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Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
Real Clear
The Cultural Divide: Unpacking Modern Societal Conflicts with Expert Panel
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Can we bridge the growing cultural divide or are we destined to fragment even further? Join us for a riveting discussion as we dissect the complexities of modern societal conflicts with our esteemed guests Hank Kopel, Dr. John Mills, Wilfred Reilly, Mark McDonald, M.D. , and Joshua Slocum. This episode tackles four critical arenas: sex, gender, and family structure; recreational drug usage; religion in the public square; and DEI and critical theory on race, gender, and sexuality. Through legislative and litigation battles, our panel unpacks the tensions between conservative and progressive viewpoints, revealing how these conflicts have evolved from past generational demands to today's radical challenges.
Explore the psychoanalytic concept of "splitting" and understand how binary thinking is deepening the cultural divide in the West. Our panel examines the exacerbating effects of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, showing how these events have contributed to a victimization mentality and social resentment. With a focus on economic disparities, geopolitical tensions, and existential threats, we reveal how these layers impact everything from family dynamics and mental health to national unity and democratic stability. This exploration highlights the far-reaching consequences of disinformation and social media pathologies in fragmenting society.
Addressing the feminization of society and its broader implications, our discussion delves into the rise of emotional and empathetic approaches and the decline of traditional masculinity. This shift, according to our panel, has led to a narcissistic society where truth and reality are often inverted. We scrutinize the psychological underpinnings of societal divides and the normalization of core mental deficits, culminating in cultural beliefs that challenge conventional thinking. Concluding with an interactive Q&A session, our guests offer diverse perspectives and emphasize the necessity of balanced, objective realities. Don't miss this thought-provoking conversation that seeks to understand the cultural tectonics at play in our society.
Welcome back to Real Clear Podcast everybody. I am so delighted to have some esteemed guests, all of whom have been on my podcast, real Clear, at least once or a few times in some of their cases. Starting from the top, I have Hank Capel, a great guy, a real mensch. He's a former prosecutor and also the author of the War on Hate. He's lectured at Yale University and in other esteemed, audacious places Auspicious, I should say. Then we have Dr John Mills, who is a renowned author, a clinical psychologist as well as psychoanalyst and very serious academic, and he treads in places that many people are afraid to go, especially in the world of psychoanalysis. And we have Wilford Riley, who has been on Real Clear Podcast multiple times in order to address all nature of things. He is the author of the newly released book Lies, my Liberal Teacher Told Me, as well as my favorite book of the year of 2021. I think Taboo. He's a genius who I love having on the podcast. Then we have Mark McDonald, a friend of mine, and he has been on the podcast a number of times Well, twice actually, I think, if you include the social media release that we did a little while back in the interstitial space when you were relaunching your great podcast, informed Dissent. He is also the author of a very good book called the United States of Fear, and I'm very glad to have him here. We also have Joshua Slocum from the Disaffected podcast. Joshua is one of my favorite podcasters. He has not only pithy things to say, but very insightful things to say about cluster B personality and broad social functioning at the level of the individual.
Speaker 1:So, without further ado, let's get into tonight's program. Tonight we have in front of us a forum that includes a question that I think a lot of Americans are pondering, and a lot of people in the Western world are pondering outside of the American borders, and that is how do we define the cultural divide? However we can define that, most people generally agree that there is something tectonic afoot. The cultures seem to be coming apart. There's a lot of tension that is difficult to define but very easy to intuit, and so I'd like to pick your brains tonight as to how you define it. A second part of this question is how do you observe it? Aside from personal conviction and rationality? How do we observe? How do we perhaps even measure? How do we convince? How do we persuade? How do we make the case that our concept of a cultural divide, however you define it, is in fact occurring.
