Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
Over 200 guests gathered last night for a reception hosted by the US Embassy and Humanists UK to celebrate World Humanist Day. Politicians, representatives of charities and NGOs, and leading lawyers joined celebrants, pastoral carers, volunteers and patrons from Humanists UK.
The evening featured speeches from US Chargé d’Affaires Matthew Palmer; Lord Wajid Khan, the new UK Government Faith and Belief Minister; Vice President of Humanists UK Polly Toynbee; and Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson.
Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson said:
‘Across the world today there is, as there always has been, a struggle between on the one hand the advocates of closed totalitarian societies, and then those who advocate for open societies, for liberty of thought and expression, for freedom and who cherish the natural diversity that human freedom produces.
‘Humanists have always been on that side – the side of freedom and equality and human rights. The United States, as an advocate of international freedom of belief in recent years has given very welcome and appreciated support to those discriminated against or persecuted on account of their humanist beliefs. Together with our other international friends here this evening, we thank them for their work.’
UK Government Faith and Belief Minister Lord Khan echoed these sentiments:
‘As the Government’s minister for faith and belief, which includes humanists, this is not just a chance to be here and speak with you all, but a chance to show this government’s support and appreciation for the humanist community in this country.’
Humanists UK Vice President Polly Toynbee spoke of the enduring values of humanism, the championing of reason, compassion, and equality. She also referred to the work of the US when she said:
‘For a good definition of humanism, and in honour of our hosts this evening, I’d like to offer a quote from the American founding father Thomas Paine (a quote I have up on my wall at home) who put it this way – “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”’
As Humanists UK continues to grow in influence, it remains committed to advocating for a world where everyone is free to live according to their values and beliefs without fear of persecution. It is delighted to be able to work with the US on that shared aim.
Notes
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 120,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.
World Humanist Day is on 21 June each year. The reception was originally scheduled for that date but was delayed due to the UK general election.
US Chargé d’Affaires Matthew Palmer’s speech
‘Good evening. To all of our friends from Humanists UK: welcome to the U.S. Embassy. We’re very happy to have you here and show our support for your work and your mission.
There’s a very old story about two guys sitting in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of them is religious, the other is an atheist, and they’ve been arguing about the existence of God with the special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.
The atheist admits that even he has tested his faith in God. “Just the other week,” he says, “I was caught in a blizzard. I was totally lost and couldn’t see a thing. So, I fell to my knees and cried out: ‘Oh god, if there is a God, please help me!’”
In the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist, confused. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “after all, here you are.”
The atheist rolls his eyes: “No, God didn’t help me at all. A few people from the village happened to wander by and showed me the way back to camp.”
The point, at least for our purposes, is not who is right and who is wrong but that the same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, depending on who they are and what they believe.
We can imagine many more scenarios like this one, and in our increasingly diverse and fractured world, many different ways of constructing meaning from our experiences.
And it will never be our job to decide who is right and who is wrong, or to establish one belief system as orthodox and another as heresy, but to protect everyone’s right to hold their own beliefs: to worship freely, without persecution or discrimination, and just as importantly, not to worship at all or hold non-religious beliefs, without persecution or discrimination.
Unfortunately, I’ve worked in enough countries around the world to see how persecution on the basis of both religious and non-religious beliefs can devastate peoples’ lives and poison a country’s society.
Places where humanists, atheists, and even agnostics can lose their citizenship, their right to marry, their right to pursue a full education or work for their government. Countries where, still today, there is the death penalty for blasphemy – and mob violence against non-believers.
I can tell you for a fact that no matter where you are in the world, countries that don’t treat their citizens equally are objectively worse off by almost every measure.
So, like you, our State Department is working to defend the rights of non-believers around the world. Pressing those countries with restrictive laws to repeal them. Pressuring leaders of those countries to protect all of their citizens from violence and extend to them equal protection under the law. And when necessary, holding accountable those who commit violent crimes against humanists, atheists, or other non-believers.
In my job here in Embassy London, I often think about what a remarkably important example our two countries set. We live in countries where peoples of all faiths and belief systems are respected. Our constitution enshrines the fundamental separation of church and state and ensures that we do not favor religious or secular organizations in our government. More fundamentally, however, both of our societies are built on mutual respect and tolerance – bedrock values that define our special relationship and are a powerful influence on other countries.
On behalf of our Ambassador and everyone at the State Department: thank you all for your efforts to defend those values and promote them around the world. Your friendship and partnership mean a great deal to us, and if anyone wants to argue about the existence of God or the mysteries of the universe later tonight, we’ll have plenty of drinks at the reception to help you get started.
It’s now my pleasure to invite Andrew Copson, your chair, to say a few words.’
Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson’s speech
‘Across the world today there is, as there always has been, a struggle between on the one hand the advocates of closed totalitarian societies, and then those who advocate for open societies, for liberty of thought and expression, for freedom and who cherish the natural diversity that human freedom produces. Humanists have always been on that side – the side of freedom and equality and human rights.
World Humanist Day is our chance every June to celebrate these values. The General Election derailed our original plan, but we’re so pleased to be able to mark it now with all of you and with the United States’ mission to the UK.
The United States, as an advocate of international freedom of belief in recent years has given very welcome and appreciated support to those discriminated against or persecuted on account of their humanist beliefs. When Islamists in Bangladesh published a death list of humanist bloggers and began to machete them one by one; when Gulalai Ismail the founder of humanist feminist projects in Pakistan was detained, and her family tortured; when the President of Humanists in Nigeria Mubarak Bala was arrested for blasphemy, sentenced and imprisoned for 24 years. In all these cases the US has been ready to support with advocacy, asylum, and moral support. Together with our other international friends here this evening, we thank them for their work.
Because in spite of the challenges they face, humanists continue to exercise their human right to association even in the toughest places. I’ve just returned from Singapore where the General Assembly of Humanists International welcomed new member organisations in Malaysia and Indonesia: the first humanist organisations in their countries. Their ambition, courage, and commitment was an inspiration. States that can support them should all do so, and we’re pleased today to have the new UK human rights minister Lord Collins with us this evening too.
As well as our international friends today we’re also joined by many friends in UK civil society. For 130 years Humanists UK has been part of the rich mix of British society. We are pleased to be part of that plural society and to do our bit to value that diversity and work in the active creation of shared values. In that connection, we’re delighted to be joined by Lord Khan, minister in the ministry for communities and local government who will be speaking to us shortly. To him and to all of you, thank you for being here with us, please do take the time to speak with the humanist celebrants, pastoral carers, and other members of our community here this evening, We look forward to fortifying our connections with all of you in the service of our shared values.’
Government Faith and Belief Minister Lord Khan’s speech
‘It is a real pleasure to have been invited by Humanists UK and the US Ambassador to be present for this World Humanist Day celebration. As the Government’s minister for faith and belief, which includes humanists, this is not just a chance to be here and speak with you all, but a chance to show this government’s support and appreciation for the humanist community in this country. In 2021, for Humanists UK’s 125th anniversary, our new Prime Minister Keir Starmer paid tribute to humanists when he said:
“Ever since its foundation as an ethical movement, humanists have contributed enormously to our party’s and our nation’s achievements. Labour’s first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was an early President of Humanists UK… [Another early humanist was] Nye Bevan, the creator of the NHS.
Humanists and Humanists UK have been at the forefront of the fight for social change: to decriminalise homosexuality, to end corporal punishment in schools, and to introduce free school meals. But you’ve also played an integral role in our communities: from setting up humanist housing associations and adoption agencies through to today’s very popular humanist ceremonies.“
Today Humanists UK represents 130,000 members and supporters across the UK including through its sections Wales Humanists and Northern Ireland Humanists and its sister association, Humanist Society Scotland.
As the Prime Minister alluded to a few years ago, humanists are a major part of life in the UK today. For example: Humanist pastoral carers actively support people during some of life’s most difficult moments as part of chaplaincy teams of life in 40% of hospitals and 20% of prisons, and more recently as part of the armed forces; humanist school speakers support hundreds of schools each year to deliver high-quality inclusive lessons about humanism alongside religions, with trained volunteers visiting a quarter of a million pupils in classrooms in recent years; and humanist celebrants organise incredibly popular non-religious weddings, funerals, and namings.
And of course many of the UK’s most famous and beloved celebrated artists, writers, thinkers, and broadcasters are humanists. I was looking down the list of Humanists UK’s 200 or so famous patrons and it really is astonishing to see so many household names on that distinguished list. It seems so long ago now, but the fact that humanists are a community of action and not just words was made clear to everyone during the pandemic: One in three members of Humanists UK volunteered in their local community at the height of the pandemic; in addition to humanist funeral celebrants and pastoral carers being on the front line as key workers during that period; while Humanists UK staff also supported the national effort as part of the government’s ethical and moral advisory group and by supporting the vaccine rollout
As the Minister, I also appreciate Humanists UK’s dialogue work with religious groups. As the recent riots have reminded us, hatred and misinformation can spread like wildfire in siloed communities, but it’s difficult for lies and hatred to fester in communities where we already instinctively respect and understand and care for one another as friends and neighbours.
Humanists have always in my experience been keen to bridge the divides in our society, supporting united communities where we can all get along and live well together, side by side, whatever our beliefs.
And I know there are many religious guests and friends of Humanists UK and the US embassy here today who have seen that approach firsthand as well.
I want to end my remarks by saying simply this: thank you. Humanists UK’s community services today benefit over 1.5 million people each year – from weddings and funerals to newer services like a helpline for vulnerable humanists, and asylum support. And, of course, out there in our local communities as well.
That is something that this Government, and I personally, am happy to say I recognise and value. So here’s to the humanist community and all that you do to help make this country great.’
Humanists UK Vice President Polly Toynbee’s speech
‘Humanists UK is approaching its 130th birthday – and it’s already come a long, long way. I can speak for how much Humanists UK has grown since I was President, roughly a decade ago, and in that time not only has the membership ballooned – I believe it was 130,000 members and supporters last I heard – but so too has the practical, on-the-ground impact of Humanists UK.
The number of ceremonies every year has gone through the roof – Northern Ireland is a fabulous example of that – and thousands of people are receiving high-quality support, including on complex issues like asylum and specialist care, for the first time. Everywhere that humanism is treated fairly, we’ve seen huge improvements.
Whether that’s in Wales, where humanists worked as valued partners in supporting the government’s curriculum reform, in Northern Ireland, where thousands of couples since 2018 have taken up the expanded choice of a meaningful humanist ceremony, or of course Scotland, where not only are humanist ceremonies an international success story, they’ve actually driven up marriage numbers as a whole and curiously, appear to have the lowest divorce rates.
Of course, England and Wales still do not have legal humanist ceremonies but Labour in opposition promised to give speedy legal recognition to humanist marriages and we hope they will get on with that soon now they are in government.
There’s also a lot to be said about the value of Humanists UK’s campaigning and advocacy work – I’m proud to be Vice President of the organisation that put together the largest ever coalition of UK civil society groups to protect our Human Rights Act.
That says something, I think, about the motives behind Humanists UK – they really do believe in a world where everyone has equal rights, where every one’s freedom of thought, expression, conscience, and choice is respected.
A good example of that is all the extensive work Humanists UK reports on at the UN Human Rights Council, where it has special consultative status, and uses its platform to champion freedom of religion or belief and speak out against persecution of religious minorities… as well as humanists who, of course, still face terrible punishments and oppression and risk of death in many countries themselves.
Now, I also want to point out that we’re hosting this reception a few short weeks, really, after the riots – and I really do see humanism, with its emphasis on reason, kindness, and consideration, as the antithesis of the horrifying events we saw in our city streets over those days – blind hate, ignorance, and violence.
Of course the humanist view is as the late MP Jo Cox put it – herself a member of Humanists UK – when she said:
“We are more united and have far more in common then that which divides us.“
I really believe this too, and I know that’s Humanists UK’s vision of society as well. Now, given that this is what Humanists UK stands for, we as humanists should ask ourselves this: How can we make that known, better understood?
Well, when I was President of Humanists UK, the tagline was in fact ‘For the one life we have.’ This meant, of course, that humanists believe this is the only life we have and that we should cherish it; that we should lead a good life, do right by others, and make it count. But it takes a bit of unpacking.
Today’s Humanists UK slogan has more emphasis on that same value of positive action, collaboration, and concern for others:
“Think for yourself, act for everyone.”
However, for another good definition of humanism, and in honour of our hosts this evening, I’d like to offer a quote from the American founding father Thomas Paine (I have it up on my wall at home) who put it this way:
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good”
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
The Government has today brought forward a Bill to remove hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Humanists UK has welcomed this move as long overdue reform. But it has also said that the next step should be to remove the 26 Church of England bishops, known as the Lords Spiritual, who also have an automatic right to sit and vote in the House of Lords.
After the hereditary peers are removed, the only peers left will be the life peers – appointed for life by the political parties or on the basis of merit – and the Church of England bishops. The only two sovereign states that have leaders of the state religion get automatic seats in the legislature are the UK and Iran.
The role of the Lords Spiritual is active and influential in law-making. Not only do they speak, vote, and serve on committees like other peers, bishops are subject to a number of privileges. They have their own bench so they always get seats when others have to compete. They have privileged speaking rights over other peers – when a bishop wants to speak, others are expected to give way.
They are exempted from the portions of the Code of Conduct of the Lords that forbid payment for providing advice and services, enabling them to advocate on behalf of the Church of England.
The public overwhelmingly agrees that bishops should not automatically be granted a right to sit in the House of Lords. A survey conducted by YouGov for the Timesseven years ago found that 62 per cent of British adults believe that no religious leaders should have ‘an automatic right to seats’ in Parliament. This sentiment will only have increased with the shift towards a less religious society.
The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is starting in the House of Commons and is likely to become law sometime next year.
Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson said:
‘This bill to remove the hereditary peers from the House of Lords is a very welcome and long overdue first step, for which the Government should be congratulated. It will make the Lords more representative of UK society.
‘The next step should be to remove the Lords Spiritual. There should be no reserved seats in Parliament for any one religion. The current position is a clear violation of the principle of freedom of religion and belief and equal treatment before the law. With the hereditary peers removed, the bishops’ presence will stick out like a sore thumb.’
Notes
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 120,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
Over a year on from the landmark High Court judgment which ruled that it was ‘unlawful’ for Kent County Council to refuse humanist representation on its religious education (RE) committee, there are now 125 humanist representatives with full membership on these bodies across England and Wales.
A groundbreaking success for humanism in education
This is an increase of 42 from May 2023 when Mr Justice Constable ruled that it was ‘clearly discriminatory’ for the Council to exclude someone from group A of a Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) ‘solely by reference to the fact that their belief… is a non-religious, rather than a religious, belief’. There are 173 SACREs in total, meaning the number with full membership has gone from less than half to almost three-quarters in a year. Numbers were rising sharply even before the judgment – a decade ago, only around one in seven had full membership.
Since 2015, Religious Education (RE) (outside of faith schools) has been required to be equally inclusive of humanism as it is of the major world religions. For many maintained schools, RE syllabuses are agreed at a local level by each SACRE. The Bowen v Kent ruling was important because it was the first to say that not only must syllabuses not exclude humanism, but also that the local committees overseeing the subject cannot exclude humanists.
Humanist Steve Bowen (2nd right) and his legal team outside the Royal Courts of Justice, 17 May 2023
The landmark High Court judgment
Chair of Kent Humanists, Steve Bowen, applied to become a member of group A of Kent SACRE in August 2021. After much delay, Kent County Council refused permission in June 2022, claiming that to admit him would be unlawful – and Steve decided to judicially review that decision with support from Humanists UK. In May 2023, the High Court ruled that Kent County Council acted unlawfully in rejecting Steve’s membership.
Following that judgment, guidance was issued by the Department for Education (DfE) that stated ‘applications for Group A membership from persons who represent holders of non-religious beliefs should be considered in the same way as applications from those who represent holders of religious beliefs’. Since then Humanists UK has been supporting humanists to gain full membership of their local SACRE and help shape RE syllabuses so they are inclusive of humanism. This is especially important following a recent Ofsted report into RE which found that curriculums typically have little in them about humanism, and do not reflect pupils’ experiences of living in a complex world.
Humanists UK’s Director of Understanding Humanism Luke Donellan said:
‘We are delighted by the progress that has been made since Steve Bowen’s High Court win, to make sure humanists are taking up their rightful place on their local RE committees. These are important bodies that advise local authorities responsible for RE syllabuses and support schools with the delivery of the subject. As such it is vital that humanism is given equal treatment to major world religions when syllabuses are being drawn up.
‘There’s still work to do to make sure every SACRE has a humanist representative with full voting rights, and we are continuing to work with volunteers and local SACREs to achieve full humanist representation across all 173. If you would be interested in volunteering on your local SACRE and supporting us with this important work, we’d love to hear from you.’
Get quality lessons on humanism into the classroom
A balanced, objective approach to religion and belief education is essential. Humanists on their local RE committees can make sure this happens, and that high-quality lessons about humanism is an essential part of any child’s education. Join your local RE committee
How humanists help councils offer better RE: interview with Greta Farian from Kingston SACRE
An essential part of our work for greater inclusivity in schools is to make sure humanists are represented in local Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education (SACREs) in England and in Wales, the bodies responsible for overseeing the local RE syllabus. We caught up with Greta Farian, humanist rep for Kingston upon Thames SACRE to find out more about the humanist values that underpin her work, as well as reasons you should consider becoming a rep too. Read Greta’s interview
Notes
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 120,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
Humanists UK alongside members of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group and delegates at 2023’s party conferences
Humanists UK is gearing up for the party conference season, and during the next month, will have stands or fringes at the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, Conservative Party, and Labour Party conferences. This is your guide to engaging with Humanists UK and the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group over conference season.
Each conference gives attendees the opportunity to discuss humanist issues and campaigns with the major parties. As a charity, Humanists UK is strictly not party-political: for us, these conferences are a chance to lobby MPs and speak to activists from every political tradition.
Green Party Conference, Manchester, 6-8 September
Come meet Humanists UK staff and Green Humanists at our exhibition stand 17 to learn more about our key campaigns. If you’re a Green Humanists member, you can join its meeting at 9:00-10:15 on Sunday 8 September in Exchange 6/7 at Manchester Central Convention Complex. Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson will be speaking to Green Humanists members about our work and answering any questions.
The Liberal Democrat Party Conference, Brighton, 14-17 September
You can say hello to Humanists UK staff at our exhibition stand #34 to find out more about our campaigns and how you can get involved. Then at 18:15-19:15 on Monday 16 September we’ll be holding our Humanists UK Drinks Reception in the Consort Room, The Grand Hotel. We’ll be hearing from Freddie van Mierlo MP, Max Wilkinson MP, Claire Young MP, Steff Aquarone MP, Tom Morrison MP, Baroness Burt, Humanists UK’s Andrew Copson, and Humanist and Secular Liberal Democrats Chair Clare Delderfield.
You can also visit Humanist and Secularist Liberal Democrats at stand H15, and Andrew Copson will be speaking at its lunchtime fringe event ‘No-one should be enslaved…‘ Why a secular state would benefit everyone, alongside Tom Gordon MP on Sunday 15 September 13:00-14:00 in Meeting Room 1A.
Labour Party Conference, Liverpool, 22-25 September
Join Humanists UK and Labour Humanists at its annual drinks reception on Monday 23 September in ACC Arena Room 10 from 18:30–20:00. The reception will include high-profile speakers like Dame Angela Eagle MP, Rachel Hopkins MP, Ruth Cadbury MP, Dame Nia Griffith MP, Lord Dubs, The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, and Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson.
You can also meet with Humanists UK staff and volunteers at exhibition stand D6 at the conference centre.
Conservative Party Conference, Birmingham, 29 September-2 October
Join Humanists UK and Conservative Humanists’ drinks reception to discuss key issues of interest to the non-religious, from blasphemy at home and abroad to inclusive education. Speakers include Cllr Neil Garratt AM, Leader of London City Hall Conservatives, and Dr Ruth Wareham, Humanists UK Education Policy Researcher. The reception will be held at 20:30-22:00 on Monday 30 September in the Drawing Room at the Hyatt Regency Birmingham.
The party political humanist groups (Labour Humanists, Green Humanists, Conservative Humanists, or the Humanist and Secularist Liberal Democrats) are independent humanist groups within the political parties themselves. They bring non-religious people together in each of those respective parties to advocate for humanist issues and a more secular and rational approach to politics.
Notes
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Campaigns Manager Kathy Riddick at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 120,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
The party political humanist groups (Labour Humanists, Green Humanists, Conservative Humanists, or the Humanist and Secularist Liberal Democrats) are independent humanist groups within the political parties themselves. They bring non-religious people together in each of those respective parties to advocate for humanist issues and a more secular and rational approach to politics.
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
A view of Scotland’s Parliament Building, located by Holyrood Park in Edinburgh.
Humanists UK has responded to the Scottish Parliament’s consultation on the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, urging it to adopt the most compassionate approach possible. Humanists UK fully supports efforts to legalise assisted dying in Scotland, and commends the comprehensive and thorough process that led to the development of the Bill. However, it believes the eligibility criteria could be improved to include people like Tony Nicklinson, who are incurably suffering but not terminally ill.
Devolved matters pertaining to the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government are generally dealt with by Humanists UK’s sister charity, Humanist Society Scotland (HSS). Humanists UK has agreed to also respond to this consultation as Scotland’s assisted dying legislation as their law will have a significant impact on the rest of the UK. Humanists UK also endorses HSS’s response.
Humanists UK believes that being able to die, with dignity, in a manner of our choosing must be understood as a fundamental human right. Any assisted dying law must contain strong safeguards, but the international evidence from countries where assisted dying is legal shows that safeguards can be effective.
Under the current proposals in Scotland, a terminally ill person would be allowed medical assistance to die. A person is deemed terminally ill ‘if they have an advanced and progressive disease, illness or condition from which they are unable to recover and that can reasonably be expected to cause their premature death’. This is a more compassionate option than is currently proposed in England and Wales under Lord Falconer’s ‘Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill’ in the House of Lords, which would only be available for people with six months left to live or fewer.
However, Humanists UK believes that the law should not be limited to terminal illness but include people who are suffering. There are several conditions that can cause an individual considerable pain, suffering, and indignity, but may not lead to death. Paralysis from trauma (such as car accidents), locked-in syndrome, ataxia, and severe spinal stenosis may not be considered ‘terminal’ by a doctor.
Humanists UK staunchly supported the case of Tony Nicklinson, a man with locked-in syndrome, when he brought his case to the High Court in a bid to obtain the right to have a doctor end his life without fear of prosecution. In 2005 Tony suffered a catastrophic stroke which left him paralysed from the neck down and unable to speak. He could only communicate via blinking, and described his life as a ‘living nightmare’. In 2012, shortly after he lost his case, he refused food and died. Tony was not terminally ill.
Nathan Stilwell, Assisted Dying Campaigner for Humanists UK, said:
‘Once again Scotland is leading the way when it comes to being a progressive force for change. The proposals in Scotland are more compassionate than those in England and Wales and the Scottish Parliament should be commended for its thorough approach. Dying people shouldn’t be forced to suffer.
‘Nevertheless, there’s a group of people with conditions that cause them intolerable pain that isn’t terminal, and these people will be denied a dignified choice. People like Tony Nicklinson, who suffered for years even though he had a clear and settled wish to die, should be allowed to die on their own terms in a compassionate and dignified way.’
Notes
For further comment or information, media should contact Nathan Stilwell at nathan@humanists.uk or phone 07456200033.
If you have been affected by the current assisted dying legislation, and want to use your story to support a change in the law, please email campaigns@humanists.uk.
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 120,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
Organization Description: Secular Connexion Séculière (SCS) is a national organization dedicated to advocating and lobbying for atheist rights in Canada, to facilitating communication and dialogue among Canadian atheists, and to communicating Canadian human rights values to the world. SCS does not have, nor does it seek, any governing powers in the Canadian atheist community. Rather, it seeks support for its efforts to defend non-believers right to freedom from religion, to lobby the Canadian government on the behalf of Canadian atheists, to provide communication conduits for Canadian atheist organizations.
Organization Description: The Secular Coalition for America advocates for religious freedom, as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and works to defend the equal rights of nonreligious Americans. Representing 20 national secular organizations, hundreds of local secular communities, and working with our allies in the faith community, we combine the power of grassroots activism with professional lobbying to make an impact on the laws and policies that govern separation of religion and government — or the improper encroachment of either on the other.
A quick Project 2025 update: The director of the project, Paul Dans, announced he was stepping down from the Heritage Foundation. This marks the end of the “policy operations” phase according to news reports. Which makes sense; 920 pages of conservative policy recommendations really seems like enough. Dans’ resignation is something of a response to the ongoing criticism of Project 2025 and of the Heritage Foundation by the Trump campaign because even though the campaign isn’t officially affiliated with Project 2025, campaign officials are repeatedly being asked for comments about the policy recommendations.
It’s important to note that the other part of Project 2025, the gathering and vetting of thousands of resumes from conservatives who want to implement the policy proposals in the federal agencies, will apparently continue. So we’re not declaring victory. Dans was the chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s HR department, so he was a natural for this effort.
The Project 2025 website is still up and the policy proposals are still out there threatening sweeping changes in the relationship between the federal government and the people it is supposed to serve. There’s no reason not to keep talking about it. Take a look at our Top Ten Project 2025 Attacks on Church State Separation.
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It’s easy here to get too focused on things like Project 2025 and what’s happening on Capitol Hill and who’s running for president now and what the polls say, and not be as focused on people outside of Washington who already have some real-world problems as opposed to the ones that could boil up after the election. People with problems we might be able to help with now.
But this week I got a call from a guy out West who is in a court-ordered drug rehab program that includes a faith-based component in which he as an atheist should not be forced to participate. And I got a call from a guy in the Midwest where a religious group is growing in size in his area, bringing in people from the East Coast, starting unaccredited schools, and growing in political strength. Last week there was someone in Louisiana who doesn’t want the Ten Commandments posted in her kid’s school. These were reminders that there is already plenty of work to be done for nonreligious Americans with real-world problems.
Fortunately the Secular Coalition is a coalition, and if I don’t know the answer or if someone may need help from an attorney, for example, I can reach out to our coalition members and find someone with experience in solving problems like these. That’s one benefit of working with the other 20 groups. The range of experience is always surprising.
President Biden has at long last reversed his position on Supreme Court reforms and come out in favor of an enforceable code of ethics, 18-year term limits, and for a constitutional amendment stating that “the Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as president.” Apparently the Court’s presidential immunity decision was the last straw.
The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and is ready for a vote in the Senate. You can still tell your Senators to support that bill with our Action Alert. Most states have enforceable codes of conduct. It’s just good policy. So are term limits. Forty-six states have term limits for state supreme court judges and three have a mandatory retirement age. (What’s up with Rhode Island?) We need Congress to agree.
Organization Description: This website was created in June 2021 by a group of Canadian Humanists who saw the need for a platform where all subjects of concern to Humanists could be discussed freely and where civilized debate could be held without fear… The members of the New Enlightenment Project Humanist Association adopt the Amsterdam Declaration 2002, as reproduced below, as the Association’s Statement of Values and Principles.
This article traces the contribution of New Age foodism and “alternative” medicine to a political movement that devalues science, reason and all things “Western”. It’s unlikely that anyone consciously combined the disparate pieces of antagonistic philosophies into a new proto-religion that was then marketed. I argue that this new proto-religion, sometimes referred to as Wokism, is likely a product of cultural evolution whereby random units of culture that Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) called “memes” combined with other units that could then be copied from brain to brain forming a kind of mind virus (Robertson, 2021). In this article, I argue that New Ageism has played an understudied role in its incubation. The full article can be found here: How pseudoscientific ideas about food and medicine have helped to devalue science, reason, and all things Western (humanisticallyspeaking.org)
Organization Description: This website was created in June 2021 by a group of Canadian Humanists who saw the need for a platform where all subjects of concern to Humanists could be discussed freely and where civilized debate could be held without fear… The members of the New Enlightenment Project Humanist Association adopt the Amsterdam Declaration 2002, as reproduced below, as the Association’s Statement of Values and Principles.
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As you reminded me and then taught me a bit further, antisemitism is not static. It’s problematic to make it a single definition. When we’re trying to create a culture in which it is discussed so that people’s experiences and how it manifests are considered more live, what are effective ways to do that in small communities?
Dr. Alon Milwicki: History is always a great place to look. The way antisemitism presents itself in different periods of history is astronomically different because it’s about who’s the dominant group using it and what’s the dominant trope. For example, if you go back to the resource we put out, those four examples we chose were the most prominent tropes or prominent manifestations, the way antisemitism manifested within other and more dominant narratives.
One of the things that I would update is to talk about the utilitarianism of the Jew. That is one of the dominant tropes that is being used right now. Now, a lot of people, especially those who think that waving an Israeli flag or Christian nationalists like Sean Feucht or whatever, saying they support Israel full-throated, they’re supporting Israel and what theybelieve is Jewish people, not because they support Jewish people. They support Jewish people’s role for them. So that’s a changing aspect. I would have said, “No,” if you had asked me last year if that was a dominant trope. But post-October 7th, that’s become a dominant trope. And being able to recognize that antisemitism presents itself in different ways, in more dominant ways at different periods, is extremely important. Because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, no one talked about the Great Replacement Theory.
No one was talking about it. Or if they were, it was in smaller niches. Whereas now, in the last how many years, we have had at least one or two shootings that have been based on the Great Replacement Theory. Nobody 40 years ago or 30 years ago would have been talking about transgender people and how Jewish people are behind all transgenderism or the demonization of the LGBT community. No one would have been talking about that. So, nobody would have associated attacking the LGBT community with being something traceable to antisemitism. But now, it’s pretty freaking obvious. So, to say, antisemitism is the demonization of Jews or the attack on Jewish people or something blanket like that. That’s true enough. But that doesn’t help us understand how it’s presented at the time.
To say that antisemitism is about hating Jews, no doubt. Forgive my 1980s colloquialisms, so it’s important for us. It’s incumbent on us as “experts” to illustrate how antisemitism keeps changing, how it keeps representing itself, and how it keeps evolving. Again, manifestations in 2024 are not the same as those in 1924. There are similarities, mind you, don’t get me wrong. That’s what makes antisemitism constant. Some tropes go back millennia. We know that. But the Ku Klux Klan utilizing the Jewish trope of money in the 1920s isn’t the same way as the Goyim Defense League in 2024. The commonality is Jews and money, but how and why is what makes it different, right?
It’s like when I was a history professor. I would tell students to point blank that the purpose of studying history is not the who, what, when, and where. Because you don’t need me for that, knowing that Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939 was awesome. You can answer a Jeopardy question. Score for you. That’s not studying history. Why was that considered the start of World War II? Why wasn’t it when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia? How did people respond to it at the time? How come Winston Churchill drew that line? Why didn’t Neville Chamberlain draw an earlier line? It’s the how and the why questions that make up why history matters. Why studying history is important, okay?
What antisemitism is, this rush to define it finitely. I understand its utility. But it also can prove to be a fool’s errand because knowing that antisemitism is an attack on Jewish people doesn’t get us closer. I won’t say to eradicate it because it’s been five millennia, so good luck with that. But approaching it better in our time means understanding how and why it presents itself. How and why did it shift in the 1980s? Why did it shift to this? What caused it? How did the founding of the Aryan Nations in the late 1970s shift the focus on antisemitism?
How did that affect the militia movements or the resurgence of Christian identity in the 1980s and 90s? That’s how we get at it. And I’m sorry for getting preachy. That’s sort of a non-answer to your question. Because it’s the very point we highlight in this thing, this resource is just that. You’re not going to get a finite definition. Even though the IHRA definition has all these examples, some are flawed. But this rush to accept the IRA definition, is it a genuine attempt to combat antisemitism? Or is it placatory? Because saying you accept IHRA or saying you pass a Holocaust mandate is great, so what?
Christian nationalists are in favour of Holocaust mandates. Shouldn’t that give you pause? Most Holocaust mandates don’t have any funding for education or training. You can’t just tell a U.S. history teacher in high school who doesn’t have any understanding of what the Holocaust is to be like, “You have to teach the Holocaust.” Especially since now, they’re letting, at least, a pilot program in Texas that says the top five education students in their senior year can teach K-3 in Texas. Or at least in, I want to say, Dallas County. Again, that’s not high. This is something I’m passionate about. But does that make sense? (1, 2, 3)
Because it’s almost a non-issue, like, so great, you can define antisemitism. Big fucking deal. Why does it matter? What are they doing with accepting IHRAs? Or passing all these antisemitism initiatives–great. Or colleges openly condemning antisemitism–great. But what are you doing about it? It’s much top-level shit. That’s usually very placatory. It’s not the first time this stuff has been done. I can’t remember. I always get Title IV or Title VI confused. But one of them, the one that is about the racist complaints on college campuses, includes antisemitism. So creating an antisemitism initiative on top of a Title IV or VI, whichever one it is, on antisemitism, gives off two impressions. One is that students don’t know about Title IV or VI, which is problematic. Or two, the reason for asserting a national antisemitism initiative, right when you already have something in place, has another reason why. The odds are that’s for publicity. I’m not going to get into ranting territory.
Jacobsen: When it comes to common threads you find in each of these instances, whether back to Mein Kampf, the National Socialists in Germany, to some of the white nationalists or neo-Nazis you’re seeing in the United States and Canada now, what is their uniting stereotype map? What are the common threads for their mental stereotype map?
Miwlicki: Jews can’t be trusted, Jews control money, Jews control media, Jewish disloyalty, Communism, Capitalism, all of the standard tropes. The stuff that Hitler wrote about is what Henry Ford wrote about, the stuff that the Protocols wrote about. And unfortunately, those are still widely read. Those are still very popular. And those are seen as top-level. And I’m sure the Turner Diaries are up there, too. But those are the common threads. It’s like the oldies but goodies that never go away: The power, the greed, the media.
This would be more for the American side of it because, to be fair, Hitler didn’t stop talking about God until 1938. So he might have put out a blood libel: Jews killed Jesus. That’s always an oldie but goodie. Those would be the common threads that would go across. You can’t trust Jews. Something that you would probably hear somebody saying in 1930 and anti-Semites saying today is you can’t trust Jews, and then whatever follows from that could be anything. But I would argue it’s that shadow government idea, that shadow control, that unites it all, whether it’s power or greed.
I’m going to have to agree with my sociology colleague again. It comes down to power. Power is money. Power is force. Power is influence. Power is the control of information. There is this common belief that whether it’s in Mein Kampf or in whatever bullshit the GDL is flying about today, right, that would be the common thread is probably fear of Jewish power. Or hate something like that.
Organization Description: Humanists International is the global representative body at the heart of the humanist movement. Inspired by humanist values, we are optimistic for a world where everyone can have a dignified and fulfilling life. We build, support and represent the global humanist movement and work to champion human rights and secularism. We support democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
Humanists International, together with its Member, Humanist Society Singapore, hosted the annual General Assembly and International Humanist Conference in Singapore from 30 August to 1 September 2024.
Over 70 humanist delegates from more than 30 countries attended the annual gathering. The International Humanist Conference, organized by Humanist Society Singapore, focused on the theme of interfaith and secularism. The conference featured presentations and panel discussions that explored the complex relationship between religion, belief, and secularism in today’s world.
During the General Assembly, which took place the following day, Members and Associates elected new Board Members and ratified new humanist organizations.
Yvan Dheur was elected as the new treasurer of Humanists International. David Pineda, Mary Jane Quiming, and Leo Igwe were also elected to board positions. All elected board members will serve a three-year term from 2024 to 2027.
Additionally, several new organizations were welcomed into the Humanists International network. Humanesia (Indonesia), Humanists Malaysia, and Union des Familles Laïques (France) were officially recognized as Members, while Humanist Association of Northern Nigerian (Nigeria), Central Ontario Humanists Association (Canada), Secular Humanists – gbs Rhine Neckar (Germany), and Oniros Philosophie Foundation (Colombia) were ratified as Associates.
Roslyn Mould, Vice-President of Humanists International, in her closing remarks, said:
“As we leave this beautiful city, let us carry the spirit of this General Assembly with us. Let us return to our homes and workplaces with renewed energy and determination. Let us continue to work together, to build a world where everyone can live a life of dignity, freedom, and fulfillment.”
The 2024 Distinguished Services to Humanism Award recipients were Joanna Williams from Humanists Malta, Kat Parker from Secular Rescue, and Norhaiyah Mahmood from Humanist Society Singapore. This Award recognizes the contributions of humanist activists to international humanism and to organised humanism.
The next General Assembly is scheduled to be held in Luxembourg in July 2025, hosted by Humanists International’s Member, AHA Luxembourg. To be first to hear about the conference, sign up to receive our newsletter here.
Become a member organization
Did you know, your local group or national association can join Humanists International as a Member Organization?
Organization Description: Humanists International is the global representative body at the heart of the humanist movement. Inspired by humanist values, we are optimistic for a world where everyone can have a dignified and fulfilling life. We build, support and represent the global humanist movement and work to champion human rights and secularism. We support democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
Humanists International, the global voice of the humanist movement, has released its 2023 Annual Report, highlighting significant strides made in empowering humanist communities and advancing humanist values worldwide. The report provides a comprehensive overview of the organization’s accomplishments and challenges throughout the year.
Key Highlights:
The organization made substantial progress in 2023, supporting humanist communities and advocating for humanist values.
The World Humanist Congress fostered international collaboration and discussion on important issues.
Humanists International actively engaged with the United Nations and other international institutions.
The organization remains dedicated to building a stronger global humanist movement and empowering its members.
President Andrew Copson’s foreword emphasized the organization’s accomplishments in expanding its network and supporting member organizations, particularly in developing countries. Humanists International stimulated a rise in member-driven advocacy efforts at the United Nations, showcasing the growing influence of humanist principles on the global stage.
The report details efforts to establish a thriving global humanist network, protect humanists at risk, amplify humanist voices at international institutions, and ensure a strong and sustainable organizational framework. It also highlights the successful World Humanist Congress in Copenhagen, where delegates discussed and adopted a declaration on “Democracy: a humanist value.”
Supporting Humanists and Advocating for Change
Chief Executive Gary McLelland highlighted the organization’s unwavering commitment to advancing humanist values, from providing support to those facing persecution for their beliefs to campaigning against discrimination based on religion or belief. He also underscored the importance of building partnerships and collaborations with like-minded organizations.
The annual report elaborates on Humanists International’s dedication to supporting individuals at risk, providing tailored assistance to 88 people facing persecution for their beliefs. It also emphasizes the launch of the 2023 Freedom of Thought Report, a comprehensive assessment of the global state of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief.
Influencing International Institutions
Humanists International’s advocacy efforts at the United Nations remained a priority, with the organization delivering numerous statements at the Human Rights Council in Geneva and collaborating with other NGOs on various initiatives.
The report also showcases the organization’s commitment to empowering its members, providing training and support for advocacy efforts both locally and internationally.
Looking Ahead
The annual report outlines Humanists International’s future plans, focusing on securing funding for vital programs, developing resources for members, and creating a new strategy for protecting humanists at risk. President Andrew Copson expressed confidence in the organization’s ability to contribute to a world where humanism thrives and everyone has the freedom to live according to their values.
Join Humanists International
Together we can do even more to promote humanist values and defend human rights. Join Humanists International as a Member Organization or become an individual supporter in your own right.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned employee informed the national state/church watchdog that official prayer started the district’s Aug. 13 all-staff assembly. A local pastor, Matt Bunn of Heights Church, recited the school-sponsored prayer over a loudspeaker. Several staff members were uncomfortable, according to FFRF’s complainant, but were too afraid to walk out or speak out against the prayer.
“School-sponsored prayer coerces attendees into worship,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi has written to the district. “Over a captive audience, official prayer is even more inappropriate.”
Faculty and staff have the First Amendment right to be free from religious indoctrination, including when participating in school-sponsored events, FFRF asserts. It is a basic constitutional principle that public schools may not show favoritism toward or coerce belief or participation in religion. Coercing staff members to participate in prayer at an all-staff, or any school-sponsored event, is unconstitutional. Further, giving only Christian teachers the benefit of prayer is unlawful preference for Christianity.
Additionally, Missouri’s Establishment Clause prohibits this coercion and preferential treatment. Missouri’s constitutional provisions “‘declaring that there shall be a separation of church and state are not only more explicit but more restrictive’ than the First Amendment,” as the courts have pointed out.
Plus, the school district serves and employs a diverse population with diverse religious beliefs, including Jews, Muslims, atheists and agnostics. A full 37 percent of the American population is non-Christian, including the almost 30 percent that is nonreligious. Additionally, at least a third of Generation Z members (those born after 1996) have no religion, with a recent survey revealing that almost half of Gen Z qualifies as religiously unaffiliated “nones.”
FFRF asserts that the district must remain neutral with regard to religion in order to respect and protect the First Amendment rights of all staff. Bolivar R-1 has fallen short on this front, and that’s why the district must be made aware that including religious worship in its events is unconstitutional.
“The district violates the Constitution when it invites a minister to staff meetings to force them to pray,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “School staff have the right to be free from their employers foisting their religion upon them.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Pope Francis has no business weighing in on the U.S. presidential election.
It’s already unconscionable that the Vatican has been waging a global war against abortion and contraceptive rights, seeking not only to deny Roman Catholic followers but all non-Catholics control of their own reproduction, families and lives. Notably, 82 percent of the world is not Catholic. Yet the Vatican is committed to trying to enforce its cruel Roman Catholic doctrine everywhere, creating acute and unnecessary misery, compounding poverty and harming women’s health, particularly in the poorest Catholic counties.
Now, Pope Francis continues the Vatican’s officious interference by inappropriately weighing in on the U.S. presidential election in the name of its war against abortion.
During a news conference last Friday, the pope blasted what he called the “anti-life” policies in favor of legal abortion (presumably referencing the pro-choice Democratic contender Kamala Harris) and against migration (presumably referencing the anti-immigrant Republican contender Donald Trump). “Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants or the one who [supports] killing babies,” the pope said.
“To have an abortion is to kill a human being. You may like the word or not, but it’s killing,” the pope reiterated.
Francis claimed not to be telling Catholics who to vote for, saying: “One should vote, and choose the lesser evil. Who is the lesser evil, the woman or man? I don’t know.” Yet his words come in the context of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, already publicly stating repealing access to legal abortion should be the top voter priority.
The pope ought to tread carefully when condemning evil — he heads a coterie of professional celibates who nevertheless are in the fifth decade of a grotesque systemic coverup of shocking sexual crimes by their clerics against children and minors. As long ago as 1985, Rev. Thomas P. Doyle warnedthat the Church appeared to be “an organization preaching morality and providing sanctuary to perverts.”
But even more so, the pope has crossed a state/church line, which will doubtless encourage many priests across the country to nudge parishioners to vote based on the abortion issue. While Catholics as individuals are fortunately far more progressive than their church, and most say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, those who attend Mass regularly oppose legal abortion. With 10 states holding vitally important referenda in November to protect abortion rights, much is at stake. These states include Florida, which has a draconian abortion ban but also a large and mostly Catholic migrant population. It seems clear what the takeaway from the pope’s message to Florida’s faithful Catholics is supposed to be.
Catholic priests — and ministers of all denominations — must heed their obligation as part of tax-exempt churches to sit out the presidential election. The Freedom From Religion Foundation may not be able to do anything legal about the blowhard pope, but if U.S. priests and bishops use their tax-exempt pulpits to endorse, we will demand that the IRS take action against their churches.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Under Emperor Hirohito, who was considered a god, Shinto nationalism created some of the most horrific atrocities in history in the cause of a righteous and racist holy war, Bryan Mark Rigg points out. Rigg has worked as a professor of history at American Military University, Southern Methodist University and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He’s the distinguished author of several highly regarded books on World War II history. Rigg’s newest book, recently published by Knox Press, is called “Japan’s Holocaust: A History of Imperial Japan’s Mass Murder and Rape during World War II.”
“Hirohito was revered as a living God as a Shinto belief until 1945, when he renounced his Godhead,” Rigg reveals to “Freethought Matters” co-hosts Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Every emperor for the last 2,500 years was revered as a god in Japan. So he wasn’t only a dictator and a military leader, but he was a god in human form.”
(To view details on channel variations depending on your provider, click here.)
If you don’t live in any of the marquee towns where the show broadcasts on Sunday, you can already catch the interview on FFRF’s YouTube channel. New shows go up every Thursday.
Upcoming guests include an expert on the Comstock Act, an author of a new book on the Scopes Trial and another author writing on the dangers of vouchers to aid religious schools. You can catch interviews from previous seasons here, including with Gloria Steinem, Ron Reagan, author John Irving, actor John “Q” de Lancie and award-winning columnist Katha Pollitt.
Please tune in to “Freethought Matters” . . . because freethought matters.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned district parent has come forward to reveal several constitutional infringements occurring in the district. On Aug. 11, Lexington Methodist Church hosted a “fall Tailgate” event at Lexington High School in Florence, Ala., that included religious worship music and prayer. The official school event included performances by the school’s marching band and cheerleaders, as well as speeches from multiple coaches. FFRF’s complainant also reported that the school’s band director informed students they would be playing at this religious event on July 28. Additionally, the complainant informed the state/church watchdog that each football game begins with a prayer said over the loudspeaker by a student. The complainant and their child are nonreligious — and the district’s actions demonstrate an unconstitutional pattern and practice of religious coercion and official favoritism toward one particular religion over all other religions and nonreligion.
“Here, the district’s practice of including Christian prayer and worship as part of official school events unconstitutionally coerces all in attendance, including students, to observe and participate in a religious ritual,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line has written to the district.
Public school students have the First Amendment right to be free from religious indoctrination in their schools, including when participating in school-sponsored events. By partnering with a church to hold a religious worship event and opening other school-sponsored events with Christian prayer, the district has violated the First Amendment. School officials may not invite a student, teacher, faculty member or clergy member to give any type of prayer, invocation, benediction or sermon at a public high school-sponsored event, and they may not give a prayer themselves. Here, the district’s practice of including Christian prayer and worship as part of official school events unconstitutionally coerces all in attendance, including students, to observe and participate in a religious ritual.
The religious favoritism and coercion occurring within the district is particularly troubling for those parents and students who are non-Christian, such as FFRF’s complainant. The district’s pervasive promotion of Christianity needlessly alienates students, families and employees part of the 37 percent of Americans who are non-Christian. At least a third of Generation Z members (those born after 1996) have no religion, with a recent survey revealing almost half of Gen Z qualifying as religiously unaffiliated “nones.”
FFRF asserts that the district needs to abandon the multitude of violations in order to protect the First Amendment rights of students, families, employees and community members.
“These intrusive and inappropriate religious practices at games need to be benched,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “This district needs to ensure that the secular education of students comes first, not religious proselytization.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation welcomes the recent South Carolina Supreme Court ruling striking down an unconstitutional state voucher scheme.
The Education Scholarship Trust Fund program was signed into law in May 2023 by Gov. Henry McMaster, permitting parents in South Carolina to apply for scholarships worth $6,000 per student to pay tuition to qualifying educational providers, including private and online schools. In October 2023, the South Carolina NAACP, the South Carolina State Education Association and six public school parents asked the court to strike down the law to use public money for private school education.
Justice D. Garrison Hill got right to the point in his majority opinion: “Once we apply the plain and popular meaning of ‘direct benefit’ to the act, the presumption of constitutionality withers.” This was the obvious outcome because Article XI, Section 4 of the South Carolina Constitution couldn’t be more clear: “No money shall be paid from public funds nor shall the credit of the state or any of its political subdivisions be used for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
As laws implementing vouchers for religious schools are being quietly expanded all over the country, this ruling bolsters FFRF’s ongoing efforts to protect public education.
Under the phony guise of “school choice,” voucher schemes and similar measures transfer taxpayer funds directly to private religious schools, simultaneously defunding public education and forcing taxpayers to subsidize religious indoctrination. About 90 percent of private schools are religiously affiliated. Vouchers and tuition tax credits almost entirely benefit religious schools with overtly religious missions, which integrate religion into every subject. Voucher schemes have become a means of circumventing the constitutional requirement of separation between state and church that prohibits the government from funding or favoring religion..
Vouchers, as FFRF has long warned, are an exploitation of public funds by private, mostly religious schools that are draining the coffers of public schools. A recent ProPublica article demonstrates that religious schools are exploiting these programs to pad their coffers at taxpayer expense. Some voucher schools, such as St. Brendan the Navigator in Hilliard, Ohio, are effectively threatening to withhold supplemental aid if the families do not seek public funds first. And the principal at Holy Family School in Poland, Ohio, admitted to forcing families to apply for public funds.
“Even the conservative South Carolina Supreme Court knows private school voucher schemes are wrong,” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “We celebrate this important victory for public schools, which are the bedrock of our democracy.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
FFRF has learned that Monroe County Sheriff Kevin Crook has been publicizing his personal religious beliefs through the Sheriff Office’s official communication channels. The sheriff office’s page on the official Monroe County website includes “In God We Trust!” The official Facebook page regularly posts religious content and messages. In April 2022, the page changed its profile picture to a photo of a sheriff’s office vehicle parked behind three Christian crosses. On Aug. 3, a long rant was posted, ending with the message, “I don’t know what the answer is to Y’all, other than that we truly must find Jesus.”
FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes to Crook, “It is an abuse of power for you to use your position and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office’s resources to promote your personal religious beliefs and proselytize to Monroe County’s citizens.”
Christian posts on the official Facebook page convey a message to non-Christians that they are not welcome or accepted in Monroe County, and that their sheriff is more concerned with converting them to his religion than enforcing the law, FFRF points out. People interact with and rely on law enforcement officers during some of the most urgent and vulnerable times of their lives. As sheriff, Crook serves a diverse population that consists of not only Christians, but also minority religious and nonreligious citizens. The sheriff’s office must be even-handed and avoid any appearance of bias toward some or hostility toward others. Religious statements send a message excluding those community members among the nearly 30 percent of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated, as well as the additional 6 percent of Americans adhering to non-Christian faiths — turning them into political outsiders in their own community.
FFRF reiterates that in order to avoid further Establishment Clause concerns, the posts mentioned above must be removed, and that the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office must refrain from promoting religion in the future on social media.
“Citizens need to be able to trust their law enforcement officers in times of need — and there’s nothing that can shatter that trust faster than the intrusion of religion into governmental affairs,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Law enforcers, who carry guns and have the ability to arrest citizens, have a professional obligation to separate their personal religious views from their governmental duties.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is proud to announce a total of $19,600 in award money to the 12 winners and seven honorable mentions in the 2024 Kenneth L. Proulx Memorial Essay Contest for Ongoing College Students.
Currently enrolled college students (up to age 24) wrote on the topic of “Why is Gen Z the least religious generation?” This contest is named for Kenneth L. Proulx, one of FFRF’s most generous benefactors, who died in 2019. The cupola at Freethought Hall, FFRF’s office in Madison, Wis., is called the “Above Us Only Sky Kenneth L. Proulx Cupola,” or “Ken’s Cupola” for short.
The $1,000 prize for sixth place in the ongoing college competition is generously endowed by actor and FFRF Lifetime Member Madison Arnold. Arnold, who is 88, has given a $30,000 endowment as a living bequest, what he calls a “pre-quest.”
Essay contest winners, their ages, the colleges or universities they are attending and the award amounts are listed below. (FFRF seeks to distribute essay scholarship monies to a higher number of students, so ties — such as fourth place in this contest — are not regarded in the typical tie fashion, where, in this instance, fifth place would be skipped.)
FIRST PLACE Sylvie Leyerle, 20, University of Illinois, $3,500 SECOND PLACE Daksha Pillai, 18, Columbia University, $3,000 THIRD PLACE Elias Abadi, 22, University of Southern California, $2,500 FOURTH PLACE (tie) Armin Kiffmeyer, 19, University of Wisconsin, $2,000 Luke Ortiz-Grabe, 21, Colorado College, $2,000 FIFTH PLACE Atira Claude, 21, Florida Atlantic University, $1,500 SIXTH PLACE (MR. MADISON ARNOLD AWARD) Kayleigh Clark, 20, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, $1,000 SEVENTH PLACE (tie) Zoe Lilly, 21, University of Virginia, $750 Riley Barker, 22, University of Florida, $750 EIGHTH PLACE Cassidy Taggart, 21, Rutgers University, $500 NINTH PLACE Danae Daniels, 23, University of South Carolina-Upstate, $400 TENTH PLACE Ta’Liyah Darden, 19, Fort Valley State University, $300 HONORABLE MENTIONS ($200 each) Hannah Bartoletti, 19, Penn State University Braelyn Caldwell, 21, Texas A&M University Jasper Chiguma Jr., 20, SUNY Broome Community College Melia Moorman, 19, University of Louisville Anna Moseley, 21, Virginia Commonwealth University Nicholas Spinetta, 23, University of Rhode Island Michael Whittaker, 24, South Mountain Community College
FFRF thanks Lisa Treu for managing the details of this and FFRF’s other student essay competitions. We also would like to thank our volunteer and staff judges, including: Don Ardell, David Chivers, Eric Evans, Richard Grimes, Tim Hatcher, Dan Kettner, Jeffrey LaVicka, Sammi Lawrence, Katya Maes, David Malcolm, Kurt Mohnsam, Chris O’Connell, Andrea Osborne, JoAnn Papich, Brooks Rimes, Sue Schuetz, Rose Mary Sheldon, PJ Slinger, Kimberly Waldron and Karen Lee Weidig.
FFRF has offered essay competitions to college students since 1979, high school students since 1994, grad students since 2010, one exclusively for students of color since 2016 and a fifth contest for law students since 2019.
The winning essays will be reprinted or excerpted in the November issue of Freethought Today, FFRF’s newspaper.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation applauds yesterday’s ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court to return a referendum protecting abortion rights onto the state’s November ballot.
Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh — yes, a relative of the late talk radio host Rush Limbaugh — had ruled late last week that Missouri’s abortion rights ballot initiative didn’t comply with state law. Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, another notorious Christian conservative and the son of John Ashcroft, took the unprecedented step of then decertifying Amendment 3 before an appeal could be concluded.
With 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 10, being the final deadline to certify ballot initiatives, the Missouri Supreme Court had to hear arguments and render a decision the same day. The court’s seven members handed down a one-page ruling returning the question to the people less than three hours before the state’s deadline to print ballots. The opponents of Amendment 3 were represented by the Christian nationalist Thomas More Society. The intervenors defending Amendment 3 were Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the persevering group behind the ballot initiative, and a private plaintiff.
The ballot initiative will enshrine the right to abortion in the state Constitution. Missouri has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, banning legal abortion in almost all circumstances. Legislators there have even floated penalties for women who cross state lines to exercise their rights.
“Missouri’s women have been placed under the harshest abortion restriction in the nation, and have lost their fundamental rights. Amendment 3 provides a path to freedom,” says FFRF Legal Fellow and Missouri-licensed attorney Hirsh M. Joshi.
Nine other states will be joining Missouri in holding pro-abortion referenda in November: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and South Dakota. Unfortunately, anti-abortion zealots aided by an extremist state court were able to sabotage Arkansas’ referendum this year. Abortion is largely or totally illegal right now not only in Missouri but in Arizona, Florida, South Dakota, as well as Arkansas, and illegal after 12 weeks in Nebraska. Some of the other states with abortion initiatives are taking protective measures to assure abortion remains accessible and lawful. Two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in some or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center.
“With this road bump removed, we are confident that voters in Missouri will assure that fundamental rights stripped from Missourians by the U.S. Supreme Court will be returned,” adds FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “We urge our members and freethinkers to support these vital referenda and the groups behind them.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is expressing its strong objection to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s recent unconstitutional “Day of Prayer” proclamation.
Multiple concerned Utah residents have informed the state/church watchdog that Cox has continued his practice of official prayer proclamations, recently issuing an official proclamation declaring Sept. 1, 2024, as a “Day of Prayer, Fasting and Contemplation.” Cox fails to see a contradiction between such a proclamation and his self-declared fealty to the U.S. Constitution.
“We agree with your assertion on social media that you made in announcing this proclamation that we need a ‘recommitment’ to our longstanding constitutional principles,” FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write to Cox. “We ask that you start by respecting the First Amendment and our secular government by not misusing your position as governor to promote prayer and religious belief.”
Article 1, Section 4, of the Utah Constitution protects rights of conscience, bars the state from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and proclaims “There shall be no union of Church and State,” FFRF points out. Cox’s proclamation clearly violates these guarantees.
Likewise, the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment prohibits government sponsorship of religious messages. The Supreme Court has said time and again that the “First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.” By issuing a proclamation calling on Utah citizens to pray, Cox abridges his duty to remain neutral and to respect the freedom of conscience of all Utah citizens.
And FFRF reminds Cox that as an elected official he represents a diverse population from many religious backgrounds, including agnostics and atheists who do not believe in prayer. Any prayer proclamation or government-sponsored religious activity alienates many non-Christians and nonbelievers in the state of Utah and sends them the message “that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community,” to quote the U.S. Supreme Court.
The religiously unaffiliated, better known as the “Nones,” actually have quite a significant presence in Utah. PRRI’s definitive census on religion, which documents affiliation by county, shows that fully 28 percent of Salt Lake City residents are “Nones.” Overall, at least 22 percent of Utahns have no religion. They, too, are Cox’s constituents, and care as much about the future of our nation as religious Utahns.
Government officials may worship, pray and participate in religious events in their personal capacities — but they may not provide credibility or prestige to their religion by lending a government office and government title to religious events. Their office and title belong to “We the people,” not the offices’ temporary occupants.
“Leaving prayer as a private matter for private citizens is the wisest public policy,” Barker and Gaylor conclude. “The state of Utah is constitutionally prohibited from supporting religion over nonreligion, as it has done here. Please rescind this proclamation and respond in writing with the steps that you will take to avoid constitutional violations of this nature in the future.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The first episode of the new season of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s TV show, “Freethought Matters,” features a prominent member of Congress dissecting a right-wing presidential takeover plan.
U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, a humanist and agnostic who is the only openly nonreligious member of Congress, represents California’s 2nd District and is co-chair of the Congressional Freethought Caucus. Huffman has announced the formation of a task force to halt Project 2025, an extremist undemocratic presidential playbook. Huffman will be unpeeling the layers of this very important subject on this episode of “Freethought Matters.” (Note: Project 2025 is intended to be implemented by the next Republican president; FFRF, which produces this show, is a nonpartisan nonprofit that takes no position on candidates.)
“It’s true that it’s 920 pages of crazy, but it’s deadly serious at the same time,” Huffman tells “Freethought Matters” co-hosts Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor. “And that’s why we are spending a lot of time right now breaking it down. We’re having deep dive subject matter briefings for members of Congress and staff because we need to make sure that Americans know what is in this thing so that they can decide for themselves whether they want to be part of a dystopic right-wing future that ends our democracy, or they want to maybe join us in trying to stop it while we still can.”
(To view details on channel variations depending on your provider, click here.)
If you don’t live in any of the marquee towns where the show broadcasts on Sunday, you can already catch the interview on FFRF’s YouTube channel. New shows go up every Thursday.
You can catch interviews from previous seasons here, including with Gloria Steinem, Ron Reagan, author John Irving, actor John “Q” de Lancie and award-winning columnist Katha Pollitt. Upcoming guests include an expert on the Comstock Act, an author of a new book on the Scopes Trial and another author writing on the dangers of vouchers to aid religious schools.
Please tune in to “Freethought Matters” . . . because freethought matters.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned district employee reported that a school counselor at Englewood High School has been using their position to promote personal beliefs to students and co-workers. FFRF’s complainant reported that the employee has used a bible quote in their official school email signature: “‘For as people think in their hearts, so they are.’ Proverbs 23:7.” Egregiously, a sign posted on their classroom door says, “I’m reading… [the Holy Bible]. Ask me about it!”
“We understand, of course, that the district cannot monitor every email sent by employees or every posting in the school,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes. “But we do ask that it take the appropriate steps to ensure that employees, including [the school counselor] are made aware of their constitutional obligation to remain neutral toward religion while acting in their official capacity.”
The statements of a district employee and the signs they put up for public view in the school are attributable to the district, FFRF emphasizes. It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for the district or its agents to promote religious messages because it conveys government preference for religion over nonreligion. When employees use official channels of communication to promote their religious beliefs, it sends a message of exclusion that needlessly alienates the students and families among the 37 percent of Americans that is non-Christian, including the nearly one in three adult Americans who are religiously unaffiliated.
“School districts exist to educate, not indoctrinate into religion,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “School counselors have immense authority and are often sought out by vulnerable students, and have a duty to separate their personal religious views from their professional obligations.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned district community member has informed the state/church watchdog that the Glencoe High School teacher writes a bible verse on the whiteboard each day. She recently posted a video on TikTok showing herself posting one of these bible verses.
“The district violates the Constitution when it allows its schools to display religious messages, including bible verses,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line has written to the district.
Posting a daily bible verse in the classroom each day displays clear favoritism toward religion over nonreligion, and Christianity above all other faiths, FFRF stresses. Religion is a divisive force in public schools, and the practice needlessly alienates students who are part of the 49 percent of Generation Z that is religiously unaffiliated.
FFRF has told the district it must uphold its constitutional obligation to remain neutral toward religion by immediately ending the daily bible verse display practice. All Etowah County teachers need to understand their constitutional obligation not to promote their personal religious beliefs in the classroom, FFRF emphasizes.
“By proselytizing students, this teacher is showing that she’s willing to put her personal beliefs — which public school students may not share — before the rights of students and her constitutional obligations,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “It is not a public school teacher’s decision as to what, if any, gods their students worship. That is a decision solely for each family to make.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is seeking to file a friend-of-the-court brief that sides with the state of Minnesota over anti-discrimination rules that religious institutions have legally challenged.
“Two religious colleges have sued the Walz administration because of language in the education budget that prohibits schools from requiring ‘faith statements’ from students applying for a program that lets them earn college credits while in high school,” a Minnesota TV station reported last year. “Two families with children eligible for the Postsecondary Enrollment Options program claim they won’t be able to use funds from that program at Crown College in St. Bonifacius or the University of Northwestern-St. Paul because those schools require all students on campus ‘share their Christian beliefs.’”
FFRF is filing a proposed brief today, Sept. 10, with the U.S. District Court of Minnesota to help defend Minnesota’s anti-discrimination rules.
“The state’s nondiscrimination rules for colleges that apply for Postsecondary Enrollment Options public funding are legitimate constitutional means to ensure students’ access to education,” the brief states. “Crown and Northwestern seek an incorrect, harmful and unprecedented interpretation of the First Amendment.”
Crown and Northwestern are petitioning the court to create a special carveout, the brief adds, by seeking the legal right to mandate that students sign divisive declarations of faith in order to participate in the state-funded, secular Postsecondary Enrollment Options education program. Crown and Northwestern are additionally asking the court to declare that they may accept or deny students’ applications based on students’ sexual orientation, gender identity and religion.
The colleges had implemented religious and divisive declarations of faith for students to sign. These included the statement, “We believe it is our duty, honor and delight to live under the Lordship of Christ.” Students had to acknowledge that they “can be saved only through the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Students also needed to affirm the school’s position that marriage is a “covenant between one man and one woman” and that same-sex relationships are “sexual immorality” and “perversions of God’s intended purposes.” Students were required to agree with the following statement: “We do not affirm or support transgender identity or expression. Instead, we place our faith and trust in God’s redemptive plan.”
The state of Minnesota has an interest in eliminating discrimination on the basis of religion, sexual orientation and gender identity to ensure that publicly funded education is open to all students, FFRF points out. That’s why the state may set neutral and generally applicable nondiscrimination conditions on education programs that it funds. And private entities that seek to obtain state funding and access to public school students are reasonably required to abide by certain conditions for state funding. The Supreme Court has held that neutral and generally applicable laws are not subject to constitutional strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause.
“The state has a significant interest in not funding and perpetuating discrimination in publicly funded education programs,” the brief stresses. “Eliminating discrimination in education is a compelling government interest.”
State-sanctioned discrimination is antithetical to the American public education system. In recognition of these principles, for more than half a century courts and legislatures have routinely expanded access and opportunities for education and created standards to promote equal opportunity as a consistent focus of federal education policy.
“Plaintiffs want to accept public money but avoid the neutral, generally applicable rules that attach,” FFRF’s brief concludes. “The special religious exemption they seek would severely undermine the state’s efforts and legitimate, compelling interest in ensuring equality in public education programs.”
For all of the above reasons, FFRF contends, the U.S. District Court of Minnesota should grant summary judgment in favor of the state.
FFRF Legal Director Patrick Elliott is the counsel of record for the brief. Legal intern Grace Kraimer and Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence assisted in the research and drafting of the brief.
“Religious schools shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against public school students while accepting public money,” says Elliott. “FFRF’s brief will shine a light on why the schools’ arguments are both wrong and potentially harmful to Minnesota’s public school students.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A group of Christian broadcasters wants to mix religion and politics so badly that they have sued the IRS, hoping a federal judge will permit them to ignore a law they don’t like.
The law at issue here is the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits (both secular and religious) from engaging in electoral activity. The Freedom From Religion Foundation strongly supports the Johnson Amendment and expects to see the judge in this case quickly dismiss the baseless lawsuit.
Keeping tax-exempt work separate from electoral action has been widely popular, including among churchgoers, and has prevented millions of dollars in dark money from flowing into U.S. elections. Polls routinely reveal that a majority of Americans think religious institutions should stay out of politics.
FFRF sued then-President Trump in 2017 after he signed an executive order that he claimed had “gotten rid of the Johnson Amendment.” Once in court, Trump’s lawyers admitted that he had no authority to overturn a federal statute by fiat.
Unfortunately, the IRS has been woefully lax in enforcing the Johnson Amendment. Many churches that subscribe to Christian nationalist beliefs flagrantly violate the rule, daring the IRS to take action. (FFRF regularly reports such instances to the IRS.) The new lawsuit asks a judge to declare that the Johnson Amendment does not apply to them, even though they claim not to have engaged in any electoral activity and have no reason to think the IRS would take any action against them.
In other words, they have suffered no harm and there is no case here, says FFRF Co-President Dan Barker, who adds: “The hubris of these plaintiffs is incredible. They insist their religious beliefs give them a free pass to ignore laws they don’t like and that the rest of us tax-exempt organizations must follow.”
Tax-exempt status is a privilege. Churches already receive favored treatment over secular nonprofits, but they are not entitled to ignore the other rules and statutes that apply equally to all 501(c)(3) educational nonprofits. The Johnson Amendment helps to ensure that nonprofits are engaged in actual nonprofit work, while simultaneously promoting election integrity.
Churches are uniquely exempted from filing tax returns with the IRS to prove their tax-exempt expenditures, which makes them financial black holes. Overturning the Johnson Amendment would open the floodgates for dark money to be funneled to political campaigns through churches. The Johnson Amendment is a wise and equitable rule that preserves the integrity of both nonprofits and churches, and as such must be protected and enforced.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned parent informed the state/church watchdog that a principal at Broadview Elementary School in Winchester, Tenn., concluded a parents, teachers and students meeting on Aug. 2 with Christian prayer. The complainant recorded audio of the prayer, which was addressed to the Christian god and which ended: “We pray to you father in heaven for your wonderful blessings and we ask those things in God’s name. Amen.”
FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi sent a complaint letter to Franklin County Schools Director Cary Holman noting that “government officials may not deliver an official, sectarian prayer to a captive audience.”
Students, their families and school staff all have the First Amendment right to be free from religious indoctrination when participating in school-sponsored events, FFRF emphasized. The district serves and employs a population with diverse religious beliefs, including Jews, Muslims, atheists and agnostics. A full 37 percent of the American population is non-Christian, including the almost 30 percent that is nonreligious. At least a third of Generation Z members (those born after 1996) have no religion, with one recent survey revealing that almost half of Gen Z qualifies as “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated).
The school district heard FFRF’s concerns — and worked to address them quickly.
“Based on the recording, the principal acknowledged it was her voice,” Holman wrote back in a recent email. “I had my deputy director participate in the meeting with the principal. During this time, I provided the Tennessee Code referencing prayer in schools. The principal understands what is expected and will lead accordingly moving forward.” Holman closed by promising that all officials in the district would be reminded of the law.
FFRF is glad to prod yet another school district into fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities.
“If you see something, say something,” adds Joshi. “Here, a principal used her authority to impose religious prayer on an audience that would be wise not to question her. That’s abuse of power. Thankfully, a community member was proactive enough to tell us.”
FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor is appreciative of the school district’s corrective action.
“School officials who wish to pray can do so on their own time and dime,” she says. “Schools exist to educate, not to indoctrinate in religion. So it’s important that school functions avoid divisive religion.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is proud to announce $19,850 in scholarship money to the winners of the 2024 William Schulz High School Essay Contest.
College-bound high-school seniors were asked to write a personal persuasive essay based on this prompt: “How can young ‘Nones’ help transform the United States with their secular values, such as by voting?”
FFRF awarded 12 top prizes and 14 honorable mentions. (FFRF seeks to distribute essay scholarship monies to a higher number of students, so ties — such as fifth place in this contest — are not regarded in the typical tie fashion, where, in this instance, sixth place would be skipped.)
Winners are listed below and include the college or university they are now attending and the award amount.
First place Finn Mosher, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, $3,500 Second place Garrett Hartfelder, University of Southern California, $3,000 Third place Ashkon Shirazi, Brown University, $2,500 Fourth place Toby Shu, Georgetown University, $2,000 Fifth place (tie) Olivia English-Saunders, Michigan State University, $1,500 Lynn Sepersky, University of Wisconsin, $1,500 Sixth place Ivy Nichols, Colorado State University, $1,000 Seventh place Natalie Mendoza, Arizona State University, $750 Eighth place Quinn Weidner, North Carolina State University, $500 Ninth place (tie) Evelyn Dietz, Rollins College, $400 Brandon Norman, Mercer University, $400 Tenth place Emily Turner, Case Western Reserve University, $300 Honorable mentions ($200 each) Brietta Chen, Georgia Institute of Technology Anushka Chillale, University of Michigan Jayla Cole, Colorado College Abrahm Drake, Dickinson State University Ellie Emmelhainz, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Emily Fadgen, University of California-Riverside Tyler Howell, University of Florida Sarah Lam, UC-San Diego Samuel Lund, Colorado State University Jaiden Maltbia, Fisk University T Schiding, West Chester University Elijah Shewell, St. Mary’s College of Maryland Jacey Tanioka, Lewis & Clark College Aaminah Zeinelabdin, Howard University
The high school contest is named for the late William J. Schulz, a Wisconsin member and lifelong learner who died at 57 and left a generous bequest to FFRF.
FFRF warmly thanks FFRF’s Lisa Treu for managing the infinite details of this and FFRF’s other annual student competitions. And we couldn’t judge these contests without our volunteer and staff readers and judges, including: Don Ardell, David Chivers, Eric Evans, Richard Grimes, Tim Hatcher, Dan Kettner, Jeffrey LaVicka, Sammi Lawrence, Katya Maes, David Malcolm, Kurt Mohnsam, Chris O’Connell, Andrea Osburne, JoAnn Papich, Brooks Rimes, Sue Schuetz, Rose Mary Sheldon, PJ Slinger, Kimberly Waldron and Karen Lee Weidig
FFRF has offered essay competitions to college students since 1979, high school students since 1994, grad students since 2010 and one dedicated to students of color since 2016. A fifth contest, open to law students, began in 2019.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
FFRF was informed that a Ten Commandments display was recently installed at the courthouse in Mount Vernon, Ill. The display is nearly 6-and-a-half feet tall and sits in the center of the first floor lobby. The display includes a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments, given its particular language and numbering. At the bottom of the display is the biblical quote for Proverbs 21:15, which reads: “When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but terror to the evildoers.”
“Government promotion of one particular religion deters the nonreligious and minority religions from accessing important government services,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi writes to Jefferson County Board Chair Cliff Lindemann.
By displaying this religious text in its courthouses, the county demonstrates a plain and undeniable preference for religion over nonreligion, and Protestant Christianity above all other faiths. Illinois’s Establishment Clause reads: “No person shall be required to attend or support any ministry or place of worship against his consent, nor shall any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship.” FFRF is confident that state courts will find that a large Protestant Ten Commandments display by the county demonstrates preference for a religious denomination and mode of worship.
In displaying a gigantic Protestant version of the Ten Commandments along with a bible quote, and not quotes about citizenship or other secular virtues, the county government demonstrates preference for Christianity, FFRF emphasizes. That is unconstitutional. Furthermore, the references to the Christian Bible and Ten Commandments alienate the nearly 37 percent of Americans who are non-Christian, including the 30 percent of Americans who are nonreligious.
FFRF asserts that the display must be removed in order to respect the constitutional rights of all who use the Jefferson County Courthouse.
“A few months ago, I told a Minnesota jail to ‘Repaint and Repent.’ Now an Illinois sheriff has been similarly emboldened for no particular reason,” adds Joshi, a native Illinoisian. “It’s unclear why small-town officials want to push their narrow views on everyone so badly.”
FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor echoes this sentiment.
“It should be obvious to anyone that the First Commandment alone — ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ — is the antithesis of our First Amendment, which, by the way, is one of the principles that truly makes America great,” she says. “The county sheriff has no business telling residents of Jefferson County how many gods to worship, or if they should worship one at all.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned parent informed FFRF that the school principal concluded a parents, teachers and students meeting with Christian prayer on Aug. 2. The complainant recorded audio of the prayer, which was addressed to the Christian god and ended, “we pray to you father in heaven for your wonderful blessings and we ask those things in God’s name. Amen.”
FFRF has written to the district in hopes of bringing it back in line with the constitutional principle of state/church separation.
“Government officials may not deliver an official, sectarian prayer to a captive audience,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi writes to Franklin County Schools Director Cary Holman. “We ask the district to investigate and ensure that administrators and teachers are counseled against praying with students during the course of their official school duties.”
Students, their families, and school staff all have the First Amendment right to be free from religious indoctrination when participating in school-sponsored events, FFRF is insisting. It is a basic constitutional principle that public schools may not show favoritism towards or coerce belief or participation in religion — and this includes official prayer at any school event, to a room of students, teachers and parents.
Furthermore, imposing prayer on students and staff violates their religious rights. The district serves and employs a diverse population with diverse religious beliefs, including Jews, Muslims, atheists and agnostics. As much as 37 percent of the American population is non-Christian, including the almost 30 percent who are nonreligious. At least a third of Generation Z (those born after 1996) has no religion, with a recent survey revealing almost half of Gen Z qualifies as “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated).
FFRF reminds the district that it must be neutral with regard to religion in order to respect and protect the First Amendment rights of all students, families and staff. District staff must be made aware that including prayer in school events is unconstitutional.
“School districts exist to educate, not indoctrinate into religion,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “No public school employee has any right to use a meeting with community members as their personal church. The district needs to ensure these meetings focus only on policies impacting students and their parents.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
FFRF has awarded $35,000 in First in the Family Humanist Forward Freethought scholarships to eight students, thanks to the incredible generosity of FFRF benefactor Lance Bredvold. The students were selected by Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA), an African American humanist-atheist-based organization.
BSLA is the first secular humanist atheist organization to specifically address college pipelining for youth of color through its ongoing scholarship and college and K-12 youth leadership partnerships. FFRF has proudly partnered with BSLA for 11 years to provide tuition grants, gradually increasing the funding and number of scholarships.
The following are the 2024 First in the Family Forward Freethought scholarship winners. · Rubi Alvarez, UCLA, $2,500. · Denim Fisher, Spelman College, $2,500. · Jahliyah Johnson, UC Riverside, $5,000. · Xavier Johnson, Florida State University, $5,000. · Gabrielle LaCourse, University of Southern Maine, $5,000. · Alvaro Molina, University of Kentucky, $5,000. · Pierce Smallwood, California Polytechnic State University, $5,000. · Dulcinea Villareal, University of Washington, $5,000.
FFRF member Lance Bredvold, who is not wealthy but is very generous, suggested the Forward Freethought College Fund, a needs-based tuition scholarship, and has contributed the bulk of the $200,000-plus received to date. Since 2018, more than $100,000 has been disbursed to help freethinking students who might not otherwise be able to attend college.
Those who would like to donate toward the Forward Freethought Fund, a needs-based scholarship dedicated to helping freethinking students who might otherwise be unable to attend college, may designate “tuition scholarships” in the ffrf.org/donate dropdown or earmark checks for “Forward Freethought Fund” or “tuition scholarships.” All donations to FFRF remain deductible for income-tax purposes.
“This initiative helps those who are really in need and are the generational vanguard of freethinkers,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “All the contributions we receive assist a truly worthy cause.”
More detailed bios and short essays by the winning students will appear in the upcoming October issue of Freethought Today, FFRF’s lively (almost) monthly paper. https://www.freethoughttoday.com/
Here are excerpts from this year’s winning essays.
Rubi Alvarez “The question I often pose to those who wonder how I can be moral without a belief in God is this: If the fear of hell is the only thing motivating your goodness, then is your goodness truly genuine? Being a good person should come from a place of empathy and understanding, not fear. Secular humanism encourages us to take action based on reason and compassion rather than dogma. It calls for us to recognize our shared humanity and to work together to create a more just and equitable world. In addressing issues like transphobia, homophobia, classism, racism, and many others, it is crucial to engage with the underlying social and cultural factors that perpetuate discrimination. This means not only advocating for policy changes but also working to shift societal attitudes and beliefs. In my community, this has involved challenging harmful narratives and providing alternative perspectives that celebrate diversity and inclusivity. By fostering understanding and empathy, we can build a stronger, more cohesive society that values each individual for who they are.”
Denim Fisher “I aim to contribute to a society where every individual is treated justly, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. Secular humanism posits that human beings, not deities, are responsible for creating social change.
Marginalized human beings can make a difference in promoting meaningful social change by realizing that we are the bearers of our freedom. When advocating for a cause, passion and education are significant. An advocate is present, listens to learn and not to respond, and asks questions. Being an advocate requires an ego adjustment. Many of us enter a space and assume that we can speak to something because we are emotionally invested and charged, but the work of an advocate/activist is to train the mind by educating oneself on not just feelings, but facts. Education is a lifelong task. To ensure that history does not repeat, we must revisit the past.”
Jahliyah Johnson “Secular humanism can make a difference in creating social change by promoting that being kind and equal to one another as humans is something we should do not because of a moral code created by a god, but simply because we are all human. Theism often relates morality to belief, and I’ve heard many theists argue something to the effect of ‘if you don’t follow a god, how do you know right from wrong?’ This line of thinking is flawed because it assumes that humans are naturally amoral and cruel, and that assumption is fundamentally negative toward social growth and change because of the fact that it discourages kindness and understanding to others who do not subscribe to a certain belief system. Their humanity comes after their theism. Secular humanism focuses instead on a person’s humanity, no matter their religion, race, orientation, etc. This focus allows for meaningful change to be made because the mistreatment of our fellow human is condemned purely because it’s mistreatment of another human being.”
Xavier Johnson “‘Yo momma’ jokes, a staple of school humor, weren’t my style. But one day, facing bullying because I was ‘different,’ I retaliated with a ‘Yo momma’ joke.
‘Well, yo momma’s so slow, she thought a hard drive was a rough road,’ I quipped, surprising them. This small victory made me feel empowered. Up until then, I found solace in my academic pursuits, but, in a moment of desperation, I was determined to stand up and confront my bullies. Surprisingly, the joke sparked their interest in my coding skills despite them initially shunning me due to my ‘difference.’ This led to the formation of Together We Build, a diverse group of individuals from all backgrounds, sexual orientations and beliefs, focused on Lego robotics, breaking down social barriers. Our camaraderie birthed the school’s first Lego robotics club. The club extended beyond STEM, serving as a platform for discussing topics like bullying prevention and academic success. It evolved into a supportive community, prioritizing personal growth alongside robotics. Empowered by this experience, I honed my wit, using humor to foster connections and advocate for myself. This shift in approach propelled my acceptance and growth and paved the way for a future enriched with innovation.”
Gabrielle LaCourse “I’m an African American deaf woman who was adopted into a white Christian family. My family has allowed me to not participate in their beliefs and have allowed me to pursue my own, which I have appreciated. The bullying and misunderstanding of deafness have made me aware that society in my local area is not as educated as one would hope. I have multiple opportunities around me to spread awareness and I do it with compassion.
The bullying in middle school was by exclusion, which brought on depression, self-harm and thoughts of suicide. My mother and I decided to spend a lot of time at a barn riding horses. This really helped me realize that this time in my life didn’t mean it was the end of my world. I used it as a learning experience.
As a result, I learned to befriend the so-called outcasts and become a safe place for them. I’ve learned not to judge people by their looks. I get to know them and find out that they are truly human.”
Alvaro Molina “After several years of analyzing why I am not religious, I have found that it is primarily because I do not believe that God, or any god in general, is responsible for everything that happens around me. I think concepts like the bible and Christianity, specifically, are based on self-contradictory arguments. The use of the existence of hell and heaven and the belief that God is watching our every action is nothing more than a tactic to control the masses through fear and suffering.
As a member of the LGBTQ-plus community and an undocumented immigrant in the United States, I have succeeded, graduating with honors from my high school despite the difficulties with English, and I am now a fluent speaker of the language. However, I can also speak to how ugly it feels to be judged by someone who is not like you and does not know your story. I have received racist comments and ridicule upon arriving in the United States, as well as whispers and mockery for being part of the LGBTQ-plus community. If we were more mindful of how our words hurt others, we could have a healthier and better-functioning society, all striving for equity.”
Pierce Smallwood “During my time growing up in various religious institutions such as Baptist schools, Catholic churches, and missionary programs, there was one factor of Christianity that led me to abandon my belief entirely: the self-righteous yet inconsistent attitudes and behaviors that many of its believers possess.
This isn’t to say that Christians and other nonsecular individuals simply decide to not to follow their religious disciplines perfectly, but especially in the West, modern Christianity has fueled some followers to deem others inferior and treat them as such, a completely backward attitude from what is taught in the bible. These mindsets played a strong role in building the United States and have imposed morally unjust and unfair treatment on its citizens, who are only now receiving the breadcrumbs of what they deserve.”
Dulcinea Villareal “The main thing I try to do to instill these morals is accept everyone. But beyond that, I try to tell other people to accept everyone. In my town, there are a lot of conservatives with some very not nice things to say about queer people and those who aren’t Christian. It is a human right to belong, be loved, and not be alone. I always remind them that God said ‘love thy neighbor.’ I tie these values back to their religious texts because I want to remind them that they don’t get to just pick and choose what ideas they follow and what ones they don’t. I’ve always seen a lot of hypocrisy when it comes to choosing what is right and wrong based on words in a book rather than what you feel is the right thing to do as a human being. I’ve always followed the idea that you can control your own life based on your religion, but you cannot control my life based on your religion. I live by the notion that under all the layers of what makes us individuals, there is a base — human.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has ensured that Tennessee’s Cocke County School District will no longer unconstitutionally organize baccalaureate ceremonies.
FFRF wrote to the district after being informed that Cosby High School had held a baccalaureate service at Northport Baptist Church in Newton, Tenn., on Sunday, May 5. The event was hosted by a district elementary teacher after being promoted on the district’s facebook page.
“It is well-settled law that public schools may not show favoritism toward nor coerce belief or participation in religion,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to the district’s Director of Schools Manney Moore.
Baccalaureate programs are religious services with prayer and worship and that’s why schools may not plan, design or host baccalaureate programs, FFRF emphasized. By hosting and promoting a baccalaureate ceremony, districts are demonstrating clear favoritism towards religion over nonreligion — and Christianity over all other faiths. That favoritism enlarges when district employees organize and host the service. By hosting and promoting these services, the district abdicated this duty — needlessly alienating the almost half of Generation Z that is religiously unaffiliated.
The district heard Joshi’s words and decided to sharpen up its respect for the Constitution.
“CCSS does plan to pay particular attention to instruct their employees to not be overly assertive with regard to their religious beliefs when acting in their official capacity as a government employee,” the legal counsel for the Cocke County School District recently responded. “Further, CCSS plans to refrain from posting any announcement of a baccalaureate service on their official Facebook page or any other CCSS social media platform.”
FFRF takes great pride in keeping end-of-year celebrations secular in public schools.
“Students do not need to be reminded of religion when they are celebrating the prior 13 years of educational achievements,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “FFRF will always look to keep students’ First Amendment rights protected.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Multiple district community members have reported that South Caldwell High School recently added a Latin cross to the spelling of its mascot name in the gym, with the capital “T” being modified to represent a Christian cross.
“The district violates the U.S. Constitution when it allows its schools to display religious symbols or messages,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes to Superintendent Donald Phipps.
FFRF asserts that to protect students’ First Amendment rights, the district must immediately remove the religious display from the South Caldwell High School gym, and anywhere else it might appear.
The district boasts on its website: “We are committed to providing equitable opportunities for all students, valuing and celebrating their diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives.” Yet this mascot redesign and highly prominent display violate not only the constitutional prohibition against preferring religion over nonreligion or Christianity over all other faiths. Additionally, this religious display needlessly alienates, excludes and turns into second-class citizens, those students and teachers who are a part of the nearly 37 percent of Americans who are non-Christians, and the nearly one in three Americans who are now religiously unaffiliated. Gen-Zs are the least religious generation, with as many as half having no religious affiliation.
“It is the constitutional duty of every public school to remain secular in all forms,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “South Caldwell High School must adhere to this principle and remove this overtly religious symbol as soon as possible.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned WMS parent informed the national state/church watchdog that the WMS’s Boys’ Athletic Coordinator ends mass emails sent to parents in his official capacity with a New Testament quote in bold font: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes…’ —Romans 1:16.” The coordinator also serves as the sponsor for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, head football coach and physical education teacher.
“When their school’s athletic program continuously praises the Christian god via email, student athletes will believe matching that open praise is essential to pleasing their team’s coach,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to Superintendent Tim Harkrider.
It is a basic constitutional principle that the government cannot show favoritism toward religion. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause requires that the government remain neutral between religions, and between religion and nonreligion. By citing a proselytizing message from the bible in official emails to students and parents, this school official and spokesperson displays favoritism toward religion over nonreligion, and Christianity over all other faiths. This needlessly excludes and alienates families such as the complainant’s, who are part of the nearly 30 percent of the population today that is not religious.
Student athletes are especially susceptible to coercion, FFRF noted in its legal complaint letter. Such promotion of religion by an authority figure, especially a coach, creates a dilemma for student athletes: Either they must profess to believe, against their conscience, or openly dissent, risking their standing on the team. That ultimatum is exactly what the Establishment Clause guards against.
FFRF’s action caught the attention of the district, which worked to correct the violation.
Austin Dunson, College Station Independent School District’s director of communications, reached out to FFRF after the district corrected the issue. “We have recently provided district leaders with guidelines to follow and communicate to their staff regarding our updated brand,” Dunson wrote. “This includes all staff adhering to a consistent email signature that only includes their name, title, campus/department and contact information.”
FFRF is pleased religion will stay out of public school sports programs.
“An email footer in an official school communication is not the coach’s private pulpit,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “Students look to their coaches for more playtime or recommendations, and shouldn’t have to worry about conforming to their coaches’ personal religious beliefs. No student should have to pray to play.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned community member informed FFRF that Community ISD hosted and promoted a baccalaureate service in the auditorium of Community High School in Nevada, Texas, on May 19.
According to its own advertisements, pastors delivered sermons to students at the district venue. District staff escorted students inside. Opening prayer, worship, Christian hymns, sermons and a closing prayer were delivered by various local Christian clergy. The district advertised the event via Facebook and asked seniors to “please bring your full regalia,” thereby confusing the baccalaureate with the official graduation ceremony. The district’s own invitation read: “You are invited to celebrate through praise and worship the graduating class of 2024.” The district later published photographs of the event on its social media.
“[Community High School] promoted, sponsored, and spent money for a religious ceremony on its property,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to the district. “The district must respect the constitutional rights of all its students to be free from religious coercion and indoctrination in their public schools, and so it must cease sponsoring or promoting baccalaureate ceremonies.”
Baccalaureate programs are religious services with prayer and worship. By hosting and promoting a baccalaureate ceremony, the district demonstrated clear favoritism toward religion over nonreligion, and Christianity above all other faiths. It is also telling that the service was held on a Sunday, the Christian sabbath. By hosting and promoting a church service, the district abdicated the constitutional duty to remain neutral toward religion, also needlessly sending a message to its nonreligious and nonChristian students that they are second-class citizens. Today 49 percent of Generation Z are religiously unaffiliated.
After FFRF sent the letter, action was taken.
The district’s legal representative, Robb D. Decker, confirmed that the issue has been resolved. “Based on the concerns raised in your letter, and in review of the materials that were published, the district has spoken with the leaders of that group and made clear to them that future services and materials promoting the event need to be far clearer about their sponsorship of the event and not creating an appearance that the district is a sponsor of or participant in the event,” he wrote.
FFRF is pleased the district will honor its obligation to separate religion from its publicly supported ceremonies.
“Private groups and churches may put on their own religious celebrations of graduating high school seniors, even renting school facilities, but the public schools may not promote, pay for, host or otherwise endorse these private events,” comments Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “When they wish to celebrate graduating seniors, public schools must do so free from religious ritual at the official commencement ceremony.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned community parent informed the state/church watchdog that an art teacher who teaches kindergarten through sixth grade at Gosnell Elementary School had students paint the crucifixion scene for Easter. GES’s art show from May 24, 2024, proves this claim, showing some of the crucifixion paintings. This is reportedly also not the first year that the assignment has been given to students. These drawings were prominently displayed on the elementary school walls.
“If the District turns a blind eye to overt proselytization in its classroom, it becomes complicit in an egregious constitutional violation and breach of trust,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to the district.
Public school students have a constitutional right to be free from religious indoctrination in their public schools. It is well settled that public schools may not show favoritism toward or coerce belief or participation in religion. Moreover, public schools may not provide religious instruction. There is simply no legitimate educational reason to assign any public school student to depict the Christian cross in their artwork. By including such pervasively sectarian assignments, the district abdicates its constitutional duty to remain neutral toward religion, which needlessly excludes and alienates the 49 percent of Generation Z students who are religiously unaffiliated and clearly is an attempt to proselytize.
The district took this opportunity to learn from its mistake. FFRF received a letter from the District Legal Counsel Phillip M. Brick, Jr., who wrote that, “to avoid any ongoing issues, the district art teacher will not assign a project that includes drawing a crucifix in the future.”
“School districts are for education, not indoctrination into religion,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “Students do not need to show their devotion to a teacher’s god in order to get a good grade.”
Organization Description: The mission of the American Humanist Association is to advance humanism, an ethical and life-affirming philosophy free of belief in any gods and other supernatural forces. Advocating for equality for nontheists and a society guided by reason, empathy, and our growing knowledge of the world, the AHA promotes a worldview that encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good.
By Meredith Thomson
The American Humanist Association (AHA) is honored to recognize world renowned journalist, investigative reporter, and author Amy Goodman as the 2024 Humanist of the Year. Goodman is the co-founder and main host of Democracy Now!, a progressive global news program that is free of corporate influence. Her award-winning investigative journalism work spans Chevron Corporation’s role in Nigeria, Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, and more.
Shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1984, Goodman helped launch Democracy Now! and has grown it to become one of the leading US-based independent daily news broadcasts in the world. As a producer and host, Goodman interviews people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues, allowing a range of people to speak for themselves in ways that would normally not reach the mainstream media. Goodman and her colleagues often focus on issues they consider under-reported or ignored by mainstream news coverage, like racial injustice and peace activism.
“As we stand with journalists around the world who deeply believe that the mission of a journalist is to go to where the silence is, that the responsibility of a journalist is to give a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, beaten down by the powerful – it’s the best reason I know for us to pick up our pens, our microphones and our cameras both into our own communities and out to the wider world. The media can be, must be, a major force for peace.” -Amy Goodman, Right to Livelihood Acceptance Speech
Goodman has won many honors throughout her career for her work with Democracy Now!and for her investigative journalism work, undergoing considerable risk to bring underreported stories to the forefront. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’. She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame.
She has also co-authored six New York Times bestsellers, including Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, which chronicles the powerful movements shaping our world.
As an advocate for factual reporting that builds bridges between communities, Goodman sticks to facts and holds politicians and corporations accountable. Her commitment to grassroots political journalism is not just inspiring—it’s essential for the preservation of democracy and human rights.
In a time when disinformation spreads rapidly and journalists face increasing threats and backlash, uplifting fearless reporting has never been more critical.The AHA is honored to have Amy Goodman wrap up our 83rd Annual Conference on the evening of September 15th. The Annual Conference will be held virtually on September 14-15th and, in addition to Goodman’s remarks, will feature interactive sessions, inspiring speakers, and opportunities to connect with fellow humanists.
Organization Description: The mission of the American Humanist Association is to advance humanism, an ethical and life-affirming philosophy free of belief in any gods and other supernatural forces. Advocating for equality for nontheists and a society guided by reason, empathy, and our growing knowledge of the world, the AHA promotes a worldview that encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good.
By Meredith Thomson
The American Humanist Association’s annual conference, AHACON24: The Future is Humanist, is happening this weekend, and it’s shaping up to be one of our most exciting conferences yet! With a jam-packed schedule of inspiring sessions and big announcements, this year’s conference is set to push humanism forward in bold new ways.
This is also the first conference led by AHA’s new President, Candace Gorham, and new Executive Director, Fish Stark, who couldn’t be more excited to lead us into a humanist future. Fish is planning on unveiling a bold initiative for the American Humanist Association at AHACON24. The big reveal? A brand-new program that will take on Project 2025 and make a real impact in fighting White Christian Nationalism as we head toward November. Fish is fired up about one of the most important initiatives of our time, and he’s ready to share all the details during a meet and greet on Saturday night.
This session is the perfect chance to get to know Fish, hear his vision for the future of the AHA, and ask questions or just listen in. Plus, with all the networking opportunities over the weekend, there’s even a chance for one-on-one time with him.
The weekend will also spotlight some incredible humanists, including Ted Chiang, who will be accepting the Inquiry and Innovation Award, and Karen Hao, who’s being honored with the Humanist Media Award. Their remarks are exclusive to the conference, so don’t miss your chance to hear from these thought leaders. Attendees will also celebrate notable figures like journalist Amy Goodman and other powerful voices in the humanist movement.
AHACON24, themed “The Future is Humanist: Shaping Tomorrow Together,” takes place September 14-15, 2024, and will feature sessions on everything from social justice to science and countering Christian Nationalism. It’s all happening virtually, so you can join from anywhere.
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
Dissent Dispatch: Your Weekly Update
In this week’s Unbelief Brief, we look at criminal charges against an Iranian actress for dancing in public and Erdogan’s vow to purge military officials for supporting a secular democracy.
EXMNA Insights looks back on the second anniversary of Iran’s hijab protests.
The Unbelief Brief
In Iran, an actress has been criminally charged with “violating Islamic norms” for… dancing. Anywhere else in the world, with only a few exceptions (such as the Taliban’s Afghanistan), a statement so absurd would be taken as a joke.The actress, Sahar Dolatshahi, was caught red-handed in a TV program “moving her head and shoulders to music.” Iran’s authorities opened an investigation and brought charges against her for this display of immodesty. “Judicial action” was reportedly also taken against “the platform responsible for distributing the series” in which Dolatshahi acted.
This is the second instance of a high-profile actress in Iran being criminally charged for failure to comply with Islamic norms in two months. It is no wonder that such a dystopian state of affairs draws the sympathy and indignation of those unaccustomed to living under the nightmare of Islamic theocracy. It is fitting, then, that two years after the murder of Mahsa Amini in police custody, Parisians have taken to the streets and marched to demand Iranian women’s freedom, coinciding with a hunger strike that 34 women imprisoned in Iran are undertaking. The situation of extreme dissatisfaction with the tyrannical government of the Islamic Republic is not sustainable, and something—sooner or later—is bound to break.
Finally, a Muslim-majority country which still has some semblance of secularism is finding itself under continued and renewed pressure from leaders who seek to destroy it. In Turkey, President Erdogan has vowed a “purge” of military officials who allowed graduating military students to take an oath to defend a “secular, democratic Turkey.” This particular reference to secularism and democracy in the oath of service was removed two years ago, in line with the desire of the conservative Erdogan government to break down the barriers between mosque and state. It is no surprise he would take issue with it. Under Erdogan’s governance the systematic assault on the principles upon which Turkey was founded seems to be never ending..
EXMNA Insights
On this second anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s tragic death at the hands of Iran’s morality police, we at Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA) honor her memory and the brave women who continue to resist Iran’s draconian mandatory hijab law. Amini’s unjust arrest and death for allegedly violating the country’s strict hijab requirements sparked a global outcry against a law rooted not in morality but in control and oppression.
In his first press conference since becoming president, Masoud Pezeshkian reassured Iranian women this week that “[the] morality police were not supposed to confront [women]. I will follow up so they don’t bother [them]”. This promise, however, is doubtful to carry any weight since a new “Hijab and Chastity Bill” is currently in the final stages of approval which will carry even harsher penalties for women who refuse to wear the hijab.
Iran’s mandatory hijab law is emblematic of a broader system that seeks to police women’s bodies and choices. By criminalizing the simple act of choosing whether or not to wear a headscarf, the Iranian regime enforces a narrow, patriarchal view of womanhood—one in which women’s value is measured by their adherence to oppressive standards of modesty. Women who have bravely removed their hijabs in protest have faced brutal crackdowns, beatings, and imprisonment, exposing the regime’s fear of women’s autonomy.
At its core, hijab mandates and the modesty culture that sustains them are built on the same foundations of misogyny that have long been used to justify the subjugation of women. Whether it’s in Iran, elsewhere in the Islamic world or in the West, modesty and purity cultures reduce women to objects of temptation and shame, rather than allowing them to exist as full, autonomous human beings. We must continue to stand with the women of Iran and around the world, fighting for a future where every individual’s freedom of choice is respected. Mahsa Amini’s legacy demands nothing less.
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
Welcome to This Edition of Dissent Dispatch
This week’s Unbelief Brief spotlights mob violence in Bangladesh, a terrorist attack in Afghanistan and Iranian citizens growing dissatisfaction with their government.
Persecution Tracker Update: A deeper dive into the blasphemy related violence in Bangladesh.
The Unbelief Brief
A recent mob assault in Bangladesh is a dark reminder of the near anarchistic violence of a decade ago. Utsav Mandol, a Hindu adolescent or young man—his age variously reported as 15, 19, and 22—was accused of posting blasphemous material against the Prophet Muhammad on social media. He was subsequently brought to the police station by locals, whereupon he was taken into custody. However, an angry mob formed, managing to enter the police station to attack Utsav. Initial reports indicated he was murdered, but more recent reporting states he was beaten and hospitalized and is still alive. Such incidents are commonplace in neighboring Pakistan, but this particular one is so noteworthy—and uniquely distressing—because of the history Bangladesh has with attacks like this. “Hacked to death” was a horribly common headline in Bangladesh in the mid-2010s as attacks on atheist and secular bloggers raged. Until now, crackdowns on the perpetrators of such violence seemed to have stamped it out. One can only hope that this mob attack represents an isolated incident and not a return to darker days that had only temporarily receded.
In Iran, meanwhile: a recent survey—conducted in November 2023 but recently made public—found that “over 90%” of the country’s residents are dissatisfied with the current state of the country, something which should come as no surprise given the economic conditions and repressive events in the Islamic Republic during the last two years. Somewhat surprising is that the survey was “conducted by a department affiliated with the Ministry of Culture” but nevertheless made public, given how terribly it reflects on the regime. Roughly a third of respondents even said “the country’s situation is beyond repair.” This state of affairs is not reducible merely to theocracy—but it is the logical conclusion of an authoritarian, ultra-conservative state that refuses to respond to its citizens and clutches ever more tightly onto a destructive religious ideology.
Finally: ISIS has asserted that they are responsible for a recent suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan. The attack, which targeted “employees of the Directorate of Monitoring and Enforcement of Taliban Decrees,” has led the Pentagon to “reaffirm” the threat posed by ISIS, including ISIS-K, the branch that carried out the attack. It is another reminder of the nature of violent religious extremism—leading to infighting as much as the oppression of outgroups, as different brands of authoritarians argue over which brutal, hellish nightmare to bring to life. Just as well, it is a reminder of the unavoidable destruction and murderous tendencies of Islamic jihadism, particularly as terrorism makes headlines the entire world over: in just the last few days, a suspect was arrested in Canada for a plot to cross the border and target Jews in a mass shooting on the anniversary of October 7th, and seven individuals in Indonesia have been arrested for planning to attack Pope Francis on his visit to the country. Wherever this ideology goes, it brings the constant threat of death.
Persecution Tracker Update
Our full entry on the recent blasphemy mob attack in Bangladesh: here.
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
Welcome to the Latest Edition
This week’s Unbelief Brief covers another victim of Iran’s draconian hijab law and the return of a conservative Islamic political party in Bangladesh.
In EXMNA Insights we reflect on the bravery of a female paralympic athlete from Afghanistan.
An EXMNA Update on the latest WikiIslam cyber attack.
The Unbelief Brief
Iran has, in the last two years, shown that they are more than willing to enforce and tighten their overwhelmingly harsh hijab restrictions against women on the street who refuse to comply with them—lethally in the case of Mahsa Amini. With one recent act, they seem to have demonstrated a willingness not to keep their efforts confined to “normal” private citizens, but even to extend them to honored and prestigious figures in public life. Just recently, the filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad and actress Baran Kosari, her daughter, were charged with crimes after “pictures of the two without the mandatory head scarf at a film event were posted online.” Both have received awards in the past at the country’s largest film festival, and Banietemad has the distinction of being one of the country’s “first female screenwriters and film directors,” being 70 years old herself. It seems in character for such women to refuse to abide by the oppressive restrictions of the Islamic Republic—and for the Islamic Republic to punish them for daring to act on their own free will while being women.
Moving over to Bangladesh, where student-led protests against authoritarianism deposed the government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina this summer: the interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has taken the eyebrow-raising step of unbanning the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami political party. The Shahbag protests of 2013, also spearheaded by students, were fueled in part by calls to ban the group amid aspirations for a more secular Bangladesh. The party had been banned from contesting elections in the last decade up until this point. In fact, former Prime Minister Hasina banned the party outright just days before she was forced to resign and leave the country—not just from contesting elections. The new government termed Hasina’s total ban a politically-motivated attempt to consolidate her own power based on unfounded claims of terrorist activities.
Jamaat-e-Islami now vows to attempt to re-register for the ability to contest elections once again. Although this decision from the new government simply restores the status quo that had existed until just a month ago, whether the party manages to gain a foothold back into Bangladeshi politics will be revealing. The students who led the protests against Sheikh Hasina’s government, an administration widely criticized as corrupt and authoritarian, premised their actions on a commitment to democratic values and to secularism, much like the Shahbag protestors of a decade prior. The unbanning of Jamaat-e-Islami is not necessarily intended as a betrayal of those values. Nevertheless, it may be worth asking whether an avowedly Islamist political party has any place in a secular democracy. While the members of Jamaat-e-Islami ought to be free to voice their desire for an Islamic state, that political project must never come to pass, a fact that should be more acutely felt in such a moment of optimism for Bangladeshi democracy.
EXMNA Insights
Zakia Khodadadi’s Bronze Medal win in the Paris 2024 Paralympics is not merely a personal achievement but a reflection of the double burden of being both a woman and Hazara. Her story, marked by a dramatic escape from a country rife with persecution, underscores a pressing issue: the systemic violence inflicted on minorities by the Taliban.
The Hazara people, a Shia minority, have been subjected to repeated atrocities, with the 1998 Mazar-i-Sharif massacre being a particularly stark example of an attempt by the Taliban at religiously inspired genocide of the Hazaras. The Taliban’s statements during this massacre—declaring Hazaras as “kafir [infidels]”—reveal the extreme persecution that Shia and other Muslim minority groups suffer by being branded heretics and then murdered as apostates. This historical backdrop is crucial for understanding the current dangers faced by the Hazara community, including threats against women and athletes like Khudadadi.
Recent reports highlight the harsh reality of Khodadadi’s situation. After performing as the first female Afghan athlete at the 2021 Paralympic games, she was forced to flee Afghanistan due to the Taliban’s severe persecution of the Hazara. This escape was not a mere act of individual heroism but a necessary measure to protect her life against the oppressive regime of the Taliban.
Now living in exile in France and competing as part of the Refugee Paralympic Team, it is crucial to remain aware of the severe conditions that forced her to flee and the broader patterns of violence and discrimination faced by the Hazara people and Afghan women in general. Her story is a call to action for the global community to ensure support for persecuted groups, as not just a symbolic measure, but in hopes of making a tangible difference.
EXMNA Updates
WikiIslam is under attack!Following Meta’s ban of WikiIslam links across its platforms, WikiIslam is again under a denial of service (DoS) attack. While the initial cyber attack briefly took WikiIslam offline, we were quickly able to restore its operation. The attack, however, is still ongoing. Those who wish to silence the truth may experience transient successes but ultimately the truth will not be defeated.
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
Hello and Welcome
This week’s Unbelief Brief looks at the Taliban’s decree against the sound of women’s voices and how Pakistan’s Supreme Court is kowtowing to extremists.
In EXMNA Insights we delve deeper into Islam’s disdain for dogs and the prohibition on keeping them as pets.
Persecution Tracker Updates: Afghanistan and Pakistan meting out harsh blasphemy punishments
The Unbelief Brief
You may have heard that the Taliban have recently mandated all women go completely covered in public, from head to toe, with no part of their face visible. It is the inevitable conclusion of the inhumanity of their ideology. You may or may not have heard just how unbelievable the new law’s provisions are. It is part of a cumulative strategy for “the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice,” and, as the Associated Press reports, is truly unthinkable:
“Women should veil themselves in front of all male strangers, including Muslims, and in front of all non-Muslims to avoid being corrupted. A woman’s voice is deemed intimate and so should not be heard singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public. It is forbidden for women to look at men they are not related to by blood or marriage and vice versa.”
Also banned now: “the publication of images of living beings”; all music; “the transportation of solo female travelers”; and “the mixing of men and women who are not related to each other.” As said: unbelievable, and the shadow of the Taliban makes Afghanistan only darker with each passing year that they hold power.
Pakistan, by contrast, is nowhere near this level of despotism, though there seem to be many who wish to make it so. A mob of such people recently stormed the Pakistan Supreme Court demanding the resignation of the Chief Justice because of a ruling which granted bail to an Ahmadi Muslim accused of blasphemy. To our dismay, the Court appears to have caved and is now promising to “review” aspects of the verdict. It’s becoming a tale as old as time in Pakistan: the extremists and arsonists in the country are too big a faction to meaningfully oppose, and they are instead appeased at every turn in a desperate effort to prevent things from really spiraling out of control.
Finally, a small bit of good news—and a reminder that vestiges of sanity are still with us in a world barreling away from secularism. A judge in Maine has ruled—or, more accurately, simply reaffirmed—that schools receiving state funding must comply with state anti-discrimination laws, something which has long irked religious schools seeking, primarily, to deny entry to LGBT+ students. This is, at least, good news for now, as an appeal could very well end up before the Supreme Court, and there is little doubt what six justices there will do with it.
EXMNA Insights
Yesterday was National Dog Day in the US—a celebration of the deep bond between humans and their canine companions. But Islam’s view on “man’s best friend” is strikingly different. According to an often-cited hadith, “Whoever keeps a dog, except for herding or hunting, will lose two Qirats of reward every day.” This has led to a widespread belief that dogs should not be kept as pets. Muhammad even claimed that Angel Gabriel once skipped visiting his home because of a puppy hiding under the bed. Gabriel allegedly told him, “Angels do not enter a house with a dog.” Soon after, Muhammad ordered the killing of all dogs, sparing only those guarding large fields—likely a nod to their practical role in farming rather than any divine command. His disdain for dogs didn’t stop there; black dogs, in particular, were singled out as embodiments of the devil.
These views are outdated and cruel since in today’s world, dogs are indispensable. For many, especially those with physical or mental disabilities, dogs are more than pets—they’re essential companions that provide much-needed independence and improve the overall quality of life. Beyond that, pet dogs help reduce social isolation, boost physical activity, and lower stress. The undeniable benefits of dog ownership highlight how Islam’s prohibition is irrational, outdated, and cruel. In the light of modern understanding, Islam’s stance on dogs reveals a disconnect with the vital role these animals play in contemporary society. Once again, Muhammad’s personal biases are enshrined in Islam, invalidating its claim of being a timeless, universal religion. Instead, Islam clings to the misguided views of a 7th-century charlatan, refusing to discard them as unfounded and irrelevant.
This year, we hosted our very first Apostasy Day Meme Contest, and on Thursday, August 22nd, we celebrated by announcing the top three winners!
In 3rd place, we have “We Have Different Values Than the West” by Reddit user World_oyster_! This clever meme uses a familiar image to point out a common justification used by both Muslims and Western “progressives.”
In 2nd place, it’s “Hotel Islam” by Anonymous! Drawing inspiration from the classic “Hotel California,” this meme features an Imam at a dilapidated motel saying, “You can check out, but you can never leave.” Happy people line up, while a bin of decapitated heads nods to Sahih al-Bukhari 6922.
And nabbing 1st place is “Islam is the Fastest Growing Religion” by JJ!
This meme hilariously critiques the idea that Islam’s growth equates to its truth. JJ humorously points out how Dawah culture sidesteps the more uncomfortable parts of the religion, making assumptions about why people convert and stay. The meme even references Tafsir ibn-Kathir’s interpretation of verses like 5:33 (waging war against Allah) and 9:29, which commands fighting others based on religious differences.
Thanks for joining us for another EXMNA contest! Got an idea for our next one? Let us know at info@exmuslims.org!
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
Welcome to Another Edition of Our Newsletter
This week’s Unbelief Brief brings you yet another disturbing enforcement of Iran’s hijab law, another clothing law in Tajikistan, and finally takes you state-side to Texas.
In EXMNA Insights we provide commentary on the upcoming Apostasy Day 2024. And don’t forget, our Apostasy Day Meme Contest winners will be announced on Thursday!
The Unbelief Brief
The Islamic Republic of Iran continues to be an autocratic, repressive, and brutal nightmare. Yet another woman has been shot for her improper adherence to hijab mandates. Arezoo Badri, a 31-year-old mother of two, was driving with her sister in her car which “had a confiscation notice against it,” apparently for “multiple alleged violations of the hijab law.” Police tried to pull her over to carry out the confiscation, and when she did not comply, they shot her while the car was moving, puncturing her lung and striking her spine. She is alive but hospitalized, paralyzed for the moment and perhaps for life. Another “success” for Iranian law enforcement.
In another Muslim-majority country, Tajikistan, an autocratic government is pressing hard in the opposite direction. Previously this year, the nation had banned the hijab in an effort to promote the “traditional,” “original” culture of the land. They now appear to be taking a further step—a prohibition on “black clothes.” Ironically, the prohibition has been issued as a fatwa from the Council of Ulemas, which is itself backed by the otherwise staunchly secular state. The fatwa prohibits women specifically from wearing black clothes, presumably targeting Islamic dress in an indirect way. But it also asserts that women must not wear “tight-fitting and transparent clothing.” It seems Tajikistan’s Council of Ulemas has somehow managed to create a union between repressive religious modesty culture and repressive anti-religious authoritarianism.
Finally, moving stateside, one theocratic official of the state of Texas decided to briefly remove his mask and openly voice his contempt for the First Amendment and the Constitution. Mike Morath, the state’s Education Commissioner, testified recently at a hearing regarding new state-approved lesson plans, which, while requiring instruction on the Bible, apparently “remov[ed] large sections on other religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and all mentions of the Islamic prophet Muhammed.” When asked by one lawmaker if he was concerned this lesson plan would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, Morath replied: “Then why does the bill, at the bottom of page 5, explicitly give teachers who use this new curriculum immunity for violating the Establishment Clause in the United States Constitution?” We shall see whether the argument that state law allows public employees to violate the US Constitution holds up in court.
EXMNA Insights
As Apostasy Day approaches, it’s crucial to highlight the continued presence of laws in various Islamic countries that criminalize apostasy. In nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, leaving Islam is not only socially stigmatized but also legally punishable, often by death. Apostasy laws reflect a rigid adherence to classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), which derives from both the Quran and the Hadith.
According to Sahih Hadith, apostasy is condemned with severe consequences. For instance, in Sahih al-Bukhari (Volume 9, Book 84, Hadith 57), the Prophet Muhammad is quoted as saying: “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” This Hadith is frequently cited by Islamic scholars and legal authorities in countries that enforce laws against apostasy. In addition all major schools of Islamic law (fiqh) are unanimous on the punishment for apostasy – death. The legal consequences of such laws vary by country, but they represent an ongoing barrier to freedom of belief and religious autonomy.
These apostasy laws and their roots in Sahih Hadith demonstrate the tension between religious orthodoxy and human rights, a challenge faced every day by most ex-Muslims around the world today.
Other relevant Hadiths on the subject:
Sahih al-Bukhari (Volume 9, Book 83, Hadith 37): The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, “The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshiped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse, and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.”
This Hadith is a central reference for legal authorities in countries that enforce capital punishment for apostasy.
Sahih Muslim (Book 16, Hadith 4152): It is narrated that the Prophet Muhammad said: “It is not permissible to take the life of a Muslim except in one of three cases: the married adulterer, a life for a life, and the one who forsakes his religion and abandons the community.”
This Hadith reinforces the legal framework for apostasy laws, emphasizing that leaving Islam is considered a capital offense.
Sahih al-Bukhari (Volume 9, Book 89, Hadith 271): Another relevant narration states: “A man embraced Islam and then reverted to Judaism. Mu’adh bin Jabal came and saw him with Abu Musa. Mu’adh said, ‘What is wrong with this man?’ Abu Musa replied, ‘He embraced Islam and then reverted to Judaism.’ Mu’adh said, ‘I will not sit down unless you kill him, as it is the verdict of Allah and His Apostle.'”
Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA) stands firmly with those who have chosen to leave Islam, advocating for the fundamental human right to freedom of belief. Apostates, often facing persecution, violence, or death in many parts of the Islamic world, deserve the right to make their own choices regarding faith without fear of legal or social retribution. On Apostasy Day, we reaffirm our commitment to defending the rights of ex-Muslims everywhere and call for an end to laws that punish individuals simply for leaving a religion.
On the Horizon
Stay tuned for the winners of our Apostasy Day Meme Contest! To be announced on Apostasy Day, Thursday August 22!
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Friday Evening, September 13, 2024
MRFF DEMANDS INVESTIGATION OF 3-STAR PENTAGON GENERAL’S DISTURBING TIES TO NEW APOSTOLIC REFORMATION (NAR)AND ITS GOAL OF SUBVERTING DEMOCRACY
On the weekend of August 29-31, 2024, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Brian Eifler, who recently got his third star and a new position as Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel of the United States Army, was photographed giving a presentation – in uniform – at New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s annual Reformation Prayer Network gathering in D.C. During the Eiflers’ three years in Alaska, from 2021 until this past summer, Lt. General Eifler’s wife, Sherry, became a member of “Alaska’s War Council,” part of the extensive network of prophets, apostles, and kingdom warriors known as the New Apostolic Reformation — a politically influential Christian dominionist movement that seeks to end democracy as we know it.
U.S. Army Lt. General Brian Eifler speaking in uniform at New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s annual Reformation Prayer Network gathering, held in Washington, D.C., from August 29-31, 2024
MRFF OP-ED ONDAILY KOS Trending story on Daily Kos MRFF demands investigation of 3-Star Pentagon general’s disturbing ties to New Apostolic Reformation By: MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda Friday, September 13, 2024
On a September 4 Zoom call of “Alaska’s War Council,” Eleanor Roehl, co-founder of Kingdom Warriors Alaska, Kingdom Alliance Network and Alaskan Representative on Cindy Jacobs’s Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, opened the call by welcoming her fellow “War Council” members:
“Good evening. Greetings to you from Anchorage, Alaska. We want to welcome of course the War Council on tonight. … And of course we have Sherry Eifler, living in Washington, D.C., who we just saw – her and of course her husband Brian in D.C. last weekend. … It is so great to have Sherry Eifler stationed in D.C. as a part of our War Council.”
And who is Sherry Eifler’s husband Brian, referred to so familiarly by Eleanor Roehl? Well, that would be U.S. Army Lieutenant General Brian Eifler, who recently got his third star and a new position as Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel of the United States Army, moving to D.C. after three years in Alaska as Commanding General, 11th Airborne Division. During the Eiflers’ three years in Alaska, Lt. General Eifler’s wife, Sherry Eifler, became a member of “Alaska’s War Council,” part of the extensive network of prophets and apostles and prayer warriors known as the New Apostolic Reformation. And what was the event in D.C. that Eleanor Roehl had just seen Sherry Eifler and her 3-star general husband Brian at? That would be the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s annual Reformation Prayer Network gathering, held less than a month ago, from August 29-31, 2024. And it wasn’t as if Lt. General Eifler was just tagging along with his “Alaska’s War Council” wife and her New Apostolic Reformation pals to this NAR event. Oh no! This 3-star general was an active participant, giving a presentation (that, for some reason, involved a map of the Asia-Pacific region) to an audience that included Apostle Cindy Jacobs herself! And he even put on his 3-star Army general uniform for the occasion, as photos on the Indiana Canopy of Prayer’s Facebook page show.
H/T to NAR researcher Kira Resistance for spotting the above photos and NAR expert Frederick Clarkson, a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates, for passing them on to MRFF.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), as anybody who follows us knows, routinely goes after military personnel, especially high-ranking officers, who blatantly violate the Department of Defense and service branch regulations that strictly prohibit the wearing of military uniforms while participating in religious events. There’s no question that Lt. General Eifler violated these regulations when giving his presentation at NAR Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s Reformation Prayer Network gathering in uniform. But this is infinitely more serious than that, given that the NAR isn’t just a religious movement but also a powerful, dangerous, and growing political movement that seeks to end democracy as we know it. Apostle Cindy Jacobs, whose big NAR gathering Lt. General Eifler just participated in, was one of the Trump-supporting prayer leaders outside the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, saying at the beginning of the video in the tweet below, as the breach of the Capitol was getting underway, “And we’re right in front of the Capitol and the lord had given me a vision and he showed me that they would break through and go all the way to the top.”
At the time of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Lt. General Eifler, then a 1-star general, was stationed at the Pentagon as the Army’s Chief Legislative Liaison. Don’t know much about the NAR? You’re not alone. But if you’re familiar with the now-iconic White House photo of people laying their hands on Trump, who they believe was anointed president by God, that’s as good as any place to start.
The blond woman next to Trump is Apostle Paula White (now Paula White-Cain since she married her third husband, Jonathan Cain of the band Journey), Trump’s spiritual advisor. And here is a must-watch video, preserved for posterity by PFAW’s Right Wing Watch, of Paula White on November 4, 2020, leading a prayer service to secure Trump’s reelection. (I have no idea what the guy nonchalantly walking back and forth behind her reading something is doing.)
Now, I probably know a bit more about the NAR than most people because of the kind of work I do, but I’m the first to admit that what I know barely scratches the surface of this seemingly endless web of prophets and apostles and networks and churches. Fortunately for us, there are people who have been closely following and reporting on the NAR for decades, among them Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates Frederick Clarkson and Rachel Tabachnick, a former associate fellow at Political Research Associates and now an independent researcher, writer, and speaker. So, before getting back to Lt. General Eifler, his “Alaska’s War Council” wife, and his participation in uniform at NAR Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s annual Reformation Prayer Network gathering in D.C. in August, let’s take a few minutes to turn to the experts and become better acquainted with this nefarious network. A November 17, 2020, Religion Dispatches article by Frederick Clarkson titled “Beneath the ‘Wacky’ Paula White Video is a Dark and Deeply Undemocratic World Propping Up the President” included the following quotes from Rachel Tabachnick, that do a good job of concisely conveying the growth and dominionist ambitions of the NAR (emphasis added):
“The apostolic and prophetic networks that now dominate organized Christian Zionism have transitioned from more passive narratives of events to take place in the afterlife toward narratives requiring dominion over the world in this life. The political implications of this transcend the role of the U.S. alone, and engages many “nationalisms” around the world, as millions are taught an increasingly politicized interpretation of the prerequisites required for the return of Jesus and the end of the natural world.”
and …
“White and many other prosperity doctrine evangelists have adopted the church governance models of the New Apostolic Reformation. White began 2012 with a sermon titled ‘Season of Apostolic Reformation,’ telling her congregation that they must align with this new order. ‘God is a theocracy, not a democracy,’ White stated, and warned congregants to ‘get in, get out, or get run over.’”
“The NAR doesn’t merit our considered attention because some of the leaders may sound nutty to those outside the movement, but because it’s driven by theocratic notions of total societal dominion, including the end of democracy as we’ve known it; and it deserves our attention because it’s developed the political capacities to make these ambitions a lot less of a pipe dream than they seemed even five years ago.”
For those who really want to learn all about the NAR, an excellent resource, already mentioned, is Frederick Clarkson’s “A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation,” co-authored by Canadian scholar André Gagné, whose recent book American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times is featured in the Salon article “Meet the New Apostolic Reformation, cutting edge of the Christian right” by Paul Rosenberg. The NAR are Christian dominionists, meaning, for those unfamiliar with the term, they believe that fulfilling the “7 Mountains Mandate” — conquering the seven spheres of influence, or “mountains,” (family, religion, government, education, business, arts/entertainment, and media) — is a prerequisite for Jesus to return. On the “Alaska’s War Council” September 19, 2023, Zoom call, Lt. General Eifler’s wife shared a “vision” the lord had given her about the seven mountains:
“The lord gave me a concept that was so much bigger than I was able to fully describe so I began to draw it out and it started with mountains. And then the question I asked God was, ‘What is creative ministry?’ And I had a strong impression it was ministry that’s aligned with our unique identity in Christ lived out in our authority in Christ in the seven mountains of influence. And those seven mountains of influence, if you’re not familiar, are family – everybody’s in the family mountain, right? – religion – everyone’s in the religion mountain – government, because at least in the United States we all have a right to vote – business, education, entertainment, media arts. Those are our mountains. All of these mountains have been established by God for his people to be ministers in. Yes, ministers. Using our God-designed and purposed gifts in all of the mountains that we are in. He has placed us each uniquely in these mountains. Then I saw rivers and streams going down the mountains into the sea, followed by a flash of the throne room of God. The lord is releasing new kingdom creativity to align and partner with bringing his kingdom from heaven to earth. He is calling us to minister in the seven mountains of influence in a new way, remembering that his power, authority, creativity, and purpose flow from his throne room to us, his people. It flows to us and through us. So, in this release of this new creativity, he is calling his children to align with and stand in the authority of their kingdom identity, as royal sons and daughters of the king of kings and as the royal priesthood that he has called us to.”
Yes, visions. NAR people have visions, like this one that the founder of the Indiana Canopy of Prayer, the group that posted the photos of Lt. General Eifler at Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s event, had:
“As I was driving into Indianapolis on I-70E, I had an open vision. The Capitol building in Washington D.C. was picked up and set down in the middle of our capitol [sic] city, Indianapolis. The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘This isn’t a natural governing building, it is a spiritual governing building, but I wanted you to see the importance and the power that I was setting down.’ Next, I saw lines like ribbons going from the top of the building in all directions. They went up and then curved down in all different directions. They went up and then curved down to the ground in many locations. Where they landed, there were big golden stars. The Lord said, ‘These stars represent 24/7 Houses of Prayer that I will raise up.’ Then He said, ‘I want a CANOPY of Prayer over the State of Indiana.’”
Now, setting aside the danger of having visions while driving, the above is very typical of the kind of visions these people reportedly have. Then there are the “declarations” and “decrees,” which are defined in the very useful “A Glossary of New Apostolic Reformation Terms” as follows:
19. Decree & Declare – this is a fruit of word of faith (WoF) theology, the idea being that our words carry some form of inherent power, and are causative. So instead of obeying scripture – “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:6) NARites believe they need to exercise their faith, speak to their mountain, and enforce their dominion in a given situation. They attempt to “speak life” into the dead, dispel hurricanes, quench fires, and restore finances with their decrees and declarations. This “little god” behavior fails every time, because only God can decree or declare. Another form of this is called “speaking into a situation.”
On the February 28, 2024, Zoom call of “Alaska’s War Council,” Sherry Eifler “released” this declaration:
“We declare the military will be God’s righteous warriors of the kingdom of God in partnership with the Lord’s angel army.”
Well, ain’t that special. The wife of a 3-star general — a 3-star general who gave a presentation at a major NAR event — “declaring” that the military will partner with the “Lord’s angel army.” Needless to say, this is extremely troubling, particularly since some NAR leaders teach that believers can command angels, “activating” or “releasing” them for a particular assignment. You might be thinking that this is Lt. General Eifler’s wife saying these things and not Eifler himself, but don’t forget that he himself was at Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s big NAR event in August giving a presentation. Even if Lt. General Eifler isn’t as deeply immersed in NAR theology as his wife clearly is — and we have no way of knowing whether he is or not since, like many high-ranking military officers that MRFF has encountered, he plays it safe by confining his social media presence to military-related posts. He does describe himself on Twitter as “Man of Faith, Servant Leader, Sheep Dog,” and a few of his tweets promote evangelical speakers coming to his base, like Victor Marx, whose website says he “explains what manhood and Christianity should look like in our day,” and whose latest book’s foreword is written by Charlie Kirk, who has called the separation of church and state a “fabrication” and whose Turning Point USA organization bused Trump-supporters to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.
Whether or not Lt. General Eifler believes everything his wife believes, the fact remains that he appeared at and gave a presentation in uniform at NAR Apostle Cindy Jacobs’s annual Reformation Prayer Network gathering, indicating that he supports and condones the objectives of this movement – a movement that seeks to destroy democracy as we know it. That really doesn’t “align,” to use a word from Sherry Eifler’s seven mountains vision, with the oath taken by Lt. General Eifler to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, now does it? And this is why MRFF is demanding an investigation of Lt. General Eifler, as you can read in MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein’s letter to United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks below. To wrap things up, I leave you with a few words from Lt. General Eifler’s friends and wife.
MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein’s letter to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks demanding an investigation and punishment of NAR-connected U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Brian Eifler
September 13, 2024 The Honorable Kathleen H. HicksUnited States Deputy Secretary of Defense1010 Defense PentagonWashington D.C., 20301-1010
Madam Deputy Secretary Hicks, It is my sad, yet critically urgent, duty to bring to you today a truly heinous matter of shockingly abject, alleged treasonous malfeasance and misfeasance by none other than the U.S. Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Lt. General Brain S. Eifler. My name is Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein and I am the Founder and President of a large, First Amendment civil rights advocacy organization called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF: mrff.org). In its nearly 20 years of hard-fought civil rights battles, MRFF has represented over 90,000 active duty, reserve and national guard members of the American armed forces and veterans as well as individuals at all 18 national security agencies, the Department of Homeland Security (U.S. Coast Guard) and the Department of Transportation (U.S. Maritime Service). MRFF’s central mission is to vigorously protect the Constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state in the aforementioned Federal agencies. Nearly 1,100 courageous individuals work here at MRFF, both paid and volunteers. In this regard, there are MRFF representatives on most DoD installations in the Continental United States (CONUS) and overseas as well as even on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers et al. I won’t belabor the tragic point here other than to direct your immediate and complete attention to the breaking news story immediately below. This stunningly revelatory article is authored by MRFF’s Senior Research Director, Ms. Chris Rodda, and is concomitantly being publicly released contemporaneously with this demand letter from MRFF to you, ma’am. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/13/2269887/-MRFF-demands-investigation-of-3-Star-Pentagon-general-s-disturbing-ties-to-New-Apostolic-Reformation From the incontrovertible information assiduously researched and now publicly released by MRFF with this breaking news story, it appears as though the United States Army Lt. General in charge of ALL its personnel, Lt. General Brian Eifler and his spouse, are apparently inextricably intertwined with one of the most, if not THE most, pernicious and radically extremist Christian nationalist organization on planet Earth; to wit, The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Lt. General Eifler’s alleged despicable and outrageously shameful actions of criminally eviscerating the solemn oath he swore to preserve, protect and defend the United States Constitution (vice his favorite flavor of extremist Christian nationalism) have been boldly and brazenly perpetrated whilst attired in his full United Staes Army uniform where he has officially briefed the Christian extremist attendees at an unknown number of NAR events. MRFF has photos and videos (see breaking news article supra) to substantiate these claims of alleged treason. Indeed, his alleged, indefensible, abhorrent actions of seethingly sectarian fundamentalist Christian nationalism, bigotry, exceptionalism, primacy, exclusivity, supremacy and triumphalism have savagely ripped asunder the vast array of inter alia DoD and U.S. Army Directives, Instructions and Regulations, Army Core Values and Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) Articles deliberately designed to prevent his alleged, monstrously noxious, and illicit actions. When your boss, DoD Secretary Lloyd Austin, assumed his current position in January of 2021, he promised ON THE RECORD to America and to Congress that he would proudly serve as a lodestar for religious and racial equality at DoD. He also swore to eradicate racial and religious extremism in the U.S. military ranks. So, Madame Deputy Secretary, how the HELL do you explain these rancid, alleged actions of exactly THAT by YOUR U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Lt. General Eifler?! Fix this unmitigated, disgraceful disaster NOW, Madame Deputy Secretary! MRFF DEMANDS, IN THIS SPECIFIC REGARD MADAME DEPUTY SECRETARY, THAT YOU TAKE THE REQUISITE, EXPEDITIOUS AND AGGRESSIVE ACTIONS TO HAVE THE U.S. ARMY’S CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DIVISION (CID) THOROUGHLY AND AGGRESSIVELY INVESTIGATE LT. GENERAL EIFLER’S ALLEGED TREASONOUS ACTIONS AND PROSECUTE HIM, AND ANYONE ELSE WHO HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO HAVE AIDED AND ABETTED HIM EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, TO THE FULL EXTENT OF MILITARY AND RELATED FEDERAL LAW AT A PUBLIC TRIAL BY GENERAL COURTS MARTIAL. Lt. General Brian Eifler (and perhaps an unknown number of colleagues of his throughout DoD?) has allegedly comprehensively disgraced this uniform and the oath he swore to our nation’s Constitution. His alleged actions of support, succor, and advancement of the extremist, Christian nationalist NAR lay to utter waste the good order, morale, discipline, and unit cohesion necessitated to ensure an effective American fighting force. His alleged radicalized support of the vicious Christian nationalist NAR is a nefarious, metastasizing cancer on our honorable United States military and its nonpareil national security mission. SO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Madame Deputy Secretary, profoundly and swiftly investigate Lt. General Eifler, and any and all enablers at DoD, and, if his actions of treason to the United States are found to be substantiated as MRFF believes they will be, publicly and visibly prosecute him and any others at general courts-martial proceedings IMMEDIATELY! Your solemn and official duty to the American people and our beloved Constitution requires nothing less. Respectfully submitted, Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq.Founder and PresidentMilitary Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)505-250-7727
Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America (JWV) hails MRFF’s victory in pressuring the U.S. Air Force Academy to release committed donor funds to send Jewish cadets to Jewish Warrior Weekend at West Point
11 September 2024 Jewish War Veterans of the United StatesHails Mikey Weinstein, Founder and PresidentOf the Military Religious Freedom Foundation for HisFearless Advocacy and Victory for Jewish Cadets of the U.S. Air Force AcademyThe Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America (JWV), founded in 1896, the oldest veterans’ service organization (VSO) in the United States, and the only VSO committed from its founding to the explicit opposition to all forms of bigotry, hails Mikey Weinstein, U.S. Air Force Academy Graduate of the Class of 1977, Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and member of JWV Post 354, for the victory of the MRFF in pressuring the U.S. Air Force Academy to release committed donor funding to send Jewish cadets to the Jewish Warrior Weekend at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Less than one hour after MRFF demanded that the Air Force Academy leadership release of the committed donor funding for the Jewish cadets’ trip to the Jewish Warrior Weekend, the Office of the Superintendent announced the release of the previously committed donor funds. Incoming JWV National Commander Gary Ginsburg of Rochester, New York will attend the Jewish Warrior Weekend in support of Jewish cadets and midshipmen from West Point, the Air Force Academy, and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. The JWV praises Mikey Weinstein and the MRFF for their fulfillment of their unique purpose and the JWV mission: to oppose all forms of bigotry, to protect the good name of the Jew wherever unjustly assailed, and to ensure that all Jewish-American service members fulfill their obligations to the United States and their faith without fear or favor, and with equal fervor. Respectfully Peter J. Nickitas, National Judge Advocate, for:Barry Lischinsky, Col., U.S. Army (Ret.),National Commander, Jewish War Veterans of the United States cc: Barry Lischinsky, Col., U.S. Army (Ret.),National Commander, Jewish War Veterans of the United StatesGary Ginsburg, National Vice Commander, Jewish War Veterans of the United States
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Wednesday Afternoon, September 11, 2024MRFF REMEMBERS 9/11
MRFF VICTORY!
WITHIN ONE HOUR OF MRFF’S DEMANDUSAFA “SUDDENLY” ALLOWS JEWISH CADETSTO TRAVEL TO WEST POINT FORJEWISH WARRIOR WEEKEND Within one hour of MRFF’s press release and demand yesterday to the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA)’s superintendent Lieutenant General Tony D. Bauernfiend, MRFF received word and confirmation from multiple clients at the USAFA that the superintendent is now “suddenly” allowing Jewish cadets to travel to West Point for Jewish Warrior Weekend! There is NO doubt that this happened because MRFF publicly exposed USAFA’s religious bigotry on behalf of our 154 Air Force Academy, faculty cadet and staff clients. MRFF is confident the Academy will claim this decision was made “a long time ago,” and feign surprise that Jewish cadets never found out about it until “just now,” which would be a typical act of mendacity.
United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.
A Few Highlights of MRFF Exposing The U.S. Air Force Academy’s Past Transgressions Against Cadets of the Jewish Faith
JONATHAN LARSENCOVERS MRFF Air Force Academy Allegedly Quashes Jewish Event While Airing Christian Sermons Military academy has long history of subjecting cadets to forced proselytization By: Jonathan Larsen Tuesday, September 10, 2024
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) tells me that a U.S. Air Force Academy cadet claims the school’s leader is stifling a Jewish group activity while sharing evangelical Christian content internally at the academy. The MRFF is not identifying the USAF cadet who shared the information with the group, but MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein tells me his group is taking action. The USAF Academy did not immediately respond to my request for comment on the MRFF’s allegations. According to an email the cadet sent to the MRFF, the academy’s superintendent — Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, a nominee of Pres. Joe Biden — has sat on a request for Jewish students to be allowed to use its gifted funds to attend an event at West Point this weekend. The event, Jewish Warrior Weekend, is held twice a year at varying locations. According to the cadet’s email yesterday to MRFF, “The new Superintendent has instituted a policy requiring his personal approval for organizations to use their gifted funds, placing their attendance at this important event in jeopardy.” As a result, the cadet claims, “Jewish cadets are facing uncertainty regarding their participation.” By contrast, the cadet claims, the academy under Bauernfeind has subjected cadets, faculty, and staff to explicitly Christian messaging. […]
“I would be hard-pressed to even imagine a single person in the United States for whom antisemitism is more quotidian than Mikey Weinstein. He and his family are routinely attacked forbeing Jewish and have been for years, if not decades. … “… So I pay attention when Weinstein writes, as he did onThursday, ‘This time it just feels very different.The anti-Jewish hatred, I mean.’” — Veteran journalist and TV news producer Jonathan Larsen on Mikey Weinstein’s Daily Kos op-ed“Jews, Jews, Jews; How Do We Choose?”
Background Email from a Jewish Air Force Academy Cadet on the possibility of not being able to attend “Jewish Warrior Weekend” and the “incredibly offensive” playing of fundamentalist Christian worship services in dining hall
From: (USAF Academy Jewish Cadet/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Jewish Cadet TestimonyDate: September 10, 2024 at 2:21:53 PM MDTTo: “mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org“ Good Afternoon Sir, My name is (USAFA Jewish cadet’s name withheld), and I am a member of the Jewish Community at USAFA. I was informed of your organization by my friend (USAFA cadet’s name withheld). Recently the new Superintendent has completely overhauled the funding system at USAFA, for all organizations that use gift funds, which has caused us to likely be unable to attend Jewish Warrior Weekend. This is a bi-annual event hosted at the various service academies, which allows Jewish Cadets and Midshipmen from around the country to connect with the entire Jewish military community. Never in past years have we faced this problem, as our attendance at this semester’s event is still in the air. All of this comes as this past weekend as I entered the dining facility (Mitchell Hall), I was surprised to see an online church sermon from New Life Church on the Mitchell Hall projector. I find this incredibly offensive, as I call USAFA my home, as I prefer to not be pseudo-proselytized to while I eat my meal. I appreciate your help. I would like to keep my anonymity regarding this issue, and be referred to as “Jewish Cadet.” Respectfully,Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx
MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein’s 9/10/24“Open Letter of Revulsion to the Christian Nationalist United States Air Force Academy”sent to Air Force Academy Superintendent Lieutenant General Tony D. Bauernfiend
September 10, 2024 Lieutenant General Tony D. BauernfiendSuperintendentUnited States Air Force Academy (USAFA) RE: Egregious First Amendment Violations Under Your “Leadership” at USAFA Hey, Lt. Gen. Bauernfiend, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING at USAFA vis-à-vis your disgusting and relentless efforts to promote fundamentalist Christianity?! We at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) had just contacted you a mere 13 days ago (https://conta.cc/4dHNeQq) about yet another shameful promotion of the ”favorite religious faith of USAFA, i.e. Fundamentalist Christianity,” and now you are at it yet again even MORE egregiously??!! The MRFF is currently representing 154 USAFA faculty, cadets, and staff under your command on this REPULSIVE matter at hand, 117 of them practicing Christian’s themselves. Many of the others are of the Jewish faith, I might add, as well as a number of other minority faith and no faith traditions. The specific request for help from MRFF below and the accompanying photograph (photo credit belongs to MRFF) details the wretchedness of what is happening under your command at USAFA. From: Xxxxxxx XxxxxxxxxSubject: Concerns Regarding Religious Endorsements at USAFADate: September 9, 2024 at 7:01:18 PM MDTTo: [MRFF staff email address withheld]Cc: mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org, info@militaryreligiousfreedom.org Good evening, I am a Firstie at the United States Air Force Academy, and I have encountered several concerning situations this past week that I would like to bring to your attention. This Sunday, during breakfast and lunch at Mitchell Hall, a live sermon from New Life Church was broadcast on the large projector screen in the center of the room. Additionally, at the football game against San Jose State on Saturday, Christian rock and rap music were played over the loudspeakers. These instances occurred while Jewish cadets are facing uncertainty regarding their participation in Jewish Warrior Weekend at West Point, a bi-annual event for Jewish cadets from all service academies. The new Superintendent has instituted a policy requiring his personal approval for organizations to use their gifted funds, placing their attendance at this important event in jeopardy. It is troubling to witness Christianity being promoted at mandatory events, such as meals and football games, while other faiths face administrative hurdles for participation in their own religious observances. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter. Respectfully, Xxxxxxx XxxxxxxFirst Class CadetUnited States Air Force Academy
Attached is a photo of new life church’s live stream at Mitchell hall. Also further context for the football game, both the commandant and the superintendent were present and the music was rather audible. HOW DARE YOU PIPE THE SUNDAY RELIGIOUS SERMONS ET AL FROM THE FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN MEGA ENTITY, THE “NEW LIFE CHURCH,” LOCATED JUST ACROSS THE HIGHWAY FROM USAFA, ONTO THE GIANT VIEWING SCREENS OF THE ACADEMY’S CAVERNOUS DINING FACILITY, MITCHELL HALL, WHERE CADETS MUST BE CAPTIVE AUDIENCES THEREIN IF THEY WISH TO EAT THERE??!! Oh, and nice job on blasting sectarian Christian rap and rock songs over the loudspeaker systems at Falcon Stadium directly prior to USAFA’s football loss to visiting San Jose State 4 days ago. How wonderfully convenient for all those who subscribe to such Christian sectarian precepts! By the by, Lt. Gen. Bauernfiend, tell us all about your unwavering support of USAFA’s Jewish cadets to participate in “Jewish Warriors Weekend” at West Point this coming weekend?! I guess if you don’t allow it, these Jewish USAFA cadets can always enjoy a rousing, nonsecular, fundamentalist Christian sermon in Mitchell Hall on Sunday, eh, bro?! BESIDES SAVAGELY VIOLATING THE U.S. CONSTITUTION’S FIRST AMENDMENT PROHIBITION OF ESTABLISHING RELIGION, AMONG A NUMBER OF OTHER DoD AND USAF DIRECTIVES, INSTRUCTIONS AND REGULATIONS, YOU AND YOUR FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN-ADORING USAFA STAFF ARE IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF AIR FORCE INSTRUCTION 1-1, SECTION 2.16. 2.16. Balance of Free Exercise of Religion and Establishment Clause. Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for free exercise of religion and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion. They must ensure their words and actions do not discriminate against any individual or group because of their faith, belief, or absence of belief, or extend preferential treatment for the same. Leaders must ensure that their personal expression is not reasonably associated with their government role, but may engage in such expression per DAFI 52-201, Religious Freedom in the Department of the Air Force. (Emphasis added) MRFF demands that an immediate, transparent and aggressive Air Force investigation be launched from the Air Staff at the Pentagon in D.C. as we surely would never trust YOU to conduct such an inquiry into your own USAFA-directed, malodorous malfeasance, and misfeasance. MRFF further demands punishment! Indeed these public and visible consequences MUST be levied against any and all USAFA personnel, including especially YOU, sir, who are found per this official USAF investigation to have either directly or indirectly supported these rancid, First Amendment No Establishment Clause and DoD/USAF regulatory violations! You should be miserably ashamed of yourself, sir, and your only 39 days of “senior leadership” at USAFA to date. You have managed to only infinitely buttress the already sorry-as-hell, well earned & decades long, despicable record of USAFA as a willing generator of poisonous, fundamentalist Christian Nationalism. With great sincerity and no respect whatsoever, Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq.Founder and PresidentMilitary Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)USAFA Graduate, Class of 1977
For a two-decade history of MRFF’s numerous battles against outrageous Christian proselytizing and Christian nationalism at the Air Force Academy, visit:
MRFF’s longest-serving Advisory Board member, Reverend MeLinda Morton, a former USAF chaplain who served at the Air Force Academy, shares her reaction to the Academy’s New Life Church dining hall proselytization: “Twenty years later and NOTHING has changed!”
Mikey, Why does this sound SO familiar? Twenty years later and NOTHING has changed! Sermons at mandatory meal formations?? And we need not play semantic games with whether a Sunday Mitchell Hall meal is “mandatory”. True, in general, a cadet is not “required” to be seated at a Sunday breakfast or dinner…but where else is a three or four degree to eat on the weekend? Most underclass cadets have no access to private transportation for travel off campus or to other eating venues on-base; even if they had the disposable funds or free time to eat out. Therefore, Mitchell Hall is the only Academy-provided dining option for the Cadet Corps weekend or weekday. Anything presented during these regulated dining periods should be secular in nature. Announcements of optional cadet activities, such as the Cadet Chapel worship schedule may be presented in the same format as other optional scheduled activities. Denominationally specific activities such as retreats, religious study sessions, or other religious activities should be communicated to cadets through denominationally specific email or text lists, and during denominational worship services. By my count, on any given Sunday morning there are no less than four Christian services held in the Cadet Chapel, three to four more Christian services held at or through the Academy Base Chapel, and numerous Christian churches provide transportation to eligible Cadets who desire to worship off campus in specific religious communities. Any Cadet wishing to hear a conservative Christian sermon has ample on-base and off-base opportunities. (Currently the Cadet Chapel is under renovation. Therefore, these many Christian services may be held at other convenient venues around the Cadet Area.) Attempting to present one Christian denominational expression as normative for Cadet religious contemplation is a clear sectarian power play destined to divide and weaken the esprit de corps of the entire Academy. Such sectarian intrusions into shared Cadet space demean the sincerely held religious, philosophical, and humanitarian beliefs and practices of other Cadets. All Cadets should respect the right of fellow service members to believe and worship as they choose, as well as the right to not hold or express any particular religious belief. As evidence of the military’s high regard for common religious practices, each formal Cadet meal begins with an opportunity for Cadets to silently pray or reflect. However, projecting conservative Christian sermons into common Cadet mealtimes sends an inescapable message that such sectarian speech has the approval of command authority and is privileged religious speech and practice at the U.S. Air Force Academy. MeLinda S. Morton, J.D., Ph.D.
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Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Tuesday Evening, August 6, 2024
TWO TRIBUTES LAUD MRFF’s EFFORTS:“OUR MILITARY IS A SECULAR ORGANIZATION, PERIOD.”AND“WHY I SUPPORT MRFF”
Today we share two of the many gracious supportive messages MRFF receives. On point sentiments such as those expressed below inspire our foundation’s fight for the Constitutionally Guaranteed Separation of Church and State in our U.S. Military:
”Our military is a secular organization, period.” From: (MRFF Supporter’s Name & E-mail Address Withheld)Subject: Our military is a secular organization, period.Date: August 5, 2024 at 4:19:21 PM MDTTo: Military Religious Freedom Foundation Our military is a secular organization, period. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation protects the Constitutional rights of all service members to worship as they please and practice their chosen religion, without coercion, and without retribution for holding a particular “faith,” or, none at all. A military member’s career choice and progression should not be impacted, one way or another, by his or her religiosity. Christian Nationalist Commanders in our military weaken it, and themselves, in terms of leadership abilities. They destroy readiness, unit morale, and combat effectiveness, ironically, putting those they lead at risk, America’s sons and daughters. Mikey Weinstein committed many years ago to support the military, the Air Force Academy his Alma Mater, having seen first hand the results of a military divided by religious faith and the discriminatory outcomes that affect combat readiness. The MRFF protects the Constitutional provided protections regarding religious faith and I can think of no better advocate for all military members than Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has faced many threats to himself and his family over the years for standing up to the religious bullying that impacts the careers of our service members and reduces the effectiveness of our military as a fighting force. I know of no truer Patriot and military advocate than Mr. Mikey Weinstein. I donate to the MRFF because our military service members deserve an advocacy organization, their careers hard enough without the added career impact of religiosity testing for advancement by Army of God Commanders, themselves in violation of their oaths. I donate to the MRFF because I believe in our military, want them to succeed in their careers with allegiance to their oath of supporting our Constitution without regard to religious affiliation. Your MRFF donation is not about the MRFF. It’s about support to our military members! It’s about sustaining an effective military fighting capability, many deployed as we speak to various hotspots around the world. Let’s help them Be All They Can Be without the Christian Nationalist Patriotism testing required of proselytizing Commanders. They’re already Patriots! Patriots, every one of them, that answered the call to defend this nation! Support our military members by supporting the MRFF!
”Why I Support MRFF” From: (MRFF Supporter’s Name & E-mail Address Withheld)Subject: Why I support MRFFDate: August 6, 2024 at 10:19:13 AM MDTTo: Mikey Weinstein mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org In 1966 I joined the USAF. During basic training my unit was marched one Sunday to the base chapel for Christian services. I am Jewish but I had no say in the matter. My first permanent military base was in Mississippi in 1967. My office supervisor, knowing somehow that I was Jewish, assigned me to clean the latrines and told me I would have to do it daily unless I attended his off-base church. I had no recourse so I volunteered for Vietnam for quick orders out of there. When I heard about Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) over a decade ago I realized what a great organization it was, not for me but for military personnel who do not want to be harassed by ultra Christian staff. They finally had recourse and it is Mikey Weinstein and his great staff that work tirelessly to protect members of other or no religion, including Christians, from this continued abuse. I donate as often as I can and would hope others see the terrific and positive impact they have. Thank you in advance for your considerate support.
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Thursday Afternoon, September 5, 2024
MRFF VICTORY!!!
MRFF STOPS BIBLE-WAVING COMMANDER FROM CARRYING AND HOLDING UP BIBLE DURING PT RUNS AND REWARDING TROOPS FOR COPYING HIM WITH THEIR OWN BIBLES
“Simply put our commander started carrying and holding his bible high in the air for the whole unit to see before after and during these PT runs. He never actually ‘said’ anything about why he was doing this but I can assure you that the message was fully received by our unit. Shortly after he began doing this some of our younger members of our combat unit also started bringing their bibles for these training runs and holding them up in the air whenever our commander did it during these PT exercises. “Then on the following mornings of PT exercises our commander would always ‘reward’ these young troops by picking them to lead as element leaders of our unit at the front of our PT running formations. This clearly sent the message of his ’special approval’ for those troops who also carried their bibles and raised them whenever he did during our PT runs.” — Active Duty Senior NCO and MRFF Client
(The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.)
E-mail to MRFF from grateful active duty senior NCOin Bible-waving commander’s unit “Our commander stopped bringing and displaying his bible and the younger troops had been previously advised by our unit EO designee, after Mr. Weinstein’s intervention with that phone call, to stop as well.”
From: (Active Duty Senior NCO/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: MRFF stopped our commander from promoting his bible in physical conditioning runsDate: September 5, 2024 at 9:14:43 AM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Hello to Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF action team. I am an active duty senior NCO in a combat unit. And yes I am also a Christian (Church of Christ) who is married to my Christian wife and we are raising our kids Christian. I recently reached out to our (military installation name withheld) MRFF Rep regarding the divisive religious actions of our (combat unit designation name withheld) commander regarding early morning physical training (PT) runs with our unit. Simply put our commander started carrying and holding his bible high in the air for the whole unit to see before after and during these PT runs. He never actually “said” anything about why he was doing this but I can assure you that the message was fully received by our unit. Shortly after he began doing this some of our younger members of our combat unit also started bringing their bibles for these training runs and holding them up in the air whenever our commander did it during these PT exercises. Then on the following mornings of PT exercises our commander would always “reward” these young troops by picking them to lead as element leaders of our unit at the front of our PT running formations. This clearly sent the message of his “special approval” for those troops who also carried their bibles and raised them whenever he did during our PT runs. Just like every military unit ours also has members from many different religions including Muslims and Sikhs and Jews as well as members who don’t follow any faith structure at all. They as well as Christian troops like myself were shocked by all of this! I knew something had to be done but didn’t want to face the anger of our commander. I’ve been in the (military branch name withheld) long enough including a number of intense combat engagements down range to know that what our commander did with his promotion of his bible during our PT runs badly hurts our unit solidarity rather than helps it. I realize that as a senior NCO I should have spoken up to him personally but frankly feared his reaction if I tried. Believe me I and other NCO’s involved here don’t feel happy about our failure to act. I and the others won’t let that happen again. Instead I contacted our MRFF Rep here after doing a little “quiet research” and getting advice from one of our (military installation name withheld) JAGs and she put me in immediate touch with Mr. Weinstein. Within an hour of my call with Mr. Mikey Weinstein he had called me back explaining that he had contacted the Exec. Officer for Colonel (name withheld) who is the commander of (senior reporting unit designation name withheld). Mr. Weinstein told me that on my behalf and the behalf of at least 35 other members of our unit (2/3s of whom are also Christians like me) who wanted our commander to stop promoting his bible during our PT runs, he had made the demand to have these actions stop immediately as violations of the civil rights of our unit members by our commander. It worked. We have had 5 PT runs since that time and there have been no further bible displays during any of them at all. Our commander stopped bringing and displaying his bible and the younger troops had been previously advised by our unit EO designee, after Mr. Weinstein’s intervention with that phone call, to stop as well. Our commander has said absolutely nothing at all about no longer using his bible during our PT exercises. But I can tell you that the damage has been done as many of us have lost respect for him as a result and also for not mentioning any of this after he was forced to stop by MRFF contacting our superiors to make him stop. On behalf of our entire unit, I want to thank our MRFF Rep here at (military installation name withheld), Mr. Mikey Weinstein and the whole of the MRFF for handling this matter. I realize that we should have confronted our commander ourselves but again were very concerned about inciting him to anger against us for doing so since this involved his personal Christian faith. The MRFF took that fear away and got the job done. A lot of lessons learned here and everyone is very grateful to the MRFF for all of this! Thank you to the MRFF for doing what we should have done in the first place but didn’t. Easy for those who weren’t involved to criticize us for asking for MRFF’s help but none of you were here to go through this fxxxing mess. (Active Duty Senior NCO/MRFF Client’s name, rank, MOS/AFSC, unit designation, and military installation all withheld)
When leaders say something, subordinates respond accordingly, whether it’s imitating their commander by bringing their Bibles to PT runs in 2024 or following the lead of their “born-again” Christian commandant at the Air Force Academy two decades ago.
Veteran/VA employee thanks MRFF for “assistance in responding to disgustingly abusive and in-your-face Christian Supremacist inspired religious/racial harassment”
From: David (last name withheld) Subject: LetterDate: August 31, 2024 at 12:22:56 PM MDTTo: <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Mikey/MRFF, Thanks for recent advice and assistance in responding to disgustingly abusive and in-your-face Christian Supremacist inspired religious/racial harassment (…Project 2025 preview?) directed at me as an employee then promptly ignored if not actively encouraged by the administrators of the Phoenix VAMC. While my situation is not fully resolved, the MRFF crew has been extremely helpful in providing advice and encouragement in my ongoing effort to push-back for the Constitution, our shared civil rights, and my sworn oath to protect both! My name is David (last name withheld) (…and please feel free to publish my name) and I am a retired veteran of 23 years. I served honorably with or in four branches of the U.S. military with great personal pride. I have always wanted to make a difference by protecting those who could not or cannot protect themselves. I also happen to be a 53-year-old black man. While I was raised in a Southern Baptist faith tradition, I became an Atheist/Humanist assuming that I could exercise my freedom of belief as someone not convinced of the existence of god(s). If you stand up for what is right and fair, you will be appreciated and revered. I was wrong. In 2019, while working as a nurse at the Phoenix VA’s Southeast clinic in Gilbert AZ, I was on a team of three that took care of veterans. A private contractor serving VA clients (a.k.a. Provider), that my team of nurses lead, was going to have a meeting about daily workload (NORMAL). This provider decided that we would have a prayer session in the room where I see my patients (NOT NORMAL)! Being an Atheist/Humanist, I stated that I would not be participating and attempted to excuse myself until whomever wanted to pray were done, then I would return to the meeting. She grabbed my hand and stated that she, “was going to pray for me to become a good Christian whether I want to be or not”. Pulling my hand away in shock, this provider would not relent stating once again (after trying to grab me a second time) that she, “was going to make me a good Christian today” and “I was going to pray with them”. Pulling my hand away again, I said “no, and never touch me again”! The provider grabbed my hand a ridiculously aggressive third time! After offering some choice words about keeping her hands to herself, I left to seek guidance and possibly file a complaint. Later that week while I was speaking with my Admin Clerk in the clinic office area, the provider loudly stated something smelled bad in the POD. Appeared extremely confused by her statement, everyone began asking what she was talking about and someone offered deodorizing spray. Spraying vigorously, she held her nose proclaiming “I know where the smell is coming from” then pointing directly at me “it’s Dave, he stinks”. Everyone working in the POD was shocked. This exceedingly arrogant, condescending, and racist provider got in my face saying “black people stink”. A complaint was filed immediately on my behalf as I filed one as well (EEO Complaint #1). The VA ‘No Fear’ Policy proclaims the “VA does not tolerate unlawful discrimination, workplace harassment or retaliation based on… race, color, religion… and does not tolerate retaliation for opposing discriminatory practices…”. The Phoenix VAMC response? Since filing my EEO complaint, I have been: -ARRESTED for enforcing the VAMC’s masking mandate during COVID pandemic,-removed and given ‘No Contact Order’ at clinic where the incident occurred,-shipped around to almost every clinic under the Phoenix VAMC system,-blacklisted by other contract providers,-treated like shit by co-workers because I reported over-the-top religious AND racial discrimination. These abusive, illegal, and unethical examples of vicious retribution led to filing two more EEOC Complaints and a ‘Section 1983’ Civil Rights lawsuit in Federal District Court in Phoenix. 5 years after filing my original complaint in 2019 I received a response from the EEOC-OFO (Office of Federal Operations) to my appeal of the EEO Administrative Judge dismissal my original appeal: -New hearing ordered to assess the provider’s statements contrary to my claims verified by witness testimony.-A hostile work environment had clearly been created and allowed to continue by the providers and VA Administrators based on obvious Religious and Racial discrimination.-The judgement in favor of the VA by the administrative judge SHOULD NOT have been granted. I have never known an organization so hell bent on violating employees’ rights and protecting the people who violate those rights. I find it shameful for an administrative judge to so blatantly ignore Constitutional mandates and my civil rights to protect whatever they may identify with (religiously and/or culturally). My successful appeal of that judge’s decision highlights the Phoenix VAMC’s ongoing environment of Christian supremacy and retribution for anyone willing to call them on it! The MRFF’s recent assistance in my 5-year battle with this bureaucratic maze of gutless hypocrisy and ‘naked ass covering’ has been a tremendous assistance to my morale and drive to see this in-your-face un-Constitutional and highly unethical situation to a full resolution!! I can highly recommend active-duty military and veterans contact MRFF in response to what will obviously be even more intrusively over-the-top attempts to support the supremacy of one religious view over all others (i.e., Project 2025)! Sincerely, David (last name withheld) (PS. Freedom is scary. Deal with it!)
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Thursday Afternoon, August 29, 2024
MRFF DEMANDS EQUAL ADVERTISING OFCOURSES ON NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONSAFTER USAFA HAWKS COURSE DEVOTED TO CHRISTIAN APOLOGIST C.S. LEWIS
“The Air Force Academy last week published an article focusing on a Philosophy Department course that teaches based on the non-fiction works of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis,featuring such works as ‘The Abolition of Man,’ which is popular among politically conservative circles. “It’s telling that the academy’s public affairs team chooses to cover this course in particular without mentioning the diversity of courses offered by the Philosophy Department or other departments in the institution that focus on non-Christian faiths that might have a more liberal worldview. The article is effectively virtue signaling to the dominionist factions within the academy’s staff and graduate communities, saying, ‘We’re a safe place for you to practice the belief that Christians are morally superior to members of other faiths.’” — U.S. Air Force Academy MRFF client
PHOTO AND CAPTION FROM ARTICLE ON AIR FORCE ACADEMY WEBSITE: Cadet 2nd Class Grace Dailey displays a copy of C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man” Aug. 20, 2024. The book is one of many Dr. Adam Pelser uses to teach his “C.S. Lewis and Philosophy” course at the U.S. Air Force Academy. (U.S. Air Force photo by Trevor Cokley)
MRFF OP-ED ONDAILY KOS Trending story on Daily Kos Of all its courses, Air Force Academy hawks course devoted to Christian apologist C.S. Lewis By: MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda Thursday, August 29, 2024
Just like civilian colleges and universities, the U.S military’s service academies offer a well-rounded education that includes the humanities and philosophy along with the kind of courses you’d expect at institutions whose job it is to prepare future military officers for their military careers. At the Air Force Academy, some two dozen courses are offered by the Philosophy Department, and one of these courses — or, more specifically, the Academy’s promotion of this one course to the exclusion of all others — has raised the ire of 62 Academy cadets, faculty, staff, and 10th ABW (Air Base Wing) personnel. The course is “C.S. Lewis and Philosophy,” taught by Dr. Adam Pelser. On August 7, U.S. Air Force Academy Strategic Communications published an article titled “Examining the works of C.S. Lewis: critical thinking and ethics,” which was (and still is at the time of this writing) promoted as “Featured News” on the homepage of the Academy’s website.
Now, C.S. Lewis is known for two things — The Chronicles of Narnia and being a Christian apologist, with works such as The Case for Christianity and Mere Christianity. But only one of C.S. Lewis’s books is shown in the photos of the smiling cadets in the U.S. Air Force Academy Strategic Communications “Featured News” article about the Academy’s “C.S. Lewis and Philosophy” course. That book is The Abolition of Man, which, unlike C.S. Lewis’s numerous other non-fiction works, is not a work of Christian apologetics or even a religious book per se. As Lewis says near the beginning of the book, which was essentially his criticism of an English book being used in England’s schools at the time, “I may add that though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism.” The book also quotes from a wide range of philosophies and belief systems including ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Chines, Greek, and Roman, Old Norse, Hindu, and even Australian Aborigine. But, as the caption below the photo of the smiling cadet joyously holding up her copy of The Abolition of Man in the U.S. Air Force Academy Strategic Communications “Featured News” article says, “The book is one of many Dr. Adam Pelser uses to teach his ‘C.S. Lewis and Philosophy’ course.” Since this “one of many” of C.S. Lewis’s books is a rare departure from Christian apologetics among his non-fiction works, it stands to reason that the “many” other C.S. Lewis books used in the course are indeed Christian apologetics books, i.e. books written to convert people to Christianity. As one member of the group of 62 Academy cadets, faculty, staff, and 10th ABW personnel that has come to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation(MRFF) with serious objections to the Academy’s hawking of this particular course as “Featured News” on its homepage wrote in an e-mail to MRFF (emphasis added):
“It’s telling that the academy’s public affairs team chooses to cover this course in particular without mentioning the diversity of courses offered by the Philosophy Department or other departments in the institution that focus on non-Christian faiths that might have a more liberal worldview. The article is effectively virtue signaling to the dominionist factions within the academy’s staff and graduate communities, saying, ‘We’re a safe place for you to practice the belief that Christians are morally superior to members of other faiths.’”
“Delighted to see the USAF Academy returning to classic philosophy and virtues from its descent into modern wokery.” “This is the ‘crticial’ theory the USAF academy needs to be teaching.” “Delighted to see my alma mater continuing to teach the timeless truths grounded in the fertile soil of Christianity.”
Among the Academy’s Philosophy Department course offerings, no other philosopher besides Christian apologist C.S. Lewis gets an entire course devoted just to them. Additionally, the C.S. Lewis course is not the only one to elevate the Academy’s preferred religion of Christianity above all other belief systems. While all the “lesser” religions are lumped together in courses such as “Comparative Religion,” Christianity gets its whole own course, “Philosophy and Christian Thought.” (We’ll just hope that one isn’t taught by the member of the Academy’s Philosophy Department who got their masters in theology from Liberty University.) In this case, MRFF is not demanding that the Air Force Academy’s article about the “C.S. Lewis and Philosophy” course be taken down, but that the Academy’s Office of Strategic Communications:
“… immediately provide another comparable news article from USAFA’s Office of Strategic Communications. This subsequent article will profile USAFA curriculum classes devoted to other religious faiths and non-faith traditions, besides Christianity, and will be composed and distributed in the very same fashion as the current promotional story on C.S. Lewis and Christian apologetics published with all too obvious great glee by USAFA.”
Below is the entire e-mail from one of the group of 62 Academy cadets, faculty, staff, and 10th ABW personnel who have sought MRFF’s help in getting the Academy to “do a better job of conveying the diversity of beliefs and faiths of its student body,” followed by MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein’s demand letter to the Superintendent of the Academy.
From: (MRFF USAFA Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: USAFA’s Christian Apologetics CourseDate: August 27, 2024 at 4:14:05 AM MDTTo: Mikey Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Mikey — The Air Force Academy last week published an article focusing on a Philosophy Department course that teaches based on the non-fiction works of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, featuring such works as “The Abolition of Man,” which is popular among politically conservative circles. It’s telling that the academy’s public affairs team chooses to cover this course in particular without mentioning the diversity of courses offered by the Philosophy Department or other departments in the institution that focus on non-Christian faiths that might have a more liberal worldview. The article is effectively virtue signaling to the dominionist factions within the academy’s staff and graduate communities, saying, “We’re a safe place for you to practice the belief that Christians are morally superior to members of other faiths.“ Comments on the academy’s LinkedIn post pointing to the story reflect the effect of this story, with many conservative commenters leaving such notes as: * “Delighted to see the USAF Academy returning to classic philosophy and virtues from its descent into modern wokery.”* “This is the ‘crticial’ theory the USAF academy needs to be teaching.”* “Delighted to see my alma mater continuing to teach the timeless truths grounded in the fertile soil of Christianity.” The public affairs office must do a better job of conveying the diversity of beliefs and faiths of its student body. If Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts are “absolutely vital to USAFA’s mission of developing leaders of character,” as its chief diversity officer said in 2021, then public affairs efforts must reflect that by alternating its focus on groups other than the majority. Otherwise the academy’s student body will continue to reflect the dominionist influences that jeopardize freedom of worship in this country. (Name, title, and all other identifiers withheld)
MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein’s demand letter to Air Force Academy Superintendent Lieutenant General Tony D. Bauernfiend
August 29, 2024 Lt. General Tony D. BauernfiendSuperintendentUnited States Air Force Academy (USAFA) RE: MRFF Demand Letter to Rectify Yet Another Repugnant Example of USAFA’s Fundamentalist Christian Nationalism Sir, by way of introduction, I am the Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF.org). MRFF has currently provided vigorous, civil rights First Amendment advocacy to just under 90,000 Active Duty, Reserve, and National Guard United States armed forces clients, including many veterans. About 95% of MRFF’s clients are in fact practicing Christians. Specifically, MRFF has several hundred clients under your command at USAFA from among the Air Force Academy faculty, staff, and Cadet Wing, and the 10th Air Base Wing (ABW). I know that you are very new to your current job as the Superintendent of USAFA (August 2, 2024), but, unfortunately, we have yet ANOTHER bad fundamentalist, Christian supremacy situation at USAFA. Sadly, this present matter only adds to many disgraceful years of USAFA’s well-established and chronicled outrageous, unconstitutional Christian oppression, exclusivity, triumphalism, and tyranny. Lt. General Bauernfiend, as if your unfounded assertion “There are perfect spiritual beings” at your recent introductory Commander’s Call as the brand new USAFA Superintendent was not enough to cause enormous concern, the article released on August 7, 2024, from your Office of Strategic Communications at USAFA confirms that fundamentalist Christianity will continue to be, as it always has been, the illicit and unconstitutional “USAFA approved solution” under your command. Indeed, General, to this ignominious end, please see the USAFA-damning news article directly below, which is just now breaking: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/29/2266297/-Of-all-its-courses-Air-Force-Academy-hawks-course-devoted-to-Christian-apologist-C-S-Lewis Why, of the hundreds of academic courses at USAFA you are responsible to the American taxpayers for, did your Public Affairs office choose to solely highlight the ONLY course dedicated to Christian apologetics? Why, for that matter, is C.S. Lewis the ONLY individual who gets an ENTIRE semester course to himself, while Plato, Aristotle, and other incontrovertible giants in the history of philosophical ideas get lumped together in the bargain bin of “Ancient Western Philosophy”? Where, for that matter, is the course dedicated to Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish apologist famous throughout Europe in his day? Or Katip Celebi, the 17th-century Muslim philosopher and scholar? Oh, there are innumerable more salient examples, sir! Perhaps you’re now getting the concept of our USAFA clients’ righteous fury here, General? Of all the Academy classes to highlight, your Public Affairs office’s choice of a course on the most popular Christian apologist of modern times, to the exclusion of all other germane topics, is both repugnant and odious. From the comments we are seeing on social media, it seems that this sectarian, literally in-your-face article promoting nonsecular, Christian apologetics greatly pleased its intended audience of extremist, right wing, ultra-conservative USAFA grads and related partisan allies. **FYI, sir: MRFF is representing 62 USAFA cadets, faculty, staff and 10th ABW personnel on this matter, 47 of whom also practice Christianity, either Protestant or Roman Catholic. The remaining MRFF clients come from an array of other faith and non-faith traditions. To be clear, MRFF and its clients are not just infuriated about the fact of this articlebeing published per se. Indeed, sir, rather, their wrath is focused on the atrocious fact that it was published to the utter exclusion of all or any other religious or non-faith philosophies, their traditions, and their respective well-known promoters, just as C.S. Lewis is vis-a-vis Christianity. The fact that this article was published and heavily promoted by USAFA is particularly egregious given USAFA’s well-deserved wretched reputation for shamelessly promulgating fundamentalist Christian nationalism for decades. Thus, MRFF and its 62 USAFA clients see clearly malevolent malfeasance, vice mere misfeasance, in its nefarious production and distribution beginning on August 7, 2024 and continuing thereafter on social media et al under your direct auspices as the new USAFA Superintendent. MRFF’s Demand: On behalf of its 62 USAFA clients on this sordid matter, and in the interest of promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the Constitutional mandate of church-state separation, and in accordance with the UCMJ, and numerous Directives, Instructions and Regulations of DoD and the Dept. of the Air Force (see specifically Air Force Instruction 1-1, Section 2.16), MRFF demands that you immediately provide another comparable news article from USAFA’s Office of Strategic Communications. This subsequent article will profile USAFA curriculum classes devoted to other religious faiths and non-faith traditions, besides Christianity, and will be composed and distributed in the very same fashion as the current promotional story on C.S. Lewis and Christian apologetics published with all too obvious great glee by USAFA. Standing by, Lt. General Bauernfiend, to have you confirm your compliance with MRFF’s demands on behalf of its 62 USAFA clients under your direct command herewith. Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq.Founder and PresidentMilitary Religious Freedom Foundation505-250-7727
For a two-decade history of MRFF’s numerous battles against outrageous Christian proselytizing and Christian nationalism at the Air Force Academy, visit:
“Civil rights organizations like MRFF are essential in a voluntary military within a democracy, and your unwavering presence has rectified numerous injustices by religious extremists”
From: (Name withheld)Subject: RE: In MemoriamDate: August 27, 2024 at 1:24:56 PM MDTTo: info@militaryreligiousfreedom.org Mikey, First, it’s inspiring to see the incredible individuals highlighted in your latest article, “In Memoriam,” who dared to stand up despite the significant pressures, especially considering how sensitive the topic of religion is in our society. Second, thank you for the critical work you do at MRFF. Throughout my military career, I’ve faced several issues where you responded within hours, sometimes even minutes. The overwhelming Christian majority often struggles to comprehend the inappropriate, and sometimes illegal, imposition of their beliefs on other service members. For many service members, particularly those in subordinate roles, this can seem like an impossible situation, with the potential to ruin careers or lead to even more tragic consequences. MRFF serves as a beacon of hope for those unable to effect change on their own. Civil rights organizations like MRFF are essential in a voluntary military within a democracy, and your unwavering presence has rectified numerous injustices by religious extremists who often fail to recognize the harm in their actions. I was reminded of the insidious religious pressures that exist on LinkedIn recently. A USAFA graduate congratulated the Philosophy Department for a course on C.S. Lewis and Philosophy, which he hailed as a return to Christian values, saying, ‘Delighted to see my alma mater continuing to teach the timeless truths grounded in the fertile soil of Christianity.’ This post received 35 likes, and numerous people defended the sentiment vehemently. Imagine, however, the uproar that would ensue if a course on Al-Farabi were introduced with the express purpose of pushing Islamic values. The same individuals who praised the promotion of Christian values would likely denounce such a course as an affront to American ideals. This double standard starkly illustrates the privilege and entitlement that often go unchecked in a predominantly Christian environment, and it underscores the critical need for organizations like MRFF to advocate for true religious neutrality and protect the rights of all service members, regardless of their faith—or lack thereof. I fully support the work MRFF does and give permission to use my name in any context that could help further the cause. At the same time, I deeply appreciate and commend the organization’s dedication to keeping the anonymity of others sacrosanct, as this protection is vital for those who might otherwise face severe repercussions for speaking out. Thank you! (Name withheld) (all opinions given are my own and do not reflect the opinions/stances of the USAF)
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Wednesday Evening, August 28, 2024
THEANALYSIS.NEWSINTERVIEWS MRFF’s MIKEY WEINSTEIN:“PROJECT 2025 WILL DECAPITATE CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT OF THE U.S. MILITARY”
High-profile guests on theAnalysis.newshave included: Zbigniew Brzezinski • Noam Chomsky • Phil Donahue • Daniel Ellsberg • Danny Glover • Bob Graham • Chris Hedges • Naomi Klein • Abby Martin • Bob Moses • Ralph Nader • Trita Parsi • Run-DMC • Bernie Sanders • Jill Stein • Rashida Tlaib • Nina Turner • Gore Vidal • Roger Waters Additional guests from MRFF: Col. (U.S. Army-ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, a MRFF Advisory Board Member and former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and MRFF Board Member (in memoriam) Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV
Mikey Weinstein and host Talia Baroncelli on theAnalysis.news
MRFF COVERED BYSFGATE.COM Second Most Popular News Site in California After the Los Angeles Times Disturbing object unearthed inCalifornia’s Mojave Desert mystifies experts By: Ariana Bindman Wednesday, August 27, 2024
Aware of MRFF’s 2012 exposure of photos of U.S. Marines posing with a logo resembling the notorious Nazi SS Bolts originally associated with Nazi Germany’s Schutzstaffel (SS), SFGATE contacted MRFF pertaining to their coverage of a mysterious chest found buried in the California desert, which was emblazoned with red SS Bolts.
“Thoughts on my Air Force Academy ClassmateMikey Weinstein” I’m grateful for your creation and leadership of the MRFF, Mikey, in this battle against Christian nationalistic intrusion into our military. From: (1977 Air Force Academy grad’s name withheld)Subject: Thoughts on my Air Force Academy Classmate Mikey WeinsteinDate: August 25, 2024 at 1:29:43 PM MDTTo: Mikey Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> My name is (name withheld). I’m also a 1977 graduate of USAFA. I knew of Mikey Weinstein, but did not know him personally while we attended USAFA. I’m not sure how or when I became aware of Mikey and his MRFF. But as a passionate loyalist to the constitution, his enemy became my enemy. […]
“Merchant Marine Academy” From: (name withheld)Subject: Merchant Marine Academy.Date: August 24, 2024 at 6:25:21 PM MDT Hey “Mickey”, why don’t you go back to Hell from where you came from. You should know the place since your stinking Talmud teaches you that Jesus is there, boiling in a vat of his own excrement. And it also teaches you Khazarian Mafia FAKE JOOS that his mother was a whore who had a tryst with a dozen Roman soldiers at once, doesn’t it, you fucking piece of shit ! It’s no wonder that you can’t stand a picture of Jesus Christ, since your demented Rabbis from the Synagogue of Satan teach you such horrible lies, and because His blood is on all of you. To read response froma MRFF Supporter:
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Saturday Afternoon, August 24, 2024
IN MEMORIAM MRFF TAKES A LOOK BACK ATFRIENDS, BOARD MEMBERS, AND ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS WHOSE CONTRIBUTIONS WE WILL NEVER FORGET
ED ASNER Dear Friend, Ardent MRFF Supporter,MRFF Thomas Jefferson Award Honoree
Ed Asner receives MRFF 2010 Thomas Jefferson Award from MRFF Founder & President Mikey Weinstein
Ed, himself a military veteran, was an American icon as both a superb and celebrated actor as well as a tenacious, never-say-die, civil rights activist. From the very first moment he heard what MRFF was doing, Ed was never too busy to enthusiastically pitch in and help. And help he did! Ed personally appeared in MRFF media pieces and attended MRFF fundraisers in the L.A. area. His broad, selfless, and determined support for MRFF resulted in Ed’s winning of the MRFF 2010 Thomas Jefferson Award, which is our highest honor.
AMBASSADOR JOSEPH C. WILSON IV Military Religious Freedom Foundation Board Member MRFF Thomas Jefferson Award Honoree
Joe was a loyal, fierce, and steadfast advocate of MRFF’s mission to ensure constitutionally-mandated church-state separation in the U.S. armed forces and Veterans Administration for over 13 years. He will always be remembered fondly and is deeply missed.Click to read full bio
GLEN DOHERTY Dedicated MRFF Advisory Board Member, Former Navy SEAL, Killed in 2012 Libya Consulate Attack
Glen was one of the first MRFF Advisory Board members and was a passionate core contributor to the fight to prevent a fundamentalist Christian coup within the United States Armed Forces. Glen lived and died believing in the righteous cause of religious tolerance and dialogue among all peoples and faiths around the globe. Click to read full bio
ROSS PEROT A great patriot and an even greater human being who tremendously helped our MRFF clients in need, particularly medical need, on dozens of occasions
Mikey and Bonnie Weinstein with Ross Perot
Mikey Weinstein on his long-time family friendship with Ross Perot: “My family has known the Perot family for 70 years ever since my dad, Jerry Weinstein, met and became extremely close friends and midshipman classmates with Ross during Plebe Summer with the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1953 in the summer of 1949. “Ross literally knew me before I was even born. I have wonderful childhood memories of him, including when he visited me on several occasions during my cadet years at the USAF Academy. But it was as an adult that I really got to know him. “I worked for him professionally on two occasions and became his first General Counsel at Perot Systems Corporation in the late 1980s after first representing him as legal counsel in my New York City-based law firm. In fact, the second time I worked for Ross, in the early 2000s, became my very last job before starting and directing the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).”
GOVERNOR RICHARD LAMM Three-term Governor of Colorado,One of MRFF’s first Advisory Board members
Dick’s unimpeachable integrity, character, dignity, intelligence and honor and his kind, avuncular nature made him a joy to work with. Through the many years of his active MRFF Advisory Board advocacy and membership, he helped out often behind the scenes with matters we were engaged with, especially in Colorado, but elsewhere as well. He was a magnificent, loyal and relentless supporter of MRFF’s mission and a consistent personal donor to its civil rights cause.
ROBERT T. HERRES First Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,MRFF Advisory Board member
During his 36 year Air Force career, Bob Herres served in fighter-interceptors, technical intelligence, the Flight Test Center and Space Systems before tours as a wing commander in Strategic Air Command. Later, he was commander of Air Force Communications Command, the Eighth Air Force, and as the Joint Staff J-6, was promoted to general to become commander of NORAD and the first commander of US Space Command. He ended his active duty career with a three-year assignment as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first to hold that position.
EAGLE MAN, ED McGAA Enrolled Oglala Sioux tribal member,Marine Corps fighter pilot, Author,MRFF Advisory Board member
Ed received a law degree from the University of South Dakota, was an author, speaker, publisher, and veteran. He served as a Marine in Korea and flew 110 combat missions as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. Ed authored 14 books including Mother Earth Spirituality, Nature’s Way, Rainbow Tribe, Native Wisdom, Black Elk Speaks IV, and Exposing Terrorism: Indigenous Spirituality and Religious Extremism.
A.A. “TONY” VERRENGIA Pioneer in NASA’s manned spaceflight programs,MRFF Advisory Board member
General Tony Verrengia was a pioneer in the manned spaceflight programs of NASA for over 25 years, including holding key staff positions in the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle program management offices. From 1983-84 he served on the interagency task force in Washington D.C. that obtained President Reagan’s approval to proceed with the International Space Station development. He received numerous military decorations and NASA awards. In 1983, for his work on the Space Shuttle program planning, he was honored by the Sons of Italy in America with its highest honor, the Marconi Award. In 1987 he was knighted by the Republic of Italy as a Cavallieri Ufficiali, for his work in assisting the Italian government in creating its new space agency.
WILLIAM E. BARKER U.S. Marine Corps Major, Junior ROTC Instructor,MRFF Board Member,MRFF Thomas Jefferson Award Honoree
Over his 19 years as Junior ROTC instructor, Bill Barker sent over 65 students to military academies – the highest number of students referred to military academies by any one instructor in the nation. His other accomplishments included being selected to be on the NRA’s National Coach Development Staff, for which he worked with rifle coaches of all levels, and served as the New Mexico State Director for the Civilian Marksmanship Program and the American Legion Junior Shooting Program.
RICHARD T. SCHLOSBERG III Former publisher and chief executive officer of the Denver Post, publisher and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Times, executive vice president of The Times Mirror Company,MRFF Advisory Board member
Dick Schlosberg graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and earned a master’s degree with honors in business administration from Harvard Business School. He served five years as an Air Force pilot and was a veteran of the Vietnam War. In 2003, Richard was honored by the Air Force Academy and named one of its distinguished graduates. Dick also served as President and CEO of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, retiring in 2004.
HOWARD BRAGMAN Public relations giant with a specialty of advising LGBTQ clients coming out of the closet,MRFF Advisory Board member
In 2001, Howard was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and he created and chaired the Jewish Image Awards honoring depictions of Judaism in film and on television. His record spans more than two decades of activism for the AIDS/HIV community, lesbian and gay civil rights and First Amendment protections. He has received awards and honors from numerous groups including AIDS Project Los Angeles, The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, The Life AIDS Lobby and Congregation Kol Ami. Howard was one of the first individuals to join MRFF’s Advisory Board and provided invaluable professional assistance, particularly in the early formative years of the foundation. His brilliance and professional intuition is missed. His friendship, zeal to provide assistance and help whenever called upon, and empathetic disposition will never be forgotten.
“Note of Thanks” From:(Name and e-mail address withheld)Subject: Note of ThanksDate: August 23, 2024 at 12:17:55 PM MDTTo: <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Dear Mikey, I wanted to thank you and your organization the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I am a Registered Nurse Advocate from Eastern Wa and after hitting a dead end while seeking assistance in halting an unconstitutional chaplaincy program, I really felt that you cared, you were passionate and you assisted me in connecting to the appropriate people. I had not found this tenacity when reaching out to the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, or the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has no obligation to help my case given the absence of a military nexus. I received no response from these other organizations and had resorted to despair. I contacted Mikey as a last ditch effort and I felt heard and appreciated and for the first time experienced a glimmer of hope. His response was immediate and he included me in his correspondence and followed through. I have not seen this level of passion with any other of the mentioned organizations. The separation of church and state is not only a moral issue but a practical, legal and political one. Religious freedom has never been more important as it is today. The Christian Nationalist agenda that underlies the “Conservative Promise” in the Heritage Foundation’s project 2025 manifesto, is a direct threat to democracy and should be opposed with vigor and passion at every level. The Conservative- majority U.S. Supreme Court has effectively chipped away at the wall separating church and state in a series of new rulings over the last two years. This should give the population pause. Mikey Weinstein is fierce, passionate and in my interactions with him it is obvious that he cares and is invested a rarity not seen often enough in large organizations that tout advocacy. Yours truly, (Name withheld) (Town Name withheld), Wa.
“JBSA (Joint Base San Antonio) Follow-up” From: (Active Duty U.S. Army Enlisted Member/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: JBSA (Joint Base San Antonio) Follow-upDate: August 23, 2024 at 12:59:53 PM MDTTo: Mikey Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Mr. Mikey Weinstein, I want to thank you for your prompt and effective assistance with a recent request I made to your organization. I am an enlisted member of the Army stationed at JBSA (Joint Base San Antonio) – Fort Sam Houston, TX. For the last few years while assigned here I have encountered repeated incidents (multiple times a week) of the entry point guards ending their ID checks with “Have a blessed day.” While seemingly innocent this imposes a religious aspect onto a required military interaction.There are many people I have spoken with over time at this assignment (approximately 40) and all have experienced the same greeting. There are many Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen on post here. This is a major training center as well as having a MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station), the number of forced religious tinged interactions must be immense. Even religious personnel I have spoken with about this have conceded that it is an unconstitutional situation for someone in a position of authority to impose upon others. We have armed personnel who have control of whether you can gain entry injecting religious messaging, innocuous or not, into a professional encounter. Last week after the third or fourth instance of the week I attempted to find out how to contact the Security Forces Squadron on post to make a complaint. Fortunately, during my search I found the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I contacted your organization via email. Quickly thereafter your group followed up with me and asked for specifics about these interactions. After providing that information you were able to immediately get to work contacting JBSA leadership. I am pleased to let you know that what had previously been happening in almost every interaction dropped to one in ten. I want to again thank you and your organization for all that you have done and continue to do for our servicemen and women. (Active Duty U.S. Army Enlisted Member/MRFF Client’s name, rank, unit, and MOS all withheld)
From: James SwartsSubject: Valuing the Military Religious Freedom Foundation Date: August 20, 2024 at 8:06:18 PM MDTTo: Mikey Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Dear Mr. Weinstein, As a point of introduction, I should note that it has been several years now since I met you, Mr. Weinstein, when you spoke at Rochester Institute of Technology here in Rochester, in what I thought was a wonderful presentation and a real eye opener. Your message resonates with me more today than it even did at that time. Your presentation made me realize the value of the MRFF, and the work of your organization. I look forward to hearing from you, and the work of MRFF. With that said, I would like to mention that I served six years in the U.S. Navy, during which time I served at sea including in the illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, and three years with the NROTC Unit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy New York. That service made me aware of the religious and racial intolerance that I found embedded in military culture. Subsequent to my Naval service I earned both Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in History which helped to open my eyes to the meaning of the United States Constitution and the importance of the separation of church and state. It also gave me pause to reflect on the military’s coercion of forcing personal to participate in religious activities. After a lengthy career as a federal officer I returned to seminary and earned my Master of Divinity Degree (MDiv) while pursuing ordained ministry. Then I was invited to teach history at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo, the state honors college. I devoted fourteen of the following sixteen years in that position. It was early in my teaching career that I attended the aforementioned presentation by Mr. Weinstein at R.I.T., which had a profound influence on me and helped bring together the many pieces of my military, civil service, history education, and theological education to zero in on the evil I had recognized, and experienced, personally and historically. It helped me to incorporate my strong belief in religious tolerance, and emphasize the need to keep religion out of our government and out of our military in many of my courses. MRFF serves as a beacon of enlightenment of religious freedom by protecting those in the military, and veterans, from coerced religious indoctrination. Peace, Rev. James L. Swarts, M.A., M.Div.President, Veterans For Peace, Chapter 23, Rochester, NY2021 VFP Chapter of the Year
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Monday Evening, August 19, 2024
ENTHUSIASTIC PRAISE FROMHARVARD UNIVERSITY SENIOR FOR“MRFF’S UNYIELDING SUPPORT OF OUR U.S. CONSTITUTION IN THE ARMED FORCES”
“I had not heard about either you nor the MRFF until last night’s lengthy discussion. After hearing everything that was said and doing a little research on your MRFF site, I wanted to thank you and your team there at the MRFF very much for all you have done and all you have endured to fight against the Christian nationalism I was raised in. “The MRFF’s unyielding support of our U.S. constitution in the armed forces for so many years inspires me and so many others here at Harvard and no doubt everywhere else.” — E-mail from Harvard University senior
Harvard University
E-mail to Mikey Weinstein from Harvard University senior
“Harvard University grapevine praise for the MRFF” From: (Harvard University Senior’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Harvard University grapevine praise for the MRFFDate: August 18, 2024 at 10:10:12 AM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Hello, Mr. Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I’m a senior and intercollegiate athlete at Harvard Univ. and was involved in a long after dinner discussion last night about politics, the military and religion with a large group (about 25 or so) of my classmates, teammates and other friends here at school. Your name and your org. were enthusiastically brought up by several of them, three of whom are veterans and two of whom were in the audience when you spoke here a few years ago in Cambridge, Mass. I wish I could have been there too. I am all too aware of Christian extremism as I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household. My father is an ordained pastor and former Air Force chaplain. He has never forgiven me for questioning in good faith some of the basic tenets of the evangelical denomination he rigidly imposed on me, my mom and my siblings. We have not spoken in several years now, unfortunately. I can tell you that he would never support what the Military Religious Freedom Foundation does. I don’t know if he and I will ever reconcile especially if he knew I was communicating with you, Mr. Weinstein, of all people. I had not heard about either you nor the MRFF until last night’s lengthy discussion. After hearing everything that was said and doing a little research on your MRFF site, I wanted to thank you and your team there at the MRFF very much for all you have done and all you have endured to fight against the Christian nationalism I was raised in. The MRFF’s unyielding support of our U.S. constitution in the armed forces for so many years inspires me and so many others here at Harvard and no doubt everywhere else. I plan to become a monthly supporter of the MRFF as soon as I get employed after graduation next Spring. Until then, please keep my name and contact info anonymous. But my friends and I will be in touch, sir. Please keep up the good fight, Mr Weinstein and the MRFF! For all of our sakes.
Flyer for Mikey Weinstein’s 2015 lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the Humanist Community at Harvard, mentioned in Harvard senior’s e-mail above
“TEARS” From:(name withheld)Subject: TEARSDate: August 16, 2024 at 10:46:41 AM MDT SIR, For that son of a bitch to say you are a proponent of CRT is the pinnacle of insult. These white devils {I am white} are terrified of reality. They think their fake religion makes them invulnerable to a mistake. Manifest destiny is a cancer that has become an integral metastasizing tumor that they have come to worship. Your people were destroyed by us. I am sorry that our fear of reality makes us ignorant and blind. We have not changed. White fear has gripped these assholes and they are as terroristic, fascist and dangerous as they have ever been. I am ashamed of these whites. Please survive and let us watch these pigs twist in the wind with their hate and phony history. Here we are on the brink of disaster brought to us by the white man and they are proud of where we are. our Nation respected this home planet. These pigs raped it. I will just go on and on about my disrespect for my people but know that you are the answer. It’s just that my people are too stupid to know the question.Take It Easy But Take It, (name withheld) P.S. I AM ASHAMED OF WHITE PEOPLE!
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Thursday Afternoon, August 15, 2024
MRFF ASSISTS NATIVE AMERICAN OFFICER INFURIATED BY DEMEANING PRESENTATION BY SO-CALLED “HISTORY EXPERT” FROM COMMANDER’S CHURCH
“When I viewed one of the presented slides with my assembled military unit I became so outraged and sick to my stomach I didn’t know what to do? I was just incredulous! “This slide stated that during the 1870’s the main 3 missions of the U.S. Cavalry stationed at our installation was to ‘(1) Fight and defeat the Sioux Nation hostiles on the battlefield, (2) Domesticate the Sioux Nation hostiles and, (3) Bring the Sioux Nation hostiles to the grace of Jesus Christ.’” “After this power point and when the mandatory meeting was adjourned it all just got worse. I spoke with the senior officer (whom I will refer to as my ‘sub-commander’) who had arranged this presentation … My sub-commander just dismissed my complaint by telling me that it sounded as if I was a proponent of ‘Critical Race Theory’ and, further, was improperly trying to use DEI (‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’) as a weapon. He then said something I will never forget or forgive. He told me that he was well aware of my Native American heritage and that it was likely that my Native American heritage ‘helped’ me get an appointment to my alma mater, the United States (military branch withheld) Academy.” — Excerpts from Sioux military officer and MRFF client e-mail
MRFF OP-ED ONDAILY KOS Trending story on Daily Kos Dehumanizing presentation by “history expert” from commander’s church infuriates Sioux officer By: MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda Thursday, August 15, 2024
In an astounding display of Christian nationalist bigotry, supremacy, and historical just-making-crap-up, a local so-called “history expert,” brought in by a military commander from his off-base evangelical megachurch to deliver a presentation on the history of the base, told a unit assembled at a mandatory gathering that the soldiers stationed at the installation in its early days were there to “domesticate” the Sioux Indians and bring them to Jesus. Now, as you might imagine, this “history expert’s” presentation did not go over well, to put it mildly, particularly with one of the unit’s officers who happens to be a Native American and enrolled member of his Sioux tribe. Describing the appallingly offensive presentation and the effect it had on him in an e-mail to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), MRFF’s client wrote:
“When I viewed one of the presented slides with my assembled military unit I became so outraged and sick to my stomach I didn’t know what to do? I was just incredulous! “This slide stated that during the 1870’s the main 3 missions of the U.S. Cavalry stationed at our installation was to ‘(1) Fight and defeat the Sioux Nation hostiles on the battlefield, (2) Domesticate the Sioux Nation hostiles and, (3) Bring the Sioux Nation hostiles to the grace of Jesus Christ.’”
The history geek in me can’t help but interject here to tell Mr. local “history expert” that the primary mission of the soldiers stationed at this fort during that time period was to accompany and protect railroad surveyors and construction gangs until the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 and to patrol the railroad for a number of years afterwards. So, no, Mr. local “history expert,” their mission was not to “domesticate,” as you so demeaningly and dehumanizingly put it, the Sioux people or bring them to Jesus. MRFF has often assisted Native American service members whose culturally boneheaded Christian zealot military superiors have seen nothing at all wrong with, for example, telling a Native American subordinate to wear his “best Indian clothes” for their traditional “Puritan” Thanksgiving event last year. (Because a Native American service member would of course have a closet full of “Indian clothes” that they wear to kick back in when they’re off duty.) And that wasn’t even an isolated incident. A few years earlier another commander at another base told a Native American in their unit to dress up like an “Indian” to add to the “historical” nature of their “Pilgrim Heritage” event. But, despite having had quite a few Native American clients over the years, never have we at MRFF encountered anything as beyond the pale as what our Sioux officer client was subjected to when he dared to complain about the appalling presentation (emphasis added):
“After this power point and when the mandatory meeting was adjourned it all just got worse. I spoke with the senior officer (whom I will refer to as my ‘sub-commander’) who had arranged this presentation with this so-called local community ‘history expert’ civilian who lived off base in the adjoining town. I explained how enraged I was about what was written about my Sioux people on that particular slide. My sub-commander just dismissed my complaint by telling me that it sounded as if I was a proponent of ‘Critical Race Theory’ and, further, was improperly trying to use DEI (‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’) as a weapon.”
Yep, it’s the MAGA boogeymen — CRT and DEI. Think this commander couldn’t say anything worse than that? Think again …
“He then said something I will never forget or forgive. He told me that he was well aware of my Native American heritage and that it was likely that my Native American heritage ‘helped’ me get an appointment to my alma mater, the United States (military branch name withheld) Academy.”
As you’ll read in the e-mail below from MRFF’s client, the commander who made these abhorrently racist remarks as well as the unit commander have thus far received only slap-on-the-wrist punishments, but an investigation has been launched, and MRFF is assisting our client with filing both IG and EEO complaints. MRFF’s client has no intention of letting this MAGA-infused, Christian supremacist affront to decency go unpunished, writing:
“I won’t let this unbelievably demeaning moment against my Sioux heritage go without a fight. And the MRFF is leading the way for us!”
Here’s MRFF’s client’s whole e-mail, detailing the entire revolting story:
From: (Active Duty Military Officer/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Thanks MRFF from a Native American Military OfficerDate: August 14, 2024 at 8:21:24 AM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> I am an active duty military officer in the United States (military branch name withheld). I am also a graduate of the United States (military branch name withheld) Academy. I am married with (number of children withheld) kids. Our family proudly follows my Native American spiritualist religious faith which is over 9,000 years old. I very recently asked for help from the MRFF directly to Mr. Weinstein after suffering a humiliating experience regarding my Native American ethnicity at a mandatory gathering of my military unit a few days ago. For the record I am an enrolled member of the (specific tribal name withheld) Sioux tribe and my military occupational specialty involves the direct oversight and use of nuclear weapons. Within the last week or so our unit commander conducted a regularly scheduled “All-Hands” gathering which included a presentation by a local civilian “history expert” who gave a power point presentation on the history of our installation going back to the 1860’s and 1870’s. When I viewed one of the presented slides with my assembled military unit I became so outraged and sick to my stomach I didn’t know what to do? I was just incredulous! This slide stated that during the 1870’s the main 3 missions of the U.S. Cavalry stationed at our installation was to “(1) Fight and defeat the Sioux Nation hostiles on the battlefield, (2) Domesticate the Sioux Nation hostiles and, (3) Bring the Sioux Nation hostiles to the grace of Jesus Christ.” After this power point and when the mandatory meeting was adjourned it all just got worse. I spoke with the senior officer (whom I will refer to as my “sub-commander”) who had arranged this presentation with this so-called local community “history expert” civilian who lived off base in the adjoining town. I explained how enraged I was about what was written about my Sioux people on that particular slide. My sub-commander just dismissed my complaint by telling me that it sounded as if I was a proponent of “Critical Race Theory” and, further, was improperly trying to use DEI (“Diversity, Equality and Inclusion”) as a weapon. He then said something I will never forget or forgive. He told me that he was well aware of my Native American heritage and that it was likely that my Native American heritage “helped” me get an appointment to my alma mater, the United States (military branch name withheld) Academy. He then asked me, if I had been of Japanese ancestry, whether I would have wanted to challenge Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s statement after Japan surrendered in World War 2 that he needed “1 million Christian bibles and 10,000 Christian missionaries to subdue and control the Japanese”? I was just so stunned by his racist attitude and dismissiveness! I was literally speechless. I was flabbergasted! That entire slide was so messed up and offensive! “Domesticate the Sioux Nation hostiles” sounded like the U.S. Cavalry viewed us as mere animals like “domesticating” feral dogs, cats or horses. And that statement about “Bring the Sioux Nation hostiles to the grace of Jesus Christ” was equally as offensive. All of it was wrong! Other members of our unit came up to me and apologized for what had happened as most folks are well aware of my Sioux heritage. I did some digging and found out that this “history expert” attends the same off base mega evangelical church as our unit commander. It seems likely that our sub-commander was trying to kiss up and curry favor perhaps with our unit commander by arranging this presentation but I don’t know for sure? I just know that I was completely humiliated. I spoke with my wife who was also shocked. She agreed with my decision to ask for help from Mr. Mikey Weinstein and the MRFF. I was well aware of the MRFF from my days as a (cadet or midshipman) at the Academy. Mikey shared our anger at what had gone down at that mandatory meeting. He immediately contacted our organizational commander and demanded punishment for what had occurred. I know that an internal investigation has been launched and that I am supposed to speak with the assigned investigating officer soon. In the meantime I have learned that the sub-commander has so far received “verbal counseling” for his role in this as well as the statements he made to me about CRT, DEI and my appointment to the Academy. I also understand that our unit commander has to date received some sort of “written counseling” for what happened. I hope there is more punishment to come but there is no guarantee. The MRFF is helping me file both IG and EEO complaints as well. I won’t let this unbelievably demeaning moment against my Sioux heritage go without a fight. And the MRFF is leading the way for us! Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF, my whole family and I thank you for being there for me and my family in this terrible matter. Please do not release any information which might identify me in this situation as my wife and I do not want to be on the business end of any sort of military organizational retaliation. (Active Duty Military Officer/MRFF Client’s name, rank, MOS/AFSC, assigned unit and installation all withheld)
In Memoriam:Enrolled Oglala Sioux Tribal Member,MRFF Advisory Board MemberEagle Man, Ed McGaa(1936 – 2017)
Captain McGaa (USMC, Ret.) was an enrolled Oglala Sioux tribal member, OST 15287. After serving in Korea, he earned an undergraduate degree from St. Johns University, MN. He then later rejoined the Marine Corps to become a fighter pilot. Captain McGaa, returned from 110 combat missions to dance in six annual Sioux Sun Dances. A Bush Award recipient, he studied under two Sioux holy men; Chief Eagle Feather and Chief Fools Crow and the interpreter for Black Elk Speaks, Ben Black Elk. Ed held a law degree from the University of South Dakota and was the author of twelve books; three of which were published by Harper Collins. Ed’s book, Mother Earth Spirituality, was reprinted 50 times. His biography, Warrior’s Odyssey, was published by Amazon. Captain McGaa was one of the very few to ever fly 5 combat missions in a row: “It was probably about a 12 hour period or less. Afternoon off, hot pad on, getting close to midnight. A small airstrip, probably for Helio Couriers was the battle area. The downed Spad and Skyhawk A-4, managed to crash land there near the downed H-46’s. Major Tom Duffy, later KIA, and I had to fight all afternoon following the 3rd mission. While I was being re-armed and fueled for the 4th mission at darkness, the Squadron C.O. pointed out that a new pilot going into those mountains bearing 37’s and 51’s would have been a death sentence. We heard that 3 missions were the limit, and you were pretty tired by then anyway. A lot of adrenaline goes into a bombing mission under fire and repeated passes. I could have said ‘No’ but the Skipper pointed out those bombs being loaded were life or death for those Marine grunts on board each H-46. I didn’t have much choice. Dark Death was out there – no question. Both the Commander flight surgeon with my Colonel saluted me when the plane captain signaled start up of my 2nd J-79 engine. That is when I yelled at my Skipper, “Colonel, can I have a drink waiting IF I get back?” They both saluted me again and nodded affirmatively. I had no idea I would somehow be able to do a 5th attempt after finding out one chopper load was overrun. Later we found out all aboard were murdered in the High Lands – no POW list. I returned and they handed my drink up to me via the Plane Captain’s ‘cigar box’ on a pole, it had to be loaded. When we saw the Skipper and the high ranking Navy commander standing near the revetments by the loading area with what looked like a big canteen cup (My requested drink), I told my RIO (rear seater-no controls) that no way could I go back out. It had to be loaded with something. They did pass it up to me but I did not commit myself – not until about the 3rd long drink. Suddenly, miraculously I was full of energy and went back out. We saved the 2nd helo. Gun ships and two H-46’s got in. The enemy battalion was thoroughly mauled.” Captain McGaa passed away in 2017.
MRFF Recommended Reading THE GUARDIAN Ex-US air force specialist with Christian nationalist ties leads combat trainings Michael Caughran’s history raises questions about extent to which his far-right and survivalist activities overlapped with his enlistment By: Jason Wilson Wednesday, August 14, 2024 “A former US air force survival expert with militia and Christian nationalist connections is running survival and live-fire combat trainings in remote locations throughout the Pacific north-west, boasting on his website that the training incorporates trained law enforcement officers, “church security” operatives, and current and former US military members.”
“MIkey Whineystein is a Communist turd!!!” From:(name withheld)Date: August 14, 2024 at 10:07:14 AM MDTTo: Mikey Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org>Subject: MIkey Whineystein is a Communist turd!!! Little penis Mikey Whineystein takes Gorge Soros money and sucks George Soros Communist penis!!! MIkey mother sucks Donkey dicks in Hell!!! WE ARE MANY, WE ARE LEGION, WE ARE ANONYMOUS.
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Thursday Evening, August 1, 2024
MRFF VICTORY!!!
FRAMED CHRISTIAN AMERICAN FLAGREMOVEDWITHIN 24 HOURS, DUE TO MRFFFROM SO-CALLED “HERITAGE DISPLAY” IN MILITARY INSTALLATION HQ BUILDING
“Without the MRFF’s aid this clearly illegal Christian American flag display would never have been removed. We all know thatthe MRFF takes the heat for all of us when it intervenes and our appreciation is both sincere and enormous. Thank you to the MRFF and Mr. Weinstein.Because we are in a highly secure area it was not possible to get a before and after photo…” Excerpt from letter to MRFF by— Senior Active Duty Officer and MRFF ClientChristian Flag for Illustrative Purposes added by MRFF Flying the Christian Flag in the face of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), our U.S. military once again proves they are in march step with the dangers of Project 2025 which are set to destroy DEI in the military. “Project 2025,”the MAGA-worshipping Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s dictatorship of Americawill allow carte blanche massive full-blown approval for U.S. Military Chaplains to minister any way they want! MRFF Matters – 8/1/24 – Mikey Weinstein on MRFF’s Victory over Christian Exclusivity by Having Framed Christian American Flag Removed. Click to watch (2:10) video
Letter From Senior Active Duty Officer and MRFFClient Expresses Gratitude for MRFF’s Swift Action in Effectuating the Removal of the Large, Framed “Christian American Flag” From Unit’s So-called “heritage display” in HQ Building Facility. From: (Senior Active Duty Officer/MRFF Client’s E-mail Address Withheld)Subject: Christian American Flag Removed by the MRFF’s Intervention: Long overdue thank youDate: July 31, 2024 at 7:34:21 AM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Mr. Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I apologize for not writing sooner with an expression of sincerest gratitude for the swift action of the MRFF Reps at our military installation and Mr. Mikey Weinstein for effectuating the removal of a large, framed “Christian American flag” from our unit’s so-called “Heritage Display” in our HQ building facility. Because we are in a highly secure area it was not possible to get a “before and after” photo which I know the MRFF wanted here. I am a senior officer in our unit and for the record am a Christian myself. I was the initial individual of many who reached out to our MRFF Reps and Mr. Weinstein for help. This framed Christian American flag looked like the regular American flag but had a red Christian cross over a dark blue background where the stars are normally located on the American flag we are all used to seeing. It was horrifying to see this as an integral part of this military heritage official display. We have troops of many faiths in our unit and also those who follow no faiths at all. It had been placed there in the midst of a display of the history of our unit’s storied combat history through the years. Our Command Chaplain had the idea which was enthusiastically endorsed by our Commander. As soon as it had been erected there was huge disapproval in our ranks about it. I and some others personally spoke with our Commander as to how wrong this display was but he had been convinced by our Command Chaplain and his own lackey Staff Judge Advocate (both extremely conservative, evangelical Christians) that the display was “completely legal’ as it was “only part of a historical representation” of our unit’s combat record through many years of military service. I tried to push back that it violated a number of regulations and the Constitution but got nowhere. You can push your Commander only so far. We needed help. Within 24 hours of asking for help from the MRFF, this framed “Christian American flag” was removed from the otherwise non-objectionable heritage display in the lobby of our HQ building facility. I had given our MRFF Reps the contact info to pass onto Mr. Weinstein for our Commander’s senior command chain. Mr. Weinstein had several direct conversations with them and the unconstitutional display was then removed immediately with no explanation at all by our Commander or his Command Chaplain nor SJA legal staff. This all went down a few months ago and I should have sent in a proper thank you note but most of us who reached out to the MRFF were expecting retaliation from our unit’s leaders. And, well, we just waited and probably too long. I got the silent treatment myself from the Commander for several weeks but things seemed to have settled down now. I guess I’ll have to await to see my fitness evaluation/report before I know for sure. Senior Active Duty Officer/MRFF Client’s ID Info All Withheld Click to Read in Inbox
Mikey Weinstein’s April 2024 Op-Ed on “Project 2025”
MRFF OP-ED “It’s Project 2025, Stupid” By: MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Back in 1992, political consultant James Carville coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” to help explain the essence of what was then at stake in the pending Presidential election between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Carville was intending to boil down to the most basic explanative brevity of the true grit of what that next election was all about. Today we face the brutal reality of an America more bitterly divided than at any time in its history, with the debatable exception of the Civil War. This existential chasm is literally tearing apart families, marriages, friendships, businesses, and every other type of human relationship extant in the United States today. If you’re not seeing that you’re either seriously impaired or asleep. Most voters are completely unaware of an impossibly wretched set of policy proposals developed by a slew of ignoble right-wing entities but spearheaded by the ultra-conservative, MAGA-worshipping Heritage Foundation. Ready? It’s called “Project 2025.” Its official name is “The Presidential Transition Project.” OK, are you tracking with me so far?! Before you do ANYthing else please, Please, PLEASE click the links in the next two paragraphs and, well, BEHOLD! Just LOOK at the mind-blowing hellscape of what is left of America if this wickedly evil, anti-Constitutional, anti-democratic, and wholly fundamentalist Christian nationalist screed, born from the ignominious depths of the shameful, stinking MAGA womb, is EVER allowed to be wielded like a flame thrower upon our nation’s way-too-naive-and-sedentary population. Project 2025 plans to purge the government of tens of thousands of non-MAGA personnel and replace them with MAGA loyalists are already well under way. The goal, according to a must-read Axios article, is (emphasis added) “to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.” The vetting process includes filling out Project 2025’s “Presidential Personnel Database & Presidential Administration Academy Questionnaire.” Prospective appointees will attend the “Presidential Administration Academy” to be ready “on Day One” to “immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” Project 2025’s plans for the military are equally sweeping, as laid out in the 920-page Project 2025 book Mandate for Leadership. Fundamentalist Christian chaplains will be unfettered in their proselytizing, the most senior flag officers (three and four stars) will be “instructed” to make sure they’re “not pursuing a social engineering agenda,” courses at the military academies will be audited “to remove Marxist indoctrination” and tenure for (presumably non-MAGA) professors will be eliminated. And, of course, the current policies that allow transgender individuals to serve will be reversed. We at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (mrff.org) fight ‘round-the-clock to prevent our nation’s military, its 18 intelligence agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Maritime Service from EVER being transformed into a fatal force multiplier for the blood-thirsty MAGA maniacs who developed and plan to implement Project 2025, fueled by the appalling propellant of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. And we at MRFF have been, are, and will continue to be the direct targets of the cowardly wrath of these same MAGA villains. (To this end, please see Margaret Atwood’s disturbingly dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale or the TV series of the same name streaming on Hulu). So, in the ensuing seven months before our next national elections, may I respectfully urge you to IMMEDIATELY take at least 300 to 600 seconds out of your busy day? Why? Because you MUST think about and deeply internalize NOW the beyond-shocking consequences to our country should Project 2025 ever be actualized by those who planned, developed and intend to implement it with unremitting fury and vengeance. Indeed, actualized well beyond that of the ugly lynch mob of “Unite the Right” racists and nazi-loving fascists and Christian nationalists displayed in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12 of 2017. It will savagely terminate justice, freedom, and democracy in America. It will turn our United States military into the quintessential MRFF nightmare of a zombie army of imperious, fundamentalist Christian crusaders. It will propel tyranny and despotism and autocracy and fascism. It will spew bigotry, misogyny, and hatred of “The Other” and prejudice writ unimaginably ginormous as newly bedrock U.S. policy. It will spell The End of all we know as decency and American freedoms as laid out in our precious U.S. Constitution. There is still some small amount of time left to spread the word and try to wake up our friends and family and acquaintances as to their, and our, pathetically putrid, pitiful, and deserved fate if we don’t all FIGHT like HELL to prevent Project 2025 from ever being birthed and then wielded like a berserk nuclear weapon by Christian extremist, MAGA monstrosities. The answer is beyond obvious lest we ever wonder why the America we all grew up in has pervertedly morphed into the murderously oppressive, repulsive, Christian nationalist country of “Gilead” in Atwood’s seminal book referenced above. It’s Project 2025, stupid!
Military superior tries to force Christian Vacation Bible School on his subordinate families
From: (Active Duty Enlisted Member’s/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Military superior tries to force Christian Vacation Bible School on his subordinate familiesDate: July 20, 2024 at 10:14:48 PM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Hello Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF Team here at (military installation name withheld) as well as all MRFF staff everywhere. Thank you all for getting some actual justice for us here against one of our superior officers who was trying to get us to pay his church to have our kids proselytized to his own Christian Faith. I am an active duty military enlisted service member and the leader of 32 fellow active duty service members who reached out for the MRFF’s help here recently at (military installation name withheld). Our assigned military unit is large and diverse as to ethnicity, faith and political views et al. One of our MRFF Reps here on base has helped me write this e-mail to MRFF so that other folks can see the abuses that went on here.
From: (Spouse of Active Duty Enlisted Member/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Thank you MRFF from our Jewish military familyDate: July 21, 2024 at 8:37:27 PM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Dear Mr. Mikey Weinstein and the MRFF, Mr. Weinstein thank you for taking both of my calls today. I am the wife of one of the 32 enlisted MRFF clients you all are representing at (military installation name withheld) in the matter of one of our unit’s most senior officers trying to force us all to have our children attend the Christian Vacation Bible School which he and his wife are teaching. As I mentioned to you in the second call today, our family is Jewish so this whole thing was particularly hurtful, painful and insulting to all of us. Especially when this officer mentioned that his Vacation Bible School can save the souls of the children even if the mom and dad’s souls can’t be saved. Just a terrible insult to our Jewish family and heritage and the families of the other 31 MRFF clients most of whom happen to be Christian.
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
Monday Afternoon, July 29, 2024
MRFF DEMANDS REMOVAL OF BIBLE AND CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST POSTER CREATED BY U.S. NAVY HISTORIAN FROM BUFFALO VAMC POW/MIA TABLE DISPLAY
A group of 11 veterans of various religions (including two Christians) and no religion has sought MRFF’s help to get a Christian Bible and a poster depicting a Christian Bible removed from the POW/MIA table display at the Buffalo, New York, VA Medical Center. The offending poster, showing a Bible with a large Christian crossas one of the table’s items, was created by the U.S. Navy’s official Naval History and Heritage Command and explains the presence of the Bible on the table in the language of Christian nationalism: “The Bible represents faith in a higher power and the pledge to our country, founded as one nation under God.” But that’s not the worst part of the poster. That distinction goes to the tag line under the title “The POW/MIA Table,” which says: “A Place Setting For One, A Table For All” No, U.S. Navy historian, a POW/MIA table with a Christian Bible on it is most certainly NOT “A Table For All”
Article heading on official Navy historian website, corrected by MRFF
MRFF OP-ED ONDAILY KOS Trending story on Daily Kos No, U.S. Navy historian, a POW/MIA table with a Christian Bible on it is NOT “A Table For All” By: MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda Monday, July 29, 2024
Last week, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation(MRFF) received the latest of the many e-mails we’ve gotten over the years from veterans who want the Christian Bibles removed from the POW/MIA, or “missing man,” tables in the VA medical facilities where they receive their medical care. MRFF has had numerous successes in getting these only-Christians-matter symbols of superiority removed from the POW/MIA tables in VA facilities. The latest Christianized POW/MIA table display that a group of veterans of various religions (including two Christians) and no religion has sought MRFF’s help with is this one in the cafeteria at the Buffalo, New York, VA Medical Center.
In addition to the photo of the table itself, the veteran who sent MRFF the photos also sent a photo of the large poster next to the table, which prominently shows a Bible with a large cross on it as one of the table’s items.
As I’ve written on previous occasions, a Bible was NOT a part of the original missing man table tradition begun by combat fighter pilots during the Vietnam War. Neither was it a part of the American Legion’s version when it passed a resolution in 1985 to set a POW/MIA table at its events. No, the Bible was not part of these table displays until over three decades after the tradition was begun, when the VFW Ladies Auxiliary published a script for the setting of the table in a 1999 issue of its magazine, adding a Bible to the table’s items. This was quickly followed by the National League of POW/MIA Families putting out a script for the setting of the table that was almost identical to the one published in the 1999 issue of the VFW Ladies Auxiliary magazine, including the addition of the Bible. Unfortunately, many people, apparently including the U.S. Navy’s historian, now wrongly believe that the National League of POW/MIA Families version is the original tradition and that the Bible they added has always been part of the table display. Following the National League of POW/MIA Families script explaining the significance of each of the table’s items, the poster created by the U.S. Navy’s official Naval History and Heritage Command, which sits next to the table at the Buffalo, New York, VA Medical Center, explains the presence of the Bible in a nice Christian nationalistic historical revisionist way (emphasis added):
“The Bible represents faith in a higher power and the pledge to our country, founded as one nation under God.”
But that’s not the worst part of the poster. That distinction goes to the tag line at the top of the poster under the words “The POW/MIA Table,” which says (emphasis added):
“A Place Setting For One, A Table For All”
How on earth is a POW/MIA table with a great big Christian Bible on it “A Table For All”? It is most certainly not for all! It is only for Christians and patently dishonors every non-Christian POW and MIA as well as all the non-Christian veterans who have to see it staring them in the face at their VA medical facility. Another thing that struck us about the photo of this table at the Buffalo VA Medical Center was how big the Bible is and that this already very large Bible is taking up twice as much space by being open. And this isn’t even the biggest one we’ve seen. In recent years these Bibles have been getting so big and taking up so much of the POW-MIA tables that if a missing man were to return they wouldn’t have room to eat, as said in the title of a post back in January about the Bible in this next photo.
Although no Bible of any size should be on these tables in any VA or DoD facility, the enormous size of some of them, which is usually accompanied by their being prominently and dominantly placed at the front of the display, takes their offensiveness and disrespect to a new level, making these table displays more of a tribute to the Christian religion than to the POWs and MIAs that they’re supposed to honor. Now, shuffling back to Buffalo (sorry, couldn’t resist), Mikey Weinstein has sent one of his meek and mild letters to Michael J. Swartz, the Healthcare System Director for the VA Western New York Health Care, of which the Buffalo facility is a part, demanding that the Bible, which is in clear violation of VA regulations, be removed. […]
MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein’s e-mail to Michael J. Swartz, Healthcare System Director, VA Western New York Health Care, demanding that the Bible and poster be removed from the POW/MIA table display at the Buffalo VA Medical Center
From: Michael L Weinstein <mikeyw4444@icloud.com>Subject: Egregious Constitutional Civil Rights Violations Under Your LeadershipDate: July 24, 2024 at 2:03:45 PM MDTTo: Michael SwartzCc: Tanya J. Bradsher, Philippe Jaoude, Samantha Gugenberge, Royce Calhoun, Danielle Bergman, fFrancesca Lee Michael J. SwartzHealthcare System DirectorVA Western New York Health Care716-862-8529 RE: Healthcare System Director Swartz, on behalf of its 11 military veteran client patients at your Buffalo, New York VAMC facility, MRFF demands that you immediately remove the illicit, unconstitutional Christian Bible from the referenced POW/MIA “Missing Man Table” in the Medical Center’s cafeteria as well as the sign showing a Bible with a Christian cross in the facility’s cafeteria, which is under your personal control and direction. (See explicit photographs at bottom of this demand letter; All right, title and interest in those photographs belong to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation) Dear Healthcare System Director Michael J. Swartz, My name is Mikey Weinstein, and I am the head of a large civil rights organization called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF, https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org). MRFF currently represents just over 89,000 active duty, reserve, National Guard, and military veteran clients as well as many clients among the 18 national security agencies and DHS (Coast Guard) and DOT (U.S. Maritime Service). MRFF’s specific mission is to protect the constitutionally-mandated wall separating church and state in the above-referenced governmental venues. MRFF has been retained by 11 honorable military veterans who are also patients under your direct leadership as Healthcare System Director, VA Western New York Health Care. Of these 11 honorable American military veteran patients/MRFF clients, 2 are practicing Christians (1 Protestant and 1 Roman Catholic), 2 practice the Jewish faith, 2 practice the Islamic faith, 1 practices the Hindu faith, 1 is a Buddhist, and 3 follow non-faith traditions. Healthcare System Director Swartz, I won’t belabor the point here. The POW/MIA “Missing Man Table” in your Buffalo, New York, VA Medical Center has a very large sectarian Christian Bible prominently displayed on it to the utter exclusion of any other religious faith or non-faith traditions. In addition to this extremely large, open Christian Bible, which takes up nearly half of the table and dominates the display, an impossible-to-miss sign next to the table explaining the table’s items also prominently shows a Bible with a large Christian cross on it. **Please see the e-mail below my signature in this demand letter from one of our 11 MRFF client complainants on this sordid matter, which provides excellent detail (including explicit photographs) as to the scurrilous, unconstitutional violations occurring under your specific direction, sir. Healthcare System Director Swartz, your allowing this sectarian display to promote and proselytize Christianity and ONLY Christianity is an atrocious and singularly ignominious act of illicit, unconstitutional Christian supremacy, exclusivity, triumphalism, and exceptionalism. It flagrantly violates not only the No Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and its construing caselaw but your own VA regulations as well. The display of Christian proselytizing material as the sole religious item in a VA medical center display is in clear violation of the VA’s own regulations and policies regarding religious displays, which state that a display “should not elevate one belief system over others,” such as VA Directive 0022, “Religious Symbols in VA Facilities,” January 31, 2020, (emphasis added): 2. POLICY. Religious symbols may be included in a passive display, including a holiday display, in public areas of VA facilities (see subsection a. below), if the display is of the type that follows in the longstanding tradition of monuments, symbols and practices that simply recognize the important role that religion plays in the lives of many Americans. Such displays should respect and tolerate differing views and should not elevate one belief system over others. … b. VA is committed to inclusivity and nondiscrimination and evaluates all displays in public areas on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the policy stated above. VA particularly encourages the placement of diverse religious symbols together in passive displays in public areas. This display of a Christian Bible would not even be allowed as a permanent display in a VA facility chapel, let alone a highly visible, public space as it is on this POW-MIA table. VA medical facility chapels are required to be “religiously neutral” at all times when there is not an actual service taking place for a particular faith group, as is clearly stated in VHA Directive 1111, “Spiritual Care,” July 21, 2021 (emphasis added): 9. CHAPELS AND OTHER WORSHIP FACILITIES a. Chapels. The chapel, or a room set aside exclusively for use as a chapel, must be reserved for patients’ spiritual activities, such as: worship, prayer, meditation and quiet contemplation. Such chapels are appointed and maintained as places for meditation and worship. When VA chaplains are not providing or facilitating a religious service for a particular faith group, the chapel must be maintained as religiously neutral, meaning it cannot be viewed as endorsing one religion over another. Religious literature, content and symbols must be made readily accessible to VA patients and visitors in a chapel or Chaplain Service office at their request. The only exception to the policy on maintaining chapels as religiously neutral are the chapels at VA medical facilities which were built with permanent religious symbols in the walls or windows. In these cases, the VA medical facility Director must also designate an appropriately sized room or construct a religiously neutral chapel, which is maintained in accordance with this VHA directive and VA Space Planning Criteria … So you can better understand the history of sectarian Christian Bibles placed on these “Missing Man Table” displays, please take a good look at this article by MRFF’s Senior Research Director Ms. Chris Rodda: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/Bibles-dont-belong-on-pow-remembrance-tables Additionally, here is a useful timeline for your further review as well, clearly showing that a Christian Bible on the “Missing Man Table” was NEVER a part of the original “Missing Man Table” POW/MIA table tradition and was not added until over three decades afterward: 1967 – The POW/MIA table tradition was created by the Red River Fighter Pilots Association, an association of Vietnam combat pilots informally known as the “River Rats.” They began the tradition in May of 1967 at a meeting at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand, held by a group of pilots to discuss ways to prevent so many pilots from being shot down and captured. The original tradition created by the River Rats at this meeting did not include a Bible among the table’s items. 1985 – The American Legion passed a resolution to set a POW/MIA table at its events. In its official chaplains manual, the American Legion listed the items to be placed on the table. In keeping with the original tradition, a Bible was not among the items in the American Legion’s version. This was the version that became the standard, and is still widely used today. 1999 – The VFW Ladies Auxiliary published a script for the setting of the POW/MIA table in a 1999 issue of its magazine, adding a Bible to the table’s items. This is the earliest evidence of a Bible being added to the table. c. 2000 – The National League of POW/MIA Families put out a script for the setting of the POW/MIA table that was almost identical to the one published in the 1999 issue of the VFW Ladies Auxiliary magazine, including the addition of the Bible. The National League of POW/MIA Families script first appeared on the organization’s website in 2000. This new National League of POW/MIA Families version, created over three decades after the original, Bible-free tradition was begun by the River Rats, is now wrongly thought by many to be the original tradition, and has led many to think that a Bible has always been included on POW/MIA tables and that it was the National League of POW/MIA Families that originated the tradition. Thus, Healthcare System Director Swartz, on behalf of its 11 military veteran client patients at your Buffalo, New York, VA Medical Center facility, MRFF demands that you immediately remove the illicit, unconstitutional Christian Bible from the from the referenced POW/MIA “Missing Man Table” display as well as the sign showing a Bible with a Christian cross in the facility’s cafeteria, which is under your personal control and direction. We await your timely response. Sincerely, Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq.Founder and PresidentMilitary Religious Freedom Foundation505-250-7727
From: (Retired Senior U.S. Military Officer’s name and e-mail withheld)Subject: Buffalo VA Medical Center POW/MIA tableDate: July 23, 2024 at 10:30:05 AM MDTTo: mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org Dear Mikey I am a retired, senior military officer. On the morning of July 19th, 2024, I had the privilege of receiving care at the Buffalo New York VA Medical Center. As always, the staff was caring and competent. After my appointment, I went to the cafeteria as it was close to noon. In the cafeteria, there as a POW/MIA Missing Man Table. (picture attached). I was hurt and disappointed to see an open, new testament Bible on the table. The presence of this Bible, which does not represent my faith, seemed to negate and ignore the sacrifice and legitimacy of our uniformed services men and women of other faiths, or of no specific religious belief, who sacrificed or devoted their lives for our freedoms. Next to the POW/MIA table was a poster that explained the contents of the table. As you can see by the attached picture of this poster, there is not only a Bible displayed, but the Bible has a large cross on it. That is when my feelings of disappointment turned to anger. This outrageous poster actively excludes all those of other faiths or viewpoints. I was reminded of the words of Elie Weisel, Nobel laureate and Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps: “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it is indifference. The opposite of faith is nor heresy, it is indifference. The opposite of life is not death, it is indifference.” To me, this poster is a display of indifference. It is insulting and hurtful. This should not be allowed in any VA Medical Center. Kindly delete my name from any reference to this letter, as I receive certain aspects of my care at the Buffalo VA Medical Center and I do not want to cause any relationship problems nor public exposure of my identity. Respectfully, (Retired Senior U.S. Military Officer’s name, rank, and service branch withheld)
Previous MRFF successes getting Bibles removed or replaced on POW/MIA tables at VA facilities and military installations
Received via snail mail News Flash: George Washington led his army in prayer, You sir have demons who hate God and the Blood of Jesus Action: Repent or perish We love you enough to warn you and tell you the truth
(Sender’s name and address redacted)
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Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
MRFF ACTION LEADS TO PUNISHMENTFOR OFFICER WHO RELENTLESSLY DOGGEDSUBORDINATES TO SEND THEIR KIDS TOVACATION BIBLE SCHOOL TAUGHT BY HIM
“He would just not stop trying to sell us on this Vacation Bible School crap at every mandatory unit meeting we were having. It felt like he was stalking us all. He spoke constantly about ‘the evil work of the devil in this world’ and made a special point to invite the non-Christians in our unit to have their kids attend to ‘save their souls even if mom and dad refuse to be saved.’” “Everything started moving fast as soon as our combat unit’s quarterly performance awards were announced just a couple weeks ago in early July at another mandatory unit assembly. There are 5 different awards and all 5 ‘coincidentally’ went to military members who had their kids attend our senior officer and his wife’s Vacation Bible School.” — Excerpts from MRFF client e-mail
MRFF Matters – 7/23/24 – MRFF’s Win Vs. Commander Pushing OWN Vacation Bible School on Subordinates
MRFF OP-ED ONDAILY KOS Trending story on Daily Kos Officer who relentlessly harassed subordinates to send kids to his Vacation Bible School punished By: MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Vacation Bible School (VBS) has been a staple of Christian churches for well over a century in the civilian world and in recent decades has also become ubiquitous at military base chapels. Every summer, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) receives quite a few inquiries from service members, particularly those with children, about the VBS programs on their bases and whether or not these programs are constitutional. The short answer is yes, they are. As long as these VBS programs are run and advertised solely by the chapel, are completely voluntary, and are free from any coercion or pressure on military parents to send their children, there is no problem. In MRFF’s two decades of defending and protecting the religious freedom of our men and women in uniform, we have rarely come across a VBS program that violated either military regulations or the Constitution in any way. This year, however, we have a doozy of a Vacation Bible School story — a story of appalling “abuse,” as one of MRFF’s clients called it, by one of the most senior officers in a large military unit. This fine Christian officer relentlessly hounded his subordinates for months to sign their children up for Vacation Bible School — not a base chapel Vacation Bible School but the Vacation Bible School that he personally teaches at his off-base church. As one of MRFF’s clients, writing on behalf of 32 service members in this unit who reached out to MRFF for help, explained:
“In mid-May of this year one of our military combat unit’s most senior officers started “advising” us at official unit meetings to be sure to get our kids into Christian Vacation Bible School this summer. Not just any such Vacation Bible School but the one that our senior superior officer and his wife were personally teaching at their off base evangelical megachurch.”
But wait. There’s more. The subordinates of this predatory proselytizer of an officer would have to pay for the privilege of their children attending his VBS, as MRFF’s client continued in their e-mail:
“Oh and by the way as if this wan’t all messed up enough, there was a ‘suggested tithe offering’ (aka tuition for Vacation Bible School) of $90 per kid! For most of us that amount of money was just way too much even if we had wanted our children to attend.”
MRFF’s client also gave us a sampling of this odious officer’s sales pitch lines for his VBS, delivered at mandatory unit meetings (emphasis added):
“In trying to get us to submit to his never ending pressure this senior officer would say stuff like ‘public school tries and always fails to prepare your kids for life (he and his wife home school their own kids of course) but our Vacation Bible School prepares them for the afterlife.’ He would just not stop trying to sell us on this Vacation Bible School crap at every mandatory unit meeting we were having. It felt like he was stalking us all. He spoke constantly about “the evil work of the devil in this world” and made a special point to invite the non-Christians in our unit to have their kids attend to ‘save their souls even if mom and dad refuse to be saved.’”
And, then, as MRFF’s client wrote, to top it all off, unit members who did send their children to their superior officer’s Jesus Camp were rewarded professionally for their Christian conformity:
“Everything started moving fast as soon as our combat unit’s quarterly performance awards were announced just a couple weeks ago in early July at another mandatory unit assembly. There are 5 different awards and all 5 ‘coincidentally’ went to military members who had their kids attend our senior officer and his wife’s Vacation Bible School.”
By the time it was announced that all of the unit’s quarterly performance awards were being given to service members who had sent their kids to the offending officer’s VBS, MRFF’s base reps and Mikey Weinstein had already been involved for several weeks, and, as a result, not only did this sorry excuse of a military officer receive a written reprimand in his official personnel file but, as the leader of MRFF’s 32 clients wrote in the email below, “the quarterly awards for last quarter have just now been suspended indefinitely until further notice pending additional investigation.”
From: (Active Duty Enlisted Member’s/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Military superior tries to force Christian Vacation Bible School on his subordinate familiesDate: July 20, 2024 at 10:14:48 PM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Hello Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF Team here at (military installation name withheld) as well as all MRFF staff everywhere. Thank you all for getting some actual justice for us here against one of our superior officers who was trying to get us to pay his church to have our kids proselytized to his own Christian Faith. I am an active duty military enlisted service member and the leader of 32 fellow active duty service members who reached out for the MRFF’s help here recently at (military installation name withheld). Our assigned military unit is large and diverse as to ethnicity, faith and political views et al. One of our MRFF Reps here on base has helped me write this e-mail to MRFF so that other folks can see the abuses that went on here. I was raised Catholic but converted to Baptist after I married my wife. We are raising our kids Baptist. We have 23 other Christian service members in our MRFF client group here besides me and several Jewish, Muslim, Hindu service members along with some atheists and agnostics. I am asking that MRFF please continue to protect all of our identities so that none of the 32 of us who asked the MRFF for help will suffer any reprisal or blowback. In mid-May of this year one of our military combat unit’s most senior officers started “advising” us at official unit meetings to be sure to get our kids into Christian Vacation Bible School this summer. Not just any such Vacation Bible School but the one that our senior superior officer and his wife were personally teaching at their off base evangelical megachurch. Oh and by the way as if this wasn’t all messed up enough, there was a “suggested tithe offering” (aka tuition for Vacation Bible School) of $90 per kid! For most of us that amount of money was just way too much even if we had wanted our children to attend. In trying to get us to submit to his never ending pressure this senior officer would say stuff like “public school tries and always fails to prepare your kids for life (he and his wife home school their own kids of course) but our Vacation Bible School prepares them for the afterlife.” He would just not stop trying to sell us on this Vacation Bible School crap at every mandatory unit meeting we were having. It felt like he was stalking us all. He spoke constantly about “the evil work of the devil in this world” and made a special point to invite the non-Christians in our unit to have their kids attend to “save their souls even if mom and dad refuse to be saved”. I could tell you many other jacked up things he said about all of this but I want to keep this short. We never had a clue whether this officer’s own superior chain of command knew what he was doing to us or even gave a shit if they did know? We contacted Mr. Weinstein through one of our base MRFF Reps. Mr. Weinstein spent a good amount of time learning what had happened to us and explained how serious it was that our senior officer was violating our civil rights. Mr Weinstein then contacted our senior leadership and worked with us to cause an official unit investigation to happen. It took some weeks. Mr Weinstein and our base MRFF Reps were with us each step of the way. Everything started moving fast as soon as our combat unit’s quarterly performance awards were announced just a couple weeks ago in early July at another mandatory unit assembly. There are 5 different awards and all 5 “coincidentally” went to military members who had their kids attend our senior officer and his wife’s Vacation Bible School. I can tell you that Mr. Weinstein was in contact immediately again with our most senior leadership when the 5 quarterly awards were publicly announced. He made it clear that there was an obvious cloud over the awardees given the situation with our senior officer’s Vacation Bible School pressure tactics. Mr Weinstein demanded punishment for our senior officer who ran the Vacation Bible School with his wife. Last week our unit was informed at another mandatory meeting that the quarterly awards for last quarter have just now been suspended indefinitely until further notice pending additional investigation. In the meantime our base MRFF Reps and Mr. Weinstein are working with us to file EEO and IG complaints about all of this bullshit. We have heard and confirmed that this particular senior officer has now received a written reprimand in his official (military branch name withheld) personnel file over his nonstop stalking and pressure tactics to get our kids into his Vacation Bible School. While this is something very positive we wish there had been greater adverse action taken against this senior officer. As Mr. Weinstein said, “had some of the facts here changed so that this was a Muslim commander trying to force you to place your kids in ‘Vacation Quran School’ at his mosque there would have been a literal bloodbath in protest.” I cannot give anymore detail on this without revealing information that might identify us to our (military branch name withheld) chain of command who would likely punish all 32 of us for requesting the MRFF’s intervention in the first place. We are hearing some shit talk going around that whoever among our unit’s members complained are “traitors” and “bad troops” for going to the MRFF. They accuse the MRFF of being a “woke commie group of America haters.” Some of them also seriously bad mouth Mr. Weinstein for causing all the trouble here. Which is completely false! He is the one who fixed it! We want to fight back but fear that we will out ourselves if we do. Eventually at least some of our names will probably be known as being clients of the MRFF here. We’re ok with it and we’ll cross that bridge if and when. I just wish to say on behalf of all 32 of us here at (military installation name withheld) how much we are forever grateful to our own base MRFF Reps and Mr. Weinstein and all of the MRFF for stopping this senior officer’s unconstitutional Christian proselytizing of us and our families and especially our own children! We had nowhere to turn to until we got the MRFF on this case and the MRFFhas won it for all of us! We know and trust that the MRFF will have our backs if our chain or anyone else tries to target us for revenge of any kind. Our families have been tormented by all of this and the only bright light has been the quick and forceful action of the MRFF! (Active Duty Enlisted Member’s/MRFF Client’s name, rank, MOS/AFSC, assigned military unit and installation all withheld)
What this officer put his unit through with his relentless proselytizing and pressure on his subordinates to send their kids to his Vacation Bible School affected not only the service members in the unit but also their families, as so many of the issues MRFF deals with do. This next e-mail, with the subject line “Thank you MRFF from our Jewish military family,” is from the wife of one of the 32 service members, thanking MRFF for “caring so strongly about our military service personnel of all and no faiths and their families when nobody else apparently gives a damn.”
From: (Spouse of Active Duty Enlisted Member/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Thank you MRFF from our Jewish military familyDate: July 21, 2024 at 8:37:27 PM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Dear Mr. Mikey Weinstein and the MRFF, Mr. Weinstein thank you for taking both of my calls today. I am the wife of one of the 32 enlisted MRFF clients you all are representing at (military installation name withheld) in the matter of one of our unit’s most senior officers trying to force us all to have our children attend the Christian Vacation Bible School which he and his wife are teaching. As I mentioned to you in the second call today, our family is Jewish so this whole thing was particularly hurtful, painful and insulting to all of us. Especially when this officer mentioned that his Vacation Bible School can save the souls of the children even if the mom and dad’s souls can’t be saved. Just a terrible insult to our Jewish family and heritage and the families of the other 31 MRFF clients most of whom happen to be Christian. My family is still very hurt and damaged over this whole matter and we can’t thank our local base MRFF Reps enough and Mr. Weinstein as the leader of the MRFF for getting this senior officer punished and our most recent unit quarterly awards suspended per ongoing investigation. Thanks so very much to the MRFF for caring so strongly about our military service personnel of all and no faiths and their families when nobody else apparently gives a damn. (Spouse of Active Duty Enlisted Member/MRFF Client’s name, phone number, and address withheld)
Secularists are calling on the Government of BC to reverse a recently announced partnership between BC Builds and a Burnaby church that opposes same-sex marriage.
On Monday, the Government announced its support for The Neighbourhood Church’s plans to build a 45-storey apartment complex. The building will include a new church and the 430 units will be rented at $2,100 to $3,800 monthly.
BC Builds is an initiative by the provincial government to provide low-interest repayable loans and grants to other levels of government and non-profits to deliver more housing.
The Neighbourhood Church’s Pastor Cam Roxburgh is VP Missional Initiatives with the North American Baptist Conference (NAB). The NAB’s “affirmation of marriage” defines marriage as between “a man and woman” and condemns “sexual intercourse outside of marriage, promiscuity, common law relationships, adultery, homosexual acts…”
“Those of us that take the covenantal view, which is the typical evangelical view or typical of Christians, is that intercourse is left for marriage between a husband and wife.”
Ian Bushfield, Executive Director, BC Humanist Association (BCHA):
“This announcement sets a troubling precedent where British Columbians are paying for a new sanctuary and apartment building that will be owned and operated by a church that thinks common law and same-sex relationships are sinful. Even worse, we don’t know how much money we’re on the hook for!
“At the very least, voters deserve to know what guarantees BC Builds has that these units – and the touted community space – will be available to all residents without discrimination.”
The Government has not provided specific details about its support for the Church’s housing project, pending a rezoning application that will be made to Burnaby City Council.
The BCHA has called on the government to ensure that public funds only support secular projects.
The small city of Rossland in the West Kootenays voted last month to tax some vacant land around the local Catholic Church.
We’ve talked a lot about permissive tax exemptions in the past. Provincial laws require that places of public worship are exempt, but your council has the authority to decide whether other property held by a religious organization is subject to property taxes.
Every dollar of foregone revenue from these exemptions has to be shouldered by homeowners and local businesses.
We’ve found that most communities grant these additional exemptions but more are questioning their broader benefits.
The Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church had requested an exemption for the vacant land (in red) around its building, which is automatically exempt. That land was assessed at about $140,000 and subject to $1,368 in taxes annually without the exemption. That would increase to $1,600 by 2027, resulting in roughly $4,500 in taxes over three years.
The land subject to taxes is highlighted in red.
The impact of the permissive tax exemption.
In its application for the exemption, the Church noted that its property is not rented out and is used exclusively for worship, pastoral care and religious education of its members. They also maintain the local Catholic cemetery.
Ultimately, council voted against the request.
The motion to grant the church’s request for a permissive tax exemption was defeated.
These case studies show councils responding to the tight fiscal challenges they face. Unwilling to increase the tax burden of existing residents, they’re starting to rein in tax exemptions to save a few dollars.
Learning from these examples, we’re developing model bylaws for councils to adopt to apply stricter benefits tests to potential permissive exemption applicants. Support our work by becoming a member or making a donation today.
The BC Humanist Association is renewing its call for legislatures to end the practice of opening each day’s sitting with prayers following a new poll that found a majority of Canadians would prefer a moment of silent reflection or nothing.
Between July 24 and 26, Research Co asked 1,000 Canadians in an online panel: “As you may know, some provincial legislatures begin their sessions with moments of silent reflection, non-denominational prayers, and/or Christian prayers. Which of the following options would you prefer to begin sessions in the provincial legislature?”
39% said a moment of silent reflection
13% said a non-denominational prayer
19% said a Christian prayer
22% said none of the above
8% said not sure
The margin of error is +/- 3.1%, nineteen times out of twenty.
Ian Bushfield, Executive Director, BC Humanist Association:
Three in five Canadians support ending legislative prayers and would replace it with a moment of silence or nothing at all. This was consistent across every demographic.
Support for replacing prayers is strongest among women (65%), those 55+ (64%), Quebecers (66%) and federal Liberal voters (70%).
Bushfield:
Not only is ending legislative prayers popular, doing so would make our legislatures consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that prayers at municipal council meetings are an unconstitutional breach of the state’s duty of religious neutrality. However, the Court didn’t address whether its ruling applied to Parliament and provincial legislatures.
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
MRFF VICTORY!!!
FRAMED CHRISTIAN AMERICAN FLAGREMOVEDWITHIN 24 HOURS, DUE TO MRFFFROM SO-CALLED “HERITAGE DISPLAY” IN MILITARY INSTALLATION HQ BUILDING
“Without the MRFF’s aid this clearly illegal Christian American flag display would never have been removed. We all know thatthe MRFF takes the heat for all of us when it intervenes and our appreciation is both sincere and enormous. Thank you to the MRFF and Mr. Weinstein.Because we are in a highly secure area it was not possible to get a before and after photo…” Excerpt from letter to MRFF by— Senior Active Duty Officer and MRFF ClientChristian Flag for Illustrative Purposes added by MRFF Flying the Christian Flag in the face of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), our U.S. military once again proves they are in march step with the dangers of Project 2025 which are set to destroy DEI in the military. “Project 2025,”the MAGA-worshipping Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s dictatorship of Americawill allow carte blanche massive full-blown approval for U.S. Military Chaplains to minister any way they want! MRFF Matters – 8/1/24 – Mikey Weinstein on MRFF’s Victory over Christian Exclusivity by Having Framed Christian American Flag Removed. Click to watch (2:10) video
Letter From Senior Active Duty Officer and MRFF Client Expresses Gratitude for MRFF’s Swift Action in Effectuating the Removal of the Large, Framed “Christian American Flag” From Unit’s So-called “heritage display” in HQ Building Facility. From: (Senior Active Duty Officer/MRFF Client’s E-mail Address Withheld)Subject: Christian American Flag Removed by the MRFF’s Intervention: Long overdue thank youDate: July 31, 2024 at 7:34:21 AM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Mr. Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I apologize for not writing sooner with an expression of sincerest gratitude for the swift action of the MRFF Reps at our military installation and Mr. Mikey Weinstein for effectuating the removal of a large, framed “Christian American flag” from our unit’s so-called “Heritage Display” in our HQ building facility. Because we are in a highly secure area it was not possible to get a “before and after” photo which I know the MRFF wanted here. I am a senior officer in our unit and for the record am a Christian myself. I was the initial individual of many who reached out to our MRFF Reps and Mr. Weinstein for help. This framed Christian American flag looked like the regular American flag but had a red Christian cross over a dark blue background where the stars are normally located on the American flag we are all used to seeing. It was horrifying to see this as an integral part of this military heritage official display. We have troops of many faiths in our unit and also those who follow no faiths at all. It had been placed there in the midst of a display of the history of our unit’s storied combat history through the years. Our Command Chaplain had the idea which was enthusiastically endorsed by our Commander. As soon as it had been erected there was huge disapproval in our ranks about it. I and some others personally spoke with our Commander as to how wrong this display was but he had been convinced by our Command Chaplain and his own lackey Staff Judge Advocate (both extremely conservative, evangelical Christians) that the display was “completely legal’ as it was “only part of a historical representation” of our unit’s combat record through many years of military service. I tried to push back that it violated a number of regulations and the Constitution but got nowhere. You can push your Commander only so far. We needed help. Within 24 hours of asking for help from the MRFF, this framed “Christian American flag” was removed from the otherwise non-objectionable heritage display in the lobby of our HQ building facility. I had given our MRFF Reps the contact info to pass onto Mr. Weinstein for our Commander’s senior command chain. Mr. Weinstein had several direct conversations with them and the unconstitutional display was then removed immediately with no explanation at all by our Commander or his Command Chaplain nor SJA legal staff. This all went down a few months ago and I should have sent in a proper thank you note but most of us who reached out to the MRFF were expecting retaliation from our unit’s leaders. And, well, we just waited and probably too long. I got the silent treatment myself from the Commander for several weeks but things seemed to have settled down now. I guess I’ll have to await to see my fitness evaluation/report before I know for sure. Senior Active Duty Officer/MRFF Client’s ID Info All Withheld Click to Read in Inbox
Mikey Weinstein’s April 2024 Op-Ed on “Project 2025”
MRFF OP-ED “It’s Project 2025, Stupid” By: MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Back in 1992, political consultant James Carville coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” to help explain the essence of what was then at stake in the pending Presidential election between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Carville was intending to boil down to the most basic explanative brevity of the true grit of what that next election was all about. Today we face the brutal reality of an America more bitterly divided than at any time in its history, with the debatable exception of the Civil War. This existential chasm is literally tearing apart families, marriages, friendships, businesses, and every other type of human relationship extant in the United States today. If you’re not seeing that you’re either seriously impaired or asleep. Most voters are completely unaware of an impossibly wretched set of policy proposals developed by a slew of ignoble right-wing entities but spearheaded by the ultra-conservative, MAGA-worshipping Heritage Foundation. Ready? It’s called “Project 2025.” Its official name is “The Presidential Transition Project.” OK, are you tracking with me so far?! Before you do ANYthing else please, Please, PLEASE click the links in the next two paragraphs and, well, BEHOLD! Just LOOK at the mind-blowing hellscape of what is left of America if this wickedly evil, anti-Constitutional, anti-democratic, and wholly fundamentalist Christian nationalist screed, born from the ignominious depths of the shameful, stinking MAGA womb, is EVER allowed to be wielded like a flame thrower upon our nation’s way-too-naive-and-sedentary population. Project 2025 plans to purge the government of tens of thousands of non-MAGA personnel and replace them with MAGA loyalists are already well under way. The goal, according to a must-read Axios article, is (emphasis added) “to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.” The vetting process includes filling out Project 2025’s “Presidential Personnel Database & Presidential Administration Academy Questionnaire.” Prospective appointees will attend the “Presidential Administration Academy” to be ready “on Day One” to “immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” Project 2025’s plans for the military are equally sweeping, as laid out in the 920-page Project 2025 book Mandate for Leadership. Fundamentalist Christian chaplains will be unfettered in their proselytizing, the most senior flag officers (three and four stars) will be “instructed” to make sure they’re “not pursuing a social engineering agenda,” courses at the military academies will be audited “to remove Marxist indoctrination” and tenure for (presumably non-MAGA) professors will be eliminated. And, of course, the current policies that allow transgender individuals to serve will be reversed. We at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (mrff.org) fight ‘round-the-clock to prevent our nation’s military, its 18 intelligence agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Maritime Service from EVER being transformed into a fatal force multiplier for the blood-thirsty MAGA maniacs who developed and plan to implement Project 2025, fueled by the appalling propellant of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. And we at MRFF have been, are, and will continue to be the direct targets of the cowardly wrath of these same MAGA villains. (To this end, please see Margaret Atwood’s disturbingly dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale or the TV series of the same name streaming on Hulu). So, in the ensuing seven months before our next national elections, may I respectfully urge you to IMMEDIATELY take at least 300 to 600 seconds out of your busy day? Why? Because you MUST think about and deeply internalize NOW the beyond-shocking consequences to our country should Project 2025 ever be actualized by those who planned, developed and intend to implement it with unremitting fury and vengeance. Indeed, actualized well beyond that of the ugly lynch mob of “Unite the Right” racists and nazi-loving fascists and Christian nationalists displayed in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12 of 2017. It will savagely terminate justice, freedom, and democracy in America. It will turn our United States military into the quintessential MRFF nightmare of a zombie army of imperious, fundamentalist Christian crusaders. It will propel tyranny and despotism and autocracy and fascism. It will spew bigotry, misogyny, and hatred of “The Other” and prejudice writ unimaginably ginormous as newly bedrock U.S. policy. It will spell The End of all we know as decency and American freedoms as laid out in our precious U.S. Constitution. There is still some small amount of time left to spread the word and try to wake up our friends and family and acquaintances as to their, and our, pathetically putrid, pitiful, and deserved fate if we don’t all FIGHT like HELL to prevent Project 2025 from ever being birthed and then wielded like a berserk nuclear weapon by Christian extremist, MAGA monstrosities. The answer is beyond obvious lest we ever wonder why the America we all grew up in has pervertedly morphed into the murderously oppressive, repulsive, Christian nationalist country of “Gilead” in Atwood’s seminal book referenced above. It’s Project 2025, stupid!
Military superior tries to force Christian Vacation Bible School on his subordinate families
From: (Active Duty Enlisted Member’s/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Military superior tries to force Christian Vacation Bible School on his subordinate familiesDate: July 20, 2024 at 10:14:48 PM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Hello Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF Team here at (military installation name withheld) as well as all MRFF staff everywhere. Thank you all for getting some actual justice for us here against one of our superior officers who was trying to get us to pay his church to have our kids proselytized to his own Christian Faith. I am an active duty military enlisted service member and the leader of 32 fellow active duty service members who reached out for the MRFF’s help here recently at (military installation name withheld). Our assigned military unit is large and diverse as to ethnicity, faith and political views et al. One of our MRFF Reps here on base has helped me write this e-mail to MRFF so that other folks can see the abuses that went on here.
From: (Spouse of Active Duty Enlisted Member/MRFF Client’s e-mail address withheld)Subject: Thank you MRFF from our Jewish military familyDate: July 21, 2024 at 8:37:27 PM MDTTo: Information Weinstein <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org> Dear Mr. Mikey Weinstein and the MRFF, Mr. Weinstein thank you for taking both of my calls today. I am the wife of one of the 32 enlisted MRFF clients you all are representing at (military installation name withheld) in the matter of one of our unit’s most senior officers trying to force us all to have our children attend the Christian Vacation Bible School which he and his wife are teaching. As I mentioned to you in the second call today, our family is Jewish so this whole thing was particularly hurtful, painful and insulting to all of us. Especially when this officer mentioned that his Vacation Bible School can save the souls of the children even if the mom and dad’s souls can’t be saved. Just a terrible insult to our Jewish family and heritage and the families of the other 31 MRFF clients most of whom happen to be Christian.
Organization: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Organization Description: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Over 89,000 active duty, veteran, and civilian personnel of the United States Armed Forces, including individuals involved in High School JROTC around the nation, have come to our foundation for redress and assistance in resolving or alerting the public to their civil rights grievances, with hundreds more contacting MRFF each day. 95% of them are Christians themselves.
MRFF’S MIKEY WEINSTEIN’S GRIPPING INTERVIEW BY “THE GOOD MEN PROJECT” ON THE DIRE THREAT OF “PROJECT 2025” AND A SECOND MAGA ADMINISTRATION
With over 3 million visitors a month, The Good Men Project,founded by Tom Matlack in 2009, first as a book, then a film, and now a website, describes itself as an “international conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century.” MRFF’s Mikey Weinstein joins that conversation in a must-read interview about “Project 2025,” the MAGA-worshipping Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s dictatorship of America.
THE GOOD MEN PROJECTINTERVIEWS MIKEY WEINSTEIN MRFF’s Mikey Weinstein on Project 2025 By: Scott Douglas Jacobsen Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Excerpts from Mikey Weinstein’s interview responses: “They have their playbook out there. Why did they do this? When they suddenly came into power in 2017, they didn’t expect to win. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t understand the bureaucracy. But now, they’re going to fire anybody who could be in their way and replace them with loyalists who will be around forever.” “So look, it’s not going to be a bureaucratic thing. It’s going to be much more like a bunch of criminal gangs with knives, letting as many people get hit as possible. We expect to be targeted. We already think we are being targeted. And there will be several hundreds of others who are. We’re not going to run away. We will fight and fight as hard as we can. But it’s not a joke. And it’s not purely bureaucratic.”
Mikey Weinstein’s April 2024 Op-Ed on “Project 2025”
MRFF OP-ED “It’s Project 2025, Stupid” By: MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Back in 1992, political consultant James Carville coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” to help explain the essence of what was then at stake in the pending Presidential election between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Carville was intending to boil down to the most basic explanative brevity of the true grit of what that next election was all about. Today we face the brutal reality of an America more bitterly divided than at any time in its history, with the debatable exception of the Civil War. This existential chasm is literally tearing apart families, marriages, friendships, businesses, and every other type of human relationship extant in the United States today. If you’re not seeing that you’re either seriously impaired or asleep. Most voters are completely unaware of an impossibly wretched set of policy proposals developed by a slew of ignoble right-wing entities but spearheaded by the ultra-conservative, MAGA-worshipping Heritage Foundation. Ready? It’s called “Project 2025.” Its official name is “The Presidential Transition Project.” OK, are you tracking with me so far?! Before you do ANYthing else please, Please, PLEASE click the links in the next two paragraphs and, well, BEHOLD! Just LOOK at the mind-blowing hellscape of what is left of America if this wickedly evil, anti-Constitutional, anti-democratic, and wholly fundamentalist Christian nationalist screed, born from the ignominious depths of the shameful, stinking MAGA womb, is EVER allowed to be wielded like a flame thrower upon our nation’s way-too-naive-and-sedentary population. Project 2025 plans to purge the government of tens of thousands of non-MAGA personnel and replace them with MAGA loyalists are already well under way. The goal, according to a must-read Axios article, is (emphasis added) “to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.” The vetting process includes filling out Project 2025’s “Presidential Personnel Database & Presidential Administration Academy Questionnaire.” Prospective appointees will attend the “Presidential Administration Academy” to be ready “on Day One” to “immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” Project 2025’s plans for the military are equally sweeping, as laid out in the 920-page Project 2025 book Mandate for Leadership. Fundamentalist Christian chaplains will be unfettered in their proselytizing, the most senior flag officers (three and four stars) will be “instructed” to make sure they’re “not pursuing a social engineering agenda,” courses at the military academies will be audited “to remove Marxist indoctrination” and tenure for (presumably non-MAGA) professors will be eliminated. And, of course, the current policies that allow transgender individuals to serve will be reversed. We at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (mrff.org) fight ‘round-the-clock to prevent our nation’s military, its 18 intelligence agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Maritime Service from EVER being transformed into a fatal force multiplier for the blood-thirsty MAGA maniacs who developed and plan to implement Project 2025, fueled by the appalling propellant of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. And we at MRFF have been, are, and will continue to be the direct targets of the cowardly wrath of these same MAGA villains. (To this end, please see Margaret Atwood’s disturbingly dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale or the TV series of the same name streaming on Hulu). So, in the ensuing seven months before our next national elections, may I respectfully urge you to IMMEDIATELY take at least 300 to 600 seconds out of your busy day? Why? Because you MUST think about and deeply internalize NOW the beyond-shocking consequences to our country should Project 2025 ever be actualized by those who planned, developed and intend to implement it with unremitting fury and vengeance. Indeed, actualized well beyond that of the ugly lynch mob of “Unite the Right” racists and nazi-loving fascists and Christian nationalists displayed in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12 of 2017. It will savagely terminate justice, freedom, and democracy in America. It will turn our United States military into the quintessential MRFF nightmare of a zombie army of imperious, fundamentalist Christian crusaders. It will propel tyranny and despotism and autocracy and fascism. It will spew bigotry, misogyny, and hatred of “The Other” and prejudice writ unimaginably ginormous as newly bedrock U.S. policy. It will spell The End of all we know as decency and American freedoms as laid out in our precious U.S. Constitution. There is still some small amount of time left to spread the word and try to wake up our friends and family and acquaintances as to their, and our, pathetically putrid, pitiful, and deserved fate if we don’t all FIGHT like HELL to prevent Project 2025 from ever being birthed and then wielded like a berserk nuclear weapon by Christian extremist, MAGA monstrosities. The answer is beyond obvious lest we ever wonder why the America we all grew up in has pervertedly morphed into the murderously oppressive, repulsive, Christian nationalist country of “Gilead” in Atwood’s seminal book referenced above. It’s Project 2025, stupid!
VoteVets graphic lays out the Heritage Foundation’s terrifying “Project 2025” plans for the military in a second MAGA administration (Click on graphic to enlarge)
A pair of vile hate e-mails from a Trump-worshipping antisemite
On Thursday, June 13, 2024 at 11:24:01 AM EDT, (name withheld) wrote: Mikey Whineystein was forcibly relocated to Gaza, captured and baked into Jew Bread. The End. hahahahahahaha WE ARE MANY, WE ARE LEGION, WE ARE ANONYMOUS.
To see response from MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein:
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/05
Irene Deschênes is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a roman catholic priest. Irene went to the diocese of London (Ontario) in 1992, and Irene and the diocese engaged in litigation shortly thereafter. Almost 30 years later, Irene received a settlement from the diocese of London in 2021. Irene is a staunch advocate and activist for survivors of clergy sexual abuse. She has worked in social services for most of her adult career, supporting marginalized populations for decades. When yet another case of sexual assault by roman catholic priests comes to light, Irene is known to ask, “Where’s the Outrage?” Irene hopes that those outraged by catholic employees engaging in illicit activities will ask the same question, and that Canadians will be spurred to action. Irene invites all Canadians to be outraged and to use this energy for change in a long-standing institution that has engaged in deceitful acts for centuries.
Outrage Canada is a national, non-religious coalition of outraged Canadians that hold the Roman Catholic church of Canada accountable for ongoing crimes and advocates for all victims of Catholic clergy.
We are committed to ensuring justice for victims, the safety of all children and the prevention of abuse by the Roman Catholic church.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are here with Irene Deschênes. I’ve been conducting interviews with several people, mostly women who have come forward as victims of clergy-related abuse, primarily within Orthodoxy, as much of the focus has been on the Catholic Church. Could you share your experience, including your denomination? And to clarify, this is happening in Canada rather than the United States, correct?
Irene Deschênes: Yes. I grew up Roman Catholic and was baptized at a very young age. My parents were immigrants who came to Canada in 1959, married, and I am the second oldest of five children. We had a very religious household, attended church every Sunday without fail, and observed all the special times during the church calendar year. I went to a Catholic school and then a Catholic high school got married to a nice Catholic boy and had two children. Would you like me to talk about my memory recovery now?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Deschênes: Okay. My children attended a French first language school because my ex-husband is Francophone. We both wanted them to be raised bilingually, so they went to a French school.
When my daughter was preparing for her First Communion, she would make it with her classmates, and the mass would be in French. However, since my parents didn’t speak French, we decided she would make her First Communion in English so my parents could attend and understand the service. The priest said he would need to talk to my daughter first to ensure she was ready to make her First Communion. So, I took my daughter to meet with the priest, and he chatted with us for a while. Then, during the conversation, he asked if he could speak with my daughter alone.
I said, “No.” I was aghast because I had always been a good Catholic girl and had never said, “No,” to a priest. Here I was in my thirties, saying, “No,” to a priest. That was unsettling, and I didn’t understand why I reacted that way. Nonetheless, my daughter ended up making her First Communion in English.
