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let's talk about how societies evolved how human culture changes across time and introduce you to some new research called the World Values Survey this is going to be a new model that we're gonna bring in to help us to understand sociological issues culture society the evolution of mankind and your place in that as an individual because of course you're not just actualizing yourself as an individual you're part of a community part of a society part of a culture and all of that creates a very serious and crucial backdrop against which now you're trying to self actualize and excuse your epistemology your metaphysics and many other things so this episode here is really a piece of the puzzle of what I call conscious politics I have a four-part episode series called conscious politics where I go into a lot of depth on that and this will be another puzzle piece and that to help you to understand why politics works the way that it works and it'll help you to understand yourself so let's get into that but before we do let's also reintroduce very quickly here the other two models we've talked about in the past that are going to be helpful here because there's going to be a lot of correlation and the first one is spiral dynamics of course hopefully you're familiar with that if you're not go see my six-part or even more part series on spiral dynamics many hours over 10 hours I talk about that model it's a very sophisticated model which basically describes the development of human values and here on the screen you're gonna see a slide of just the essence of what sprawl and AMEX is so if you want a quick refresher to refresh your memory there's stages here there's seven or so these stages different colors purple red blue orange green yellow turquoise moving upwards as we move upwards we encounter more complexity and a sort of a evolution of cultures and human value systems and you can see there are the various descriptions of what those different stages mean I won't go over those again here you already be familiar with that if not go check out that many series multiple part series so we're gonna be relying on this keep this in mind and also we're gonna be relying on the old classic model of Maslow's hierarchy of needs so here you see it on the screen the classic pyramid you might have learned about this in high school or in college I've talked about this in my episode called using Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualize so basically what you see here is you have you see different levels of priority that the human organism and human society as well has in terms of what it needs to survive at the very bottom of course you just have the basic stuff like food water sleep sex and so forth and then as you satisfy those of course higher needs come online the need for maybe a nicer shelter for a family health then beyond that you have friendship sexual intimacy beyond that you might have self-esteem needs a need for achievement a need to get respect of your colleagues and friends and then beyond that you have stuff like the need to be creative the need to have freedom to discover to explore to travel to contribute to the world and then at the very very top you have the self transcendence needs which is the need to move beyond your human identity and things such as truth spirit consciousness being an unconditional love so keep all this in mind because this will be very important for what we'll be talking about throughout this episode so now let me introduce you to the world values survey that's what it's called sometimes it's abbreviated as W V s this is some groundbreaking and remarkable research that's been done over the last 40 years and hardly anybody knows about it they don't really talk about it in the news when you listen to politics nobody really talks about it nobody really knows about it so I want to introduce this to you this will help you to situate yourself and understand what's going on around you it gives us important insights into human evolution and development it explains culture politics really well so that culture and political debates no longer just devolve into left versus right or conservative versus liberal but you see something deeper this is sort of a meta analysis of what's really going on and why these you know cultural wars and so forth happen that you see in the news so this world value survey this is a global research project spearheaded by social scientist named Ronald Englehart and many others alongside him so by no means just himself in fact there are dozens and even hundreds of social scientists involved with this research it's a very big project one of the reasons it's so big is because it covers the whole globe the other reason is so big is because it covers a long chunk of time so basically they've been doing this survey from 1981 till 2020 and it's still ongoing and every four years they do a new wave of surveys to add on top of the database of data so what are they really surveying here well they're trying to ask people all around the world ordinary people basically what they think about fundamental issues such as the economy the environment gay rights religion do you believe in God or don't you about beliefs in science about their ideas about what the right and best government should be their satisfaction in life and so on and so forth and so they've been doing this since the 1980s and the whole point of it is not just to gather the data once but to keep regather ofor years in as many countries as feasible and to get a picture of what the trends are how are these values shifting over time and what are the causes and effects and factors that lead to these values changing and so we're going to be talking about that in a lot of great detail and giving you insights from that in these surveys over 100 countries are involved which accounts for 90 percent of the world's population so it's important understand that these surveys are not just being done in first world to developed countries in the West these surveys are done all around the world in as many places that they can do it it includes South America it includes Asia includes Africa it includes the Middle East basically the whole world and they're expanding it as far as they can so it's very widespread so of course you know sometimes there's criticisms of surveys where it say oh well this data only accounts for Western Europe or only for Americans well here we want to make sure that we understand how all cultures evolve we don't want to be chauvinistic and we don't want to assume that the Western worldview or the European worldview is the only true one and what you'll see in this data is that there's a lot of commonality of course there's nothing special per se about Europe or about America or about the white race that makes them more important than than any other we'll see that many of these trends are common across all these different countries but of course countries are at different levels of development countries are not all the same and we do need to make those distinctions which we'll be making so how is this data collected it's collected through questionnaires so they have political and social scientists around the world who are responsible who are volunteers who go out there and administer these questionnaires in their local areas and countries and then they bring it back to some central location where it's all compiled into a database giant database of all the raw data after the raw data is compiled over a period of four years that constitutes a single wave then that data is released and it's available for free to everybody who can then study it and then you can see if you could find trends you can create graphs and charts and do analysis on this data we're gonna be covering a lot of the analysis because we don't really care about the raw data itself here we're more interested in the analysis of what the data means and the the particular people I want to give credit to here for the some of the analysis that I'll be offering is Ronald Englehart of course and his colleague Christian Wells all their central to some of the analysis that I'll be providing so the World Values Survey network it's a network of scientists has produced over 300 publications in 20 languages and the world values database all the raw data is published for free online you can go and download it at World Values Survey org alright so that was sort of just a little bit of the preamble now let's get into the meat of what this is and I'll be quoting a little bit here from Wikipedia which describes and does a nice introduction to what we're talking about wikipedia says quote the World Values Survey is a global research project that explores people's values and beliefs how they change over time and what social and political impact they have the World Values Survey measures monitors and analyzes the following support for democracy tolerance for foreigners and ethnic minorities support for gender equality the role of religion and changing levels of religiosity the impact of globalization attitudes towards the environment work family politics national identity culture diversity insecurity and subjective well-being otherwise known as happiness data from the world value survey has been used to better understand the motivations behind events such as the Arab Spring the 2005 French civil unrest the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Yugoslav wars and political upheaval in the 1990s the world value survey has over the years demonstrated that people's beliefs play a key role in economic development the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions the rise of gender equality and the extent to which societies have effective government end quote that's all from the Wikipedia page about the World Values Survey so now let's start showing you some of the charts and some of the data from the survey and start to do the analysis on this so this is perhaps the most important thing that you need to know about this survey and here on the screen you're going to see a slide of the first set of data so what we're doing here is we're mapping all the countries that we've surveyed onto two main axes the horizontal and the vertical on the horizontal x-axis we have the survival versus the self-expression values so that's going to be one key distinction is a nation predominantly survival oriented or self-expression oriented and we'll explain that in a second and then on the vertical axis we have the the y-axis we have another dimension that we're going to use for mapping these these different countries which is traditional values versus secular - rational values so some countries are more traditional some are more secular and rational so you can see that slide here now what does this mean here's a description of traditional values countries that value traditional values emphasize the importance of religion parent-child ties deference to Authority and traditional family values people who embrace these values also reject divorce abort that abortion euthanasia and suicide these societies have high levels of national pride and generally a nationalistic outlook okay and then that contrasts with secular rational values which are the opposite we might say of traditional values in these societies less emphasis is placed on religion traditional family values and authority so in these societies it's not about obedience to Authority it's more about independent thinking and rationality and in these societies divorce abortion abortion euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable and then the next axis of course we have is the survival values versus the self expression values so here's what the survival values mean in these countries emphasis is on economic physical security it is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance high corruption and authoritarian styles of government so in these countries they are closer to poverty they have more food shortages and basic physical survival is more difficult so if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs you might say this is the bottom half of that pyramid all the very fundamental stuff how do you feed your children how do you get a job how do you get basic health care how do you get access to food and water and such things electricity and then that's contrasted with the self expression values so in these countries that are self expressive a high priority is placed on environmental protection a growing tolerance for foreigners gays lesbians and gender equality rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life and these countries tend to be more democratic so in these countries it's the upper half of Maslow's hierarchy of needs because they've already satisfied the lower half so then now they're working on the upper half so these are the different dimensions that we can use to classify countries now if you look at that slide you can see how some of the countries are arranged basically they're arranged into three tiers there's the low income countries the mid tier and then the high income countries and this is just measured by GDP and per capita income so let's just quickly list off some of these so that were clear what we're talking about so in the low tier we have countries like Zimbabwe Jordan Morocco Egypt Bangladesh Iraq Iran Turkey Thailand India Vietnam Russia Romania Colombia South Africa Peru Pakistan Indonesia Venezuela China Ukraine and Guatemala and by the way even though we're classifying these countries and we will be here and what we're gonna be classifying different regions and people's and real even religions into like low mid and high tiers be careful not to confuse this with some sort of racist secret agenda right we're not saying that these are bad countries we're not saying that they are irredeemable we're not saying that they can't outgrow the current position that they're in we're just evaluating you know stuff like objective measures of their wealth and corruption and other things like that now the mid-tier are South Korea Taiwan Hungary Croatia Poland Chile Brazil Mexico Puerto Rico Argentina Uruguay Malaysia Hong Kong now of course I know Puerto Rico isn't isn't a country of its own but anyways it's a region so and then we have the top tier Germany Japan Italy Spain Ireland the USA the UK Canada New Zealand Australia France Belgium Norway Finland Netherlands Denmark Iceland Switzerland Sweden Slovenia the Czech Republic now of course these designations are somewhat arbitrary somewhat subjective depends on how you want to categorize them but that just gives you a little bit of an idea of how countries can be classified in terms of their level of success at least economically and then we'll also be looking at culturally as well we're gonna be matching the economic and the cultural and we'll see how it all inter place together so it's not so simple to separate for example democracy from economic success and from cultural tolerance these things tend to go hand-in-hand which is why this data is so valuable it shows us that and we'll see more that in a minute so the less developed countries are more traditional and survival oriented in their values this is spiral dynamics stages purple red and blue the lower three stages and then the more developed countries tend to be secular rational and self expressive in their values and this is spall dynamics orange green and yellow and above so why is this the case that's what we'll be looking at it's easy to think like oh well yeah of course the unsuccessful countries are the religious ones they're the religious fanatics and the scientific countries they're the more successful ones and they're the ones associated with Western culture it's it's much more nuanced than that so be careful not to take that sort of arrogant position we have to really take a look at what's going on here so perhaps the most important thing that needs to be stressed now is the function of survival in driving all of these values and dynamics survival drives everything people don't just adopt values willy-nilly your values are a survival strategy that the human organism and the super organisms of your community and your tribe adopt in order to meet the survival challenges that you're facing and survival is not just about keeping your body physically safe as I talked about in my two-part series understanding survival if you haven't watched those two episodes part 1 and part 2 of understanding survival go watch those because that will change how you understand what survival is survival is a much more robust notion just than just physical survival it includes cultural survival it includes survival of the self image and identity that you have and it brings in with it ideology worldviews dogmas perspectives biases and so forth that all of this plays into the survival of what you call yourself and what your society calls itself so it's really about the survival of identities see so without meeting basic survival needs you can't evolve and even care about self-expression needs so of course it makes sense that before you go caring about creativity and art and truth and consciousness and all this sorts of stuff first you gotta be able to feed yourself and clothe your children pretty obvious from Maslow's hierarchy of needs