464. The Devouring Mother, War, & Human Aggression | J. D. Haltigan
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Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today with Dr. J.D. Haltigan.

Dr. Haltigan is a developmental psychologist with a real interest in psychopathology, the study of mental illness and the manner in which it develops in relationship to such things as early childhood experience. And so he's also quite a pronounced and courageous voice on social media, which is really where I first came across him.

There are a lot of crazy things going on in the psychological community at the moment. And so Haltigan is one of the few voices in the psychological community that are properly expressing dismay at the state of the culture and of the profession. And so I've been following him, watching what he's doing and appreciating it and trying

Learning more about his story, you know, he's a pretty good researcher. Certainly good enough so that he should have, at minimum, a decent academic job. And maybe good enough so that he should have an excellent one. But instead, he's working at a deli because he decided he'd rather have his conscience than his position. And that's, you know, impressive.

So I thought I'd reach out to him and have a chat. And I know my wife has done the same on her podcast platform. That's Tammy Peterson. And so join us. Hello, Dr. Haltigan. Thanks for joining me today. Very pleasure to meet you, Jordan, here on our call. And it was a very pleasure to see you here in Pittsburgh and great to meet you as well here.

Let's start by talking about who you are and what you do. Why don't you walk everybody through your... Well, let's go into your graduate education. We'll start there and walk people through. And so they get a sense of what you do, but also what position you're in at the moment and why. Sure. So my academic trajectory was... My graduate academic trajectory started really after I did some residential treatment work

in upstate New York here in the States. And then I did my PhD in developmental psych at the University of Miami in Florida. And I was really interested in that time in attachment theory. And the advisor I worked with there was doing some early stage autism work. So I kind of looked at attachment in the context of early risk for autism. And then

And subsequent to Miami, I did a couple of postdocs, one of which at the University of Illinois was with an advisor who was fairly prominent in the attachment literature field.

And I trained on things like, you know, measures that are kind of conventional for the attachment developmental tradition, like the adult attachment interview and the strain situation. I can discuss those later, but I did that. And then I kind of kept doing postdocs and trying to find a tenure track position in academia and psychology. And it was just so difficult. Ended up going to the University of Ottawa to do another postdoc. And that's when kind of things sort of

transitioned. I was there for two years to talk, taught some courses. And at the end of the day, was recruited down to the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And that's where I got my appointment at U of T in psychiatry and was there from about 2016 to 2023. And that appointment ended. And that was kind of right around the time, 2016, 2023, when things were getting a little woke in the academy and

I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with some of the research and how it was being conducted and what we were able to say about mental health and early development and came back to Pittsburgh, which is where I'm here today, and really trying to stay involved in academia in any way that I can and get through this period of

What I consider to be woke insanity, for lack of a better term, and working some odd in jobs, blue collar jobs at a local deli to kind of make it while continuing to write about some of this stuff and to use my platform to speak about some of these issues like the gender stuff and other things that I've researched in my career.

Okay, good. Well, that's great grist for the mill. So why don't we start by having you explain to everybody, well, two things. Why don't you tell them what developmental psychology is, broadly speaking, who the masters are in the field and what attracted you to it, and then zoom in a little bit more particularly on attachment theory. Sure. So developmental psychology is more or less a study of development across the lifespan from

From the cradle to the grave, which was one of the earlier terms that John Bowlby, the sort of originator of attachment theory, came up with. So across birth to death. And we look at how individuals develop, how they develop their cognitive skills, how they develop their emotional capacities,

In particular, the earliest stages of life and infancy, how the relationship with parents impacts that, the development of language, the development of theory of mind, for example, and other things. And some of the earlier stuff that happens in adolescence, the crisis of identity is another big one. And then in aging, which is not really my focus, I was always early infancy to adolescence.

to middle childhood. But in aging, you study similar things, the decline of mental faculties, emotional capacities in old age, and so forth. I guess some of the big names that listeners might be aware of in terms of developmental psych would be Piaget, maybe Bowlby a little bit less so. But if they're interested in developmental psych, Bowlby would be a name that would come up

Certainly, some of the old school theorists played a role in developmental psych as well. I mean, the tradition of Freud and so forth definitely played a role in some of that. But I would say Piaget, Vygotsky is another one, the Russian psychologist who studied language acquisition and how that impacted emotional development.

and cognitive mastery of the environment and the child's ability to learn. So those would be some of the people that I would associate or would think that some people might recognize as developmental psychologists. Yeah, so Freud, I mean, Freud at least attempted taxonomy and a classification of developmental stages. And, you know, I think he actually made some pretty good contributions to our understanding of psychology

parental relationships insofar as they impact psychopathology. I mean, my sense, especially in modern times, I'd like your take on this, is that Freud's specification of the Oedipal complex was a major step forward in identification of, well, much of the pathology that characterizes the modern world. I mean, it's a variant of really what Freud was pointing to in a rather oblique way because he tended to sexualize everything

Freud was very convinced that the fundamental motivating factor in human beings could be construed in a relatively unitary manner and that sex occupied that place, although he also was concerned with the impulse towards death. But Freud certainly pointed out that the instinct that mothers have to love and care for their infants was also something that if it went wrong could pose a remarkably serious

pervasive danger to those same infants. And the psychoanalysts, for example, posited that the good mother necessarily fails. And that stemmed from the Freudian tradition, the idea that the mother was in this uncomfortable position of having to make a transition from the

indefinite amount of care that has to be poured into a newborn who's completely helpless to the facilitation of the relative autonomy that a toddler requires and then obviously older children and adolescents. And Freud pointed out, highlighted, let's say, the fact that

mother who extended her concern for the infant past its due date could then pose a major threat to the developing psyche and I think he got that right and then of course Jung and his followers followed that up especially Eric Neumann with their descriptions of the symbolism and mythology associated with the devouring mother and I can't help but see in

the pathologization of the current administrative environment, let's say, particularly in universities and also in the K-12 system. All the hallmarks of a maternal instinct go on absolutely stark, raving mad so that everything becomes an infant. And if it isn't an infant, then it's likely a predator. And that's a bad situation to be in if you're either the infant or the predator and you actually happen to be neither. So

Any comments about that? Part of the reason I wanted to talk to you, I think, is because I've been following you on Twitter for a long time, and you're one of the very few psychologists, yeah, they can probably be listed on one hand, who's willing to make a case for the

developmental psychopathology that's associated with the current culture war. And so I'm kind of wondering how you construe that, and then we'll get back to some of these more fundamental developmental theorists. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Freud and how he kind of, you know, some of his contributions, because I see Freud's work as mostly a cultural psychologist. I think Freud, like you said, he sexualized everything

People have dismissed him out of hand because of that, and kind of, in some ways, rightfully so, if you're a psychological scientist. But from a cultural perspective, when you're looking at what's happening now in our culture, he was really indeed onto something. And you mentioned the good enough mother, and that's kind of where I departed and where attachment theory departs a little bit from Freud. The object relations school like Winnicott, Donald Woods Winnicott, who was the famous British psychoanalyst,

And then Bowlby following from him, they kind of broke away from Freud. In fact, Bowlby was excluded from the British Psychoanalytic Society because he focused on the environment, what was actually happening in the world and to the infant rather than in some fantasy world environment.

