I thought a fitting first video for the beginning of a new year would be a video about why I talk about the things I talk about after all. I've been on YouTube for quite some time, as many of you know, and I certainly have a set of priorities when it comes to discussing various things. Some of the more obvious things are my concern for men's issues. I think men are struggling quite a bit, and I've never ceased being concerned about that.
But there are other issues that I'm concerned with from a broader, more macroscopic perspective that I also try to drill home and talk about a lot. And that is why we are the way we are, as in, why are human beings the way we are? We are Apes after all, as we all know, and why are we the particular type of ape that we are? And why do we behave the way we do? Why do we do the things that we do? These are very important questions to ask and even more important questions to answer. And I talk about it because I think it is probably more or less the most important thing anyone can understand at a basic level.
Now, if you were to go up to the average person and say, "Why do you think people are the way they are?" I suspect many people, not all, but many people might give an answer along the lines of, "Well, you are the way you are because of how you were raised by your parents and where you grew up and things of that nature." And of course, there's a smidgen, a kernel of truth to that, but it doesn't really capture fundamentally the reason why we are the way we are.
One thing I've talked about seemingly ad nauseum, and I won't cease talking about this until my dying day, is of course, the importance of understanding the evolutionary perspective, context, and our own evolutionary background. We are animals, we are Apes, we are descended from a long line of successful mammals to get where we have gotten to. And it is not just difficult, it's impossible to separate our behavior and how we are these days from where we came from in terms of our origins.
And of course, as many of you know, I have railed for a very long time against the very common hokey perspective that purely culture and purely society are the determining factors in our behavior and how we got to be how we got to be. Oftentimes, culture and society take the form of a type of circular reasoning.
We behave the way we behave, men, women, different individuals, because society conditions us to be this way. And then you ask the question, where did society get the conditioning in the first place? And they never seem to have an answer to that question or they evade it. Eventually, if you're thinking clearly, you have to come up with some kind of origin that at least takes into account some aspect of biology and where we came from.
After all, culture and society could not have emerged in a vacuum. It's been a very gradual process. And so, you have to think of these things even in 2024. I dare say when it comes to human beings, the common person, and I'm almost certain of this, really thinks, perhaps not constantly, but they really do think that when people talk about evolution and gorillas and chimpanzees and lions and all these animals, talking about something else entirely, and we exist in our own little bubble.
We're separate from that somehow. We have shrugged off this influence, somehow we have shrugged off this burden of evolutionary weight. Because let's be perfectly honest, I don't blame them. Everything we can observe in society seems to be geared towards that. In the sense that when we look out at the world, we see buildings and skyscrapers and cafes and video games and all these complex things that emerge from culture and human ingenuity, and we think, "Wow, this is us outstripping ourselves and evading our evolutionary nature."
However, as you all know, upon closer inspection, it becomes very obvious that virtually everything we do has some kind of evolutionary motivation. You want to be successful? Well, why, particularly as a male? Because status equates, on average, with attracting more mates, reproductive success.
People chase money. Money is necessary for survival. In former times, money would not have been the coin of the realm, no pun intended, but rather the byproducts of the hunt or the amount of cattle you might have owned, which still persists in certain societies. So, status is really important. People are obsessed with status. And survival is important as well. But why is that? Well, because ultimately, most of us want to pass on our genes. And even if we don't want to actively pass on our genes, that subconscious drive undergirds everything we do. It undergirds what I do, it undergirds what you do. We simply cannot escape that evolutionary nature that has been imprinted upon us, being the byproducts of tens of millions of years of mammalian evolution. You simply cannot escape that type of trajectory.
And so, as I said, a cursory glance reveals much. But the problem is, and this is why I'm sort of in a state of psychological or cultural war with many individuals, is that very few people openly acknowledge those evolutionary roots. Which is to say, they will say, "Of course, evolution is real, of course, it took place." This is what I call lip service evolution. You might be familiar with me saying that, but it doesn't have any real impact.
Now, not in 2024, this is the current year, we are well past that point. But unfortunately, we're not. And when we don't take that into account, we are at risk of a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, which is what has transpired over the last couple of decades and has accelerated in the past decade and a half or so. And this is particularly true of the left, because both the right and the left, broadly speaking, are adversarial or antagonistic towards evolutionary theory and its impact on us.
On the one hand, in terms of the right, its typically religious leanings, God, blah, blah, blah. But in the left, it's something else. It's not really God. So, the left will say, "Yes, evolution is all true and real, but we're better than that. We're human beings." So, there's a kind of special quality to being a human being that sets us apart from other Apes.