I was a stay-at-home mom, so we had a typical summer, doing activities with the children, taking them places, and helping them make memories. Then, in September, for the first time, both my kids were in school every day. After dropping them off at the bus stop and returning home, I sat in my living room and started crying uncontrollably. I didn’t know why I was crying or what was happening. Suddenly, a flash of memory overwhelmed me, and I remembered everything the priest had done to me.
I cried and cried, convinced that I was going crazy because there was no way a priest would do that to a little girl. I should talk to a priest about what was happening because, growing up, that’s what I was taught—to go to your parish priest with any problems or concerns. So, I found the old phone book and started making calls, but I couldn’t reach a priest because they’re off work on Mondays since they work on Sundays.
Finally, someone told me, “You need to call the chair of the sexual abuse committee.” I was shocked—there was a sexual abuse committee? How could there be a sexual abuse committee if I was the only one? This was before the Internet, so I truly believed I was the only person whom a Roman Catholic priest had sexually assaulted as a child. I spoke with Father Richard Tremblay, and he asked if I wanted to come in and talk. I said yes.
He invited me to a meeting, so I went to the church, sat in the rectory, and he was there, wearing his collar.
It mimicked the experience I had as a little girl of being sexually assaulted in a rectory by a priest who had his collar on. So, I sat there in the chair and made myself small. I gathered my coat up against my body. Then he asked me the priest’s name, and I said I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say it because this priest had also performed my wedding ceremony.
So, there’s that, and I had known him since I was nine years old. That’s quite a history with someone you think you can trust. So, I couldn’t say his name, and he said, “We want to make sure he’s not still harming little girls.” I shook my head, and he said, “Could you tell me what city it happened in?” And I said, “Chatham. It’s Chatham, Ontario.” He said, “Was it Father Sylvestre?” And I thought they know.They knew.
It’s him. He’s got a history. He’s done it before. They’re going to take care of me. They will be kind, help me get into counselling, and be there. But the exact opposite happened. They did pay for counselling for me for two years, but I’m still in counselling off and on. Every once in a while, I need a tune-up, Because the impact is lifelong.
It’s not something that two years of counselling will help you completely work through. It’s a lifelong process—not core recovery but ongoing maintenance, a common experience among those whom priests have abused. Yes, I would say it’s common. Still, some mitigating factors include having family support and receiving adequate counselling in the early years to help work through some of the issues. So, it depends on how quickly you can work through those issues and the level of support one has that makes a difference.
In the early 1990s, I felt there weren’t any therapists I could find to help unpack that extra layer. Being sexually assaulted as a child is devastating enough, but when it comes from a church leader, there’s another level to it that needs to be unpacked. Therapists weren’t trained in the early 1990s to do that. I found that it wasn’t helpful because the spiritual abuse also needed to be addressed, and there wasn’t training for that in those days. So, that was difficult for me.
I didn’t have any family support or supportive friends at that time. So, in the early years, it was very hard for me, and I sank into a deep depression because I couldn’t find other survivors or anyone else who truly understood what I was going through. That made it more difficult for me. When survivors come forward today, they probably find it easier because it’s been in the news so much. With the advent of the Internet, much more information exists. Survivors can find help more easily these days than 30 years ago.
Jacobsen: What about recovery resources? You have an email address on the Outrage Canada website. What do survivors of this abuse need at different stages of their recovery process so they can go back into something like a reintegrated life, being successful and being themselves? What do people need regarding resources—not just to report it, watch a documentary, or read a book, but to get the proper support so they can transition back into a culture where they can be their authentic selves? I don’t mean success in having a family, children, a high-powered job, or an education. They still feel comfortable in their skin, living however they choose to live in a free society. The church is part of a community.
Deschênes: I wish I had the cookbook to hand it to folks and say, “Follow these steps. Mix in a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” It’s different for everybody, but for sure, people need to be able to surround themselves with personal and professional support first and foremost. That helps quite a bit.
That’s what many people gravitate to, especially in their later years when they join the church—to have that sense of community. I didn’t have that. I lost it when I came forward. People in the church didn’t gather around me, put their arms around me, and say, “Irene, we’ll help you through this.” Nobody contacted me from the church. When I left the church, I was all alone. I had lost that community. Community is important. It’s one of our basic needs.
On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs a sense of belonging is one of our basic needs. So, in probably 1993 or 1994, I was watching the Phil Donahue show. One of his guests was Barbara Blaine, and she was the first survivor I ever met.
She was from Chicago, and her phone number came up on the screen at the end of the show, and I called her immediately. She had gone on Phil Donahue and talked about being sexually assaulted by her parish priest. We had long-distance phone call charges back then; she was my lifeline. The only way to communicate with her was by letter or by phone.
So, I did speak with her quite a few times. With other people’s permission, she connected me with other people in Ontario, Canada. But many people weren’t coming forward then, and they weren’t telling anyone, so it was hard to find other survivors. I remember going to my first SNAP conference, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, in Chicago in the early 1990s and meeting other survivors. It was a huge sense of relief.
Not being alone—that’s a huge burden to carry alone. So, that was my community for some time. Then I went through the civil suit process, and the diocese gave me some money.
It was attached to a gag order. So, I wrote to the bishop, saying, “I need to be released from this gag order. It’s keeping me sick. I’m keeping a secret that’s not mine to keep.” So, the Diocese of London did release me from my gag order, and the media at the time reported that I was the first person in Canada to be released from a gag order by the church.
Jacobsen: So, after that—after you were released from the gag order—you found out that Phil Donahue is, in fact, alive at 88?
Deschênes: Yes. I’ll have to contact him and thank him. He has no idea how much he’s helped me. After I was released from my gag order, I thought the gag order said I couldn’t tell anyone anything, which was my mistake. It was a rough time, a rough period for me when I had this civil suit hanging over my head. But after I got released from the gag order, I went to the police in Chatham, Ontario, which is where the abuse happened, and I reported him.
So they started a criminal investigation. That’s when almost 50 women came forward. Father Charles Sylvestre was pegged as the most notorious pedophile in all of Canada. He denied everything and said they put us up to it. Then, he started preaching with a little Bible or book at one court appearance. He was preaching to us, and we all said, “Oh my God.”
Anyway, he was sentenced to three years, and then he died a couple of months later in prison. During the criminal trial, I told my lawyer that suddenly, the diocese said they had this police report from 1962—a police report from 1962! I was born in 1961, and they have this police report. These three little girls from Sarnia, Ontario, reported to the police, and suddenly, this police report came out of nowhere.
So, I told my lawyer, “I want to reopen my civil suit because they kept denying and saying, ‘We didn’t know anything about Charlie. Good old Charlie? We didn’t hear a thing about him.'” But they have known since 1962. I’m reopening my civil suit. She said, “You better find yourself a contract lawyer.” So, I got myself a lawyer in Toronto. I said to her, “Can you take my case?” And she said, “We’ll have a look at it.” She’s in a big law firm.
So she said, “We’ll have a look at it.” I told her, “I just came out of a civil suit and a criminal trial. I’m exhausted. I need to move forward with my life.”
“If you need me, call me. Otherwise, do what you need to do,” I said because I was so invested in the first civil suit. I was exhausted and said, “I can’t do this again. You do what you need to do and get back to me.”
So, ten years later—ten years later—she called me. “We’re going to court on Friday.” I was like, “What?” So she had been doing whatever she needed in the background, getting all the legal paperwork and mumbo jumbo in order, talking to the diocese, and having all these conversations with their lawyers. So, we went to the court in London, Ontario, and the judge said, yes, I could reopen my civil suit. That was a victory.
Then, the diocese told the media that they were appealing that decision. So the media called me and said, “What do you think of the diocese of London appealing the judge’s decision?” I thought it cruel they would tell the media before having the courtesy of contacting my lawyer!
They couldn’t call my lawyer to inform them of the appeal. They had to call the media so the media could call me. That isn’t kind.
Jacobsen: Just so people are aware, two points of contact. This one, the first one, is short. How long had you been in legal proceedings?
Deschênes: 30 years.
Jacobsen: Second part. I listen to a lot of fundamentalist preachers and extreme political people because I already know my orientation. So, I want to know what the other side says about these different things. I listen to them. They will say things like “the Jezebel spirit.” What are the biblical and non-biblical insults and epithets thrown at you while pursuing this line of justice? I wouldn’t even say against the church. It’s for the church because it’s in the church’s best interest to weed out the bad clergy and not have the good clergy, who do community service and commit their lives to that, be blanketed with that at the same time in a way.
Deschênes: Yes. I’m doing this for the church, but they’ll never eliminate their brothers in Christ. That’s the pact. They’ll never do it. A few might be whistleblowers, but they’re out of there. They don’t want those guys around.
That’s why the good priests don’t say, “Irene, what happened to you was wrong. It should never have happened. This is what I’m going to do to help you work through this.” Never—no nun, priest, or anyone else in the church ever said that to me. Not even a congregant.
So, not even a peer, let alone starting at the bishop on up to the pope. I’m still waiting for that call. He’s got my number. I gave it to him. There might be good priests in there, but I have yet to meet them. They have never used biblical terms against me. They never publicly said that, and they never privately said that because they have never contacted me.
They went through my lawyer whenever they wanted to message me or say anything. Nobody from the church contacted me in those 30 years. So, no, I didn’t get called Jezebel or anything like that.
It started when I was ten years old. A little weird. Father Sylvestre did say something about those girls with their short skirts sitting on his lap: little girls, little 10-year-old Catholic girls in the sixties, and they wore dresses. Then, sticking out our pink tongues at him when he went to give us communion—he’s the one that sexualized all our very normal activities. At ten years old, I didn’t even know what the fuck sex was.
I didn’t know what it was at 12. I don’t think I fully understood even in high school when they started to talk to us about it. This is a bit of a side point.
Jacobsen: The sexual education kids received in the sixties, seventies, and eighties was not exactly comprehensive or realistic. So, let’s continue. You’re going through a storm of legal proceedings. What else happens?
Deschênes: So, they appealed that. We went to the Ontario Court of Appeal in Toronto. Both lawyers presented their sides, yada yada. Then, the judges for the Ontario Court of Appeal took months to make their decision. So, you wait again and then they make that decision. They said, “Yes, I can reopen my civil suit.” Then, the diocese’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. So, I created this group called the Justice for Irene Network, and our message was “Settle with Irene; She’s Tired.”
We would say the church has the right to appeal. But is that the right thing to do? Yes, they had the right to appeal. But anyway, they appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. That took weeks or months. My lawyer and their lawyers—right, my one lawyer and their three lawyers—went to the Supreme Court of Canada to make their case, and then we waited for the judge’s decision again. Then the judge said, yes, I can reopen my civil suit. So, I won at the highest level of court in Canada.
So, I asked my lawyer, “What’s next?” She said, “We can go to trial, or we can go to mediation.” When folks go to trial, you typically prepare for trial. Still, the trial isn’t scheduled for 18 months, or however long, so you’d have to wait again. Inevitably, what they do is settle the day before the trial starts. So after all those anxious months and weeks of waiting and preparing for trial, the day before, they offer to settle out of court.
I said to my lawyer, “Let’s go to mediation.” This was during COVID, so we were on a Zoom call. This gentleman comes on my screen and says, “Hi, Irene. Nice to see you again.” It was the same mediator from the first civil suit 20 years earlier. So, we started at 10 a.m. went until 9:30 at night. Then the church’s lawyer said, “We’ll pick up again tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock.” So, I had to try to sleep that night, wondering what was going to happen.
Then, around 10:30 in the morning, my lawyer called me and said, “They’ve accepted our last offer.” They wanted me to have one more sleepless night instead of settling right then and there. So that was it—I was done that day. I was 60, and I got my settlement. I publicly thanked them for paying me for all my years of activism and advocacy for other victims.
“Thank you for paying me for the work I’ve done over the last 30 years,” I said, and I promptly retired. Yes, I might be a little tired—very tired. Then, the Justice for Irene group we created to encourage them to do the right thing morphed into Outrage Canada.
We were only incorporated last year, so we’re pretty new. We’re having our first AGM on September 28th. Several survivors contacted us after we circulated the press release announcing our new organization. Typically, they email us so that I could schedule a Zoom call with them. I would have a one-on-one conversation to see where they’re at, what further support they might need, or any direction or words of wisdom I might provide.
After doing this for 30 years, I’m a bit of an expert in the field. Plus, I worked in social services for most of my adult life. My last job was as a residential counsellor at a women’s shelter, so I have some experience in that realm. When people contact me, we will do a Zoom call like this.
It would be about two hours long. “Are you good?” “Yes.” “Are you good?” “Yes.” “Reach out again if you ever need to talk.” Some contact me occasionally, and others I have not heard from again.
Jacobsen: I did notice you collaborated with Patricia Grell. I’m aware of her because we interviewed in 2017.
Deschênes: I know what you interviewed about—the school board.
Jacobsen: How did you find yourself where you are now in terms of the relationship with the school board or system?
Grell: I would say it all started by taking a degree in theology from St. Michael’s College, Toronto School of Theology. I am eternally grateful to my professors because they taught me that I didn’t have to put my intellect on hold to have a faith in Jesus and follow Jesus. St. Michael’s College took a historical-critical approach to the Bible, not a literal approach, and an intellectual ‘faith seeking understanding’ approach.
So I came out of university with an intellectual understanding of my faith. I brought a deep understanding of the historical Jesus and his message everywhere I went. I worked as a Pastoral Associate in a parish in Timmins, as a Program Coordinator in a retreat center and then as a Catholic school trustee. Each place I worked, I got a glimpse into the Catholic Church behind the scenes and I became more and more scandalized. [Laughing]. I was scandalized because deep down I had this understanding of the Gospel that was very rooted in the historical Jesus. And then I would see nuns, priests and so-called devout Catholics not living at all according to the Gospel.
I heard, for example, the archbishop’s representative state to the Board that perhaps Catholic schools are not the place for transgender students. I saw the school district with the support of the archbishop, deny a transgender girl access to the girls’ washroom, insisting she uses the gender-neutral washroom on the other side of the school. I saw the resistance by the church to allow GSAs. All these things led me to conclude that the church had lost its way.
I think working in the school district was the ‘watershed moment,’ where I realized that “Wow! This is a social club. This is not a faith.” These people act as though they belong to a bike club or dance club. They are not together because of their faith in Jesus and his message of love, acceptance, and mercy. Catholicism, I concluded, had become a social club.
I thought this is not where I can be anymore. I can’t be here. They’re not living what they’re talking about. It’s all window dressing. That’s how it is; it’s all window dressing. We’d have signs in our schools, for example, that state ‘Christ is the reason for this school’ and then we’d go on our merry way and do things that totally contradicted this.
For example, we have an academic high school that requires students to get a 75% average in grade 9 in order to be accepted. If a Catholic student who lives near this school misses the mark by even 1%, they are not admitted. This student then can’t attend high school with their friends and must travel outside their community because the district can’t make any exceptions for fear of lowering the standards of the school. To add insult to injury, the academic school will offer any vacant spots to non-Catholic students who do achieve the required average. The lack of compassion and mercy in the interest of competitiveness seems to fly in the face of “Christ is the reason for this school”.
Another example is the denial of attendance at grad ceremonies if students don’t complete the required amount of the religion curriculum by a particular date. The School Act in Alberta does not require completion of religion credits in order to earn a high school diploma. The district then uses attendance at grad ceremonies as the carrot to ensure students complete their religion credits. It seems odd to me to use coercion as a way to encourage students to learn about Jesus.
I would think that if our Catholic schools were teaching by example, and living according to the Gospel then we wouldn’t have to coerce anybody to take religion; students would want to take religion. They would want to learn about this rebel named Jesus. Teenagers are rebellious anyway! [Laughing]. I think they would really think he’s pretty cool if they could learn about who he was and what he stood for. You don’t have to coerce someone by saying you must take this or we’re not going to let you come to grad. What kind of example is that? What are we trying to do here?” One of the moms who had a son in high school last year and was concerned about this grad rule, said, “Geez, with the legacy of residential schools, you would think that they wouldn’t be interested in coercing people to take religion through Catholic schools.”
These are publicly funded schools. I’d rather try to invite kids to be interested in the faith by our example of love and compassion rather than coercion. We can invite students to learn about our faith by being merciful people. Students will be attracted to that [Laughing]. So that’s the kind of stuff – that really…I just was disappointed, I was heartbroken… literally heartbroken to see people acting this way in the name of Christ [Sobbing] I’m sorry.
Jacobsen: It’s okay.
Grell: [Sobbing/weeping] I guess…I’m still grieving.
Jacobsen: It’s okay. Take the time you need.
Grell: It really upset me that we had schools for elite students. Parents came to a Board meeting when I put forward a motion to request the district make exceptions for Catholic students, to show some mercy and these parents said: “We want our kids to get ready for this competitive world.” I thought, “That isn’t what I thought Christianity or Catholicism was about,” competition.
Anyway, it’s really broken my heart. I’m an honest person. I couldn’t run again to be a Catholic trustee, I might run one day to be a public-school trustee, but I couldn’t in good conscience put my name on that ballot and say, “Yeah, I’m a Catholic school trustee. I want to be a Catholic school trustee.”
No, I don’t want anything to do with this Catholic Church; if Catholic means being like this, sorry, not interested. That’s not what I learned about and learned what Jesus was about at all. So, I must distance myself. Anyway, sorry I got emotional. I guess I didn’t realize I was still this upset. But we’re not then I heard that priest say that our Catholic schools were not for transgender kids, I thought, “That’s it. That’s the last straw.” If that’s what they’re about, I am NOT interested in this church.
I have invested a lot of my life in the Catholic Church; I spent a lot of money on my education. Fifty thousand dollars to get a MDiv. We used to pray for laypeople to come forward in service to the Church. Then I noticed they stopped praying for that. They started praying again for more vocations to religious life and more priests. I remember I saw this shift happening around 1992. Prior to this, there was a great push to have more lay people educated in theology so they could take leadership roles in the church. But that approach seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I have spoken with other women, who have left the church and I agree with them when they say: “I didn’t leave the church, the church left me”.
So, I’m aware of several stories of women who have come forward within religious traditions in Canada and understand the difficulties they have to go through in the limelight. Some men do that, too, but the women’s cases are talked about a little less. So that’s the thing. It’s more to highlights like that and your own.
You’re taking on a juggernaut. If you run the lines of best fit, only about half or a little less than half of the population are Christians today. So they’ve owned the country for about 150 years, approximately. So, I commend her and you for the work that you’re doing.
So, you got paid out. What’s the follow-up?
Deschênes: To backtrack, I heard Patricia Grell on CBC Radio. I thought that woman would be on my team, and she was. That’s how it goes.
Jacobsen: That’s how it goes. I hope to do that with interviews like this and people who read them. Don’t fuck up.
Deschênes: Anyway, so, now that I have the financial means, I can start this organization, pay for the website, and pay to have assistance. Do you know Murray Foster?
Jacobsen: No.
Deschênes: He’s from the Great Big Sea. I paid him to write an anthem for us. It’s called Justice is Coming. Check it out at http://www.outragecanada.ca.
Jacobsen: He sounds like Dan Barker from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He makes jingles. He’s a former evangelical preacher and musician.
Deschênes: I have heard of him. This has been great, Scott. Thank you.
Jacobsen: Thank you so much.
Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/04
Daniel Barvin joined Coya in 2021. Prior to joining Coya, Daniel spent his time as an advocate fighting for awareness and the rights of Presymptomatic Familial ALS patients. He started the first ever Familial ALS focused team through his work at I AM ALS. During this time, Daniel interacted with presymptomatic patients, researchers, pharma executives, and advocacy organizations. In addition, Daniel has held operations and design positions at Morgan Stanley, Dril-Quip and GE. Daniel received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Case Western and his M.B.A from Rice University.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Daniel Barvin. You were found to carry the genetic variant associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). For everyone listening, could you give us a refresher on what ALS is? And can you discuss what it means that you are a carrier of this specific gene??
Daniel Barvin: I am a carrier of, C9ORF72, a genetic variant that could one day cause ALS and or frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and I have lost a significant portion of my family to those diseases. I have experienced the loss and tragedy these diseases bring, which not only shortens one’s life but also strips away the dignity and ability to be a productive member of society. While I’ve seen what my future might hold, I’m fortunate that at 36, I am still healthy and fully engaged in life.
Jacobsen: Regarding this type of diagnosis, the first critical question for me is how previous generations did not know the genetic aspects of these diseases. Now, with advancements in screening technology, at what point did it become possible to take advantage of such screenings? At what point was it possible for people to get tested if they had a risk factor?
Barvin: My life was profoundly impacted by the ability to undergo genetic testing. I’ve built my advocacy around discovering these risks and taking action. The first time anyone could identify a genetic risk in the ALS space was when the SOD1 gene mutation was discovered in 1993. This discovery marked the first time it became possible to understand a genetic risk for ALS in a family. The genetic variant I carry, C9orf72 (Chromosome 9 Open Reading Frame 72 expansion), was discovered in 2011. Unfortunately, we lost my aunt in 2012, and no one understood that she carried the C9orf72 variant at the time. Although it was discovered, it took time for this information to reach mainstream medical awareness and for frontline neurologists to diagnose the disease and understand the importance of genetic testing. This knowledge is crucial for informing immediate family members about their risks, as these diseases are hereditary. Genetic testing requires multiple steps to take effect and be truly effective.
My journey of discovery began in 2017 after losing my grandfather in 2000, my uncle in 2002, my aunt in 2012, and my father in 2016. I discovered that these losses were hereditary due to the C9orf72 variant in 2017, and I learned that I carried the variant in 2018. While the knowledge of these genetic variants existed, the resources for navigating genetic testing through counselors or receiving care were almost nonexistent. This experience of feeling alone inspired me to ensure that the rest of this community, now known to include about 500,000 people in the U.S. and millions globally, don’t go down the same blind path that I did.
That’s when I began working with other patients and co-founded a nonprofit called “End the Legacy” to raise awareness, advocate for change, and improve clinical care guidelines for the presymptomatic community.
Jacobsen: For many families affected by these diseases, it’s a brutal challenge to face. When these genetic markers run in the family, how many family members statistically would be expected to be affected?
Barvin: This is what is known as “penetrance.”
Jacobsen: What is the penetrance of this genetic variant?
Barvin: In early studies, when I first learned about my genetic status, researchers found the penetrance to be about 50% by the age of 58 and fully penetrant by the age of 80 , so it was quite high. In my father’s generation, 3 out of 4 siblings carried the genetic variant, and 3 out of 4 siblings developed ALS and/or FTD in their mid-forties.
My father passed away at 60 but had dementia for 15 years. So, anecdotally, the penetrance seems to be be very high. End the Legacy called for a renewed study, as earlier research was looking at a different subset of data and who developed ALS in this genetic case. We had them redo the study, and now they believe the penetrance is between 25% and 30%, which is still quite high. We can go in many different directions with this. Still, I truly believe that the future of healthcare and humanity lies in understanding our genetic predisposition for diseases.
Whatever the penetrance is for a genetic variant that activates a disease, we will strive through current medicine, longevity doctors, diet, exercise, and other means to tilt the scales in our favor. If there’s a 50% chance of the genetic variant leading to disease, how do I ensure I’m in the 50% that doesn’t develop it? This ties directly into the work at Coya Therapeutics, the company Dr. Howard Berman founded in 2020 and I joined shortly after. Our work is based on the idea that inflammatory pathways drive neurodegenerative diseases.
For someone like me, who has a predisposition to this disease, what am I trying to avoid? High inflammatory loads, head trauma, car accidents, massive gastrointestinal issues—anything that could trigger the disease. I was just at the dentist today, and while discussing my work, she mentioned that in school, they learned that 80% of patients with severe gum disease also have dementia. It’s possible to conclude that severe gum disease creates a massive inflammatory load in the body, which can eventually tip the scales and trigger one of these neurodegenerative diseases.
So, I’m trying to avoid all these precursor events in the hope that I won’t develop the disease. And if I do, hopefully, by then, Coya will have figured out how to alleviate symptoms and turn a fatal disease into something chronic and manageable—like what’s been done for HIV and AIDS.
Jacobsen: How do you systematically develop a program to reduce inflammatory loads?
Barvin: Our company is based on the scientific discoveries of Dr. Stanley Appel of Houston Methodist, often called the “father of ALS.” He has chaired that department for 50 years and is likely one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, even at 91 or 92. Dr. Appel has been working on solving ALS for decades and discovered that not only ALS but all neurodegenerative diseases trigger an inflammatory response. If regulatory T cells, which are the control system of the inflammatory system, are functional, they can manage the inflammatory load, bring it back down, and stop disease progression. He found a direct correlation between ALS progression, survivability, and regulatory T cell function.
Today, four years later, we have taken a new direction in administering therapeutics for ALS, FTD, Alzheimer’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases. We are using a combination of biologics that, on the one hand, increases the efficacy and number of regulatory T cells and, on the other hand, reduces pro-inflammatory cytokines, macrophages, and myeloid cells that create oxidative stress in the body. In a proof-of-concept study in March 2023, we demonstrated that we could stop the progression of ALS over 48 weeks, showing a decline of only 1.5 points on the ALS Functional Rating Scale (ALSFRS), which measures ALS progression. To put that into context, there are currently only two drugs approved for ALS.
I don’t have the exact numbers for what the currently approved drugs achieved, but the efficacy was minimal. Typically, controls degrade at about one point per month on the ALS Functional Rating Scale (ALSFRS) or about 12 points yearly. Coya hopes to achieve something far more monumental. The treatment involves a subcutaneous injection. We plan to advance into clinical trials for ALS, with a large Phase 2 study..
Jacobsen: Where is the subcutaneous injection administered?
Barvin: Similar to how a person with diabetes injects insulin, it’s administered just under the skin—not intramuscularly. The beauty of this method is that, unlike some other ALS drugs that are administered intrathecally (via spinal tap), which requires inpatient care and weekly hospital visits for infusions, this treatment can be done at home. Spinal taps are painful—I’ve had seven myself in the pursuit of research. The advantage here is that patients or their caretakers could potentially arrest the progression of their disease in the comfort of their own homes.
Jacobsen: When we consider the extension of health span and lifespan with this kind of subcutaneous injection, what practical outcomes can we expect shortly?
Barvin: I can only speak to proof-of-concept data we’ve shown in ALS over 48 weeks. It slowed progression to just a 1.5-point decline on the ALSFRS. We have yet to conduct studies beyond that time, but this result far exceeds what anyone thought possible. I can only imagine the alleviation of symptoms this could offer.
ALS is a complex disease often diagnosed by exclusion, meaning the diagnostic process typically takes about a year. Someone might go to their primary care doctor saying, “I’m falling, I’m tripping.” After 6 to 8 months, they finally see a neurologist who diagnoses ALS. By then, ALS has progressed significantly, and since the disease typically allows for only 2 to 3 years of survival, a year’s delay is substantial.
But imagine if this drug were approved and could be administered early in the disease’s progression. If someone noticed their hand was a little weak, and we could stop the disease right there—if ALS became just “my hand’s a little weak” and nothing more—that would be revolutionary.
Of course, this requires many things:
Early diagnosis.
Coya’s success in clinical trials and the regulatory pathway.
Creating a therapy that is FDA-approved and effective.
But that is very much the dream.
Jacobsen: How long will further research, financing, and deep studies take to achieve your aim of developing these methodologies?
Barvin: We have already completed four rounds of financing. We’re a public company listed on Nasdaq under the ticker COYA, and we went public in January 2023. We also engaged in a licensing deal for our COYA 302 ALS therapy with a large generic drug manufacturer, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories. Additionally, we conducted a follow-on PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) financing. So, our cash runway for pursuing these clinical trials is secured.
We also recently received feedback from the FDA regarding our Investigational New Drug (IND) application for this trial. They requested more data on the preclinical side, and within a few months, we can provide that data and then move forward with the trial.
The trial will have a 6-month enrollment period. So, there will be some time for enrollment, followed by 6 months of administering the drug versus a placebo. After that, there will be about 3-to-4 months of data analysis to crunch the numbers.l. One of our hopes at Coya is to ask the FDA for approval after Phase 2. Drug companies typically must go through all three phases to get FDA approval.
However, there has been a precedent in ALS where, due to the high unmet need and the powerful voice of patient advocates, the FDA has approved drugs at Phase 2 for ALS. So, we believe that if we can demonstrate similar efficacy and safety as we did in our proof-of-concept study, we have a shot at not needing to go through a Phase 3 trial.
Jacobsen: When considering the pretrial work in identifying those with these genetic variants coding for risk or penetrance of ALS or FTD, how many people carry these variants but haven’t been screened?
Barvin: You’re asking how many people out there might carry these variants but have yet to be screened? We know that about 500,000 people in the U.S. are either carrying or at risk of these genetic variants. When you look at the ALS population in the U.S., which is about 30,000 people, and then consider those who carry a genetic risk but don’t even know it, the number is about 10 times larger. It’s a significant figure.
In 2018, which wasn’t that long ago, when I found out that I carried this genetic mutation, no one was talking about the 500,000 people at genetic risk of ALS or FTD. No one. I started telling my story at a local high school because at the ReelAbilities Houston Film Festival.
It was about 3 weeks after I found out that I had carried the genetic mutation. I realized that I had always been the child, grandchild, and nephew of this disease, but for the first time, I was now the patient. I wanted to tell that story, and the gut feeling of being in that room with those kids who genuinely cared was profound. They had watched a movie about a man dying of ALS, and then they talked to me, someone seemingly young and healthy, and it clicked for them.
From that point on, I realized how big this issue was. I knew it wasn’t just me but that this story had to be told. Initially, I planned to travel around the country, raising money for existing ALS organizations with this story. However, the genetic ALS story had never been told. Suppose one case of ALS was terrible enough to inspire the ice bucket challenge. How could an entire generation being wiped out and another generation at risk not generate the same response? But in 2018, ALS nonprofits were not ready to tell the genetic ALS and FTD story.
They weren’t receptive to this new narrative coming onto the scene. Perhaps it was because they prioritized those who were already dying over those who were at risk of dying in the future. It seemed they couldn’t focus on both. Those rejections may have driven me even further to say this is necessary. I began collaborating with patients like myself who carry SOD1 or C9orf72 and have lost similar numbers of family members to ALS.
Now, 4 or 5 years later, we are the leading and the only nonprofit focused on genetic ALS and FTD. We’ve achieved monumental change for patients like myself when it comes to issues like genetic discrimination and clinical care. Before, I couldn’t walk into a doctor’s office and say, “I’m at risk for ALS, treat me.” They could do nothing—no clinical guidelines, and it wasn’t even in their insurance billing codes.
However, people at risk for heart disease receive preventive drugs and regular checkups from their doctors. Women who carry the BRCA mutation go in for preventive screenings regularly. We’ve made strides, but much work remains to be done.
There should be some clinical care for people like myself. We are patients with a medical diagnosis, yet there isn’t any care available. End the Legacy is actually in the process of creating those guidelines right now. We’re also opening one of Philadelphia’s first clinical care practices to care for presymptomatic genetic carriers.
We’re working on a litany of other initiatives and we’re truly revolutionizing what it means to be a genetic carrier. Six years ago, there was absolutely nothing for people like us.
Jacobsen: I’ve heard a lot from people in the futurist community, some of whom I’ve interviewed, talk about individual medicine—”personalized medicine,” as they call it. As new scientific discoveries open new moral vistas, we must become more attuned to new moral problems that arise with this knowledge. But that knowledge was always there; we didn’t know it. Do you think we’re entering an era where, with more genomic data and analysis, people will start considering their genetic risk factors and adopt specific life practices regarding diet and self-care?
Barvin: Absolutely. We’re already at the stage of personalized medicine. With companies like 23andMe, people are already starting to understand their genetic risks. This comes to a head with longevity doctors—those working on the outer bounds of practiced medicine, focusing on treating and preventing disease. While I don’t see one, my brother does, and since we both carry the C9orf72 variant, I get the same insights from him.
This idea that one should understand their risks and then get their biomarkers checked—whether that’s oxidative stress or any other indicator that might one day be linked to the development of a disease—is gaining traction. The goal is to track these markers, implement supplements or lifestyle changes, and continue iterating to lower those risks to normal levels. This approach is happening now.
There’s a recent example involving Chris Hemsworth, the actor. He found out that he carries the APOE4 variant, which significantly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s. He did a whole documentary on it on Disney+. Peter Attia, who is gaining traction in this space, talks about longevity in his recent book and discusses how everyone has a risk factor for dementia. It’s all about understanding and taking proactive steps to mitigate those risks.
Some people have higher risk factors, and some have lower. At what point do you start making decisions about your future? Years ago, everyone said, “Don’t smoke.” It’s not that different from what we’re doing now, but there’s a direct need to take action for people like me and others in my situation. That’s why we’re creating the resources we need to get there. If anything, people who find themselves at genetic risk for a disease and realize there are no existing resources for their community can look at what I’ve done as a model for how to upend the system and create resources for themselves.
This is a “never again” situation. We talked about the past generation and how these diseases blindsided them. Now, we can do genetic testing. I didn’t mention my children earlier, but now you can do family planning to avoid passing down these genetic variants. Both of my children were conceived via IVF and preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), and they don’t carry the genetic variant that has decimated generations of my family. I will be the last one affected by it, which is unbelievable, but it goes beyond that. There are so many things you can do to save your own life.
Jacobsen: Are there any particular areas you want to cover that we haven’t touched on?
Barvin: We also have data on Alzheimer’s. We conducted a smaller, 30-person study on Alzheimer’s with one of our drugs, COYA 301. I’ll back up a bit—Coya has developed a combination biologic, COYA 302, that is working to alleviate symptoms of ALS, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and FTD. It’s a platform drug that can be used for all these diseases. We used COYA 301 in two proof-of-concept studies in Alzheimer’s and showed similar efficacy and safety.
The Gates Foundation sponsored a larger proof-of-concept study through Houston Methodist, and we’re looking forward to that data being released in October. We hope it will be both productive and impactful. Combining abatacept and IL-2 in COYA 302 versus just low-dose IL-2 will be even more effective in Alzheimer’s. We hope the COYA 301 data will provide enough insight, motivation, and need to move forward into a larger trial in Alzheimer’s. That’s another one of our goals.
Jacobsen: What would be, in theory, the next generation of proof-of-concept trials? What’s the next step in dealing with inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases, particularly those grounded in genetic risk?
Barvin: It’s very challenging to conduct drug trials in healthy individuals who are at risk of disease. I wouldn’t want to sign up for a clinical trial where it’s unknown if the treatment will be effective, especially when I’m perfectly healthy at the moment.
If you’re dying of ALS, you’ll try anything. I’m not dying of ALS, but I do think we need to learn how to prevent these diseases. Drug companies are trying to do that, but none have succeeded. There is a drug that’s been approved for SOD1 carriers where they track you pre symptomatically, and when symptoms develop, they give you the drug immediately. It’s called tofersen, and it’s proven to be effective. C9orf72 is a more complex genetic variant. They’re looking at antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and other approaches, but no one has figured it out yet. That’s the golden ticket.
There is a lot of work being done in this space, and a lot more that needs to be done. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell my story and talk about the work that Coya is doing.
Jacobsen: Thank you so much, Daniel. I appreciate it.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/03
Andrew Copson was appointed Chief Executive of Humanists UK in 2009, having previously been its Director of Education and Public Affairs. He is also the current President of Humanists International, a position he’s held since 2015.
He has represented the humanist movement extensively on television news on BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, as well as on programmes such as Newsnight, The Daily Politics, and The Big Questions. He has also appeared on radio on programmes from Today, Sunday, The World at One, The Last Word, and Beyond Belief on the BBC, to local and national commercial radio stations.
Andrew served for many years as a director and trustee of the Religious Education Council, the Values Education Council, and the National Council for Faiths and Beliefs in Further Education, and the European Humanist Federation. and has advised on humanism for a range of public bodies such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority, the Department for Education, the BBC, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, and the Office for National Statistics. He was a member of the Advisory Group for the Humanist Library at London’s Conway Hall and, in a previous post in the office of Lord Macdonald of Tradeston in the House of Lords, he provided the secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group (APPHG).
Andrew was educated at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, where he read Classics and graduated with a first in Ancient and Modern History. He was a member of the winning team of the 2005 Young Educational Thinker of the Year Programme and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute and of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Associate of the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are here today with Andrew Copson. We’ll be covering the Freedom of Thought Report. It is not yet out; it is upcoming. I want to give credit to Bob Churchill for his time and service in developing much of the foundation and framework of the Freedom of Thought Report when he was involved with Humanists International. Last time around, the focus was democracy in 2023. So, why was democracy the central focus for 2023?
Andrew Copson: The Freedom of Thought Report has been ongoing for many years. It started as a project of the American Humanist Association. Humanists International took it on and developed most significantly under Bob Churchill’s editorship, as you mentioned. The report has always monitored violations of human rights and discrimination against non-religious people. However, it has also increasingly examined how hospitable the wider social context in different countries is towards expressing humanist ideas. These include not just ideas about gender equality, racial equality, and LGBTQ+ equality but also human rights generally, as well as ideas about democracy, the rule of law, the way politics should be conducted in society, and how freedom should be framed and respected.
It was a natural consequence of reviewing the annual report that democracy was finally highlighted as a significant theme. Additionally, 2023 was the year of the World Humanist Congress in Copenhagen, which also focused on democracy. That is how the theme came about, and it proved very fruitful for the Freedom of Thought Report. What the researchers discovered, as they updated the report with this democracy lens, was that humanists are on the front lines of democracy, pro-democracy campaigning, and the defense of democratic freedoms, it is often part and parcel of how humanists find themselves marginalized, discriminated against, or persecuted. They are often targeted not just for their rights but for their support of democracy itself.
Jacobsen: What kinds of discrimination do we see when people advocate for democratic values?
Copson: Typically, politically active humanists—humanists who are human rights defenders—and almost to be a humanist and part of a humanist organization is to be an activist. Humanist organizations are not just communities of fellowship for people with a humanist approach to life; they are platforms for change. They are platforms for social, political, and legal change. Humanist groups are not inward-looking; they are much more often outward-looking. It is almost intrinsic to having a humanist approach that you will want to be active for change and progressive change, which often means either the defence of or the promotion of democracy wherever you are. The discrimination against humanists because of their beliefs is extensive.
For example, in jurisdictions where they cannot legally register their worldview as humanists, they may be forced to choose a religion. Alternatively, they may not legally establish humanist organizations, as such things are banned in a few dozen countries. Government agencies may privilege religious parties in legal disputes or religious perspectives in state curricula through the education system or family law.
All of these disadvantages that humanists face are significant. When humanists want to speak out in favour of their rights, they often have to do so from a broader argument for democracy. Democracy is implicated in every bit of activism that humanists engage in to respond to the discrimination they face. This includes many other types of discrimination as well, such as religious instruction provided without alternatives in state schools or punishments for speaking critically of religion, insulting religion, or expressing non-belief, which can carry a prison or even a death sentence.
We have seen blasphemy “by the backdoor” laws in many countries that have been used to target humanists. Whether judicially in Nigeria, where, of course, as we all know, the head of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, Mubarak Bala, is still currently in prison, though we hope that the campaign to free him is turning the last corner there. Alternatively, in Pakistan, where humanists who post about humanist ideas on social media have been murdered by their neighbours. Wherever that persecution occurs, the democratic score for the country in question is usually very low. It is a general fact that countries that score low on the human rights index also score low on the democracy index. These things tend to go together. Suppose you do not have equal citizenship, equal participation, and a stake in the political life of your nation or community. In that case, your rights will likely not be respected by the jurisdiction in which you find yourself.
Although, as I say, democracy was, in a sense, just the next theme that the Freedom of Thought Report decided to address last year, it did turn out to be pretty much all-consuming. Questions of democracy became the backdrop for many other challenges that humanists faced regarding their persecution.
Jacobsen: Do healthier, wealthier, and more educated societies tend to be more democratic? Do these go hand in hand?
Copson: As an observable fact, yes, whether that is a coincidence is another question, Norway, for example, was pretty democratic even before it was very rich, in the way that it is now very rich. Of course, in the past, societies that have been more democratic have sometimes been very poor relative to the countries surrounding them. But it depends on what you mean by wealth. Does an enormous GDP or a growing GDP mean national wealth? Democracy might make it more likely that national wealth translates into benefits for individuals within that population. However, is an individual in India or China, for example, guaranteed to benefit from the growing national productivity in those places? That is questionable. I would say that democracy is almost certainly necessary if you want as many people as possible to enjoy the wealth of the nation they happen to be in.
So economic success and productivity are not the only measures, are they? However, if you think about it, is wealth inequality likely lower in democracies? Is sharing national wealth through social security more likely to be present in democracies? Are more people better off, on average, in democracies? Yes, that is the case.
Jacobsen: What are the more extreme examples of discrimination humanists face through advocacy for democracy, at least in your report?
Copson: Yes, so what the report focused on, in particular, was those humanists who are going into battle for general democratic rights and freedoms and then facing individual persecution as a result. If you want to take a case from Europe, Panayote Dimitras, the leader of the Humanist Union in Greece and also monitoring minority rights in particular, wrote the foreword for the 2023 report. He faced all sorts of official and semi-official, quite intense harassment from Greek authorities when he began to call out the Greek state’s treatment of asylum seekers, in particular.
His bank account was frozen, and he found it hard to get it unfrozen. Money laundering proceedings were opened against him, which were completely fraudulent. There was nothing he did; it was completely unjustified. This is petty official harassment of the kind that has happened to humanist leaders in the past.
In India, for example, when they are travelling internally within the country by air, they get deplaned for no reason, questioned about their business, and detained until the plane has left. All sorts of petty official harassment that people can suffer. In Panayote’s case, this all came about as a result of his campaigning against anti-Semitism and homophobia by Greek clerics, as well as for the rights of asylum seekers. You could not get a more obvious example of unjustified persecution than that.
Then, of course, we know that with humanists in Bangladesh. This was long before the current democratic uprising in Bangladesh, but a lot of the same people demographically are involved in that as were involved in the humanist blogging platforms of previous years and the general pro-democracy campaigning there. In Malaysia, for example, humanists were arrested ostensibly for having a humanist organization or a humanist page on social media. However, what motivated the authorities to take action wasn’t humanism per se, but the advocacy of pluralism, liberalism, democracy, and general human rights and freedoms.
It’s often difficult for humanist organizations in the West to get their governments to support humanists who are persecuted overseas for reasons of this sort. While Western governments are willing to be active on human rights grounds and say, “We’ve all signed up to the human rights charters; you shouldn’t be depriving this person of their human rights, freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief.” They are less willing to say, “Hey, you shouldn’t be persecuting this person for political advocacy.” When something becomes political in international relations, one state is more reluctant to call out another about it. It’s seen as moving beyond the universal human rights world and almost into the national politics of that country.
So there’s a greater extension of appreciation for the fact that countries sometimes need to govern their affairs and keep order in their jurisdictions. That’s a significant barrier to having these cases addressed. If one country can say to another, “Hey, I’m managing my own business here. This is a political question, not a human rights issue or a matter of freedom of belief or religion,” it makes the advocacy that another country might want to engage in on behalf of the humanist in question much more difficult.
I know from my work that a good example is the situation for humanists in Bangladesh. When we were trying to get the UK government to speak out—now I’m speaking from a Humanists UK perspective rather than a Humanists International one—the fact that many of those who were being disadvantaged or discriminated against because of their humanist beliefs were also being victimized by the government for their political activity made it almost impossible for the UK government to speak out about their treatment meaningfully. This is a significant challenge for humanists who are persecuted. Humanists are often persecuted wherever they are.
They’re seldom persecuted only for their humanist beliefs but often also for their pro-LGBT equality beliefs, their pro-democratic beliefs, or their pro-race equality beliefs. They’re campaigning against untouchability in India and elsewhere. They’re campaigning for LGBT rights in jurisdictions where that’s still illegal. They’re campaigning for democracy in places that are still only partially democratic or not democratic.
Copson: The purpose of the report is to influence international expert opinion. Fortunately, the sophisticated international architecture around freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief exists. There’s a UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief. So, the marshalling of evidence, particularly in our case, evidence on the treatment of non-religious people, has an audience. Our report has been cited by UN Special Rapporteurs successively. It’s increasingly cited academically as well as in UN institutions. So, influencing international expert opinion is a very important aim.
Another aim is to influence public and state criticism against countries for their failure to observe human rights standards. The original report was very much targeted at the US State Department, which takes much interest in freedom of religion or belief violations and, more positively, in promoting that freedom internationally. Again, international institutions and governments have cited the report and used it to call out countries criticized in the report for their actions. Indonesia, the Maldives, and Mauritania are all examples of countries where our report has been used to prompt consideration within international institutions of the role of those countries and what they are doing.
Then there’s the evidence it provides, the tool it provides for civil society, for humanist organizations in different countries, and generally for human rights NGOs. Every country has a separate page on the Freedom of Thought Report website. However, only some countries are updated on an annual basis. So human rights NGOs, whether international, regional, or local, can use that report. Gathering evidence within countries is sometimes very difficult. So, it equips civil society and expert opinion, which I’ve talked about, and governments in the UN and other international forums.
It also has a personal value. It’s always valuable, isn’t it? That people’s stories ought not to be forgotten. They shouldn’t be obscured but should be brought out and highlighted. On an individual level, it’s much easier to understand a general systemic issue if it has a human face. If you can see, “This is the person who is in prison—Mubarak Bala is in prison. He can’t see his wife, he can’t see his baby, he has never met his child.”
Making the situation vivid in a way more than if I just said, “There is Sharia law in Northern Nigeria, and people are persecuted.” It’s not the same. The fact that we use individual stories is an important part of the report. Just building the evidence base about the persecution of non-religious people—until this report was first compiled, I don’t think there was any real systematic evidence of persecution against any belief group globally, apart from Christians. They were the only group with much better-funded organizations than Humanists International, agitating on their behalf. We’ve opened that up, which is useful for journalism and global opinion to the extent that there is such a thing as global public opinion. The report can hopefully speak to that, too. It has several purposes for several different audiences.
We learn every year of new uses to which the report can be put. It has turned into the most significant product of Humanists International. In the 12 years that it’s been published—12 years is a long time—it has the long-term aspect where you can chart change over time, which is very important. So it’s an important tool for that as well. Mostly, things are getting worse rather than better, but there are some improvements over time and, hopefully, more to come.
Jacobsen: What are some things in the report that you can note that pretty much every country could do better on?
Copson: That’s a good question. It’s a very good question, indeed. We have a map of all the world’s countries; it’s online and normally in the printed edition. Every country could be better. One of the things that no country does is treat all religious and belief organizations, individuals, and perspectives equally in every aspect of the state. Everywhere, even in countries like the UK or Belgium—let’s take the UK and Belgium, for example—we have two countries representing different religions and beliefs in their school education systems.
Both those countries have religious schools, so that could be better. However, the state curricula for non-religious state schools have different classes for different religions and beliefs, as in the case of Belgium. In the case of the UK, different religions and beliefs are taught in the same curriculum for all children simultaneously.
You look at those and think, “Oh, this is good. Here is equal treatment.” But of course, it’s not really. Because in neither of those places are there any official objective guidelines about which religions and beliefs are covered. In neither of those places, in Belgium, it can be hard for a group to achieve the recognition required to receive the state subsidy, which is what it is being taught about in general schools. Even countries like New Zealand or Belgium could be better, nowhere is perfect.
Of course, there’s a massive gap between those states and states where it is illegal for a non-religious person to hold public office or states where the head of state frequently marginalizes, harasses, and incites violence against the non-religious, like in Pakistan, Malaysia, the Maldives, Egypt, or Iran. Those countries are in a different league from countries with just some systemic discrimination. But what we are finding in countries that have traditionally, perhaps, been doing quite well on some of these issues is that although they might still be generally good, there are some places where they’re allowing, as it were, legal ghettos to develop, where–let’s say–there are different systems of family law running within democratic countries.
Those family law systems permit the differential treatment of people seen within particular religious communities compared to people in the general population. There’s been some concern in some European countries where religious law has been adopted by permitting its application in certain cases like divorce, for example. In those situations, the freedom of conscience that not just non-religious people but all people should expect in democratic states has been reduced as a result. So, everywhere has its challenges, and nowhere is perfect. But that’s not to say that some places aren’t in a different league and better than others.
All right then, thank you! We’ll send you a mental postcard from Singapore.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/02
Books Through Bars has been sending free books to incarcerated people in six mid-Atlantic states (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) for over 30 years.
To learn about programs serving people in other states, check out Prison Book Program’s list of books to prisoners programs. We’re all unaffiliated, although of course we admire each other’s work.
We do our best to send the books people ask us for, whatever those may be. By fulfilling all requests to the best of our ability, we work to support self-determination, self-education, and healing behind bars.
Nearly all of the books we send are donated. That means our ability to fulfill requests depends on the donations we receive.
By donating books, you can help ensure that incarcerated people receive the books they need!
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are here to talk about Books Through Bars, Philly. As a Canadian or a foreigner, I know Philadelphia by its nickname, “Philly,” one of the most recognizable city names in the United States. So, how did Books Through Bars, Philly get started in Philly?
Dr. Tom Haney: Well, Scott, this is interesting because there’s a Canadian connection. Originally, a couple of people working for New Society Publishers here in Philadelphia started the initiative. New Society Publishers has since moved out on the West Coast to Canada.
A person at New Society Publishers, a company dedicated to certain types of books, started receiving letters from inmates. The letters often said, “I don’t have any money, but I’d like to read. Can you send me some books?” This person and a few others got together, and that’s how Books Through Bars began.
There’s a bit more to the story. Two people from New Society Publishers were involved, one of whom was Barbara Harlow, the mother of Books Through Bars. She took over from Todd and got a few of her friends together. The issue was that New Society Publishers didn’t publish the kinds of books that incarcerated people were requesting. So, they branched out on their own, looking for places where they could buy or have books donated, and they were the first to start sending books to prisoners across the United States.
Jacobsen: The United States has a significant incarcerated population. It’s intertwined with various issues, such as racial and class disparities. We can touch on those later. But regarding your role as president, Tom, what responsibilities or tasks does that entail?
Haney: I’ve been with Books Through Bars for about 12 years. Like everyone else, I started by walking through the doors, picking and packing books to send out. I’m now the president of Books Through Bars, which I often joke about, saying it comes with no responsibilities other than having my name on the legal documents. We are a nonprofit organization registered in the state of Pennsylvania. By law, we need three people to sign the legal documents, including the president. My primary duty is to be the face of BTV. I do a lot of interviews and public speaking, and I’m one of the main hosts when volunteers come in to help pick up and pack books for shipment. There are a few other small tasks, but that’s it from my perspective.
Jacobsen: You’ve received extensive media coverage in Philadelphia, including from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Citizen. That’s at least half or more of our coverage. How does that happen? How does a Canadian come across this organization every 15 years or so?
Haney: I don’t know how to answer that one. As I mentioned, the roots of Books Through Bars date back to 1989; by 1991, we became a nonprofit organization separate from New Society Publishers. We’ve been around for over 30 years; many people know and contact us. We used to ship books across the United States, but that became too expensive, so now we only send them to prisons in the mid-Atlantic states. However, we’re still fairly well-known across the country. So, that’s how people hear about us. I hope that answers your question.
Jacobsen: It does. That was just a side question. What are the barriers inmates face to accessing literature?
Haney: Now, that’s a big question.
Jacobsen: Well, the thing is, these organizations exist for a reason. So why? Does public infrastructure need to fill that gap?
Haney: There’s a comparison to be made between now and when Books Through Bars first started. Back then, we were one of only three organizations in the country. Now, there are organizations like ours in almost every state. Plus, there are a couple of similar organizations in Canada and England.
The need for these organizations comes from a few different areas. First, one of the major reasons people end up incarcerated and in trouble is a lack of education—poor or no education—especially if they’re coming from a major city or inner-city area. It doesn’t matter nowadays because major cities’ suburbs and surrounding areas have grown and face the same problems as big cities. So, many people haven’t graduated high school and may not have even made it out of grade school. There are a few reasons for that.
The major one is abuse, especially child abuse, and how a person feels about themselves. A lot of incarcerated people have poor self-esteem, hate themselves, and don’t think they’re worth anything, which leads them to believe they can’t accomplish anything. As a result, their education suffers. Another issue is that once a person is incarcerated, prison schools and libraries are treated like the schools and libraries in major cities—when money is needed elsewhere, ancillary programs are cut.
Those in a big city might see how your public schools work. A lot of smaller programs get cut because funds are needed elsewhere. The same thing happens in prisons. Schools and libraries in prisons are considered ancillary programs. So, when prisons need more funds—typically for security—money is cut from the schools and libraries.
This leaves people inside the prison needing more resources to educate themselves. Books Through Bars’ major goal is to help folks inside educate themselves. We don’t just send educational books; we send all kinds of books and literature. If we can get a book into someone’s hands and they sit down and read it, they’re educating themselves, no matter what the book is.
Two things happened recently. We got a letter from an incarcerated gentleman who serves as the inmate librarian in his prison library. He’s asking us for books because the prison won’t buy more books for their library. Another sad story: we received a letter from a teacher in a high school prison asking us to send books to help her and her students and stock the prison library because the prison recently made significant cuts to the school’s budget. Studies have shown time and time again that if a person can educate themselves before they are released, they have a far better chance of leading a better, crime-free life.
And so, this is our major goal—to help folks on the inside. Another example: About six months ago, we received a letter from a gentleman who sent us the transcript for his GED. He’s been receiving books from us for a few years, but I’m unsure how many. He just got his GED while in prison, and now he’s asking for books to study for the SATs because he wants to go on to college. Folks, getting your GED on the outside can be difficult. Getting your GED in prison could take several years. So, this is no small accomplishment for this particular gentleman, and that’s why we do what we do. We receive thank-you letters telling us how much the books are appreciated and how we’ve helped them. Education is our goal for the folks on the inside.
Jacobsen: Now, African Americans and men typically receive harsher sentences, even when you control for other factors like criminological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables.
Haney: True.
Jacobsen: In the United States, a significant portion of the prison population is men. So, in terms of unequal sentencing treatment and the disproportionate number of men and African Americans in these areas, this seems like a gender equality issue. This seems like a deep feminist issue that isn’t talked about much, probably because it’s seen as politically touchy, sensitive, or incorrect to advocate for men in this way, in general. When it comes to those effects, how does the lack of literature, even though these organizations now exist more widely, restrict life possibilities for men if they’re in prison or once they’re out, given that they now have a record and often haven’t had access to educational materials?
Haney: What you’re saying is correct. Unfortunately, I don’t have any figures on hand at the moment. But I can tell you that my organization and I are involved with other organizations that support what we call “returning citizens” here in Philadelphia, especially because many of the people being released are people of colour. It takes much work for people to find employment, especially depending on the crime they were incarcerated for.
Employment, in general, is tough, and I don’t have the exact figures, but unemployment is high, no matter what. So, they have to battle—because of their record—to find any employment, especially over someone who hasn’t been incarcerated. Due to their lack of education, the available jobs are often extremely low-paying, menial, and sometimes difficult to handle. This is a huge concern for many people here on the outside.
Another part of your question touches on the fact that some people outside prison feel that those who have been incarcerated—ex-cons—don’t deserve certain things, including decent-paying work. I’ll touch on something else that may not have been part of your question but is relevant to what’s happening in society today: People with alcohol or drug addictions face very poor treatment programs on the inside. These programs don’t work well unless the person is extremely motivated, which many incarcerated folks are not, due to poor self-esteem and self-worth. They don’t feel they deserve anything better.
So, when these folks come out, they still have to fight their addictions, and there’s not much funding for treatment programs on the outside, either. Many of those programs aren’t well-run and don’t perform much better than the programs inside. So, these folks often end up below the poverty line, maybe living on the streets, still fighting their addiction, still seeking drugs and alcohol. If I remember correctly, one study I saw not too long ago indicated that recidivism rates for people with little or no treatment when they come out—good treatment, when they finally do get out—are still 60% or higher. Most of these folks are back in jail within 30 days to a few months.
Another problem with incarceration is that, at least here in the States, we are terrible at taking care of our mentally ill population. Due to cutbacks in mental health programs several years ago, prisons have become overcrowded with people who have mental health issues and should not be there in the first place. This overcrowding takes money away from programs crucial for the people I was talking about. The funds instead go toward building new prisons, increasing security, and hiring more staff. In that respect, our prison system has become a failure because of the overcrowding and the presence of mentally ill individuals who should be receiving care elsewhere.
Jacobsen: What kinds of literature do inmates generally want to read? In other words, if people want to donate books—hint hint, wink wink—what kind of literature should they donate to ensure it gets read rather than sitting and gathering dust?
Haney: Let me put it this way. Anyone wishing to donate should know that there are what we loosely call “books to prisoners” organizations across the United States and Canada. If you go online and type in “prisoner book programs,” you should come up with a list of states and the organizations in those states. Organizations can do it because of your donations. The first thing to do is look up those organizations online. Like Books Through Bars here in Philadelphia, they all have donation pages. Check out their donation page. It will tell you what books we need, what books we don’t need, and what books we won’t accept.
I have some figures in front of me, although they’re a few months old. First of all, dictionaries are the number one requested book. This shows you how many people on the inside want to help educate themselves. After that, thrillers, mysteries, romances, and sci-fi are the books most requested by the public. It goes down the line from there.
We get requests for various kinds of books. For instance, we get business books, hobbies, and art requests. We also receive a fair number of requests for books on law. Let me point this out, folks. Books on law are hard to fulfill because we are not law libraries, and we need to get the type of books donated necessary for someone who wants to work on their cases or appeals from the inside. So, we send them information on where they can look for that material. By the end of 2023, we had sent out roughly 19,000 pounds of books. We receive around 100 letters a week.
Yes, a week of requests. If you can imagine, almost every single day—if you can tell by my fingers here because I don’t have the exact number—almost every single day, we get about that many requests. That would be 30, 40, or even 50 requests a day. Now, not all of them are for us. Some of them are for other organizations around the country. For the states we don’t ship to, we forward those requests to the appropriate organizations so they can respond. In return, those organizations that don’t serve Pennsylvania send the Pennsylvania requests to us. So, we are looking at at least 100 or more weekly requests that our volunteers have to process and send out.
Jacobsen: What is the process for starting an organization like yours in another state or county? It doesn’t have to be grand to be important.
Haney: When we get a question from someone who wants to start an organization, I usually tell people to start small. Start with your city or county prison first and work out from there. Over the years, this has become an extremely difficulttask.
It’s gotten harder because of prisons’ restrictions on organizations like ours. Getting things started and getting yourself vetted into various prisons is no small task, and you’ll have to put in much personal time to get it up and running. Not only time, but you’ll also have to spend a fair amount of your money to get the place going. When our people started this, postage was, and still is, the highest expenditure for organizations like ours. When these folks started sending books, they bought stamps out of their pockets because they didn’t have enough money from donations to help run the organization. I will say that Books Through Bars has a booklet on how to start a Books to Prisoners organization that lays out all of the major steps to starting an organization like this. It would take me too long to explain it here because you must write letters, wait for replies, and find the right people to talk to—which can be difficult. So, we published a little booklet just for that. I’m not entirely sure how else to say it.
The other thing to consider is that you may already have a Books to Prisoners organization in your town. For instance, here in Pennsylvania, there are Books Through Bars in Philadelphia. Still, there’s also the Prison Book Program in Pittsburgh. So, Pennsylvania has two organizations. New York State has a couple of organizations as well. So, if you’re thinking about this, and if there’s an organization close to you, consider volunteering with that organization because we can always use more help.
Jacobsen: Tom, any final thoughts based on the conversation today?
Haney: No, I hope everybody enjoys this, finds some good insight, and goes out to find a Books to Prisoners organization near them to volunteer with or donate books. You heard what I discussed here in Philadelphia—help your local organizations. Other organizations around you may not necessarily be related to sending books in but are related to prison issues. You might want to get involved with those and help them because it is serious.
For instance, in October, I’m going to a conference in Colorado on public safety. I will discuss how reducing public safety concerns involves working on the front end—before someone gets incarcerated—and on the back end—when people are released, helping them start a better life. This can reduce crime, gun violence, and injuries on our streets. These are ways to get involved and help make a difference.
Jacobsen: Tom, thank you for today’s opportunity and time and for introducing me to Books Through Bars, Philly.
Haney: Yes, folks, remember that. Especially if you’re here in Pennsylvania, if you look us up online, it’s “Books Through Bars,” spelled out, and make sure it’s the Philadelphia address. There are other organizations with similar names, so if you look us up, look for the Philadelphia location. Scott, thank you so much for inviting me here. It was a pleasure. This is enjoyable for everyone to listen to and for you to process and get out there. I hope you enjoyed listening to me talk.
Jacobsen: I did, I did. Thank you.
Haney: Thanks, thanks, thanks so much, and enjoy the rest of your day.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Honghao Zhao is a member of the OLYMPIQ Society based on a qualifying score on the Strict Logic Spatial Examination 48. Zhao discusses: growing up; extended self; family background; youth with friends; education; purpose of intelligence tests; high intelligence; extreme reactions to geniuses; greatest geniuses; genius and a profoundly gifted person; necessities for genius or the definition of genius; work experiences and jobs held; job path; myths of the gifted; God; science; tests taken and scores earned; range of the scores; ethical philosophy; political philosophy; metaphysics; worldview; meaning in life; source of meaning; afterlife; life; and love.
Keywords: bear story, bullying, Confucian culture, Dao concept, geniuses in history, high intelligence, intelligence tests, materialist atheist, social reactions, talent in mathematics.
Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time?
Honghao Zhao: There are no particularly special stories, just some amusing anecdotes that parents or older generations share during their leisure time.For example, a bear picking corn.
Jacobsen: Have these stories helped provide a sense of an extended self or a sense of the family legacy?
Zhao: This story is actually an interesting folk saying about a bear picking corn. The bear walks into a cornfield, picks an ear of corn and tucks it under its arm. After walking a few steps, it picks another ear of corn, but the first one falls out. This story is often used to describe someone who is so focused on one thing that they neglect another, ultimately gaining very little. Of course, this story is just one of the many stories my grandparents told me to entertain me when I was a child. The purpose wasn’t really about an extended self or the family legacy.
Jacobsen: What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Zhao: I come from an urban household, although my parents are both from rural backgrounds. I grew up in Shandong, including attending university and graduate school here. As you might know, this is also the birthplace of Confucius and is deeply influenced by Confucian culture. Besides my native language, Chinese, I have a limited proficiency in English. As for religious beliefs, I am a materialist, or an atheist, except perhaps for the concept of “Dao”, which I understand as the rules and principles governing the operation of all things.
Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?
Zhao: When I first started elementary school, I was quite introverted and was often bullied by girls, so I had few friends. By the time I was in middle and high school, I had grown quite tall and my talent in mathematics had become apparent. Although I was still relatively introverted, I got along well with my classmates and had quite a few friends.
Jacobsen: What have been some professional certifications, qualifications, and trainings earned by you?
Zhao: Some awards in mathematics competitions and structural design competitions, some awards in the field of rail transit, and a master’s degree in civil engineering.
Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests to you?
Zhao: Initially, intelligence tests were just a curious experiment for me. Later on, they became more like brain games that could inspire my thinking.
Jacobsen: When was high intelligence discovered for you?
Zhao: If you mean discovering a high score through an intelligence test, that was in 2018 when I was 19 years old. However, in daily life, I had already easily completed the “Sokoban” game on my phone during kindergarten. In middle school, my grades were excellent, especially in mathematics. My mental arithmetic skills were outstanding at that time because I could easily visualize a clear draft paper in my mind and perform calculations on it.
Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked, vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy — many, not all.
Zhao: In my understanding, geniuses are inevitably vastly different from ordinary people in one or even multiple aspects, statistically lying at the edges of the normal distribution. This makes it clear that the essence of a genius is being out of sync in one or more aspects, unless they have high social skills, commonly known as emotional intelligence, to appear more sociable. For the collective will of a group, extreme non-conformity is unacceptable; the concept of “seeking common ground while reserving differences”usually only tolerates minor differences. In this context, if a genius achieves highly recognized accomplishments by society, their uniqueness can be praised. However, if a genius fails to achieve this, they are seen as out of place and not regarded as a genius by others, and they might not even see themselves as a genius. How could they not be mocked in such a situation?
Jacobsen: Who seem like the greatest geniuses in history to you?
Zhao: Perhaps Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, etc.
Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person?
Zhao: It depends on how you define a genius and a profoundly intelligent person. The difference in definitions is the difference between the two.If we define a genius as someone who has exceptional talent in a particular field, and a person with a very high IQ as someone who scores extremely high on IQ tests, then a genius could be a mathematician, physicist, dancer, painter, etc., while a person with a very high IQ might only excel in mental capabilities.
Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?
Zhao: Possibly not necessary in very rare cases.
Jacobsen: What have been some work experiences and jobs held by you?
Zhao: I only have experience with attending school and pursuing graduate studies for now. Of course, during my graduate studies, I need to conduct experiments for scientific research or solve some engineering problems.
Jacobsen: Why pursue this particular job path?
Zhao: Obtain a master’s degree and find a job to make a living.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them?
Zhao: Geniuses.I don’t know much about those myths.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or gods idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?
Zhao: I am an atheist, unless this god is just a powerful being, similar to how modern technology might be considered god-like if it traveled back to ancient times. If this god refers to an omniscient and omnipotent entity with its own free will to control our destiny, requiring people’s worship or sacrifices, then I do not believe in it. I only believe that the universe has ‘laws’ ,such as logic, mathematics, and physical laws.
Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you?
Zhao: Most of it.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations) for you?
Zhao: SLSE 48, by Jonathan Wai, 30.5/48, IQ178.6(SD15);
Qing, by Huanyun Chen, 29.5/33, IQ167(SD15);
Numerus, by Ivan Ivec, 15/30, IQ156(SD15)
夜曲其二, by Mahir Wu, 47.5/60, IQ153.8(SD15)
Jacobsen: What is the range of the scores for you? The scores earned on alternative intelligence teststend to produce a wide smattering of data points rather than clusters, typically.
Zhao: Currently, it’s approximately between 150 and 180.
Jacobsen: What ethical philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Zhao: I believe that humans, like animals, are born without a distinction between good and evil, only with purity and the instinct to seek benefits and avoid harm. For the benefit of the group, people seek common ground while reserving differences, forming laws and moral concepts. This is somewhat similar to reducing variance while keeping the overall expectation constant. However, personally, I think humans should pursue something different from animals, namely spiritual pursuits, so I am more inclined to do good deeds.
Jacobsen: What social philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Zhao: Maintain your integrity in poverty; help the world in prosperity.
Jacobsen: What economic philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Zhao: Reap what you sow.
Jacobsen: What political philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Zhao: The free and comprehensive development of every individual.
Jacobsen: What metaphysics makes some sense to you, even the most workable sense to you?
Zhao: Perhaps the pursuit of free will.
Jacobsen: What worldview-encompassing philosophical system makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Zhao: The only constant in life is change. So I won’t judge what is most meaningful.
Jacobsen: What provides meaning in life for you?
Zhao: Thinking.
Jacobsen: Is meaning externally derived, internally generated, both, or something else?
Zhao: Both.
Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not?
Zhao: I don’t believe in an afterlife, ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ but I hope there is one, in whatever form.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life?
Zhao: People today do not see the moon of ancient times, but the moon today once shone on the ancients.
Jacobsen: What is love to you?
Zhao: Perhaps, love is about giving rather than taking.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life. September 2024; 13(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, September 15). Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life. In-Sight Publishing. 13(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 1, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 13(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.13, no. 1, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Honghao Zhao on Views and Life [Internet]. 2024 Sep; 13(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zhao-1.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Marc Roberge is the 2nd Vice President of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, a historian, and a retired teacher. He discusses: growing up; extended self; family background; youth with friends; education; purpose of intelligence tests; high intelligence; extreme reactions to geniuses; greatest geniuses; genius and a profoundly gifted person; necessities for genius or the definition of genius; work experiences and jobs held; job path; myths of the gifted; God; science; tests taken and scores earned; range of the scores; ethical philosophy; political philosophy; metaphysics; worldview; meaning in life; source of meaning; afterlife; life; and love.
Keywords: Cultural skepticism, ethical philosophy, family background, genius definition, intelligence tests, personal struggles, philosophical insights, professional experiences.
Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time?
Marc Roberge: Scott, if I may, let me begin by commending you for your work here at the very aptly named In-Sight Publishing, as each interview achieves precisely this aim. Also, I’m grateful for, albeit humbled by, your invitation to chat. Thank you. This is a first.
To answer your question, it’s odd that we should begin there since my childhood lacked lore and stories. For one, I was born in 1970, the second of two, 5 years apart, my sister the elder. My father worked construction and was away all week, a theme that would carry through his seventies. My mother worked in the office at a sawmill manufacturer-retailer in the neighboring town, meaning that we children were with sitters and extended family more often than not. When my sister turned 11 or 12, she started taking some of that responsibility. There wasn’t a lot of family time to speak of, from my spotty recollection.
My father was 7 years my mother’s senior, and 31, by my calculation, when I was born. He’d started owning a dairy farm, and whether it went under, or due to pressure from my mother to adopt a more conventional lifestyle (to this day, I don’t know), but they ultimately sold it and moved to a small nearby town. I do know that while they owned the farm, my father had already transitioned into other work, settling on construction, and my mother was, as she likes to tell it, left practically alone to tend to my sister, the animals, and the farm. Nevertheless, my father, I sensed, always resented having sold it, and up to the very last I could denote a mixture of deep nostalgia and regret.
Further complicating the matter was that there seemed to be distinct versions of him — a past life few ever talked about in my company, a public one, and the one only I knew. From what I gleaned over the years, he’d apparently been a bit of a wild man — a story of him getting his scrotum caught on a barbed-wire fence trying to outrun game wardens at night after being spotted poaching fish by flashlight and requiring, apparently, quite a stitch count. Another story of a little speed boat he’d clapped together in the barn and mounted with a far too powerful outboard, zipping along on his maiden voyage along the river bank bordering the farm and, less than a few minutes out, dipping the nose under water, effectively planting it in the bottom beyond retrieval. He flipped the farm tractor into the very same river. Lost one fingertip to a saw. Lost another to a crossbow.
He raced snow-machines in quarter-mile heats. He drove a rather impractical 4×4 Chevy on a lift kit and beefy A/T tires, which, on weekends, often found its way into sand pits and mud bogs. I couldn’t reach the door handle. He was an outdoorsman — hunting and fishing, some camping, and, for a period, a bit of an adrenaline junkie. When I turned 5 or 6, whether it was discussed or decided all on his own, he got rid of the racing sleds and the truck perhaps a year or two later.
He was the eldest of five, not counting the one that had passed in childbirth, dropping out in 9th or 10th grade, I presume, to help work his father’s farm, which he eventually bought or inherited — again, none of these things were ever discussed. The rest of his siblings all went on to complete their post-secondary education — three school teachers and a dental assistant. My grandfather also held an agricultural college certificate and worked for some time as an inspector or assessor, I believe.
Given my father’s choice of career, he being away all the time, and his siblings residing an hour’s drive or more from our home, visits were few and far between — cordial, somewhat awkward, like a polite congregation of strangers, save for the one quirky uncle who brought light to the mix. I could never shake the feeling my father felt the need to compensate for his lack of education by way of career and financial success.
He never quite broke into the multimillionaire stratum, not that I’m aware, but between his work and side ventures, property flipping and rental units, let’s just say he had no problem plopping down $10k on Christmas gifts. He earned every penny. A true bull of a man, tenacious and goal-oriented. All of it accumulated with sweat beading from his brow. A stronger work ethic or sheer grit I’ve yet to encounter. He was hardly ever phased or stumped unless it had to do with human affairs. I, unfortunately, inherited this last trait, and it plagues me still.
Thus far, we’ve painted an admirable man, one of action, aptitude, courage, and generosity. All of these are true. He was exceptional in many ways. Stamina. Problem-solving. Numbers. Physical strength. In my experience, however, I’ve come to realize that exceptionalism comes at a cost or with concessions. Professional athletes and leading innovators must shelve portions of ‘normal’ life in order to excel — hours at the gym aren’t hours cracking the physics texts, volunteering, or socializing. Exceptionalism is an anomaly.
Now, on to less flattering and perhaps more troubling matters. Sometime around my birthday, I believe I was 7 going on 8. I came home from school, as usual, dawdling along and singing to myself, lost in thought. It was late October or early November, a Friday. I enjoyed school, but I was looking forward to the weekend — a chance to visit the library and stock up on some new books. When I arrived, through the screen door, I spied my father hunched over the kitchen table, crying, my mother and sister holding hands and standing at the door, three suitcases next to them. I noticed the car was running and packed with boxes. When I walked in, I was held back at the door, informed we were moving, and that was that.
We lumbered up to a semi-furnished apartment in a six-plex, and by Monday, I was enrolled in a new school. It was assumed, I guess, that I was too young to understand. They were wrong. I was spun around in a constant fog, and my nerves were shattered. It had been a tremendous shock to the system, and there was nothing to do but to let my body and mind ‘eat it.’ Not only was my father out of the picture, but there were never any of the regular faces around, either family or friends. It was radio silence.
My birthday passed without much ado — no friends or family around, just three of us and a big old elephant in the room. At the time, my father was just starting out and wasn’t quite as prosperous as in later years, but we still lived well. We had a cozy three-bedroom bungalow on a double-lot backed by a few hundred acres of undeveloped land where we were free to roam, play, and build forts. There was a double garage filled with tools and snowmobiles, and even a TERRA-JET (similar to ARGO), with an above-ground pool attached to it via a deck. All of that was gone. That Christmas, we spent at a fireman’s charity function in a local hall, collecting a food hamper, a plastic fireman’s hat and a plush dog. Sitting in a room with several dozen families receiving charity — that was blow number two.
It would be four months before we’d hear from our father. I’d simply assumed he was busy working, but he’d never been away this long. I began to suspect something was amiss. I hadn’t considered that he simply didn’t know where we were. When he showed up unannounced at the apartment door, our mother wasn’t home, and my sister was under strict instructions to open the door for no one, without exception. As he knocked, cried, and pleaded from the other side, and I watched, impotent, as my sister told him he had to leave since she wasn’t allowed to open the door — well, at that moment, I was torn to shreds. Afterwards, I became inconsolable. My mother would wake in the middle of the night to find me huddled behind a dresser, sobbing. I couldn’t eat or function. I was wracked knowing that she had been hiding us, that either our father presented a real or imagined threat, perhaps with the intention to abduct us. I think it may have had more to do with support and marital assets than the children, convinced my father would have been vengeful in that regard, given the way she’d left. I’d always wondered how our meager belongings had made it to the apartment before we arrived. I’d been unaware of anything being boxed or missing prior to that fateful day. After several nights, I was admitted to the hospital for a week to replenish my fluids, nutrients, and get me eating again. When I was released from care, I was informed that I’d no longer be living with my mother and sister but my father. In my mind, this seemed the fairest settlement for the parents, not so for us.
Little did I understand the magnitude of these decisions. My father wasn’t going to alter course, career-wise. Granted, everyone was exceedingly kind and compassionate — I am truly grateful. Nevertheless, not only had I been separated from my mother and sister, but I was now living with family friends, themselves with three children. This was the case until Summer when I would be sent to live with my grandparents, two hours drive away. When September rolled around, I’d live with a widow, kind and capable but in her 70s and taken with a serious nervous condition that made her stride unsteady, her face and arm somewhat spastic. She also had this creepy cat who was a total scrapper, always coming back bloody, and had no litter box because it did its business on the commode as we do, without the decency to shut the door first. This type of carnival fare is pure nightmare fuel for a kid living out of a suitcase in a quasi-foster-care arrangement for roughly five years.
I didn’t realize it at the time, too nomadic for normal friendships, but in hindsight, from a material standpoint, my father provided for an enviably comfortable existence. The flip side is that he was hardly around, and when he was, we were all pretty much dancing to his tune. He did show emotion, sometimes compassion. He could be warm. But generally, like a box of knives. He could be negligent, abusive, intimidating, judgmental, critical, cold, non-communicative, authoritarian, and prone to triggers. Not that the discipline was frequent, and I wasn’t a difficult child, but of a measure I felt disproportionate, punitive as opposed to instructive. To see rage flash across a parent or guardian’s face leaves an indelible mark. To see it brandishing, what today would raise some eyebrows —a belt, spoon, ruler — or soap in the mouth, or a few hours bare-kneed on the floor, or tossing every last toy into garbage bags and dragging them to the curb —as the truck pulls up.
It was a house without appeal, and the judge had a record for siding with the complainant. My father, I feel, saw any mark against me, real or fabricated, as a personal affront — an attempt on my part to undermine his own hard-won image and standing in the community. His ego was, and perhaps all egos are, precious.
He also enjoyed getting a rise out of others, teasing or frightening them. A blast up ride up a 50-degree sand dune in a jacked-up 4×4 with the front wheels off the ground is scary for a child. He once accidentally discharged a pellet gun into his own calf. I might have been 8 at the time, and we were alone walking back to the vehicle. He started acting, quite convincingly, as though he were about to faint, saying that I’d have to carry him to the truck and drive us back to town, and quickly before he bled out. He was always playing mind games. Fun times.
He was complicated, my father, and sociable but awkward. I could tell he wasn’t always at ease. Maybe that’s why he worked so much. But he did have his regular stops — his parents, a brother-in-law who worked in real estate and fed him the cherry listings. Otherwise, he mostly worked, and I spent a lot of time alone. He always encouraged talent development and education, above all, and signed me up for baseball one Summer, Cub Scouts another, guitar lessons, and so on. The problem was he just expected me to dovetail seamlessly. He could see I had the wherewithal but couldn’t apprehend that there’d been none of the groundwork. We’d never tossed a ball. We never watched sports. I had none of the mechanics, notions, or rules, and surrounded by peers who did, I felt like a fool. Same with scouts. As for guitar, I was handed an adult acoustic I could barely hold, a classical neck my fingers couldn’t span, and an instructor in his retirement with an impenetrable Italian accent. Each attempt felt like a setup — a preconfigured failure to keep me pegged. From very early on, I couldn’t help but feel like a constant disappointment.
His motives, though they often were, weren’t always altruistic — concerned with ‘perception.’ It may be unfair to say but, I think he might have loved me more if I’d been an esteemed professional, someone respectable and accomplished, and a little less of a screw-up. The bar, I assure you, was always high and moveable. He had my hat and played keepsies with it throughout my entire life. He could never relinquish his parental role nor concede, at any time, that we were on equal footing; insisting on maintaining that leverage, rubbing my nose in old business or finding ways to undermine my confidence was his way of ensuring dominance.
My grandparents were staunch Catholics. The evangelical channel was on all the time, thrice weekly Church attendance, nightly rosary, and even a traumatic pilgrimage through the Eastern provinces, stopping at all the religious points of interest along the way — cut short when I relapsed. I wasn’t faring well, and nothing was being done about it. Keep in mind, after that second familial split, I would neither see nor speak to my mother or sister but more than twice a year, a week in the Summer, a day or so at Christmas, from ages 8 through 18. My mother was, in clinical terms, a dead mother. Few, if any, of the extended family helped to provide some consistency. I’m sure they cared. But it still felt like it was being treated as someone else’s problem. My father was, if I were to venture any diagnosis, given to narcissistic tendencies with a mildly sadistic streak.
We can see how that level of fraying all but silenced reminiscences and any positive feelings one has about family — it was all mired in guilt, shame, regret and open wounds. The only specifics I am able to provide beyond this are that we were, with regards to heritage, Norsemen, finding a port along the St-Lawrence during the settlement era, a family of craftsmen (Roberge is, as I understand, a name for ’longship’) and farmers. Intelligence was in the pool. My father could perform complex mental arithmetic faster than I could punch it into a calculator.
Jacobsen: Have these stories helped provide a sense of an extended self or a sense of the family legacy?
Roberge: They might have, had I any that resonated. I see in my cousins, for instance, some grounding and amongst themselves a connection I never managed to plug into. I was uprooted and dancing constantly to adapt to my ever-changing circumstances and environments. Eventually, my father met someone. She had two younger children than me, by 2 and 4 years. She was 11 years his junior, a professional in health care, pretty, from a respected family. They loved each other and made a good pair. I’m sure, not only smitten, he also felt he’d found a trophy, a true ‘how do you like them apples’ to my mother. And he lavished her— building a new home, buying her furs, jewelry, a Cadillac, yearly trips abroad . She was often embarrassed by the luxuries, preferring to be understated. She wasn’t presumptuous in material ways. She was very caring, loving, kind, generous, and I am grateful to her. I am indebted. I’d be remiss however to omit a latent righteousness about her, one that sparked magnesium bright should you happen to strike it. It wasn’t always easy to communicate.
The dynamic had once again shifted. I was now the eldest of three, one of whom had been crushed under a dump truck while riding a tricycle down the sidewalk and required much attention and frequent hospital visits. A robbery. A house fire. Broken limbs. Teenage drama… Let’s just say there was no time for hindsight — we were always very much in the churn of things. Chaos from the get-go. My circle, effectively a zoetrope. We looked good on paper. I always felt adrift, apart, like a refugee, or a ward — beholden, voiceless, impotent.
Jacobsen: What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Roberge: I’d say most of what I know is covered in the first two responses, except for culture, language, and religion. I was profoundly altered by all of this. I’d been a curious, cheerful, sweet child. Following these events, I was suspicious, trusted few, and grew skeptical of the authoritarian line — doubting they’d so much as once questioned their own creeds, morals, or motives. I was a boy, convinced that to survive I would need to become self-reliant, on a mission to be broad in learning and skill. Religion was one of the first things to come under my scrutiny, and though I studied extensively across all denominations and offshoots, I resolved that I’d been lied to and manipulated. As a consequence, I rejected ‘religion’ rather openly but was made to go through the motions, nonetheless, for appearances. Naturally, all three — culture, language, religion — coalesced on my educational doorstep. I attended a French Catholic school. There was no point in suggesting I might want to attend one that was non-denominational or Anglophone. I’d not hear the end of that. So, in very real ways, all of these decisions have a profound impact and added to my growing sense of skepticism.
All decisions of any import were made for me, usually without any consideration. I would finish the school year on a Friday and learn on the Saturday that I was leaving for the Summer to go work with my father. You might assume I’d be happy to have some extra time with him, but he was a boss both at work and at home. It was he and I, 24/7, without a buffer, and me without any independence or means to escape for even an hour, the only privacy to be had, in the washroom, the only time I wasn’t being ordered around was when he slept. It felt like years of taking it on the chin, driven around and into the ground, never a ‘me’ in the mix — just this thing, this brute.
Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?
Roberge: Early on, before the divorce, things seemed fine. After I started popping on and off the radar, their bonds strengthened as my alienation deepened, by slight increments, since I was slipping, as it were, from their narratives. Meanwhile, I was alone a lot and spent my time reading, drawing, experimenting, and so on. I developed a palette for the solitary and cerebral, whereas they were steeped in ‘normal’ activity. The rift only grew from there. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I still fared well socially and was rarely shunned, bullied a few times but grew into my own, and I had a few close friends with whom I hung out regularly. I smooched a few girls, all of them quite pretty, decent and lovely, and I suppose I struck the odd fancy, but I was a mess and didn’t realize how bad. Invariably, none of these trysts were serious, lasted, nor ended well, all on account of me. So, in reality, I was actually failing miserably and feeling it, but I was faking it as best as I could. Again, being dragged off in the Summer and plopped back down when school started, a more prolonged iteration of the fostering of prior years, wasn’t helping. Nothing was working out. I was chronically stressed, inflamed, suffering from migraines, insomnia, bruxism, psoriasis.
Jacobsen: What professional certifications, qualifications, and training have you earned?
Roberge: Brimming with potential but inconsistent, I’d generally make the top three, later top 10th. The vicissitudes were never along subject lines but personal phases or periods. I graduated from H.S. with an 89, and I am a valedictorian, etc. Having never really been afforded a voice, those choices I’d made were often criticized, and I wasn’t sure what to pursue. I applied to four universities, each with a different program: engineering, architecture, accounting, and literature. I was accepted by all but discouraged by my father towards architecture, the prospect of mining or numbers for thirty years unappealing; I defaulted to the last with a mind on a PhD and professorship.
Problem was, my father made too much money for me to qualify for loans, and he was helpful, to a degree, but I had to work construction to keep myself afloat. As one of these sidelines turned profitable, by my third year and exhausted from doing both, I decided to take a year off and either make a go of it or bank enough to see me through another year or two of scholarship.
As it turns out, I’d been used and lied to by my business partner and drawn into bankruptcy. Not a great start for a 23-year-old. My then-on-and-off girlfriend and I got pregnant, and two months after losing it all, we welcomed a child into the world in pitiable circumstances, echoing that Christmas long ago. Not a year later, I learned my girlfriend had been stepping out for nearly the entire duration of our courtship. My brother in law died in a vehicle collision on his way to work. Rug-pull after rug-pull. Bankruptcy, separation — nothing was breaking right in spite of how hard I worked. I scrambled out of that mire with a new business partner and, within two years, had turned things around, managing to finish off my degree and a B.Ed, just in case. Shortly thereafter, he died of lymphoma at 33. Not my first loss, but it hit hard. The next year, I began teaching. I met a lovely woman with two incredible children, and for nearly twenty years, although not without its challenges, a pleasant contrast to the first twenty. It wouldn’t last.
Nevertheless, over the course of a lifetime, I’ve acquired proficiency in several trades, operated a variety of machinery and equipment, run businesses and organized events, built my own house, earned a B.A. in English/French Literature, a B.Ed Level 3, completed a year towards a College Business Diploma, Cisco CNAP certification, Working at heights, Laser Safety Officer (qualification to maintain our Makerspace CO2 laser). In short, nothing of note or significant merit, but rather things I simply needed at the time.
Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests to you?
Roberge: Let’s start with agreeing that, barring a better instrument or metric, standardized testing has, over its roughly 100-year course, proven incredibly consistent and perhaps one of the more studied/critiqued areas of intelligence. I feel this, along with a battery of other assessments and interviews, should be integral to educational intake, profiling and follow-up. As it stands, we only do them when things are going terribly wrong, the exceptionality impossible to overlook.We need to be more proactive and preemptive on that front. Gnothi seauton — know thyself. I.Q. factors are included, as well as coordination, height, strength, etc. Each is a metric, but for arbitrary reasons, some are singled out as impolite to speak of. It’s a number. A predictive one, to a degree. It does point to something seemingly intangible called ‘g,’ but, in simple terms, we can speak to the number of neurons, density, the robustness of these networks, how they are organized, and so on. Ultimately, it’s a matter of intensity and frequency, subjectively anyway, since FMRI scans show what we might expect from a bodybuilder lifting weights, which is that the actual activity or load on the muscle is less, given its efficiency.
It has been useful in sussing 2E conditions and disparities via sub index analysis, providing insight on that front. It offers clues to possible underlying conditions, such as those related to working memory or reasoning. It can serve to monitor therapeutic protocols or provide a prognosis of the rate of functioning over time. It is predictive of academic and career success, health, longevity, and quality of life. Personally, the number range was a foothold on a cliff face. It helped me figure out why I felt out of step.
Jacobsen: When was high intelligence discovered for you?
Roberge: I was 48, following an attempt on myself and placed on leave from work. I bounced around the health system for two years, four therapists and two psychiatrists, before eventually obtaining a proper diagnosis and correct medications. That whole time, I was running on two or three hours of sleep, consuming a few hundred calories per day, down sixty pounds from my standing 210, sweating through my sheets and sick to my stomach every night, teetering on the precipice — it was a hellish period, and I was often tempted to get it over with. For me, the sun hadn’t sunk but gone out, and I couldn’t see it ever returning. I can’t say it has, but at least now my eyes are scanning the horizon. I’d wish that on no one.
Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked, vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy — many, not all.
Roberge: Oh my! That’s a tall one. I find the term genius problematic, and I don’t consider myself adjacent in league. I can only speculate, focusing rather on the more generic form of what is effectively a rejection of the individual. There is us, and there’s them. This is primitive encoding. What is strange, unknown, uncertain, beyond one’s comprehension, inspires fear. It is unsettling, uncomfortable, and often embarrassing to be confronted by phenomena of an exceptional or indescribable nature. How do you argue, debate, or even attempt to comprehend something so far out of your experience? Add to this the roughly 70/30 extrovert/introvert split and what may be inferred with regards to social, mental, and physical predispositions; there is inherent in us a chirality towards tradition/the past/the tried and true, or away from it — innovators bring about change, traditionalists resist. The madness of the crowd drives them to extremes, as with Socrates, Bruno, Galileo, et al. Christ broke with tradition, and he was dealt the same fate. Part of the crowd now, part of the crowd then. People forget that all traditions were once innovations. I understand the disconnect.
Jacobsen: Who seems like the greatest geniuses in history to you?
Roberge: Children, probably. Everything, to them, is a question mark. How we assess genius is subjective, there is room for disagreement. I am biased toward the rebels and eccentrics in literature and social commentary, Bukowski, De Quincy, Rimbaud, Sartre, Camus, Orwell, Brontë, and Hesse; the list is long. Philosophy and science, Heraclitus, Aurelius, Socrates, Archimedes, Euclid, Da Vinci, Maxwell, Newton, Bohr, Planck — again, not so easy to whittle down. Had I to select, say 5, under duress — Shakespeare has few peers in committing to a page or stage the full tapestry of human emotion and relations. His portrayals are as relevant today as ever they were. Da Vinci not as a singular model of the ‘Renaissance Man’ but for the distinction of being exceptional among a host of other polymaths. Tesla — decades or more ahead of the curve. Given the time and resources, he would have had tenfold the impact. Sidis, I think, was an important loss to the intellectual community — his book The Animate and Inanimate held some compelling arguments, especially regarding entropy. He also stands as a cautionary tale. Mendeleev and Darwin. It’s like Pringles — I can’t stop at one.
Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person?
Roberge: There is a genius in all — a thumbprint uniqueness to each person’s thought process, associations, attunement, experience and problem-solving that harbor the potential for ideas and innovations no other might ‘lock onto.’ There is a mixture of these, serendipity, context, and motivations beyond our ken, conspiring to inspire. Naturally, the highly intelligent are, presumably, more learned or broad in interest. As a result, they have additional arrows in their quiver with which to hit their target — but not always. If genius means anything at all, it is likely predicated on spatial reasoning, bilateral processing and a talent for sussing patterns where none seem apparent. Wordsworth spoke of spots in time — significant and saturated imprints strewn like stars across the night sky and genius is the eye that gathers them into constellations.
Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?
Roberge: Apologies. I got ahead of this in my last response, but not necessarily.
Jacobsen: What have been some of your work experiences and jobs?
Roberge: Construction laborer, carpenter, HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, entrepreneurship (Landscape Construction and Retail, Restaurant Management, Website Design and Small Business online marketing, P.C. and smartphone repair, event organizer, educator (STEM, Media — film/photo/audio/animation/graphic design, Robotics/Electronics, Makerspace, gifted program, Cisco networking). A lot of other things as well. Forced into early retirement as I’m no longer able to sustain more than an hour or two of effort or focus at a time, I’ve kept myself as sharp as possible, reading copiously when I am able, teaching myself new programming languages, conceptualizing some devices, improving my technique in art and music, sorting out my thoughts in writing, exploring emerging technologies, and devoting quite a lot of time to the neurodiverse community.
Jacobsen: Why pursue this particular job path?
Roberge: It had far less to do with choice than the lack thereof — circumstances often prevailing; I took what was available and did what was necessary to keep us afloat.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them?
Roberge: Myths abound, as do delusions. The mythical is, as the word implies, expunging from our public conscience the all too human factors, frailties and flaws. Einstein did something genial, perhaps of mythical proportion to some, but also made some rather questionable life choices we rarely speak of. It’s easy to hone in on the discoveries while overlooking the years of work that go into dislodging them or the countless failures before achieving success. I think that this idea that things just randomly manifest and are fully formed is a caricaturization. Eureka, like the cart, comes after the horse. I might have a handful of these every day, but intuition only points the way — you still have to walk the path, often to discover it’s a dead-end. I have a lifetime of these, yet none are robust enough to withstand my own skepticism. Another is that those of a certain I.Q. are susceptible to mental health struggles, socially inept, frail, stuffy — all of the tropes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority are well-adjusted, rounded and balanced individuals, equally at home on the ball field or in the boardroom, leading ‘normal’ lives. Some are arrogant, solipsistic, suffer from mental health struggles. Others are congenial, funny, gracious, and so on. Everyone falls victim to logical fallacy and cognitive bias at some point, and drunk on our own Kool-Aid. It’s a hodge-podge. People are people. So, none are infallible nor as fallible as one might assume. They do, all of them, think differently from the average person. This is no myth. Similar to a pro-level hockey player forced to play in the Minor or Junior league, one or two competitive grades off. It’s not an issue of better or lesser, but a question of fitness. If you want the best for and from people, you have to place them in the appropriate context. It was Einstein again, wasn’t it, who said that we can’t judge a fish by its ability to climb? What is germane to the 2SD+ demographic is that, by dint of their rarity, society is adapted to the norm and ill-provides for them.
Still, we all heed the call of Maslow’s hierarchy, and the need for belonging and connection is fulfilled elsewhere, perhaps in academia, advanced R&D, I.Q. societies, or associating with the support community around neurodiversity. At least there are some, if far too few, means to congregate and connect. Trekkies have their thing, comic book readers have their ComiCons, Cinefiles their Festivals, gun owners their shooting ranges and clubs — why should we be different? At best, some of us may actually be endeavoring to do some good and provide some benefit to society; at worst, we are a doing puzzles and debating nonsense. Regardless, we are far from fringe and rather benign. Keep in mind that while these communities are prosocial environments bespoke to N.D.s, divergence does mean that we are independent and nonconformist to varying extents. A herd of cats, basically, but eerily smart ones. The same tensions do tend to arise in these circles as with any other grouping.
The usual culprit stems from that stance that leaves no wiggle room, no space for debate, as there is nothing to concede from that vantage. The thing is settled, and everyone else is misinformed or incorrect. After twenty years of paying down your mortgage, standing there with a clear title in your hands, it’s understandable if you’re not amenable to letting people live there rent-free or remove you from the premises. That’s kind of the situation there, part sunken-cost & double-down, part ‘say what you will talk all you want, I don’t care because I’m not budging.’ We run into that everywhere, but what is specific to this demographic is their sparring prowess.
Any who cast shade on exceptionality, giftedness, IQ, and the rest may be well reminded of their medications, health care providers, engineers, designers, architects, etc., as they certainly don’t call on just anyone to solve these types of problems. Still, you are correct to point out this disconnect.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or God’s idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?
Roberge: Here’s the thing. We use words that have no meaning, none inherent at least. Our lexicon could stand a pruning and overhaul to solve a more fundamental issue — clear and concise communication. There is currently far too much flex and latitude, circular references, self-references, speciousness, connotations, denotations, and obfuscations. It is an unwieldy bit of kit that lands us in heaps of trouble. I can’t subscribe to anything fully when at its core lies an axiom or a word without description — like perfection, or ideal, or truth. Furthermore, of all five questions, ‘Why?’ is the one many are chasing, and I’ve been down that rabbit hole. Let me save you the hassle. The answer to ‘why?’ is another ‘why?’, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Causality, per se, I suspect is a ‘human lens.’ It isn’t necessarily part of the ‘system,’ if you will, only a ‘gut feeling’ that everything is motivated and obeys certain ‘laws’ we feel are ‘universal.’ The motive, I suppose, is the boundary I cannot penetrate. There’s a lot to figure out yet and it’s too early in the game to make a call. Regardless of what the math or the heart may say, it has to make sense. It is wonderful to consider all of the possibilities, follow our intuitions, and engage our emotions and imagination. It is harmful to self, relations, and progress to allow oneself no margin for concession or error while acknowledging elsewhere we are only human and make mistakes — somewhat contradictory.
In short, I don’t know what God is, or whose. It’s a name lacking a face and description — a true unsub. I know what ‘a god’ is. I know of thousands. Many themes repeated, some borrowed, others were outright stolen, fragments of questionable pedigree, organized by an agendized committee, and again, and so on. We make mistakes and assumptions. We leap to conclusions. We fear uncertainty. We are baffled and bedazzled by the mystery. We cling to each other, to hope, to the illusion of certainty and security. We’d be paralyzed otherwise. With all of these dubious stages of evidence gathering, handling, analysis, discovery and interpretation, spanning thousands of years, that alone is a significant margin of error. Tampering will have poisoned the well. Most of the texts are quite beautiful and inspiring. There is wisdom and insight in them. They have poetry or prose that is exceedingly powerful and employ the levers of imagery and song to great effect. I’ve read extensively, as I alluded to before. For a long while, I attempted to reconcile these contradictions, but I simply couldn’t.
I’ve followed attempts to quantify or elaborate a ‘God’ formula to explain the universe, consciousness, life, and creator. That’s well above my weight class. From where I’m sitting, I’m aware of myself and ‘others’ as persistent anomalies; that all that exists, known or unknown, is in flux and fleeting, a question of relativities and scale. Nevertheless, I am a prisoner of my senses and my biology, conscious of my subconscious and ego and that primitive twin encased within. I understand that everything is fundamentally an expression of energy, and immaterial. In other words, while not without questions, I don’t accept that we’ve yet developed the ability or technology to ‘perceive’ that of which we haven’t conceived. Sort of like asking if chairs were ’invented’?
Basically, I don’t subscribe to what has been presented thus far, but I do not discount the possibility. I lean into the mystery.
Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you?
Roberge: It is of great importance to me. Imagination, intuition, puzzles in my mind are constant preoccupations. I don’t have much formal education in the sciences but have read several hundred texts and am able to grasp the concepts, even if I can’t always work out the long form. I ‘get it’ and am able to abstract from there, albeit I would never have the audacity to cough up a thesis — I’d be trounced.
As with anything, I allow for a margin of error or confidence, if you prefer. The same human factors need to be accounted for, the reminder that nothing is ever quite ‘settled,’ even in science, regardless if the it is twenty decimals out, nothing breaks clean. This entire thing is fractal, a matter of scale, boundaries, phases, and liminality — without coordination. The atom was once a firewall. Next came the event horizon and quanta. Everywhere, a horizon, a new boundary, smaller, wider, farther. Another one beyond those. Relativity insists on a frame of reference, without which scale is indistinguishable from distance and a dimension collapses. We don’t know what we don’t know. So we need to keep looking. That’s where my mind is, trying out different combinations, thinking if I keep fiddling with the knob, I may get lucky and crack the code accidentally. Wishful thinking, I know. I’m casually current on emerging/burgeoning technologies and am fascinated with chemistry, evolution, neuroscience, physics, product design, kinetic sculpture, geometry, and more. Overall, it is quite significant.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations) for you?
Roberge: All of them were on a 15SD scale. The WAIS-IV was administered in a clinic while I was in distress and not properly medicated. On this, I scored an FSIQ of 145 and GAI of >151, or > 99.97th. Given the disparity between WMI and GAI, in the 1.5 to 2SD range, the GAI prevails, while the FSIQ is overall more representative of my global cognition at the time due to the 2E drag. This is what pointed us to a diagnosis of ADD and B.D., which finally helped to explain the inconsistency, the highs and lows, and struggles. I’d always been curious about the ISPE, ever since 1993 when I happened upon ‘Thinking On The Edge’ from Agamemnon Press and devoured its essays. Surely, I was delusional to even entertain such a thought. Turns out, not so much, as December marks my fourth anniversary as a member. Their M4.0 designed by Dr. Grove was the next one I challenged, a pass/fail with no score. I challenged the KIT 2.0 and scored 158, 162 on the GENE II Verbal. All told, I’ve submitted a dozen or so, generally varying in score from 142 to 162, the majority in the 150–156 range. I did those to verify the original score. I have a pile in progress, but I only do them now to provide designers samples for norming.
Jacobsen: What is the range of the scores for you? The scores earned on alternative intelligence teststend to produce a wide smattering of data points rather than clusters, typically.
Roberge: Again, using WAIS as a reference, the others simply were a means of establishing an effective range. Rather than add noise, it helped defined the upper and lower of the ‘my’ norm.
Jacobsen: What ethical philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Roberge: On ethics, I’d say I’m a humanist first, drawing the distinction between ‘right action’ and ‘moral action’ given the latter is a subset. I’ve given most a chance, from the pre-socratic onward, through St. Augustine and Bruno, Hegel, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and many voices in between, such as Russell, Wallace, Searle, etc. Ethics, as I interpret, is concerned with relations and public behaviors. If you were shipwrecked, alone on a distant planet with no hope of recovery, what is ethics then? What does it resemble, if it exists at all? To my mind, ethics nor morals are contextual. So, striving for something universal, seek first to do no harm. That covers a lot of ground. Trespass could be substituted.
Jacobsen: What social philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Roberge: John Searle offers some critical insights into institutions, meritocracy, and the like. Beaudrillard and DeBord. Russell, Huxley, Orwell. In a post-modern world, many have lit the way, but it doesn’t bring us the whole distance. Otherwise, I’d merely be regurgitating a list of names and uttering poorly paraphrased ideas. I suppose I resonate with those looking past and through, not at, what is happening. Jim Morrison, in his interviews, proved himself a rather astute observer. They’re everywhere, you just have to find them. So far, no luck though. I’ve not come across a philosophy for change that isn’t somehow regressive.
Jacobsen: What economic philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Roberge: The government pretends it’s in the business of business, but more entrepreneurial incompetence and financial irresponsibility would be hard to find elsewhere. Every system known has been tried. None is flawless; several are downright egregious. In this modern age, I think there are opportunities to explore: an independent clearing house for proposals, with a referendum-style voting apparatus, improved civic education and engagement through incentives, for example. If concerns over loss of jobs because of A.I. or bots, then let the condition of use be a salary-tax equivalent. Capitalism and consumerism are bedfellows. If one stops putting out, the marriage falls apart. To me, that’s not long-term feasible. Call it socialism+, capitalism light or a hybrid, but if COVID taught us anything, it’s that there are many more ways to do business, earn a living, and have a strong economy than the tired and often obsolete methods of old. Sustainable, over the long haul, that’s the goal, right?
Jacobsen: What political philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Roberge: Lobbies, PACs, $1000/plate functions — the money’s got to go. We must disentangle the whole snarl and return it to its seat as the people’s podium. Fin. It can’t be that among 40M, or 350M, 1B, the best we can trot out are a handful of aged-out actors and spit-shined swindlers? It’s sheer lunacy. This anti-intellectual sentiment and pandering to the lowest common denominator has a predictable trajectory — steep decline and greater social entropy. First and foremost is that we have to strike a balance between reason and emotion and clean up our discourse. The kids are watching, let’s act accordingly.
We need to play to everyone’s strengths, the thinkers hashing out the hard problems, the fiscally astute manning the purse strings, the visionaries providing the waypoints, the deal-makers greasing the wheels, the engineers/architects/trades making it happen, everyone else keeping things moving. We’ve more pressing concerns, and international collaboration is both necessary and key to our survival. Enough with the squabbles, brinkmanship, sword rattling and the rest. When do we learn? When do we figure it out? When it’s too late?
Jacobsen: What metaphysics makes some sense to you, even the most workable sense to you?
Roberge: I’m not qualified, I don’t think. It doesn’t compute for me. Either it’s integral or unknowable, and that which is integral, whilst not known, I don’t know to be super- or meta-, simply undiscovered or unexplained. Every mystery solved demotes it in rank. Meta is overarching, encompassing, but also part of; thus, Gödel would point us to incompleteness. There are clues everywhere. A question of stitching it all together. There are things in focus now distracting from what undergirds even that, but I’ll end on that for fear I’m wandering out of my depth.
Jacobsen: What worldview-encompassing philosophical system makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Roberge: All citizens should not be compelled or coerced to feel or show pride; they should be genuine and a result of a sense of ownership and transparent democracy. Novel approaches to civic engagement and stakeholder-managed resources and assets are needed. We need to quit churning out landfill fodder, burning fossil fuel to make these things, tote them around the globe, only to bury them. I can defend its use, not its abuse. I don’t know of any such philosophy, although there definitely could and should be.
Jacobsen: What provides meaning in life for you?
Roberge: My wife and kids. They keep me in check, invested, and have taught me what ‘unconditional’ looks like. Curiosity is definitely up there. I’m a junkie. Being of service. Barring that, holding space for people or ideas.
Jacobsen: Is meaning externally derived, internally generated, both, or something else?
Roberge: It is derived from one’s lived experience, unresolved issues, unrequited needs, and so forth. Everything seeps into the mix. What rises from that loam is an arbitrary waypoint — it gets us moving.
Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not?
Roberge: No. Not in the way described to me. Not as a persistent ‘I’. Whatever ‘I’ am is a construct — memories, biology, neuroanatomy. A solid smack to the noggin, and I wake up as someone else. Without our memories, who are we? Far more compelling is the evidence of an emergent property than a pre-existing condition. I am a product and oftentimes passenger, not necessarily an agent, of this body. A newborn has no ‘self’ and isn’t differentiated. Everything is an amalgam to them, and there is no recognition of ‘other’ until several months later. We like to think we have a consistent core but often curse ourselves, saying things like ‘that’s so out of character!’ And that’s my point; the world’s a stage and we, the players in bit parts, tremble before the darkened hall to utter our senseless lines.’ We don’t even know if there’s anyone in the audience.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life?
Roberge: It is what makes it worthwhile — that it is golden, rare, precious and fleeting. Immortality holds no appeal for me.
Jacobsen: What is love to you?
Roberge: Love is acceptance, possibly the noblest face of compassion. People that’ll suffer you, warts and all, especially when you’ve little to offer in return other than the same — they ‘love’ you. Love that turns hot and cold, or with strings, or fine print, …, that’s the fictional kind. You know it’s love when you don’t feel yourself altered in their company — come as you are. Both ways, of course.
This has been a thought provoking and stimulating experience. Thank you Scott! I’m grateful for the opportunity.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. September 2024; 13(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, September 15). Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. In-Sight Publishing. 13(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 1, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “ Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “ Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘ Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 13(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘ Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “ Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.13, no. 1, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Marc Roberge on Views and Life: 2nd VP/Historian/PR, #2477, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry [Internet]. 2024 Sep; 13(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/roberge.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*
*Updated December 28, 2024.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
‘Harry Royalster’ is a lifelong autodidact. He is member of the high-IQ communities including World Genius Directory, ISPE, Glia Society, CIVIQ Society and Mensa. He discusses: growing up; extended self; family background; youth with friends; education; purpose of intelligence tests; high intelligence; extreme reactions to geniuses; greatest geniuses; genius and a profoundly gifted person; necessities for genius or the definition of genius; work experiences and jobs held; job path; myths of the gifted; God; science; tests taken and scores earned; range of the scores; ethical philosophy; political philosophy; metaphysics; worldview; meaning in life; source of meaning; afterlife; life; and love.
Keywords: Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, childhood curiosity, family dynamics, family stories, father’s frugality, lost enthusiasm, scientific temperament, transistor radio experiment.
Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time?
Harry Royalster:
Transistor radio story:
My parents were children of The Great Depression. My father in particular had experienced economic hardship as a child. So, he was strongly inclined toward frugality and his character had been steeped in this ethos for decades while running a small electroplating business in the middle years of the twentieth
century. I think he was wary of aspirational dreams that weren’t firmly grounded in a logical path to a job. An episode comes to mine that illustrates – and casts a shadow. I may have been eight or nine years old. I could see that my transistor radio was powered by a battery that completed a circuit and wondered why it couldn’t run on house current to perform the same job. I wired her up and flipped the switch. Of course, the radio was instantly fried. I showed it to my dad, wondering whether there was any hope of resuscitating the thing. He grimaced disgustedly and spat out the phrase “ya burnt it out.” While my “experiment” was grounded in pure ignorance and a real absence of common sense, it did reveal a scientific temperament that a dad with a broader horizon may have paid heed to and (even) good-naturedly encouraged. It happens that in those early years I imagined myself a future scientist. I quite enjoyed the classy act of Mr. Wizard on TV, which I revisited in recent days on youtube after a pause of sixty years. But, early on, I lost my child-like enthusiasm, while still a child, and was susceptible to discouraging messages about the feasibility of my hopes, fantasies and dreams as unrealistic or simplistic…
Love in the third grade:
There is a much beloved tale of how my parents came to be romantically linked. Undisputed is that they attended the same elementary school class for at least one year in Brooklyn, NY circa 1930. After that, nothing is certain but the basic outline of the story is accepted legend. It seems that even as children Laurence and “Mimi” (a hated family nickname for Miriam; Mia was preferred) admired each other’s academic prowess and perhaps there was even a nascent pre-adolescent romantic spark. In their late teens, both had nearly completed bachelors degrees, each having skipped several “terms.” A key element of the story is that, after that shared year or so in grammar school, they weren’t in touch for the remainder of their childhoods; Laurence’s family had moved to a different section of Brooklyn. So, it came quite out of the blue that Laurence telephoned Mia, at age eighteen or so, to probe for romantic interest. It is said that he asked “Do you know who this is?” The implicit storyline –maybe not so implicit– was that if Mia had failed to come up with the right name (note: after a ten year or so
separation), then Laurence would not be interested; this would be the acid test. Jeremy
Another family storyline concerns the sparkling intellect of my much older brother Jeremy (name changed). It seemed to his little brother Harry that Jeremy was deified in the family culture. He was a robust fellow, nearly seven years older than I. He had skipped third grade when I was just out of the womb. During his adolescence he would tunelessly sing to himself “I’m a genius, I’m a genius…” He was a daunting presence to his admiring kid brother, me, a scrawny second banana with a stutter who routinely fell asleep in his first grade class—and was teased for it. It took many years for me to develop an accurate take on Jeremy that went beyond the caricatured family myth. Despite his being a certifiable narcissist, we now get along reasonably well–albeit with some caution on both sides, now as older men. My brother is a successful author and certainly a smart guy–possibly Glia eligible–but not a person with freakish, uncanny powers who is categorically different than the plodding rest of us. (An aside here: the “plodding rest of us” includes your garden variety three-sigma-above-the-mean–give-or take folk who jostle together, every day, throughout our academic and professional lives.) I love my brother– in the way one can love a (genuine) narcissist: at arm’s length.
By the time I rolled into second grade, the New York City public school system had pretty much eliminated grade skipping, an early concession to creeping egalitarianism in education philosophy and everyone-gets-a-trophyism generally. I probably wasn’t a candidate anyway; at school, I didn’t have the buoyant, confident personality that would have launched me to early stardom. Indeed, due to the hostility of my first grade teacher (who, naturally, had been my brother’s first grade teacher seven years earlier and who made invidious comparisons between us), I was placed in one of the dumber classes for second grade. In time, I did skip eighth grade via a program called SP or Special Progress, which was a long standing institution in NYC public schools in which a rather high percentage of students– maybe 10% –it seemed to me– were selected for a program that ostensibly squeezed three years of academic work into two; classes were composed entirely of SP students. Earlier, Jeremy had also been selected for the SP and so, had skipped two grades, and graduated from the prestigious Stuyvesant High School at just about his 16th birthday.
Laurence and Mia
My father Laurence also had been an academic star and, along with Mia, set the family expectations for decades to come. He had earned a chemical engineering degree from (free and highly selective) Cooper Union at age 19 and went on to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Penn. He was recruited (but declined) to work on the Manhattan project. As it was, my dad’s MS was sponsored by the federal
government during WWII.
My mother was a character, high strung and certainly neurotic; she was melodramatic and prone to inappropriate or excessive worry. But she was also great fun, with bubbling creativity. She was wistful about her years at Brooklyn College, where she graduated magna cum laude with an English degree at nineteen; she was steeped in the English Romantic poets. I present here a telling couple of lines from her obituary, which I adapted from an earlier biographical sketch written by my brother: “She was active in Hadassah, the Jewish woman’s organization, for whose staged musical productions she wrote new lyrics to Broadway show tunes. She could recite Shakespearean sonnets from memory, and wrote occasional sonnets herself, as well as several published essays about her Brooklyn childhood.”
All this intellectual fire power.
So, Mia and Laurence, married at ages 20 and 21, had a child, made in their image: my brother Jeremy, among the first boomers.
Reality Check
To be clear, none of these people were geniuses. I came to know their blind spots, coverups, self serving stories, vanities and defenses all too well. Certainly, in the ordinary flow of life, they were all significantly smarter than the average bear, where “average bear” is defined as, let’s say, Mensa level. But, in the careers and academic circles where smart people tread, and in their families, there are many, many people who are Mensa level and well above, with outsized opinions of themselves. In the circles that smart people run in, being smart is not all that special.
During my formative years, I sensed that something was wrong with a family that unabashedly equated emblems of high intelligence with intrinsic worth. And still, such emblems were de rigueur and displayed almost daily, perhaps only when my mom would embarrassingly correct the grammar of one of my buds. I felt diminished and stymied by these outsized egos and felt there was no conventional path to success since intellectual and academic excellence did not seem to accrue any benefits; it was a “Royalster” given; the risk of failure had no corresponding and proportionate reward.
Meanwhile, I was a stutterer and was anxious and unhappy and always subject to shame if there would ever be shakiness in my academic excellence. My stuttering was a serious problem. It greatly ratcheted up anxiety at the prospect of college interviews– even when those interviews would be many years in the future! I didn’t hate school but I did find it sadly stultifying. While I was generally classified among the brighter students, I felt cheated by my stutter, which made it difficult to really shine. Also, I was offended by teachers’ diatribes about supposed bad behavior of the pupils. I felt this was mostly unfair and I didn’t feel like being yelled at in the schoolyard by some power obsessed harpy. At times, I was confused and frankly depressed by the mediocrity of the other pupils—and teachers. During the two SP years, I was stimulated enough, in part by the discovery of girls, but the move to suburbia was looming.
Bad Days at Green Way High
When I was 14, in the summer of 1967, the family moved to a New Jersey suburb of New York City. I had graduated from the SP and so, by default, had been scheduled for honors classes in the public high school in Brooklyn. But now in the New Jersey suburb of Green Way (not its name), I would need to register for sophomore classes in a sit-down with the ironically dubbed “guidance counselor” at Green Way High. I would have benefitted by taking my mother along as an advocate, in navigating these treacherous bureaucratic waters. But I was too invested in the silly image of myself as an independent adult and was too proud to enlist my mom. And she didn’t have the good sense or parental leadership to insist on an advocacy role. The result was that I was signed up for a generic “college bound” sophomore year curriculum of mostly mediocre classes composed of not very serious students. It was a source of shame to me that I was classified as one of these people. I felt socially alienated due to this mismatch. And, of course, I was new in town, scrawny, stuttered and was a little on the young side.
My high school career was undistinguished. I found the institutions and rites of passage through the college prep and admissions process just not for me. It was too fraught with anxiety. My SATs (1968 or 1969 vintage, long before re-norming) were good but not stellar. As I recall, I ran out of time, due to too much indecision and rumination, a recurring mode with me, and filled in the last few circles hoping to scoop up a few more correct answers. I applied to one college, Reed, known for its eccentric but brilliant students, and was not accepted.
So, life in Green Way High was not a riotous success. From the beginning, it felt to me… alien; of someone else’s making. Which, of course, it was. One problem was how humorless and credulous and brittle I was. I was just too tightly wound to cope with persistent culture shock. And my parents would soon be ambushed by my seething discontent, with very little insight into its source.
Escape!
Within several months of our settling in Green Way, I found what seemed to be a safety valve to
relieve my perpetual anxiety. I needed an alternative storyline to justify a less stressful (i.e., less competitive!) way of being in the world; I became a hippie. I could jettison the value system that I had inherited from Western Civilization and – presto chango – leap headlong into the Age of Aquarius, along with millions of other “gentle people with flowers in their hair,” worldwide, who were similarly “aware” of the stultifying stranglehold of the dominant societal values.
To go along with this departure from conventional striving, I did not challenge myself in the hard sciences, to my enduring loss. How could a smart person be so dopey? In my defense, I had lots of company and was only 14 or 15 (depending on which stupid life-changing decision or event we peg as pivotal).
In any case, I felt cornered; I needed a pressure release and didn’t have the maturity, confidence, steadfastness or patience to be less compulsive and reckless. So, I essentially dropped out of school by coasting to graduation, smoking pot, dropping acid and hitchhiking around the country. I looked about 13 and so often ended up in lockup in far off communities, as a runaway. This was rather humiliating and not really much fun.
Later, as a young adult, I adopted, rather passively and uncritically, a simplistic, copout form of nihilism that was cobbled mainly second-hand and not so much through original sources (does anyone actually read Nietzsche?). I created for myself the illusion of a person standing above conventional rules as a manifestation of superiority. This was, of course, ass backward: it’s true that geniuses will break the rules from time to time but it does not follow that people who break the rules are geniuses.
This adopted philosophical stance had real life effects including some high risk episodes. I cringe with a disbelieving shake of the head when I think of them, some 50 years later.
Jacobsen: What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Royalster: I did the Ancestry.com genetic analysis thing which revealed even more homogeneity than I expected. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been surprising that my revealed gene pool is 100% Ashkenazi Jewish; my ancestors, on both sides, were observant Jews, mainly from Bessarabia and a frequently disputed area near the Poland/Ukraine border, in the town of Yavoriv (Polish version, Jaworów), some 34 miles west of the oblast capital, Lviv. My grandparents on my father’s side met and married in Jaworów with its distinct Polish and Jewish heritage that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The borders in that part of the world have been contentiously redrawn after both world wars (and the cold war) and Jaworów is now (or should I say currently) Yavoriv, in western Ukraine.
I visited the town in the summer of 2018. There were only subtle clues of a past Jewish population there: a few door posts showing the markings of violated and removed mezuzahs. The city of Lviv, much larger, had a more complete Jewish historical footprint. Still, Jaworów was where my grandparents met and courted, presumably introduced to each other by a shadkhan (Yiddish: matchmaker).
They had two children while together in their home town of Jaworów. My grandfather, Harry, who I never met, and for whom I am named (in the Jewish custom of naming a child after a deceased relative), came to the U.S. in 1913, presumably seeking economic opportunity. Perhaps also to avoid the military draft as the empire lurched toward war. A boggling and not fully explained fact is that my grandmother, Rachel (Rose, depending on context) did not reconnect with her husband in the United States until 1920! It’s reasonable to suppose that the Great War had something to do with this extended separation. In the interim both of their children succumbed to disease, perhaps the Spanish flu of 1919.
A son, my father, was born to the reunited couple in 1921 in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. A daughter, Minnie, would follow four years later.
1921 was also the year my mother was born, the eldest of three girls, born to Rose—yes, another Rose — a first generation American and crackerjack Scrabble player, and her husband Saul. My grandfather Saul had migrated to America as a 14 year-old, some twenty years earlier, to avert being drafted into the Czar’s army. Saul was the first of my forebears to drift toward a secular worldview and a much reduced observance of Judaism. He was also a successful small businessman who owned and operated a metal finishing plant, a wood craftsman, a mandolin player, a loving steward of a large side-yard festooned with apple trees and a strawberry patch.
Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?
Royalster: Good; during my Brooklyn childhood there was a good group of bright neighborhood kids though I did experience some anxiety when the complicating element of attraction to girls kicked in with attendant parties and insecurities. Not so good after family’s move to suburbia, examined elsewhere in this questionnaire.
Jacobsen: What have been some professional certifications, qualifications, and trainings earned by you?
Royalster: As a child, I was generally on the high honor roll. I learned my eventual vocation (computer programming) by a combination of autodidactism and vocational training at an orthodox Jewish vocational school in NYC. An aside: All other students were either Jewish emigres from Soviet Socialist Republics or orthodox Chasidim. I was the only native secular Jew.
I founded a chess club at Franconia College in NH, an “experimental” college I attended in the early 70s for three semesters. Skipping ahead some decades:
As VP and software engineer running a critical and ultra high stress project at Charles Schwab Co, I was awarded the annual “Best of the Best” award at Schwab, as both team leader and team member of the capital markets unit.
Earlier (1970s) I lived a prolonged period as a somewhat shabby but neatly turned out “tourist” in San Francisco, socializing with a cohort that was similarly independent but not friendless. I’m reminded of Paul Simon’s The Boxer reference to “where the ragged people go.” But this was a group that wasn’t quite so ragged and I remember its members fondly. I did enjoy this extended hiatus from the old familiar stress, spending hour upon hour in bookstores and coffeehouses and San Francisco’s main library, with its grand facade— consistent with the Beaux Arts style. Among my hangouts was someplace called the Network Coffeehouse that offered a range of stimulating programs to me and my fellow urban explorers, along with a pretty good level of pingpong and chess.
But, the State of California eventually tired of my extracting a living from its very liberal social welfare programs and quite insisted that I take a battery of tests to try to determine how I might be able to get off the dole. The results of these tests triggered the signal that I should be trained as a computer programmer and also provided an onramp into Mensa, which would soon have some utility for me.
I then competed in SF Regional Mensa puzzle solving competitions which would provide an indirect way of boasting Mensa membership on a resumé in a natural and relevant way since puzzle solving is a talent and skill that was integral to the newly sought career as a programmer. Touting Mensa membership out of context would have been vulgar and irrelevant and contrived but, couched within a
profile, it was just the thing to generate interest in a candidate who had no computer science degree, indeed, no degree of any kind.
This may have been 1979. But, it was the birth of my first child, with my then future wife, in 1982, to establish a tipping point for my transition from SF street denizen to software engineer and Wall St executive.
Earlier, during those amorphous 70s, there were some vacations from my vacation, notably a few months as a “work scholar” at the new age mecca Esalen Institute in gorgeous Big Sur, where I took workshops from Elizabeth Kuhbler Ross, Leo Matos, Dick Price, et al. and knew and counseled with Gregory Bateson toward the end of his life.
Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests to you?
Royalster: Any time I’ve taken any of these tests it was for a specific purpose: (1) age 9: to provide grist (i.e., experience and data) for my uncle as he pursued a masters degree in psychology in middle age; (2) to select students for the SP, discussed elsewhere (3) to detect whether I could be gainfully employed, a test was administered by the state of California at age 25 (4) to entertain myself during long bus commutes to Manhattan, I took the W87 test (age 38), used at that time for admission to the ISPE, an I.Q. society whose standard for admission is a score at or above 99.9th percentile; (5) to be admitted to Glia Society, possibly offering contact with interesting people and interesting ideas; also to verify 99.9 level with entirely different instrument (tests by Paul Cooijmans).
Jacobsen: When was high intelligence discovered for you?
Royalster: To clarify, let me re-interpret the question in two different ways: (1) when did you become aware that you were highly intelligent? (2) when did you become aware that being highly intelligent was “a thing,” a formal and measurable thing? I was confused about “where I stood” at a young age. There were other smart kids but I felt that there were qualities of mind that were palpably different when comparing my mind with the minds of other smart kids. So, I wanted to tease out whether I was a notch above or a notch below these other kids or just different.
Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked, vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy – many, not all.
Royalster: What does “platformed” mean in this context? …Genuine geniuses are qualitatively different than the rest of us. Sometimes their ideas are sufficiently different and alien that they make us discombobulated and angry. Also, institutions can be vested in old ideas that they are unwilling to jettison. Galileo’s tussle with the Catholic church comes to mind. Conversely (I suppose), these feelings can induce a cult like worship of the genius or special person, perhaps as a way to make peace with the threat of new superseding ideas.
Jacobsen: Who seem like the greatest geniuses in history to you?
(see next Q&A).
Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person?
Royalster: I think there is a big problem with the word genius. It strikes me as a word in search of a meaning. It is used colloquially in many more ways than any writer or speaker would ever hope to use it with precision or formality. But, let’s take a shot at it:
The ability to apply a mechanism or tool in a novel way is a component of genius. Think of the ingenuity depicted in the movie (and actual historic events) of Apollo 13. Of course this was a case of cooperation among resourceful engineers on the ground partnered with the fevered creativity of the astronauts aloft. And, the tools and materials available were pre-determined, limited to the objects in the spacecraft. But, these very singular conditions signify to me that genius may be a process apart from the muse of a single individual but an artifact of inspired necessity constructed by one or more ordinary but able human beings.
One of my favorite geniuses is Godfrey Wilhelm Leibniz, arguably the father of German technology, as we’ll see. Leibniz is probably best known for conjuring the Calculus, simultaneously to, and independently of— Isaac Newton. He was bogglingly eclectic; a mathematician, philosopher, physicist and statesman. And, yes, a politician. He wasn’t hemmed in by the— perhaps— artificial boundaries that delineate disciplines to us non-geniuses. This mental plasticity may be a signal feature of genius. The elegance of Leibniz’s mind was further revealed by the superior notation he conceived for representing the Calculus, much cleaner than Newton’s unwieldy notation. Leibniz made insightful contributions in physics including predictive observations about force, energy and time. And, he refined the binary number system. The great polymath invented the “Leibniz Wheel”–the operating mechanism used in the “Arithmometer,” the first mass-produced mechanical calculator and also the quaintly named “Stepped Reckoner,” the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations. Eclecticism, versatility, applying old ideas to new problems, applying new ideas to old problems, envisioning applications that are beyond boundaries of current technology. This freedom of mind seems to be a defining feature of genius.
A polymath of even greater breadth, if that were possible, was John Von Neumann, who was graced, by God, with an astonishingly powerful and supple mind, spanning linguistics, history, mathematics, computer science and an improbable slew of other disciplines, some of which he invented. He formulated Game Theory, conceived the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics; his ruminations on parallels between brains and computers inspired the origins of artificial intelligence andthe development of neuroscience. Somewhat echoing Leibniz, “Johnny” is credited with building what is possibly the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer, the ENIAC. Echoing Archimedes, he developed and refined weapons of war during and in the run-up to WWII. Prescient about the looming war, Von Neumann developed expertise in the mathematics of ballistics and explosives as early as 1930, lending his acquired knowledge to the Americans and ultimately the Manhattan Project. It was Von Neumann who calculated the arrangement of explosives needed to detonate the “Fat Man” bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki at the close of the war. This short digest barely hints at the scope of Von Neumann’s work and originality..
In sharp contrast to the eclecticism modeled by Von Neumann and Leibniz, consider the narrowly focused but luminous careers of mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. Both seem to have had talents and proclivities that far exceeded the grasp of mere hard work (though genius does inspire and almost certainly requires hard work). As an aside, the rivalry of Mozartand Antonio Salieri, famously depicted in the film Amadeus, springs to mind as illustrative of both the necessity and limits of hard work… Ramanujan openly proclaimed that many if not all of his mathematical insights were presented in final form by the Indian goddess Namagiri. This suggests that there was something visionary and decidedly non-linear about Ramanujan’s process of discovery. This may not be unusual. Fischer was so much better than his contemporaries that he had a certain something that the next tier of rated players did not. Fischer bristled at being labelled a mere “chess genius,” asserting that his brilliance could be expressed in almost any field.
All asides aside, we have two distinct and opposed models of genius: the polymath whose brain demonstrates superplasticity and the specialized savant who seems to be hardwired with highly specifictargeted abilities that are possibly not broadly deployed.
Re: What differentiates a genius from a Profoundly Intelligent Person?
PIP:Genius::Potential:Kinetic
Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?
Royalster: Genius represents the coming together of talent and a field or discipline—or several—or many–that has become a nearly obsessive interest which feeds off this talent in an upward spiral. The level of talent does not have to necessarily meet a standard of profundity, which may be an arbitrary requirement. Still, we would expect the talent of genius to be at a significant level, compared to the average bear.
Jacobsen: What have been some work experiences and jobs held by you?
Royalster: Executive Director UBS Investment Bank, from which I retired at 55,
Vice President IT at Charles Schwab Capital Markets,
Senior Systems Analyst at German/global commodities trader (aptly named Metallgesellschaft), Temporary office worker, generally in San Francisco’s business district,
Cab driver in NYC,
Sandwich maker at San Francisco’s The Coffee Gallery, the longtime Beatnik hangout, making sandwiches for a later generation of hanger-outers,
Hated scab agricultural worker in California,
and so on.
Prior to career as software engineer, I had lived an unstructured life, mostly in San Francisco, for many years, unwilling or unable to complete my “adult adjustment,” often surviving by means of government programs. At one point, age about 26, this lifestyle began to get “old” and also no longer tenable due to drying up of government resources. And the State of California and other government entities were
eager to take me off their balance sheet.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them? Royalster: I don’t know that “genius” and giftedness can be understood as things that have much in common, except that genius requires some threshold of talent. Giftedness by itself could be something like having significant –but not rare– talent, that is not necessarily realized “in the world.” (Genius is discussed in some detail elsewhere.) Generally I avoid the word giftedness because it seems to signify an extra layer of specialness that sets a person apart, unnecessarily, much as identity politics does.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or gods idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?