And really, Winnicott's notion of the good enough mother was that she would fail or the good enough caregiver would fail. In other words, they wouldn't suffocate the infant or try to be too perfect. And so that's kind of a critical concept that is really happening. And as I see it in the world today, this sort of overprotectiveness or suffocation of children's ability because children have to grow up and develop and master, cognitively master the environment. And

And so if you constantly shield them from any challenges or impingements, as Winnicott might say, on the environment, you're necessarily going to restrict their ability to adapt to that. Well, we should point out, too, what that failure of adaptation means is that

So a child who's intimidated by a novel situation will turn, a young child will turn to their caregiver, their mother or father or substitute to regulate their anxiety when a challenge confronts them that

their emotions indicate might be too large to master. And so what the good enough parent does is replace that need for dependency on an external source with competence and skill on behalf of the child. Now, the problem with that, and I think Freud and certainly the Jungians as well got this right, is that for a mother whose status and sense of moral superiority

depends on that relationship with her child. Maybe her emotional dependency is there too. The fact of that child's dawning competence actually poses a threat to her psychological integrity. And that, I think, becomes particularly relevant when we're discussing, let's say, mothers with cluster B psychopathology.

who are very, very immature and narcissistic themselves, like toddlers, let's say, and who are unable, in consequence, to attend to the child without putting their own emotional, personal emotional needs first and foremost, need for status, need for love, need for security, need for belonging, all those sorts of things. That shouldn't be there, twisting and

dementing the child's pathway forward. And so that also, I guess, gives us a route into discussing developmental psychopathology and the relationship. I've read, for example, that up to 50% of mothers whose children progress with trans surgery, for example, have some variant of the cluster B

personality disorders. Yes, and I think cluster B personality disorders in the attachment literature would track what we call preoccupation with the attachment relationship. In other words, there's sort of some inability of, in this case, you know, typically the mother to extract herself from

whatever she was dealing with in her own early childhood or around those sorts of relationships with her own parental figures. And this preoccupation is a constant focus or hyper-focus, a hyper-affective focus on aspects of the relationship. And so what happens is that they regulate, the parent regulates their own sense of satisfaction or affirmation through their child.

And so it's kind of exactly what you're suggesting is that the child is basically placed in the position, a reverse position of providing the sort of emotional satisfaction for the parent that the parent would otherwise sort of seek to establish in the child, a sense of competence, a sense of direction in the world. And so it's kind of an inverted position.

what we call role reverse relationship. And that's very toxic for a child who has to, in other words, to adapt to the environment, develop his own sense of mastery and competence. But when it's inverted like that,

the caregiver, in most cases the mother, will place that burden on the child. And so that's kind of where you see that inversion. Of course, that leads to all sorts of psychopathology in the child. Certainly influences it in terms of a weak identity structure, inability to regulate their own emotions, and the child's constant focus on pleasing the caregiver or the mother at the risk of, if they don't, they're going to lose that source of caregiving that protects them and is their source of

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Right. Well, they face the additional problem, those children that the parent, let's say, most often in this case, the mother, cluster B fathers tend to be absent. So cluster B mothers tend to be present. And so...

we should outline for our viewers and listeners what cluster B consists of. So that's a grouping of statistically and symptomatically related pathologies of personality that include histrionic, and so that's kind of the modern variant of the Freudian hysteric, who's very dramatic and over-emotional, narcissistic, and so people with narcissistic personality disorder

are always attempting to garner unearned social status and attention. Psychopathic, which is callous and unfeeling, very, very self-centered, very present-focused, and antisocial, and that's more associated with

criminality per se. That particular variant is more common among men, especially in its more violent forms. As I said, those sorts of fathers tend to be absent. So,

Now part of the problem if you're a child and you have a mother with cluster B psychopathology is that not only are you called upon to attend to her unmet emotional needs constantly, but there is actually no way of meeting those needs. I mean treating cluster B people is notoriously difficult.

and stressful for even a very practiced therapist who's only around some of the time. For a child, it's filling a pit that is so deep that a lifetime of work would not be sufficient to

you know, fill it to the brim. So let's, why don't you tell us a little bit about how, let's tie that into attachment theory and how that develops. We can focus a bit on the multi-generational transmission of familial emotional pathology.

Well, yeah, I think it's important to consider that multigenerational transmission from both the sort of biological and the social perspectives. And that means that there will be some inherent dispositions on the part of caregivers to be, you know, we all have our own baseline levels of emotional regulation. But the actual social relationship of early childhood is critical to sort of fine tune or to calibrate the ability to emotionally regulate.

So we all have a baseline of the ability to regulate our emotions and so forth, but it's really that early caregiving relationship that kind of fine-tunes or calibrates it. And if that fails, what you end up having is a complete failure and inability to regulate emotions. And that's kind of what we see

And some of the cluster B histrionic preoccupied discourse or personality disorders. And so when that continues generationally, it basically perpetuates itself and propagates itself from parent to child and child to the next generation. So

So I think it's important for listeners to understand that if there's a failure to regulate or to sort of scaffold the infant and child in developing their own regulations, that's going to persist until there is some corrective course or it won't. There won't be any corrective course. And I think that's kind of what we're seeing now is that a lot of these failures have sort of aggregated in the culture and you're seeing that play out as sort of a more of a macro social level.

So let's, I'm going to walk you through a very brief description of a, let's call it a summary of proper infant development. And then I'll like you to comment on that and flesh it out or offer criticisms if you will. So you could imagine this neurologically and practically. So an infant comes into the world with cancer.

a few primary emotions which develop across time, a few primary motivations, and a few wired-up motor skills, skills for action and perception. So a very early, very young child, an infant, can focus his eyes or her eyes on the face of the mother at about the distance from breast to mother's face. The sucking ability

reflex. It's not precisely reflex because it's more sophisticated than that. The child's mouth and tongue are quite developed when the child's born. So you can imagine an animal like a deer or a moose, something like that. Very soon after they're born, they can stand up and walk or even run. Human infants can't, but we do come equipped into the world with some

hard wiring and our lips and our tongues work pretty well. And so we can latch onto a nipple say, and, and, uh, it's partly also why very young children put things in their mouth because the motor and sensory apparatus of the tongue and lips are there. The child sort of develops from that outward, it develops from the center outward. Um,

The basic emotional structure is positive and negative emotion, but it works on a very, very short-term basis, and it's very focused on the immediate needs of the child.

And those emotions are very intense and all-consuming. And the negative emotions can include pain, it's there at the beginning, anger, that's there very early, fear, that develops about when the child starts to be able to move. And on the positive emotional side, well, interest, excitement, enthusiasm, certainly the capacity for love, those are all there.

What the parent and the social environment is trying to do with that panoply of motivations and emotions is to further the skill development, but also help the child learn to integrate its emotions in a playful manner with the family and then a broader social community and to facilitate that movement from egocentricity to

thoroughly engaged social play. And rough and tumble play helps with that, and so does the more subtle forms of play that a mother might engage in. And hopefully that gets to the point where by the age of about three, a child that would otherwise be egocentric and hyper-emotional is now able to take the stance of another person and start to develop the ability to play and to engage in

turn-taking reciprocal friendships. And then those friendships scaffold further development from the age of four onward. And the best evidence that I had come across, and I haven't reviewed this literature for a long time, was that there was something like a critical stage of development for play between the ages of two and four, such that if a more aggressive and emotional child wasn't

socialized into proper play behavior by the age of four. It was very difficult for them to establish friendships and they tended to fall further and further behind and to be isolated and alienated and sometimes criminal for the rest of their lives. So anyways, that's my memory of the developmental literature in a nutshell. And so elaborate on that, criticize that, tell me what you think about that as a model.

I think as a model, that's kind of a broad generalized overview that's pretty on point. I would say our sort of understanding of critical points of time is still fluid. We're still looking at that in the literature. But I'm glad you brought up sort of the basic instincts and drives because I was just discussing this the other day on another podcast.

show that the best sort of analogy or best sort of understanding to give your listeners would be there's a paradigm in infant research called the face-to-face, still-face paradigm. And basically what that is is it illustrates everything you just said with remarkable clarity. Basically, the paradigm is this. It's a well-known paradigm in developmental tradition that

Usually an infant and a mother is brought into the lab or in some cases, his father too. I don't want to emphasize the mother, but in most cases that is true. And you place the infant in a car seat in front of the mother or the caregiver, and you have them looking at each other. They're separated by maybe a little bit of space. And the paradigm is this. You have three minutes of free play where the mother usually engages facially and communicatively with the infant.

Then you have a two-minute period where the mother sits back, kind of like I'm doing now, and maintains a completely...

still face. And then you have a follow-up three-minute period where they resume interaction. And one of the best replicated effects in all of infant literature is during that still face, when the parent cuts off that social communication, those facial gestures, the infant's negative affect just rockets up. And I've seen this in the lab myself, crying, squirming in the car seat, and so forth. And then typically we call that the still face effect.

