Mind Body Evolution Podcast

Memes and Anti Memes

In this episode Dr. Josh Stout discusses theories on why we are experiencing a decline in concentration and memory, and why daily life feels so disconnected from reality. Truth vs “truth” is destroying our minds.

Dr. Josh Stout, PhD

25 Oct 2024 — 34 min read

Creating our own fog to obscure reality

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

Eric 0:08

So. So what is the sexy part of what you want to talk about?

Dr. Josh Stout 0:11

I want to talk about why we are all losing our minds, why we have no ability to remember anything or concentrate on anything and what it is that's happening to our society right now that feels so unreal and we're disconnected from reality.

Eric 0:27

So by right now, where right now you mean Friday, October 25th, 2024. This is mindbodyevolution and Dr. Josh Stout, I completely agree with you. It kind of feels like we're all losing our minds a little bit and can't focus.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:42

Yeah, and I think it's it's partly deliberate and it's partly a product of how human culture works.

Eric 0:51

It is deliberate. What does that mean?

Dr. Josh Stout 0:53

The loss of the ability to focus or even to know what reality is.

Eric 1:00

Accepting that that these things are happening. Deliberate means that it's been imposed? Consciously?

Dr. Josh Stout 1:06

Yes. I want to talk about…

Eric 1:09

That’s quite an accusation. Who are you accusing?

Dr. Josh Stout 1:11

I want to talk about a time this has happened before. And then I want to relate it to what has been going on in this country since the inception of this country. I want to talk about what a meme is, and then I want to talk about something strange, which is an anti meme. It's the opposite of memory. It's the opposite of the ability to know things.

Eric 1:33

Okay.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:34

All right. So memes are not just cats on the Internet. They're also - they were originally the idea of they were sort of like genes. They were individual components of larger ideas. And so an idea was composed of memes that were sort of individual to that particular idea. So there would be very specific sets of code that would be related to these larger ideas and.

Eric 2:09

Sets of of, of of like, code?

Dr. Josh Stout 2:12

DNA code. Oh, okay. So, so for example, you know, you have the sayings of Marx might be in totality an idea, but they're made up of separate individual memes and some of them have more power than others. We tend to remember that somehow we're supposed to give the, you know, means of production back to the workers and not have religion. Those are like his two big sort of memes that come out of it. We don't exactly know what power back to the workers means, but we know that there's something about no religion. And you know, and sort of that's that that's one of the ideas that carries through with this larger idea of, you know, what he was trying to do is communism, etc.. Yeah.

Eric 2:54

And communism in and of itself be a meme in this.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:57

No, I think it would it would be an idealistic idea, which he would hate. He hates the idea of idealism. Well, no, he was a materialist. He didn't think he thought it was not means he did not think that there were through put ideas so there is there's been an argument between these worlds for a long time. So Hegel thought that history was driven by ideas moving us forward. And Marx thought that history happened, which produced ideas. And that's and we move forward through history happening, which always confused me and didn't make any sense. But that's why people talk about Marx turning Hegel on his head. It was just upside down. Hegel And you can, you can see how both have some truth to them that you know, you see the world around you and you come up with an idea, but now you have an idea and this leads your civilization to do certain things because of the ideas that live within it.

Eric 3:53

One gives all of the the onus for action on us, and the other one has us just floating down the stream.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:01

And, you know, undoubtedly Hegel would agree that there are both of these ideas coming together. But I want to talk first about, you know, what what do we mean mean by the sort of larger idea memes that are not just a cat on the Internet, but actually the things that sort of seem to shape our lives in many ways. So… political factions today don't necessarily have to have a written platform in quite as many details as they used to have, because everyone knows what the idea is. Everyone is with the program. So if you're a Republican, you hate DEI, even if you don't know what it is, you knowyou don't care about the details of things. You're part of a movement that's trying to stop Wokeness And.

Eric 5:01

I used to describe this as ‘no longer needing the smoke filled room’.

Dr. Josh Stout 5:06

You don't need the smoke filled room. Exactly. Because every every everyone is is is on the bus. Everyone is part of the program. They all know exactly what is going on.

Eric 5:17

And somehow, everyone gets the memo.