Now, on some level, that's actually true. We are very distinct, even unique Apes compared to gorillas and chimpanzees and Gibbons and orangutans. It's obviously and absolutely true. But we're not that different. And so, the left needs to, of course, acknowledge this. But they can't actually properly acknowledge it because if they did, their entire system of thought, their theory of everything being social conditioning, would fall apart.
The right is these days, of course, much less influential, particularly the religious aspect of the right. And so, it's less of a concern. But again, most people that I've engaged with and observed do not take into account why we do the things we do. Ultimately, it has to have an evolutionary origin. It cannot be found in a circular social conditioning theory that is often proposed to be the be-all and end-all.
The other thing I've taken to talking about quite a lot in the last two or three years in particular is the importance and influence of genes. Because again, if you were to ask people why people behave the way they do, why they are the way they are, how they are the way they are, they'll just say something like, "Well, it's where they grew up, it's how they were raised." Again, there's a smidgen of truth to that and we can talk about environmental influences.
But the reality is, and this of course goes hand in hand very neatly in fact with our evolutionary origins, the reality is that we are not but genes and environment. The genes are the hardware, as it were, the environment is the software. But to ask the question why X person is the way that they are, well, the answer is pretty simple. Even not knowing all the details or most of the details, they are the way they are because they had a certain set of genes and they grew up in a certain type of environment. And that's the reason why they are.
Now, of course, there is the notion of how they were raised, and I'm going to talk about this in a separate video, but it is true that that contributes to a degree. But only in a very minimalistic sense. And the principle here, as I've talked about before, is it's very easy to break something. It's very easy to destroy a house rather than build one. Likewise with human beings, negative parental influences from the parental environment can be very destructive and completely derail the course of a child. And later on in life, you know, as an adult, depending on how great the damage has been with respect to the child. But neutral or positive influences really don't have that much an effect based on the research and based on observation.
So, my father, who has always been a nice guy in this respect, said, "Well, the reason why you liked X is because I read to you." No, what parents do, of course, is they respond to their children's instincts, needs, and wants. So, you might have a child who's very sporty, very jockey, he likes, and so what are you doing? Well, he has those instincts. And then you take him to Little League, he engages in X and Y and Z, and eventually, he gets very involved in athletics and sports. That's you as a parent engaging in nurture, responding to nature. Because nurture ultimately is an aspect of nature.
And on this point, it's important to drive home, as I did in my previous video, that when you look at different outcomes in life, they are yes, entirely due to a combination of genes and environment. And the bitter pill to swallow here, of course, is that when it matters most in terms of the environment, you have absolutely no control.
Basically, ages 0 to 5, by the time you finally get out of the prison of childhood, most of the damage has either been done or has not been done. And the environment, in as much as it shaped you, has been that environment you did not have much control up until you became a young adult. And by then, it is very difficult to change core personality traits that you would readily associate with yourself, never mind the genes.
Ultimately, different outcomes are attributable to genes in the sense that you have the hardware or the clay, it is molded. But the hardware is different from individual to individual. There's no version of myself, at least in this universe, that could have been a prodigious accountant much like Py the great ginger punani slayer is. I could not be an accountant. I don't have the mental wherewithal, I don't have the interest, I don't have the desire, it's just not there. And so, that wasn't going to happen. Why is Sir Py the punani slayer able to do it? Well, because that's how he's wired, in no small measure due to his genes.
So, over the year, I will be talking a lot more about this in greater detail. But what I'm really speaking out against here is the blank slate mentality that a lot of people have, in particular, the notion that environment has this enormously elastic influence on your personality, on your being, how you are, completely discounting genes.
And again, environment is important to a degree, mostly in a negative sense, but especially when you're really young, the environmental interventions people talk about would probably be most effective between the ages of zero and five, not when they're 15 or 20. And so, a lot of this is amiss because people simply refuse to acknowledge that human beings are different, they differ in terms of their attitudes, they differ in terms of their personality, they differ in terms of their intelligence, their ability to achieve.
And the current meta, as it were, or the current ideology tells us otherwise, tells us that we are endlessly flexible in what we can do and what we can become. And it's a paradoxical because both the right and the left have issues with genes. The right, as I've discussed before, believes in the virtue of hard work and believes that anyone can work hard, it's a freebie, it's not that some people are naturally more conscientious than others, they just choose it somehow, it's sort of fairy dust, right? The left doesn't want to acknowledge the importance of genes mostly for historical reasons because they fear it would lead to some sort of horrific political institutionalization of policies that would wipe out people or something like that. But the reality is that there's no way of getting around this anymore.
