Bret Weinstein: whatever happens today, the system is broken

Just ahead of the election, Freddie Sayers speaks to Bret Weinstein — a leading member of what used to be called the Intellectual Dark Web, evolutionary biologist, writer and host of the Dark Horse podcast.

Over the course of 45 minutes they cover the danger of censorship by the big tech platforms, the possibility of a new political coalition and whether we’re more likely to be heading into a new Renaissance era or towards disaster.

Enjoy!

KEY QUOTES:

On tech censorship:
I have a model in which many of the things that feel conspiratorial are actually a combination of phenomena: one part is emergent and one part is conscious, and the two of them work together to create something quite Soviet and bureaucratic. There’s also another possibility, which is that if one wants to do arbitrary things, if one wants to silence certain kinds of speech, and amplify other kinds of speech because they are advancing a political agenda, then they can build a system in which your antagonists are in a position to trigger algorithms.

On Trump:
I think Trump is going to perform way better than people expect. There’s no question that there is an Orwellian force that causes people to think twice before they confess even any nuance about Trump effective. I mean, I saw Noam Chomsky in the New Yorker a couple days ago said that Donald Trump was the worst criminal in human history, which is a preposterous statement coming from a place you would really expect a great deal more nuance than that.

And yet, here we are, that passes for intellectual evaluation at this moment, so undoubtedly, there are a large number of people who are frightened by the democrats willingness to pretend that this authoritarian mindset is reasonable… But I will say I hear it enough that I feel confident Trump will outperform expectations, whether he’ll win, I think he actually might well, but he is going to surprise people one way or the other.

On Portland:
Portland is mostly intact, but the energy in the system has built up there’s a tremendous amount of pressure which has taken a form that is quite ominous. We have regular violence breaking out on the streets. It’s always localised to a few blocks because it’s a small number of people who are engaged in it, but the police are simply not putting a stop to it. And the protesters who every night become rioters are learning what they can get away with. They are going neighbourhood to neighbourhood and terrorising business owners and people in their homes. And perhaps most ominous of all, the mayor, who is also our police commissioner, who is allowing this to happen is facing a challenge for office. Which might ordinarily be a good thing, except that he’s being challenged by somebody who has signalled quite strongly that she embraces the wrongly labelled anti-fascist perspective in this case.

On progress:
I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. I believe strongly that we will have to make progress if we are to survive as a species. That means I regard myself as a radical, but what I’m watching is people who are nominally on the same side of the political spectrum, who do not appear to understand that systems have basic requirements in order to function that these systems are necessary to our continued existence and they are jeopardising them. Because in a state where the where one party effectively has complete control, there is no force to cause a reality check. In effect, people’s fantasies have run away with them. They do not seem to understand that they are playing with the substance of our real lives as if it were a video game.

On misinformation:
The population is drenched in a kind of bullshit that is with them, almost from the instant that they get up in the morning, right. As soon as you’ve engaged your phone, there’s a pretty good chance, you’ve encountered something inauthentic, you know, some kind of advertising at least. And it’s with us all day, until we go to bed. That’s not normal. Right? Our ancestors didn’t face that there have always been con artists. But in general, that’s not what you were dealing with moment to moment. What this has created, is a kind of hunger that people don’t realise they’re experiencing for authenticity. And that paradoxically, has created an opening for very unlikely phenomena.

Видео Bret Weinstein: whatever happens today, the system is broken канала UnHerd