Dr. Josh Stout 5:20

Everyone gets the memo. But these in reality are the tides of history. These are what drive big movements. And they always have. It's not just now, it's just that we feel it very strongly now because there's it feels like there's something happening. It feels like there's an activity that has developed itself and become essentially the Republican Party. But it's a much bigger set of ideas than you could write into a platform of a political party. It's a it's a it's a movement, and it's a very dangerous thing that's happening. And so I want to talk about that. And I wanted to go back to a very early period of history where similar kinds of activities have happened.

So around 1550 B.C., the or B.C.E., if you prefer, the people who were going to eventually be the Jewish people. The Hyksos were fleeing Egypt after having ruled Egypt and they had already developed something like the beginning of monotheism. So as as an Egyptian I former pastoralist, people, they had seen storms, they'd seen the desert. They they, they got the idea of the sun and all of these things had gone together into a sort of storm God, sky God. It was associated in Egypt actually with Set - Set was not considered quite as evil until after the Hyksos, at which point they're like, Set is also the God of foreigners. And so the Egyptians basically designed their whole theology, redid it after the Hyksos left and said that's that's what evil is. But this idea of a of a of a of a of a monotheistic god sort of persisted. And this is what I mean by a meme. It's it's something that is difficult to let go of. It's an idea. It has lots of connections and everyone kind of knew what it was.

This was okay within Egyptian society somewhat the way many ideas that are we don't like are okay in American society today. American society is open to ideas. Egyptian society was open to gods. You could just add more gods. It was really easy to do and it didn't really. There was no easy way in their society to get rid of gods that you didn't like. It wasn't it wasn't really something possible. But they lived in a world of memes that were extremely magical Ideas were things you could write them down on a wall and you could change the ideas and then the things would change. And so everything was connected. You know that the prayer, as you said, made the sun come up in the morning. You wrote them down on your on your walls of your tombs, and it kept your soul alive after death. All of all of these things were were reality. But also, you know, forms of information, essentially. So 100 years go by. The the Hyksos themselves have gone up to the area area of Palestine, and they're now with the the pastoralists up there herding sheep and they're doing their own thing. They're now becoming almost the Jews. They're basically right about there. So around 1550 B.C, the Pharaoh Akhenaten or Amenhotep starts following this idea of monotheism following the God, often some sometimes associated with Amon-ra - uh, Amon-Ra. Think of that, that that's the Sun God combined with the God Amon a sheep. So you can there's like a little bit of a through line to these sheepherder people who had been ruling Egypt for a while. So, you know, those spiral horns of of the god Amon combined with Ra is essentially the God Aten the the this monotheistic god so Akhenaten changes his name to Akhenaten who says I'm the pharaoh of of art and essentially and I am going to make this the state religion and we're all going to be monotheistic.

He - his his reign ends.

Eric 9:51

Wait. We’re all going to be monotheistic. Yeah. About me. No, I am the God he named himself the god’s name.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:56

He's basically the gods like purpose. He was not like the God, the God. There's only one God and it is not the Pharaoh. So this also changed things. So now. So now there is a monotheistic god that rules everything. They go around and they start actually trying to change the state.

Eric 10:13

He could he could do this to the culture and the religion singlehandedly as one man?

Dr. Josh Stout 10:18

Yes. Yes, he could, because he was the pharaoh. And so they start trying to change things and something that's been around for 2000 years already, he's going around and changing documents and destroying statues and all this kind of stuff.

He leaves power, Tutankhamen comes into power.

Tutankhamen is a young, fairly malleable pharaoh and is able to be manipulated by priests who remember what it was like before there was monotheism. And so he's he's now got Aman in his name there, Tutankhamen, but he's turned away from the monotheism and back to the the standard religion. When Tutankhamen dies early, you know possibly possibly assassinated something like that, a whole new dynasty starts.