Speaker 1:So, after each of you give your definition or answer to the question, then there's going to be a question from any of you, all of you. I'd like to ask a question to any of the others. Now, this is not going to go in a stepwise fashion. If all of you end up asking a question to the same person, that's okay. The reason that I'm doing it this way is because I don't believe in equity. I believe in equality of opportunity. So whoever has the best delivery is going to get the most questions and so forth. And you're all right, mature guys who can handle themselves. So we're going to start from the top in the middle with Hank Capel. Hank, please give us your answer to the question.
Speaker 2:Thanks, lucas, and thanks to this distinguished panel. My take is the so-called culture war is a product of at least four separate arenas of cultural conflict which in recent years, thanks to concepts like intersectionality, have all converged into one large multi-front culture war. What's interesting is each conflict arena. In each conflict arena, most of the past generation's demands are now the establishment position, but each one now faces more radical challenges. So I'm going to run through the four areas briefly. First there's sex, gender and family structure. This comes from the 1970s with things like second-wave feminism seeking equal pay and abortion rights, and also from the Stonewall gay rights movement, which was opposed by advocates of quote traditional family structure. Now, equal rights, feminism and gay marriage are pretty much establishment positions. The new battle lines focus much more farther out on deconstructing the two-parent family, granting legal recognition from multi-spouse polyamory and unconstrained gender fluidity policies.
Speaker 2:Arena number two is recreational drug usage. This comes out of the 1960s as well, with the counterculture. Today's establishment position is pretty much medical marijuana, decriminalization of same and for some still in dispute, full marijuana legalization. But today's battles involve decriminalizing harder drugs, imposing nonjudgmental harm reduction policies like needle exchange and electing Soros-funded DAs to stop prosecuting drug laws. Arena three is religion in the public square. This came out of things like the ACLU battles over school prayer. Today's battle lines involve efforts to just shut down prayer and public events and also ending religious constant doubts for folks like you know, baking gay wedding cakes and things like that. The last area that's kind of merged into it of late is DEI and critical theory on race, gender and sexuality. It came out of what is. It was very different from the 1950s 60s civil rights movement, which later came to include feminism and gay rights etc. Now the establishment position is Dr King's call for equal rights and judgment by one's content of the character, with today's battles focused on defining oppressor and oppressed groups, demanding reparative quotas in schools and jobs to achieve equity and et cetera.
Speaker 2:So at bottom I would say, underlying all these disputes are battles over boundaries, but generally conservatives seek to uphold and defend existing boundaries and so-called progressives emphasize and love to say what professors call transgressing the boundaries. My favorite summary of this goes back to 1968 with the Paris youth riots where they hang a bunch of posters that said it is forbidden to forbid. So question number two is what's the evidence of it? Am I just making this up out of whole cloth, I would say no. There are two arenas of evidence I would cite. One is legislative and litigation battles across the country that are highly visible Things like transgender rights to choose bathrooms and sports teams, polyamory partner benefit laws coming into play in municipalities, drug law battles over enforcement versus non-enforcement, religious conscience lawsuits over things like, as we said, the gay wedding cake baking and things like that. And school boards and state legislatures that are debating intensely over DEI and critical theory curricula.
Speaker 2:Second evidence route is polling data. Just two months ago, pew did a 2024 poll which shows the culture wars positions very closely aligned with the presidential preferences of voters. I'll just give you a couple examples. Asked if people can freely choose or change their gender, those who said yes were 9% of Trump voters, 59% of Biden voters. Asked if society is better when it focuses on marriage and child rearing, the yeses were 59% of Trump voters and just 19% of Biden voters. So I'll sum up by saying there is a deep divide on several cultural issues. It's real. The core issue is mostly upholding versus transgressing social behavioral boundaries and increasingly now it unites people across broad and very disparate ranges of partisan preferences, sometimes to the point of total absurdity, like my favorite example we've seen these last few months in campuses, queers for Palestine, which we all know. Queers in Palestine would never exist because they'd be murdered. That's my take.
Speaker 1:Very good, we're going to move to Wilfred Riley for his answer to the question.
