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- [00:00]
A
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B
Would we benefit from a world that's more perverse? Would I like if I could turn the dial? Would I? Probably not. I mean some perverse acts are very cruel. Just cruelty for the sake of cruelty, causing suffering for the sake of causing suffering. I think for some lives though some the dial could be turned up a bit. I think some of us might feel we're a little bit too predictable. I think some of us might feel we're a little bit too rational, too dull, even too moral.
- [01:04]
A
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times. It's Ali here for the episode Perversity and the Limits of the Rational. This is an interview with the well known psychologist Paul Bloom, who takes unconventional opinions on the importance of perversity and maybe more conventional ones on the importance of rationality. He is questioned by Charlie Barnett. So do have a listen if you're curious about how rationality can be attacked and defended. Passing it over to Charlie Barnett.
- [01:40]
C
Paul Bloom, welcome to how the Light Gets In.
- [01:43]
B
Nice to talk to you, Charlie.
- [01:44]
C
So you argue that perversity is sometimes a good and an optimal strategy, or can be. Could you explain what you mean by this?
- [01:52]
B
So first you got to talk about what perversity is. And the way I define it is a perverse act is something that's seemingly done for the sake of being bad or silly or unreasonable. The classic story is of St. Augustine who goes into an orchard, some friends and steals some pears. Wasn't hungry. He just did it to be wrong. And a lot of perversity is just awful. It makes the world worse. It makes the own person suffer. You don't want to have a reputation. Somebody does these erratic, stupid things. But sometimes it could have an advantage and sometimes a perverse act could impress other people of how bold you are and how courageous. Sometimes a perverse act can can. If you're in a rut, doing something unpredictable and a little bit crazy might be the way to get out of it. And I think most of all, perversity at its best is a way of expressing our Autonomy, our freedom. You know, I mean, one way to think about it is suppose you always do the right thing to do. You always do a rational thing to do. At some point it might occur to you, what use are you? You could be replaced by an algorithm. And nobody wants to be replaced by an algorithm. It's a non Jewish figure. The right thing to do is this. The rational thing to do is this, I'm going to do that. And it's a way of showing ourselves off to be human.
- [03:08]
C
And is the argument there that sometimes irrationality can be a good thing?
- [03:13]
B
Yes, and I think there's a lot of cases where it can be. One case just is in the so called madman theory of diplomacy where sometimes if you act crazy, people are sort of forced to acquiesce to you because they can't do reasonable countermeasures. If I, if I, you know, if terrorist says I don't care if I live or die, which is very irrational thing, but that's something that means that there's much more powerful because you can't dissuade him with normal threats. Sometimes craziness can be an advantage. Now I don't want to overstate this. If you and I are negotiating and dealing with things, if you're not, if you're totally crazy, I just don't want to deal with you anymore in some way, you know, to get sort of contemporary. Donald Trump is a nice example of somebody who flirts with the madman theory where he does these crazy erratic things in some way. He gets concessions no one else would get because they think this guy's really going to do the things he's threatening to do. But the cost of it is people might think he's too irrational to be.
- [04:19]
C
Or, and this is quite interesting because obviously several years ago you wrote your book Against Empathy which argues for the use of rational compassion and similarly how the Light Gets In. You've been on panels where you've argued for the importance of rationality and you've stated it there, that there is a balance between the rational and the irrational. Where roughly would you draw the line? And how does one come to draw the line between sometimes deploying irrationality in cases where it's important or it will give you an advantage.
- [04:49]
B
Yeah, that's a good question. I'm a complicated guy. I think that the argument about empathy and a lot of arguments I've been making at different panels is not a matter of being good to be a good person. I think to be a good person you shouldn't be so Swayed by your feelings, by your emotions, you should try to think about the consequences of your actions. You should try to take away the bias that emotions give you and so on. And a lot of that's my argument against empathy. We're better with sort of more diffuse compassion. The case for perversity is more a case, not necessarily a moral case. I think kind of perversity makes you a little bit of a worse person, but maybe a case for interestingness, I think. I think sometimes there's a clash between an interesting person, an interesting world, and a good person in a good world. And perversity is a little bit of a push for the interesting.
- [05:44]
C
With perversity, would you go as far to say, as someone like Carl Jung have and actually Jordan Peterson lately, that perversity is sometimes a means by which you have to integrate your shadow and be a sort of stronger person, I. E. If you don't have the capacity for cruelty or you don't have the capacity to sometimes deploy perversity, in certain situations, you won't be able to be a strong or resilient person. Are you making a similar argument to them, would you say?
