Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream. I believe this is our 36th. Is that correct? That's right. 36. That's hard to imagine. I'm hard to say too. Yeah, it is hard to say harder that you try it at home. You'll see.

I'm sitting with Dr. Heather Hying as always and we have as always too much to discuss for the allotted time on a count of it being 2020 and things just keep happening. Do they ever? It's it's almost too much to keep up with. Of course a lot going on today and we will get to it in due course.

Where shall we start? You wanted to start with a summary of the three big ideas that you have been talking about in the last couple of live streams and bring them all together just to remind us at the top of the hour verificationism auto immunity and groups psychosis.

Right. So these are three concepts that I believe are at least very useful if not necessary in cobbling together a mechanism for sense making in this moment where our sense making is becoming increasingly deranged and in fact the model in part explains why sense making is becoming so deranged.

So I'm actually going to start with auto immunity auto immunity is a process by which the body which is supposed to recognize an absolute distinction between molecules that you yourself make and molecules that you yourself do not make and therefore if they are organic molecules the body assumes our hostile and it attacks them with the immune system.

So that system develops when you're very young your system recognizes every molecule that you yourself are producing and it eliminates the cells in your immune system that react to it leaving only cells that react to other things.

So this is an analogy for the situation that we find ourselves in where we see many in our midst attacking the very structures on which our system depends and they are attacking them with various rationalizations claiming that these structures are so broken that they could not possibly be rescued but the result is just like a body that is rejecting its own tissue that we are putting ourselves in mortal jeopardy as a result of this misunderstood.

I would also just as an aside point out that many of the food sensitivities that some of us have I have a very severe sensitivity to wheat that these things are like auto immunity except instead of reacting to your own tissues you're reacting to foods that you yourself consume.

Something has caused me for example to become reactive to wheat molecules when I eat them my immune system reacts and I get sick as a result not of the wheat but as a result of my reaction to it so auto immunity is a key concept the second key concept for sense making in this moment is verificationism so verificationism is a process whereby instead of trying to find reasons to disbelieve some hypothesis you look for reasons to believe it.

And the problem with verificationism is that one can often find some evidence for a wrong idea and therefore if you are looking for evidence that confirms a hypothesis you will very often validate it even though it is false whereas if you try to falsify a hypothesis and you fail that means there isn't strong evidence against it and the hypothesis probably has a good degree of truth in it.

So the claim is that most of what people are doing as they are trying to make sense of the world at the moment involves verificationism that they have a perspective and they are looking for things to validate it and they are finding a tremendous amount of support for wrong ideas on the basis that they are looking only for those things that support them rather than things that negate them which results in what we are arguing is groups psychosis.

Psychosis is essentially the result of incompatible programs running simultaneously that one one cannot reconcile two things or cannot find a mechanism to compartmentalize them and keep them apart what happens is the programs keep tripping over each other and so one ends up responding to a view of reality that is false and disruptive of the ability to function properly.

So much of what we see is the result for example of two perspectives both of which are wrong being simultaneously deployed to different populations who find each other increasingly ununderstandable these incompatibilities are resulting in us at some level literally becoming crazy some of us as individuals but all of us as part of this group that cannot figure out even in what language to approach each other to discuss what we face and what are.

Overwhelmingly common interests clearly are we can't figure out how to protect them because the incompatibilities between these worldviews are too great the gap is too big for us to look past it.

In the language of sense making we literally do not find any sense in those who are on the other side.

We do not find any sense in increasingly we regard them as some anomalous phenomenon right in fact I would argue that one of the outgrowth of a psychotic collective sense making is the verificationist belief that in fact you've got it right and the other side is simply insane and if one can for a moment just step out of your own sense making bubble and realize that the likelihood of that is actually quite small right it's certainly possible.

It's certainly possible for a small number of people to be simply insane but the idea that half the population has simply lost its mind while you have retained a perfect grasp of what's going on is indeed quite unlikely so the trick the thing which actually I swear if you'll try it you'll find it rewarding and maybe even reassuring but the trick is to figure out who you can talk to in that group of people who you probably regard as that shit crazy.

Who might be able to convey to you where to stand in order to see through their eyes now many on your own side will tell you don't you dare right to the extent that you even humor them as if they are making some kind of point you are putting the thing that we must do right away in jeopardy and you must ignore that if your purpose is to figure out what's going on rather than just to simply participate on a team no matter how dangerous its viewpoint has become then it is necessary that you figure out how we are going to do that.

So that's the model and indeed I think you will see in many of the things that we discussed today that these these ways these concepts that help organize our thinking around the way events are unfolding in the world many of them are manifest in these other unrelated topics are seemingly unrelated topic.

So at the final point there I would say that we hear a lot from people who say they are right of center who say they enjoy hearing what we have to say because we are trying to make sense rather than simply indoctrinate and there are a number of ways that little little sound bite can sound but that people are coming to us despite the fact that we probably have never voted the same way they have or would disagree on a lot of the methods by which we are trying to obtain a just world.

So long as we do share underlying values which the vast majority of us do that people are heartened conservatives good faith conservatives are heartened to hear us as good faith liberals doing this kind of analysis and one of the things that is so disheartening and I think we may I guess we could start here but I want to talk just briefly at some point today about about what's going on in Louisville and the response to it maybe that is the right way I thought we would finish there but should we maybe start there.

Well I want to follow on two things and maybe we can come back to that one is in somewhere in I think it must have been at the end of last week I happened to catch up Tucker Carlson monologue in which he specifically alerted his audience he called out honorable liberals who are horrified by what's going on on the nominal left at the moment and his exact phrase was something like you know honorable liberals are horrified to they exist.

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