The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or BJ Campbell. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is BJ Campbell. BJ writes one of my favorite Substacks, which is called Hand Waving Freak Outeries. A goddamn shame he got it first – I could have titled my life that. You can check it out at hwfo.substack.com. He covers a wide range of topics including culture, media, egregores, and actually, BJ’s done a lot of interesting stuff on the odd topic of egregores, environmentalism and guns. Welcome, BJ, how you doing? It’s good to have you back.
BJ: Yeah, it’s good to be back. I always enjoy stopping by.
Jim: We’ve always had some good conversations. BJ’s a returning guest – he was in Currents episode 090 along with Patrick Ryan on Egregores. If you’re interested in that peculiar topic, check it out. And way back in Currents 024, BJ was on where we talked about the woke religion. Today’s conversation was triggered by one of his Substack essays, which I read back in December or something like that. It’s got a wonderful title: “Cops, Belief and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs.” How’d you come up with that title?
BJ: Well, the title came after the article’s contents. If we want to go through the article, we can. But the gist was really that there’s certain societal efficacy you can garner from belief. And it’s clearer to understand that if you strip away what we look at today outside our window and just consider hypotheticals. The more extreme and absurd a hypothetical is, the more entertaining it is to read, but also a lot of times more clear it is. So the idea that you would have chainsaw face robot dogs that enforced morality can keep a reader reading. We’re also able to come up with a pretty good AI-generated image for the splash, which will always get a few extra clicks. In some ways, all this is a tiny bit of engagement farming.
Jim: Of course, as my wife calls it, “artisanal performativity.” Those of us in our backwoods cabins, whacking away in the meme space wars. And the reason I reached out to BJ was right at that time I was thinking and posting and doing a little writing on the topic of the noble lie. The noble lie is a concept that, as far as I know, goes back to Plato’s Republic where he argued that a carefully crafted falsehood can be justified if it serves the common good. In his framework, the lie is not meant to deceive for personal gain, but to foster social harmony and maintain a well-ordered, stable society. I have my issues, to say the least, with that concept. But as you can imagine, when I read this essay, it kind of said, “Oh yeah, BJ’s sort of talking about the noble lie.” Let’s dig into your essay a little bit. If you remember it way back yonder, why don’t you start up sort of at the beginning?
BJ: Well, the idea behind this – I have an equally frustrating time dealing with another quote which is more recent from Yudkowsky, who folks in the rational sphere and probably your listeners are a little bit familiar with. But he said “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Which is in some ways the opposite of the Greek concept of noble lie. And in particular it’s – we must destroy the noble lies. I was having an argument with other folks outside of you that I was like, this is objectively wrong. This is really bad. We should not be doing this.
Speaker: And so the article really was kind of an exposition of Chesterton’s Fence. Don’t wreck stuff until you figure out what the thing you’re wrecking actually provided you. So the thought experiment really goes like this: You consider the hypothetical town of Robotnik, right? Robotnik is a perfect surveillance state. It has a surveillance camera on every street corner, every room, all networked to a central computer, has a morality program. And anytime you deviate from the morality program, quadrotor drones airlift in chainsaw-face robot dogs that cut your arms and legs off.
So that’s what we might call an absolute police state in the thought experiment. If you live in this absolute police state, you can be relatively sure that you will have absolute order and absolute adherence to whatever the morality program of the AI computer is. So that would be a very peaceful city in which to live, maybe a good place to raise children and such. We could argue about what the peripheral bad results of that might be as far as suppressing innovation and whatnot. But let’s set that aside for the sake of argument.
Instead, let’s compare it to a parallel thing. So you go across the national lines and then you have a new country – it’s called New Robotnik, it’s a neighbor, right? And in New Robotnik they still have the surveillance cameras, they still have the quadrotor drones, but the surveillance cameras don’t work and the AI is busted and the quadrotors never go. But that would look no differently to someone who lived in it than old Robotnik did, because those chainsaw-face robot dogs never showed up either, because everybody was scared of them. So comparing those two, you’d have the same amount of crime, which is zero, effectively. What that tells you is that you don’t need the actual chainsaw-face robot dogs, you just need the fear of them or the belief in them to get the same kind of result.
So let’s say we’ve got a third country to compare, because we’re just doing hypothetical comparisons: Chainsaw-wielding Tooth Fairy demons. So this is Tooth Fairyville one country over. And those people have an absolute belief that the Tooth Fairy is going to come down with fairy demons and saw them in half if they violate the moral program. We might call this an absolute belief state as compared to an absolute police state. But your result is the same – you have social order and you have no crime as long as the belief is maintained.
So along comes Eliezer Yudkowsky and he says “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” And he moves into Tooth Fairyville and he exposes that Tooth Fairyville’s belief is false and everybody stops believing in the Tooth Fairy, and then you end up with crime, you end up with disorder, you end up with losing all the benefits that that belief carried you and you end up with a bunch of refugees that all move to New Robotnik, right? So then Yudkowsky moves in with them and he exposes the fact that the cameras don’t work and the drones are busted, and then it falls to the same fate as Tooth Fairyville did, and then everybody flees there and they end up moving into the absolute police state because they’re looking for stability and they’re looking for no crime.
So that is a thought experiment that in my mind, when I framed it, proved the argument of Chesterton’s Fence – that you don’t want to undo things that you don’t understand what kind of benefit they have for society. And it also shows that those are all absolutes, right? So you’ve got an absolute belief state, you’ve got an absolute police state. Those are two different cases.
BJ Campbell: Each of them suppresses crime 100%. But then you could plot these things on a graph. You could say, well, a zero belief state or a state with no belief and no police would trend towards the maximal amount of crime that you might experience. And both of those probably describe a function. You could plot a three-dimensional function. And that’s one of the things that I did actually in the article – I cooked up an actual equation and plotted it so you could see some amount of belief and some amount of police might get you most of the way there.
The argument really stemmed from the “defund the police” efforts and Black Lives Matter in the 2020 misbehavior that was going on and its relation to crime, in particular the homicide rate spike.
Statistically speaking, if you look at the United States, we had a homicide rate prior to 2020 that was at or near historic lows. It was similar to what we had in the 1950s and under half what it was in the 1990s during the crack epidemic. Then we had this spike that was very well documented in the media, and nobody wanted to talk about the relationship between the crime wave and the defund the police efforts and people’s distrust in police. When the crime spike finally went away, it went away when we refunded the police and stopped talking about these sorts of things and started to have more police and also more belief in them. It returned back to what we had around 2019, 2018. It was the steepest crime crash, as far as murder rate, that we’ve ever had in the history of the statistics.
Your liberals claimed that was from gun control and the conservatives claimed it was for some other reason. The conservatives largely actually pretended it wasn’t happening because it wasn’t helpful to their narrative since it happened during the Biden administration. But the effect was really that we were riding that function up and down where we had more crime when there were fewer cops and less belief in enforcement, and then we had less crime when there were more cops and more belief in enforcement.