we can see that just from your own life you can see that it's for you to care about the lofty stuff in life when you're struggling with very basic things you got to take care of the basics and build upon that foundation that's how life works right we are dealing with certain physical limitations and biological limitations when we're talking about life understand that people around the world and even within your own country in different regions of your country especially if your country is is large geographically they face very different survival challenges not everyone faces your survival challenges and one of the most tricky things to wrap your mind around here especially for those of us who grew up in in the luxury of a first world developed countries in opulent neighborhoods if you had a good childhood where your parents took care of all your financial needs basically you never had a shortage of food you never had a shortage of electricity and clean water and all the sorts of stuff was taken care of for you that is not most people's experience of life around the world that's an exception to the rule the rule is that many people close to 40 percent live near poverty near starvation around the world we just don't see it in the developed countries because we're sort of in our own little bubble and if you are watching me chances are you grew up in such a bubble now of course some of you did struggle with paying your bills and getting your food and I totally understand that in which case you have a little bit of a different appreciation for what real physical survival challenges are like you're very familiar with the bottom half of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and I know that many of you are struggling with that even in many developed countries people still struggle with that I understand that but remember we're generalizing here and we're talking about sociological trends so survival challenges dictate one's beliefs values and worldview that's crucial to understand most people take their beliefs values and worldview as function of truth like well I believe in God I'm a Christian because it's true or it's like well I'm a capitalist because it's true because there's something valuable there because I really believe in it I'm a libertarian because you know that's the right way to look at the world this is a naive approach to life when you start to study different perspectives and why people believe the things they believe and what this data shows us from the world value survey you start to see that actually your beliefs values and worldviews are almost entirely dictated by the survival situation that you grew up in if you're a Christian you're a Christian only because you were raised in a Christian family in a Christian nation most likely of course there's a few exceptions here and there but most likely if you're a Muslim you're a Muslim because you were raised in a Muslim part of the world not because you independently derived Islam for yourself and independently of your own will decided to become a Muslim you didn't have a choice about it you are programmed to be a Muslim and now here's the kicker that's difficult for many Westerners to swallow if you're an atheist rationalist secular scientifically minded person that too is not something you arrived at independently you didn't just decide to be that way you are that way because you grew up in a culture in which having those beliefs values in that worldview was conducive to your survival and you ain't doing anything original in taking on this worldview now of course all of us love to rationalize and justify to ourselves how actually no no no Leo if I had a choice I would choose the beliefs and values and worldview that I currently have but that there that is the ego bullshitting itself so we got to be careful to not fall into those traps your worldview and values isn't based on truth it's what was necessary for you to survive and that's difficult pill for many people to swallow to admit that just to admit that is very threatening because it threatens to undermine your entire foundations of reality imagine admitting that your Christianity is contingent on something like where you were born not that it's true in any important way and furthermore imagine acknowledging that even your scientific worldview is also not true in any objective sense but is contingent upon the culture you grew up in see people don't want to admit this if you could admit this to yourself you're already making some real good progress because a lot of people get really stuck at this point so I just wanted to point that out to you and now we're gonna really get into the analysis of some of the data I'll be quoting extensively from Ronald englehart's book called cultural evolution and I recommend that book if you want you can go purchase it and read it in detail it explains a lot of this data but for those of you who aren't gonna go that deep I'm gonna pull out some of the best juiciest quotes and then offer some of my analysis and commentary on them especially sort of from my perspective for my sort of higher consciousness experiences and understanding so here we go quote a culture is a set of learned behaviors that constitutes a serve a society survival strategy the norms governing this strategy usually change very slowly often persisting for centuries but under certain conditions they can change rapidly though fashions change quickly basic values tend to change slowly through intergenerational population replacement with multi-decade time lags end quote let's pause and explain this because this is very important so as I was saying about survival a culture as a whole what is that that is a collective survival strategy of millions of people that's really what a culture is oftentimes we don't think about it this way oftentimes we think of culture as just something like you know all well those people over there do things one way and these people are here do it another way and it's kind of like well those people over there are weird they have weird food weird dress weird customs weird rituals and we over here have our own if you're an absolutist you think yours is the best if you're a relativist you think that all different cultures have different pros and cons but still have you really contemplated and wondered what is a culture and why are there different cultures why don't we all just have one culture and the reason is is because of course geographically and historically we're trying to survive as humans and as clans and tribes in different geographies different conditions in the world which leads to different climate different weather different animals to each different plants too to use for medicines a different humidity different numbers of sunlight versus nighttime hours depending on your you know your latitude and longitude and all of that on the planet whether you're near an ocean or you're in a desert all of these play huge factors which shape culture for example cuisine why does the Japanese cuisine contain a lot of raw seafood and seaweed and stuff like that well because they live on an island and there's a lot of seafood around you're not gonna find a bunch of raw seafood in the Middle East why not cuz they live in a desert there's not much to go around they're difficult to keep that stuff from perishing when it's 100 degrees outside see so that's just a little a little example but of course there's a lot more so all of the different rituals and and cultural customs and even ways of dress all of this is adapted to be an optimal survival strategy in that particular situation in that particular part of the world but of course not just a part of the world but also a certain slice of time so the way you survived in Japan thousand years ago is not the same way that you survive in Japan today even though the geography hasn't changed fundamentally it's still the same in a thousand years not much geographical change but see what's unique about us humans is that our culture becomes its own ecosystem so once we start to create culture unlike other species which mostly adapt to fit their environment our environment becomes our culture to survive today you have to survive within a culture to get a job you have to fit in within the jobs and skill sets that your culture requires otherwise you won't be having a profitable job to find a mate to start a family with to have sex with to spend your time with this is all cultural in different cultures there are different ways to find mates it might be an arranged marriage through social connections it might be by paying a giant dowry to hire in order to basically buy your bride and just convince her family to allow you to marry her and it might be like that or it might be going to a nightclub and getting drunk and you know high on Molly and that might be how you find your true love or it might be going to Burning Man to some hippy festival in the middle of nowhere and then there you find your true love you know different ways of finding your true love and then of course different ceremonies for how to tie that knot and different legal codes and bla bla bla bla bla but why all these differences because people are in different places and also people have different environments cultural environments social environments that they're trying to navigate and these environments they're changing they're not the same the culture of Japan a thousand years ago is not the one of today the culture of America 50 years ago is not the culture of America today and people forget this and they tend to treat culture as a sort of a monolithic static thing it's not static at all culture evolves much quicker then the landscape upon which the culture was built see and we have to be adaptable to that and what this World Values Survey data shows is that values change they change to track the changes in the culture and of course technology plays a huge part in this as well because as we develop new technology our technology literally changes the landscape we clear forests we build skyscrapers and concrete jungle cities we build suburbs we build roads and highways and bridges and airplanes and airports and power plants and cars and computers a lot of people these days are surviving online we have a whole new dimension to survival online survival I'm one of those people I get most of my money through online business you see so something that's sort of unreal like the Internet you might say well how tangible is the Internet it's not very tangible it's almost some sort of virtual space on the other hand if you do business through the internet if you're a remote worker that's huge for you your entire livelihood and survival depends upon having an internet connection you see literally I'm I'm tied to having a high-speed Internet connection I can't just go live on some island somewhere in the middle of of the Pacific Ocean because they're not gonna be enough internet for me to even upload one of these episodes and then how am I gonna eat maybe I'll eat coconut see I'll have to adapt but that's exactly the point and the trait of course is that people don't like to adapt the mind is notoriously rigid and dogmatic and ideological once it adopts a set of values and a perspective and worldview it doesn't like to change that and so that's the part of this quote the second part of the last part of this quote that's very important which is he says that basic values change slowly through intergenerational population replacement and multi-decade time lags so what this means is that we have generations basically every twenty to thirty years is a new generation so the time it takes from a baby to grow up and have its own baby start its own family that's about 20 to 30 years on average and so of course what happens is that a baby is born it gets programmed with all of the values of the culture and society that it's growing up in it doesn't really have a choice it just gets programmed through family through religion through going to church through going to school going to university hanging with friends going to work all of that programs you as a baby and even as a teen and even as a young adult so the first 20 years of your life you're just being programmed like a robot and then for the rest of your life you're gonna be acting out that programming and you're gonna be very resistant to changing it it's almost like setting a foundation for a house in concrete once that foundation is set it's very difficult to change and that's exactly how the human mind works we've talked in the past about things like imprinting how the mind can be imprinted and then it gets stuck within those imprints and those beliefs it's very difficult to change those so you know if you were born into a Christian household and they baptized you from a very early age and they read you Bible stories and so forth that becomes the foundation of your sort of mental operating system that you use to understand the world and it's going to be very difficult for you to ever transcend that completely in your life it's set in stone now that doesn't mean you can't transcend it if you really wanted to but it'll take serious work and most people won't do it so what happens is that each generation sort of leapfrogs the previous generation because when a new human is born it's soaking up the new values of the culture but there's a sort of a delay of 20 or 30 years between different generations and so really society inches along gradually like an inchworm one generation at a time and as one generation is born on all generation dies when the old generation dies all of the values that it had and all this worldviews die with it and this is actually a very good thing because it frees up the sort of the that ossified matrix it makes a little bit more fluid and the new generation can come in of course it'll take 20 or 30 years for the new generation to really come online mature into adults and then really have an impact in the world and that's when we'll see those new set of values and worldviews start to shape the culture into something new and this is how society moves forward the next quote says quote historian Ian Morris after examining a vast array of historical evidence concludes that each age gets the thought it needs with foraging farming and industrial societies developing appropriate value systems through an evolutionary process end quote C so each age gets the thought it needs so if you are in a foraging society you're gonna have world views and beliefs and morality and even spiritual practices which perfectly suit a foraging society if you're in a farming society you're gonna have a different set which suit are suitable for farming if you're in the Internet age and you spend most your time on social media you're gonna have a set of world views and beliefs that fit that getting this the next quote is quote one of the most pervasive concepts in social science is that one's basic personality structure crystallizes by the time one reaches adulthood considerable evidence indicates that people's basic values are largely fixed when they reach adulthood and change relatively little thereafter end quote so that's exactly what I was describing with the sort of setting into concrete your minds operating system that's exactly what happens and so what you have to appreciate is that whatever culture and social norms exist today right now they are mostly enforced by the oldest generations in our society and that if you want them to change you basically have to wait for the older generations to die off to free up the space the cognitive space we might say for new generations to come in and change that now of course the old generations can they're capable of change but by large they don't want to they're stubborn they're dogmatic they think they're right they're arrogant their minds are set in stone of course there's always some exceptional older people whose minds are not set in stone but that's an exception okay next quote the feeling that the world is secure or insecure is an early established and relatively stable aspect of one's outlook when they are insecure people give top priority to materialistic goals end quote now this is crucial again because here's one of the most important factors in determining your worldview or outlook on the world did you grow up as a kid in a part of the world where you felt secure or did you rub in a part where you felt insecure did you grow up in a war zone or did you grow up in a nice suburb somewhere in California this is huge this shapes your entire outlook on the world if you grew up in a war zone you're basically gonna treat the whole world as unsafe you're gonna have that paranoia with you for the rest of your life because you've seen firsthand how dangerous it is and it was necessary for you to develop that sort of paranoia because that kept you alive in that war zone whereas if you grow up in a cushy opulent suburban California somewhere with a silver spoon in your mouth and your parents were millionaires you're so out of touch with physical insecurity the idea that you can go hungry you can run out of water or electricity or basic services or the idea that there's no decent roads or that the government is corrupt or that the police are corrupt these these never even entered into your mind so you grew up in such an