Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome. Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption. Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to discuss some things we saw in the Righteous Mind, which is a book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which, as explains, as explained in its subtitle, seeks to provide understanding on, quote, why good people are divided by politics and religion.
So, you know, it's something that is very timely, you know, our modern United States, at minimum.
Now, in it, Haidt does a deep dive into the concept of morality. Looking at.
He looks at where it appears to come from, how it appears to work, and also how it affects our ability to form and operate in societies.
Joining me today is a man who's convinced that this is his year, like he's the chosen man. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to break down what you see in the hearts of men?
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Shoot, that's a tall order, man.
I'll break it down. I don't know if anyone wants to hear about it.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: No pressure, man. No pressure.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: What's in the hearts of men? Wow. Very, very poetic, sir.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Now, we're recording this on May 23, 2022. And we continue our culture series today by doing some reading between the lines in the 2012 book the Righteous Mind, again by Jonathan Haidt. Now, Haidt uses three principles of moral psychology to organize this book. Now, these three principles provide a pretty good framework in terms of. To understand the total arc of what's happening. And the first one is intuitions come first, strategic reasoning comes second.
The second principle is that there's more to morality than just harm and fairness.
And the third one is that morality binds and it blinds.
And so through these, he's able to take the. The reader on a journey, essentially, that lays out how morality, where this morality stuff comes from and how it works and, and, you know, the pros and cons on, on these things.
So, Tunde, to get us started, let's just. Let's look at part one. And obviously we're not going to go through line by line what happened in the book. But what, what was something that stood out to you or you found particularly interesting in part one?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: I was disappointed. I thought I was going to do an audiobook here and read it back to you.
We don't have 11 hours for me to.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: I guess.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Not bad.
No, man, this was a great book. I want to thank you for recommending it because I had never read it, but it's definitely something I'll recommend to others and Will probably get read several more times if I can live a long life from here on out. That is one of those that you can come back to different times in your life and I'm sure, you know, continue to get good stuff out of it. So.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: But to go right into it, you know, one of the. You know, there's a couple of key parts to me that really stuck out, which is what I would say is kind of his overarching key themes. And this one was the concept of what he called the elephant and the rider.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Which I think I'll break it down in the sense of. It's kind of a little bit. I'd say maybe we could think of it as conscious and subconscious. Even though he doesn't. It's not a perfect analogy of it, but for the listeners here to this show, it's just that the elephant represents really our core almost.
It's like the hardware in a computer. It's our automatic processes.
It's the skeleton and kind of the bones of our morality. It would be.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: I mean, to your point, it's like the unconscious, the part about us that happens automatically. He calls that the intuition. And. And what it is is he uses that as an analogy for decision making, basically. You know, like you have the elephant being the intuition. What happens automatically without you thinking about it. But go ahead.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And then the rider, even though he doesn't say it's the conscious mind, I would say it's more of the writer is more like the software in the computer system where the elephant's the hardware and the rider represents the controlled process. So that's why, to me, it's a little bit more of the conscious. Where the elephant represents the automatic process.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Like the rational part of the. Basically, where you work through.
Systematically work through things and you analyze it and stuff like that.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yep. And so the interesting part is, to the points we're making here together. Right. Is that the elephant represents the emotion and intuition part. Which part of that branch of the tree, if we can go down it a bit, is that's the stuff that gets developed in childhood from all. You know, at the. For all of us as humans, the kind of hard wiring of certain things, then the rider is the rationale. It's the reasoning why. And so the rider is the one who is. Is if the elephant. And he uses these terms, if the elephant leans a certain direction, if it. If it wants to go a certain way, the rider then creates justification as to why that direction makes sense. And another, it leads me to the next one, which.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Well, before you go, let me just. Because I want to overlay what you just said onto. Remember, this first part is called intuitions come first, strategic reasoning comes second. And so that analogy basically really does. It's a good illustration. It's one of the key takeaways of the book. Anybody who reads the book or has read the book, you can say, oh, yeah, the elephant and the rider. And everybody will immediately remember that as one of the key themes of it. Because that basically, we walk around in our conscious minds, oftentimes thinking that the logical part of us, the rational part of us is what's in charge.
But really what he was saying and what he lays out the case for is that actually. No, no, no, the automatic stuff, the innate stuff, or the things that develop, as you said, over childhood or whatever, those are the things that actually our. Our. Our ration. Our. Our rational part of our mind works for that, like our rational mind. And the reason he used the elephant in the rider is because an elephant, if you're a rider of a horse, you can control the horse a little bit. But if you're a rider on an elephant, even if you have, you know, like, all of the tools you need to try to control the elephant, the elephant's still going to do what it wants to do. And the rider then, you know, the rider's job, so to speak, in our decision making most of the time is to come up with reasons to justify why it's okay to do what the elephant wanted to do anyway.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, one other thing as you're talking about, I wanted to add here, he actually explained. I like his explanation of why he came up with the term the elephant and the rider, because he said, you know, I could have picked a horse, right, A horse and a rider. But he said, he specifically picked an elephant. A, because elephants are highly intelligent, and then B, because of the visual we all get where. Because you can picture a man or woman sitting on an elephant and they're pretty small in comparison. And. And so it's the idea that our subconscious, you know, this emotional intuition, this automatic part of our mind, that it's actually got its own mind. Right. It's smart, it wants to go in certain directions, and it's pretty big. It's not easy for us to control. Just like a human being on an elephant. Yeah, that's why I love it.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Try tell the elephant to go or try to tell the elephant to stop.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Elephant will go if it wants to.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: And that's why I love how he says, you know, if it leans left or right, even if the rider is looking in the other direction, trying to go the other direction, you know, eventually most riders end up leaning with the elephant. And what I thought of was, you know, that helped me understand a lot of things that on the surface I always looked in from politics and certain things, religion. That was irrational and it helped me understand.