And the basically reason for the beginning of this dynasty was getting rid of this monotheistic idea. And so they systematically eliminate all accounts of the God. Often they erase all of the texts they race, any carving, they destroy anything they can find, and they destroy any reference to the pharaoh himself. And he no longer exists. And it wasn't until relatively recently that we discovered all this he was lost from history entirely. He didn't make it into anything. The Romans didn't know about him. He was gone. And so this is what I mean by memes and anti memes where you have an idea that can spread, it can be sometimes antithetical to the society. It's part of, right? So you have a society of accepting all gods suddenly accepts this idea of monotheism that specifically says it does not accept all gods, it only accepts one God. And there's a clash between the two. And then to get rid of it, you have to get rid of the idea entirely. And because of what Egypt was, they did it and they wiped it out and they erased it from the surface of the earth. And basically no one knew about it for another 2000 years dead.

Eric 12:33

I want him dead. I want his family dead. I want his house burned to the ground, I want to piss on the ashes.

Dr. Josh Stout 12:38

Yeah. No, it was it was absolutely that it was absolute destruction of anything he'd ever touched or done or looked at or anything.

Eric 12:45

And so this is the anti meme, not just in effect during that time when they were effecting these changes, but the fact that he and this entire movement had been forgotten for almost thousands of years.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:01

More than thousands.

Eric 13:01

More than thousands? How long?

Dr. Josh Stout 13:02

Yeah. Well, 1550 till 19 century. So 3000 years. Yeah.

Eric 13:11

So that was a pretty strong and effective anti meme.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:14

It worked. It worked. Yeah, it worked. And so it is possible actually, to destroy ideas. We'd think that's not really possible. But it can be done.

Eric 13:21

But it's not.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:24

Well, see, And then it comes back again. Exactly. And while that was happening, monotheism was flourishing as a non Egyptian religion right next to Egypt since that basically for the last 3000 years and still clashes between these cultures and monotheism everywhere now but now we've got divisions between kind of not talking about that today I just wanted to talk about how this could be done and and what what these things might involve.

So the meme essentially that created the United States was the idea of equality. And this was dangerous to the European leaders. They did not like the idea. Democracy seemed like chaos and peasants to them. And this was a lot of what was driving people to leave Europe and create the American experiment. And so Jefferson and his ideas of, you know, we hold these ideas to be self-evident. A idea that builds itself from the very nature of being human, gives us grants us fundamental equality. And at the same time we had slaves. And so the very first competition with this idea of equality for all was some people are inherently inferior. And so this is what I mean, I've talked about it before that that racism is the original sin of this country. It's not the first bad thing we did when we got to this country. Not original in that sense, but it's the original sin as it's the first thing that we consciously did to destroy who we are. So America is founded on the idea of equality. And at its core, we have this idea that some people aren't equal. And so we have these two competing things.

Eric 15:27

That equality is only for certain people.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:29

Is only for certain people. And so this this this is is, you know, poisoned at its heart.

Eric 15:34

Essentially, we destroyed irony at our very creation.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:38

In many ways. And this is this is one of sort of the functions of these of these anti memes is you no longer can can think in certain ways because they get destroyed. And so this this was absolutely specifically mentioned by the founders of the Confederacy that yes, yes of course equality for all that's the way things should be. It's just some people are not equal and so therefore they get to be slaves and they're not really the same kind of people. And I've mentioned this before, racism is something that all cultures have had, but this was something very specific to America where we combined the idea of equality with the idea of racism. This had never been sort of brought together in the same way that we did it in this country. And I think it yeah, in a poisoned us right from the very beginning. And so that's what I mean by an original sin there. And I think something is going on like that right now in this country with the idea of free speech and open society and accepting people from other countries. And part of the project of who we are as Americans, as a as a country of immigrants, and we are trying to turn away from that in many ways, much like racism did. We are now leaving essentially the the the project of the Enlightenment, where we are searching for scientific truths. We are trying to figure out how we can achieve equality between people. We can give the vote to women, we can we can have AI, you know, the Supreme Court supporting voting rights. We can do all of these things that are actually expanding everyone's equality of power and access to a system and there has been a through line against this based on this original sin of racism, essentially using anti-science. you know, first really, I think, promulgated I mentioned this before by the oil companies first going against led in the gas, then going against global warming. All of all of this or all of all of these kinds of things are using the same approach to arguments against reality. And we see the beginning of this during the Reagan period when they start saying fake news, when the news.

Eric 18:16

Did fake news started during Regan?

Dr. Josh Stout 18:18

Yes, it really did. I know Trump takes credit for it, but Trump says a lot of things.