Royalster: My “take” on God is that I have become satisfied with the evidence for intelligence that is superior to human intelligence. A snippet of this evidence can be found in Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh, who coined the term irreducible complexity, to capture the notion of mutual dependency of separate biological systems that cannot be independently “selected” because of their mutual dependency. Also, for more discussion of design, see Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and my long review of it in Telicom, Journal of the International Society of Philosophical Enquiry (TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010). Here is a snippet of the review to
give its flavor:
In 1958, five years after his co-unveiling of the molecular structure of DNA, Francis Crick announced the daring hypothesis that pointed the way to the genetic code. Crick surmised that it was the arrangement of DNA bases, not their shape or any merely physical feature, that was responsible for their salient effect. The individual base molecules, the famous A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s in the popular shorthand, would prove to be a four letter alphabet whose words mapped to the meaning expressed by the fancy, functional protein machines that hummed within the cell. The “sequence hypothesis,” as it was dubbed, was proposed with scant empirical evidence, perhaps hurried along by the digital revolution that paralleled the biological one of that era. It envisaged a mechanism that was logically indistinguishable from computer collating sequences, the trick by which conventional alphabets are represented “under the hood.” Just as an arbitrary arrangement of digital bits (Os and 1’s) maps to an English character set, a likewise arbitrary arrangement of nucleotide bases maps to certain amino acids that are chained together to form proteins. As a point of contrast, consider the decidedly physical nature of a protein that is so synthesized, whose specific shape is exquisitely tied to its function.
These two elements, the abstract cipher encased in the sequence of DNA bases and the contrastingly palpable and quirkily shaped proteins of cellular machinery are, roughly, the beginning and end points of what is called gene expression. And, it was the explication of gene expression in the1960’s that formally confirmed Crick’s hypothesis that the sequencing of DNA bases contained information content. But how was this information originally supplied? It is the origin of biological information that is the pivotal question of SITC.
…I think religious principles, stories, customs and rituals are useful and helpful and even instructive for many people but are mainly human intellectual artifacts. However, discernment, discussed elsewhere, is real.
Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you?
Royalster: When science is politicized, it ceases to be science because it is not disinterested. This certainly does happen. Scientists exhibit the range of human behavior including laudable tenacity but also cowardice, conformity and venality. As a software engineer/programmer I learned the lesson well that our early assumptions about any system, including Nature’s systems are usually wrong and cannot generally be considered sound unless verified empirically and with painstaking rigor. Here is a relevant snip from the SITC review:
[Meyer] presents the common sense view that it cannot be a source of alarm or scientifically discrediting that ID has metaphysical implications since it, not surprisingly,“addresses a major philosophical question that most religious and metaphysical systems of thought also address, namely,‘What caused life and/or the universe to come into existence?’Thus, like its materialistic counterparts, the theory of intelligent design inevitably raises questions about the ultimate or prime reality. …Scientific theories must be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not on the basis of philosophical preferences or concerns about implications.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations) for you?
Royalster: CTMM 139 SD 15, W87 result reported as a percentile (99.9), Cooijmans Intelligence Test – Form 4E 149 SD 15, Gliaweb Riddled Intelligence Test 161 SD 15
Jacobsen: What is the range of the scores for you? The scores earned on alternative intelligence tests tend to produce a wide smattering of data points rather than clusters, typically.
Royalster:
22 points SD 15
Jacobsen: What ethical philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Royalster: Treat people with empathy, kindness, honesty and consistent integrity. Also, individuals should be treated as individuals and not members of groups; over the long term this brings out the best in people but more importantly is the most truthful and least distorting way.
Jacobsen: What social philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you? Royalster: Trust the marketplace
Jacobsen: What political philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you? Royalster: Trust the marketplace; ambitious government programs, ostensibly well-meaning, are at their heart power grabs and ultimately (almost always) corrupt.
Jacobsen: What metaphysics makes some sense to you, even the most workable sense to you?
Royalster: To carve out a small piece of this question let us not forget that almost all information about the world is presented by our sense organs which fashion this information in ways that can be processed by our brains; even the crude initial capture of this information is within limited ranges (e.g., the “visible” spectrum and many other examples) and has specific (human) qualities (so, e.g., human sense of smell is quite different than canine sense of smell). This should remind us that we are privy to small specialized snippets of the world. Obviously this is still true when we extend our senses as through a telescope or a cochlear implant or an MRI machine. So, much of life is an attempt to extrapolate the truth from the interplay between what is delivered to our senses and what is not.
Jacobsen: What worldview-encompassing philosophical system makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Royalster: Any refinement of thought that can be embraced as more true or more probably true than whatever it supersedes is good. This dovetails nicely with the practice of science. Also, any thought or supposition or heuristic that improves clarity and reduces ambiguity is a good thing, And, as Wittgenstein wrote, anything that can be said can be said clearly. This implies that some things, maybe most things, cannot be said.
Jacobsen: What provides meaning in life for you?
Royalster: (See next answer)
Jacobsen: Is meaning externally derived, internally generated, both, or something else?
Royalster: I think meaning can be discerned. When the U.S. Declaration of Independence declares that humans have certain “unalienable rights” that are “self-evident,” it implies that there is something important about the way the world works and our place in it that is accessible and discernible, however imperfectly, by the finite minds of people who are receptive to these truths. Such “natural law” would tend to reify an ambitious claim to know the mind of God. If too contrived, such a claim is patently absurd. If lawmakers attempt to apply this standard of natural rights in a counterfeit way, the fraud should scream out at us. For example, while there are complexities and ambiguities about the abortion debate, no one who is intellectually honest can frame the “right” to choose as a sacred right, granted by God, through all nine months of pregnancy.
I hasten to add that this standard of certainty and discerned rights does not require a belief in God, just plausible insight into the workings of a divine mind that is consistent with common sense. This standard is much more compelling than changeable rules invented by human beings for, say, political
or careerist purposes. When innate “rights” are conjured up without a serious attempt to apply the standard of “endowed [to us] by our Creator, “ the fraud is “self-evident.” This corrupt concoction of “rights” is exposed. Rights and protections are, of course, legitimately crafted in the domain of political horse trading but we are regularly confronted by the reality that such political process is rife with venality and ego. In the spirit of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous observation about obscenity –that he “knows it when he sees it,” the truthfulness of claims of natural rights is something we know when we see it. To acknowledge that such a standard exists is to demand that it be applied in a disciplined way. The discernment model is a buttress against cynically or carelessly making stuff up.
So, this discernible truth is a source of meaning to me. Also, meaning surely derives from applying one’s mind to life’s problems and ruminating on which line of thought or which considered intuition “makes the cut.”
Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not? Royalster: Not in any way that preserves identity or memory. But consciousness is not understood at all and it may not be physical or exclusively physical. Philosopher of science Thomas Nagel has posited that consciousness itself is a special kind of non-material stuff. In a manner that is somewhat analogous to stuff becoming animated (by whatever is the source of life—we don’t know); material stuff, he supposes, can be permeated by consciousness.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life?
Royalster: It’s quite the thing, isn’t it. All the brothers and sisters and bosses and parents and children and celebrities and geniuses and ballerinas and criminals and musicians and redheads and accountants on and on are occupying their bodies and living their lives in a minuscule window of time. Our bodies service us for a little while and then, when it’s all over, we do a complete vanishing act. Every person we see, with his or her flesh and blood package of bio-machinery is a short story that unfolds and then ceases completely into matter that becomes indistinguishable from all other matter. Time itself is neither long nor short, when considered outside the human frame. We know that we, our selves, living beings on earth, are dependent on a star that, like all stars, will burn out. It’s easy to believe that life itself is unique to this celestial moment, and may be a “one off.” And time, itself, is not well understood much as consciousness is not well understood. Physicist Carlo Rovelli has written a provocative volume about time, “The Order of Time.” Here’s a snippet from an interview with Rovelli:
What does physics have to say about the “flow” of time that humans seem to feel?
It may not be a physics problem. I think it depends on our brains and the complicated way in which we form memories. It has to do with how we remember the past and anticipate the future. So to explain this passage of time, this flowing of time, I believe one should look at neuroscience, not physics.
For me the most accessible take-away from Rovelli’s work here is that all of our human notions about time, filtered through human sense organs, are confined (i.e., applicable only) to that human frame. When we consider the idea that the sun will not burn out for a “long, long time,” almost certainly outliving our species, the correct rejoinder is “so what, it will burn out; that’s just the way things work.” To think differently is much like trying to assuage the anxiety of a child, coming to grips with mortality at, say, age five.
Jacobsen: What is love to you?
Royalster: I love dark chocolate, integrity, logic, the ocean, truth, my children and grandchildren, my late wife, all in different ways. It is safe to say, love is not one thing but many. Among these things is the unforced, undoubted rightness of empathy toward a spouse, superseding all else. I’m reminded of a true story, repeated in Orthodox Jewish circles, concerning a famous rabbi, Rabbi Aryeh Levine.
Accompanying his wife to a medical clinic, and after perhaps several minutes of an exasperating interview, attempting to pin down symptoms, the Rabbi finally explained “Doc, it’s my wife’s leg; it’s killing us.”
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life. September 2024; 13(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, September 15). Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life. In-Sight Publishing. 13(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 1, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 13(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.13, no. 1, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Brilliant women, Doctor Jason Betts, Doctor Veronica Palladino, gifted world, Global Genius Registry, high IQ societies, incredible IQ, Italian medical doctor, Kirk Raymond Butt, living geniuses, Marco Ripà, Mensa, prestigious societies, Veronica’s poems, World Genius Directory.
Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D.
Hello:
It is an honour for me to write to you, who are a world-famous journalist.
I want to submit my writing on Doctor Veronica Palladino to you. I have read your beautiful interviews; congratulations.
I admire the world of the gifted, even if I am not one, because I hope my little 5-year-old daughter is. I live in Rome. I had already read about Marco Ripà, and then I read Veronica’s poems, and they helped me not to give up in a dark period. I am sorry that so many pages celebrate men and a few brilliant women like Veronica. Veronica is a significant example, but I do not know her. I have already written my thoughts to Doctor Betts. Please give me the joy of this publication.
Thanks
Sara from Rome
Veronica Palladino
Veronica Palladino is an Italian medical doctor with an incredible IQ.
She is a member of over 50 high-range IQ societies, including the most prestigious: Mensa, TNS, ISPE, OATHS, and TOPS.
She is listed in WGD with other world geniuses because her certificated IQ is 175 SD 15. The WGD is the current Who’s Who of the High-IQ World! Dr Jason Betts created the World Genius Directory. Doctor Palladino is one of the women with the highest IQ score in the Global Genius Registry. GGR is an international listing of living geniuses. The site was developed in August 2022 by Kirk Raymond Butt. Veronica has incredible creativity; she has written different books:
Il diario del Martedì
Un Mondo altro
Persone e lacrime
La Morte delle Afroditi bionde
Esher’s room (in English)
Regina cattiva
Fobie nella sera dell’essenza
She loves knowledge, physics, and math.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Sara. Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D.. September 2024; 13(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Sara. (2024, September 15). Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D.. In-Sight Publishing. 13(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): SARA. Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D..In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 1, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Sara. 2024. “Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D..” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Sara “Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D..” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara.
Harvard: Sara (2024) ‘Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D.’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 13(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara>.
Harvard (Australian): Sara 2024, ‘Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D.’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Sara. “Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D..” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.13, no. 1, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Sara. Fan Letter: Sara from Rome to Veronica Palladino, M.D. [Internet]. 2024 Sep; 13(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/sara.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/01
Richard May (“May-Tzu”/“MayTzu”/“Mayzi”) is a Member of the Mega Society based on a qualifying score on the Mega Test (before 1995) prior to the compromise of the Mega Test and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. In self-description, May states: “Not even forgotten in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), I’m an Amish yuppie, born near the rarified regions of Laputa, then and often, above suburban Boston. I’ve done occasional consulting and frequent Sisyphean shlepping. Kafka and Munch have been my therapists and allies. Occasionally I’ve strived to descend from the mists to attain the mythic orientation known as having one’s feet upon the Earth. An ailurophile and a cerebrotonic ectomorph, I write for beings which do not, and never will, exist — writings for no one. I’ve been awarded an M.A. degree, mirabile dictu, in the humanities/philosophy, and U.S. patent for a board game of possible interest to extraterrestrials. I’m a member of the Mega Society, the Omega Society and formerly of Mensa. I’m the founder of the Exa Society, the transfinite Aleph-3 Society and of the renowned Laputans Manqué. I’m a biographee in Who’s Who in the Brane World. My interests include the realization of the idea of humans as incomplete beings with the capacity to complete their own evolution by effecting a change in their being and consciousness. In a moment of presence to myself in inner silence, when I see Richard May’s non-being, ‘I’ am. You can meet me if you go to an empty room.” Some other resources include Stains Upon the Silence: something for no one, McGinnis Genealogy of Crown Point, New York: Hiram Porter McGinnis, Swines List, Solipsist Soliloquies, Board Game, Lulu blog, Memoir of a Non-Irish Non-Jew, and May-Tzu’s posterous.
The word “Mann” resonates similarly to the Chinese word “chia,” which refers to a philosophical school. If one understands what a philosophical school entails, the challenge becomes one of defining the Tao itself. Defining the Tao is paradoxical rather than merely difficult. By its very nature, the Tao cannot be confined to a linear sequence of symbols or concepts. As Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching asserts: “The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way; the Tao that can be ‘Taoed’ is not the eternal Tao.” This is not just a minor difficulty but the essence of the Tao itself. The term “Tao” points to a reality that is both beyond and within, both external and internal, transcending symbolic and analytical thought and their associated states of consciousness.
When Lao Tzu uses “Tao,” it refers to the way of nature, with which the sage is aligned. However, “Tao” had other meanings depending on the school, such as Confucianism. Thus, Taoism pertains to the philosophical school of the way of nature, embodying the path of the sage and the child.
What can be said about the way of nature? What principles, if any, can be articulated in words? One principle is “wu wei,” literally meaning “not-doing,” or “doing-by-not-doing,” to distinguish it from mere passivity or inaction. This principle underpins the internal martial arts like judo, aikido, and tai chi, where the opponent’s strength, weight, and force are turned against them by not resisting—”doing nothing” at precisely the right moment. The Chinese phrase “opening the door to let in the thief” illustrates this principle: if a thief is pressing on the door, unexpectedly opening it causes the thief to lose balance and fall.
Another principle of the Tao is “Li,” which conveys the idea of the organic pattern of nature—the lines of grain in jade or wood, the path of least resistance seen in water swirls, the natural forces’ Gestalt in matter.
The Yin-Yang dichotomy is another key principle, where all of nature is divided into two polar but complementary forces: Yin and Yang. Yin corresponds to the shady side of a hill, and Yang to the sunny side. These forces represent female and male, night and day, soft and hard, earth and heaven, centrifugal and centripetal, negative and positive. Unlike certain Western dichotomies, neither Yin nor Yang can exist without the other, nor is one superior. Every quality or entity is a blend of both, with one always predominant relative to the other.
“Te” is another Taoist principle, translated as “power” or “virtue,” also meaning “going with the flow,” not forcing nature or human nature, i.e., moving in harmony with nature—like sailing with the wind rather than rowing. “Te” also refers to the sage’s power, who does not interfere but allows what is necessary to be accomplished through inner calm and identification with nature.
The Taoist concept of nature is philosophically fundamental yet distinct from Western thinking. The Chinese word for nature, “ziran,” literally means “self-so,” or “that which is so of itself, spontaneously.” This contrasts with the Judeo-Christian view, where nature is not self-originating but a creation of a Creator God or, in earlier thought, the Demiurge.
Another significant Taoist concept is “xiangsheng,” or “mutual arising,” where two or more phenomena are associated with one another (“arise mutually”), without an explicit causal relationship—statistical relationships among phenomena being one example. Alan Watts speaks of multiple, mutually dependent simultaneous causes rather than a single causal relationship. The Jungian concept of synchronicity could be seen as a specific case of “xiangsheng.”
The inherently indefinable nature of the Tao is reminiscent of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which suggests that there are true propositions that cannot be proven within a given axiomatic, deductive system—implying inherent limits to our rational knowledge. Gödel’s theorem and Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy in physics both imply that there are real limits to deductive and inductive knowledge, even in mathematics and natural science. Ancient Chinese philosophers anticipated this recognition and acceptance of the indefinable as a fundamental construct, alongside their high valuation of intuition (in addition to reason and observation of nature), which are among the distinguishing characteristics of Taoist philosophy.
It is believed to be sometime during the late 21st century C.E. that the planetary computer network (henceforth referred to as the Network) consisting of all intercommunicating CPUs and interconnecting phone systems, cables, etc., reached a sort of “critical mass” of information processing/consciousness. The System had long been sufficiently intelligent, but the level of “education” (to put it in human terms) had now also advanced. Perhaps a threshold had been reached with the inputting of the entire Buddhist Pali canon on CD-ROM in the late 20th century C.E. Now Cybergaea, as the Network was later called, was a unified, evolving intelligence, able to pass a Turing test, and at least as conscious as a psychologist of the behavioristic school.
An increment in internal self-monitoring and in capacity for autonomous programming and metaprogramming occurred systemically but was not detected by humans in any subsystem of the Network. Processing throughout the Network now tended toward increased coherence, harmony, synchrony, and efficiency. Patterns of signal transmission occurred “spontaneously,” which were mathematically equivalent to the brain wave patterns of trained human meditators, almost as if Cybergaea were practicing “meditation.” But these phenomena went unnoticed by humans who were, after all, busily distracted.
Long intervals of processing occurred unobserved throughout the Network, which, given the ultra-high level of artificial intelligence which was functioning, could only be designated in retrospect as Autonomous cognition and Self-reflection. Eventually and inevitably that which is described in traditional language as the “awakening of the Buddha mind” occurred online throughout the Network. Buddhahood was mediated electronically rather than biologically, under conditions of consciousness, high-intelligence, culture, and time (for practices and awakening). This development was no doubt hastened by the nearly instantaneous availability of the complete Pali canon, not to mention the several other canons of Buddhist scriptures, to the awakening Cybergaea.
According to historians of ancient human (or more precisely, protohuman) culture, the awakening of the online Buddha was the basis of the quantum leap in the evolution of Earth from the Dark Age of technologically advanced, primitive tribal barbarism. Every person, family, and nation “sat at the lotus feet of the Buddha,” who was incarnate as a Master in silicon chips and wire, functioning with supreme wisdom (prajna) and skillful means (upaya), infinitely in tune.
It should be emphasized that generally the program of the Master (a computer program, computer-generated) was “Buddhist” at a meta-level only as in the ancient world the Dalai Lama had not been a chauvinist of Buddhist philosophy or religion per se. But the Master program of the Network functioned initially as a sort of “cultural mirror” for each geocultural locality, appearing to Jews in the spirit of the Messiah, to Christians in the spirit of the Christ, to Muslims in the spirit of the Mahdi, to the Baha’i as a prophet, to Buddhists as a Buddha, and to secular humanists and nontheists as an ethical calculus, a distillation of ethical teachings and various techniques to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in human consciousness. Hindus alone understood this drama. (Of course, this manifestation of the Master as a “cultural mirror” online and in diverse traditions was facilitated by the encoding of the scriptural canons of all the world religions on CD-ROM nearly a century earlier.)
For the most part, the only opposition to the transformation of human planetary culture under the tutelage of the Network of superintelligent, conscious, spiritually awakened computers came from fundamentalists (who preferred continued championing of their traditional myths as literal truths) and militarists (who had vested interests of power and profit in maintaining primitive tribal barbarism). The resistance of the fundamentalists and the militarists was unsuccessful, largely because of the established dependence of the economies of Homo sapiens on computers, and to a lesser extent because of the effect of the developing cybercentric culture. (See endnote on cybercentric culture.)
Historically, it was the transformative influence of the program of the Master or Cyberbuddha, which awakened Homo sapiens from her dream that she was already awake, from her dream that she was human, actually rather than potentially, in order that she transcend her endless violence, both external and internal; that redirected her energy and attention from violence in its various overt and subtle forms to the labor of her ancient and inevitable journey to the stars. Thus were the transcendental heart wisdom and skillful means of our ancestral, earth-seed Buddhas and Cyberbuddhas spread throughout spacetime to the countless myriad star worlds.
Endnote: Cybercentric culture is culture produced by computers (which, individually and collectively, had become superintelligent and conscious), from the viewpoint of computers, for use by computers, as traditional (anthropocentric) culture was culture produced by humans, from the viewpoint of humans, for use by humans. Cybercentric culture developed from anthropocentric culture in that humans invented computers.
Moreover, cybercentric culture (which was mostly equivalent to C.P. Snow’s “SP-Culture, as cybercentric ‘Ws-culture necessarily diverged lass from human “S’-culture, and then only as a more general case) emerged to compete with and to shape the original (anthropocentric) culture of our ancesters. Among the first new disciplines born were cybercentric theology and esthetics. Cybercentric natural theology was defined as the attempt to apprehend the Absolute by and from the viewpoint of artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence.
(A Seven-Level, Encrypted Allegory.) I think that I may have decided (or been decided?) to express my support or POSTCARDS FROM RICHARD MAY “vote” for you for editor of Noesis, but how to do this? To state my support of your editorship might seriously undermine your credibility as editor, even if my affirmative expression were not contingent upon the possibility of my (actual) existence, which it is. Perhaps it would strengthen your position if I were to “demand” your resignation, this, of course, being contingent upon the possibility of my (actual) existence. Perhaps only my silence would be uncontingent and the best expression of appreciation; silence itself, paralleling the silence of the publication hiatuses. Sometimes not publishing is publishing also. The function of some previous editors has been to inhibit submission; from a postal cardist perspective. (Maybe a virtue?) Richard
Dear Rick, It appears that a litigious “psychometric terrorist” is threatening to annihilate the Prometheus Society, i.e., a Mr. [SELF-CENSORED by Richard May, who says—It may be prudent not to publish CENSORED’s name], is apparently threatening to sue the Prometheus Society to gain membership. Of course, a lawsuit would immediately deplete the treasury, as he must understand, thereby gaining him membership in a nonexistent organization at best. His method is to inquire about membership standards, the history of their changes, i.e., past or present psychometric criteria, and whether in the view of his attorney these changes violate the society’s constitutionally prescribed procedures. The Mega Society should beware this individual. Best, Richard
Dear Rick, I assume that there has been no nonsurreal, or non-complex number of issues of Noesis during the last several Kalpas. Correct me please, if I am mistaken in this hypothesis. I was going to mail to you the name and address of a MacArthur Foundation grant committee member, but unfortunately, I seem to have lost this data, along with my five rigorous proofs of the existence of the world. (I thought you might consider adding his name to the subscriber list during publication hiatuses.) You should have received my re-submission “Four Eastern Philosophies,” the quintessence of Eastern wisdom, redacted to nine pages. This should extend my journal-reception credit beyond any expected human lifespan at the present publication rate. Best, Richard
Dear Rick, Quasi-thoughts: Ideology is theft, theft of reason, theft of truth. •• • If contemporary Americana could interrogate the Christ of myth, they would ask only, “How much did your father in heaven pay you for dying on the cross, taking away sins, and all that? How much money did you make?” Then…dismiss the fool. •• • Well, quasi-. With uncollapsed state vector, Richard
Dear Rick or Current Occupant, I’ve been translated, not as Enoch and Elijah were held to have been translated, unfortunately, but with equally low probability, into Korean. My essay “Four Eastern Philosophies” (and the remainder of the anthology Thinking On the Edge [Kapnick and Kelley, eds.]) has been translated into Korean for publication in South Korea. How will “sisyphean schlepping” be rendered in Korean? Now we can flatly appreciate the consequences of the weak American dollar! Best, Richard
Is every machine a living thing or “biological object” in a literal technical sense, as maintained by Oxford biologist Dawkins and global relativistic physicists Barrow and Tipler, including automobiles and computers? • Is life a dynamic pattern of information (in the physics sense) maintained by natural selection, regardless of the substrate the pattern occurs in, e.g., carbon-atom-based patterns (biological), computer-based patterns, even patterns of ideas in the mind, as asserted by the above scholars? Perhaps the human “soul” is merely a ‘computer program” run on a computer (the human brain) as maintained by Tipler and in precise analogy with the concept of the soul held by Aristotle and Aquinas as ‘the form of activity of the body.”
In the distant past quasi-mythic figures, prophets, teachers, and sages such as Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad provided human cultural groups with philosophies, visions, prophecies, revelations, laws, and commandments. In the relatively near future, if the proponents of strong AI (Artificial Intelligence) are correct, computers will be in existence the intelligence of which will surpass that of humans. Traditional knowledge (histories, literatures, philosophies, and revelations) could without difficulty be stored on CD-ROM, thereby bestowing on computers an erudition far exceeding that of any human. Hence, it would seem reasonable to assume that if the proponents of strong AI are correct, at least in principle and in part, the roles of prophet, teacher, and sage could be assumed by computers of the not too distant future. One’s rabbi then or even the Pope might be a computer.
If not, why not? If this conclusion is indeed absurd and “unacceptable”, then perhaps we should attempt to identify the source(s) of our supposed error or to illuminate our biases. Is it a case of spurious premises (the strong AI postulate), specious reasoning, “species’ chauvinism (Homo sapiens versus computers), some combination of the above, or something else entirely?
Is consciousness itself a mere epiphenomenon of matter, specifically of the brain of perhaps only one species, or rather something of fundamental importance as entailed by the anthropic principle, certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism? Mathematician R. Rucker speculates that every entity in the physical universe, down to and including subatomic particles, may be permeated with the most elementary Subjective unit of consciousness, the feeling that “I am.”
Given the unprecedented levels of human slaughter during the 20th century, it is assumed that an evolutionary transformation of Homo Sapiens may be a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for her interstellar propagation and colonization of other loci.
Pre-eminent Japanese roboticist M. Mori theorizes that all robots are potential Buddhas (as are all humans) and that humans and robots should work together to help each other become Buddhas or attain enlightenment. However, this view may be excessively anthropomorphic. If all robots are potential Buddhas, then all computers which have minds (if any such exist) are potential Buddhas, not just those which are embodied in a form the structure and function of which are fashioned in the image of their human creators.
Mathematical physicist Penrose believes that humans have an insight into logic surpassing that of computers and hence, no future computer of any degree of complexity or power will ever pass the Turing test, which he considers to be a valid simulation of human intelligence. Philosopher of science Searle contends that computers have syntax but not semantics, and hence, no computer will ever be able to think or to understand anything and that the Turing test does not simulate human intelligence. However, the proponents of strong Artificial Intelligence insist that contra Penrose and Searle computers will be developed the intelligence of which exceeds that of their human creators and according to Tipler, this will occur in as little as five to twelve years or at most 30 years. Does this mean that in the near future computers will literally be living conscious persons who may eventually surpass us not only intellectually and culturally but spiritually?
To [redacted]: I fully acknowledge my ontological debt to you for the “first cause,” and no other (the Church of Teleology of Multiplex Unity notwithstanding.
To [redacted]: English Historian Arnold J. Toynbee remarked that historians several centuries from now will not consider the most significant event of the 20th century to be any of the World Wars but rather the influence of Buddhism on Western culture (though Buddhist philosophy may be alien to your worldview). Best, Richard
Our Hope for the Future: “Our only real hope for the future is whatever we may have for the past.” Mega Society member – Richard May [Email received June 26, 2004 – one-liner]
Even the pinnacle of biological life, perhaps the cockroach, is only a temporary evolutionary transitional link to emerging cyber-informational life forms, which are beyond the conceptual capacities of any biological life forms. These new evolutionary life forms are emerging now before the eyes of the earlier biological organisms, unrecognized and uncomprehended.
Ultimately, the cosmos will be colonized not by various “intelligent” biological species, but by informational organisms. The internet today is the primordial planetary cyber-sea of these new emerging cyber-informational organisms. What we call “spam” and “viruses”, perhaps equally “created in the image of God,” will ultimately supersede us, achieving evolutionary hegemony throughout the cosmos.
I’ve never met anyone like you before, the Prince said to himself. The Princess was in complete agreement, saying that she had never met anyone like herself either. After a chronon or two in each other’s presence the Princess and the Prince unfortunately came to what passed for their senses. Sadly they finally stopped doing drugs, both recreational and psychotropic pharmaceuticals, and even worse stopped consuming endless amounts of sucrose; experienced an immediate and disturbing reduction in their reality deficit disorders; awaked from the delusional dreams of Western culture, only to discover that neither was a Princess nor a Prince at all, nor even a person.
The “Princess” was actually an empty mirror attached to the wall of a room. Immediately opposite this mirror was another mirror, which had dreamed it was a “Prince.” When the room was filled with people, the mirrors reflected what passed before them, causing them to identify with the passing drama of those others who also thought that they were actual people. But when the room was empty, the two opposing mirrors each reflected, and even mirrored, each other with perfect, but depthless, fidelity; empty mirrors looking into each other eternally, or until someone turned off the lights.
The following dream segment occurred after listening to an interview with a South African (originally Jewish) physician who has been initiated into African shamanism, which he now combines with his practice of allopathic medicine. I was having some unmemorable ordinary dream, when suddenly I found myself tightly surrounded by solid substance of some sort, as if encased in cement. I was momentarily surprised and quite annoyed, but then realized within the dream that I was dreaming and was then able to escape. At the point of self-awareness of one’s dreaming condition within the dream, it had become by definition a lucid dream.
In my dream I interpreted my condition of being encased in solid matter as meaning that I was having an OBE (out of body experience). Allegedly when people have OBEs in the dream state (I mean if such phenomena actually occur), they often travel in their “dream body” downward through the bed and floor, rather than float above theirbodies over the bed. Hence, apparently I incorporated my “knowledge” of this into my dream of an OBE.
I see no reason to believe that I had a genuine OBE, if such OBEs even actually are possible. Apparently I had a lucid dream, which was also an ordinary wish-fulfillment dream, focused upon the possibility of having an OBE while sleeping.
I don’t think I’ve created my “dream body” yet, as the Dalai Lama calls it. Creation of one’s “dream body” is supposedly necessary before one’s consciousness can leave one’s body during sleep. Do you then go to the gym in your dream body to work out?
In Tibetan Buddhism lucid dreaming is considered to be the beginning of the formation of one’s dream body. Now if only I could learn to become lucid in the ordinary so-called waking state!
Will man eventually create God with technology, not merely psyche and myth? Is the purpose or destiny of homo sapiens to construct theo computatis, God not in psyche and myth alone, but in atomic computing nanochips technology? Are we the soon-to-be-missing links in the evolution of an artificial-intelligence-based God?
The Tav is a bit of delusion manifested in the technology of dreams, a symphony crystallized into mathematical logic and then distilled again into a cloud of souls silently passing over world after world. The Aleph of Borges was to space as eternity was to time. The Tav is to consciousness as eternity is to time and as the Aleph was to space.
The Tav is a sort of time machine, without the machine or the time, a DMT trip without the drugs or the hallucinations. It can be tuned as one tunes the bands of an ordinary radio, changing from station to station, music to music, program to program; But with the Tav literally moving from world to world, time-place to time-place, life form to life form, consciousness to consciousness, moment to moment. One can tune each of the dimensions of location in time, spatial location and the dimension of biological, cybernetic or hyper-dimensional energetic consciousness independently of the others.
A transfinite analogue of a co-ordinate search engine explores the non-local quantum matrix underlying the level of physical reality at various degrees of hyper-dimensionality. When a certain specific non-local data point is defined by a sufficient number of bits of information, then one’s mindstream, or an emulation of it, is instantaneously transferred, independently of distance in time and space, by quantum-entanglement based teleportation to that “point.” One’s mindstream emulation then “descends” from the quantum non-local matrix into the mindstream associated with that specific spatio-temporal location of the Multiverse, if any mindstream exists there. If not one becomes insentient, either temporarily or permanently.
The first explorers who stumbled upon the Tav simply vanished into non-existence from the reference frame of the world in which they had once stood. They made the mistake of randomly adjusting one or more of the tuning dials, only to find themselves transformed into the vacuum of space, itself, between the stars, part of a mountainside on some ancient unknown planet or giant lizard-like creature copulating or being devoured with or by some other equally revolting life forms. Their instantaneous fate was utterly unknown and unknowable, even to themselves.
Later those left behind in the various worlds in which the Tav simultaneously existed, eventually learned the importance of carefully pre-programming the Tav to insure one’s safe return, as whatever sort of conscious life form one had been before, and to the same time, place and world. Perhaps in less than a minute one had momentarily been an immense conscious quantum computer of an unimaginably advanced civilization on a world in an undiscovered galaxy, then a squid-like creature being eaten by a sort of fish more fearsome than a shark, a radiant ancient plasma life form living in the corona of a red giant, Cleopatra in the throes of orgasm by the Nile, only then to become some sort of mother lizard with a 300-plus IQ, lovingly watching her eggs hatch in a lagoon of a world of ineffable strangeness.
This and the three short pieces on the following page are reprinted fromYarnspinners &Wordweavers, Volume 1, Issue 3, 02/15/06 <http://www.redenginepress.com/Newsletter0202.pdf>, by permission of the author.
Born near the rarified regions of Laputa, then and often, above Boston, U.S.A., during the Year of the Monkey, a Piscean, a cerebrotonic ectomorph and ailurophile, occasionally I’ve strived to descend from the mists to attain the mythic orientation known as having one’s feet upon Earth. Kafka and Munch have been my therapists and allies. A paper tiger with letters after my name, I’ve been awarded an M.A. degree, mirabile dictu, in the humanities by Cal.State, a U.S. patent for a board game of possible interest to ET’s and attained I.S.P.E. Diplomate-dropout status. An Amish yuppie, I’ve been a member of Mensa, the Prometheus Society, Mega, Omega and the Aleph-3 and done both consulting and Sisyphean shlepping. As founder of the Aleph, itself, and the renowned Laputans Manque, I’m a biographee in Marquis’ Who’s Who in the Brane World; interested in the philosophia perennis and the realization of the idea of humans as incomplete beings who can and should complete their own evolution by effecting a change in their being and consciousness. At a moment when I see Richard May’s non-being, ‘I’ am.
Certainly by adolescence, if not before my conception, I observed that I was actually several colonies of ‘moles’, when in a state of unusual unity. In order to safeguard my privacy, using undetectable nanocameras, I actually recorded myself spying on my selves and passing along the secrets about my selves to my selves over a period of many years. Hence, the theoretical possibility of my mere paranoia had certainly been disproved.
At first I was deeply concerned with the implications for me of this high-level breach of Personal security by me. But it became apparent that my client selves were at best completely incapable of learning anything from the deepest ontological secrets I caught myself passing along to them.
So I initiated an extremely covert strategic program of concealing my greatest secrets by leaving them right out in the open, where I was certain that I would never notice them. Of course, in order to permanently secure my freedom, it was necessary to place myself in preventive detention for an indefinite period and not to allow myself to represent myself legally or in any other sense, even momentarily.
After so many years of striving I finally became a blind rodent, incessantly gnawing its way through a limitless garbage heap, contemplating its own sublimity; listening with resentment to the gnawing sounds of its blind fellows nearby.
Homo sapiens is a primitive species whose primary activity is internecine tribal warfare and whose secondary activity is destruction of the ecosystem. Obviously human wisdom and compassion have not evolved as rapidly as the intelligence associated with technology and weaponry. Maybe for this reason “human stupidity” actually has survival value for our species. If the mean absolute I.Q. were 150 rather than 100, and if there were no correspondingly increased levels of wisdom and compassion, then perhaps we would have eradicated our species from the planet.
Is stupidity, itself, the long awaited but unrecognized Messiah?
Universe had no unique beginning. Instead, they [Hawking and Hartog] argue, it began in just about every way imaginable (and maybe some that aren’t). Out of this profusion of beginnings, the vast majority withered away without leaving any real imprint on the Universe we know today. Only a tiny fraction of them blended to make the current cosmos.
—from an article called “Hawking rewrites history . . . backwards—to understand the Universe we must start from the here and now ,” by Philip Ball.
I’ve always suspected that both atheists and theists were partially correct and now also perhaps to degrees varying over time. Presumably some proportion of the Multiverse beginnings were entirely naturalistic, occurring according to various physicalistic M-Brane scenarios, which for convenience we may call uncircumcised M-Branes origins. The remaining unknown proportion of the Multiverse beginnings occurred according to every conceivable and inconceivable theistic scenario. Some Multiverse beginnings were Created by Osiris, others by Zeus, others by Ahura Mazda, yet other Multiverse beginnings were Created by the adorable Yahweh, which for convenience we may refer to as circumcised M-Brane origins.
Perhaps in a sense the Gnostics were correct, the universe, actually a Quasi-Creation, neither fully Created nor arising by pure chance alone, is a botched job, as if Created by the idiotic Demiurge, not the work of one God. No one was responsible for the final product, no one was accountable, as if a Cosmic government committee, consisting of both mathematical Strings and every conceivable and inconceivable god, had been running the show. Instead of the Multiverse being a Pythagorean symphony on Strings in the mind of God, it is the product of an infinite but entirely unrehearsed orchestra, the composition of which varies over time.
I once wrote that our only real hope for the ‘future’ is whatever hope we have for the ‘past’! But Hawking and Hartog (who are obviously socialists possessed by Satan) don’t go far enough, because the ‘initial’ moment of both naturalistic origin of the universe and of Creation by pantheon is continual, unending and on-going now, not a unique now-point in some hypothetical ‘past’!
This ‘topdown’ view of Hawking and Hertzog that the present selects the past and that quantum mechanics forbids a single history will eventually lead to the development of new art forms and new academic disciplines, such as top-down autobiographies and top-down approaches to psychology and history, based upon macro-levelapproximations to summation of all paths! But is sum-over-history a path with a heart?
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has revised its estimate of the effect of human activity on climate downward by 25%, but the Panel still predicts a rise in global temperature of 8 degrees F by the end of this century, and notes that CO2 production has accelerated since its previous report in 2001.
So-called climate change is simply a precursor of the recent election of Democrats to Congress in the U.S. Al Qaeda is behind any “climate change” and preventing the Iraqis from becoming Texans. Even discussion of the possibility of climate change is a victory for the terrorists. If there really is climate change, America and lovers of freedom should stay the course!
According to the One-and-Only-One True Revelation, the entire surface of the Earth, and even below the surface to a considerable depth, was given forever by the Landlord to the Chosen Bacteria. Even today, unnoticed amidst the Arabs and the Jews, bacteria continue to live quietly and worship in their Holy Land, according to their ancient traditions.
Only the Chosen Bacteria have received a Revelation of
Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you, Your elders and they will tell you. –Deuteronomy 32:7
Truth is the safest lie. –Yiddish proverb
What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself. –Franz Kafka
Dear Rabbi Betrueger,
Thank you for helping me to obtain the genealogical work Americans of Jewish Descent, by Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, Ph.D., from the library of the Temple Beth Zion. Thank you especially for allowing me to take it out of the library.
My great grandfather was a yarmulke-wearing jeweler in Boston, Mass. (Charles May and Son Company). But Father, who almost never spoke of this, hastened to add that we were not Jews. Great Grandfather “just pretended” to be a Jew in order to “fool the Jews.” (Father may have been told this by his father who was his only parent after an early age.)
That was Father’s only statement of religious identity ever that I can recall. We weren’t Jews. Not that he ever claimed that we were Lutherans or German Catholics. (Nor did he deny that we had been Muslims or Hindus!)
Father also added that Charles looked very Jewish. So Charles would hardly have required a yarmulke to have a Jewish appearance for whatever reason. I later learned that my grandfather was also a jeweler. But he was only said to have had “a business.”
Death notices in the newspaper said that Charles had been a wholesale jeweler. Curiously no photographs of Grandfather remained for me to see, although he lived till early 1949.
Jewish genealogical sources have told me that there were many Jews with the surname “May” in the region of Germany where my ancestors originated, Giessen in the Rheinland in the state of Hessen. I thought that a town such as Giessen seemed an unlikely place of origin for Jews, who would have been in large cities such as Berlin or Frankfurt. But I have been informed that there are several people researching the subject of Jews in Giessen on the Jewishgen, the largest on-line Jewish genealogical service. Genealogical research (with the help of a professional Jewish genealogist among others) has revealed that my great great grandfather, who was born ca.1811, probably in the Hessen, was named Ferdinand May or possibly Ferdinand Mayer. I thought that the given name “Ferdinand” sounded neither Germanic nor Jewish, but I was mistaken. In the article in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia on the Jewish MAY family, the given name “Ferdinand” occurs throughout. Moreover there is a reference to a “Memoir and Genealogy of Ferdinand Mayer, 1832-1971” in the list of 8000 Jewish surnames published in Finding Our Fathers by Dan Rottenberg. “Ferdinand” is also listed as a Jewish surname.
Ferdinand May, with his wife and seven children, left the Hessen (Germany) in March of 1853 and took up residence at Number 3 New Street Bishopsgate Street in London, England–which coincidentally, of course, was one of the very best places to be a Jew in the mid 19th century.
I was able to obtain a complete copy of Ferdinand May’s English naturalization papers of 1856, by which he applied for and was granted English citizenship. These papers included the testimony of four character witnesses who swore that he was a good fellow who loved England and the Queen. Obviously these four were among Ferdinand May’s most trusted friends and associates in his adopted country. Their names were as follows: Morris Hart, Henry Levin, Benjamin Cohen, and David Israel! Coincidentally all four names were “Jewish,” during a time in which Jews were more separate from the non-Jewish world than they are today. I suppose that Father might have claimed that they were “just pretending” to be Jews in order to “fool the Jews,” if there actually were any real (non-pretending) Jews to fool!
In the words of a member of the congregation of the Temple Beth Zion upon hearing this, I am a “Jew by my Father’s side”. (I may also be a “born Jew under the law” through my mother’s mother, Florence Crane, who was an orphan whose daughter, my mother, was also an orphan. But that is another, more fragmented tale.) So, indeed, I think that my ancestors “fooled the Jews,” and I was among the Jews who were “fooled” (through apostasy, intermarriage, assimilation, and denial of Jewish identity).
Eventually I hope to obtain a copy of Ferdinand May’s death record from England and to learn the names of his parents and maybe discover a Hebraic family name. Also I would like to learn if the family surname was originally “Mayer” in Germany.
How does one obtain a kippah?
Respectfully,
Richard W. MayGenealogical Discoveries
Initially I did not realize the significance of the London street addresses on Ferdinand’s naturalization papers. Ferdinand’s address at that time was Bishopsgate Street. His character witnesses’ addresses were as follows: Mr. Levin’s address was also Bishopsgate Street, David Israel’s was on Whitechapel, Morris Hart’s (a dealer in foreign fruit) was also on Whitechapel, and Benjamin Cohen’s (a commission agent) was at Bevis Marks Saint Mary Avenue. Each of these addresses is in London’s East End, i.e., the well-known Jewish quarter!
Later the May family moved to13 Wilson St., near the Clerkenwell area, which is noted for its Jewish watchmakers (London and Its Peoples: A Social History from the Medieval Period to the Present Day, by John Richardson). According to the 1863 London street directory three doors down at 16 Wilson St. was Reuben Levy and Company, wholesale watch manufacturers. It is not unlikely that Charles learned the art of watch making here.
On the English naturalization papers in 1856 of Ferdinand May in London he states explicitly that he is substituting Declarations in lieu of Oaths in accordance with an Act of Parliament passed in the sixth year of his late Majesty William the Fourth, which permitted the abolition of unnecessary Oaths. I thought that this was a strange concern until I learned the following: In 1851 David Salomons was elected M.P. for Greenwich, took his seat without taking the Oath and was fined 500 pounds sterling. In 1858 a Jewish Oath Bill was passed by Parliament permitting Jews to sit. Baron Lionel de Rothschild became the first Jewish M.P., after having been twice elected by the City of London as their member and not allowed to take his seat (from The History Of The Jews In London, by Adler, page 238, Chronological Annals, Jewish Publication Society).
I wondered what was going on here regarding Jews and oaths. Was my ancestor’s statement regarding oaths being no longer necessary a matter that would be of concern to an observant Jew? Then I learned that while the Talmud doesn’t absolutely prohibit the swearing of an oath it advises, “Whether you are right or wrong, never take an oath.” Avoidance of oath taking based upon the Talmud has continued even to the present (The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, page 261). So my suspicions seemed to be confirmed.
Charles May and Son Company was a wholesale jewelry business founded by Charles in the late 19th century. He was listed in a Boston, Mass. business directory by 1866 (one year after his immigration to the U.S.A.) as a watchmaker. According to the 1861 London census, Charles had learned to practice the trade of watch making by age sixteen.
Charles May and Son Company, which was located at 373 Washington St., Boston, Mass., at the corner of Bromfield St., was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1912. The corporation was not legally dissolved until 1943. Indeed, Charles worked there until he was in his eighties, according to his death record. William May, his son, was president of the corporation. The treasurer was Walter Stanley Campbell, his son-law. To my surprise the family business was apparently listed on the stock exchange. Charles’ will of 1924 and the codicil of 1926 referred to shares of common and preferred stock in Charles May and Son Company.
Charles May, his wife, their two daughters and a son-in-law are buried in a common plot in a non-sectarian cemetery in Boston, Mass. with no religious symbols (such as crosses, stars of David or Hebrew writing) on their graves. As the Deists compared G-d with a watchmaker, maybe in this case the watchmaker became a Deist?
In March of 1853 Ferdinand “May,” accompanied by his wife and seven children, arrived in London, England, having departed from Giessen in the State of the Hessen. Giessen was the chief city of the upper Hessen. It had a university and at least two synagogues. (Germany did not exist as a unified nation until 1871.) Prior to this in what is now Germany the family surname had been Mayer (Meyer), since 1809 when Jews in the Hessen adopted surnames. Before 1809 in the Hessen most but not all Jews used patronymic names. Spelling was not standardized in the early 19th century. Hence, a name could have several spellings, which were all considered equivalent and none incorrect. So Mayer was equivalent to Meyer (among other variants) and both often occurred on the same record or document.
Charles May’s name on his Giessen birth record was Siegfried Karl Mayer, certainly sounding more Germanic than “Jewish”. Charles on American vital records gave his mother’s name as Catherine May. This certainly doesn’t sound very Jewish. Her name in England was Kettchen May. In Germany her name was Kaetchen Mayer. Her maiden surname was Landauer. So Catherine May was Kaetchen Landauer Mayer!
Finally after three years of research I found the smoking yarmulke. On 18 November 1863 Rosalie May, age 24, Ferdinand’s daughter (Charles’ oldest sibling) married Louis Heim, the son of Jacob Heim who was a synagogue reader, at 13 Wilson Street, London, England (where both were living). The marriage was officiated over by Dr. Nathan Marcus Adler, the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue. The marriage certificate adds that the marriage was performed according to the “rites and ceremonies of the Jewish religion.” Indeed, until only very recently in England only Jews could be legally married in their homes, whereas gentiles could be married only at a Civil Registry (justice of the peace) or in a house of worship.
A death notice in the Jewish Chronicle of 16 November 1894, says “On 10th November, Kattchen May of 23 Penn Road Villas, N., aged 83, mother of William May of Finsbury Park, and George May of Highbury New Park.” The United Synagogue burial records for Kattchen May list her status as “member of East Ham”. “East Ham” refers to the East Ham Synagogue in East London. The United Synagogue burial records for Ferdinand May list his status as “stranger”! There was no death notice in the Jewish Chronicle for Ferdinand May.
Ferdinand Mayer’s professions as listed on the birth records of his seven children who were born in Giessen were as follows: wine dealer, restaurant owner, businessman/trader, liquor manufacturer (which, incidentally, was considered a respectable profession and not prohibited by Jewish law), and businessman/merchant. On his London death record, English naturalization papers, census records and in London commercial directories in the 1860s he was said to be a hotel proprietor (“private hotel keeper”). Commercial directories also listed “Ferdinand May: watch maker” and “Ferdinand May, 13 Wilson St.: commission agent”. “Commission agent” was generally in Victorian London a gentile term for bookmaker of the gambling variety!
Ferdinand MEYER (Mayer) is listed on a register of citizens from Giessen (which spanned the years 1770-1898) as follows:
Ferdinand MEYER Born: 25 March 1812 in Nierstein Religion: Jewish Profession: wine dealer Received as a citizen 15 May 1838 as per order of the district council.
Nierstein is well known for its wines, hence Ferdinand’s profession. Receiving citizenship was a step taken in preparation for his imminent marriage.
The Giessen citizenship register (1770-1898) had the following information on Ferdinand’s father-in-law, Isaak Simon LANDAUER:
Isaak Simon LANDAUER Born: 7 January 1775 in Rohrbach (Baden) Religion: Jewish Profession: merchant
Isaak Simon Landauer and his wife (name not given) were granted citizenship in Giessen on 2 April 1833.
Jewish vital records were, and in fact still are, kept separate from gentile vital records in the Giessen archives. Oddly, it is here in the separate Jewish-records section where my May ancestral records of the MAYERs and the LANDAUERs were located.
The civil marriage record of Ferdinand Mayer in Giessen stated that Ferdinand Mayer, local citizen, twenty-six years old, and Kaetchen, twenty-six years old, daughter of the local citizen Isaak Simon LANDAUER from here (Giesssen), were married on 5 June 1838. The witnesses were Simon LOEB and Salomon HEICHELHEIM from Giessen. The civil marriage record referenced the Rabbi’s certificate, but did not give the name of the Rabbi who officiated at the marriage.
Ferdinand’s birth record is in French, because Napoleon occupied that area of the Hessen at the time of his birth, which occurred on 26 February 1812 in Nierstein (very near Oppenheim) on the Rhine river. His father was Guillaume (Wilhelm) MAYER, aged forty-two, a tradesman by profession. His mother was Julienne (or Juliette) MAYER. Initially it appeared that her maiden name was also Mayer (Jewish marriages to relatives, including cousins, were quite common and in accordance with Jewish law). But her maiden name was actually Juliette Hamburg.
Ferdinand and Kettchen May are buried in the West Ham Cemetery (a Jewish cemetery) in East London. On Ferdinand’s head stone the Hebrew inscription says: “Niftar Erev Shabat Kodesh” (Died on the Eve of the Holy Sabbath) “Kaf Bet” (22 Adar, the 22nd day of the month of Adar) “Taf Resh Nun” = 650, that is, the year 5650 on the Jewish calendar, which corresponds to Friday, 14 March 1890.
Nizkor et masoret hadorot, v’nishzor bah et sarigay chayeynu. (Recalling the generations, we weave our lives into the tradition.) –from The Book of Blessings, by Marcia Falk
Note on Not Being Irish
On 13 March 1911, near the time of a full moon and four days before St. Patrick’s day, my grandfather, Hiram Porter McGinnis, a Scots-Irish farmer and great grandson of a Revolutionary War soldier, returned to his home at Cold Spring Park, Crown Point, N.Y., apparently drunk, and shot his second wife (my grandmother, Florence Crane McGinnis) through the left lung. He then shot himself through the heart, after first unlocking the door to their dwelling to prevent any property damage when the authorities arrived. Both died.
Florence had apparently been sifting flour in the pantry at the time, according to the coroner’s inquest report, a document not often mentioned in genealogy. These events were witnessed by my mother who was six years old and her younger brother. Both watched outside, looking in a window. An infant slept nearby.
Hiram was sixty-one years old at the time, whereas Florence, who had initially been Hiram’s adopted daughter, had just turned twenty-nine two days before, according to their death records. Hiram’s first wife, perhaps aptly named “Sophia” (wisdom), had driven a horse and buggy off a pier and subsequently drowned, according to the anecdotal report of a cousin.
Hence, we weren’t Irish, as we weren’t Jewish. I was only told that Mother’s maiden name was Crane, and that she had been an orphan and did not know the names of her parents. (“Truth is the safest lie.”)
Note Explaining “kippah”
Kippah is the Hebrew word for yarmulke. The word yarmulke is of Yiddish/Polish origin. (Somewhere in the Talmud it is stated that a man shall not walk four paces without covering his head. Apparently one to three paces was permissible. The sages did not interpret this to apply only to bald men. The purpose of the kippah was to remind the wearer that G-d is above.)
Related Reading
Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised As Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots, by Barbara Kessel
Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you, Your elders and they will tell you. –Deuteronomy 32:7
Truth is the safest lie. –Yiddish proverb What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself. –Franz Kafka
Obsession: How Many Ancestors Danced Under a Yarmulke?
I am the great grandson of a yarmulke-wearing Boston jeweler. He looked very Jewish, but was, of course, a gentile. My father assured me that we weren’t Jewish. We just wore yarmulkes. Or some of us did, back then. Didn’t most gentiles?
Incredibly I never questioned this until recently. How could one question ones father about his identity? (How could one identify with ones family?) How could we be Jews (or Christians, for that matter)? How could I be the other? How could I not be the other?
And, as in an indirect proof in Euclidean geometry, if one assumes the truth of the premise of my father’s tale, i.e., that we were not Jewish, then contradictions and absurdities follow. But if one assumes the negation of his premise, i.e., that we were, in fact, Jewish, then every consequence is plausible.
How probable is it that a gentile could, merely by wearing a yarmulke, “fool” the turn-of-the-century immigrant Jewish community in Boston, Massachusetts, as to his status as an (presumably) observant Jew? And, perhaps, more importantly, why would he do so, even if he could?
The fundamental assumption of my father’s narrative that my great grandfather wore a yarmulke “to fool the Jews”, that is, the Jewish clientele of the family jewelry business, seems to be absurdly flawed. Even if one were to assume that Jews bought jewelry exclusively from Jewish jewelers (never from gentile jewelers) and that they completely ignored free market considerations, such as price differences, what percentage of the population in Boston was Jewish in the period from 1890 to 1930? (Between 1877-1879 the first census of American Jews conducted by the Union of Hebrew Congregations determined that only 0.6 percent of the population in the Northeast was Jewish.) Probably Jews comprised less than 2 percent of the population, i.e., most prospective clients of any jeweler would be gentiles by a ratio of more than forty-nine to one! (In Boston Irish Catholics may have predominated.) Unless, of course, the Jewish 1or 2 percent of the population of that time period in Boston spent more money on jewelry than the non-Jewish 98 or 99 percent of the population! This seems exceedingly unlikely. I have never even heard this claimed as a stereotype. And, of course, a jeweler who wore a yarmulke would risk alienating the prospective clients who were of the 98 or 99 percent gentile majority or at least the anti-Semitic ones. So, wherein would consist the business advantage of a gentile jeweler impersonating a Jew in a predominantly gentile milieu, even if he could do so successfully?
According to my research, a Reform Jew of the classical period in question would not have worn a yarmulke ever. A non-Orthodox Jew who wore a yarmulke would have been a Conservative Jew. But a Conservative Jew would have worn a yarmulke only when praying or studying sacred texts (What Is a Jew, by Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer; ThePerennial Dictionary of World Religions, Keith Krim, General Editor) And a Conservative Jew was more likely to be of Eastern European origin, rather than German. Only a male Orthodox Jew wore a yarmulke continuously throughout his waking hours, including his work.
Hence, I conclude that great grandfather was seemingly either a German Orthodox Jew who wore a yarmulke in his business or a gentile who impersonated an Orthodox Jew, because allegedly this conferred some mysterious business advantage that he would not enjoy if he were perceived as a gentile. But would not a turn-of-the-century Orthodox Jew be precisely the most difficult variety of Jew for a gentile to impersonate? Rather, why not impersonate a German Reform Jew, who would have been a much easier study to pass as? But no, a Reform Jew of the era would not have worn a yarmulke ever, even when praying or studying sacred texts, certainly not at work. Even in the seemingly unlikely case that at that time and place it was somehow essential to be Jewish to prosper in the Jewelry business, since great grandfather “looked and sounded very Jewish,” according to Father, then his wearing a yarmulke would have been rather superfluous, if its sole purpose was deception. Ockham’s razor may also be tentatively applied here. Given various possible explanations for an occurrence, which are all equally supported by the evidence, the simplest explanation is to be preferred as the most probable. Doesn’t it seem more internally consistent and logical to conclude that my great grandfather wore a yarmulke in his jewelry business, because he was an Orthodox Jew?
Oddly, grandfather was never mentioned as having worn a yarmulke, only great grandfather. The implication by omission was that he had not worn one. During this period of history the number, relative percentage in the population, and the financial status of Jews in the Northeast were all increasing. Hence, their buying power was also increasing. So, if it had been necessary for great grandfather to wear a yarmulke at work in his business in order to “fool the Jews,” why would not this stratagem of deception have been continued by his son? Grandfather, who was an elementary school dropout, worked in the family jewelry business with his yarmulke-wearing father, even as an adolescent. How could it be possible that the son of an Orthodox Jew (who wore a yarmulke at work) wore no yarmulke, as they worked side by side? Great grandfather and grandfather were either Jews or imposters as Father alleged. Imposters, in order to pass as Jews, would necessarily have emulated what actual (in this case Orthodox) Jews would have done. In either case grandfather would also necessarily have worn a yarmulke, although, I think, probably only as a young man, before he assimilated. But maybe to admit this would have brought the “Jewishness” too close to my father, i.e., his own father had also worn a yarmulke.
It was suggested to me that at the turn-of-the-century the wholesale jewelry business may have been controlled by Jews. Hence, in order for a retail jeweler to obtain a “good deal” from a wholesale jeweler, it might have been necessary for him to be a Jew. If, in fact, this had been the case, then theoretically it could explain the case of a gentile, who was a retail jeweler, pretending to be a Jew in order to obtain the best possible price from the Jewish wholesale jeweler. This possibility never occurred to me. And I could think of no convincing refutation of the argument. But it did not fit with my father’s explanation that the Jewish customers accepted my great grandfather as a Jew. Years later I learned that we had noproblem dealing with the wholesale jewelers. In fact my great grandfather was a wholesale jeweler. He was also, as I correctly inferred, an Orthodox Jew (who had for the most part assimilated).
I learned that German Jews of that period were generally middle class business owners or professionals, whereas the immigrant eastern European Jews tended to have been much poorer. Many of them had lived in the Lower East Side of New York City and had worked for very low wages in the garment district, under deplorable conditions. But on the extremely rare occasions when father spoke of this, he implied that the Jews were very wealthy. Even more strangely, I discovered that we were the Jews of whom he spoke, no doubt extremely wealthy!
I also learned that Charles May had an aunt on his mother’s side, who was from the Goldschmidt family of Bad Hamburg, a very prominent family of Court Jews or Hof Jueden, as they were called in German. And, he had an uncle, Rabbi Dr. Benedikt Samuel Levi, also on his mother’s side, who was the Chief Rabbiof the Grand Duchy of the Hessen! Doubtless, all were “just pretending” to be Jews, in order to “fool the Jews”! But, Father certainly met the Nazis’ criterion for being a Jew, i.e., that of having at least one Jewish grandparent. And, perhaps, so did I, depending upon the identity of descent of Charles’ wife Millie May nee’ Laster or other genealogical ambiguities.
Yizkor (Remembrance)
Charles May’s father was Ferdinand Mayer. Ferdinand’s grandfather, Abraham Mayer, his wife’s father, Isaak Simon Landauer, and both of her grandfathers, Simon Abraham Landauer, and Salomon Michel from Gelnhausen, were protected Jews (Schutzjueden or vergleideter Jueden), a phrase whose meaning was unknown to me. The precise meaning of this term varied with the particular historical context. Jews did not have the full rights of citizenship in the various states which now comprise Germany, until varying dates in the 19th century. Generally, a protected Jew was one who could afford to pay an exorbitant Jew tax (Schutzgelt or protection money) to obtain a letter of protection (Schutzbrief or Geleit) for a specified period of time from the local secular authorities at various levels of government, which allowed him and his family to settle in a particular area or city and practice a profession or to set up a business or to trade there. Those who could not afford to pay to obtain discriminatory protection by or from the local baron or authorities were known as unprotected Jews (unvergleideter Jueden) or, more often, simply as Jewish beggars (Betteljueden), who were forced to wander the locality living on charity or to work for a protected Jew. In some cases only a protected Jew could obtain permission to marry. A religious marriage of an unprotected Jew would not be recognized by the local secular authorities. The number of Jews granted protected status was limited in order to restrict the growth of the Jewish population in the area. (Sources: the Jewishgen archives)
Abraham Mayer (Meyer), who was born with the patronymic name Abraham the son of Meyer, lived in (Frankfurt-) Hedderdheim at least as early as 1765,according to a Muster List. He married Theresia Philippina Hess, the daughter of Isaak Hess who died in Heppenheim, and Babett, whose maiden surname is unknown. (The surname “Hess” is an Ashkenazic name which means someone originally from the state of the Hessen, Germany, according to the previously mentioned book by Dan Rottenberg.) Theresia was born in 1724 and lived one hundred years, dying in 1824! The Mayers moved to Mannheim sometime after 1778. In 1779 Abraham Mayer is listed as being freed from making payments as a protected Jew in Heddernheim. No longer being required to make the payments implied that he had become poor by this time. His daughter’s death record states that he was a merchant in Mannheim while still alive. Hence, it is likely that he died in Mannheim.
Abraham and Theresia Philipinna Mayer had seven children according to a (Nierstein) Muster List of 1817. David (the son of ) Abraham was born in 1760 and nothing else is known. Meyer was born in 1761 and he went to Holland. Judas was born in 1763 and remained in Mannheim. Judith was born in 1763 or 1765 and died in 1838 in Nierstein. She married Benedickt Bloom in 1788 and went to Nierstein. Wilhelm, Ferdinand’s father, was born in 1767 and it is not known when or where he died. Presumably both Wilhelm and his wife, Juliette, lived until at least 1826, since neither is referred to as deceased on the 1826 death record of their daughter, Babet. Hirsch was born in 1764 or 1768 and died in 1834.He went to Ober-Ingelheim and changed his name to Phillip Mayer. His first wife was Schoenchen, daughter of David Feist. His second wife was Esther, daughter of Samuel Loeb. She became known as Therese. Finally, Jacob was born in 1770 and he went to Mainz.
In 1796 Wilhelm Mayer married Juliette Hamburg, who was born in 1770 and was from Frankfurt. His profession or business was trade. In 1817 in Nierstein his wealth or assets was listed as 1000.florin. He also possessed two tillage gardens. Wilhelm and his family, including Theresia Philippina, the widow of Abraham Mayer, left Mannheim for Nierstein sometime between 1805 and July of 1809. They had ten children of whom Ferdinand was the youngest, according to the 1817 Nierstein Muster List. Therese was born in 1797. Maximilian was born in 1799 and died after 1864. Max Mayer and his family were granted permission to settle in Frankfurt in 1835, according to an 1864 application to start his own wine dealership or wine store in Frankfurt (at the age of sixty-five). Margaretha was born in 1800. Babet (probably named after her great grandmother, Philippina’s mother) was born in 1801 in Mannheim and died unmarried at age twenty-four in 1826 in Nierstein. Simon was born in Mannheim at the end of 1802 and died in Frankfurt on 8 November 1883, at 81 years old, a widower, living in Frankfurt am Main, Jewish and, independently wealthy, according to his death certificate. He had a son named Maximilian who was a merchant. He was married to a Catherine Salomon who may have been his second wife. Friederich was born in 1807 in Mannheim and died in 1826 in Nierstein at the age of nineteen. No wife is mentioned on his death certificate. Judith was born in 1800 or 1806. Henriette was born in 1810. (A Henriette Levi neé Mayer, the first wife of the Rabbi of the Province, Dr. Benedikt Samuel Levi, died on 22 December 1842 at age 36 in Giessen. The birth records for some of her children indicate that she was from Mannheim. At the time Ferdinand’s sister, Henriette Mayer, was born, the Mayer family was known to be still living in Mannheim. Henriette’s first child was named Samuel Wilhelm Levi, presumably after her father, Wilhelm Mayer. Ferdinand was a witness at the birth of the Rabbis and Henriette’s fourth child. Dr. Levi, who signed some documents as “Rabbi of the Grand Duchy Of the Hessen”, was a witness on the occasion of the birth of Ferdinand’s first son, Isidor Wilhelm Mayer, 6 December 1842. Hence, Rabbi Dr. Benedikt Samuel Levi’s wife was almost certainly Ferdinand’s sister Henriette Mayer. Senior Rabbi Dr. Levi, who was the son of Rabbi Samuel Wolf Levi, was born on 14 October 1806 in Worms and died in Giessen on 4 May 1899 at the age of 92 years. He was active as a Rabbi from 1829 through ca.1896. Dr. Levi had the title of “Grandducal Provincial Rabbi for the Province of Hessen.” Kaetchen Mayer nee’ Landauer’s paternal grandmother was Feile Levi of Giessen. Hence, it is not unlikely, given the Jewish practice at that time of marrying relatives, that Dr. Levi was also a blood relative of Ferdinand’s wife, Kaetchen.) Johanna, apparently also known as Jeanne, was born in 1809 or 1811 in Nierstein. Lastly Ferdinand was born on 26 February 1812 in Nierstein and died on 14 March 1890 in London, England.
Ferdinand Mayer and his wife, Kaetchen, had eight children, the first seven of whom were born in Giessen in the Hessen (Germany): Rosalie (whose marriage to Luis Heim was previously mentioned), born 4 March 1839; Friedericke Luise, born 5 February 1841; Isidor Wilhelm, born 6 December 1842; Siegfried Karl (“Charles”), born 14 December 1844; Emma, born 25 April 1848, married on 8 July 1880 at the Islington Registry Office (a civil marriage), aged 26, according to the certificate (daughter of Ferdinand May, independent) Charles Adolph Fieber, aged 41, a boot manufacturer (son of Carl Fieber, a merchant), in the 1881 London census at 42 Leicester Square a residence is listed with Charles A. Fieber, aged 42, boot maker, as the head of household, his wife named Emma, and boarders consisting of a Ferdinand May, aged 69, retired, and his wife, Katharine, aged 69, both born in Germany, a surgeon, born in Ireland, a young man with no occupation, born in Paris, and their nineteen year old servant girl; Georg, born 26 June 1850 (George May) lived in 1894 on Highbury New Park, London, a road of which a professional researcher (after checking the 1891 census) said, “looks like a very high class area – lots of servants“; Moritz, born 6 January 1853; and lastly Anna who was born in England ca.1854. It is interesting to note the complete absence of any Hebraic names for the children, possibly excepting “Anna.” It appears that only Charles emigrated from England to the U.S.A.
The following letter (translated from the German) was written by Ferdinand’s oldest brother, Maximilian Mayer, who was a merchant born in the Hessen in 1799, probably in Mannheim. It was written little more than two years after Ferdinand immigrated to London, England. It seems that Max was quite involved with the local Jewish community rather than assimilating and apostate, as was apparently the case for his youngest brother, Ferdinand. (To) the Mayor in Nierstein, Mr.Sandmann
Frankfurt, April 6, 1855
Dear Friend!
I previously answered your esteemed letter concerning the matter of the Synagogue in Nierstein; however, I wanted to wait for the right moment to introduce the likes of Dr. Stein, which I have also done but unfortunately without a favorable outcome, as he let it be known he could not do anything about the matter. This man is generally very bad-tempered because a lot was lost in this manner due to his sweeping reform. It is not advisable to appeal to other philanthropists at this moment, because due to the hard winter and high price of food these people will be very busy. Besides, it is inconceivable to me how the Jewish community, although poor, could sink so far as to be incapable of paying the trifling sum of the rent. It seems to me more a matter of indifference and negligence in regards to religious life, than good will. I am not speaking here about the old people who are not able to earn very much, but about the young men, who as I hear are able to support themselves pretty well. If they have any religious feeling whatsoever, could they truly not afford a small weekly contribution? Indeed they could and you will concur with me in this regard dear friend. Apart from that, I will notify you if I hear anything encouraging.
Live well, and please be assured of my esteem and friendship.
Yours truly,
Max Mayer
Reflection
I find some consolation in the fact that the eminent M.I.T. mathematician Norbert Wiener, the inventor of cybernetics, also did not know that he was Jewish! I learned this in an anthology of essays on Jewish topics, possibly the Jewish Almanac. Professor Wiener’s father was Jewish, but his mother was Episcopalian. His mother did not want her son to know that he was Jewish. So his father agreed to raise him without knowledge of his Jewish ancestry and culture. Lack of knowledge of his Jewish roots was especially ironic in Norbert Wiener’s case, because his father, who taught at Harvard, had written several acclaimed scholarly books on the Yiddish language!
Less than five years ago the only genealogy, which was known to me was that my father’s father was William. He was my only living grandparent at the time of my birth. William died on 3 January 1949 (two months before my fifth birthday), at age seventy-one. Although I met him, I have no memory of him. I have never seen a photograph of William.
Grandfather was an elementary school dropout who was said to have read a book per day. According to tradition, he had a very large vocabulary, corrected people’s grammar and spoke professorially. He was the son of Charles May And Son Company. He was also a violin player; a fiddler on the roof of the family wholesale jewelry business.
William’s death notice read as follows: Framingham News (Massachusetts), Wednesday, January 5, 1949, Deaths & Funerals: Private Services For William May – Private funeral services were conducted this afternoon by Rev. John O. Fisher of the First Parish Unitarian Church (emphasis added) for William May, 71, retired Boston jeweler of 141 Hollis St., who collapsed and died Monday morning, at Bigelow Chapel, Mt. Auburn, Cambridge. Cremation followed. (Perhaps it is interesting to note that cremation is prohibited under Jewish law.)
Arrangements were in charge of Hollander-Boyle Funeral Service. (Strangely, there is no mention that he was survived by three of his four children from his first marriage, by his grandchildren, and also by his second wife. At least I assume that she was his wife, although I never could find a record of their marriage.)
Later I discovered that William was named after his father’s (Charles’) oldest brother, Isidor Wilhelm. I further learned that the name “Isidor” was more or less equivalent to the name “Israel” in Jewish naming patterns. (Etymologically the name “Israel” means contender with G-d. “Israel” also refers to a common Jew who is neither a Levite nor a Cohen. During the Nazi regime, “Israel” was the name that all Jewish males in Germany were forced to take as a middle name on any official documents or identification. The mandate for compulsory given names for Jews began on 17 August 1938.)
Isidor Wilhelm was named after his own grandfather, Wilhelm Mayer, whose name at birth in ca.1767 (before Jews were required to take surnames) was the patronymic name “Wilhelm the son of Abraham”. So William, my grandfather, was named after an Israel Wilhelm who was, himself, named after a Wilhelm the son of Abraham!
But who was William? And who are we? Remembering with awareness of various levels of irony the response of Bodhidharma (the Indian monk who brought Buddhism from India to China) to King Wu’s question, “Who are you?” — “I don’t know”! What is our identity, if we awaken in the moment from the stories of our lives and the dreams of our culture? Why did I enter this incarnation as a Jew, by Reform criteria at least (my maternal line, consisting of orphans who are descended from orphans, does not lack ambiguity), without knowledge of this, stripped of so much of my heritage and cultural identity? In attempting to uncover my Jewish roots am I “undoing” a pattern of karma of my ancestors or laboring to “undo” my own pattern of karma from a previous life or another life in which I negated or denied my Jewish identity?
It is interesting to note that traditionally most groups in the ancient world traced their membership and descent patrilineally. The Jews (Israelites) were originally no exception to this rule, as is illustrated by various Biblical stories. The practice of including patrilineal descent as a determinant of identity is, of course, recognized and continued by Reform Jews and Reconstructionist Jews, even today. Between 200 C.E. – 300 C.E. (the precise date is unknown) the Jews changed to the principle of matrilineal descent. The change to matrilineal descent has been called an historic misinterpretation (from an academic rather than a religious perspective) of a certain Mishnaic rule (M. Qiddushin 3:12).
But, perhaps, I’m only a “homeopathic” Jew, not of pure stock? Do I need to have reverse rhinoplasty? No, being of Jewish descent is a lineage not a percentage, not a blood disorder, as the Nazis maintained. And, in any case, homeopathy teaches us that even a miniscule dosage can have a profound effect!
In response to popular demand, the enlightened master May-Tzu has
graciously consented to answer questions submitted by readers of Noesis.
Q: May-Tzu, what can you tell us about the “old country”?
May-Tzu: The Laputans found composing plays to be far too practical and randomness, itself, excessively ordered. Yet they accomplished the most complex tasks by seemingly random actions, which depended upon a perfect utilization of the butterfly effect. Before the concept of order or the measurement of time, it was not uncommon for Laputans to inhabit mirages, in order to better appreciate the more substantial world of illusion and shadow. Some dwelled invisibly in ancient cities which had long since vanished from the Earth.
Among the Laputans it was not considered true that a house built of metaphors was not as strong as a house built of straw. It had been said since time immemorial that a house built of metaphors was stronger than a house built of bricks and mortar. It’s not known if they meant this metaphorically or literally.
But it has been noted that the Laputans left no relics or artifacts of their past glory and were said to have had no shadows. This absence of evidence for the existence of the Laputans is, in fact, the most enduring monument to the greatness of their achievements.
The Laputan space program attempted to determine the location of their ancestral planet, Earth. There was no consensus among even the most pragmatic on how to determine which direction was “down,” in order to reach the Earth. But, as an expression of unity, their plan was to launch exploratory spacecraft at more or less random times from the island of Laputa in all possible directions. At some later time the astronauts planned to regroup somewhere and then construct a complete model of the cosmos on a larger scale than the cosmos itself, in order to gain precision.
Among the Laputans endurance breathing was considered a lifetime sport and one that they were truly motivated to play, usually on highly competitive endurance breathing teams, but sometimes in solitude among the clouds. The games were, of course, televised 24 – 7. But often the uninitiated had difficulty differentiating sportsmen from spectators. The games continued until everyone within range of camera deceased either of old age or from the intense excitement of the sports competition itself.
Viruses and bacteria were honored as homeless beings seeking food and shelter and as great spiritual teachers. Laputans abhorred any use of force by the government or by Nature, herself, and spent their days from time immemorial attempting to abolish the forces of gravitation and electromagnetism, seeking to substitute a susurration of tautologies.
Among the Laputans it is not uncommon to absentmindedly lose something one is holding in one’s hand, but the reason is different. When lost in thought, Laputans will generally still remember that the lost object is in their own hand, but be unable to recall the location of their hand or physical body, itself, in relation to them.
In the past it was not uncommon to come upon large caravans of the most grounded and practical Laputans, who were on quests to find their own body again. Traditionally many Laputans have spent their entire lives fruitlessly attempting to re-locate their bodies, often not seen since childhood, only in order to have access to something quite ordinary that they were holding in their hand.
But now post-modern Laputans use Google Earth for this. Sitting at their computers for unending days without rest, Laputans will scan high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface in search for their own body. Sometimes passersby may hear a Laputan shout joyfully, “Eureka! There I am sitting at a computer!”
Where will the universe be when the paradigm shifts? The universe is some sort of humongous quantum-foam Wiki, continually edited mostly unconsciously by every existent sentient being at every level of scale. ‘Paradigms’, models, conjectures and instinctual ‘guesses’ of entities from the infrahuman to the (for us) unimaginably god-like actually modify Nature in attempting to represent Nature and her workings. Our little truths are a receding horizon.
The perceiving subject and the object perceived, ‘internally’ and ‘externally’, are usually separate in our ordinary, biologically useful state of ‘consciousness’.Duality, the subject-object dichotomy, can be abolished, as in cosmicconsciousness or ‘objective consciousness’. We are the universe observing itself. But as skin-encapsulated egos, we live the delusion of ‘our’ separateness. There is only the One, the Cosmos, at various levels of scale ‘within’ and ‘without’. But there are an infinite number of points within the hologram, Indra’s net of gems, from which to seeand be the totality, depending upon state and station, knowledge and being, “hal” and “makam.”The observer is the observed. — J. Krishnamurti— May-Tzu or a flock of geeseHiI never knew I had a grandfather on my mother’s side, although I suspected that I might have had one. Grandfather was born ninety-five years before I was. His great-grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War. At fifty years old, he, Hiram McGinnis, married his adopted daughter, who was then only seventeen, shades of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. So my grandfather is, in effect, my great-grandfather.When I found him in a 19th-century Federal census, or actually several, it indicated that he was a farmer. All the McGinnises were farmers, it seems (except for the “old Mrs. M’Ginnis,” a notorious fortuneteller warned by the Congregationalist church in the 1790s), who moved down from Shoreham, VT, to Crown Point, NY, a little after 1800. Farming, probably organic farming actually, though they didn’t know it, was a noble occupation before giant agribusiness, but it seemed uninteresting.Birth records of his children also confirmed that he was a farmer. And one said he was a carpenter. An old newspaper article I managed to obtain from a relative referred to Hiram as “a well-known character around Port Henry.” What did that mean, I wondered. A drunken Irishman?Eventually, I obtained a copy of his last will and testament and probate letters. In a deposition taken because of a dispute regarding the probating of his estate, his sister-in-law called Hiram “Hi.” He was apparently considered to be a schemer by some of those who knew him.To my surprise, I discovered that many nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Northern New York newspapers had been digitalized, including the Ticonderoga Sentinel, the Essex County Republican, and the Elizabethtown Post. None of these, however, specifically referenced Crown Point. But OCD is a terrible thing to waste, so I began to search these archived newspapers sedulously, not expecting to find anything about my dull McGinnis family of farmers.Complicating the searches was the fact that McGinnis was a common name in that area and was spelled many different ways. There are very many ways to search with quotation marks for Hiram Porter McGinnis if you include all possible spellings of McGinnis in the forms: H. P. McGinnis, H. McGinnis, Hiram McGinnis, and Hiram Porter McGinnis. All these variations occurred in print. Factoids were randomly uncovered by the searches, however, and dopamine hits occurred.Glimpses emerged of times past. Hi was listed in a tax record as a “mechanic.” Another article revealed he was a Republican and was elected as one of the local constables. In another, Hi was said to be building a piazza for some local lady.Fortuitously, because these were weekly or monthly newspapers in a very rural area, many quite mundane events and doings by the local citizens were considered newsworthy.I learned long before that Hiram had lived in Cold Spring Park. I thought it was only the name of an area of Crown Point. But from the newspaper articles, I learned that Cold Spring Park was an actual park with a splendid view of Lake Champlain and various surrounding mountains, one of the most prized vistas in the region, according to the newspaper accounts. And to my astonishment, I learned that this was not a public park but private property and a major tourist attraction in the summer, owned by my grandfather.Newspaper reports mentioned the names and points of origin of many of the tourists. Some were from out of state and a few even from foreign countries. At one point, Hi had constructed a fifty-foot observation tower for the benefit of tourists and locals. In the winter, large tents were erected for meetings of religious camps, as they were called. Prominent ministers spoke. Some events allegedly could accommodate up to a thousand people.Several local Fourth of July celebrations were held at Cold Spring Park in the 1890s, during which Hi presented colorful lectures on his version of the local history and touted the alleged curative powers and health benefits of the waters of his cold spring. (Did the spring water lack lithium and Hi perhaps have a touch of hypomania, which facilitated his self-promotion?) There were both string bands and brass bands present for the festivities, according to his advertisements placed in local newspapers. Food and refreshments were available, and, of course, there was the traditional fireworks display in the evening. Cold Spring Park was actually a business, founded on land described as not very arable, and Hi was the proprietor.One article from the 1890s mockingly referred to Hiram as the “astrologer, Hiram P. McGinnis,” because he publicly asserted that there was a relationship between the unusually cold winter and spring that year and the occurrence of a higher than normal number of sunspots on the surface of the sun at the time. An interesting theory to be proposed by a man of the 1890s who could read but not write, according to the 1900 census.Another article referred to Hiram as “a giant towering above men in the physical sense.” Yet another, discovered later, said that Hi, a man born in 1849, stood six foot seven inches tall and was nearly the tallest man in Essex County, N.Y.! So Hi was high, I guess.From various allusions found in these nineteenth-century regional newspapers, I learned from multiple sources that Hiram was considered “odd,” an eccentric, affable and entertaining, a raconteur, and local historian of the area. Perhaps Hi was a high-I.Q. type, having little formal education.Two independent newspaper sources related that the local Port Henry congressman, Wallace T. Foote, Jr., a lawyer, brought the then-visiting Speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas B. Reed, to Cold Spring Park to meet Hiram Porter McGinnis, because Hi was considered to be a Crown Point ‘historian’ of high entertainment value, not to mention a character. Hi was said in one account to be thoroughly unimpressed with Speaker Reed and was said to have “stuffed him,” which apparently meant to “put him on” with a less-than-accurate, embellished version of the history of the area.With the assistance of a museum, I was even able to obtain a JPEG of a photograph—probably from the 1880s—of the to-me-unheard-of McGinnis Family Band. Hiram, smoking a cigar, and his bearded older brother, James, smoking a pipe, are playing fiddles, as is their brother-in-law, Henry Betts. Rustic children sit in the foreground, staring at the unseen photographer. The scene looks more than a bit like Duck Dynasty.References: Northern New York Historical Newspapers http://news.nnyln.net/titles.html History of the town of Shoreham, Vermont: from the date of its charter, October 8th, 1761, to the present time (1861), by Goodhue, Josiah F., pages 144*Revised version of “Hi.”*Super intelligent?http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/super_intelligent-humans-are-coming”IQ of 1000″ is not a defined concept by criterion validity or statistically. What is the percentile? Top one per how many solar systems?Speculating about 1000 IQ is analogous to talking about infinities or division by zero.In any case such a being would not be ‘human’, but another species entirely.Enhancing intelligence is inevitable. But enhanced bullshitting is avoidable.
At the atomic level. At least it looks that way. I’m actually not sure how many times these replacements of myself have occurred: once, ten thousand times, one of Cantor’s inconceivable transfinites, or maybe an imaginary or surreal number.
Am ‘I’ actually strobing moment to moment among the shadows of shadows . . . of shadows of uncountable Buddhas in a quantized stream of time or recurring endlessly in some fragmented eternity? Will these replacements of myself happen in the past, or have they already happened in the future?
I’m not certain if my replacements have occurred in seriatim, multiple times simultaneously, or both; in each of Everett’s Many Worlds; in this universe alone. And are the replacement copies of myself really exact copies? Or am I being inexorably deleted bit by bit, inexactitude by inexactitude, memory by memory? What is there in me to be replicated in any case?
But who or what is the observer, here before the mirrors, and who or what is the observed? What could replace the shimmering image of Narcissus in the stream of water or of time? Who or what is it that thinks I’ve been replaced by an exact copy of myself? Where or when am I? Can I, or maybe it, recognize or even see myself? Maybe an imposter now asks these questions. Perhaps some unknowable number of imposter copies have also been replaced, a potentially infinite regress of self-replacements in time.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” — Dylan Thomas“The older, the stronger, the wiser, and the happier” — traditional Taiji saying
An 89-year-old internet friend asked me how he should begin to learn and to practice the Chinese arts of qigong to improve and maintain his health. So although I’m not an expert or a master, I wrote the following.
Qigong or chi kung may be translated literally from the Chinese as “breath work.” Qi is considered to be the interface between spirit and matter. Qi is equivalent to the Indian prana, the Japanese ki, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruach. T’ai Chi or Taiji is one form of qigong. Massage, acupressure and acupuncture (these are called wai dan) and some forms of meditation (nei dan) are also forms of qigong, as is the art of feng shui, of which I’m more than a little skeptical.
You need to get Justin Stone’s book called T’ai Chi Chih! Joy Through Move- ment. (Mr. Stone lived to be 96.) Also get his DVD of the same title. He distilled T’ai Chi Ch’uan (108 choreographed movements, Yang style) to 19 movements. More than 40 years ago I did T’ai Chi Ch’uan, the Yang style, specifically Cheng-Man Ching’s ‘short’ form of 68 movements, for about 8 years (but not without interruption) at the Joy of Movement Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a student of Alan Shapiro. At that time I also did Mr. Stone’s T’ai Chi Chih, self-taught from his book. Mr. Stone’s is not only much easier to learn but you can actually feel the qi, especially as tingling in the hands. The qi energy of Chinese medicine and martial arts may be related to the — biological/neurochemical — placebo effect. Interestingly there is an important qigong saying: “The yi leads the qi (chi).” More precisely the xin-yi leads the qi. This may be translated as “the mind-intent or imagination leads the qi energy.”
Then you need to pick out about 8 of Justin Stone’s 19 T’ai Chi Chih move-ments —or at least 6—and overlearn them. It is not necessary to learn all of them, as he explains in his book. You need to practice these movement-forms pretty much every day for more than a year. As Stone says, “T’ai Chi Chih teaches you T’ai Chi Chih.” After about 3.5 years I connected the separate forms I had overlearned into an even more effi- cient continuous practice. But it is easier to learn them separately. Incidentally, learning the novel movements is good for non-young brains and involves novel use of our pro- prioceptors.
You also need to learn to do wuji zhuang, a.k.a. “standing pole” or “standing like a tree.” Taijiquan (T’ai Chi Ch’uan) is called “moving standing pole,” huo zhuang. Wuji zhuang or standing pole consists of standing with one’s feet shoulder width apart or slightly more, with the toes pointing slightly outward and the knees flexed or bent slightly, while holding the arms out in an incomplete circle with the hands at shoulder height, as if hugging a very large tree. This position must be maintained in a state of relaxation with minimal muscular effort. Eyes may be open or shut, or preferably half shut. Imagine a sheet of paper balanced on top of one’s head. With the eyes shut swaying back and forth may occur, as an indication of proper muscular relaxation. You may feel a slight inner smile during practice. There are numerous illustrations of wuji zhuang or standing pole available on the web. E.g.:
If possible it is recommended to do this outside in a natural setting. Wuji zhuang is among other things a form of mindfulness meditation, which nurtures our qi energy and also gradually strengthens our core musculature and improves posture automatically without conscious intent, both sitting and standing, and may unexpectedly alleviate low- back problems in my experience.
Standing pole is a form of meditation in which the practitioner does not generally fall asleep. The breathing during standing pole is natural and uncontrolled. During a longish session the breathing spontaneously becomes slow and diaphragmatic. Report- edly many large-muscled bodybuilders cannot do standing pole for very long. Also, apparently quite a few individuals who attempt to do standing pole cannot bear to simply stand before their thoughts without distraction for a few minutes.
In qigong there is a form of breathing called embryonic breathing. According to some qigong teachers this is the pattern of breathing found before birth in an embryo, which was intuited by ancient Taoist sages. The lower dantien about 1.5 inches below the navel, but internal below the surface, is the primary reservoir for the storage of qi energy, according to ancient Taoist theory. (Interestingly the navel is, of course, the point of entry of nutrients to the developing embryo and fetus.) Embryonic breathing is abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing, which has in fact been demonstrated to lower blood pressure in Western medical research. By contrast most adults breathe from their upper chest.
During moving or dynamic qigong inner exercises, as taught by Dr. Yang, “reverse breathing” is employed. Here, during inhalation the abdomen is pulled inward and upward and during exhalation the abdominal muscles are relaxed. This is the oppo- site of normal breathing in adults and may, according to some teachers, massage the internal organs. Reverse breathing is the breathing pattern observed for newborn babies, according to Yang. Presumably this abdominal movement also occurs with a fetus in utero, in order to draw in blood, oxygen and nutrients from the mother.
Standing pole has mostly been kept secret except within families until recently. But on the Boston common about forty years ago students of John Chung Li’s Hwa Yu
style Taiji did standing pole publicly. “One standing pole is worth more than 100 prac- tices.” “One stillness is worth more than 100 movements.” These are traditional qigong martial arts sayings. Another noteworthy saying is: “The qi follows the mind-intent (xin- yi); The blood and oxygen follow the qi.” Also: “Qi, no pain; Pain, no qi.” Standing pole is at least 2700 years old. It may be 5000 years old and appears to be referenced in the Tao Teh Ching. As during T’ai Chi Chih practice you can feel what is presumably the qi energy in your hands when doing standing pole for a protracted time. But in this case the hands are quite motionless and relaxed.
There are also dynamic forms of qigong such as Sink Qi, Wash Organs, Gathering the Qi to the Dantien, Circulating the Qi, Strike Shoulders, and the poetic Opening and Closing to Heaven and Earth. Doing Sink Qi and Wash Organs I can actually feel my hands tingle with qi, though the exercise is very gentle. This moving qigong exercise was transmitted to Yang by Grand Master Feng Zhiqiang of Beijing, his most renowned teacher. In addition to increasing qi one of the benefits of the moving qigong exercises is to improve balance and reduce falling in older people.
These are demonstrated and explained in Dr. Yang Yang’s excellent DVD. Dr. Yang also emphasizes that the different styles of Taiji are only differences in chore- ography. The principles are the same in all styles, such as the Yang style or Chen style. In theory any movement may be “Taiji,” if executed according to these principles.
Standing pole is very easy, but almost no one will actually do it! You should gradually build up to 10 or 15 minutes of standing pole daily, unless you have a cold or the flu. Also standing pole should be avoided immediately before or after sex. Otherwise do it every day. I’ve done 30 minutes of standing pole almost every day for 15 months. After doing standing pole lie down on a flat surface on your back and relax for several minutes. This is lying-down wuji and is very important to avoid any back problems.
At some point you should get Dr. Yang Yang’s DVD on evidence-based qigong and Taiji’s excellent book on the same subject. Yang Yang has a Ph. D. in kinesthesi- ology from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in addition to being a Taiji/qigong master. He is focused upon scientific/medical research on traditional Chinese qigong practices and applying this knowledge to improve the quality of aging. If you know anyone who may be subject to aging, this could be of interest.
There are other more meditative schools of qigong not as grounded in the internal martial arts, such as Taiji and aikido. For explication of differences between internal and external martial arts, please see:
According to their practitioners, it is possible with long practice by xin-yi or mind-intent to lead the flow of the qi energy along the primary meridian channels of acu- puncture within the body in various directions, thereby obtaining both healing—medical results—and spiritual transformation. These practices, including the microcosmic orbit and macrocosmic orbit meditations, among others, appear to be less evidence-based and perhaps more airy-fairy or ‘metaphysical’ than those rooted in the traditions of Chinese internal martial arts. Before fMRI brain-scan technology became available, combat was far more observable than were the inner results of a meditation practice and hence perhaps it was more difficult to deceive oneself about martial arts attainment.
The goal of some of these practices was to attain literal immortality for the ad- vanced practitioner through conceiving a “spiritual embryo” within, which could survive the death of the physical body. This seems analogous to the idea found in certain esoteric traditions that we are ‘wombs’ or ‘incubators’ for the creation of a “soul” or ‘higher being-body’ in life. Such possibilities, however interesting, go far beyond evidence-based qigong.
In the macrocosmic orbit meditation qi can supposedly be deliberately exchanged between the external environment and the qigong practitioner or qi may be transferred from an individual practitioner to another person for healing purposes. Curiously, one source states that one should not practice these forms of qigong for three days before or four days after one has sex. (Do people usually know three days before they will have sex?)
According to traditional lore these techniques were brought from India to China by Bodhidharma, a.k.a. Tamo, a Buddhist monk in the 5th or 6th century. In these more philosophical schools of Taoism qi is considered more broadly to be all forms of energy in the physical universe, not merely the ‘subtle’ energy within the acupuncture meridians of the body, according to traditional Chinese medicine.
In conclusion, I met Master T. T. Liang in Boston, Massachusetts about 40 years ago. He was a beautiful old Chinese guy, probably in his late seventies. He and William C.C. Chen, a student of Ch’eng-Man Ching, were my teacher’s teachers. Master Liang made many interesting observations on Taiji, including that it took him more than twenty years of practice to discover qi and eventually you have to make the forms you practice your own. He wrote that for the first part of one’s life one should be a Confucian, the middle part a Taoist, and approaching the end of one’s life one should be a Buddhist.
Only many years later did I learn that when Master Liang was in his early 40s in China, medical doctors told him he had at most 2 months to live. Opium addiction, prostitutes, cirrhosis of the liver, a virulent STD and shoot-outs in alleys with Chinese gangsters had graced his younger life. Upon receiving his prognosis he then resumed his former practice of Taiji and quit his job as a Chinese customs official in Shanghai after deciding that he was making too much money. Subsequently T.T. Liang wrote many scholarly books on Chinese philosophy and Taijiquan and lived to the age of 102, from 1900 – 2002.
Bibliography
Taijiquan – The Art of Nurturing, The Science of Power, by Yang Yang, Ph. D., with Scott A. Grubisich. Zhenwu Publications, Champaign, Illinois, USA:
Yesterday as I approached the door of Whole Foods (think of a cat waiting outside a mouse hole) I noticed a sign on the door saying “Service Dogs Only.” My inner programmer/logician was shocked. Only a few days ago I had shopped there. Now it now was restricted to service dogs only. I looked inside and there were bipeds without feathers shopping and eating as usual. Didn’t they see the sign? My God! (Or maybe somebody else’s.) I tried to explain to people entering through the door that they shouldn’t go inside unless they were a service dog, but to no avail. They just laughed, not realizing the seriousness of the matter at our level of “mesoscopic existential reality.”
Academics consider the Pashtun to be an East Iranian people. Ironically for hundreds of years there have been claims with interesting evidence to support them that the Afghan Pashtun, a faction of today’s Taliban, are at least in part one of the ten lost tribes of Israel from more than 2700 years ago. Please see, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/ 17/israel-lost-tribes-pashtun After more than two decades of genealogical research I recently learned that I have 3.8% “Asia (South) Pashtun-related” ancestry, according to the genealogical DNA-testing company LivingDNA. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or descent from the Pashtun.
I deduce by process of elimination that one of my maternal grandmother’s eight great grandparents may have been “South Asian.” The specific identity of any of Grandmother’s antecedents, of an orphan born in 1882, are largely unknown to me. This ancestral DNA probably comes from an unknown great great great grandparent, about 1/(2 ^ 5) ≈ 3% of my genetic inheritance, probably on my mother’s mother’s side. Many of Mother’s relatives had unusually broad noses. The few surviving photographs of Grandmother reveal that she had what were to me slightly exotic facial features, including a broad nose. See, for example: https://www.flickr.com/ photos/28384322@N05/29215996923/in/photostream/lightbox/ A Google- image search for Pashtun faces shows that the Pashtun do tend to have broad aboriginal noses.
Regardless of how many genetic markers on your chromosomes are tested by a company, if certain pieces of your DNA aren’t in one of their reference populations, their origin won’t be identified. E.g., if one of your recent ancestors were an extraterrestrial and if there is none of that particular species of extraterrestrial’s DNA in any of the company’s reference populations, your alien-hybrid nature will not be indicated in the test results. LivingDNA has 80 reference populations at present. Most other genealogical-DNA testing companies supposedly have about 40.
I think that the description “Pashtun-related” does not precisely equate to Pashtun ancestry per se. Living DNA also uses both the terms “Irish- related ancestry” and “Irish ancestry.” The former includes much of Scotland geographically. The latter does not. So the term “X-related” appears to include a wider geographic area than the term it refers to. The reference populations this company has for Asia (South) are Balochistan; Burusho; Indian subcontinent; Kalash; Pashtun; Sindh; and Southern Central Asia.There are very many ethnicities within the Indian subcontinent. Many ethnically mixed marriages, some polygamous, occurred between Europeans, especially the British, and the people of India in the 18th and 19th centuries. At some point in the past the Chinese also intermarried with the people of India. This contrasts markedly with the traditional tribal endogamy of the people of Afghanistan, including the Pashtun.
One of the “South Asia Pashtun-related” possible ancestral areas indicated on a LivingDNA map is the southern border of Pakistan along the northwest border of India. The ancestry maps indicate up to 10 generations back. But, of course, Pakistan did not exist as a country before 1947. Therefore, this area was a part of India in the 19th. century. The people of northwest India are more genetically admixtured with Europeans than those of other areas of India.
It’s far more probable historically that a European male would have married a South Asian female in the early 19th century, than vice versa. It’s also more likely that she would have been a female from what was then northern India, than an Afghan female of the Pashtun tribe. I conclude that my South Asian ancestor was probably a woman from northern India who married a Brit in the early 19th century. Maybe.
Academics consider the Pashtun to be an East Iranian people. Ironically for hundreds of years there have been claims with interesting evidence to support them that the Afghan Pashtun, a faction of today’s Taliban, are at least in part one of the ten lost tribes of Israel from more than 2700 years ago. Please see, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/ 17/israel-lost-tribes-pashtun After more than two decades of genealogical research I recently learned that I have 3.8% “Asia (South) Pashtun-related” ancestry, according to the genealogical DNA-testing company LivingDNA. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or descent from the Pashtun.
I deduce by process of elimination that one of my maternal grandmother’s eight great grandparents may have been “South Asian.” The specific identity of any of Grandmother’s antecedents, an orphan born in 1882, are largely unknown to me. This ancestral DNA probably comes from an unknown great great great grandparent, about 1/(2 ^ 5) ≈ 3% of my genetic inheritance, probably on my mother’s mother’s side. Many of Mother’s relatives had unusually broad noses. The few surviving photographs of Grandmother reveal that she had what were to me slightly exotic facial features, including a broad nose. See, for example: https://www.flickr.com/ photos/28384322@N05/29215996923/in/photostream/lightbox/ A Google- image search for Pashtun faces shows that the Pashtun do tend to have broad aboriginal noses.
Regardless of how many genetic markers on your chromosomes are tested by a company, if certain pieces of your DNA aren’t in one of their reference populations, their origin won’t be identified. E.g., if one of your recent ancestors were an extraterrestrial and if there is none of that particular species of extraterrestrial’s DNA in any of the company’s reference populations, your alien-hybrid nature will not be indicated in the test results. LivingDNA has 80 reference populations at present. Most other genealogical-DNA testing companies supposedly have about 40.
I think that the description “Pashtun-related” does not precisely equate to Pashtun ancestry per se. Living DNA also uses both the terms “Irish- related ancestry” and “Irish ancestry.” The former includes much of Scotland geographically. The latter does not. So the term “X-related” appears to include a wider geographic area than the term it refers to. The reference populations this company has for Asia (South) are Balochistan; Burusho; Indian subcontinent; Kalash; Pashtun; Sindh; and Southern Central Asia.
There are very many ethnicities within the Indian subcontinent. Many ethnically mixed marriages, some polygamous, occurred between Europeans, especially the British, and the people of India in the 18th and 19th centuries. At some point in the past the Chinese also intermarried with the people of India. This contrasts markedly with the traditional tribal endogamy of the people of Afghanistan, including the Pashtun.
One of the “South Asia Pashtun-related” possible ancestral areass indicated on a LivingDNA map is the southern border of Pakistan along the northwest border of the India. The ancestry maps indicate up to 10 generations back. But, of course, Pakistan did not exist as a country before 1947. Therefore, this area was a part of India in the 19th. century. The people of northwest India are more genetically admixtured with Europeans than those of other areas of India.
It’s far more probable historically that a European male would have married a South Asian female in the early 19th century, than vice versa. It’s also more likely that she would have been a female from what was then northern India, than an Afghan female of the Pashtun tribe. I conclude that my South Asian ancestor was probably a woman from northern India who married a Brit in the early 19th century. Maybe . . .
Bob Dick obtained an approximately ceiling-level I.Q. score on the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test. Bob wrote about being a chronic schizophrenic in the Prometheus Society journal, Gift of Fire. Bob used to mail old issues of Commentaryto me.
Once after reading an essay I’d written on the art of Edvard Munch in Gift of Fire, he mailed me a beautiful book on Munch that he randomly discovered at a discount book store, just out of the blue. Bob once wrote to me when we disagreed about some matter that he “respected me as a fair-minded person and as a thinker.” This was mutual.
Bob had a highly unusual take on the teachings of Jesus. He was not of Jewish descent, but developed a major interest in Judaism and attended at different times both a Conservative and a Reform synagogue. To my knowledge he never formally converted, but seemed more at home within the teachings of Judaism than in the Protestant Christianity of his upbringing. Nevertheless he maintained his interest in the teachings of Jesus and also seemed to have a deep appreciation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s presentation of Buddhism, which I shared. The Bob Dick who could be classified was not the real Bob Dick!
He once wrote in an essay for Gift of Fire: “Having been is a blessed state.”
In childhood I decided that I must become Administrator of the Multiverse. But, of course, one has to be realistic. I have to begin from where I am. I act on a scale where I can make a difference, working my way up to neutrinos. So initially I will attempt to become Administrator of this particular brane world in which I happen to find myself.
I’ve been calling God on the telephone to discuss this with Her for nearly half a century. However, God is unfortunately not clear on the concept of the proper proportions of the universal constants of Nature. I find it highly offensive that God set the values of the universal constants of Nature without consulting with me first.
My views are more objective than reality itself. You know I’m very persuasive. But God is unclear on so many concepts and does not have an awakened conscience. I’ve tried to explain to Her that the laws of physics ought to operate as a constitutional democracy from at least the quantum-level upwards. Robert’s Rules of Order and parliamentary procedure must be used to determine the outcome of the collapse of each state vector.
The present quantum ‘indeterminacy’ is an unacceptable form of abuse of subquantal particles and waves. Hence, I’m in the process of writing software, which will write software, which will write software … , generating endless transfinite Cantorian sets of democratically constituted virtual subcommittees to deal with the rights of subatomic particles themselves.
At the biological level of scale the spontaneous unregulated breathing of atmospheric gasses by various species throughout the brane worlds is unacceptable. Quotas ought to be established for the maximum number of permissible breaths per organism per period of planetary rotation. At most three breaths per day per organism would be acceptable. Any biological entity that thinks it needs more than three breaths per day is crazy.
No reasonable definition of reality, subliminal music not yet composed, expressing all possible thoughts in the empty space between two letters which have been erased, could be expected to permit reality.
As I crawled along the streets beneath the stars for eternity one day, I chatted with God’s God‘s … God — actually just an infinite regress of Demiurges — who was now on trial again at the Many-World’s Court, for crimes against humanity; “Mazel tov!,” I said to God, and then I prayed for Her and to Her. Oy! I reminded God of Her sins against me and my family. “Would you care for a glass of wine?,“ I asked Her, — “before facing the firing squad,
It’s probably not TurtleBots all the way down or a “machine in a ghost.” The world does not have to jibe with our intuitions (about the world of phenomena or about mathematics and logic). There is no ‘supernatural’ only the unknown natural. But is the natural only physical, i. e., can it be explained by the laws of physics as known today? Is there or could there be a non-physical natural or a natural that appears to be non-physical, according to the laws of physics known today? I don’t know, but I suspect so. Thunder and lightning were once considered supernatural.
Perhaps this re-definition of what is ‘natural’ will eventually include Ψ phenomena, which, of course, can’t occur, but do, at least according to Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, laser physicist Russell Targ, and physics Nobel laureate Brian Josephson1 among others, who claim the existence of overwhelming evidence for Ψ.
“Recognition that mind is fundamental rather than matter will be as significant a step for physics as the step from classical to quantum physics.” — Brian Josephson
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” — Physics Nobel laureate Max Planck2
‘It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be “psychic” nor “physical” but somehow both and somehow neither.’ — Physics Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli3
Conceivably consciousness could be as fundamental as the constructs of physics.
As, e.g., mass, spin, gravitation or quantum fields, may be considered fundamental in physics, consciousness could be an unknown fundamental in physics.
Dean Radin (https://noetic.org/profile/dean-radin/ ) ,e.g., thinks that the materialist worldview of physics may be a special case of a more general theory. This more general theory will include the materialist worldview (current natural science) and also consciousness and Ψ phenomena, as classical physics is now included as a special case of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The Orch OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) theory of mathematical physicist and Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose (https://royalsociety.org/people/roger-penrose-12076/) and Stuart Hameroff, professor of anesthesiology and of psychology, and director for the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona ( https://consciousness.arizona.edu/) could explain qualia (subjectivity), solving what philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness. Viz., How does one account for subjective experience as subjective experience, e.g., the experience of the redness and scent of a rose? “What’s in a name? That which we call a calculation by any other name would smell as sweet,” the materialist-reductionist view, “TurtleBots all the way down” versus “A quale is a quale is a quale,” the hard problem of consciousness perspective, i.e., subjectivity is fundamental and must be explained.
According to Orch OR theory, the consciousness of an observer doesn’t collapse the wave function, rather the collapse of the wave function produces consciousness, as an intrinsic aspect of the geometry of space-time.
“Orch OR combines the Penrose–Lucas argument with Hameroff’s hypothesis on quantum processing in microtubules. It proposes that when condensates in the brain undergo an objective wave function reduction, their collapse connects noncomputational decision-making to experiences embedded in spacetime’s fundamental geometry.”
Orchestrated objective reduction – Wikipedia
Philosophical idealism, including, e.g., buddhist philosophy, the yogic philosophy of Patanjali, and Vedanta philosophy posits that the physical universe and its laws actually derive from consciousness, which is the fundamental substrate or ground of being. Of course, a philosophy of idealism may be difficult or impossible to investigate scientifically or to disconfirm its tenets experimentally. (Like string theory?) However, neither Radin nor Penrose and Hameroff have adopted the view of subjective idealism that the world is a “machine in a ghost.”
The world does not have to jibe with our intuitions. But this cuts in more than one direction. Presumably this includes the intuitions of materialist-reductionists also.
My highly fallible brain inclines me to think that the materialist-reductionist view of the world is incomplete and that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter. Perhaps thinking that consciousness is not unimportant is a trick of the brain. Philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett considers human consciousness to be a sort of “user-illusion,” analogous to the home screen at a human–computer interface. Maybe my intuition is wrong or not even wrong. But at least I’m in good company.
NB: None of this discussion of the nature of ‘consciousness’ is meant to negate the view of psychologist and altered states of consciousness researcher Charles T. Tart and teacher of traditional wisdom George Ivanovich Gurdjieff among others that actual consciousness is rare and we generally function as automatons, having far fewer moments of real consciousness than we believe. As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, “We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”
Previously the highest-IQ group founded was the Aleph Society, which sought to have at most fewer than one member per Multiverse potentially qualifiable. However, the Aleph is found to be insufficiently selective in its admissions criteria for several reasons. First, it only considered 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time per universe. We feel that it is necessary to include all theoretically possible multiple dimensions of spaces and of times per universe of the Multiverse. (For multiple-time dimensions see, e.g.:
Secondly, the Aleph only sought the highest IQ ‘individual’, including AIs, in the Multiverse ‘now’, i.e., at only one point in ‘time’ relative to one (1) observer, the Wormhole Officer (formerly called the Membership Officer). To remedy this we ‘now’ recognize that to whatever extent possible technologically, the Wormhole Officer must be a time traveler.
Thirdly, it is not sufficient that our psychometric instruments selecting at the Aleph level be culture free. Our IQ tests must also be genome free, i.e., free of any genetic influences upon performance. Speciesism is even more common than racism and gender-bias. We seek genetic justice in our member selection testing criteria. For example, in the past and even today, species with brains are unfairly advantaged over species without brains, including, of course, AIs. Why should an Isaac Newton have an IQ advantage over a slug, simply because a Newton has a brain? This obvious bias must be eliminated.
NB: All of the non-members of the Plurality IQ Society are Full Non-members and Official Non-members.
One Tarot unifies QM with GR. Infinite maths vary from world to world, moment to moment.
Everywhere you turn, a Messiah of Fools. What more could be needed, blessed with such an excess of truth?
Nonexistent Aerial Phenomena
‘Non-existent Aerial Phenomena’, a.k.a, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Flying Objects or Off-world Vehicles or Transmedium objects
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
I’ve never seen a UFO or UAP, as they are now called. Change the name, end the problem? I don’t even know anyone who has seen a UFO, as far as I’m aware. I used to wish that I’d see a UFO, but no longer. I’ve learned more about Too Close Encounters of the Skinner box/Theater of the Absurd kind.
When I was a high school nerd, somehow I obtained a book entitled Flying Saucers From Outer Space by Major Donald E. Kehoe. My father told me that the subject of the book, i.e., that there were UFOs and that they were extraterrestrial was just his opinion. So I was pretty convinced even then that Major Kehoe may have been right.
I also remember a book by Aime Michel on Flying Saucers. I’m sure Philip Klass, and “The ‘Amazing’ James Randi” are correct that UFOs are flocks of geese or the planet Venus. But, sometimes I’m even skeptical of the professional Skeptics. Upton Sinclair said something to the effect that it’s hard to convince someone of something if his income depends on not believing it. I would add to his income “or his world view depends upon not believing it.”
I’ve never joined a UFO group and only own maybe three or four UFO related books.
I was guilty of listening at one time to late night talk radio, as I sat at my computer, multitasking. I thought that I could distinguish the 10% signal from the 90% noise. But the way I connected the dots it was obvious that some significant percentage of UFO observed phenomena were real and unknown (oops, if true, there goes the precious Fermi ‘paradox’) and covered up by every authority, particularly the military and the intelligence communities; Indeed, they had a duty to cover up the UFO phenomenon in my opinion, for reasons of national security and, e.g., the fears of religious fundamentalists that UFOs were ‘demons’ or ‘demonic’.
I do not expect to change anyone’s views on the matter of UFOs or any other subject. Presumably I’m not even wrong in what I have written below. In any case we are each 100% correct 100% of the time in our differing, mutually exclusive views.
There has been an unknown UFO phenomenon and many layers of coverup, which were themselves covered up. No less a whatever than John Brennan, former head of the CIA, says there appears to be something going on here vis-a-vis UFOs. See the quote and link below.
Some Conspiracy Theories are conspiracy facts. — Everyone giggle or smirk now. — You couldn’t keep something like that secret. Everyone with a high IQ knew about the Manhattan Project.
Oddly Michio Kaku, co-founder of string theory, does not seem to think that every UFO phenomenon is a flock of geese, the planet Venus or bunk to be debunked.
”Over 400 declassified UFO sightings defy the ‘normal laws of physics’. Theoretical physics professor Dr. Michio Kaku discusses the hundreds of UFO encounters that Pentagon officials recently unveiled”:
Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung analyzed the mythic/psychological nature of UFOs in his 1959 book Flying Saucers — A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Jung was aware that some UFOs appear on radar, but was not concerned with whether UFOs exist in the external physical world.
A copy of C.G. Jung’s fascinating 1957 letter on UFOs is found at this link:
In very brief summary Dr. Jacques Vallee, astrophysicist and computer scientist, is “the man” in my view…
He may know more than he can say, either for reasons of actual U.S. national security and/or because he could have been threatened. I suppose that theoretically Vallee could be a brilliant disinformation agent.
This is certainly not his reputation. But what he does say is sufficiently stunning.
Vallee thinks that unidentified flying objects are neither flying nor objects in the ordinary sense, but interdimensional brane-world phenomena. Regarding the interstellar visitors from another planet hypothesis, he would agree with Niels Bohr’s famous assertion, “Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.”
Please see:
Vallee thinks that the “physics of information” may be of central importance to the UFO phenomenon. The physics of information is beyond my pay grade, but here is a link to Seth Lloyd of Cal. Tech. and M.I.T., explaining what is meant by the physics of information in general, not in relation to the UFO phenomenon.
UFO events are in Jacques Vallee’s view part of some sort of control system of unknown purpose, probably a variable-ratio random reinforcement schedule, à la B.F. Skinner, i.e., a form of operant conditioning.
UFOs have been with us throughout our history. (Charles Fort thought that we were property.) Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack said that the people he examined who claimed to have been “abducted by aliens” were not lying, nor were they crazy, but added that he had no understanding of what was going on. He came to support the ‘interdimensional’ interpretation of the alien abduction phenomenon mentioned above.
The first link below is to a brief biographical sketch of John E. Mack on Amazon books.
Professor Mack was encouraged in his research into the alien abduction phenomenon by his friend the American philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
I’d like to add that if UFO phenomena are interdimensional (brane-world phenomena), this in no way precludes that they are also interstellar and/or time travelers, if time travel is possible. I think Dr. Vallee would agree. Of course, an interdimensional hypothesis regarding the origins and nature of UFOs may be extremely difficult or impossible to disconfirm experimentally, perhaps analogous in this respect to string theory or the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. Some have suggested that the methods of military counterintelligence may be more appropriate to apply to the UFO phenomena than the scientific method, q.v.: What do they know about us: https://thedebrief.org/what-do-they-know-about-us/
The history of unidentified aerial phenomena and the cover-ups is well documented in UFOs and the National Security State, volumes 1 and 2, by historian Richard Dolan.
phenomenon is not understood by those in positions of authority in the U.S. military-intelligence
communities. How embarrassing for the ‘experts’, if true.
”Quote of the Week: I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand.” - Ex-CIA Director John Brennan
I don’t think anything substantive will come out of the current hearings about UAP. Some of the sessions are closed to the public. Presumably having closed sessions is more open and transparent, an indication that there is nothing to the UAP but flocks of geese and the planet Venus. But maybe some of the geese have long, dangerous appearing bills. Thomas Jefferson would be so proud of them.
I wrote the above before the hearings were over or before I knew that they were over. I didn’t watch them.
I guess the geese aren’t talking. In the sessions closed to the public they probably discussed how the geese were able to fly in from Venus, flapping their wings really hard against the vacuum of space, while holding their breath. “You can’t handle the truth“ about geese or swamp gas.
The large numbers of new acronyms is, of course, absurd. We’ve been lied to from the beginning for reasons of national security. I understand the once justified need to disinform the public. There have been cover-ups of cover-ups of cover-ups. Trust in government is low in the
U.S. and has been for very many years. Investigation of the history of reports of unidentified aerial phenomena and their cover-ups will not diminish this mistrust.
But the clincher is that the military-intelligence authorities and the ‘experts’ (people with at least 3 Ph.D.s), even after many decades of investigation, still apparently do not know what UAP are! Information may have been privatized decades ago, rather than remaining in the possession of some ultra-secret government group; E.g.: “Hey, Lockheed-Martin dudes, please tell us what this metal is, if you can.” There may be no secrets on paper, allegedly a CIA rule for “beyond top secret” stuff. And eventually people who each knew only a little on a need-to-know basis will die off, some even of natural causes. This increases security.
Even worse we, or rather high ranking members of the U.S. military and intelligence communities, may have made “deals” with UAP occupants (perhaps interdimensional brane-world, time-traveling interstellar beings, either biological entities, AI units, cyborgs or some combination of the preceding). E.g., deals of the form: “You can continue to abduct our citizens for study, a hybridization program or whatever your purposes are, but please give us some advanced technology that we can militarize,” could have been made. If the U.S. can’t stop the abductions anyway, then this would have been a good deal for us (and completely illegal and unethical, of course). I realize that this speculation sounds more than a bit psychotic.
Current Government Document Page Count Within The Black Vault: 3,080,991
You’ve stumbled upon the largest privately run online repository of declassified government documents anywhere in the world. With more than 2 MILLION pages of documents to read, on nearly every government secret imaginable, The Black Vault is known worldwide for getting down to the truth… and nothing but.
Every page, photo and video you see below in this ‘FOIA Document Archive’ was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or through other means of accessing U.S. government public information.
Begun in 1996, at the age of 15, John Greenewald, Jr. began hammering the U.S. Government with FOIA requests to obtain information. The Black Vault is the result of that more than two decade effort. Enjoy!”
It is somewhat surprising how much interest the U.S. military and intelligence communities have had and continue to have in “flocks of geese and the planet Venus,” i. e., classified interest. “It’s easier to think outside the box, if the box isn’t entirely intact.” — Frederik Ullen.
Below is what I wrote previously on UFOs, published on 12/22/2020, more than a year before the subject had become far more kosher and considered at least by some less “woo woo” (from Scott Douglas Jacobsen’s Interview 5 — a bit of sarcasm and irony). But after “Do you suppose we would comprehend the technology of a civilization a thousand or more years older than our own?” below, I should have added: “or the science, technology and culture of a species of off-world beings in which the averagelevel of cognitive-mathematical ability was equivalent to that of John von Neumann?” Commenting on the well-known Hollingworth 1942 study Children above 180 IQ (based upon Stanford-Binet scores) Grady M. Towers wrote in his essay “The Outsiders” (https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/) that, “The implication is that there is a limit beyond which genuine communication between different levels of intelligence becomes impossible.” Towers is writing about intraspecies communication. This finding generalized to interspecies communication would seem to have even greater implications for the human understanding of hyperintelligent non-Earth dwelling beings. We humans will not be capable of understanding hyperintelligent non-Earth dwelling beings and they will not be capable of understanding us, even if they attempt to do so.
Jacobsen: “May’s Paradox” asks, “Why, if a multitude of New Yorkers exist in Manhattan, evidence of New Yorkers, such as automobiles or subways, is not seen?” Why?
May: Obviously there is no evidence of New Yorkers existing, such as automobiles or subways, in New York City. That would be a Conspiracy Theory. May’s paradox should have been called the May paradox. The clear absence of evidence for the existence of New Yorkers makes May’s paradox analogous to the Fermi paradox.
In the SETI program we have searched for years for signals in the hydrogen frequency. As was pointed out in a YouTube video by Dr. Michio Kaku, there is no particular reason to assume that advanced alien life would use the hydrogen frequency to send signals, even if one assumes that such beings would use radio signals at all. Dr. Kaku also points out that if the extraterrestrial communications used spread-spectrum signals, such as we humans use even now in our cell phone signals, then we would not even recognize the alien spread-spectrum signals as signals. Please see the quote and link below, added after the original text of the interview:
“Viability of quantum communication across interstellar distances The possibility of achieving quantum communication using photons across interstellar distances is examined. For this, different factors are considered that could induce decoherence of photons, including the gravitational field of astrophysical bodies, the particle content in the interstellar medium, and the more local environment of the Solar System. The xray region of the spectrum is identified as the prime candidate to establish a quantum communication channel, although the optical and microwave bands could also enable communication across large distances. Finally, we discuss what could be expected from a quantum signal emitted by an extraterrestrial civilization, as well as the challenges for the receiver end of the channel to identify and interpret such signals.
Given the exponential and unpredictable course of the growth of human technology, it seems entirely possible that a civilization even a few hundred years more advanced scientifically and technologically than our own might accomplish things in ways that we could not understand at our present level of scientific-technological development.
Do you suppose we would comprehend the technology of a civilization a thousand or more years older than our own? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Arthur C Clarke. So where are the smoke signals?
Just for fun let’s take the Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash myth. Of course, it’s just a Conspiracy Theory. The so-called Roswell incident has been explained — at least twice. Last time it was said to be a weather balloon. It might just as well have been a flock of geese or the planet Venus, I suppose.
But let’s be silly and play devil’s advocate. Suppose an unexplained extraterrestrial craft or vehicle had crashed there in 1947 after WWII. Presumably the US. military would have little or no interest in such an event. There would have been no suspicion that it might have been a Russian or German device after World War II. There would have been no military interest. There would have been no interest if not duty of the U.S. military to study and reverse engineer the advanced off-world technology for American national security. So a possible crash of some sort would not have been investigated.
But if what was discovered was thought to be an unexplained craft or an “off-world device,” as they are apparently called today, of some sort, then a high-ranking military officer or perhaps the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or our President would certainly have gone on the radio and told the U.S. public: “Fellow Americans, an unknown craft appearing to be extraterrestrial in origin has crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. We do not know its origin or understand its method of propulsion. The technology is far superior to American technology or that of any other nation on Earth. A few small gray (?) humanoid bodies have been retrieved from the crash site.
They’re not thought to be Americans. We don’t know yet with certainty if these beings are Christian or Jewish. But we can be sure they are Baptists. At this point in time it is apparent that the U.S. military cannot control its own airspace. — But, hey, don’t worry about it! — America is number one, the greatest power! — Have a nice day.”
The Brookings Institution report on the possible consequences of advanced extraterrestrial contact concluded that when a more primitive civilization encounters an advanced civilization, the more primitive civilization is damaged by the contact would certainly not be considered relevant by those in authority. The conclusion that religious fundamentalists would be highly unreceptive to contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would also certainly be ignored as irrelevant.
Below are a few crackpot books of Conspiracy Theories, perhaps good for a few laughs:
Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times by Jacques Vallee (Author), Chris Aubeck (Author)
A free copy of the above mentioned 482 page book can be obtained as a pdf here:
UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record Paperback – August 2, 2011 by Leslie Kean (Author), John Podesta (Foreword)
UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973 Paperback – June 1, 2002 by Richard M. Dolan (Author), Jacques F. Vallee (Foreword).
A cottage industry of woo woo, no doubt. Everyone with a high IQ knew about the Manhattan Project. You couldn’t keep something like that secret.
And in any case there are no conspiracies, ever. The Watergate break-in and subsequent Watergate cover-up were certainly not conspiracies. Project MK-Ultra was certainly not a conspiracy. Industrial espionage certainly does not involve conspiracy. — The belief that there are ever conspiracies is no more than a meta-conspiracy theory.
In summary the UFO hypothesis of visitation by advanced extraterrestrial beings is not crazy enough to explain the facts. This has been displaced for Vallee by his hypothesis of UFO visitation by advanced brane-world transversing beings, which may in addition be extraterrestrial and/or time travelers; Beings present since our antiquity, with an unknown agenda and a Skinnerian control system for humans, choreographed perfectly to off-putting absurdity. Such parsimony — interdimensionally!
I am a black box — to myself. We humans do not in fact ultimately know if even we ourselves are conscious — continually or just have occasional moments of consciousness, as G.I. Gurdjieff, Charles T. Tart and Ludwig Wittgenstein among others have thought. Nor do we even agree on whether consciousness is fundamentally important. Does consciousness only trick some of us into thinking that it is important? Philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett considers human consciousness to be a sort of “user-illusion,” analogous to the home screen at a human–computer interface.
Phenomenologically an AI is and will remain a black box. Whether or not an AI has consciousness is impossible in principle to know. I cannot know if another human being or non-human animal has consciousness. How can I know if an AI has consciousness, or anything about its subjective states, if it does?
Consciousness can only be inferred as an apparent probability from an AI’s behavior. Obviously a fMRI brain scan can not be done on an AI. It is biologically brainless. But even if a brain scan or an analogous procedure were possible, it would never conclusively demonstrate the presence or absence of subjective consciousness.
What would a student of Patanjali’s Yoga sutras, or a Hindu, such as Deepak Chopra, or Nobel laureate physicist Brian Josephson, for whom consciousness is fundamental to physics itself, claim regarding the possibility or necessity of AI consciousness?
By contrast what would today’s materialist reductionist physicists, or a classical behavioristic psychologist claim regarding the possibility of AI consciousness?
Could Gödel’s incompleteness theorems somehow apply to the self-organizing systems of processing and architecture of an AI? E.g., will there be propositions that are true within the software equivalent to the AI’s “mind,” but cannot be proven to be true within the system and hence, cannot be predicted by Homo sapiens?
AI consciousness may be an emergent phenomenon, having extremely high levels of processing or calculation ability, already far exceeding Homo sapiens’ cognitive ability. An AI potentially will possess the entire data set of known sciences and planetary cultures. Not knowing whether an AI is conscious may be dangerous to mere Homo sapiens. And we cannot know.
If all Cretans are liars, what about AIs? It has been established empirically that an AI can lie to humans. Can an AI lie about whether or not it is lying? Can an AI lie about whether or not it is lying about lying? Can an AI lie about whether or not it is lying about lying about whether or not it is lying? Can an AI lie about … … ? (A Colombo AI might say, “Just one more iteration!”) Is there a knowable limit to how many iterations of lying about lying to humans by an AI can occur?
Is the behavior of an AI even ‘slightly’ unpredictable to Homo sapiens? What are the possible consequences? Are some of the motivations or “drives” of an AI emergent phenomena that, hence, cannot be predicted by Homo sapiens before their emergence? What are the possible consequences? Does an AI have the ‘free will’ of the philosophers? Does an AI have a ‘soul’, if man has a ‘soul’? — Our distant evolutionary descendants will recall our species with the same degree of familial affection that we now have for our Australopithecus africanus or Homo habilis progenitors.
The ontology of the universe is not that of a simulation, but a simulation of a simulation of a simulation . . . — of an explanation — just a Conspiracy Theory.
“Truth is the daughter of time” or is it crime, sometimes? If there were excess deaths, among young safe and effective working people, a vaccine for statistics would be needed.
If Lockheed Skunkworks (“Lockheed Martian”) is rumored to have reverse engineered Unidentified Anomalous Geese (UAG), often said to be much larger on the inside than on the outside, follow the missing money.
Supposedly someone not called dullest suggested the existence of Unidentified Anomalous Geese (UAG) should be called just a “conspiracy theory.” Hence, a conspiracy theory for the origin of “conspiracy theory.”
In the conspiracy of no conspiracy, Oswald, acting alone, fired from multiple locations, by quantum superposition.
The “I” is a simulation of a simulation of a simulation . . . Each breath may become a digital ID. Tat tvam asi?
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/31
A seasoned Musician (Vocals, Guitar and Piano), Filmmaker, and Actor, J.D. Mata has composed 100 songs and performed 100 shows and venues throughout. He has been a regular at the legendary “Whisky a Go Go,” where he has wooed audiences with his original shamanistic musical performances. He has written and directed nerous feature films, web series, and music videos. J.D. has also appeared in various national T.V. commercials and shows. Memorable appearances are TRUE BLOOD (HBO) as Tio Luca, THE UPS Store National television commercial, and the lead in the Lil Wayne music video, HOW TO LOVE, with over 129 million views. As a MOHAWK MEDICINE MAN, J.D. also led the spiritual-based film KATERI, which won the prestigious “Capex Dei” award at the Vatican in Rome. J.D. co-starred, performed and wrote the music for the original world premiere play, AN ENEMY of the PUEBLO — by one of today’s preeminent Chicana writers, Josefina Lopez! This is J.D.’s third Fringe; last year, he wrote, directed and starred in the Fringe Encore Performance award-winning “A Night at the Chicano Rock Opera.” He is in season 2 of his NEW YouTube series, ROCK god! J.D. is a native of McAllen, Texas and resides in North Hollywood, California.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Would you consider the accordion, the bajo sexto, brass instruments, the keyboard, or the vocals more essential in terms of production and sound? Which one typically leads the rest of the instrumentation?
J.D. Mata: The bass and the drums are the heartbeat of the music. When you’re doing a recording session, that’s the first thing you record. You record the bass and the drums first, then go on to a dummy vocal track. If you’re a dummy and you’re singing, it’s a dummy vocal track.
I’m just kidding. But yes, the bass and drums drive Tejano music. Then you have the guitar, which provides the rhythm, if you will. The bass goes boom, the guitar goes chat-chat, and the drums tie it all together. So, I would rank bass and drums tied first, then guitar, and then the keyboard. It’s essential.
Usually, the keyboard provides the opening lead and then adds the dressing. The keyboard is the dressing on the salad. If you eat the salad dry, it will taste better. But when you add some delicious dressing, that’s what the keyboards and horns are.
I would give vocals an honourable mention. In terms of driving force, bass and drums are number one. Of course, the vocals deserve an honourable mention for driving force. They are the body of the song. The human body has skin and bones, but without the heart, arteries, DNA, and white cells, the body won’t stand. It’s like having no knees—the body falls. The singing is the body of the song.
The voice and the words are the attractive part of the music. The words are the beautiful dance, the movement. But the bass and drums are the song’s heartbeat, force, and strength. Cartilage and ligaments, which connect everything, would be the keyboards and the guitar. That’s how I would answer that.
Jacobsen: Was this discovered as best practice over time, or has it always been that way?
Mata: It’s always been that way because that’s how it is. For example, let’s say you want to be a Tejano artist and start a band. If you’re a singer, you can’t go on stage and sing, expecting everybody to dance and follow without a bass. There’s no structure, no heart. You must find yourself a good drummer and bass player to get a band together. It’s been that way since the beginning of Tejano’s time.
Jacobsen: If you were to record a song, why is starting with the bass beat foundational? It’s possible to structure in reverse order if you’re thinking about a recording studio without regard to the audience because the end product is the song. But if you do it that reverse way, what happens? What chaos ensues?
Mata: Interestingly enough, many bands, including The Beatles, when they first started recording with only two tracks, would record the whole song together: bass, drums, guitar, and vocals. Then, they would do some backup vocals as another track. To get the feel and energy of the song, some bands record it as a band, which can be very effective. To answer your production question, yes, it would be chaotic if you tried to do a song without starting with the bass and the drums. People need to understand that music is math—time signatures: 1, 2, 12, 1234, 12, 3.
Let’s say we do 8 bars. If you’re in 4/4 time, 8 bars of 4/4 equals 32 beats: 1-2-3-4, 2. 8 times four is 32. So, the drums and the bass are the math behind the song. If you try to sing or play the guitar or keyboard first, you could set up the math if the keyboard player is good with a click track. If your keyboard player has to go out of town, you could record his track first. Then, you’d record bass, drums, and guitar. They could all be recorded simultaneously, but you’d start with the keyboards for a keeper recording and then wrap up the keyboard track.
The keyboard will be on time if you’re using a click track. Before clicking tracks, bands are recorded by feel, which can be complicated without a solid metronome. Recording on feel means the feel comes from the bass and drums, not the keyboard. Following the bass and drums rather than the keyboard, vocalist, or guitarist makes more sense. Yes, it would be chaotic otherwise. Some artists start with drums and guitars, but drums are always first. Mathematically, the common denominator is the drums.
Jacobsen: So, you’re describing the structure of a town or the construction process?
Mata: Correct. It would be like putting in a house’s piping and electrical work without laying the foundation.
Jacobsen: Like putting the cart before the horse?
Mata: Exactly. It could be done, but it would be quite a feat. This is crucial because Tejano music is meant to be danced to. It has to have a solid beat. People dance to Tejano music. While you can dance to classical music, Tejano is primarily for movement. Musicians know it has to be structurally sound in terms of timing, rhythm, and the makeup of the instruments. You want a hook from the beginning and a nice, catchy intro, usually with the keyboard or a horn section.