Well, it's actually not an irrational response. Now that I've been educated on this part of human psychology.
It's the brain's need to want to justify and be correct about something that it already intuitively believes.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: But by that, though, it is irrational. But you were just mistaken. And I agree with you. I had the same realization. I was mistaken in thinking that the rationality was in charge. And actually the rationality is not in charge. The rationality works for the intuition.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Well, one of the things, that's why I want to share this. I mean, this is a direct thing from my life that I'm not going to put on you or anyone else. Right. But I told you, like after George Floyd got killed, for example, one of my friends in my network sent me a text trying to justify, I guess, what happened, that George Floyd had been locked up for criminal offense in 2009. And remember, you came up with that term. Well, some people need an emotional off ramp. Right.
And that's my point. Like, and I bring that up specifically the Floyd case, because it's a case everyone knows now and it's pretty cut and dry for most people.
But in my head I was thinking like, well, why would he say that? Why would he. Like, it's irrational for me, because I'm thinking all rational, like, well, what does that matter? That he had something in 09? This is, you know, America. He deserves due process. Due process? Yeah, he deserves due process because of whatever happened that day that he got arrested. Did he deserve to die? He was already in handcuffs. Our system is that he should have been taken to court. And, you know, they decide there if he did a crime or not.
And now what I learned is that that was an example of the elephant and the rider. Yeah, the rider actually saw something on TV that didn't jive with how the elephant felt. Because the elephant felt. Well, there's a black guy with a police officer. Well, he must have done something wrong.
And so the rider, the elephant is leaning in that direction and the rider just needed something to justify it. And once he got told from his ecosystem that, oh, this guy wasn't deserving of better treatment because he did something literally 11 years before this happened that was enough that the writer said, okay, now we can lean in this direction and we can go with this. And it really woke me up when I read this part about the elephant and the rider, because I realized, wow, that accounts for so much in our society. And I'm not just saying about racial stuff now. I'm saying about a lot of things, just how we all deal with everything.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: So I think that it's actually, it's very helpful in your interactions with all people. And I think it was good that he started the book with this, because a lot of times I find myself doing this. You know, one of the things that was very interesting to me in this was that they talked about how intelligence itself, a lot of times really just helps people's writer be more efficient and effective at coming up with justifications and reasons. And so I find, like, I was talking to my wife the other day and. And like, it was something I was going to complain about. And then I thought for a second, like, you know what?
I'm just upset about this. And I'm sitting here, I've just come up with all these reasons why this is why I'm upset, but really I'm just bothered. And so I, you know, like, ultimately it was like, okay, I caught myself in that moment. Like, okay, yeah, you know what? I'm just not going to say anything because I'm just bothered by it. I'm sure she knows that it's something. It kind of irked me. And so there's no need for me to go and give her all these reasons as to why she shouldn't have done this. And it really also distilled down. Now, my profession is attorney, and so it really distilled down.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: You could just be a husband and still give her ish.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: But of course, of course, that's all.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Another. That's a whole other.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Now, these are separate, though. These are separate. But what it gave me an appreciation for also. And he does this analogy he uses, and I know you want to talk about this, he uses how the writer is kind of like, you know, your rationality is kind of like your inner press secretary or your inner lawyer. And that struck me as well. It's like, yeah, you know what? When I get hired by a client, I'm supposed to, you know, the client wants to do certain things. They, oh, I want to file a patent application or I want to do this or that. And my job is to kind of advise and guide them along that process. It's not to, you know, like wherever they're leaning and so forth is pretty much where we're going to go. Unless they're, I mean, my field doesn't deal with much illegality, so it's not like I'm telling, oh, you can't do this because it's illegal. It's more so, well, here, you know, if you do this, here are the risks, you know, and so forth. Here's the way we would go about it. And so I think it's a really good, like the writer, a lot of times is the advocate or the person that justifies internally or externally, which I want to talk about why it may matter to be able to justify externally. But I know you wanted to say something about the press secretary piece.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I just, I mean, you pretty much said, I mean, I just like that idea that he related or he related the writer to the press secretary. Because I think all of us that have watched some kind of politics, no matter what our individual politics are, we've seen press secretaries on stage having to answer for maybe poor policy decisions or a gaffe that a president made. They're always there staunchly defending it no matter what, and because that's their job. Right? So whether it was Sarah Sanders under Trump or this one, Psaki under Biden, doesn't matter who it is. We all, if we're all honest, no president is perfect. So all of them have done something in the four to eight years that they serve that probably even their supporters may not agree with 100%. But the press secretary never says, you know what, the president was wrong for that decision.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: We blew it.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Yeah, we recognize that. He shouldn't have done that. It's always the champion. Oh, no, no. This is why.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: Here's why it's okay. Here's why it's okay.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: You know, just like a press secretary, if they really get challenged, what do they do? They get mad at the press, they get mad at the, they want to kill the messenger and the people asking the question. So that's the same with the rider of the elephant that they're going to find any reason to justify.
And then in the event that they get frustrated, they'll just get mad at the person who's pointing out the discrepancy between the rider and the elephant, you.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Know, and I want to talk about this just a little bit more and then we can jump to part two, because again, we're not going to be able to go through the whole thing. It's a long book, it's very well done. But it's a long book. But the other thing I want, I.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Can read it with a Barry White voice.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Hey, I bet you that'd probably be our most listened to episode ever.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: You're a patent attorney. Maybe we can call and do the copyright thing and we can get.