- [06:13]
B
Not really. I see where you're coming from. But the idea of wanting to employ aggressiveness, even cruelty, isn't so much perverse because it's sort of too instrumental. If I decide I'm going to show off how tough I am, it's not necessarily perverse. It might just be a way to get what I want. What makes the perverse interesting is that it doesn't seem to make any sense. And so. And then you get to the paradox. How could something which doesn't make sense in the end be rational and be good and make your life better? But I think those explanations for cruelty or aggression are too reason, too instrumental, too utilitarian.
- [06:57]
C
It sounds like you're more trying to explain why perversity exists within the human condition as opposed to making a prescriptive claim that perversity is something that we should all partake in sometimes? Or are you saying that maybe we should partake in it sometimes for the reasons that you suggested?
- [07:13]
B
My interest in this topic, which is pretty new and something I'm developing exactly as you say, is the sort of thing, why do people do these perverse actions? Why did Augustine Steele appears? Why do people do these crazy, unpredictable, weird things? And so I'm developing different theories of why we do it. Would we benefit from a world that's more perverse? If I could turn the dial, would I? Probably not. I mean, some Perverse acts are very cruel. Just cruelty for the sake of cruelty, causing suffering for the sake of causing suffering. I think for some lives though, the dial could be turned up a bit. I think some of us might feel we're a little bit too predictable. I think some of us might feel we're a little bit too rational, too dull, even too moral. And it might be good for our mental health and maybe make things more interesting. People around us if we got a little bit crazy sometimes in a sort of circumvented way. But I want to be cautious because you know, when you think of perverse, perverse acts, often you think of just cruel, nasty acts. And I'll turn down the dial on that. The more fun sort of perversity which we get with friends goofing around. I have this thing where I collect stories of perverse actions and my favorite story is a guy who's having ice cream with his friend and that's going to all of a sudden like, takes a bite out of his friend's ice cream and, and that kind of stuff, the kind of goofing around, you know, you're sitting around and I steal your French fry. Low level micro perverse acts make the world a little bit more interesting.
- [08:47]
C
The opposite of irrational, of rationality is often posed as irrationality and something that is fundamentally a negative thing or something that we should fundamentally avoid and that doesn't help us get forward. Would you replace that way of thinking of irrationality as something is negative, as rather something just, just a different way of approaching the world? Sometimes, as you've suggested, that sometimes the opposite of rationality isn't a bad thing, but it's actually something that gives meaning and helps people in their lives. Do you think that sort of false, negative, false, sorry, a positive, negative dichotomy is a bad thing and it's been leading us astray.
- [09:28]
B
It's a nice way of putting it. I think a strict dichotomy between irrational and irrational or irrational is always good and irrational is always bad. I think that that's untenable. Look, I'm a big defender of rationality. I think that, you know, I think it's hard to coherently be against it. What rationality means is you act in ways that, that, that try to ensure your goals. You know, if I want to make it to, to Wales for this festival, I book a plane ticket that's on the right day, you know, I, I book a hotel room in the right city. That makes, that makes a lot of sense. If you were to Say if I was to defend irrational. No, don't do that. It's ridiculous. But there is a space of things that aren't entirely rational in a straightforward way that either are sort of valuable in and of themselves or in some sort of unintuitive long range way, by dint of being irrational, it is itself a rational behavior. And again, something like certain ways in which we act, which may not be predictable, which might seem others to be crazy, can actually get us certain goals we want, like intimidating other people or getting concessions and so on. So the space has to be more complicated than rational good, irrational bad. You have to have a sort of in between things of things that are irrational but serve some benefit.
- [10:46]
C
Some, like Stephen Pinker, to use your metaphor earlier, have argued that we need to push the rationality dial up a little bit. However, there have been others on the other side of the debate, people like Ian McGilchrist, who argue that there's essentially the left and right hemisphere of the brain. And to put it simply, the left hemisphere, he says, is systematic and logical and more bureaucratic, whereas the right brain is more sort of holistic and creative and sees things in a more contextual way. And he actually argues that the left brain, the more logical and systematic side, is what's been dominating culture too much and that we need to dial things back in the opposite direction. Would you agree with Iain McGilchrist?