If you want to understand why we're different, why some people do certain things and other people do not, we're going to have to begin a cultural revolution of sorts. Now, I am small potatoes. I'm small fries. I'm a nobody here on YouTube, but I'm trying to make my dent here even if only some individuals become aware of this because the reality has remained that people are adamantly opposed to this idea, broadly speaking.
They don't want to accept things like the idea of stratification being due to things like genes, they don't want to accept that not everyone can be X and vice versa because in theory, it is possible to improve many of these things. But you first have to understand their origins, where this all comes from. All we are are genes and environment and we came from a very long history and prehistory of things outside of us. And if you want to understand how we actually are, you have to do that. You have to take that leap and attempt even at a basic level to understand our ultimate origins.
And yes, it matters. It matters in your daily life too because when you understand that people are byproducts of their genes and environment, you're less likely to make all kinds of incorrect attribution errors when it comes to their behavior, when it comes to their being, when it comes to what they've done in their life and what they've not done in their life. Attribution errors are legion and I don't think they're very helpful. So, ultimately, and I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon, all of us, whatever our particular polarities, whatever you particularly think about certain things, need to get on the same page when it comes to the basics of human behavior and the basics of human being.
Before we even get into the details, how did we get to be what we are? What are the continuing influences of this evolutionary past and why are we the way we are right now? Genes and environment, and it's all interconnected and interlinked. However, we are not on the same page right now. There are many people across the board, across the political aisle, from every perspective imaginable that will discount these multifarious influences and attribute to something like, "That's just the house you grew up in," or something as nebulous as "society."
Now, I'm not particularly optimistic on the front of winning this war of ideas, but I think it's so important to understand because once we understand the basics of this connection between our evolutionary past and our present and our nature as byproducts of genes and environment, only then will we be able to craft an appropriate understanding and theory of how we ought to optimize things. And since we are currently in the throws of a genomic revolution of sorts and things are changing rapidly, a lot of this might be inevitable in the sense that people are going to avail themselves of many forms of technology, all the while publicly disavow much of this.
And we need to push for getting rid of this double standard. We need to push for society, broadly speaking, being on the same page when it comes to these very basic things, which are sometimes counterintuitive. But we need to push past that and accept that we are animals and that we are animals that are born of genes and environment, and that genes are a huge, if not the hugest, contributing factor to how we end up being the way we end up being.
Until we get there, I will be fighting this war for the foreseeable future, a war of ideas, of course, a war of psychology. But this has to be said, and I think that's an appropriate message for the New Year. Anyway, as always, thank you for tuning in.
But there are other issues that I'm concerned with from a broader, more macroscopic perspective that I also try to drill home and talk about a lot. And that is why we are the way we are, as in, why are human beings the way we are? We are Apes after all, as we all know, and why are we the particular type of ape that we are? And why do we behave the way we do? Why do we do the things that we do? These are very important questions to ask and even more important questions to answer. And I talk about it because I think it is probably more or less the most important thing anyone can understand at a basic level.
Now, if you were to go up to the average person and say, "Why do you think people are the way they are?" I suspect many people, not all, but many people might give an answer along the lines of, "Well, you are the way you are because of how you were raised by your parents and where you grew up and things of that nature." And of course, there's a smidgen, a kernel of truth to that, but it doesn't really capture fundamentally the reason why we are the way we are.
One thing I've talked about seemingly ad nauseum, and I won't cease talking about this until my dying day, is of course, the importance of understanding the evolutionary perspective, context, and our own evolutionary background. We are animals, we are Apes, we are descended from a long line of successful mammals to get where we have gotten to. And it is not just difficult, it's impossible to separate our behavior and how we are these days from where we came from in terms of our origins.
And of course, as many of you know, I have railed for a very long time against the very common hokey perspective that purely culture and purely society are the determining factors in our behavior and how we got to be how we got to be. Oftentimes, culture and society take the form of a type of circular reasoning.
We behave the way we behave, men, women, different individuals, because society conditions us to be this way. And then you ask the question, where did society get the conditioning in the first place? And they never seem to have an answer to that question or they evade it. Eventually, if you're thinking clearly, you have to come up with some kind of origin that at least takes into account some aspect of biology and where we came from.
After all, culture and society could not have emerged in a vacuum. It's been a very gradual process. And so, you have to think of these things even in 2024. I dare say when it comes to human beings, the common person, and I'm almost certain of this, really thinks, perhaps not constantly, but they really do think that when people talk about evolution and gorillas and chimpanzees and lions and all these animals, talking about something else entirely, and we exist in our own little bubble.