Sorry.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: The question being, though, well, why does the writer do this? Why does. If the intuition decides what it wants to do, why doesn't it just do what it wants to do? Well, he talks about how the writer kind of evolved and this thing evolved, like with language or the thinking whiz. And it really became its form as we moved into a language species. Because if a dog doesn't have to explain to itself or to other dogs why it does what it does, you know, language allows that. And so what I thought on the internal side a lot of times is that certain things about us that we think or that we do a lot of times can create cognitive dissonance in us. And resolving that feels good. And when you have that dissonance, then you want to resolve it. And so a lot of times, internally, the writer can do that. That's coming up with the justification for why you feel the way you feel, or you did what you did. But externally. And the book gets into this a lot with, in terms of reputation management, that the writer is in the business in the same way a press secretary is. The writer is in the business when you're talking about dealing with other people, of managing your reputation, or managing the reputation of your elephant or the entire being of you, which was fascinating to me. And he actually gave the analogy and talked about. I mean, he talked about 2,000 stuff, 2,000 years ago, in terms of Socrates and Plato and Glaucon and talking about how Glaucon really went in on the fact that how people care more about appearing to be good than being good and going into the Ring of Gyges and all these other things where the Ring of Gyges being. You could put on the ring and disappear. And so. And who would be honorable then at that point? And so there's been much debate over this. The rationalists were always like, oh, no. Certain rational people, you know, rationalists in those days were philosophers. So they were like, oh, the philosophers, of course, we. If we had the Ring of Gyges, if nobody knew we were doing dirt, we still wouldn't do dirt. But when you do these studies, when studies have been done, it does vindicate Glaucon in that sense. And I found the idea of the reputation management being just fascinating. And that'll come in later when we talk about in group settings why this stuff matters. But it really is interesting how that with you, when you have language and therefore you have to explain to other people why you did what you did, being able to come up with a good explanation and therefore people be like, oh, okay, well, he's a decent guy, then matters a lot. And so to me, that was just. That was very interesting, you know, from the standpoint of why. Why can't we just ride with the so to speak. Why don't we just go with the intuition and not think again about it?
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's. This is why it was a, it was a great read and I love that.
The bringing up of Glaucon, because it is true. Like, and I think it was this Ring of Gyges they were talking about that if you were.
If you could put the ring on and no one could see you, would you still act pure and good and all that. And one of his studies, that meaning not Plato and Glaucon and all these guys, but I'm talking about the author of one of these modern studies they did, was without getting into it, for the sake of time here, they basically found that almost 100% of people will cheat if given a chance. But what happens is most will cheat just a little bit. Like. So it was interesting that I was thinking about it.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: They'll cheat to the point that they themselves can justify it themselves.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: What I'm laughing at is this. In my head I'm thinking about when I'm on the show, should I talk about how I do my taxes? I was like, just a little bit counter or not. Nah. Maybe an IRS agent will listen.
Technically I didn't say I did anything wrong, but okay, yeah, y' all want this in the archives, man, everyone can laugh a little bit about that one.
So anyway.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: But no, I mean, that's what they found for the non psychopaths is that people would cheat a lot of times up to where they felt they could justify it to themselves even, you know, or to like, it'd be like, okay, well, I don't want to go that far. Then I would be a bad person. And this is an internal conversation.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: That's why I thought about the tax return.
Sometimes I'm thinking about my mileage, like, oh, what I really do.
But I don't get all my records.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: The concept of reputation mattering to people, though, as we said, we're going to talk about that later because that has a lot of implications in terms of trying to create a society. But I do want to talk about part two. I mean, we can any of these parts, we could spend an hour. So we'll have to move and keep it moving. But the second piece being there's more to morality than harm and fairness.
And what this is really is a shot at liberalism or the Enlightenment and so forth. Because what he details is how he details what he has found to be six foundations of morality. And he's found that post Enlightenment Western thinkers, Western and more people on the more in the United States we consider more liberal or in other parts of the country maybe consider more or the world be more progressive.
Of the six, they make use primarily of two and maybe three of the six principles or foundations for morality and I'll list them here in a second, but that conservatives or most societies in the world actually make use of all six. And so there's this disconnect in terms of the moral foundations that people find to be important. And you'll. I mean, it's understandable why once, you know, once I get into them and like actually lay out what we're talking about here. Because the first foundation would be the Care and Harm foundation. That's like, is it wrong to cause harm to somebody? You know, like. And so forth. And pretty much everybody's on board with that one.
Fairness and cheating, you know, whether things should be fair. If you take eye for an eye type of thing. If you take something from somebody, should you be able to keep that unjust enrichment and all that. There's also the loyalty and betrayal foundation, the authority slash, subversion, you know, like higher, like the idea of there should be a hierarchy and so forth. The sanctity, degradation foundation.
And the last one is the Liberty foundation, you know, liberty and oppression. And he found basically that the section is there's more to morality than harm and fairness. He found that there is a overemphasis of the harm and of the fairness and a little bit with the. Or the liberty goes in as well in the American left, whereas the American right uses all six of those. But actually there is a hostility to the other three amongst the American left a lot of times because they don't look at authority as always being a value that needs to be saved or whatever or sanctity that things should be, they have to be a certain way in order to be pure and so forth in society. When you look at the types of restrictions that people should have and so forth, or even the loyalty and so forth, where if you're going to be Critical of your tribe or something, even if you're trying to make them better. Just. But should you be showing. Is that a sign of disloyalty or is that a sign of honest criticism and so forth? So it was really interesting how he broke that down. But just thoughts on that or thoughts on anything else in part two that you wanted to get into?