And then in the reunion, once there's a rapprochement and the mother engages typically or the caregiver engages back with this emotional communication, gestures, like you said, sort of social play, the infant is still highly negative in affect, but there's sort of a deadening of that sort of towards a more positive, affective tone. Typically by the end of that three minutes, there's some sort of reintegration. And that little encapsulated moment

eight-minute sequence right there illustrates in sort of a tight way what's happening all across infancy and childhood. And so what we can see from that procedure is that if there's an inability of sort of the reunion effect, if there's still consistent negativity, you kind of get a window into how that socialization process is maybe going.

And so during the reunion, what we typically see is that the caregiver will work to reengage, you know, to lessen the negative affect in the infant. And so that's kind of the basic thing.

sort of analogy to use even in later development is what the idea is, the parent is scaffolding in many ways that regulation of emotion. And as the child ages, that includes things like letting the child explore the environment. What if the child is out and playing, you know, on the street, has a fall, they're injured. How does that process of seeking comfort work out? And how does the parent regulate sort of the need for autonomy for

from a need for closeness and some sort of protection as the child grows.

Right. Well, and we should point out, too, that this is a very tricky business in the real world for parents to negotiate, not least because children vary widely in their intrinsic levels of negative emotion. And so there are children who are, by temperament, they're much more likely to become upset, but also once upset are much more difficult to soothe emotionally.

And so how in the lab do you separate out or can you at all the competence of the parent in reestablishing that relationship and the intrinsic sensitivity or trait neuroticism of the child who's involved?

Well, that's kind of what gets down to the heart of the methodology about some of this work that's been so degraded with the current insanity that we're living through in the academy. So we have these gold standard measures that measure infant temperament, which is essentially personality and infant. And we have measures that we have coded observational protocols to look at

how sensitive, for example, a parent is being towards the child in a free play setting or the still face. How much do they look? How much do they engage? And you can code all of that and then you can look at that in a multivariable analytic framework

So that's one way to do that. But what you point out with sort of the basic instinctual drives, as well as the sort of social influence is crucial because now there's sort of a hyper focus on the only reason that, for example, an infant or child could become screwed up in a way or maladjusted is from social influences. There's never a proper accounting of

the role that temperament does play. Some children are much more difficult to soothe. And that's why Winnicott and others beyond him emphasize that the parent's role is not to be perfect. They got to do the best they can to manage those different levels of baseline negative affectivity and other sort of intrinsic characteristics of

of their child. But there's become a constant hyper-focus in today's culture about this idea of perfection and the perfect child or the perfect environment. And I think that has led to a lot of the sort of the notion of the suffocation or the devouring mother that is actually, you know, enigma to healthy development. You might say as a rule of thumb,

that the combined influence of the mother and father should be about as positive and about as negative as the typical potentially social interaction that a child's likely to have in the world.

So you can think of parents as caregivers, but as the child matures, the parents should also become proxies for the actual social world that the child's most likely to encounter. So one of the reasons that disciplinary strategies are necessary with regards to

the fostering of infant and toddler development is that parents obviously have to prepare their children to behave in the real world. And that means that the child has to learn to integrate their emotions into a framework of behavior and attention that other people find attractive and inviting.

See, when I worked in the developmental field, which was back in the mostly in the 90s, mid-90s to say mid-2000s, the first decade of the 2000s, I was struck and hurt in some ways by the fact that the destiny of children who aren't well socialized

between that age of two and four is pretty damn dismal. And it really struck home for me the necessity of parents to do everything they could to encourage another instinct in their children, which is that instinct towards mastery and integration. You know, we talked about the instinctual basis of negative emotion and positive emotion, but there's also an instinct towards integration, which is probably associated

With the transfer of behavioral control from the more primordial and immediate emotional systems to the more distal and social systems that are mediated by the cortex, which takes a lot more socialization, so to speak, to program.

And so the reason that parents need to regulate the emotions of their children is, first of all, so their children won't be suffering as a consequence of the domination of their negative emotion, but also so that other people can appreciate or even stand having their children around so they'll play with them and educate them. And so if you're at the beck and call of your infant constantly,

and you're doing that in part because you can't tolerate any distress on the part of the infant, or you're covertly rewarding the infant's infantile behavior so that he or she won't leave, then you're absolutely devastating their... You're destroying the possibility that they're going to be able to have friends and thrive in the world. And so why do you think...

Do you think there's any evidence that that developmental process has been interfered with at a societal level now?

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Well, that's right. What you said is right. It's completely a fair description of sort of this process of impulse control development and so forth. And I think, you know, there's a lot of work that has been done regarding sort of broad-based trends and sort of helicopter parenting or, you know, parental over-involvement. And I think that's exactly what's happening, at least at some sort of generalized level in the larger culture. If there's an inability to

for the child to engage the environment because they're constantly dependent on the parent for whatever reason, either to fulfill the parent's needs of their own emotional satisfaction or to fulfill the child's need who's never told, you know, you need to explore the environment, which you see as an inability to regulate the, you know, the impulses. And that ends up in, uh,

you know, down the road, a complete failure. And that's kind of what you see in the phenotype of some of this cluster B stuff we're seeing play out on the tent cities and these campus protests, for example, even in 2020 with a lot of the rioting. It's just sort of this completely emotionally dysregulated behavior. And that's downstream from the millennial generation being raised in sort of this different way than, you know,

was, you know, 30, 40 years ago where the child went out, they explored, they, you know, a lot of sort of commentators have noted, you know, you went and played it on the street till it got dark and you came home. That isn't happening anymore. And so what is the sort of effect or can we sort of quantify in some way what that's doing? I think there's definitely evidence for

this playing out. There's definitely evidence for an influence of some of this overprotection. But in terms of, and this is one of the things that the ideologues in the academy will do, is they want you to sort of mechanistically fine-grain measure this and make the case for it in sort of a mechanistic way. And that's sort of the challenge that someone like me is faced with. We can see with our own eyes these trends playing out. But

But then how do we frame it in an academic, methodological way to make the case? And I think we are at that point. But there has to be room in the academy to investigate these questions. They can't be censored. They can't be allowed to be not asked. And so grant money needs to be funded for those types of things. But I definitely think there's evidence for these types of large,

trends that we're seeing. I mean, we see them with our own eyes and sort of it's undeniable in the sense that you can look at something that's happening earlier and, you know, you can see something that's happening now and you can make the link, but the challenge is really formalizing that in some sort of methodology.

Right, yeah, well, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been struggling with that. Abigail Schreier is another one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me offer some sociological explanations for this argument.

dysregulation, because I'm always inclined to, well, you have to give the devil his due. And as you said, if you're going to consider multiple variables, you consider sociological and economic variables along with psychological variables. So tell me what you think about these contributors. So while now we have older parents, often old enough so that under normal human conditions, they would have been grandparents.

And so older parents are more conservative and they also tend to be richer and they have far fewer children. So they have all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. Plus they're more conservative.