Eric 18:23

I guess the Trump era, took, uh, started alternative facts. But yes. Okay. Fake news. Yes.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:29

And at the same time as this is happening within academia, you have the movement of deconstructionism and the idea that all thoughts are forms of bias and there is no way to actually make a statement without there being a form of bias about it. So all, all facts are actually opinions fundamentally, because there is no way to prove anything ever. So we all have our opinions and you combine that with the baby boomer, sort of, I'm okay, you're okay. Well, that's your opinion. Now you've you've you.

Eric 19:07

Now I want to jump out a window.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:08

Exactly. So you've undermined the possibility for factual argument. At the same time, the Reagan administration removes the regulations that control the news organizations. They no longer have to tell the truth. That was that was a requirement. And so we get fair and balanced. Fox News. What they mean by fair and balanced isn't fair and balanced between different factual events. What they mean is balanced between fact and non fact that now we have the non fact to balance out those facts. We have the, as you say, alternative facts. That's that's sort of the newest version of this. But it was it was it was Newt Gingrich talking about this and he specifically mentioned deconstruction as a way to attack language itself.

Eric 19:56

Yes. Well, deconstruction was his entire program. Tear it down.

Dr. Josh Stout 20:02

But as as as as a as a ideological sort of intellectual framework, he actually didn't like it. It was one of the things he was responding against in academia. He thought as a historian, he should be able to say what actually happened in the and the deconstructionist were saying, no, you can't say what actually happened because it's all opinion. And he's like, fine, I'm going to go into politics. And that really is all opinion. And so I'm going to change the way we speak because nothing has any meaning and we can say whatever we want to. He did and he did. And so he was really the beginning of that, combined with the the the end of regulations on on what news was. And I think that this is now the entire mechanism that we're seeing the idea of the big lie destroying our context for reality itself. And it's this that is really driving our difficulty to find sanity in the world because we don't know what's true anymore, because we're getting so many lies all the time. And, you know, it's it's natural as a human to see someone telling this long story and figure there's probably some kernels of truth in there somewhere. And not that the entire.

Eric 21:16

Thing is fabricated.

Dr. Josh Stout 21:17

Is fabricated from end to end.

Eric 21:19

I'm always fascinated when I hear of people driving hours to go hear him speak, when especially now, when what's coming out is literally just a firehose of of of of stuff often made up on the spur of the moment. It's it's got to be pure entertainment. But it's it's politics. It's terrifying.

Dr. Josh Stout 21:42

So I was reading this book that my son who's online quite a bit lent to me it's called There is No Antiemetics Division. And it's a it's a strange book in that it is trying to talk about these monsters that live amongst us and what it had done. Is it basically, I don't know if personified is the right word, but talked about as sentient creatures, the idea of memes themselves. What if there are anti means that are essentially sentient creatures so monsters of of unreality that eat our ideas are carnivorous or scavengers or parasitic in some way. And so if we think of memes as existing outside us, even though they require our brains for production, they can be larger than any given individual like the concept of monotheism, for example. I like the concept of equality for all humans in, you know, American society. These these are these are things that are larger than any one individual. We have different ways of describing it. We have different ways of approaching it. But these are things that we all kind of know what it is. And they can they can give us a way to, you know, guide our approach to life. Well, if if I do something and it lessens my or other people's equality, I know that's a bad thing. And so I can say, oh, we should probably make laws that encourage people to be, you know, have more access to democracy. And this is a reason why we should, for example, give women the vote or, you know, stop what's happening in the South with the Jim Crow laws. You know, we should probably change those things because they go against our fundamental I mean, essentially, and we we can describe it very I, you know, easily equality for all. But it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. And the whole project as one is bigger than any one person. Yes racism in is in many ways an anti meme against this and it leads to all sorts of unrealities.

Eric 23:51

You mean American racism.