Speaker 3:Go ahead, wilfred, I'd agree with a lot of that just right off the top. I mean, to me, the culture war at root is one thing conflict about what Western society is and should be, and this definitely defines what I think most people in my field of political science would call the core threads of culture war, faith, a conflict around quote-unquote wokeness, ie, dei, crt, the alphabet soup we see in business, the recent very practical racial reckoning that we've seen in society, the second through fourth, the later wave of feminism. So there's a lot of chaff here on the margin. But I really think there are two base visions that are involved, which Tom Sowell, for example, has outlined book-length a couple of times. And the first vision of Western society really is the vision that became prominent during the 19th century era of radicalism, which is that the US, the Five Eyes, the Euro, descent quote-unquote. White culture is bad, that America in particular is founded on, for example, the genocide of Native Americans, which I would argue never happened in any coherent form, the enslavement of black Americans, so on down the line, and our society is in need of total revamp and Root.
Speaker 3:What I would describe as wokeness or wokeism has three core principal components that are very much downstream of Marxist theory are very much downstream of Marxist theory. So the first one is that society is a trick to some, that what appear to be facially neutral systems intelligence testing in the schools or incarceration for rapists and wife beaters are in fact to oppress, and this is a position as a center-right political pundit it's said very often. I mean, if you read the New Jim Crow, for example, one of the first things of that bestselling book is we've replaced some extent is a joke, is a trick, is a scam. The goal of property laws, for example, is simply to protect the rich. The goal of standardized testing is simply to keep the white supremacist ruling class in power in educational institutions. The second point would be we can tell this oppression is occurring simply because there are disparities in performance, and again, this is entirely mainstream. This is Delgado and Stefancic, page seven, this is Ibram Kendi, almost every damn page of every book that the only possible explanation for group performance differences are either genetic inferiority at a level that no one wishes to even contemplate, or some kind of subtle racism, subtle bias in systems as a popular and I'll break character for a moment and note that this is nonsense, at least at mode. The average black man, 27 man, 58 dozens of variables play a role. That's the argument. And third claim is the the way to remedy? This is woody in the modern, which essentially means proportional representation without regard to performance. So if we see an underrepresentation of blacks among astronauts, the reason it must racism, and the solution is simply that 13% of astronauts must be black. I think a very prominent figure is Dr Kendi, during his day, which I believe is recently ended, robin D'Angelo people that have published both academically and nationally, have suggested, for example, the creation of a national department of anti-racism that would be in charge of overseeing this test National Department of Anti-Racism that would be in charge of overseeing this task.
Speaker 3:And this really is a core thread throughout everyone I've ever debated on any of these topics. For example, third-wave feminists believe the fact that women are more involved with early life childcare than men is a result of social conditioning of males. There was recently a debate on Twitter about why women appear to have darker sexual fantasies than men, initiated by the account known as DateSite. The argument feminist friends and sparring partners of mine preferred was that oppressive men have somehow made women adopt and believe in these fantasies. So where are you? One of these theories, this mold. I mean in in classic, vulgar marxism the ruling caste is the rich. Critical race theory simply subs out the rich man for the white man. Feminism subs out the rich man for the men, queer theory subs out the rich man for the straight man, so on down the line. The other viewpoint and I get to got about a minute left is actually less coherent. I mean, we're really in response mode I mean the last speaker, if I have that correct and what used to be radical theories are now absolutely mainstream. Gay marriage is US law. You give you some of that is good, some of that is bad, but we are now the reactionary minority, which is an interesting position.
Speaker 3:But the two core themes seem to be a reliance on tradition and what works, chesterton's fence, an assumption that it's there for a damned reason generally, and meritocracy. The key figure to me as a center-right black intellectual here would be Thomas Sowell, who's presented the idea of the vision of the benign. The mass information is very often circulated in society best by almost market style processes the interactions of millions of people every day, every time they run into one another, so that what most people think to be true for a very long period of time, women like heterosexual love relationship and they are not dreamed up by men to oppress women. That's very likely to be true. So people who hold this second vision are very likely to stick with core ideals of society, be those paparian takes on plans, the takes of the church, so on as versus modern. And now actually moving to the second point yeah, that that shows up in a great deal of data that we can track.
