Moral Circles & The Conservative Brain

In this episode, we delve into the famous 'moral circle' chart from the study 'Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle.' We discuss common misinterpretations of the study, highlighting errors made by the researchers that led to widespread confusion. We explore how conservatives and progressives allocate their moral concern across different layers, from immediate family to the entire universe. We also examine neurological and psychological differences between these groups, touching on aspects such as threat sensitivity, cognitive processing, and brain structure. This comprehensive discussion aims to shed light on the fundamental ideological divide and how both sides perceive and value their moral priorities.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be chatting with you today. Today, we are going to go in to the famous circles or charts of interest. It comes from a study titled Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle. And so this is a moral circle chart that everybody loves to show. And I wanted to go into this in an episode because one, what the study actually says, Versus what people think it says is hugely misinterpreted, mostly because the people who wrote the study made a mistake in the way they described the procedure of the experiment, which led people to completely misunderstand what was being shown in the graph because the graph is intuitively not what you would expect it to be.

So there is actually data that looks at what people think this is, which is on average what conservatives and progressives care about. But it's not the graph that you think you're looking at. Okay, so what a lot of people think that this graph shows that I have shown you is [00:01:00] sort of moral expanses of what people care about.

Where do they put their intention with each layer of this circle, representing moving out from like yourself to your family. To out out out. So let's go over what the the various rings mean. The innermost layers include categories like immediate family, closest friends, et cetera.

Simone Collins: Okay,

Malcolm Collins: then you have the innermost layers, layers, sort of the middling layers, all people you've ever met, all people in your community, all people in your country which reflects sort of a broader sense of community.

Then you have the outer layers. These encompass all humans, all mammals, all living things in the universe, including plants and trees. And then you have the very outermost layer, which is all things in existence, like rocks and everything like that, okay? And what a lot of people interpret this chart as meaning is the average of what conservatives and progressives care about.

And in a way, it's telling, because not a lot of people pushed back against this interpretation. I. e., you see here, conservatives care about things like family. [00:02:00] their countrymen, whereas progressives in this interpretation cared the most about things like rocks and plants and stuff like that. And, well, I mean, people intuitively hear this and they're like, yeah, that sounds like the type of brain dead thing a progressive would care about.

The problem is, is they did ask that question. Okay. It's just the data that they collected from asking that question was shown in a separate chart. Which I will show you in a second. And this chart shows data around the question of what is the furthest extent of the things you care about.

Simone Collins: Which makes

Malcolm Collins: progressives look a little less crazy.

IE conservatives often do not really, it actually makes the conservatives look a little sociopathic with many conservatives not really caring much outside of their family, their friends, etc. And with, and I, and progressives being like [00:03:00] almost sort of sociopathic in the other extreme. I care about the universe and everything.

I care about all things.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so let's look at the real graph that that actually looked at the answers to this rating and you'll see why nobody shares it because it's done terribly and it's hard to interpret.

Now,

if you saw this graph, you'd think that the first graph was the, what do you care about most? Not the extent of your beliefs. And right. This graph was the extent of your beliefs question, but no, they did it oppositely because they were bad at their jobs. It was great for memes and they haven't really gone back and commented on it much because They're scientists and they don't like that it's become like a meme thing and they feel kind of bad about messing it up to begin with.

It's sort of like my read of what's going on here. But what you can see from this chart is this took the thing that you care about most on average basically gave people a number of tokens. And you can slot them into different categories. You can put like all your tokens on family and only like one or two on country and stuff like that.

Or you can distribute [00:04:00] your tokens more evenly. And so when you divided people into human versus non human categories, what you see here is that generally the more progressive somebody was, the less they cared about human things. More plants, animals, space, rocks. Or more,

Simone Collins: I, I would argue the more equally you care about all things.

Malcolm Collins: Well, including non human things. Yes, including non human things. This is assigning value to non human things, which I think is weird, but okay. And then I'll put another graph on screen here, which will give you a bit more, because it shows like the error bars on each of these. Or the, the margins so you can get an idea of how much they separate from each other.