Jim Rutt: Now, I don’t know about that as the actual causal link. There could be… you know, I know fair number of cops, and the number of cops didn’t change anywhere near enough to change the crime rate that much. What did change was for a while, cops’ attitudes – they were demoralized and they basically went on soft strike for about two years. That’s the real cause.
BJ Campbell: That’s absolutely true. Well, so that’s a reduction in effective policing, whether or not it’s a reduction in the direct number of police. I’m aware, having spoken to cops in 2020, that there were times they got calls from dangerous areas of town which demographically speaking weighed more towards the black community, at least in Atlanta. And they just chose not to go because they didn’t want to get caught on YouTube and thrown up on some kind of Internet video that’s going to cause them to get fired.
Jim Rutt: So there was a lot of that and even not that extreme occasion. The cops just said, you know, the establishment does not have our back. We have an extremely dangerous job here. We have to make split second decisions and if the bosses don’t have our back, fuck them all. Right? We’re going to do the least we can do to not get fired.
And being civil service, that’s not much, right?
BJ Campbell: No, and I think that’s accurate. And I also want to be clear that I am not a book-thumping pro-cop person necessarily. And I acknowledge that there are a lot of issues with over-policing and all that sort of thing. And I think those issues are difficult and they need to be attacked and resolved. But that doesn’t prevent me from understanding that police are a necessary function of civilized society.
Jim: At least at the moment. Well, yeah, we’ll get to that later.
BJ Campbell: Well, if we were to move to a total belief state, maybe we wouldn’t need police. And that’s one of the other interesting arguments that fell out of the great 2020 shenanigans – if you guys really want to defund the police, you know what you need? You need, from this position or this analysis anyway, you need more belief and you probably also need more individual gun ownership.
Jim: And perhaps some other things. Right. Open the brain. Think prayer. First I want to check and see if you were building a metaphor here for also, in addition to things like defund the police, but also the dim of religious fervor in the West at least over the last couple hundred years.
BJ Campbell: I think that generally speaking that’s an issue and that’s kind of where I presume this conversation is going to go over the long term. But at the same time, I don’t know that crime itself from a statistical standpoint is so tied up in so many different things. It’s so multivariate that you can’t easily point to a graph that says that we ended up with more crime when we had less religion. But I think that it’s conceivable that you could put together a multivariate analysis that would show that. I just don’t want to make that claim explicitly because I don’t feel like making claims explicitly without mathematical backing.
Jim: But a concept, actual evidence. What the fuck? What kind of prognosticator are you?
BJ Campbell: Well, it’s like if you’re going to prognosticate about this stuff, then you need to at least come up with an intellectual hypothetical framework where you can test out extreme cases and then you can kind of show what’s going on. And that’s what I was trying to do in that article also. I was trying to kite a few clicks by having a picture of a chainsaw-faced robot dog on my splash image.
Jim: Yeah, of course, that’s been one of the arguments for religion, right? You know, all right, the guy in the sky, he’s going to burn your ass in hell forever if you pick your nose or something, right? And in theory, if you know, of course one of the fallacies is the homo economicus fallacy because humans are exponential discounters. So hyperbolic discounters, not even exponential discounters. So they discount eternity almost to zero as eternity.
BJ Campbell: Right.
Jim: But suppose they actually were something like exponential discounters. Being fried forever in the sea of lava or whatever the fuck it is that they talk about ought to keep you from committing crimes. And perhaps in very devout societies that might. Though I do notice that relatively devout societies like Saudi Arabia back that up with lopping hands and chopping heads and things like that as well. So fear of Allah doesn’t seem to be all that powerful even in very devout societies. And so I suppose you could call the belief in post-death punishment something like the virtualization of the chainsaw fairy approach.
BJ Campbell: Well, let’s be fair to Saudi Arabia. It’s not just about post-death punishment with them. When you’re lopping a hand off, that’s a pre-death punishment. Absolutely. And also to be fair to the other reverse side, if I were to pull crime rates with Saudi Arabia, I expect them it would be probably very much lower than the United States. But that’s also multivariate, right? Like they don’t have alcohol there – there’s a big variable on crime, so that’s those sorts of things.
So it’s difficult to make direct comparisons. But I would expect if we were to pull side-by-side crime comparisons with Saudi Arabia to its neighbors, for instance, you might see that they have much lower crime rates than other areas in the Middle East.
Jim: They used to have remarkably low crime rates. You’d always hear stories about somebody who went to the bazaar and was haggling over a rug or something, and took the rug and left their wallet sitting on the table, and the merchant would grab their wallet and go running after them through the bazaar.
BJ Campbell: You left your wallet.
Jim: You left your wallet because through the combination, presumably, of post-death sanctions, plus hand-lopping and flogging and what have you, had an exceedingly low crime rate.
BJ Campbell: So where does that flow from in Saudi Arabia? I would think that it would be relatively obvious that their basics flowed from the Quran, from religious adherence.
Jim: Probably so, yeah. And probably on both aspects. The post-death stuff is clearly all about the supernatural, and the injunctions from the Quran presumably back up their actual on-the-job policing. Of course, the same could be true for Judaism. Right? You go look at the Old Testament – there’s 134 death penalty offenses, including working on Saturday and disrespecting your father.
Listen to that, teenagers out there, right? If Israel were to take the book and enforce it literally, they probably have a pretty low crime rate too. But they don’t.
BJ Campbell: Well, there’s obviously certain problems with doing that. You generate some problems more than you solve, potentially maybe. But I think that if we want to take Saudi Arabia as a specific case, I think it’s a really good case to buttress the idea that Islam in Saudi Arabia is a beneficial noble lie at the minimum. Right, let’s say this for the purposes of the podcast – let’s presume that neither of us, neither you nor I, are religious or adhere to a particular religion. I don’t want to make an actual statement about my personal beliefs, but I think it’s a good intellectual exercise to approach this as if no individual religion is necessarily true in the verifiable sense.
Jim: Yeah, what’s his name? Mr. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – who the hell is his name? Guy wrote that book. Why is that eluding me at the moment? But anyway, he famously said about the gods in Rome, of which they had hundreds, that the people believed they were all true, the philosophers believed they were all false, and the magistrates believed they were all useful.
BJ Campbell: Right, right, right.
Jim: So let’s step back from that. What is the morality of that? Let regular listeners know – I pound the table a fair bit and say I’m an Enlightenment man, a good old 18th century Enlightenment fellow. And if the Enlightenment was about anything, it was about the hypothesis that mankind had now matured enough. I sometimes like to call it childhood’s end, that we could put away these fairy stories with respect to the God who’s going to smite us and cook us in the fiery lake for eternity and all that. And that there were other ways to be ethical, secular, social organization, and it was just morally wrong to frame a society based on elites pushing what they know to be lies to the masses.
BJ Campbell: Okay, well, so as a child of the Enlightenment, do you believe that the Enlightenment thinkers were focusing on all of the available noble lies, or were they focusing their attention on religion?
