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Balancing Selection and Our 50/50 Nation

How Balancing Selection keeps our two party system in unstable equilibrium to the benefit of the ultra wealthy 1 percent.

Dr. Josh Stout, PhD

Nov 19, 2024 — 22 min read

Equilibrium

Please scroll down for links below the transcript. This is lightly edited AI generated transcript and there may be errors.

Balancing Selection and our 50/50 Nation
mindbodyevolution
Dr. Josh Stout

Eric 0:01

Today is Friday, November 15th. Good morning, Josh.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:06

Hi, Eric.

Eric 0:07

How you doing?

Dr. Josh Stout 0:08

Well, it's after the election.

Eric 0:10

It is. It's after the election.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:12

Coming up with reasons to do anything is is some work. So I wanted to talk about sort of an ecological explanation of how we are living on this knife’s edge of being a nation, perfectly divided between what seems like an irreconcilable opposites. But before I do that, I just wanted to tell some nice stories just because it's it's been a hard few couple of weeks.

Eric 0:41

Kind of like looking at the cats on the internet.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:42

Yeah, something like that. So when I. When I get up in the morning, I sit on my porch and I do some meditation and I like to look at the birds. And I've had a relationship with the birds for a while and I've talked about them before. Yeah. And there there were several years ago there was a family of Blue jays where there was there was a younger Blue Jay that saw me in a blue shirt and thought I was a giant daddy blue Jay. And you know, he or she, I can't tell. Actually, the difference with Blue Jays was actually coming and begging for food from me until I moved in, realized that I was not a giant blue Jay and ever since then was bringing the family by to come and yell at me for like years. This would bring the whole family by to sit in the tree and yell at me every morning because look at this thing. So anyway, I knew that family and that family has been living in the area for a while and it knows me. And so, like we have this relationship, but it's not necessarily a nice one.

Eric 1:35

Well, not a good, necessarily, relationship.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:37

But I also have this relationship with the with the Cardinals. And so there was there was a pair that was living in the backyard. And I known the male and we'd been feeding it food for a while. And then my cat caught him and I caught the cat and I got him released and he left. But his son stayed on. And I've told this story before, Right. And so his son was sort of, you know, my friend after that, because I was personally feeding him. And so I was putting food out there and I watched the whole thing develop and saw how, you know, he he this.

Eric 2:12

This was the son who was too coddled?

Dr. Josh Stout 2:13

Yeah, no, he was a big guy. So I decided I think we should we should name them. So I'm calling them like, you know, John and Martha. So John, because he looks like John Goodman kind of. He's a big guy. He's he's not like obese, but he's a big guy. And he actually pushes around some of the other birds when he needs to because he's he's he's got some heft to him. Not the Blue Jays, though. There's those those guys are intense.

And so this this summer they they had a daughter and they're there's this sort of complex relationship. So first he was the sweetest husband possible He was putting seeds into into Martha's Beak. She didn't want to come land. She was too scared to be near me. But so he would pick up a seed and just put it directly in her mouth. And then they were raising this, this, this lovely little daughter. But there's this thing that Blue Jays sorry, that cardinals do where the the female actually goes off to start a new nest and possibly a whole new clutch of eggs. And then the male takes over caring for the the older fledglings. And so now he had what looked like a fully fledged female, but it was still her, his daughter.

Photo by Dr. Josh Stout — Dad and Daughter

And so he's picking up food and giving it to his daughter now instead of instead of his wife. And I'm purposely being a little more anthropocentric on on the descriptions here. But this this is really how I felt about what what I was seeing. And her her nest didn't really go anywhere. And she was on her own and he was really harried. His his his plumage was going, his crest was going. You could see clumps coming out everywhere. He was having a hard time caring for this daughter, but he was really, really good. And then one morning, it's just like a switch goes. I see him putting a piece of, you know, sunflower seed in her in her beak one moment, and then 2 minutes later I actually have photos of some of this. He's chasing her away. And after that, he just chased her, chased her, chased her because he can't have her living there. You know, he has to get rid of her because otherwise there's going to be inbreeding or or she could be attracting another male into the area or whatever it's going to be unstable. And that's where he and his wife live. So he now spends he spent he spent the last three months chasing her around. And I was really worried that they weren't coming back anymore. And we had a new house getting built in the in the neighborhood.