idyllic environment that you take much of this survival for granted and in a certain sense this is a positive thing because you're not now paranoid you don't think everyone is out to get you to screw you over you basically probably believe that people are nice and decent and that there's no reason to go to war there's no reason to to steal loaves of bread and so forth whereas someone who grew up in a war zone to them stealing loaves of bread this is this was a necessity of survival see so these people have very different worldviews and even if you take one of these insecure people and you transport them into a modern luxurious environment where they have all their physical needs taken care of and deep down their psyche has not been instantly transformed their psyche is still insecure at some fundamental level and that's going to affect how they vote what kind of culture they subscribe to what kind of ideas they have about democracy or authoritarianism what kind of political people they support and have their views on gay rights their views on religion and many other factors right so understand this survival is everything in determining your worldview it's everything it's so crucial it's so much more crucial than people give it credit for next quote there is a huge difference between growing up knowing that survival is insecure and growing up and taking survival for granted end quote so that's exactly what I was just explaining it's nice to be able to grow up to he survival for granted in a sense we need that because that's what actually ultimately leads to the progression and evolution of culture culture used to a lot more brutish violent and unfair because a thousand or 2,000 years ago almost everybody was living in a part of the world which was insecure but as we developed more technology and more material wealth as we build better infrastructure better bureaucracies better governments we craft new constitutions which give more civil rights in all of this and we create better government as we do that we're moving out of insecurity towards security as we become more secure were afforded luxuries like compassion and empathy and caring about social justice and democracy in all of these sorts of quote-unquote luxuries that many of us take for granted in first world countries it's difficult for someone who grew up in a first world country to appreciate that democracy isn't just something that comes about naturally or organically not everyone is just born believing in democracy or freedom of speech or equal rights for men and women or tolerance of homosexuality or appreciation of science these are things that had to be hard fought for over millennia and over centuries you in a sense if you're living in a personal country you're standing on the shoulders of giants on a pyramid or on a pyramid of the corpses of millions of and of your ancestors all the old generations it's almost like in you know in geology they have different sediments you can slice through mountain there's different sedimentary layers well that's how human society is - in developed societies advanced societies we have many many layers that we take for granted but those layers are absolutely crucial as soon as those letters stopped a function everything falls apart see and also you need understand that in other parts of the world where those layers haven't been built up yet well you can expect that they won't be able to appreciate some of the things you appreciate because you already have those layers in place see you might go to some place like in Saudi Arabia you might wonder oh my god is there is so barbaric there they they sentence homosexuals to death and they barely even let women drive and women have to wear these these black burkas that cover their whole body it seems so crude and barbaric why don't they just throw a party at the pool and everyone's walking around in bikinis and listening to pop music I said no you don't get it they haven't developed themselves to that as a culture see this is a matter of life and death for them it's not just a matter of like all yeah let's just be nicer to women no no no you have to understand that in Western cultures we also had those same things just it might have been hundreds of years ago it might been thousands of years ago but we had the same sorts of attitudes we've just evolved and they evolved less now why did they evolve less that's a different issue and we're not gonna tackle that too much here but suffice to say that it's not because they're an inferior race there's a lot of geological geographical factors and just historical developmental factors involved there so it's not it's not that one culture is better than another culture every culture has its pros and cons some cultures developed faster than others in different environments depending on all the factors involved there's thousands of factors involved there's no one single factor to explain it let's keep quoting here quote individuals under stress yearn for rigid predictable rules they want to be sure of what's going to happen because survival is precarious and their margin of error is slender conversely people raised under conditions of relative security can tolerate more ambiguity and have less need for the absolute and rigid rules that religions provide people with relatively high levels of existential security can more readily accept deviations from familiar patterns than people with who are uncertain that their survival needs will be met and quote so this is crucial as well see you might wonder how is it possible that in certain blessed of all parts of the world they actually vote for autocrats and tyrants into office how come they're not all clamoring for democracy because democracy is actually something that is a luxury that comes later if you or your society and your culture are under a serious existential threat like there's a threat of war or invasion you will gladly take an authoritarian or a dictator and throw out democracy and free speech and you will impose rigid rules because the most important thing for you is survival not free speech not individual liberties those are all luxuries that come only once you've handled your basic survival see so people who are on the brink of starvation they're much more open to rigid rules they're much more open to strongmen and leaders who could come and take charge and try to lead them out of that situation so the crucial mistake that many Westerners and so-forth make is they look at an autocrat or a dictator somewhere they say oh my god is so terrible he's so evil how could he oppress his his fellow countrymen that way no you don't get it that's not what's going on it's not that he's evil it's that the conditions the survival conditions in that part of the world at that time in human history are such that the citizens themselves put forth such a person to take charge and lead them out of that situation in that situation your simple democracy doesn't work for a democracy to work you need to have some rule of law democracy doesn't work when I can aka 47 and just go shoot your family you can't have a democracy that way and there are many parts in the world where that's how issues are settled rather than going to court people come at each other with knives and with guns with pitchforks see you have to develop a court system you can develop a police system which is not corrupt in order to handle these sorts of issues such that then we can go to a forum a public square and debate out our differences democratically so to speak and then we can go to a to a voting booth and vote democratically for something right to be able to vote democratically there need to be on intimidated voters the voters need to have a certain level of education they need to be literate they need to be able to read the names on the on the ballots and all this might seem so basic that you might think that everyone has this but no just a few hundred years ago the majority of the world's population was illiterate I don't know what the rate is now but it's it's still substantial see next quote threats increase the need for strong norms and punishment for deviant behavior to maintain order tight societies with autocratic governing systems that suppress dissent provide strong deterrence and control of crime and tend to be more religious nations that encountered severe ecological and historical threats have relatively strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior and quote so this explains a lot of why like for example in the Middle East or that they have very low tolerance for homosexuality for feminism they can be quite xenophobic and and so forth and they're also very very religious is because that religion is a sort of a binder it binds people together into a nation or into a tribe or into a clan and it keeps people aligned thinking in a certain direction valuing the same things one of the greatest challenges is managing a group of people whose values are incoherent with each other you know one person believes he can do this other person believes he can do that and there's a thousand such people how do you get so many people to work together against a common enemy let's say we have a tribe of a thousand people and we're gonna we're gonna have invaders coming in next month well what's gonna happen if you know I decide to just go spend the next month having sex somebody else decides to go then spend the next month playing video games somebody else decides to spend the next month you know starting a business we're gonna get exterminated we could get together mean to come up with a common set of values and things we can agree upon that will bind us together so that we can act as one larger unit of a thousand to fend off this invader we're gonna build a wall we're gonna build weapons whatever to do it see so under these conditions you don't have the luxury to just go and play video games or go have sex with whoever you want or to to be homosexual or to to advocate for women's rights and so forth and I'm not justifying these things as proper I'm just saying this is simply what's required to survive in that particular situation if it is sometimes it isn't required but sometimes it is so in these sorts of societies where they're closer to physical danger where they're not as secure they tend to be a lot more conformist there's a lot less individual expression or room or tolerance for that you follow the norms you obey Authority because the Authority is the thing that keeps you alive whether it's the church authority or the government authority or even a local authority like a chieftain or an elder next quote submission to Authority has high costs the individuals personal goals must be subordinated to those of others under conditions of insecurity people are willing to do so under threat of invasion civil war or economic collapse people tend to seek strong military figures who can protect them from danger conversely prosperity and security are conducive to tolerance of diversity this helps explain a long-established finding that rich societies are much likelier to be Democratic than poor ones under conditions of insecurity people may readily submit to authoritarian rule and quote which is just what I was describing so next here I want to show you a chart and this chart here on the horizontal axis shows the percent emphasising self expression values and then on the vertical axis it shows the level of effective democracy in the country and what we can see here is a very clear trend that those countries which have the most effective democracies which means the democracy is the least corrupt it works the best for the most people in those countries countries such as Finland New Zealand Canada Australia Switzerland Denmark the United States the United Kingdom Iceland so forth in these countries they have a very strong emphasis on self expressive values these are values of free speech individual rights the right to Liberty life and happiness all that sort of stuff this stuff in the Constitution civil rights and so forth whereas countries like Zimbabwe or Pakistan or Jordan or Bangladesh in these countries democracy is very ineffective there's virtually no democracy there they're highly corrupt and of course they emphasize survival values not self expression values because they're struggling just to maintain themselves and then in the next slide here this is some data which is completely separate from the World Values Survey but I wanted to introduce it here anyways because it correlates nicely this is some data from the transparency international organization this is the 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index the CPI they call it so this is a number from 0 to 100 so this nonprofit organization basically tracks and monitors the corruption levels of police courts and governments in all countries around the world and they give a number from 0 to 100 zero meaning totally corrupt 100 meaning squeaky-clean and you can see what this looks like and you can see that many of the Western countries especially northern European countries countries in North America are some of the least corrupt Australia and New Zealand's these are some of the least corrupt countries and then the most corrupt countries are often in parts of Asia of course a lot in Africa South America Russia Eastern Europe and and so on and this correlates very nicely with the World Values Survey data because the more corrupt your country is the less democracy it has and vice versa and here in the following slide is the same data but now just displayed in a different way you can see the different levels of democracy and how countries are arranged here and the corruption index is going horizontally and then vertically is the different levels of democracy so there's full democracy flawed democracy hybrid regimes and autocratic regimes at the very bottom those four levels you can see going horizontally across so yeah it's pretty self-explanatory there and you can see just how well a full democracy tracks with low corruption and just how well high corruption tracks with autocratic regimes down at the very bottom at the left all right so let's do some more quotes quote economic development brings systemic changes in society's beliefs and values 40 percent of the world's population is moving from starvation level poverty to a modest level of Economic Security all of the low income and lower middle income societies again without a single exception fall into the lower left-hand zone which is the traditional slash survival value oriented world view a very clear that's a very clear correlation from this data quote low income societies remain solidly opposed to gender equality and tolerance of gays & quot why is this is it because they're ignorant and closed-minded and evil and bad people no it's because in a low-income society maintaining that strong family unit that traditional family unit is very important to be able to survive see and in these societies there's clear delineation of roles for genders the woman is supposed to take care of the kids the man is supposed to take care of the woman and the kids by going to work and this is just how it's arranged because that's how it has to be arranged to survive in that environment in those conditions now of course as you outgrow that as the environment conditions change a society becomes more technological a man no longer needs to support the family so much the woman is able to support herself and her kids more because technology equalizes that physical difference between the strengths of them you know the brute physical strength between men and women which on average exists and then there's more tolerance for homosexuality in more advanced societies because now it's not so important to raise eight children to help you to maintain your farm now you can be sexually promiscuous and you can even not have children and that's considered okay because the society already has a massive population by that point it's overpopulated so it's not so important to breathe I Kravitz you can sustain yourself even with one or two children or no children there are systems in place that when you get old you don't need children to take care of you you can earn enough money to put in a bank account put it in some IRA and then live off that savings get an annuity live off of it and retire live in a retirement home but you see in low-income societies there are no retirement homes the children have to take care of the parents when they get old see so having lots of children in disease is their insurance policy in a developed society we have social security in a low income Society the Social Security is having eight children and not being gay that's the Social Security now again make sure you don't misunderstand me I am NOT justifying homophobia I'm not making any judgments about it one way or another I'm not saying it's good or bad right or wrong I'm just explaining where it's coming from it's a survival thing your worldview is a survival thing and if you're homosexual realize that that's only because you're living in a certain society that allows you to be all openly homosexual that's a luxury probably in most other times and places in the world you would have had to kept that keep that deeply under wraps because if they found out you would have been excommunicated