Jim: Well, first and foremost, because it had been so dominant for 1,500 years, was not just religion, but specifically Christianity and specifically in France, Catholicism, which is where it started. And surprisingly late in the day, the Catholic Church was still quite horrific – tearing people’s tongues out and torturing people to death and killing people based on rumors of witchcraft into the 18th century. It’s hard to believe, but the Catholic Church was a quite depraved entity, surprisingly into the 18th century. And so that was their primary target.
BJ Campbell: Do you think that the Enlightenment thinkers, as far as you’re aware, would agree with the idea that some noble lies have value? Or do you think they were of the position that all noble lies should be taken down?
Jim Rutt: That’s an interesting question. Let’s think about someone like Thomas Jefferson. Did he actually think that we were endowed by our Creator with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Probably not. That’s kind of interesting. It’s a new civic noble lie, I suppose. But I would say this is the difference.
It is an aspirational statement without any supernatural enforcement mechanism. So I think it falls more into the class of how secular societies can organize themselves around some accords, some agreement about what we believe on the grounds that we choose to believe it. Not that somebody 2,000 years ago wrote it down in a book and said, you got to believe this. I think those are probably qualitatively different. What do you think?
BJ Campbell: Well, one of the things that I did when I was preparing for this is I sat down and I made a list of what I would consider to be beneficial noble lies. The first one that popped to my head, above all the others – I’m going to list about eight or nine of them – is that money has value. I think that money is an obvious noble lie. You can’t prove with science that $3.14 is worth an extra value meal at McDonald’s. But we all agree that it is.
And it’s a mutually agreed upon noble lie that makes the whole thing work. And in that case, and from that standpoint, it’s incredibly valuable. And it crops up in multiple societies throughout history, and the societies who adopt it do better than the societies who don’t. So we have then possibly generated a new definition of what is true or right by replacing its scientific veracity with its societal efficacy. Do you follow me there?
Jim Rutt: I don’t know about that. I am a deep student of monetary theory. I’ve read 50 to 100, probably more than 50 books, maybe 100. And from a theory perspective, money has a very legitimate function, which is it is a coordination signal.
And that’s all that it is, right? And it basically is a signal that’s tokens that flows through our society that basically organize the cycle of production, distribution, consumption, savings, investment, innovation, and then production again. And every society has one. And it may just be a noisy, informal one – it’s how we do things, or “I’ll swap you a bushel of potatoes for a pig.” Those are signaling modalities. They’re just not very good ones. Turned out money, because it’s totally lightweight, zero weight, actually – there’s really nothing to it other than the symbol itself – is actually perfect to use as a signaling modality, particularly when it got rid of artificial constraints like gold and things of that ilk. It’s quite good. It’s got all kinds of problems too.
That’s another story for another day. But with respect to what came before, it’s totally legitimate and you need something like that. Now where you could say that it’s edging towards a noble lie – I’m not sure quite noble lie is the word – is that your average Joe Blow reifies money in a way that’s not true. They think that money is actually wealth, when it’s not. It’s a pointer to wealth.
You know, a wad of hundred dollar bills is just a wad of paper and you could use it for toilet paper, I suppose. But it is a social convention only that for the time being, those papers are pointers to claims on actual wealth as part of a collective cycle of passing these tokens around. Now, it turns out that that conception of money is more sophisticated than most people want to get their heads around. That doesn’t mean it’s not real and true and useful and at least up to some limit, good.
BJ Campbell: Okay, now I don’t disagree with anything that you said. I’m not as versed in the history of money as you are, but I’m versed enough to be able to talk about this. But I think that you hit the nail on the head when you called money effectively a social convention that greases the wheels of barter. It’s a barter proxy, but it’s more than that. It’s a store of wealth and this and that and the other. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a noble lie, because we could all decide that this money is not worth anything and we’re going to use that money, or we can all decide, well, Bitcoin is worth something when for a while nobody thought it was.
And so these social conventions are, by their nature, noble lies, as I understand the noble lie framework to be, are they not?
Jim Rutt: No, I don’t think so. That’s not what Plato had in mind. Let me give you an example, a counterexample of an analogous convention. Let’s say you need some way to mediate the cycle of the economy. And our social convention is that we pass around these USDs, US dollars, right? I’m going to argue that that is almost entirely analogous to the decision that we drive on the right side of the road. You need such a convention.
And the better your convention is, the better your traffic flows. I mean, you’ve probably seen pictures of traffic in China, especially in the old days before qi. It was crazy, everybody cheating and running around and just a total mess. If everybody drove on the left or the right, it doesn’t actually matter. Traffic flows. So I would suggest that money is closer. The actual instantiation of our monetary system as a series of conventions.
That’s closer to driving on the right side of the road than it is to, as I recall, Plato’s noble lie. Remember here, it was basically a claim that people were made out of three kinds of metal: gold, silver, and copper. Bizarrely, as a way to justify the hierarchical composition of society with the gold people at the top, the silver people in the middle, and the masses working the land, they’re the copper people. And his intent in The Republic, which of course was a thought experiment as well, was that the state and the leaders of the state had a moral obligation to convince the people that it’s true, that they were actually made in some sense out of these three metals. That strikes me as much closer to the conventional usage of a noble lie than driving on the right side of the road or passing these tokens around to organize our economy.
Okay, now I’ll give you a better example. This is one I use all the time: Santa Claus. Right. It’s absolutely true that Santa Claus makes four-year-olds behave better for two months a year. And so it’s the classic noble lie.
BJ Campbell: Well, okay, I understand where you’re coming from with that, but I want to push back a little bit more on money in two ways. One of them is I want to come up with a thought experiment. Here we have the dollar and we have all the machinery that goes behind it. And I would call it all very carefully crafted social convention. I think we can both agree on that. If we carry our carefully crafted social convention to an island in the Pacific in the 1930s that’s operating off a cargo cult, and we say, “This is money.” And they look at us and they say, “What is that?” How is that any different than a carefully crafted falsehood we’re attempting to bring to them to reorganize their society?
Jim: It could be sold that way. So I could see that you could, via propaganda, tell them this has innate wealth because they’re used to swapping SPAM. I think that was the monetary system in some of those islands. And SPAM actually has use value. And that’s an earlier stage of exchange in human societies – everywhere people swap potatoes for pigs, right? In this case, they happen to use canned SPAM. After World War II, bizarrely, Kent cigarettes became the medium of exchange in Romania for like 40 years.
Nobody smoked them, but they just passed them around. But in theory you could smoke them. I guess occasionally somebody did. When the monetary value of a pack of cigarettes became less than the use value, then the smart thing to do is to smoke up your cigarettes. So I could see a form of propaganda that tried to convince these people that our dollar had intrinsic worth rather than being a signaling modality when it’s actually in place and running. I don’t think it’s… it’s a thing that… Nobody unders… Very few people understand. But is it actually noble? I don’t know. Let’s move on to your next example. I would say no, but it’s closer to a convention.
BJ Campbell: Do you believe that most people in the country, we’ll say a majority, 51% of the country in the United States, understand money to have intrinsic value as it would be explained to the guy on the cargo cult, or do they understand the signaling modality definition of it that flows from advanced monetary theory?
Jim: You are right. The vast preponderance is more like 99% have reified it into something like wealth.