And they can also provide for their children in a way that makes saying no to their wants dependent on the decision of the parent rather than the restrictions of their economic circumstances. So those are three big changes, right? So now let's say the typical mother is 30. Let's say the, and because she's 30, likely to be in more trouble.

positive economic circumstances and therefore able to respond to the child's demands with the provision of material wealth. Then we also have the fact that

There's far fewer children in each family, and so that means each child doesn't have to contend in what's likely a beneficial way, at least under some circumstances, with a multiplicity of siblings with whom they have to share the attention and resources and learn how to get along with, right, in that intense cooperative and competitive environment that characterizes a sibling relationship. And then we also have the additional problem of

single parents or parents with multiple relationships who've had disrupted familial relationships themselves, then we have the problem as well that there just aren't as many children out on the street. There aren't mothers watching them all the time like there were when there were neighborhoods full of children. And so that's in some sense independent of the psychological variables that we've been describing. And

So what does the current literature in relationship to developmental psychopathology have to say about those longer-term sociological transformations? Well, I think that's an excellent question. It isn't really being asked in the developmental psychology literature, at least to the extent that I've seen it recently. The developmental psychology literature tends to be heavily focused on sort of a mechanistic investigation of things in infancy or childhood,

with less of a focus on those broad-based trends that you just mentioned. And I think that's one area that needs to be improved in the literature. Obviously, single parenting has been studied, but the role of what you're noting, these more broad-based secular trends, for example, of older parenting, fewer children, to my knowledge, at least, at least in terms of the literature scope that I have looked at recently, is

those types of questions aren't being asked because in part, I think,

the answers is not what the ideologues in the academy want to hear, that there is sort of evidence for some of the things that they don't want said. So, you know, the role of younger parents and single parenting and older parents has to be all looked at with sort of an equal poise that is not really happening right now in developmental psych. And that's one of the limitations of developmental psych is it's so fine grained and focused on some of these

more fine-tuned interactions, like I mentioned to you with the face-to-face still face, and they miss the forest by focusing exclusively on the trees. And so I think we need to get back to some of these bigger questions and

that are asking why do we see a generation growing up in the way they are with sort of an undeniable, I guess, less of an ability to regulate their emotions than previous generations. How much of that is due to actual three things, really. How much of it is due to their inborn temperament? How much of it is due to being differences in how they were reared? But also how much of it is due to differences in the larger cultural milieu and how that's influencing people

their decisions, perhaps consciously, to regulate or not regulate their emotions. Okay, so we could add some additional variables there that need to be considered. So Jonathan Haidt has been making a strong case for the danger of, let's call it... Social media. Well, yeah, but we could expand that a bit because I've talked to some of the

leaders, let's say, of the social media networks about Haidt's concerns. And they made some very interesting points. It's social media to some degree and the intense competitiveness, abstraction, and backbiting that characterize those realms. But the thing is,

It isn't obvious at all that children and adolescents are spending the bulk of their time on social media per se. Depends on how you define it. So they're also texting instead of interacting face to face, for example. And then they're also exposing themselves to other people.

content online like pornography. But then there's something more fundamental, I think, that's often missed, which is that, see, when we had little kids back in the 90s, my wife and I were the youngest parents we knew with the oldest kids, even though we weren't that young. We didn't start having kids till we were in our late 20s.

Now, one of the things that would happen was that we would take our kids over to other houses that had children. And when we got there, the parents would put on a television show for the kids to watch, which I was never happy with because what should have happened was the kids were thrown into the basement, so to speak, and with nothing to do so that they had to play.

And so they could watch TV and of course they were quiet if they were doing that, but they weren't inventing their own dramas. They weren't interacting face to face in a manner that made them come up with the creative conceptualizations that characterized dramatic play.

like playing house, for example, that lay the bloody groundwork for future adult relationships. Now, and that was TV, that had nothing on screens because everyone was concerned about the detrimental effect of TV back then. But my God, now, you know, screens are absolutely everywhere. So the screens have content, but they also interfere with child's play. And so I'd like your opinion about that. And also one other thing that I've been thinking about, let me, tell me what you think about this.

You know, I watch all these strange identity issues that are emerging in adolescence and even on university campuses in early adulthood. This preoccupation with sexual identity, with gender identity, and also the variant forms of even more imaginative play that are associated with that, like the furry culture, for example, and the anime culture. And what I see there is delayed dramatic play.

So I'm wondering if what's happening to some of these kids is that they get away from this oppressive family environment where they're never allowed any freedom. They burst out at, say, the age of 17 or 18, and then they have to frenetically engage in a dramatic search for identity because they didn't do it when they were like three, which is when it really needs to happen. We radically underestimate the significance of dramatic play.

Then we have dramatic play on the part of rebellious adolescents constantly, you know, as they protest in the streets.

That's right, 100%. I've spoken with Jonathan Haidt and others, and I've really been kind of engaged in the discourse about the role of social media and how that plays into the development of emotional regulation. You're right. How do we define that? But I think your point about it's basically more broadly than just whether they're on TikTok or whether they're on Facebook or whether they're on Snapchat, it's looking at a screen

rather than at another face. And you see that wherever you go. I mean, even when I do work in a supermarket deli now on a part-time basis, customers will come in, they'll be looking at their phone, or I'll be trying to look at my phone. And it's a completely different world and landscape that we're now in that has sort of taken away the normal face-to-face communicative

rough and tumble play where you're actually physically looking at somebody rather than at a screen or your attention is not constantly looking at a screen. So it's much more broader. And I think the other point too, you said, well, it's not just social media. You're right. It's social media combined with

An increasing secularism that has basically – we've lost all sense of moral constraints. So when there's no sort of – when there's sort of a weakening of all traditional classical religions and there's no orienting structure, you get thrown into the social media world where you can basically create anything.

That gives rise to what we see as this complete inability to form an identity in early childhood. Now they're on the screens where there's just basically a consumer market for identities, whether that's identities as furries,

whether it's an identity as gender identity, or even like you say, I mean, it's a complete role-playing world now that's happening on social media. And one of the individuals who's done a lot of great work on this is Catherine D., who's default friend on Twitter. She's looked at some of this, and I think we're missing to a certain extent and all the discourse around the role of social media on mental health

and the ability to establish a strong identity is the fact that we're now moving into a different era where we're actually living online rather than in the world. And that's why I've been constantly stressing the need for athletics-based programs

programs or environmental programs where children are in nature to get away from this sort of movement to a world that's completely imaginary online. Because that leads to all sorts of limitless ability to establish identities that while they may exist in this creative realm,

When you get back into the real world, they're useless. They're dysfunctional, really. And that's sort of what we see. Well, they're also not subject, as far as I can tell, they're also not subject to the constraints that are characteristic of the real world. Like, one of the things I've been very concerned about, and I'd like your thoughts on this, is

Thank you.

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What's that boxer's name? Mike Tyson, who so famously said the problem with the virtual world is that it's made all of you all too comfortable with never getting punched when you deserve it. Now, that's a bad paraphrase, but he did actually say that. And I think there's something about that that's actually very interesting and very correct. You know, one of the I don't know how many comments I've looked at online, but it's tens of thousands, you know, and I've started to develop interest.

something like a troll taxonomy. And, you know, there is a culture online they call lulz culture, and that's laugh out loud, or I did it for the lulz. And it's basically a culture of sadists and psychopaths. And this is actually quite well documented in the relevant research literature because

There has been ongoing research into the personality structure of provocative trolls and their dark tetrad types. So they'd fit into the cluster B psychopathology. They are...

narcissistic, so they want unearned attention. They're Machiavellian, so they use their language as a tool to manipulate rather than to communicate. They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. And that wasn't good enough, as it turned out, because that was the dark triad. They had to add sadistic to that. And that's where the lulz element really comes into play, because

the sadist takes positive delight in the suffering of others, and that's really the nature of Lull's culture. And it can thrive online because, well, people say things online all the time that would get them an immediate slap in the real world, like a morally required immediate slap. And so they say things that now, the reason that concerns me, see, my sense is that we know that the

base rate of psychopathy across cultures is about 4%, which isn't that high. But we also know that there were historical epochs in which the cluster B personality types probably got the upper hand. And I would suspect that happened in the French Revolution. I think it probably happened in the Russian Revolution. Probably happened during the rise of the Nazis in National Socialist Germany.

You don't need that many people to be disinhibited in their psychopathology before your culture might be in grave danger. And that's particularly true if they can organize, which they can really do online. And so I'm very concerned that the...