- [11:27]
B
No, no, I wouldn't. I very much agree with Hinker. Pinker embeds his discussion of rationality with a broader claim about human progress, that we are kinder to one another we've ever been. We have the progress of science, we live longer, we have fuller, richer lives. He says this isn't some way to triumph of rationality while fully accepting, as I do, as you do, as everybody does, that in many ways the world is terrible, but it's not as terrible as it was 100 years ago. And I think being rational is terrific. But I also worry a little bit about a false dichotomy, which is that to say being rational is terrific and we should become more and more rational doesn't deny we should expand on the creative sides of ourselves. Art, music, fiction, play, love, sex and all of those things, those aren't irrational, those are just other aspects of life that you might want to encourage. But leaving the space for a little bit more perversity in one's life, which I would recommend, I really am a big champion of being more rational. Nobody would ever look at, you know, at, at, I don't know American politicians, Canadian politicians, politicians in the UK said, here's what we need. We need them to be less rational. We need, we need them to behave more unpredictably and erratically. We need more bias, more prejudice is what we need. A little bit more racism and sexism, that's just the ticket. I think that's insane. Of course we want people to be.
- [12:54]
C
Rational, but to get into the weeds of it a little bit more because obviously you've been, you'd be very careful to say that, you know, we need to be nuanced about this and we need to be balanced about this. We need to be, on the one hand, rational and understand when to deploy rationality in certain situations. But then we kind of need to be perverse and develop our character sometimes. But just saying that we need to be balanced is quite difficult for a lot of people because it's quite difficult to know where that balance is. And you always overshoot something sometimes, sometimes you undershoot. It's different for different people. Are there specific situations in which you'd. You'd encourage people to be perverse or help people find their palace or in a kind of more virtue ethicist way, would you say? No, it's just about experience. You just have to learn these things over life or other sort of practical axioms you can give people.
- [13:44]
B
I, I was once asked so sort of thing that the figured, what did I put on a short billboard, if I could put a billboard somewhere? And what I came up with is, don't listen to your heart, which is listen to your head. Don't listen to your gut. Your gut will lead you astray and everything. So I am given the choice. You're kind of pushing me to make a choice. Yeah, I'm very much in favor of rationality. I think there's a fairly small space to encourage the perverse. What is that space? Well, I would think largely within intimate relationships, within friendships, a bit of playfulness. I think when you're in a rut, when you're in a rut and you're doing things that are what you think is reasonable and you fail and fail and fail and fail, you have to, you have to come into grips with the fact you might not be doing things right. You know, there's an old Seinfeld episode where George, his life is in tatters, this hapless guy, and he decides to do the opposite. And this being a comedy, of course, it all works out well for him, but I wouldn't normally recommend for people to do the opposite of what they've been doing. But maybe what you think is rational isn't. And then you should do something different. And it might feel to you to be perverse, but actually you might stumble onto the right way of doing things, a way to sort of think of this into the way people's in sort of neural network models and machine learning is a bit of random perturbation can help you discover new things. And so the bigger answer to your question, a broader answer question is yeah, be more rational. Try to, try not to let your heart rule you. Don't do, don't do crazy stuff. But within a small space of things, then you could be a little bit crazy.
- [15:36]
C
Just for our audience and the people who are watching now, what are examples that you've seen in people's lives where people really have been in a rut, whether it be in a job circumstance, whether it be in a relationship or anything like that, where people have been in a rut and then they've used some more creative or perverse or irrational or anything strategies to enable them to be able to get themselves out of the hole they're in.
- [16:06]
B
I've seen this in both jobs and relationships where people have really bad jobs are really bad relationships. But they reason and they say, look, if I quit, it will be in a short term. If I quit my job, I quit my short term. Worse. And it's true, you could be in a, in a bad marriage and then be. But at every point you say to tell my partner, I want to end this, be terrible. Better to sort of sit with the badness for a while. You'll be in a bad job and I don't like this, but if you quit it, you'll be unemployed and so on. And I think you have to at some point take the leap of faith and say, I'm going to start anew, I'm going to quit, I'm going to try something new. And in the short term, you know it's going to hurt you. These transitions always hurt. But in the hopes and maybe you haven't got it worked out that things will be better. And from the outside that might seem perverse. Why did she leave her job? Why did she leave her relationship even though it was fine? But in the long run, it may be better for the person just to.
- [17:07]
C
Move back to what you said about rationality leading to progress, which is very much Pinker's argument. Some people have counted this claim both before and after Pinker. So an example of someone who's counted this claim is Nasser Nicholas Taleh, who essentially argues that the biggest sort of events, whether they be progress or a reverse in progress in history, are black swans that are fundamentally unpredictable. Whereas rationality relies on the fact that you need a predictable set of circumstances and axioms to then be able to sort of predict the future and make decisions on that basis. But he says the world is fundamentally unpredictable, and therefore rationality most of the time for being able to achieve progress isn't an optimal strategy. What would your argument be against something like that?