BJ Campbell: So that would be a noble lie to them.
Jim: Interesting question. Nobody came… I don’t think anybody said… I don’t know. That’s an interesting question because I doubt anybody set out to actually say this stuff is real wealth, not a pointer to wealth. But in the social convention of the fact that everybody uses it all the time to acquire material things via social learning, we build that association in. And it’s actually true within the context of inside our society, as it turns out, so long as the convention holds, a bag of hundred dollar bills will take you a fair way. But after the fall, I guarantee you a suitcase full of .22 ammo will take you a lot further than a suitcase full of $100 bills will.
BJ Campbell: Right. What about nationalism? Is nationalism a noble lie?
Jim: Yeah, I’d say that’s a noble lie. That strikes me as a classic noble lie. We, the German people are über alles over everybody else. You know, everybody else should bow down to us. Right? Why? Because we said so.
And of course this is where I do sometimes equivocate a little bit. Not quite as pure on this as I would like to or I don’t like to be. None of us, none of us are totally consistent. I do believe that the belief in one’s own country is a good thing. Oikophobia is the name for the habitual belief that your own society is bad. That’s one of the things I complain about with the so-called progressives these days is “Oh, you know, the West, they’re oppressors. Oh, we did nothing but kill Indians.”
And oh, by the way, every country was founded on crime. Look at England, the great imperialist. They were conquered countless times. The Celts came in and conquered the pre-Celtics. The Romans conquered the Celts, the Romans left, the Anglo-Saxons came in. The Anglo-Saxons were invaded first by the Vikings and then by the Normans when they were overthrown. And to this day over half of the aristocracy in England are direct descendants of the lieutenants of William the Conqueror. And the King of England is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. So we all have these fucked up stories, but nonetheless, even though they’re sort of noble lies, it’s not healthy to not believe that your own country is a good country.
BJ Campbell: Okay, so that would… It sounds to me, what I’m hearing, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that nationalism is a noble lie that is of value.
Jim Rutt: That it is, can be, if it’s not too strong. Right again. Germany 1939, not good. Probably China today, not good. So it’s a question of balance, I would say.
BJ Campbell: Okay, and then sort of on the list… We’re trending more towards more abstract stuff here. But cultural tradition, social norms, they can be “noble-ized” as well?
Jim Rutt: I would say in general, no, because those are conventions. Again, I say please and thank you. That’s kind of like driving on the left or driving on the right.
BJ Campbell: So what I’m hearing, and again, correct me if I’m wrong, it sounds as if you agree that there are some noble lies that are worth keeping because they have societal efficacy. And I’m also gathering, correct me if I’m wrong, that you find that there are some noble lies that do not, or you might just call them ignoble or just lies. Is that your position?
Jim Rutt: I think that’s probably fair to say I’m in general opposed to noble lies, but in moderate doses there are probably some that are better than not having them. For instance, some sense of patriotism is probably good. I suppose you could reconfigure patriotism into something like the social contract. Right. We all agree that we are here and that we are going to operate together as a nation, but in reality, of course, that’s not how it’s actually propagated.
BJ Campbell: Right. Okay. So if we had a list of noble lies, we picked one off a shelf, would your impression about whether this noble lie should be torn down or not, would that be an efficacy valuation based on the overall effect of the noble lie?
Jim Rutt: Let’s think about that. That’s a good question. I think from a morality perspective, I think it’s important that it be relatively obvious that it’s a noble lie. It doesn’t take much to penetrate the fact that the usual rah-rah shit about your country is something somebody just made up, and we all know that history was written by the winners, etc. As opposed to a stronger claim of veracity about it, such as, for instance, traditional religion or the ex cathedra claim that Santa Claus is real. Those strike me as stronger attempts to bamboozle people than selling patriotism.
BJ Campbell: Would a stronger attempt to bamboozle people be justified if the efficacy of it was also stronger?
Jim Rutt: I suppose possible. The moral calculus is not actually math, unfortunately. The moral calculus would essentially, in my mind, have to be extremely strong to justify the elites knowingly telling the people, let’s say, to believe in Yahweh. Right. And to be like it was in the Middle Ages, where people were absolutely terrified of going to hell. For the purposes of lowering the crime rate by 10%, I’d say no.
BJ Campbell: Well, if an elite believes it too, is that a noble lie?
Jim Rutt: No.
BJ Campbell: No. So Christianity is not a noble lie from the Pope’s perspective?
Jim Rutt: I’m not sure about the Pope.
BJ Campbell: Okay, I’m not. Maybe not.
Jim Rutt: I’m fairly sure the Jesuits are well enough educated to know it’s all horseshit.
BJ Campbell: Okay, so popes in general, though, like the previous hypothetical pope.
Jim Rutt: Yeah, Benedict definitely believed. No doubt about it in my mind. But this guy, he might. He seems like he’s a sweet, soulful person, but he’s also the first Jesuit to ever be a pope, and Jesuits are very well educated.
BJ Campbell: Well, okay, so if the elites believe the lie that they’re telling, that transmutes the noble lie into no longer a noble lie.
Jim: It’s not a lie because nobody is saying what they don’t believe to be true. They are mistaken. There’s a big difference between being mistaken and lying. A person who absolutely believes in Catholicism is not lying when he or she is encouraging the spread of Catholicism to save all these people’s souls. When it becomes a noble lie – this is right out of Plato – is when the top of the pyramid knows its faults. You know, Plato had made no claim that people were actually made out of gold, silver and copper. But he said it’s a useful thing to tell them, to provide reinforcement to the social hierarchy.
That’s the noble lie – knowingly saying something you know not to be true.
BJ Campbell: If a belief evolved over time that was efficacious from a societal perspective that allowed society to interact better, to propagate better, or to outcompete other societies, and that belief was universal, top to bottom – even if that belief was not true, then it would not be a noble lie and it would be of value. Is that correct?
Jim: Could be. It’d be a collective hallucination, I guess, like money, which is a collective hallucination, so long as there isn’t particularly an elite that is knowingly pushing a lie to the people for the purposes of controlling them.
BJ Campbell: Does that mean that Christianity as a noble lie began during the Enlightenment and that prior to the Enlightenment, everything was hunky-dory?
Jim: Let’s compare Christianity to science. Prior to about 1625, humans really had no clue on how the universe worked. We thought that the sun went around the Earth, that life spontaneously generated. We had all kinds of screwy ideas from Aristotle about acceleration and physics, which Galileo proved weren’t correct. So we’ve had a revolution in our understanding of the nature of the universe we find ourselves thrown into, to use a little Heideggerian term there. And once we were able to explain an awful lot via valid scientific reasoning, gathering of evidence, falsifiability, etc.
The supports for Christianity, one after the other, slowly fell away to the point where it became impossible to take seriously, particularly the biblical literalist, fundamentalist claims about Christianity of, say, the 1780s. If you look at our Founding Fathers, almost none of them were actual Christians. John Adams was definitely not a Christian. Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian. They were both deists. Madison was an outright atheist. Monroe was a deist.