Incentive structure online facilitates dark tetrad behavior. Now, there's more evidence too, right? Because here's another problem. 25% or thereabouts of online content is pornographic. So basically criminal, right? It's basically prostitution.

facilitated by electronic pimps. So that's not good. And then a tremendous amount of online activity is outright criminal, right? I mean, older people are just being scammed on an unbelievably constant basis. And so it might be that 50% of online activity is in the psychopathic, antisocial, and cluster B realm. It's very, very difficult to regulate. And my suspicions are is that spilling over in really

a really counterproductive manner into the actual flesh and blood world. And so, you know, I'm curious about your thoughts about that because one of the things that's odd about you on Twitter, in a good way, is that you are constantly drawing people's attention to the relationship between cluster B psychopathology and

online and political behavior. And so what do you think about that as a hypothesis with regard to the pathological incentive structure of the virtual world, right? Maybe it's a non-playable degenerating game. Like it could be. Well, I think in a lot of ways, that's exactly why I know you're familiar with the paper that I wrote on this. Social media is an incubator of all this cluster B type of stuff because on social media,

You have this indirect, communicative, language-based amplification of all of these traits, whereas male aggression in the real world, it doesn't scale. You have an encounter. There's something said. Somebody gets punched in the face, and that's it.

What you have is on social media, indirect aggression, and you have all these traits and antagonism and histrionic behavior that just basically gets amplified and emotionally resonates and resonates and resonates and balloons out. And it builds and builds and builds. And, you know, one of the best examples of that is what we saw with Hamas. I mean, they filmed all their atrocities as they were going into Israel. And that was one of the most...

you know, interesting in a morbid way kind of aspects of that incursion was it was just filmed. They were basically, in fact, doing it for the laws, regardless of whether you think on how much atrocities or what was the exact specific atrocities that were committed. They were filming them on GoPro for exactly that reason and to amplify that. And so, you know, that is one way for a

perfect example of how this is all spiraled out of control. And I will say for myself that

Others have written about the cluster B stuff in terms of political ideology and how that's played out before. The famous Lobozewski is one of them and others. But I just see it so clearly because when you look at the traits and you look at what's happening online, it's a perfect incubator for all these just to continue to amplify and amplify and amplify without any...

mechanism that limits it and it just spills out. And then what happens is you have an event like October 7th, or you have an event like what you're seeing on these campus tent cities, all of that's mediated and amplified online. And then it gets played out with all this petulance and romper room behavior on campuses. Yeah. Okay. So let's dig into that two ways. So

The first thing I'd like to point out, and you can comment on this if you would, is that, you know, you mentioned that male aggression doesn't scale well and it doesn't work that well in the real world. And that's definitely the case. I mean, one of the things that my daughter was often perplexed about when she was growing up in our household with our brother is the difference in response pattern to aggression between men.

boys and between girls. So my son and his teenage friends would not that infrequently have an altercation. Sometimes it might even come to brief blows, and that would end it. And that would often not only not stop a friendship, but strengthen it, partly because they knew where they stood with each other. Now, this didn't happen that often, but the threat of it happening was always there.

Now, with the girls, by contrast, they could backbite and gossip and screech and moan and bitch and kill each other virtually online, and there was no limit to it. And it was very difficult to limit at all. It's definitely the case that female-style antisocial behavior is unbelievably difficult to regulate.

Having said that, I'm not blaming the females for online pathological behavior, although there's certainly the female equivalent of that in places like TikTok. But what I do see happening is that the histrionic, narcissistic, and borderline, the men who have those traits,

can get away with that kind of female type antisocial behavior online, that gossiping and backbiting and reputation savaging and outright Machiavellian deception with absolutely no consequences or even worse, with a certain level of perverse reward because attention is brought to it and maybe even amplified by the social media companies. So that's not good.

to say the least. Now, let's add one more thing to that that people need to understand. So, you know, the conflict between Hamas, let's say, and the people of Israel, and the rest of the bloody world for that matter, can be construed as a political or as a religious or economic battle. But you put your finger on something that's absolutely vital. So the cluster B types are

the psychopaths and the narcissists and the Machiavellians, they're unbelievably good at using proclamations of victimization to justify their aggression and also to camouflage what they're doing with a moral story. And so like when I think of violent religious fundamentalists, I don't actually generally think of the religion itself as a motivation, even though it can be.

I think of the psychopathic, power-striving, narcissistic Machiavellian adopting the cloak of the religious. That's what the Pharisees do in the Gospels, by the way, and they're Christ's biggest enemy. They adopt the camouflage of moral virtue, religious, economic, or social, and then they pretend to be the good guys while, in fact, they're

ravening, what did Christ call them? The ravening graves that would devour even the ancestors that they claimed to worship. And so I think that as a culture, we're radically underestimating the perverse consequences of the intermingling of

the cluster B psychopathologies with the hypothetically religious, political and economic, right? We're making them primary when in fact the pathology, the cluster B pathology is probably the primary problem. So maybe when you see people involved in sectarian violence, the first thing you should ask yourself is, well, is that sectarian violence or is that just an excuse for the cane-like narcissists to get the upper hand?

So what do you think about that? I think that's exactly right. I see the world from that lens of looking at psychopathology as opposed to the background religion itself. Clearly, there's definitely historical religious conflicts that motivate some of this, but I see it much more from the perspective of

of how does this culture give rise to these macro-social, what I consider contagions of these cluster B traits. And you mentioned lying and moral virtue. And I think one of the things, and I just made this point a couple of days ago with regards to what's happening here in the States and sort of the lies that the mainstream media have told about Joe Biden is that

There's lying that most corrupt politicians will do. Many people lie. There's white lies and so forth. And then there's lying but moralizing that lie. And moralizing that lie, in my view, is much more worse and psychopathic than

than just some lie that you beat some kid on the street the other day and it never happened. And you see that's the strategy that they use. They lie, but they moralize it. They're the oppressed. They're the victims. So that gives them the currency to then create and engage in all sorts of atrocities or behaviors that somehow are socially acceptable.

And you mentioned too the sort of male instantiation of these cluster B traits, and that's something I saw during COVID online too. A lot of the female scholars that I was collaborating with at one point or that kind of grew to knew who were doing COVID work or pushing for the elimination of mask mandates or saying that lockdowns were harmful, they were getting attacked by these male narcissistic

you know, what I would consider trolls on Twitter who had credential degrees, but they were constantly bullying these female nurses, doctors, and so forth in the most trollish way.

And so that sort of manifestation was something that was very glaring. That would have never played out in the real world. It was only made possible by the sort of milieu of the social environment of the internet and social media. And it was something that really bothered me. And so there's this idea that you moralize that, you know,

A few people might be harmed by lockdowns, but the majority of the population won't be. And it's the majority of the population that were in fact harmed

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And you said that what you saw first and foremost was the pathology. Okay, so I want to delve into that a little bit, eh? Because one of the things that's really struck me about the peculiar times that we're in is the dissociation of atrocity from guilt. So one of the things that you had to give the Nazis credit for, so to speak, is that they were guilty about their crimes and they tried to hide them.

And one of the things that I see at the moment that's so unbelievably pathological that I can hardly get my head around it is that the butchery on the trans side, for example, is trumpeted as a moral virtue, right? There's no attempt to hide what's going on. In fact, it's brought forward as something that's positive. Now, that's associated in a way with what you saw with regard to the Hamas massacres, is that this is actually being reveled in

Again, we're going to talk about this independent of the hypothetical reasons for the cause. I mean, people, you just think about it, man. The sadistic types...

want to claim victimization because they're also predatory parasites. And if you're a victim, then other people have to kowtow to you and take care of you. And we know that half of criminal lifestyle is parasitical lifestyle, right? There's the rule breaking and the actual crime, but the other part, that's the predation. But the other part of it is living off the work of other people in an insanely unconscientious manner and coming up with a story to justify it.

you know, that the successful are just thieves themselves, for example, or that nobody really works to get what they deserve. There's no really such thing as merit. There's only power. And so since everyone's a thief, there's no reason not to get in there and get some of your own, you know? And so...

You watched the tapes with the eye of a psychopathologist. And so what do you think you saw? Well, what I saw was the valorization of sadistic behavior and not just sexually sadistic behavior, but the killing and mass slaughter of people. It was sort of meant it was meant to be propagated.

Yeah.

You can also see that, like you say, in the trans movement. Online, Reddit, TikTok, there's a glamorization about this stuff that is sort of

So widely discrepant from what is actually happening in the actual perpetration of, in the case of the trans stuff, the mangling and the confusion of children and other negative effects that this leads to, that it's almost something that

They're trying to create an environment where it's seen as heroic to engage in these behaviors when, in fact, it's just the opposite. And that's made possible by the social media landscape where you can click like and you can get all the retweets and shares or create these echo chambers online.

