to get your message out there. This will become like Ted Kazenski, this kind of underground tome. You know that that sort of you know, produces some sort of cultural response and you will have you know, left your mark. Right then

the kind of narcissism part. And it's always interesting to me to see the cases where you can find all of those, all of those I guess you could say elements, but not necessarily the conclusion, because this comes back to our discussion of politicized violence. So the origin of the chud Jack I believe was the Dallas Fort orthshooter went to a grocery store, you know, killed a number of

people for being Hispanic. And what's interesting about that is that, you know, he was reported as this kind of like four Chan neo Nazi, but if you've read his manifesto, it's completely insane, right, there's no political through lines whatsoever. It is simply a sort of way to you know, strike out, a way to you know, to basically answer

that combination of narcissism and nihilism. And I'm curious how many of these people who were being drawn to the left for the sake of political violence are there for that reason instead of any you know, left wing politics in particular. Aid. Sorry, that was a massive rant for me. I'll throw him.

extreme ideologies. So for people who were to the far of either side those types of extreme you know, political opinions are driven oftentimes by mental illness or at least mental instability when you start talking about people who are way way out there, so you will get that on

both sides. But Crispin and Bertram's twenty twenty five also in their study they called this the dark ego vehicle, which is specifically that individuals with pronounced dark personalities may repurpose political and pro social activist This is a quote, as a vehicle to satisfy their ego focused needs rather than for the pursuit of pro social goals and social justice, since participation in such activism may gave us give those individuals not only opportunities to gain social status and engage

in social conflicts, but also to display moral superiority and in my opinion, most importantly, dominate others. So you're talking about people already who are emotionally or psychologically unstable, who are going to go the furthest with this, the little street level violence. Renee Good trying to hit a vice officer with her car or whatever she was trying to do there exactly Who's probably not? Just like abject pathological narcissism. What drives a lot of these people to extreme acts,

as you say, it's that they'll be memoralized forever. That is the ultimate goal of a narcissist or someone with extreme narcissistics traits. It's more important to be memorialized to be deified. And particularly I think when you combine that with atheism or at least a lack of belief in an afterlife. Why you've only got one shot, don't you. You have one lifetime, You have one time, this one life to leave your mark on the world. Might as

well go out in a blaze of glory. The guy who set himself on fire.

and insecurity often masked by victimhood. So it's unsurprising that you find vulnerable narcissism being a little bit more common in leftist with extreme ide ideology, and although they also have grandiose narcissism, again inflated self importance that is more

commonly linked with extreme right wing ideological positions. However, again when you talk about the fringes of politics and people who will go out and do violent, crazy things, even though it is self harmful, self terminating, even it's this dark ego vehicle.

But have you fought at all, Not that you should have, but the kind of flick armed trans groups like the two A for all crowd. Have you paid attention to that at all?

are kind of amplified within one echo chamber. And I think that that's a very interesting dynamic because before it was like, oh well, you know, I can reliably be assured that a teenager in Biloxi, Mississippi will be different from one in Brooklyn, New York. And you know, while that still may be sure on like a demographic level, the political extremism I think is a very different beast from the pre digital era.

It's a Bacca, Cerivianus and Blackburn from twenty twenty three, and they were looking at tanky subreddits, which is like the perfect example of this stuff of what you're talking about there, I think, where it's a group of people who have some shared political ideology, are perhaps quite similar political ideology, and what they sit around doing is compared to the rest of Reddit, which is already you know, leftist in nature, the tanky subreddits were a hundred times

more likely to make threats, fifty times more likely to attack the identity of others, twenty one point two times more likely to insult others, and five point three times more likely to use profanity than the rest of Reddit. They end up getting involved in these like you know, highly ideologically extreme circles talking about things. And by the way, the things that they talked about the most on these English speaking subreddits was it wasn't things like that were

mostly related to US politics. A lot of it was what were the things they were so Nikolaiechchescu, they hate him, They talk about him all the time, for example, all kinds of anger about that Israel Palestine, the weaker. Actually they don't call it the weaker genocide. They call that weaker re education camps or I should re education centers or just re education or not even re education. What's the word they used for it. Oh sorry, boarding schools,

that was the term weird boarding schools. They use different language in order to reframe things, and they tend to focus very much on things that are happening on the other side of the planet. They don't talk a lot about things that are happening nearby them, which it can only be facilitated by the Internet and access to these things that happen worldwide all the time, which actually kind of goes back to the weights heat maps. Their focus is out in these distant, concentric rings, very far away

from themselves. It's also why they tend to focus so much on let's say, immigrant communities. Why are they out here putting their lives on the line for people that they don't really have anything in common with. And that's because of identity fusion, which has also been found to be let me see fusion significant among people who lean left.