Washington, it’s unclear if he was. He was just going through the motions. He never seemed very devout. Franklin was clearly an atheist. And so at that time there was enough evidence from science to say, wait a minute, all this crap, all that we’ve inherited in the Middle Ages is definitely not true. So it was undermined by the gradual, for 150 years, building up of evidence.
BJ Campbell: So I don’t disagree with any of that. I want to pivot slightly, lead to a hypothetical here. Let’s say you’ve got two societies and they’re next door to each other and they’re isolated, there’s no crosstalk. And they both, as we have discussed before, were brought up on a belief system that was not rooted in fact, but the belief system evolved over time to be efficacious for their societies. And these societies are equally efficacious, basically by Darwinist principles. Because if one of them was more efficacious than the other one, then it would have rubbed the other one out. Right? So they’re neck and neck.
Jim: If you had a system that developed within one of these two societies where the belief claims within that society – that is, an efficacious belief that helps bind the society together – became undermined and then transmuted into noble lie status, and that transmutation made the lie less efficacious compared to its hypothetical society next door that did not have this problem… wouldn’t that, from a social Darwinist perspective, put the society that had its myths undermined and transmuted into noble lies at a disadvantage and possibly lead to it getting rubbed out?
Jim: Indeed. And in fact, this is one of the arguments for why we’re such strong believers. Daniel Dennett laid this out quite brilliantly in his book. He’s considered one of the four horsemen of the new atheists.
But in reality, the main book he wrote about atheism was a nuanced study of how to think about and study religion as a serious intellectual form. And one of the arguments he made was that groups with higher group coherence will typically beat groups that have lower group coherence. Coherence in believing the same thing, even if it’s utterly preposterous – you know, like the wooden idol that we set up in front of our campfire before we cook dinner every night. If that group has higher coherence than the guys next door who don’t believe in anything, it’s all one person for their own self only, then yes, not only does that group conquer in a Darwinian fashion, but if there are differential genes that encourage belief in early primitive warfare – typically the modality on victory was you kill the men and you kidnap all the women – then the genes for, let’s say, a propensity to believe in anything, including wooden idols, ought to be reinforced over the 200,000 years or more that we basically lived at the forager level, and probably was reinforced even more later.
So yeah, I think that from a Darwinian dynamic, that’s true if and only if the debunking of the noble lie doesn’t add, let’s say, virility to the society. A very interesting counterexample, of course, is the West. As we debunked Yahweism, the efficacy of the West actually exploded. It went almost straight up – look at the rate of innovation, rate of population growth, rate of concrete produced, rate of anything. Starting around 1625, it starts moving very rapidly. And around 1800, it starts rising at a crazy rate.
And so there’s an example of where debunking the lie – it was probably not even a lie for a long time, it was just a wrong belief by most of society – starting with the humanist thinkers and then through the Renaissance and onto the Enlightenment. The debunkers got stronger and stronger until they basically prevailed, at least with the educated class. And that turned out to be freeing Western civilization specifically from superstition and ultra-traditionalism. And we see the result now, of course, 300 years later – the result is about to overrun its limits. And so its sell-by date has passed. But in 1700, when humanity had a world population of 600 million and each one of them consumed about a twelfth as much as we consume today on average, it was an amazing boon for humanity to cast loose of these false beliefs and instead replace them with some true beliefs or truer beliefs – there is no actual truth in the real world. There are axiomatic truths, but there are no hard truths. There are first-order approximations at great level of detail, but none of them are, of course, absolutely true. So there’s an example where ditching the superstition, or for a while probably a noble lie, turned out to be a huge trade. Big win.
BJ Campbell: Do you believe that Daniel Dennett’s argument then appropriately refutes the Yudkowsky article edict, saying that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, given that there might be some things that could be destroyed by truth that could put you at a competitive disadvantage to your adjacent society that still maintains a myth?
Jim Rutt: I would say Yudkowsky’s position is a conjecture and is almost certainly not true in the short run for groups that gain from their higher coherence. In the same way, telling a four-year-old or proving to a four-year-old there is no Santa Claus in the middle of November will make that four-year-old worse for six weeks. So yeah, I think you cannot say that in the short term at least Yudkowsky’s position is going to be efficacious. You may say it is more moral in some higher sense and that we are attempting as a thinking organism to arrive as close as we can to the truth. But we’ll have to acknowledge that may have some short-term costs.
BJ Campbell: This is a big jump sideways and I apologize about this, but I think it’s important to kind of plug in, to kind of establish our priors. You have, it seems to me, represented the opinion that belief is based on what you see with your eyes and that belief is something that’s imparted to you but is not necessarily chosen. Do you think that people can choose to have a belief even if the belief contradicts what they see with their own eyes?
Jim Rutt: Oh, it happens all the time, right? Think about the people who seemingly sensible and go off and join some fundamentalist cult or it may not be a Christian cult, but it’s one of these wackadoodle new age things, right? Former physics professors have been known to do that.
BJ Campbell: Happens all the time in your sense of this sort of oppositional social Darwinism of our two hypotheticals. Your country A that had its myths turned into noble lies by evidence – do you think there are scenarios in which that country could end up recovering the benefits that it had from its noble lies by choosing to believe them in the face of evidence?
Jim Rutt: That’s going to be hard though. America shows that it’s possible, right? Some majority of Americans are still believers in Yahweh and some crazy number believe in things like angels, right? So despite 300 years of the Enlightenment, the United States at least is still a barely believing country. Now most of the rest of the Western world has pitched it, but US is an interesting example that it can happen. Of course my position is we should go through and beyond, not back. Right? We should create a new social order where we have coherence and we have high trust and we have a much richer social network than say late-stage financialized capitalism does.
And that we create membranes, each which have their own rules for appropriate behavior and they enforce those rules strongly within their membrane. And so you can have all the strength of voluntary accords of how we are going to live without having to have a top-down form of noble lie. I think that is where we’re headed in the future.
BJ Campbell: Do you see a path to – I’m just going to be blunt about this – do you see a path to get the Walmart shoppers on board?
Jim Rutt: With your vision over a couple of two, three generations? I think it’s quite possible by example. Let’s name the thing that I work on, something called Game B. It’s a pretty good-sized community, probably 50,000 people now in the world that think about themselves as Game B aspirants. We believe that for most people there’s an intellectual 1 or 2% of pioneers who can get to this via thinking about it and talking to other people who are also thinking about it. But for 98% of people they have to see it. So we have to create some demonstrations, some membranes within the greater game.
Jim: A body that when people come to visit, go to the Airbnb, come to the restaurants or the brew pubs, they say “Holy shit, this is a way better way to live.” And that it is now possible to get out from underneath the game – a hyper individualized, broken down everything is driven by the money-on-money return cycle – and live a different way. And talk isn’t going to do it. We have to demonstrate it. That’s why I believe it’ll take 60 years.
BJ Campbell: Are you familiar a lot with the approach the Quakers took to propagation when they moved here?