Dr. Josh Stout 23:54

American racism specifically. And it's it's anti-science aspects, but also essentially anti-religious aspects. You there's there's no way for racism to be anything other than untruth. If you are a completely religious person. Everyone comes from Adam. There's only one beginning. There are no divisions between races. And if you're a completely scientific person, everyone's coming from the same evolutionary heritage. There is no division between anyone, no matter what of our fundamental truths for the origin of humans you decide to accept. Racism has no part, and yet it is absolutely deep in our society and sending its tentacles out there. And racism, as I've said before, does not exist. So this is like the definition of an anti meme. Anti memes can't exist in the normal way that memes do. We all understand what the idea is, and it creeps into our brains and it starts eating truth. But races don't exist no matter how you slice it. If you go with the religious version or the scientific version, there's no such thing as a race. And so we've created this artificial destroyer of truth, essentially. And it is that the basis of everything that is happening right now. And it is it is it is what Trump hooks on to to destroy our our brains, essentially. It's very, very interesting. You know, we think about how the right accuses the left of just being gullible to our own media that we don't believe the news that tells us what's actually happening is real and they don't. And we do. And so therefore, we're gullible and we think they're gullible because they're believing the lies from Fox News.

When you do surveys of people's gullibility, essentially the right wing doesn't believe things as much as the left wing does. Republicans don't believe their own news sources. So Democrats actually have more faith in their own sources of information than Republicans have faith in their sources of information. And so they're they're adrift, which makes it much more easy for someone like Trump to say, I'm the source of information. I'm going to give you what's what's necessary. And so this is what authoritarians do.

Eric 26:29

This is the fascist agenda, right?

Dr. Josh Stout 26:31

So you you break reality. You say reality isn't reality. I'm reality. And yes, this is exactly the fascist agenda. So this is this is what I'm trying to talk about, of how people can deliberately attack ideas and deliberately go after the essentially the unifying project of a society. And that this has been done over and over again from the beginning of this country, the very beginning through till now, using this this this way of attacking reality itself to begin to make your project. You know, how do you get thousands of poor people in the South to fight for the rich people to have slaves? How do you get that to happen? How do you get that level of unreality in people's minds that they're somehow fighting for their own heritage when they're really just fighting to enslave people.

Eric 27:34

The same way that you get 47% of the people to think that this guy is fighting for them, right? Support them and help their lives be better.

Dr. Josh Stout 27:43

Right. And so you what? And so you see so you see, you know, Kamala being asked, do you think they're stupid? Do you think the American people are just stupid and. No, of course not. They have been systematically lied to and they're actually the people who are most worried about being lied to are the ones who are most following the MAGA agenda.

Eric 28:08

And the ones who are the most worried about being lied to are the ones who are the most being lied to.

Dr. Josh Stout 28:13

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so yeah. And so I think I think it is this conflict that has now somehow balanced itself in our society that is destroying our essentially our wellbeing. We don't know who we are anymore. We don't know if we're Americans who are welcoming of immigrants and looking for equality of all people. And, you know, the shining beacon on the hill right from the very, very beginning, even of the Puritans who were very judgmental people. They also thought we're going to be the examples for all other people. Puritans didn't like the slavery. They actually specifically had to avoid Virginia for its decadence, and they wanted to go into New England, where they didn't have that decadence. But we haven't been able to separate ourselves. We are all one country. We're all one people. And we can't have these, you know, one half of the people seeing the truth and the shining city on the hill. And we're going to live in ways as example, examples to others. We're going to be good people. We're going to help people. We're going to be we're going to we're going to we're going to share. We're going to we're going to try and help the downtrodden. We're going to bring up people and give them access to education. We're going to give everyone the vote and the other half of the people be like, no, we're enslaving people. We are. We are. We are removing freedom.

Eric 29:32

Enslaving people, deporting people, removing freedoms.

Dr. Josh Stout 29:34

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Eric 29:36

So, so what what our our anti memes that we can employ to to defeat their dangerous memes?

Dr. Josh Stout 29:44

I was thinking about what happened to Akhenaten is is you know you saw it you saw it with with you know people like Colbert stopped saying the word Trump for a while. Yeah. Where we have to start not giving them the attention because an anti meme is like a meme in that it exists within our minds but is also bigger than us. If we stop giving it a home in our minds, it will be harder to resurrect. I mean, like, like the, the like, like, like monotheism. You're not going to be able to stamp it out.

Eric 30:17

The only way, the only way to not give it a home in our minds right now is to defeat it at the ballot. There is no other way.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:26

Right. Well, right now, that's the one thing we have to do.