And what you'll notice here, is some interesting things. But in general, the broad trend is that, yes, liberals actually do care about non human things more. Now I want to, now suppose you're like, okay, but what if we did like a heat map of what people were caring about? [00:05:00] Graph what people are caring about.

And then we're going to go into the neuroscience of this because the conservative and progressive brain are actually a little different.

Simone Collins: Okay. Oh.

Malcolm Collins: So here, here you can see like a depth map or heat map of where people were actually clicking and it does show that yes, the conservatives largely viewed their loyalty in tranches, i. e. a lot of them were really loyal to family, a lot of them were really loyal to country and then you have a smaller like out there group, whereas progressives are much more unified in their beliefs with sort of a out there, probably all plants and animals.

Yeah, like it's

Simone Collins: very, it's much more outwardly focused with. Very little emphasis put on the nearest circle.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I I'd say that I also understand this conservative idea of okay. I'm distributing tokens. What do I care about? It's gonna be Family a lot in country a lot. Yeah, or when I think of country, I've been like wider cultural System that I'm a part of right maybe not necessarily exactly like just a country for arbitrary like countryman's sake [00:06:00] Yeah, and I think that's the way a lot of people would interpret that and then the second graph here that I'm showing what you can see is Approximate distance from center aggressive versus conservative, and you can see that what you actually get is progressives actually care about almost everything more except for family, where the conservatives

Simone Collins: beat you a little bit more.

That makes so much sense that you always make the point that like the urban monoculture works like a cult by starting. with a separation between the person and their family and their support network. The therapist goes and finds about all the terrible things that supposedly were done by this person's parents in their childhood.

And there's a lot of hatred for one's inherited group and their traditions because they're backwards. And Savage,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah so, I think that, why is this a meme? Before we go into neuroscience and stuff like this. Why is this all out there? I think because it shows something that we all know to be intuitively true, which is that [00:07:00] progressives care about things outside of sort of their immediate circle.

People will be like, well, why can't you care about everything? Why can't you just Like, I guess you can say that, but care units are attention units. You can say care units are units of like, what are you weighing? Right. And somebody who distributes too many care units outside of, because that's what I'm saying when I'm, when I'm distributing a care unit, I'm saying when I'm making moral decisions or equations, how much am I going to reference things outside of my immediate community

Simone Collins: and, or how much of your mental bandwidth goes.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And this actually matters a lot if I'm thinking about the type of people I want in my community or I want to invest at invest in, in members of my community because these individuals, I can invest in them, but then they will make decisions or the community can invest in them. And they will make decisions that benefit things other than the community.

It's [00:08:00] like. You know, you have the old grandma who you're giving money to, to try to help her and her cat and you learn that she's been giving it all away to Rwanda. And you're like, well, you know, yeah, I gave you this cat grandmother. You were supposed to be taking care of it. Like, what are you doing?

Like, it's like, well, I gotta give it all to Rwanda. And it's like, well, I gave you the money. For you, like, do you not have any loyalty to that? And it's like, no, I don't because we're Wanda. And I think that this is, this is why it makes sense for conservative cultures, i. e. cultures that have survived a long time and are just like made up modern philosophical hokum to want to reject and eject individuals who over emphasize moral weight of things far out of the system.

Simone Collins: Mm hmm. I mean, I would also argue just from a logical standpoint, I've I've definitely shifted from being very, very outward circle focused to very, very inward circle [00:09:00] focused because I'm aware of where I as an individual can make the most difference and you can make the very most difference at the local level.

Not, you know, not very far away. And honestly, if you really care about Rwanda, the best way you could make a difference is probably by well one either like Donating as much of your income as you can to that and just focusing on it exclusively or honestly going out there and helping like getting on the ground and helping.

Yeah. If you can't make a lot of money. And then, and then what? Then it becomes your local circle. So now you're, you've, you've shifted the circles and now you're, you're, you're, you're an inner circle person. It's almost like they, they, they want to make the outer circles their inner circles, but they don't.