demonized tarred and feathered or even executed or locked in jail which is not to say there weren't homosexuals 2,000 years ago of course they were but it was just treated very differently even homosexuals themselves thought of themselves very differently 2,000 years ago than the way they think today because world views have evolved even homosexual people have evolved their own world views about themselves that's all part of cultural evolution and that's all part of survival next quote people who experience threats to themselves and their families or their communities during their faith their formative years tend to be far more religious than those who grew up under say safer and more predictable conditions end quote so this is big because religion is one of the strongest forces for unifying people under one common banner or umbrella of values religion helps to set up a moral system that people can agree upon which is why religion plays such a huge survival function religion is not just people the way that way that's some atheists portray it or some rationalist portrays like oh well religion is just believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because you're stupid and because you don't want to think rationally about the world no no religion is a is a very powerful mind-control device that gets disparate people to come together and to create a proto legal system because without religion how do you get people to agree on what's right and what's wrong you might say oh that's obvious just you know leo you can be an atheist and you can still be moral you don't need to be religious to be moral maybe not but still that relativism this idea that you can just say well you know cannibalism is it really wrong or is it sort of just something that we invented to even have the luxury to consider that maybe cannibalism is something that's only relatively wrong and not absolutely wrong or to consider that homosexuality is only relatively wrong and not absolutely wrong those those sorts of considerations already are only possible in advanced societies that have already met their survival needs you see one of the functions of religion and for example and a lot of people criticize Islam as being a negative force in the world but these people don't really understand the function that Islam played back when it was invented Islam wasn't affected today Islam was invented in 400 AD or something like that in the Middle East totally different survival conditions at that time there in the Middle East it was tribal warfare it was tribes slaughtering other tribes they didn't even have the ability to set up a nation that could defend itself why not because you had so many different tribes all these tribes had their own clan alliances and allegiances and identities and they couldn't even agree with each other about the fact that it's not right to kill people insane so there was so much bloodshed going on there Islam was a unifying force that was able to unify the different tribes in the Middle East and allow them to advance to become larger nation states and countries see it created a sort of a moral code to which everybody in that very conflicted region could agree to and then by following these strict rules they were able to reach a new level of peace and prosperity now of course today you might look at and say well but today the Middle East is one of the least developed regions of the world that's right but you have to always look at it within the context historically as it developed so it doesn't really matter where it's at today today it might not be so developed and maybe today Islam is holding the Middle East back maybe it is but you also have to consider what would happen if you got rid of it or if it wasn't there in the first place it might be much worse always consider that if you get rid of something in society you think is it necessary that might actually make things much worse than you assumed they would be now you say well why can't I just become atheists they could of course but that will take the more evolution to get there and of course the challenge with survival is precisely that those rigid systems you at one level of survival to survive you're gonna have to transcend those and release and detach from those to reach the next level of survival and so on and so on and so on that's what all spiral dynamics is about each stage to ascend up each stage you have to let go of the previous stage you have to recognize its limitations you have to sort of detach from it but that the minds ability to detach is is quite rare most minds attach to stuff and don't let go until they're dead you see so this is what's going on here's a chart that shows on the horizontal axis we have um same-sex legislation scale which basically shows you how lenient legislation is in a various in various countries or their attitude towards towards sex how permissive they are and then on the on the vertical axis is whether these are self expressive values or based sort of traditional values and what you see here is clearly how the different countries align countries like in Sweden Norway Canada Spain and so forth basically same-sex marriage has been legalized and then in countries like Iran Saudi Arabia Bangladesh and so forth you get the death penalty basically for for homosexuality so it just shows you the differences very clearly and keep in mind whatever you think you know if you have to take this attitude that well I live an advanced country and we are so much better than all the other countries so much more advanced keep in mind that that's only a recent development if you rewind the clock 500 years even the most progressive countries of today would look a lot like Saudi Arabia and Iran just keep that in mind if you are in advanced country today it's not because you are just part of some master race of people who are smarter wiser more compassionate by default no it's because you've already gone through all that other stuff you've gone through the barbarity that certain other countries are still struggling with today you're a little bit further ahead that doesn't actually make you better you see you're basically just standing on the shoulders of giants that came before you next quote in traditional societies up to 95 percent of the public say that god is very important in their lives yet in secular rational societies as few as 3 percent do in survival oriented societies up to 96 percent of the public say that homosexuality is never justifiable and in self-expression oriented societies as few as six percent do end quote so you see this is not just merely a matter of like do you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster this is this is life-and-death stuff and if you don't see it as life-and-death stuff that's because you already have your life-and-death stuff taken care of and you have the luxury to not look at it as life-and-death stuff and then you can start to make arguments about Flying Spaghetti Monster 'z and you can start advocating for homosexual rights and women's rights and all this sorts of good stuff only because we've gotten to that point because there's bureaucratic systems there's education systems there's Technology there's all this stuff there's a decent economy that enables this there's a lack of threat from the outside your nation isn't being invaded there's no threat of you getting raped and butchered and murdered these are real threats that many people face in the world if you don't face the threat of rape murder genocide theft on a daily basis you're and living your living the good life appreciate what you have that's not how it was for most of mankind for most of mankind's history quote the shift from survival values to self-expression values also includes a shift in child-rearing values from emphasis on hard work towards emphasis on imagination and tolerance as important values to teach children and quote so this is a good way to see where's a person at you can ask someone like ask your friend for example if you have children would you prioritize teaching them hard work or would you prioritize prioritize teaching them imagination and tolerance what you'll find is that if your friend is highly developed and lives in a developed country grew up in a developed country and feel secure about his survival or her survival then they will tell you that of course imagination tolerance is much more important than hard work but if your friend is from some poor struggling country they will tell you hard work is everything and imagination and tolerance that's some fluffy [ __ ] stuff that is intangible that's some woowoo stuff which is why for example parents in India and in China they drive their children like slave masters they push their children to get solid well-paying jobs engineering jobs computer programming jobs doctor jobs lawyer jobs why because those parents come from these countries like India and China which were at poverty levels 40 years ago they still have huge poverty today but 40 years ago it was even worse millions of people in China and indeed in India die from poverty so for them these parents the worst thing that they can imagine for their children is that their children end up in poverty so of course they push their children to to work extra hard study extra hard get college degrees get good well-paying jobs and when you tell one of these pairs that you want to become a philosopher or an artist or a musician or a poet what do they do they they they can't take you seriously because from their point of view survival Trump's everything and to them survival means you got to be a sigh like a doctor or a lawyer to earn good money otherwise you ain't surviving so these parents are looking out for their children but also what these parents don't realize is that survival conditions change so China in India today are not as bad as they were 40 years ago there is more opportunity to be an artist to be a poet to follow your dreams to be more imaginative to be more tolerant of course there's more opportunity for this but there's also still dangers it is still possible that you get some philosophy degree and then you end up broke and then you know come begging your parents for money which they may not have and then you become homeless and then what see but if if you grew up in a country where your parents are rich have plenty of money then your parents will not push you hard to be working all the time they will give you more more of a push to be more imaginative more artistic more tolerant and more liberal generally speaking next quote people who emphasize serve out survival values tend to be significantly less satisfied with their lives and less happy than people with self-expression values and code so this is an important point which basically says that there is a clear trend and a reason for why societies move from survival values to self expression values because it increases happiness overall as a human you don't get much satisfaction from just meeting your basic survival needs from eating [ __ ] having sex going to work this produces a relatively mild level of satisfaction the true satisfaction in life is found when you can be artistic creative free to pursue your life purpose and your vision for the world when you are free to be spiritual not in some stifled religious way but you can be spiritual in your authentic way the way that's true for you see but these things are luxuries for most people so don't take that for granted if you have these opportunities which is where self actualization comes into play self actualization is basically what you do after you've satisfied the majority of your basic survival needs then you start to ask the question what's next what do I do with my life how do I impact the world how do I be creative how do I live a life of purpose how do I help uplift others how do I grow myself cognitively morally spiritually how do I educate myself to to higher levels how do I understand more of the world how do I become more conscious how do I find out what the truth is where did reality come from all these sorts of questions now become important to you whereas before it was just about eating [ __ ] having sex making money so here's a chart which shows and maps the GDP on the horizontal axis this is per capita GDP basically this is the wealth of the country per person per citizen and then on the vertical axis is life satisfaction means score which is just basically how happy are people in this country so which you can clearly see is that the the people with the highest happiness the countries that have highest happiness basically tend to be the wealthier countries there's a correlation there and and then at the very bottom of this chart the bottom left you see basically the poorest countries and they have the lowest life satisfaction scores which makes sense I mean if you live in Iraq in some war-torn part of the world it's gonna be harder for you to be happy because it's harder for you to get access to basic things that you need and it's harder for you to live from your heart and to follow your heart without a bunch of restrictions but also notice what this chart shows it shows that for the bottom half of this chart basically with the with this kind of curve shows is that for countries which are lower income and have weak economies for them one of the fastest ways to raise the happiness of everyone in that country is to build better infrastructure and develop a higher economy that works for everybody more equally that is the fastest way to raise your happiness there on average but then countries who are towards the second half of the chart in these countries you can raise the economy more but you're gonna get diminishing returns in terms of satisfaction and happiness so once you have most of your basic needs met at that point chasing more money chasing luxury is not going to lead to a lot of fulfilment and that's what a lot of movie stars and wealthy people discover because after a certain amount of money more money doesn't really do anything for you then you need to be switching over to self-actualization work to spiritual work to growing yourself to contributing back to society that's where the real fulfillment comes from not from a better economy which is one of the reasons why in American politics for example you know many politicians in America push for you know more more capitalism even better economy and while I can understand that many people in America do want more job opportunities and many people in America are still struggling with poverty and so forth don't forget we even have poverty in America and in Europe it still exists but still this emphasis on just never ending growth of the economy never ending growth of the stock market this becomes counterproductive after a while and what a lot of Americans need is not more of the economy what they need is they need more personal development work which really is getting badly neglected as we go chasing material success so be careful about that but also what this chart shows you is that if you are in a country where you're struggling materially there's nothing wrong with handling your basic material needs you need some of that in order to have a sort of a foundation from which you can do the rest of the work and I do see this problem with some of my students some of you guys I know are in underdeveloped countries some of you are from Iraq some of you are in Iran some of you are in the Middle East or in Asia somewhere or even in Africa and hey I totally get it it's much harder to self actualize from those countries you don't have the same resources you don't have the same economic power it's hard for you to even like buy a self-help course because your money is so devalued relative to a country that would have produced a self-help course in them in the first place you know like you're not gonna find a self-help course made in Africa for the most part self up courses are made in America or in Europe see and you're gonna have to be paying dollars or euros for it and you're you know your African currency is not gonna match up very well against dollars and euros you might not even be able to afford a course like this that's right that makes it harder for you now of course don't turn this into a limiting belief I'm not saying it's impossible but it is harder and it's important for us to acknowledge that it's harder you know so don't don't let people Gaslight you if you're in India if you're in China if you're somewhere in the Middle East yeah you're gonna have a difficult more difficult time studying my work and embodying my work because chances are that your family and your culture are gonna be at such a low level of development and also economically there's gonna be less opportunity for you so because of this you're gonna struggle with more basic survival needs and people will judge you more for deviating from traditional cultural values your parents won't understand this thing called non-duality you know good luck convincing your friends and your family that you're a god when you awaken they won't be so understanding cuz they can barely tolerate homosexuality let alone the idea that you're God even though you are even though they are but hey you know they're not at a level where they can open their minds to that so it will be harder and of course one of