Speaker 3:As a political scientist, one of the most striking things we're seeing right now is an extraordinary level of polarization around virtually every issue, so that by knowing someone's position on one political issue, you can almost entirely, with a better than 85% level of certainty, predict their position on a whole range of other political issues.
Speaker 3:So knowing whether or not someone believes you can effectively change your sex or gender will, in most cases, tell you who they support in the Israel-Palestine war. But four issues where we see extraordinary polarization Palestine war. But four issues where we see extraordinary polarization CRT, DEI, education in the schools, the transgender question, obviously guns, arms for the private citizen and, to some extent, whether or not a more socialized model for the country is better overall to one sentence points one the large majority of young people think it is, which I find very troubling. And two, we're seeing a division between black and white, male and female. We really haven't seen to the same level before this era Men moving to the right, young white and African-American men, women moving very sharply to the left. So there is a real divide here and it's a divide over a real thing.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. We're going to move to Professor John Mills.
Speaker 4:This is a tough question to answer, so I'm going to just take a stab at it. I think the cultural divide not what people about in the US, but in the West, maybe on a broader scale is that there's fundamental differences in people's perception of social reality and that's very intimately tied to value-based clashes that divide society. So what we're seeing is an alarming degree of splitting, in psychoanalytic language, of people into groups and in bipolar camps where people are either good or bad. This is a binary logic of either-or thinking and it's an eclipse of critical thinking or a rational analysis of the nuances and contexts and factual, objective, social conditions that are more likely to favor a reductive way of thinking that centers around people's subjectivity, lived experience, feelings, and they're really based on fantasies that people project onto others or onto imaginary groups, and they construct this narrative of how they think reality really is and they view the world these ways. So the splittings, the binaries, the divisions that are based in these different perceptions and value judgments are really driven by a negation of otherness and juxtaposed to an affirmation of one's own group identifications. You know, whether they be political or social class. You know identarianism. You know such as culture, whatever that means, whatever culture you identify, race, religion, national origin and identity politics and this is really based on the psychology of blame. That means there's always someone else out there, some group, some entity or agency that is causing me suffering, and people need a whipping boy to scapegoat rather than to, you know, be troubled enough to think about the complexities of, you know, social collectives. And you know this was brewing for at least a whole decade and it was catalyzed with the election of Donald Trump. And so we see even more divisions. At that stage, we see more of a progressive, if not an illiberal, progressivism on the left and a popularism on the right. So you see the splitting this is more of the objective evidence that takes place on more of a group or social collective level.
Speaker 4:So now, of course, the pandemic only exacerbated everybody's primal fears of anxiety, of difference, of paranoia, of threats to safety, to triggering and dredging up project hate onto the perceived threatening object. And of course, it's all done under the moral guise of social justice. And then this, of course, is fueled by a victimization mentality that maintains these divisions that both Hank and Wilford just mentioned. So what's that conjure up? It conjures up a really primitive way of thinking about the complexities of our world. I'm right, you're wrong. Based upon my identity, you're different than mine, and it's become so commonplace that even we see a very naive way of thinking in the academy, all plated.
Speaker 4:So this is the value-based clashes, I think, that are fueling many different aspects. You're the do or done to kind of you know narrative that you see, of course everyone's lumped into some, you know, group, usually based on the color of their skin or sexuality. You know just, you know the identity. Politics are everywhere. But this conjures up this notion of entitlement and this feeling that, because you've hurt me, I resent you, and this Nietzschean resentment, the rancor, the animosity, the hatred that I have for you because you are the cause of my suffering, is out of control.