Eric 4:28

He was trying to get her to leave.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:30

He was trying to get her to leave him come.

Eric 4:32

The time had come and he just…

Dr. Josh Stout 4:33

And she wasn't leaving. She was going around and around. And this is what he had done.

Eric 4:36

It must have been confusing for her.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:37

His father had been trying to get him to leave when the cat caught him. And so he got to stay because the father left. Because the father was like, I'm not going back to where that cat is. Right. But now this is his. And so she was kept flying around the neighborhood and trying to come in, and he would not allow her to come in. So I thought that they'd all left maybe, and I hadn't seen them in a couple of weeks. And this house was going up and it was disturbing everything. And this morning I got up a little bit earlier before there was a lot of noise in the neighborhood and they came and the Blue Jays came and the Juncos came. And the way through it, sparrows came and everyone came. So I put a little handful of birdseed right on the railing directly in front of me. And first, you know, the Blue Jays come and they have a whole range of different calls that they have their aunt, which is like the annoying one that everyone knows about, but they have this other one that is is it's sort of commentary, sort of you look and they, they, they, they, they, they they're saying, come look at this thing. And so I think it's that same family that I've now known for years comes and they're they're kind of bigger and meaner than the than the cardinals so the blue jay lands, starts eating. The other ones aren’t really certain. I think it's the same one that knows me that's coming and actually eating the seeds. He can't get the rest. He can get his family to come and sort of sit in the tree. But not actually come to the scene most of the time. So he came down, he got one other one to come and then they left. Then the male cardinal came down and he left. And then eventually the female was was able to feed. I almost never get to see her feed. So it was really nice. So she came in. So anyway, that's what's been keeping me going is, is seeing sort of that this larger natural world is, is still happening all around us and it's perfectly normal and everything is happening just the way it always did. Yeah. And nothing has changed. And, you know, I can I can pay attention to these, you know, soap operas of the world around me and enjoy their sort of everyday as they play out and have my little ups and downs. And I don't need to think about everything else that's happening sometimes.

Eric 6:36

Oh, I think a lot of us are kind of aiming in that direction.

Dr. Josh Stout 6:38

I think so too. So anyway, I just wanted to say that that's that's what where my brain has been a lot of the time. But last week or a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how there's these sort of different contesting ideas within our current culture, sort of a, you know, the zeitgeist of this. It is time and Geist is spirit. So the spirit of the time, a girl or a ghost. So, you know, the ghost of the times is now split. We we live in a schizophrenic nation that has been cut in half.

Eric 7:08

It sure feels that way.

Dr. Josh Stout 7:09

And …it’s really like they're not they're not sides that easily talk to each other. And we don't enjoy talking to each other anymore. It turns out that, like if you actually meet someone from the other side and do talk to them, they turn out to be regular people, but…

Eric 7:26

Everyone's regular people.

Dr. Josh Stout 7:27

Exactly. And so it's it's fine. But we've built this sort of as I said, we've built a website case that's now schizophrenic and it's very difficult to have it. We're moving to different neighborhoods. There's democratic and republic neighborhoods where we're not marrying each other. There is more and more of a separation every day.

Eric 7:43

From what I understand, I don't know much about it - from what I understand we are not even dating each other.

Dr. Josh Stout 7:46

Yeah, we're not dating each other - all of these things are moving apart. Moving apart, moving apart. You Republicans move to more Republican areas. Democrats move to more Democratic areas.

Eric 7:55

Doesn’t sound good.

Dr. Josh Stout 7:56

No. No, it's it's somewhat of a bad situation and as as a you know evolutionary biologist ecologist. I see this as strange that we can maintain something like this. Normally dynamic systems do not maintain equilibrium. They go one way or the other when something happens. If you have two bacteria in a jar, you only have one bacteria after that bacterium, after, you know, a couple of days, you don't keep having to they don't someone wins and someone loses. And it can be tiny, tiny random things. If you had ten versions of that, it wouldn't always be the same one. There's chaotic interaction.

Eric 8:35

Going back to the beginning. This is this is your very theory on how humanity rose to be. Humanity. We killed all the rest.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:44

Oh, well, yes, this is what happens. And this this this is sort of the natural order of things in some ways.

Eric 8:50

Like us. And now there's only one.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:52

But how how is it that, you know, we still have a natural world if this is the natural order of things, if everything is always conquering everything, why don't we only just have one thing?