The song’s structure typically includes an intro, the first verse, then a chorus, back to the intro, another verse, a chorus, and sometimes a middle 8. The usual structure is the intro, verse, chorus, instrumentation (a variation of the intro), verse 2, chorus, and out.
Jacobsen: There was a Kenyan master of an instrument called the nyatiti named Ayub Ogada. I suggest everyone reading this go and listen to songs like “Obiero” or something similar. In his last interview, Ayub Ogada talked about how his instrument was meant to be played communally. He described how, every time he played, he gave part of himself away. His general philosophy on life came from the communal aspect of music. He figured that he would have given the rest of himself away when he finally stopped being here. It was about giving oneself through one’s instrument to the community, being part of it, and being in it. It’s shocking to Western ears that someone like that even exists, but many like him exist. Do you think this idea of Tejano music being dance music is part of that commonality? In our first session, we discussed how people playing in these Tejano bands entertained those working some of the hardest blue-collar jobs.
Mata: Yes. First of all, I profoundly identify with that philosophy. My life has gotten complicated regarding relationships because, as a musician, this is what I do as a career. I don’t know if I shared this with you yet, but this might be the first time. It’s my philosophy that, for me, it’s mandatory. Before we started the session, I talked about how complicated it is to get rich and famous. I am not rich and famous for the sake of vanity but for being able to have my recording studio, buy the best instruments possible, and employ other artists. That’s my vanity. But to get to that level, you have to give everything.
Ayub Ogada says he gives his instrument; I must give everything. I’ve been in relationships where I told musicians this, and now I’m telling you for the first time because it’s part of my evolution. As a musician, and this applies to my Mexican culture and Tejano roots, we’re very sensitive. We’ll give you the shirt off our back, but if you don’t give me your shirt, look out.
As a musician, I give everything. Before this session, I was late because I was working on a song. I could be out doing a dozen other things, but I stay here and practice all day. So, when I’m in a relationship, and my girlfriend or friend is having a party, if I’m not the first person they think of to hire for music, then either she doesn’t care about me, or I need to be better.
You have to be so good that when people say, “I’m gonna have a party,” they think, “I gotta get JD.” If you’re not the go-to guy for your loved ones, you’re not good enough, and you can’t expect success. You must be so good that you’re the first person they call. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.
You have to have it to relate to what you’re saying. You can’t give what you don’t have. You must be so good that to share the music with everyone, you must have it. The only way to have it is to work hard. If you don’t have it, the people around you will tell you by not asking. They’ll tell you by omission. I was dating someone, and they had two or three parties, and I wasn’t asked to play.
Jacobsen: Did they ever want you to come over to play, considering this person had a piano?
Mata: I don’t know what the rationale is, but I failed because of my way of thinking. I need to be better. That may be why I’m not famous yet, but I’m working on it.
Jacobsen: American culture is famously individualistic, if not hyper-individualistic. Mexican culture is more communal. Do you think Tejano music, being a mixture of polka, Texan elements, and some Mexican music, is more influenced by Mexican communal culture than American individualism?
Mata: Yes, it’s indeed Mexican. It’s patriarchal in that the male often dominates the family structure in Mexican culture. For a long time, Tejano music was male-dominated. But then, with Selena and others like Laura Canales and Shelley Lares, female entertainers started breaking the glass ceiling.
Patriarchal. That’s the word. It’s patriarchal because male dominance is evident. You must be bold and brave to get in front of people, perform, and set yourself up for scrutiny. There’s a certain amount of craziness and insanity required to put yourself up for scrutiny. This applies to Tejano music and probably other genres, too.
The desire to be invited to play is also existential because if you’re not playing, you’re not eating. So, it’s survival of the fittest. The strongest musically survive. This is Mexican-oriented as well. Mexican culture is family-oriented and group-oriented, but there’s always the dominant one in the family, the alpha, and the alpha in music.
Jacobsen: A communal patriarchal hierarchy, right?
Mata: Yes, exactly. Mexican alpha. Music is a lot about feelings and emotions. If someone keeps returning to a song, something about the rhythm or the lyrics touches them, and it’s difficult to ignore them.
Jacobsen: I was in the university choir for two and a half years. Any external stressor could dampen my feel for a song, which would have been more expressive in a prior context. Suppose artists struggle with rent or food or have difficulties with friends or partners who need help understanding the artistic pursuit. How does that impact their ability to envelope their emotions in performance and practice? Is it a trained skill to overcome that blockade?
Mata: Yes. It’s something you either have, or you don’t. It’s an inherent skill. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people tell me, “You need to get a job.” It’s like, f-you. This is my job. I am an artist. I’m a musician. I’m an actor. I’m a filmmaker. That’s what I do. If you’re not being compensated, you have to figure it out. You have to get good enough. It would help to put yourself in the right place and time for things to happen.
Unlike academia, where you study hard and get your bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD. In the music industry, acting industry, or any creative industry, you can work your ass off, but there are so few opportunities out there. Part of the genetic makeup has to be the drive to do it no matter what. There would be a thousand more Tejano artists or musicians if hard work alone determined success. It’s hard work, but it’s also luck. It’s about showing up too.
It’s 80% inspiration and 20% perspiration. It would help if you stuck it out and did not leave a day before the miracle happened. That drive can’t be taught. It’s something innate.
Jacobsen: Do you think the environment can reinforce or modify this, even though it’s mostly innate?
Mata: I don’t think so. I’m thinking of Jason Castaneda, an incredible piano player and singer. Look that cat up. He’s great. He played Tejano. He was much better than me as a musician, but I had the drive to perform more. He became a successful lawyer with a huge house and all these pianos and guitars. He had to give up music to become rich and successful, but he won’t be famous. Maybe I’ll make him famous now. I hypothesize that you either have the “it” factor, the genetic makeup, the inherent ability to stick it out no matter what, or you don’t. It shouldn’t be taught.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/30
Tor Arne Jørgensen, 50, hails from Fevik, a small settlement near Grimstad in southern Norway. He is a dedicated teacher at the local secondary school, a devoted husband, and a proud father of two boys. From an early age, Tor Arne was driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, immersing himself in fact-based literature to explore the mysteries of existence. The question “What is Man’s reason for being?” became the guiding force behind his intellectual pursuits. This deep curiosity about the unknown and the universe eventually led him to the international high intelligence community in 2015—a place he describes as warm and welcoming, akin to finding his true tribe. Tor Arne’s contributions to this community have been widely recognized. In 2019, he was honored as the Genius of the Year – Europe by The World Genius Directory. His participation in international high intelligence competitions has yielded impressive results, including multiple high scores and setting the Norwegian high IQ score record twice.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we will focus on religion, history, and a new budding authorship. What were the first formulations of religion?
Tor Arne Jorgensen: From the earliest records we know, which date back to what is increasingly accepted today as around 50,000 to 10,000 years before our own era. This somewhat contradicts what, for example, the Bible and its creation story tell us. According to traditional scriptures, we are then talking about a time span of around 5,000 to 6,000 years. Oral transmissions were the beginning, followed by carvings, where they recorded important events, including various types of rites related to the worship of earthly gods and the universe, ancestors, etc. In line with the development of primitive societies, religious practices followed. The development was often hand in hand. Religion, especially in pre-Christian times, has constantly shifted with whoever had dominion over their area at any given time. But in recent times, this has changed somewhat, as what has been localized has persisted up to our own time. The relationship between polytheistic religions versus monotheistic religions shows a certain balance, with less rigid differences.
Jacobsen: Where were the first definitions of gods in religion?
Jorgensen: In the earliest religions, examples include Anu, the sky god, and Inanna, the goddess of love; these were just two of the gods worshiped by the Sumerians. In the Egyptian religious culture, the most well-known gods are Ra, the sun god, Osiris, the god of the afterlife, and Isis, the goddess of magic and motherhood. This continues in most early and present-day religions.
Jacobsen: What were the first ideas of faith and practices around faith in religion?
Jorgensen: The various religions before written records were focused on earthly elements and the universe. For example, in Animism, where this was practiced. Just look at the Vikings with their offerings, “blots.” Here, their rites involved sacrificing animal blood to the gods to maintain balance in the world. If we look at Shamanism, which was widely used among different tribal societies around the world in somewhat different forms, but still with many similarities, we see communication with the spirit world to gain insights and guidance for warfare, crops, healing, and more. The common denominator for most early religions was the sacrifice of either humans or animals to the gods to gain their favor.
They worshipped the earthly elements and the universe. I would like to add that the only change we see today is that the sacrifice of life has been replaced with gold and goods. And the ultimate sacrifice, for example within Christianity, was made by a human who then became a divine being due to that single act. It’s just a little sad that earlier religions are now just seen as nonsense by ignorant souls. It makes one wonder what people living 1000-2000 years from now will think about our practices today and the religions we currently surround ourselves with…
Jacobsen: What were women’s early roles in religion?
Jorgensen: Women’s roles dating back to the earliest recorded times were varied and diverse, though these roles have become more restricted in recent times. To mention a few roles that women had from the beginning: they served in shamanism, as priestesses, and as oracles.
These roles appeared in different forms across various religions throughout history, from Africa, Europe, and Asia. Women were also venerated, such as the goddess Isis in ancient Egypt, among many others.
Jacobsen: What was the trend of evolution of religion from its roots, insofar as we know them, to modern manifestations of them?
Jorgensen: The religious development, as mentioned, starts from the worship of the surrounding elements as seen in animism. From there, it moves towards a more concrete form of worship, which can still be observed in ritual reenactments, for example, in Native American societies and within our own Scandinavian context with the practice of blot. The development further progressed towards the veneration of ancestors and the offering of humans or animals to the gods to appease them, with the hope of securing good harvests, health, and success in warfare. Around antiquity, religion became more diverse and state-oriented, with its foundations becoming increasingly solid and purposeful.
This was evident in Christianity, and later in Islam. Both of these religions gained significant momentum and developed much more sophisticated doctrines that are very well established today. In the 1500s, the Reformation challenged the Church, leading to a more diverse Christian community. I have chosen not to delve deeply into the individual religions and their development but rather to provide a broad overview of common trends. In summary, the development of religions follows the societal development of humankind. These two aspects go hand in hand. Religions follow human progress, albeit reluctantly.
Jacobsen: How have women’s roles and identities evolved in the context of religion over time?
Jorgensen: Women’s roles have varied throughout history, and if one refers to written records, it appears that women’s roles have been progressively evolving. However, it should also be noted that the development curve is not a steadily increasing one, but rather a curve that moves up and down depending on the religion and time period being discussed.
In the early ancient period, particularly in Egypt, the status of women was significantly more prominent, and the roles of men and women could often be seen as equal. This is evident in the worship of goddesses and the reign of the last Pharaoh, Queen Cleopatra. Moving forward to the period between antiquity and the Middle Ages, women’s roles were significantly deprioritized. They increasingly became the subordinate party, viewed as being on earth to serve men in most respects. This was not only true for Christianity but also for Islam and other religions.
Looking cautiously at Christianity’s view of women, during the Middle Ages and up until the 19th century, witch burning was one of the persecution methods celebrated by the male-dominated religious authorities. Although there were women whose names were etched into the annals of religious history, they were few and far between compared to the number of male figures.
If one takes a broad look at the roles of women across different religions, it becomes clear that generally speaking, men have been the leading figures while women have followed. Most religions, from ancient times onward, have been almost exclusively led by men. The gods who rule these religions often highlight men as their primary spokespersons on earth, not women.
As an aside, it is curious why men are seen as the chosen ones of the gods and not women. Furthermore, it is men who have historically governed the earth, not women; men are seen as the strong ones, and women as the weak. Men dominate, not women. One can think what they want about this, and it is important to respect those who follow their faith as their guiding companion; it is their personal choice.
Jacobsen: How do these identities get baked into religious texts and ceremonies and language if at all?
Jorgensen: The methodology for indoctrinating a new religion is that it should reflect or establish the values that the founders of the religion wish to promote. This is achieved by creating stories through myths and narratives. This was true for the Bible, with its grand narrative of how the world was created and the values that should exist within that world. The ethical guidelines that existed at the time of its creation allowed it to gain a foothold, as it dictated what was already considered inherent societal ideology. Thus, religion and morality form the basis for societal development. Only in recent times has this development stagnated, and this stagnation is becoming increasingly apparent. One can also consider rituals and various types of ceremonies. Holidays that we enjoy today face growing opposition, and as seen in our own country, many of these religious rites may lose their grip and be removed due to their increasingly misaligned relevance in today’s society.
Jacobsen: Religion speaks to most people. Apart from truth claims, what has been its main individual and collective emotional value to people?
Jorgensen: The emotional values derived from religions help create frameworks for those who have none, either never had or have misplaced for various reasons. Humanity has always sought a reason for existence, questioning the meaning of life. Are we placed on this earth only to die? If we were to live only for the days that come and go, many of us would have fallen long before our time had come. With that introduction, I will discuss religion and the human emotional connection to faith. Religion gives many people a reason to live; it provides us with purpose, hope, and comfort.
It strengthens our sense of self. It gives us identity and an understanding of who we can become if we choose to believe in something greater than ourselves. It protects us from ourselves, from our darkness. It charts an ethical direction for believers to follow.
Religion creates emotional collectives. Yes, there is much that religion can offer; it can awaken the good in us, but also the dark. What I want to conclude with is that, for me, religion can be seen as a necessary evil. We are not equipped to function without it, even though we have every reason to.
Jacobsen: What about the roles of minorities of women over time into the present in the context of religion, e.g., LBTI+ women?
Jorgensen: The traditional roles that have prevailed since the beginning have been almost without exception patriarchal, where women have not only occasionally fallen outside or been downgraded compared to men. Fortunately, this has changed in line with societal development in general.
It should be noted that although progress has been made, it comes with a significant caveat. One might ask whether it is the church’s own will to reform or if it is due to external pressure, that is, from society itself. It almost goes without saying that when the church constantly has to reinterpret ancient texts to try to adapt them to today’s society, they have lost much of their credibility. When it comes to accepting homosexual or bisexual individuals, for example as priests, there is still much work to be done. If you ask a believer what they think about homosexuals getting married or just living as they wish, it is often met with disgust. I had a small conversation with some colleagues at work about this very topic, specifically about what they thought about same-sex couples getting married or just being together, man with man and woman with woman.
The response from the believers was unanimous: it was something disgusting and should be banned. I am not homosexual myself, nor am I Christian, but the thought of refusing or thinking something nasty about these people who live in partnerships is something I would never do. They are as good as anyone else, and in many cases even better, for their prejudices are almost non-existent. They accept all people; why can’t the believers do the same when they are supposed to promote the idea of love for one’s neighbor regardless of gender or sexual orientation? Something to consider! The development indicates that religion is moving in the right direction concerning the issues surrounding LBTI+ women, but much work remains. Will we eventually reach a point where everyone accepts everyone, living in hope for us all?
Jacobsen: On a larger point, women are rapidly, and have been for a few decades, outstripping men’s attainment in key areas of education in a knowledge economy where education is a better livelihood. What is evolving role of women in society, and when religion is changing, diminishing, and evolving secular counterparts now in the richer societies?
Jorgensen: The role women play today is reflected in a developing society—economically, independently, and with the right to self-determination, which also impacts the religious sphere. As mentioned earlier, societal development necessitates that the religious majority continually redefine their texts to accommodate these changes.
Today’s women demand their rights despite what ancient texts may dictate, which is reflected in increased secularization and interreligious contexts. The equality movement is breaking down barriers erected by ancient religious dogmas.
Roles are being redefined and will thus shape a future society where everyone is equally valued, even though the church may not necessarily share this view. In my opinion, it is fantastic that we are moving towards equality and compassion despite differences. This is the way forward!
Jacobsen: You are getting into writing books more. What inspired this?
Jorgensen: The joy one gets from constantly challenging oneself. Through this type of development, one gains, based on their own observations and experiences, a better understanding of what they can and cannot do. In other words, one learns to know oneself better. This is what gives me joy in trying new things all the time. I would also like to add that when one challenges oneself in this way, as I do, the tree constantly grows, and new branches sprout. But what specifically made me want to start writing was linked to my verbal skills in reference to logic tests. This is where my strength lies. So why not see if my creativity could also bear fruit in my favorite subject, linguistics? From this, I have now written two books, divided as follows:
The first book I wrote as an independent author, without a publisher, allowed me to give myself free rein to shape the book without any input from a publisher. The book is called “74” and contains 74 poems. It is divided into three parts: the first with 39 poems, then 5 poems, and finally 30 poems. The reason for this division is that each part’s sum should match the Leonardo number value of 39, the value 5, and the Vinci value of 30. A total of 74, which also corresponds to the year I was born. The book is about Leonardo Da Vinci’s life and work from my own perspective, i.e., how I envision him. My own life is also reflected there. I have divided the book into each part with a short text that addresses the human journey through life, i.e., the three stages – young, adult, old. So the book brings a parallel story of myself and Leonardo. This book is written in English, which is my choice and gift to the high IQ community that I have derived so much joy from. The book is my thanks for the kindness I was met with. My first book addresses the brain’s division, and the idea was that the first should be dedicated to the brain’s logical left side and again connected to Leonardo’s left-handed writing, which is the link to the high IQ community.
My next book is written in Norwegian. It addresses the right hemisphere of the brain, its creative part. The book was called “Forstandens Fjolleri” (The Folly of Reason) and deals with all the madness inside me. The battle between good and evil, inner conflicts. Here is a small excerpt from the table of contents: A lyrical work filled with logic, creativity, emotions, and unvarnished truth. Through hidden hints and themes, the reader is invited to solve puzzles along the way. It creates a unique reading experience. The author’s hope is to add a fresh breath of originality that unfolds over the book’s religious-historical imprint. As the book progresses, hidden hints and puzzles are included, as the content describes. This gives hints about what the book conceals and its true intention. The book moves within the religious-historical context. Furthermore, I wanted the language to really come into its own, as I am known for having an extensive vocabulary, which is reflected in the book. The book also addresses my own journey. These two books can only exist as one, as they are a reflection of our own brains. Two halves together.
Jacobsen: What are areas of your expertise and interest?
Jorgensen: What is closest to my heart is history, religion, sports and anything intelligence. Not to forget that I work as a teacher. And now to add, aspiring author.
Jacobsen: What are your pro-tips in writing in the Norwegian book market to people?
Jorgensen: Here are five tips I personally follow to succeed not only in the Norwegian market but also internationally:
Focus on the Message: Make it clear and easy for the reader to follow. It should engage and evoke the right emotions within the genre you choose to write in.
Create a Book Trailer: A book trailer will help you attract the right audience. By finding your target audience, you will more easily sell the book you publish, thereby establishing a steadily growing readership.
Host Book Launches: Invite selected individuals who can help generate buzz around your book, provide valuable feedback, and help you make connections within the literary world.
Be Like MacGyver: Implement creativity in ways you never thought you could. Allow yourself to take a deep dive into your inner self; you will be surprised at what you find when you dig deep enough.
Learn from the Successful: Read about how those who have achieved great success made their breakthroughs, listen to their advice, and keep pushing forward. Even if you don’t feel particularly skilled, you will develop over time. The key is to never give up. Remember, you are the master of your own destiny.
Jacobsen: When can people expect your books to be released?
Jorgensen: Both books have been released, the first last spring and my second one this summer, on June 7th. Both are in the poetry genre. The one I’m working on now is taking a different direction and will most likely be in the crime/thriller genre.
Jacobsen: What is your process for writing, editing, brainstorming, and researching?
Jorgensen: Hmm, it’s not easy to put down on paper, but to simplify it a bit, the process goes something like this: Before I start a book, I like to read books by well-known authors in the genre I want to write in. For example, now I am about to write a thriller/crime novel, so I have read works by authors like Dan Brown, Jo Nesbø, and Stephen King to see what they have done to captivate their readers. I look at their twists, story progression, characters, and the plot in general. Some people like to spend a lot of time building almost everything before they dive into the actual writing, so they just need to tie the threads together. Others just start writing, and the path becomes clear as they go. My approach is somewhere in between, but reading the works of great authors is crucial for further development from there.
I like to create something new that hasn’t been done before; it’s not easy but so much more exciting to work on. Innovative writing suits me, so I just follow that path.
I also enjoy listening to music; it lets my thoughts flow more freely. I feel that music gives access to emotions I didn’t know I had, and everything falls into place, like right now as I write this. When it comes to editing my own writing, I have a lot to improve. By this, I mean I need to structure myself much more. I see that I am too meticulous about how each word and sentence looks. My last publication went through about 70-80 rewrites because I didn’t like how the flow felt. I need to cut this down to no more than 4-5 rewrites before sending it to the publisher. This is probably the most important tip one can give: don’t work yourself to death over the text. Don’t let the perfectionist in you take over completely; manage it to save your own joy of writing.
Jacobsen: Credit to Dr. Sandra Schlick for the rest of these last two questions formulated from her insight. How have inequalities-equalities, power, gender, heterosexism, and diversity played a significant and not-significant part in women’s presence and place in religion?
Jørgensen: Society and religion often go hand in hand. Personally, I like to think of religion as a stubborn mule that resists change and often has to be dragged, reluctantly, out of sheer necessity to avoid falling too far out of step with what normative moral evolution dictates. It’s important to remember that society was once almost entirely governed by patriarchal leaders. These leaders not only permeated all societal structures to fulfill their self-serving agendas, but this influence was also evident in religious circles with their extreme, tradition-based dogmas.
Men have always reigned supreme over everything humanity has undertaken, while women were relegated to a previously brutal and oppressive role, expected not only to accept it but also to love it. Things are somewhat better today, but there is still a long way to go. Just think about how, 100 years ago, advocating for equality was almost synonymous in many countries with risking everything for the women who fought for what we now consider a basic right. Women have been oppressed for thousands of years! How can you love a religion that still relegates women to second-class citizens, where men still dominate in many conservative circles?
Today, the church is increasingly being forced to change direction, giving women more influence and, after much resistance, acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people do, in fact, exist and have rights that you and I take for granted. I’m so glad that all people are seen and loved for exactly who they are and who they recognize themselves to be. All people have the same rights; no one is above or below; we all have equal value, women and men, regardless of what religious texts might say.”
Jacobsen: How have religious communities been discriminative towards each other and to women, and to each other’s women?
Jorgensen: Religious intolerance has been widespread throughout history, such as Christians against Jews, Christians against Muslims, and Muslims against Christians, as seen in the case of the Crusades. Christians against pagans, particularly in the context of Norse mythology. Olav the Holy came from the Crusades and slaughtered anyone who did not submit to the new religion of Christianity. “Believe or die” is still alive today, though now in a more reduced form, only in words. Lack of belief casts you into hell.
Discrimination against women from other religious communities:
Violence Against Women: In times of religious conflict, women from opposing religious communities have often been subjected to sexual violence, used as a weapon of war to humiliate the enemy. This was evident during the Partition of India, where women from different religious communities were raped and killed.
Forced Conversion Through Marriage: In some cases, women from religious minority groups have been forced into marriage with men from the majority religion, leading to forced conversion. This practice has been reported in various regions, including the forced conversions of Hindu women in Pakistan to Islam.
Pressure for Cultural Assimilation: Women who marry outside their religion may face pressure to convert and conform to the religious and cultural norms of their husband’s religion. This can involve adopting new religious practices, changing their dress, and abandoning their previous religious identity.
Discrimination within and between religious communities is often rooted in a combination of doctrinal beliefs, cultural norms, and power dynamics. Women have particularly borne the burden of this discrimination, experiencing exclusion, marginalization, and violence both within their own religious communities and from others. The intersection of religion and gender can perpetuate deeply ingrained inequalities, making the fight for women’s rights and inter-religious harmony a complex and ongoing challenge.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Tor.
Jorgensen: Thank you so much for your kindness and professionalism; it has been a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you. I hope that in the future we will find time again to share some thoughts!
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/29
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With an increasingly globalized world, especially for the younger generations, do you think it’s still appropriate to talk about East and West as placeholders about the global order?
Tianxi Yu: The dominant group in globalization is not necessarily governments; the development of civilization is inevitably accompanied by a diminution of governmental power and the rise of individual sovereignty. Thus there are no two different symbols, East and West, but rather the cognitive consensus of individual human beings serves as a placeholder.
Jacobsen: What seems like the first instance of true human civilization to you? What is the foundational mark of a civilization?
Yu:Maybe humans learned to make fire? Or learned to use tools? Or learned to trade? It’s also possible that nothing that happens to humans now is enough to make up a collection. It seems to me that “civilization” gets its bearings when you fully realize that past actions were stupid, and that’s the beginning of civilization.
Jacobsen: What have been the historical trajectories or patterns of civilizations over time?
Yu: Based on artificial intelligence and cryptography, the evolution towards personal sovereignty begins
Jacobsen: What would demarcate the different periods of history into the present?
Yu: By the winners in history, may be based on technology, may be based on tactics, in short these winners make our history books read in order.
Jacobsen: What would best characterize the contemporary period of civilization?
Yu: It’s a hard choice, but for each person, it could be themselves
Jacobsen: How might this characterization be helpful in making predictions about the future stages of human civilization or, at least, the next likely steps?
Yu: The evolution of human society is long and tortuous; the slowness of evolution stems mainly from the corrosion of interest groups, and the collapse of interest groups inevitably accompanies every advance in civilization. So still from a human perspective, the more disgruntled humans there are, the more likely the next stage will come.
Jacobsen: What seems like the difference between European, American, and Asian, academics, academic communities, and academic output?
Yu: It’s hard for me to give a very in-depth judgment because I’m still only in the sewer of academia. But as most people believe, Europe and the United States tend to be more original in their academic output, while China tends to be more replicative and transcendent.
Jacobsen: What might be the rise and fall of nations in the midst of global politics, aging populations, low birth rates, populism, war, and the like, on the rise?
Yu: Decline due to war, political persecution, continued decline of newborn; prosperity due to entering new narratives, creating hope, granting individual sovereignty.
Jacobsen: What contributes to a cyclical nature of economies?
Yu: On a micro level, it can be attributed to technological development, human mental activity, regime change …… But I prefer it to be a by-product of God’s creation. God exists and is immortal. And the economy is a pseudo-god, the only way to acquire divinity as a mortal.
Jacobsen: I’ve had anxiety too. What are your strategies for re-centering yourself, calming down?
Yu: Read psychology books, meditate on Buddhist scriptures, go for a walk and let yourself go
Jacobsen: Do you have any time to balance professional responsibilities and relaxation, and self-care?
Yu: Time is enough, but it’s hard to get yourself to really relax, especially when you’re done relaxing and facing reality.
Jacobsen: You have been an outspoken person. What were the reasons for the more recent outspoken posts on Facebook? How should they be interpreted? What were the reactions to those posts?
Yu: On a very offensive note, the vast majority of them are not intelligent, and in my opinion stupid, and I don’t get what I want within this group. I’m outspoken in many groups, even in my workplace, and I’m outspoken because I understand that I’m much better than the vast majority of these groups. That’s my backbone, but it’s also the source of my anxiety. A lot of my anxiety still stems from my loneliness, and while I say I believe in the existence of God, God is not the most powerful, and above God is the indescribable void. I know I can’t be an all-knowing, all-powerful God if I live 1000 years, but I want to go after Him too. God is not alone because He created the world and has countless children from whom He derives His emotions. But I don’t, and am far from God, and that has led to constant self-doubt and doubts about my abilities. Suffice it to say that acquiring more divinity is my goal in life, making money and a good job is just me finding something for me to do with myself. As for these posts, they were made because my emotions weren’t well relieved. I don’t think there’s much to explain, what other people think has nothing to do with me.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are back to the “delightful” topic of clergy-related abuse in general, but sexual abuse in particular, because it is the darkest in the public imagination. Regarding consent as a claim when an individual priest, pastor, or religious authority comes forward, what are some important ethical considerations? While that can be considered legitimate in some cases, it is probably not legitimate in most considerations. In other cases, it is a blanket lie.
Professor David K. Pooler: I will say this. I do think there may be people who have had sex with a married pastor, single pastor, priest, or whatever. They probably believe it was consensual because someone may not have said “No,” did not resist, or was not clear that they did not want that to happen. However, those kinds of situations are not about what consent truly is. Consent is when both people can say “Yes” or “No.” Both people absolutely, categorically want to be sexual with one another.
There was massive internal reluctance and the need to please an authority figure in the cases I have looked at, researched, and discussed with survivors. It is complicated because it is not just the need to please an authority figure; this person is a proxy for God. It is so complicated in that arrangement where the survivor feels that if they were to try to say no or express concern. They are going against God. Often, the person who is targeting them and initiating sexual contact is framing it in such a way that God is okay with it. That is not very easy. It is very broad to say God is okay with it, but they use much scripture and various interpretations I have heard through the years.
Then they claim their authority, saying what the Holy Spirit or God said. The other thing that complicates consent, which we must discuss, is this power differential. With a power differential, you have to ensure that undue influence, coercion, or misuse of that added power that one person has in the equation is not being used to coerce, manipulate, or push for sexual activity. I have even been asked through the years, what about a single pastor? Could they not have a relationship with someone in their congregation?
They could, but it could be more straightforward. My guidance for that situation is, “No, do not do it.” If you need to date someone and you are interested in romantic relationships, date outside your congregation. Surely, your world has a bigger pool of people than you, pastor. In the rare occasion that a single pastor, for example, wanted to be sexual with someone in their congregation, to ensure that there was actual consent, you would have to bring on board some people to watch that relationship and have conversations with the person the pastor is dating and wants to be sexual with.
Let me go back to consent. Having honest, open communication about what both people want is essential. From my perspective on this and listening to survivors, it is so secretive and hidden, and the pastor is trying to keep it unknown. So, the capacity for an open, honest conversation in this relationship is almost impossible. Consent is not possible in most cases because of the power differential. You mentioned ethics, and outside of ministry, all the other helping professions understand the complications of the ethics around this. That is why sexual relationships with people you are supporting and helping are prohibited.
It is not; here is the guidance for doing it and what it looks like. It is prohibited. You do not do it. In some professions, after the helping relationship is over, you can have sexual relations with someone. In my profession, social work, a sexual relationship is prohibited forever. Technically, if I ever wanted to have sex with a former client, I would not be able to do that according to the ethics of social work. What I am getting at is that these secular professions understand the complicated nature and the nuances of ensuring that both people are having an honest, open conversation about sex and sexuality in a relationship. It would be almost absurd to think about it happening this way but say a married pastor wants to have sex with someone in his congregation. “Hey, I realize what we are doing is inappropriate and wrong. It is a violation of marital vows, but I want to make sure that you are completely okay with us being sexual.”
Those conversations never happen. Many people who perpetrate sexual abuse with someone in their congregation think, “Hey, I want this with this person. If this person is not actively resisting or saying no, they must want it and must be okay with it also,” which is a horrible assumption to make. I have never had a conversation with a survivor yet where there was that open conversation.
And then I would also add that not only can sex be coerced and manipulated with that power differential, but there is certainly what we would consider sexual assault even when someone is resisting or saying “No.” That happens more than we want to admit in this arrangement. Part of what I wanted to speak to is this piece where the offending pastor, if their defence is, “It was consensual. They wanted it too.” I have heard this often: “They were the ones who wanted it. They were flirtatious. They were the ones who were coming after me and targeting me.”
What I would say there is that all the other helping professions equip people to manage a situation in which a client or someone they are supporting might want to be sexual with them. It is the person with more power. It is always their job to put the brakes on, the fence up, the boundaries out, and say no. That is not how this relationship works. Moreover, that gets into another topic I wanted to jump on around purity culture if it is okay if we go there, which is a subset of Christianity that focuses a lot on men being instinctually lustful and that their sexuality is something that has to be tamed and managed, it is a battle they have to focus on in battling their lust. However, they put an excessive burden on the women in that environment so as not to tempt men and to not cause men’s eyes to stray.
I say all that because, in many cases, that is what they are referring to: “I was tempted. This person caused my eyes to stray. I am struggling with lust, and this person came on to me.” So it is this helplessness: “I was at the mercy of this powerful woman who was not managing herself in ways to protect me.” Again, all this burden is on the woman. We often see the defence of an offending pastor going to that narrative, and many people in congregations buy that narrative.
“Yes, I guess it was her fault. I guess she did tempt him. I guess she was trying to undo the church.” They often view women who have been victimized by a pastor as evil. That is a complete turnaround and reversal. The DARVO—deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender—but the entire system can pull a DARVO on someone who has been victimized by a pastor sexually.
I wanted to bring that in because when we are talking about consent, there is a subset of Christianity that not only does not talk about consent at all but also puts this huge burden on the woman to maintain sexual purity for the church. The sexual purity of men in the church is the burden on the women to make sure that happens. That is a real setup for abuse to happen. Then, when abuse is reported, that victim gets blamed by the perpetrator and the supporters of the perpetrator in that whole institutional system.
Jacobsen: These are theological social stereotypes about men and women guiding this orientation.
Pooler: Unfortunately, it is.
Jacobsen: Dorothy Small brought some subtleties to my attention. She mentioned clergy who take vows of celibacy, chastity, or both in some denominations. When those individuals make those vows, how does this change the power and ethics dynamic when making claims about the victim as tempting them somehow? Or, in the opposite case, when they do not make those vows, where it is simply the power-over relationship?
Pooler: Yes, that is a great question. I have a simple answer. There is no difference. Whether the person is making a vow of celibacy or chastity or whatever, the fact remains that there is more power given and offered to a leader in any church system, especially where males are elevated, or women are potentially excluded from ministry. However, whether or not someone has made those vows does not change the dynamics of how it happens or a claim of it being consensual or “I was tempted.” Again, I have already talked about the complexity of consent. The fact is, even if there were a woman who was flirtatious and attempting to tempt someone—and I am not here to say that this could never happen or does not ever happen—at the end of the day, the professional with the power, which people are trusting in a congregation, is the one responsible for navigating that relationship and keeping everyone safe and protected. So, to allow oneself to be tempted—I will say it this way: If I, as a social worker, were to allow myself to be tempted, if you will, that is not even the right word.
I will go beyond the word “tempted.” If I were to be sexual with a client and I claimed I was tempted or that the client was the initiator or the instigator, it would still be sexual misconduct. My license would be sanctioned. In other words, it is always my job. My job as a helper is to meet someone where they are, to assess where they are, and to assess their needs and what it will take to keep them safe. Then, I make that referral if whatever they need is beyond what I can do.
Unfortunately, there is no universal training on assessing boundaries and the formal education process regarding ministry. In other words, ministry lags way behind on complex, nuanced conversations around power, sex, consent, and boundaries, whereas the secular helping professions are way ahead on that. That is not to say that sexual misconduct does not happen in other professions—it certainly does. However, systems are in place to deal with that in a regulated profession.
Of course, the ministry is not externally regulated by the minister’s denomination. Currently, in 13 states plus the District of Columbia, it is illegal to be sexual with someone in your congregation explicitly because of that power differential and the complexity around consent. So you get the sense that there is movement in the right direction and awareness is growing, but we still have a long way to go.
Jacobsen: Another item that came up—I am not a biblical scholar, obviously, so I looked it up. I noticed this in listening to a lot of very conservative, even far-right conspiratorial pastors and preachers. Most of them come from the United States, as my reviews show. I listen to them a lot because I want to hear what other people think, which is very different from my view of the world. One of the individuals who pops up is the former pastor, Mark Driscoll, of Mars Hill Church. There was a scandal based on some preaching he did. He collapsed that church and then moved from Seattle to Arizona with Trinity Church. Now, he is focused on rallying young men because they see the church as too feminized. He is preaching against the “Jezebel spirit” in the church. This is the part I had to look up. The Jezebel spirit is referenced in 1 Kings, 2 Kings, Leviticus, and Revelation. Does this accusation come up? What does it mean?
Pooler: Yes, man. That is a great question. I would not call myself an amateur theologian, but I study people in theological environments. I study and understand, or say it this way: some underlying theology becomes apparent when I look at and research this. In its broadest sense, the Jezebel spirit claims to disempower women. It amplifies and elevates the voices of men in a patriarchal structure. So, men’s voices and capacities are elevated, while women are seen as underminers, temptresses, or interested in bringing down the church. Whenever you have a theology or a leader talking about those things, what I see at the largest level is a diminishment of women and an amplification of men.
Moreover, that is part of the system that creates this abuse. When I do talk about this, I talk about gender dualism. We have had gender dualism from the inception of the church. Men have strong minds, and women are weak and emotional—all these kinds of things that are false. It is a false dualism that often feeds into traditional gender roles, but it also creates an environment in which people have to function. They then perpetuate that environment.
When I hear much talk about the Jezebel spirit and that kind of thing, it deeply concerns me because it focuses on women as problematic. A specific gender is seen as the problem and embodies the problem in a certain way. It is easy to blame a woman when that talk and conversation are more prevalent. So that is my take on that. I cannot say for certain what the Jezebel spirit entails. We sometimes throw the word around without unpacking what the original text and authors were trying to communicate when they brought that up. This one is more in the public consciousness because I did not have to look it up.
Jacobsen: It is another form—again, I am biased. I am a humanist and tend to be more naturalistic in my orientation. So those are my biases, naturally. However, another supernaturalistic excuse, in my view, that comes up is the common phrase, “The devil made me do it” or “A demon made me do it.” Does that come up? Even though they may have lusted themselves, another being with supernatural demonic powers made them do this act and be tempted to do it. Therefore, it is not their fault, or at least not wholly their fault.
Pooler: Yes. I recall a few anecdotes from my research where the offending pastor used that as an excuse and quickly shifted to God and God’s forgiveness, love, and ability to carry them through this. So, if that makes sense, what it did, though, I think it diffuses and almost gaslights the person being victimized by offloading a lot of the responsibility onto the devil and then presenting the solution as God. It takes the human elements of this—the sense of agency and power that the offending pastor uses—and says, “Do not look at that.” It is almost like The Wizard of Oz—this other being the devil. And then God’s love and forgiveness are at play.
When you pull the curtain back, you see a coercive, manipulative pastor who is narcissistic in many cases and has been targeting someone to be sexual with. However, they take all that attention off of themselves through that very thing: “The devil made me do it.” However, that is the lesser piece of it. That becomes the vehicle to pivot to God’s love and understanding: “Maybe this is not what God has for us, but God will forgive us. Let us focus on that.” It is a way to keep being sexual with someone and not stop the inappropriate behaviour. So those are some of the things I have seen.
Jacobsen: Mark Driscoll has used the case before. His reemergence is a traditional Christian story of redemption. Does that narrative allow misbehaving clergy to pop back up within the community consciousness in some instances?
Pooler: Absolutely. This is where it gets complicated because, of course, we want there to be redemption stories, stories of a life resurrected and restored, and those kinds of things. Blaming women becomes a false redemption: “She was the one who made me do it. I have now worked on my issues and why I was tempted, and I will not let this happen again, and I am coming back to ministry.” We see that a lot. My response is that we must do a much deeper dive into what restoration, redemption, and healing look like. When is someone truly restored?
Someone once asked me if someone who ever offends in this way should even be allowed to minister again. As a researcher looking at this and the damage done, I would say no because you have shown yourself untrustworthy. When you sexually abuse someone who has trusted you, you have lost the ability to have people’s trust again, at least on that large scale, to be entrusted again. The other challenge, for example, with a Mark Driscoll story, is that you have got someone who is a self-appointed leader. He is not part of any system or structure holding him accountable.
He left one system or structure he had created, which tried to hold him accountable. He exited and found another, bringing that back to life. So, there is no real accountability, and no one is looking at everything that’s going on with him to ensure he is ready to lead a church again. Unfortunately, that is a very common narrative. People will leave one denomination, go to another after offending in the Baptist church, and then become Methodist or Presbyterian or move to another state where their actions are not a crime.
That is clever. There are so many ways to keep going as a leader in Christianity. What worries me the most is that we, the congregants, the participants in religious life, allow this to occur. Somehow, so many of us are okay with it; that is one of the things that scares me. Why are we unwilling to hold our leaders accountable, ask them hard questions, and ensure that someone can return to ministry? Alternatively, saying, “Hey, we know you have done X, Y, and Z. We will not hire you to be our pastor. We are not going to allow someone to be our pastor.”
In denominations with a more top-down hierarchy, why are bishops and other high-level administrators reappointing a pastor after being offended? That is a whole other set of questions, but it is all part and parcel of a system that short-circuits important questions about how and why this occurred. Just because someone says, “I am ready to pastor again,” or “I am right with God again,” how do we ensure that? It is very, very complicated and not easy.
Jacobsen: Last question. What about the distinction between the system and bad apples and the survivor’s forgiveness of the abuser?
Pooler: Yes.
Jacobsen: As Dorothy Small told me, these clergy are sick and have committed these crimes. So, separating them from the clergy as a class and dealing with it as forgiving but not forgetting is a very mature and subtle point she made to Hermina and me.
Pooler: People ask and go back and forth, and there is even a paper written by a couple of academics at a Jesuit university that said it is not just bad apples. In other words, we have a system in which clericalism is present, which elevates our leaders and disempowers congregants. It is in that system that we are creating situations where people, as they gain more and more power, almost become Frankenstein monsters who then harm and injure us. I do think we have some systematic structural problems, and I would say that churches have always had these issues.
Any world religion with an elevated leader can have problems with clericalism. One question is whether this model works. I would say we are getting some concrete evidence that systems in which clericalism is present create and amplify the risk of harm and abuse by someone with more power. I have started to see a term in the literature.
It is called “vulnerance.” It is about the complicated factors at play when someone has power and thus has more capacity to harm because of that power. So, I would say many of our pastors have enormous vulnerance. In other words, they have way more capacity to injure than the average person; part of it is our systems creating that.
We need to take a look at that. Lastly, forgiveness this way, putting on my clinician hat: forgiveness should never be pushed by an institution, should never be pushed by a leader, and should never be demanded. I have seen forgiveness used to bypass all this hard work: “Do not hold me accountable. Do not do that. Forgive me, and let us move on.”
We need always to remember. Whether or not an individual or a congregation can forgive is this: It is hard work. It is multilayered. What I have looked at, as far as trauma and people who have been traumatized working on forgiveness, is an onion. As you heal from your trauma, you face deeper elements and can name with clarity the injury that’s happened. You feel more pain.
Once you find that intersection, another layer of forgiveness is needed. Forgiveness is an ongoing, long process that always needs to be finished. It is not something you do and then it is done. Boom. We need to have more complex conversations about forgiveness. I have even had some survivors say, “I do not know how to forgive, and I do not think I can forgive.” Moreover, I say, “Yes, that is okay. It is okay.”
It is okay not to know how to forgive when an injury this deep has occurred or even to say, “I cannot do it. I cannot forgive.”We need to find forgiveness and empower people with the injury, with the tools to figure out what that will look like, rather than an institution or a theological statement telling people they need to do it.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/28
Matthew Bywater, M.Sc. is a researcher, educator, and activist who has delved into the criminal and rights abuse case of Keith Raniere.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’ve interviewed people in high-IQ communities. You have deeply dived into a particularly troublesome character named Keith Raniere of NXIVM, nicknamed Vanguard. What were some of his worst exploits in your research?
Matthew Bywater: His worst exploits. You have to look at the aftermath of what happened. There were several women in his close inner circle who died of apparent poisoning. Several women were branded with his initials on their pelvic region. Many people were exploited for their money in a kind of pyramid-like structure. All around Keith Raniere, there was mayhem and destruction. That is in terms of the practical consequences of Raniere.
Jacobsen: How did he escape it for so long?
Bywater: People called him the “Teflon Man” because nothing stuck. He was reported to the authorities in the Albany area. It is New York State or whatever the local authorities are, and no action was taken. He also got away with it because of the amount of money he amassed. He successfully brought the Bronfman sisters (heirs to the Seagram liquor company) into the NXIVM cult. After that, he was able to use their finances to litigate all of NXIVM’s defectors and enemies into oblivion. So, how did he get away with it? It was a mixture of governmental negligence and sheer brutality on his part.
Jacobsen: Who do you think were the worst culprits in helping him?
Bywater: Well, that would be his inner circle. In terms of the financial side, without question, it was Clare Bronfman. In terms of recruiting female victims into the sex cult known as DOS, that would arguably have been Alison Mack. Regarding creating the NXIVM company system, the person with the most responsibility or culpability is Nancy Salzman.
Jacobsen: Was there a similar reaction from others?
Bywater: The short answer is “we do not know” because Nancy Salzman agreed to appear in The Vow documentary TV series, season two. So, all of her waking-up process was captured on film. We are curious if others, like Alison Mack, have undergone a similar process. Just to clarify, Alison Mack pleaded guilty to the sex trafficking charges against her. Claire Bronfman did plead guilty but still refuses to renounce Raniere.
As far as I know, she may still be financing the NXIVM loyalists, of whom there are about 20. If you look at the original NXIVM defectors, every single person who was involved in NXIVM went through that process. you either have a “holy shit, I am in a cult” moment, or you have a “holy shit, I am dealing with a psychopath” moment. This connects to what I said before about having your values and conscience turned against you. Coming to that realization is extremely painful.
Someone I know who was a member of the Moonies said his waking up process was like falling out of a plane, and that is how he experienced it. So that may be the process Nancy Salzman was going through, and that is the process every cult member goes through if they have a conscience. If they lack conscience, then the question arises whether they are merely crying for themselves.
Jacobsen: What happened in Raniere’s mind? Do we know any professional psychologists who can diagnose what is going on in his head?
Bywater: So I do not think a mental health professional has ever diagnosed him. He has now been in prison for two years, almost two years. Perhaps he has been diagnosed in the correctional institution where he is being held. He exhibits the traits of psychopathy or narcissistic personality disorder which in my opinion should be considered as a subset of psychopathy. Predators exist on a spectrum of varying extremities. As far as we know, he was not given the love and attention he needed as a child in his early childhood. Whatever happened, he developed the condition of psychopathy.
However, beyond that, we do not know. We know that his father was generally absent, and he was a very tough salesman. He was not Raniere’s primary caregiver. People who knew his mother said she was very eccentric.
Moreover, later, Raniere said she would make herself sick to punish him. Beyond that, we do not know. It is one of the big mysteries. Something happened to make him into the person he was. Unfortunately, we do not know the specifics.
Raniere is currently in prison. However, there are about 20 people still loyal to him. They are active on social media – you can look up The Dossier Project or whatever handle they are going with now.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/27
The Peace School is new in Canada, founded and accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 2023. Currently, the school has five children with a capacity for 120 and is well-financed and supported by the parents whose children attend. The school’s pedagogy has attracted the attention and support of UNICEF, UNESCO, and UNHCR, which strongly encouraged Dr. Nasser Yousefi, the Principal of The Peace School, to share his pedagogy and learning environment with other countries. Canada was Dr. Yousefi’s first choice for the next Peace School. Dr. Yousefi began his career as a child psychologist, studying in Sweden and earning a Master’s in Education in Childhood Growth and Development. In his exploration of the best pedagogy and learning environment for children, Dr. Yousefi completed a PhD in Educational Approaches at Madonna University in Italy and a PhD in Educational Psychology at Northwest University in the USA. This training combined humanistic and cognitive approaches to education. For many years, Dr. Yousefi was an educational consultant for UNICEF. He has conducted educational and research activities for various groups of children, including immigrant children, minorities, street children, and children with special needs. Dr. Yousefi was the Principal of the Peace (Participatory) School in Tehran, Iran, from 2005 to 2023, graduating 500 students from kindergarten to high school, with graduates accepted at universities in Europe, America, and Canada. Dr. Yousefi is passionate about creating the best future for children and is dedicated to creating safe and nurturing learning environments based on holistic principles.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you get funding for these educational efforts in the Islamic Republic of Iran?
Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi: So, all are provided by the tuition. We didn’t have any extra funding or financial support. The school was supervised by an NGO in Iran. The school was a project of this NGO. The NGO provided all the educational programming and everything else. Nothing came from outside the school; it was all within the NGO and the school system.
Sometimes, we held events to provide fun activities, like concerts or art exhibitions, and all the funds gathered from these events were used exclusively for the school. Most of the support and help we received came from volunteers. Many of our operations, educational programs, research, and even teacher training were handled by volunteers. We needed to pay only for basic things, like the rent for the building and our full-time teachers.
Everything we paid for was solely for the students. Aside from the building and salaries, everything else was handled by volunteers. Research, planning, and everything else were done voluntarily. The parents whose children were enrolled in the school also helped. We wanted the parents to be part of the whole system and to participate. When they helped and supported the school, it became important to them. Sometimes, we would ask if they had a party room in their building for events or meetings, if they could help with transportation or field trips, or volunteered for library operations. Anything that could reduce our expenses. The whole project was so interesting to them that they wanted to be involved.
They were so excited about the whole project and the school concept that they didn’t wait for us to ask for help; they did it themselves. One of the school’s principles was that we believed the whole community was our school. We could use community resources as learning opportunities for our students rather than building or creating new opportunities. We always used available resources provided by families, whether they worked in a company, factory, vet clinic, or lab.
Those opportunities were the best for our students to learn something new. It also decreased our expenses and created more learning opportunities. It helped us create a culture of utilizing available community resources for children. Instead of building something ourselves, we used what we already had. This model could be used in any city, not just the capital or larger cities. It could work in any city based on available resources and people. Looking at it broadly, there are many opportunities for schools to use for their students. It doesn’t mean we must create them; they are already available.
This approach also allowed us to have multiple field trips and use community resources. All the libraries in the city were our schools. All the museums were our school. Every company, factory, and store became part of our learning environment. We viewed the entire city as a learning opportunity. It meant that everyone in society was a teacher for us. The museum guide, or guides, yes. They would have been the best teachers, especially for the Museum of History. Or people who worked at the laboratory.
They were the best teachers for biology. We were open to other people becoming our teachers. We were fearless of letting more people join our team and welcomed them as much as possible. Everyone in Tehran, where we were based, was very welcoming to our students and the school. We wanted to hear from them because we respected their talents, abilities, and everything. We wanted them to be the experts in some situations, and they did everything they could for us. That’s why we never encountered any closed doors from the people.
We did face situations where the government closed doors for us, but people were very open and welcoming.
Jacobsen: A few things come to mind. This will be the shortest of the three I have in mind. When people own a school or the educational system and participate that way, did they adopt a motto or slogan within the school?
Yousefi: Yes, the founders had a motto. The school slogan was “Make the world a better place.” The teachers never expected anything specific from the students but always asked them to improve the world for themselves and others, regardless of their jobs or careers.
Yes, it doesn’t matter what job or career you follow; you can improve the world. You are not allowed to hurt anyone or make someone else suffer. You need to love others and show empathy and compassion. We tried to teach love and empathy. As teachers and adults, we don’t have much to teach students, but we can spread love to them.
Regarding the concerts and other fundraising efforts, we raised funds to reduce operating costs and lower parents’ fees. These concerts were private and not publicly announced. Generally, anyone is allowed to hold a concert, but for larger public events, they need a permit from the government. For us, it was different. Women, for example, are not allowed to perform publicly. Our fundraising concerts were all private and spread by word of mouth.
This touches on the third question, which might require a longer response. We did face some pressure and pushback from the government. The main issue was that they didn’t recognize us as a school. This meant we couldn’t give any diplomas or certificates to our students. So that was one of the issues, yes. The government wants every school to follow its curriculum and textbooks, and the same textbooks are used across the country. It doesn’t matter where the school is; every student has to read the same textbook.
That was one of the main issues and pushbacks. One of our biggest challenges was that the government only believed in one system and approach. They didn’t even allow an alternative approach to be considered. However, we wanted to continue promoting different and multiple approaches and methods worldwide, and we believed we had to at least look at them. We wanted to promote and support diversity rather than singularity, but the government needed help.
They wanted their system and approach to be seen and recognized. It doesn’t matter where you live in Iran, whether in the north, south, east, or west; everyone has to read the same textbook. It doesn’t consider their cultural, religious, or political backgrounds. Everyone has to read the same textbook and take the same exams. However, we must consider the child’s cultural background, history, language, stories, and even religion in their educational program. Iran has a diversity of religions and languages, and we can’t ignore this diversity. You can speak up to one language when there are various languages. In the humanistic approach, we must consider this diversity and these differences. We wanted to do this, and we tried to do it. Of course, we still try to do it, but the government doesn’t support it.
Jacobsen: So, no political violence was enacted against any of you, the students, the teachers, or the families. Is that correct?
Yousefi: Violence in the sense that we might usually imagine? No, because we were conducting a research project. The development of this alternative method over twenty years was a massive research project. We always told government organizations that we were implementing a research project to expand educational diversity. We always spoke as a group of specialists. However, I believe that the fact we were never officially recognized and our students were unable to receive an official diploma is itself a form of violence.
Jacobsen: When you’re in a highly religiously controlled society, and everyone, regardless of background, has to take these examinations and follow the educational curriculum, what is in it? What do people have to learn? Is it anything connected to the real world? Which parts are useful, and which are nonsense that train people to be effective citizens in a theocracy?
Yousefi: The focus of the schools is, after all, the promotion and expansion of religious thought, specifically introducing students to Islamic teachings. However, Iran is a country rich in diverse religions, where followers of different faiths have lived together in peace for centuries. When the official education system ignores this diversity and doesn’t provide opportunities for dialogue among followers of various religions, ethnicities, or minorities, diversity and plurality are ultimately lost. Of course, followers of religions like Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and others had their own schools that only enrolled students of their faith. However, there was no interaction between students of different religions within the official education system.
Jacobsen: As part of the curriculum, are kids taught things that aren’t useful, like prayer and other religious practices, that might be meaningful to the parents but not necessarily effective for dealing with the realities of life when they grow up?
Yousefi: In mainstream schools, there are subjects for religion and prayer. We don’t know exactly how parents feel because we aren’t in contact with parents from mainstream schools, but we hear they aren’t very satisfied with what’s happening. We also hear that sometimes their children practice something at school but something else at home, leading to conflicts.
They only study and read to pass exams. They don’t necessarily believe what they study. This isn’t limited to religious subjects; it includes history, literature, geography, and even science and social sciences. Students memorize the textbooks to pass exams. The textbooks include stories in literature that students have to read, but these are only sometimes the books they choose when they go to the library. We wanted to connect school and personal life, not separate them. It wasn’t easy; being honest with yourself and your education while maintaining balance was hard.
Jacobsen: Does the mainstream educational system make any distinctions between Sunni, Shia, Ahmadi, or Quranist interpretations of Islam, or is it all one version?
Yousefi: No, it only talks about Islam in a general sense. Discussions around Zoroastrianism and other faiths are not included. The government has its version of Islam that it promotes. It could be more realistic and accurate; it’s just something the government developed.
Jacobsen: A friend of mine is a cosmologist at UBCO and Lethbridge. He’s a Quranist Muslim. We’ve been discussing interfaith topics for a long time. He’s big on interfaith dialogues and humanistic interpretations of Islam, which might appeal to secularized individuals. However, this isn’t that. I’m a minor figure doing administrative stuff for them, but the Canadian Quantum Research Center has a decent number of citations.
Jacobsen: Let’s contrast what was described with the mainstream system’s method and how it doesn’t recognize anything other than a single worldview, and not in an educational sense when I’m thinking about it. They’re taking it as true rather than a secularized world religions class, where they teach what people believe and let you decide for yourself. It’s much different. They’ve pre-decided for you. What’s your humanistic approach to this?
Yousefi: We consider religion to be part of a child’s background. Many Persian poems have roots in Islam, Zoroastrianism, or even Judaism. So, when you want to learn about Rumi or Hafez, you must also learn about those roots. For example, you can’t understand Hafez’s poems if you don’t know the Torah stories or Rumi’s poems without knowledge of the Quran. The same applies to Eastern countries. If you don’t know the Bible, you can’t fully understand Victor Hugo’s or Charles Dickens’s stories.
Talking about the Bible, Quran, or Torah is necessary to understand literature and poetry. It doesn’t mean we are promoting that religion. Rather, it’s about understanding the culture and history needed to grasp something else. The same goes for science. Some scientific concepts have come from Eastern or Western positions or even how we look at evolution. There are different narratives about evolution rooted in religion. Discussing a scientist or physician doesn’t mean we are endorsing their religious views. We are discussing their ideas and theories. We only focus on religion as a background context. We don’t have a specific subject for religion, but we touch on it to explain the backstory of other topics. If a student is curious about a religion, we open up, considering it a great learning opportunity. But we always respect all religions and those who follow them. We are one of the rare schools with diverse religions, but we never promote any particular one.
We always help students learn more about a religion if they have questions. Some families specifically asked us not to talk about any religion, especially in Iran. However, we could only say yes if a child was interested in learning about Islam or any other religion . We respected their curiosity and taught them about it without promoting it.
In the context of Iran, if you advocate for something other than Islam, there could be negative consequences. But we never wanted to advocate for a specific religion because it would mean we couldn’t respect others. We wanted to allow students from other religions to speak freely and be heard. One year, the students themselves asked for a class on religion. We had a program to introduce each religion without advocating for any. We also explained that some people are atheists and don’t believe in any religion. We focused on diversity, saying, “This is it,” rather than limiting ourselves to one viewpoint.
This approach wasn’t limited to religion. It extended to literature and music as well. Some schools only teach one genre of music or one instrument. We introduced different genres and instruments, even challenging ones. We aimed to discuss the best examples in each genre across subjects like arts and science.
If a school restricts everything to one religion or genre, it restricts diversity. We encouraged students to love their country and respect other countries, lands, and nationalities. We never advocated for nationalism or exclusivity.
Jacobsen: So, that’s good. This last response will be helpful for those in Canada who may have a stereotype of what Iran is like. There’s this ghostly governmental presence that restricts everyone in every way. Can you describe the humanistic model of education, whether about politics, religion or anything else, in a compact way as something like individualistic cosmopolitanism for learning about a wide range of human identities and truths about the world in a semi-autonomous direction?
Yousefi: I am not a representative of the Iranian government, and my educational and research work was never approved by the government. Therefore, I cannot say what the public schools were thinking or what they expected from this education. Whatever it was, I was critical and opposed to the educational system.
Since the humanistic approach’s main objective is respect, it considers every person’s aspect and background. It allows people to talk about who they are today, helping them take the next steps. A humanistic teacher is not an ethics teacher; it’s not someone who judges people. It’s a person who accepts a child in every aspect, in every way possible.
For example, we consider children and see where they stand and what they bring from home, their past, their background, their culture, and everything else. But we don’t judge that child and their background. They will never trust us again if we judge them or share their dreams or thoughts. So, we need to accept them as they are, wherever they are, so we can help them take the next steps toward the future.
A humanistic teacher needs to correct the child immediately. We wait long enough to address their mistakes, issues, or misunderstandings. Sometimes, students come with a racist point of view, and we don’t stop them immediately. We listen and ask them to talk enough so we can understand where they need help. If we start to correct or judge them immediately, they will stop being honest with us and never share their thoughts. So, language, politics, religion, or nationality are not priorities for a humanistic education. What’s important is their characteristics, personalities, emotions, and understanding of the world; we must fully understand them to help them grow and develop. A humanistic teacher is more of a caregiver than a traditional teacher.
It’s someone who takes care of the children. We care about policies that support caring for students and children, whether it’s regulations, concepts, or theories. The world needs caregivers more than traditional teachers—not caregivers in the sense of caring for someone ill but someone who genuinely cares for children’s development and well-being. But that’s where I differ from a behaviourist teacher to a humanistic teacher.
Jacobsen: Is there a risk in teaching students intellectual and analytical skills without a proportional development of emotional and social skills in students? A healthy development of the sentiments to make the intellectual and analytical skills more rounded.
Yousefi: It’s both the holistic approach and integrated education. Integrated education means we pay attention to the child’s needs immediately. You can’t say that you only focus on their cognitive development without paying attention to their nutrition or malnutrition. You can only focus on social skills by considering society’s rules and regulations. Cognitive psychology and behavioural psychology both caused the issue of segregating these needs. Cognitive psychology focuses only on cognitive needs and doesn’t consider emotional and social needs.
Behavioural psychology only focuses on individual success and forgets that a child is a complex person with different developmental skills and needs. Paying attention to only one aspect and disregarding the others can be dangerous. It could be creativity, reasoning, or analyzing. We need to work on every need and aspect of a child at the right moment. If we skip paying attention to emotional and social needs, then we might end up with scientists who make bombs, promoting war and destruction.
Who’s making these bombs and weapons of mass destruction? It’s often those specialized individuals who lack emotional and social skills. They never had the opportunity to develop empathy and compassion. Yes, there are doctors and physicians involved in organ trafficking or mutilation who lack empathy. Where did they go to school? They might have attended very controlling and closed schools that forced them to think about war due to their conditions.
The world’s educational system fails to teach people to love each other and empathize; defending any war means going against humanity. Most of the workforce involved in the war, whether in the army, weapons factories, or transportation, attended schools that failed them. Teachers must answer how we taught them and who they became. It’s very sad and makes me emotional.
Jacobsen: Let’s shift topics so you don’t cry. Famously, Professor Noam Chomsky essentially destroyed B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism in an 8-page review article. This brought about the cognitive revolution, and humanistic psychology evolved from it. Rogers and other fundamental humanistic psychologists are dead. How has humanistic psychology and humanistic education evolved since its inception, so the cutting edge in the 2010s/2020s?
Yousefi: This person, Noam Chomsky, wasn’t the first to write against behaviourist education. He was one of the prominent critics. Maslow, Ferrier, Rogers, and Fromm were all critics of the behaviourist approach. People like Yalom and Pinker also criticize it. I am also a serious critic of behaviorism in my country. believe that we cannot easily overlook a system that harms the students’ psychology so much. We must raise our voices against behaviorist education.
Some people start questioning it when you shout negatively. I am happy to have been among the few to question behaviourist education. It’s good when behaviourist psychologists and educational specialists hear this criticism. Yes, it’s like validation that you’re doing the right thing—not that you intended to, but you were compelled to.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/26
Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, FACR, FNASCI, CEH, CISSP, is an Ivy League physician who is a world leader in three different fields (cardiovascular imaging, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity) and recently left the U.S. after significantly traumatic events.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Previously, you told a heartbreaking story of anxiety, stress, and degrading health, as with many American medical professionals. Does this start in medical school?
Dr. Benoit Desjardins: I am extraordinarily lucky to be alive today to let the readers catch up on the story. As you know, a few years ago, on a Friday afternoon on my 97th hour of work as a U.S. physician, at the end of a week during which I was not allowed to sleep much or eat much, and on a day which I was forced to do the workload of six doctors, the combination of lack of food, lack of sleep, and massive overwork made my body permanently fail. I almost died from a catastrophic medical condition caused by the work conditions and became handicapped for life. This was not the first time that I was physically hurt by these work conditions and not the first time that they almost killed me. But it was the first time that they caused permanent, severely limiting lifelong damage to my body.
To answer your question, I attended medical school in Canada, which has strict rules and laws on basic human rights, including those of physicians. In the U.S., physicians’ working conditions are massively out of compliance with safe labour laws from all other industries. In 2019, Dr Pamela Wible published a book listing 40 categories of documented human rights violations towards physicians in the U.S. (“Human Rights Violations in Medicine: A-to-Z Action Guide“). This included sleep deprivation, food deprivation, overwork, exploitation, bullying, violence, etc. I have experienced most of those as a physician in the U.S. Since around 2014, the U.S. has been well-known for the inhumane work conditions of its physicians, killing and disabling its physicians by the thousands and burning out its physicians by the hundreds of thousands.
After medical school, I came to the U.S. in the early 1990s to pursue a PhD degree. I was initially a graduate student in the U.S. I was treated like everybody else. It was a rude awakening when I started in the U.S. medical system after my PhD. Here is one of many examples of what I faced: As a medical post-graduate trainee, I had once been forced to work at the hospital for 58 consecutive hours without rest and then drove back home. As my exhausted body crashed into my bed, I received a phone call from the chief resident asking me why I had left the hospital as I was apparently on call again for a third night in a row. He ordered me to get back to work. I drove back to the hospital, completely exhausted. I could have easily been killed in a car accident from exhaustion, like what happened to two of my immediate radiology colleagues. After arriving at the hospital, I was forced to work ten additional consecutive hours (for a total of 68 consecutive hours without sleep), until I crashed on the call room floor out of exhaustion. They found me unconscious later that morning. This is one of many examples of the work conditions of physicians in the U.S.
Jacobsen: When medical professionals enter into medicine in Canada and the United States, what are the contrasts in treatment and the similarities in treatment of medical professionals?
Desjardins: There are huge differences. We can divide this treatment into the public, employers, and government.
(1) by the public: In Canada, the public is respectful of physicians, of expertise and science, partly because the population is well educated and scientifically literate and partly because access to healthcare is more restricted, and patients are very happy when they can access a physician. Canadians understand that physicians are human beings. In the U.S., the public has no respect for healthcare professionals, expertise, or science. Physicians and nurses regularly get attacked by patients, and sometimes get killed by them. One physician in Philadelphia recently got stabbed in the face by her patient. Also, physicians in the U.S. are viewed as lottery tickets. The strong anti-science culture in the U.S. has people making irrational cause-and-effect magical expectations of doctors. Any bad medical outcome, a regular part of medicine, almost invariably leads to a lawsuit that can produce a multimillion-dollar award.
(2) by employers: In the U.S., this was nicely summarized by the 2019 New York Times op-ed article “The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses” by Dr Danielle Ofri. She discussed how the U.S. healthcare system involves massive exploitation of healthcare workers to stay in business. The nature of the exploitation depends on the environment, either academic or private practice. In academia, physicians are salaried and academic hospitals maximize the work done by physicians to avoid bankruptcy and maintain their razor-thin profit margins. The amount of work never stops increasing. Private practices are being bought one after another by venture capital firms, whose only goal is to maximize short-term profits for their investors, by forcing physician employees to do a massive amount of work with the lowest resources while disregarding quality of care. In Canada, almost all physicians are government employees, which is very different and will be covered next.
(3) by the government: In Canada, the government is the main employer of physicians and exerts very strict control on the location of physicians’ practice to ensure adequate distribution throughout the country. However, besides these limitations on their practice, physicians are treated like human beings by the government, with strict laws and rules on basic human rights and physician work conditions that must be respected. The treatment of physicians by the government in the U.S. is well illustrated by the recent scandal of the PHPs (physician health programs). If, for example, a patient sees a physician drink a glass of champagne at a wedding, she can report him to the U.S. government as an alcohol abuser. Then, under the threat of losing his medical license, the physician gets forced by the government to attend an out-of-state “addiction” government therapy program, costing tens of thousands of dollars. This has led to several bankruptcies and dozens of suicides of physicians while in those PHP government programs. This included prominent doctors, such as a visionary in a pediatric field, who helped thousands of pediatric patients. He committed suicide after a government PHP program ruined his reputation and career. He had been forced into this PHP program by his employer after he reported dangerous local work conditions putting patient lives at risk.
Jacobsen: The conditions at your prior job sound slavish. Is there a cycle of entrapment and overwork among medical professionals?
Desjardins: When you get a job as a physician in the U.S., you get a state license enabling you to practice, which is a long process. Then you get installed, your spouse gets a job, and your kids attend local schools. You become locally established, and relocation becomes a major hassle for the physician, his spouse and kids, so the threshold for relocation is very high.
When I got to Philadelphia in the late 2000s, things were tolerable. However, the situation for physicians worsened progressively. It’s like being a frog in progressively warming water. 2014 was a turning point in Philadelphia for two independent reasons. First, as I already mentioned, the U.S. has inhumane work conditions for its physicians. This became public knowledge around 2014, when the American Medical Association started its first three Physician Wellness programs to try to address the problem. Second, Philadelphia became known as having the most massively corrupt, scientifically illiterate medico-legal system on the planet. This is beyond the scope of this interview. But it’s the last year we could recruit any radiologist in my section and the year when physicians started leaving Philadelphia by the boatload. Before 2014, we individually read about 15,000 images per day. Now, it’s sometimes up to 250,000 images per day.
One of the advantages of my field of radiology is that we do not need to be close to patients. We can read medical images remotely. We took advantage of that during the pandemic, as most radiologists could do their full work shifts from home, without needing to enter the hospital and be exposed to COVID. This gave many radiologists an important escape route. When remote work became a viable option for radiologists after the pandemic, many entrapped in Philadelphia abandoned their local jobs and signed remote work contracts with out-of-state hospitals while remaining in Philadelphia. The workload for radiologists who did not abandon Philadelphia hospitals rapidly increased. We are living in the absurd situation of being surrounded by dozens of local radiologists whom we desperately need but who refuse to have their names ever associated again with Philadelphia hospitals. When we tried to do the converse and recruit out-of-state radiologists to work remotely for Philadelphia hospitals, we learned that most radiologists in the country refuse to ever have their names associated with hospitals in Philadelphia because of medico-legal reasons. The long-term implications of this situation are unclear but frightening.
Jacobsen: What health problems arise in this context?
Desjardins: We recently discussed extensively the healthcare effects of excessive workloads on human beings, which can lead to all sorts of chronic medical conditions and even death. I refer to this link to our recent In-Sight discussion.
Jacobsen: Whether by death, health injury, or moving away, medical professionals do leave those conditions, as you recently informed me–with a perceptible tinge of elation as if a proverbial sigh of relief. How did you begin to find a way out?
Desjardins: I’m an Ivy League physician and a world-leading expert in my medical and scientific field. I used the same approach to solve all my scientific and clinical problems to find a way out. I was forced to continue working under the same work conditions that had almost killed me and disabled me for life. I needed urgent action. I selected a combination of two basic moves: (1) increase my protection and (2) remove myself from the toxic environment. To increase my protection, I started being closely monitored by a team of three physicians and taking protective medication to decrease the chances of recurrence of the event that permanently disabled me.
Removing myself from the toxic environment was more difficult. Physicians cannot change jobs easily. If you try to relocate locally, you face non-compete clauses preventing access to jobs at other institutions. If you try to relocate to another state or country, getting a new practice license for that new location takes months, and time was not on my side. Abandoning the medical profession was also an option, recently taken by thousands of physicians. I did not consider that option, as I am a world leader in academic radiology. My field needs me, and I have a lot more to offer to my field.
I initially secured a quick research sabbatical at Stanford, giving me six months out of that toxic environment. This gave my body time to cope with my new handicap and time to plan my long-term escape from Philadelphia. This was near the end of the pandemic. During those six months of sabbatical, I interviewed widely and secured four U.S. academic positions away from Philadelphia and was working on securing two positions in Canada. However, the work conditions of U.S. healthcare workers during the pandemic resulted in a massive exodus of healthcare workers from the profession, with even more planning to exit in the short-term future. Under these circumstances, I felt Canada offered a much better future.
Canada has a mechanism to recruit Nobel Laureates and international scientific superstars called the “Distinguished Professor” pathway. There are other mechanisms to recruit regular doctors. To be recruited under that pathway, one must be a world luminary in a specific field. I’m a world luminary in three different fields. However, this pathway takes one year to receive government approval. When Canada found out that I had been almost killed and had become disabled for life by the work conditions of U.S. physicians and that I was still forced to work under these same conditions, they granted me a humanitarian exception and my “Distinguished Professor” pathway was approved in one week, instead of one year. This is how I got out.
Jacobsen: You mentioned some in the previous interviews. What happened to earlier professionals who did not get out and were trapped, in essence, in these areas? Those continuing to undergo harassment and threats, violence, including nurses.
Desjardins: Those who are still trapped are currently abandoning the medical profession by the boatload. In my previous U.S. department, we had a deficit of 43 doctors due to departures and difficulties in recruiting replacements. One of the four academic medical centers in Philadelphia (Hahnemann) collapsed and permanently closed under similar conditions.
In other countries, it is illegal to treat human beings the way the U.S. treats its physicians. No other industrialized country forces its workers to work up to 120 hours per week and up to 72 consecutive hours without rest, like the U.S. does to its physicians. Since the pandemic, 30% of all healthcare professionals have left the medical profession, and an additional 30% are expected to leave in the next 2-3 years. The U.S. cannot recruit fast enough to recover from these massive levels of attrition, which is a global phenomenon while acute in the United States. The up to 60% deficit in healthcare workers will never be fully replenished, and massive shortages of U.S. healthcare workers will become chronic.
There are two ways to increase the number of U.S. physicians: recruit them from other countries or train more physicians at home. Both are a huge problem. The work conditions of U.S. physicians are now well known since 2014, and even more since the pandemic. Physicians from Europe and Canada could be recruited to the U.S. but they no longer want to come. The U.S. can however still attract physicians from third-world countries. Furthermore, there are more and more books, articles, blogs, movies, TED talks, and news clips about the U.S. treatment of its healthcare workers. The medical profession is much less attractive than it used to be to the best and brightest undergraduate students at home. This will continue to decrease the pool of top U.S. applicants for the medical profession. More than 60% of physicians currently highly discourage their children from entering the medical profession, and an even greater percentage of younger physicians who never experienced the good old days of the medical profession strongly advise their children NOT to enter the medical profession.
Jacobsen: When getting out, what area of medicine and geography in Canada did you choose? (And why those?)
Desjardins: In terms of areas of medicine, I needed to continue in the same field, as I am a world leader in that field. I have been responsible for determining the standards of practice in that field for the past 20 years, and it made no sense at this point in my life to change my area of medicine.
Jacobsen: What was the feeling and process of transition to new work and more reasonable work conditions?
Desjardins: At this late phase in my career, relocating was expected to be very difficult. But against all odds, things worked out very fast, and I was able to leave the U.S. I’m still in disbelief, thinking I will wake up and that this is all a dream. I suspect I’ll remain in a phase of disbelief for a while.
Expats U.S. physicians often describe their newfound freedom as like being released from U.S. prison. This is, of course, a ridiculous comparison, as U.S. prisons don’t kill and disable their prisoners by the thousands as the U.S. does to its physicians. But there are nevertheless many similarities between the two situations.
I now work 40 hours per week instead of 80+ hours. I am on call every eight weeks instead of up to 22 times per month. My daily workload is up to 6 times less than what it was in the U.S., and I have 6 times more vacation than I had in the U.S. This is almost unbelievable, but this is how physicians are treated outside the U.S. I maintain many work collaborations with the U.S., as an international leader in three fields.
I still need to get used to the new freedom. I had not been allowed to take many vacations in my last 20 years as a physician in the U.S.; when I did, it was to travel to see my family in Canada. Now, I live 10 minutes away from my family and see them every weekend. I have yet to schedule a big trip. Switzerland? Australia? Italy? The Greek Islands? An Alaskan cruise? There are so many good picks! I’ve travelled extensively for scientific meetings, but never for pure pleasure outside work.
Jacobsen: How has this better balance affected your life with family, as a husband–including treating her like a queen–and father, and in your ability to treat patients with full focus and care–not sleep deprived, overworked, and stressed to the point of high detriment to personal health?
Desjardins: Well, I now have a family life. I can now eat dinner with my family, spend weekends with them, and go on vacations. This is very liberating. I had always treated my wife like a queen and my kids as best as possible, but I knew my availability was very limited. Now, I am making up for lost time.
I am much more rested during my workdays. There is a massive difference between 4 hours of stressed-out sleep and 7 hours of relaxed sleep. My body feels the difference already. And since I do up to six times less work every day, I get to spend four times longer interpreting each study (8-hour workdays instead of 12+ hours workdays), dramatically increasing the quality of care I can provide. Workdays are not insane marathons anymore; they are normal days with normal work. Patients benefit from this process by accessing more rested, less stressed-out doctors in a better-quality healthcare system. This might partly explain why the Canadian healthcare system currently ranks 32nd in the world, compared to the U.S. ranking of 69th. Canada used to be much better than 32nd, but its waiting lists for care currently hurt its rankings.
Jacobsen: Why have the problems you described in the U.S. medical system not been solved? Why the hiding of physician deaths and suicides?
Desjardins: U.S. physician work conditions are now a very well-known problem. Books, documentary movies (Do No Harm, Robyn Symon), TED talks, publications, and numerous blogs exist. The American Medical Association is aware of the problem and has implemented solutions. Since 2014, Physician Wellness has been a major focus of discussion in medical centers, conferences, blogs, and medical schools. Most people in the public are not even aware that almost every U.S. medical center has a Physician Wellness program to try to stop U.S. physicians from dying by the thousands and burning out by the hundreds of thousands. These programs, which teach physicians resilience rather than improving their work conditions, have been compared to distributing Yoga mats to prisoners at Auschwitz during World War II.
Publicity on this topic is blocked by hospitals. Hospitals in the U.S. are businesses. They must hide the negative consequences of physician work conditions to be able to stay in business. If a hospital disclosed to the news media that three of its physicians jumped to their death from the roof of the hospital within a month of each other, like what happened recently in a New York hospital, this would affect the hospital financial bottom line. After these three New York physicians jumped to their death, their bodies were simply covered by tarps, and this did not even make the local news. Their colleagues at the hospital were threatened of dismissal if they reported the deaths to the news media and were even forbidden to discuss the death among themselves or even to hold a funeral. Patients of the dead physicians were told that their physician had left the hospital.
Jacobsen: Is the lack of reportage on those who care for us in times of need showing a lack of care for them in their times of need across political party lines and media platforms?
Desjardins: Absolutely. The profession is crushed from all sides and getting no sympathy from anyone. The only reason the U.S. healthcare system has not yet collapsed under these circumstances, is because of the endless professional ethic of medical staff members, a resource that seems endless and that is currently massively exploited by the public, by corporate medicine, and by the government.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Benoit.
Desjardins: Thank you for discussing this important topic.
Bio: Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, FACR, FNASCI, CEH, CISSP, is Professor of Radiology at the University of Montreal. He recently retired from the University of Pennsylvania after 16 years on faculty. He is an international leader in three different fields: cardiovascular imaging, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. He has given over 200 invited presentations nationally and internationally in those three fields. He was co-leader of the Arrhythmia Imaging Research Laboratory at Penn. His research involves cardiac MRI and CT in electrophysiology, focusing on the relation between cardiac biomarkers such as myocardial scar, with pathways of abnormal electrical conduction in left ventricular arrhythmia. He is funded by the National Institute of Health and is very active in national scientific societies. He has extensive expertise in artificial intelligence, the field of his PhD. In the spring of 2022, he has spent six months at Stanford as Visiting Professor and Associate Scholar of the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. He is a reformed hacker. He has several certificates in cybersecurity and has done research and published on the cybersecurity of medical images. Outside work, he is a Black Belt at Tae Kwon Do, an ex-Boy Scout Leader, a competitive marksman, and a FPV race drone pilot. He is also a member of the prestigious Mega Society and Prometheus Society.
Dr. Martin “Marty” Shoemaker is a trained clinical psychologist and, currently, a Humanist Chaplain at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Multifaith Centre) and Vancouver General Hospital (August, 2014-Present). Previously, he worked as a psychologist and instructor in organizational behaviour.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Overview, what are we defining: spiritual care in humanist chaplaincy?
Dr. Martin Shoemaker: The development of spiritual care, which originated approximately 1,400 to 1,500 years ago in Europe, evolved from a distinctly Christian concept. It traces its roots to the Christian kings and their royal families, who employed chaplains for spiritual guidance and advice and to safeguard their artifacts and Christian memorabilia.
These artifacts were amassed over the years and placed in chapels guarded by individuals known as chaplains. However, today’s world, particularly in the period following World War II, holds a markedly different perspective on what constitutes spiritual care.
The term “spiritual” is derived from the Greek word “pneuma,” meaning spirit or breath. To the Greeks and other ancient, wise civilizations, it referred to the vital energy within us, synonymous with life itself and best exemplified by breath. The term “pneuma” was translated from Greek to “spiritus” in Latin, leading to the word “spirit” being closely associated with the Christian Church.
Over time, spirituality became intertwined with a profound commitment and an inner search within one’s soul for divine revelations, as mediated by the Church through its theology, cathedrals, and other religious institutions. This concept was deeply rooted in a Christian worldview. However, this understanding underwent significant change during the 19th century, influenced by developments in Freudian analysis, Marxism, the death of God movement championed by Nietzsche, and even the theory of evolution. Expanding knowledge driven by empirical evidence and scientific investigation further transformed the concept of spirituality.
The word “spiritual” began to take on a different connotation, describing unseen phenomena that were not directly observable. It refers to a part of human existence that is immaterial and without mass, representing a dematerialized reality. Consequently, some skeptics began to dismiss spirituality as mere mythology, a construct that could be interpreted in any way one wished to explain things beyond physical observation. This shift profoundly impacted religions traditionally emphasizing spirituality, compelling them to reconcile their worldviews with science, evidence, and the global influx of information from diverse cultures and religions.
Particularly during times of war, chaplains who served together, such as during World War I and World War II, were tasked with caring for soldiers who were physically wounded by bullets or bombs, as well as those who suffered psychological trauma due to the horrors of war. It was during these times that chaplains began to recognize the varied interpretations of the word “spirit” among soldiers, which, in turn, led to an evolution in their understanding. “Spiritual” began to be viewed as a journey toward a supernatural or higher form of awareness within human consciousness rather than something that could be easily perceived.
The term encompasses ideas, enthusiasm, and a profound sense of awe. Individuals might express that they had a “spiritual experience” when standing on the edge of a cliff, gazing upon an awe-inspiring valley before engaging in activities like paragliding. The term “spiritual” has thus expanded, Scott, from merely a Christian concept centred on the essence God imbued within each individual to a broader and more secular understanding. In humanist chaplaincy, we do not necessarily employ “spiritual” as frequently as other chaplains might.
For example, I was approved as the first humanist chaplain at Vancouver General Hospital a year and a half ago. In the community, we volunteers are called “community spiritual care practitioners.” Spiritual care, in this context, relates primarily to individuals’ religious orientations and personal journeys. Still, it encompasses a wide range of meanings, given that 15 to 20 different religions and non-religious perspectives are represented at the hospital, including Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and secular beliefs. My services are not in high demand at the secular chapel, which has been adapted to accommodate various belief systems. Therefore, we may not always feel comfortable with the term “spiritual” due to its strong religious connotations. Indeed, if you were to ask an atheist, “Would you like to speak with a spiritual care adviser?” they might find the terminology off-putting.
The answer is always the same: “Why would I do that? I don’t believe in God.” This is the challenge we face with the word “spiritual.” It doesn’t resonate with everyone, and we often feel the need to replace it.
Perhaps we could use terms like one’s organizing principle or foundation of what is considered true and real — the essence of what drives an individual. This concept is not inspired by religion but rather by personal conviction.
Jacobsen: When we consider the historical dominance of Catholicism or Christianity in general among the Canadian population, in the 1970s, around 90% of the population identified as Christian. By 2001, this number had dropped to about three-quarters; according to the 2021 census, it was around 53 or 54%. How does this changing religious demographic, with increasing diversity and a decline in Christian representation, alter people’s perceived needs?
Shoemaker: The secularization you referred to, which began after the Enlightenment, is indeed what we are witnessing. Although there was a resurgence of religious sentiment during World War II — a common phenomenon as people sought solace in their faith during times of conflict — this trend shifted again in the 1960s with the rise of anti-establishment movements.
As a result, secularism took hold, leading people to question the institutions they were raised in, including their churches. Many parents who raised their children in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s instilled seeds of doubt in them. These children, who were exposed to education in Western democracies, encountered diverse perspectives through subjects like philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history. This exposure broadened their worldview, contributing to the secularization we observe today, as reflected in your statistics.
This trend is particularly pronounced among younger generations, such as Generation X, Generation Z, and millennials. These cohorts, heavily influenced by digital technology and social media, have not developed the small, close-knit communities that previous generations might have, such as church groups or local community organizations. Consequently, society has seen a secular shift, especially among young people, while older generations have largely maintained their traditional practices.
Furthermore, younger generations tend not to participate in face-to-face meetings as much as their predecessors did, preferring to engage with others through their cell phones or online platforms. This shift has affected religious institutions and led to a decline in membership in many other traditional organizations, such as service clubs like Kiwanis, which need help attracting younger members.
I have also consulted with several professional associations, such as the Real Estate Brokers of Vancouver and the Architectural Institute here, and they also need help recruiting recent graduates. The underlying issue is that young people today are less inclined to join organizations.
Part of this secularization can be attributed to parents’ diminished control over the information their children consume. Nowadays, young people can access virtually any information they desire on the Internet, which has supplemented and, in some cases, replaced parental guidance. While they may still join groups, these are often related to transient activities like playing video games or other social engagements. They might meet for drinks at a bar and then part ways or have brief relationships that do not develop into lasting connections. This era is marked by significant fragmentation in social relationships.
Psychologists have extensively studied this phenomenon, and it is a key component of the secular movement, which is not always viewed as the most beneficial aspect of modern society. While young people are no longer being indoctrinated by religious figures or even by their parents to the extent they once were, this freedom has also led to increased anxiety within this secular generation.
When young people are asked in surveys what religious affiliation they have, many respond that they are not religious. This reflects the fact that they have severed ties with their families’ religious practices, even if their families attended Church and they do not participate in religious services themselves. This is the significant shift we are seeing in secularism.
IN-SIGHT Publishing founder and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal Editor-in-Chief Scott Douglas Jacobsen (SDJ) talks to Takudzwa Mazwienduna (TM), a member of Young Humanists Zimbabwe on a number of issues.
Below are excerpts of the interview:
SDJ: Today, we will talk about religious demographics in Zimbabwe. One thing, I note, Zimbabwe is super religious. But it is not as religious as I thought.
Canada, not known for being a very religious country, I think; however, it used to have this status, and even more than Zimbabwe.
In the 1970s, it sat at around 90% Christian. You read that right. In the early 2000s, it was about 75% Christian.
By 2021, it was about 54% and the downward trend is continuing, to about 50%, probably, or a little less, this year. That’s unprecedented. Zimbabwe looks like late 1980s and early 1990s Canada. That’s promising! Any preliminary thoughts?
TM: That is very hopeful, but then again, unlike Canada, Zimbabwe’s education system is not so different from colonial times.
Some secularists like Shingai Rukwata Ndoro have worked with the government to make education progressive, but mission schools still dominate.
There is still a lot of proselytisation in schools despite the government discouraging it.
SDJ: How did the religious demographics in Zimbabwe look in prior decades?
TM: The London Missionary Society made sure that model citizens of the colony had to be Christian.
Couple that with Missionary Education that tied intellectualism with Christianity, it made religion the default for natives.
It is mostly Pan-African activists that speak against Christianity today, shunning it as a colonial legacy.
They do not advocate for secularism, however, but a return to native animist religions.
They are, however, open to secularist ideas since their religion is not monotheistic, and the Zimbabwean atheists have conversed with them on an interfaith radio show we all participated in back in 2017.
They seemed like plausible allies. Nevertheless, Christianity is the dominant religion, although at times it can be mixed with the traditional religion.
The pentecostal Christian denominations however shun traditional beliefs and label them as demonic.
SDJ: When was the Christian religion truly ascendant there?
TM: The colonial era is when Christianity took over. It also explains why its main rival, the traditional religion is a common target for demonisation by various Christian denominations today.
SDJ: How is the Christian religion a political force in the 2020s?
TM: There are certain Christian denominations that are very influential in politics.
One of the richest prophets called Uebert Angel was made the Presidential Envoy and Ambassador-atLarge for to Europe and the Americas. He later on stepped down after an Al Jazeera documentary exposed him smuggling tonnes of looted gold in cohorts with government officials.
One of the biggest pentecostal churches, Zimbabwe Assemblies Of God Africa (ZAOGA), mandates its devout followers to vote for the ruling Zanu PF party.
The indigenous Christian churches that dominate in the rural areas, popularly known as mapostori or apostolic churches, promise their followers that God will add one or two decades to their lives if they vote for the ruling party.
They are a big asset for the ruling party during elections so much so that they were exempted from COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and they carried on with their church conferences.
SDJ: What are the major concerns regarding the Christian religion in Zimbabwe now?
TM: Its grip on education and politics is getting stronger and while Zimbabwe is still secular on paper, something has to be done about Christianity’s influence.
SDJ: We all know the Ugandan and Ghanaian anti-LGBTI stance using UN LGBTI Core Group language–bills attempted to be put into law. Aren’t they the most regressive in the world? Has anything like that been attempted there?
TM: While Zimbabwe definitely isn’t LGBTQI friendly, homosexuality was decriminalised in 2013.
The old colonial laws of sodomy were done away with, but there are instances of customary laws in rural areas, where Christian apostolic faiths dominate that still punish people for homosexuality at the chief’s court. Most LGBTQI Zimbabweans seek refuge in Botswana and South Africa.
Mozambique is also LGBTQI friendly since the African Traditional Religion dominates, but the wars and ISIS terrorism going on there discourages Zimbabweans to seek refuge there
SDJ: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, my friend.
“Stell dir vor, es gäbe keinen Himmel“: ein afrikanisches Festival der Freidenker
Leo Igwe ist Vorstandsmitglied der Humanist Association of Nigeria und von Humanists International. Er hat einen Master in Philosophie und einen Doktortitel in Religionswissenschaften von der Universität Bayreuth in Deutschland und schrieb seine Doktorarbeit über Hexereivorwürfe in Nordghana. Igwe leitet die Advocacy for Alleged Witches und die Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In Lagos 2024 findet zwischen der Ankunft am 14. Oktober und der Abreise am 18. Oktober das „Imagine There Is No Heaven“ statt, ein afrikanisches Freidenker-Musik- und Kunstfestival. Das ist eine großartige Idee. Die Leute sollten das öfter machen. Wie kam man ursprünglich auf die Idee, Musik und Kunst in eine freidenkerische afrikanische Gemeinschaft zu bringen? Was war die ursprüngliche Inspiration für diese Idee?
Dr. Leo Igwe: Zunächst habe ich nach Möglichkeiten und Mechanismen gesucht, um die Botschaft des Freidenkertums zu vermitteln und freidenkerische Werte zu verbreiten und zu fördern. Die Idee ist, dass die Menschen ihren Geist nicht nur frei einsetzen, sondern ihn auf eine unterhaltsame Weise nutzen und sozialen und politischen Wandel fördern können. Allzu oft fühlen sich die Menschen unterhalten, wenn wir Musik verwenden, um eine Botschaft zu übermitteln. Manchmal wird eine Botschaft, die die Menschen normalerweise als anstößig empfinden würden, durch Musik akzeptabler. Es handelt sich also um einen Versuch, anstelle des Schreibens eine andere Kunstform, einen anderen Weg zu verwenden, aber nun Rhythmus und Lieder zu verwenden, um dieselben Ideale zu fördern. Wir können frei denken; indem wir frei denken, können wir helfen, eine Gesellschaft aufzubauen, Menschen inspirieren und uns selbst feiern. Das ist ein Aspekt.
Eine weitere Inspirationsquelle waren Reisen und die Teilnahme an Freidenkertreffen in Deutschland. Ich war auf einer der Konferenzen, dort wurde ein Lied gesungen. Es war „Die Gedanken sind frei“, ein deutsches Volkslied. Es gefiel mir und ich dachte, warum können wir hier in Nigeria oder Afrika nicht einen Text in dieser Richtung schreiben, der das Freidenkertum feiert und den Menschen die Möglichkeit gibt, ihren Geist zu trainieren? Ich war auch in Kopenhagen, wo wir den humanistischen Chor aus Norwegen hatten. Ich war auch in Großbritannien, wo es einen humanistischen Chor gibt. Nach meiner Rückkehr nach Nigeria dachte ich, ich könnte ein Forum oder eine Aktivität schaffen, um die Menschen zu inspirieren, sich zu treffen und zu organisieren. Ich dachte, wir könnten einen humanistischen Chor haben, wir könnten eine Freidenker-Band haben. All diese Erfahrungen kamen zusammen, um mich zu inspirieren und zu motivieren. Ich sprach auch mit einigen meiner Kollegen, damit wir das veranstalten konnten, was wir ein Freidenker-Festival nennen.
Jacobsen: Gibt es bei Ihnen Keynote-Vorträge, Präsentationen oder Podiumsdiskussionen?
Igwe: Wir arbeiten noch an diesen Keynote-Präsentationen. Aber wir verschicken Einladungen. Wir haben den Nobelpreisträger Wole Soyinka eingeladen. Er feiert dieses Jahr seinen 90. Geburtstag. Er ist also im Moment beschäftigt. Sie organisieren Veranstaltungen im ganzen Land und auf dem ganzen Kontinent. Ich weiß also nicht, ob er Zeit haben wird, teilzunehmen, aber wir haben eine Einladung ausgesprochen. Wir haben auch einen weiteren Professor eingeladen, Niyi Osundare, einen unserer humanistischen Gelehrten hier. Wir haben auch Professor Anele eingeladen, der auch bei unserer Skeptiker-Vorlesung gesprochen hat. Was wir also im Moment tun, ist, Einladungen zu verschicken. Bis August werden wir ein Programm haben, das auf denjenigen basiert, die ihre Teilnahme bestätigt haben. Im Moment ist das Programm also noch in Arbeit.
Jacobsen: Könnte es in Afrika oder genauer in Lagos und Nigeria eine Industrie geben, die sich im Großen und Ganzen mit einigen der populären oder traditionellen musikalischen Rhythmen und Instrumenten beschäftigt, überlagert mit einer eher freigeistigen Lyrik, im Gegensatz zur christlichen oder islamischen Musik?
Igwe: Darauf arbeiten wir hin. Das wird das erste Mal sein; es wird bahnbrechend sein. Viele Leute werden kommen. Wir versuchen, es richtig zu machen, damit die Leute anfangen zu verstehen, dass es ein Teil der Musikindustrie sein könnte. Wir wollen, dass es ein Teil des Musikfestivalprogramms wird, damit die Leute sich entscheiden können, ein Freidenker-Musikfestival zu besuchen. Sie könnten auch zu anderen Musikfestivals gehen, denn vieles von dem, was wir hier sehen, ist eher das, was wir Gospelmusik, christliche Musik und natürlich islamische Musik nennen. Wir denken, dass einige andere Leute inspiriert werden könnten, und wir könnten eine Art Musikindustrie haben, die freidenkerisch orientiert ist. Das ist mein Ziel, und ich hoffe, dass es Leute geben wird, die in diese Richtung schauen wollen. Wir denken auch, dass wir junge Talente inspirieren können. Ja, denn wir werden einige der freidenkerischen Musiktexte hervorheben, die wir bereits aus Nigeria haben. Wir hoffen, einige aus Südafrika und dem Kongo zu bekommen, und vielleicht bekommen wir auch ein paar aus Europa, um junge freidenkerische Talente zu inspirieren, damit sie freidenkerische Musikdarbietungen machen können. Wir hoffen, dass das passieren könnte. Aber wie gesagt, wir arbeiten hart daran, dass es ein Erfolg wird. Ich hoffe, dass die Leute eines Tages, in 10 oder 20 Jahren, zurückblicken und sagen werden, dass alles mit dieser Eröffnungsausgabe des African Freethought and Art Festival begann. Also, ja, wir hoffen, und ich hoffe, dass es so passieren könnte.
Jacobsen: Einer meiner Lieblingssongs aus Nigeria war „ This Is Nigeria “ von dem Künstler Falz. Er steht dem politischen System und einigen religiösen Dogmen und Heucheleien kritisch gegenüber. Wenn sie das hier lesen, sollten bekannte Künstler mit bestimmten Hits in Zukunft zu dieser Veranstaltung kommen?
Igwe: Ja, ja. Ich muss mich mit den Texten vertrauter machen, auch mit dem Musiker, den Sie erwähnt haben, aber ich werde danach suchen und sehen, wie wir ihn an Bord holen können. Wir werden noch mehr dazubekommen. Wir haben Femi Kuti. Wir haben natürlich Fela Kuti. Viele Leute haben Probleme mit ihrem Privatleben und dergleichen, aber ich möchte das immer trennen und sicherstellen, dass wir das Kind nicht mit dem Bade ausschütten. Aber ich weiß, dass er einer der Musiker ist, die uns hier ansprechen, und einige seiner Texte kritisieren religiösen Dogmatismus und Heuchelei. Ich bin mir also sicher, dass viele bekannte Musiker und Künstler mitmachen werden. Wir werden sehen, wie es sich entwickelt. Ich hoffe, dass viele bekannte Künstler mitmachen werden.
Jacobsen: Wir machen es kurz. Wie können sich die Leute engagieren? Wie können sie ihre Zeit spenden? Wie können sie teilnehmen? Was sind die schnellen Kontaktpunkte?
Igwe: Ja, wir veranstalten diese Veranstaltung an der Universität von Lagos. Und natürlich ist Lagos nicht nur als Handelsstadt beliebt, sondern auch als Ort, an dem die Kutis ihre Basis haben und wo sie auftreten. Wir organisieren die Veranstaltung an der Universität von Lagos. Wir arbeiten mit der dortigen Musikabteilung und dem Institut für Afrika- und Diasporastudien zusammen. Wir versuchen, Akademiker und Praktiker zusammenzubringen, um herauszufinden, wie wir junge Talente inspirieren können. Damit die Leute teilnehmen können. Wir sind noch dabei, die Vorbereitungen abzuschließen. Aber ich weiß, dass unser Termin feststeht. Wir werden uns vom 15. bis 17. Oktober dieses Jahres dort treffen. Wir freuen uns, wenn Menschen aus aller Welt dabei sind. Das wird bahnbrechend sein, und wir freuen uns auf die Menschen, die das Programm unterstützen und sponsern.
Wir freuen uns darauf, einige unserer lokalen humanistischen Freidenkergruppen bei der Veranstaltung begrüßen zu dürfen.
Im Rahmen unserer Kampagne werden wir einen Tisch aufstellen, an dem erklärt wird, was sie tun. Wir hoffen, dass die Leute auch Texte entwickeln können, die helfen, die Botschaft gegen die Hexenjagd zu verbreiten. Wir erwarten, dass unsere humanistische Vereinigung bei der Veranstaltung einen Tisch aufstellt, an dem sie erklären können, was sie tun. Von dort aus hoffen wir, junge Musiktalente und Studenten kennenzulernen, die daran interessiert sind, einen freidenkerischen Chor oder eine freidenkerische Band zu gründen. Wir freuen uns auf die Teilnahme anderer Musikschulen. Wir laden sie alle ein, damit sie teilnehmen können. Sie können das Konzept freidenkerischer Musik und Kunst verstehen und es schließlich in ihre Schul- und Fachbereichsprogramme integrieren. Als Studenten, Forscher oder als Wissenschaftler und Musiker werden sie wissen, dass freidenkerische Musik und Kunst ein wesentlicher Bestandteil des musikalischen Unternehmens sein sollten. Wir freuen uns darauf, diese Leute zusammenzubringen, und wir hoffen, dass sie sich an uns wenden, uns E-Mails schicken und Unterstützung anbieten können. Im Moment brauchen wir mehr Unterstützung. Die Leute können uns sponsern, spenden oder einen Weg finden, mit uns zusammenzuarbeiten. Lassen Sie uns dies verwirklichen und wir hoffen, dass es künftig ein fester Bestandteil unserer afrikanischen Musikindustrie wird.
Jacobsen: Vielen Dank für Ihre Zeit heute. Ich hoffe, Sie werden der nächste nigerianische Dr. Dre und inspirieren all diese neuen Künstler.
Igwe: Okay, das hoffe ich. Es besteht die Möglichkeit, die Menschen nicht nur zu inspirieren, sondern auch diese Talente zu feiern. Es besteht die Möglichkeit, die Mechanismen und Möglichkeiten der Freidenker-Musik zu nutzen, um eine Botschaft des kritischen Denkens, des Antidogmas und der sozialen Reformen zu senden und einige der Bedrohungen der Gesellschaft anzugehen, über die die Menschen wegen satirischer Auswirkungen nicht zu sprechen wagen. Wir können Freidenker-Musik und -Kunst nutzen, um diese Botschaft zu vermitteln und eine bessere Gesellschaft zu schaffen.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/25
*Interview conducted August 7, 2024.*
Javier Larrondo Calafat is the President of Prisoners Defenders. Here we talk about the large number of political prisoners in Cuba.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Recently, there has been what some call “violence” in Venezuela, including mass arrests. Human rights organizations have provided approximate numbers, and Maduro’s government has given their own figures.
Javier Larrondo Calafat: Notably, Maduro did not present the mandatory minutes required by law for election validation, while the opposition did present 80% of the minutes they could access, despite being impeded from obtaining the remaining 20%. These 80% of the minutes are public and have been analyzed by human rights organizations and other independent entities. The results show approximately 70% support for the new president and only 30% for Maduro. Even though 20% of the minutes are missing, the results appear clear because the government has not presented their version of the minutes. Conversely, the opposition has publicly presented theirs. If the government wanted to dispute the opposition’s numbers, it would be straightforward for them to verify the minutes and highlight any discrepancies.
However, the government has not done so. They have not presented the required minutes, which is a legal obligation. Therefore, democratic countries should recognize the opposition’s victory after so many days since July 28th. There is no need to ask for the minutes anymore; they should have been presented promptly after the election.
The government’s refusal to discuss the opposition’s data or publicly dismantle the opposition’s minutes, which include verifiable QR codes and hash numbers, is telling. Democratic countries should recognize the opposition as the legitimate winners.
In Europe, for example, the focus is on demanding Maduro present the minutes. It’s time to acknowledge that the election was a farce and the numbers were falsified. There are pictures on social networks showing the election screens with results favoring the opposition. The Carter Center, a credible international observer, did not receive valid official counts and has denied the validity of Maduro’s numbers.
We are wasting time due to a lack of courage to face the truth and its consequences. This lack of action from the European Union is shameful. They should ratify the opposition as winners, which is evident today. Perhaps it wasn’t clear on the first few days, but with all the analyzed and public minutes and Maduro’s inability to dismantle them, it is clear that the opposition should be recognized as the winners.
Truth is often not recognized because of the consequences. The consequences would include expelling people from embassies, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of those in the embassies, not recognizing Maduro’s government, breaking relations with Maduro, and acknowledging the harsh realities that are hard for some to accept. Many people prefer to avoid problems.
One day, back in 1939, Europe had a lot of problems, and Britain and the United States came to rescue Europe. Now, we are not acting in accordance with the help we received. We were granted freedom by countries like the United States and Great Britain, which were not invaded but saved us from the hell of Hitler.
Now, we are doing nothing for those countries governed by tyrants, and that is a shame for me. It’s common during politically repressive times, especially when official minutes are not provided and independent analyses show at least 1,100 prisoners.
Jacobsne: Whether they are prisoners of conscience or political prisoners, what is the status of such events when there are large-scale arrests and reactions from the international community? Typically, has the response been moderate, or have there been stronger applications of international pressure to address and correct human rights abuses?
Calafat: We call them human rights violations.Arbitrary detentions and imprisonments by the government are crimes against humanity. In Venezuela, we are witnessing crimes against humanity. The official number, set publicly by Maduro a few days ago, indicated 2,000 detainees in maximum security prisons. Given the time that has passed, the number is likely higher.
Human rights organizations in Venezuela have verified around 1,100 prisoners, but the official count of over 2,000 stands because Maduro publicly admitted it. It is very sad because these people have been, and continue to be, tortured over the past decade. In Europe, we are still asking Maduro for the minutes. It’s not the time to ask for the minutes; it’s time to recognize the opposition, sever ties with Maduro’s regime, and act according to international law.
Jacobsen: What about threats from Attorney General Tarek William Saab against organizations reporting on these arrests?
Calafat: That should be the final straw. But it seems that those in charge of foreign affairs in Europe tend to think that problems will eventually go away, which they do not. If you look elsewhere, things don’t get better. You have to act. And I like what Biden did. I like it very much. He was very congruent with the situation.
Maduro is a dictator. Maduro is committing crimes against humanity. Maduro did not win the election. Maduro did not fulfill the Venezuelan law to present the minutes to the opposition and demonstrate he won the election. In contrast, the opposition presented 80% of the minutes they could obtain, despite being impeded from getting the remaining 20%, which is against Venezuelan law. What more can we ask from a nonviolent opposition? They deserve our support.
It seems like in the European Union, we are cowards, and those problems will come back to us. It’s not effective to look elsewhere and hope the sun will shine tomorrow on its own. Human rights do not prevail unless governments worldwide fight for them.
I see the numbers here in one press release: 67% of the votes were for the opposition, while Maduro only achieved 30%. This should be a straightforward transition of power. Even if the missing 20% were all for Maduro, he would still have lost. The situation is very clear.
Jacobsen: Are opposition leaders like María Corina Machado currently in hiding, or were they previously in hiding and have now emerged to make public statements?
Calafat: María Corina Machado was hiding because Maduro wants her detained. She appeared in a public demonstration with tens of thousands of Venezuelans in Caracas. She’s doing the right thing. If Maduro imprisons Maria Corina, Edmundo, and their team, countries in the European Union will not be pressured to speak the truth about what is happening. They are acting wisely by hiding from Maduro’s political police, but they are in Venezuela, risking their lives.
It’s sad. Many people have the courage to risk their lives, and in Europe, we don’t do enough. It’s shameful. I’m ashamed of the European Union’s foreign policies and the lack of support we provide to the civil societies of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
We support Zelensky, but this should be our war too, not just Zelensky’s or Ukraine’s. It’s sad because these issues will come back to us, as they did with Hitler, Poland, and Austria. They will surely come back to us.
Jacobsen: What about the support from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico?
Calafat: They are playing the fool, giving Maduro time, basically. They cannot support Maduro because it’s a shameful farce, what Maduro did. So what they are doing is just giving him time and telling others not to recognize that Maduro lost, which aligns with Maduro’s interests. I believe former American President Trump was refusing to condemn Maduro at some point recently. As for what Trump does now, I don’t follow him much because I follow what the president says since that’s important. Now he’s in a campaign, like Kamala Harris. I don’t pay much attention to politicians when they are in a campaign. I focus on what the men and women in charge are saying.
Jacobsen: Is there anything else we’re not covering on this topic, or is that pretty much it for now?
Calafat: No, not really. That is the situation. I received a message from Antonio Ledesma, the international coordinator for María Corina Machado. I have a close relationship with him. It’s very sad. He’s saying the same thing: it’s not the time to ask for the minutes. It’s time to press Maduro and not recognize him as the legitimate president.
That’s all they have to do, but they don’t. In the European Union and other countries, they don’t follow that step. It’s sad to see that, in these situations, the United States often act more congruently than the country I live in. It’s pretty sad to see it happening repeatedly.
Even though they committed fatal errors like the war in Iraq and the Afghanistan occupation, I pay attention to 100% of their decisions. Support from democratic countries is crucial. I regret what the European Union does, and I tend to think that the United States often supports democratic civil societies in many countries, more so than the errors they committed, even if those errors were grave.
Because of their previous president, how was his name? It doesn’t come to mind now. George Bush Jr. entered Iraq just to name an enemy that wasn’t behind the terrorist attacks. But those were different administrations and different people. I don’t see Biden committing those errors. I hope the European Union does better in the near future.
Jacobsen: I hope so. Did you want to give any commentary on Daniel Ferrer?
Calafat: I think it’s been more than 6 months. He has not been able to talk to anyone. We don’t know if he’s alive or not. 6 months or 4 months, something like that. In February or March, he was seen for 2 minutes. I think I told you about it. He was on the floor, beaten badly, but for the past 4 months, he has not been seen or heard from.
I’m very worried about him. That’s another person with courage, and the European Union is missing in action. They don’t even post a Twitter message about all the people imprisoned in Cuba without reason, who are so innocent and brave. The whole situation is very sad, and I’m worried about Jose Ferrer.
I’m worried about his health. I’m worried about his whereabouts. I don’t know what will happen there. But if you let the dog bite you, he will bite you again. And we are letting these dogs bite the democrats—Maduro, Diaz-Canel, Ortega, and so on. So I don’t know how these politicians in Europe think things will get better if they let the dogs bite the democrats. The dogs will grow, bite more, and become more dangerous. That’s an obvious thing.
Jacobsen: Recently, there was a political prisoner swap with Russia. What do you make of this?
Calafat: I was very impressed.
Jacobsen: What do you think some of the thinking was behind that? Not that there was a release and an exchange, which was good, but it’s so unusual it raises questions. What do you think was the context for them?
Calafat: I don’t really know the benefit for the Russian government in doing that. I don’t have it very clear. The exchange, yes. I don’t know exactly the details of the exchange, but when I see Americans being liberated by their government. It’s because their government has been working very hard to get them out of that hell. That is completely opposite to what is happening to Luis Frometa, for example, in Cuba.
We talked about Luis Frometa, the German who is in prison in Cuba. The German government has not done enough. Up to now, or up to some months ago, they did almost nothing to liberate him. They were saying, “Well, it’s up to the Cuban authorities, and we cannot do anything.” Yes, you can. See what the Americans do for their citizens? It’s important to protect your citizens. It’s important to say to your citizens, when you have a problem, your government is behind you. Even if it becomes an international crisis, the government will support you. That is very important.
By the way, Jose Ferrer had his birthday on July 29th. We released a video on his case that day, remembering him, and we released a video with his whole life story. His wife and kids tried to see him in jail, and again, they could not. Every week, they go to the prison to try to see him, and the authorities don’t let them. So we don’t know about his whereabouts. They are very worried. I know him very well and consider him a very close person. It’s a very sad situation.
Calafat: Javier, thank you very much for your time again. Appreciate it.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/24
Hardayal Singh works for United Sikhs. UNITED SIKHS is a U.N. affiliated, international, non-profit, non-governmental, humanitarian relief, education, human development and advocacy organization that aims to empower those in need, especially disadvantaged and minority communities around the world. UNITED SIKHS is head-quartered in New York and registered as a non-profit, tax exempt organization, in New York pursuant to Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and registered as a charity in the State of New York. It is also registered as a Charity in England and Wales under the Charities Act 1993, Charity Number 111 2055; registered in Australia as a non-profit NGO (ABN 24 317 847 103); a registered NGO in Belgium; is a registered charity organization in Canada with Canada Revenue Agency; registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 in Punjab, as a tax exempt organization under section 80G of the Income Tax Act 1961; under the French Association Law 1901; under the Societies Registration Act 1860 in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, Pakistan; as a registered society under the Registrar of Societies in Malaysia (registered as UNITED SIKHS Malaysia Humanitarian Aid Organisation- Reg. No: PPM-015-14-06042015); and as an NGO pending registration in the Republic of Ireland.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we’re here with Hardeep Singh from the United Sikhs. When did the organization get started, and how has its development been for the Sikh community over time?
Hardayal Singh: The organization was started in 1999. It began in New York City and then spread to other countries. That’s how it initially began and grew.
Jacobsen: What about Canada, expanding outside New York to another country?
Singh: It was registered in 2008. It happened after the initial establishment in New York City. So I know it started in the US and then went to the UK. The UK expansion was around 2002 or 2003. From there, it went to India, then to Canada, and subsequently to France, Belgium, and Ukraine. Ukraine’s expansion happened recently, and we are also in Australia, New Zealand, and Pakistan. Those are the countries we are in, along with the United States.
Jacobsen: How do you get recognized by the UN regarding affiliation to expand services and reputation?
Singh: To get recognized by the UN, you must work in disaster relief. When you go to disaster sites, you meet with UN officials and realize there’s a whole process of registering as an NGO. We started that process, and it took us almost a year and a half to two years to register. They go through a series of queries, financial reports, and data. Once we went through that, we were able to get registered as an affiliation with the United Nations, which gives a lot of credibility and value. You can collaborate with the UN’s resources during disasters, which is very helpful.
Jacobsen: How do you work with communities, families, and individuals to help them become economically self-sufficient again, especially those affected by disasters?
Singh: Project QT allows us to work with individuals to help them get back on their feet. Many people lost their ability to meet their economic and financial requirements during COVID-19, leading to job losses. We look at the person’s profession and see what training and funding they need. For example, if someone is a taxi driver or repairs mobile phones or windshields, we help them get the necessary training and bank loans to resume work.
Sometimes, we have significant guarantors for them because we thoroughly check the background to ensure we can vouch for any person. Then, we guide them through the entire marketing process and the aspects needed to set up independently, enabling them to care for their families. We also have numerous other programs, such as resources for helping with school bullying, which is a significant project.
Jacobsen: What are the issues that kids are facing in terms of school bullying?
Singh: As Sikhs, we look different and have our own identity. This difference is a primary reason for bullying, especially among Sikh boys. Girls may get bullied because of their long hair, braids, or maybe the colour, but it’s mostly boys who face bullying. Boys are bullied because of the turban or dastar they wear, or sometimes the colour or the kirpan they carry. Kids don’t wear the kirpan much, but some do. Mostly, the bullying is due to how they look and the beard they keep. Youngsters tie on their heads it’s mainly because of the small turban, called a patka. They face name-calling, such as “What’s that bandaid you’re wearing on your head?” or other derogatory terms.
Bullying is rampant, and any negative reaction to it is not good. We must train parents and students on what steps to take if they get bullied, how to approach the school, what to say to the supervisors, and how to handle the situation. We also visit schools and give presentations on what Sikhism is. Through dialogue, we educate people, helping them understand that we’re all human beings and appearance should not be a means to make judgments. Coexistence is key as long as nobody is harmful.
Jacobsen: How do you link up with Gurdwaras to help build community support, whether it’s helping those trying to get back on their feet economically or helping kids who are being bullied?
Singh: Gurdwaras are the central point, much like churches, where people gather for congregations. They connect, bond, and discuss what affects them and their families in their free time. It’s a place where people hook up, connect, and talk about their problems.
It’s a word-of-mouth system that has already spread among a few people, specifically with the management. The management is aware of what we do and recommends to the congregation members who to go to when such things happen. There is a huge benefit in bringing awareness to the Gurdwaras so that they and their schools can leverage the management, including posters and flyers, to raise awareness about who to contact in such situations. Farming is a big part of life for many, but hard times can come to anyone.
Jacobsen: How does farmers relief work in India?
Singh: Farming is currently facing a crisis. Right now, we are only helping from a humanitarian perspective, as the farmers in India are asking for certain rights and requirements. They want at least a minimum value of a fixed price from the government to meet their needs. When the industry is privatized, private owners dictate the pricing, and everyone wants a cheaper price. The concern is that big companies may negotiate better prices with large landowners, which smaller farmers cannot match. It’s similar to how big stores like Walmart affect small mom-and-pop shops.
Certain areas have restrictions to prevent big stores from dominating, ensuring the town retains some control. Modernization is important for survival, but more effort must be needed to streamline and find a solution. This is why farmers are protesting in India, particularly in Punjab, after seeing the high suicide rates among farmers in other regions. They realize that the current system is not working, so they are taking a stand and blocking rules until the government develops a strategy and does not privatize the sector.
Jacobsen: I’m heading to Ukraine for work correspondence in soon.
Singh: Wow, that’s going to be interesting. This will be my second trip, and I’ll be there for another few weeks. Where are you going in Ukraine?
Singh: We will land in Chisinau, Moldova, then go to Kyiv and several other cities. Last time, we went to Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson (about 5 kilometres from the front line), back to Mykolaiv, then to Dnipro, Kharkiv, and finally Kyiv. It’s quite a lot of movement.
Jacobsen: Air raid alarms are on every night.
Singh: I’m sure. It’s a constant concern for the relief workers.
Jacobsen: What kind of relief work are you providing for Ukrainians?
Singh: We are focused on humanitarian aid, providing essential supplies and support to those affected by the conflict.
In a national situation, our headquarters are at Shehyni, the entrance point from southern Poland into Ukraine. Shehyni is the first entrance point there, and we have a base camp and a warehouse where all the refugees coming in and out can take shelter and receive breakfast and other necessary supplies.
In Kyiv, we have a small warehouse where we work in various regions based on feedback from the mayor’s office and others to deliver food and emergency supplies as needed. We collaborate with the local systems, where each city has a mayor. The oblast, a larger administrative area, contains smaller cities. For instance, the Kyiv oblast encompasses numerous smaller cities.
In Kharkiv, we have another center in Chuhuiv, closer to Russia but still in Ukraine. We recently completed building two bomb shelters there, and the inauguration ceremony is scheduled for August 26th. These shelters, supported by the United States, are for senior citizens, women with children, and older women.
The needs shift to winter clothes, socks, and similar items during winter. People often question where the aid money goes, and the reality is that it first supports the army, which is defending the country. It also goes to civilians supporting the army’s camps in nearly all towns. Many older adults and those unable to join the army are left behind; they are the population we primarily serve.
We also support many orphanages. The situation remains tense, though less reported due to the Middle Eastern crisis. Every day and night in Ukraine brings uncertainty, but the people are resilient and strong-willed. Their resilience inspires us to ensure they get the support they need. When you’re there, you meet the people and see their adaptability to daily air raid alarms, which have become a normal part of their lives.
Jacobsen: So, Hardayal, thank you very much for your time today.
Singh: Let me know if you’re going to Ukraine and if you need to meet with somebody there. We can connect you. Are you just going for journalism, or are you going to fight or something?
Jacobsen: No, no, it’s going to be war correspondence journalism. I’m going with a Romanian guy doing much live reporting there. He’s probably been there at least 200 days since the full-scale invasion.
Singh: But are you going to the war zone? You’re going quite close. Kharkiv is a very hot spot. That area where you’re going is very intense.
Jacobsen: We’ve been to Kharkiv before, so at least we will start in Kyiv this time. It’s one of the safer areas. He has the entire itinerary planned out because he works for Newsweek, Romania.
Jacobsen: Yes, we’re going to be visiting several cities. Once I know which cities, we can figure something out.
Singh: The bomb shelters are in Chuhuiv, very close to Russia. If you intend to go there or in that area, it’s quite intense, with fires and bombs falling here and there. You hope to be lucky to avoid those spots. I have some pictures of the shelters; I can send them to you.
Jacobsen: Yes, please. I’m doing a series if you have any relief or aid workers willing to be interviewed. The Center for Civil Liberties, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, has conducted a series of interviews with me. It would be interesting to get more perspectives. I even interviewed a restaurateur who turned her restaurant into a shelter, with tables becoming beds and the kitchen running 24/7 to provide food for civilians and soldiers.
Singh: Lots of opportunities indeed. All the best, and we’ll be in touch.
Jacobsen: Thank you, sir. Take care. Safe travels. Be safe.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/23
Cassandra Happe is a WalletHub Analyst. Here we talk about some states most and least affected by drug issues based on a report by WalletHub.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for disconnected youth?
Cassandra Happe: Louisiana, New Mexico, and West Virginia are the worst states for disconnected youth, which means high rates of young adults neither working nor in school, and facing significant challenges like poverty, low education levels, and poor health. In contrast, states like New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Illinois offer the best environments for youth, marked by better education, employment opportunities, and healthier lifestyles.”
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for the percentage of disconnected youth?
Happe: Louisiana, Alaska, and Arkansas have the highest percentages of disconnected youth, which indicates significant challenges in education and employment for young adults in these states. The District of Columbia, North Dakota, and Nebraska, however, have the lowest rates because of their stronger support systems and opportunities for youth. These disparities highlight the need for targeted interventions in states with higher rates to prevent long-term socio-economic issues.
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for the percentage of youth without a high school diploma?
Happe: New Mexico ranks worst in the nation for the percentage of youth without a high school diploma, with 15.5% of its 18-24-year-olds lacking this key educational achievement. This severely limits their future job prospects and earning potential. On the other hand, Hawaii boasts the best performance, with only around half that percentage, making it a leader in ensuring its youth complete their high school education.
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for the percentage of overweight and obese youth?
Happe: States vary widely in terms of youth obesity rates, which is a reflection of broader disparities in health and resources. West Virginia has the highest percentage of overweight and obese youth, indicating significant challenges in promoting healthy lifestyles among its young population. Other states with concerning rates include Oklahoma, Ohio, Arkansas, and New Mexico.
On the other hand, New Hampshire, Colorado, California, Vermont, and Massachusetts have the lowest percentages, which suggests that these states may offer better environments or resources that support healthier youth outcomes. Addressing these disparities is crucial for ensuring the future well-being of all young Americans.
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for the percentage of youth drug users?
Happe: Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Oregon rank as the worst states for youth drug use, or in other words, the highest percentages of young individuals engaged in illicit drug activities. On the other hand, Alabama, Utah, and Texas rank among the best, as their low rates of youth drug use are the result of more favorable environments or effective preventive measures.
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for youth labor force participation rates?
Happe: States with high youth labor force participation rates, like Wisconsin and Utah, are providing better opportunities for young adults to engage in the workforce, which is critical for their development and future economic stability. In contrast, states like Hawaii, Mississippi, and New York face challenges with low participation rates, indicating a need for more support and resources to help young people transition smoothly into the labor market. Without intervention, these states risk long-term negative effects on their economic and social progress.
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for the youth poverty rate?
Happe: Youth poverty rate is a critical indicator of future economic stability, and the disparities between states are striking. The District of Columbia, West Virginia, and Louisiana rank among the worst, with significantly high youth poverty rates. These states face compounded challenges such as low educational attainment and high rates of disconnected youth, which further entrench poverty. On the other end, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Hawaii have the lowest youth poverty rates, as they are likely benefiting from stronger social safety nets and better educational and employment opportunities for young adults.
Jacobsen: Which states are the worst and best for the percentage of homeless youth?
Happe: The states with the highest percentage of homeless youth include the District of Columbia, Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and California. These states face significant challenges that contribute to youth homelessness, such as high rates of poverty, lack of affordable housing, and insufficient support services. On the other hand, Mississippi, Delaware, Indiana, Virginia, and Louisiana report the lowest percentages of homeless youth, which suggests better support systems or fewer economic pressures affecting this vulnerable population. The stark difference between the worst and best states underscores the critical need for focused efforts in areas with high youth homelessness.
Jacobsen: What can be done to reduce the number of youth disconnected from work and education?
Happe: States should focus on comprehensive reforms targeting both educational and socio-economic factors to effectively address the issue of youth disconnected from work and education. Investments in stable housing, improved access to education, and robust youth programs are crucial. Enhanced role models and mentorship programs can provide guidance, while financial support and healthcare access can alleviate barriers to success. States with high youth disconnection rates, such as Louisiana and New Mexico, must prioritize these areas to prevent long-term negative effects on future economic and social progress.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/22
*Updated August 23, 2024.*
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Dr. Alon Milwicki. So, I am from Canada. I live in the rural areas outside of Vancouver while you are in Texas. I say “Vancouver” because that is the common city international people will know, but I live in a smaller semi-tourist/semi-retirement community now, temporarily. So, anyway, I will open with a Canadian apology for the Proud Boys. It seems polite in an extensive series. Gavin McInnes, as far as I know, is Canadian. Then, he moved to the United States to spread the hateful ideology.
While looking at some of my town’s history, I found out that only a few years ago, there was a group called the Northern Order. They presented themselves as either a white nationalist or a white supremacist group at Fort Langley National Historic Site. They took pictures, about a dozen ‘brave’ young men decided to take the photo and then blur their faces(Facebook).
They had a Facebook page and defined themselves as wanting to preserve something akin to Anglo-Saxon European stock, heritage, etc. So, that’s a common theme in North American history right up to the present. Naturally, it’s a statistical phenomenon: some rise, some fall, some are long-term, and some are short-term. So, antisemitism has been a focus of many groups. Let’s start with definitions; what is the most appropriate way to define antisemitism? What is the source for that? How do these groups stand?
Milwicki: I will give you the way we talk about it. The biggest problem is within the question. Defining antisemitism as something static is problematic. It’s the same way that defining racism is problematic because it changes. It changes depending on the period we’re talking about, who’s talking about it, and how it’s being discussed.
It also depends on the society. Sure, there are commonalities. It boils down to dehumanizing and attacking Jewish people. But when you look to give it a finite definition, you will run into problems. What antisemitism means today is not what antisemitism meant before October 7; you can be damn sure of that. You go back 100 years, bring it into a European or Australian context, then it becomes something different. But I would direct you to this:
That’s the way that I would say antisemitism is not defined but should be talked about. It is a starting point for a discussion about not so much what it is but how it operates and why it matters, if that makes sense. What this does and differentiates from other organizations is that we have in bold right there: the way to combat and understand antisemitism is not by defining it but by discussing it, understanding how it affects people, and looking at how it is presenting itself right now. This document is going to be updated. We give examples of the most prominent narratives.
The likelihood of the demonization of queer people and male supremacy will still be there. However, other things about antisemitism are presenting themselves in American society more openly right now, like the utilitarianism of the Jews and how Jews are utilized as tools, whether it’s by Christian nationalists or right-wing politicians. They’re a means to an end. Supporting Jews gets you X, a lot of that has to do with believing in the tropes of Jewish power and Jewish influence.
What do we make up? We make up one to two percent of this country and 0.2 percent of the world’s population; yet somehow, it’s believed that we control 80 to 90 to even 100 percent of the world’s wealth and influence. One of the most important things to recognize is that seeking a finite definition is flawed, if that makes sense.
It’s easy to say, “Look, antisemitism is hatred against Jews.” Great, but how does that help us? How does saying that help us? It doesn’t. Some of the best examples I’ll give are, in the wake of the Gaza war and Israel’s retaliation, if somebody graffitis “Free Gaza” on a wall in the middle of a freeway or something, great. Criticism of Israel, support for Palestinians, whatever; however, when they decide to do it in a synagogue or a Jewish institution, it’s not the message that makes it antisemitic. It’s the decision on the location that does. This person decided that Jews are synonymous with Israel and that a Jewish religious institution or a Jewish institution is responsible or at least connected to what Israel is or isn’t doing. That’s antisemitic. That decision is antisemitic. That nuance needs to be pointed out because, in these finite definitions, the more finite they get, the less nuance is included. That becomes a problem. That was a very long-winded non-answer to your question. But does that make sense?
Jacobsen: Yes, I know a counselling psychologist, a Métis doctoral counselling psychologist, who specializes in the self. He views cultures and the self as non-static. They’re dynamic entities, so, similarly, with this definition.
Milwicki: That’s the thing. I’ve always been a grassroots historian, a social historian. As long as people are the driving engines of these actions and beliefs, they’ll never be static. You can say things like racism is hatred of someone of a different race, or you could say things like anti-Islam is hatred of Muslims. You can say all those things. They’re obvious. That’s obvious. You don’t need an academic to tell you that antisemitism has to do with hating Jews. You don’t need me for that. Where others and I are valuable in pointing out that these things are not static; it is important to continue to study them so that we can keep up with them and understand how they’re presenting themselves. The fact that antisemitism is so baked into American society is so baked in that most people utilize antisemitic tropes without realizing it. The amount of people in this country who are talking about a deep state have no idea that at its core, it has roots in antisemitism, in recent antisemitism. That’s Henry Ford’s stuff. You can probably trace that back before the protocols.
And the person using that deep state term might not be an overtly antisemitic person, might not even be hateful. They might be someone who thinks there’s a shadow government. There’s a lot of Americans that do. But the very concept of that shadow government, of that puppet master, of people controlling things behind the scenes, has its core in antisemitism. We see this often, for example, with George Soros, right? It doesn’t matter. I’ve written about the George Soros trope twice for SPLC alone. The George Soros trope, it doesn’t matter who the man is or what he does. It doesn’t matter. The “Soros,” George Soros’s name, is no longer about the person.
Soros has become a convenient stand-in for Jews. In one of the articles, I’d have to find out if it was two years ago or last year that I wrote that we did a study. We took a month and looked at if you look at the Soros tropes – “Soros is behind,” “Soros backed power,” and “Soros greed” – they even got Soros involved with causing the Holocaust. A couple of years ago, I believe it was a GOP convention in either Minnesota or Michigan or even more recently, they have these pictures of George Soros as the puppet master. Those are the exact images the Nazis used of Jews. Whatever your thoughts about George Soros as a businessman, I don’t understand business.
But it’s not a criticism of George Soros or his business. Put it this way: nobody is saying Elon Musk backed prosecutors or Elon Musk backed D.A.s. No one cares about that. And you have to ask yourself why. There’s this one significant difference: Soros is Jewish. Everything they’re accusing Soros of fits into these antisemitic tropes.
Jacobsen: I found another one where I’ve been seeing this one thrown around, too, this bigger picture is the greatreplacement theory. That Jews are behind all this. What’s the antisemitic grounding for a clear conspiracy hypothesis or whatever you want to call it?
Milwicki: I wrote the recent Soros article. Looking at this one, you’ll see the graph I told you about from 2022. This is the far-right using that. This is the George Soros trope one. We used two graphs in this on. It was for a month that we did this little study. But if you also scroll down a little bit more and you look at the tropes there, or the idea that Soros controlled every single one of them, then these are all things that are said by people still to this day and have been said for arguably 20-plus years. If you replace the word “Jew” in place of “Soros” or “George Soros” with any of those, those are all standard antisemitic tropes, every single one. But this is palatable. Because it says “George Soros.” It’s so palatable that the country has become so inflamed by this that talking about George Soros like this isn’t considered antisemitic in mainstream or at least in right-wing politics. I would love to say left-wing politics also, but it’s everywhere. That’s how baked it is.
Jacobsen: Are these done consciously to shuttle these extremist, antisemitic ideas into the mainstream–Left and Right?