the best things you can do if you're in a you know one of these poorer countries and if you really care about self-actualization is find some way to move to a better country but if you can't and I understand many of you can't or don't want to then you can still you can still improve yourself greatly it'll just be more difficult all right so just let's acknowledge that all right this next chart I have for you shows some trends of where countries and parts of the world have moved over the last few decades in terms of their values so we can see for example Japan has made a big leap from survival to self expression values and then Protestant Europe as well Catholic Europe a little bit less english-speaking countries as well but then there are some countries that actually you can see some regressions for example Russia you can see a serious regression from secular rational values to traditional values and the reason that is is because under communism it was sort of dictated from above that God was outlawed religion was outlawed in all of Russia for example the entire USSR so once that collapsed in the 1919 90s then traditional values what the doc's Christianity came back into full force there because it was never really transcended or outgrown it was merely suppressed from up high so that's what that's what explains for example the the Russian trends in China as well you know China has been dealing with a lot of poverty and a lot of political upheavals so that explains why there's a little bit of progression there but overall also you know China has done a lot to secure its survival in the last 60 years let's say and and so oftentimes when you see this sort of regression from secular traditional values to traditional values that's when nationalism also becomes a powerful force in politics so we can see nationalism in Russia we can the nationalism in China we can see nationalism in ex-communists Europe we can see nationalism on the rise in India as of late we can see nationalism on their eyes for example in Brazil so do keep that at night and one of the things that leads to the rise of nationalism is a situation where people feel that their survival is more threatened so for example when the economy starts doing worse people are much more likely to go nationalistic because basically they're operating out of fear and they're looking for some strong authoritarian to come in and rally them together and to maybe push something through but oftentimes of course this ends up backfiring and they end up regretting it in the long run kind of like with Nazi Germany all right let's keep going here quote life experience pectin sees incomes and school attendance rose from 1970 to 2010 in every region of the world poverty illiteracy and mortality are declining globally and war crime rates and violence have been declining for many decades end quote so this is important to acknowledge sometimes people boo moan that society is regressing especially lately with the rise of Trump or various nationalist movements around the world people you know turn on the news and they say all this negative stuff on the news and they say oh my god the world is going to hell the world is not really going to hell the world right now is the best that's ever been it's the freest that's ever been it's the wealthiest that's ever been it's the more fair and just than it's ever been and you might say well that's crazy there's we have high income inequality we still have plenty of racism and homophobia and xenophobia and nationalism and all this how could you possibly say that well you're not appreciating just how much worse it used to be culture and society is always progressing forward even when there are temporary setbacks and there can be some serious temporary setbacks but it's always progressing forward towards higher consciousness higher complexity and higher love and that's something that's challenging to explain to you if if you don't have a high perspective to see that but that is the case that is the trend and that's what can keep you optimistic and hopeful about mankind is that we are progressing forward now you might say we're not progressing forward fast enough well of course fast enough slow that this is relative fast enough compared to what compared to your lifetime maybe but then again culture changes quite a lot like even just in America take a look at our politics twenty years ago the idea of legalization of recreational marijuana this was opposed by the majority of people and it was considered outrageous and wrong and today the trends have completely flipped and likely in the next ten years America will legalize marijuana at a federal level because we've already done it in many of the states and it seems to be working fine people are happy with it there seems to be no problem even many of the conservatives are now not really against banning marijuana views have changed in the last twenty years on that issue same thing with gay rights 20 years ago the idea of gay marriage even in liberal circles many liberal politicians Democratic politicians would have laughed you out of the room to say that we would have gay marriage recognized by the Supreme Court and yet today it is and today even many conservatives and Republicans basically have resigned themselves to accept that gay marriage is a thing it's not going away any anytime soon gay rights are just gonna become more robust I mean it's just like you can't put that genie back in the bottle and this is happening on many levels now of course there are some you know regressive trends especially with Trump and the Conservatives in power now yes there's regressive trends but you have to have a long time horizon you have to see that these regressive trends will play themselves out and these regressive trends are merely a launching point for even more progressive trends coming in the future and why do I say this with such certainty is it because I'm some bleeding-heart liberal and social justice warrior no it's because look at the data look at the data look at human history look at what's been happening over the last 2,000 years of human history we went from being complete animals and barbarians to being animals and barbarians only part-time that's big progress name I said all 2,000 years that's a long time well relative to your lifetime it's a long time but actually it's pretty quick in the evolutionary time so actually even though it seems like progress is slow it's much faster than anything else evolution is done that we know about technology is advancing very quickly culture is advancing quite quickly it's a conveyancing so quickly that actually we have these regressive nationalist movements why do we have them because the culture is advancing so quickly to try to keep pace with the technology which is advancing even quicker that a lot of people are being left behind and they're scared what's gonna happen with automation well how do we handle you know legalization of drugs and homosexuality and sexual promiscuity and all the sort of stuff you know how do we deal with birth control pills and women having control over their reproductive body and and going to work all of these things these are relatively new developments that many people are still like struggling to wrap their mind around because most people have very simple minds that are not processing all of this information most people go to school maybe they finish college and then that's it that's the end of their education they don't learn anymore they don't grow anymore now they coached off of that and they and they look for ways to validate and entrench themselves in their worldview they're living in a bubble of their friends and they have to live that way in a sense because that's how they survive as the kind of self that they are for them to survive in a different way you could say well Leo can they just grow they can grow but that means they'd have to face the fear of surrendering their ego self which of course they don't want to do can Christians outgrow Christianity of course but that means they have to die as a Christian identity they want that no that's the last thing in the world they want they're terrified of that therefore we have Christianity being dogmatic same thing with Islam same thing with scientism same thing with atheists same thing with rationalist so don't think that this is all just some something to blame on simple-minded primitive religious people no scientific people face exactly the same challenges just on a slightly higher level next quote if economic collapse occurs cultural changes start to move in the opposite direction so we've already touched on that next quote two-thirds of the average countries respondents fall within one standard deviation of their country's mean score on both dimensions and 95% fall into two standard deviations despite globalization nations remain an important unit of shared experience and the predictive power of nationality is much stronger than that of income education region or sex end quote now this is an important point so it's a little technical here he talks about standard deviations all this really means is that if you're within a country the similarity you share within the country with your fellow citizens is much stronger than the than the similarity between for example your same gender in a different country or your same religion in a different country see and the reason that is is because each country basically has its own national education system this education system indoctrinates children and you it indoctrinated you with a set of values a shared set of values which sort of define what that country is a certain language a set of values a certain religious orientation or a secular one if that's what your country is is into and that creates a sort of a shared experience of your fellow citizens which is distinctly different from that of some other far away country or even a neighboring one for that matter see so you might think that women living in America have a lot in common with women living in India because they're both women and you would think like well women are all women so all women should be for feminism and women's rights right because in America women are for feminism I mean the majority of are are for gender equality and you know they stress the importance of dinner club but in India many women are not and you might wonder why is that that's because totally different levels of development totally different education systems totally different cultures you see so it's not just about breaking people down in terms of gender income education or sexuality a lot more depends upon their values it's much more accurate to break people down across their values are their survival value oriented or are they suffix pression value oriented are they traditional value oriented or are they secular rational value oriented these are far better dividing lines than something like gender next quote individualism is not a static individual level psychological attribute it is shaped by a society's level of development modernization facilitates a shift away from collectivism towards individualism bringing increasing emphasis on individual autonomy weakening traditional hierarchical norms and quote so this one is for you libertarians out there who tend to treat everyone as an individual and think that everyone is just individually responsible for themselves no it's never really been this way this is a modern development individualism is only facilitated by collectivism you can only be an individual in a modern society because of the technology and all of the bureaucracy that has been built up by government this is the the chief absurdity of libertarianism this idea that we should do away with government and all just live as individuals no if you do away with government you can only live as a tribe you're gonna have less individualism when you get rid of government not more if you take a look at primitive tribes they're extremely collectivist there's no room for individualism in some Amazonian tribe they're your entire sense of individualism is erased and you're part of a a giant tribal unit you don't think of yourself as an individual there you're not gonna have a libertarian philosophy in one of these tribes because in these tribes these tribes can only survive in the middle of the Amazon when they work together and they share collective responsibilities they live as a commune which is sort of the last thing that some of these libertarians want it's only because of how far we've come that today you can be an alienated individual in a developed first world country and you could sit at home on the Internet earn your money off the internet or something like that and you can be relatively comfortable and you can make snarky libertarian comments online about how we should do away with government and how taxation is theft and all the sorts of nonsense because you've completely neglected your roots and the foundation upon which this individualism is built see when you take a look at a group of chimpanzees they are not individuals they act as a social unit and they work together they live as a commune that's where humans came from there was never a time in human history where humans lived as some romantic lone individual off in the forest chopping my own trees and providing myself with my own security this this was never the case it's impossible because those people who band together can create a more powerful tribe and they will simply go and attack any individuals they will rape them they will enslave them or they will kill them so individualism doesn't work at that level individuals have comes about later once we've got court systems laws taxation a strong government police roads and all this or stuff then you can be an individual and even so society oscillates between individualist and collectivist and that's what sprawl dynamics will teach you if you watch my multi-part series on spousal dynamics each biodynamic stage is either more individualistic or collectivist and it swings back and forth there's no there's no sense of like collectivism is evil and individualism is the best or vice-versa it's always finding the right balance and always the kind of an oscillating swinging back and forth to find that sweet spot and of course it's all about what fits your environment in certain environments it's more conducive to be collectivist in your worldview and in other environments it's more conducive to be individualistic in your worldview and if you happen to be an arch libertarian that's because you grew up in an environment that has made survival easy for you as an individualist that's why it's not because libertarianism is true or individualism is the best or something like this this is these are you know fantasies you tell yourself to justify how it is that you're surviving because you're not conscious of how it is that you're surviving and why you do the things you do necessitated by certain survival conditions next quote simply holding elections will not establish effective democracy in the Muslim world end quote that was pretty obvious when the United States invaded Iraq under george w bush in the in the aftermath of 9/11 it was pretty obvious that it wouldn't work yet we were bamboozled and promised by the likes of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and George W Bush and and all of his cronies that if we just if we just topple Saddam Hussein and throw him out we can establish a flourishing democracy and everything will be nice and and and peachy in that part of the world no because the problem is it wasn't saddam hussein that was the problem like I said earlier the problem is the level of development of the entire population their value system you can topple Saddam Hussein but you cannot change the value system of every Muslim in Iraq or Syria you can't do it they have to grow themselves through that see Saddam Hussein would have naturally been toppled as Muslims in that part of the world developed more and moved from survival values to self expressive values it might have taken 50 years or a hundred years there might have been other dictators that came after him and of course that I was saying was a terrible dictator and he you know brutally murdered many people but on the other hand you have to take into account that murdering of of many people that he did why was that necessary was it because he was a monster no it was because that's how business is conducted in that part of the world under that value system because there are many conflicting tribes and if you take out Saddam Hussein you might get something worse like Isis like terrorism so as bad as Saddam Hussein was he wasn't a terrorist in the same way that that many terrorists groups are in that region now he was actually interested in building a stronger unified nation of Iraq where as many of these terrorists in that region now they're not interested in that they're interested in building sort of Caliphate or you know doing other kinds of low consciousness things and the next quote here is quote Islamic fundamentalist see Western culture as something to guard against end quote and that's generally true of of all secular trends every time there's a secular trend in society there's always a countervailing fundamentalist trend fundamentalism