Jim: Not really. I do know some Quakers. In fact, where I used to live up in Loudoun County, it was in Quaker country and there was still a pretty active Friends congregation in the next little village over. But I will say they had shrunk down to like 30 people, something like that. Not sure that their strategy was very efficacious, whatever it was.
BJ Campbell: Well, that’s why I’m bringing it up, because that was their strategy. I was raised a Quaker, so I’m plugged in a little bit to how it is, and I don’t practice anymore. But one of the things that Quakers are, the Society of Friends, very unusual from a Christianity standpoint. They break from regular Christian dogma in dozens of ways.
Jim: A lot of people argue they’re not actually Christians in any orthodox fashion.
BJ Campbell: Right, yeah, there’s some people who would make that argument. But one of the ways they broke from it was that they did not believe in evangelism. They didn’t run around and try and convert people. They were trying to convert simply by exposure, by doing exactly what you said – like, well, people just need to see. And they’ll see how we behave and they’ll realize that what we’re doing is better. And therefore they’ll ask, “Hey, why are you doing that?” And they’re going to say, “Because I’m Quaker.”
And then, aha, you get it in. Now, that worked really well for a short period of time in England, and then they were able to populate chunks of Pennsylvania because they were granted that area. And a few of them flowed south into your area in D.C. and down into northern North Carolina, that kind of thing. But then it didn’t go anywhere else. So the propagation method that you’re proposing for Game B does not necessarily have… it’s got at least one counterexample, at least one example of it not working particularly well.
And you might want to look into that a little bit further with your Game B talk. But that’s not necessarily what we were going to be talking about on the podcast. I just wanted to bring it up.
Jim: I will respond to that, though, because this is one we thought a lot about, which is, as we’ve been thinking about the nature of Game B, we realize it’s a fair bit like creating a new form of life. Everybody on Earth, all life from yeast to us, is all descended from LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, probably three, three and a half billion years ago. We all use the same biochemistry. It’s all the same thing. It may well be possible for there to be an entirely different form of life. And if there’s life around other stars, it probably will be biochemically different to some degree. And the current thinking about origin of life on Earth is started out with chemicals doing kind of interesting chemically reactive things near high energy sources like hydrogen sulfide vents at the bottom of the ocean, or volcanic heated springs, et cetera.
Jim: But it didn’t really get rolling until membranes were created where the concentrations were held high enough within the membranes. We have a whole complicated doctrine about why this is so. And we believe the mistake that the Friends made – and what you described makes sense to me – is that they did not have a membrane. They just basically lived out in the community and they tried to show their sterling example as good people. And I will say, by the way, every Quaker I’ve ever known was a good person, interestingly, and most of them quite successful in life. Whatever it is that informs their worldview, it seems to be a pretty efficacious one. But they didn’t get the sauce to be strong enough by living together within a membrane where the Quaker values were dominant. And if they had, might have been a different story.
BJ Campbell: It seems that you are of the opinion that we are now at a technological level due to the Enlightenment, where religion as a social organization principle is no longer necessary and you’re looking for the next one. You said you wanted to go forward instead of back, correct?
Jim: Correct. And I will say it’s basically impossible to believe traditional organized religion. I mean, yes you can, some people do, but are the leading thinkers in our society going to believe that? Actually believe it? No. And think about things like present-day High Church Episcopals – do they believe in Christianity? Who the hell knows? They certainly aren’t very fervent about it. And they certainly don’t believe every jot and tittle of the law as Jesus instructed them to.
And so we have no choice but to go forward. The traditional religion – the desert religions of 2000, 3000 years ago, 1500 years ago – are just untenable. So we have no choice. We have to come up with another way to socially organize that has high coherence, is very values-ridden, helps build morality, may not even require police. Something that most people don’t know is that the phenomenon of police is very recent. I believe the first police in the history of the world, in the sense that we know them now, was as late as the 19th century. Around 1830, the London Metropolitan Police were the first police in the world. We managed to survive 250,000 years without police. And we at least hypothesize the Game B world may not require police, because if we organize as small communities on the order of 150 people, we will police each other the same way we did in the hunter-gatherer days.
BJ Campbell: Your target says stick under the Dunbar number. I can tell where you got the 250 from. So I want to go again back to a couple other questions here. First off, I’d like to point out that I was not aware of that police statistic. I think that’s interesting. I do think that the idea that London had to come up with police as a stopgap measure to reduce belief falling down fits at least the theory inside the Chainsaw Face Robot Dogs article because some portion of each, you know, can provide enough stability and if you end up running out of one, then you’re going to need more of the other. Now I don’t know that that’s proof, but it does fit the model that was in there.
But one thing that I’m interested to hear what your opinions are is this: As far as I’m aware, the only historical atheist great powers in the history of mankind were the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Soviet Union lasted 70 years, fell apart. China’s at or around maybe what, 75, something like that right now. There’s never really been a history of atheist societies working. And now I will grant, I want to go down front – I mean the response you have to that is, well, the technology wasn’t there, right?
Jim: And the scientific knowledge wasn’t there.
BJ Campbell: The scientific knowledge wasn’t.
Jim: We don’t need Thor beating on his shield to cause thunder. We now know what causes thunder.
BJ Campbell: Do you think that the scientific knowledge was not there 70 years ago?
Jim Rutt: 70 years ago, no. Yeah, that’s a continuum. It started around 1625 and has gotten stronger and stronger and stronger over time. We know there’s huge cultural inertia. The fact that a bare majority of Americans still believe, which is pretty amazing, means that we haven’t seen a decisive tipping point, but we have seen a slow erosion over time. And let’s look at Western Europe, where essentially traditional religion at least is a dead letter.
Nobody goes to the churches in England or Netherlands or Germany or the Nordic countries, even Poland, which had held out for a long time as a very Catholic country. The churches there are now essentially empty. Western Europe, even Central Europe, has become, if not atheist, an extremely secular set of societies.
BJ Campbell: That’s inside the last hundred years, probably.
Jim Rutt: Largely, though in fact since World War II.
BJ Campbell: Right, right. So if the USSR only made it 70 and China’s only made it 75, and the other things that we have examples of that are largely atheist societies are technically younger than them, we don’t have a whole lot of strong evidence now that an atheist society can stand the test of time. Just from a number standpoint, that doesn’t say that they won’t, but that says that we don’t have a lot of supporting data to the idea yet. What makes you think that we are at the level of science and technology now that would support it when perhaps, you know, by inspection, we weren’t there 100 years ago?
Jim Rutt: Well, again, it’s two parts. One is our affordances, what can we do as a society. But the second is our knowledge of the universe. And both together provide us the capability without the ability to explain the universe. People need an origin story for the universe, right? That seems to be a human thing. How did this damn place come around? Right. Well now we have a reasonably good scientific argument on how that came about.
How old is the world? How old is humanity? Every culture has stories like that. The American Indians of the Southwest I know a little bit about, they all have interesting and quite bizarre and non-scientific stories, but they were important for their group coherence. So now that we have scientific explanations for all these classical things that religion provided us, there’s just much less glue for religion to work as a thing to hold us together. Because it’s basically implausible for most people – not to say we couldn’t cook up a new religion. People do that from time to time.
