Greg Lukianoff: evaluation

Transcript context

…We took a long dark journey from what about-ism, and related to that is straw-manning and steel-manning. So misrepresenting the perspective of the opposing perspective. And this is something also, I guess, it’s very prevalent and it’s difficult to do the reverse of that, which is, steel-manning requires empathy or requires eloquence. It requires understanding, actually doing the research and understanding the alternative perspective. My wonderful employee, Angel Eduardo, has something that he calls star-manning, and I find myself doing this a lot. It’s nice to have two immigrant parents, because I remember being in San Francisco in the weird kind of a ACLU/Burning Man kind of cohort, and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas. And that was his metaphor for middle America, is what he meant by it. But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas. And I’m like, you got to understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners and think about change the name of Kansas to Croatia, change the name of Kansas to some, that’s what it sounds like to me. And the star-manning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you’re saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority, and that’s when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it, how typical. America is exceptional in a number of ways, but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical. It’s one of the reasons why when people start reading Thomas Sowell for example, they start getting hooked, because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of country’s problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United States exist in 75% of the rest of the countries in the world. Francis Fukuyama’s, the book that I’m reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we’re not special in a variety of ways. This is actually something that’s very much on my mind. And Fukuyama, of course, it’s a great book. It’s stilted a little bit in its writing because his term for one of the things he’s concerned about what destroys societies is repatrimonilization, which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your family and friends. And I actually think a lot of what I’m seeing in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization. And I think that’s one of the reasons why people are so angry. I think the prospect that we very nearly seem to have an election that was going to be Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton. It’s like, are we a dynastic country now? Is that what’s kind of happening? But also it’s one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about legacy admissions, about how much certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually. And believe me, we were poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancies, I got to go to Stanford. eem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually. And believe me, we were poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancies, I got to go to Stanford. And I got to see how people, they treat you differently in a way that’s almost insulting, basically suddenly to a certain kind of person. I was a legitimate person. And I look at how much America relies on Harvard, on Yale, to produce its, I’m going to use a very Marxist sounding term, ruling class. And that’s one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these elite colleges. And these elite colleges, with the exception of University of Chicago and UVA, do really badly regarding freedom of speech, and that has all sorts of problems. It doesn’t bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society.…

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