is a reaction against the secularization of society which is why there are Christian fundamentalists Islamic fundamentalist Hindu fundamentalists Buddhist fundamentalists and and others because the world is becoming more secular and as that happens those old egos are clinging to the old belief systems that they're trying to preserve old traditions and so then there's a fundamentalist backlash against this secularization because they view the secularization as a collapse of society as a existential threat you see if you grew up in a survival situation where religion was the sort of the binding force that brought everything together and gave life meaning and allowed you to survive and to thrive it to some degree then when you see others trying to secularize society and remove those religious elements you could look at that you can say well great that means we're gonna go to the next level or you could look at it say no that's terrible because that means we're losing all of our traditions and all the things that make us who we are of course that's a fear-based egoic reaction which basically all fundamentalists are are prone to and guilty of but you should also understand why it is that they feel that way because they're afraid because they're insecure because they don't understand that the next level could be that's even better than we then we currently have you see so if you want to if you want to really help fundamentalists help them to see that there's a next level and that they don't need to be afraid of losing their fundamentalism of course that's that's not easy to do because fundamentalists by definition tend to be very closed-minded and dogmatic and ideological and they don't want to listen to what's coming next because they think they're already at the absolute best that there could be you know you can't tell some fundamentalist evangelical that there could be something better than his current form spirituality because he thinks his spirituality is the one true one well that's that's his problem right there of course that's not true maybe his spirituality was good at a certain point of time but now it's time to move on to something better but that requires an open mind next quote quote younger birth cohorts and people born in diverse metropolitan areas are considerably more supportive of new cultural norms than older people and those from rural areas as younger cohorts replace older ones major cultural changes continue so that's what I was talking about at the very beginning of these quotes with the inchworm inching its way forward old people die new generations come online and values evolve and here I just want to show you one more chart which is basically the same sort of data we've been talking about survival versus self expression values on the horizontal traditional versus secular rational values on the vertical and here though you can see them you can see different sort of groups countries not just as individual countries but broken down to sort of into these larger regions like all of Protestant Europe or all of Catholic Europe Orthodox Slavic countries African Islamic countries Latin American countries Confucian Asian countries some Baltic countries you can kind of see where they're at and where they might be headed gives you a bit of an idea so as you can see they're the African Islamic countries are are the most traditional and the most survival oriented and also the least developed again that doesn't mean they're bad or evil it doesn't mean that they're permanently gonna be that way it just means that they have more growing to do okay so now let's talk about some of the various insights from this world value survey data number one human values evolved in predictable ways there are clear trends with lower and higher it's clear which way Zimbabwe and Bangladesh will evolve in the future there's no mystery about this it's clear which way Russia and the United States will go in the future there's no mystery about this not in the long run in the short run we can have a bad election cycle we can have some sort of nationalistic movement we can have a war or something that will regress any of these countries but in the long run we know that they are moving in that sort of upper diagonal direction towards more self expression values and towards more rational secular values another insight is that the largest increase in basic survival happens from agrarian to industrial societies so countries that have not industrialized yet they're still stuck in survival values so industrialization is a very important event in a nation's development and it corresponds to the larger shift in secular rational values so highly industrialized nations tend to be highly secular and rational America is actually a bit of an exception in this regard it has a pretty strong kind of religious undercurrent that is being clung to by conservatives you know come what may another insight is that survival to self-expression values come with increase in individual agency so modern societies make individualism viable that's what I was talking about the libertarian stuff another insight is that the largest increase in individual agency comes with the advancement from industrial societies to knowledge societies that produces the largest shift in self expression values because in a knowledge society now it becomes more important to be educated and as you become more educated you naturally want to express yourself more life becomes not just so much physical but it also becomes more intellectual as well and this sort of intellectualism spreads across society as more people finish high school and graduate from colleges another insight is that democracy is driven by self expression values not the other way around if you want democracy in the Middle East help them to advance to self expression values and then democracy will naturally flourish but if you just depose some dictator and try to install democracy it's not gonna work because their values haven't shifted from survival values see so this is why war and brute force doesn't work so well for growth you can't just beat a child over the head with a stick to get him to learn to read or to write or mathematics the learning is not about physically beating somebody it's about showing them the value of learning the value of growth getting them excited about that getting them bought into that and that's the sort of a soft skill that's a diplomatic skill that's an education problem that needs to be solved that's not a problem that you solved with bombs and rockets and invasions the next insight and this here's a quote quote the strongest emphasis on traditional values and survival values is found in Islamic of the middle-east and quote we already talked about that another quote the strongest emphasis on secular rational values and self expression values is found in the Protestant societies of northern Europe end quote we've sort of also alluded to that the next insight is that desire for democracy is universal it is not only a product of the West as some people like to portray there's a lot more commonality between human values around the world yes there's a lot of levels different levels of development but overall if we give these countries enough time we will see that they will develop into sophisticated democracies advanced democracies with quote unquote Western values they're not really Western values these are just values that come about when you get a certain number of your survival needs met and you become comfortable with that when you move to a certain you know second half of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs then Western values become everyone's values some more insights is that high the higher your education the more liberal you are the younger your generation is the more liberal you are the less survival threats you face the more liberal you are so in generally the conservatives are less educated older generations and face more survival threats it's pretty obvious then I have a quote here for you between 1981 and 2007 happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries that were surveyed in that period so happiness is rising because our material wealth is rising education is increasing healthcare is increasing all these things so overall the trends are good it just may not be happening as fast as you individually want but you know if you want to have it faster than participate you can get politically involved you can vote more you can be more active you can volunteer you can donate there's a lot of stuff you can do you can have a life purpose that helps to awaken mankind you can become an educator you can improve mankind's consciousness through your business and in many other ways now an insight about happiness in low income societies a better economy leads to massive increases in happiness or as in high-income societies more democracy more self-expression leads to ha to higher happiness see so if you're living in a high-income country kind of society you need to dial off the economy it's not about the economy stupid and if you live in a low income society then yes you need to you need to rapidly develop your economy because that's gonna massively increase the happiness of of you and everyone around you but don't take it overboard realize when the economy has gone to a level where now you're just getting diminishing returns now I want to paint you a little bit of a picture of how societies evolve because that's the title of this episode so here's how it works basically human societies go from hunting and gathering to horticultural which is raising of small animals in non-math scales then agrarian which is basically massive farming then from agrarian to industrial and then from industrial to post-industrial which is sort of a knowledge worker economy and a service economy which is a lot of northern Europe and America Canada and so forth so we have the pre-industrial era we have the industrial era and we got the post-industrial era and really some of the some of the key distinctions here is is a citizen college-educated or not our citizen interest citizens interested in philosophy and science or or not are they knowledge workers or are there a manual laborers these sorts of distinctions are very important for determining for the political trajectory of a country most people are not educated enough for anything but manual labor at least right now in the world that the case as more people come together but they are not very well educated they need to be organized by some sort of higher intelligent force and oftentimes this needs to be through brute force because they don't understand anything else so this leads to totalitarian regimes and autocracies and dictatorships and tyrannies right you have thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people who are not intelligent enough to do anything but manual work so what do you do you corral them together into one group so they can defend themselves against invaders right and for that you need some sort of tyrant or dictator then what happens is that as you're organizing these people your population becomes so large that it requires more and more bureaucracy because you know if you're all only organising a thousand people you can do that through word of mouth if you're trying to organize a million people now you need records you need writing systems you need language you need accountants you need bureaucrats to manage that for you but these bureaucrats and these accountants and so forth what do they need to be they can't be dumb manual laborers they need to be knowledge workers they need to be intelligent they need to go through years of education to learn language to learn how to think to learn some philosophy and so forth so as as the population grows education becomes imperative and so we build bureaucracies that provide education school systems and then as more people become educated those who rise to the top are not the manual laborers but the elites who are the most educated because actually the education of the intelligence it takes to organize manual labor is far more valuable in the grand scheme of things than manual labor itself and then as we do this as we create better organizations for our society this leads to better and better economic efficiency more trading more opportunities for technology as we developed more technology of course technology leads to better education and puts more demand on education because you need to be more educated to learn to use the technology effectively right you got to be pretty well educated to learn to use a computer and so forth you know some illiterate person can't just use a computer so everything here turns into this sort of upward spiral where economic success leads to more education and more technology and then yet yet more technology and more education leads to more economic successes this creates this upward spiral until we get out of the rut of having to be worried about basic survival needs like food water shelter and so forth this becomes relatively easy to acquire after a certain point and at this point we've built up so much social infrastructure in order to manage all of this that now we are also much more socially interconnected with each other and this allows for more self-expression to flourish this puts pressure on people because they're more knowledgeable and educated to push for democracy now people are not just satisfied with putting food in their belly and clothing and sheltering their children now people want more they want us to have a say they want to run for office they want more civil rights they want more gay rights they want more sexual rights they want more technological rights they want free speech they want all this sort of stuff and survival brute survival starts to be taken for granted and now survival moves into the the more abstract creative domain the self-expressive domain values shift from the traditional survival values - now the secular rational self expressive values and now people demand democracy we're before an autocrat or a tyrant or a king could manage this whole affair now people see the injustice of that they demand democracy and so really democracy is the fruit of dictatorship and monarchy so if a king or a dictator becomes very very successful at organizing people eventually those people will overthrow the king or the dictator so the king or dictator ends up undoing his own self which is why basically all kings and dictators have a very short life time they don't tend to live very long precisely because when they succeed they become irrelevant and when they fail well of course they they also become irrelevant because they get replaced by somebody more vicious than them also what happens is that as we have more knowledge workers and more education in a society workers in general rather than just being dumb manual labourers now they have a more understanding more sophistication they think cognitively in more sophisticated ways and now they are able to organise better with each other because you see to be an effective knowledge worker means that you need to have more education and the more education you have the more free you're able to use your mind to look at the world and to see in justices in the world and to demand freedom for self-expression and so higher education increases the need and demand for democracy and as this happens organized religions declined because with higher education now we're more empirical and we start to question our own dogmas and ideology so we go back we we examine our old traditions and we realize that many of our old traditions and religions and dogmas they were they were not absolute truths they were just vehicles to get us to where we are today they were certain survival patterns and habits and that now that our environment has changed it's time to outgrow those and so we outgrow those and oftentimes we go more secular and rational as this happens also xenophobia racism sexism homophobia and Elite ISM all of these decline because all of them basically were coming from fear and insecurity once we become more secure in ourselves we don't need to fight everybody for food and shelter and so on and once we start to transcend and question our old traditions from religion now we don't need to be so xenophobic we can be friends with our neighbors even though there are different race or different nationality now we can be more tolerant of of different genders we can see the Equality we can be even taller in homosexuality and and so on we're moving away from fear and towards greater consciousness and self-acceptance now of course as this secularism prevails over the population fundamentalist movements break out as ego back collective ego back lashes to try to go back and this breaks out amongst people those parts of society which are not as educated and are not being advanced as quickly to the cutting edge of where society is going so basically that part of society which you tend to leave behind and which you don't educate that part of society which doesn't experience the economic prosperity that the other half of society does they tend to get resentful and fearful and perhaps rightly so and they start these fundamentalist and nationalist movements but these are temporary because remember the society still keeps