And so they're feckless. And that's, that's what bothers me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's almost like, But I think having kids really switches this up for people, because then you get invested in this sort of the intergenerational part of life, investing in the next generation, thinking about how you're going to set things up for your kids, for your country, for your cultural group.

And you begin to realize. That a [00:10:00] lot of the signaling of things far outside your immediate cultural group is ultimately signaling to make yourself feel like a good person. I think I don't think that a lot of this is actually deeply caring about these things as you see with a lot of progressive causes, you know, they care.

They say, Oh, I care about human suffering. And I'm like, well, yeah. Population collapse is going to lead to astronomical suffering when social security systems and welfare systems collapse. Don't you care about that? Or I care about the environment. Well, then shouldn't we be doing nuclear plants? Why are you shutting all the nuclear plants down in Germany, right?

Like, that's people who say they care about the environment doing that. Like, that's nuts. But it's because they don't actually care. They care about looking like somebody who cares about the aesthetics of the environment or the aesthetics of family or, or, or human suffering. Whereas I think conservatives, when you are allocating your points pragmatically, like, where am I actually going to be able to make an impact in the world?

I think that that's a big part of why conservatives [00:11:00] allocate their care in this way, because they know that that's where they can matter and where them, when you. Help communities that aren't your own overly you typically end up one causing communities that are less healthy and cause more suffering over the time to proliferate and end up making your own community suffer.

So just on net, you cause more suffering in the world. When you look at our video on, on Nietzschean philosophy on this where we critique it, but we say, but you know, it's not wrong on everything. But let's go into the, the, the brain and psychology of all this. Psychologically, progressives tend to score higher on traits like openness to experience, a big five personality dimension tied to curiosity, imagination, and tolerance for ambiguity.

They're often more comfortable with change and uncertainty, which aligns with their inclination towards social reform and making things up. Here it says innovation, but. I'm gonna say making things up. Conservatives on the other hand typically score higher on conscientiousness, particularly the sub trait of orderliness, and [00:12:00] they value stability, tradition, and structure.

You see, Simone, you were always meant to be a conservative. Orderliness, conscientiousness.

Simone Collins: Well, and why I was the black sheep of my family as I grew up in California.

Malcolm Collins: Low anxiety, structure. Order this can make them more skeptical of rapid change and more focused on preserving established norms. And, and I think that this is not as much what we see from modern conservatism because we live in an odd time where the dominant culture is a progressive culture and to maintain tradition and what the conservatives largely make up today is people who are rebelling against a domineering and fascist like Social order attempting to force people to live and think what it believes if you look for example Let's say like the reason why the people who are labeled anti lgbtqia or whatever are anti it now very few are anti it because they're like This is what the bible says [00:13:00] if you look at the most prominent leaders of this space They're generally just anti trans And started as pro trans, but moved anti trans when engaging more with the science and with like J.

K. Rowling didn't go anti trans because she was a Christian curmudgeon. Elon Musk didn't go anti trans because he was a Christian curmudgeon. Both of these people started as avidly pro trans. and moved against it over time as they learned more about the, the science and the social costs and the, the nature and psychological, you know, stuff.

You can look up our trans episodes, we don't need to go into that here. But the point being is what motivates people to be a conservative today is often very different than what motivated them in the past, which was maintaining traditions. Which I think changes a lot of the nature of the community.

When the conservative community of today goes towards traditions, they go towards them [00:14:00] not out of a fear of change, but because they believe they work. Like you can look at someone like J. D. Vance, like why is he going towards traditions? And I love that all the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Monocle and stuff all now said, because the evidence does show this, it turned out that the Christian traditions were probably better and we shouldn't have met with them.

And the one, the Muslim one who did end up converting to Christianity, she even said when the, you know, people would be like, why did you convert, you know? It wasn't like a religious argument, it was, it was a functional argument. She was depressed, she had tried everything, and her psychologist was like, I know this is going to be offensive to you.

Oh my gosh. Thought about just trying to pray. Really? And that's what did it for her. She tried and it worked and she started to feel better. And then she, she got into it again.