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it was thoughts on the whole book. But yeah, this was like, you're saying this was interesting. There are a few things that came out of it. I mean, when you talk about things like harm. I found that interesting that some of the research suggests that morality may develop during childhood as a response to how children encounter harm.
And I found that very interesting because that explains certain concepts that, again, seem a little bit irrational when you're on the surface. Meaning how many times in life have we met or heard of people who grew up in a very abusive household, who themselves will talk about the negative experience they had when they were growing up, meaning they were scared of their parent or whatever that the abusive parent. But then they grow up and manifest the same type of behavior. And for the first time ever in reading that, I thought, yeah, because I guess if you're 3, 4, 5 years old and you're learning your relationship to morality is through this kind of carrots and sticks from an abusive standpoint, then that is going to form the foundation of your morality as an adult, as opposed to.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: At least there's a high chance that it can or a legitimate case that it can. Because.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Because I used to.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: That's how you understand how that foundation of morality should play out. If there's a difference.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: I used to hear that, like, from people that, like, that would share, you know, the rare time someone maybe gets really open with you, they grew up in a very abusive situation. And how it's not like they were like cheering about it, they found it very negative. But then they can't help but behave the similar way in their own family structure. And it's just interesting. And like you're saying, not 100% of people fall into that category, but you would say if 60, 70%, it's a majority. And on the flip side, too, generally. Right. We see that children raised in very loving and kind of egalitarian households where they're taught to share their feelings and be transparent and all that, generally don't become very abusive adults.
So it kind of is. It just struck me that during that part of the book to learn that that's some of the moral development side, which then led to Them getting into things like children learn empathy and certain things through not having as much of a hierarchical structure, but more of an egalitarian structure. And they were talking about how just the nature of the parent child relationship is more of hierarchical. And then in our society, the way we teach in our schools and all that is more hierarchical. So it got me thinking into some of the things like we've talked about in other shows, like the social and emotional learning and certain things that have been tried to be implemented in our society. Again, I'm not here to say whether they should or shouldn't be or whether they would work or not, but just this is the first time I've ever read somewhere where, wow, okay, so this is what people might be trying to consider in terms of how to change the nature of our education system in terms of the ability. Because remember, one of the things they discussed was the best way that young people, children can learn about someone else's kind of story is by kind of role playing within it. Right?
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: And it goes back to some of the things we've seen, even in some of our current discussions in our culture is that should we have children empathize with people from groups outside of their own? I'm not here to say whether we should or shouldn't. It's just the first time I've seen in a psychological kind of study and really documented through scientific research that there is a difference. If you teach children certain ways, they will grow up.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: And that's why that's where that stuff came from. Are the best types of studies. But I mean, to me, when I see this, like, I'll tell you, this is my second time through the book, the first time through. And this time, I mean, I have a healthy respect for what was done. This one, though, I looked at a little more critically the second time through. And not in the sense that it's incorrect, but just more in the sense of, okay, so now that we have this, now that we can see kind of this stimulation and response and that how what he actually defines the cultures or people or so forth that tend to overemphasize harm and fairness and liberty and avoiding oppression, so to speak, he calls them weird relative to the world because they focus on those three and really don't give much attention or actually are anti the other three.
And weird is an acronym that he gives. And that acronym that he lays out is Western, Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.
And so it's basically defined like if you say you're a person on the center Left or whatever or in America or really not even necessarily center left, but just having a certain ethos of American liberalism, like the whole liberal form of government that we have then that really describes you. And I know you pointed out to me when you were talking about, when you were interested in the part where. Because so many studies on morality up to a certain point were done on highly educated, relatively wealthy, you know, like subjects in the United States, they got a skewed view of morality because they weren't talking to people from other cultures or, or even other.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: From.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: From other circumstances, situations in the United States. And once they actually broadened out and started talking to people in South America or in Asia or in different parts of this country, they got to see a more a broader picture of the things people's intuitions took into account in deciding right from wrong and morality. But from a critical standpoint, I was looking at. Okay, so now that you have this information, what do you do with it? Because the writer acknowledged, you know, Height acknowledged that to these things, if you take all six without any priority and you really turn them all up, you can lead to fascism. You know, like that can be an end result. If authority and sanctity, as is decided by the group and loyalty are turned all the way up, then you can end up in a very oppressive society. And liberty can be restricted to that will give you the kind of liberty that we want you to have, so to speak. And you could still have stability, you can still avoid harm, so to speak, but it really can take you into a place that is antithetical to the kind of free and open society that we believe that we value here. And I think that. And he gave some conversation on this at a certain point, but I don't think enough was done in terms of. To say, okay, well, should all of these things are important in terms of us functioning as a group, which I believe is true. But are there ones that should be? Should all of these go into the law? Should authority in terms of how people interact with people that are over them? Or should authority be built into the law? Should hierarchy be built into the law? Or should there be equality in the law?
Should sanctity be in the law? Should things that. Because I think it's against, if I think it's an unpure practice, should that be illegal? Or should that just be something that I myself won't do? So I think that ultimately that. And he's a psychologist, you know, social psychologist, so that's not necessarily where he would get into answering the question. Maybe me as a lawyer is looking at that. Okay, well, how do we work at that? But that, to me, is a piece that was left unanswered. But, you know, to his credit, that may not be what he set out to do. What he was setting out to do is do the job of a psychologist, which I think he did a good job.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah, man, that's a problem with you being a lawyer.