getting more evolved more wealthy more prosperous so eventually it will at some point all trickle down even to the fundamentalists and it will make them more pacified and more secure and eventually they'll be ready after a certain point to let go of their fundamentalism or if they're not then their generation will simply die out and the next generation will start from a cleaner slate and be less infected with those dogmas and ideologies so the success of previous generation creates the foundation for the next generation which is free to be more liberal and more self expressive so this is how society works and every generation basically becomes progressively a little bit more liberal than the previous one the trick though is that prior generations don't fully understand newer generations because the past generations are still weary of the old survival threats and nowhere is there a better example of this than for example in America with this whole debate around capitalism versus socialism so today we have politicians like Bernie Sanders and others aoc who advocate for democratic socialism it's not the same thing as socialism but a lot of the older generations the Boomers they are very leery of this and they tend to conflate Bernie Sanders with an old-style Soviet communist which is really silly it's a silly conflation but you can see how it happens because the baby boomers actually lived through the Cold War so the Cold War was a serious threat to them they grew up as children having to duck and cover under desks in school from the threat of a nuclear war from the Communist Soviets so of course they still carry those fears those fears are deeply wired into their into their minds such that when there are 60 or 70 years old they're still stuck in that mindset they can't see that what Bernie scientist Sanders for example is advocating in his policies and his politics has nothing to do with Soviet Communism it's it's a it's the next level it's the level beyond capitalism not the level that came before capitalism so there's a conflation sort of a pre trans fallacy that happens there with the boomers so that's because the old generation can't quite understand the new generation which is why what's going to happen in practice is that all those boomers in the next 20 years they're going to die and once they die off the new generations are going to be much more accepting of the label of socialism and the kind of politics that Bernie Sanders is advocating which is why Bernie Sanders has the most support among young people under age 45 and why he has the least support amongst people who are aged over 65 because they've been so threatened by the Cold War that they can't tolerate anybody with the label socialist see now who's right who's wrong well that's up to you to decide I'm just trying to explain to you how some of these dynamics work but also notice that when your opposition to something comes from a place of deep fear or insecurity that ends up being a problem in and of itself and what many of these baby boomers don't understand is of course is that survival threats change Soviet Russia ain't Soviet Russia anymore communism of the old school type is long gone it's not the 1950s or 60s or 70s or 80s anymore there's no cold war anymore things are different now of course there can be still problems with Russia unless anything is perfect but the situation has changed our technology has changed our culture has changed infrastructure has changed government has changed a lot of stuff has changed society is not static in those 50 or 60 years the baby boomers were growing up a lot of stuff has changed so stuff that didn't used to work might now work think of society as a collective memory Bank of mankind baking in lessons from each generation for the next generation so your children when they are born what's going to happen is that they are gonna get programmed with the collective lessons of all of mankind for previous generations those are the lessons that they will need to survive at least until they become adults and then they will need to think for themselves independently and generate new ideas and new world views and new paradigms to take society to the next level and so in this way each generation is sort of passing on the baton to the next one and the next one and the next one and baking in all those lessons within our culture within our institutions within our bureaucracies our legal system our language our books our technology and see layer after layer after layer every 20 or 30 years there's a new layer added on top of this thing we call civilization and basically society is growing just like a tree with those rings in a tree each ring represents one year or one generation we might say see and it's progressively evolving but the key is to recognize this entire dynamic from sort of a big-picture perspective from an elevated perspective and not to get too attached to any one ring or to any one generation one of the biggest problems we have right now is that the baby boomers are so clinging to power and their old value systems that they're not allowing the newer generations who have a better more conscious worldview to occupy positions of power and make the change that we need for example right now we badly need action on climate change but many baby boomers don't want to lift a finger on climate change why not well because they've already lived their life so for them why should they pay a lot of money to clean up the environment to them it doesn't make sense because they're gonna be dead in 20 years but to their children it makes a lot of sense because they still have their whole life ahead of them but the baby boomers have most of the wealth in society at least in America and they also occupy many of the positions of power politically and so forth so of course it's frustrating for Millennials and other younger generations dealing with these baby boomers Cuzzi baby boomers take all the money take all the positions of power and then they don't really want to advance forward as fast as we need to to take care of some of these new existential challenges see it when the baby boomers were born environmental issues weren't a thing environmental issues are relatively recent development that's because the population of the planet has since the baby boomers have been think about that doubled when people were born in the 50s or 60s the planet was half as populated that's crazy that's crazy if you think about it there are so many more people which means that all of the problems that come with the scale the mass scaling problems like pollution trash co2 emissions all of them are exponentially worse and they're keeping and they're they keep getting exponentially worse if we don't do anything about it see but the Boomers are not used to thinking in this way because they weren't raised with this sort of mentality but newer generations are now much more environmentally conscious because they need to be for purposes of survival because now it matters when you have lead in your water or mercury in your in your teeth fillings see now this sort of stuff or we care about this because we know we have the science now to tell us how seriously this affects crime rates how it affects the body function endocrine system glands autoimmune issues and so forth and this is just a tip of the iceberg of environmental issues so I just want you to notice how society is like a treadmill it's always or maybe even better like an escalator it's always moving up and it's always churning through itself there's always new stuff being developed it's not the same statical society of a hundred years ago you can never go back to how great things were in the past this whole idea of make America great again it can't possibly work because going back to the 1950s that was a different world there was half as many people on the plan in the 1950s today there were no environmental issues there were no nuclear issues barely back then the technology has completely changed there was no internet back then everyone didn't have a personal vehicle back then there were not certain diseases that exist today there were not certain pollutants that exist today corporations were not as big and as powerful as they are today a lot of stuff has changed and you can't put those genies back in the bottle so we need new solutions not just going back to the past you can never go back to the past you're never going to go back to a society with a bunch of coal producing power plants the way that you know Trump has promised this is never gonna work this is fantasy and this needs to be understood and acknowledged the solution is not to yearn for some fantasy of the past but to go boldly into the future to face the future challengers take them head-on and to deal with them truthfully courageously fearlessly and to be visionary to be innovative and to take some of the risks yes it's risky to go into the future into the unknown but what other choice do we have that is just the very nature of evolution I've said in the past and this is somewhat controversial when I talked about conscious politics that liberals are more evolved than conservatives and of course this pisses off a lot of conservatives to say this but it is nonetheless true and this World Values Survey data is the proof of it the trend of societies goes from traditional survival to secular rational self-expressive from conservative to liberal conservatives are mostly traditional survival oriented liberals are mostly secular rationalist self-expressive oriented every generation becomes more liberal even if you're a conservative today you're a liberal by the standard of your ancestors notice this even the most arch conservatives of today would never support something like slavery whereas your ancestors would without any hesitation they would support slavery why is that simply because what conservatives is about is about preserving the status quo whatever it happens to be if it happens to be slavery that's what you're preserving but if it happens to be you know whatever conservatives want to preserve today then it's that gun rides or whatever now of course this is all denied by conservatives that's part of the whole problem and conservatives will say that this this is so uh this is so biased and unfair to say that conservatives are less evolved than liberals but look look at the data look at the historical trends look at it in an objective way step outside of your ideology and have the courage to admit that maybe your ideology is not equivalent to all other ideologies maybe there is a maybe there's a sort of a progression here and that is in fact what you'll find but of course that's exactly what you don't want to do as a conservative you don't want to consider other perspectives you don't wanna consider the possibility that there might be better ways of doing things than your current ideology because you're attached to it and you're protecting and defending it out of a sense of insecurity and fear notice that today today's liberal is also tomorrow's conservative so also if you're a liberal don't get cocky because you might say all the odds so liberal yeah you're liberal now but when you turn 60 years old relative to new generations you're gonna look like look like a old conservative fart and yet you're still gonna cling to power and think that you're right you see today's conservatives are yesterday's liberals humans 100 years from now will be extremely extremely liberal by even today's most liberal standards today's liberals will be uncomfortable with the crazy liberal ideas of humans 100 years from now but luckily they'll be dead a hundred years from now so it won't be a problem which is why death is actually a very important component in the progress of mankind if generations didn't die out but live forever this would be very problematic because the whole system would get constipated because you got to have a mechanism for flushing out old ideas people who cling to power attach to old ideologies but all of this doesn't mean that conservatives are evil or always wrong conservatives could still have valid opinions I'm not saying that liberals are right about everything don't don't got so reductive and simplistic about this it's just that there's a clear trend and we want to be conscious of what this trend is the arc of history bends liberal and democratic you can clearly see that if you study history the biggest obstacle to liberal democracy is threats to basic survival this is the classic tug of war between fear and love basically liberalism is more love oriented and conservativism is more fear driven self expressiveness brings back spirituality in true form after secular rational values so this is one of the things that many scientifically-minded rationally minded atheistic lis minded and liberal people get wrong from this data is they think like oh we'll leo so this means that in the future religion will be completely wiped out and there will be no spirituality and it will be just all pure secular and rational right and that's precisely wrong in the future what will happen is that there will be even more spirituality but it will be more powerful more authentic more true more individual conservatives practice a sort of dogmatic conformist authoritarian spirituality sort of a top-down spirituality whereas in the future when we get past the secular rational values there's gonna be other levels this data here doesn't show you all the future levels that will exist remember this data is only tracking what's there now it doesn't tell you about the future so much but I've sort of been to the in the sense that you know you can become more conscious and then you can you can clearly see where the future is if you become more conscious you'll clearly see that spirituality is gonna play only a bigger role within science not less of a role but it will be a different kind of spirituality it won't be religion from the old Bible sort of thing it's gonna be mystical experiences it's gonna be psychedelic it's gonna be meditation it's gonna be yoga and these sorts of things basically everything that I teach here on actualize that org with non duality so spirituality is by no means dying and this is one of the problems that fundamentalists face is they think that well if we open the doors for science that's gonna kill God and kill spirituality but the opposite is the case it will only kill our old dogmatic ideas of God and spirituality but actually the science will open the doors for actually realizing God it and an even deeper level and practicing spirituality at an even deeper level which you can do with psychedelics with various kinds of you know scientifically tested meditation methods and even brain training machines you know iíve used brain training machines to have powerful meditation sessions that's science helping you to be more spiritual so the folly of the fundamentalists is that they don't understand that actually science and secularism this is not going to lead to a downfall of religion and a loss of morality and depravity and devil Rhee actually it will take us to a new even better way of doing spirituality because true spirituality builds on top of rational secular values that's what people don't understand fundamentalists to understand this and even the secular rationalist scientists don't understand this but that's because there's that there's another level that we haven't even talked about here so liberals and conservatives are not merely polar opposites they are not just two equal sides of the coin there's a clear directionality their society never stands still it's always evolving no one culture racer group has a monopoly on democracy or evolution we have a lot more in common than we often realize world happiness is rising keep that in mind keep in mind that your values are not true or original any sense and that many of your justifications for your values in your worldview are really just self biased and self deceived so liberals need more compassion and understanding of conservatives things like racism homophobia transphobia sexism xenophobia and nationalism authoritarianism are not simply moral failings they are survival responses this is something liberals don't understand and if you're a liberal I want you to understand the following if you were born into a harsher survival situation you too would be a racist a sexist a homophobe xenophobe a transphobic authoritarian and nationalist and if you deny this you're kidding yourself you are only a liberal because you happened to be born in the right place at the right time standing on the shoulders of giants thanks to them thanks to their education systems that they constructed thanks to the bureaucracies and the legal systems that they constructed thanks to the government that they constructed thanks to the amazing economy that they constructed thanks to all that now you can sit on a sort of a on a perch and look down at others below you and call them racist sexist homophobic zeenat hope folks nationalists and authoritarians and Nazis and so forth but if you just happen to be born a little bit off to the side you would be the one who would be call these names by some other liberals that's a very humbling thought experiment to go through I recommend you actually contemplate that one and recognize how privileged