Simone Collins: And this is like Grimes saying she, she might, she might be getting Christianity because it helps her quit vaping, whatever it takes.

Malcolm Collins: Sometimes you just need,

Simone Collins: sometimes religious fixes problems. That's so true.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, I, I think of that, that well, no, but I mean that that, that means that [00:15:00] the modern conservative today, actually the, when the old right tells the new right, you guys have a lot of progressive traits or, you know, you, you guys used to be in the progressive movement.

I think they're, they're right about both of those things, but they're misdiagnosing what's happening. What they picture is happening is the Overton menu, just moving window, just moving further and further to the left. And then. People who, you know, in the nineties would have been like standard progressives in their ideology becoming conservatives today, and I don't think that that's what's actually happening.

The core reason why they look like progressives of the nineties is because that they are the rebels trying to buck the social order. And that's fundamentally where the new right comes in is most of them are people who are like, they didn't like the censorship of tech. They didn't like all of these.

like anti reality stuff, like, Oh, men, when they transitioned, don't have an advantage in sports. When like, everybody knows that's like clearly, obviously not a true thing. And yet we're supposed to repeat it. They are people who feel like [00:16:00] in the same way that many of them built a grudge against Christianity, telling them what to do in the nineties and in the eighties.

That same instinct and those same cultures are now antagonistic against the progressives. And it's funny that it turned out that the way that you got these people to become Catholics, like, like, say, J. D. Vance or something like that, was just to have atheists tell them what to do. Like, you know what?

I'm going to become a Catholic, dammit! And, and I actually think that this is where we're getting a lot of growth in Christianity today, is the urban monoculture overplaying its hand and trying to force people to become believers. And I also think it's why, when you look at faiths that are the minority within their region, their members are typically much more faithful.

I. e., if you are a Catholic in a majority Protestant country, and the Catholic communities in majority Protestant countries are typically Much stricter in their faithfulness and much more believing and in their sense of community than Catholics in [00:17:00] Catholic majority countries where you see Catholicism dying out much more quickly in terms of fertility rates and in terms of strictness of practice.

And, and I think that that's what we're seeing here is being a rebel is useful. And even within America, I think that it is fundamentally wrong to try to raise your kids to be full. America, American, you can be Americana so long as Americana is framed as a state of rebellion against those who control our society and the, the, the people in power and everything like that.

But trying to try to push for this normalcy, I don't think works, but thoughts before I go further.

Simone Collins: I think you're right. And I think this shows up in, in the fact that you see lower rates of fertility in homogenously religiously conservative, like when it feels forced on you. That back, there's backlash

Malcolm Collins: emotionally, fear and threat sensitivity play a big roles.

Studies like those from John Himmering and colleagues suggest conservatives have a stronger physiological response to [00:18:00] threatening or disgusting stimuli, e. g. images of spiders or rotting food, measured through inconductance or brain activity in the amygdala. The fear processing hub. This heightened sensitivity might explain a preference for security, authority, and clear boundaries.

Progressives, while not immune to fear, seem less reactive to these triggers and more attuned to empathy driven concerns, often prioritizing fairness and harm avoidance as seen in John Haydite's moral foundation theory. Now, I note here that this has actually changed. Okay, continue. John Haidt. John Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt. Oh, yeah. Where I do not think, I think in the 80s, a lot of the conservatives, and I mentioned this on other videos, you can check it out, really interesting, where we talk about conservatives motivated voters with disgust. You vote against gayness because of disgust, because it makes you feel disgust.

This system largely just collapsed and fell out of favor, culturally speaking where very little is motivated by disgust anymore. Then we had a system that was motivated by. Fear of social shame. This is the cancellation system that progressives really jumped on to. And [00:19:00] the new conservative system is motivated positively through sort of vitalism.

Which you see in Trumpianism and everything like that. This idea of like. Be alive, have hope in the future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You think for yourself.

Speaker 5: let's go start a f*****g revolution. Take it!