No, he's trying to find some angle to argue a point.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean, I just.
Is the. Is this advice as far as how to run our society, or is this saying, hey, people who are going to figure that out with people who are going to figure that out, you guys need to think about all this stuff and not just think about these other things. And being the latter, I think, is what I think it is, and I think it's very good for being the latter, saying, hey, anybody who's going to be trying to put up guardrails or put up structure in a society needs to be aware of this stuff. You got to speak to these things, because this stuff all does matter. You can't just say loyalty doesn't matter or sanctity doesn't matter in the context of what we're talking about here. Like, you have to at least come up with. You have to account for it in some way, whether it's by law or whether it's by practice and so forth.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah. And look, it's interesting, actually, the way you put that, because it is true. I mean, even within societies, right, there's microcosms within the society. So, you know, even in our country, right, you have different socioeconomic pockets. You've got different, you know, groups of people. You've got all this kind of stuff that needs to be considered. And I think the bigger the population, the more difficult these issues become. And, you know, that's. That's something I'll save for kind of the next section, but I wanted to end. I know we're on section two and just kind of on this weird part and a couple things that just stuck out to me as well that talked about this kind of basic side of morality, because he gives some interesting examples, like things that I knew of, but it kind of forgot about, like, the left and right hand as an example and how humans evolved to use it. And I think a lot of people, especially people that have either grown up in other cultures or have parents that grew up or grandparents in other cultures, have a direct tie into this still. Maybe not in the United States. It's not the culture but like, my mom grew up in Europe and she was left handed. They forced her to write with her right hand because Even in the 50s, it was seen as still kind of the devil was left handed.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: That's a violation of the Sanctity Foundation.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Correct. And so it was immoral to basically use your left hand in that way. And so forever, her whole adult life, my whole life, her handwriting was terrible. And that's what it was. She said, this isn't my natural writing end. And another was.
He gave a good analogy that I felt was a great thing that I wanted to share on the show because it shows how morality is very personal for all of us. Because I remember when this happened. Do you remember? I think it was around 20 years ago. I think it was at the Modern Museum of Modern Art in New York. Someone had a painting of this Virgin Mary and then they smeared elephant dung all over it. So basically, they smeared. They shown a religious picture of a religious person.
And, you know, to the defense of the religious community, they were clearly upset about it. And then like you're saying in our society, it was kind of the American left, the more liberal was like, no, well, it's art and da, da, da, you know, and because I'm not religious, I didn't really take that as threatening. I'm kind of like in the middle. Like, I could see how the religious crowd's upset, but I could see how an artist says that this is qualifies as art. But what he said in the book was he goes, okay, so take that story and assume someone did that and smeared elephant dish all over a picture of Martin Luther King and hung it up in an art gallery and said that that's art. And I thought that was the first time I was confronted with that. Like, yeah, actually, I don't know if I'd be cool with that. Yeah, but that's. I gotta be humble and accept the fact that, well, if I'm gonna feel disturbed by watching someone smear elephant dung on a picture or painting of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, who are men that I would revere and wanna be seen in a respectful light, then if I'm a fair person in an open society, then I gotta respect that someone who's religious would feel the same way about the depiction of a person they revere, which in this case would be the Virgin Mary. And it was like, I like the way he did that in the book. Because at least for me as the reader, when I read it that way, I was like, well, he makes a good point.
I can't deny that, you know.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that gets.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: And that's an example of different morality. Right.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Well, also, how. Well, how those foundations will play. They're different in each person, like, which ones are turned up to which level and how. So different things will cause a different intuitive reaction from you.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: And so that's what you realize is like, my intuition here would be like, you know, what the hell, you know, like. And. Whereas this other one, it didn't trigger me that way. But, you know, and what was interesting to me about that was that you can still, if let's say you wanted to, like, you had that intuitive feel and. But you wanted to justify it, you could come up with reasons. And that's kind of where the writer comes in. You can come up with reasons to justify. Like, I was just gonna say that, you know, like, that's because racism's such a big deal and yada, yada, yada, it'd be, it wouldn't be about, you know, just art. It would be. They'd be trying to make up. They would be trying to disrespect me and yada, yada, yada, like, and that's the writer hard at work. And the smarter you are, so to speak, the way they're researching it, the better you are at coming up with reasons why that, why, why that intuition there. But you didn't have it on the, on the Virgin Mary would have been different. You know, so to me, that part was, Was extra interesting on it as well. Like, just like, okay, yeah, so you, you, regardless of whatever intuitive reaction you're going to have, there's still that second layer in terms of whether you're going to allow. If you're, if it's all, if it's happening without you knowing, then you're automatically going to justify it. But if, you know, then you can, like, you did kind of take a humble approach. Like, you know what? I could justify that, but I could just sit with it and be like, you know what? That's an interesting point.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's interesting because, like you said about the elephant and a rider, because in the first one, when it's the Virgin Mary as the, as the depiction with the elephant dung, my writer would have been more like, yeah, well, you.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Know, it wasn't triggered. Is the.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So my, my, my, my writer's kind of like, well, you know, both of them got a point and, you know, like, let me work it out. Like, but on the second one, because the elephant was triggered, there's There's. There's much less likely that I would find a way to justify that it's okay to smear dung on the image of an mlk.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: And it's interesting because. And that's what, to me, the book was so good, because it's. If you're reading it the right way, I guess. Right. It's a mirror to yourself. And you're kind of. It made me again. Now, we've talked about this in other shows and we've talked about certain psychological things. Is it's another reminder of how little control we actually have about. On ourselves. And we tend to think we're in such control of ourselves.