Eric 9:01

Because you can't. You can't live that way.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:03

Right. But. But what? But how is this possible?

Eric 9:07

Interacting systems?

Dr. Josh Stout 9:08

Well, there is there's a couple of different ways that things happen. But one of the one of the major things that maintains diversity in natural systems is something called balancing selection, where a predator will target whatever they see the most of because that makes the most sense for them. So if there is, you know, an orange frog and a blue frog and they're not poisonous or something, which blue frogs probably are. Yeah, same orange frog. Exactly. They're both probably poisonous. But let's.

Eric 9:39

Let's So there's.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:40

Some sort of predator that's figured out how to eat these things.

Eric 9:43

Yes.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:44

And there's more blue frogs than there are orange ones. It's going to start having a search pattern that targets the blue frogs because it's more worth it for it.

Eric 9:52

This is what you talked about in the last episode.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:53

And it's always going to start bringing them down. And so they can they can maintain equilibrium. And so I was trying to figure out last time, how can there be something like this? How can there be a natural system that's doing that to us as as Republicans and Democrats? And I couldn't quite figure it out. Like, what predator do we have?

Eric 10:12

A predator is picking off the ones that are standing out?

Dr. Josh Stout 10:14

And I don't I don't think there is some sort of international conspiracy. I don't think there's some sort of national conspiracy, although I do think it is serving people's interests. You know, I think I think the oligarchs win when we are divided and not united against them. Yes. So I think that there are people who this is serving their interests and they're in favor of it. But given that, I still don't think they could arrange it, I think they're taking advantage of something that that's happening.

Eric 10:39

Okay.

Dr. Josh Stout 10:40

And encouraging it when they can. You know, certainly when when when Putin sees America is divided, he'll fund both sides of the argument. Yes. And, you know, call out two demonstrations from two different sides in the same place. Yes. Because, you know, that helps his thing. But he didn't create the division. He's exploiting it and making it worse. So So how do we end up in this situation where we don't end up with either one side or the other and then start solving our problems? How do we end up with both sides really strong all the time, preventing anyone from getting anything done ever? How how is this possible if it's not a conspiracy?

Eric 11:17

I mean, that does sound like Putin's program.

Dr. Josh Stout 11:21

It's what he takes advantage of and he would love to make it worse, but I don't think he's creating it.

Eric 11:26

No, I think you're probably right about that.

Dr. Josh Stout 11:28

So I had the idea that part of it started with Republicans when they decided to stop working with Democrats. So the Republican House was a minority for decades and decades and decades. And Newt Gingrich said we have to stop working with Democrats so we can retake power. And he was the first one to really cause a government shutdown. And he managed to blame the Democrats and then they took power. And ever since then, things have been pretty balanced. But you can understand how that would be allowing him to take power. But why can't he keep it? Okay. So the Republican program is to prevent Democrats from getting anything done, make sure we don't appoint any judges, make sure we don't, like, accomplish anything if we're putting through a law, no matter what it is, they oppose it, even if it's one they want. We want to stop refugees at the border coming in and control the number of people coming into our cities. The Republicans are like, No, you can't do that. You know, they'll they'll block things that they're personally in favor of if Democrats want to do it, because that's their agenda. They know how that's going. And so what the perception is, is that Democrats can't get things done when this is happening. And so this pushes the Democrats out of power and the Republicans come to power. So…

Eric 12:42

Who then don't get anything done.

Dr. Josh Stout 12:43

Who don't get anything done. So why like.

Eric 12:45

and wreck the economy.

Dr. Josh Stout 12:45

And but it's — Democrats are actually willing to make compromises and they're willing to work with people. So why why does this happen over and over again is because they're actually bad at what they do. And so that's what happens with balancing selection. You have one side that is corrupt enough to say anything, bringing down the other side and preventing them from governing in a responsible way and lying constantly about it. And then when they take power, they're the kind of people who say anything and lie constantly. And so it's very, very difficult to arrange a government on that. You know, we just saw that. We saw these, you know, despicable nominees of Trump, but they're all incompetent people.

Eric 13:24

Well, but that's the but that's the program. They're not trying to be right or competent people.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:27

I understand that. I understand that. And but this is why they then fail to govern successfully. And we've seen it. We've seen this kind of malfeasance and criminality over and over again in the Republicans. Bring them down. We saw that with Nixon. We saw it with Bush.