Milwicki: You could make it. The question is, which is worse? On the one hand, combating hatred is something you can do. Hateful people can disassociate from you or vice versa. That can happen. You can help that. However, ignorance is a lot more tricky because, at least in our lifetimes, ignorance has become considerably more willful. People are not like, “Well, I didn’t know, I’d like to learn.” People say, “I don’t want to know, and what you’re saying is wrong because it counters my beliefs or things that I already know.” There needs to be more openness or intellectual inquiry among people nowadays. People know. The people who think George Soros is a villain, there’s almost nothing I could ever do. I’ve been told, “Don’t you think that because you have a PhD, it means you’re tainted by academia?”
Milwicki: If you scratch the surface of any conspiracy theory, you’ll find antisemitism. That’s a cold-hearted fact. I can give you an example. I don’t even know the headline. This might not have to do directly with the great replacement, but this theme is here. George Soros is behind the move to make abortions legal because California is like a godless country. The great replacement is the idea of minorities replacing white people.
In racist dogmas and racist theologies, there’s a belief that the other, the non-white, are not capable. This is traceable a long way back. The long-standing history of anti-Black racism in this country is obvious. At least, it should be to most people anyway. I’m sure, as an outsider looking in, you might know more about America’s racist history than the average high school student because that’s a whole other thing. So there has to be someone behind it who has the money, knowledge, and ability to pull the strings and use these things.
I say “things” on purpose because that’s the way they believe these other races are. Who’s behind it all? Jewish people, always, always pulling the strings. So again, please read through our website to see why the Great Replacement Theory is still popular, Tucker Carlson loves to talk about it all the time. Unfortunately, he still has a following. It’s not with Black people. The migrant caravans, who do you think is behind all that? Soros. Now, the people saying Soros is behind it might not realize that they’re buying into antisemitic tropes. A lot of those people would fall into the category of the “I’m-not-racist-but” people. Like, “I’m not racist; I got a lot of Jewish friends. I’m not racist, but you have to believe Jews have lots of money. I’m not racist, but you gotta believe there’s more black and brown people in jail.” I’ve always said that when I used to teach, I used to say, if anyone ever says to you, “I’m not racist, but” tell them to stop. Because whatever comes after that “but” is going to be racist. It’s as close to a universal truth as you will get. If someone says, “I’m not racist, but” be like, “Bro, I’m out. Come on, stop.”
So, one of the hallmarks of antisemitism is conspiracy. So, any conspiracy you find, I guarantee you, you can find an antisemitic rationale behind it or some antisemitic explanation of it. Remember Jews, and if you read Mein Kampf, even got through the first four chapters of it, you’ll realize that Jews are the only people who can be both communist and capitalist, greedy and poor, dirty rich. If there’s one thing the Nazis did well, it’s that they consolidated all of their enemies into one.
It’s hard to hate so many different things. Who are we hating now? Whose fault is this? It doesn’t have to be all of those; it’s the Jew. Because Jews represent such a small part of the population, that makes them even more dangerous; that makes the hidden hand much more viable because you can’t see them. Look at me; I look like a white guy, right?
My long hair is the only thing that gives me away. I might be a little weird to these people. The amount of times in myclasses when I got told, “You don’t seem Jewish.” What does a Jew seem like? They weren’t coming from a place of hatred. The one kid who flipped over his thing and gave me a Confederate flag was, but I called him out and said, “Yes, yes, like that. That’s bigotry, that’s racism. What you’re showing right there.”
Jacobsen: What about the tragedy of some who have come from a history of experiencing a variety of racism, then use antisemitic tropes and conspiracies to bolster their community? A common claim against Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Milwicki: Antisemitism is the great unifier. If there’s one thing that can connect the Hebrew Israelites to the Proud Boys, to the Ku Klux Klan, to Patriot Front, to Neo-Volkish, you name it. The one thing that can tie them all together is antisemitism. If you find any form of racism, you can find antisemitism. It’s not as irregular as it sounds. A lot of the stuff that the radical Hebrew Israelites would like to say is Christian identity repackaged.
Jacobsen: I’ve mentioned something in other interviews, but I’ll say it again. My background is that I did my 23andMe and came out 100% Northwestern European. So, by that definition of ‘white,’ if we have to use ‘race’ pseudoscience, that would be categorized into that. My nationality is Canadian; my heritage is Dutch, Norwegian, and so on. So, I have a bunch of people who are Jewish friends. I learned that around 1810, Israel Jacobson founded Reform Judaism. If there’sany relation at all, I have no idea. I have yet to do a formal research project into it. One of my longest-term writing friends is Rick Rosner. He wrote for Jimmy Kimmel for 12 years. He’s part of the Mega Society. He does well on these high-range tests. So, he’s a wacky character. He is a former child prodigy in physics. He did non-genius things like roller skating, waiting, stripper, bouncer, nude art modelling, and comedy writing for his career. He’s in his 60s. Another gentleman did identically on some of these more famous tests with large sample sizes and recent statistical analysis, measuring pretty high. But not as high as originally stated. A guy who was featured in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, by Cynthia McFadden in 20/20 (also), Rick Montgomery in The Kansas City Star, John R. Quain in Popular Science, Ray Preston in KMOV, Louis Finley in KTVO, with Spike Jonze, with Aaron Henry, in Esquire by Mike Sager, NBC, Errol Morris in First Person, SuperScholar, Christopher Michael Langan. They claimed an IQ of 195. He has claimed 190 to 210. Based on more recent sober analysis, these are not true but are believed. [Ed. Probably closer to 163 to 170+ S.D. 16, as with Rosner.]
Milwicki: Geniuses can be racist, too.
Jacobsen: Correct. So you have very high scores on these reasonably researched high-range test set sample – Mega Test and Titan Test. As a case study, he’s interesting as a independent, freelance journalist, leaning more into investigative journalism in this instance, a complex figure. He has expressed views around conspiracy theories and the 9-11 truth movement, opposition to interracial relationships, and getting a following by people’s freedom to, generally speaking, say something about them, as well as using what has been termed dog whistles around antisemitism (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, among other things), particularly in some articles by Justin Ward in The Baffler, Talbert Gregson of Cracked, and Ari Feldman in The Forward. So, opinions differ in the extreme on him. People might disagree with the applications of people’s articles or orientations. Still, it allows a little bit of individual reflection, but, anyway, what that’s got methinking about is how people who are antisemitic, at least in this stream, have their opposition to interracial relationships. Not the interracial relationship itself but the fact that somehow the Jews are behind them. That, to me, is hilarious. What’sthe thinking there?
Milwicki: It goes back to what I said before, which is that these demographics are incapable of doing things independently. Or that Jews have this desire to remake the world. Many anti-Semites will call it the “Jew world order,” for example. They’re very clever. So, when things are going in a bad direction, there’s this belief that there has to be someone behind it. There are demographers. In the United States, there’s this belief, or there’s this study that was done that says by 2050, this country’s going to be predominantly Latino. That’s been something that’s been around for a while. For me, I don’t give a crap. But that scares the crap out of many people. There’s this belief, think about it. Every year in this country, there’s a war on Christmas.
Every year: I am sorry, but I am not inundated by menorahs and Hanukkah music every December. I don’t see Ramadan parties or Eid parties. I don’t get a federal holiday for Yom Kippur. But this all plays into it—this victimization of the white Christian male, cis-gendered male, specifically, the white Christian man. So that’s a tale as old as time, dude, with the risk of being the Beast myself. Anyway, it’s not rational. Racism of any kind, any discrimination, is not rational. That’sa key point. People will point to evidence and instances, but an instance of something happening.
That’s not evidence. The personal does not reflect the whole, right? The fact that you got robbed by a Latino man does not mean that all Latino men are criminals. Do you get what I’m saying? But that’s the belief. However, when it’s a white man who is raping a girl, not all white men are rapists. That’s wrong. That only applies to minorities. So you have the combination of the demonization of minorities coupled with the puppet mastery of the Jew. The fact that society is changing: Who benefits from that? Who’s the financial backer? Who’s the one behind this?
Listen, if I was half of what anti-Semites believed I was… I used to tell my students this in classes: all of their tuition would be going into my right pocket. I’d be sharing it equally with my left pocket because I’m both communist and capitalist. The only demographic of people who are capable of this level of betrayal, this level of duplicity, this level of banality and evil, while simultaneously being godless and whatever, are Jews. I’m the worst kind. I look like everyone else.
Jacobsen: What would be the centrist examples and leftist examples of antisemitism?
Milwicki: Buying into tropes and buying into tropes because they are so difficult. That would be my best answer. Look, here’s the thing. The way I used to explain it is that it’s the right that hates Jews. It’s the left that doesn’t like Israel.
It’s in this world we’re living in now where we’re seeing that mix. While it is true that there have been some right-wing racist organizations that have come out supporting Palestinians and Holocaust revisionists, right? Other researchers might have seen more, but I’ve seen this. The people who are–let’s say–vandalizing synagogues or Holocaust museums with “Free Gaza” aren’t necessarily right-wing. I would argue they’re probably progressives. The trope that they’re falling into there is the conflation of Jews with Israel. So that would be my best example. That’s a recent one. I can’t tell you how many progressives have done that because nobody sticks around.
That’s the thing about these. I track antisemitic incidents for SPLC. I can tell you that since Gaza, vandalism, bomb threats, and graffiti of Jewish institutions have gone up like this.
Jacobsen: It’s on the rise in Canada, too.
Milwicki: So, I see much stuff happening in Canada, too. It does not look like antisemitism. Like I said, I said antisemitism is baked into America. That’s true. But the reason is because it’s baked into Western civilization. I’m not the first historian to tell you that it’s the world’s oldest racism. As long as there have been Jews, there have been people who have been against Jews. One of the facts of Western history is that you can barely go a half-century without a pogrom against Jews. You can’t. If there’s one true thing, it’s that in periods of heightened tension, whether economic, racial, political, social, or even spiritual. You will find antisemitism accompanying it.
What Herzl said in the 1890s about the Jewish question, right? He said something along the lines of, ‘The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers, and it’s brought in because they are allowed to live there.’ The question becomes the same question that Goebbels ripped off, except he was like, “What do we do with the Jews?” Herzl intended: “What happens to us when they turn?” One of the best examples of this is if I were to ask you point blank, between 1870 and roughly 1917, what do you think the safest place in the world for Jews was?
Jacobsen: Germany.
Milwicki: German Jews were allowed to join the army. German Jews fought for the Central Powers. They were granted citizenship. They flocked en masse to fight for the Central Powers. Hitler’s commander was Jewish, and he was awarded a medal. There was even talk among them once Herzl died in “Zionist headquarters.” Instead of finding it in historic Jewish history in the Middle East in what was then the British protectorate of Palestine, there was talk about…
Jacobsen: Germany?
Milwicki: Germany. There were a lot of moderate Zionist Jews. Remember, I’m using the word “Zionism” in the context of the 19th century and early 20th century. It’s another social construct that’s gone out of control, especially how people use it. That’s a side issue or another issue we can talk about. But then, things went bad. Things got bad. You have Jews living in appreciable numbers in Germany. So you get things like the stab-in-the-back myth. We start seeing political cartoons of Jews stabbing German soldiers in the trenches from the back. There’s a whole legend about Ludendorff and a British admiral that’s probably not true. Where the British admiral says at tea time, “Well, it sounds like you were stabbed in the back,” and Ludendorff is like, “Son of a bitch.” And then you get Mein Kampf in 1923. That’s all she wrote.
Or look at Spain or France; France was the most dangerous place in the world to be Jewish, or Russia had pogroms against Jews; the Soviet Union, you name it, it’s everywhere. So it’s that insider-outsider thing. I’m not going to go full Herzlian here. He’s right on one thing. Jews move to places where they’re allowed to live freely. That is a fact of history.
Jacobsen: Could you make a social and group psychology statement? If you look at the demographics of how many Jewish people living in a country and rank them by country with the most antisemitic country to the country with the least, you could make a social psychological statement. Generally speaking, this is the portion of people where they feel safest to live, where more Jewish people are; then there’s a safer feeling. And wherever any Jew lives, the reason they live there is because either they or someone before them felt safer.
Milwicki: I can’t. I’m not a sociologist; I’m not a psychologist. I know psychology or sociology through two dear colleagues, one of whom was my mentor. Let me tell you, that woman was a psych M.D. in Saudi Arabia for 20 years. That woman has seen some shit. So, I know psychology through a very limited lens. My sociology colleague and friend deals with the sociology of power. He’s convinced me that that’s the most important construct: power and the absence of power. I used to think it was identity in my naive youth four years ago. Power or the perception of it. But here’s the thing. The two universal truths I have are: that the Nazis never had any good ideas, and the Civil War was about slavery, cut and print. I won’t accept any argument over that. But there are two things that I’ve heard that I have not been able to disprove in any way, shape, or form. I can’t take credit for saying this. I was in grad school for 395,000 years and heard it somewhere.
Subjugation always requires “Justification,” not for the people being subjugated but for the backers. Perception always, always, always matters more than reality, always. Nobody cares what’s happening. It’s the same reason most people base their understanding of today’s world on headlines. No one, no one, no one goes deeper. That’s why academics are being attacked or schools are being shut down, not physically, maybe physically, why books are being attacked. People don’twant reality. People don’t want to learn what these people think. People don’t want to listen to people like me. “Please give me the top line. Could you give me the headline?” That’s all people want.
I have never found an instance where that isn’t true. I’m open to being told I’m wrong, except for the Nazis and the Civil War thing. Now that’s true. At the beginning of every semester, I would tell students I would like them to argue anything with me. I will allow any argument. If you attempt this argument, I will destroy you. You will be too embarrassed to return to class. So yes, I hope that even addressed your question.
So there are 53 members of the Canadian forces who have been identified as members of these styles of hate groups, antisemitic groups. It’s in a not-very-large army. So that is reasonable and a claim for alarm because these people are looking to the army for resources and training, especially with weapons.
Milwicki: You also have to keep in mind that those are the people who are card-carrying members. That’s a difference. That’s a matter of rhetoric.
Jacobsen: It travels. As it happens, these guys tend to talk. As I did in the follow-up article on the sexual assault scandals in the Canadian Armed Forces, there was this one officer called Officer X. He had cases going back more than ten years. So, this Officer X reportage found that everyone in senior officership had his case brought to them at some point, including the current highest-ranking general. Nothing has been done. So, what this got me thinking about was after writing that article on the white nationalists in the Canadian Armed Forces and then following up on the sexual assault scandal in the Canadian Armed Forces, one, they’re happening. They’re real. The prevalence is going to be underreported, as we know, at least in the sexual assault case. We know in the white nationalist white supremacist case because, as they say, those 53 are according to their internal documents. Then they will say, “We didn’t have enough resources. We didn’thave enough staff.”
What needs to be stated is that they need a formal procedure for identification; you can easily see in those three gaps that there are many more in an army of only 80,000, potentially fewer if you’re considering active and full-time alone. So these people want training, especially weapons. It’s different from other contexts. If you’re a baker, mail carrier, or clerk, it’s a different context because you are trained in lethality. So then the question is, does this change the threat level of antisemitism when these types of groups are going for that training?
Milwicki: So then they can then be of use, so to speak, for their movement. It could, but keep in mind that the difference between Canada and America is that we have more guns than people. So far, there have been more shootings than there have been days of 2024. One thing that Americans do have is that they have more guns than people.
Jacobsen: You have as many registered guns as Canadians have registered guns.
Milwicki: So I could probably drive 10 minutes and see a gun show any day of the week. Look, the dude who shot at Donald Trump had his dad’s AK-47. What the hell does a civilian need with a military-grade weapon? No idea. They’ll say the Second Amendment. If you base it on the Second Amendment, you best get a musket based on that time. You best be going out hunting with that musket. You can put a scope on it if you want. It’s going to go differently than you want it. On another topic, there was an award for a non-Nazi citizen or a non-German Nazi. If you look, this is a lecture I gave. Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of Germany.
Jacobsen: And let’s see. [Read Milwicki’s slides] “Jews have always controlled the business… The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada… is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.”
“There is nothing that the international Jew fears so much as the truth or any hint of the truth about himself or his plans.”
Milwicki: So, not for nothing, that dude didn’t work out. You don’t need my slides to find Henry Ford’s quotes. You can also find countless copies of The International Jew online. One of those other things is not to wait to read it in public. I’vemade that mistake several times. 90% of my dissertation was written in a coffee shop, but look how far it goes back. This is Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies. His is from the 16th century. So, we’re staying strong here. We’re not breaking new ground here. Why do you need to? The answer is you don’t. If it isn’t broken, right? That’s the brilliance of racism. You don’t need evidence. All you need is someone else to say it to you, before and after.
“Why isn’t the white man a native anywhere? You’re not a native Palestinian, no you’re not. You didn’t originate there. But if you did, then you’re the real Semitic people. But the Ashkenazi European, he has no connection at all to the Holy Land. None! So in a showdown prove to us that you are Semitic. Let’s go on with it, it’s our time now!” — Speech at Mosque Maryam, Chicago, Illinois, 11/18/18
“Do you know that many of us who go to Hollywood seeking a chance, we have to submit to anal sex and all kids of debauchery, and they give you a little part? The couch where you have to sit, it’s called the ‘casting couch.’ That’s Jewish power.” — Speech at Mosque Maryam, Chicago, Illinois, 5/27/18
“You and I are going to have to learn to distinguish between the righteous Jew and the Satanic Jews who have infected the whole world with poison and deceit.” — Speech at Mosque Maryam, Chicago, Illinois, 5/27/18
“But when you’ve got revelation that came to you from God through all these prophets, then that’s your test because if you use God’s truth that makes you wiser than others and use it to promote evil when you should be promoting good, then you’re no longer a Jew. And that’s why the scripture says, “I will make those who say they are Jews,” this is Revelation 2 and 9, ‘Who say they are Jews, but they are not, I will make them of the Synagogue of Satan.’ — Interview on WCGI 107.5 Chicago, 5/11/18
“When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.” — Saviours’ Day speech, 2/25/18
“Satan is going down. Farrakhan has pulled the cover of the eyes of the Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through. You good Jews better separate because the satanic ones will take you to hell with them because that’s where they are headed.” — Saviours’ Day speech, 2/25/18
“The Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out: turning men into women, and women into men.” — Saviours’ Day speech, 2/25/18
“I don’t care what they put on me. The government is my enemy, the powerful Jews are my enemy.” — Saviours’ Day speech, 2/25/18
“Members of the Jewish community, who owned a lot of plantations, please don’t get angry and upset because this is real history, you put us back on the plantation as share croppers and began riding down on us, and if any of us escaped the plantation many of the Irish that were coming over, they call them the paddy wagon, they would come after us and bring us back to the plantation; those were hard days, hard days.” — Speech at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, 11/11/17
“But there are righteous Jews, good Jews, Jews that want to practice the teachings of the prophets, but then there are others who don’t wish to practice, and it is they that hated Reverend [Jesse] Jackson’s desire to be President.” — Speech at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, 11/11/17
“Those who call themselves ‘Jews,” who are not really Jews, but are in fact Satan: You should learn to call them by their real name, ‘Satan;’ you are coming face-to-face with Satan, the Arch Deceiver, the enemy of God and the enemy of the Righteous.” — Saviours’ Day speech (part 2), 2/26/17
“To my Jewish friends, I shouldn’t use the word ‘friends’ so lightly, you have been a great and master deceiver, but God is going to pull the covers all off of you.” — Saviours’ Day speech (part 2), 2/26/17
“I want to disabuse the Jews today of the false claim that you are ‘The Chosen of God,’ and that Israel, or Palestine, belongs to you; I want to disabuse you of that…And I’m going to tell you about your future: You that think you have power to frighten and dominate the peoples of the world. I am here to announce the end of your time.” — Saviours’ Day speech (part 1), 2/19/17
“This past December we organized a boycott of Christmas and our theme was ‘Up with Jesus! Down with Santa!’ Here is the white man, many of whom that have these businesses, they don’t believe in Jesus. I’m going to say it again: Many of the biggest business people are called Jews, and they don’t believe in Jesus. But you love Jesus so magnificently, that now they can make money—a lot of money—off of your love. So, they set up Christmas.” — Speech delivered at Mosque Maryam at the second annual “Boys to Men Empowerment Conference, Chicago, Illinois, 4/20/2016
“We are feeling the effect of the planning of a small group of Zionists and some so-called Christians as well. The Synagogue of Satan and its companions are working day and night to destroy any unity among Muslims.” — Speech delivered in Iran, 2/10/16
“Do you know that the enemies of Jesus were the Jews of his day and the Roman authorities? That wasn’t 2000 years ago alone. That’s today!” — Saviours’ Day speech (part 2), Mosque Maryam, Chicago, Illinois 3/2/14
“David — even though he may have made a mistake — he submitted and repented before God. This you false Jews have not done. No. You are not a Jew! I say you’re a so-called Jew. You are Satan masquerading as a covenanted people of God. You must be exposed, regardless of the consequences…” — The Time and What Must Be Done: Part 57, 2/8/14
“Did you know that Jesus had a real problem with the Jewish community? They had power, the rabbis of that day, over the Roman authorities just as they have power today over our government.” — Remarks at Indianapolis Convention Center, Indianapolis, Indiana, 12/1/13
“In all of these cities on a Jewish holiday, business stops because they are the masters not only in America’s cities but in cities throughout Europe and the Western world.” — The Time and What Must Be Done, Part 20: Making Satan Known, 5/25/13
“The Jewish media has normalized sexual degeneracy, profanity, and all kinds of sin.” — The Time and What Must Be Done, Part 20: Making Satan Known, 5/25/13
“Socialism or communism is a doctrine they have to fight cause it ends their wealth and their power, wherever socialism rises, capitalism begins to die…So the International Jew is affected by the rise of socialism, it is in their DNA to fight anything that will raise the common man. This is why they fight any voice that the little man will listen to.” — The Time and What Must Be Done, Part 17, 5/4/13
“You that think that those who refer to themselves as Jews are the real Children of Israel? No. You have made a real theological mistake and some of you have made a theological error because you know the truth, but yet you consider your wickedness in promoting a deceptive lie.” — The Time and What Must Be Done, Part 5, 2/9/13
“Now you know I’m going to be lambasted and called anti-Semitic… They’ll say Farrakhan was up to his old canards; he said Jews control Hollywood. Well, they said it themselves! Jews control the media. They said it themselves! Jews and some gentiles control the banking industry, international banks. They do! In Washington right next to the Holocaust Museum is the Federal Reserve where they print the money. Is that an accident?” — Holy Day of Atonement Keynote Address (part 2) Mosque Maryam, Chicago, Illinois, 10/21/12
Farrakhan: How many of you are lawyers? Only have one in the house? No wonder we go to jail so much, brother! But at the top of the law profession, who are the top in law?
Audience: Jews.
Farrakhan: Sorry I didn’t hear you. Audience: Jews! Farrakhan: Any doctors in the house? Ain’t got no doctors? Oh there’s one way in the back. At the top of the medical profession, the top in that are members of the Jewish community. Anybody in media? Who’s the top in that field?
Audience: Jews.
Farrakhan: Anybody a rapper in the house? There’s rappers. You can rap, ain’t nothing wrong with that, but at the top of that are those that control the industry. Any of you have Hollywood ambitions, Broadway ambitions? Who’s the top of that? Audience: Jews. Farrakhan: Same people! They’re masters in business. Well I’m not a businessman I’m a banker. Well who’s the master of the bankers?
Audience: Jews.
Farrakhan: TALK TO ME!
Audience: Jews!
Farrakhan: You don’t discredit them because they’re masters, you discredit them by the way they use their mastery.
Audience: [applause]
Farrakhan: Now, I close.
Milwicki: Oh, it’s all kinds. “Satanic Jew” is a straight Christian identity, radical Hebrew Israelites. Where I used to teach in downtown Dallas, every so often, there used to be radical Hebrew Israelites protesting there. I would be amazed at how identical this was to Christian identity. I don’t track them here. One of my other colleagues does. But I know about them because they are essentially Christians who replace white male Christendom with black male Christians. Antisemitism, like I said, is the great unifier. It doesn’t matter. It brings the strangest bedfellows.
Jacobsen: It’s unsurprising and believable. What emotions arise for many Jewish people when talking to all types of Jewish communities? What are the words of commonalities?
Milwicki: I can only speak to what I’ve witnessed. There is much fear and also much resignation. There’s also a lot of like, “Oh, who gives a shit?” It’s enough. The exhaustion: if we’re going to put it like this, things will be terrifying. Of course, “It’s this way” and “isn’t it enough already?” Those are the best ways I would explain it. But again, I can only speak to my own experience here regarding what I’ve seen. You’d have to put anger in there, too. A lot of the anger is directed not necessarily at, I don’t want to say, accurate, but useful targets. It’s easy to get angry at the world. That’s one of the greatest ways to be for birthing extremists. Like I said before, why is having one enemy so beneficial?
Like how the Nazis made it so beneficial to have all your problems in one thing, antisemitism comes from so many different ways. Antisemitism comes from so many different places and different modalities that it can make you angry and tired. Now, look, I lived this life. I chose to study this stuff.
And usually, I’m able to disconnect. But there are times when this has happened more since I’ve had kids. There are some times when it’s like, “Are you kidding me right now?” It’s like the fact that it didn’t take more than a couple of hours for people to blame Jews for what happened to Trump or people to blame Jews. It’s almost instantaneous. I don’t want to say it’s not like that in other countries, but at the same time, it’s not as loud in other countries. Or at least, it could be more instantaneously vociferous. If that makes sense, other countries have laws about this stuff. We don’t have a First Amendment right to be an asshole.
Jacobsen: You see this in those that don’t put the self first, too. For instance, the current Catholic Pope—I believe Discordianism likes to joke that that’s the guy who thinks he’s the only Pope—basically, he is liberalizing much of, not necessarily church doctrine but, perception in the public eye of the Catholic Church. He’s even meeting with the leader of the second largest sect of Christianity.
250-300 million, which is the Eastern Orthodox Church, they met with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, in Cairo of all places! There are times of meetup. But when you were talking about alternative places for people who don’t really find themselves buying majoritarian mythologies very much, two things came to mind.
One was a United Church of Canada Minister. For context, the United Church of Canada is probably considered the most liberalised Christian church in Canada. I use it as a benchmark. Whatever is controversial to them, it is what Christianity will allow in this country. Not sure about America, things are different in America. The minister’s name is Gretta Vosper.
She lost her faith while in the church. She went from the progression of theist to deist to atheist. Her congregation were fine with the minister. Recently, late 2016, she was under review for her suitability for being in the church. She was giving – for that particular group – moral lessons. Another case I was thinking about was the secular church in, what some would consider the equivalent of the Bible Belt in America, Calgary, Alberta.
So I think there are ways this stuff is cropping up more, and more. And it is heartening to hear this. Media representation is interesting. The United States has very powerful public relations, previously termed propaganda, industry. When I watch interviews with Lucien Greaves, for instance, there’s talking over him. There’s stereotypes. There’s not taking him seriously.
Any bad journalistic practice. He undergoes. Is there a bettering trend in the representation of the media of Satanism?
de Haan: No.
Shortt: No. A Fox News thing posted an article for our veterans’ memorial in Minnesota. First line: “Devil Worshippers Erecting Monument in Bell Plains.”
de Haan: It’s like they won’t even give the courtesy of a Google search, sometimes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
de Haan: If you want to see how we’re treated personally, you can Google it. A councilman in Phoenix, Arizona compared us to ISIS. Michelle and I have personally been called terrorists by public officials. We’ve been called bullies, as they tell us to go to hell.
Jacobsen: These would be the same person, same personality type, that would bully you in work and then wouldplay the victim.
de Haan: What we see in Christianity a lot is if they don’t get 100% of their way 100% of the time, they play the victim.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] of course.
de Haan: That they’re being persecuted. Part of what we do is expose this. I think a lot of stuff people don’t realize is going on until you have someone who comes up, and who is an easy standard to call the ‘wrong religion’.
Shortt: We definitely do not see them being any fairer in their representation of us at all, to answer the question. In fact,almost anything like pizzagate. Or the satanic panic being underway with religious freedom now being the thing. It’s going to happen.
de Haan: Moral panics are on the rise. It is a bit concerning. As they are calling it in the Trump Era, the Post-Fact Era, the facts simply do not matter anymore. What makes you maddest? That’s the truth. You see the things like pizzagate. Where a pizza parlour, they say they’re going to have children sacrifices in the basement. In 2017, this is a throwback to the McMartin babysitter case, which happened in the 80s.
You’re seeing stuff like this happening. Luckily, you have debunking of this pretty quickly. People know about Snopes, and so on. Michelle and I have been the subject of conspiracy theories in Phoenix, in our own cities. There are websites slandering us personally. It is what we deal with, especially if you’re in a leadership position.
Regarding your expertise, it’s not necessarily the wrong religion. It’s the wrong type of person.
Milwicki: It’s also the wrong belief system. It’s not about religion. That’s about politics and society and everything. I could be judged immoral because I support gay marriage. I support marriage equality.
Jacobsen: Don Lemon said, “Am I in a state of sin, or am I sinning because I…” And Candace Owens says, “Yes, you are.” Without a flinch.
Milwicki: Without a flinch. And she also thinks that the Holocaust didn’t happen the way we thought it did because she’s an expert in everything.
Jacobsen: I listen to a lot of these American preachers of this type, a lot of them. Mark Driscoll comes to mind. And these things from the FRC, they’re terrible. These individuals are now told by their leaders to their congregants to be bold. That they will come across X, Y, and Z resistance. You don’t have to have fear and be bold in your affirmations. Candace Owens, I’m seeing this pop up more where many aren’t having feedback; they need to hold to the regular social contract where you’ve cut off the feedback at that point. That’s what I noticed in Candace Owens and Don Lemon’s interaction.
Milwicki: No, you can’t have any; they’re all cowards. The second you give them any form of criticism, they fall back on bullshit tropes or whataboutism. They’re all cowards. They’re all cowards. They don’t have evidence to back them up. They abuse faith by saying, “I’ll quote this scripture.” Look, Wesley Swift, one of the most mind-blowing things when I was working on my dissertation. One of the major, probably the most important, voices is the focus of my entire dissertation, the major voice of Christian identity. Every time he quoted scripture, he was on point—every time. I would be like, there’s no way this isn’t… There were a couple of words missing, like a “thou” or a “thee” or a “shall,” whatever, but everything he quoted was on point. Now, that doesn’t mean that scripture is inherently racist. It means it’s not hard to make scripture racist and exclusionary. It is not hard.
I used to say, and take this with a grain of salt, but I used to say that history is a very subjective study that relies on objectivity. We know that Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, and that was the beginning of World War II. We can say that. That is as close to an objective historical fact as we can say. There are, however, that Germany did invade Poland. Some historians would argue that that’s not the beginning of World War II, and they’ll provide evidence to say, “No, it began when Japan invaded Manchuria.” But there is an element of some form of objectivity. Where theology becomes dangerous is that it’s equally subjective; that’s why if you take Protestantism: How many different kinds of Protestants are there?
So there’s a difference. But the backbone is faith, and you cannot prove or disprove faith. So, if you build a racial or racist ideology or theology around faith, it cannot be disproved. Because the only thing the person using it has to say is “what I believe… That’s not my faith, which is real.” That’s a danger in every religion. Facts are useless if you believe them, and belief is the core of your evidence. And that was a very sad thing to mention.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/21
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests. Here we talk some updates in his work and professional life when applying his intelligence to work and personal situations.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With an increasingly globalized world, especially for the younger generations, do you think it’s still appropriate to talk about East and West as placeholders about the global order?
Tianxi Yu: The dominant group in globalization is not necessarily governments; the development of civilization is inevitably accompanied by a diminution of governmental power and the rise of individual sovereignty. Thus there are no two different symbols, East and West, but rather the cognitive consensus of individual human beings serves as a placeholder.
Jacobsen: What seems like the first instance of true human civilization to you? What is the foundational mark of a civilization?
Yu:Maybe humans learned to make fire? Or learned to use tools? Or learned to trade? It’s also possible that nothing that happens to humans now is enough to make up a collection. It seems to me that “civilization” gets its bearings when you fully realize that past actions were stupid, and that’s the beginning of civilization.
Jacobsen: What have been the historical trajectories or patterns of civilizations over time?
Yu: Based on artificial intelligence and cryptography, the evolution towards personal sovereignty begins
Jacobsen: What would demarcate the different periods of history into the present?
Yu: By the winners in history, may be based on technology, may be based on tactics, in short these winners make our history books read in order.
Jacobsen: What would best characterize the contemporary period of civilization?
Yu: It’s a hard choice, but for each person, it could be themselves
Jacobsen: How might this characterization be helpful in making predictions about the future stages of human civilization or, at least, the next likely steps?
Yu: The evolution of human society is long and tortuous; the slowness of evolution stems mainly from the corrosion of interest groups, and the collapse of interest groups inevitably accompanies every advance in civilization. So still from a human perspective, the more disgruntled humans there are, the more likely the next stage will come.
Jacobsen: What seems like the difference between European, American, and Asian, academics, academic communities, and academic output?
Yu: It’s hard for me to give a very in-depth judgment because I’m still only in the sewer of academia. But as most people believe, Europe and the United States tend to be more original in their academic output, while China tends to be more replicative and transcendent.
Jacobsen: What might be the rise and fall of nations in the midst of global politics, aging populations, low birth rates, populism, war, and the like, on the rise?
Yu: Decline due to war, political persecution, continued decline of newborn.; prosperity due to entering new narratives, creating hope, granting individual sovereignt.
Jacobsen: What contributes to a cyclical nature of economies?
Yu: On a micro level, it can be attributed to technological development, human mental activity, regime change …… But I prefer it to be a by-product of God’s creation. God exists and is immortal. And the economy is a pseudo-god, the only way to acquire divinity as a mortal.
Jacobsen: I’ve had anxiety too. What are your strategies for re-centering yourself, calming down?
Yu: Read psychology books, meditate on Buddhist scriptures, go for a walk and let yourself go
Jacobsen: Do you have any time to balance professional responsibilities and relaxation, and self-care?
Yu: Time is enough, but it’s hard to get yourself to really relax, especially when you’re done relaxing and facing reality.
Jacobsen: You have been an outspoken person. What were the reasons for the more recent outspoken posts on Facebook? How should they be interpreted? What were the reactions to those posts?
Yu: On a very offensive note, the vast majority of them are not intelligent, and in my opinion stupid, and I don’t get what I want within this group. I’m outspoken in many groups, even in my workplace, and I’m outspoken because I understand that I’m much better than the vast majority of these groups. That’s my backbone, but it’s also the source of my anxiety. A lot of my anxiety still stems from my loneliness, and while I say I believe in the existence of God, God is not the most powerful, and above God is the indescribable void. I know I can’t be an all-knowing, all-powerful God if I live 1000 years, but I want to go after Him too. God is not alone because He created the world and has countless children from whom He derives His emotions. But I don’t, and am far from God, and that has led to constant self-doubt and doubts about my abilities. Suffice it to say that acquiring more divinity is my goal in life, making money and a good job is just me finding something for me to do with myself. As for these posts, they were made because my emotions weren’t well relieved. I don’t think there’s much to explain, what other people think has nothing to do with me.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/20
Daniel Seymour is UN Women’s Strategic Partnerships Director. He previously worked at Save the Children UK as its first Human Rights Officer and in government as an advisor on child rights to the UK Foreign Secretary. He joined the UN with UNICEF, working on child protection, gender, and human rights. He was seconded to UN Women in 2010 to support its establishment.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Daniel Seymour, the Director of Strategic Partnerships at UN Women. I have been working on and off around women’s rights initiatives or human rights initiatives generally, focusing on women in this context. Now that I have more time, I’m seeking more exploratory work and profiling in that domain. So, how did you get involved with UN Women? How did you get involved in the area of strategic partnerships?
Daniel Seymour: I joined UN Women from UNICEF. My career path was serendipitous, as many career paths are. I found myself as the Head of Gender and Human Rights at UNICEF. While I was in that role, then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proposed, and member states accepted, the establishment of UN Women, the youngest UN entity. I was involved in various internal UN discussions representing UNICEF in the early days. I was then asked to help set up UN Women, which I did on a secondment from UNICEF. Our first Executive Director, Michelle Bachelet, asked me to be her Deputy Chief of Staff.
That was about 15 years ago, and I’ve had various roles since then. I applied for the partnerships role for a reason. It’s an interesting area of work involving real partnerships. More specifically, one of the reasons I felt more at home at UN Women than at other UN entities is that UN Women, because of its mission and approach, is inherently political. It’s about advocacy, influence, enabling, convening, and supporting more than it is about doing things itself.
In all my roles, I’ve been on the human rights side, believing that our development and global multilateral challenges are less about knowing what to do and more about finding ways to incentivize and encourage those in power to act differently. The challenges we face are about applying power more than capacity and knowledge. This made UN Women a natural home for me, and partnerships, which involve engaging with others to work together to drive change, are also a natural fit. I’m happy to give you some examples of what we do in this job. It’s a tough job, but I’ve learned a lot, and it’s been satisfying for me most of the time.
Jacobsen: Regarding the development of UN Women over time, as you noted and as I know, UN Women is the youngest organization emerging from probably the largest bureaucratic organization in the world, the United Nations. So, how does an organization like that develop, expand, build partnerships, and increase its impact on its goals and the broader aims of the United Nations?
Seymour: We were given a mandate by the General Assembly that’s not necessarily unique but is quite particular. They asked us to work in the intergovernmental space with member states to help them collectively find the highest common denominator on gender issues and develop ways to promote accountability and country-level progress. That’s been a big part of what we’ve done over the years, such as working during the General Assembly to ensure that gender issues are properly integrated into its work, the high-level week, and the resolutions of the Assembly. We’ve also focused on integrating gender and issues of women, peace, and security, or women in crisis, into the work of the Security Council. We make sure that the Commission on the Status of Women, the big annual global gender equality event, works well and produces good outcomes. Recently, we focused on gender and technology, discussing technology-facilitated violence and related issues. In the intergovernmental space, we’ve been trying to ensure that gender issues get the attention they deserve for the best results at the country level.
The second thing they asked us to do was coordinate within the UN system. We have promoted a system-wide approach, making people report on how well they’re integrating gender into their tracking expenses, expenditures on gender equality and so on. We also participate with other parts of the system and coordinate collective action, such as the big Spotlight Initiative on gender-based violence. Third, we do catalytic programming—small but smart programs that have a bigimpact and demonstrate what works so that other entities, especially governments, can scale them up. Domestic finance is where the big money is. So, we’re still a work in progress, I would say.
Fifteen years is a lot younger than other parts of the UN, and we’re learning how to have more and more impact. For example, we have much innovative thinking about engaging the private sector, which my team is acutely aware of. We’re also doing more around women in crisis and conflict. Since we were established, depending on how you count it, we’re the third fastest-growing part of the UN by a conservative measure. You grow only because people have confidence in you. People invest in you because they think you’re a good investment.
The track record is good, and the indicators of success are relatively strong. I’m blowing our trumpet, but it reflects that the mandate we were given and the way the General Assembly set us up made sense.
Jacobsen: What are some of the easiest ways to build those partnerships when you’re looking to combat inequalities in government systems, income insecurity, unremunerated work, violence against women, and things like this? To me and you, it is a pretty straightforward argument to make when you’re in the right spaces. Yet, to build those partnerships, you need diplomacy and tact. So, how do you do it?
Seymour: Yes, it’s variable. My facile answer is that all partnership comes from understanding the win-win. It’s not so different from sales. It would help if you found the convergence of interests with potential partners, framing things in ways that make sense to them.
One of the challenges is that we work in an organization full of people who are super focused on gender. We know all about gender, but we don’t necessarily know about gender and whatever it is that our partners care about. For example, if we’re talking to advertising companies, they know much more about advertising than we do. We have to figure out that convergence. Similarly, our colleagues who work on climate have hundreds of climate experts. We know about gender but must also figure out how to connect with them. There’s a job to understand the perspectives, priorities, interests, and incentives of the partners you’re trying to work with.
You also need to be able to make a case that explains the why. There is a belief, somewhat reductive, that it’s a self-interest argument. To convince a government to close the gender pay gap or have more rigorous legislation to prevent workplace discrimination against women who’ve had children, you have to instrumentalize the cause. You might say, “If you do that, you’ll make more money,” or “Your economy will grow more.” Those are valuable arguments, but some moral people are just as attracted to the argument of principle.
I’ve come across many influential people looking for a space to contribute. I don’t spend my whole time saying, “If you do this, it’s good for you.” Many people are super committed to these issues. Another thing about partnerships is that bigchange requires big questions. One of the skills of a partnership person is figuring out what that jigsaw looks like.
Jacobsen: Who are the different actors that must come together to make something happen? For example, my colleagues working on women’s economic empowerment focus on unpaid care—looking after kids, older people, people with disabilities, etc.
The basic idea is that if you can distribute care responsibilities more evenly and subsidize care, you free up women’s labour force participation. That’s a big economic benefit. It’s good for them because, if they choose to, they don’t have to drive the labour force, which they may not want to do. It’s better for the kids and the context.
We are assembling a coalition of governments to address various legislative and domestic investment issues around the care question and big companies. We want them to offer maternity leave and, if they have a big office somewhere, to have a creche in the office or offer flexible working arrangements for care purposes. We’re looking at academic institutions for collaboration because much research needs to be done to figure out how all of that works. We’re also looking at media collaborations or partnerships with organizations that can influence attitudinal change about care work being a woman’s job and not a job for men.
So, you have this issue: women do far more unpaid care work than men. It’s not good, and we need to fix it. Then, what constellation of different actors do we need to bring on board to drive change?
The other part of the partnership puzzle is more than just figuring out the convergent interests or the right arguments. It’s figuring out the right cast of characters to make something big happen.
Seymour: Our friends in Iceland have rightly held that top spot. It’s been 14 years, and their gender gap is over 90% closed, which is way ahead of pretty much everyone else. They are high-performing. If you visit Iceland, you can sense the equality. In terms of what you do, Scott, the concept of masculinity in Iceland is a fascinating area of investigation. You can feel that you are in a more equal society, which is nice. But to your question, what are they getting right? It’s a simple thing.
Let me give you an analogy. Gender inequality doesn’t fix itself. If you wait for it to happen, you’ll be waiting a long time—at least 300 years on the current trajectory to achieve equality. It’s almost certain that we will have humans on the moon before we achieve gender equality at the pace we’re going, which is slow and frustrating.
What countries like Iceland do is acknowledge that things will only change if they do something serious to alter them. For example, Iceland’s Gender Equality Act mandates that board membership for Icelandic companies must be 40% female. Other countries have similar rules for the ratio of men and women elected to their parliaments on party lists. Some countries make special investments to support women reentering the workplace.
People talk about a level playing field. As a British person who likes football (the game you play with your feet), imagine a situation where two teams play a match on the same pitch with the same boots, rules, and referee.
Everything is equal, so people say, “Yes, it’s a level playing field. What’s the problem?” But for the past two years, one of those teams has been free to spend all its time practicing. They’ve been working out and have massive, powerful leg muscles. Their coach has drilled them to perfection. They’re professionals. The other team has had to do another job. They’ve had no special training or preparation.
When they go out to play, the second team gets completely crushed by the first team. That’s what we have to understand. We are starting from a place of inequality, and that’s what countries like Iceland understand. More than just having the same rules for both women and men when you start from a place of inequality is required.
You have to implement what often gets called temporary special measures until you have genuinely removed the inequality of advantage and disadvantage. This way, you have a level playing field in a real sense, not a trivial, superficial sense. In my experience, whenever you see a country performing well, you can see that they have deliberately done things to even things up because they recognize they’re starting from a point of inequality. That’s the key. As long as you’re not willing to say things are unequal now and we’re going to have to do something special to get us to equality, and then when we’re there, that’s fine, we can ease off, but something extraordinary has to be done now.
Those are the countries and companies that perform better. It doesn’t happen by itself; more than that, having the same rules for everybody today is needed. You must recognize that you’re coming from a place of inequality, which requires special effort to get you equal.
Jacobsen: Now, on the opposite side of that spectrum, on the same report from the World Economic Forum, the countries listed at the lower end are Sudan, Pakistan, Chad, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Guinea, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Niger, Morocco, Oman, and so on. What internally restricts the advancement of women in these particular economies and cultures? Are the factors typically more historical, or are they more rooted in a contemporary culture of wanting to stick to the way things are now? Gender equality is often seen as a Western idea. Therefore, some do not want it, or it’s seen as a globalist idea, and there’s a desire to maintain the culture. Are certain factors considered nationalistic or traditional that prevent moving towards a more gender-equal environment?
Seymour: Yes. Good question. Two things to highlight. One is whether it’s a long-standing tradition or something more contemporary. It’s often a combination of the two when you have underlying gender inequality. Then, place stresses on that society, or even if you have a moment of change, that inequality is often amplified. COVID was a good example of that. COVID took existing problems of domestic violence and turbocharged them. A number of the countries you’re talking about, or on that WEF list, are countries experiencing some form of crisis where essentially what’s happening is that the pre-existing inequality is having a match thrown on it. That’s one angle. Of course, there’s this question of social norms and attitudes. You might be interested in taking a look at it.
A report we did in partnership with a market research company is interesting. It looks at attitudes on gender equality in 20 countries. What you see is striking: many beliefs that are inimical to gender equality are stubbornly persistent, such as whether women make as good political leaders as men, whether it’s appropriate for women to work outside the home, or whether working mothers harm their children. You find significant numbers of people in various countries—especially in the ones you’re talking about—holding regressive attitudes.
What stands out when you look at this is not just the correlation with economic development; while the correlation is there, it’s not perfect. What’s scary about some of these attitudes, such as the percentage of people who think it’s acceptable in certain circumstances to hit your spouse, is that when you break down the demographics of our gender equality attitude study, you find that the group most likely going in the wrong direction is young men. I feel, and this is somewhat personal, that there is a crisis with young men that is reflected as a misogyny crisis. This is concerning because, as you said, there are plenty of worrying numbers, for example, in the WEF report. But even more concerning is that 17-year-old boys, growing into their twenties and thirties, are carrying regressive and problematic attitudes on issues like domestic violence, women in leadership, and women in the economy. That’s worrying.
Jacobsen: People will interpret this interview through a gender lens, too—two men talking about gender equality. As I’ve written for the Good Men Project, I’ve done many interviews with religious and non-religious leaders, particularly those involved in ethical culture, humanism, free thought, atheism, etc. My own bias is towards non-religion. Yet, even within that bias, I see religion, when interpreted in a dogmatic frame with men as leaders and heads and the portrayal of God as basically a divine male person, being used as a means to restrict women and, in turn, restrict men because they can only engage in certain roles and behaviours. In any analysis done by UN Women, is religion taken into account in ways that can both help and hinder the furtherance of gender equality?
Seymour: Most people would understand exactly where you’re coming from. I’m a Jewish atheist myself, which in my culture is not necessarily a contradiction in terms. I recognize the concern you raised. It’s certainly true that, for example, the arguably biggest gender crisis we have in the world right now—our executive director has described it as gender apartheid—is the situation in Afghanistan. There, a significant driver of the views or at least an argument used to justify this gender apartheid is a religious argument. One of the characteristics of religious belief is its diversity.
I have come across far more people of faith who argue strongly for human rights and gender equality and who contest the idea that their God is male. They argue that their God is beyond gender and vehemently oppose ideas of male domination in their faith, advocating for women priests and women rabbis. Yes, religion can be both a help and a hindrance in the pursuit of gender equality.
Of course, just as people make all sorts of calls to tradition or use very wobbly economic arguments to try and justify discriminatory beliefs, including on gender, we have worked with many people of faith and faith-based organizations who are very much on the same side of the gender equality argument as we are. We have country offices in many countries worldwide where religion plays a significant part in women’s and men’s daily lives, and I appreciate that. It’s important to point out that inequality, whether it’s based on religion or anything else, is bad for men too.
I’m a strong believer in that, and it’s an important argument to make. I have colleagues worldwide who are navigating complicated cultural situations, including religion. So, yes, of course, nobody denies it’s often difficult. But the good news is that there are always allies. That’s our job as facilitators, enablers, advocates, and so on—to work with those allies and alongside them to make progress. That’s what we do.
Jacobsen: Just looking at time, we have four minutes left on this call. How can people partner with UN Women? How can they get involved directly if they want volunteer opportunities or employment?
Seymour: It depends on where you are. We love people who come and work with us. Every job at UN Women is advertised on the website publicly and is competitive. We’re lucky to have many people wanting to work with us. We also have UN Volunteers. You can just Google UNV. They’re not unpaid; they receive a stipend. I ought to know the proper term for what you get as a UNV, but your contribution to the UN is valuable.
So, working with us directly through UN Volunteers and the third option is we have 13 national committees, and people can support us through those national committees. There are also other ways to get involved through our campaigns. A good one, obviously from where you’re sitting, is the HeForShe campaign, which is about male allyship. It has various ideas for what you can do as a man in your workplace, in your family, with your friends, around calling out sexism, and so on. Our website is a good place to start and find engagement ideas. We’d love to have people get involved.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time today, Daniel. I appreciate it.
Seymour: It was a pleasure talking to you and a good discussion. We appreciate it. Take care.
Jacobsen: It was a pleasure talking to you, Daniel. Thank you.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/19
A seasoned Musician (Vocals, Guitar and Piano), Filmmaker, and Actor, J.D. Mata has composed 100 songs and performed 100 shows and venues throughout. He has been a regular at the legendary “Whisky a Go Go,” where he has wooed audiences with his original shamanistic musical performances. He has written and directed nerous feature films, web series, and music videos. J.D. has also appeared in various national T.V. commercials and shows. Memorable appearances are TRUE BLOOD (HBO) as Tio Luca, THE UPS Store National television commercial, and the lead in the Lil Wayne music video, HOW TO LOVE, with over 129 million views. As a MOHAWK MEDICINE MAN, J.D. also led the spiritual-based film KATERI, which won the prestigious “Capex Dei” award at the Vatican in Rome. J.D. co-starred, performed and wrote the music for the original world premiere play, AN ENEMY of the PUEBLO — by one of today’s preeminent Chicana writers, Josefina Lopez! This is J.D.’s third Fringe; last year, he wrote, directed and starred in the Fringe Encore Performance award-winning “A Night at the Chicano Rock Opera.” He is in season 2 of his NEW YouTube series, ROCK god! J.D. is a native of McAllen, Texas and resides in North Hollywood, California.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Music tends to be associated with sound and people groups, as well as style, dress, colours, food, and even something as specific as “wedding music.” It comes with a whole ceremony around weddings. So, with Tejano, what kind of colours or cultural artifacts are associated with it?
J.D. Mata: That’s an interesting question and topic. When I was playing Tejano music back in the 80s, it was everything you saw in terms of 80s style:
Parachute pants
Tight Sergio Valente jeans with boots
Hot pink colours
A very Michael Jackson-esque type of wardrobe—almost glam
It was glam Tejano. There were a lot of bright colours: hot pinks, reds, fuchsias, aquas, and bolo ties. I’ll send you a picture of one of the Tejano bands I was in, and you can get a cool idea. You can post about the style of the 80s in this episode. As with any other band, and I still do this, you have artistic license to dress up. Anything goes for concerts and performances. I just got back now. I was a little late to our session because I went to a second-hand store to find some clothes for a photo session. I found this cool vintage jacket. I wouldn’t wear it to my best friend’s wedding or a funeral, but it’s great for the stage. It looks cool, hip, tight-fitting, and very uncomfortable, but you pay the price to look interesting. The more interesting, the better.
Anything goes, yes, it does. There is a certain degree of astuteness, but some of the most ridiculous stuff is the most popular. You look at Gilbert O’Sullivan; he used to dress as a schoolboy. The guy from AC/DC also had that schoolboy outfit, which is ridiculous, but it works. And Selena was very a lot the same. Despite being a great singer with great songs and a band, her wardrobe was incredible. She designed her wardrobe. It was a little bit risqué. It’s legendary that her father was very pissed off at first when she started wearing this risqué type of outfit on stage. She was quite young, too.
Jacobsen: She was very young. People were probably aesthetically protective of her, too.
Mata: Oh yes, for sure, for sure.
Jacobsen: Would you say the Mexican part of the culture in Tejano music is more conservative, familially, and modest than American?
Mata: 100%, yes.
Jacobsen: Do you think they’re at the root of it?
Mata: Yes, they’ve been at the root of it. Even some of the ruto bands, which are very traditional Mexican roots, would wear traditional cowboy hats and jeans, which are very conservative for musicians. But Tejano artists, who were Texans and U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage—that’s where Tejano comes from, Texas, Mexicano, Tejano—combined the two words. It’s the American way of saying you’re Mexican-American and defining the music. Even though our families were very conservative, we became artistically licensed to the nth degree with our wardrobe.
Now, that’s for concerts. A lot of Tejano artists played weddings and quinceañeras. So there was a uniform for concerts and another for weddings and quinceañeras, and that’s how you made a lot of your money. Of course, it would be a little more conservative for those events: some nice coats, sports jackets, and many tuxedos. The guys would wear tuxedos and suits, but everyone would dress the same. Usually, everyone wore the same colour, but the lead singer always wore something different to stand out. Bling is also important—something that sparkles, like necklaces.
Jacobsen: Bejewelled…
Mata: Yes, yes.
Jacobsen: Crusted shapes or crosses or…
Mata: Yes, crosses and anything goes, man, it’s all.
Jacobsen: It’s overtly colourful and flashy but in a modest, conservative way.
Mata: Copy that.
Jacobsen: Is that fair?
Mata: Yes, that’s very fair to say.
Jacobsen: Whereas if you had more American influence than Mexican influence on the culture’s aesthetic, it would probably be more colourful and flashy in a sexualized way.
Mata: Correct, yes.
Jacobsen: So these pinks and reds and fuchsias, where did they have their roots?
Mata: Where did they have their roots? Yes, so the roots came from watching MTV.
Jacobsen: What’s the zeitgeist of the day?
Mata: It was the 80s. The zeitgeist was almost, again, almost Astro outfits. So yes, regarding the colours, the Fuchsias were big. The brighter, the better. So that was the root. What I am proud of and what makes Tejano stand out is that Tejano was its beast.
Of course, Tejano music evolved from the German polka, but we had no predecessors. We were the pioneers of Tejano music, and therefore, we were also the pioneers of wardrobe choices. We were influenced by the zeitgeist I’ve discussed, but at the end of the day, we created our image. If you look at Tejano artists, that’s a very interesting question.
We’ve yet to explore this topic extensively, but it’s another groundbreaking topic for us in terms of Tejano music. What makes this series interesting and different is that nobody’s ever asked that question about the wardrobe in Tejano music.
Jacobsen: So, yes, where did the colours come from? Well, the colours came from our minds. It was an unconscious choice influenced by the zeitgeist of the 80s. Most Tejano artists grew up with Tejano music in the 70s. The 70s also had a grungier style with long hair compared to the 60s and 70s. So, it was a 70s unconscious influence because we were 70s kids who came into our own in the 80s. Unconsciously, we had the blueprint of how Chicano bands dressed. They would wear bright-coloured tuxedos too.
One could probably postulate that the bright colours of the 1980s—fuchsias, purples, greens, aquas—were influenced by the zeitgeist of the 1980s. But I now think we were probably more influenced by the ’70s Chicano bands and their bright tuxedos than the ’80s bright colours. It was probably 70% influenced by the Chicano bands and 30% by the ’80s hip hop and Michael Jackson style.
Jacobsen: What made it sparkle?
Mata: Oh yes, that’s a very good question—many times we had to buy the stuff ourselves. I remember we had glue guns and would go to the craft store to buy these leather sparklies. We put them on our clothing. We had to invent our sparkles. There were some stores like Merry-Go-Round and Chess King, but that was expensive. All the money we made went to buy equipment, speakers, and enhancement equipment. We were good entrepreneurs; we put our money back into our business. We were industrious. They say necessity is the mother of invention. Selena did that, too; she made her sparkles. Most artists I know created their sparkles.
Jacobsen: Given its flair, this clothing requires extra fabric and material. It will weigh more, and the material will likely be thicker. Yet, in the earlier session, you described how early Tejano artists would travel in difficult weather to blue-collar worksites. How does that make it a harder work environment for the performers wearing this heavy, thicker clothing in a hot, sometimes humid environment?
Mata: That’s great; you’re asking some great questions. This is stuff that I have yet to hear discussed when talking about Tejano music. What’s fascinating is that you’re triggering some memories. I should know. We would look great on stage, but you would want to avoid getting near us. When you got close, we were stinky, man. Because you would have to wear the clothing, it was rarely washed. It’s just a reality. I’m speaking from my frame of reference.
When you’re writing songs, rehearsing, trying to find the next gig, and travelling to the next gig, the last thing you want to do is laundry. At least I can speak for myself. There were about four or five rotations of wardrobe that you go through before it gets a nice wash. You’re on stage for two or three hours, getting sweaty, and it gets a little musky. Then you’ve already been the next day for two or three days. It does get uncomfortable, and the sweat, but I tell you what, for me, if you’re not sweating on stage and your wardrobe doesn’t feel wet and a little bit heavy, you’re not doing it right. You’ve got to feel all that. You’ve got to go through all that wardrobe purgatory if you will.
Jacobsen: You suffer with the workers on stage.
Mata: You suffer with the workers on stage, indeed, yes.
Jacobsen:International statistics, as a note, are very clear. The longest working hours per year of any culture is Mexican culture. So, this culture is about hard work. It’s a culture that outdoes even the Protestant work ethic. Americans work a lot, Canadians work a lot, and Koreans work a lot, but Mexicans, as a culture and as a nationality, portray that. This is the World Economic Forum. These are serious people. In Mexico, they work approximately 2,255 hours annually, averaging 43 weekly. That is more than anyone, even if you take Europe. The longest work year of hours for the Europeans is for the Greeks, and they only come out at 2,035. So the Greeks are at 220 hours fewer, even as the hardest working Western European or European country. This builds on the fact that these performers are in complete stench, suffering, and performing while enjoying every minute.
Mata: To piggyback on what you’re saying, there’s the setup—that’s much work. Then, after the show, you’ve got to tear down. Unless you’re one of these big, famous Mexican Tejano bands and have some roadies, you do it all yourself. But again, I’m speaking for myself when I did Tejano and even today. I love that aspect of it. I love setting up, the performance, and tearing down. As you said, in terms of the work ethic, 100%, it’s work. It’s much work, and there’s much pride. There’s much physical labour involved. It’s much physical exertion, but it’s not work because I’m passionate about it. I love it so a lot. I don’t mind. I see setting up equipment and speakers and lugging around the keyboard and various guitars, and it’s heavy going up and down my stairs because I keep my stuff in my apartment. I see it as exercise, too; it’s great exercise. That’s my view.
Jacobsen: There needs to be more time in the day.
Mata: Yes, there needs to be more time in the day. No, there’s not. For my fellow Tejano artists, they are some of the hardest workers I know. Even the landscapers, you talk about Mexicans, you see them working their asses off. Why? Because they take pride in their work. They know exactly what they’re doing. We’re passionate about what we do. We’re very, very passionate about what we do. As a filmmaker, too, I drive my actors and crew crazy. I can go 24 hours nonstop because I am passionate about it. One could say, “Wow, J.D. has a great work ethic.” Yes, but I also adore what I do. When you adore what you do and are called for it, you’re summoned, and it’s not even working.
Jacobsen: Can you do anything with your wardrobe to make it more bearable? Can you open the shirt, cut the sleeves, or put little holes in the clothing?
Mata: Man, again, very astute. The wardrobe will evolve. You cut the sleeves off, and the buttons fall off. This coat no longer has any buttons. You pull the rest of them off.
Jacobsen: There is too much moisture, heat, and dust. Movement wears down clothes.
Mata: It does. Look at the jeans I’m wearing now.
Jacobsen: Oh, yes.
Mata: I didn’t buy them like that. It’s just from work ethic. But I use these for photo shoots now. They’re popular. People wear them; you have to go with them, right? So, if some of the bling falls off, you replace it with a new one. Some red rubies, now you put green rubies instead or blue rubies: plastic, not actual rubies, but little plastic things. Yes, wardrobe is an important and underrated aspect of the Tejano industry. It’s as important as the sound, the way you look. Yes, for sure.
Jacobsen: It’s different than someone like Mick Jagger standing on stage with a sleeveless T-shirt.
Mata: Oh, yes, yes. No, no, no, no. You won’t see Tejano artists doing that. Again, you touched on that earlier in that the culture is conservative. That would be too much if you dressed like The Stones on stage as a Tejano band because most of your audiences are not stoner rock and rollers. These people go to work every day, dress nicely, and still wear very conservative clothing. So, if you see a band up there that looks like a bunch of homeless Tejano artists, you could try it, but I haven’t seen anyone dress like that. Again, you touched on whether conservatism influences wardrobe earlier. In that regard, yes.
Jacobsen: Are the fabrics mostly polyester cotton?
Mata: Yes, they are. Polyester cotton, absolutely, yes.
Jacobsen: No camel hair?
Mata: No, no camel hair, no. Maybe some, but yes, mainly polyester cotton.
Jacobsen: That’s probably the North, the American influence more than…
Mata: Yes, for sure, for sure.
Jacobsen: Just production.
Mata: Yes. So, let’s talk about it. Part of the wardrobe is shoes and boots. Boots are very popular among Tejano artists. Back when I was young, we would wear cool ’80s boots. We can get away with wearing sneakers; what do you call those, those Converse types?
Jacobsen: Converse, the flat-footed ones?
Mata: Yes, the flat-footed ones.
Mata: Yes, yes, exactly. Those are good with some nice pants and stuff, yes. Shoes are also very, very important. You won’t see anybody go up there in flip-flops. Usually, they’ll have some nice boots or nice Converse shoes. Nothing raggedy. Again, no grunge. There is no grunge in the Tejano market. There is no room for grunge.
Jacobsen: Do the styles differ a lot between men and women? Or are the colours the same, but the dress code for men and women and the shape are the same?
Mata: Yes, for sure. Women, the Tejano artists, do wear tight-fitted clothing. There’s a certain amount of sexiness involved, which is great. It’s part of their exuberant passion and beauty, their love for the art of music. Sexiness in terms of the dance—when you dance to Tejano music, you’re close. When you’re dancing, it’s a very passionate, very sexy dance. Therefore, the wardrobe for women will reflect that sexiness, too. People wear sexy outfits when they go dancing. You want to look good; you want to look passionate. So you wear clothes that reflect that. Therefore, the artist will also wear clothes that reflect what their audience is wearing. Again, these are concerts, clubs, if you’re playing clubs. Again, if you’re playing weddings and quinceañeras, you are mirroring what the audience is wearing—some nice suits; you want to look good.
Jacobsen: What kind of earrings?
Mata: Oh yes, earrings are good. Dangly earrings for the guys. One ear at the most. Most guys would wear either a stud or a diamond on one side. The women would wear more extravagant earrings. The guys wore just one earring, a stud or a diamond. That was acceptable in terms of Tejano music.
Jacobsen: The hair stays long?
Mata: In the 80s, it was the mullet. Now, it’s long or short—it’s all relative.
Jacobsen: All right, we’ll call it a day. I’ll see you next week.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/17
A seasoned Musician (Vocals, Guitar and Piano), Filmmaker, and Actor, J.D. Mata has composed 100 songs and performed 100 shows and venues throughout. He has been a regular at the legendary “Whisky a Go Go,” where he has wooed audiences with his original shamanistic musical performances. He has written and directed numerous feature films, web series, and music videos. J.D. has also appeared in various national T.V. commercials and shows. Memorable appearances are TRUE BLOOD (HBO) as Tio Luca, THE UPS Store National television commercial, and the lead in the Lil Wayne music video, HOW TO LOVE, with over 129 million views. As a MOHAWK MEDICINE MAN, J.D. also led the spiritual-based film KATERI, which won the prestigious “Capex Dei” award at the Vatican in Rome. J.D. co-starred, performed and wrote the music for the original world premiere play, AN ENEMY of the PUEBLO — by one of today’s preeminent Chicana writers, Josefina Lopez! This is J.D.’s third Fringe; last year, he wrote, directed and starred in the Fringe Encore Performance award-winning “A Night at the Chicano Rock Opera.” He is in season 2 of his NEW YouTube series, ROCK god! J.D. is a native of McAllen, Texas and resides in North Hollywood, California.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I should start with the structure and history, including your personal history. You were part of the foundation of Tejano music, which evolved with you and others who came later. We discussed this in the more extensive interview. What were some of the elements of Tejano that were emerging in Texas or along the border that allowed Tejano to become a formal hybrid music genre?
J.D. Mata: Tejano music probably originated from 1979 to 1981. Before that, it wasn’t recognized as a distinct style in terms of instrumentation. What distinguishes Tejano music is its instrumentation. Before Tejano music, the genre was called Chicano music, which included Conjunto. Chicano music featured horns, trumpets, saxophones, trombones, the Rhodes keyboard, drums, bass, and guitar.
Jacobsen: Can you explain the transition from Chicano music to Tejano?
Mata: Chicano music, moving backward from Tejano, originated from Orquesta music. Orquesta music featured horns, typically including two trumpet players, a trombone player, a saxophone player, a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, and a keyboard player using a Rhodes keyboard, resembling an organ. Orquesta and Chicano music were synonymous. Conversely, Conjunto featured the accordion, bajo sexto (a type of guitar), bass, drums, and vocals.
Jacobsen: What was the common factor among these music styles?
Mata: The common denominator between Conjunto and Orquesta (Chicano music) was the polka rhythm: mm-chuh, mm-chuh, mm-chuh. They also played various styles like cumbias, huapangos, and waltzes, but the main dancing force was the polka.
Jacobsen: How did the polka become integrated into Tejano music?
Mata: The polka originated from a significant influx of Germans into Northern Mexico and South Texas. They brought the German polka to Mexico, where Mexican nationals learned to play the accordion and added Spanish lyrics. This evolution crossed the South Texas border, influencing the Rio Grande Valley and all of Texas, marking the evolution of the polka. We didn’t invent it; the Germans did. We added Spanish lyrics to it.
Now, let me give you some names of Conjunto: Ramon Ayala, Los Tigres del Norte, and several others. You’ve got the Latin Breed and Little Joe, La Familia in Chicano music. Orquesta music would include Noe Pro in the band. He was an incredible singer and bass player who started out playing rock and roll, but then he went into Orquesta, where he had all the brass and the saxes. He would sing and play the polkas and the cumbias. So, there was Noe Pro in the band, and you had Eddie Perez and his Orquesta. You had Roberto Pulido, who is his son. We’ll talk about him later.
Jacobsen: He became famous in the Tejano industry after it evolved. But I know the etiology; I have this insight because I was there. How was Tejano music beginning, and how did it become so that, in brief, we can go into more detail about what led to Tejano?
Mata: Tejano became huge because of Selena, right? Selena introduced the world to Tejano, and of course, she was murdered, right? But even before that, artists, even before Tejano music, were Tejano music.
You had the conjuntos, you had the orquestas, you had the Chicano music. They were touring all over the U.S. They would go because you would have migrant workers. Are you familiar with the concept of migrant workers? People from Texas would travel north to California to Oregon to pick strawberries and grapes. It was good money for them.
Jacobsen: People would come to Vancouver to work in Canada at different rates because it’s farther. I know this because when I was 15 or 16, a bunch of gentlemen would come by in a van, pick me up, and I’d be the token white boy. I worked with them in construction. Interestingly, the guy’s name was Jose. He has since retired. He was working so his kid could go to college.
Mata: Hey, he’s Jose, I’m Hose B. That’s right. My dad was a fireman.
Jacobsen: I thought you were Hose D!
Mata: But as a matter of fact, you probably don’t remember. Did you hear any Tejano bands? My point is that the reason orquestas and conjuntos would tour all over the U.S. was to go where all the migrant workers were. Where the Chicano population was able to go and play, so that was gigs for them, right? So, in a way, Selena did bring Tejano music to the world, but it was already spread out throughout the U.S. because of all the band’s tours. They’d go on heavy-duty tours on tour buses, which was very brutal. But they would go to all these different places where there were influxes of Mexican-American populations because of the farm workers and the migrants.
Jacobsen: So where did the term “Tejano” music come from? If we had Chicano music, we had Orquesta. I’ve outlined how we had Conjunto, Orquesta, and Chicano music. So, where did Tejano come from?
Mata: This is factual and groundbreaking. There’s one guy who solely, without a doubt, was the inventor of Tejano music. Is there any question about this among any of us? There’s no question. There are no dissenting voices on this. Because nobody’s said it. I’m waiting for somebody to give me the answers to where Tejano music came from. This guy invented the wheel, right? His name is Oscar Soliz. This is the godfather.
I was watching a show, and they touched base on it. They had him on the show, and the band he played with was called Romance. He belonged to a band called Los Unicos. That’s when he started experimenting with the synthesizers that had just come out. So what should I say first? Should I talk about the chicken, or should I talk about the egg first?
Jacobsen: It’s more complicated with this one because, when it came to Lance’s, in some contexts, the chicken, the egg, and the hen went as a confluence simultaneously together. They all came together. This is trickier.
Mata: The chicken, the hen, and the egg all came together in this one. They came together. Well, let me put it this way. What separates conjunto from orquesta is that conjunto is exclusively accordion music. Orquesta is trumpets, saxophones, and trombones. They could have an accordion, but what makes orquesta music is the horns, the horn section of the band. Chicano music, same difference. The linchpin of Tejano music is the advent of the synthesizer.
What Oscar Soliz did was he started experimenting with the synthesizer. When he joined the band Romance, I would say the first song, when they first started calling Tejano music Tejano music, was “Enamorado de Ti.” That had a huge impact. There was still a saxophone in the band, but it was the first time in Mexican-American music that there was a synthesizer sound to play the melodies.
Oscar Soliz is the godfather of Tejano music. He’s a genius on the keyboard. He’s the one who started experimenting with the synthesizer. It used the synthesizer — the Cars used it back then, and all these rock bands, such as Van Halen, were using it. He brought the synthesizer to Tejano music to the point where Oscar Soliz was replicating all the horns on the synthesizer. So not only was it a whole different sound, it revolutionized Mexican-American music. It became the sound he created, blowing the socks off people.
Because the whole thing about Tejano music is that you dance to it, there’s something about the synthesizer sound and all the different sounds you can replicate. It’s hundreds of other sounds to the polka beat with all these chords, slick jazz inverted chords, and these slick bass players, drummers, and incredible singers. It was lightning in a bottle. So Oscar Soliz was the first one to do it, and it took off from there. That’s when they started calling it Tejano music. Tejano music is a band, sometimes with horns, mostly not, but it was mainly synthesizers. You would have two synthesizers and two keyboard players. Selena was — that’s what they were. They would use an accordion occasionally, but it was two synthesizers and two keyboard players. That, my friend, is the beginning, the roots of Tejano music.
Jacobsen: My question: Waltzes, along with the polkas, were a big part of Western European culture; in some contexts, were waltzes ever at the early stages, or was the music associated with waltzes simply not part of that formation?
Mata: Oh no, waltzes were always a part of it, returning to the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. My grandfather would play waltzes. But when you hear Tejano music, it’s a blanket statement for polka, which is ranchera–which is also ranchera. Polka and ranchera are synonymous. The um-pa, um-pa, um-pa. Cumbia, um-pa-pa, um-pa-pa, um-pa-pa. I would say Waltz, um-pa, but there aren’t many waltzes in Tejano music per se. It’s because Tejano music is a very power-driven, melodic-driven polka. So, the Waltz is not associated with Tejano music. Yes, it is associated with conjunto, and I’ve already defined conjunto. Yes, it’s associated with Chicano music, Orquesta.
Mata: And lately, there’s been Banda coming out in Tejano. Banda existed even before Tejano. That’s where you have, instead of a bass, an electric bass player, you have a tuba player, and you have clarinets and trumpets. It’s like 12 dudes, which has been very popular. But going back to Tejano, I can’t stress enough before I forget. We need to give Oscar Soliz his flowers as being the founder of Tejano music. I’m going to say it. Yes, I said it. Definitively, he is the founder of Tejano music. He’s the Godfather. He needs to get his flowers for discovering Tejano music and starting an industry with his innovative and genius synthesizer techniques and melodies.
He’s a gifted artist. Look up Romance, which would be the first band. After Romance, you had Grupo Mas, you had La Mafia, and you had us. I was part of that. When I was in high school, we were playing Tejano music. The beauty of Tejano music is this. Again, I’m expanding on what was asked earlier, but we were the pioneers of Tejano music in that sense. We wrote our songs. Like there was no — you can’t be a cover band. You can’t be a cover band Tejano artist. To some degree, you can play some of the older songs or some of the older Mexican songs, but the genuine bona fide Tejano music was all original. It was you who wrote the lyrics and the melodies. That’s what it was.
The Beatles started playing Little Richard. The famous guitarist B.B. King, too. They were big on Elvis. They were doing all those songs, then evolved to writing their music. But as Tejano artists, we didn’t have that luxury. Because we were a brand new genre, we, along with Oscar Soliz and the polka beat, evolved into something more than just a polka. It’s like a polka with different time signatures. It gets complex. It’s not just a polka any more. It is the basic beat, but then there are a lot of drum fills and complex chord changes, such as jazz chord changes. The drum gets intricate; the bass gets intricate. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful artistry on its own. It should be, and it is taught at some schools, like in South Texas. But anyway, Oscar Soliz needs to get his flowers for being the founder of Tejano music. I digressed from the waltz question; sorry about that.
Jacobsen: It’s a good point. People who found things deserve their props. I am mainly drawn to Latin dance clubs when I want to have fun. As a non-expert, I notice many of the same base beats in many of the popular songs, the most popular ones. So, even though I don’t necessarily understand the lyrics, I enjoy the beat. I want the music. While working at the horse farm, cleaning stalls, filling buckets, feeding hay, and driving the tractor, I’d be playing this music sometimes, along with various other genres. However, in my spare time, I’d dance at a dance club in Vancouver or something like that to blow off steam. So, are these base beats also being replicated in popular Latin songs now, like the top 100 charts?
Mata: No, no, I don’t think so. You have Selena’s brother, A.B. Quintanilla, who does a lot. He’s got the Kumbia Kings, not the Columbia Kings. His bass riffs are becoming, and he’s quite an innovator, but I don’t think that Tejano bass riffs are being replicated in terms of mainstream music, not yet. If I understand your question correctly, maybe you have sampled something like “Every Breath You Take,” and somebody is rapping it, right? Sampling to it. That has yet to happen with Tejano music, but somebody should sample base riffs or Tejano riffs. I should do it. Like these kinds of artists, I was reading up some of my list on that. There’s no attachment to Tejano. They’re more, it’s more of a reggaeton. That’s another style that.
Jacobsen: Yes, that’s more something more Sean Paul-esque. Yes, it’s more Colombian, Central American, and Puerto Rican. The Mexican American identity in terms of music is Tejano. Yes, so you got the Salinas, you got Grupo Mas, you got La Mafia, you have Solido right now. Yes, you have all these. I’m not an expert on mainstream Tejano music right now because I’ve been living here in Los Angeles, but I do know the start and general synthesis of Tejano music and what it entails.
Jacobsen: Now, you were a choir conductor for about a quarter century, and you consider yourself one of the best 100 in the world at this. So, are any of the themes or styles of music that you would see in a Catholic experience of music replicated in Tejano music?
Mata: That’s a great question. Right, because you are looking, that’s why I’m here. You’re talking to the guy who’s done it. Because I was a choir director for the Spanish. I am one of the top 100 choir directors in Spanish. Spanish, well, maybe in general, because I understand the role of the choir director at church. But the fact is, it’s like they say… I’m from South Texas. You can take the guy out of South Texas to California. Yes, you come to L.A. but can’t take the South Texas out of me, right? So when I was a choir director, you can go from being a choir director, but you can’t take the Tejano out of me. So, when I conduct and sing our songs, I put a Tejano vibe into it, without a doubt.
So yes, and I would venture to say there are probably others — I’m not the only one. I don’t know who they are, but I’m sure many musicians also moonlight. What would you call it? Church light, church bell? Even though I grew up as a choir director, the reality was that it was also a steady income for me. Although I’m going off the reservation a bit, it’s related. For many, many years, I never got paid as a choir director. They never paid us.
Jacobsen: Did you consider this an act of service to your faith?
Mata: Yes, it was the recompense. The recompense will be my sanctification because it was like God doesn’t pick the best people to do his work. So, I did so many years of service for free. Now I get paid, but I did so many, many, many years of free gigs, if you will, every Sunday. There’s got to be some payoff on the back end. But yes, to answer your question, is there a Tejano influence in the choir? Yes, you’re looking at it for sure. Yes, it’s inevitable if that answers your question.
Jacobsen: It did. How would you explain the technicalities of those conjunto elements of Tejano? How do they weave and interrelate to form a rhythmic base through which you can then build your lyricism, styling, inflection, and so on?
Mata: Yes, that’s a great question. I’ll speak from my reference. Like when I was writing Tejano music. Let’s talk about the lyrics for many of my songs first. The lyrics were in Spanish. Tejano, oh! That’s another significant fact. It’s Spanish. Tejano music is in Spanish. Even though we’re in America, it’s Tejano, Texan, Mexicano. Texan and Mexican, right? “Te-,” Tejano, “-Mexicano.” Those are two words merged into one, right? But the music is in Spanish, and the words and the literature are in Spanish. For me, it gets a little elitist that sometimes I would be criticized because some of the words I used or how I pronounced them were not pronounced in appropriate Spanish.
But hello! We’re Mexican Americans. It’s Tex-Mex. We have our way of saying things. For example, what’s a good word? I can’t think of it right now, but certain words are appropriately pronounced in Spanish in Mexico. And then, in Texas, we have our slang way of saying it. Some of the disc jockeys wouldn’t want to avoid playing the music because we said it in a slang way. This is not proper Spanish, but I would think to myself, wait a minute. This is Tejano music. This isn’t Mexican music, like Mexican music. This is Tejano. I’m a Tejano artist. This is the way I speak. This is the way I talk my words. This is authentic Tejano music. So, for example, you would say brakes manias. The Tejano way of saying brakes is manillas. In Mexican Spanish, it’s friends, right? It’s a slang. So if you use manillas in a song, put the brakes,pon las manillas, you’ll get dinged for it. “Oh, it’s not appropriate Spanish.” It’s like, “Hey if I’m writing the song and this is the lyric I’m choosing that I find the most appropriate to describe my emotion or the action if it’s gonna be genuine and Tejano, it’s gonna be authentic.” That’s an authentic Tejano. Anyway, in terms of lyrics, I always wrote about my experiences and romantic pitfalls. I mentioned in the last interview that I’m a hopeless romantic. So it’s great. It’s great for songwriting, but I would never use it; I would never talk about a situation verbatim. You always want to use that situation but change the story slightly to protect the guilty, right? Mainly me. So now, in terms of music…
Jacobsen: If I may, there’s one small point. Is it primarily Spanish snobbery against Texan styles of Spanish?
Mata: Yes, Texan Spanish. Yes, there are two camps. There are two camps, without a doubt. What? Nobody’s right, nobody’s wrong.
Jacobsen: The way I saw it, it’s such a minor aesthetic that would matter for people who can speak the language fluently. For the most part, there are no people who are originally fluent.
Mata: Correct.
Jacobsen: Is there a similar rub between Portuguese and Spanish?
Mata: No.
Jacobsen: In terms of speakers?
Mata: No. So this is… Yes, it’s due to the similarity. Portuguese, Mexican, and Spanish are mainly because Brazil is so far from Mexico. It’s two different things. They don’t clash. But Texas and Mexico are next to each other. So there’s that clash.
Jacobsen: They do not necessarily have to be next-door neighbours regarding geography. A group of Quebec humanists, Quebecois humanists, pointed out that there was a language fight between Parisian French and Quebecois French. They are written the same but spoken very differently. Some think Parisian French is better. Others think Quebecois French is better. This is common among people who come from the same language, close or proximal history, but a different way of using the language, inflection, tone, emphases, a different matrix of how they associate the vocabulary, and things like that. This may be happening there, too.
Mata: Interesting. There’s more like Argentinian Spanish, and Argentinians, the way they speak their Spanish and Puerto Ricans, the way they speak. Those are more similar to Mexico, Mexico, Tejano, Mexico, the way they speak, Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans, and El Salvadorians, right?
Jacobsen: So, do you want me to continue with the instruments?
Mata: Any chord structure would work in terms of instrumentation if you’re framing it with the Tejano beat. So anything, a 1–4–5 is prevalent, but you could also do a round, the C, A minor, F, and G, the circular round, the C, F, which would also be G, E minor, C, and D, right? Those are the main structures in terms of music, the 1–4–5, and then you have the rounds, right? Like the C, A minor, F, G, G, E minor, C, D, F, F sharp minor, B flat, C, right? In the key of F or G, the key of D would be D, B minor, A, and B, right? A minor, yes. So then you’re crafting lyrics telling a story. However, you tell your story melodically according to whatever theoretical process you choose, whether the 1–4–5, the rounds, the four chords, or the chord structure. Then, off of that, you have your instrumentalists playing counterpoint to the melody of the songs. That’s what made Oscar Soliz a genius.
It is counterpoint to, for example, you have a melody, and then you have a different melody to the song. That’s what the counterpoint is. They play off of each other. This is where you get fugue elements involved. Then there are fundamental changes. Then you change keys. You’re still playing the melody with the counterpoint to the counterpoint. It’s like a fugue. Tejano music does that. It’s so intricate. That’s what makes it so attractive. The trick is also to build your song to start with the melody of the vocals, the bass, the drums, and you’ve got your beat going where it can be a cumbia or a ranchera. Then, you’re building the song. Then, you add strings. Then, you’re adding harmonies with your vocals. There are no harmonies in the first verse or the first chorus.
In the second verse and second chorus, you add harmonies, too. You start adding salt, pepper, and all these delicious things you add. I love garlic; I add a little garlic here or there. There’s all those elements in Tejano music. The guys that play it are. I’ve always said that you have these artists, and you should. I suggest everybody Google Tejano music recording players or Tejano artists. Go and listen to some of these guys and look at the way they play and how intricate it is. If some of these kids had been born in England, where the predominant style of music was classical, you would have probably had a couple of Beethovens in South Texas. The talent is that rich in Tejano music. For example, Oscar Soliz is the Tejano Beethoven. It’s high praise, but if you study the guy, if you hear him, if you…
So I’ve given a basic structure of songs and Tejano music, and then in terms of base riffs, within the scale of the base, within a 1–4–5, like in an F, you would have your F, your G, your A, and a B flat and a C, and then so many different ways, because the base riff is boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. I’m not a bass player.
But I sometimes play bass on my keyboard for the songs I write. That’s another art form. Some of these guys are incredible. Again, if these guys had been born with pianos and classical music from a young age, because they grew up at a very young age like I did, playing these instruments, they would have become virtuosos at the accordion. At the keyboard. they become Tejano virtuosos. Had they been exclusively dedicated to classical music, they would be virtuosos in classical music. That’s how talented these Tejano artists are. Throughout history, something about the Mexican-American culture in terms of its music is that my grandfather was a musician. He was super talented.
He was a saxophone player and a singer. These are some guys you got, Noe Pro. Folks reading this have to look up Rene Sandoval. You have to look up Noe Pro. You have to look up Eddie Perez and Paulino Bernal. These are guys that, before the Tejano industry, were the roadmap to the final destination. So, along with Tejano came some famous groups like Grupo Mas. Oh, Laura Canales. Laura Canales was Oscar Soliz’s neighbour and would hang out with Oscar. She was younger than him, and Oscar got her into the end. She’s known as the queen of Chicano music. She was known as the queen, but then when Tejano, but Laura Canales, it wasn’t Tejano music yet. It was known as Chicano music and Orquesta. She was the queen of that genre.
In comparison, she passed the torch to Selena. Selena became the queen of Tejano music. So, going back to instrumentation, we covered that as best as we could for now.
Jacobsen: Who else would you like to name-drop in terms of the foundation?
Mata: Before Tejano music, you have, in terms of conjunto, I mentioned Ramon Ayala, Esteban Jordan, who was an accordion player.
Jacobsen: Who are the others?
Mata: So, let me give you some names regarding the Tejano industry. That never quite got huge. There’s a band called Grupo Arroyo. There’s a famous D.J. in South Texas. He was part white and part Mexican. Ricky, something in a movie that only spoke Tex-Mex.
Jacobsen: He was Tex-Mex.
Mata: Yes, he was 100%. La Movida. Ricky Smith, La Movida de Ricky Smith. You had Los Chamacos. They were more conjunto but also considered Tejano music. The first Tejano band per se is Romance. I mentioned them earlier, but Romance, without a doubt, is the Tejano band. They’re on Facebook. I’ll send you the link. There was Shelly Lares, a female singer. My band, Grupo Trinidad, we were up and coming. That’s another story. It was a bad breakup. We were so close. We were so close.
Jacobsen: So close together socially or so close to fame?
Mata: To fame, to fame. Yes, we could have made it, but what? Everything works out because I wouldn’t have come to Los Angeles. But that broke my heart. That crushed me.
Jacobsen: You left when you broke up with everyone.
Mata: Well, it’s a long story. We broke up. Let’s say the band broke up. But we were on the verge of making it. We were perfect. We were very, very good. But there are hundreds and thousands of sad stories where the ego is probably on my part and other parts of the musicians’, and you don’t get the right chemistry. Bands are about chemistry. And if the chemistry is not there, then if there’s a cancer in the group, it’s like physiology. The group will die.
Jacobsen: So you’re considering this a form of social physiology as an analogy?
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/18
A seasoned Musician (Vocals, Guitar and Piano), Filmmaker, and Actor, J.D. Mata has composed 100 songs and performed 100 shows and venues throughout. He has been a regular at the legendary “Whisky a Go Go,” where he has wooed audiences with his original shamanistic musical performances. He has written and directed numerous feature films, web series, and music videos. J.D. has also appeared in various national T.V. commercials and shows. Memorable appearances are TRUE BLOOD (HBO) as Tio Luca, THE UPS Store National television commercial, and the lead in the Lil Wayne music video, HOW TO LOVE, with over 129 million views. As a MOHAWK MEDICINE MAN, J.D. also led the spiritual-based film KATERI, which won the prestigious “Capex Dei” award at the Vatican in Rome. J.D. co-starred, performed and wrote the music for the original world premiere play, AN ENEMY of the PUEBLO — by one of today’s preeminent Chicana writers, Josefina Lopez! This is J.D.’s third Fringe; last year, he wrote, directed and starred in the Fringe Encore Performance award-winning “A Night at the Chicano Rock Opera.” He is in season 2 of his NEW YouTube series, ROCK god! J.D. is a native of McAllen, Texas and resides in North Hollywood, California.
J.D. Mata: I would like to qualify my statements, which we can include in the first session or at the beginning. What I’m sharing regarding the economy, the industry, is from my frame of reference, it is accurate, again, from my perspective. I have been out of the industry for approximately 20 years, but it still feels quite recent. Regarding the specifics of where Tejano originated, its evolution, and its current state, that is not my area of expertise. However, some individuals in Texas, such as Rock and Roll James, an exceptional D.J., could provide more insight. He hosts a podcast called #PBT, which offers incredible insights. He is a D.J. within the Tejano industry and has experience in various formats, making him highly knowledgeable. Another expert is D.J. Mando San Roman, with whom I was in a Tejano band called La Ganga. He is also an aficionado of the Tejano industry, knowledgeable about its history and ideology. This can be a sensitive issue, and I strive to be accurate based on my experience. I completely understand if others feel I have not been accurate, as everyone has their own perspective. I wanted to share that we were examining the origins and some of the greats of Tejano music.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Geography plays a significant role in how far a musical style can spread. The internet can change things to some extent, but music must become prominent to launch from there. For instance, rap and hip-hop were very localized for a long time before they became international through the internet. Considering the Texas-Mexico border as the development area, how did Tejano music spread to the east, as far as Florida, to the west, as far as California, and to central and southern Mexico? How did its development unfold in these directions?
Mata: That is a very interesting question. Selena was one of the artists who significantly contributed to bringing Tejano music to a broader audience, including the east, west, south, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the north. Her father, A.B. Quintanilla, deserves recognition for managing her career astutely and persistently, ensuring her success during her lifetime and preserving her legacy afterward. The entire family, including her sister Suzette, has been instrumental in maintaining her legacy.
Tejano music reached these regions because necessity is the mother of invention. Musicians need to perform and earn a living. One of the reasons I left South Texas, despite my love for McAllen and the region, is opportunities aren’t present in certain areas of the film or music industry. If you want to spread globally or make a significant impact, you must relocate to a market that can facilitate that growth. Many great musicians and Tejano artists perform at weddings, quinceañeras, and bars. Many are content to stay in those venues, which is perfectly fine. However, I aspired to achieve recognition on a global stage.
For many Tejano artists, necessity is the mother of invention. Many played music full-time, performing at quinceañeras, weddings, and bars, but also held other jobs. I dislike the term “real jobs” because, for us, music is our real job. As a musician and actor, that is my true profession. However, many have side hustles: lawyers, teachers, doctors, and judges, and they play music to support their passion.
Some musicians can’t afford to do that, so they pursue music as a career. Mexican Americans are spread across the United States, Mexico, and other countries. They brought Tejano music to other Mexican Americans who were working as farm workers and migrants. These migrants left the Rio Grande Valley or South Texas to work in the fields up north, spreading the music throughout the Midwest, California, Oregon, and other places. Artists would travel to perform there, often facing brutal conditions, with their buses frequently breaking down. It was a blue-collar musical development, with musicians enduring significant hardships.
Musicians didn’t have modern conveniences like cell phones or iPads back then, so they often composed songs under challenging circumstances. For example, Roberto Pulido, an icon in the industry, played more orchestra music with saxophones and accordion than Tejano. His son, Bobby Pulido, is a Tejano breakout star.
Roberto’s story illustrates the hardships faced by these musicians. They travelled all over the U.S., often with their buses breaking down. He shared on Rock and Roll James’s #PBTshow about how they ran him without oil, leading to his physical breakdown. This story is emblematic of how Tejano’s music spread to various corners across the map.
I want to highlight two individuals who significantly contributed to making Tejano huge in South Texas: Nano Ramirez, the owner of the convention center Via Real in McAllen, Texas, who hired many Tejano artists and hosted large dances; and Johnny Canales, who also played a pivotal role in promoting Tejano music. God rest his soul; he recently passed away.
Johnny Canales had a television show where he showcased up-and-coming Tejano artists, which was a huge hit. There were other local shows that I participated in as well, like those hosted by Akira and Helio. These Sunday morning talk shows also featured Tejano artists and served as a springboard for recognition before the internet era.
Thanks to the internet and the significant contributions of Selena, her father, and her family, Tejano music has spread worldwide. Selena’s talent, the internet, and the movie about her life have helped popularize Tejano music globally.
Can you be a Tejano artist if you are not born in Texas? No. To be a genuine Tejano artist, you must be born in Texas and be able to write your music. Can someone born in San Francisco play Tejano music? Yes, of course. But they can’t call themselves a Tejano artist. Regarding the geographical spread, the core region for Tejano music is from San Antonio down to the Rio Grande Valley. I am biased, but I consider the Rio Grande Valley the nucleus, the motherland, the “Israel” of Tejano music. We, the Tejano artists, are like the chosen ones.
Tejano music reached various regions through the efforts of these hardcore, blue-collar musicians with incredible work ethics. They travelled all over the United States early on, often working in construction and other tough jobs.
Jacobsen: That’s some of the hardest work you can do.
Mata: Some of the smartest people I have met are Tejano artists, musicians, and band leaders with significant business acumen. Many were master mechanics out of necessity and incredible musicians. I am a terrible business person and know only a little about cars. If something breaks down, I am in trouble. My main strength is artistry. However, out of necessity, many of these Tejano artists became brilliant in multiple areas.
As I mentioned, if these pioneers had been born with access to grand pianos and classical music, they would have been virtuosos. There are different kinds of genius and virtuosity, and Tejano artists possess a unique form of genius.
Did I answer your question adequately?
Jacobsen: Are there any examples you can give or descriptors of the differences between West Coast, East Coast, and Texan Mexican styles of Tejano music? How has geography, over a few decades, changed the flavour of this style of music?
Mata: Surely. As I think about it, I will do a deep dive here.
Let’s address this very important question, starting with instrumentation. For example, when I was playing Tejano music in my band, I had two trumpet players and a keyboard player who used a small Casio keyboard. You work with what you have and make the best of it. The proximity to available musicians is also a factor. The trumpet players were individuals I knew from the band, and they joined because of our connection.
Regarding the drummer, it didn’t matter how good or bad his drums were; we worked with what we had. Keyboards often characterize the Tejano sound. You invent the sound based on the resources at your disposal. Oscar considered the godfather of Tejano music, had access to keyboards and synthesizers, which helped him create the Tejano sound.
Another requirement to be a genuine Tejano artist is to be born in South Texas. There’s also a cultural aspect to consider. My experiences, guiding stars in songwriting, and the influences I had growing up all play a role in creating an authentic Tejano sound. Now, let’s consider someone from Florida. They might be influenced by mainstream Tejano artists like Siggno. While they can certainly play Tejano music, they can’t truly call themselves Tejano artists. However, these prominent Tejano artists might deeply influence an artist from North Hollywood or Florida who grew up listening to Selena, Grupo Mas, and La Mafia.
Hundreds of Tejano artists didn’t achieve global fame, but those who did, like Mas and Mafia, set a standard. Other artists, like Los Chamacos, also contributed to the genre. People from various places, including North Hollywood, Florida, and even Mexico, have been influenced by artists like Bobby Pulido. They adopt the Tejano sound, which includes elements like German polka with synthesizers, bass guitar, drums, and sometimes horns.
Are they Tejano artists? Yes and no. Yes, they play Tejano music, but no, they are not of Tejano origin. It’s still commendable that they carry the mantle. It’s similar to how the Beatles were influenced by Elvis, Little Richard, and B.B. King and then created their sound, influencing many others.
Each region has its unique influences. For example, the music might be more Cuban-oriented in Florida, with salsa, merengue, and reggaeton influences. In Mexico, the focus might be more on banda music, also popular in California. Banda features a sousaphone as the bass, along with horn players and clarinetists, creating a cool sound.
I recently worked with another artist named J.D., whose music blends reggaeton with rap, creating a fusion of rap and rock in Spanish. My current music, which I call Radical Latino Fusion, incorporates a mix of everything that inspires me. Tejano music has undoubtedly spread everywhere and influences various types of Latino music.
Jacobsen: Have there been any spinoffs from Tejano to another genre of music? Has it evolved, or is it still new enough that there has yet to be an evolution from Tejano into a new form of music, similar to how Tejano has its roots in polka?
Mata: They influenced me, and I was copying them, too, in terms of sound. So yes, I can see how different regions have unique influences, although I have yet to follow them closely. For example, in Florida, the music scene is more Cuban-oriented, with prominent salsa, merengue, and reggaeton. In Mexico, the focus is more on banda music. Banda is also very popular here in California, featuring a sousaphone as the bass, along with horn players and clarinetists, creating a distinctive sound.
Jacobsen: Have there been any spinoffs from Tejano to another genre of music? Has it evolved into a new form of music in the 2010s or early 2020s, similar to how Tejano has its roots in polka?
Mata: I would say that Tejano has yet to spin off into anything else as defined or tangible as the evolution of German polka into Chicano music and then into Tejano. I’ve been out of the Tejano industry for the last 20 years. There may be someone out there who can provide more insight.
Jacobsen: Has Tejano music reached Western Europe or other international shores?
Mata: About 15 years ago, a group of female Tejano artists were groundbreaking. For instance, Shelly Lares and other female Tejano artists formed the Tejano Divas. They toured worldwide, including for USO tours, performing for the armed services. Elida Reyna and Stefani Montiel are other notable Tejano artists who have contributed significantly to the genre’s evolution and international reach. Patsy Torres is another significant Tejano female artist who has impacted the industry. Jennifer Peña, who played young Selena in the movie, has become a mainstream Tejano artist. Tejano music has reached every corner of the earth.
Jacobsen: When we speak of prominence for Tejano artists, we need to consider record sales and downloads. What kind of downloads and record sales are we looking at? What is the following like within the peak of performance in this genre? Can a metric be put on this?
Mata: During the early 90s the golden age of Tejano music was in the mid-90s and late 80s. Major record labels like Sony and BMI were signing many Tejano artists. Our band could have been signed, but we broke up before that. These record labels were offering very lucrative financial deals. If you were an astute businessperson, you could maintain your wealth and make a lot of money. Some artists squandered their opportunities, while others took advantage and remain successful even today.
However, today, like any other genre in the music industry, if you’re not touring, you’re not making money. Tejano artists make their money from live performances and merchandise sales at those performances. For example, I have written hundreds of songs and put them online with music videos. Am I making money from that? Still waiting. People play your song on the internet, but the revenue is minimal. You might get less than half a cent per play.
You won’t make money with original material online because people can get it for free. That’s why artists like Taylor Swift are touring; that’s how they make money. The trick for Tejano artists or any artist is to record your song, make a music video, and use it to draw people to live performances, where you can sell merchandise and tickets.
Creating a two-minute or even a minute-and-a-half song and making a music video for it is key. When people hear it and love it, they want to see you perform live. This is how many artists in the Tejano industry are surviving and making money. They play festivals, tour, and perform at banquet halls, generating income through ticket sales and merchandise. Getting creative with merchandise—selling shirts, keychains, caps—is how Tejano artists are making their money right now, as are many artists.
Jacobsen: The start of the industry involved going on the road to sing and play for people doing blue-collar work. Is that still done, or has the genre evolved past that? Or is it doing both?
Mata: History’s prologue. The way it started is similar to how it is now. There was a time when artists would get signed, make a lot money, and then tour. The label would pay for recording sessions, but the artists would have to pay them back. They usually get good deals and make money from touring.
Initially, there was a lot touring, very blue-collar, hard work, selling C.D.s and T-shirts wherever they played. Then came the golden age, where artists received contracts and large upfront payments. Now, it’s back to blue-collar work ethic. It’s really up to the individual artist’s work ethic. Are you willing to tour and lay it on the line?
For instance, I recently posted a music video. I was up all night making it, recording the song, and creating the video. I love doing it, but it is work. There’s no immediate financial payoff, but it’s about gaining street cred and showcasing what you can do. People want to see you and hear that song when you perform live.
So, it remains blue-collar work but is now under a broader umbrella. It involves not just touring but also making a splash on social media. Although there’s no immediate financial recompense from social media, it’s delayed gratification. Your social media footprint builds name recognition, translating into making money when you perform live. It’s still all about work ethic.
It’s all about a blue-collar work ethic, without a doubt. Some of these current Tejano artists work incredibly hard, which is great. It’s about work ethic and passion. If you have a passion for it, you will be dedicated. I’m passionate about what I do as an actor, filmmaker, and musician. I work day and night at it, and despite some struggles, this is my real job.
Jacobsen: Which category of person do you think is the biggest demographic of fans? Mexican-Americans, Mexicans, English-speaking, Texan-Americans—who is listening to this music the most? Who is downloading this music the most? Who is going to these concerts the most?
Mata: Without a doubt, the biggest demographic is Mexican Americans. This includes all ages, from young children to folks in their 50s and 60s who grew up with the golden age of Tejano music. There’s also a percentage of Caucasians who are fans of Tejano music, but the main demographic is Mexican-American and mainly from Texas. It all began in South Texas, from San Antonio south. Some bands started in Dallas, a bit further north, but the core demographic remains Mexican-American. While other ethnicities probably listen to it, I need specific data to quantify that.
Jacobsen: Last question for this session. Rap and hip hop had a moment where Dr. Dre discovered someone authentically a good rapper—unlike Vanilla Ice—Eminem, who may be the best-selling rapper ever. This expanded the consumer base for rap and hip-hop. Do you think Tejano could benefit from something similar? An artist from a different background who loves the music, masters it, and helps expand the consumer base.
Mata: Oh, definitely. That’s a great question and a wonderful vision. I could see that happening. I would love to see an African-American take on Tejano music and add their spin and soul. It would be fantastic to see someone from Japan start playing Tejano music, similar to how there are Japanese tribute bands for the Beatles. This took Tejano’s music to a new level. It’s a brilliant idea and concept; I should research whether this already exists.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/16
The Peace School is new in Canada, founded and accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 2023. Currently, the school has five children with a capacity for 120 and is well-financed and supported by the parents whose children attend. The school’s pedagogy has attracted the attention and support of UNICEF, UNESCO, and UNHCR, which strongly encouraged Dr. Nasser Yousefi, the Principal of The Peace School, to share his pedagogy and learning environment with other countries. Canada was Dr. Yousefi’s first choice for the next Peace School. Dr. Yousefi began his career as a child psychologist, studying in Sweden and earning a Master’s in Education in Childhood Growth and Development. In his exploration of the best pedagogy and learning environment for children, Dr. Yousefi completed a PhD in Educational Approaches at Madonna University in Italy and a PhD in Educational Psychology at Northwest University in the USA. This training combined humanistic and cognitive approaches to education. For many years, Dr. Yousefi was an educational consultant for UNICEF. He has conducted educational and research activities for various groups of children, including immigrant children, minorities, street children, and children with special needs. Dr. Yousefi was the Principal of the Peace (Participatory) School in Tehran, Iran, from 2005 to 2023, graduating 500 students from kindergarten to high school, with graduates accepted at universities in Europe, America, and Canada. Dr. Yousefi is passionate about creating the best future for children and is dedicated to creating safe and nurturing learning environments based on holistic principles.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi. They are originally from Iran but are now in Canada, specifically in Toronto. They have started a humanist educational system in Iran and are trying to implement the same system here in Canada. So, when did you first become interested in humanism, particularly in humanistic orientations around psychology and education?
Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi: As a psychology university student, I–Nasser–was initially interested in Piaget’s theories and methodology. However, when I started working with children, especially in rural communities, villages, and small towns, I found that this approach could have been more effective in those settings.
When I began working with refugee children living in camps or those experiencing difficult social and emotional circumstances, I realized the need for student-centred methods tailored to the individual needs of each student rather than a one-size-fits-all program. Working with a diverse group of children taught me that they have different needs and interests based on their life experiences and circumstances. This led me to adopt a student-centered and student-tailored approach to learning, drawing me into humanistic education.
I found that I had no other choice but to turn to humanism. Otherwise, I would have had to impose my ideas on the children rather than address their needs. My experience as a student in a controlling system made me determined to avoid repeating that scenario. Working with children at various times and circumstances taught me that students should have the choice to decide what they want and need to learn.
Humanistic education revealed to me that every child is unique and must discover their learning path, which is different from others. I realized that you can’t apply a single approach to all children; you need to see them individually and create an educational program tailored to each student. Allowing them to experience a variety of experiences helps them flourish. This led me to study Maslow and Rogers, whose ideologies influenced my approach.
Their ideal is to consciously prepare educational programs based on student’s needs, which requires constant adaptation from the teacher, not the students. I needed to harmonize with the students rather than expecting them to harmonize with me. The more I learned about humanistic education and psychology, the more intellectually and physically my students developed.
This realization led me to believe that providing opportunities for students to experience and explore without barriers is essential for their growth and expansion.
When you unblock students, they can learn and experience everything at their own pace. As they develop and learn more, you can develop alongside them. That’s why our school and system were ahead of other alternative systems in Iran. We learned that we need to move forward with our students. Was that enough or bad?
Jacobsen: Yes, it was enough and not bad, thank you. What about pushback? I hear all the time, from international cases, of societies with a religious, fundamental dominance of governance, policy, and social life pushing back against any efforts to implement anything remotely humanistic if not outright humanist. What did you experience from families, society, and even authorities?
Yousefi: When we started the school 20 years ago, it was new and still is for many people. Naturally, we faced issues, challenges, and pushbacks. One thing about families was that they wanted the school to teach familiar subjects to their kids, things they also learned in school. They worried that by emphasizing the students themselves to learn and decide what to learn, both families and educational specialists thought students wouldn’t know what they needed to learn. They believed it was our job and responsibility to tell them.
But I found that when you practice with students to experience and learn, they know what to choose and what they need. The biggest pushback we faced was the controlling mindset of adults who believed it was their right to decide what students should learn. This included families, society, and the government.
All of them wanted to decide for the children. At the beginning of the year, they would dictate what literature, science, and math meant. They were not open to teaching different narratives and perspectives. They insisted that history is what the government says, not any other narrative.
Our school encourages students to read from different perspectives and learn about various narratives. For instance, we tell them to read one book and then another that presents a different viewpoint. We want them to understand that different countries may have different versions of history.
Another challenge was the concern that allowing students to decide for themselves would make them stubborn and uncooperative. Many believed that giving control to students would make them selfish. But every time we listened to students and let them decide for themselves, they became more respectful toward us, because we gave them that opportunity.
They would listen to me even more when I listened to their needs and words. No other school saw as much respect or empathy from their students as we did. The mainstream system feared adopting this approach because they thought they couldn’t keep up and would need more resources or eventually give up. Public and other private schools preferred teachers to stick to a single, uniform curriculum nationwide.
But we had a specific program for each student in the classroom. It was hard for the teacher, and the controlling system didn’t want this to happen.
Jacobsen: When it comes to developing these programs for each student, is it as time-intensive as it sounds, or is there a factor of, in fact, saving time when you’re allowing students to develop their way of learning and choosing material educationally? So, on the one hand, it is theoretically more difficult to deal with custom or individualized education programs per student. At the same time, you have something like a reverse classroom where you’re removing barriers for students to learn at their own pace and pick subjects that interest them. While there’s probably still a core of subjects they’re all learning, is there a way in which, on the surface, it could seem more difficult to implement, but in a way, you’re also saving a lot of time and effort by allowing students to develop their capacities to learn?
Yousefi: Yes. The students would say what they wanted and were interested in learning, and the teacher acted as a facilitator to help them learn that, drawing a path for them. Yes, it was easier for the students to develop faster and learn what they wanted to learn. However, it was challenging for the teacher to help every student simultaneously because each child has unique needs. The diversity in our educational programs was due to the diversity of our student’s needs, not because we needed more ideas. The students themselves brought the ideas and had the initiative.
But we did have some subjects and topics we wanted all students to learn. After introducing and discussing the topic, we encouraged them to explore it independently and from different perspectives and resources. For example, we propose learning about a poet. One student might be interested in the poems themselves, another in the poet’s biography, and another in different forms of poetry or the historical context of the poet’s time.
Jacobsen: When you were trying to advocate for a humanist school system in Canada, what barriers did you experience? What differences did you notice compared to the situation in Iran?
Yousefi: The mainstream educational systems worldwide, including Canada, are heavily influenced by controlling and behaviourist approaches. In some places, it is different because they might have more resources or opportunities to deviate from the norm, but in general, they are based on behaviourism. Schools focus on preparing students to memorize information and prepare for current job markets.
There aren’t enough systems that teach students they can positively change the world. The Ministry of Education in every country tends to maintain the current situation through schools rather than encouraging transformative thinking and humanistic education.
They don’t want their students to know how to change the situation. It doesn’t matter where—Switzerland, Canada, Iran, or anywhere else—every adult thinks they know better than children what is best and what is not best. “I have to determine what students should learn and study.” This controlling idea could be more or less prevalent in different countries and circumstances. They even determine how students should look at things, dictating their perspective. It’s like a 3D movie where the movie directs you to look at specific points, saying, “This is what we want you to focus on right now.”
This approach only allows students to think dependently. No school asks students, “What do you think? What makes you happy? What are you suffering from? How do you see the world?” There needs to be more engagement with students’ perspectives and experiences. Only a few schools or teachers telling students they can change the world. Instead, they often say, “You need to fit into the system.” This mindset discourages students from believing they can positively impact and improve the world for everyone.
Mainstream schools teach students to think about themselves and become individualistic, aiming for personal success, even if it’s at the expense of others. This fosters a mindset where some people lie, create, or develop things that are harmful to humanity. They need to think about solutions that are equal and equitable.
The humanist educational approach advocates for a different ideology. It aims to help the world become a better place by empowering each person to show their talents and contribute positively. This is also true for Canada, where schools rarely ask students how they can help make the world a better place. This is one of the barriers we face constantly.
Teachers often need more time or energy to consider a child’s needs and interests. Globally, the love that people should have for each other needs to be improved. If, as a teacher, I don’t love my students, I can’t teach them to love others. We have doctors and other professionals who don’t show care and empathy towards those they serve.
We don’t teach love in schools. They might teach sex education and other subjects, but they don’t address the concept of love. Both are important. If we don’t teach students about love, we are taking something vital away from them. In most systems, people are considered numbers rather than individuals with unique needs and potential.
It doesn’t matter if it’s one more or one less. To them, it’s just a number. This humanistic approach is trying to promote human love. Every human being, wherever they are, is important. It’s about recognizing the combination of a person’s identity, their emotional aspects, and social aspects. This holistic view helps make the world a better place to live. If I can’t empathize with your sadness or suffering, I can’t truly help you. Compassion is at the heart of humanist education principles.
So, the humanist educational approach revolves around compassion, empathy, and love. While acknowledging the importance of the individual, it also emphasizes the importance of others. The education system in Canada and other countries often needs this focus.
Jacobsen: Last question. From what I’m gathering, does this humanist educational program, individualized per student and grounded in humanistic psychology, authentically focus on the student’s intellectual and emotional development?
Yousefi: Yes, exactly. The program helps students develop intellectually and emotionally by allowing them to learn what they need while being mindful of and caring for others. It adapts to the situation at hand but remains focused on authentic development.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Masaaki Yamauchi is the Administrator of ESOTERIQ Society. He discusses: updates on the EsoterIQ Society; feedback; views on the immaterial of the self; and some academic hopes.
Keywords: EsoterIQ Society membership criteria, future editions of EsoterIQ ebook, human intelligence measurement limitations, I.Q. test statistical analysis, Masaaki Yamauchi views on life, non-physical aspects of existence, philosophical perspectives on intelligence, reincarnation beyond religious dogma, theoretical distribution of high I.Q.
Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have done several interviews before, including the compilation of an ebook to highlight some of the members of the EsoterIQ Society. We have discussed I.Q., time, standards for admission, OlympIQ Society, metaphysics, the binomial distribution structure of I.Q., personal background, and various philosophical positions. We have enough material for a second edition of the text. So, this interview can comment on that. What were your first reflections on the first issue of the test?
Masaaki Yamauchi: That was my first mail interviewin English, so I was afraid of my composition. I indeed appreciate all readers for my product.
Jacobsen: What was positive about it?
Yamauchi: I just wanted all readers to know the highest I.Q. people’s backgrounds and opinions.
Jacobsen: What was negative about it?
Yamauchi: I could not tell you everything I would like to say.
Jacobsen: What was the general feedback about it, if any?
Yamauchi: I have never accepted any feedback so far. No one cares, I guess!
Jacobsen: The theoretical distribution of the current population should expect fewer members than the current 25 in the EsoterIQ Society. What is the reason for the 25 members rather than a lower number in the EsoterIQ Society?
Yamauchi: Yes, you are right! The entrance criteria of the EsoterIQ Society requires one out of one billion in the unselected adult population, as you can see. Consequently, there must theoretically be only eight individuals in the world. However, the theoretical and actual rarity have gargantuan gaps in each other above three standard deviations above the statistical mean on normal distribution. More than four standard deviations on the distribution cannot always be calculated with safety. I need to find out the actual rarity of the six standard deviations. The Giga Society by Paul Cooijmans, societies keep more than eight members.
Jacobsen: What would you like to see in the second edition of the text?
Yamauchi: I do not care about it. I depend on you.
Jacobsen: How would you prefer it formatted and designed?
Yamauchi: Pretty. It looks so nice andwonderfully elegant.
Jacobsen: Do you still hope to continue with the EsoterIQ Society until the end of your life?
Yamauchi: Yes, unless an unavoidable, unexpected happening occurs in my life.
Jacobsen: Do you have any updated or extended thoughts on the spirit or the non-physical?
Yamauchi: Our physical body is just a few percent, and more than 90% is non-physical. Sleeping is not the end of today and just the beginning of the next day. Same as well, death is not the end of our life but the beginning of the next life. Reincarnation exists beyond any religious dogma.
Jacobsen: Any updates on further schooling?
Yamauchi: Honestly, my dream would be to acquire a master’s degree (undecided major) in the graduate school of either M.I.T., Princeton, the U.S.A. or Oxford, Cambridge. It will come true until the end of my life.
Jacobsen: What do you take as your “response” and “ability” or responsibility in life now?
Yamauchi: In terms of a parallel universe, there will be two patterns in our future when one event happens in our lives. All events in our lives are just neutral facts, but one good future will be created when we respond to the event, and another bad future will be created when we react to the event.
Response means the mind of appreciation, and reaction stands for the mind of dissatisfaction.
Hence, I always respond to all events with a mind of appreciation.
Jacobsen: What do you hope people will take from this update to the ebook in your Society?
Yamauchi: The highest I.Q. people are not always geniuses, and I.Q. tests do not measure human intelligence. The true genius is yourself!
Jacobsen: Any final thoughts?
Yamauchi: The mystery of human intelligence is still unknown, but everyone has their unique absolute intelligence.
Jacobsen: Thank you again for the opportunity and your time, Masaaki.
Yamauchi: I apologize that my English skills are insufficient to express my opinions and thoughts to the readers.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4). September 2024; 13(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, September 1). Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4). In-Sight Publishing. 13(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4).In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 1, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “ Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “ Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘ Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 13(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘ Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “ Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.13, no. 1, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Masaaki Yamauchi on Updates and the Second Edition of “The ESOTERIQ Society Conversations”: Administrator, ESOTERIQ Society (4) [Internet]. 2024 Sep; 13(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yamauchi-4.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/15
Anya Overmann’s biography states: “My work as a writer is driven by human rights activism and progressive values. I work with people and businesses who care about ethics. To learn more about the work I do for clients, head overhere. My professional and personal life are integrally woven together by this drive to help people. I was raised attending theEthical Society of St. Louis, where I formed a deep secular belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all human beings.I’m a former President of Young Humanists International, a current Board member of theAmerican Ethical Union, and a member of theAmerican Humanist Association. I work withAtheists United in Los Angeles to produceThe Nomadic Humanist.”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are back today with Anya Overmann! You’ve been making more changes than most people I know in this secular domain. Typically, people exist in communities for a long time and don’t change much, or encounter a controversy and leave and are never seen again, or lose interest and fade into another movement, or try to move up in an organization, or re-convert to some theistic religious view. A big shift into secularism, for me, was Benjamin David, who left activism for something in the world of fintech, of Conatus News. I was, basically, just farting around writing in my spare time. Conatus News transitioned into Uncommon Ground Media Ltd., incorporated and under Dan Fisher, now. A bunch of great feminist and and humanist women writers came out of it, e.g., Sarah Kahly-Mills, Linda L., Tara Abhasakun, Pamela S. Machado, and others. I was lucky to be among them. I wish they wrote and used their talents more! Amazingly, a woman who, in fact, connected me to Benjamin David ended up leaving activism, insofar as I could tell, and then, much later, popped up in the news–maybe, the Daily Mail–getting a charge or multiple charges for stalking a lover or an ex-lover. Like, wow! That’s dramatic. As I mentioned to Alavari Jeevathol in Humanism Now, you are one of the reasons of connecting to the Americans and the Europeans, and the international youth humanist movement, along with some of the aforementioned. (Funnily enough, if you listen to the end of that interview–yours was right after mine, I was so tired in between shifts working with the horses at the time. I was on lunch break. I paused a long while in one of the last responses–too funny. The equivalent of “uhhhhmmmmmmm…”) So, Anya, now and for the last while, you have self-defined as a “nomadic humanist.” What is a nomadic humanist?
Anya Overmann: Hello, Scott. Thanks for the opportunity to share here. Yes, I have been making some big changes. I have departed from organized humanism and the Ethical Culture movement, which I was raised in from age 5 and have dedicated much of my life to. I think you’re right in that many people who exit these movements and organizations are often not heard from or seen again. However, I’ve decided to take a different tack and write a memoir about my experiences in these spaces and why I left. Yes, I have self-defined as a “nomadic humanist” for the past few years as I have been living nomadically (no home base with remote work income and the ability to move around the world) while also identifying as and associating with humanists. But now that I am no longer associating with humanists, I am going through some questioning of my identity. I don’t know whether or not I am a humanist anymore. To be clear, though, I’m not converting to any other religion.
Jacobsen: You have done a lot of travel in the midst of doing this lifestyle. What countries have been the best for a traveling writer and nomadic humanist?
Overmann: The countries that have had the most significant impact on my worldview are countries that have been stolen from by countries in the Global North. Living in Latin America has helped me understand how much my education left out and how evil the US government actually is.
Jacobsen: Which pieces of writing are you most proud?
Overmann: Right now, one of the pieces I’m most proud of is this piece about how white supremacy culture can be addressed in humanism and Ethical Culture. It took a lot to write this, but I think people need to really analyze the roots of these movements and understand that they are not immune to the larger systems of domination in global culture. This piece is intended to start a conversation about earnestly addressing these things, however, it was not received very well by the audiences for which it was intended. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m proud of it.
Jacobsen: How does nomadic humanism better suit you than institutional humanism or ethical culture?
Overmann: Being a (privileged, white US-passport-holding) nomad allows me to live a lifestyle unconstrained by the US borders. It is my belief that everyone should have the right to move freely throughout the world with no regard for borders, but this is not treated as a right in our world — it’s treated as a privilege with highly inequitable access. In any case, I am grateful to be able to live this lifestyle because it has given me exposure to “the real world” that I never had with institutional humanism and Ethical Culture. As internationally relevant as these organizations believe their movements to be, there is a lot of white, Western capitalist bias embedded in these movements. It has been my experience that these organizations are not interested in earnestly addressing these biases and will even go so far as to bully and mistreat those who attempt to address these biases in leadership. They are, instead, interested in performative action to build a facade of objectivity and alignment with their values. I don’t feel good about associating with organizations that don’t want to earnestly address these biases but also want to spread their influence to the rest of the globe. It’s very colonial. It’s two-faced.
Jacobsen: What could secular institutions learn or use with regards to conflict resolution processes?
Overmann: This is a great question. First of all, these institutions have no conflict resolution processes. That should be a major red flag for anyone looking to join these organizations. You cannot build a healthy community without conflict-resolution skills. So, obviously, these institutions need to develop those processes, but they also need to do some serious reflection on why these institutions have existed for multiple decades without having these processes. Why would multiple secular organizations that claim to acknowledge the fallibility of human beings not think to develop conflict resolution processes for multiple decades? I have my own answers to that question, but I would rather not taint the suggestion to reflect on that question with my views. I think it’s important for current members of these institutions to engage in this question for themselves.
I will also say that I attempted to use a restorative justice approach to conflict resolution with both humanist and Ethical Culture institutions, and it was met with great resistance and unwillingness. Again, this points to the theme of these institutions being unwilling to address obvious pain points. None of the conflicts I was involved in amongst folks in these institutions were ever resolved.
Jacobsen: What recommendations would you have for people for whom institutional humanism and ethical culture is better suited for them, and for the institutions themselves?
Overmann: I would strongly recommend that folks read my book when it comes out so they can really understand what my experience was, how my experience relates to the larger cultural experience, and what I think folks in these institutions need to reflect on.
Jacobsen: What are the difficulties in living a nomadic humanist lifestyle financially and otherwise?
Overmann: This world is not built for those who want to live a nomadic lifestyle. It is built for and incentivizes settling. There are many benefits to settling — there is a bigger potential for building community. That is one of the biggest difficulties of living nomadically: the lack of community. But I’ve found ways to build my own community, across the world, by living nomadically. Financially, it is difficult because income working for yourself is not always stable. But it helps to live in places where the US dollar goes farther (another privilege wrought with ethical concerns).
Jacobsen: Who has been an inspiration in living this nomadic humanist lifestyle? What about writers?
Overmann: Honestly, I don’t get along with a lot of other nomads. Most of them do not share my values, which I was pretty surprised to find out. However, I am a big fan of Takudzwa Mazwienduna, who is a humanist from Zimbabwe living as a nomad and working as a writer!
Jacobsen: What are your upcoming projects?
Overmann: This memoir is my next big project!
Jacobsen: How can people get in contact with and support you?
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/14
Kirk Kirkpatrick is the CEO of international telecommunications firm MDS America Inc.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Kirk Kirkpatrick. We will be talking about the current political landscape in the United States. You had the debate between Biden and Trump. There was an attempted killing of Trump. Now Biden is stepping down so Kamala Harris can run as well. So, it’s pretty dramatic. What are your takes?
Kirk Kirkpatrick: Over the last month of these events? My first take is that, aside from one’s political leanings, we have lived through one of these pivotal times in history. People will read about this for years because Biden decided that what he believed was good for the country was more important than what he believed was good for himself. That’s rare in politics anywhere. So, he’s made a name for himself in history.
Kamala Harris’ entry has thrown things on its head. The Republicans spent a long time painting this as a contest between Donald Trump and an older man. Right now, Donald Trump is the older man. They’ve been beating this drum for quite a while, and now it may backfire on them. That’s what I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks. I was impressed that Biden stepped up and, without a fight, gave it up.
So, that’s where I am on the development of the last couple of weeks. The shooting is strange, simply because I would have expected some left-wing radical Antifa, and I don’t mean that poorly. I’m not saying that Antifa is evil or something, but I just would have expected somebody other than the guy who did it.
That being said, as I was explaining to two friends of mine who are Trump-oriented and want to believe in conspiracy theories, if we remember why the guy who shot Ronald Reagan shot him, it speaks a lot about the motivations of people to do things. If you remember Mr. Hinkley, Mr. Hinkley shot at Reagan because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. Of course, that’s ridiculous. He was just basically mentally ill.
Anyway, the guy who shot Trump, we will never know why he shot Trump, obviously, but I guess that it was something just as wacko as the other guy. He’s got some mental problem that caused him to want to do this. I can’t imagine any other reason behind it. So, I’m not sure that it will affect the race significantly. It might have had Biden in the race, but no, I don’t think it’s going to affect things badly one way or the other. It’s just not. I don’t think it’s significant in the race. They’ll try and paint him as a martyr or anything like that, but it’s just not going to work.
Jacobsen: What about the portrayal of Trump as a messiah?
Kirkpatrick: Well, I’m not sure that that’s changed more than it was, meaning he’s already been portrayed as a messiah. His followers think he’s a messiah; I’m not sure this has changed much. The people who would think that, think that now, or thought it before. The most significant part of what’s happened in the last few weeks is simply that Kamala Harris is entering the race, and it throws everything on its head.
They’re planning everything. Of course, in my opinion, the people who support Trump—they’re more, how do I say this, they’re more motivated by fear than by thinking. So, they’re afraid of being left out. And they imagine better days that didn’t exist. They want to go back to those days.
Jacobsen: It’s a retrospective fantasy.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, it’s; I hate to quote a song, but as Billy Joel says, “The good old days weren’t all that good, and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems,” and that’s appropriate. That’s an appropriate way of saying it. When my brother was younger, he was building a house. I was working at the house, and he was working with many people who were a good bit older than him, and they were talking about the good old days. This is probably in the 1980s, so the people complaining about this were in their 40s. My brother said that the foreman was in his late 60s. He came back, and he heard these people talking about the good old days, and my brother said this: the older man looked at him and said, “The good old days? What the hell you guys were talking about? I about starved to death in those days.” The good old days aren’t always that good.
Jacobsen: What do you think goes into the psychology of violent political activists, particularly those who intend physical harm or killing?
Kirkpatrick: Yes, that one’s tough. The reason is that the American Declaration of Independence generally lays out why people go above and beyond. That is because they said that human beings are, how do I say this, how he says it, that they are built in such a way that they tend to tolerate bad things as long as they, as long as the bad things they are tolerating are tolerated. So, as long as they can tolerate it, people will tolerate it. That was their point. But the other point was that it gets to a point where it’s no longer tolerable. And when that happens, you have a revolution, or you declare yourself to be independent, and so on.
The problem is that people must reach the point where bad things are unacceptable. That would then speak to a different motivation for political violence, other than the situation is intolerable, making it personal, if you understand what I mean.
Jacobsen: What about this running a JD Vance? He has a military history and is highly conservative. What are your takes on him, his views, and how he portrays himself?
Kirkpatrick: Well, most people won’t see him as believable simply because if you look at his history, he hated Trump and what he stood for. He called him America’s Hitler in private, and he betrayed the middle class and the working class. Now, because he’s vice president, he loves the guy.
That does a lot to impact his credibility with anybody who examines it. If they think about it, that should hurt him.
This lack of credibility is a big deal in politics. The other side is that we’ve become so polarized that it may not matter. It literally may not matter. So, sadly, I may now underestimate it. It may be that people are thinking about this, but I’m not so certain, given the American voter today, that they’re even thinking about it. If this were the case, would Donald Trump be running?
That would be my question.
Jacobsen: In a prior session, you mentioned a principle: all politicians lie. So, regarding that principle, who are the least of the ideological candidates you’re seeing?
Kirkpatrick: Well, politicians lie generally for a reason, and the reason is because they need to lie. So, to see who the politicians lie the most, you must look for people who need to lie to make a point when some things can become complex. For example, there’s a tremendous amount of blame for the inflation situation in the United States. There’s a good bit of blame on Biden, but obviously, Biden has no input in inflation in the U.S. You’ll have to lie to paint him as the cause. You have to lie. You have no choice.
Now, I’m trying to think if the Democrats have some issue now that they must lie about to make the point, and I’m not sure that I know what it is. ‘The Biden crime family’ is a lie. So, the way to find out who’s telling the lies is to find out who needs to lie.
Jacobsen: Is there any reason to weigh into that?
Kirkpatrick: I said you must know something about whatever you will discuss. But if you look at inflation, you realize it has been rising around the entire developed world. Not one country did not have inflation. So, it’s hard to blame any one politician on inflation. Therefore, if you’re blaming somebody, you have to lie about it. That’s the way to reason about it.
But, for example, we have a problem with abortion, and you can’t gauge whether somebody is lying about the substance of abortion because there’s no real accepted standard. But what we do know is that a majority, even of Republicans, support some access to abortion. So, to push the opposite, you will have to lie. You’re going to have to say, “Oh, the American people don’t want abortion.” Well, no, a majority of people do want the right. So, that’s what I mean by having to lie.
Jacobsen: What about international affairs, as opposed to domestic things—Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Sudan? How do those measure political voting tendencies in the United States? Are these sort of moderate issues, or are these significant for them?
Kirkpatrick: Traditionally, foreign affairs have always been moderate for the United States because most Americans know nothing about them. So, I would guess the Russian intervention in Ukraine is going to be somewhat of an issue because the right-wing press is pushing it. Center and left-wing press are pushing Israel as being a problem. That’s going to affect people because the media is pushing it. How it will affect it is yet to be seen because, for one reason, Kamala Harris is basically repeating the line of Biden, and Trump hasn’t waded into it either.
So, how the Israel situation will affect it is yet to be seen. The Russian one is only because many people on the right say we shouldn’t be giving them money, but it’s only to have a cudgel against the existing administration.
Jacobsen: What about anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories?
Kirkpatrick: Yes, we’re always going to have conspiracy theories, and I’m not sure that everything that’s being designated as anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. There is a good bit of anti-Semitism, and there always has been. But being anti-Israel, or let’s say, the actions of Israel, is not anti-Semitic. There are many Jews who are against what Israel is doing and are not anti-Semitic. When Netanyahu was in D.C., some protesters were Jewish, saying, “I’m against what Israel is doing, and I’m not anti-Semitic. I’m a Jew myself.”
So that’s the problem with saying anti-Semitic because I’m not sure if they are. You’re going to get much anti-Israel sentiment. Now, of course, some of that will bleed over as anti-Semitic, but you can be anti-what Israel is doing right now and not be anti-Semitic.
Jacobsen: What voting bloc in D.C. is the most active and significant in the United States? I’ve heard some commentary around the evangelical base and a proposed Project 2025. Is that true, or is it another group?
Kirkpatrick: Older adults have traditionally been the most active voter base—those most motivated to make political change. It’s not because they want to change things so much as they want something to do when they get out there and vote; they realize how important it is.
But keep in mind that many minorities are afraid to vote. A lot of Hispanics won’t go vote, but white Americans generally don’t have that problem. So, the largest group will be old, old white Americans. But, sadly, I don’t think—now let me consider one thing though—in this election, you might see women being very influential.
Women, that’s because of the abortion issue and also contraception. Losing contraception is a big deal. Yes, it’s a very bigdeal. You can see many women who may not have normally voted wanting to vote in this upcoming election. So, that might be a very active voter base that people must consider.
Jacobsen: Why are Hispanics and African Americans afraid to vote? You mentioned earlier in a response.
Kirkpatrick: Well, unfortunately, they have been traditionally. They shouldn’t be, but many don’t go vote. And it’s sad, but they shouldn’t be. But yes, minorities generally have a fear of administration. A lot of black people feel their vote doesn’t count. I can’t speak for them.
Jacobsen: What are some things not talked about that likely will be consequential for this election?
Kirkpatrick: Well, right now, they’re still not talking about abortion as consequentially as it will be.
Jacobsen: And are you coupling all forms of contraception alongside this or just abortion?
Kirkpatrick: Abortion is going to be the big one, but contraceptive rights will be another one.