And.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: Well, I think that's what you have to say that together. Because it's not that how little we have control, it's just how much less control we have than we think.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Because we have control. We have a lot of control, but not what we think. We think we're cool, calm and collected all the time. And most of the time we are chicken with the head cut off, running around and then just figuring out a way to explain it later on.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, and that's why. Because the one thing I want to bring up here is one of the actual scientific studies they did, which is the affective flashes, which is called. The specific test, is called the implicit association test, iat, where they'll show you positive and negative things like sunshine and death and like two words put together. And they do FMRI brain scans, so they know within microseconds how your brain lights up and reacts.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: And that's your intuition, that's your automatic.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Correct, certain stimulus, positive or negative. And that's my point about saying that when you read this kind of study, you realize again, how much we're being. When we're triggered by things, how.
You're right, we might not be able to control our immediate reaction, but with some training and understanding, we might be able to control kind of our riders, follow up to it or at least.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: Have a chance, at least like you. If we're not even paying attention, we don't even have a chance. But go ahead.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: So one thing they pointed out specifically that the most overwhelming negative triggers. And I mean, this is specifically. He named it black people, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly. It was interesting.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: And this is in the United States.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Yeah, and this is in the United States. So that's what I thought of, like, okay. Because I've lived overseas, so. Because it's similar with other groups as well. So I don't want to Just pick on Americans, like to say, okay, the picture of an immigrant. I mean, that's a pretty broad statement, right? What does an immigrant look like? But I'm sure with Americans, they might have had someone looking more Central American. Maybe they weren't. And they're looking like they were at the top of the socioeconomic ladder, all that. But I remember when I lived in Australia, you know, they had big issues with immigrants from Southeast Asia. So in that country and culture, maybe the flashcard would have had that. A person from that part of the world and. But let's stick on.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: But it shows. But I mean, I do want to move on. I'm glad you made the point. But what it does show is that. And what that illustrated was because they showed, like you said, the sunshine and then the death. And then they showed that these other images that were creating negative, intuitive associations were akin to the kind of negative association people would have with the image of death. And so you're any person, if that's how people are having these. These automatic responses. It shows how difficult it would be in a society like that to. For people to overcome that, if even possible.
It basically shows what we're up against. If people have that level of negative, intuitive, uncontrolled. Uncontrolled reaction. Because remember, part of it was how people would be surprised at their. Like, certain people they'd, like, yeah, you responded very negatively to this. And they'd be like, what? And they would be like, personally, I'm not racist. How did that work? But it just shows. And that gets into how, you know, like. And you said our development, the things that we learn as we grow up, you know, and so forth, and how that can be kind of put into us or without us really knowing. And so it's like even that even.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: Confirms that things like race are cultural. That's my point, right? Is that that's why it's so difficult for us to address some of these things. And that's why having a conversation about something specific like racism is very difficult, because a lot of people can have tendencies that you and I might consider somewhat racist, but in their own heart and mind, they're not. And so, of course, if most of us were armed with this kind of knowledge, we might have a better time talking to each other. I guess that's my point.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: Or if just if more of us were. And I think that's the author's point, because ultimately what's going on here is that we all have to share this space. You know, like, we're all Here together.
And so understanding more on how we share this space or how we operate in sharing this space, ideally can allow us to come up with some better systems, better structures to get better outcomes. But I do want, in the final part of the book, actually, I mean, leading right into that, discuss the idea of groupishness and how this morality overlay that we have is something that is directly tied to groupishness and being able to build and maintain cohesive groups. And, you know, so what about the discussion of groupishness and how our morality enables that can build that, you know, to be something that's strong. Like you've pointed out to me, like. Well, from the book, talking about how through that we can. Groups of people can be. Can operate essentially like a superorganism. But what about, you know, like, the groupishness aspect of human nature and how morality plays into that, you know, really hit home or stood out for you?
[00:40:18] Speaker B: No, no, it was great. You know what's interesting? One concept he had that was interesting is that humans are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bumblebee.
And that was kind of the point of the book where, yeah, we're these emotional creatures that kind of go rogue and do what we want and we can throw feces against the wall and all that good stuff, just like chimpanzees, but there is a part of us that can come together like a beehive colony and create something much more magical and special than just the individual. And I like how he started that with an example of a young man who was in World War II. And I guess he was talking about how his first four or five weeks of boot camp, they didn't even have guns.
I guess there was a shortage on stuff. So all they were doing was marching. And at first he didn't understand and all that. And he said by the third or fourth week, he got this overwhelming feeling, like it's almost like this cadence, like a group thing, that he kind of lost himself as an individual and became part of this bigger, like, super organism, kind of they called it. And.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Yeah, marching in concert. I just want to add, like, marching, you know, like, to the same beat. They were all, you know, moving in unison.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And you know what it reminded me of, and that's what I wanted to share is, like, it reminded me of when I was younger and played competitive, like, basketball for real high school, NCAA basketball. Because that's a similar feeling I remember having at certain, you know, just certain times, a certain practice or certain game where there was just this unspoken kind of cohesion with my other teammates and certain things, and it's just unexplainable. And you kind of. Your muscles almost move in tandem. And I've never seen that explained in writing. So that was interesting to me to see that.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: And then he explained it almost. Well, let me. You know, like that particular one that you're talking about is muscular. He called that muscular bonding. But there's the idea that human beings can come together and kind of. He called it a hive switch and operate like that is pretty amazing. And it's something that most of us have experienced. Remember, he talked about football stadiums even not just the players, but the people in the stadium, how they get all in and they're all doing a unified chant or the religious being in a congregation, people are in a choir, like, doing these things. They're doing things together with other people can create like a blissfulness in us.