Eric 13:42

But that doesn’t keep them from being reelected back into office.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:45

Right. you know, so so, you know, Nixon lies and we're like, well, it'll never happen again. Bush lies about the Gulf War, and we're like, That'll never happen again. And then immediately we're like, you know, oh, let's elect someone who lies all the time. And, you know, and it happens over and over again. And we don't remember.

Eric 14:00

People say that the Democrats all lie all the time, too.

Dr. Josh Stout 14:02

Because they're willing to lie. So this is what creates the balancing selection. There. They're not seeing reality and so they can't govern in reality. And the Democrats are able to see reality, but they're blocked by people who deny reality. And so they've created this system where it can never allow one side or the other to do well, because as soon as incompetent people take power, they're incompetent, but they're very, very good at bringing down the competent people so it never can really get anywhere. And the overwhelming feeling people have of having been abandoned by both parties is kind of true because the real problem is the income inequality and neither party is able to get at that.

Eric 14:49

Right. And and, you know, and as as as Robert says, the true minority is the 1%. Like when we when we start looking at.

Dr. Josh Stout 14:58

0.01%, you look at you look at logarithmic stuff and it is just ridiculous.

Eric 15:04

If we start thinking about it that way and realize that the rule of the minority is the rule of those people with all of the money.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:11

So we think of like someone with a million dollars is rich and someone with one dollar is poor. But the difference between one dollar and one million dollars.

Eric 15:20

Is nothing…

Dr. Josh Stout 15:21

Is nothing compared to what those guys have. Yeah. Like, okay, so Jeff actually told me about this as sort of a way to think about it. If you think about one million dollars in dollar bills, you're talking about a pallet of money, right? So you're at that, you're at the mint and they put a, you know, forklift under a pallet of money. And it's, you know, I don't know, let's say two, three feet high and two or three feet wide over the whole pallet. Yeah. I don't, I don't exactly know. I have not looked up exactly how big a pallet of money looks, but you know, it has to look something like.

Eric 15:50

I mean, whether it's ones or hundreds…

Dr. Josh Stout 15:53

That’s a million dollars Right. You can imagine it. That's a size of money that you could put, you know, on a bed.

Eric 15:59

So let's talk about a billion.

Dr. Josh Stout 16:01

And 2000 of those stacked on top of each other.

Eric 16:04

Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 16:04

Okay. So the the the the the new World Trade Center is famously 1776 feet high. Yeah. With this little needle on top, that's not a thousand times two feet. A thousand times two feet would be 2000 feet high. Yeah. So $1,000,000,000 would be a thousand pallets stacked higher than the World Trade Center.

Eric 16:32

Yeah. And the number of people who have this is is is so exceedingly small that the that they are the true minority and we are under their rule. Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 16:42

Yeah. And Musk has more than 100 billion it so those those that tower are now stacked 100 times.

Eric 16:52

And as you have said…

Dr. Josh Stout 16:54

Getting out of the atmosphere.

Eric 16:55

As you have said in earlier podcasts, the very existence of these people causes us stress and makes us less healthy. Exactly. Now, the fact that they are in our face even more than they have ever been before and they will continue to be increasingly in our face. Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 17:11

And so people feel betrayed by the Democrats who are saying let's let's, you know, govern rationally, let's help people by getting them things like health care and making sure they have unemployment insurance and stuff like that. And people are like, this is not helping us with the billionaires. This is not giving us what we really need, not.

Eric 17:27

This is not helping us with the cost of food and gasoline and rent. I mean, that's really what they're saying this was about.

Dr. Josh Stout 17:34

And who has all the money is it's the billionaires. I mean, there's there's the gross domestic product per person in the US is over $60,000 per person. So if we just divided everything equally, which of course wouldn't work and I'm not saying we should do that, but if we happened to. Mhm. We would all have $60,000 a year to live on which is we could live on it. You know a two family family would be 120.

Eric 17:59

Not in New York City. But anyway go on.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:01

$120,000. You could probably even live in New York City now you know. All right. Anyway you could, you could be living in a lot of places pretty decently look, but.

Eric 18:09

That is absolutely true.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:11

Yeah. And we are, in that sense, the richest country in the world. But in other senses, we are very much not in that that income disparity is greater in our country than most others. And so when you're looking at the logarithmic curve, everyone's on the straight line that you can't tell the difference from it and zero and then there's 0.01% that are up through the roof. If you actually drew it as a curve, I try to do this in my class.