Speaker 4:Now, people have no filters, they can't regulate their affect, they can't think about again integrating these complexities. So they, they displace them onto these abstract systems. So like what? What is that Like? Capitalism now is to blame colonialism, white supremacy If you're white, you're a supremacist. You know the systemic racism. What do you mean by a system here? But whatever it is, these injustices, people feel that it was intensified by the murder of George Floyd, and this is where I think things really started to have an international trickle effect. So that's a little bit of a background.
Speaker 4:But there are these layering that are more complex, that are also more on a collective scale, and I look at these as falling into three major groups. One would be the social and economic, or seeing wealth disparities among people. The other one is the global impact of geopolitics and the third is even a larger kind of global notion of existential threats to our existence. So the first, with these economic disparities you have. Obviously the pandemic was um the uh springboard to this, but we see, objectively speaking, that there's been downward social mobility in the masses, like basic needs are not being met, the the, the inflation and cost of food and energy and housing. You know people can't even afford rent, let alone a home now.
Speaker 4:So if people can't afford to live, you know it has massive hardships on families. The household debt is ballooned and when that happens, the stress, it really impacts on your physical health. That happens, the stress, it really impacts on your physical health. And when you have physically related health issues that inhibit people from being able to work, you've got a loss all the way around. And those kinds of internal pressures within communities lead to systemic familial pathologies. So you see, then parents have attachment deficits that they engender in their kids. They can't take care of them. You have split families, you have the transgenerational transmission of traumas that result over and over again. You have addictions, you have domestic abuse and you have mental illness.
Speaker 4:So now that is then to be experienced in the background of the geopolitics. Here you've got civil violence that's breaking out everywhere. You have military conflict in every inhabitable continent, and the biggest, bigger threat here is the disinformation that we see in information technologies and the social media pathology. You can't even trust the news, you can't tell what's true from what's not, and when that stuff happens, we're seeing a gradual erosion of national unity and democracy is starting to break down, and democracy is starting to break down. Then you have the international alliances that become even more fragile. Like you know, you had mass diasporas. You have migrant invasions and things like this, and then what's looming above all of that of our planetary catastrophe, is the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear engagement and the modern armament of increasing our nuclear arsenals by the superpowers. You have overpopulation. That's then becoming like a pressure cooker that is creating more and more panic, insecurity, anxiety and criminality. So law and order is now in a precarious state.
Speaker 4:But getting back to this disinformation we're seeing more of this in our face every day. It's in your algorithms. You're seeing more and more of something that you would never see in the past, because you're getting bombarded with it and then people get worked up, they see it over and over and over and then they think that it's happening at a massive scale, when it might be a little fragment of what's really happening in the broader social spectrum. But what this bottom line means is that there's some feeling that the metaphysical order of the cosmos is in chaos here. Cosmos is in chaos here and we feel you know, you're just watching how people are deteriorating, yeah, yeah, and the way they. They think we're living now in a completely unstable world thank you very much, dr mills.
Speaker 1:I'm going to turn to joshua slocum j. Josh, go ahead.
Speaker 6:So what explains the divide in our culture? There are a number of things, and I have a hard time anymore teasing out causes and effects. I think I can do pretty well at describing what is going on, but the relationships between them seem murkier to me than they did in years past. Between them seem murkier to me than than they did in years past. I look at, I come to this from a perspective um, having been in the past a woke liberal progressive. Um, I am not now I am, I consider myself, a conservative. I I see this, I think, from both sides.
Speaker 6:I remember what it was like to believe in the things that all of you have been citing no-transcript, but I emotional instability, moral subjectivity and relativism. We have elevated the traits of actual personality disorders such as narcissistic personality, borderline personality, histrionic personality personality. Borderline personality, histrionic personality, antisocial personality. We have elevated those to social and personal goods.