And that, that's something that's there and is not just like something that just happens to be there. Just something like it actually has a purpose and something that is important to our ability to build societies and so forth. And he talks about how the groupishness is something that has allowed human beings to progress like we have, you know, to be able to do more. Like chimps are pretty much what they were. And not to compare us directly to chimps, but because obviously there's a big gap in intelligence. But they don't work together to build metropolises, you know, and things like that. Like, they don't have that in them. Whereas bees do, you know, bees relatively work, can work together and build something immense and incredibly complex, you know, together for all that serves all of them. So it was very interesting for him to make that and then you tie that into morality. But, you know, I know you wanted to jump back in.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And so it's very interesting because there's another part of it with the hive switch that I want to get to in a second. But to stay on your theme is this coming together. So first of all, you're right that the idea, the way he defines morality in this overarching way, not only the whole book, but then coming together with this hive switch section does take us to how did we go from the chimps to the humans. And somewhere along that couple million years path is developing. Like, to me, this book was an interesting maybe look into really what. What is being a human being, you know, in this kind of human consciousness.
And so you're right, the ability for us to be individuals like chimps. But also that 10% beehive to come together and build a city and build, build big roads and highways and all that kind of stuff. And so what, what part of this I realized in the long arc of kind of humanity, right, is as we've gotten more and more populous as a species, because part of it he gets into is around populations of 150 or less.
You, you have. Because he even uses the term in the book of a quote unquote free rider, like the rider on the elephant. But there's some people in a society that'll become a free rider.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: Well, that's a different writer that we're talking about. The free rider is the person that is lying, cheating and stealing, taking advantage of the resources of the society without or of a group. And like you go to your point about 150 being the cutoff, because that's a really interesting point.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so the thing is, is that, you know, let's say you have a small village of 80 people, 120 people. Usually there's a enough.
It's a small enough group that everyone can have some sort of individual relationship with the other. So it makes it harder to, like you're saying, usurp people and cheat and steal and all that.
And then on the other front that usually those kind of societies, everyone does need to be doing something to help out. So there's also less room for someone to kind of fall through the cracks. But once you started having societies of, you know, let's say 3,000 years ago, during the time of the pharaohs, you know, building the great pyramids, you might have had 200,000 people there. And then you got the first million person society. And then.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: But just for the point of the ark, the cutoff. And this has been researched not just here, but we've seen this research in other places. 150 seems to be the cutoff where under 150, a group does seem to be able to manage the free rider problem and either sufficiently discourage free rider behavior or get rid of the free riders where everybody knows everybody. It's like, oh yeah, there's not an endless supply of dupes for the free rider to take advantage of. It's just like you fool one person, two people that you're out, you know, because everybody can talk. But after you get to that 150, this groups don't seem to be able to naturally take care of that. So yeah, we get to 200,000 or you get to a thousand or get to, you know, a million or whatever. Something else Needs to account for this.
[00:46:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And so what I saw in the book with this, like you put it, well, the long arc of kind of human progression, part of it is the things like our intelligence and all that. But part of this human journey has been, you know, we went from at some point zero, right, but, but let's say in the last 2,000 years we've gone from about 200 million people on the globe to 8 billion. So we have much more, we have much larger individual societies, we have much more of them. And so humanity over that time has developed different systems. And one of the things that's interesting is he brought up kind of the development of the corporation in, you know, post middle ages, let's say during the enlightenment period in Europe. And that created another opportunity for a hive type of environment.
And again, after the first few hundred years of getting the kinks out, the corporation has become another form of superorganism. But what's cool is he says, so I quote here, he says the corporation institutionalized the carrots and sticks to motivate self motivated employees to act in ways the company desires. And he went and went on two big branches from that tree trunk of the corporation. One went to transactional forms of leadership where this is the self interested employees who are more like the glaucons, they're just doing what they doing that they think the company wants looking good and they just want to make money and kind of want to want to peel whatever they can for themselves out of the company and keep moving, not worried about the greater good. And it says this, he kind of said this style does have its limits.
Then he had went to the second branch of the tree as kind of the transformational leadership. And he said where the corporation can create trust and a more positive HIVIs environment.
And then he said because this style of leadership also focuses on the followers. And I found that interesting because he kind of made the point that. And I thought about this too. I mean I've heard this in other kind of just leadership books and things like that, that if you think about most great leaders were also great followers. At some point I just started thinking about anyone. Colin Powell, Abraham Lincoln, you name the kind of great leader we can think of in human history. At some point they were a younger person and they were in line to get up top. And then I thought of other leaders and I won't start picking on people. But I thought, yeah, all the ones that I don't think are good leaders, they don't probably seem that they were good followers.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: Well, yeah, not good team players. I mean, that's what you're getting. Because really what it is, what he boils down morality to within this last section is that it's what allows humans to have this kind of periodic groupishness that allows us to accomplish so much more than any of us could individually.