But it's a parasitic lifestyle, which is exactly what Herbie Cleckley, who really was sort of behind the original construct of psychopathy, that's exactly what he identified, this parasitic lifestyle. And they moralize that type of behavior as virtuous. It's like virtuous victimhood, and it's very toxic. Virtuous victimhood valorizing sadism.

You mentioned lying. There's lying, and then there's lying that is—there's moralization of the lie. And I see the latter. Moralization of the lie is much, much worse. And we see that just recently. I'm sure you're aware of—we had a debate here in the States, Biden and Trump—

It's obvious that Biden is cognitively really struggling, and we all knew this for many years, but the mainstream media constantly moralized this lie that it was somehow unfair to criticize Biden for that or to acknowledge that. That's much worse, in my view, than Trump just shooting off some ridiculous remark. It's clearly a lie, but it's

Now, he's not moralizing that lie. He's not saying you're a bad person because you basically observe with your own eyes what we've all known about Biden for four years. And so I see the latter as much more psychopathic, parasitic, and toxic to a culture than the former. So, okay, so I'm going to tell you a frightening story and you tell me what you think about it. Maybe this is too pessimistic.

but I'm still working that out. To what degree do we have moral instincts, let's say, that are in keeping with the self-sacrificing ethos of a complex civilization? How much of that is part and parcel of our inborn conscience? You know, Cleckley, of course, defined the psychopaths as someone without a conscience or with a very underdeveloped conscience. So I read two books in quick succession,

One of them was a book by the Dutch primatologist who unfortunately is recently deceased, Frans de Waal. One of his books on chimpanzee behavior. I don't remember which one because I read a number of his books. But he detailed out the phenomenon of chimpanzee war, essentially. And this was first discovered, I believe, by Jane Goodall, who was pretty...

flipped upside down by the revelation, as she should have been. Because, of course, the sociological types and the lefties and the cultural constructionists like to think that the human proclivity for warfare is a consequence of corrupt social structure, a theory which is shot to hell by the fact that chimpanzees go to war, which indicates that it's much more an inherent part of our primate nature than anyone wants to think. So what happens with the chimps is that

The juveniles in particular will go on parties around the borders of their territory, let's say. They have a fairly acute sense of territory. And if they come across chimpanzees from another troop and they outnumber them because they have a rudimentary sense of amount anyways, they can't count, but they have a sense of amount, they'll attack them, sometimes with juvenile females accompanying them.

And they tear them to shreds, right? So what seems to be the case is that in the absence of a social hierarchy that limits aggression. So if a male gets too aggressive in a troop, the rest of the troop gets upset and generally the alpha male will step into quell it or the rest of the troop will. So you can think about the troop's level of negative emotion as an inhibitory factor

function, has an inhibitory function. It clamps down on male aggression, which might otherwise have no limit. Okay, so why would I say no limit? Well, because when you look at the chimpanzees go to war, when they're attacking a troop member that has no social standing, which would be a member of another troop,

There's no limit to what they'll do. Now chimpanzees are capable of hunting. They hunt 40 pound colobus monkeys and they'll eat them alive while they're screaming. So it isn't obvious that the distress of another primate has much inhibitory force. And so they'll use their jaws to castrate the other chimpanzees, for example, and literally tear their skin off. And they're very, very powerful. They're very, very strong.

about six times as strong as the typical adult male. So look the hell out if you're attacked by a chimpanzee. Okay, so the hypothesis there would be our closest primate relatives have no inhibition whatsoever on their capacity for aggression once they're outside the confines of a well-constituted social hierarchy. Okay, so soon after that, I read...

The Rape of Nanking, which is a book about as brutal as any book you might ever come across. And it details the magnitude of Japanese atrocity in the city of Nanking just prior to World War II. And there isn't, you would have to be one pathological person indeed to imagine, even in the wildest extremes of your most vicious life,

fantasies, anything worse than what happened in Nanking. You could take the worst possible chimpanzee troop and equip them with a much more sadistic imagination and then set them free to do anything they could possibly imagine. And that's what happened in Nanking. And so then I started thinking, oh my God, does that actually mean that there's no limit on human aggression outside of social hierarchy?

because there were a lot of normal Japanese soldiers that were involved in this. It was certainly contagious. Now, undoubtedly, it was led by the bloody psychopathic sadistic types, and it was certainly the case that the Japanese government had instilled in their troops a sense of ethnic superiority with regard to the Chinese and dehumanization of the Chinese. But that in itself isn't enough to account for this sadistic,

Stunning sadistic brutality. And so, you know, that would indicate that, well, what does it indicate? It indicates that that psychopathic and sadistic tendency might be a lot more transmissible than we think at minimum.

Yeah, I think the abolition of hierarchies has led to worse hierarchies in almost every situation and historical circumstance we can think of. Hierarchies are an ingrained part of human behavior. And when you try to replace them with some other utopian scheme where there is no hierarchy or dominance hierarchy, what you end up with is what you just described. And I think...

That's really what the tyranny of structuralistness is all about. When there is no hierarchy or guiding set of principles to create a hierarchy, you just have complete structuralistness. And to think about it, that's what you see in all this cluster B behavior. It's completely dysregulated. There's no structure to any of their behavior. And that's really what's at the heart of, I think, the cultural malaise that we're living through is that

All of these ideologues want to abolish structure or categories, whether that's categories in mental health, diagnostic classifications, law in society. And you see this with some of the LGBTQ T plus 3,000 hundred world things. They want to abolish any type of constraint that

And as Reef, one of the cultural commentators, Philip Reef, who is no longer with us, once you have a culture in which

man is allowed to express anything, you have a culture in crisis. You have no constraints on the ability of anybody to live any pathology they want or do anything they want. There's nothing, no hierarchy, no containment at all to some of the underlying tyrannical behavior that can be given rise to when you have a lack of structure or containment. So you have a culture in crisis right now because they're trying to abolish all structure, all containment,

All hierarchy. And that's just a recipe for cultural disintegration. All right. So, okay. So, on that note, let's turn to the more particularly personal. So, I sat on a lot of university hiring committees at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. And I've evaluated a lot of CVs. And your CV is great.

is good. It might be very good. You have an age index of 34, which means that you have 34 papers with more than 34 citations. And so that's at minimum respectable and a citation count of about 5,000. And for those of you listening, scientific productivity and merit is quantified

not least by observing how many other scientists cite someone's work, that is, refer to it in their own writing, in their own research. Now, it's not a perfect measure because you can be cited for being hyper popular in a sense, or you can be cited for publishing an erroneous paper that people are required to refer to. But by and large,

citation count is actually a good predictor of future productivity. It's about the best predictor we have, actually, that and pure number of papers. And so number of well-cited papers is also a good indicator. So on purely objective grounds, you're a contender, let's say, and you can obviously speak and you can obviously think and you're very interested in research. And so we might ask ourselves,

Why aren't you employed in the academy?