Speaker: The entire world would be better off if these people were permanently removed from these platforms. Like, there is no downside and only upside to see people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Tim Poole never be allowed to publicly broadcast their opinions ever again.

Speaker 5: Tread on them! Tread the f**k all over them!

Speaker: I don't give a f**k about anybody that winds up at any of these rallies and gets shot or whatever the f**k, okay?

Speaker 6: You gotta fight! For your rights! At home in such despair. Now

Speaker 20: Is free speech under threat in the UK? With the rise of so called non crime hate incidents, arrests over grossly offensive memes, can you really speak your mind in 21st century Britain?

Speaker 7: [00:20:00] bussy. You gotta fight for your

Malcolm Collins: And there's very little discussed, but I can see why in the older disgust based framework, when these studies were done, discussed would be found more among conservatives.

Simone Collins: Oh here, here's a study I found actually just in, in contrast to the one that you cited that in this case, researchers found that conservatives do not appear to feel more disgust than liberals.

Malcolm Collins: When was it done? Remember I told you that the way that people motivate political action changed over time.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so, this is My guess is is discussed a conservative emotion published when was yours? I told you. Yours was later.

Malcolm Collins: No, the one I did was a long time ago, that would have been like the 80s. What I said was, is that in the past, in the 80s and 90s, conservatives [00:21:00] used disgust to motivate voting behavior.

Today, they don't use disgust to motivate voting behavior. They use vitalism to motivate voting behavior.

Simone Collins: So it's just less Which means that you would no

Malcolm Collins: longer see this trait clustered in conservatives like you would have historically. So that makes perfect sense and seems to validate my theory.

Simone Collins: Interesting. Okay, fair enough.

This is, this is interesting though, because I, I kind of gave up for a while on reviewing studies on conservatives and progressives, because After a while, it became so obvious that it was just about people with agendas, like, basically a bunch of researchers just wanted to publish a study saying conservatives are dumb or conservatives are whatever, it's the same, like, progressives are stupid and, and then they, they're just not really well done they're not very interesting, there's not much that I can act on.

So I just, I kind of gave up on them, but I do think that when you see the averages that come out, [00:22:00] you see patterns and there is, we, that, that should help us understand what's going on and what it actually does mean to, to be more progressive versus conservative so that it's a worthwhile discussion and I'm glad you brought it up.

Malcolm Collins: If you talk about threat sensitivity, research actually suggests that leftists exhibit higher threat sensitivity to certain types of threats, such as environmental issues and social inequality when compared with conservatives. However. Conservatives are more sensitive to what we would call real threats, such as physical threats or social order threats or crime and terrorism.

Interestingly Social studies have shown that conservatives tend to be less threatened by social threats, e. g. outgroups, but more responsive to physical threats, which goes against what a lot of progressives would want to believe, that conservatives are the ones afraid of people who don't think like them, which isn't true, they're afraid of being stabbed by somebody who doesn't think like them, but it is fundamentally the progressives who are more afraid and have a higher tendency of being afraid of people who think differently than them.

Simone Collins: I think this, [00:23:00] this reveals though, a very deep set understanding of how you relate to the world. I remember, remember that interview around the pandemic that went viral of some woman who is progressive saying that she was assaulted on, I think the New York subway and how that was just like, you know, normal, like she wasn't supposed to do anything about it.

And I think it had to do with this broad concept that it's. I don't know, like it's, it's not your responsibility or there's nothing that you can do about these immediate physical threats and really the, your way of relating to the world is so much more cerebral, so much more, I mean, if you want to be prerogative about it, you would be, or sorry, derogative about it, you would say that it's performative.

But I guess they would say that they're focusing on the big problems that really matter. Whereas the conservative mind seems a lot more oriented around what. Do I need to physically address in my immediate area now? Well, [00:24:00] there can I actually protect? Can I actually help?

Malcolm Collins: It's like a mass action solutions as we've seen, whether it's, you know, social services or, you know, UBI or anything like that.

See our UBI video. They, they appear to make people worse off intergenerationally.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And, and they appear to make cultures that they end up getting bloated. They end up not serving their original function. Argentina is basically a case study to all of this. The ways that progressives attempt to fix things doesn't work, but the ways that conservatives attempt to fix things do work intergenerationally.

