The death of democracy? Why unintelligent protest may wreck society
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Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying rose to prominence as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web after she and her husband, Professor Bret Weinstein, spoke out against a planned “Day of Absence” at Evergreen State College, where white students, staff and teachers would vacate campus and only minority students would remain. Their opposition to the event led to accusations of racism and a string of protests, threats, and violence, leading The Seattle Times to call the college a “national caricature of intolerant campus liberalism.”
Democracy depends on protest, Heying asserts above, but a new strain of unintelligent protest on the Left may damage the very values liberals are trying to protect. “Increasingly we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done,” she says. “… But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme Right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous—but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy.”
In this video, Heying looks at tribalism and dissent from an evolutionary perspective, and highlights how technology has hijacked our ancient brain to create a more polarized society than ever before. Follow Heather on twitter: @HeatherEHeying and on Medium and through her website,
heatherheying.com.
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HEATHER HEYING:
Heather Heying is an evolutionary biologist and former Professor at Evergreen State College. She applies the tool kit of evolutionary theory to problems large and small, some seemingly intractable, some possibly trivial—what to eat, how to teach and parent and be an upstanding citizen, what to avoid, and what to seek.
Heather came to prominence after she and her husband, Bret Weinstein, stood up to supporters of an enforced “Day of Absence” for white staff and teachers at Evergreen State College.
Follow Heather on twitter: @HeatherEHeying and on Medium and through her website, heatherheying.com.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Heather Heying: Society-wide, people are becoming ever more tribal. And tribalism is as old as social groups, which is older than humans. So it’s no surprise that people are looking to find those who sound the most like them, and who they imagine will be the most likely to keep them in their heads when things go wrong. But the way that it’s manifesting is a particularly modern instantiation that I don’t think we’ve seen before.
So protest is old and is honorable and is important; we must be allowed, in any system that calls itself democratic, to dissent. Increasingly, we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done, and that’s dangerous, and it comes from a place of fear, and fear is very powerful evolutionarily. It rises to the top of the emotions when it shows up, and it’s hard to get through the fear with an argument that is rational. Emotion and rationality don’t tend to interface with one another very well, and some of the language that we’re hearing from the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum—I’m not sure that calling it a spectrum is really apt, but everyone is familiar with it.
So the extremes on the right and on the left are both using fear to further polarize people, and the people on the right, the people on the far right, the extremists on the right are both, I think, a smaller group and better armed and thus in some ways more terrifying, but there are so many fewer of them that they don’t seem to have as much voice in society as the growing numbers of extremists on the left who are using words and increasingly, in the case of some of the groups, violent tactics.
But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous, but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy.
So why does it work? It works because since people have been social, which is to say since be…
For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/heather-heying-why-unintelligent-protest-may-kill-democracy
Fascinating piece. Especially when we find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic with the radical right spreading misinformation, and attempting a coup with citizens being whacked in the streets by armed right wing militias and police. To suggest the left are even close to the right in terms of misinformation and refusal to dialog makes this woman's words absurd and very, very dangerous. She is apparently unaware that she lives in a racist world where coloured people live in abject poverty and are attacked in the streets. Her words are pure evil. All of it. Designed to put demonstrators in their place. Rioting is not a good thing., but if we don't consider the cause of these riots and we ignore the murder of George Floyd and others, we are in big, big trouble. Do not be fooled by this grift. What a disgrace!
Deeply dislike the assertion the 'left' is increasingly violent when currently and historically the 'right' are much more violent in comparison.
She doesn't know what the "left" is. Many leftists reject identity politics, which is more a product of the neoliberal center.
big think? more like small think. This shows ignorance of political ideas, she deos not even realize, but she is fearmongering herself and afraid herself and she mixes apples and and oranges in a single basket. She also reproduces the predominant ideology, of those in power, which is right wing, having perceptions of the left that are full of fear and very disconnected from reality, such as actually seeing predominance of left wing ideology and she clearly confuses political correctness with the excesses of people defending it while forgetting that we actually already have a number of limitations on our ability to protest, dissent and speak in the current system be it by means of law or by how things are actually done outside the fromal versions in papers. The North American government is a violent, genocidal and authoritarian government in many ways and so is capitalism, people are killed by the system and they are blamed by it, It is a far better tactic for public opinion than concentration camps. What about snowden, assange? There are indeed scary excesses on the left, as there have always been by the way with groups and ideas, but not in this vague and generalistic way that is being presented that ignores so much of reality and political science, there is a lo of false equivalence also
You know politicians are corrupt right? What will happen if America’s enemies kept digging dirt on your President, Gov. officials, or their family and then leaking it into the internet?
Would that be a good thing? OR a bad thing?
Yup. If we don’t let people share and spread their Nazi views that will be the death of democracy. Ya know that’s actually how the Nazis rose to power. It was the left being intolerable to the Nazis that led to Hitler
God what a brain dead take
I'm old enough to have seen when we didn't do our socialization over the internet, and I noticed one big change was that people on the internet will commonly say things to other people that they would never say face-to-face. This strongly pushes us to the conflict way of resolving differences and away from the cooperation way. One of the things you mention that needs to be addressed, climate change, is considered radical liberalism by a lot of people, including high-ranking politicians and, in the current environment, any meaningful proposals for solution will be systematically rejected by those people. It's too bad, because scientists have shown that this will be our undoing in the not-too-distant future.
The establishment is lucky all American cities are not on fire. The elites don’t respond to protest. They WILL when we shut down the economy.
Was this script written by a Markov Chain or was it edited to be nonsensical?
Democracy can't work without collective rationalism