Hypocrites, Michael Jackson, Parkinson’s Law
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my recent talk at the University of Austin:
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Wall Street Journal:
I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about Michael Jackson and why some artists get cancelled while others don’t.
I was hanging out with some fellow graduate students at the University of Cambridge in 2019 when one suggested seeing the new Liam Neeson movie, “Cold Pursuit.” Another student, referring to an unflattering confession Mr. Neeson had recently made, replied, “No, he’s racist, remember?” The first student said, “I read online that people forgive him and he’s OK now.” He pulled out his phone to verify. A few minutes later we walked to the theater.
Nobody had reconsidered Mr. Neeson’s character or weighed the evidence against him. What they’d instead done was consult the social-media consensus to find out what they were permitted to enjoy.
Last month, many moviegoers did something similar. They packed theaters for “Michael,” the new Michael Jackson biopic, which took in $217 million worldwide in its opening weekend. That’s the biggest-ever U.S. and Canada opening for a biopic.
This is strange, because Jackson faced allegations of child sexual abuse for decades.
Read the whole thing here or here.
The Psychology of Morality:
My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.
I delivered six lectures in front of a live studio audience that explore the origins of morality. The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles. It also investigates frameworks such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory and Gray’s moral dyad theory. The series also covers dark personality traits and their relationship with moral behavior, and concludes by examining the relationship between morality and happiness, sex differences in moral judgment, and moral development across the lifespan.
Enroll here for immediate access.
Here’s the trailer:
Links and recommendations:
Habits for Americans in an Age of Disruption by Ben Sasse
if you can’t get a job today, it’s your fault by Auren Hoffman
Women Complain about Men by Roy Baumeister
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Wolves and dogs cycle through an elaborate sequence before a fight: stiffened posture, growl, snarl. Each signal is an honest communication—an escalating declaration of intent that gives the other party a chance to back down. The system evolved this way because violence is expensive. The entire architecture of threat signaling exists to make actual combat unnecessary. (source).
2. Women’s sexual desires change more across the course of their live more than men’s do. A 55-year-old man wants and likes pretty much the same things he did at 25, while over the same age range a woman’s sexuality may have transformed several times. (source).
3. As the Royal Navy steadily shrank in size (fewer ships and less actual work), the number of Admiralty officials grew—from 4,366 in 1914 (when Britain had the world’s largest navy) to 33,000 in 1967. The historian C. Northcote Parkinson distilled this into what is now known as “Parkinson’s Law”: work expands to fill the time available for its completion, showing how bureaucracies naturally grow and protect themselves regardless of the real workload. (source: Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary by Robert Nisbet).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
That conversation about Liam Neeson sounds like many of the young people, mostly the college students, have joined a collective mental BDSM club... When I look for other topics more practical in nature, I can see a growth of videos with young people talking or presenting BDSM practices to very deep levels affecting the mind of the submissive subjects.