That's see Counstead All twenty eighteen had a sample of white American university students who reported feeling strongly fused with Palestinians and Kurds, and when they who also identified as left wing activists, and when they strongly identified with Palestinians and Kurds and not with domestic leftist issues and domestic leftist groups. They said they were more likely to go out and fight and die and kill on behalf of Palestinians and Kurds than they would for to fight and

die for domestic issues. The hypothesis why is well. The hypothesis as to why is confusing. I think it's because when you don't have personal experience with these groups, you

don't have any necessarily negative information about them. You can make up in your head and fantasize about them being just perfect victims, in the same way that you'll find a lot of times when some and like Rene good is It dies in one of these confrontations, they don't want to look at any kind of negative information about that person. Knowing as little as possible about someone allows you to construct a version of that person or people

in your head that is very positive. Familiarity breeds contempt, so they fuse themselves without groups they have no personal relationship or ties to, and then they because they have no personal relationship or ties, they can make them into psychologically like these perfect moral beings comparatively to people that want.

come out or not, with my buddy Braxton. And you know, being a white guy from southwest Virginia, I've worked on farms before, I've gone outside before, and you know, I enjoy hunting and fishing, and so I have a you know, a pretty realistic view of nature, right, like even the US East Coast, which is not that dangerous one hundred

percent it is. And you compare that to you know, my neighbor, who's a very nice lady but a stereotypical hippie, got into a conversation about conservation and realized very quickly we have radically different understandings of what nature means, right, Because again, this is someone who grew up in an urban area and for them, nature is the park, right, It is a bald Garden literally instead of you know, this thing that has positive and negative aspects.

x y sad. They're all just struggling for a better life. They're just you know, they're here with the best intentions. They would never do any crimes or anything, because they're just honest, hard working people. That's really easy to do, in particular, if you're a awful for example, you know, affluent white liberal female, right, you don't actually interact with these people on a daily basis almost at all, if

at all. They exist out in the periphery, so it's very easy to assign positive traits to them.

they're seen as inherently virtuous. They're scene as you know, inherently oppressed, whereas you know, their uncle Randy right, who owns a dishwasher repair business, is inherently suspect. We don't like. We think he's gross, we think he's low class. And

it's interesting. And I'm sure you remember this during the the kind of Bush era right where there is this sort of like oh, kind of open season on rednecks, right, yes, and this sort of like competitive virtue signaling about how awful and racist your family or your X y Z distant relation was. Again because it was it was distant. It was sort of, you know, a way to you know, externalize again born from, let's be honest, very limited or

no real contact. And the positive side of that is what you see in you know, diverse urban communities.

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the sort of like romanticized version of it. But it is interesting how there's both a positive and a negative aspect to that kind of social distance. But sorry, I'll kick it back to you.

murder capital of the US. So but again for the people who are the affluent white liberal females or female liberals, the awfuls and people in that same sort of category, they go to Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Randy, with racist Uncle Randy, so they've got a little flash point of interaction with him that they can model who Uncle Randy and other people like him are off of.

And in fact, I just did a video on Christmas for the Christmas season and the political divides that that causes, and that in particular is it seems like in the data where they follow people's cell phones so they could see how long they actually spent it at different locations for Thanksgiving dinner and then pull them about it as well. And it turned out that the leftists ended up staying at those dinners for longer, but they reported it. They were more not they to report it as being a negative,

hostile experience. So the conservatives wanted to leave, they wanted to disengage, They didn't want to be involved in the hostility and the arguments. The liberals wanted to stay and fight. So it seems oftentimes too, is that they have to maybe even do this virtue signaling, this performative stuff in

front of racist uncle Randy. They want to be confrontational because again, even if there's no audience, particularly in the age of social media, then they can go home and type on social media and write an article about how they defeated racist uncle Randy and then turn that performance that they've done at the dinner table into a broader performance for the public. But at least they can model

him because they kind of know him. They probably don't have almost any interaction with inner city blacks in Baltimore City, for example.

