Closer than before but you're still in strawman territory.

Basically, he preaches against what he labels postmodernism but is actually a simplistic strawman of the left that wants to remove all hierarchy and tradition. The lobster example is to show that we share a basic structure with an organism that is removed from us evolutionarily by so many millions of years that any similarity should be striking.

The point is to reinforce the idea that hierarchy may go awry but the basic concept has a natural utility.

That sounds suspiciously like the good old 'it's (un)natural' argument to me.

I don't know much about this lobster **** so I'm just working with what you're saying, but the fact that hierarchy has a use in nature does not mean that 1. it's good 2. it still has a similar use for humans, considering we have strayed pretty far from our hunter gatherer origins.

Emphasis because I think that was the main point.

The heavy message was about savage defeats in life impacting the amygdala and hippocampus. It was mostly a message of compassion. That segment of the lecture was about the going awry part of social hierarchy.

He was teaching psychology and not ethics but the obvious extension of what he was saying is that as a species we can use later evolutionary developments (the frontal cortex) to spare each other the irrevocable misery caused by continuing to kick a dog while he’s down.

Not that it really matters that much but he’s talking about evolutionary developments that are occurred like 2 billion years before we became hunter gatherers.

Everyone laughs at your penis.
We're all dicks at MB amirite?

I know. I didnt mean it literally

It's a response to the general oversimplification that hierarchies are just arbitrary social constructs imposed in order to maintain the patriarchy. It comes close to the naturalistic fallacy but it's not quite that because he does stress that it's important to question hierarchies, he just thinks the left is dogmatically opposed to heirarchy of any form despite its natural utility and ubiquity. Once again pointing out that we're far away from lobsters misses the point. That's the entire point is that we're so far removed from them yet we can point to very basic similarities and structures that have maintained themselves in some form or another for billions of years. That's how useful they are.

So his whole shtick is to say we need a left to question hierarchies and traditions and we also need conservatives to preserve the useful hierarchies and traditions. It's a rather mundane and middle of the road message but because of his verbose and pretentious way of conveying things it gets misconstrued from both sides. He has legions of fans who take the wrong message from what he says and legions of haters who do the same. I think it is intentional on his part. He is careful with his words so you can't pin him down but he is vaguely giving the impression of a basic reactionary hold on to your traditions message like elph said.

Like I said I'm not defending him or his character. I lost all respect I might have had for him when I found out about him hiding his benzo addiction while preaching self help. But there is some substance to some of the stuff he says that people who jump on the hate bandwagon don't even seem to have grasped when they mock him.

As for elph saying I'm giving him too much credit... I'm just paraphrasing what he himself has said many times. I listened to him for like a good year so I think I'm more familiar than you are.

If that's all he's saying then he's definitely a grifter for being so obtuse about such a boring position.

@ jwb Fair enough, but it still seems like a naturalistic fallacy to me. If he points out that we should question hierarchies then that's fine, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that he brings up hierarchies being ubiquitous in nature as an argument for their usefullness to humans.

I was ****ting on kermit before it was cool.