I. e. because they're focused on the cultures and people who they can influence, i. e. my own culture, my own community my own people. And the paper I was talking about earlier is titled, Who Fears Strangers and Spiders? Political Ideology and Feeling Threatened. Neurologically brain structure differences pop in some studies a 2011 study by found that conservatives tend to have a [00:25:00] larger amygdala, potentially amplifying threat perception, or at least certain types of threat perception.

While progressives show more gray matter in their anterior cingulate cortex, ACC, a region linked to conflict resolution and handling ambiguity, fMRI research also hints that conservatives active Regions tied to rule based reasoning more strongly, while progressives lean on areas involved in social and emotional processing.

I actually think what we're seeing here, and we've talked about this before, is the memetic virus. It's sort of like a self replicating virus, which Is represented in the urban monoculture when I mean it's a memetic virus. I mean quite literally It's a virus that gets into people's heads and then starts replicating and then uses them to spread itself it needs a certain amount of structure And so it's pretty bad at spreading in people below a certain level of intelligence Um in in which case those people only really conform to it when they realize that they can use signaling their conformity to it Do you get other people to do what they tell them to?

This is why you see was like [00:26:00] the low IQ communities. They use the wokest context concepts when they think that they can browbeat someone into following them.

Or when they're afraid of bring Val break themselves,

Simone Collins: That's really interesting,

Malcolm Collins: cognition is another divide conservatives often favor intuitive heuristic thinking quick gut level decisions rooted in tradition or group norms again This might have changed. I don't know. Progressives are more likely. I mean, it seems to me that now progressives make the gut level decisions It's interesting in looking at this research.

You can see how much What aligned people with conservatism has changed over time? It was do you actually like are you doing this because of the tradition or are you doing? Like with progressives, are you doing this because you're part of the urban monoculture because there used to be an alliance with like elitist, intellectual culture and fighting back against the system, which, you know, you could say started with the hippies, right?

Are you actually fighting for individual freedom or are you fighting with the ultimate goal of imposing your values on everyone else?

And that, that sort [00:27:00] of split, you know, was now the progressives that are left are just the ones who want to impose their values on other people. Yeah. Cognition is another divide. Conservatives often favor intuitive heurists. Yes, sorry I said that. Progressives are more likely to engage in analytical reasoning. It seems to be one of your studies of like, trying to make progressives sound smart. Absolutely. Questioning assumptions and weighing abstract systems according to work by psychologist John This can make progressives seem overthinky to conservatives, while conservatives might strike progressives as rigid or simplistic.

It's interesting, I'm pretty sure of this flip. Because when I talk to progressives now one person has noted, and I think I have a question, is why do conservatives have like, if you look at like 8 of the 10 long form podcasts, why are they conservatives? And as somebody was saying when they were on the long form podcast, that Gazam Newsom has now done, where he talks with conservative thinkers.

Oh, God, and people

Simone Collins: love

Malcolm Collins: that. I want to get, you know, it's got a review of like 2. 5 or something on, on what's the progressives bombing it? Like, why are you giving these people? Oh

Simone Collins: my gosh. How sad is that? But conservatives are [00:28:00] loving it though. They're like, wow, he actually listens. Just this idea of a progressive actually listening to conservatives is mind blowing.

But the point

Malcolm Collins: being is the reason why conservatives have all this long form interview content and stuff like that and long form talking content like this show is you couldn't do this as a progressive, like I couldn't every day go over for like 45 minutes something that is interesting without updating my beliefs, just be telling you what you're supposed to believe.

And most progressives already know what they're supposed to believe. So they don't need to be told again, you know, there, there, there is no. curiosity about digging into these subjects because if you dig into things like human sexuality or arousal or transness, you're bound to accidentally cross the line somewhere.

I

Simone Collins: don't know. No, I, I listened to a decent amount of long form progressive content, but it's mostly just building a case as to why something is something. So it doesn't need to lead to a changing of minds. So I don't really know what it is.