And, you know, like, where you can flip that high switch, you need morality to solve, like you said, the free rider problem, but also to allow large groups of people to be able to not be at each other's throats all the time. And so it's interesting that it's presented in a way right now as, as, hey, why are we all at each other's throats over these abstract concepts like politics and religion? Whereas on the other hand, it's like, well, actually we wouldn't even be able to be around each other if we didn't have this stuff as a baseline. And then we get around. We, you know, a lot of us can get around each other and it becomes more complicated and more complex. But ultimately the morality is what allows us to build or to have this periodic groupishness. And the good team player, so to speak, that goes to that loyalty. And then. But also one of the things he made, one point he made that I think is always overlooked, or at least, you know, vast majority of time overlooked, is the nature of authority. And you got into this as well when you were talking about how a lot of times we look at these good leaders and their background is not one of just dictating all the time. Their background is learning how to get people to want to buy in and so forth. That is the concept that a lot of times we think of authority and hierarchy as being rigid, as being enforced with an iron fist. But he talked about a lot of times hierarchy. There can be hierarchy where the person at the higher end has an obligation. It's more of an obligation type thing. Like, okay, well, if you're at the top, then it's your job to make sure the people under you can flourish and can have.
[00:50:48] Speaker B: And that's that type of classic master and apprentice type of, well, yeah, but that.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: When you talk about the transformational piece in corporations, that's where you see that is when the leadership isn't there, just saying, hey, we'll do this for me. I'll just offer you a bunch of money. But they can get people to buy in and be like, okay, well, us doing this together is something that we all can build up something bigger than all of us. And so it really does. It goes into those leadership styles like you talked about. But ultimately there's one thing I want to mention because I want to close up here shortly that I think that we have to acknowledge and I don't know that it was acknowledged like kind of outright in the book. But one of the things that stood out to me in looking at this is that when you look at what he's laid out as morality, which I don't dispute, I think it's a good kind of analysis on what's happening, you know, like it kind of a prescription or kind of a report. Okay, here's what's going on. But I'd say, you know, the American experiment seems to have attempted at least to try to subvert some of these explicitly. You know, all men are created equal doesn't comport really with a, a hierarchy based or authority based morality system, you know, like that is based on kind of, you govern with the consent of the governed type of thing. And it changes that relationship to one of a traditional authority. When we like look at like a China which has a traditional hierarchical relationship at government level, at a family level, at a community level and so forth, and not this kind of consent of the government, so to speak. So several of the pieces here, the sanctity piece, you know, like our Constitution kind of undermines that with the First Amendment and say, hey, you can't be making rules based on religion and things like that. And it's interesting to me, I'm not, and I'm not saying this is exactly what was happening because obviously there's a time gap of a couple hundred years, more than a couple hundred years, but it seems like some of the things that Haidt has identified as being key pieces of morality, our founding fathers said, you know what, these things lead to bigger trouble than they're worth. And so I wonder, and I don't have an overriding takeaway from here, but I just wonder, are these the three that were left out from these Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies, these weird societies, the threes that are de. Emphasized there are, are. Is. Is the position is this, this is. Doesn't appear to be inadvertent. It seems to be that they looked at a long time ago when these, this ideology, so to speak, was coming up. And you look at the Enlightenment or whatever, they looked at these other ones and said, you know what, those may be good for order and control, but we've seen too much, we've seen too much to go down that road, you know, voluntarily, so to speak. So I, I Wonder how you balance that moving forward as societies get more complex. And in our country, our biggest challenge is going to be that we, we don't seem to be. Want to work together as much anymore, or at least a good chunk of us don't want to work together anymore. It's either my way or the highway.
[00:53:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, just to wrap it up, one of the things that. Just to pick up exactly where you left out on not wanting to work together anymore is because I think, unfortunately, you know, our forces in our media landscape and our technology landscape specifically, you know, all the stuff that we've talked about on various shows and a lot of people know now about, you know, that the algorithm, Facebooks and the youtubes and all that, they play on all of these parts of our, you know, the elephant and the rider stuff.
[00:54:17] Speaker A: The intuition. Yeah, they play on the elephant. Yeah.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: And so what's happened is they figured out for their own monetary gain. Right.
The transactional leadership of, I guess if we can say that at the big level that, you know, their bottom line will be fed well, but the rest of us are going to have more infighting and deal with this stuff.
[00:54:37] Speaker A: What that is actually, in the context of what Haidt laid out, that is a distortion of the Authority foundation. Because the Authority foundation is built on the concept of with great responsibility, with great power comes great responsibility. And what, what you see when you see these huge media companies with all that power, what they do when they're putting. When they're making decisions, not what's not based, not what's on what's best for their viewers or their community, but what will grow their bottom line. Then they themselves are the ones distorting the Authority Foundation. They're the one. They are abusing the great power that they have. They are disregarding the Authority foundation just for their own bottom line. They, in a sense, become the free riders in our society that we have to go after and to try to stop. And so to me, that's. It's something we have to identify. Like there can be a hierarchy. Ideally, as it's pointing out in this book, the hierarchy is one that's earned, not one that's taken. It's okay. People look to you because you step up and provide leadership. Not you just take leadership because you're willing to do dirty stuff the other people aren't willing to do. So until we get to that point, it's going to be difficult because right now, the incentive structure in our society is definitely empowering the charlatan, the one who will not take their great power and exercise responsibility, but the one will exploit it to their greatest personal benefit. So I had to get that out before we closed it up, but. But we can wrap from there, man. We definitely would recommend the book, though. You know, people check it out because it is insightful, and if you read it with an open mind, like I said, you don't have to buy everything and say, oh, this is gospel, but it is insight. So we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us, tell us what you think, share it with your friends. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:56:27] Speaker B: I'm Tundeg Online.
[00:56:28] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
[00:56:38] Speaker B: I.