Eric 30:28

Right now we are days away from an election.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:29

But I'm trying to talk about it sort of on a larger sense where…

Eric 30:34

Is that is that education? Is that just discussion with people? Is that like.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:38

Well, certainly as an educator, I try and I try and go against the ideas of deconstruction. I try and say there is a truth out there that we are seeking for. We as individuals might not be able to get the whole truth all the time, but the scientific project in general as a direct descendant of the Enlightenment projects, Search for Truth is we've got ways to approximate this. We can look at statistics, we can look at facts, we can look at a mathematical model and see and then relate it to reality and see if they overlap. And so, you know, these are the things we say and and this confuses us when people don't believe us. So we show very clearly that global warming is happening. We predict how it will happen. We show that it is happening. And then you take measure measurements to verify that it's happening. And then you have people who say it isn't happening.

Eric 31:33

Yes. It doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter how you show it, how you prove it, or if you do.

Dr. Josh Stout 31:37

Seriously bizarre to me. And it is also bizarre to me that there are any Republican scientists given all of this, I do not understand it.

Eric 31:46

Irony is dead.

Dr. Josh Stout 31:48

Yeah, and it does seem that it's it's people people don't need to - they don't need to think through the the ideas they're holding to look at their origins and see if they're compatible with reality. They don't need to think that being anti-woke is part of a larger anti meme that is against the very project they're part of, which is trying to find truth in reality.

Eric 32:22

Except. Except are they trying to find ultimately, are they trying to find truth? Because if you know, who are these scientists who are going to come up with statistics that prove things that they need to prove, like, well, they have scientists that support their point of view?

Dr. Josh Stout 32:37

No, I'm talking about real scientists doing real science. My colleagues right now, some of them consider themselves to be Republicans and are are absolutely normal people with normal views on the world.

Eric 32:51

Except that they support.

Dr. Josh Stout 32:53

But they really don't like what woke ideology is doing to their university. And they think it is they think it is going against the idea of free speech and truth. And so.

Eric 33:04

I am sighing deeply.

Dr. Josh Stout 33:07

Yes, I thought bubble sigh. Yeah. No, this this this is absolutely something that is destroying, you know, information and the possibility of information in many ways. And we see it as, you know, a twisted battle for truth where each side sees the other one as promoting untruth. And there is this mirror aspect to it. But one side fundamentally has at its root the idea of a, you know, black is white, night is day, people are unequal. And America is based on inequality. And we should not have immigrants. And these these these bizarre thoughts where, you know, all their grandparents were immigrants. They didn't come at a time when you had papers. They came with nothing in their pocket and worked their way to where they are now. You know, all the American dream is the opposite of the people. What the people who are doing who are saying they are patriots, you know, it's it's bizarre where we've gotten to, but it is a absolute project that is attacking our, you know, the very central party of the idea of truth.

Eric 34:25

It sure sounds like something written by Aldous Huxley, doesn't it now?

Dr. Josh Stout 34:29

It does have that feeling of.

Eric 34:32

Like in a way. Yeah. That just sends shivers right down your spine in a physical way.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:36

It's it's and we think Trump is to blame for it, but Trump is more or less a monster created by it, you know, fright from the quote unquote, reality TV, which is like the least real thing out there.

Eric 34:49

He was created by so many different forces.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:52

Absolutely. Racism from the very beginning of his.

Eric 34:55

Roy Cohn and.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:56

Exactly all that.

Eric 34:57

and where Roy Cohn ame from. And and then the the the real estate world that his father was in and what New York was at the time and what his origins are. I mean, they hid there. They hid their German background and all of this all of this, All of it.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:11

All of it. Exactly. So this this this is the unreality project that has been going for quite some time. And it is used for, in my opinion, every form of evil that we get on a societal level that, you know, we can't afford health care for people. Our health care would be bad for people because it would just cause them to not need jobs and then they would all be lazy. And.

Eric 35:36

You know, well, this is the Republican project that helping people is hurting people.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:39

Yeah, exactly. But it's also the thing that the Russians latched on to. They were able to troll us very easily because we were we were primed to accept whatever we saw. That wasn't the regular news which we'd stopped believing in. All of these things weaken our immune system essentially to bad ideas.