Malcolm Collins: That is [00:29:00] fundamentally, I think, you know, like what ContraPoints does and stuff like that.

Yeah. Like one long form progressive area where they do like broad philosophy, but they do it fairly rarely. My X is Y. I, I don't know any that are regular shows, like Philosophy Tube, ContraPoints, all of that stuff is like. Once you

Simone Collins: mean just like philosophical discussion, or do you mean discussion about current regular

Malcolm Collins: podcasts?

If we're looking at regular podcasts, eight of the top 10 are conservative, like daily podcasts or weekly podcasts. I don't know, like the one I can think of that's progressive is Hassan, but Hassan is mostly done in a short form context. And without really engaging with people who have different beliefs or attempting to update his view of the world.

Which makes it, you know, less interesting unless you're just there for the shock jock stuff, which Hassan does very well. I mean, I do think that that's how you make progressive. Content interesting is be shocking in how extreme you are, which is one reason why the progressives who have done that and white progressives do well on platforms like tick tock.

And [00:30:00] originally on systems like Twitch before, you know, I wonder if that was moderation, like Is it the only reason progressives seem to do well in any platform, whether it's Twitch, because the Chinese are trying to destroy us, or old Twitter, because they are very good at controlling bureaucracies and then putting their finger on the, on the scales.

Once the finger is removed from the scales, they end up fleeing like we've seen with TikTok.

Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe. I don't, I don't know. I don't know. Like, I don't spend enough time on TikTok to be a good judge of any of this. I wonder if blue sky is still growing. I do too. I really do.

Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You're looking it up? Yeah, looking it up. It says its growth has slowed significantly.

Simone Collins: I mean, it would. Yeah. And you get the initial boost, then it

Malcolm Collins: slows. Actually, even the, the articles about it slowing are mostly pretty old at this point. So, oops. That, I mean, it could, could continue to grow. I mean, it's, it's astronomically small when compared with two other platforms.

So,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: well, any takeaways you've had from this[00:31:00]

Simone Collins: that perhaps this isn't just a story of polarization. When we talk about very difficult to cross political divides, perhaps it's also a story of a fundamental way of relating to the world. And perhaps part of the reason why it can be so difficult for conservatives and progressives to relate to each other and effectively communicate is because they have such a different contextualization of self and a different contextualization of that which we must protect.

So when people are talking about protecting good things, or, you know, we have to do this, it's just. It's it's difficult to have a debate when your definitions are so different when

Malcolm Collins: I disagree pretty strongly. Yeah, I think that this is what progressives tell themselves when they're trying to look like they're they're seeing both sides of the issue.

But I think the core thing is that conservatives, when they look at what they want to protect and [00:32:00] grow. It's typically realistic things. Like it is a real system that could potentially work and improve the world. Whereas a lot of the progressive stuff, like shutting down nuclear power plants and stuff like that, it's not realistic stuff.

It's stuff that is based around personal signaling.

I think that that's the core difference is the conservative is okay with. Doing what actually makes the world a better place, even if it makes them look like a villain. Whereas the progressive cares more about looking like the good guy than doing good.

And we've seen this from conservative icons throughout history, like Ayn Rand, for example, like famously leaned into that. And I think that we're seeing it even more within the new right, the acceptance of Do the right thing, even if it makes you, I mean, what is the pronatalist movement, but that what is hard EA.

org, but that,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I love you to that Simone. I love you too.

Simone Collins: You're perfect.

What are we

Malcolm Collins: doing for dinner tonight?

Simone Collins: You can have [00:33:00] potstickers or you can have green curry with coconut rice.

Malcolm Collins: Green curry!

Simone Collins: Green curry.

Malcolm Collins: Green curry is really good.

Simone Collins: Well, then that is what you shall have, my love.

Speaker 2: Egg Tower! Go ahead, take a bite, Octavian. It's ready for you. Woah, woah, woah! I put a ton of salt on already. Yeah, you can taste it by taking a bite. Right, Titan?

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