Give the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

Charles Murray is a political scientist best known for his work on intelligence, socioeconomics, and the American welfare state. In books including 'Losing Ground' (1984), 'The Bell Curve' (1994), and 'Coming Apart' (2012), Murray has offered an interpretation of the world that foregrounds the role of genetic luck in social outcomes. A lot of people dislike this interpretation, to put it mildly. But I'm convinced by the evidence that genetic luck is important, and that we can't ignore this factor when trying to make sense of the world.

One profound problem that we face in the twenty-first century derives from the fact that unusually intelligent people – i.e. people who have lucked out in terms of both their genetics and their environments – are often very bad at understanding how others experience the world. Murray describes a process we've undergone since the end of the Second World War whereby a new cognitive elite has become increasingly isolated – socially and geographically – from the rest of society. This distance encourages feelings of contempt towards people further down the class system, who in turn feel anger at the ways in which they are misgoverned by an elite that feels no sense of noblesse oblige. The result has been bitter political polarisation – one of the many subjects that we discuss in today's episode.

Find ad-free and bonus episodes of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast at louiseperry.substack.com.

Discussed in this episode:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our hands

Mentioned by

Mentioned in 1 episodes

The AI-powered Podcast Player