Speaker 6:I come from a family headed by a mother with both borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. So all of the very typical outcomes of such an abusive childhood were present in my home. There was incest, there was emotional incest, there was physical abuse, there was psychological abuse, there was parentification children being made to take care of their parents, who were emotionally broken and unable to do so because I didn't understand my life trajectory and why I had turned out the way I did until about eight years ago, when I had to have a crisis confrontation with my mother and really reevaluate my life. To my horror, I look out at the world and I say this on my show. We are living in a version of my mother's crazy deranged cluster B funhouse mirror world. What used to be domestic abuse has gone public and feral, and I think there are crazy deranged cluster B funhouse mirror world. What used to be domestic abuse has gone public and feral, and I think there are several I would point out several dominant strains that show this.
Speaker 6:What divides us? Well, to me, there's a very stark divide between people who are able to think and people who believe that they are thinking, but they are, in fact, only emoting, they are only feeling. We see this reflected in the way our lexicon changes. You almost never hear, and this has happened in a very short time. This has happened in less than 10 years and it's happening with men and with women working class people all the way to professionals. It's happening with men and with women working class people all the way to professionals. You never hear someone say and you never see them write that they think something. They sit, they feel this, don't you feel that the tax rate is 15%? It's not a question of whether I feel that the tax rate either is or is not 15%, that doesn't matter anymore. Feelings have taken over.
Speaker 6:So we have a number of people and I used to be one of these people who believe that they are thinking, but they are not thinking at all. There's no rational mentation going on, there's only having emotions. That's what's going on, and we have a large segment of the population about half the population that in most ways are fundamentally disconnected from reality. They do not or cannot or are unwilling to recognize the existence of anything like an objective fact. This drives our political decisions. It drives our decisions about what we buy and what we don't buy.
Speaker 6:Another dominant strain in this problem is the almost complete feminization of society, both at the individual level, in our social relations with each other, in economics, in politics. The female style, the emotional, relational style that advocates would say is approaching the world with an empathetic point of view, has taken over the masculine men themselves. Maleness and anything that we describe as masculinity has been coded and described and accepted as inherently wicked, inherently destructive. As somebody who used to describe himself as a male feminist, I look at men, like I used to be now, and I see them as extraordinarily misguided. I understand some of the reasons why men go to that place, but I really do believe that we are in an inverted reality. That's what a narcissistic outlook does To me, one of the cores of pathological narcissism not healthy levels of narcissism or self-regard, but pathological levels One of the things that defines it is inversion of the truth. Black is white, up is down, beautiful is ugly, ugly is beautiful, abuse is caring. We are living in a world of reversals. We are in a narcissistic society, society and it is very difficult for many people to recognize it or to name it, partially because we are in a feminized, narcissistic society. Um, despite the claims of feminists, there is no such thing in the western world as anything even approaching a patriarchy and in fact, um, I would submit that we are. We are living in a female rule regime and feminists will object and say well, there aren't as many female senators as there are male and there aren't as many CEOs. Completely, well, of course, feminism, which has become mainstream. It's not just this isn't an academia anymore. This is not 10 percent of the left, this is mainstream.
Speaker 6:Received opinion Does not believe in the power behind the throne. And feminine power, when it's exercised pathologically, is exercised indirectly. It is exercised through implication, insinuation, reputation management and with a maternal face, a tearful lady, bountiful, our lady sort of. I'm going to take care of all my little queer children. I'm going to take care of all my huddled masses. Get out of this. If we don't bring back a balance of masculinity to the way we run the world and if we do not demand of ourselves and other people that we actually engage with objective reality in front of us and stop talking about our feelings, I do not have very much optimism for the outcome of our society.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, josh, and we're going to move to Dr Mark McDonald, who is last but certainly not least.