you are if you are a liberal you are woke because you stand on the shoulders of giants liberals need to admit that conservatives are not evil and conservatives need to admit that liberals are more developed but of course liberals and conservatives are mostly just happy to be attacking one another liberals love to attack conservatives as brutes and as hypocrites and barbarians and then conservatives love to attack liberals as being airy-fairy and woowoo and you know unrealistic and in this game this name-calling game it turns into sort of a mud wrestling contest this stalls our further development forward the difficulty of seeing social evolution is that it doesn't happen precisely until the current generation dies off the mind tends to block out from its own view those things which don't fit its existing worldview biases and perspectives which don't serve its survival so when I talk about cultural evolution how fast everything is progressing forward many people might say well Leo what I don't see any evolution what's happening it's all sort of the same you don't see it precisely because it's not in your interest to see it because if you saw all of the evolution that was happening all around you you couldn't maintain your old worldview and that would be very threatening for you so either you're gonna wake up to what I'm saying here and start to agree with me or you're gonna deny and resist entrench yourself deeper in your worldview stick your head in the sand but then eventually you're gonna die as your generation will die necessarily and then it won't matter what you believe because the new generation your children and their children they will transcend your limitations so either do it willingly or not but it's gonna happen either way you are not going to stop the evolution of society no matter how conservative you get you're not gonna stop you can only [ __ ] it for a short while but eventually you're going to lose so my question to you is why be on the losing side of history why not look into the future a little bit and be more open and accommodating of the new changes that are happening in culture and society be more open-minded be more willing to learn and adopt trends that are coming to you in future generations listen to younger generations than you rather than just acting arrogant and thinking that you've got it all figured out the reason many people don't see cultural evolution is because it doesn't suit their survival to see it see many Muslims and Christians and Hindus don't want to admit that religion evolves the Christianity of today is not the Christianity that it was a thousand years ago not even close totally different Islam of today is not the Islam of a thousand years ago Hinduism of today is not the Hinduism of a thousand years ago and yet these things this evolution needs to be denied precisely because that it creates a sort of a bubble we could say well Christianity was just this one monolithic thing that which has existed for 2,000 years no it hasn't but that's a fantasy that's really convenient if you want to just defend Christianity blindly because as soon as you start to admit that Christianity evolved here and there and there and there and there and there then all of a sudden you have to admit that maybe maybe many of the Christian practices and beliefs you hold today and that you that you do that they weren't even there they weren't even practice by Jesus so you can't go back and kind of ground yourself in Jesus's original teachings the way that many Christians love to do and the fact most Christian today have nothing to do with over the teachings of Jesus they they practice and preach exactly the opposite of what Jesus would have practiced or preached many Christians in America today are pro-capitalist which is completely absurd if you think Bernie Sanders is a communist what would you have called Jesus see but people don't like to think about these things they just blindly sort of follow tradition so in conclusion I want you to notice how well the world value survey that we covered here corroborates spiral dynamics Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the corruption perception index that we showed a chart of all of these things work together to sort of give you a bigger picture of what's really going on that's what's so nice about all these models and all this data now let me issue a few final warnings about the world value survey do not use this data to make some sort of racist nationalistic claims or theories about how all the West is the best because it seems to this data seems to show it's the most advanced and the least corrupt that's only a function of history that doesn't prove that that white man is more intelligent or better or smarter or anything like this also the world value survey it doesn't show you the highest stages of development it doesn't even go as far as spa the damage because pile dynamics will show you stages yellow and turquoise which are barely shown in this world of value survey remember this is raw data from 1980s to the 2020 and it's tracking you know these are questionnaires that are tracking very broad trends so if a trend or a set of values is not prevalent in society let's say it's only prevalent in 1% of society then this survey is not going to pick it up and now the case with for example spa dynamic stage sage turquoise it's so rare right now so few people have reached stage turquoise that is less than 1% which means that it's not going to be present in these surveys but in let's say 50 years when stage turquoise maybe becomes 5% of the population then the world value survey will start to pick it up more and you're gonna you're gonna see you're gonna see that reflected in the data in some way see but every model has its limits violet Hammond's is also limited but it's not as limited as the world value survey because they're serving different functions see is it's one thing to track what's already happened it's another thing to anticipate the future and to track and kind of speculate about where mankind is going I also want to warn you that don't get the wrong idea that secular rational values are somehow the end-all be-all not at all as stage turquoise shows you there's there's something beyond the sexual to secular irrational there's something called post rationality there's something called vision logic there's mystical experiences there's non duality there's a lot of stuff beyond the secular and rational it's just that it's not it's not very widespread yet and people are still very closed-minded about it which is why it remains sort of hidden what is there for you to access if you want and my work will help you to access that if that's what you're interested in if you want to reach the highest levels of human development keep in mind also that this is just one model it's one lens that you can use to look at reality through I like to use many different lenses no one lenses conclusive or absolute so hold it loosely don't turn this into an ideology or a dogma don't use this data to justify all of your personal biases and worldviews that would be a mistake rather use this data to sort of zoom out and look at the big picture correlate it with other models compare it with other models notice its limitations every model has certain limitations it makes certain assumptions it has certain biases keep all that in mind and the final warning is don't let collective conclusions limit you so you might have heard all this and then you might say well Leo this is so depressing because I live in Bangladesh and this seems to show that in Bangladesh is impossible to self-actualize it's impossible to rise to stage turquoise it's impossible to become a mystic it's impossible to do non-duality is impossible to self-actualize no these are very general trends even in the lowest and worst of countries there are people who can be at stage turquoise there are people who can be powerful mystics and sages and gurus in India in Bangladesh you know wherever you are if you really want to you can do it you as an individual is a very different matter than your entire society collectively now will you face additional obstacles and challenges because you happen to live in a very underdeveloped society yes you could could you even be in more physical danger could you life being threatened yes it could but I'll not also not necessarily don't get paranoid about it it doesn't have to be you can learn to be a conscious individual no matter what country or society you live in you can find ways to make it work if Jesus could do a 2,000 years ago you can do it today alright so in general be very careful with these sorts of studies and models because remember these are generalizations that apply across millions of people you can always be an exception to the rule there are always exceptional people and don't fit these models and if that's you if you want to be mega successful if you wanna you know rise to the highest potential of mankind go for it don't let this be an excuse don't create some victim mentality around this data use this data to empower yourself where it can help you and then in those areas where it seems disempowering ultimately forget it let it go it's not serving you go find those techniques and methods that will serve you because in the end what you ultimately care about is waking up growing yourself developing yourself and then being a powerful leader in the world so go focus on that that's what you can directly control you can't directly control what a million people around you think or believe you can play a part you could influence them to some degree but ultimately first you gotta take care of yourself build yourself up actualize yourself then you can worry about how to transform people around you to be more conscious and more woke and more developed so I hope that this world value survey has given you some deep insights into the nature of politics and culture really if you use this lens you can you can you can look at politics in a totally different way all of the political battles that you see between liberals and conservatives and so forth you should be able to break all of that down and see the silliness of it all these battles between gay rights versus non gay rights or gender this or gender that gender equality you can you can look at all this and you can see you can see how foolish it is from both sides that people are arguing about these things like pro-abortion anti abortion you can see that there's no truth in these debates it's just people acting out their survival and adopting ideologies to help them to do that and yet even though that's the case the sides are not equal there is still a trend from conservative to liberal notice that society is constantly changing around you and constantly growing what is it growing towards contemplate that I suggest that if you do you'll discover that it's growing towards more consciousness more equality more democracy more justice more love less fear and then the only question is which side of history do you want to be on do you want to be on the side of love and consciousness or do you want to be on the side of fear do you want to be on the side of self lessness or on the side of selfishness that's up to you but understand that fear will always be conquered by love and selfishness will always be conquered in the long run by selflessness and falsehood will always be conquered by truth in the long run but then again as some famous economist I think once said in the long run we're all dead and that's the end all right that's it for me I'm out of here that's my website right here actualize that org come click on it check out my blog you can find new insights and videos that I post there every week check out the forum check out the life purpose course check out my book list lots of books on this topic and more if you'd like to support me on patreon go to patreon.com/scishow to video that you can click on and you can chip in 5 10 bucks a month that helps to support the research that I do and sustain this channel and I'm grateful for that and in general I just want to I guess put out a word of appreciation just for the fact that you know I'm really lucky and fortunate that I get to do this content that I get to do what I love most which is thinking about these deep petty topics talking about metaphysics and epistemology and earn decent money doing it and able to sustain myself and able to you know share this wisdom with you just to be in this position took a lot of work and I'm really grateful to be here and really it's been amazing the last seven years has been so amazing that I've even sort of sort acclimated to it to the point where now I I take it for granted that I'm even able to do this most people are not able to have the kind of job that I have and sustain themselves doing it and also share this deep wisdom with the rest of the world helped uplift the world this is this is what I've worked for very hard to to actualize my life purpose and if you want to know the exact techniques and principles that I use to do that check out my life purpose course in a life purpose course I talk about the sort of mindsets and the sort of worldview that I needed to find my life purpose I give you exercises is extremely practical so if you're one of these people that wants to live a life purpose centered life where your life is not just about going to work but about doing something for mankind and of course finding that fulfillment within it if you want to self Express you know speaking of self expression values then the life purpose is all about that it'll help you to find your values it will show you how to express yourself and how to start to build some sort of career or business around your deepest passions and help you to find what that is and to get you a clear vision of a way forward and I guess the final thing I want to say here is that a lot of people treat politics as just some sort of dirty side affair that's not what politics is politics is extremely important and it's more important than ever to infuse consciousness and our politics today without politics there cannot be awakening because politics creates the infrastructure the fertile soil in which the seed of awakening can be planted there is no possibility for awakening in some terrible country which is completely corrupted and which barely allows you to meet your survival needs it's very hard to awaken still possible but very very hard for the majority of mankind to awaken so in the future awakening mankind is not just going to be about going to a meditation retreat it's about creating policies and bureaucracy and infrastructure and a kind of society and technology in such a way that facilitates that for a meditation to retreat to exist technology and politics is required a certain kind of level of government is required for that to happen you can't just go to Saudi Arabia and host some hippie dippie mystical retreat they're going to charge you for blasphemy against Islam because they're not open-minded enough to that you see and that's just one example there's a lot of political change that we need to make awakening more readily accessible even in developed countries let alone underdeveloped ones and democracy is the way that we do it and healthy democracy requires conscious citizens and conscious citizens are created by doing this work that we're doing here so it's all it's all interconnected is what I want you to see and it's time that we start to evolve our politics beyond the kind of stuff that you see on CNN and MSNBC and Fox News or even on most of YouTube the way of the future is conscious politics and if you want to know what that looks like go check out my four-part series called conscious politics part 1 2 3 & 4 where I outline that a bit and this episode here is in addition to that and I will have more episodes in the future that help you to develop a sort of a political consciousness get your mind thinking in the right directions because as we're seeing with all the rise of various nationalist movements that are regressive around the world in America in Europe and South America we see these trends it's more important than ever not to take our democracy for granted it's more important than ever to talk about conscious politics and to stop thinking of politics as some sort of dirty business that some politicians do but something that you gotta keep an eye on as your self actualizing because society is not just a collection of individuals it's also a collection there collect if forces involved see and you are part of this collective and you are responsible if you're conscious you're responsible for what this collective is doing there are certain things you don't like that a collective is doing and you know what you don't want them done in your name and as a collective ultimately what are we moving towards as I talked about in college politics we're moving towards greater consciousness so if we're moving towards greater consciousness that means we need more consciousness in our politics to help us to build systems and infrastructure that will facilitate more consciousness so stay tuned in the future because we're going to have more political topics but also not only political topics we're still going to have a bunch of just ordinary individual self-help topics as well you