Eric 18:38

And they keep us focused on us.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:41

You know, so when I when I, when I when I make a graph, the graph goes from, you know, 0 to 100 million. Mm. And all the money is up there at 100,000,000 - one million on a chart of 0 to 100. Looks a lot like zero.

Eric 18:58

It goes up to one. Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:59

Exactly.

Eric 19:00

If you have 100 clicks that gets you up to a hundred million, that 1 million is going to be on and a quarter of a million is going to be a quarter.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:09

So. So 100 million is the top of of, of my whiteboard and that's only 100 million.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:16

Ten times that gets you a billion. I'm now like you know the fifth story of my building and then Musk has a hundred of that. Yeah it's very difficult to conceive of these numbers, but we feel it viscerally and it's bad for us. And they've taken the money from us. Right. So how are they making these money? They're making sure we're not paid well.

Eric 19:33

And as I've been saying, they're not just taking the money from us. They're keeping it in jail.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:37

Yeah, exactly.

Eric 19:38

And it's doing nothing.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, this is what I wanted to talk about. I don't want to talk too much more about it because it'll just become griping. But I wanted to get an idea of why it is that we're able to live on this knife edge and who it's serving when it does. And how it's able to be maintained without any one person saying, Let's have a conspiracy so that we live on a knife edge.

Eric 20:03

Right. But it is just a few people.

Dr. Josh Stout 20:06

It is just a few people.

Eric 20:07

So what you are saying is that it is the super wealthy in our society that are pushing us back and forth and back and forth.

Dr. Josh Stout 20:16

And it can be maintained as long as there's one party that's willing to say anything and do anything to get into power. And it attracts the people who are willing to say anything and do anything to get into power. As long as that party gets money from the oligarchs and the oil companies, there's not going to be someone stopping global warming. There's not going to be someone taxing, taxing assets. You know, there's not going to be the things that are so obviously needed to fix our country. You know, we could all have health care from a small portion of, you know, taxing people's stock portfolios of, say, over 100 million, which would leave almost everyone out of it. Right. And only only a significant tax on the super end. And we could provide health care for everyone and we could do things that would really, really help this country. You know, health care for everyone isn't just some sort of pipe dream that would make us healthier. It would help our employment, it would help the economy. We'd be able to transfer jobs more easily.

Eric 21:12

You're going to talk along these lines. We should be able to afford not just universal healthcare, but universal basic income. I mean, these these things are are the time for these is already.

Dr. Josh Stout 21:22

I mean, there's some decent evidence that things like universal basic income rather than stealing the will to live from people, which is how it's portrayed is actually more efficient. And because people tend to invest it in things like food and housing and you know, that way you have fewer hungry, homeless people. But yes, anyway, I, I think we agree on these things, but I really wanted to think about how it is that we've gotten ourselves into this situation.

Eric 21:51

I mean, when you're going back to your your your example of the predator that seeks out the thing that pops out. Right, the color, the thing that's different. Yeah, I'm going to go for that. You know, the the that's exactly what we're looking at with these with these billionaires who are trying to be populists.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:09

So they're going to fund whatever pops out in terms of corruption. Wherever the corruption is, they're going to fund it. If the Democrats were more corrupt, they would fund Democrats.

Eric 22:18

But it doesn’t even need to be real corruption. It could be perceived corruption. It could be whatever catches on.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:21

It's whatever catches.

Eric 22:22

Yeah, pop out. And then they're going to go for that. I mean, they are the predator that you were talking about that’s keeping us all in line.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:27

Kind of are. I think you're right.

Eric 22:29

In your theory.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:31

I, I think you're right. They are. They are preying upon us.

Eric 22:34

And it's and, you know, this goes this is exactly, you know, what what Robert says that, you know, they they are they are the minority. They are also the problem.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:44

Well, I mean, that's how predator situations work. You have to have mostly prey. You can't have mostly predators. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric 22:53

Okay.

Is that where we end today?

Dr. Josh Stout 22:56

That's where we end today.

Eric 22:57

A short episode. But. But, you know, it's something we needed. We needed to get it.

Dr. Josh Stout 23:03

I needed to say these things. Yeah.

Eric 23:04