And so do you want to tell that story? And you were at the University of Toronto in the psychiatry department. Tell everyone what happened and how things ended up for you and why, as far as you're concerned. I think there's a number of different things that I've thought. Obviously, I have no specific answers to why I'm not in the academy. I have a number of different takes on why that may be, but a couple of different things. A lot of my early work was in attachment, and that's a very nuanced...

of research that has its own people in the academy that do that kind of work and so forth and so on. Another reason is that I'm very strident in what I believe and what I say and what I feel. And if you're a white male, and especially in psychology, and you're strident, and you tend to be a little bit more outspoken, that's seen as being too disagreeable. Once you get on faculty interviews, of which I've been on many, it's...

it becomes a personality contest. And I think in retrospect, I've been told things like I don't smile enough on faculty interviews or other outlandish things that have nothing to do with my merit. I'm

I'm sure that there's been faculty interviews or job market searches where I've given talks that haven't been great as other talks. So you never know the real reason why you don't end up in the academy or you end up not staying in it. As far as sort of where I'm at now, when I was at the University of Toronto and working at the medical hospital that I was there,

It was during that period of time where things were getting very woke, especially around the gender stuff. I was working with people who, you know, they claim to be scientists who are rigorous and you have they, them and their bios. And that to me was just outlandish. I mean, how can you be at a medical research hospital, uh,

an ideology that is totally disconnected from what we know about human sexual development. So I spoke out about that. I spoke out about things on acts like land acknowledgements and how they were just absolutely ridiculous. And they were being forced on people

And I think that didn't make things sort of go well for me. I have to say, though, that others have been canceled way worse than I was. I don't have a typical cancellation story. You have an invisible cancellation story. And I actually think in some ways that's worse. Look, one of the reasons I stopped working at the University of Toronto was because I

while graduate students were interested in working with me. But the whole point of having a graduate research student, fundamentally, if they're really research-oriented, is...

so that they can go off and have their own research lab and pursue an academic career. And I knew with 100% certainty that any of the Caucasian males that worked with me, or perhaps any females for that matter, would be so tainted by their mere association with me that the probability that they would ever get an interview even, let alone a job, was essentially zero.

And so how in the world can I offer a person a position, even if they're interested in working with me on those grounds? And I know perfectly well that a fair bit of that is racial. So if you're Caucasian, you're much less likely to get an interview at the same degree of merit. That's 100% true. And it's also true when it comes to

gender. So you're much less likely to get an interview if you're male. And so I also didn't want to partake in that anymore. It's like, go to hell, you sons of bitches. If that's what you want, you think I need you. You've got another thing coming. And so I don't know. You know, I read recently that 94% of the 300,000 jobs that were

distributed in the aftermath of George Floyd's death went to non-white males. Non-white non-males. Right. Sorry, I'm still not getting that right. If you were white and male, you didn't get one of those jobs. Put it that way. Right. And so that's inexcusable in my opinion.

way of looking at things because I also know because I've done extensive work in psychometrics that we can assess merit especially in the scientific realm with a fair degree of accuracy and the best way to do that as we already discussed is by just looking at publication record back before the whole goddamn publication system has also become corrupt beyond comprehension. So

You know, you say you didn't get cancelled that hard, which means you escaped without overt reputational damage that was made public, but you don't have a bloody job. And so that doesn't seem so minor to me, given that you have a stellar academic record, that you're obviously someone who's genuinely interested in research, and those people aren't that common. And so where are you working now?

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So I would see myself as having a soft cancellation. What I've done is I've come back. I've tried to build my social media platform. And prior to me leaving Toronto, I had numerous students...

reach out to me that wanted research, you know, mentorship and so forth. And those students came to me via the normal channels that you would when you're sort of a professor at an institution. And, you know, I got so many emails, I didn't know what to do with them all. So I said, look, the more high merit ones that I saw, I could see from their CVs, I said,

you know, if you're interested in getting some experience and you want to do it on an involuntary basis and just kind of work with me offline and, you know, through some of the projects that I have ongoing, feel free to do so. And many took me up on that offer. I had them write substack pieces and tried to improve their writing skills in that way. And some still do kind of engage with me. We're doing a meta-analysis that I had started recently.

But as far as my current work, it's kind of hard because you have to have some sort of income. So I've kind of take a part-time job at a deli, cut some meat. I see the working class culture. I'm sort of in there, but it's very difficult in the sense that to go from the sort of intellectual world to the blue collar world, it is a dramatic change and you can't be as dialed into the

all the sort of rapid pace intellectual stuff that's going on now. And so that's really what I'm finding challenging and difficult. But it is my love of research that has kept me in this. My students have kept me in this, the ones that reach out to me via Twitter, via email, or who have just seen what I've said on Twitter and email me independently saying, we thank you so much for speaking out.

Because a lot of the younger students, whether they're undergraduates or early graduate students, they don't have any, either they don't have the temperament to speak out or they don't feel that they can. And giving them a voice has been hugely influential for me.

And so I guess right now I'm in sort of this transitional state where I am slated to do some online teaching in the fall at my alma mater, the University of Miami, teaching some stats there. And that's, you know, I feel very empowered to do that and continuing to work with my students. But otherwise, it's just speaking out and trying to build your independent platform. Another thing that I had happen is that through my Substack writing,

a Pacific legal team picked up a case on my behalf. We sued the University of Santa Cruz for their DEI statement requirement, which all professors typically have to submit now as part of their job applications. And that's still in the mix. It's now with the judge. There was a motion to dismiss, but that case is one that we filed sort of saying that, look, DEI statements are a form of compelled speech. And you're seeing now a lot of pushback

on the DEI statements. And so I'm hoping that my case, you know, whether the case is dismissed or not, will continue to work against it. But that's been hugely influential to me to see some of the legal stuff that goes on behind the scenes and how badly there is sort of this reverse discrimination in DEI statements, which are nothing more than political litmus tests.

And they filter out. If you're not on board with social justice or equity or any of that stuff, forget it. So for me, that was just pointless. Why apply when I have to submit stuff that I don't believe in? And I'm not someone who, you know, that would sit well with me. So I want to sleep well at night. And sleeping well at night means staying true to who you are and what you believe. And I'd rather do that and, you know,

work at a deli than have a position where people around me are saying outlandish things or they're sort of walking the walk and they don't believe any of the stuff that they've said socially. Well, it's death for scientists because look, well, okay, two things. First of all, I've seen very little evidence in our discussion so far that you're particularly strident.

I've seen plenty of evidence that you're trying to do your research and you're trying to go where it takes you. And that you are doing that in a manner that's more overtly conservative than the manner that might characterize the demented progressives and the outright bloody cowardly liars that aggregate in the psychology field at the moment.

So there's that. So Strident, like I don't see any evidence of that at all in your comportment. You know, I've interviewed lots of people, like 500 people for YouTube alone. And so, and I've sat on many forums

you know, juridical committees trying to evaluate potential candidates. And there isn't a single bit of behavior that you manifested today that I would put in the strident camp. In fact, when you're discussing not only your research preoccupations and your beliefs, but what's happened in your own personal life, you're remarkably reserved and careful in your choice of words. So that's just rubbish. It seems to me much more that, you know, you

ran into the trouble that you ran into because you wouldn't go along with the lies. And that's one of the things we should point out to people who are watching and listening is that that's the death of the scientific enterprise, right? Because the only thing that makes science true

is the truth-seeking behavior on the part of scientists. You can falsify your data at every level, in its recording, in its statistical analysis, in its presentation at conferences, in its publication in papers, in your public discussions of it. You can lie nonstop at all of those levels if you're incompetent or all you're doing is pushing your career forward because there's no objective truth

and you're not oriented right to the bloody core of your soul for truth, you're definitely not a scientist. 'Cause it's actually hard to be a scientist and it rubs against the grain, you know? I mean, I had students who lost two years work because we wouldn't publish a paper that they weren't able to replicate. You know, there was a rule in my lab is you don't get to publish your study even if it works unless you can replicate it. And so it would have been much easier on the students and certainly,

better for me in that narrow sense of career provision if I would have just let my students publish the first paper that they had positive results with. But that's not acceptable because it pollutes the literature. And if you believe in truth, you don't want to do that. If you don't want to pursue a goddamn lie for the rest of your life too, because you've been such an idiot as a graduate student, you allowed yourself to get deluded into believing that you found something when you didn't. So

I, you know, I despair of the academy putting itself back together on the research side. I mean, again, that's pretty damn pessimistic, but I don't see an alternative to it at the moment.

So it's not surprising you're on the outs. I really have become much more pessimistic as well. And even some of the students that work with me now on an independent basis, I mean, you know, I teach them a lot of skills that are relentless in terms of, you know, when you do a meta-analysis, you have to do a complete literature review that's very detailed and systematic. And they're learning those skills, but it's a very...

um, aggressive and relentless pace. And they're, they're, you know, they're learning how to do good research. There's no, there's no immediate payoff, but that's really how the Academy is being degraded now with a lot of what's happening is there's no, there's no attention to detail. There's no scientific rigor and it's just anything goes. And even when there is scientific rigor in the sense of, uh, appropriate methodology, it's being laundered around ideologies where you might do a study. There's a recent, uh,

thread I did on Twitter where there's sort of a study on scales of identity dysfunction. And of course, what you find in these scales is that there is a structure of identity dysfunction that's associated with all this negative mental health stuff.