Eric 35:58

What’s the antibiotic? Where where do we go with this?

Dr. Josh Stout 36:02

We have to stop believing in the concept of race. I'm sorry. This does not mean that different people won't exist anymore, that there won't be a diverse community of peoples in the United States. We are all different peoples. We all have different backgrounds. But the idea of any kind of either scientific or religious or philosophical basis to fundamental differences between people being something you can base policy on or base programs on in any way I think is dangerous.

Eric 36:43

And you, you know, it sounds right, but it also sounds like you you're going against an entire culture, an entire society.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:51

Yes. No, no. I mean..

Eric 36:52

The way absolutely everything works and is baked in. Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:56

And and the only people who go against race these days seem to be racists. And, you know, the first thing..

Eric 37:02

Right. It doesn't make you look like you're in good company.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:04

And the first thing I think you when I first mentioned some of these ideas, you're like people are going to say you're trying to say there's no black people. That's not what I'm saying. Okay? I want to be very, very clear. You know, you can identify problems based on populations. That's completely normal. That's this is this is this is.

Eric 37:21

All different kinds of demographics.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:23

This is this is what science does. If you want to look at high blood pressure in different populations, you look at different populations and look at blood pressure, that's a normal thing to do.

Even in science, we'll often use race as a stand in for populations. So someone will write a paper looking at high blood pressure and black people. I think that's a problem. You need to describe your populations. You need to be very specific. You know, is is is Obama the same population as someone who's a, you know, a direct descendant of slaves? I don't know if they're exactly the same population. Those would be things you need to think about. If he's from Kenya, that's East African. Most of the slaves came from West Africa. Those are two genetically distinct groups within genetics itself. There are really very few distinctions between people.

So to talk about any kind of populations it's actually more useful to talk about cultural heritage. So we often confuse things like Jewishness being a race because we think that culture is race. And that's also clearly a confused concept. Not saying Jew Jewish people do not exist clearly right. There are long standing, strong cultural groups that can be identified, but they are not racists and they have nothing to do with race. And if you see a group being discriminated against in some way, it is perfectly reasonable to figure out how to not discriminate against that group. However, I think any concept that involves the use of race is is is falling right into these these these ideas of of of racism. I think race is racist. And I don't know what to do about this because it.

Eric 39:27

And fundamentally it is an anti meme that is destroying what we seek.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:31

Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:32

And you can really tell that it works that way because the people who really say we have to get rid of race are the people who are against wokeness are the racists. And so it's dangerous to even to even say this anti meme doesn't exist is to be eaten by the anti meme. You know, this monster gets us every time we think about it, every time we touch it, you know it's going to stick to us and won't let us go.

Eric 40:05

It's just it just brings me back to, you know, the part of the problem with with with this kind of is that we allow people to speak like this openly. Like if we could this is these are going to be things that are going to exist in people. But we we just need to not in not allow it to be out in the open and eventually it will be suppressed or repressed or diminished. It's not going to disappear. But we can't we can't let it run as much as it's running right now.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:39

Yeah, no, it's it's, it's strange because the the, you know, the the American ideal and the enlightenment ideal and ideals of Christian brotherhood and such that were coming out in the 18th century all had a lot in common. And so, you know, the people who are, you know, Christian nationalists are trying to tap into that they're the most freaky people you could possibly meet. There they are. They're trying to destroy our country and yet they're harkening back to a project of, you know, the lion lying down with the lamb, the kingdom of God, where we're all brotherhood, you know, the brotherhood of man, all this stuff of the enlightenment, of equality, the fundamental we hold these truths to be self-evident, You know.

Eric 41:32

Back to what you called the original sin of of this country.

Dr. Josh Stout 41:36

Of of breaking that.

Eric 41:37

That. Let's go right back to the beginning.