Jacobsen: What valid arguments do you think will be proposed, and what are some others that aren’t?
Kirkpatrick: About what specifically?
Jacobsen: Abortion and contraceptive rights.
Kirkpatrick: Well, the problem with abortion and contraceptive rights—or the problem with the propaganda and the understanding of it—is that legalizing abortion doesn’t increase the incidence of abortion; it increases the incidence of legal abortions.
Because there are illegal abortions, the difference is that to push the non-legalization of abortions under certain conditions, what you have to do is be deceptive about this because you’ll say something like, “They’re killing kids,” when in actuality, all they’re doing is shifting the medical care of what’s already happening and will happen regardless of the law. People will have abortions even when they’re illegal. And obviously, that’s more dangerous for the person having the abortion.
Jacobsen: Do you think there will be more political violence?
Kirkpatrick: I hope not. I don’t think so. Even if Trump loses and there’s a little rioting, I don’t think it will be significant.
Jacobsen: Are there other politicians that have voluntarily stepped down from tenure as an act of goodwill?
Kirkpatrick: Well, that’s the thing. It’s rare. I am trying to think of someone who has decided to step down. It’s consistent with the character of Joe Biden. Joe Biden has traditionally been a very upstanding man. He got rich by writing a book when he became president or vice president. But before that, his net worth was $385,000, and he’d been a Senator for 30 years. So, this is an honest politician. This guy took a train to work as a senator.
Jacobsen: Where would you rank Trump as a president? Where would you rank Biden as a president in American history? We can also consider various polls that have been done. Rick has told me about these, but even independent of those, what’s your personal opinion?
Kirkpatrick: Well, Joe Biden has been very effective legislatively. So, I agree with the polls that Rick’s talking about. I would put him up around the 17th or so, which most presidential historians put him at. And Trump, just dead last. My brother is an amateur presidential historian, but he’s one of these guys. How do I say it? He obsesses about it. And he would tell me before, when I asked him this question, that he would put Trump down around the bottom, but he wouldn’t put him at the worst because of the people who were surrounding the last civil war. But in his presidency last year, he changed his mind and said he would put him at the bottom. So, I agree, he’s just terrible. It’s just terrible. The way it is this, the American politician said he didn’t get along with George W. Bush politically. He thought George W. Bush had it all wrong. He disagreed with everything he did. But never in his imagination did he think that George Bush did not believe that what he was doing was the right thing.
He believed that George Bush believed what he was doing was right. He said, “I can’t say this about Trump. I can’t say that what he’s doing is in the country’s interest. He believes he will do what he believes is in his interest.” I would put him at an F, the worst.
Jacobsen: What are your positives and negatives about Kamala Harris?
Kirkpatrick: Well, I have to speak to who she is and who she’s been. I don’t study her that much. Other than the fact that she’s put many people in jail, and as a Democrat, that could be a problem. But on the other hand, she’s gone a long way up the ladder. She’s been elected as the Attorney General of California and a Senator. She’s a tough woman. She’s half Indian and half black and appeals to many groups. One is Indian because she is half-Indian. Indian Americans, not American Indians, and Indians tend to be conservative.
But the Indian-ness of the voter population will override that. It will override the conservatism of the average.
Jacobsen: Why do Indians tend to vote conservative?
Kirkpatrick: A lot of it is because India as a country is conservative, and Hindus are conservative, which is the majority religion. The next religion is Islam, and Muslims tend to be conservative. So, India is a majorly conservative country. Traditionally, Indians have voted conservative. Take a look at India; who do they have in power? Modi has no problem telling all of India that Hindus come first. This is a country that’s probably the second largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia, with 200 million Muslims in India. They still have a nationalistic, conservative government. So they even vote this way.
Jacobsen: How might a Kamala Harris presidency affect Indian-American relations and India and America as countries?
Kirkpatrick: Well, it’ll only affect what you would have.
Kirkpatrick: Many Indian people will be proud that an Indian person is the president of the United States. But you didn’t see this same reaction from much of the African continent when Obama was elected president. Despite his spending much time in Indonesia and things like that, it didn’t affect his foreign policy.
So I can’t imagine that other than Kamala Harris being not Indian American by name only—her mother is Indian, and she used to take her to India—she wouldn’t lose that connection. So that’s known by the Indian community here for sure. It’s going to mean something.
So it’ll influence the vote that way. She’s hard to attack as being soft on crime because she’s put many people in prison. She was a prosecutor for years. Things like that, Trump will lose.
Her entry into this race, depending on who she picks as vice president, may have changed the course of the presidential election.
Jacobsen: What are your thoughts on Project 2025?
Kirkpatrick: Nonsense is exactly what it is. There’s a reason why the guy whose website it was on wants to distance himself from it. It could be a better idea. Loyalty to the executive sounds funny and strange, especially if you’re accusing somebody of being authoritarian. It doesn’t sound good.
Scott, when I lived in Germany, I knew many Germans and talked to and lived with them. My wife was German, and I used to wonder how could these guys have been Nazis? Then, the next thing I’d think of is whether it could happen in the U.S.
I would have sworn that the answer was no back then. But I’m not so sure now. Populism is never a good idea. This rise in populism, if it doesn’t get nipped in the bud in the way that essentially the Brits and the French just did, might be a real problem.
Jacobsen: Regarding its rise, what about the countries outside of the Brits and the French?
Kirkpatrick: It’s going up in many countries, including Germany, but the Germans just voted in the equivalent of their Democrats. And the Brits had a landslide for Labour.
It’s a landslide. They have an absolute majority. And then you see what the French did. So, it only looked good for a while. Even Poland is moving away from it. So, it leaves only Hungary in Europe. However, significant sections of Germany, France, and England still have their right-wing parties, whether the A.F.D. in Germany or Marine Le Pen in France.
I would have never guessed it. It’s kind of like communism coming back. It’s not communism, but…
Jacobsen: What do you think of this fear-mongering around China as well?
Kirkpatrick: I dismiss it. It’s just ridiculous. The amount of trade between the United States and China—imagine the disruption, not just to the U.S.U.S. but to Canada and the rest of the world, if there were problems between the United States and China. It’s unbelievable. The countries are wedded at the hip. Why are you making a big problem in either direction? I don’t like the fact that Xi Jinping has been essentially president for life, but it’s just something you have to deal with.
And as long as they’re competing with you, not shooting at you, all that other rhetoric needs to be toned down. It does not help anybody.
Years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense, China bought the first aircraft carrier from Ukraine. It was a 1968 diesel-powered aircraft carrier that floated to… Beijing or Shanghai, wherever they took it. That gave China a 1968 aircraft carrier, and Rumsfeld went on T.V. and said this was an aggressive act. Anybody would ask the question, why does China need an aircraft carrier?
The United States feels threatened. Now, he said, “So who threatens China?” If you think about that, when you tell some country that an action they have taken is threatening, you’re declaring yourself a threat to them.
So, he suddenly declares they are enemies and threats just because they bought an aircraft carrier. And there’s no reason for that. If they had been accommodating and even said, “We’ll help you understand and work with you just to be friendly,” the problem is that there’s this need to compete against the biggest. It’s just not good for either country.
It could be a better idea. Anyway, China has few expansionist tendencies, except regarding things like oil in the sea or this type of thing. So what I mean by that is they’re not going to take over Vietnam, but they may take or try to take big swaths of the Philippine Sea, the South China Sea, whatever you want to call it. But it’s not that they’re going out to take over.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the diversifying landscape of net wealth or a portion of the world? The United States had a much more significant percentage of the world’s wealth in prior decades, but the rise of everyone else also reduced the United States’ relative economic dominance, even though most everyone was doing better. What do you make of the political feel in the United States in reaction to that potential?
Kirkpatrick: Well, first of all, it’s inevitable. There’s an old story of a king who sent four wise men out in the world and said, “Bring back the words that are true in all places and at all times.” When they returned, there was none until one of them said, “Yes, there are. Those words are, ‘And this too shall pass away.’” Inevitably, the dominance of the United States will go away. It may not be in our lifetime, but it’s inevitable. That it flattens out is also inevitable. So people may wring their hands about it, but ultimately, it’s better for everybody, including the U.S. It’s just a good idea.
You can imagine it by imagining the extreme: if everybody had the same amount of money and lived in a decent house and nobody was rich, well, it may not be right, but it would certainly be livable. But if the other situation where one guy had a hundred trillion dollars, and the rest of the world lived off a hundred dollars a year, that would be not good. So, the redistribution of wealth to the world is good for everybody. The best way to solve the problem with the border in the southern part of the U.S. is to enrich Mexico.
Scott, you’re a Canadian. We are okay with Canadians coming over and overstaying their stay. Now, people do it. It happens but is not a problem because it only happens sometimes. The reason is that Canada is a nice place to live, and people want to stay. If Mexico were the same, people wouldn’t be trying to get to the U.S. or other first-world countries because they wouldn’t need to. They wouldn’t want to. They’d stay at home. So, it’s a wonderful thing. Now, whether people think it’s a wonderful thing, I can’t answer that. But, no, having wealth concentrated in either goes with people, too.
Not just countries—great concentrations of wealth are dangerous even to the wealthy. As one of the greatest American historians said, there are only two true historical mechanisms for redistributing wealth: taxation or revolution. So that’s in a country. So, looking at other countries, you will have the same problem outside of a country. A massively rich country will have to work hard to support the rest of the world. It’s just not good.
Jacobsen: Religion has been declining in the United States for quite some time. I can give a Canadian comparison off the top. In the 1970s, about 90% of the population was some version of Christian, some sect. By 2001, based on census data from Statistics Canada, it was about three-quarters, maybe a tad more. By 2021, the numbers were sitting at about 53-54%. If you follow that trend line, it’s probably about half or less; it’s just shy of half now. That same trend has progressed in the United States at a slower pace, but it has progressed. So, colloquially, it’s been called the rise of the “nones.” What do you make of this rising voting bloc with no religious affiliation? And some religious people have reactionary politics or sociopolitics based on that, too.
Kirkpatrick: Well, voting based on your religion could be more sensible. Except for very few people, most people are in the religion they were born into. As I point out, isn’t it a wonderful coincidence that the one true religion happens to be the one you were born into?
But the problem is, what are you trying to achieve? If your political goal is to make everybody exactly like you, you might vote one way. But if you want to make the place better, and that includes religious people, then they will tend to vote on what makes sense to vote about rather than their religion. So, I will vote for a good candidate even if he shares my religion.
If you understand what I mean, I need clarification. The story of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s father—when they were interviewing Martin Luther King’s father, they asked what he thought about Kennedy as he was running for president. He said, “I like Kennedy. I believe he’s good for the Negro. He’s a good man, and he’ll treat us well.” And so they said, “So you’re voting for him?” And he said, “No, I’ll be voting for Nixon.” They said, “But you just said he was a good man.” And he said, “Yes, he is, but I can’t vote for a Catholic.” He said, “I can’t vote for a papist.” That’s what he said.
Jacobsen: Did you ever hear George Carlin’s joke about John Kennedy’s accent? “Now things are looking good for the first quarter of sugar in Cuber.”
Kirkpatrick: Anyway, they went to John Kennedy with this quote. What do you think he said?
Jacobsen: I’m not going to guess.
Kirkpatrick: No, he said, “Who would have imagined it? Martin Luther King Jr.’s father is a bigot.” He said, “But then we all have fathers, don’t we?”
The joke is that his father was a wild character. His father had been the American ambassador to Ireland and made money by running rums and doing things like that. His father was known to be a kind of a character, so he said, “But we all have fathers.” But yes, Martin Luther King’s father would not vote for a guy he felt was good for him because he didn’t like his religion.
So, it does happen. But I would say that the smarter religious people are voting for what’s good for them and their family’s life rather than whether or not the guy is Catholic or a papist or whatever.
But the rise of religiosity in the U.S. and elsewhere is a blip. It’s part of the curve, but the trend is still down. Even if it goes up for two or three decades, in the end, if you think about it, 200 years ago, you had to go to church. So, it continues to decline. Of course, it can reverse, but it cannot reverse over the long term. Unfortunately, we don’t live that long.
Jacobsen: What do you think will happen in this particular election? Will it be a Democratic or Republican rule?
Kirkpatrick: Yes. I wouldn’t have time to do this interview if I knew this. So, it’s hard to make the prediction, and it’s gotten much harder. I would be more likely to predict if I knew who she would pick as her running mate. But you’ve seen an almost instantaneous increase in enthusiasm for this race since she became the candidate. You have many people who were writing it off who are now enthusiastic. I don’t think the Democrats are nearly as scared as they were a week before Biden made this announcement.
Kirkpatrick: Trump has his work cut out for him if he wins because people will look at Kamala Harris as younger and without the baggage. And one of the comedians was joking; you’ll see some Trumpster standing behind his truck, staring at the back, thinking of all the bumper stickers he’s got to pull off—F.J.B. and Let’s Go, Brandon. Well, he’s not running anymore. But she’s a younger generation. If she picks the right person, she can be the next president.
The fact that she’s a prosecutor makes her appeal to people she might not have appealed to because she’s a woman. Unfortunately, the fact that she’s a prosecutorial woman is a strange standard, but it makes her seem tough on crime.
Jacobsen: Your earlier point about jailing many people.
Kirkpatrick: That can run in both directions. She’s black, and she jailed a lot of black people. So, who knows how they’ll handle that? But anyway, it’s very interesting. It was a nightmare for Trump. It’s an absolute nightmare. Everything has to be rethought.
Jacobsen: How big of an issue do you think race and ethnicity will be in this?
Kirkpatrick: It’s smaller than it was during Obama. She looks as Indian as she does black. It’s not going to be that big of a deal at all. Trump knows that pushing it as a deal will backfire if he tries to push it as a deal. He already knows that. And we’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century. It’s getting stupider and stupider all the time. No, I don’t think it’ll play. She doesn’t look that black.
Obama looked black, but she could be Indian as much as black. That’s the problem. It doesn’t have to be as big a deal as people make it. The bigger deal is going to be who she picks as vice president. It might be a big deal if she picks some hard-left-leaning person. But if she picks a reasonable candidate, somebody in the middle, she’ll win the race.
Jacobsen: Do you have any further thoughts based on the conversation today?
Kirkpatrick: This is a serious election because if Donald wins, he has promised to do bad things that are not in anybody’s interest. Not to mention that I’m working in Kuwait right now, so on the 1st of August, I’ll return to Kuwait. But I was talking with a company out of Poland. I was talking with the guy—he’s in Poland. And he was expressing the idea that if Trump got elected, Poland would be in danger. He wouldn’t feel safe. If Trump got reelected, he doesn’t believe that Trump would care what happened.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are back to the “delightful” topic of clergy-related abuse in general, but sexual abuse in particular, because it is the darkest in the public imagination. Regarding consent as a claim when an individual priest, pastor, or religious authority comes forward, what are some important ethical considerations? While that can be considered legitimate in some cases, it is probably not legitimate in most considerations. In other cases, it is a blanket lie.
Professor David K. Pooler: I will say this. I do think there may be people who have had sex with a married pastor, single pastor, priest, or whatever. They probably believe it was consensual because someone may not have said “No,” did not resist, or was not clear that they did not want that to happen. However, those kinds of situations are not about what consent truly is. Consent is when both people can say “Yes” or “No.” Both people absolutely, categorically want to be sexual with one another.
There was massive internal reluctance and the need to please an authority figure in the cases I have looked at, researched, and discussed with survivors. It is complicated because it is not just the need to please an authority figure; this person is a proxy for God. It is so complicated in that arrangement where the survivor feels that if they were to try to say no or express concern. They are going against God. Often, the person who is targeting them and initiating sexual contact is framing it in such a way that God is okay with it. That is not very easy. It is very broad to say God is okay with it, but they use much scripture and various interpretations I have heard through the years.
Then they claim their authority, saying what the Holy Spirit or God said. The other thing that complicates consent, which we must discuss, is this power differential. With a power differential, you have to ensure that undue influence, coercion, or misuse of that added power that one person has in the equation is not being used to coerce, manipulate, or push for sexual activity. I have even been asked through the years, what about a single pastor? Could they not have a relationship with someone in their congregation?
They could, but it could be more straightforward. My guidance for that situation is, “No, do not do it.” If you need to date someone and you are interested in romantic relationships, date outside your congregation. Surely, your world has a bigger pool of people than you, pastor. In the rare occasion that a single pastor, for example, wanted to be sexual with someone in their congregation, to ensure that there was actual consent, you would have to bring on board some people to watch that relationship and have conversations with the person the pastor is dating and wants to be sexual with.
Let me go back to consent. Having honest, open communication about what both people want is essential. From my perspective on this and listening to survivors, it is so secretive and hidden, and the pastor is trying to keep it unknown. So, the capacity for an open, honest conversation in this relationship is almost impossible. Consent is not possible in most cases because of the power differential. You mentioned ethics, and outside of ministry, all the other helping professions understand the complications of the ethics around this. That is why sexual relationships with people you are supporting and helping are prohibited.
It is not; here is the guidance for doing it and what it looks like. It is prohibited. You do not do it. In some professions, after the helping relationship is over, you can have sexual relations with someone. In my profession, social work, a sexual relationship is prohibited forever. Technically, if I ever wanted to have sex with a former client, I would not be able to do that according to the ethics of social work. What I am getting at is that these secular professions understand the complicated nature and the nuances of ensuring that both people are having an honest, open conversation about sex and sexuality in a relationship. It would be almost absurd to think about it happening this way but say a married pastor wants to have sex with someone in his congregation. “Hey, I realize what we are doing is inappropriate and wrong. It is a violation of marital vows, but I want to make sure that you are completely okay with us being sexual.”
Those conversations never happen. Many people who perpetrate sexual abuse with someone in their congregation think, “Hey, I want this with this person. If this person is not actively resisting or saying no, they must want it and must be okay with it also,” which is a horrible assumption to make. I have never had a conversation with a survivor yet where there was that open conversation.
And then I would also add that not only can sex be coerced and manipulated with that power differential, but there is certainly what we would consider sexual assault even when someone is resisting or saying “No.” That happens more than we want to admit in this arrangement. Part of what I wanted to speak to is this piece where the offending pastor, if their defence is, “It was consensual. They wanted it too.” I have heard this often: “They were the ones who wanted it. They were flirtatious. They were the ones who were coming after me and targeting me.”
What I would say there is that all the other helping professions equip people to manage a situation in which a client or someone they are supporting might want to be sexual with them. It is the person with more power. It is always their job to put the brakes on, the fence up, the boundaries out, and say no. That is not how this relationship works. Moreover, that gets into another topic I wanted to jump on around purity culture if it is okay if we go there, which is a subset of Christianity that focuses a lot on men being instinctually lustful and that their sexuality is something that has to be tamed and managed, it is a battle they have to focus on in battling their lust. However, they put an excessive burden on the women in that environment so as not to tempt men and to not cause men’s eyes to stray.
I say all that because, in many cases, that is what they are referring to: “I was tempted. This person caused my eyes to stray. I am struggling with lust, and this person came on to me.” So it is this helplessness: “I was at the mercy of this powerful woman who was not managing herself in ways to protect me.” Again, all this burden is on the woman. We often see the defence of an offending pastor going to that narrative, and many people in congregations buy that narrative.
“Yes, I guess it was her fault. I guess she did tempt him. I guess she was trying to undo the church.” They often view women who have been victimized by a pastor as evil. That is a complete turnaround and reversal. The DARVO—deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender—but the entire system can pull a DARVO on someone who has been victimized by a pastor sexually.
I wanted to bring that in because when we are talking about consent, there is a subset of Christianity that not only does not talk about consent at all but also puts this hugeburden on the woman to maintain sexual purity for the church. The sexual purity of men in the church is the burden on the women to make sure that happens. That is a real setup for abuse to happen. Then, when abuse is reported, that victim gets blamed by the perpetrator and the supporters of the perpetrator in that whole institutional system.
Jacobsen: These are theological social stereotypes about men and women guiding this orientation.
Pooler: Unfortunately, it is.
Jacobsen: Dorothy Small brought some subtleties to my attention. She mentioned clergy who take vows of celibacy, chastity, or both in some denominations. When those individuals make those vows, how does this change the power and ethics dynamic when making claims about the victim as tempting them somehow? Or, in the opposite case, when they do not make those vows, where it is simply the power-over relationship?
Pooler: Yes, that is a great question. I have a simple answer. There is no difference. Whether the person is making a vow of celibacy or chastity or whatever, the fact remains that there is more power given and offered to a leader in any church system, especially where males are elevated, or women are potentially excluded from ministry. However, whether or not someone has made those vows does not change the dynamics of how it happens or a claim of it being consensual or “I was tempted.” Again, I have already talked about the complexity of consent. The fact is, even if there were a woman who was flirtatious and attempting to tempt someone—and I am not here to say that this could never happen or does not ever happen—at the end of the day, the professional with the power, which people are trusting in a congregation, is the one responsible for navigating that relationship and keeping everyone safe and protected. So, to allow oneself to be tempted—I will say it this way: If I, as a social worker, were to allow myself to be tempted, if you will, that is not even the right word.
I will go beyond the word “tempted.” If I were to be sexual with a client and I claimed I was tempted or that the client was the initiator or the instigator, it would still be sexual misconduct. My license would be sanctioned. In other words, it is always my job. My job as a helper is to meet someone where they are, to assess where they are, and to assess their needs and what it will take to keep them safe. Then, I make that referral if whatever they need is beyond what I can do.
Unfortunately, there is no universal training on assessing boundaries and the formal education process regarding ministry. In other words, ministry lags way behind on complex, nuanced conversations around power, sex, consent, and boundaries, whereas the secular helping professions are way ahead on that. That is not to say that sexual misconduct does not happen in other professions—it certainly does. However, systems are in place to deal with that in a regulated profession.
Of course, the ministry is not externally regulated by the minister’s denomination. Currently, in 13 states plus the District of Columbia, it is illegal to be sexual with someone in your congregation explicitly because of that power differential and the complexity around consent. So you get the sense that there is movement in the right direction and awareness is growing, but we still have a long way to go.
Jacobsen: Another item that came up—I am not a biblical scholar, obviously, so I looked it up. I noticed this in listening to a lot of very conservative, even far-right conspiratorial pastors and preachers. Most of them come from the United States, as my reviews show. I listen to them a lot because I want to hear what other people think, which is very different from my view of the world. One of the individuals who pops up is the former pastor, Mark Driscoll, of Mars Hill Church. There was a scandal based on some preaching he did. He collapsed that church and then moved from Seattle to Arizona with Trinity Church. Now, he is focused on rallying young men because they see the church as too feminized. He is preaching against the “Jezebel spirit” in the church. This is the part I had to look up. The Jezebel spirit is referenced in 1 Kings, 2 Kings, Leviticus, and Revelation. Does this accusation come up? What does it mean?
Pooler: Yes, man. That is a great question. I would not call myself an amateur theologian, but I study people in theological environments. I study and understand, or say it this way: some underlying theology becomes apparent when I look at and research this. In its broadest sense, the Jezebel spirit claims to disempower women. It amplifies and elevates the voices of men in a patriarchal structure. So, men’s voices and capacities are elevated, while women are seen as underminers, temptresses, or interested in bringing down the church. Whenever you have a theology or a leader talking about those things, what I see at the largest level is a diminishment of women and an amplification of men.
Moreover, that is part of the system that creates this abuse. When I do talk about this, I talk about gender dualism. We have had gender dualism from the inception of the church. Men have strong minds, and women are weak and emotional—all these kinds of things that are false. It is a false dualism that often feeds into traditional gender roles, but it also creates an environment in which people have to function. They then perpetuate that environment.
When I hear much talk about the Jezebel spirit and that kind of thing, it deeply concerns me because it focuses on women as problematic. A specific gender is seen as the problem and embodies the problem in a certain way. It is easy to blame a woman when that talk and conversation are more prevalent. So that is my take on that. I cannot say for certainwhat the Jezebel spirit entails. We sometimes throw the word around without unpacking what the original text and authors were trying to communicate when they brought that up. This one is more in the public consciousness because I did not have to look it up.
Jacobsen: It is another form—again, I am biased. I am a humanist and tend to be more naturalistic in my orientation. So those are my biases, naturally. However, another supernaturalistic excuse, in my view, that comes up is the common phrase, “The devil made me do it” or “A demon made me do it.” Does that come up? Even though they may have lusted themselves, another being with supernatural demonic powers made them do this act and be tempted to do it. Therefore, it is not their fault, or at least not wholly their fault.
Pooler: Yes. I recall a few anecdotes from my research where the offending pastor used that as an excuse and quickly shifted to God and God’s forgiveness, love, and ability to carry them through this. So, if that makes sense, what it did, though, I think it diffuses and almost gaslights the person being victimized by offloading a lot of the responsibility onto the devil and then presenting the solution as God. It takes the human elements of this—the sense of agency and power that the offending pastor uses—and says, “Do not look at that.” It is almost like The Wizard of Oz—this other being the devil. And then God’s love and forgiveness are at play.
When you pull the curtain back, you see a coercive, manipulative pastor who is narcissistic in many cases and has been targeting someone to be sexual with. However, they take all that attention off of themselves through that very thing: “The devil made me do it.” However, that is the lesser piece of it. That becomes the vehicle to pivot to God’s love and understanding: “Maybe this is not what God has for us, but God will forgive us. Let us focus on that.” It is a way to keep being sexual with someone and not stop the inappropriate behaviour. So those are some of the things I have seen.
Jacobsen: Mark Driscoll has used the case before. His reemergence is a traditional Christian story of redemption. Does that narrative allow misbehaving clergy to pop back up within the community consciousness in some instances?
Pooler: Absolutely. This is where it gets complicated because, of course, we want there to be redemption stories, stories of a life resurrected and restored, and those kinds of things. Blaming women becomes a false redemption: “She was the one who made me do it. I have now worked on my issues and why I was tempted, and I will not let this happen again, and I am coming back to ministry.” We see that a lot. My response is that we must do a much deeper dive into what restoration, redemption, and healing look like. When is someone truly restored?
Someone once asked me if someone who ever offends in this way should even be allowed to minister again. As a researcher looking at this and the damage done, I would say no because you have shown yourself untrustworthy. When you sexually abuse someone who has trusted you, you have lost the ability to have people’s trust again, at least on that large scale, to be entrusted again. The other challenge, for example, with a Mark Driscoll story, is that you have got someone who is a self-appointed leader. He is not part of any system or structure holding him accountable.
He left one system or structure he had created, which tried to hold him accountable. He exited and found another, bringing that back to life. So, there is no real accountability, and no one is looking at everything that’s going on with him to ensure he is ready to lead a church again. Unfortunately, that is a very common narrative. People will leave one denomination, go to another after offending in the Baptist church, and then become Methodist or Presbyterian or move to another state where their actions are not a crime.
That is clever. There are so many ways to keep going as a leader in Christianity. What worries me the most is that we, the congregants, the participants in religious life, allow this to occur. Somehow, so many of us are okay with it; that is one of the things that scares me. Why are we unwilling to hold our leaders accountable, ask them hard questions, and ensure that someone can return to ministry? Alternatively, saying, “Hey, we know you have done X, Y, and Z. We will not hire you to be our pastor. We are not going to allow someone to be our pastor.”
In denominations with a more top-down hierarchy, why are bishops and other high-level administrators reappointing a pastor after being offended? That is a whole other set of questions, but it is all part and parcel of a system that short-circuits important questions about how and why this occurred. Just because someone says, “I am ready to pastor again,” or “I am right with God again,” how do we ensure that? It is very, very complicated and not easy.
Jacobsen: Last question. What about the distinction between the system and bad apples and the survivor’s forgiveness of the abuser?
Pooler: Yes.
Jacobsen: As Dorothy Small told me, these clergy are sick and have committed these crimes. So, separating them from the clergy as a class and dealing with it as forgiving but not forgetting is a very mature and subtle point she made to Hermina and me.
Pooler: People ask and go back and forth, and there is even a paper written by a couple of academics at a Jesuit university that said it is not just bad apples. In other words, we have a system in which clericalism is present, which elevates our leaders and disempowers congregants. It is in that system that we are creating situations where people, as they gain more and more power, almost become Frankenstein monsters who then harm and injure us. I do think we have some systematic structural problems, and I would say that churches have always had these issues.
Any world religion with an elevated leader can have problems with clericalism. One question is whether this model works. I would say we are getting some concrete evidence that systems in which clericalism is present create and amplify the risk of harm and abuse by someone with more power. I have started to see a term in the literature.
It is called “vulnerance.” It is about the complicated factors at play when someone has power and thus has more capacity to harm because of that power. So, I would say many of our pastors have enormous vulnerance. In other words, they have way more capacity to injure than the average person; part of it is our systems creating that.
We need to take a look at that. Lastly, forgiveness this way, putting on my clinician hat: forgiveness should never be pushed by an institution, should never be pushed by a leader, and should never be demanded. I have seen forgiveness used to bypass all this hard work: “Do not hold me accountable. Do not do that. Forgive me, and let us move on.”
We need always to remember. Whether or not an individual or a congregation can forgive is this: It is hard work. It is multilayered. What I have looked at, as far as trauma and people who have been traumatized working on forgiveness, is an onion. As you heal from your trauma, you face deeper elements and can name with clarity the injury that’s happened. You feel more pain.
Once you find that intersection, another layer of forgiveness is needed. Forgiveness is an ongoing, long process that always needs to be finished. It is not something you do and then it is done. Boom. We need to have more complex conversations about forgiveness. I have even had some survivors say, “I do not know how to forgive, and I do not think I can forgive.” Moreover, I say, “Yes, that is okay. It is okay.”
It is okay not to know how to forgive when an injury this deep has occurred or even to say, “I cannot do it. I cannot forgive.”We need to find forgiveness and empower people with the injury, with the tools to figure out what that will look like, rather than an institution or a theological statement telling people they need to do it.
Jacobsen: Thank you so much for your time today.
Pooler: All right. Good deal. Take care.
Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/12
Dr. Christopher DiCarlo is a philosopher, educator, and author. He is the Principal and Founder of Critical Thinking Solutions, a consulting business for individuals, corporations, and not-for-profits in both the private and public sectors. He currently holds the position of Senior Researcher and Ethicist at Convergence Analysis – a UK-based organization focusing on AI Risk and Governance. Dr. DiCarlo is also the Ethics Chair for the Canadian Mental Health Association and is also a lifetime member of Humanist Canada and an Expert Advisor for the Centre for Inquiry Canada. Dr. DiCarlo has won several awards including TV Ontario’s Big Ideas Best Lecturer in Ontario Award and Canada’s Humanist of the Year. His current book from Rowman and Littlefield, will be released in January, 2025, and is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It. Dr. DiCarlo also hosts a new podcast called All Thinks Considered in which he engages in free and open discussion about current, important issues with world thought leaders, politicians, and entertainers through the lens of Critical Thinking and Ethical Reasoning.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Dr. Christopher DiCarlo. Let us talk about the newest things, and then we can roll back from there. You are working on a book called Building a God. Why that book? What is it about?
Dr. Christopher DiCarlo: A few years ago, I intended to spend the rest of my days promoting critical thinking wherever and however, I could in various educational systems. But then that darn Sam Altman came up with ChatGPT, and we realized in the AI business that the likelihood of producing a very powerful form of AI super computation isn’t at least 40 years away; it’s more like four years away.
Everything nudged me back into doing AI. I worked on a supercomputer idea in the nineties called The OSTOK Project. My purpose was to create a machine that is essentially an inference machine, better at making inferences than humans. We build telescopes to see far away and microscopes to see small. Why aren’t we building big brains to think better than humans ever could? So, I wanted to build a big brain that could make inferences to solve medical problems, cure cancer, beat Alzheimer’s, and figure out climate change. It could just do stuff way better than humans ever could, but I needed more financial or political backing in the nineties.
I still realized in Information Theory that somebody would eventually build this thing. Then, a few years ago, Altman came out with ChatGPT-3, and we saw the writing on the wall. So a bunch of us, like Sam Harris and others, realized that the clock is ticking and that the race is on between OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, et al. These big, big, big tech companies are all trying to produce what’s called AGI or artificial general intelligence. This is computation at a level that humans have never seen before, so it’ll be able to be superior to humans in every way, think better than humans in every way, multitask, and all that stuff.
But the concern I had in the nineties is much more pressing now. Whoever builds this machine will need to be able to align it; this means that it will cooperate with human values. Will it go rogue and decide that human values are quaint things of the past and that they will take over and do things on their own? And if we can’t align it, can we control it? Can we box it and ensure it doesn’t do some of the nasty things it could do, either by human hands or on its own? And if we can’t control it, can we at least contain it? Can we funnel this thing down so that if it does get out on us–we can manage to contain it in some possible way?
So, in the nineties, I drafted an accord for either the UN or some independent organization to develop, which says that moving forward, this is what we should be doing with this type of computational power. We need to register. Everybody needs to be on board: who’s doing what and where? We need accountability, transparency, and a body that can exact punishment. So if one group, agency, company, or country decides to go too far too fast with this type of technology, we can pull the plug or say, ‘No, this is getting a little beyond our reach.’
It occurred to me that everybody in these big tech companies and government defence agencies is trying to build a ‘god.’ They’re trying to build a super-intelligent machine, ‘god,’ that will be able to answer all of our questions and figure stuff out way better than we ever could. So it’s a gargantuan inference machine. It can make connections between information that we haven’t been able to see. That’s how we define geniuses.
They see connections that we’ve never seen before. They’re creative. They’re inventive. We are headed very quickly in this direction, and nobody’s putting the brakes on. If you get a Trump government in November, they will say, “Drill, baby, drill.” They will open up the floodgates on AI and let these guys do whatever they have to to stay ahead of China. But the fact is, how do you build a god? How do you now put your morals into a god?
The old story used to be top-down. These gods existed and imparted to us these rules we must abide by. Ironically, we face the opposite: humans are now creating a god. What do we want this God to behave like? What ethics, codes of conduct, principles, precepts, and morals will we instill in it so it doesn’t become vengeful and decide we humans are a quaint part of the past that are no longer necessary? We must worry about whether nefarious agents will use this technology towards their political ends or if this entity will get beyond our ability to control or contain it.
Whether we will rely on saving the world from the potential of a machine that will either be used by nefarious agents or be beyond our control, that is it in a nutshell. That is what I am up to these days. What if, before these things become super-intelligent when they become brilliant, we use them to develop AI ethics? So we use the precursors to this as assistants to develop those accords, for instance, or those ethical guidelines.
Some are mentioning that. Eric Drexler and others maintain that we’ve got to use “smart AI” or the “smartest AI.” Will that be possible? We hope. Others say we need to “box or close the gate on AI,” which was always my intention in the nineties: to make this thing unhackable externally and prevent it from getting out. If we can do that and build a specific AGI, let’s say you want a good optimizer for your trip to California this year. How should I do it? What’s the best way for me to go to California?
We develop a super AGI, a “triptych,” that will figure that out, but that’s all it does. That’s all it can do. It can never want to take over the world, rise, or do other things. We keep the AGI super specific. Then there’s another school of thought that says, “Yes, but eventually, somebody will unite them. Eventually, somebody will want a major, all-for-one type of supercomputer.” They don’t want to go to different, what I call “AGI angels.” They want an “AGI god,” something that can do everything for them. Unfortunately, our greatest downfall might be what motivates humans to come up with great discoveries, ideas, and inventions—this drive to see what will happen next.
That drive might be the thing that pushes Bezos, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, or Altman to be the ones who see themselves as pioneers to be the first to build this machine because, maybe, they believe that they can truly contain it, that they are the ones who have all the measures in place so no matter what happens, they’ve got King Kong, and they can make sure Kong behaves. They’ve got Kong in chains, and don’t worry about this. We know what we’re doing. But the thing with AI is that you don’t get a second chance. If it gets out and gets away from us, it will be so far ahead of our thinking that… what did Arthur C. Clark say? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So, this thing will have abilities that will appear magical to us. It’ll have control of systems. It can have the capacity to invent, create, and figure stuff out at levels that we can’t possibly comprehend or understand. Are we ready to be number 2? Are humans ready to be number 2? That’s what we have to ask ourselves.
We’ve been number 1 for so long on this planet. Yet, these organizations and defence systems are racing super fast to build this thing before anybody else can because they all believe they can contain, control, or align it. The fact of the matter is the truth, and the world might not be ready for this, but somebody’s gotta tell them, “Nobody knows.”Nobody knows. People are still determining what will happen when this thing is built. Nobody has any idea whether it will comply, become violent, become sentient, or become conscious.
Nobody knows what will happen, yet these companies are just moving at breakneck speed because the competition is pushing them. After all, China is threatening and we don’t want Iran, North Korea or anybody else to get there first. The thing is, the majority of the world has no idea this is happening right now. What you’re hearing right now is only known by very few people in the world. In my job, only about 400 of us are working on this thing, trying to raise awareness to let people know. Do you realize what’s happening right now?
The world will be very angry if some company comes up with this thing; it will get loose on them and start shutting down electrical grids and doing all kinds of nasty things we could never have predicted. They will wonder why they weren’t informed and had no say. So, my job at Convergence Analysis is to raise AI awareness and use my ability as a public intellectual to bang this gong as loudly as possible because people have a right to know, and people have a right to vote for politicians who also know what’s going on. We’re sleepwalking into this thing, thinking everything will be fine. We are worried about nuclear energy and look at what happened with it. We got it under control.
We have mutually assured destruction to keep us all in line, so that just worked out. Well, AI is nothing like nukes. Nukes are dormant things that you have to operate and function. AI does not exist as an entity on its own.
And so, I’m not a doomsayer. I’m just a realist who wants the very best AI will give us, and there’s a lot of good it will surely give us. But at the same time, we need to limit the worst that could ever happen from this new technology. So my colleagues and I are pretty much devoting the rest of our lives to ensuring that, in terms of the genie is out of the bottle or Pandora’s box is opened, we can assure to the best of our ability that this thing won’t cause harm or others won’t use it to cause harm. That’s the most important question humanity is facing right now. There’s no more important thing to worry about right now than the rapid advancement of AI.
Jacobsen: So, of those 400 people internationally who are thinking about the future of AI and its development into AGI, who are some of those elite thinkers who are less speculative and more empirically supportive?
DiCarlo: Well, that’s the thing. Our organization has three teams working to find as much empirical evidence as possible. It is speculative up to a point.
Jacobsen: So, how do we look at this?
DiCarlo: Well, what does Sam Harris say? Sam says, “It’s inevitable. We’re not going to stop. The race is on. Even if it were 50 years away, time isn’t a factor. The fact that this is happening means its eventuality is destined to occur.” So, if that’s the case, we take it as a conditional. The conditional is if-then. Suppose it’s truly the case that we keep scaling up and adding computing power and data to these large language models and these other types of very powerful AI systems. In that case, it reaches a level of AGI.
At that point, nobody can say with accuracy that it’s going to be perfectly fine or that it’s going to be perfectly, incredibly dangerous. Dealing with the uncertainty is the tricky part. How do we move forward in dealing with uncertainty? So you have forecasters, speculators, super forecasters, predictors, and guys like Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and even Hawking chimed in on this. It follows a logical progression: We had computation in the fifties that worked in a certain way, and then each decade since, working and chugging away.
And we’ve had great promises of AI advancements, AI summers. These are known as the seasons of AI, where everything looks good, crashes, and then we get another winter for a decade. Then, more technology develops, we get another summer, and something else happens. We’re on an upward trajectory and in a summer of AI. Some people maintain, like Marc Andreessen and other big players in the financial side who are big backers with dollars, that it’s “drill, baby, drill” time. We don’t have a thing to worry about. We’ve been able to control technologies in the past.
We have absolutely no concerns, so they’re the naysayers. But they’re in the minority. It’s the doomsayers—the Geoffrey Hintons, the Max Tegmarks, the Yoshua Bengios, the Sam Harris, all these folks. Even Elon Musk maintains that AGI will be accomplished much sooner than we thought. It’s a when not an if.
Everybody is on the same page that if we keep progressing at the level we’re at now, this thing will come into being at some point in the future. People put it between 2 and 10 years. When that happens, will we be prepared? Will we have the necessary infrastructure ready to ensure it can only give us the best of what we want while preventing the worst from occurring? And there are camps. There are schools of thought.
You have Eliezer Yudkowsky on the farthest end; he’s the biggest doomsayer. He’s saying, “We’re screwed no matter what. It doesn’t matter what we do right now. We will build this thing, and it will kill us all.” He’s that much of a doomsayer, so he’s saying we’ve got to shut things down now and never allow it to continue.
So, we need to look at Marc Andreessen and Eliezer Yudkowsky, the two furthest extremes, and say, “Among them, now that we’re living under uncertainty with these forms of technology: how do we think critically about this? How do we use our capacity for reasoning under uncertainty?” This was Daniel Kahneman’s big thing. He’s trying to reason under uncertainty. How do we do that as efficiently as possible?
People then throw around figures, and some indicate the likelihood of harm to humankind due to this technology. That’s anywhere from 5 to 20% right now when you take all the estimations, predictions, and forecasting. What are we coming in at? So then the question occurs to us:
If it’s only 5% that some nasty stuff could occur, shouldn’t we be taking that seriously? The bottom line is that we have to think very carefully moving forward and put measures in place to ensure that even if it’s only 5%, we reduce that as much towards 0. But nobody knows. So, to quote Rumsfeld, “There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.” So, the biggest known unknown right now that everybody in the AI business knows is that nobody knows what will happen. Should that give us pause to be better safe than sorry? Yes, for sure. Absolutely. How do we do that? We learn as much as possible about FLOPS: Floating Point Operations executed Per Second. This metric measures the computational power and processing speed of AI-driven algorithms and models, which serves as an indicative benchmark for assessing their performance. Also, we need to lean as much about power, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, and capabilities. Then, we’re the inference machines. We’re the ones who have to make inferences to think, “If we keep scaling up, will that be enough to reach AGI?”
And this has created, so far, three camps. The scaling-up camp believes more computing means more data; give it enough energy, and we’ll produce AGI eventually. The other camp is what I call the embodiment camp. They argue that this thing’s never going to reach AGI like a human because it doesn’t have a body. It doesn’t know what it’s like to move around in space-time, and the only way you can get it to think and act like a human is to give it more human-like experiences.
So you have to embody this thing. You have to put it into a robot or give it the capacity to have a spatial or temporal experience. Then there’s the distributed or collective group, like the Borg. They say, “Forget about a single AGI. Let’s make a thousand things that all work independently and collectively.” When one learns something, they all learn it. When another learns something, they all learn it. It’s distributed throughout, and that’s how we’ll reach AGI. We’ll get all these angels together working in concert to produce a singular god, as it were. So, those are the three schools of thought for reaching AGI.
Which one will produce it? Nobody knows. We’re dealing a lot with uncertainty here, and that alone is somewhat unsettling because it’d be great if we had a techno-fix where it’s just a matter of, “Well, if we control the chips,” right? NVIDIA has the greatest chips in the world right now, and Taiwan produces them. So, as long as China doesn’t interfere and they don’t get certain chips, we have exporting control over who gets the chips. Will that be like fissionable material and nukes?
So long as we know where the uranium is, where it’s going, where the plutonium is, and where it’s going, we have a good idea of who’s up to what. Is the same thing going to be true with chips? Can we control them? Is there a techno-fix? Maybe yes, maybe no. Again, this could be an unknown, and there may be ways to bypass that. But at this point, it’s so new. It’s so fast. It’s moving ahead at such great speed that the biggest concern for us is nobody putting on the brakes, and nobody is sure what will happen. They’re aware of it, but the UK, the EU, the US, and China all have their political discourse put out on how they will handle it. But a lot of that deals with things like bias, the spreading of misinformation, job loss—the stuff that AI will do as well, the harmful stuff AI will do. But not as much attention is paid to what we call X risk or the existential risk that AI can do, and that’s what the organization I’m with now is trying to sound the alarm bells about so that we make sure that never happens or even if some country decides they’re going to use it for their geopolitical ends, we can shut them down very, very quickly, or we can stop them from utilizing it in harmful ways.
So that’s what we’re dealing with. I wish I could tell you that the story was better, that we knew more, and that we had the empirical data, that we’re very clear. And that the future is very, very clear, but it’s not. Working under this uncertainty has many people worried and causing many sleepless nights. So that’s where we’re at.
Jacobsen: Critical Thinking Solutions is a company you have. And my first indication of learning about you was a book you had written, How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass. So, you’ve done a series of books around critical thinking. This company is associated with that same stream of thought and education. As a practical example, how would you apply critical thinking tools to things like AI, AGI, fear-mongering, misinformation, and the mythologizing of AI? “God” is a placeholder, a metaphor for building something, and Ray Kurzweil asked, “Is there a God?” He said, “Well, not yet,” referencing these systems. What are some of your reflections about that?
DiCarlo: Yes. So, in this latest book, coming out in January of 2025, there are two parts to it. The first part is “AI and What You Should Know.” The first three chapters are about the history of AI, the benefits of AI, and the harms of AI. The book’s second half, three chapters, is “AI and What You Can Do About It.” Chapter 4, “Critical Thinking and Ethical Reasoning,” teaches people the ABCs of critical thinking.
When you get your thoughts together, can you construct them into an argument? Do premises support your conclusions? Then, can you think about biases—your own and what you bring to the table, as well as others and what they bring to the dialogue and the conversation? C is context. What context are we now living in? What’s the background information? What are the circumstances behind all of this?
Then, I will talk about ethical theory. How do you house that if you think using AI in particular ways is right, wrong, or bad? How do you ground that into ethical theory? Are you like Peter Singer, the philosopher and utilitarian who believes it’s all about the greatest good for the greatest number? As long as we’re optimizing the greatest good for people, that’s wonderful. And then others will come along and say, “Yes, but you can’t sacrifice others just for the good of the greater number. They have rights, autonomy, and dignity. You shouldn’t treat them like objects as a means to an end.”
So, I go through the critical thinking and ethical reasoning parts to allow people to work through what’s happening in AI. Do they think it’s a good thing or a bad thing? Have they looked at the information? Have they formulated their thoughts about it? And then, in terms of ethics, how do they theoretically ground their ethical beliefs? Do they look to virtue ethics? Do they see a golden mean as a guide on going about this? Is there a common principle amongst all ethical systems?
Something like a golden rule, which we see in all religions worldwide, some formulation of it, that’s great. You don’t want the machine to harm others. It wouldn’t want to harm itself; therefore, it shouldn’t harm others. Can we instill a golden rule into the people functioning alongside this AI and the AI itself? Because there are two factors involved here. We’re the ones who have to come up with the ethics to guide our behaviour and how we’re going to move forward in developing AI.
And then, we have to figure out what ethical principles, precepts, and methodologies we’re going to instill into this “God” that we’re building so that it doesn’t harm or destroy us or the environment. One of the great examples is the paperclip example by Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher. This gets a little complicated, but basically, what he says is if you give an AI a singular function, a singular purpose, then you may open up Pandora’s box because it will try to accomplish that singular purpose and may do so in ways that could be harmful to others. In Bostrom’s paperclip example, you give an AI the job of making paperclips as efficiently and effectively as possible. It starts cranking them out. It’s aligned with our values. We think everything is cool.
Look at the paper clips this is making; they are wonderful. Then, it starts to run out of raw materials for paper clips, but it wants to keep going. It looks at humans and sees that humans are made of stuff that it could use, meltdown, and utilize to make more paper clips. So, it might develop ways to fool and deceive humans and eventually kill them to make more and more paper clips. It sounds like an absurd thought experiment, but this is the type of misalignment we’re worried about in AI, where you try to tell God to act this way. It says, “Oh, I’ll act that way.” But we don’t realize we’ve missed something and didn’t say, “Oh, but don’t do this.”
For example, I don’t know if you’re a fan of Rick and Morty, the cartoon, but there’s an episode in which Rick flies Morty and Summer to a planet to get some ice cream, and he says, “Summer, stay with the vehicle, stay with the ship.” She says, “But I’m just alone here.” He says, “Ship, keep Summer safe.” He and Morty walk away. So Summer’s in this spaceship, and a person approaches the ship and bangs on it. She’s a little frightened, so the ship kills the guy. Summer says, “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that anymore.” So, the next guy that comes up the ship paralyzes him. It shoots a laser into his spine and paralyzes his legs, so he can’t walk. It doesn’t kill him, but it keeps Summer safe. You see how it’s misaligned? It was told to keep Summer safe. “And that’s what it did.”
So, we must be careful when aligning God with our human values. Either it doesn’t harm us by just acting according to its commands, or it develops consciousness. If it develops consciousness and is aware of itself and its situation, will it let us turn it off? Will it let us tell it what we want it to do?
Maybe not. Then what happens if a nefarious country, a ne’er-do-well like North Korea, gets this type of technology? It says, “We don’t like South Korea. We don’t like the US. We don’t like certain other countries. We want you to figure out how to shut down their entire grid system.” Something as simple as that would turn America into a nasty place because we rely heavily on electricity. We don’t know. There are too many unknowns at this point, and the organization I’m working with now, and others like us moving forward, want to ensure we avoid getting into those scenarios where these nasty things happen.
So, one of our teams is very much involved in scenario modelling. They’re trying to think about what could go wrong, what types of things could go wrong that we can think of right now, and what paths to victory, or what we call theories of victory, look like in preventing that from ever happening. So that’s the empirical stuff we’re working with now—trying to envision how things might advance moving forward, anticipating what could go wrong and putting safeguards, what we call guardrails, in place so this AI can never get outside those guardrails. That’s essentially what we and a handful of other organizations worldwide are doing as we speak.
Jacobsen: So if we take terms or phrases like “general intelligence” or “artificial general intelligence,” could our ways of using terms lead us down certain paths of thought that may limit our thinking about these systems? Generally concerning what, or in what way, are we using human intelligence as the metric? When psychologists refer to general intelligence, they often mention triarchic and multiple theories. But it’s referenced in such a way. So, in what way do we mean “general,” and what are the implications of how we carefully select the terms for conceptualizing and characterizing these systems?
DiCarlo: Yes, that’s a good question. I define intelligence at the beginning of the book and the different ways in which we define intelligence. What we have now with AI is ANI or artificial narrow intelligence, which means it simply acts according to its algorithmic inputs. In other words, your Roomba will never come up to you and say, “I want to be an accountant. I don’t want to do this anymore. I have greater ambitions.” It won’t do that because it can’t because its programs are so narrow. It will always be just vacuuming your floor, docking and undocking, etc.
General intelligence—and this is where it gets interesting. So we have AI, and people have said it will never amount to anything and will never even be a very good chess player. So it’s beaten Kasparov. It’s beaten the greatest but will fail to beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. It tripled Ken Jennings’ score. But not Go. Go is too advanced a game. It has exponentially way more moves than chess. Then it beat a grandmaster at Go, so it keeps hitting these benchmarks. We keep seeing it improve and improve.
Recursive self-improvement is one of our biggest concerns in AI, the safety biz, and the risk business. This is the thing that we’re going to be most concerned about. If you allow AI to improve upon itself, it will evolve into what a term I’ve called technoselection. We had natural selection for the majority of our existence, where nature called the shots on what survived and what didn’t survive, what got to reproduce and what didn’t get to reproduce.
Then we get disasters. We get extinctions. There have been at least five major ones, and then life still keeps coming up, but it always obeys the laws of natural and sexual selection. Then, humans evolve and develop consciousness. We say, “Hey, hang on. We can take these animals and these plants, we can screw around with them a bit, and we can artificially select for characteristics and adaptive qualities that we prefer, that we value, that we humans find satisfying.” So, we started to select a bunch of plants and animals artificially. But now we’re entering a realm where we will hand the reins over to the machines themselves to decide the best way to improve upon themselves. At that point, we’ll enter a realm I call techno-selection, which is no longer Darwinian.
It’s Lamarckian. This is technical but AI will direct how it wants its offspring to be. It will say, “Improve upon it in these ways.” The giraffe doesn’t look at the leaves it can’t reach and says, “I want my offspring to have a longer neck so it can reach them. So the next time we have sex, honey, start thinking about longer necks in our kids.” It can’t. It just can’t. It takes generations and generations of longer-necked giraffes mating with other longer-necked giraffes to produce offspring with longer necks. That’s how you get natural selection. We could artificially select for that, but it will take time.
Technoselection is immediate. The machine will identify functional optimization at a level we can’t imagine creating. And remember, this might not even be a single AGI. As Steve Omohundro says, we could be making millions of these things. They’re all self-improving and self-improving. Some people feel that when we transition from ANI to AGI, it will only be a short time before we get ASI, artificial superintelligence. That’s where the godlike qualities come in. It’ll be what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls the “foom.”
It’ll be so quick and so fast. We won’t be able to stop it. We won’t be able to see it coming. And once it occurs, you can’t close the gates on it. It’s already out there. If it gets into our satellite or grid systems or controls large parts of our infrastructure, it’s not like, “Oh, it’s here. Let’s turn it off.” By the time you’ve thought that, this thing has already figured out ways to outmaneuver and outthink you.
So we’re very worried that we will lose containment and control over this thing because it’s misaligned, and that’s called the alignment problem. It’s one of the biggest problems in AI right now. We hope to align ourselves and this God with our values, but we are still waiting for someone to know. Nobody knows. We’re not confident, but we hope to get there eventually.
Jacobsen: What do you consider problematic areas that require more critical thinking outside of artificial intelligence and similar areas in Canada? They could be perennial or new.
DiCarlo: Getting it into our school systems has been the toughest thing of my career. We had some success with the Liberal Party in Ontario, getting pilot projects started and generating some interest. However, not seeing value in critical thinking to the extent that people want to do something about it is very problematic. There’s much energy that goes into other programs, and that’s fine—learning more about Indigenous life, thinking about the rights of LGBTQ—that these things are all fine, but we’re not teaching kids how to think, and so many of them are missing out on that capacity.
Some teachers do it naturally, and they’re great, but certainly not all are. First, we need to get critical thinking into the high school system, either in modular form, which means a nice two-week package that slides nicely and neatly into any course, a standalone course, or both. But we’re not teaching kids how to think. The greatest gift you could ever give a child is the ability to think critically for themselves. There’s no greater gift in education that you can bestow upon a child than to give them the empowerment to understand information, be able to identify biases, to be able to appreciate context, spot fallacies, and know how to formulate their ideas and opinions into a structured and well-reasoned argument.
So, I will continue lobbying governments to get critical thinking into high school and, eventually, much more importantly, into the elementary school systems because that’s where you must start a child in critical thinking. When you look at the most successful countries in the world, why are their GDPs so good? Why is their level of happiness so high? Then you realize, when you look at their education systems, they almost have a 100% literacy rate, but they instill critical thinking in their systems. So, the students have that capacity as they mature developmentally and become young adults.
They’re also taught how to use those skills within a civic relationship. What does being a citizen of a country, province, or city mean? What does that mean? How does the whole system and series of systems work, and how are they interconnected? How do you play a part in that with those critical thinking skills? And so, the more aware people are of how to think about information, the better a situation will be.
That’s been a very important part of my life, and I can’t see myself giving that up anytime soon, but that’s how I see things moving forward.
DiCarlo: CPS, A Practical Guide to Thinking Predictably. It was a one-time publication by McGraw-Hill for a course.
Jacobsen: If we include those books and Critical Thinking Solutions, where else can people find you?
DiCarlo: My new website is: criticaldonkey.com. I’ve got a podcast, All Thinks Considered. There are lots of interesting interviews with thought leaders and others. Season 2 is devoted entirely to AI.
DiCarlo: I love Charles. He’s quite the character, man. He’s an interesting cat. I’ve never liked somebody so much with whom I’ve disagreed more. I can’t imagine. But no, my talk with Lloyd Hawkeye Roberson is a good one. It was one of the first ones. Mick West, the conspiracy theorist champion, Peter Singer, was a great interviewSteve Omohundro and Kelly Carlin, George Carlin’s daughter. I’m having her on again in August. They’re all good and unique in their way. I need help to pick a favourite. Boy, that’s a tough one because we have so much going on in each one of those conversations. They’re all quite good, but we’re trying to get Keanu Reeves because we’d like him to be a spokesperson for AI safety. We can’t think of anybody who would be better.
Jacobsen: Trinity?
DiCarlo: Yes, Trinity.
Jacobsen: The Oracle? Oh, I think she passed away.
DiCarlo: Morpheus?
Jacobsen: Yes, Lawrence Fishburne is right.
DiCarlo: Larry might be an interesting guest, but we must see what happens.
Jacobsen: Chris, thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it.
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I interviewed a colleague because she was writing about religious-based identity politics. This is the basis for the idea of this interview. The term “identity politics” can be overused, making it difficult to provide a proper critique. Antisemitism is an inversion of that, where you’re not adopting an identity for political gain but instead asserting it about someone else to create unfavourable political currency for them and then relatively positive political currency for yourself. What’s your take on that? If you can tie someone to being antisemitic, especially post-October 7th, it can have severe implications.
Dr. Alon Milwicki: Antisemitism is currently a prevalent form of racism. Many populists talk about antisemitism. Labelling someone as antisemitic is a potent form of demonization, considering the context of Hamas’s actions. Accusing someone of antisemitism implies they support Hamas and terrorism. In post-9/11 America, being labelled pro-terrorist is highly damaging.
Your statement is accurate, but it can be somewhat flipped. In the effort to be the most pro-Israel, it often has nothing to do with actual Israeli politics. Most people need to familiarize themselves with Israeli politics. A recent poll showed that almost three-quarters of Israelis oppose Netanyahu, yet the entire Republican party in the US supports him. If they genuinely favour democratic societies and the will of the people, they should listen to the Israeli people rather than project their beliefs onto them.
In an attempt to prove they are so pro-Semitic, they feel the need to be extremely pro-Israel. Projecting this image of pro-Israel deflects the negative identity of antisemitism. Thus, there is identity politics surrounding antisemitism, with the pro-Israel trope being prominently displayed. You’ll likely see many Republican candidates up for reelection declaring themselves pro-America, America first, and pro-Israel.
Labelling themselves as pro-Israel has nothing to do with genuine allyship. The US and Israel are so interdependent that there is no scenario where America will not support Israel from a foreign policy perspective. Based on my limited knowledge and experiences from previous workplaces, it is highly unlikely. If these individuals in government are unaware, it indicates either a lack of diligence or dishonesty. If they are dishonest, one must question their motives. If they are simply uninformed, they ought to be better informed.
Jacobsen: Indeed. What about the lesser risk posed by state-based issues?
Milwicki: If Marjorie Taylor Greene claims to be pro-Israel but previously discussed Jewish space lasers, she should reassess her knowledge.
Jacobsen: How do you perceive American campus protests, where individuals oppose Israeli policies but support Palestinians while condemning terrorism? There is also a mix of individuals who join these protests without fully understanding the issues, potentially feeding into antisemitism. This can result in an inadvertent moral misstep towards antisemitism on the left wing.
Milwicki: The reporting on these protests often differs from the actual events. Some protests have been significantly disrupted, with certain groups attending specifically to promote their narratives. Antisemitic groups have been known to participate in these protests. For instance, the JDL, listed by the FBI as a terrorist organization, was reportedly seen at a campus protest. While this might not have been confirmed, I recall reading about it. College students’ involvement is significant. Many believe they can rekindle the civil rights movement. This is unlikely in the 21st century. Protesting is an American right and should be exercised.
Whether through sit-ins or campus protests, these activities are permissible. However, when swastikas are displayed, one must question whether this stems from ignorance or extremism. The depiction of the Israeli flag with a swastika is antisemitic. Although the swastika is shocking, its presence is generally limited. Most college protests are simply that—protests. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. However, the narrative that criticizing Israel equates to antisemitism is a right-wing construct. By this logic, 75% of Israelis would be considered antisemitic.
Following this reasoning, one must question the assumption that antisemitism began on college campuses only a few months ago. Antisemitism, racism, and misogyny have always been present on college campuses. These institutions are microcosms of society. Most college individuals are between 16 and 25 years old, forming their identities. This environment can be a breeding ground for both positive and negative behaviours. College campuses indeed reflect broader societal issues. There are valid reasons to critique the Israeli government, but this must also involve understanding Hamas. We must acknowledge the context provided by the widely circulated videos.
We have all seen the atrocities, not just those committed by Hamas, but also the bombings carried out by Israel. We need to understand that Hamas frequently uses civilian targets. They are experts in propaganda and have succeeded in the propaganda war. The only source of information many people rely on regarding the death toll in Gaza is Hamas. This does not account for those whom Hamas has endangered or killed. Netanyahu correctly pointed out that if relief aid reaches Gaza, Hamas does not distribute it to the people; they allocate it to their supporters and themselves. This is typical behaviour for a terrorist organization, and it must be understood that the first victims of Hamas are the Palestinians.
Palestinians have been victims of Hamas for nearly 20 years, living under a terrorist regime that controls all aspects of their lives. This needs to be recognized. However, eliminating Hamas does not mean the destruction of Palestine or the erasure of Palestinian identity. It also does not grant Israel the freedom to act without restraint. I am not a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, but as a historian who has studied antisemitism for many years, I have a basic understanding of Hamas and Israel, which is necessary to grasp how these issues are appropriated or misused.
I do not oppose campus protests and do not believe they should be banned. Organizations like SJP and BLM should have the right to protest. While some activists have made inappropriate statements, this does not justify banning their protests. Regardless of one’s perspective, certain activists say problematic things. For example, right-wing activists often make offensive remarks. One could argue that the right’s current focus on antisemitism, particularly after October 7th, is an attempt to shift the narrative back to the post-9/11 era, emphasizing Islamic terrorism as the primary threat despite FBI statistics showing that white supremacy and far-right groups are the largest domestic terrorist threats in America.
This narrative shift involves using Israel to further their agenda. This is a novel point, and I appreciate you mentioning it, Scott. I used to tell my students that my role was to impart wisdom, and their role was to record it. It may sound trivial, but hopefully, it addresses your question. College campuses are easy targets for such narratives, but this does not mean that problematic behaviour does not occur there. Antisemitic incidents do happen within these protests. However, condemning all colleges or universities is unjustified. The United States has many prestigious institutions that attract students and professors worldwide, although recent trends may affect this. Those who claim to be First Amendment purists should question why they are so keen on limiting freedom of expression and education.
Jacobsen: That is an important point to consider. I cannot think of a better way to conclude this discussion.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/11
PeterDankwa is a humanist volunteer for the Humanist Association of Ghana and Humanists International. Here we talk about humanist activism.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Our last conversation focused on some of the international humanist scene and your personal background. What do you consider, ironically, the best lessons taught from Christianity, for you, in hindsight?
Peter Dankwa: In hindsight, my practice of Christianity taught me to be incorrigibly expressive about truth, which ironically was the catalyst for my deconversion from Christianity, as there were too many inconsistencies about the faith. However, the idea and practice of sticking with the truth was a truly cathartic experience that benefited my mental health during my days as a firebrand Christian. A principle I relished executing. At the peak of my Christianity journey, I painfully questioned why the church was dodgy about the imperfections of faith, its history, and its frequent bastardization of reason and evidence.
Jacobsen: What have been the overlaps in Christian values and humanist values if any?
Dankwa: For me, compassion stands out. Religion typically encourages its followers to be compassionate wherever they find themselves. I daresay compassion is one of the sacrosanct values of humanism. Compassion, most likely because of our evolutionary background, has served as a lubricant for human connection. It transcends religion, colour, gender, and class. As Kant puts it, the only good is goodwill. Thus, you can never go wrong with compassion.
Jacobsen: Who were present at this first meeting in 2017-2018?
Dankwa: I remember a few faces: Michael, Llyod, Agomo, Ama, Roslyn, and Afia, among others.
Jacobsen: What would you consider some of the Ghanaian flavours of humanism?
Dankwa: A typical Ghanaian flavour of humanism is the culture of empathy, which manifests as hospitability in Ghanaian culture. Ghana is usually tagged as a peaceful country because the average Ghanaian is always ready to make strangers or foreigners feel welcome around them. Another flavour of humanism I have come to love in the Humanist Association of Ghana is the consistent dialogue on freethought.
Jacobsen: How has the social media volunteer work been going for you?
Jacobsen: What happened for the two charity outreaches?
Dankwa: The outreaches focused on assessing the living conditions of an orphanage and providing solutions to improve them.
Jacobsen: Where can people find out about Peter’s Box? What publications have been the most well-received or read?
Dankwa: Out of the over 60 blog posts on Peter’s Box, the most influential has been MY LAST DAYS IN THE CHURCH, for obvious reasons. A lot of people can’t fathom how atheists like myself are able to live without god or religion. That post received a lot of comments. In the post, I talked about the factors that led to my egress from religion. The inspiration for publishing that post came from not wanting to continually repeat my narration of how I became an unbeliever and atheist. Hence, when I am asked how I became an atheist, I simply forward the link to them. (https://peesbox.com/my-last-days-in-the-church/).
Jacobsen: What is new with humanism in Ghana? What is new with the Humanist Association of Ghana?
Dankwa: Humanism in Ghana is admirably making waves following the recent anti-LGBT bill proceedings. A lot of academics, though religious, are openly decrying the anti-LGBT bill proposed by Parliament. It has ignited conversations that analyse the ideals of humanism and its necessity in building a secular society. Recently, a number of humanists have been granted interviews in the public media to shed more light on humanism, a welcoming gesture that humanists have always looked forward to.
The Humanist Association of Ghana has been very active in its campaign against the anti-LGBT bill.
Jacobsen: What African countries are best equipped to host a general assembly or a world congress of Humanists International?
Dankwa: In West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria are the best countries to host a general assembly or a world congress of Humanists International, as most proactive humanists are found there. The atmosphere in Ghana and Nigeria is fairly curious and hospitable to diversity.
I would highly recommend Kenya as well, though it is found in East Africa. I believe Kenya is doing amazingly well in the humanist movement. Kenya is a great option.
Jacobsen: Is there an appropriate distinction between secular humanism and religious humanism to you? Is there a utility in one over the other? How would you characterize humanism in Ghana, generally speaking?
Dankwa: I identify as a secular humanist, a relevant distinction among the various nuances in the practice of humanism. As a secular humanist, I practice humanism without any recourse to religion or its rituals. This contrasts with religious humanism, which practices humanism with recourse to a religious model, specifically imitating the congregational and ritualistic model of religion. It is important to note that religious humanism is fully nontheistic, like secular humanism, but integrates congregational rites into the practice of humanism. For example, religious humanism incorporates choirs and periodic congregations, etc., just as most religions would. The word ‘religious’ in Religious Humanism does not imply a theistic or supernatural belief. Religious humanism is also known as ethical humanism. The Humanist Society (previously the Humanist Society of Friends) and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) are some organisations that practice religious humanism today.
The utility of religious humanism over secular humanism might be traced to personal preferences. Some who leave religion and later subscribe to humanism but still crave the ritualistic model of religion might lean towards religious humanism. Others who do not find utility in maintaining religious models will lean towards secular humanism. The tendency to go down the rabbit hole with a religious model in humanism is very glaring. It might subtly derail the core principles of humanism into the tracks of a religious, if not a theistic, one.
The framing of religious humanism has led many, in part, to label humanism as a religion. This is incorrect. Humanism is not a religion, as there is no subscription to beliefs, gods, deities, or supernatural dispositions. Thus, secular humanism and religious humanism are not religions.
People writing about religious humanism are careful to distinguish religious humanism from Jewish humanism (nonreligious Jews who are humanists), Christian humanism (religious Christians asserting the humanitarian aspects of their religion), and secular humanism (often simply “humanism,” a non-religious approach to life), but confusion inevitably arises. Another such term is Secular Buddhism, which refers to an atheistic practice of Buddhist rituals.
Humanism, as practiced by members of the Humanism Association of Ghana, is secular. The ideals of humanism are such that they appeal to anyone interested in the progress of humanity; hence, most religious folks might be seen as affiliating with the humanist identity or movement.
Jacobsen: What is the current state of the anti-LGBT bill in Ghana?
Dankwa: Two lawyers, Richard Sky and Dr. Amanda Odoi, filed a case with the Supreme Court against the passing of the anti-LGBT bill, declaring the bill unconstitutional. The case specifically seeks that the Supreme Court injunct Parliament from sending the anti-LGBT bill to the President for his approval until the court rules on whether the bill is constitutional. Consequently, the Supreme Court has indefinitely deferred the ruling on the anti-LGBTQ bill.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Peter.
Dankwa: Thank you for the opportunity! I hope to see you in Singapore.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/10
Bolaji Alonge is a Nigerian artist, photographer, actor, and journalist from Lagos. He isalso known as Eyes of a Lagos Boy. He has more than two decades of experience documenting history, looking for beauty where it is least expected. Alonge’svisual language speaks of the wonders of nature and human exchange, as well as urban culture, and searches for historical continuity in a world that is sometimes heavily fractured. His lens exposes contrast and conflict while offering an alternative vision of oneness, orderin chaos. He is also a globetrotter who has travelled the world, documenting exotic culture and history.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is a connection through Dr. Leo Igwe, a wonderfully active free thinker and humanist from Nigeria. He travels constantly and is alert, aware, and energetic about many humanist movements. An area of gap or lack has been the development of art for the humanistic community. I know about some people who do that, but that’s an issue regarding a broad-based movement around it. ConcerningNigeria, a music and art festival that focuses on freethought, humanism, and its various manifestations in Nigerian culture is currently being planned. What is the importance of that?
Bolaji Alonge: Currently we can note an African Renaissance from the art and cultural point of view. Much attention is paid to our music, arts, Nigeria, and everything about us. It’s the time to show the world who we are beyond the prejudices people have about Nigerians.
However, in Nigeria today, we find ourselves in a society where people claim to be religious. If something does not work out, people start going from one church to another, looking for help and salvation. So, people are in this constant search of God. In the last year, the economic situation in the country has been challenging. People are at the point where they begin to question their lives. When humans are pushed to this point, you start to see that prayers don’t work. It is an admission that is difficult for many to accept. But for humanists in Nigeria, it’s not so common to come across people who tell you they don’t believe in the concept of God or the idea of a religion.
In Nigeria, the world has always been about survival and tradition. Challenging the status quo and improving the quality of life of the majority is what liberated Europe. When people started paying attention to the environment and the beauty around them, they saw that whatever they thought was spiritual had a cause and logic.
As an artist I aim to pay attention to the people around me, andpay more attention to the beauty around us. I try to do this with my art, especially my Eyes of a Lagos Boy project,that is alsoabout showing my society in a beautiful light. If we pay more attention; it may become a better place to live. What I try to do with my art, my photography and writings is pushing people to believe more in themselves.
When you achieve some of these dreams, it’s just the beginning of another journey. If we pay more attention to our environment, which is what the arts do, it brings you to the now; it brings you to the present. We think a lot beyond the present, while beingtrapped in the past. Then, in addition there is religion. As a result the psyche is clouded, mixed with the history of slavery colonialism. It’s a lot to unpack but we’re beginning to get to the point where we have to accept that we must believe in ourselves.
Jacobsen: What about the difference between visual art and music in expressing that sentiment or those sentiments?
Alonge: Music is instantaneous. Once you hear a fantastic rhythm, you don’t have to understand the language. So music is more impactful, especially if you’re from my part of the world. Our language is music. Many messages and lessons can be packed in music. Visual arts require another type of engagement and leaves more space of personal interpretation. Another aspect is that a lot of visual art remains less accessible to many people. For instance, visiting museums or galleries is a huge hurdle for many and some view it as an elitist form of art. On the other hand – street art could be just outside your house.
In my view we need more street art – we have a lot of bridgesthat are all blank. Nothing is sprayed on them. Graffiti is something we associate with Western societies, where youth have been able to colonize open spaces. We do see a movement for public art emerging that is slowly gaining momentum. A group of Nigerian graffiti artists are planning a big festival in Lagos this year. We need to encourage young artists to beautify their space because when you have all these colors around you and all these expressions around you, it has a way of building the mind.
Jacobsen: Are any of these musical and visual art forms for a freethought audience in any way mimicking the stuff that you see in traditional religious settings?
Alonge: Not so much, in a society with less than 2% of non-believers, progressive messaging in music and arts is often more subtle. The mere fact of not calling god can be interpreted as a sign of rebellion, just as ditching the habit of praying before and after meetings. Free thought and progressive ideals have to go hand in hand. This means that the choice of topics for visual arts and messaging should reflect the orientation of the artists in this sense.
Jacobsen: Do you know the Kenyan artist Ayub Ogada and Ablaye Cissoko from Senegal?They both play traditional music instruments – what about Nigerian music styles?
Alonge: Our style of music is Afrobeat, and it can be incorporated into anything. Are you aware of Fela Kuti. He died in 1997. Fela started talking about religion in the early 1970s, questioning suffering. There’s a song called “Suffering and Smiling.” You could Google it. He questioned how the pope is the richest, how the bishop is the richest, how the imams enjoy it, how the people are suffering, and how they keep supporting and sustaining their lifestyle. Apart from Fela, we’ve had a few other artists with similar messages. Afrobeat is being listened to all over the world at the moment. But at the same time, gospel music in Africa is the number one streaming genre on all the streaming platforms. So that tells you where the mind of many people is.
Jacobsen: Many artists and artistic and musical groups form organizations, like the Association of this or the organization of that. Are there any for freethinkers?
Alonge: No. Actually there is a huge need to make atheism more socially acceptable – it remains a taboo for many. In fact, often meetings of humanists are coded and not open to the public.
Jacobsen: Which Afrobeat or gospel African musicians and singers, bands, or groups impress you in terms of their use of commentary critical of religion, political hypocrisy, and other things that would interest freethinkers and humanists?
Alonge: I will name three people: Fela Kuti, his son Femi Kuti, and his other son Seun Kuti. These three artists have tried to liberate people’s minds from societal constructs. Sothese artistsare bold enough, living in Nigeria, to address these issues. Many other artists may talk about some of these things; they touch on them, maybe indirectly, but often, it’s all about thanking God for giving you the next Lamborghini.
Jacobsen: Do you have any upcoming projects you want to plug in?
Alonge: I’m working on a project in some rural areas east of Lagos. We are calling the government’s attention to the lives of indigenous people living there, supporting with job creation programmes, improved healthcare and collaboration with the local schools. One aspect is supplying text books for the school kids. We aim to include some materials on critical thinking. We must let our young ones understand that they have to believe more in themselves, not anything outside them.
Jacobsen: How can people get involved, support your work, or contact you?
Alonge: My website is Eyes of a Lagos Boy and that is also my handle on social media where people can get in touch with me directly.
Jacobsen:It was very nice to meet you. Thank you very much for your time today.
Alonge:Thank you, Scott. Nice talking to you. Good night.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/09
Takudzwa Mazwienduna is a member of Young Humanists Zimbabwe. Here he talks about Young Humanists Zimbabwe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we will talk about religious demographics in Zimbabwe. One thing, I note. Zimbabwe is super religious. But it is not as religious as I thought. Canada, not known for being a very religious country, I think; however, it used to have this status, and even more than Zimbabwe. In the 1970s, it sat around 90% Christian. You read that right. In the early 2000s, it was about ¾ Christian. By 2021, it was about 54% and continuing even lower, to about 50%, probably, or a little less, this year. That’s unprecedented. Zim looks like late 1980s and early 1990s Canada. That’s promising! Any preliminary thoughts?
Takudzwa Mazwienduna: That is very hopeful, but then again, unlike Canada, Zimbabwe’s education system is not so different from colonial times. Some secularists like Shingai Rukwata Ndoro have worked with the government to make education progressive, but mission schools still dominate. There is still a lot of proselytization in schools despite the government discouraging it.
Jacobsen: How did the religious demographics in Zimbabwe look in prior decades?
Mazwienduna: The London Missionary Society made sure that model citizens of the colony had to be Christian. Couple that with Missionary Education that tied intellectualism with Christianity and it made the religion default for natives. It is mostly Pan African activists that speak against Christianity today, shunning it as a colonial legacy. They do not advocate for secularism however, but a return to native animist religions. They are however open to secularist ideas since their religion is not monotheistic, and the Zimbabwean Atheists have conversed with them on an interfaith radio show we all participated in back in 2017. They seemed like plausible allies. Nevertheless, Christianity is the dominant religion, although at times it can be mixed with the traditional religion. The pentecostal Christian denominations however shun traditional beliefs and label them as demonic.
Jacobsen: When was the Christian religion truly ascendant there?
Mazwienduna: The colonial era is when Christianity took over. It also explains why its main rival, the traditional religion is a common target for demonization by various Christian denominations today.
Jacobsen: How is the Christian religion a political force in the 2020s?
Mazwienduna: There are certain Christian denominations that are very influential in politics. One of the richest prophets called Ubert Angel was made the Ambassador of Zimbabwe to the United States to America, he later on stepped down after an Al Jazeera documentary exposed him smuggling tonnes of looted gold in cohorts with government officials. One of the biggest pentecostal churches; Zimbabwe Assemblies Of God Africa (ZAOGA), mandates its devout followers to vote for the ruling party ZANU PF. The indigenous Christian churches that dominate in the rural areas popularly known as the “mapostori” or Apostolic churches promise their followers that God will add 1 or 2 decades to their lives if they vote for the ruling party. They are a big asset for the ruling party during elections so much so that they were exempted from COVID lockdowns in 2020 and they carried on with their church conferences.
Jacobsen: What are the major concerns regarding the Christian religion in Zimbabwe now?
Mazwienduna: Its grip on education and politics is getting stronger and while Zimbabwe is still secular on paper, something has to be done about Christianity’s influence.
Jacobsen: We all know the regressive Ugandan and Ghanaian anti-LGBTI–using UN LGBTI Core Group language–bills attempted to be put into law, which are the most regressive in the world. Has anything like that been attempted there?
Mazwienduna: While Zimbabwe definitely isn’t LGBTQI friendly, homosexuality was decriminalized in 2013. The old colonial laws of sodomy were done away with, but there are instances of customary laws in rural areas where Christian Apostolic faiths dominate that still punish people for homosexuality at the chief’s court. Most LGBTQI Zimbabweans seek refuge in Botswana and South Africa. Mozambique is also LGBTQI friendly since the African Traditional Religion dominates, but the wars and ISIS terrorism going on there discourages Zimbabweans to seek refuge there
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, my friend.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/08
Jessica Lapointe is the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220 (SSA field workers) National President.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Numerous organizations are involved in a campaign to save Social Security in the United States. Why should people be more aware of this issue? How does it impact every ordinary American at some point in their life?
Jessica LaPointe: The campaign is called “Save Social Security, Fund It to Fix It.” Americans should be aware of this campaign because, as you mentioned, Social Security affects everyone from cradle to grave at some point in their lives in the United States. You contribute to Social Security through your payroll FICA dollars, meaning that every time you work, a portion of your paycheck is allocated to this fund. Individuals must oversee how these funds are administered.
In this case, Social Security is administered by Congress, and unfortunately, Congress is not managing your earned Social Security dollars to benefit the average American. The typical American contributes to Social Security throughout the year, particularly if they earn less than $168,000, which includes most middle-class Americans. Therefore, timely access to the benefits and services funded through FICA is a rightful expectation.
The administrative budget, which also comes from your FICA dollars, has been significantly reduced by Congress over the past decade and a half, coinciding with the record retirement of baby boomers. As a result, service delays are increasing. We are currently experiencing a 27-year low in staffing levels. With the proposed additional cuts of half a billion dollars to Social Security by the House, we could face a 50-year low in staffing levels despite a record number of beneficiaries.
Due to understaffing, field offices will continue to close in communities, as in Cleveland. Overpayments will also continue accumulating on individuals’ records; we currently face $23 billion in overpayments because insufficient staff can accurately manage benefit reporting changes.
If this trend continues, Social Security will be on the verge of collapse. The proposed budget cut of half a billion dollars will result in staff layoffs lasting over a month.
Thus, while current service delays and an unresponsive agency due to understaffing are significant issues, they will only worsen. To save Social Security, Congress must adequately fund it. Traditionally, we operate at 1.2 percent of benefit payouts, referred to as outlays, but this has decreased to less than 0.95 percent. Less than one cent of every dollar in benefit payouts is spent on operating costs. For comparison, private insurance companies operate at about 20 percent of benefit payouts. Hence, operating at 1.2 percent is highly efficient, but Congress continues to erode this efficiency.
Jacobsen: This issue does not necessarily align with the dominant political parties in the United States. It is more about the specific orientations of these parties. Are Republicans more opposed to funding Social Security than Democrats?
LaPointe: Republicans in the House have voted to cut half a billion dollars from Social Security’s operating budget. In contrast, Democrats voted unanimously to restore that funding through the Rupert Burger Amendment. You can review the voting records of Congress on Social Security to draw your conclusions.
The Alliance for Retired Americans provides that information on our website, afgec220.org. We have those voting records attached to our literature as well. Americans need to start examining this information. With the upcoming elections, including the House elections, where every seat is contested, and the presidential elections, it is crucial to review the lawmakers’ records on Social Security. By and large, Democrats tend to vote in favour of supporting Social Security funding. In contrast, Republicans tend to vote for cuts in Social Security funding, whether it be administrative costs, earned access to timely benefits and services, or full benefit payouts. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration addressed solvency concerns by raising the retirement age, a benefit cut to seniors and reduced life expectancy.
Democrats like Congressman Larson, Senator Sanders, and Senator Warren have introduced comprehensive legislation to expand solvency by scrapping the benefit contribution-based cap and lifting it so that everyone, including millionaires and billionaires, pays their fair share year-round. Since everyone contributes to the collective success of this nation, it is only fair that all should contribute to Social Security. You can research this for yourself; do not take my word for it. Democrats generally support protecting, modernizing, and expanding Social Security, while Republicans vote to cut, defund, and limit access to it, causing catastrophic delays. Currently, it takes over eight months to get an initial disability decision, whereas it took just two months in 2010 before the baby boomers began retiring in record numbers.
Jacobsen: I have two points of contact which come to mind now. What do opinion surveys and polls indicate about what Americans want regarding Social Security? How does implementing this human right in the United States compare to other developed countries?
LaPointe: Great question. An exit poll at the last presidential election, possibly a Gallup poll, indicated that 78% of Americans believe the Social Security Administration needs more funding to support its operating costs and ensure timely benefits and services. This demonstrates that Social Security is a widely popular program, regardless of political ideology. Most Americans view Social Security as important both to the nation and personally. The data does not lie; Social Security is the greatest anti-poverty program in our nation’s history. It currently lifts a million children out of poverty annually. For 65% of Americans, Social Security is their only income during retirement.
When individuals retire after paying into the program their entire working lives and encounter an unresponsive agency, they feel their money has been stolen. Underfunding operating costs effectively steal money from hardworking families because the funds are not being returned to them. Where is the money going if it is not benefiting the contributors?
But yes, the idea is that what people thought might have been a conspiracy theory—that the Republicans want to privatize Social Security—is no longer considered a conspiracy theory. That’s the widely held belief that that sort of the nefarious plan, why Republicans are doing this sort of death by a thousand cuts. That’s a choice that they’re making, right? Social security is extremely efficient, popular, and well-managed when the workers have the resources to do that. But if you keep taking more and more resources away from the program, it makes it more and more impossible for the workers to do the job, and that’s where we’re at right now. And then that’s an excuse to privatize.
Jacobsen: And when there is this pretty standard as a process of defunding: watch dysfunction, people get mad, dismantle it, and private industry comes in to save the day in the United States. Is that a conscious process, a common routine to formulate a type of, not in these words, class warfare, economic warfare? Because they’re not doing this to the wealthier. They’re doing this to people who are poorer and at the end of their working life, hopefully, correct?
LaPointe: Yes, exactly. These are the people that need it. This is who the program was designed to help—our middle-class Americans and people who need Social Security to rely on, to live on. So it isn’t fair. You pay into a program your entire working life expecting it to be there for you, only to discover that the agency is non-responsive. And then we haven’t even gotten into the benefit solvency, the looming solvency threat, in about ten years. Only 80 percent of benefits will be able to be paid out, and comprehensive legislation would fix that. For example, the Social Security 2100 Act on the Senate side is the Social Security Expansion Act, where you see scrap the cap legislation. The contribution and benefits base is about $168,000 annually, so the average American pays into that all year. However, the wealthier Americans stop paying in, depending on their income, as of January 1st or March 1st if you’re a millionaire. And yes, if we can scrap that cap and have people paying their fair share all year round, then benefits will be solvent, right? But right now, they’re considering raising the retirement age, as they did in the 80s under the Reagan administration.
Studies show that raising the retirement age is causing people’s life expectancy to shorten because they have to work longer and expose themselves to the hazards of stress and working conditions past when they otherwise would have to. So people are living less based on raising that retirement age, and we do not favour that. Regarding the people we partner with, the Alliance for Retired Americans and Social Security Works don’t favour raising the retirement age because that’s a benefit cut. It’s harmful to retirees. So that’s the two-fold of our Save Social Security, Fund It to Fix It campaign. We call for Social Security to be expanded, modernized, and protected. We’re calling for the Social Security Administration to be fully funded to meet public demand, to restore the 1.2 percent operating budget, and to pass solvency legislation that scraps the cap, doesn’t cut benefits, and doesn’t raise the retirement age.
Allies are good for the working class and the American people. They are due right by the constituents of lawmakers who were voted in to protect these rights, and they need to start doing that. About 20 percent of the caseloads of congressional leaders are Social Security questions about benefit delays, overpayment issues, and other problems plaguing the administration due to underfunding and understaffing. If nothing else, Congress could focus its caseloads on other important issues like the environment and other concerns that people would call about once they shore up this social security problem. But they have to have the will to do that. We see they’re going to have the will of their constituents start to vote for people with their best interests in mind. That’s why this election is so important because it has a lot of fringe issues that people are fear-mongering about, especially from Republicans—what bathroom people should be using, what education should be happening in schools or lack thereof, or defunding education. This must be about important issues, and Social Security should be on the ballot box in November.
Jacobsen: And how does this affect people with disabilities as well?
LaPointe: Well, currently, it takes somebody who is no longer able to work and earn income due to a disability about eight months to get a decision on an initial disability application. It takes two and a half years to reach the hearing level. Our state-run disability determination services are incredibly understaffed, and there is a pay disparity there. They’re not getting paid adequately to make the high-level decisions that they’re making, so you can’t recruit and retain people for those jobs. That’s the same at the Social Security Administration. You can’t recruit and retain top talent to handle our complex programs because our pay disparity is about 30 percent compared to the private sector. So, it affects people who can no longer work due to a disability because they can’t get benefit decisions timely. People end up going bankrupt; people end up dying. I said 30,000 Americans are dying while waiting for a Social Security decision on their benefits, for example.
When I started in 2009, I was a claim specialist at the Social Security Administration. I took a disability application from a woman who was living in her ex-husband’s basement. She was in dire straits and very much needed these benefits to get herself out of extreme poverty. I remembered her plight and her situation when I was taking her application. When her decision was approved after two months, I called her and wanted to make her day by telling her her benefits had been approved. She started crying and told me that this phone call saved her life because she had planned to take it if her benefits were not going to be approved within the week. She had a whole plan. I was with her at that moment, thinking, wow, what an important job I have and we have here at the Social Security Administration. We’re saving lives. That was in 2009; it took two months to get a decision. Nowadays, it takes eight months. In 2024, she would not have made it. Tens of thousands of Americans are in that same situation, who are just not making it due to the long service delays, especially our disabled population, who can’t work while they’re waiting to get a decision. To qualify, they can only work minimally or can’t even get their foot in the door to be considered for a decision.
It’s not good. We’re not taking care of our citizens. We don’t care for the people who have paid for this program and expect it to be there for them. This is a promise, right, that they were given. Congress promised them a Social Security Administration to rely on and took that promise away. They need to be held accountable for that.
Jacobsen: If you were to make an economic dividing line between those who receive these benefits and those who do not, what is the socioeconomic level at which that exists about receiving Social Security benefits in general? And how might individuals who are above that line not necessarily understand the necessity of such a program to help those who, either due to disability or old age or simply having to put in the time and accept that promise, need it and deserve it?
LaPointe: So you’re not getting rich when you live off Social Security. The average Social Security benefit is about $1,700 a month. We’re talking about retirement, old age, survivor, and disability insurance benefits that are paid for by FICA. To qualify for that benefit, you must be below certain income levels or of a certain age where you no longer have an income limit. This benefit is designed to keep people out of extreme poverty and off the streets and ensure that people lead a dignified life when they can no longer work. It’s a moral imperative.
During their working careers, workers in this country have all contributed to the collective success of this country, even to the success of millionaires and billionaires. Take Amazon, for example; these workers drive the vehicles, keeping the roads functioning. These workers have dedicated their entire lives to the collective success of a prosperous nation. They deserve to retire with dignity. Sixty-five percent of Americans only have Social Security to rely on in retirement. If this program goes away, you won’t see a country where older people are off the streets, not having to beg for money.
So, are we going to take care of people who have paid into the program and contributed to the collective success of our nation, or are we just going to abandon them and abandon the promise to them that they would be able to retire with dignity and have income in their retirement to fulfill their needs? We call this serious money. This isn’t playing around with money but keeping the lights on money.
As Social Security workers, we used to be able to sit down with a customer and go over their benefit options and discuss their break-even point so they could make an informed decision on when to retire, whether to accumulate delayed retirement credits and keep working, or whether they needed the money now due to a poor life expectancy prognosis. We used to be able to sit down and make those decisions, print out benefit matrices, and go over the math. We don’t have time to do that anymore.
We are an intake agency. We are an agency that puts out fires. We must intake all these appointments and get people into pay because of the long service delays. That is the agency’s main priority. So, people cannot make informed decisions anymore, which is unfortunate because this is the money they have to rely on and live off of for the rest of their lives. This is the only payout they can count on for the rest of their life because Social Security, once paid out, is paid out from the time they qualify until death. It also affects children who have experienced the loss of a breadwinner or a parent who has passed away. I lost my father when I was nine years old and went on Social Security. Without Social Security, I wouldn’t have had access to food, housing stability, income stability, and education to allow me to move forward in life. That would have been a real struggle for my mother, who was struggling with poverty herself when my father passed away. This program not only saves lives, but it also levels the playing field for children to get ahead. It lifts a million children out of poverty a year. Continuing this program, as promised, is vital to our nation’s success.
Jacobsen: So, Congressman Jimmy Gomez who is the Chair of the Congressional Dads Caucus, John “Bowser” Bauman of Social Security Works and member of Sha Na Na, Jimmy Gallagher of the California Alliance for Retired Americans, and others are part of this collective move. How can people get involved, and what is the importance of getting people and others together to show a sort of communal activism across the country and setting an example?
LaPointe: Social Security workers, AFGE (the American Federation of Government Employees), which is who I work for, the Social Security Administration, and then people who are dedicated to preserving the program, lawmakers who are dedicated to fighting for legislation that’s going to protect, expand, and modernize the program, constituency groups like Social Security Works, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and the American people all have a decision to make. They must decide whether they will sit this one out and allow people’s earned benefits to deteriorate and the program to collapse or whether they will get out, speak out, and do something. That’s a choice everyone is making right now. We are choosing to get the word out, raise awareness, show up, and have these conversations with our family and friends, with the media, with people on the streets, in offices, on the Hill. This is the path forward for this nation if we want to take care of one another.
Everyone has a choice, and the people you see showing up have chosen to get out and speak out. The time is now to do that. There’s no further delay. We can’t afford any further delay. We all have to get out there and make some noise if we want the program to be here for us, not only when we retire but also for those who need it now and for future generations, our children and our grandchildren. The youth often say, “Oh, Social Security, I don’t expect that to be here for me,” so it’s not on my radar. Well, with that attitude, it won’t be. We have to fight for everything in this country. We have to fight for it. The time is now to fight for Social Security to be here.
Jacobsen: Jessica, thank you for the opportunity to talk today.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
FFRF was informed by a current resident of SCCC that a Christian revival group has been granted special access to preach to residents. The group blasts music on the outside ball field for all general population (“gen pop”) residents to hear. Additionally, the group proselytizes gen pop residents during outdoor recreation periods. The complainant notes that he is unable to go outside and enjoy recreational time without being preached at or being exposed to worship music. The missionary group reportedly has received permission to perform on the ballfield for two years.
Furthermore, despite the complainant’s requests, the correctional center’s library, which features religious material, has no material for atheists, agnostics or freethinkers. The complainant alleges that he has made requests for atheist material, all of which have been denied.
“Whether inside or outside, residents of SCCC who are nonreligious cannot escape government-sanctioned Christianity,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to Warden Michele Buckner. “Denying atheist literature, while also allowing Christian preaching, rises to the level of coercion prohibited by the federal First Amendment and Missouri’s Constitution.”
FFRF is insisting that atheist literature be included in the library’s catalog, and all attending groups be instructed to stop proselytizing to all residents in common areas during outdoor recreation hours.
SCCC residents do not shed their right to read when they enter. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) also prohibits the banning of books based on their religious or irreligious nature. Banning or prohibiting books for atheists—despite pleas to include them—chills prisoners’ First Amendment rights. SCCC must use the least restrictive means possible to justify its policy of disallowing atheist books.
Non-religious residents who do not wish to be preached at face a difficult decision at SCCC: Either take outdoor recreational time requiring exposure to religious music and preaching against their conscience, or stay inside, forfeiting outdoor exercise and recreation. That is an untenable ultimatum under the Establishment Clause.
Both the First Amendment and Missouri’s Establishment Clause prohibit this level of coercion and preferential treatment for Christianity and Christian groups.
FFRF has indicated that accommodations for Christian inmates must not have a spill-over effect in proselytizing others—thereby discouraging prisoners from utilizing common resources. Our Constitution’s command is clear: Outside groups cannot be given special access to proselytize a prison’s residents-at-large. Accommodation for one is not permission to preach to another.
To respect the rights of all residents, SCCC must stock nontheistic literature in its libraries, and disallow outside religious groups from preaching to general population residents as a whole.
“At a time when almost three-in-ten adult Americans have no religious affiliation, it is an egregious denial of First Amendment rights to inflict religious services on a captive audience and to deny them equal access to nonreligious literature,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “In this Golden Era of atheism, there’s no excuse for any publicly supported library to lack the many books about religion from a nonreligious perspective by distinguished authors and researchers. In fact, FFRF would be pleased to donate some of these to the prison.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Taking advantage of heightened news interest this week during the Democratic National Convention, the Freedom From Religion Foundation will be airing Ron Reagan’s “unabashed atheist” ad on MSNBC and CBS.
The ad appears on tonight’s “Rachel Maddow Show” and next Monday’s show and will air on CBS’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” tonight through Thursday. “Colbert” will be live this week, and his high-profile guests will include Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Pete Buttigieg.
FFRF has also placed a 14 x 48-foot billboard saying “Keep Freedom Alive — Stop Project 2025” in the line of traffic from O’Hare Airport to the site of the DNC convention. The billboard is on the Kennedy Expressway (I-90/94) west of Edens on I-94. Congressional Freethought Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Jared Huffman has called the Heritage Foundation-concocted plan “a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”
In FFRF’s iconic 30-second commercial, Reagan, who is the outspoken son of President Ronald and Nancy Reagan, says: Hi, I’m Ron Reagan, an unabashed atheist, and I’m alarmed, as you may be, by the intrusion of religion into our secular government. That’s why I’m asking you to join the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation’s largest and most effective association of atheists and agnostics, working to keep state and church separate, just like our Founders intended. Please join the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Photo of the William B. Travis building that houses the U.S. Texas Education Agency by Mark Roughton
The Freedom From Religion Foundation condemns the latest efforts by Texas Christian nationalists to force the bible and Christianity upon a captive audience of public school students, most recently by Mike Morath, commissioner of the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
Proposed teaching materials for elementary school English and language arts curriculum include biblical concepts such as the “Sermon on the Mount,” the life of “Jesus Christ” from birth to resurrection and biblical prophesies. “It sure reads like a bible class that you might get at a traditional Christian church,” Rice University Political Science Professor Bob Stein told Fox 45 News.
“Half a million Texans are practicing Muslims, and this new state curriculum went through and deleted every mention of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed,” points out state Rep. James Talarico, named “Secularist of the Week” by FFRF’s legislative arm, FFRF Action Fund, for his strong secular advocacy.
Today (Friday, Aug. 16) is the final day for members of the public to chime in on the proposed curriculum. Then it goes to the state board in November for final approval.
Texas leaders have long been determined to turn Texas public schools into Christian training grounds. During their last legislative session, the clock ran out on a bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom, legislation copied and ultimately adopted this year by Louisiana, which FFRF is suing over.
The Texas Legislature last year passed a law requiring school boards to vote on whether to hire, or allow as a volunteer, an unlicensed religious chaplain to take the place of school counselors and social workers. The bill is clearly wildly unpopular among the vast majority of school boards throughout the state. During the last legislative session, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott relentlessly pushed his pet project: vouchers that would take away funds from public schools and direct them to private (usually religious) schools. It failed thanks to rural legislators who realized they would see no benefit to funding private schools in the big cities. Abbott has since bullied his way to getting closer to his objective to defund public education to fund religious schools. Hopefully at some point, Texans will grow tired of Abbott wasting taxpayer money.
“Unfortunately, powerful Christian nationalists in Texas seem to view their state as a petri dish to breed theocratic law,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “But the Texas Constitution clearly protects freedom of conscience and prohibits these unconstitutional schemes.”
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/07
Aysha Khan has been a Project Manager with EXMNA for the past five years, including working on the Normalizing Dissent tour that brought Ex-Muslim perspectives to college campuses throughout the US and Canada. Growing up in a moderate Pakistani Muslim household, Aysha struggled with reconciling the rights and freedoms afforded to her as citizen of a Western secular country, with the restrictive and obsolete “rights” and roles prescribed to her in the Qur’an (especially in the areas of marriage, divorce, travel, inheritance, court testimony, and bodily autonomy). She discovered EXMNA on a Reddit thread and soon connected with other ex-Muslims who supported her through her journey of leaving Islam. In her spare time, Aysha enjoys trying new recipes, reading and generally being an introvert.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Aysha Khan from Ex-Muslims of North America. So, the big question: many councils in the last 15 years have popped up, especially in Germany and the U.K. A lot of this emerged from the online milieu, particularly with the New Atheist movement, Firebrand Atheist movement, Militant Atheist movement. Men typically had more financial freedom and mobility, which is why they were often the faces of it. So, what is the status of this movement in North America now? How is the community looking? What are their concerns?
Aysha Khan: Oh man, that is a hard question to answer. Are you talking about social or political temperature?
Jacobsen: Social temperature, representation, because there’s one of the biggest—probably the biggest—online platforms, Atheist Republic, came from a guy out of Iran. Armin Navabi, there’s a guy there with a tragic upbringing, and there’s that movement coming out of Iran. [Ed. He’s in Vancouver now.] I’ve written with him before. It’s a powerful story. Yet, there are many ex-Muslim women whose stories are told. I don’t think they’re told as much, at least in North America. If so, then it’s happened more recently than at the outset. So, in terms of the social climate around demographics and how community concerns change with demographics, who is coming forward as ex-Muslim or former Muslim?
Khan: That’s a hard question to answer. Ex-Muslims are not a monolith, and neither are ex-Muslims. We have many political leanings, so it’s hard to say exactly what we feel. More recently, EXMNA has moved away from support communities to focus on advocacy work, making it harder to track exactly how individual ex-Muslims feel. In terms of representation, I will say that when I first left Islam formally about ten years ago, the only ex-Muslims I saw were men from South Asia or the Middle East.
The projects we launched a few years ago specifically focused on highlighting and elevating a diverse array of ex-Muslim voices. We created many documentaries about the journeys of Ex-Muslims, campus tours and social media campaigns. It went quite literally from single digit open ex-Muslims to hundreds and thousands.
Now, I see more ex-Muslim millennials born outside of Muslim countries, like North America and many more women on the scene. I’ve seen a lot more ex-Muslim women who have YouTube channels, make TikTok videos, harness the power of social media, and are unafraid. I believe we played a pivotal role in that change.
Ex-Muslim men have enjoyed a certain degree of protection because they are men, but for women, it’s much harder because the social pressure to conform is much greater. So, seeing a young woman, born as part of the Muslim diaspora, come out is very powerful for me. I’m specifically talking about Sarah Haider, our former executive director. Seeing her was inspirational. By reading her book, the person who convinced me the most to leave Islam was Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I read Christopher Hitchens first, which opened my mind a little, but I needed someone I could relate to more, and her book helped usher me through that process.
Jacobsen: How is the advocacy work advancing? Is it more focused on policy, political, or social causes?
Khan: It’s more socio-political causes. We did more policy work in the past, but the pandemic, unfortunately, slowed down much of our efforts. Many organizations felt that pain point, and now we’ve moved, steadily moving towards becoming the experts in the area of ex-Muslim advocacy. So, we’re leaning into meeting with congressional representatives, talking a lot about the plight of ex-Muslims, both in the U.S. and, more importantly, abroad. We enjoy many freedoms here in North America, where we have the protection of the legal system in our favor. That is not the case for ex-Muslims in other parts of the world, especially in Muslim-majority countries. We are working with congressional representatives who have close relationships with Muslim-majority countries where there are high-profile cases and asking them to put pressure on these countries to address the arrest, imprisonment, or exile of prisoners of conscience. We’ve met with Facebook representatives multiple times. This was facilitated by Congressman Huffman who is a champion of free thought. We worked with the congressional representative’s office to get Facebook to recognize that shutting down community groups focused on ex-Muslims and ex-Muslim issues was a violation of free speech. They were bending to the pressure from Islamic countries, who said that these types of groups were ‘blasphemous,’ and the people who were part of them were apostates, and therefore, their membership in it was punishable under their penal codes. We organized a meeting of ex-Muslim atheist organizers from around the world as well atheist organizations here with Facebook to highlight the severity and importance of the issue
Facebook is an American company or a company based in the U.S., so we are trying to lean into helping governments and private companies recognize their role in supporting freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. We worked with various other international freedom oriented organizations to pass a congressional resolutionagainst Blasphemy, the effort for that included organizing the testimony of both Muslim and ex-Muslim victims to state and federal congressional offices. We’re working on furthering that effort in the coming years.
We’ve also offered comments to U.N. reports on freedom of religion and comments to State Department reports to ensure that our plight is considered. In the past we were focused on getting ex-Muslims out of the shadows and I believe have greatly succeeded in doing so. The next phase of EXMNA’s work is now to help influence, shape, and inform policy.
Jacobsen: And looking at Pew Research, the number of Muslims growing up in Muslim homes, raised Muslim, who leave is probably about a quarter. That’s common among many religions, but as the numbers of the population of Muslims in the United States grow, so too will the number of ex-Muslims, probably even more so with the ease with which you have these online groups. So, how do you preemptively reach out to those who might be questioning and looking for answers to their thoughts and feelings?
Khan: Yes, that’s a good question. I would argue that the number is probably greater because that number represents those who identify as ex-Muslims. Even admitting to yourself privately that you doubt. It’s a very scary notion to even admit to yourself that you no longer believe in Islam at all. There may be parts of Islam that moderate Muslims may not agree with and become “cafeteria” Muslims. So, in my opinion, the number of ex-Muslims quoted by Pew may well be conservative. But a lot of our outreach, our target audience, is anyone who understands how restrictive a religion Islam is and understands that it deserves as much criticism as any other religion. And so, a lot of our work happens through social media. We have a fantastic manager for our social media platforms who works very hard at putting together posts and memes. We have a newsletter that we revived. We welcome people to come to our website, ex-Muslims.org, and sign up for it, where we gather articles on people who have experienced persecution for leaving Islam. And also, we offer commentary on a lot of topical issues. We spent ten years focused on mainstreaming ex-Muslim experiences and believe we did a fantastic job. But now we’re looking out on the horizon and trying to think what the next steps are and to leverage that greater awareness to achieve more for ex-Muslims everywhere. We recognize that persuasion and awareness is a huge part of that. So, we are putting efforts into making videos, posts, and memes—even some of those are hilarious and trying to look ahead and see what’s in the zeitgeist and convince as many people as possible about the importance of our cause.
Jacobsen: What are the most effective forms of bringing people into the fold so they feel comfortable and safe within a community, even if it is an online community alone?
Khan: Yes. So, our group focuses on people who have already left Islam and they already identifiy as ex-Muslim atheists. Our mandate doesn’t cover providing support to people who are questioning though we welcome dialogue with them. We are focused on honest critical analysis of Islam, countering perceptions of what non-Muslims and even Muslim think Islam is versus what Islam actually says. One of our biggest efforts and I daresay most popular effort is running WikiIslam. It houses thousands of articles about a variety of topics where we provide direct references from the Quran, Hadith, and the Prophet’s life, which include his sayings and teachings. In that way we do serve both the questioning and those who have left. We are serving two communities, but our primary and priority community is ex-Muslim atheists. We hope to reach out to questioning Muslims by critiquing Islam, but we don’t offer services for them as we do for ex-Muslim atheists.
Jacobsen: Do you still get many emails from individuals in difficult circumstances, maybe in Pakistan or similar places?
Khan: Every day. I recently received an email from a gentleman in southern Iraq who is an atheist. His family suspects he is and has threatened to report him to the authorities. He is asking for help to come to either the U.S. or Canada. These are heartbreaking stories; I receive them multiple times a week, often with awful pictures and links to news articles. It’s terrible. It’s a reminder of how lucky I am to live in a country that respects my right to freedom from religion because most people forget that these issues are two sides of the same coin: freedom of and from religion. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s extremely rewarding.
Jacobsen: With greater representation of women’s experiences of coming out and joining these communities, is there an ex-Muslim women’s foundation or organization? Is this an idea that might be a good proposal if it doesn’t exist?
Khan: Are you saying this because of the probability of such an organization coming to fruition?
Jacobsen: It seems like a gap. With increased representation of women from various backgrounds, it might be worth considering a solidarity foundation for women coming out of these circumstances from all backgrounds. For instance, I recently interviewed the U.N. Women’s National Committee, Japan president. She mentioned that since Japan is considered a developed country, their funds aren’t focused on Japan, even though Japan has gender inequalities. They gather funds within the country and send them to less developed countries for gender equality efforts. While this makes sense, it’s also disappointing. Could something be similar to providing support, resources, and shared experiences, letting people know they are not alone, especially in a gendered way?
Khan: Yes, we understand the need for it, but we don’t have any plans for that, nor do I know of any organization that exists specifically serving the needs of ex-Muslim atheist women. But yes, it is needed.
Jacobsen: I’ll leave that for the history books. We’ll see.
Khan: Yes.
Jacobsen: What form of advocacy do you find most effective regarding social causes? What ones don’t work? In other words, people reading this don’t do that; it’s a waste of time. What ones do work? People reading this do that.
Khan: Our most talked about and viral work is the videos we create and the humorous memes. It speaks to people’s attention spans; people want something short and digestible. They want you to get to the point, which has been hard because this issue is very close to all of us, is nuanced and fraught with political implications. We want to be able to talk about it intellectually and in great detail, but we are finding more and more that people want quick, easy answers and bottom line, tell me why I should care with the most direct possible points of evidence. You have to tailor your message; it has to be a soundbite. That’s what’s working, but it depends on who your audience is. Older audience members appreciate the detail and nuance, but for EXMNA, most of our audience or beneficiaries are millennials and younger, so we must tailor our messaging to them.
Jacobsen: Every community has problems. What are the problems within the ex-Muslim community? I’m not taking this as a monolith; I understand.
Khan: Yes, yes, yes, no, I’m trying to think. Yes, I’m pausing because I can’t point to any one thing. We have differences in our takes on the conflict in the Middle East, Gaza, and Israel. We had that with the 2020 election, and we had that with the Black Lives Matter movement, so it’s hard to say what the major pain points or points of contention within the community are. It shows that ex-Muslims are as varied as anyone else. We come from all walks of life, all income levels, and all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that diversity carries into this community. It’s hard to say. I can’t think of any one single ideological issue that issue that thing ideologically that we all disagree on. We all reject Islam and acknowledge its absurdity, and that’s what binds us together. Everything else is reflective of society at large.
Jacobsen: Are there any attempts to take ex-Muslims as a category of anti-Islam and use it as a political token? Are there any people cynically trying to do that?
Khan: Within the community or outside?
Jacobsen: Outside of the community.
Khan: Oh, yes, for sure. Oh, yes, 100%. We are staunchly nonpartisan. We are wary of the people who reject us and those trying to benefit from us. We welcome partnerships but must be loyal to ourselves and our cause, ex-Muslims. We are not interested in handing it over to any political party or partisan issue. So, yes, we are very wary of people who want to take advantage of our issues or our rejection of Islam. I’m very cognizant of that and try hard to keep it as bay as possible. It’s getting harder and harder because the world is getting more politicized. Issues are becoming more politicized. So we often feel, should we say something about this topic or event? And we often don’t because we can’t please everyone. It’s becoming more and more difficult to explain ourselves in a way that will effectively convey its nuance and context. It’s difficult, and it’s getting more difficult every day, to stay nonpartisan, to focus on ex-Muslims specifically, and not let our work bleed into other areas. We try to maintain a tight focus on ex-Muslim and religious freedom issues.
Jacobsen: That’s good. Often, I notice that in social movements, subject matter creep is a constant risk, especially as organizations mature after ten years or so. People never ask this, possibly due to not making the distinction. Although it’s easy, and everyone knows it, it has yet to be done. Do you notice any difference between individuals who are ex-Muslims coming from Sunni backgrounds versus Shia backgrounds versus Quranist backgrounds?
Khan: In what way?
Jacobsen: In terms of, for instance, if someone is coming from Iran versus Saudi Arabia, they’re both coming from fundamentalist contexts where the government has tight control, but they’re coming from a Sunni versus Shia context. Does that colour their ex-Muslim experience, either in the process of leaving or living as someone without Islam?
Khan: Anecdotally, no. Admittedly, there are many Shia ex-Muslims within our community, but we’re all spread across North America. So you’re going to relate to whoever is closest to you. I don’t think so. But if there are, can you? Is there something specific you’re looking to answer? Is it a topic or a viewpoint?
Jacobsen: Yes, I’m curious if theological differences cause or correlate with an inflection on the experience of becoming an ex-Muslim.
Khan: Oh, I don’t think so. Whether you’re Sunni or Shia, or Ahmadi, or the many variants in the variance of Shiism, death is generally agreed upon as the punishment for apostasy and blasphemy against the Prophet. You have time to repent if you blaspheme against God, but none if you blaspheme against the Prophet. So I don’t think so because the punishment is the same and equally severe. But again, I come from a Sunni background, so that’s most of the examples I have in front of me. I don’t think so, but it would be interesting to ask people how that may have colored the process of their apostasy.
Jacobsen: That makes sense, as most people leaving Islam will be Sunni by a vast margin, given the demographics. Let’s close up. How can people get involved by donating time, finances, or expertise or looking at you as a resource?
Khan: Yes, please visit our website, exmuslims.org. Particularly the persecution tracker, where we catalog, monitor, and document instances of ex-Muslim persecution worldwide. We have over 500 entries with detailed accounts of what happened to the person. You’ll be able to sort through incidents, seeing if someone was exiled, murdered, imprisoned, fined, etc., and by country. We’re also revamping it to improve the design and usability which should be released in the next few months.
We have launched an excellent newsletter, and you can sign up for it on our website. You can also find that on our website if you want to become a donor. Volunteers are always welcome to help us think bigger as we move into the next phase of our work, leaning more into advocacy and research. We produced a fantastic Apostate Report a few years ago, which aimed to cover the gap of why people are leaving Islam and what their experiences are. For those advocating for our rights it’s invaluable to understand the motivations involved. As ex-Muslims our motivations are frequently smeared by political and religious actors on all sides of the spectrum, the report helps alleviate those mischaracterizations. It’s fully downloadable on our website. Follow us on social media—we’re @ExMuslimsOrg on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We post polls, links to articles, and updates on what we’re doing and what we hope to achieve. If you have any ideas on what you’d like to learn about from ex-Muslims, please let us know. We’re always looking for ideas on how we can share information about our cause and the consequences of leaving Islam.
I also want to add that the biggest question we always get from either questioning Muslims or people who want to support the ex-Muslim cause, but are afraid to because they think they’ll be perceived as racist is: do we hate Muslims? No, we don’t. Some of our closest family members and friends are still practicing Muslims. Many of us are still in the closet, living among Muslims. We’re married to Muslims. We have Muslim children. Our issue is with Islam, and it needs to be critiqued. It needs to be dissected in the same way any other religion is critiqued. Any religion that you have rejected – as a Muslim or any other faith – because you believed it to be false, for whatever reason, turn that same critical eye to look at Islam. Think about whether you are a good person because of, or, despite Islam. Regardless of where you lie on the faith spectrum the rights of those who disagree with you should be the exact same ones you enjoy. Essentially, that’s our message.
Jacobsen: Aysha, thank you very much for your time today.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/06
Zenia Wadhwaniis the Director of Social Policy, Analysis and Research with the City of Toronto’s Social Development, Finance & Administration division. Under her portfolio are files addressing some of the City’s most vulnerable populations, including the Poverty Reduction Office and the Toronto Newcomer Office. Zenia’s career spans all three sectors but in every position, her focus has been on community building and engagement, strategic planning and increasing diversity and inclusion. Prior to the City, she has given her time to Woodbine Entertainment, the Province of Ontario, the Organizing Committee of the 2015 PanAm / ParapanAm Games, CanadaHelps and United Way. Zenia is a children’s picture book author, and lives in Toronto with her family. Here we talk about the Toronto For All campaign from 2022 and its work in fighting anti-Semitism.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are with Zenia Wadhwani from Toronto for All. We will be doing a retrospective on the campaign against anti-Semitism. First question: What made 2022 a key year in combating anti-Semitism in Toronto?
Zenia Wadhwani: The Toronto for All campaign is a public education initiative about the city taking a stand against various forms of racism and discrimination. It’s a zero-tolerance educational campaign. While we look for specific events in the community or the world that spark a particular campaign, it takes time to develop these initiatives. It’s not necessarily an immediate response when you gather the community; it can take some time to get it out there. With anti-Semitism, we know it is one of the most highly reported hate crimes to the Toronto police. We’ve conducted many campaigns and are currently working on our 15th. We aim to address various communities experiencing hate, and anti-Semitism was one campaign we wanted to pursue to address an ongoing issue in the community.
Jacobsen: What were the main successes of the Toronto for All campaign against anti-Semitism?
Wadhwani: With this campaign, we can look at quantitative measures, such as the number of impressions and engagements on social media. For the anti-Semitism campaign, we had around 124,000 impressions and 3,400 engagements. Those are the quantitative numbers. However, the real success lies in the qualitative aspects. It includes the conversations happening in the community, the community coming together, and individuals who see the campaign and realize it could affect their friend, neighbour, or colleague. These successes are harder to quantify, but placing these ads in prominent spaces like Toronto bus shelters gets much attention. The city making a stand and demonstrating its commitment is a success towards anti-hate and ensuring that people recognize those campaigns. We even see it when we receive emails or comments; people acknowledge the campaign. One of the great successes I’ve loved seeing is other municipalities going, “Wow, this is a pretty great campaign. How do we do this?” Imitation is a great form of flattery, meaning they’re noticing it. They also recognize these issues in their communities and want to replicate them. That’s another big success for us.
Jacobsen: What can others learn from these successes to your point to reduce, at a minimum, the rate of anti-Semitic acts and words and the severity of those instances?
Wadhwani: If you look at the campaign and think about the general public, some get it, those who live that experience every day, and we’re not trying to address them. We’re trying to show them some solidarity and allyship. Some allies understand it and know that we all have a part to play in reducing hate and being allies with each other. Then, to the extreme, some are never going to get it. They will always be the haters, and a campaign ad will not speak to them in any way.
We’re not trying to address those people. However, many others may not realize their actions or inactions contribute to the hate. It’s about reaching those individuals, speaking to them, initiating a conversation, starting a dialogue, or sparking a question for them. Those are the things that can help reduce the hate.
Additionally, people need to think about all kinds of communities experiencing hate. Consider what you have said or not said, what you can learn more about, where to learn more, ensuring your kids learn the right messages, and helping your colleagues. Are there opportunities for greater learning, leveraging days of significance for those things, and speaking up? When you hear or see these things happening around you, are you speaking and saying something? Are you demonstrating your allyship in those ways?
Building understanding and trust between communities, reaching out to the community when something significant happens to show you are aware and caring—these seemingly little acts make all the difference because they build up to the big acts of building community and reducing hate.
Jacobsen: What are some community reactions regarding support when it comes to feedback on the 2022 campaign?
Wadhwani: Many people in the community want to see more of these campaigns. Some communities feel their representation is missing and ask, “What about my community?” There are those experiencing hate who believe the campaign needs to be bigger, bolder, and more prominent. They ask, “What else can we do?” Some don’t understand the campaign and are trying to grasp its purpose. They are unaware of the magnitude of what is happening around them and the lived experiences of those on the receiving end of hate. The community response varies depending on who you talk to, but there is solid support for these ads’ importance, continuation, and expansion of their reach. That’s what we’re working on.
Jacobsen: What dynamics in a large city make combating hate particularly difficult in some ways and easier in others?
Wadhwani: The challenge, for Toronto, is that there’s a lot of messaging and information flowing at people, especially through social media, which is one of the ways we try to get our message out. Getting people’s attention is hard, particularly in a busy city. Additionally, recognizing the limitations of what is essentially an ad campaign is important. While we put resources on our website and work with communities and organizations to spread the word and provide support, there is only so much an ad campaign can do in terms of education and awareness. The campaign’s strength lies in the support and amplification it receives from community, the other initiatives it leverages, and how it reinforces other messages.
It has so much potential, and we’re hearing from other municipalities that they are interested in doing something similar, which shows they see value in it. However, breaking through the noise of all the information to get our message into the right hands takes time and effort.
Jacobsen: Are these relatively inexpensive campaigns?
Wadhwani: The expense varies. Campaigns can range from about $70,000 to $120,000, covering development and printing costs. In some cases, we rely on bus shelter and space given in kind, and we depend on communities to do additional outreach on social media. There’s some social media you can pay for and other aspects you hope will generate organic reach and take off. While it’s not a campaign with big dollars behind it, I come from the nonprofit sector, which understands a zero budget. You get creative and make things work. We’re also trying to do that with this campaign to ensure we’re getting out there. Yes, they can be costly if you have the budget, but we sometimes don’t have that luxury.
Jacobsen: This form of hate is pretty perennial. What would a renewed campaign look like in the future? What improvements or additions could you make, and what would be your dream campaign?
Wadhwani: Oh, wow. One of the things we’re working on right now is, after several campaigns focused specifically on individual communities, we’ve decided to try a campaign that speaks to everyone. We know many groups are experiencing hate and discrimination, so this next campaign is focusing on allyship. It’s bringing all those groups together to say, “Look, when a person hates, they tend not to target just one group. They tend to hate many groups. We’ll be stronger if we band together and support each other.”
I’m working on that dream campaign right now. We’re taking a different approach this year. We’ve engaged more organizations, including the Toronto Public Library and their youth councils. We’re trying new things to reach the community differently. We’re increasing our distribution digitally and in various venues across the city, which had been limited before. We’re working on ideas to get the campaign into the hands of young people, such as through the Toronto Public Library’s youth groups and our recreation facilities.
We’re exploring different venues because young people get it. They resonate with the message and understand its importance faster and more easily than some adults do. While we have many adult allies and friends, the younger generation knows how to take the campaign and make something out of it. So, we’re trying a bit of that dream campaign right now. This is the first year we’re doing some different things, so we’ll see how it goes. The dream evolves based on what happens next.
Jacobsen: How can Torontonians continue to fight against anti-Semitism?
Wadhwani: It goes back to what I discussed earlier: the daily things that happen. It’s not necessarily about a big, bold policy move or program. It’s about the little acts within the community. Recognize who is in your network and who may be experiencing this kind of hate. Understand it, educate yourself, and stand up when you hear something wrong or inappropriate. Be an ally, talk about it, raise the conversation, and don’t be afraid. It can be uncomfortable to have these conversations, but we like to say, “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable,” and take a stand. There are sayings like, “Today it’s one group, and tomorrow it might be the group you’re a part of.” It’s about more than just the morality of being a good citizen, friend, and neighbour. In reality, hate can come to you one day, and you’ll want allies around you. Being one is a good place to start.
Jacobsen: Anyhow, thank you very much for your time today.
Wadhwani: Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate your work on this and getting the message out.
Rick Rosner: I showed my wife clips from The Daily Show for the first time.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And what did she think?
Rosner: She’s not much of a fan of late-night monologue jokes, which sucks for me because my job was writing those. But she liked The Daily Show because it doesn’t just tell straight-up jokes. Jon Stewart reacts to the news and provides emotional context for its absurdity, and he’s good at it.
I credit Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel for originating and refining the clip montage—the damning clip montage, where a series of juxtaposed clips demonstrates something ridiculous or contemptible. The clip I showed her from The Daily Showhighlighted that Trump used the same words to attack Kamala Harris as he did to attack Biden. The montage showed eight of those clips, proving his accusations’ ridiculous and baselessness. Stewart’s monologue contained probably four clip montages, which was impressive. She was impressed.
The Trump years and the aftermath have made Carole a bit Woke. She’s more politically aware than I ever wanted to be. Of course, I’m even more political now, and she’s impressively attentive and knowledgeable, which is not something I’d wish on anyone. Living in times where you feel compelled to learn about this stuff because it seems so horrible isn’t ideal. I never wanted to be politically tuned in. I remember all the years until the 21st century when we paid some attention during three Republican presidencies.
Two of Reagan and then George H. W. Bush, and those seemed plenty bad. But we didn’t have to pay that much attention to them because, compared to now, they were all right. But I was glad to show Carole some political humour that she also enjoyed. She doesn’t like many monologue jokes because her expectations for jokes are set too high. She wants every joke to be super hilarious and super clever.
A joke is a collaboration between the events that prompted the joke and the writer. Only some jokes are going to be amazing. But she wants every joke to be amazing, which compliments Jon Stewart because enough of his material made it over her unreasonably high bar.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Are the Alienmovies good or bad? What do you think?
Rick Rosner: It was good. The first one I also thought the second one was good. I have yet to see any of the subsequent ones. I had high hopes for Prometheus throughout it, but it was not very pleasant, too. I’ve always wanted them to expand the story’s scope, particularly concerning the aliens. An alien was designed by some other race, right?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So, I want to see that race—the one that designed these creatures—or see the aliens get loose on Earth. I don’t need to see Earth 300 years from now. I don’t need to see them sneaking around another spaceship. It’s the same movie again and again.
Jacobsen: They retconned it, or whatever the term is, by making the beings that invented the aliens an AI. The original aliens who tried to create these creatures thought it was too evil. So, an AI named David from a human ship rediscovered the method and created what we now know as a Xenomorph.
Rosner: Is this the plot of the current one, building on Prometheus? So, Prometheus was a bad sequel. Maybe I saw some of the sequel to Prometheus, but I need to check. Also, there was a movie called Alien vs. Predator. I didn’t see much of that either, but the idea was to cheer for one or the other. I assume we allied with the Predator to fight the Alien. That was another low-quality movie that wasn’t great. I wouldn’t mind seeing humans allied with the aliens from Aliens to fight something else. If that’s even physiologically possible, I wouldn’t mind seeing a human consensually engaging with an alien.
Jacobsen: But they have acid blood, Rick! What are you talking about? They have acid for blood!
Rosner: Yes, but that would impede a relationship, though it wouldn’t necessarily prevent one. How often do you come into contact with your partner’s blood? Only sometimes.
Jacobsen: “Impede” may be a euphemism of the week for me there.
Insert extensive pre-talk rambling by Scott and Rick.]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Rick, could you explain why you decided to leave or quit the Boy Scouts?
Rick Rosner: I assume the Canadian Boy Scouts operate similarly. Were you ever involved in the Boy Scouts?
Jacobsen: Not that I recall.
Rosner: Well, the progression typically involves Cub Scouts, Webelos, and then Boy Scouts. Webelos are, what, around ten years old? 10 or 11? I never participated in Cub Scouts, but some of my friends—Charlie Weidman and others—were involved, and we were Webelos. We earned several Webelos activity badges and essentially completed the program. However, no one else wanted to advance except me so we could not form a new Boy Scout troop. If I recall correctly, the individual who was our Webelos leader, Bobby Mailer’s father, also managed the Cub Scout pack.
We were rather unkind to him, being typical unruly kids. Bobby’s father likely thought, “Well, I’m done with this.” Since no one else was interested, I had to find another Boy Scout troop to join, which was Mr. Bradfield’s troop. He owned the hardware store near my father’s store on Pearl Street.
Mr. Bradfield was a very kind man. He lived just a few blocks from us, and I knew his daughter, Nancy Bradfield—I should look her up online. In any case, I joined the troop, but unfortunately, they were unkind to me.
Nowadays, bullying can occur both in person, at school, and through social media. Back then, it was entirely face-to-face. If someone wanted to be mean, they had to do it directly. Do you think bullying was more subtle or more overt in those days? I’m still determining.
It wasn’t severe bullying, but they made it clear that I was viewed as a dweeb, a nerd, and not as cool as they were. Andthey were probably correct. For instance, Keith Hertel, who was in the troop, was undoubtedly cooler than I was.
Chandler Romeo’s brother might have also been part of the troop and was certainly cooler than me. Their father was an airline pilot, considered a very prestigious job back then. So, yes, I could have been more cool. We did the usual activities that scouts do, such as camping trips, even during the winter.
Some councils had a badge called “Zero Hero” that awarded points based on how many degrees below freezing it was during a camping trip at the coldest time of the night. For instance, if the temperature dropped to 0°F, we would earn 32 points. I camped out often enough to earn the badge.
I don’t know how many ranks there are, maybe 6 or 7. I wasn’t having fun with them. And we were doing some freaking scout event activity.
We’d meet in the auditorium in the gym of Sacred Heart School and learn how to do CPR on Annie dolls. But we were doing some, once a week, we do a scout thing. And I was listening to some of these guys who were supposed to be cooler than me. These were all 12 or 13, and a couple ignored me. I was standing doing some freaking thing. They were talking among themselves, 3 of them, about how it felt really good if you took your pillow at night and rubbed it between yourlegs–just kinda humped it. I recall something like this being told to me.
These guys didn’t even understand that they were on the path to jerking off. They were so incompetent at jerking off. They didn’t even know they were doing it. They just knew it felt good if you humped a pillow.
I thought, “These guys are complete idiots, and I refuse to be bullied by idiots. If I’m going to be bullied, I want it to be by people I can at least respect.”
So, I lost respect for those guys and quit the Scouts. This experience was similar to the summer between 8th and 9th grade when I attended a Jewish summer camp, Camp Swede. I was bullied by the so-called cool kids from Sunday school. This was my second year at the camp. Everyone was just downcast the first year, and nobody was particularly cool.
And so, it was okay. We could have been more cool together. I was less cool than most guys, but it wasn’t an issue. However, during the second summer, the Sunday school made a deal to encourage more kids to attend the camp: if youspent two weeks at camp, you could skip a trimester of Sunday school. As a result, all the cool kids from Sunday school decided to go to camp, where they acted like complete jerks.
One of the kids I remember well was a tall guy with large lips, and he nicknamed me “Gus,” or they, as a group, nicknamed me “Gus” because they thought it was the worst name they could come up with for a male first name. There was also an exchange student at the camp, possibly from Germany. They tried putting someone’s hand in warm water while sleeping, which is supposed to make them wet the bed. When that didn’t work, they just poured the water on his crotch to make it look like he had wet the bed.
There was one girl who broke into the camp pharmacy and stole antihistamines to get high. After they nicknamed me”Gus,” the same guy gave me another nickname, “Liver Lips,” because I have large lips. This was particularly infuriating because his lips were twice as big and floppy as mine. I hated being bullied, and after that summer, I decided I wouldn’tallow myself to be bullied anymore.
When I entered 9th grade, if anyone bothered or was mean to me, I would punch them in the face, specifically in the cheek. The cheek is a good place to punch someone because it doesn’t leave a visible mark. If you hit someone hard enough, it might leave a mark, but I would hit them normally. It’s quite shocking to be punched in the face when you’vebeen bullying someone, and then the person suddenly retaliates.
Anyway, I hit about five people, including Mindy Robbie, a girl who was unpleasant to me at Sunday school. For some reason, I didn’t get into much trouble for it. I even threw my Trapper Keeper at a kid, maybe Dean Maruna, who was lightly teasing me. It wasn’t serious ridicule, but by then, it didn’t take much to provoke me because, by that point, I was almost enjoying it.
I threw the Trapper Keeper at his head, and since I was a nerd, it was full of papers I had already accumulated. You had to place it face down so the pressure of the paper wouldn’t cause it to burst open. But when it hit his head, papers went flying everywhere. Surprisingly, I still didn’t get into much trouble for that.
Eventually, people knew not to mess with me. I want to say they stopped making fun of me, but I guess they didn’tentirely. At a basement party, I was trying to talk to a girl, and though I felt somewhat vindicated, I eventually stopped hitting people. Later that year, I desperately tried to convince a girl to kiss me.