But when it comes to gender identity, the authors in the discussion talk about how, well, we can't evaluate these associations in the gender diverse population because they're not cis-normative. And so that's sort of a soft normalization of psychopathology in my view. It's not...

true scientific research. They see what they see in terms of the statistics, and then they try to write it off by defining a population as somehow deserving of less scrutiny or different scrutiny. And that's really, to me, even if you want to take that view, you have to demonstrate equal poise about what you're doing, and they don't do that. I think that word cis is a curse.

I hated that word when it first popped up. I knew exactly what those goddamn lefties were up to with that. Progressive radicals were up to with the misuse of language in that regard. I was just going to say, CIS is basically the elimination of structure. It's basically defining sort of a normative and trying to eliminate any sort of hierarchy or any sort of structure to what we've understood in the natural world for a long time. And that gets back to what we were earlier talking about. It's complete abolition of structure and

the complete abolition of any definition of normativity. And when you do that at scale, you have a culture in crisis. So, Er, I've got one final horrible hypothesis for you. So you tell me what you think about this. So you know that if you're marginal,

you're likely to occupy a lower rung socioeconomically, and your existence in some fundamental sense is much more likely to be tenuous. So if you occupy a lower rung in a hierarchy, you're more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, and you're more likely to be unemployed, and you're more likely to be mentally ill, and you're more likely to have an alcohol and drug problem. Of course, there's a bidirectional causal relationship. So you can imagine,

a structure with something at the center and then rungs, circles, concentric circles of marginalization radiating outward from that center. Okay, so now imagine this. You could think of the world as thesis and antithesis, right? There are things and there are opposites, but that's not right. There are things and a plurality of opposites. Now, imagine you try to make the marginalized central.

which is the big postmodern push. Let's bring the margin to the center. Well, that's fine, except the margin is a plurality. So now you're hypothesizing that you can make a plurality a unity, which you can't. And that's why the LGBTQ, et cetera, mob continues to expand its nomenclature because there's no limit to the plurality. There's literally no limit to the plurality. Okay, so what does that imply? Well,

Let's say you bring the marginal to the center, but now that doesn't center all the marginal because the marginal is an infinite plurality. And so what that means is that when you bring the marginal to the center, you just get a new margin. But that new margin is even more marginal. So let's say that's the addition of T to LGB. Okay, now the question is, when you bring the even more marginal to the center, who do you destroy?

Do you destroy the center or do you destroy the previously marginal? And the answer to that seems to me, given the vulnerability of the marginal, is that when you bring the fringe of the fringe in, you destroy the fringe, not the center. So I don't see a way out of that because if the fringe are already compromised because of the multiple forms of stress and the

the even more fringe come in. Like at some point, as you go out into the fringe, you're past the fringe, you're into the bloody monstrous. This is what happened to the Scottish prime minister when she decided that all men who said they were women were women. And so then made political moves to allow women

you know, psychopathic rapists to claim that they were women and to go into women's prisons. The naivety of these people or their malevolence is really without bounds. It's like you have no idea what you're encouraging. And this is one of the advantages or disadvantages of being a psychopathologist. Like I've seen and studied some of the worst forms of human behavior, and I have some real sense of just exactly what will happen if you

destroy all hierarchical structure. You know, and you saw this after the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution. All the useful idiots lose their heads first.

So there's a warning to those who want to extend the alphabet brigade beyond any reasonable limit. It's like, we wait till you get to the real monsters, boys and girls, and you're damn close now. They'll come out under their rocks and you wish you'd never been born. That's exactly right. And I've spoken out about pluralism on X as well. You're seeing that pluralism language everywhere.

in developmental psychopathology is somehow lauded. Pluralism is being described as the new wave of, you know, you have pluralism and methodology, but you have pluralism and integrating lived experience into our understanding of mental illness. And what ends up happening, and I've said this in these exact words, is unmitigated pluralism is ideographic insanity. And

It's just you have a thousand, my thousand, my truths, and there's no truth. It just spirals completely out of control. And that's exactly the language that is being used in developmental psychopathology right now. Pluralism. That's lauded.

But that's going to lead to completely, you know, at the end of the day, that's going to lead to no psychopathology at all. Everybody's going to be living their own psychopathology, their own idiosyncrasy, and you won't be allowed to categorize them as somehow disordered or somehow non-normative. And so Christopher Lash, one of our great cultural commentators of all time, he basically pointed this out. It's...

It's a pluralist utopia and it never works. And so you reach a threshold where you have so many plurals and it's just insanity. I mean, we see this now even on social media. The plurals movement is this sort of the idea that you have all these plurals that assume multiple identities online and it's just complete nonsense, but it's being given a patina of credibility by this lunacy in the academy where I don't know if they're doing it intentionally or

And some pluralism might be good if you're like a methodologist and you want to have different methodologies to sort of test something out. But that's not what they mean. It's much more of an ideological political project. All right, sir. Look, I think we should probably close with that. So I'd like to keep in touch. I'm obviously following you assiduously on Twitter because, as I said, you're one of the few voices in the psychological community that

that's willing to, Jesus, to point out the obvious. I'm so appalled by my colleagues. I'm so ashamed, especially of the psychopathologists, because they should know better. And the developmental psychologists too, they know perfectly well that what's being foisted on us in terms of gender affirming care and the rewriting of the rules around the classification of psychopathology, they know perfectly well. And the whole notion that,

We should do anything other than wait in the case of kids with gender dysphoria who are primarily depressed and anxious and victims of their pathological parenting. We all know that. All psychologists with their salt know that. Bloody bunch of silent cowards. And so, you know, so you're working at a deli, at least you've got your tongue.

And that's attached, that's the thing that's attached directly to your soul. So, you know, good on you as far as I'm concerned. And I hope that you keep scrapping away. My suspicions are that things will turn around for you quite dramatically when they do turn around. And at least in 20 years, you're not going to have to be sitting there thinking, geez, you remember when all those young girls were getting their breasts cut off and I was fully for it or too damn cowardly to say anything about it? It's like, at least you had enough courage

of a spine and a spirit to put your money where your mouth is. And so, you know, that's very rare in today's world. And so I salute you for it. Seriously, good work.

Certainly, you're one of the ones that has really compelled everybody to speak out more. And I certainly have been influenced by a lot of your speaking out. But yeah, I mean, that's what allows me to sleep at night. I'm not going to sit back and watch this unfold and not be able to speak out about it. And I'll have to deal with whatever challenges. And I don't mean to imply that I have challenges.

you know, extensive challenges. Certainly there's people that have many more, but it is hard not to be part of the research, not to be part of the milieu, but I don't see any other way. I don't see any other way except to continue to speak out and build your platform and hope for things to turn around.

All right, sir. So for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue my conversation with Dr. Haldigan on the Daily Wire side of things. I'm not exactly sure what we'll delve into there. Probably I'd like to find out a little bit more about the students that he still has and how he's managing to continue developing his social media network and what he thinks about the return of amateur scientists. You know, when the scientific endeavor emerged, mostly or most,

much of it in Great Britain, a lot of the founders of the disciplines we have now were amateur scientists who actually did scientific work on their own and

You know, for a while the universities were capable of protecting the eccentrics who had that kind of drive for knowledge, and that was their damn job. That was the job of the secretaries and the administrators instead of hoisting their idiot opinions on the faculty members who were trying to pursue truth. And so maybe we'll see a return to something like that, you know, independent science.

That means we'll have to do something about the way science is published, but that doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle to me. So anyways, we'll talk about that more on the Daily Wire side of things. Thank you very much, Dr. Haldgren, and to everybody watching, listening, the film crew here up in the wilds of Ontario. Appreciate your work today, too. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you.

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