Speaker 5:Go ahead, dr McDonald my fundamental thesis of why the country appears to be divided. And this question is asked to me very frequently and when I hear other people answer it not people here today, but people in society who are trying to find amicable solutions or answers to the question I frequently become angry, because usually the answer to this question is something along the lines of we need to find a middle ground that only works if both poles are to some degree correct and worthy and healthy. If one pole is not, if one pole is, then meeting in the middle is not a solution. So the premise of my response to this question is that we are not facing a cultural divide that's based on something like politics Republican versus Democrat. In fact, I would say that the political divide is actually a symptom or an expression of the more fundamental problem which, as Josh pointed out, is actually quite psychological. John said the same thing in different terms, in different foci divide that we have in the us is based upon a divergence into two groups of people who see reality fundamentally differently. That's a psychological problem. That's not a political problem, that's not an economic problem, that's not a linguistic problem. It's not even really a cultural problem, although it shows up in our culture. It's actually a core mental deficit, and I think that we have core mental deficits in our country that have been collectivized and have been validated and have been extolled and have been turned into norms. We have normalized pathology.
Speaker 5:A few examples probably the most strident of these examples is the statement that men menstruate. You either believe that that's true or you don't. There's no meeting in the middle. Well, men menstruate, but only every other month, unlike women who menstruate monthly. That's a nice middle ground, right? That's equally absurd. There are other, less obviously absurd but equally factually provably false, dividing points in our country, such as the belief that climate change is an existential crisis. This is exemplified by a recent poll taken among university students who, the majority of whom, responded with the comment that they agreed with the following statement that, due to climate change, climate change we would be I would be in favor of rationing food and money. That's sick. Another america is fundamentally racist. That began under obama and now it's become not even controversial but accepted among a certain plurality of Americans. And then, third, that masculinity is fundamentally toxic. These statements would not have been debatable 10, 15, 20 years ago. They would have been considered expressions of insanity. Now they're not debated because they're accepted as truths.
Speaker 5:It appears to me that in my practice and out in society, I'm seeing the exact same thing. I'm seeing that the expression of my patient's pathology is displayed and is on display in our society, which has become a larger world of pathology that leads to irrational thinking bound in unrestricted passion. I don't believe that there's a solution to this that can be found by meeting in the middle, that can be found by compromise, that can be found by empathy, sensitivity, inclusion, discussion, apologies, in other words, everything that Josh describes as the feminine mystique. That doesn't work, because I believe he accurately described our society as already having been feminized. So, once a society is utterly feminized, there's no way to find a meeting in the middle by expressing and extolling more feminine virtue. It doesn't work that way. I believe that the solution is not political, it's not even really cultural, because I think the culture is the exemplar, the exemplification of the pathology. It has to stem and arrive from something more fundamental that makes up our culture, and that would be the following Number one, it would be family.
Speaker 5:We do not support families anymore. Family is no longer a value. Any civilization that does not extol families as fundamental fails. There is no historical example of this, at least in modern times, to the opposite, outside of tribal cultures. The second is religion. We are a secular society. Secular societies do not fare well. When secular societies, when religious societies become secular, they wither and they fail. And the third is male and female role models. Man, woman, husband, wife, mother, father. We do not even believe in role models anymore that are sex-driven, biologically bifurcated. If we do not return role models from parents to children, children will not grow up with the capacity to differentiate reality and fantasy, and they aren't, and that's why they're sick and that's why they're feminized and that's why they're narcissistic, histrionic and borderline. If we can get back to reinforcing I would say even refinding rediscovering family, religion and male and female role models, we will have solved about 80 of the worst problems that we are being confronted with today with the cultural divide.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, dr McDonald. And now we're going to move on to the second structured part of the evening, where each of us can ask a question or two to any of the rest of the panel members, and let's start at the top again with Hank Capel. Go ahead, hank, select one person that you'd like to ask a question to and then fire away. Okay, and from here you can listen to the full episode. If you go to realclearpodcastcom or click the link in the show notes below, it's only $4.99 a month, or if you buy an annual membership, you get a pretty big discount, so I recommend it. You'll get access to everything that I'm doing all episodes, uninterrupted essays and Sunday news releases. It's well worth it. And turn other people on to realclearpodcastcom with Lucas Klein.