Dr. Josh Stout 41:38

Yeah, exactly. So, so so the people who are talking about Christian nationalism aren't talking about let's go back to our roots of equality for all and acceptance for all. They're talking about the exact opposite of that. And so we've gotten into this case where language is often meaning its own opposites. And so it breaks our minds. And this is why I'm saying that we're losing the ability to concentrate, we're losing our minds is because it's not just that truth is is being attacked and we're there trying to defend it. But on the left we get confused because we know at our hearts that race is racist and yet we want to defend a diversity in our universities. And so we defend affirmative action and we defend programs that people who are being hurt by our society because our society has fundamental things that are racist are built into it. And so we try and help people by race. And immediately people are like, well, you're racist and you're anti-white and you get this kind of stuff happening all the time. And it is it is breaking our minds because.

Eric 42:48

Yeah, I mean, I think another part of what you're saying is that is that every single thing is being weaponized and that's a great part of what's getting me.

Dr. Josh Stout 42:58

Every single thing is being weaponized. But we also even even those of us on the side of good in light are are sucked into this debate where we can't we can't, we can't, we can't lose. We can't lose the framework. We can't lose the framing of of how, how, how. Okay. So if one side is against helping people and we're for helping people, but we decide that race exists and we help people based on race, we're falling back into the trap again.

Eric 43:36

I mean, you know, it's fascinating, the framing. You're talking the framing. And it brings me back to something you've you've spoken of. We've spoken about a number of times, which is the default mode network and meditation. Yeah, Yeah. And it occurs to me that, you know, maybe, maybe I mean, I mean, we can't make a national move towards meditation, but maybe we can. I mean, it feels like that would be a step towards being able to get ourselves mentally in a different state.

Dr. Josh Stout 44:04

Well, absolutely. And this is the strangest thing for me, is that, you know, that should be the same as saying, you know what? We should really do is have more prayer. And what we really need is to pray to God and let Jesus tell us that we're all good people and we have to be good to each other and we have to help our neighbors and we have to turn the other cheek. And when someone hurts us, we are.

Eric 44:25

It’s the opposite of praying. It's it's it's.

Dr. Josh Stout 44:27

No, it's the same. It really is the same. It's it's these these these are different ways that different cultures have tried to come up with. How do we think about the truth? You know, for me, I really like the Buddhist approach where we have a religion without a deity that that appeals to me. And it is something that I get where there's only one truth and I'm trying to access it when I meditate. But it's not really fundamentally different from the Christian principles that again, that began the Enlightenment.

Eric 45:01

Sure. I you know, look, I can see how prayer is is, is, is clearly meditation. I can see that. But but my point is that it's not about anything done in a group. My, my, you know, our our is it's a solo activity.

Dr. Josh Stout 45:17

That the group or non group ness of it I don't think matters I don't think prayer actually is the same as meditation in a in a neurological sense but in a what what its function is in terms of the ideas we are building within our heads I think can be similar. The idea of compassion, the idea of, of the need to help people.

Eric 45:38

But prayer wouldn't do the same thing to the default mode network as meditation.

Dr. Josh Stout 45:41

I don't think so. No, I don't think it works the same, quite the same way.

Eric 45:44

Where I was okay with this because it's the it's the it's the quieting or rather the the the the stimulation of the default mode network through the meditative act that might help us disassociate from this matrix that we're in everyday that’s destroying us.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:01

I think you actually have a very good point there. I think that's a really interesting point because what does the default mode network do is it builds our ego essentially. And that's an important thing. You know, we have to have a sense of self, but all of all of this misinformation that we have out there is essentially eating ourselves.

Eric 46:22

Yes. And which is why we can't concentrate. That's what you're.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:25

Saying. Yeah. So I think I think, yeah, meditation would be a path towards letting go of some of that attack on our own, our own selves. Grasp of what truth - what truth we're trying to construct. We can let go of that for a moment and maybe see reality as it is.

Eric 46:42

I'm reeling right now because I haven't been able to get back to meditation since my surgery. And is this really driving home that I need to start that again.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:51

All right. I think we can probably leave it there because I think that's actually kind of an answer is is a way to deal with some of the unreality we're facing in our lives is.

Eric 47:02

The lack of focus and unreality, yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 47:03

Is is quieting our minds and seeing it all for illusion, which is what it is, and really just participating in the reality that exists around us at the moment that you're meditating rather than the constructed reality of these memes and anti means that are destroying our ability to think.

Eric 47:24

Yeah, well, thank you. Just that was utterly fascinating. All right, folks, until next time.