We're separate from that somehow. We have shrugged off this influence, somehow we have shrugged off this burden of evolutionary weight. Because let's be perfectly honest, I don't blame them. Everything we can observe in society seems to be geared towards that. In the sense that when we look out at the world, we see buildings and skyscrapers and cafes and video games and all these complex things that emerge from culture and human ingenuity, and we think, "Wow, this is us outstripping ourselves and evading our evolutionary nature."
However, as you all know, upon closer inspection, it becomes very obvious that virtually everything we do has some kind of evolutionary motivation. You want to be successful? Well, why, particularly as a male? Because status equates, on average, with attracting more mates, reproductive success.
People chase money. Money is necessary for survival. In former times, money would not have been the coin of the realm, no pun intended, but rather the byproducts of the hunt or the amount of cattle you might have owned, which still persists in certain societies. So, status is really important. People are obsessed with status. And survival is important as well. But why is that? Well, because ultimately, most of us want to pass on our genes. And even if we don't want to actively pass on our genes, that subconscious drive undergirds everything we do. It undergirds what I do, it undergirds what you do. We simply cannot escape that evolutionary nature that has been imprinted upon us, being the byproducts of tens of millions of years of mammalian evolution. You simply cannot escape that type of trajectory.
And so, as I said, a cursory glance reveals much. But the problem is, and this is why I'm sort of in a state of psychological or cultural war with many individuals, is that very few people openly acknowledge those evolutionary roots. Which is to say, they will say, "Of course, evolution is real, of course, it took place." This is what I call lip service evolution. You might be familiar with me saying that, but it doesn't have any real impact.
Now, not in 2024, this is the current year, we are well past that point. But unfortunately, we're not. And when we don't take that into account, we are at risk of a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, which is what has transpired over the last couple of decades and has accelerated in the past decade and a half or so. And this is particularly true of the left, because both the right and the left, broadly speaking, are adversarial or antagonistic towards evolutionary theory and its impact on us.
On the one hand, in terms of the right, its typically religious leanings, God, blah, blah, blah. But in the left, it's something else. It's not really God. So, the left will say, "Yes, evolution is all true and real, but we're better than that. We're human beings." So, there's a kind of special quality to being a human being that sets us apart from other Apes.
Now, on some level, that's actually true. We are very distinct, even unique Apes compared to gorillas and chimpanzees and Gibbons and orangutans. It's obviously and absolutely true. But we're not that different. And so, the left needs to, of course, acknowledge this. But they can't actually properly acknowledge it because if they did, their entire system of thought, their theory of everything being social conditioning, would fall apart.
The right is these days, of course, much less influential, particularly the religious aspect of the right. And so, it's less of a concern. But again, most people that I've engaged with and observed do not take into account why we do the things we do. Ultimately, it has to have an evolutionary origin. It cannot be found in a circular social conditioning theory that is often proposed to be the be-all and end-all.
The other thing I've taken to talking about quite a lot in the last two or three years in particular is the importance and influence of genes. Because again, if you were to ask people why people behave the way they do, why they are the way they are, how they are the way they are, they'll just say something like, "Well, it's where they grew up, it's how they were raised." Again, there's a smidgen of truth to that and we can talk about environmental influences.
But the reality is, and this of course goes hand in hand very neatly in fact with our evolutionary origins, the reality is that we are not but genes and environment. The genes are the hardware, as it were, the environment is the software. But to ask the question why X person is the way that they are, well, the answer is pretty simple. Even not knowing all the details or most of the details, they are the way they are because they had a certain set of genes and they grew up in a certain type of environment. And that's the reason why they are.
Now, of course, there is the notion of how they were raised, and I'm going to talk about this in a separate video, but it is true that that contributes to a degree. But only in a very minimalistic sense. And the principle here, as I've talked about before, is it's very easy to break something. It's very easy to destroy a house rather than build one. Likewise with human beings, negative parental influences from the parental environment can be very destructive and completely derail the course of a child. And later on in life, you know, as an adult, depending on how great the damage has been with respect to the child. But neutral or positive influences really don't have that much an effect based on the research and based on observation.
So, my father, who has always been a nice guy in this respect, said, "Well, the reason why you liked X is because I read to you." No, what parents do, of course, is they respond to their children's instincts, needs, and wants. So, you might have a child who's very sporty, very jockey, he likes, and so what are you doing? Well, he has those instincts. And then you take him to Little League, he engages in X and Y and Z, and eventually, he gets very involved in athletics and sports. That's you as a parent engaging in nurture, responding to nature. Because nurture ultimately is an aspect of nature.
And on this point, it's important to drive home, as I did in my previous video, that when you look at different outcomes in life, they are yes, entirely due to a combination of genes and environment. And the bitter pill to swallow here, of course, is that when it matters most in terms of the environment, you have absolutely no control.