But again, right, there is that kind of secondary social market of being able to market on social media and put yourself out as the kind of person who not only has far left politics but is speaking truth to power, right, and if that power is a seventy year old, aging Vietnam veteran, indeterminate right. But again that's that element of social signal.

But then when they actually go and do it, it turns out it's used tactically for this performance of activism. And whether that again, I don't think social media helps it. There was a Victorio on Twitter A couple we have been talking about this recently about how social media has and the divide between women and men in political belief has exploded since cell phones and social media became readily available,

or smartphones in particular. It didn't happen in two thousand, It happened in like twenty ten or didn't happen in nineteen ninety. It happened in two thousand and five, right after social media and smartphones started to become ubiquitous. Because now there's a perpetual audience, the performative nature of your empathy, the performative nature of your activism is always in your pocket.

Before you could only do it at a street protest or something, but now you can do it constantly, So it reinforces the narcissistic behaviors and rewards them.

has just decided that they will overpay non contractors. Yeah, who knows, I may end up as a West Virginia refugee sooner or later. But in all seriousness, right, again, you're creating a selection pressure, and somewhat similarly, when you know there is effectively rewards to be given for this sort of anti social behavior, you're going to see more

of it now. One of the interesting things that I am constantly wondering about is when we get from the level of social selection to genetic selection, right, you know, just kind of going through the biological bottleneck. It seems that these would be negatively associated with production. That the kind of mentally unwell people doing this, you know, narcissist peace but think so interested in their image, do not reproduce. Is that true? Am I completely wrong? And does it even matter?

the lower status males will pretend to be innocent. They'll pretend to just be interacting in a subservient or submissive way comparatively to the male. But they will get erections and hide their erections with their hands so that it is visible to the fertile females and invisible or obfuscated

from the male. If chimps are able to do that, then we have a pretty good rationale that this evolved a long time ago as a strategy to make yourself look good to do facework, as Irving Goffman would call it, towards a selective party. So yeah, it actually seems that there is now empathy. Genuine empathy obviously has evolutionary pressures behind it, because it's a way to be able to signal to other members of your group something is wrong,

there is danger. Being able to read faces, being able to take perspectives allows you to feel with other members of your tribe. So if a member of your tribe is killed, you feel with their family and will want to protect them, and this is advantageous to the survival of the group, just as it is advantageous to be able to read emotions to detect if another member of the tribe is afraid. But then we also see, well, this empathy evolves for that reason, you also get the

tactical layer. In order for the chimps to be able to why why would a chimp do that? The only reason to hide the erection. It has to be able to simulate the minds of other chimps to know what they can see and what they can't see, to know that the males, the dominant males, can't see the erection because it's been hidden with their hand, but that the

females can see it. So this very basic perspective, taking that it's at the core of empathetic response evolutionarily is also selected for to be tactical in certain circumstances.

mean like that that bears out right anecdotally. You and I both probably know half a dozen examples so, yeah, I mean, that's that's a very interesting thing that you bring up there, And honestly, it's part of the reason why generally speaking, it's it's things like you know, academia are kind of a tough nut to crack because those accreditation and prestige networks are so ideologically captured and when they have that kind of you know, ability to designate

what is and isn't prestigious, there isn't isn't socially advantageous you know, to people who are looking to sort of, you know, climb up the social ladder, it's like, well, right, what do you do then?

They will observe the way other people are expressing emotions and they will mimic them. This is mirror neuron response. It's also been observed in macaque monkeys, and it's again millions of years old. When you know, when somebody waves that you, someone's waving in a crowd, maybe they're waving at you, so you wave back, that's a mirror neuron response.

It happens autonomically, and people who have these dark personality traits, they recognize that they can maneuver their way into these different situations, environments, groups and engaging them tactically by observing others and emotions and mirroring them using this evolved mirror neuron response. And it's unfortunately the institutions have to be changed because otherwise, again it selects for people who can manipulate the best.

are curious about. I am also looking launching a substack that will probably be before the video comes out, but not before the YouTube shorts. So if you're interested in kind of getting the TLDR on all of the major subjects I'm going to cover in the video, those will come out to shorts first, or some of it will

come out of shorts first. Then I'll put out something on substack, the full audio version of it and the actual article if you want to read that, and then if you just want to watch the completed documentary video that'll be out a couple weeks after that.

get the episodes early and ad free. Check out our sponsor, Axios Remote Fitness Coaching again, Aiden, this was a ton of fun.