- [17:55]
B
So Taleb, as I understand it, makes one point which I think is very good and which Pinker concedes, which is there could be a black swan event that could upend all of this. You know, five minutes after we're done talking, somebody could set off a nuclear bomb in Manhattan, and that's going to change everything. And with technologies like nuclear weapons and increasing like AI, you know, there's the possibility of a rare event coming which will transform everything, usually for the worse. But the broader argument I can't make any sense of. I mean, what we see over and over again is the things just getting gradually better and better and better through the exercise and rationality. A long time ago, obstetricians and doctors in general didn't wash their hands. You know, and then there was a. And that was a long battle, a long, protracted battle to go against, to persuade people that they persuade doctors who wash their hands now they wash their hands, and now all the babies who would have died now live. And you say this is just a simple triumph of good arguments and also an illustration that sometimes we resist. We fall back on tradition and custom and so on. I think there's a lot of social movements we see now where we could argue back and forth whether being done right to woke the anti woke and so on. But it's hard to deny that we live in a better world where it's considered bizarre to say, oh, women shouldn't be allowed to work, or bizarre to say, I'm not going to hire any black people. And people use that all the time. And I think we. We can attribute this growth of a sort of moral circle, this, this more enlightened morality to exercise irrationality. And it. It's slow and everything. And I. I don't understand what Taleb has against that.
- [19:40]
C
But so. But sometimes appeals to rat. So, so the things that you cited before, so, for example, not allowing black people to vote or not allowing women to vote have been justified through appeals to rationality. Is that just a misuse of rationality?
- [19:57]
B
So it's a good point. I do think it's a misuse of rationality. I will concede that everybody who does everything always says, well, I have rationality, I have reason on my side. And it's quickly used as kind of a shield for any sort of awful policy. Well, this is unpleasant, but the forces of reason dictate I do this and so on. I'm defending, like Pinker does, like many people do, rationality, but it's very separate from defending those people who sort of put on the mantle of rationality and reason. And sometimes the people who are most sort of explicit, oh, this is my, this is my, my, my realm, this is my authority, my intelligence and everything are often just pursuing their own self interest.
- [20:40]
C
So how. What's the correct use of rationale? Or how do we distinguish between someone who's convincingly putting on a mantle of rationality and what the correct rationality is? Is there a universal rationality?
- [20:54]
B
I think there is a universal rationality in the sense that there are principles of logic and science and inferences, ways to infer from facts and probability theory that wherever we are ground reasonable decisions. Now, there's limits to rationality too, in that what rationality is, is a way of achieving your goals. But if your goal is, I don't know, to kill all the Jews, you could pursue that very rationally. Here's the best way to do it. That would be a waste of time. This is most effective. And so on. It's a pretty terrible goal. But I'm not sure rationality should speak to your goal as opposed to the means of getting it. The other thing you asked, which is I think a very interesting question, is how do we know when we're doing things right? And I think that the best way to know, and maybe this brings us back to institutions like this festival, is you're in a community of people who don't put up with your bullshit. You're in a community of. So science at its best, at an idealized form is, here's my theory of things. I'm 100% confident it's right. I've devoted my whole life to it. And other people have to say, no, you're wrong. And then we have to duke it out in front of a skeptical audience. And so I think the best insurance that you're rational is will your arguments survive confrontation with somebody who's not you, who's not you, who's not your brother, who's not your graduate student, not your best friend, but is somebody maybe that's sort of opposed to you. And through this sort of. This is not really a free market metaphor, but through this clanging together of diverse perspectives under sort of rules of conduct, you get great things, you get science, you get morality, you get at this very best version, the development of political systems. So I think the test that you're rational is you have to sort of will you convince somebody who's not on your side already?
- [22:50]
C
Paul Bloom, thank you very much.
- [22:52]
B
Thank you.
- [22:53]
A
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. I hope you enjoyed the interview. Paul Bloom tends to be quite an interesting voice on lesser discussed topics. This will be part of a very short mini series on the subject of perversion and transgressiveness, exploring the limits for humans in terms of what is considered acceptable in our actions and behaviors. We hope you are having relaxing and pleasant holidays and see you next time. Bye. With savings over $390 this shopping season, VRBO helps you swap gift wrap time for quality time with those you love most. From snow on the roof to sand between your toes, we have all the vacation rental options covered. Go to VRBO now and book a last minute week long stay. Save over $390 this holiday season and book your next vacation rental home on VRBO. Average savings $396. Select homes only.