But also the capacities, and let me turn your comment about time around. The steam engine was invented in the mid-18th century, didn’t become practical really until the early 19th century. It’s very interesting. The first coal wasn’t mined in the United States until 1804, amazingly enough. And so we have only lived with steam power, which is a fundamentally different way of relating to the universe for 225 years. Was that a good idea or not? It’s too early to tell. So I would say a lot of these things that modernity has brought upon us we just have to go with because it is what it is, right?
BJ Campbell: When I say to you, how do you know whether or not we are at the level of scientific and technological advancement to where we can move towards an atheist society that is efficacious and works long term, what I heard was, correct me if I’m wrong, suck it up. We don’t have a choice.
Jim Rutt: First, our knowledge of the universe makes it untenable to believe in the old religions, right? You take the Old Testament, go through it and you go, no wrong. Not true, no, yes, no, no, no.
Jim: And then ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. The 134 death penalty offenses just no longer works. I mean, this stuff is thousands of years old in some cases, and it’s no surprise, particularly in the face of the great growth of our human knowledge in the last 300-350 years. So it’s just untenable in that regard. And we have alternatives now that we have high-speed communications, mass communications, other ways to build coherence than through the slow propagation of a set of religious doctrines.
BJ Campbell: So one of the things we talked about earlier in the podcast was how it is likely that human brains evolved to have the capability to take on religions and belief structures and follow them easily, because the brains that weren’t able to do that got rubbed out by the brains that did because they were more easy to organize into social societies. Given that, why would the solution going forward be an atheist society when it could just be a differently religious society? Most of the complaints I’ve heard from you about religion refer to the origin stories of the Abrahamic religions and talk about how sort of absurd they are. Why wouldn’t we move towards a religion that was more believable instead?
Jim: All the historical religions are unbelievable and often in horrifying ways. Think of the Aztecs who sincerely believed, apparently, that you needed to cut the hearts out of 100 teenagers every week to keep the sun shining. Or the Carthaginians, very highly sophisticated people who believed you had to toss, I think it was 25 or 50 infants alive into a fire every year to propitiate the god Tophet. So religion produces horrendous outcomes and things along the way in addition to creating their coherence. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the coherence without these horrifying sideshows?
And in terms of an alternative, are you familiar at all with the work of John Vervaeke?
BJ Campbell: I am.
Jim: Vervaeke has postulated something I think is very interesting. He starts off his analysis of the meaning crisis and how we can escape from the meaning crisis by positing this Dennett-style evolutionary tendency to want to believe. He calls it the God-shaped hole in the human psyche. And with the death of God – let’s call it Nietzsche drives the wooden stake through God’s heart – there’s a hole there. And he has done a tremendous amount of work to understand what are the things that can assuage that hole without having to believe balderdash. And he believes a lot of it is practice.
One of the things we now know from cognitive psychology is that people singing together actually produces a really good effect on people’s brains. Dancing together does the same thing. Eating together does the same thing. Doing martial arts, the slow-form artistic martial arts, aikido and things like that apparently have similar effects. I don’t know anything about those things. So Vervaeke has a large body of work where he decomposes the nature of the God-shaped hole and how we can assuage that in ways that not only make the hole be filled in for us as an individual, but also build group coherence at the same time without having to believe any supernatural balderdash.
I think that’s the road forward.
BJ Campbell: Okay, all right, now let’s presume – I don’t know whether Game B has conventions. I’ve always actually wondered whether they do or not because I’d like to come to one. But let’s presume there’s a, you know, the great Game B convention gets together and people sit down and Varvakey’s at the table. I’ve been on, I think, three different podcasts where he’s also been a guest, so I figure one day I’m probably going to bump into that guy. Because he and I think in similar ways by appearance, let’s say Varvakey’s sitting at the table and the rest of the Game B people are sitting around and you’re struggling with the Walmart shopper issue.
How do you get Walmart shoppers on board? And Varvakey says, “Well, okay, our problem is that the problem with the legacy religions is not that they didn’t have necessarily good behavioral ethics, because a behavioral pattern was developed through social Darwinism and evolved over the course of years and is generally matched. But maybe it’s a little bit behind the times because the environment is changing so quickly.” So Varvakey says at the table, “What we need to do is we need to have… the actual best way to fill the God-shaped holes with a different God.”
He says, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to cook up a religion and we’re going to make sure that it is believable inside the current scientific framework.” People have the ability now to choose what they believe, as we’ve already talked about earlier. “We’re going to try and promulgate this religion as a way to make sure that people are following along the new program.”
And it includes tai chi in the morning and singing in the evening, and it includes this and that. But it also includes a belief system because in order to make it stick, people got to believe in something because that’s what the God-shaped hole is shaped as. He lays it all out, says this is the way to the future, to be able to resolve things in the Game B manner, to be able to promulgate Game B properly. I don’t know if Varvakey would say this – let’s pretend he did. You’re standing across the table. This is an efficacious answer.
Here’s my question: Are you going to call him out for proposing a noble lie?
Jim Rutt: Let’s decompose this for a number of dimensions. First, I want to make it very clear that the opposition to old superstitious religions is Jim Rutt. That is not Game B.
BJ Campbell: Okay, thank you.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. Game B absolutely allows people to believe whatever nonsense they want. Right. But not to force it on anybody else. And in fact, I fully expect that many of the early Game B membranes will be very religious in a traditional sense. Right. Because those people have high enough coherence to actually pull off the trick of basically becoming exiles from Game A.
Jim: So this is quite ironic that Game B may well be the thing that produces some of the most intense religious communities we’ve seen since the Middle Ages. But that’s alright. But there will also be ones, I would certainly hope, that are taking a radical enlightenment perspective and saying, “Hey, childhood has ended. We are now strong enough that we can develop our own personal sovereignty. We can write accords on how we deal with each other, which actually demand a higher level of ethics and good behavior than what actually happened under the old style revealed religions.” And we will demonstrate over a period of generations that our way works good. And some people will adhere to us, some people will go to the crackpot box, Bible thumper, Game B membranes.
And that’s all fine and good. So I want to make that very clear that this is the Rutt view, not the Game B view on the enlightenment. But now let’s go to Vervaeke. And so Game B would say, fine, whatever, give it a try, see if it works. Rutt would say, if you want me to align with that… You said something earlier, which is that there is nothing that contradicts what we know today. And if that’s the case, then I could actually say I could be on board with that and be aligned with you.
And in fact, there is such a packaging which is becoming a little bit more popular in relatively esoteric areas, and that is the Panpsychic or Spinoza God. Spinoza was the philosopher back in the 1500s in the Netherlands. He was a renegade heretical Jew and he essentially came up with a view that all of the natural world is God. Einstein was 97% a Spinozan – I don’t think he may or may not have known it. And if you want to say that, that’s fine.
That’s just words, right? It doesn’t make any claims that aren’t true. If you want to say that my appreciation of the universe is my God, that’s great. I have no objection to that. In fact, a fairly good friend of mine who was a confirmed atheist has recently converted to a Spinozian style God. And I go, that’s great.