Basically, ages 0 to 5, by the time you finally get out of the prison of childhood, most of the damage has either been done or has not been done. And the environment, in as much as it shaped you, has been that environment you did not have much control up until you became a young adult. And by then, it is very difficult to change core personality traits that you would readily associate with yourself, never mind the genes.
Ultimately, different outcomes are attributable to genes in the sense that you have the hardware or the clay, it is molded. But the hardware is different from individual to individual. There's no version of myself, at least in this universe, that could have been a prodigious accountant much like Py the great ginger punani slayer is. I could not be an accountant. I don't have the mental wherewithal, I don't have the interest, I don't have the desire, it's just not there. And so, that wasn't going to happen. Why is Sir Py the punani slayer able to do it? Well, because that's how he's wired, in no small measure due to his genes.
So, over the year, I will be talking a lot more about this in greater detail. But what I'm really speaking out against here is the blank slate mentality that a lot of people have, in particular, the notion that environment has this enormously elastic influence on your personality, on your being, how you are, completely discounting genes.
And again, environment is important to a degree, mostly in a negative sense, but especially when you're really young, the environmental interventions people talk about would probably be most effective between the ages of zero and five, not when they're 15 or 20. And so, a lot of this is amiss because people simply refuse to acknowledge that human beings are different, they differ in terms of their attitudes, they differ in terms of their personality, they differ in terms of their intelligence, their ability to achieve.
And the current meta, as it were, or the current ideology tells us otherwise, tells us that we are endlessly flexible in what we can do and what we can become. And it's a paradoxical because both the right and the left have issues with genes. The right, as I've discussed before, believes in the virtue of hard work and believes that anyone can work hard, it's a freebie, it's not that some people are naturally more conscientious than others, they just choose it somehow, it's sort of fairy dust, right? The left doesn't want to acknowledge the importance of genes mostly for historical reasons because they fear it would lead to some sort of horrific political institutionalization of policies that would wipe out people or something like that. But the reality is that there's no way of getting around this anymore.
If you want to understand why we're different, why some people do certain things and other people do not, we're going to have to begin a cultural revolution of sorts. Now, I am small potatoes. I'm small fries. I'm a nobody here on YouTube, but I'm trying to make my dent here even if only some individuals become aware of this because the reality has remained that people are adamantly opposed to this idea, broadly speaking.
They don't want to accept things like the idea of stratification being due to things like genes, they don't want to accept that not everyone can be X and vice versa because in theory, it is possible to improve many of these things. But you first have to understand their origins, where this all comes from. All we are are genes and environment and we came from a very long history and prehistory of things outside of us. And if you want to understand how we actually are, you have to do that. You have to take that leap and attempt even at a basic level to understand our ultimate origins.
And yes, it matters. It matters in your daily life too because when you understand that people are byproducts of their genes and environment, you're less likely to make all kinds of incorrect attribution errors when it comes to their behavior, when it comes to their being, when it comes to what they've done in their life and what they've not done in their life. Attribution errors are legion and I don't think they're very helpful. So, ultimately, and I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon, all of us, whatever our particular polarities, whatever you particularly think about certain things, need to get on the same page when it comes to the basics of human behavior and the basics of human being.
Before we even get into the details, how did we get to be what we are? What are the continuing influences of this evolutionary past and why are we the way we are right now? Genes and environment, and it's all interconnected and interlinked. However, we are not on the same page right now. There are many people across the board, across the political aisle, from every perspective imaginable that will discount these multifarious influences and attribute to something like, "That's just the house you grew up in," or something as nebulous as "society."
Now, I'm not particularly optimistic on the front of winning this war of ideas, but I think it's so important to understand because once we understand the basics of this connection between our evolutionary past and our present and our nature as byproducts of genes and environment, only then will we be able to craft an appropriate understanding and theory of how we ought to optimize things. And since we are currently in the throws of a genomic revolution of sorts and things are changing rapidly, a lot of this might be inevitable in the sense that people are going to avail themselves of many forms of technology, all the while publicly disavow much of this.
And we need to push for getting rid of this double standard. We need to push for society, broadly speaking, being on the same page when it comes to these very basic things, which are sometimes counterintuitive. But we need to push past that and accept that we are animals and that we are animals that are born of genes and environment, and that genes are a huge, if not the hugest, contributing factor to how we end up being the way we end up being.
Until we get there, I will be fighting this war for the foreseeable future, a war of ideas, of course, a war of psychology. But this has to be said, and I think that's an appropriate message for the New Year. Anyway, as always, thank you for tuning in.
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