BJ Campbell: Well, I mean, ultimately the… And I don’t object to anybody doing anything either. But ultimately the problem with the Spinoza God is you have to try and make a… For a religion to be efficacious, it has to make a connection between its origin story and its teachings. And it has to do it in such a way that the Walmart shoppers behave themselves. So getting from those high value thought experiments down to the gritty that you’re actually trying to achieve with your potential noble lie, I think, is the hard work.
Jim: So let me at least throw in a very light pencil sketch of what that might look like. Let’s take Vervaeke as the furthest along thought leader and convene some people who are much more mass market oriented, some people who do cigarette ads and God knows what. And let’s say, let us take what Vervaeke and his colleagues know, people like Jordan Peterson, by the way, who’s also one of these people who does not believe in Christianity. But he is more of a noble liar. He seems to be like Voltaire who said, “I’m not a Christian, but I certainly insist that my servants and my lawyers be.”
BJ Campbell: Peterson’s value in your marketing team probably went way down around 2018 or 2019.
Jim: When he kind of went nuts or something.
BJ Campbell: He was very high for a little while and then kind of fell.
Jim: I don’t think Peterson’s a good example, but he and Vervaeke know each other and they’re both… We’re both at UD together, etc. Anyway, so let’s say we get a mass market team with Vervaeke being the ethicist. And he says – and he’s been on my podcast lots of times, and I pushed him on this – he absolutely does not believe in anything supernatural. He’s entirely a naturalist.
Jim: Yet he has a huge affinity and love and knowledge of practices – what he calls meditative practices, these martial artsy practices, singing together, breathing coordinately, on and on. And so we basically work back and forth between people who understand mass marketing and what will actually sell to the Walmart shopper and something that does not offend Vervaeke’s defense of natural honesty. The question is, can we build such a product or not? Nobody’s tried. And so I’d suggest that’s something that will inevitably have to happen in the Game B world.
BJ Campbell: When you brought up Vervaeke, I thought that was interesting. He’s also, I think, semi-regular on the Paul VanderKlay podcast, and I’ve done a couple of things with him. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him or not, but he’s a very interesting character. He’s a minister out of California who does a lot of Jordan Peterson analysis and is deep into the VanderKlay thought experiments too. He might be somebody you might want to go back and look at, because what he likes to do is break down religious formations into their efficacy and their use and what they actually mean in terms of semantics and whatnot in a very clever way. So he might be someone that you could at least spend some time scratching your head and looking over.
Jim: Yeah, sounds good to me. I’m always looking for those things, so long as they don’t feel the necessity to add things that seem highly unlikely to be true. And again, Vervaeke is a master of this. He knows how to build what seems like to me very rich forms of group coherence and group practice and everyday practice and things that have powerful effects on your brain and do so without saying anything that’s not true.
BJ Campbell: Feel like we’ve probably reached the end of the road here. What else is on your list of discussions? If I could summarize, it sounds like we went through discussions of what qualifies as a noble lie and what doesn’t. We did some hypotheticals about the societal efficacy of different ways to organize society. We talked about the Game B attempt and where it’s got to go. And it sounds like one of the possible paths of your Game B project is going to – in my opinion it has to be, but in your opinion it seems like it could at least be on the table to try and rebuild these structures that have been torn down.
Jim: Build something that fills the God-shaped hole in humanity without making any supernatural claims. I think that’s likely to be either essential or if not essential, extremely helpful. I’ve long ago come around to that point of view. I guess the last thing before we go is how much do we need? This goes back to some of the fundamental questions that have bedeviled the philosophers forever. Are humans fundamentally good or are they fundamentally bad? The Abrahamic tradition is humans are fundamentally bad and they need the fear of Yahweh to keep them in line.
On the other hand, there’s been a lot of recent field research, anthropological research. Two people I happen to know, Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles, have done a lot of this work, there’s been others. They do exchange games – very interesting, clever experiments that indicate that there is a very high level of innate fairness and goodness in people all over the world. And interestingly, even in primates like monkeys. If a monkey feels like it’s been being fed celery to do a task and it sees that the monkey in the next cage is being fed a grape to do the task, and it likes grapes better than celery, it’ll refuse to do the task because it’s not fair. So one of the questions that is subject to empirical study is to what degree can we rely on innate goodness from humans in crafting our social operating system? Do you have any thoughts on that?
BJ Campbell: I do actually, and I think it probably ties back to the very beginning with this article, the “On Cops: Belief in Chainsaw Face Robot Dogs” article. When I was trying to put that article together, I put together a visualization which was a three-dimensional graph where the X axis is the police from a scale of 0 to 1 or 100%, and belief from 0 to 1 where you had absolutes on the one scale. And then I cooked up an equation that had crime and so forth – the crime was up to 100% at zero and zero. But that’s not true, right? If you had a zero police, zero belief society, crime would not be at 100%. Crime would be at some other percent that would be dictated by the innate goodness, fairness, etc. of the human population that the experiment was being run on.
And it sounds to me like what those anthropologists are identifying is what the actual upper bound of my graph would be really. They’re providing me a constant I can plug in there for the graph, if that makes sense.
Jim Rutt: And there’s some other things too that they have discovered, which is that people love to punish cheaters and bad people, and people will even pay a cost to themselves to have the opportunity to punish malefactors. And again, police didn’t come around – I looked it up – until the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. It was the first professional police force in the world. And so we had mechanisms. A lot of it was informal. In Western Europe, it was the system of the hue and cry.
If somebody, let’s say, grabbed somebody’s purse and ran off with it, the hue and cry goes out. And all the citizens have a moral, if not quite legal obligation to pursue the criminal, beat him to the ground, drag him before the magistrate. Because we did have courts, even though we didn’t have police. The magistrate says, “Yep, he’s a thief. Twenty people saw him, hang him tomorrow morning” and that’s what would happen. So there are ways to the upper bound or I guess the lower bound of how criminal a place would be without police is probably a lot higher than you think. And that’s even without a Game B type modification to how we actually choose to live.
Now, I would say in late stage Game A, where we have hyper-individualism where everything is denominated in money and we have huge stores of wealth which are relatively easily stolen, the non-police state of criminality is likely to be pretty high, but that is not necessarily the way humans are going to choose to live in the years going forward.
BJ Campbell: Well, that’s a good point. I mean, like monkeys don’t have a huge amount of crime incentive.
Jim Rutt: Not much to steal from a monkey, right? You might be able to steal his favorite stick or his nest or something, but no big deal. All right, this has been a very interesting conversation. Went a little different way than I thought.
I got 26 questions prepared. I think I asked four or five of them, but it was a very, very interesting conversation nonetheless.
BJ Campbell: Well, you answered a lot of questions. I kind of led you down a rabbit hole to see where we could end up with.
Jim Rutt: Yep. No, I saw you doing that. I said, let’s do it. That’s always fun.
A little different. Alrighty. BJ Campbell, Handwaving Freakoutery – what a great name. Wonderful having you back on the show.
BJ Campbell: All right, thanks. Appreciate it.