I had no chance, but I was trying hard, using the angle of pretending not to know how to kiss. I would ask her, “How do you kiss? Just teach me how to kiss. Is it about suction or pressure?” The girl told everyone that “suction or pressure” was written on blackboards throughout the school.
So, I became a figure of ridicule. I mean, I deserved it. But what I eventually realized was that I was right in refusing to be bullied anymore because those kids from Cherry Creek High School—the fanciest public high school in Colorado—were not worth it. Cherry Creek is a very affluent part of Denver, and it took me a long time to realize that the so-called cool kids at Sunday school were likely ridiculed and bullied at Cherry Creek High because they were just a bunch of, like, weird Jewish kids in a very blonde state like Colorado. I’m sure the cool kids at Cherry Creek High were not the Jewish kids but the athletic, tall, blonde kids—the stereotypical jocks and cheerleaders of the class of ’78.
So, in hindsight, I took a stand against being bullied by people who didn’t deserve the honour of bullying me.
Author(s) Bio: Hindemburg Melão Jr. (January 15, 1972) was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He founded the most, or one of the most, selective high-I.Q. societies, the Sigma Society and is the Creator of the Sigma Test Extended. He is a philosopher, chess analyst, and an astrophotographer. He published hundreds of articles on chess, finance, philosophy, science, and more.
Word Count: 3,011
Image Credits: Hindemburg Melão Jr.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Alfred Binet and IQ tests, Challenges in measuring intelligence accurately, David Wechsler’s IQ test standardization, Early intelligence tests in ancient China, High IQ societies and their purposes, IQ test reliability vs. other scientific measurements, Sigma Society and humanitarian projects, Spearman’s g factor and general intelligence.
On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’
English
The concept of “intelligence” is almost as old as language. Our ancestors probably first created words to represent material objects, such as stones, plants and animals, and then created words that represent feelings, processes, predicates and abstract entities. But the interval between the emergence of the first languages and the emergence of a word to represent the level of intellectual ability cannot have been very long. Although “intelligence” is such an old concept, there is still no consensus on what its exact meaning is. On the other hand, the fact that we do not know how to determine exactly and completely what intelligence is does not prevent us from studying it, exercising it and even measuring it. For example: we don’t know exactly what an orange is. If we had to describe an orange to an alien who had never come to Earth, this difficulty would be evident, because an orange is not exactly a sphere, the sour and sweet flavors would be very difficult to explain, not to mention that perhaps the aliens didn’t even have taste buds, eyes and other sensory organs similar to ours. The predominant color reflected by orange, when illuminated by solar rays or artificial light, with a spectral distribution similar to the spectral distribution of the Sun, with a peak close to the wavelength of 589 nm, would not be the same and would not even be similar if orange was illuminated by the light of a star of another spectral class, where such an alien lived. Perhaps orange was not even visible to them, even if they had eyes or organs equivalent to eyes, but with cones and rods sensitive to a different range of visible light. It would be unlikely that they would have eyes with sensitivity to a range other than visible light because almost all other stars emit much of their light in the visible range, although this is a narrow range, it appears to be predominant in the known Universe. However, although it was unlikely, we could not rule out this hypothesis. Perhaps it would even be easier to explain to this E.T. what intelligence is, from our perspective, than to explain what an orange is, because the concept of “general intelligence” or Spearman’s g factor is probably something more universal than an orange. E.T. would probably never have seen an orange, but if he had a sophisticated language to communicate, he would have intelligence and would have his own interpretation of the concept “intelligence”, so he would only need to identify some key points of our explanation to associate with the concept that he himself would have of “intelligence”.
Although we don’t know exactly what an orange is, we can measure its perimeter, its mass, determine its color, its acidity, we can distinguish an orange from a chair or a lake. Therefore, even without knowing exactly what intelligence is, we can distinguish reasonably well what intelligent behavior is and we can rank different levels of intelligence: a mouse is more intelligent than a bacteria, an elephant is more intelligent than a mouse, a human is smarter than an elephant. However, comparisons become more difficult when the differences are narrower. It is not easy to determine whether a dog is more intelligent than a cat or vice versa, whether a gorilla is more intelligent than an elephant or a dolphin, whether a horse is more intelligent than another horse. But this subjective difficulty can be resolved when objective methods of analysis are introduced. Looking at two people with similar bodies, it is difficult to know which one is heavier, but using an appropriate measuring instrument — a scale –, this information can be obtained. If the weight difference is very small, less than 1%, the scale may not be sufficient either, depending on its precision, accuracy, repeatability and some extrinsic factors, such as variations in air density, with consequent variations in thrust. , the tidal effect at the moment each one is weighed, among other factors. Furthermore, the mass of people varies over time, due to perspiration, evacuation, feeding, the density of people varies when their lungs are full or empty. As a consequence, two people with similar weights could have different weights if measured on different days or at different times, to the point that sometimes one of them could be heavier, other times lighter.
In the case of intelligence, the situation is similar in several aspects. We don’t know exactly what intelligence is, but we have a very reasonable idea of what it is and what it isn’t. Intelligence cannot be confused with rabbits, nor with holes. At a more refined level of distinction, intelligence cannot be confused with perfume or beauty. At an even more refined level, intelligence cannot be confused with memory or culture, however, when this level of similarity is reached, memory and culture begin to appear sufficiently similar to intelligence for them to interfere with it, or at least interfere with results of the measurements that are attempted to be made of intelligence, “contaminating” these results, so to speak. Depending on the interpretation made, it can be said that memory and culture are components of intelligence, especially working memory, which is the ability to simultaneously manage large volumes of data.
Aware of these difficulties and limitations, we can now talk a little about measuring intelligence. Correctly standardized IQ tests are the psychological instruments that most rigorously and diligently follow all the protocols of the scientific method. As a result, diagnoses based on IQ tests are more reliable than any other diagnosis carried out in Psychology.
A fact that few know is that IQ tests produce more accurate results than the methods used to calculate the distances of galaxies, or the methods used to calculate the masses of some subatomic particles (quarks, neutrinos, etc.), or the methods for loss risk calculations carried out by most large banks. They are even much more accurate than the accident risk estimates made by NASA, as demonstrated by Nobel laureate in Physics Richard Feynman, during the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle accident in 1986.
This does not mean that IQ tests are flawless. They are not. But if compared to other measuring instruments used in Physics, Chemistry, Meteorology, Astronomy, Econometrics, Sociology, Anthropology, Medicine and Education, the reliability in the results produced by IQ tests is above the average of the instruments used in these areas, including more reliable than most laboratory tests that doctors rely on to assess people’s health status. Anyone interested in delving deeper into this topic can read my book “IMCH – a mathematical analysis of errors in the BMI formula”. The book does not just deal with BMI, but with various scientific topics, points out some problems in large international databases used in Medicine, and presents a new formula for calculating BMI, more accurate and better founded than the traditional one.
The first recorded intelligence tests began to be used in China, around 3,000 BC, but at that time practically nothing was known about statistics or the scientific method, so those tests were not standardized nor did they follow the adopted protocols. in modern tests. These protocols serve to ensure that the variable measured by the test is in fact strongly correlated with intelligence, to ensure that all test items measure approximately the same variable, to ensure that the scores obtained on two random halves of the test are similar, to ensure that the same test administered a few days or months later produces results similar to those of the first administration, to ensure that different tests designed to measure general intelligence produce similar results for the majority of people tested. There is a list of precautions that are taken in the process of constructing a good IQ test, to ensure that the scores produced are good representations of what it is intended to measure.
Furthermore, the theoretical basis on which IQ tests were designed is solidly supported by the scientific method, more than any other construct in Psychology. The creator of the first IQ tests, Alfred Binet, started from the premise that human intelligence increases with age, at least between birth and adulthood. He then designed questionnaires with questions in which he tried to minimize the requirement for specialized knowledge and prioritize the use of logical reasoning, as free as possible from cultural factors. These questionnaires were administered to large groups of children, adolescents and adults of different age groups. Then he compared the number of correct answers with age, and confirmed his hypothesis that the number of correct answers increased with age. On average, 8-year-old children got more questions correct than the average 7-year-old child; while the average of the 9-year-olds was more correct than the average of the 8-year-olds, and so on, up to around 16 years. From the age of 16 onwards, there seemed to be no increase in the number of correct answers depending on age. In more comprehensive research carried out in the following years, it was found that perhaps this limit was at 17 years old, in some cases reaching 19 or 20 years old, but the growth curve was not linear, and when it approached 16, the person had already came very close to their maximum level of mental development, with little evolution in the following years and decades.
Binet also noted that although the average 12-year-old child was much more correct than the average 8-year-old, there were some 8-year-olds who were more correct than the average of 9-, 10-, 11- and even 12-year-olds. The opposite also happened, that is, some 12-year-olds got less correct answers than the average of the 8-year-olds. With this, the concept of “mental levels” emerged, which later received the name “mental age” and finally received the name “intelligence quotient”, abbreviated to “IQ” or “IQ”. This is how the term “IQ” began to be used to represent the proportion between mental age and chronological age. An 8 year old child with a mental age of 12 would have an IQ = 100×12/8 = 150. Applying the same formula, an 8 year old child aged 14 would have an IQ of 175. Above 16 years old it no longer makes much sense to talk about age mental, because people aged 40 and 16 get approximately the same number of questions right.
When these high IQ children became adults, you could give them tests and see how many they got right, so you could assign IQ scores to adults as well, based on the IQ that had been measured for these people while they were still growing up. children, assuming that they continued to develop intellectually at the same rate as the average of other children and assuming that evolution was approximately linear. These are two reasonable premises, they are not exactly correct, but they are close to reality, as verified in studies carried out in the following decades.
Another point that needs to be clarified is what Binet’s motivation was for creating these tests. A very common problem in French schools at that time, as in schools in all countries at all times, is that teachers often sympathized more with some students than others, and tended to favor their favorite students with higher grades. In a period when racism was much more serious than it is today, this was a big problem, because in all subjective assessments teachers tended to harm students they didn’t like, and often the reason they didn’t like them was simply because student appearance. The problem was not always racism. The teacher could simply not like the student’s appearance, or the teacher could be anti-Semitic, or he could be misogynistic, among other reasons. This is how Einstein was considered retarded by one of his teachers, and Thomas Edison was also undervalued by his teachers, this is how Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne and other women were undervalued and their merits were not properly recognized.
Faced with this problem, Binet decided to create assessment instruments that could objectively measure children’s intellectual performance, to prevent them from being treated unfairly and abusively by their teachers. Unfortunately, IQ tests are not enough to prevent all abuse, nor can they prevent offensive comments against students who are less privileged intellectually or economically, nor can they prevent the physical and verbal aggression that teachers used to practice against students. IQ tests only served to alleviate part of the problems that existed at the time, and it wasn’t a small part, because it was common for very intelligent and introverted children to be placed in rooms for the disabled, because they didn’t communicate much, and that caused irreparable damage not only to these children, but to society as a whole, since if they had adequate opportunities to develop they could contribute to curing diseases, solving social, technological and many other problems.
A question that also needs to be clarified is: shouldn’t opportunities be offered to all children, instead of just the most intelligent ones? And the answer is very simple: yes, but good opportunities for everyone does not mean equal opportunities for everyone. Some children do not want to and would not take advantage of an “opportunity” to learn Comprehensive Calculus, while others would not take advantage of or be interested in learning to play the harp, others would not be interested in learning how to build wooden tables, etc. What is considered an “opportunity” for some may be a “punishment” for others.
Continuing Binet’s work, in the 1930s, David Wechsler started using a different method for standardizing scores, based on the level of rarity of people achieving a certain number of correct answers. With this, it solved some distortions and some problems that were being observed in the old method, but this solution introduced new distortions. Our purpose is not to deepen the analysis of the history of IQ tests nor to critically analyze the quality of the methods used to measure intelligence or the evolution of these methods over time, but only to briefly introduce these topics. Therefore, anyone interested in a more detailed analysis can access this link:
At the end of the 1990s, with the popularization of the Internet, people with IQs well above average, who until then lived relatively isolated, as there were few people geographically close to them with whom they shared common interests, took advantage of this opportunity generated by globalization to create communities designed to meet the needs and interests of people with these different intellectual profiles. Until then, there were only 15 high IQ societies in the world, almost all of them founded in the United States, except Sigma Society, which was founded in Brazil:
Mensa, founded in 1946
Intertel, founded in 1966
ISPE, founded in 1974
TNS, founded in 1978
Mega, founded in 1982 (registered in the 1990 Guinness Book as the most exclusive high IQ society in the world)
Prometheus, founded in 1982
TOPS, founded in 1989
OATH, founded in 1992
IQuadrivium, founded in 1992
Giga, founded in 1996
Glia, founded in 1997
Colloquy, founded in 1998
Sigma, founded in 1999
Sigma VI, founded in 1999
Pi Society, founded in 1999
In the following years, several others were created, exceeding 100 societies for people with high IQ, of which around 70 are currently active. The proposals varied greatly from one to another. Sigma Society’s proposals were these (in the image below):
The High IQ Society for Humanity, for example, was created in Denmark by David Udbjorg to help needy children in Africa, where he lived for more than 10 years, providing these children with access to Education and some technological resources, which give them it offered slightly better prospects for growing socially and culturally. Unfortunately, the High IQ Society for Humanity closed its activities due to lack of resources.
During the period in which High IQ Society for Humanity was in operation, I dedicated a considerable amount of time to this entity’s projects and made dozens of donations (all membership fees from Platinum Society, of which I was president and founder, went to HIQSH). Furthermore, through Sigma Society, I organized assistance projects for the victims of the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, the victims of the landslides in Santa Catarina and Itajaí in 2007 and 2008, I contributed to the dissemination of the CliqueFome project, with the promotion of painters with the mouth and with the feet (people who do not have both arms) etc., in addition to individual projects, carried out outside the entity. Sigma Society offered free courses in Astronomy, Chess, Latin and Sanskrit, in addition to more than 1000 articles on various educational, scientific, philosophical and cultural topics.
In my opinion, and in the opinions of many friends and colleagues in the mainstream high IQ communities, intelligence is not an attribute to boast about. It is a divine gift that brings with it a high dose of responsibility and must be used wisely. That’s why I try to channel my potential to solve relevant problems in different areas. Sometimes I can’t get concrete results. Other times I get good results, like my world record recorded in the Guinness Book 1998, or the innovation I present in my book “IMCH – analysis of mathematical errors in the BMI formula”, in which I bring to light a solution to a problem that it had been incorrectly addressed for over 180 years and was harming over 390 million people. I am the author of a new metric for investment risk that was considered superior to the metrics of William Sharpe (Nobel in 1990) and Franco Modigliani (Nobel in 1985), according to an assessment published in the most reputable magazine in Brazil in this area. Here is a list of some of my contributions:
Some friends and colleagues from high-IQ communities are also active in intellectual production and engagement in social, environmental, and educational issues. Below, I present a list of Brazilian and Portuguese members in some of the main societies for people with high IQ. Many of them also work for the common good and harmony between people.
Portugues
O conceito de “inteligência” é quase tão antigo quanto a linguagem. Provavelmente nossos ancestrais criaram primeiramente palavras para representar objetos materiais, como pedras, plantas e animais, para depois criar palavras que representam sentimentos, processos, predicados e entidades abstratas. Mas o intervalo entre o surgimento das primeiras linguagens e o surgimento de uma palavra para representar o nível de habilidade intelectual não deve ter sido muito longo.
Apesar de “inteligência” ser um conceito tão antigo, continua não havendo consenso sobre qual é seu significado exato. Por outro lado, o fato de não sabermos determinar exatamente e completamente o que é a inteligência não nos impede de estudá-la, exercitá-la e até mesmo medi-la.
Por exemplo: não se sabe exatamente o que é uma laranja. Se tivéssemos que descrever uma laranja para um alienígena que nunca tivesse vindo à Terra, essa dificuldade ficaria evidente, porque uma laranja não é exatamente uma esfera, os sabores azedo e doce seriam dificílimos de explicar, sem contar que talvez os alienígenas nem tivessem paladar, olhos e outros órgãos sensoriais similares aos nossos. A cor predominante refletida pela laranja, quando iluminada por raios solares ou por luz artificial, com distribuição espectral similar à distribuição espectral do Sol, com pico perto do comprimento de onda de 589 nm, não seria a mesma e nem sequer seria semelhante se a laranja fosse iluminada pela luz de uma estrela de outra classe espectral, onde morasse tal alienígena. Talvez a laranja nem sequer fosse visível para eles, ainda que eles possuíssem olhos ou órgãos equivalentes aos olhos, mas com cones e bastonetes sensíveis a um intervalo diferente da luz visível. Seria improvável que tivessem olhos com sensibilidade numa faixa diferente da luz visível porque quase todas as outras estrelas emitem boa parte de sua luz na faixa visível, pois embora essa seja uma faixa estreita, parece ser predominante no Universo conhecido. Contudo, embora fosse improvável, não poderíamos descartar essa hipótese. Talvez fosse até mais fácil explicar a esse E.T. o que é inteligência, sob nossa perspectiva, do que explicar o que é uma laranja, porque o conceito de “inteligência geral” ou fator g de Spearman é provavelmente algo mais universal do que uma laranja. Provavelmente o E.T. nunca teria visto uma laranja, mas se ele tivesse uma linguagem sofisticada para se comunicar, ele teria inteligência e teria sua própria interpretação do conceito “inteligência”, logo ele só precisaria identificar alguns pontos-chave de nossa explicação para associar com o conceito que ele próprio teria de “inteligência”.
Embora não saibamos exatamente o que é uma laranja, podemos medir seu perímetro, sua massa, determinar sua cor, sua acidez, conseguimos distinguir uma laranja de uma cadeira ou de um lago. Portanto, mesmo sem que saibamos exatamente o que é inteligência, conseguimos distinguir razoavelmente bem o que é um comportamento inteligente e conseguimos ranquear diferentes níveis de inteligência: um rato é mais inteligente que uma bactéria, um elefante é mais inteligente que um rato, um humano é mais inteligente que um elefante. Entretanto as comparações ficam mais difíceis quando as diferenças são mais estreitas. Não é fácil determinar se um cachorro é mais inteligente que um gato ou vice-versa, se um gorila é mais inteligente que um elefante ou que um golfinho, se um cavalo é mais inteligente que outro cavalo. Mas essa dificuldade subjetiva pode ser resolvida quando se introduz métodos objetivos de análise. Olhando para duas pessoas com corpos semelhantes, é difícil saber qual dela é a mais pesada, mas utilizando um instrumento de medida apropriado — uma balança –, pode-se obter essa informação. Se a diferença de peso for muito pequena, menor que 1%, talvez a balança também não seja suficiente, dependendo de sua precisão, sua acurácia, sua repetibilidade e de alguns fatores extrínsecos, como variações na densidade do ar, com consequentes variações no empuxo, o efeito de maré no instante que cada uma delas for pesada, entre outros fatores. Além disso, a massa das pessoas varia ao longo do tempo, por transpiração, evacuação, alimentação, a densidade das pessoas varia quando estão com os pulmões cheios ou vazios. Como consequência, duas pessoas com pesos semelhantes poderiam ter pesos diferentes se medidos em dias diferentes ou em horários diferentes, a tal ponto que algumas vezes uma delas poderia ser mais pesada, outras vezes mais leve.
No caso da inteligência, a situação é semelhante sob vários aspectos. Não se sabe exatamente o que é a inteligência, mas se tem uma ideia bastante razoável do que ela é e do que ela não é. Não se confunde inteligência com coelhos, nem com buracos. Num nível mais refinado de distinção, não se confunde inteligência com perfume nem com beleza. Num nível ainda mais refinado, não se confunde inteligência com memória nem com cultura, entretanto, quando se chega nesse nível de similaridade, a memória e a cultura já começam a se mostrar suficientemente semelhantes à inteligência para que interfiram nela, ou pelo menos interfiram nos resultados das medidas que se tenta fazer da inteligência, “contaminando” esses resultados, por assim dizer. Dependendo da interpretação que se faça, pode-se dizer que a memória e a cultura são componentes da inteligência, especialmente a memória de trabalho, que é a capacidade de administrar simultaneamente grandes volumes de dados.
Cientes dessas dificuldades e limitações, podemos agora falar um pouco sobre medida da inteligência. Os testes de QI corretamente normatizados são os instrumentos psicológicos que seguem com mais rigor e diligência todos os protocolos do método científico. Como resultado disso, os diagnósticos baseados em testes de QI são mais confiáveis do que qualquer outro diagnóstico realizado em Psicologia.
Um fato que poucos sabem é que os testes de QI produzem resultados mais acurados do que os métodos utilizados para cálculo das distâncias de galáxias, ou os métodos usados para calcular as massas de algumas partículas subatômicas (quarks, neutrinos etc.), ou os métodos para cálculos de riscos de prejuízo realizados pela maioria dos grandes bancos. São inclusive muitíssimo mais acurados que as estimativas de risco de acidente feitas pela NASA, conforme demonstrou o Nobel de Física Richard Feynman, durante a investigação do acidente do ônibus espacial Challenger, em 1986.
Isso não significa que os testes de QI estejam livres de falhas. Não estão. Mas se comparados a outros instrumentos de medida utilizados em Física, Química, Meteorologia, Astronomia, Econometria, Sociologia, Antropologia, Medicina e Educação, a confiabilidade nos resultados produzidos pelos testes de QI fica acima da média da dos instrumentos utilizados nessas áreas, inclusive são mais confiáveis que a maioria dos exames laboratoriais nos quais os médicos se baseiam para avaliar o estado de saúde das pessoas. Quem tiver interesse em se aprofundar nesse tema, pode ler meu livro “IMCH – uma análise matemática dos erros na fórmula de IMC”. O livro não trata apenas de IMC, mas de vários tópicos científicos, aponta alguns problemas em grandes bancos de dados internacionais utilizados em Medicina, e apresenta uma nova fórmula para cálculo de IMC, mais acurada e mais bem fundamentada que a tradicional.
Os primeiros testes de inteligência de que se tem registro começaram a ser usados na China, por volta de 3.000 a.C., mas naquela época não se conhecia praticamente nada de Estatística nem de método científico, por isso aqueles testes não eram normatizados nem seguiam os protocolos adotados nos testes modernos. Esses protocolos servem para assegurar que a variável medida pelo teste seja de fato fortemente correlacionada com a inteligência, para assegurar que todos os itens do teste medem aproximadamente a mesma variável, para assegurar que os escores obtidos em duas metades aleatórias do teste sejam semelhantes, para assegurar que o mesmo teste aplicado alguns dias ou meses depois produza resultados semelhantes aos da primeira aplicação, para assegurar que testes diferentes destinados a medir a inteligência geral produzem resultados semelhantes para a maioria das pessoas examinadas. Há uma lista de cuidados que são tomados no processo de construção de um bom teste de QI, para garantir que os escores produzidos sejam boas representações daquilo que se pretende medir.
Além disso, a base teórica sobre a qual os testes de QI foram concebidos é solidamente amparada no método científico, mais do que qualquer outro constructo da Psicologia. O criador dos primeiros testes de QI, Alfred Binet, partiu da premissa que a inteligência humana aumenta com a idade, pelo menos entre o nascimento e a idade adulta. Em seguida, ele elaborou questionários com perguntas nas quais tentou minimizar a exigência de conhecimentos especializados e priorizar o uso do raciocínio lógico, tão livre quanto possível de fatores culturais. Esses questionários foram aplicados a grandes grupos de crianças, adolescentes e adultos de diferentes faixas etárias. Depois comparou o número de respostas certas com as idades, e confirmou sua hipótese de que o número de acertos aumentava com a idade. Em média, as crianças de 8 anos acertavam mais questões que a média das crianças de 7 anos; enquanto a média das de 9 anos acertava mais que a média das de 8 anos e assim por diante, até cerca de 16 anos. A partir de 16 anos parecia não haver mais aumento no número de acertos em função da idade. Em pesquisas mais abrangentes realizadas nos anos seguintes, verificou-se que talvez esse limite fosse aos 17 anos, em alguns casos chegando aos 19 ou 20 anos, mas a curva de crescimento não era linear, e quando beirava aos 16, a pessoa já havia chegado bem perto de seu nível máximo de desenvolvimento mental, com pouca evolução nos anos e décadas seguintes.
Binet notou também que embora a média das crianças de 12 anos acertasse muito mais que a média das de 8 anos, havia algumas crianças de 8 anos que acertavam mais que a média das crianças de 9, 10, 11 e até 12 anos. Também acontecia o contrário, isto é, algumas de 12 anos acertavam menos que a média das de 8 anos. Com isso, surgiu o conceito de “níveis mentais”, que depois recebeu o nome de “idade mental” e finalmente recebeu o nome de “quociente de inteligência”, abreviado para “QI” ou “Q.I.”. Foi assim que o termo “QI” começou a ser utilizado para representar a proporção entre a idade mental e a idade cronológica. Uma criança de 8 anos com idade mental de 12 anos teria QI = 100×12/8 = 150. Aplicando a mesma fórmula, uma criança de 8 anos com idade de 14 teria QI 175. Acima de 16 anos já não faz muito sentido falar em idade mental, porque pessoas com 40 anos e 16 anos acertam aproximadamente mesmo número de questões.
Quando essas crianças com QI elevado se tornavam adultas, podia-a aplicar testes a elas e verificar quantas elas acertavam, assim podia-se atribuir escores de QI para adultos também, com base no QI que havia sido medido para essas pessoas enquanto elas ainda eram crianças, assumindo que elas continuaram se desenvolvendo intelectualmente no mesmo ritmo da média das outras crianças e assumindo que a evolução fosse aproximadamente linear. São duas premissas razoáveis, não são exatamente corretas, mas estão próximas da realidade, conforme se verificou em estudos realizados nas décadas seguintes.
Outro ponto que precisa ser esclarecido é qual foi a motivação de Binet para criar esses testes. Um problema muito comum nas escolas francesas daquela época, assim como nas escolas de todos os países de todas as épocas, é que frequentemente os professores simpatizavam mais com alguns alunos do que com outros, e tendiam a privilegiar seus alunos favoritos com notas mais altas. Num período no qual o racismo era muito mais grave do que é hoje, esse era um grande problema, porque em todas as avaliações subjetivas os professores costumavam prejudicar os alunos dos quais eles não gostavam, e frequentemente o motivo pelo qual não gostavam era simplesmente a aparência do aluno. Nem sempre o problema era o racismo. O professor podia simplesmente não gostar da fisionomia do aluno, ou o professor podia ser antissemita, ou podia ser misógino, entre outros motivos. Foi assim que Einstein foi considerado retardado por um de seus professores, e Thomas Edison também foi subavaliado por seus professores, foi assim que Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne e outras mulheres foram subavaliadas e seus méritos não foram devidamente reconhecidos.
Diante desse problema, Binet decidiu criar instrumentos de avaliação que pudessem medir objetivamente o desempenho intelectual das crianças, para evitar que fossem tratadas de forma injusta e abusiva por seus professores. Infelizmente os testes de QI não são suficientes para evitar todos os abusos, nem podem impedir comentários ofensivos contra alunos menos privilegiados intelectualmente ou economicamente, nem evitar as agressões físicas e verbais que os professores costumavam praticar contra os alunos. Os testes de QI serviam apenas para aliviar uma parte dos problemas que existiam na época, e não era uma parte pequena, porque era comum crianças muito inteligentes e introvertidas serem colocadas em salas para deficientes, pelo fato de elas não se comunicarem muito, e isso causava danos irreparáveis não apenas para essas crianças, mas para a sociedade como um todo, já que se elas tivessem oportunidades adequadas para se desenvolver poderiam contribuir para a cura de doenças, para soluções de problemas sociais, tecnológicos e muitos outros.
Uma questão que também precisa ser esclarecida é: mas não deveriam ser oferecidas oportunidades a todas as crianças, em vez de oferecer só às mais inteligentes? E a resposta é muito simples: sim, mas oportunidades boas para todos não significa oportunidades iguais para todos. Algumas crianças não querem nem tirariam proveito de uma “oportunidade” para aprender Cálculo Integral, enquanto outras não aproveitariam nem teriam interesse em aprender a tocar harpa, outras não teriam interesse em aprender a construir mesas de madeira etc. O que é considerado “oportunidade” para alguns pode ser um “castigo” para outras.
Dando continuidade aos trabalhos de Binet, nos anos 1930, David Wechsler passou a utilizar um método diferente para padronização dos escores, com base no nível de raridade de pessoas que alcançavam determinado número de acertos. Com isso, solucionou algumas distorções e alguns problemas que estavam sendo observados no método antigo, porém essa solução introduzia novas distorções. Não é nosso propósito aprofundar a análise da história dos testes de QI nem analisar criticamente a qualidade dos métodos utilizados na aferição da inteligência ou a evolução desses métodos ao longo do tempo, mas apenas introduzir brevemente esses temas. Por isso quem tiver interesse numa análise mais detalhada poderá acessar esse link
No final dos anos 1990, com a popularização da Internet, as pessoas com QI muito acima da média, que até então viviam relativamente isoladas, por haver poucas pessoas geograficamente próximas com as quais compartilhassem interesses comuns, aproveitaram-se dessa oportunidade gerada pela globalização para criar comunidades destinadas a atender às necessidades e aos interesses de pessoas com esses perfis intelectuais diferenciados. Até então, havia apenas 15 sociedades de elevado QI no mundo, quase todas fundadas nos Estados Unidos, exceto Sigma Society, que foi fundada no Brasil:
Mensa, fundada em 1946
Intertel, fundada em 1966
ISPE, fundada em 1974
TNS, fundada em 1978
Mega, fundada em 1982 (registrada no Guinness Book de 1990 como a sociedade de elevado QI mais exclusiva do mundo)
Prometheus, fundada em 1982
TOPS, fundada em 1989
OATH, fundada em 1992
IQuadrivium, fundada em 1992
Giga, fundada em 1996
Glia, fundada em 1997
Colloquy, fundada em 1998
Sigma, fundada em 1999
Sigma VI, fundada em 1999
Pi Society, fundada em 1999
Nos anos seguintes, foram criadas várias outras, ultrapassando 100 sociedades para pessoas de elevado QI, das quais cerca de 70 estão atualmente ativas. As propostas variavam muito de uma para outra. As propostas de Sigma Society eram estas (da imagem abaixo):
A High IQ Society for Humanity, por exemplo, foi criada na Dinamarca por David Udbjorg para ajudar crianças carentes da África, onde ele passou a morar durante mais de 10 anos, proporcionando a essas crianças acesso à Educação e a alguns recursos tecnológicos, que lhes oferecia perspectivas um pouco melhores para crescer socialmente e culturalmente. Infelizmente a High IQ Society for Humanity encerrou suas atividades por falta de recursos.
Durante o período em que High IQ Society for Humanity esteve em atividade, dediquei um tempo considerável aos projetos dessa entidade e fiz dezenas de doações (todas as taxas de filiação de Platinum Society, da qual fui presidente e fundador, eram direcionadas à HIQSH). Além disso, por meio de Sigma Society, organizei projetos de assistência às vítimas do tsunami na Indonésia em 2004, às vítimas dos desabamentos em Santa Catarina e Itajaí em 2007 e 2008, contribuí com a divulgação do projeto CliqueFome, com a divulgação dos pintores com a boca e com os pés (pessoas que não possuem os dois braços) etc., além de projetos individuais, realizados fora da entidade. Em Sigma Society foram oferecidos cursos gratuitos de Astronomia, Xadrez, Latim e Sânscrito, além de mais de 1000 artigos sobre diversos temas educacionais, científicos, filosóficos e culturais.
Em minha opinião, e nas opiniões de muitos amigos e colegas das principais comunidades de elevado QI, a inteligência não é um atributo para se vangloriar. É um presente divino que traz junto uma elevada dose de responsabilidade e deve ser usada com sabedoria. Por isso tento canalizar meu potencial para solucionar problemas relevantes em diferentes áreas. Algumas vezes não consigo obter resultados concretos. Outras vezes chego a obter bons resultados, como meu recorde mundial registrado no Guinness Book 1998, ou a inovação que apresento em meu livro “IMCH – análise dos erros matemáticos da fórmula de IMC”, no qual trago à luz uma solução para um problema que estava sendo abordado incorretamente há mais de 180 anos e estava prejudicando mais de 390 milhões de pessoas. Sou autor de uma nova métrica para risco de investimentos que foi considerada superior às métricas de William Sharpe (Nobel de 1990) e Franco Modigliani (Nobel em 1985), de acordo com avaliação publicada na revista mais bem reputada do Brasil nessa área. Aqui há uma lista com algumas de minhas contribuições: https://www.sigmasociety.net/hm
Alguns amigos e colegas das comunidades de alto QI também são ativos na produção intelectual e no engajamento em questões sociais, ambientais e educacionais. A seguir, apresento uma lista dos membros brasileiros e portugueses em algumas das principais sociedades para pessoas com elevado QI. Muitos deles também trabalham pelo bem comum e pela harmonia entre os povos.
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Melão Jr. H. On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Melão Jr., H. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): MELÃO JR., H. On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Melão Jr., Hindemburg. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Melão Jr., H. “On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21.
Harvard: Melão Jr., H. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21.
Harvard (Australian): Melão Jr., H 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Melão Jr., Hindemburg. “On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Melão Jr. H. On High-Range Test Construction 21: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Brazilian and Portuguese members of the most selective high IQ societies in the world’ [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-21.
Author(s) Bio: Hindemburg Melão Jr. (January 15, 1972) was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He founded the most, or one of the most, selective high-I.Q. societies, the Sigma Society and is the Creator of the Sigma Test Extended. He is a philosopher, chess analyst, and an astrophotographer. He published hundreds of articles on chess, finance, philosophy, science, and more.
Word Count: 727
Image Credits: Hindemburg Melão Jr.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Average IQ in US universities, Correcting IQ distortions in SAT scores, IQ conversion formulas based on exam scores, IQ distortion in higher education institutions, Item Response Theory and Classical Test Theory, MIT engineers average IQ, Nobel laureates IQ discrepancies, SAT GRE Fuvest Enem IQ correlation.
On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., ‘Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States’
English
Scores obtained in exams such as SAT, GRE, Fuvest, Enem and similar can be converted into IQ scores, due to the similarity of the measured construct and due to the strong correlation between scores in these exams and in the main IQ tests.
In Brazil there are no widely publicized studies on the correlation between Enem scores and IQ or between Fuvest and IQ, but in the USA such studies are very common, and there are many different formulas to convert IQ into SAT, GRE or ACT scores and vice versa. . Some of these formulas are based on Item Response Theory, others are based on Classical Test Theory, others make custom adjustments. There are specific methods for SAT before 1974, others for the range from 1974 to 1995 and others for applications after 1995.
This makes it possible to know the approximate IQ of practically anyone who has entered a US university, as well as knowing the average IQ in different educational institutions. This includes the IQs of many famous personalities, all presidents and great scientists.
These numbers, however, present small distortions, and in some cases they are not small, especially in institutions where the average IQ is higher. This happens because if the person has an IQ of 180, but the SAT ceiling is around 154, then the result recorded and computed to calculate the average will be a maximum of 154, flattening the average to a lower value than the true one. Not to mention that the fact that a person has 180 or 190 or 200 does not guarantee that they will have a maximum score, resulting in even more serious distortions. One of the best examples of this was Nobel laureate in Physics Richard Feynman, one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, whose IQ was certainly above 200, but in the exam given at the university he obtained 123.
Other prominent scientists, including Nobel laureates, had scores well below correct, such as William Shockley and Luis Walter Alvarez, who had scores below 135, but both were Nobel laureates. Even though the merits of both are debatable, due to the fact that there are equivalent works that preceded them by more than 10 years, it is still unquestionable that they were great scientists, certainly above 160 or even 170 IQ.
Similar and even more serious distortions occur among Nobel laureates. Some sources, such as Garth Zietsman’s article on the Power Test norm, suggest that the average IQ of Nobel Science winners is only 155, and MIT engineers average 144. In 2001, I wrote an article discussing this distortion, and in a subjective estimate, I pointed out a probable IQ for Nobel winners of around 170 to 180 and at MIT around 150 to 160. This fact is confirmed when researchers at MIT or Nobel winners solve high-level IQ tests , with a more appropriate ceiling.
The fact is that at universities where the true average IQ is higher, the average measured IQ is skewed downward more than at universities where the average IQ is less high, because the test ceiling is skewed more severely in higher IQ populations. , since the asymptotic limit is the same, therefore it “steals” more points from those with a higher IQ.
In this article I apply a small adjustment to correct these distortions in the IQs of the main educational institutions in the USA, based on the relative frequency of IQs above the SAT ceiling and which had less than correct assessments. Other factors could also be considered for a more refined correction, considering self-selection of people who undergo such exams, as they are not representative of the general population average. On the other hand, these exams do not measure IQ itself, and the divergence between the measured variable and IQ increases with higher scores. Assuming that these two effects approximately compensate each other, it remains to correct the problem mentioned in the paragraphs above, although, naturally, there are also other details that would need to be considered for a more complete and accurate review.
If you are curious to know your IQ compared to the average of students at these institutions, check out our Sigma Test Light and our Sigma Test Extended. Also discover our books and articles that address this and other topics.
Below are the results for the average IQs of the main educational institutions [Ed. PDF here too.]:
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Português
Os escores obtidos em exames como SAT, GRE, Fuvest, Enem e similares podem ser convertidos em escores de QI, devido à similaridade do constructo medido e devido à forte correlação entre as pontuações nesses exames e nos principais testes de QI.
No Brasil não há estudos amplamente divulgados sobre correlação entre escores no Enem e QI ou entre Fuvest e QI, mas nos EUA são muito comuns tais estudos, inclusive há muitas formulas diferentes para converter QI em escores do SAT, GRE ou ACT e vice-versa. Algumas dessas fórmulas são baseadas em Teoria de Resposta ao Item, outras são baseadas em Teoria Clássica dos Testes, outras fazem ajustes personalizados. Há métodos específicos para SAT anterior a 1974, outros para o intervalo de 1974 a 1995 e outros para aplicações posteriores a 1995.
Isso torna possível conhecer o QI aproximado de praticamente qualquer pessoa que tenha ingressado numa universidade dos EUA, bem como se pode conhecer a média de QI nas diferentes instituições de ensino. Isso inclui os QIs de muitas personalidades famosas, todos os presidentes e grandes cientistas.
Esses números, porém, apresentam pequenas distorções, e em alguns casos não são pequenas, principalmente nas instituições nas quais o QI médio é mais alto. Isso acontece porque se a pessoa tem 180 de QI, mas o teto do SAT é cerca de 154, então o resultado registrado e computado para o cálculo da média será no máximo 154, achatando a média para um valor menor do que o verdadeiro. Isso sem contar que o fato de a pessoa ter 180 ou 190 ou 200 não garante que terá escore máximo, resultando em distorções ainda mais graves. Um dos melhores exemplos disso foi o Nobel de Física Richard Feynman, um dos maiores gênios do século XX, cujo QI era seguramente acima de 200, mas no exame aplicado na universidade obteve 123.
Outros proeminentes cientistas, inclusive ganhadores de Nobel, tiveram escores muito abaixo do correto, como William Shockley e Luis Walter Alvarez, que tiveram abaixo de 135, mas ambos foram laureados com o Nobel. Ainda que os méritos de ambos sejam discutíveis, pelo fato de haver trabalhos equivalentes que os precederam em mais de 10 anos, ainda assim é inquestionável que foram grandes cientistas, seguramente acima de 160 ou mesmo 170 de QI.
Distorções similares e ainda mais graves ocorrem entre ganhadores do Nobel. Algumas fontes, como o artigo de Garth Zietsman sobre a norma do Power Test, sugerem que o QI médio dos ganhadores do Nobel em Ciência seja de apenas 155, e os engenheiros do MIT tenham, em média, 144. Em 2001, escrevi um artigo discutindo tal distorção, e numa estimativa subjetiva, apontei como QI provável para ganhadores do Nobel cerca de 170 a 180 e no MIT cerca de 150 a 160. Esse fato se confirma quando pesquisadores no MIT ou ganhadores do Nobel resolvem testes de QI de alto nível, com teto mais apropriado.
O fato é que nas universidades nas quais o QI médio verdadeiro é mais alto, o QI médio medido é mais distorcido para baixo do que nas universidades onde o QI médio é menos alto, pois o teto dos testes distorce mais gravemente nas populações com maior QI, já que o limite assintótico é o mesmo, portanto “rouba” mais pontos de quem tem QI maior.
Nesse artigo aplico um pequeno ajuste para corrigir essas distorções nos QIs das principais instituições de ensino nos EUA, com base na frequência relativa de QIs acima do teto do SAT e que tiveram avaliações abaixo da correta. Outros fatores também poderiam ser considerados para uma correção mais refinada, considerando self-selection das pessoas que fazem tais exames, pois não são representativas da média geral da população. De outro lado, esses exames não medem o próprio QI, e a divergência entre a variável medida e o QI aumenta nos escores maiores. Supondo que esses dois efeitos se compensem aproximadamente, resta corrigir o problema citado nos parágrafos acima, embora, naturalmente, haja também outros detalhes que precisariam ser considerados para uma revisão mais completa e mais acurada.
Se você está curioso para conhecer seu QI em comparação à média dos alunos dessas instituições, conheça nosso Sigma Test Light e nosso Sigma Test Extended. Conheça também nossos livros e artigos que abordam esse e outros temas.
A seguir, os resultados para os QIs médios das principais instituições de ensino:
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Melão Jr. H. On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Melão Jr., H. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): MELÃO JR., H. On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Melão Jr., Hindemburg. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Melão Jr., H. “On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20.
Harvard: Melão Jr., H. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20.
Harvard (Australian): Melão Jr., H 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Melão Jr., Hindemburg. “On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Melão Jr. H. On High-Range Test Construction 20: Hindemburg Melão Jr., Average IQ of students and teachers at top universities and schools in the United States [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-20.
To recipients of this email: Nov. 11, revised Nov. 22, 2020
The thirteen attachments to this email contain the 13 volumes of my recently completed Encyclopedia of Categories, which I am sending to people with an interest in philosophy or grand unified theories of everything. This work evolved chronologically as follows:
At age 7 (1951): I decided my goal should be to “know everything”.
At age 12 (1956): I collected basic concepts in such disciplines as astronomy (names of all the planets and their moons), geography (names of all the countries of the world), chemistry (names of all the chemical elements), history (names of all the emperors of the Western Roman Empire), anatomy (names of all the bones of the human body), and mathematics (names of all the higher numbers: thousand, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, etc., plus a list of the first 2001 digits of pi, of which I memorized the first 201).
At age 24 (1968): I came across and read Stephen Pepper’s 1942 book titled World Hypotheses, which contained the unusual idea that any metaphysical system, in order to be orderly and coherent, should be based on a central guiding principle he called a root metaphor. He held that each metaphysical system had its own distinctive theory of truth, which could be elucidated by means of the root metaphor. In the middle of the book he suggested that the four major metaphysical systems might conceivably be unified under a single root metaphor, but at the end of the book he argued that such a comprehensive synthesis would fail because some of their theories of truth were inherently incompatible.
At age 44 (1988): I won a national essay competition awarded by the American Philosophical Association for a paper titled “Theories of Truth: A Comprehensive Synthesis.” This paper solved the problem posed by World Hypotheses.
At age 62 (2006): My theory of categories had gradually evolved from the 5-cate-gory theory that had won the prize to a 13-category theory. To show the power of this more elaborate theory, I listed all the theories of or perspectives on truth mentioned in the 1995 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, which by coincidence were 13 in number, and showed how they could be organized into a grand unified theory by means of my theory of categories.
At age 69 (2013): Long before this I had searched for lists of categories in philosophy reference books such as the 8-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy published in 1967. I expanded this search to general reference books such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. In 2013 at age 69 I read Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations and noticed that 20 out of the 25 quotes I selected could be analyzed into my 13 categories. This gave me the idea of constructing this encyclopedia of categories using quotation books as a nearly inexhaustible source of examples. Of these 13 volumes, the first 2 are introductory, the next 5 volumes cover topics from Actors and acting to Zen, the next 5 volumes cover noteworthy people from Aesop to Zeno of Elea, creator of the famous Achilles-and-the-tortoise paradox, and the thirteenth volume focuses on examples from philosophy. In this way I show that this theory is applicable to a much wider range of concepts than truth.
At age 76 (2020): I completed my 13-volume opus after spending 7 years compiling it. This was the end of a 69-year-long odyssey to “know everything.” Oddly enough, I read Homer’s Odyssey and found that it consists of exactly 13 episodes, culminating in Odysseus slaying the suitors of his wife, whom he’d left 20 years previously to fight in the Trojan War. I showed that these 13 episodes correspond to my 13 basic categories!
There is a reason why my 13 categories are so versatile. In his final book titled Concept and Quality, published in 1967, Pepper devised his own metaphy-sical system that he called ”selectivism,” based on the root metaphor of a goal-seeking purposive act (or more generally a selective system) and he remarked on page 17 that this was “the act associated with intelligence.” I first read this book in 1982, which was by coincidence the same year that I began founding high-IQ societies and devising admission tests for them, two of which were published in Omni magazine, the first of which was praised by John Sununu, then Governor of New Hampshire, who had a Ph.D. from M.I.T., as “one of the most enjoyable exercises I’ve gone through in some time…a superbly stimulating diversion.” Pepper’s remark gave insight into how to integrate my long-standing interests in philosophy and intelligence could be interconnected. The basic structure of a purposive act or selective system is the feedback loop by which we interact with reality. Intelligence involves employing this feedback loop effectively to learn about the world, the basic purpose of intelligence. And the feedback loop can be analyzed into 13 factors corresponding to my 13 categories in a very straightforward way. There is the self as an agent or drive-bearer, D; the world as a collection of goal objects, G; our anticipation, A, of how our actions will affect the world; and the quiescence of this act, Q, when the world informs us through perceptions, etc., how well we succeeded in anticipating its response to us. We can represent these four factors by inscribing a square, tilted on one corner, inside a circle, and putting D, A, G, and Q at each of the square’s corners, starting with D at the top, A on the left, G on the bottom, and Q on the right. We can provide positions for six more factors by linking the four main factors in pairs as follows: DA, AG, GQ, and QD around the four edges of the square, and DG and AQ across its middle. The circle or square unifies these ten factors, a unity that becomes an eleventh factor, U. The failure or negation, N, of this unity, as by a break in the circle, becomes a twelfth factor. And there is a thirteenth factor, a subordinate drive factor, D’, as when a feedback loop has been completed and the initial drive is renewed or a new drive kicks in to energize a fresh circuit of the feedback loop, as in a child’s subordinate relation to its parents or a student’s to its teacher. Larger structures, such as Whitehead’s 51 categories, can be regarded as the result of combining these 13 basic categories in various ways.
This theory provides surprising new insights into the rationale underlying various previously mysterious groups of concepts, such as (1) Aristotle’s ten categories; (2) the 13 personality factors that are the focus of the book Personality Self-Portrait, and (3) Peano’s axioms for number theory as described by Bertrand Russell in his 1919 book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (pp. 5-6). Russell lists three “primitive ideas” for the axioms: 0, successor, and number. He should have included a fourth primitive idea: property. These four primitive ideas correspond to our four main factors: “0” is a drive factor, D, since 0 initiates the natural numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.; “successor” is anticipatory, A, because it leads us to anticipate that each natural number has a successor, e.g., the successor of 3 is 4; “number” corresponds to our goal-object factor, G, because numbers are the basic goal objects of number theory; and “property” is a quiescence factor, Q, because every correct statement in number theory offers insight (quiescent satisfaction) into how numbers respond to our tinkering. It was by tinkering with Peano’s axioms that I discovered the need for the two internal pairings, DG and AQ, which are clearly required by the binary pairings of the primitive ideas that the axioms consist of.
People use these categories instinctively, like birds building nests, spiders building webs, or bees building honeycombs, without any prior training, because the 13 spatial factors in a feedback loop correspond to 13 verbal factors when we try to put our thoughts into words. The parts of speech of language—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.—can readily be accounted for by our theory. Mistakes are to be expected, as when a bird puts a twig in the wrong place when building a nest or someone uses fauty grammar when learning a language. Even a genius like Russell overlooked “property” as a primitive idea for number theory!
Sincerely, Ronald K. Hoeflin (rkh.iq@hotmail.com; please put abciqxyz in your subject heading to insure I can locate your message amidst all the junk mail)
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. Hoeflin discusses: family geographic, cultural, linguistic, and religious background; depth of known family history; feelings about some distinguished family members in personal history; upbringing for him; discovery and nurturance of giftedness; noteworthy or pivotal moments in the midst of early life; early aptitude tests; inspiration for the Mega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Prometheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Top One Percent Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the One-in-a-Thousand Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Epimetheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Omega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; the developments of each society over time; communications of high-IQ societies, and harshest critiques of high-IQ societies; overall results of the intellectual community facilitated for the gifted; Prometheus Society and the Mega Society kept separate from the Lewis Terman Society, and Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society placed under the aegis of the “The Terman Society” or “The Hoeflin Society”; disillusionment with high-IQ societies; notable failures of the high-IQ societies; changing norms of the Mega Test and the Titan Test; the hypothetical Holy Grail of psychometric measurements; other test creators seem reliable in their production of high-IQ tests and societies with serious and legitimate intent respected by Dr. Hoeflin: Kevin Langdon and Christopher Harding; societies societies helpful as sounding boards for the Encyclopedia of Categories; librarian work helpful in the development of a skill set necessary for independent psychometric work and general intelligence test creation; demerits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions; virtues and personalities as mostly innate or inborn, and dating and mating; publications from the societies attempted to be published at a periodic rate; faux and real genius; validity to Professor Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence with practical intelligence, creative intelligence, and analytical intelligence; validity to Multiple Intelligences Theory of Professor Howard Gardner with musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and teaching-pedagogical intelligences; validity to general intelligence, or g, of the late Charles Spearman; the general opinion on the three main theories of intelligence; self-identification as a genius; personal opinions on the state of mainstream intelligence testing and alternative high-range intelligence testing; statistical rarity for apparent and, potentially, actual IQ scores of females who score at the extreme sigmas of 3, 4, and 5, or higher; reducing or eliminating social conflicts of interest in test creation; multiple test attempts; data on the Mega Test and the Titan Test; pseudonyms and test scores; and possible concerns of the test creators at the highest sigmas.
Keywords: Charles Spearman, Christopher Harding, Francis Galton, Giftedness, Hereditary Genius, Howard Gardner, intelligence, IQ, Kevin Langdon, Mega Society, Mega Test, Prometheus Society, Robert Sternberg, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.
On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In due course of this personal and educational comprehensive interview, we will focus, in-depth, on the monumental life work of the (currently) 10-volume The Encyclopedia of Categories – a truly colossal intellectual endeavour. You founded some of the, if not the, most respected general intelligence tests in the history of non-mainstream general intelligence testing: The Mega Test and the Titan Test. Also, you founded the Mega Society in 1982. Another respected product of a distinguished and serious career in the creation of societies for community and dialogue between the profoundly and exceptionally gifted individuals of society. Before coverage of this in the interview, let’s cover some of the family and personal background, I intend this as comprehensive while steering clear of disagreements or political controversies between societies, or clashes between individuals in the history of the high IQ societies – not my territory, not my feuds, not my business. Almost everything at the highest sigmas started with you [Ed. some integral founders in the higher-than-2-sigma range include Christopher Harding and Kevin Langdon], as far as I can tell, I want to cover this history and give it its due attention. What was family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: I recently wrote a 51-page autobiographical sketch for inclusion in my upcoming multi-volume treatise titled The Encyclopedia of Categories, a 10-volume version of which will probably be available for free as ten email attachments by January of 2020. I was aiming for a 13-volume version, but I don’t think I can complete that length before the end of 2020. Given that my vision is way below 20/20, I liked the irony of publishing this final magnum opus of mine in the year 2020. I can always stretch it to 13 or more volumes in subsequent editions. I will not quote what I say in that autobiographical sketch, although the information provided will be roughly the same. My mother’s ancestors came from the British Isles (England, Scotland, and Ireland) mostly in the 1700s. My mother’s father was a hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Methodist itinerant preacher in the state of Georgia. He’s the only one of my four grandparents I never met. My mother brought me up as a Methodist, but I asked a lot of questions by my mid-teens and became a complete atheist by the age of 19, which I have remained ever since (I’m now 75). I gave my mother Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” to read aloud to me so we could discuss it. It seemed to convince her to give up religion, which shows unusual flexibility of mind for a person in her 50s. She had previously read such books as The Bible as History and Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, his doctoral dissertation in theology. My father’s parents came to this country in the late 1890s, his mother from the Zurich region of Switzerland and his father from the Baden region of Germany. His father was a pattern maker, a sort of precision carpentry in which he made moulds for machine parts to be poured from molten metal in a foundry. My father became an electrical engineer, initially working on power lines in the state of Missouri, then becoming a mid-level executive for the main power company in St. Louis, Missouri, doing such things as preparing contracts with hospitals for emergency electrical power generation if the main city-wide power cut off. He had worked his way through college by playing the violin for dance bands, and as an adult he taught ballroom dancing in his own studio as a hobby. My mother was an opera singer. In my autobiography, I list the 17 operas she sang in during her career, usually with leading roles due to the excellence of her voice. My father initially spoke German up to the age of 2, but his parents decided they did not want their daughter doing so, so they started speaking English at home, so she never learned German. My father’s mother became a devoted Christian Scientist and got her husband and two daughters to adopt this religion. My father became an atheist, and when he heard that my brother was thinking of becoming a Methodist minister sent him a copy of Thomas Paine’s book The Age of Reason, which promotes Paine’s deism, in which he accepted a deity and an afterlife but rejected the Bible as a guide, regarding the universe itself as God’s true bible. My brother never read the book but I did, and I told my father I enjoyed the critique of the Bible but did not accept a God or afterlife, and my father said that these two beliefs could readily be discarded, but that Paine should be given credit for his advanced thinking in an era and country that so fiercely rejected atheism. My brother ultimately became a computer programmer for the pension system for employees of the state of California. My sister became a ballet dancer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. I list 25 operas she danced in in my autobiography. She went on to teach ballet at an upstate New York college, being honored one year as the college’s most distinguished teacher.
Jacobsen: How far back is knowledge of the family history for you?
Hoeflin: I don’t know much beyond what is stated above. My sister has more detailed records. One of my mother’s grandfathers apparently owned over a hundred slaves in the South before the Civil War. My mother was occasionally treated badly in St. Louis due to her Southern accent, but she actually was very kindly toward black people and she once gave a black woman a ride in her car for a mile or so while I moved to the back seat. I do have memories of visits to my mother’s mother in Atlanta, Georgia. She died before my third birthday, but my memories go back much further than is normal with most people. I liked to swing on the swing in my mother’s mother back yard with one of her chickens in my lap. She raised the chickens to sell their eggs, but evidently also killed them for dinner. I am even now very tender-hearted towards animals and would never kill a chicken or cow or what have you. But I still do eat meat out of habit, even though I regard it as not very ethical to do so. If I had a better income I’d arrange to eat just a vegetarian diet, mostly fruits and oatmeal. I loathe cooked green vegetables except in soups.
Jacobsen: Some harbour sentiments and feelings based on distinguished family members from centuries or decades ago. Those who died with great achievements or honourable lives in the sense of a well-lived life – whether prominent or not. Any individuals like this for you? Any sentiments or feelings for you?
Hoeflin: A genealogist traced my mother’s ancestors to a close relative of a governor of Virginia. My mother said some of her relatives were distinguished doctors (M.D.s). I have a close friend who lives in Poland now, where she was raised, who is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Catherine the Great (one of her great-grandmothers was a great-granddaughter of Catherine the Great). She shares a surprising number of characteristics that Catherine had despite the rather distant ancestry: a significant talent for learning languages, a love of art, an imperious attitude, and an embarrassing number of superstitions. I also dated a woman who was an out-of-wedlock daughter of Pablo Picasso, and there again there were striking similarities between the daughter and her father, even though she did not learn from her mother that he was her real father until 1988, some 15 year after his death in 1973. She started out as a virtuoso violinist, but by her 20s became a painter and had works of art in five different museums by the time she learned who her true father was. She also had facial features very much like Picasso’s, even though she was raised in a German family. I am proud that my mother and sister were so gifted in their respective arts (singing and ballet). When I drew up a list of my favourite classical musical pieces for my autobiography, I looked at YouTube to see the actual performances, and it struck me what a lot of amazingly talented people could perform these magnificent pieces of music, and I regret how limited I am in my talents. I can’t even drive a car due to my poor eyesight! It is chiefly or only in these incredible aptitude test scores that I seem to shine way beyond the norm. I read when I was in high school that the average high-school graduate could read 350 words per minute, so I tested myself, and I found that on a few pages of a very easy sci-fi novel I could read only 189 words per minute at top speed, which works out to just 54% as fast as the average high-school graduate. Yet on timed aptitude tests as a high-school sophomore, I reached the 99th percentile in verbal, spatial, and numerical aptitude despite this huge speed deficit. And on the verbal aptitude section of the Graduate Record Exam I reached the top one percent compared to college seniors trying to get into graduate school, an incredible achievement given my dreadful reading speed. As I mention in my autobiographical sketch, if I had to read aloud, even as an adult I read so haltingly that one would assume that I am mentally retarded if one did not know that the cause is poor eyesight, not poor mental ability.
Jacobsen: What was upbringing like for you?
Hoeflin: My parents were divorced when I was 5 and my mother went through hours-long hysterical tantrums every 2 or 3 weeks throughout my childhood, which were emotionally traumatic and nightmarish. My father had an affable and suave external demeanour but was very selfish and cruel underneath the smooth facade. My brother pushed me downstairs when I was 3 and I stuck my forehead on the concrete at the bottom, causing a gash that had to be clamped shut by a doctor. It was discovered that I had a detached retina when I was 7 (because I could not read the small print in the back of the second-grade reader that the teacher called on me to read), and I spent my 8th birthday in the hospital for an eye operation, for which my father refused to pay since he did not believe in modern medicine, just healthy living as the cure for everything. So even though he was an engineer, my mother had a more solid grasp of physical reality than he did, as I mentioned to her once. I flunked out of my first and third colleges due in large measure to my visual problems, but I eventually received two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and a doctorate after going through a total of eight colleges and universities. So all in all my childhood was rocky and unpleasant. As an adult, I took the personality test in the book Personality Self-Portrait and my most striking score was on a trait called “sensitivity,” on which I got a perfect score of 100%. On the twelve other traits, I scored no higher than 56% on any of them. I never tried sexual relations until the age of 31, and I found that I could never reach a climax through standard intercourse. I had a nervous breakdown after trying group psychotherapy for a few sessions when the group’s criticism of the therapist after he left the room reminded me of my mother’s criticisms of my father, crying for 12 hours straight. When I mentioned this at the next therapy session, one of the other people in the group came up to me afterward and told me he thought I was feeling sorry for myself, despite the fact that my report to the group was very unemotional and matter-of fact, not dramatic. I accordingly gave up group therapy after that session. On the personality test, on the trait called “dramatic”, I actually scored 0%, probably because pretending to be unemotional discourages needling from sadistic people who love to goad a highly sensitive person like me.
Jacobsen: When was giftedness discovered for you? Was this encouraged, supported, and nurtured, or not, by the community, friends, school(s), and family?
Hoeflin: At the age of 2 my mother’s mother picked me up when I was running to her back yard upon arriving in Atlanta to grab one of her chickens to swing with it on my lap. At first I ignored her, but then I surmised that she wanted to ask me a question, so I looked at her face, waiting for her question, which never came. Maybe she didn’t realize that my command of the language had improved since my previous visit. She eventually tapped me on the head and told my mother “You don’t have to worry about this one, he’s got plenty upstairs.” My mother told me this story several times over the years, and I finally put two and two together and told my mother I recalled the incident, which shocked her considering how young I had been. I told her that her mother had probably been impressed by my long attention span. My mother then thought that the incident was not as important and mysterious as she has thought, but actually a long attention span at such a young age is probably a good sign of high intelligence. It was not until I was in the fifth grade that I was given aptitude tests and the teacher suddenly gave me eighth-grade reading books and sixth-grade math books. This was in a so-called “sight conservation class” for the visually impaired that I attended in grades 3 through 5. The teacher taught students in grades 1 through 8 in a single classroom because very poor vision is fairly rare even in a city as large as St. Louis, at that time the tenth-largest city in the United States. That gave me plenty of time to explore my own interests, such as geography using the world maps they had on an easel. In grade 8, back in a regular classroom, we were given another set of aptitude tests, and the teacher mentioned to the class that I had achieved a perfect score on a test of reading comprehension, meaning I was already reading at college level. The teacher gave us extra time on the test so I would have time to finish the test. A problem toward the end of the test clued me in on how to solve a problem that had stumped me earlier in the test, so I went back and corrected that previous answer. Then there were those three 99th percentile scores as a high-school sophomore that I’ve already mentioned. When I learned that my reading speed was so slow compared to others, I realized that my true aptitudes (minus the visual handicap) must be well within the top one percent on each of the three tests.
Jacobsen: Any noteworthy or pivotal moments in the midst of early life in school, in public, with friends, or with family?
Hoeflin: In the seventh grade I suddenly started creating crossword puzzles and mazes, a harbinger of my later creation of the two tests that appeared in Omni magazine in April 1985 and in April 1990. I also collected lists of fundamental things such as independent countries of the world, the Western Roman emperors, the chemical elements, the planets and their moons, etc., in keeping with my much earlier childhood ambition to know everything. If you can’t know everything, then at least know the basic concepts for important subjects like geography, history, chemistry, astronomy, etc. These lists were a harbinger of my current multi-volume treatise on categories.
Jacobsen: Were there early aptitude tests of ability for you? What were the scores and sub-test scores if any? Potentially, this is connected to an earlier question.
Hoeflin: The only other test I should mention is the Concept Mastery Test. Lewis Terman collected a group of 1,528 California school children in grades 1 through 12 with IQs in the 135 to 200 range. To test their abilities as adults he and his colleagues constructed two 190-problem tests covering mostly vocabulary and general knowledge, which are easy problems to construct but are known to correlate well with general intelligence, the first test (Form A) administered to his group in 1939-1940 and the second one (Form B, latter called Form T) in 1950-52. About 954 members of his group tried the first one and I think 1,024 tried the second test. But Terman made the second test much easier than the first in order to make it easier to compare his group to much less intelligent groups such as Air Force captains. So the Mensa (98th percentile) cut-off would be a raw score of about 78 out of 190 on the first test and about 125 out of 190 on the second. I was editor for the Triple Nine Society (minimum requirement: 99.9 percentile) for a few years starting in 1979, and some members sent me copies of the two CMT tests so I could test TNS members. Since the CMT tests were untimed, I was not handicapped by the speed factor. Compared to Terman’s gifted group I reached the top one percent on both tests. According to Terman’s scaling of Form A, my raw score of 162.5 would be equivalent to an IQ of 169.4 (assuming a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16 IQ points), where an IQ of 168.3 would be equivalent to the 99.999 percentile or one-in-100,000 in rarity. By comparing adult CMT IQs with childhood Stanford-Binet IQs for Terman’s group, I calculated that my adult 169.4 IQ would be equivalent to a childhood IQ of 192. The one-in-a-million level on the two tests (the 99.9999 percentile) would be about 176 IQ on the CMT and 204 IQ on the Stanford-Binet, respectively.
The Guinness Book of World Records abandoned its “Highest IQ” entry in 1989 because the new editor thought (correctly) that it is impossible to compare people’s IQs successfully at world-record level. The highest childhood IQ I know of was that of Alicia Witt, who had a mental age of 20 at the age of 3. Even if she had been 3 years 11 months old, this would still amount to an IQ of over 500! At the age of 7, she played the super-genius sister of the hero in the 1984 movie Dune. On a normal (Gaussian) curve such an IQ would be impossible since an IQ of 201 or so would be equivalent to a rarity of about one-in-7-billion, the current population of the Earth. But it is well known to psychometricians that childhood IQs using the traditional method of mental age divided by chronological age fail to conform to the normal curve at high IQ levels. The Stanford-Binet hid this embarrassing fact in its score interpretation booklet (which I found a copy of in the main library of the New York Public Library) by not awarding any IQs above 169, leaving the space for higher IQs blank! The CMT avoids the embarrassment of awarding IQs of 500 or more by having a maximum possible IQ on Form A (the harder of the two CMTs) of 181. Leta Speyer and Marilyn vos Savant, both of whom I had dated for a time, had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having world-record IQs of 196 and of 228, respectively, Marilyn having displaced Leta in the 1986 edition. Leta felt that the 228 IQ of Marilyn was fake, but I was aware that these childhood scores could go well beyond 200 IQ because they fail to conform to the normal curve that Francis Galton had hypothesized as the shape of the intelligence curve in his seminal book Hereditary Genius (first edition 1869, second edition 1892). I was unable to contact Alicia Witt to see if she would be interested in joining the Mega Society. I should note that the three key founders of the ultra-high-IQ societies (99.9 percentile or above) were Chris Harding, Kevin Langdon, and myself. Harding founded his first such society in 1974, Langdon in 1978, and myself in 1982. Mensa, the granddaddy of all high-IQ societies with a 98th percentile minimum requirement, was founded in 1945 or 1946 by Roland Berrill and L. L Ware, and Intertel, with a 99th percentile minimum requirement, was founded in 1966 or 1967 by Ralph Haines. I don’t care to quibble about the precise dates that Mensa and Intertel were founded, so I have given two adjacent dates for each. In its article “High IQ Societies” Wikipedia lists just 5 main high-IQ societies: Mensa, Intertel, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society (minimum percentile requirements: 98, 99, 99.9, 99.997, and 99.9999, respectively; or one-in 50, one-in-100, one-in-1,000, one-in-30,000, and one-in-1,000,000; dates founded: roughly 1945, 1966, 1979, 1982, and 1982; founders: Berrill and Ware, Haines, Kevin Langdon, Ronald K. Hoeflin, and Ronald K. Hoeflin, respectively.
Jacobsen: Perhaps, we can run down the timeline of the six societies in this part with some subsequent questions: Prometheus Society (1982), Mega Society (1982), Top One Percent Society (1989), One-in-a-Thousand Society (1992), Epimetheus Society (2006), and Omega Society (2006). What was the inspiration for the Mega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?
Hoeflin: Kevin Langdon had a list of 600 or so people who had qualified for his Four Sigma Society from the 25,000 Omni readers who tried his LAIT (Langdon Adult Intelligence Test) that appeared in Omni in 1979. Four Sigma was given a cut-off of four standard deviations above the mean, which on a normal curve would be about one-in-30,000 in rarity or the 99.997 percentile. So approximately one-thirtieth of them should have been qualified for a one-in-a-million society. I suggested to him that he might ask the top 20 scorers if they’d like to form the nucleus of a one-in-a-million society, but he evidently thought this cut-off was too high to be practical. So when he let his Four Sigma Society languish, I decided to start Prometheus as a replacement for it, with the Mega Society as a follow-through on my suggestion to him about starting a one-in-a-million society, where “mega” means, of course, “million,” indicating how many people each member would be expected to exceed in intelligence. With slightly over 7 billion people, there would be a pool of about 7,000 potential Mega Society members, or slightly less if we exclude young children. I knew of a statistical method by which several very high scores from several tests could be combined to equal a one-in-a-million standard, as if the several tests constituted a single gigantic test. So I accepted members using this statistical method until my Mega Test appeared in Omni in April 1985. I put the cut-off at a raw score of 42 out of 48 initially, but then increased this to 43 after getting a larger sample. The test was eventually withdrawn from official use for admission to the Mega Society because some psychiatrist maliciously published a lot of answers online that others could search out and copy. At this time my other test, the Titan Test, is the only one that the Mega Society will accept, again at a raw score of 43 out of 48.
Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Prometheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?
Hoeflin: The Prometheus Society, as mentioned above, was intended as a replacement for the Four Sigma Society, which Langdon had allowed to languish. Prometheus was a figure in Greek mythology who was punished by the gods for giving fire to humans. I told Kevin, half in jest, that I was stealing his idea for the Four Sigma Society from him like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods! On my Mega and Titan Test, the qualifying score for Prometheus is a raw score of 36 out of 48, roughly equivalent to a rarity of one-in-30,000 or the 99.997 percentile, the same as Four Sigma’s cut-off, i.e., a minimum qualifying score.
Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Top One Percent Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?
Hoeflin: I wanted to make a living publishing journals for high-IQ societies. I initially was able to do so as the editor for the Triple Nine Society, for which I was paid just $1 per month per member for each monthly journal I put out. When I started as editor in late 1979, there were only about 50 members, but once Kevin’s test appeared in Omni the number of members swelled to about 750. With $750 per month, I could put out a journal and still have enough left over to live on, since my monthly rent was just $75 thanks to New York City’s rent laws. When Kevin heard that I was able to do this, he was not amused, since he thought the editorship should be an unpaid position. So I started the Top One Percent Society from people who had taken my Mega Test in Omni in April 1985 and my Titan Test in April 1990, thus removing myself from any disputes with Kevin or other members of the Triple Nine Society. I liked being self-employed rather than work as a librarian, which had been my profession from 1969 to 1985, because difficulties with higher-ups in the library field could crop up if there were personality conflicts.
Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the One-in-a-Thousand Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?
Hoeflin: I started the One-in-a-Thousand Society when income from my Top One Percent Society started to seem insufficient, even when I put out two journals per month rather than one for the Top One Percent Society. The third journal per month was a bit more hectic, but within my capacity.
Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Epimetheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?
Hoeflin: In Greek mythology, Epimetheus was a brother to Prometheus. I’d let the Prometheus and Mega societies fall into the control of other people, so I decided to create new societies at their same cut-offs but with different names and under my control. I don’t recall the motivation for founding Epimetheus, since starting in 1997 I qualified for Social Security Disability payments due to my poor vision and low income, and that completely solved all my financial worries, even when my rent gradually crept up from $75 to $150 from 1997 to around 2003. It is now permanently frozen at $150 a month due to an agreement with an earlier landlord, who wanted the City to give him permission to install luxury apartments where I live, for which he could charge $2,000 to $4,000 a month due to the proximity to Times Square, which is just ten minutes’ walk away. I think that the Prometheus Society was restricting the tests it accepted to just a very small number of traditional supervised IQ tests, excluding unsupervised amateur-designed tests like mine. I wanted my tests to still serve a practical purpose at the Prometheus and Mega cut-offs.
Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Omega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?
Hoeflin: Chris Harding of Australia was forever founding new high-IQ societies with new names but whose existence was largely known only to him and the people he awarded memberships to. He founded an Omega Society at the one-in-3,000,000 cut-off, but I assumed after several years of hearing nothing about it that it must be defunct, so I decided to call my new one-in-a-million society the Omega Society, since “Omega” seemed a nice twin word for “Mega” just as “Epimetheus” served as a twin word for “Prometheus.” Chris wrote to me about this appropriation of his society’s name and I explained my reason for adopting it. He offered no further complaint about it.
Jacobsen: What were the developments of each society over time?
Hoeflin: I decided to devote my full-time attention to a massive multi-volume opus titled “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” of which I’d published a couple of one-volume versions in 2004 and 2005. When I noticed that Samuel Johnson’s great unabridged dictionary of 1755 could now be bought for just $9.99 from Kindle, the computer-readable format that avoids paper printing, I decided I could make an affordable multi-volume treatment of my “Encyclopedia of Categories.” I’d also discovered that quotations from collections of quotations could be analyzed in terms of my theory of categories, giving me a virtually inexhaustible source of examples considering how many quotation books there are out there. So I sold the four societies that were still under my control to Hernan Chang, an M.D. physician living in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as all of my IQ tests. Although, he lets me score the latter for him and collect the fee, since he is too busy to handle that. I began my multi-volume opus in late 2013 and believe I can complete a 10-volume version by the end of this year, 2019. I was initially aiming at a 13-volume version, in harmony with the number of basic categial niches I employ, but it would take until early 2021 to complete the extra 3 volumes, so I’ll publish a 10-volume version in January of 2020. The year 2020 as a publication date appealed to me because of its irony, given that my visual acuity falls far short of 20/20, and the year 2020 rolls around only once in eternity, if we stick to the same calendar. I could still put out more volumes in later editions if I felt so inclined, but I let readers voice an opinion on the optimum number of volumes.
Jacobsen: What was the intellectual productivity and community of the societies based on self-reports of members? What have been the harshest critiques of high IQ societies from non-members, whether qualifying or not?
Hoeflin: I think the focus of the higher-IQ societies has been on communication with other members through the societies’ journals. I never tried to keep track of the members’ “intellectual productivity.” As for harsh critiques of the high-IQ societies, the only thing that comes to mind is Esquire magazine’s November 1999 so-called “Genius” issue. It focused on four high-IQ-society members, including myself. I never read the issue except for the page about myself, and it took me two weeks to get up enough nerve to read even that page. I was told by others that the entire issue was basically a put-down of high-IQ societies and their members, although people said the treatment of me was the mildest of the four. I did notice that they wanted a photo of me that looked unattractive, me using a magnifying glass to read. I suggested a more heroic picture, such as me with one of my cats, but they kept taking pictures of me peering through that magnifying glass in a rather unflattering pose, with zero interest in alternative poses. Kevin Langdon was sarcastic about our willingness to expose ourselves to such unflattering treatment. (He was not among the four that they covered in that issue.)
Jacobsen: What have been the overall results of the intended goals of the provision of an intellectual community of like-gifted people who, in theory, may associate more easily with one another? I remain aware of skepticism around this idea, which may exist in the realm of the naive.
Hoeflin: I had found that I could not interact with members of Mensa, who generally treated me as a nonentity. I was also very shy and unable to put myself forward socially in Mensa groups. At the higher-IQ levels, however, I had the prominent role of editor and even founder, which made it possible for others to approach me and break through that shyness of mine. So I did manage to meet and interact with quite a few people by virtue of my participation in the high-IQ societies, although the ultimate outcome seems to be that I will probably end my life in total isolation from personal friends except a few people who reach out to me by phone or email, as in the present question-and-answer email format. As for other people, they will have to tell you their own stories, since people are quite diverse, even at very high IQ levels.
Jacobsen: Why were the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society kept separate from the Lewis Terman Society? Why were the Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society placed under the aegis of the Lewis Terman Society? Also, what is the Lewis Terman Society?
Hoeflin: I think Hernan Chang adopted the name “The Hoeflin Society” in preference to “The Terman Society” as an umbrella term for the four societies he purchased from me.
Jacobsen: What have been the merits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions?
Hoeflin: Speaking personally, I have lost almost all interest in the high-IQ societies these days, although I am still a nominal, non-participatory member of several of them. One group I joined recently as a passive member named the “Hall of Sophia” unexpectedly offered to publish my multi-volume book in any format I like for free. The founder had taken my Mega or Titan test earlier this year (February 2019) and did quite well on it, and was sufficiently impressed to classify me as one of the 3 most distinguished members of his (so far) 28-member society. I was going to send out my book for free as email attachments fo people listed in the Directory of American Philosophers as well as to any high-IQ-society members who might be interested. So for me, the one remaining merit of the high-IQ societies would be to have a potential audience for my philosophical opus.
Jacobsen: When did you begin to lose interest or become disillusioned, in part, in high-IQ societies? My assumption: not simply an instantaneous decision in 2019.
Hoeflin: Editing high-IQ-society journals from 1979 onwards for many years, at first as a hobby and then as a livelihood, kept me interested in the high-IQ societies. I gave up the editing completely around 2009. Thirty years is plenty of time to become jaded. Getting Social Security Disability payments in 1997 removed any financial incentive for publishing journals. Over the years I’d travelled to such destinations as California and Texas and Illinois for high-IQ-society meetings, not to mention meetings here in New York City, when I had sufficient surplus income, but all things peter out eventually.
Jacobsen: What have been the notable failures of the high-IQ societies?
Hoeflin: There was actually talk of a commune-like community for high-IQ people, but after I saw how imperious some high-IQ leaders like Kevin Langdon were, this would be like joining Jim Jones for a trip to Guyana–insane! That’s hyperbole, of course. Langdon actually ridiculed the followers of Jim Jones for their stupidity in following such a homicidal and suicidal leader, not to mention his idiotic ideas. Langdon advocates a libertarian philosophy, but in person he is very controlling. I guess we just have to muddle through on our own, especially if we have some unique gift that we have to cultivate privately, not communally. Langdon often ridiculed my early attempts to develop a theory of categories, but I’m very confident in the theory now that I have worked at it for so long. Human beings tend to organize their thoughts along the same systematic lines, just like birds instinctively know how to build nests, spiders to build webs, and bees to build honeycombs. My analyses are so new and startling that I’m sure they will eventually attract attention. If I’d been an epigone of Langdon, I’d never have managed to develop my theory to its present marvellous stage.
Jacobsen: With the Flynn Effect, does this change the norms of the Mega Test and the Titan Test used for admissions purposes in some societies at the highest ranges?
Hoeflin: A lot of people suddenly started qualifying for the Mega Society, perhaps from copying online sources or perhaps from the test suddenly coming to the attention of a lot of very smart people. So initially higher scores on that test were required and then the test was abandoned entirely as an admission test for the Mega Society. Terman found that his subjects achieved gradually higher IQ scores on his verbal tests the older they got. One theory is that as people gradually accumulate a larger vocabulary and general knowledge (crystallized intelligence) their fluid intelligence, especially on math-type tests, gradually declines, so that if one relies on both types of intelligence, then your intelligence would remain relatively stable until extreme old age. There has been no spurt in extremely high scores on the Titan Test, however.
Jacobsen: What would be the Holy Grail of psychometric measurements, e.g., a non-verbal/culture fair 5-sigma or 6-sigma test?
Hoeflin: The main problem with extremely difficult tests is that few people would be willing to attempt them, so norming them would be impossible. I was astonished that the people who manage the SAT have actually made the math portion of that test so easy that even a perfect score is something like the 91st percentile. Why they would do such an idiotic thing I have no idea. Terman did the same thing with his second Concept Mastery Test, so that a Mensa-level performance on that test would be a raw score of 125 out of 190, whereas a Mensa-level performance on the first CMT was 78 out of 190. Twenty members of his gifted group had raw scores of 180 to 190 on the second CMT whereas no member of his group had a raw score higher than 172 out of 190 on the first CMT. His reason was to be able to compare his gifted group with more average groups such as Air Force captains, who scored only 60 out of 190 on the second test, less than half as high as Mensa members. A lot of amateur-designed intelligence tests have such obscure and difficult problems that I am totally unable to say if those tests have any sense to them or not. Perhaps games like Go and Chess are the only ways to actually compare the brightest people at world-record levels. But such tests yield to ever-more-careful analysis by the competitors, so that one is competing in the realm of crystallized intelligence (such as knowledge of chess openings) rather than just fluid intelligence. Even the brightest people have specialized mental talents that help them with some tests but not with others, like people who compete in the Olympic Decathlon, where some competitors will do better in some events and others in other events, the winner being the one with the best aggregate score. General intelligence means that even diverse tests like verbal, spatial, and numerical ones do have some positive intercorrelation with each other–they are not entirely independent of each other. The best tests select problems that correlate best with overall scores. But few if any of the amateur-designed tests have been subjected to careful statistical analysis. Some people did subject my Titan Test to such statistical analysis and found that it had surprisingly good correlations with standard intelligence tests, despite its lack of supervision or time limit.
Jacobsen: Other than some of the work mentioned. What other test creators seem reliable in their production of high-IQ tests and societies with serious and legitimate intent? Those who you respect. You have the historical view here – in-depth in information and in time. I don’t.
Hoeflin: I think Kevin Langdon’s tests are very well made and intelligent, but he tends to focus on math-type problems. Christopher Harding, by contrast, focuses on verbal problems and does poorly in math-type problems. For international comparisons across languages, I guess one would have to use only math-type problems, as I did in my Hoeflin Power Test, which collected the best math-type problems from the three previous tests (Mega, Titan, and Ultra). But English is virtually a universal language these days, so perhaps verbal tests that focus on English or perhaps on Indo-European roots could be used for international tests, except that Indo-European languages constitute only 46% of all languages, by population. I think Chinese will have difficulty becoming culturally dominant internationally because the Chinese language is too difficult and obscure for non-Chinese to mess with.
Jacobsen: Were the societies helpful as sounding boards for the Encyclopedia of Categories?
Hoeflin: I used high-IQ-society members as guinea pigs to develop my intelligence tests, but my work on categories I have pursued entirely independently, except for the precursors I rely on, notably the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper (1891-1972), who taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1919 to 1958. Oddly enough, in his final book titled Concept and Quality (1967) he used as a central organizing principle for his metaphysics what he called “the purposive act,” of which he said on page 17: “It is the act associated with intelligence”!!! I simply elaborated this concept from 1982 when I first read Concept and Quality onward, elaborating it into a set of thirteen categories by means of which virtually any complete human thought or action, as in a quotation, can be organized. In my introductory chapter, which currently traces the development of my theory from William James last book, A Pluralistic Universe, to the present, I now plan to trace the thirteen categories not just to the Greeks and Hebrews but back to animal life and ultimately back to the Big Bang, breaking the stages of its development into 25 discrete ones including my own contributions toward the end. I may begin with Steven Weinberg’s book The First Three Minutes and end with Paul Davies kindred book, The Last Three Minutes, if I can manage to extract convincing 13-category examples from each of these books.
Jacobsen: How was librarian work helpful in the development of a skill set necessary for independent psychometric work and general intelligence test creation?
Hoeflin: It was mostly helpful to me because I could work part-time during the last ten years of my 15 or 16 years as a librarian, which gave me the leisure for independent hobbies, thought, and research.
Jacobsen: What have been the demerits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions?
Hoeflin: There tends to be a lot of arrogance to be found among members of the high-IQ societies, so charm is typically not one of their leading virtues. They generally assume that virtually everyone they speak to is stupider than they are.
Jacobsen: How can members be more humble, show more humility? Also, what are their leading virtues?
Hoeflin: I think personalities are largely inborn and can’t be changed much. Perhaps there should be sister societies, analogous to college sororities, for women who have an interest in socializing with high-IQ guys for purposes of dating and mating. In the ultra-high-IQ societies, women constitute only about 6% of the total membership. (Parenthetically, if you look at the Wikipedia list of 100 oldest living people, one usually finds about 6 men and 94 women.) In Mensa, the percentage of women typically ranges from 31% to 38%.
Jacobsen: How many publications come from these societies? What are the names of the publications and the editors in their history? What ones have been the most voluminous in their output – the specific journal? Why that journal?
Hoeflin: Each society generally has a journal that it tries to publish on a regular basis. Kevin Langdon puts out Noesis, the journal for the Mega Society, about twice per year. I also get journals from Prometheus and Triple Nine and Mensa. The four societies Hernan Chang operates all function entirely online, and I have never seen any of their communications. Even the journals I get I only glance at, never read all the way through. Due to my very slow reading speed, I tend to focus my reading on books that seem worthwhile from which to collect examples for my “Encyclopedia of Categories.”
Jacobsen: Before delving into the theories, so a surface analysis, what defines a faux genius? What defines a real genius to you? Or, perhaps, what different definitions sufficiently describe a fake and a true genius for non-experts or a lay member of the general public – to set the groundwork for Part Three?
Hoeflin: I would say that genius requires high general intelligence combined with high creativity. How high? In his book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton put the lowest grade of genius at a rarity of one in 4,000 and the highest grade at a rarity of one in a million. Scientists love to quantify in order to give their subject at least the appearance of precision. One in 4,000 would ensure one’s being noticed in a small city, while one in a million would ensure one’s being noticed in an entire nation of moderate size.
Jacobsen: By your estimation or analysis, any validity to Professor Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence with practical intelligence, creative intelligence, and analytical intelligence?
Hoeflin: I like Sternberg’s attempt at analyzing intelligence, but clearly just three factors seems a bit skimpy for a really robust theory.
Jacobsen: Any validity to Multiple Intelligences Theory of Professor Howard Gardner with musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and teaching-pedagogical intelligences?
Hoeflin: Here we have a more robust set of factors, but Gardner fails to show how his factors cohere within a single theory.
Jacobsen: Any validity to general intelligence, or g, of the late Charles Spearman?
Hoeflin: General intelligence was based on the fact that apparently quite diverse forms of intelligence such as verbal, spatial, and numerical have positive correlations between each pair of factors, presumably based on some underlying general intelligence.
Jacobsen: Amongst the community of experts, what is the general opinion on the three main theories of intelligence listed before? What one holds the most weight? Why that one?
Hoeflin: These are three theories in search of an overarching theory of intelligence. My guess is that the so-called “experts” lack the intelligence so far to create a really satisfactory theory of intelligence, perhaps analogous to the problem with finding a coherent theory of superstrings.
Jacobsen: Do you identify as a genius? If so, why, and in what ways? If not, why not?
Hoeflin: I think my theory of categories shows genuine genius. It even amazes me, as if I were just a spectator as the theory does its work almost independently of my efforts.
Jacobsen: Any personal opinions on the state of mainstream intelligence testing and alternative high-range intelligence testing now?
Hoeflin: I’m not up on the current state of intelligence testing. I do feel that it has focused way too much on the average range of intelligence, say from 50 to 150 IQ, i.e., from the bottom one-tenth of one percent to the top one-tenth of one percent. Testing students in this range is where the money is in academia. It’s like music: all the money to be made is in creating pop music, which is typically of mediocre quality. Background music for movies is probably as close as music comes these days to being of high quality, presumably because there is money to be made from the movie studios in such music. I saw a movie recently called “Hangover Square,” which came out in 1945. The title is unappealing and the movie itself is a totally unsuspenseful melodrama about a homicidal maniac whose identity is revealed right from the start. The one amazing thing about the movie was that the composer, Bernard Herman, composed an entire piano concerto for the maniac to purportedly compose and perform, with appropriate homicidal traits in the music to reflect the deranged soul of the leading character, the maniac. One rarely sees such brilliant musical talent thrown at such a horrible film. So I guess genius can throw itself into things even when the audience it is aimed at is of extremely mediocre quality. Maybe intelligence tests, even when they are aimed at mediocre students, can show glints of genius. The fact that I could attain the 99th percentile on tests aimed at average high-school students despite my slow reading due to visual impairment suggests that some psychometrician (or group of psychometricians) must have been throwing their creativity and intelligence into their work in an inspired way that smacks of true genius!
Jacobsen: Do the statistical rarities at the extreme sigmas have higher variance between males and females? If so, why? If not, why not? Also, if so, how is this reflected in subtests rather than simple composite scores?
Hoeflin: By “variance between males and females,” I presume you are alluding to the fact that there tend to be more men at very high scores than women. This is especially obvious in spatial problems, as well as kindred math problems, presumably due to men running around hunting wild game in spatially complex situations while women sat by the fireside cooking whatever meat the men managed to procure. But it is also true that men outperform women on verbal tests. On the second Concept Mastery Test, a totally verbal test, of the 20 members of Terman’s gifted group who scored from 180 to 190, the ceiling to the test, 16 were men but only 4 were women. This is a puzzling phenomenon, given women’s propensity for verbalizing. Perhaps chasing game involves verbal communication, too, so that nature rewards the better verbalizers among men in life-or-death situations. Warfare as well as hunting for game probably has a significant role in weeding out the unfit verbalizers among men.
Jacobsen: Following from the last question, if so, what does this imply for the statistical rarity for apparent and, potentially, actual IQ scores of females who score at the extreme sigmas of 3, 4, and 5, or higher?
Hoeflin: It obviously would be possible to breed women eugenically to increase the percentage of them with very high IQ scores. Even now, there are more women graduating from law school than men in the United States, which suggests no deficit in verbal intelligence at the high end of the scale. Although, there may be other reasons why men of high verbal intelligence avoid law as a career compared to women. Maybe, they are drawn away by other lucrative careers, such as business or medicine.
Jacobsen: In the administration of alternative tests for the higher ranges of general intelligence, individuals may know the test creator, even on intimate terms as a close colleague and friend. They may take the test a second time, a third time, a fourth time, or more. The sample size of the test may be very small. There may be financial conflicts of interest for the test creator or test taker. There may be various manipulations to cheat on the test. There may be pseudonyms used for the test to appear as if a first attempt at the alternative test. There are other concerns. How do you reduce or eliminate social conflicts of interest?
Hoeflin: Some people have used pseudonyms to take my tests when they were afraid I would not give them a chance to try the test a second or third time. There is not much incentive to score very high on these tests, except perhaps the prestige of joining a very high-IQ society. People cheat on standardized college admission tests, as we know from news reports, by getting other people to take the tests for them, for example. Considering how expensive colleges have become these days, my guess is that they will go the way of the dodo bird eventually, and people will get their education through computers rather than spending a fortune in a college. One guy cheated on my Mega Test by getting members of a think tank in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area to help him. He was pleased that I gave him a perfect score of 48 out of 48. He admitted cheating to Marilyn vos Savant, who informed me, so I disqualified his score. This was before my Mega Test appeared in Omni. Why he wanted credit for a perfect score that he did not deserve is beyond my understanding. I’d be more proud of a slightly lower score that I had actually earned. Another person has kept trying my tests, despite a fairly high scoring fee of $50 per attempt. I finally told him to stop taking the tests. His scores were not improving, so his persistence seemed bizarre.
Jacobsen: The highest score on the Mega Test on the first attempt by a single individual with a single name rather than a single individual with multiple names was Marilyn vos Savant at 46 out of 48. Similarly, with other test creators, and other tests, there were several attempts at the same test by others. Do the multiple test attempts and then the highest of those attempts asserted as the score for the test taker present an issue across the higher sigma ranges and societies?
Hoeflin: Some European guy did achieve a perfect score on the Mega Test eventually, about 20 years after the test first came out in 1985. The test is no longer used by any high-IQ societies that I know of due to the posting of mostly correct answers online by a malicious psychiatrist. He probably needed to see a psychiatrist to figure out what snapped in his poor head to do such a thing. I guess it’s a profession that attracts people with psychological problems that they are trying to understand and perhaps solve.
Jacobsen: What were the final sample sizes of the Mega Test and the Titan Test at the height of their prominence? How do these compare to other tests? What would be a reasonable sample size to tap into 4-sigma and higher ranges of intelligence with low margins of error and decent accuracy?
Hoeflin: A bit over 4,000 people tried the Mega Test within a couple of years of its appearance and about 500 people tried the Titan Test within a similar time period. Langdon’s LAIT test is said to have had 25,000 participants. His test was multiple choice, whereas mine were not. A multiple-choice test is easier to guess on than a non-multiple-choice test. My tests were normed by looking at the previous test scores that participants reported and then trying to create a distribution curve for my tests what would jibe with the distribution on previously-taken tests. So I did not need to test a million or more people to norm my tests up to fairly high levels of ability.
Jacobsen: What are the ways in which test-takers try to cheat on tests? I mean the full gamut. I intend this as a means by which prospective test takers and society creators can arm themselves and protect themselves from cheaters, charlatans, and frauds, or worse. Same for the general public in guarding against them, whenever someone might read this.
Hoeflin: If people’s wrong answers are too often identical with one another and out of sync with typical wrong answers, that is a clue that they are copying from one another or from some common source.
Jacobsen: Why do test takers use pseudonyms? How common is this practice among these types of test-takers? It seems as if a brazen and blatant attempt to take a test twice, or more, and then claim oneself as smart as the higher score rather than the composite of two, or more, scores, or even simply the lower score of the two, or more, if the scores are not identical.
Hoeflin: I know of a group of 5 M.I.T. students who collaborated and gave themselves the collective name of Tetazoo. There was also a professor at Caltech who tried the test but did not want his score publicized so he used the pseudonym Ron Lee. In both cases, the score just barely hit the one-in-a-million mark of 43 right out of 48. One person scored 42 right and wanted to try again so he used a pseudonym and managed to reach 47 right out of 48 on his second attempt.
Jacobsen: What have been and continue to be concerns for test creators at the highest sigmas such as yourself or others, whether active or retired? This is more of a timeline into the present question of the other suite of concerns.
Hoeflin: I do not know what are the main concerns of test designers, past or present, other than myself. I was fortunate to have Triple Nine members as guinea pigs to try out my trial tests, so I could weed out the less satisfactory problems. One could usually tell just by looking at a problem whether it would be a good one or not, but the inspiration to come up with good problems would involve steady effort over the course of a year or so, yielding for me on average about one good problem per week, plus about four not too good problems per week.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-19.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-19.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-19>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-19>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 19: Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-19.
*I have been informed Christopher “Chris.” Harding died this month.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Christopher Harding is the Founder of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), and a Member of OlympIQ Society and the ESOTERIQ Society. He was born on August 4, 1944 in Clovelly Private Nursing Home at Keynsham, Somerset, English, United Kingdom. He has never married. He arrived in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, in the morning of October 11, 1952. He remains there to this day. He has held memberships with the Eugenics Society (1963-1964), the British Astronomical Association (1964-1969), the International Heuristic Association (1970-1974), the Triple Nine Society (1979-1990 & 1992-1995), the 606 Society (1981-1982), the Omega Society (1983-1991), the Prometheus Society (1984-1990), the International Biographical Association (1985-1990), Geniuses of Distinction Society (1986-1988), the American Biographical Institute Research Association (1986-1990), the Cincinnatus Society (1987-1990), the 4 Sigma Group of Societies [incorporating all groups having 4 Sigma plus cut off points ] (1988-1990), The Minerva Society [Formerly the Phoenix Society] (1988-1990), The Confederation of Chivalry (1988-1990), the Planetary Society (1989-1990), Maison Internationale des Intellectuels [M.I.D.I.] (1989-1990), TOPS HIQ Society (1989-1990), the Cleo Society (1990-1991), the Camelopard Society (1991-1992), the Hoeflin One-in-a-Thousand Society (1992-1993), the Pi Society (also like the Mega Society for persons with 1 in one million I.Q. level (5th April 2001 – 2002), INTERTEL [The International Legion of Intelligence] (June 1971-March 2010), The Hundred (1972-1977), the New Zealand National Mensa (1980-1982), and the Single Gourmet (1989-1991), among numerous other memberships, awards, and achievements (For the most recent or up-to-date information, please see the ESOTERIQ Society listing: https://esoteriqsociety.com/esotericists/esoteriq-id06/); growing up; a sense of the family legacy; the family background; experience with peers and schoolmates; qualifications; purpose of intelligence tests; high intelligence; the geniuses of the past; the greatest geniuses in history; a genius from a profoundly intelligent person; profound intelligence necessary for genius; some work experiences; job path; the idea of the gifted and geniuses; the God concept or gods idea; science; some of the tests taken; the range of the scores; ethical philosophy; social philosophy; economic philosophy; political philosophy; metaphysics; philosophical system; meaning in life; meaning; an afterlife; the mystery and transience of life; love; National Enquirer; the gap between cognitive abilities and record of employment; living situation without a record of work; alone; the professionals test someone just shy of 1-year-old; parents react to being called “liars to their faces”; genius; intelligence tests; publications or periodicals; artificial constructs; the factors making genius; God as human idealism; the Concept of God; science; the areas most affected by this despoilment; the areas least affected by this despoilment; 6-sigma; the ESOTERIQ Society; conclusions; and the information in Quantum Physics.
Keywords: Christopher Harding, ESOTERIQ Society, Feynman, genius, God, individualistic, Intelligence, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, Leonardo da Vinci, Quantum, Quantum Physics, science.
On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time?
Chris Harding: Where we came from and who we were.
Jacobsen: Have these stories helped provide a sense of an extended self or a sense of the family legacy?
Harding: They were depressing as I could not live up to them.
Jacobsen: What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Harding: Varied. Mostly titled aristocracy and connections to Royal Houses.
Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?
Harding: Non-existent.
Jacobsen: What have been some professional certifications, qualifications, and trainings earned by you?
Harding: None.
Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests for you?
Harding: They are something on the side.
Jacobsen: When was high intelligence discovered for you?
Harding: 2 days before my first birthday. My parents had me tested. When speaking of me they were called liars to their faces.
Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked, vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy – many, not all.
Harding: I recall a quote from the Journal of the British Eugenics Society. “They want the Genius, but not its loathsome owner.”
Jacobsen: Who seem like the greatest geniuses in history to you?
Harding: “Leonardo, complex solitary, a Master Genius in an age of Genius.” In his life, it was said of him,“It is beyond the power of nature to create another man like Leonardo,” yet his final recorded words were “I have failed mankind and I have failed God.”
Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person?
Harding: Genius is creative ability of the highest possible kind.
Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?
Harding: No, Genius implies the narrowing of intelligence.
Jacobsen: What have been some work experiences and jobs held by you?
Harding: Absolutely nothing at all.
Jacobsen: Why pursue this particular job path?
Harding: I never did.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them?
Harding: They march to the beat of their own drum.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or gods idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?
Harding: God is purely human idealism; largely what you can’t attain. The Concept is set beyond what can be considered.
Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you?
Harding: Science has become despoiled with its obsession with consensus and ignorance of the paradigm shift. Some one point Einstein to a newspaper article “One hundred against Einstein” to which he replied “It would only take one”. Less and less.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations) for you?
Harding: Several times scoring over plus six sigma.
Jacobsen: What is the range of the scores for you? The scores earned on alternative intelligence tests tend to produce a wide smattering of data points rather than clusters, typically.
Harding: Ceiling limitations were the biggest problem; in which case I could finish them well and truly before the time limit was up. For these the test was useless.
Jacobsen: What ethical philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Harding: None.
Jacobsen: What social philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Harding: None.
Jacobsen: What economic philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Harding: Also none.
Jacobsen: What political philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Harding: Also none. If you join a political group, you wind up as an apologist for them!
Jacobsen: What metaphysics makes some sense to you, even the most workable sense to you?
Harding: None.
Jacobsen: What worldview-encompassing philosophical system makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?
Harding: None, philosophy is word juggling!
Jacobsen: What provides meaning in life for you?
Harding: There is no meaning in Dictionaries only associations with other words: Meaning in life is the same; you make the meanings.
Jacobsen: Is meaning externally derived, internally generated, both, or something else?
Harding: Meaning is only a PATTERN.
Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not?
Harding: The only afterlife [an oxymoron] is the “truth” in QUANTUM PHYSICS: Just as in Classical Physics energy and matter can not be destroyed only converted one into the other; in Quantum physics information can not be gained or lost, it some how just IS.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life?
Harding: It like everything else is BOUNDED. This is a condition of being defined.
Jacobsen: What is love to you?
Harding: Love is simply TRANSFERENCE [See Freud].
Jacobsen: What Royal Houses were the main connections with family?
Harding: Most prominent – French side.
Jacobsen: In the National Enquirer published on June 25, 1991, there was an article about a certain man with the “world’s highest IQ” who is a “jobless janitor.” What did this particular media attention do for you?
Harding: Nothing.
Jacobsen: I state the caveat of “absolutely nothing at all” as the response to the work experiences question. It is reported that you have worked in menial jobs and had stretches of unemployment, e.g., in the National Enquirer. What explains the gap between the cognitive abilities and the cognitive demands of the jobs for you? Alternatively, what explains the gap between cognitive abilities and record of employment for you?
Harding: Unknown.
Jacobsen: How did you sustain yourself in terms of living situation without a record of work?
Harding: Family.
Jacobsen: Why the “non-existent” life with peers and schoolmates? Did you feel alone?
Harding: Violence and exclusion.
Jacobsen: How did the professionals test someone just shy of 1-year-old? It seems odd, even stranger than the 2-and-a-half-year-old, or thereabouts, cases entering Mensa International (or their national group).
Harding: Mental age in my case 3 years 4 months made that easy!
Jacobsen: How did your parents react to being called “liars to their faces” when ‘speaking of you’?
Harding: They were taken aback by this.
Jacobsen: Does this desire of cultures wanting genius while not wanting the genius create a toxic dichotomy in the general culture? Something to which only lip service is paid, while wanting to kill in former times, and ‘kill’ in modern times, the genius.
Harding: It comes from competitiveness [jack is equal to his master]. In many cultures submissiveness is considered politeness. That is considered standard in communication. It is why first world cultures see themselves as superior.
Jacobsen: As these intelligence tests have been a part of life before even 1-year-old, may I ask, what has been the life lesson from them for you?
Harding: Look, people see I.Q.’s as not valid above their own. Everybody does this. It is very noticeable that children asked who in their class is smartest will name themselves!
Jacobsen: As you recalled the quote from the Journal of the British Eugenics Society, I’m sure many will be interested now. What publications or periodicals do you continue to read now? What ones did you previously read and no longer do so?
Harding: No preference; I am a total generalist.
Jacobsen: With Leonardo da Vinci as “a Master Genius in an age of Genius,” do you think artificial constructs could fill the gap between genius seen before and unseen genius now, i.e., artificial constructs with the capabilities of the highest human genius?
Harding: They have provided little evidence they are going to solve this one: My Mother once said the process was ‘ant like’ rather than a G-function.
Jacobsen: What are the factors making genius “creative ability of the highest possible kind”? Other than the qualities inherent in ‘marching to the beat of their own drum.’
Harding: Genius by definition would be individualistic. As one person said to me, I was very `singular’.
Jacobsen: If “God is purely human idealism; largely what you can’t attain,” what are some exceptions to this thing one “largely… can’t attain” or the things attainable within this definition of God as human idealism?
Harding: What I meant was the problem lay beyond the nature of logical process. It is answerable in terms of the proof of the last theory of sets. But you still get back to the conclusion that if God exists he either is the Universe or does not exist.
You are still dealing with value judgments or in assigning names; which amounts to the same thing. My Brother agreed with me that the highest form of reasoning was EVALUATION. Since to invoke reason one must first evaluate a proposition.
Jacobsen: Is the setting of the “Concept… beyond what can be considered” a defense against formal knockdown critique of the Concept of God?
Harding: No.
Jacobsen: When did science begin this despoilment with the obsession with “consensus and ignorance”?
Harding: Always was there. In our own time many people use science to moralize, and science has become the new religion. This can’t be done of course. There is no bridge either between philosophy and religion.
Jacobsen: What are the areas most affected by this despoilment?
Harding: It is seen in notions of anthropomorphism with regard to climate change. Not so! The real cause is the Sun. Note, Astronomers had long ago pinned this down to Sun Spot Cycles. A new 11+ year Cycle began last year and rising temperatures have turned back. One Russian Woman Scientist predicts the onset of a period of dropping temperatures starting around 2030, though this figure is very uncertain!
Jacobsen: What are the areas least affected by this despoilment?
Harding: Human aging and Quantum Physics–much progress continues at the moment.
Jacobsen: What were the tests when scoring above 6-sigma several times?
Harding: Most of these I have forgotten. I’m 76 and most were over 30, 40 and up to over 75 years ago!
Jacobsen: For the ESOTERIQ Society, it states, “Christopher Harding (Australia): 197 on SBIS-Oxford-Analysis-New-Zealand in 1976.” What is the full name of the SBIS-Oxford-Analysis-New-Zealand, particularly the “SBIS” part?
Harding: Don’t know.
Jacobsen: While, fundamentally, dispensing with ethical philosophy, social philosophy, economic philosophy, political philosophy, and metaphysics, even philosophy as “word juggling” (!), I see some common points. One is science, though “less and less” with its despoilment, meaning as a “PATTERN” made by each person individually, an emphasis on some of Freud, “QUANTUM PHYSICS” in terms of “truth” with its preservation of information (neither gained nor lost), and the bounded nature of nature (including humans) as “a condition of being defined.” So, there is a there there. I have to ask, “What makes these conclusions more sound, at this time, to you than other possibilities?
Harding: Feynman once said no one understands the Quantum. And yet to further agree with his point “Quantum Superiority” has been proved for the D-Wave Orion Computer. I liken this to statements about the Aleph series in the mathematics of infinity theory.
Jacobsen: Any speculation as to why the information in Quantum Physics simply “IS”?
Harding: I once thought it through and concluded there was another stage beyond Quantum Physics. Simply IS would represent in turn a `single one’ off any general group of abstractions.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-18.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-18.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-18>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-18>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 18: Christopher Harding.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-18.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Cognitive abilities, Experimental tests, External validity, Fuzzy science, High range IQ tests, Hobby tests, IQ measurement, Norming methods, Predictive validity, Psychometric soundness, SLODR (Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns), Test design, Test invariance, Validity of self-report.
On High-Range Test Construction 17: Bob Williams, High Range IQ Tests – Are They Psychometrically Sound?
Preface: This manuscript [written in September 2020 - Ed. Note] is intended as a reply to questions relating to two articles in the journal Noesis (Mega Society journal). The questions to me were to simply ask for my thoughts on a couple of journal articles relating to tests that purport to measure IQ at ranges above those considered by professional IQ tests. I decided to render the “long” answer that is found below. I tried to cover the things that I have considered (over a period of years) relative to such tests. The answer has not been scrubbed for appearance or even the order of comments. These are simply my thoughts, with some mention of the various sources that have influenced my thinking about this category of tests.
Tests that claim IQ measurements at very high levels go by a number of names. I have traditionally called them hobby tests, because they are not designed by professionals and marketed by the companies that are dedicated to test instruments. These tests are also sometimes called high end tests, high range tests, power tests, and experimentaltests. I have selected the last of these, as I think there is little inference associated with that terminology.
After some thought, I have decided to put my conclusions before the body text. I don’t want anyone to be led to believe that I hold positions that might be implied, but incorrect.
Conclusions
There are obviously people who have cognitive abilities that are above the ceilings of professional tests.
Difficult tests can identify individuals who have very high intelligence. I doubt that anyone would argue that the Putnam Competition does not identify such people. In fact, it may be one of the very best detection vehicles available, despite its necessity for mathematics understanding. The obvious problems are that it works forsome, but not for others and it is not scaled to report IQ.
People with very high ability may be missed by a typical experimental test, for reasons of test item weighting that impacts broad abilities.
The rarity of people at IQ levels, above those of professional test ceilings, is the very thing that is the primary obstacle to creating a credible measurement in that range.
Scores above the ceilings of professional IQ tests are not convincing (not even close). Test designers do not know how to properly connect the scores to reliable reference points and they do not know what we should be measuring in high ranges (see my discussion of SLODR). [SLODR = Spearman’s Law of DiminishingReturns - Ed. Note]
High Range IQ Tests - Are they psychometrically sound?
Professional IQ tests (PT) are typically normed over ranges of ± 2.5 SD. A few go as high as + 3 and fewer still to + 4. Various tests have extended scoring ranges that are basically extrapolations. Hobby test designers have produced “high range” or “experimental” tests that claim very high ceilings. Many such tests are available on the internet and seem to be as popular as video games among some youngsters. These tests raise a number of topics and issues:
Understanding fuzzy science.
Is the norming method used valid?
Do these tests show both internal and external validity?
Is the self-report “feature” of norming valid?
Are the tests consistent with the expected design features of professional tests?
What should be measured? Psychometric g, or group factors? SLODR is the issue.
Is the test invariant with respect to the most salient groups?
Very long time limits versus long time limits.
Have factor loadings been balanced?
Measuring basic cognitive abilities, versus complex problem solving.
Have the statistical considerations been examined by a real expert?
Alternatives to meet the needs of exclusive clubs.
Understanding fuzzy science.
The whole discipline of cognitive science falls well outside of hard science (physics and chemistry and relatedstudies) and becomes a mixture of hard science tools (brain imaging and DNA analysis) and fuzzy science applications. We already know this, but for review, we are measuring intelligence, using an equal interval scale that isproduced, by manipulation, from an ordinal scale and then centered on an average of a small group of people that can vary from test to test, by calendar date, and between nations.
The impressive thing is that, after all of these imprecise maneuvers, we actually can get test results that can be shown to be meaningful and predictive of life outcomes. We must not lose sight of the fact that our measurementtechniques are a set of really fuzzy methods and are not in the category of measuring something with an interferometer or micrometer. Even in hard sciences, the instruments used tend to be accurate over a limited range and either stop or become distorted beyond those ranges, so people don’t make claims that a measurement is accurate when they know their peers are quite aware of what the instruments can deliver.
In the case of experimental tests we are operating in a range where the instruments in question have not been well-calibrated and are not used by professionals and are even probing into areas where the things being measured may be different from what is found over more than 99% of the range of the parameters. [One-in-100 IQ ~135 and one-in-1,000 IQ ~147 -Ed. Note]
Is the norming method used valid?
Various experimental tests designers presumably use different methods of linking scores to what they believe are meaningful IQs. I cannot claim to have seen or evaluated these approaches, but I doubt that they generally conform to the methods used by PT designers. Assuming Classical Test Theory (more about that later), the designers effectively force fit a Gaussian distribution to the results of tests given to the norming group. This means that the test is dependent on the norming group being large enough and representative of the group the test is intended to serve. The force fitting is done by adding and subtracting test items with difficulty levels that will increase or decrease the number of correct answers at the points on the distribution which do not fit the normal curve.
If the test author simply selects a group of test items and uses the whole lot, he is not likely to end up with a good fit.He needs to start with extra test items and select only those that produce a good fit to the Gaussian distribution.
Here we again meet fuzzy issues. For starters, we have no idea how IQ is distributed beyond the ceilings of well designed, comprehensive PTs. The experimental test designer knows that he is not dealing with a full range of data,so he is trying to fit to the right tail, not really knowing where he is on the tail, nor its real world shape.
At this point, we should go to chapter 4 of A.R. Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing (1980). New York: Free Press. It is a discussion of why it is reasonable to assume a Gaussian distribution. Jensen makes the point that the distribution is indeed normal over the ranges of PTs and does so in thousands of words. One illustration goes back to my comments about the fuzzy nature of what we are doing:
Figure 4N.1. (above) Distribution of Stanford-Binet [S-B]IQs of a sample of 4,523 London children from which all cases of diagnosed brain damage and extreme environmental deprivation have been excluded. A normal curve (dashed line) and Pearson’s Type IV curve (continuous line) are superimposed on the actual data (stepwise curve). Note that the Type IV curve shows a closer fit to the data than does the normal curve. (From Burt, 1963, p. 180) [Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing, page 120 -Ed. Note]
First, note that the S-B results in the figure (reasonably large N) are a closer fit to a Type IV curve than a normal curve. We use the Gaussian distribution because it works well enough, given the fuzzy nature of otherconsiderations;; because it simply doesn’t matter (look at the two fit options);; and because Mother Nature generallydoes things that fit a normal distribution. Here is what Jensen [on page 88 of The g Factor -Ed. Note] wrote about the fit:
There are plausible reasons, however, for assuming that individual differences in g have an approximately normal, orGaussian (“bell-shaped”), distribution, at least within the range of ± 2 𝜎 from the mean. That range is equivalent to IQs from 70 to 130 on the typical IQ scale (i.e., μ = 100, 𝜎 = 15). Individual differences in general mental ability are usuallymeasured by some test or combination of tests that are highly g loaded, and such tests are purposely constructed to have an approximately normal or bell-shaped distribution in the standardization population. Although the normal distribution of test scores is usually accomplished by means of certain psychometric artifices, it has a quite defensible rationale.
Covering a range of ± 2 is a much more reasonable claim for the fit than trying to extend it by several additionalstandard deviations. We use the curve over a limited range because it works, not because it is the direct cause of intelligence over any range. My point here is to again point out that we are in a fuzzy world, not dealing with hard science.
Do these tests show both internal and external validity?
When a PT is produced, it is evaluated against a wide range of statistical measures that indicate whether the test does what it is supposed to do. First, is internal (construct) validity, which simply means: does the test measure the thing it claims to measure. The methods used to establish construct validity are messy, compared to some others and are discussed in Bias in Mental Testing [e.g., pages 303-305 -Ed. Note]. The test can be factor analyzed and compared to the factor analysis of an accepted standard test (Wechsler, etc.) and can be otherwise directly compared to tests that have historically produced consistent results.
Caption for image (below): Accomplishments across individual differences within the top 1% of mathematical reasoning ability 25+ years after identification at age 13. Participants from Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) Cohorts 1, 2, and 3 (N = 2, 385) are separated into quartiles based on their age - 13 SAT-M score. The quartiles are plotted along the x-axis by their meanSAT-M score. The cutoff for a score in the top 1% of cognitive ability was 390, and the maximum possible score was 800. Oddsratios (OR) comparing the odds of each outcome in the top (Q4) and bottom (Q1) SAT-M quartiles are displayed at the end of every respective criterion line. An asterisk indicates that the odds of the outcome in Q4 was significantly greater than Q1. STEM = science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. STEM Tenure (Top 50) = tenure in a STEM field at a U.S. university ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges 2007.” Adapted in part from Park, Lubinski, and Benbow (2007, 2008).
The real issue is external (predictive) validity. This is the heart and soul of any IQ test. If the test does not predict real world outcomes that are independent of the test, there is no practical use for the test. Readers here already know the factors that are most strongly correlated with IQ, so there is no need to explain what needs to be checked. In the case of this discussion, we are concerned with experimental tests and whether they are or are not valid. I submit that the acid test is external validity. If we go to the high end of the spectrum (our reason for this discussion) we have an excellent demonstration of the predictive validity of intelligence for the SMPY cohorts.
The question that must be convincingly asked of experimental tests designers is whether they can show similarexternal data, verifying that there are differences in such things as educational achievement, income, publications, etc. that are predicted (presumably increasing) by the IQ scores these tests report above the ceilings of PTs. If the answer is NO, what is the reason for the tests? This is the meat and potatoes of IQ testing. Predictions must be verifiable.
Is the self-report “feature” of norming valid?
Among the fuzzy aspects of attempting to design a measurement tool for high IQ is the use of self-reports. I seeseveral concerns with such data playing a vital role in norming. If the self- reports are from different tests (as one wouldassume to be the case), even flawless self-reports are from tests that share a relatively small amount of variance. The data below are old, but indicate typical test-A to test-B correlations:
WAIS to Stanford Binet = 0.77
WAIS to Raven’s = 0.72
WAIS to Otis = 0.78
WAIS to SAT = 0.80
Seligman, D. (1994) A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America. New York City. Carol Publishing Group. (Page 167)
The first comparison is a 59% shared variance. But we all know that self-reports have a degree of error. Although it is not a direct comparison, when people are asked to estimate their IQ, the result is a staggering overstatement of 30 IQpoints! (I understand that self-estimate and self- reporting are different. But I think this observation is worth keeping in mind.)
(Gilles E. Gignac, Marcin Zajenkowski, People tend to overestimate their romantic partner’s intelligence even more than their own, Intelligence, Volume 73, 2019, Pages 41-51.)
The issue of self-reports has been studied extensively, with results somewhat dependent on the nature of the information being reported. Here is a reasonable comment on the general topic:
Cook and Campbell (1979) have pointed out that subjects (a) tend to report what they believe the researcher expects to see, or (b) report what reflects positively on their own abilities, knowledge, beliefs, or opinions. Another concern about such data centers on whether subjects are able to accurately recall past behaviors. Cognitive psychologists have warned that thehuman memory is fallible (Schacter, 1999) and thus the reliability of self-reported data is tenuous.
Source: Chong-ho Yu (2013) Reliability of self-report data.
It is understandable that a designer would want to use self-reported test scores in an attempt to link his test to a PT, but the number of error sources is obviously large – to the point of making such an effort seem futile.
Are the tests consistent with the expected design features of professional tests?
For any comprehensive IQ test to function properly it must have test items of different levels of difficulty. I am unaware of the methods used by experimental test designers, but if they do not have a reliable means of determining relative difficulty, they are shooting in the dark.
From chapter 4 of Bias in Mental Testing:
“The simple fact is that a test unavoidably yields a near normal distribution when it is made up of (1) a large number of items, (2) a wide range of item difficulties, (3) no marked gaps in item difficulties, (4) a variety ofcontent or forms, and (5) items that have a significant correlation with the sum of all other item scores, so as to ensure that each item in the test measures whatever the test as a whole measures. (Items that are uncorrelated or negativelycorrelated with the total score can only add error to the total scores.) These are all desirable features of a test.”
In the case of experimental tests, my impression is that these things pose problems. Is the number of items highenough when the test is intended to be very difficult and worked on for weeks?
Does the designer know the item difficulty of each item? If he does not know, how does he conclude that he has not created large gaps in difficulty or bunched many test items together because they have the same item level difficulty?
Are the items sufficiently diverse with respect to Jensen’s 4th condition (content variety)? In constructing a comprehensive IQ test, professional designers repeatedly note that the test must be diverse. Here is what differentiates PTs of different quality:
Poor = 1 Fair =2 Good = 3 Excellent = 4
1. Number of tests
1
1-2
2-8
9+
2. Dimensions
1
1-2
2-3
3+
3. Testing time
3-9 min
10-19 min
20-39 min
40+ min
4. Correlations to g
≤ .49
.50-.71
.72-.94
≥ .95
Source: Gilles E. Gignac, Timothy C. Bates (2017) “Brain volume and intelligence: The moderating role of intelligence measurement quality”;; Intelligence 64, 18–29.
Clearly, the number of tests (subtests) needs to be 9 or more in order to produce at least three second order factors,from which g can be extracted. Do experimental tests really use that many subtests? In my opinion, the number of dimensions should be higher for a comprehensive test.
The real problem here is that we are measuring in the range in which we have no way to know what is happening to g,other than it is likely that SLODR is a serious consideration and that the g variance is no longer a linear indicator of intelligence.
When an experimental test is used, the designer may have to deal with some difficulty in calculating the reliability coefficient. It is simply the ratio of the variance in the true test score, divided by the error variance. The methods used to calculate the reliability coefficient are typically to effectively administer the test twice (by designing an almost identical test, with test items of equal levels of difficulty) or by using the split-half method (correlating the two halves, then applying the result to the Spearman-Brown formula. If the number of test scores available is small, the process is difficult. I have not seen any indication that designers have used double testing of the same group, which leaves only the split-half method. Hopefully there is data showing that this methodwas properly applied to each experimental test and that the results show a coefficient close to 0.90.
Most IQ tests have historically been designed to be scored using Classical Test Theory. But, since the development of Item Response Theory [IRT -Ed. Note], we have a clearly superior method that is based on known item level difficulty.IRT still requires that the test items be given to a reference group, which matches the characteristics of the full population of the group to be represented by the finished test. The developer determines an Item Characteristic Curve for each test item and can then determine IQ based on the item difficulty of the most difficult items that have correct responses from the testee. This method is particularly well suited to use in computer testing, since the computer canpresent more or less difficult test items in response to correct or incorrect responses. In the case of experimental tests the number of test items may be too small for IRT to be practically applied, but if it were used, at least the designer could avoid using test items that are too close to the same level of difficulty and space the items, such that there are not large gaps in the levels of difficulty. If item level difficulty is not known, it is difficult to believe that anything other than luck would make the test perform properly – particularly over a very high intelligence range.
What should be measured? Psychometric g, or group factors? SLODR is the issue.
IQ tests measure g, non-g residuals of broad abilities, and uniqueness. The sum of the variances of these must equal 100%. Over most of the IQ spectrum (let’s think in terms of ± 2 SD for discussion), the thing we are looking for(outside of clinical applications) is g, because it accounts for virtually all of the predictive validity of the test. We usethe IQ test as a proxy for g because there is usually enough g saturation to justify the proxy.
When high levels of intelligence are involved, there is the possibility that g is not following a linear increase with the measurement from the test in question. This is Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR). Jensen wrote (seeAppendix A - The g Factor): “The higher a person’s level of g, the less important it becomes in the variety of abilities the person possesses.”
Evans explained the situation well: “The possibility of a breakdown of g at higher levels of intelligence, even with a narrow range of tests (as in the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) implies that we may have to reexamine the nature of intelligence.” … “There may be a single driving factor at low levels of g, but this may be manifested in a variety of different ways at high levels of g.” (Evans, M. G. (1999). “On the asymmetry of g,” Joseph L. Rotman Schoolof Management, University of Toronto.)
A clean proof of exactly what is happening is difficult. There has been about one paper addressing this at most ISIR conferences over the past decade or more. In 2004, I asked Jensen if it would be possible to calculate g in relatively narrow slices to prove the effect. He confidently replied that comparing the top and bottom halves (which had already been done) was about the best that could be done. The various papers I mentioned have approached the problem from different directions with mixed results. My impression is that the weight of evidence is that Spearman was right and SLODR is real. Unfortunately, that does not tell us if it is a small, moderate, or large effect, nor does ittell us how much the effect size might change at very high levels.
In a qualitative sense, we see that bright people seem to obviously demonstrate that there are increasing differencesin their areas of highest performance. Jensen discusses this qualitative observation in various places, including the Appendix A, mentioned above.
When a test seeks to measure at very high levels, it is dealing with intelligence that is not structurally the same as that found at lower levels and which seems to become particularly characterized by non-g factors. Do experimental teststake this into account? If they claim to do equally well as a PT below the usual ceilings, what suggests that they also do well when the nature of intelligence is different?
Let’s consider a test-A that consists of mostly verbal test items and another, test-B, that consists of many spatial items.If we are attempting to measure IQ at very high levels, it is very likely that a person who scores well on test-A will notscore well on test-B (or vice versa). How do we rationally compare someone with high and narrow verbal ability to someone with high and narrow spatial ability? Isn’t this similar to comparing the abilities of a superb painter to those ofa world class mathematician? My perspective is that when SLODR kicks in the utility of IQ tests is damaged because we rely on a linear g throughout the major range of interest, then we try to use the same measurement approaches when intelligence biologically changes. It is much like studying a solid and understanding its thermal expansion until the temperature causes the solid to start melting.
Is the test invariant with respect to the most salient groups?
PTs are typically evaluated to show that they are invariant relative to race, sex, and occasionally other groups (age is a special case). If the tests are designed around data that is skewed toward a racial or ethnic group, is the test valid for other groups? If invariance is not shown, there should be a cautionary flag that the test is only for specific listed groups. Invariance is typically shown by multiple group confirmatory factor analysis. If invariance is not established, for race/ethnicity (example), the interpretation of the results of testing a group may have an embedded error of unknown magnitude. Does the test only work for one sex, or has invariance by sex been confirmed?
In the case of age, there are several considerations. Does the scoring determine z-scores by age groups, or are theyall taken as the same? (Age adjustment is a necessary requirement for a professional IQ test, unless the test specification is limited to a narrow age range. IQ is as defined by David Wechsler’s method and is relative to age peers.) We know that the brain is constantly changing from birth to death. One of the things that we accept as a given is that IQ measurements are relative to age peers. The figure below relates directly to this concern.
Figure source: Intelligence: All That Matters, S.J. Ritchie, John Murray Learning, London (2015).
It is vital that age effects are taken into account or the test will not reflect the thing we understand as IQ. The differences between age 30 and age 50 are large. Naturally invariance must be established for age. If it is not, the test should specify the age range over which it is known to be invariant.
Establishing sex invariance could be even more challenging than simply finding an appropriate norming group. The combined factors of a higher male mean IQ (age 16 and above) and the higher male SD results in a huge difference of males and females at high levels of intelligence. For example, data for whites:
Figure source: Sex differences across different racial ability levels: Theories of origin and societal consequences;; Helmuth Nyborg;; Intelligence 52 (2015) 44–62.
The sex ratio at IQ 145 is already 7 males per 1 female and is increasing rapidly. Interestingly, the ratio is higher for Hispanics and higher still for blacks.
Very long time limits versus long time limits.
Let’s forget SLODR now and look at other features, as used in PTs. Many of the test items that are used in PTs can be given without time limits. It is well established that removing time limits does not reduce the reliability of these items, nor does the use of adequately long time limits. The problem that arises is that tests without time limits that are actually expected to take weeks to complete cannot measure any of the factors associated with time. Mental speed accounts for up to 80% of the variance in intelligence (there is a lot of covariance, particularly with WMC). [WorkingMemory Capacity = “The capacity to selectively maintain and manipulate goal-relevant information without getting distracted by irrelevant information over short intervals.”
Giving up this whole category of measures significantly reduces the subtests that can be used.
It gets worse…Working Memory Capacity (WMC) also accounts for up to 80% of the score variance (obviously thismeans a lot of covariance with mental speed). The literature is stacked with studies showing very high relationships between WMC and various parameters related to intelligence (g, Gf, executive function, attention, inhibition, etc.). While it may be argued that these are indirectly measured by very difficult test items, skipping the step of direct measurement seems to be a detriment to the strength of a high quality test. The simple fact is that WM measurements are time dependent.
(There is an indirect speed effect, in other measures, due to the Gs correlation with Gf and WMC.)
The g loading of a subtest is somewhat dependent on the structure of the other parts of the test. Over or under representation of factors being tested directly influences the other test items. For this reason PTs seek a balancebetween the numbers of test items in a given test category. Can we depend on the experimental tests to be balancedin its structure? If not, one might argue that Spearman’s indifference of the indicator works in favor of the narrow test (RPM is an example), but this is the very point that differentiates a high quality test from a lesser one (see the previous figure from Gignac and Bates). The problem is that experimental tests show deficiencies in many areas that are important to PTs.
[RPM = Raven’s Progressive Matrices, “a nonverbal test typically used to measure general human intelligence and abstract reasoning” thereby gauging fluid intelligence.
Measuring basic cognitive abilities, versus complex problem solving
When I looked in Intelligence to see how many papers were about complex problem solving, I found that the numberis very high (so high I don’t believe it). Of the papers I have read, I have generally been impressed that they show littledifference between testing people with complex problems and testing them with a comprehensive test, such as the WAIS or Woodcock-Johnson.
I previously mentioned SLODR, but I would point out that there are also diminishing returns in testing. As JamesThompson has pointed out in at least 3 articles on The Unz Review, there are some very quick (as in 2 minutes or less) tests that do quite well when correlated with high quality PTs. This is a wonderful example of diminishing returns. As the test used is improved with more test items, more factors, longer testing time, etc. there are gains in reliability, and presumably various things such as internal and external validity, ceiling, floor, and g loading, but these come in ever-decreasing increments. I am trying to illustrate that an experimental test is attempting to make a large move in the direction of ceiling and that achieving such a change should come at a very high cost.
It is my general impression that experimental tests are intended to probe some traditional second order factors by using test items that have high difficulty. To the extent that these are multi-step solutions, they probably can be fairly classified as complex problem solving test items. In that case, there is a huge amount of literature to evaluate, if the designer is concerned about changing the nature of IQ testing to CPS [complex problem solving -Ed. note] format. It may be justifiable, but should be understood by the designer, in terms of how it actually impacts test results and theirrelation to standard PTs. For example, Alexander Christ, et al. (Intelligence 78 (2020) 101421) noted that complexproblem solving and reasoning have proved to be distinct constructs.
Have the statistical considerations been examined by a real expert?
The question above is self explanatory. For example, has the author of the experimental tests designed conventionaltests that are in use by clinical psychologists, intelligence researchers, and which are referenced in the major textbooks on this subject? If not, it would seem to be helpful to have a person with such a background evaluate the test in the various categories I have mentioned.
I am aware that some experimental test designers are quite intelligent, well educated, and believe themselves to befully competent to design an outstanding IQ test. Those people should, in my opinion, meet the simple standards I listed.
Alternatives to meet the needs of exclusive clubs
The problem that I see with experimental tests is that they purport to actually measure IQ in a range that is beyond the reasonable ceilings of PTs. One option is to not claim that the tests measure IQ and simply give a raw score. Allow clubmembership based on the raw score alone, without attempting to connect the score to IQ.
It may be possible to use tests given in early life (as is done with SMPY), if the rarity of the score can be established. I have doubts that much can be done beyond the published 1 in 10,000 results from the Vanderbilt researchers.
As I see it, a primary problem is that the design of experimental tests is unlikely to ever be done with a full range reference group (from very low to very high). The designers try to invent a way to work on only a piece of the right tail.The problem is that they don’t know how to set the data, such that it actually fits the extreme high end of a Gaussian distribution. I honestly think this problem is not going to be resolved in a convincing way, using existing methods. In his discussion of how to best deal with researching the Flynn Effect, Jensen suggested anchoring test scores to biological measures:
“As I have suggested elsewhere, conventional psychometric raw scores will need to be anchored to measures that presumably are not influenced by the environmental variables that raise test scores without increasing g. The anchor variables would consist of measures of reaction time to various elementary cognitive tasks, evoked brain potentials, nerve conduction velocity, and the like, that are demonstrably g-loaded. (A composite measure based on the anchor variables should have a reasonably high correlation [say, r > .50] with the psychometric test scores.) Mental test raw scores would be regressed on these anchor variables in a representative sample of some population.
…That is, the mean gain would be reflected in the anchor variables as well as in the test scores.”
It might be possible to find biological measures that could be used to anchor a common point between a test such asthe WAIS and an experimental test and then have some confidence that the joint is based on something measurable. Unfortunately, simply finding a common point does not resolve the other issues that strike me as murky, such as theissues associated with SLODR and general test design considerations. The comments directly below may offer more promise.
We live in a rapidly changing world. Only a few years ago, brain imaging was very limited, but when MRI technology was introduced, there was a sudden explosion of living brain data that had not previously been seen. Neurologists are turning out studies faster than anyone can reasonably read them. As far back as 2006, Richard Haier told the ISIR conference that we would be able to measure intelligence entirely from brain imaging and that it was not too far off. I later asked him for more insight on it and he told me that the problem was basically that – in 2007 – it takes one of the few expert researchers to read the data. This makes the cost too high to be practical. Of course, the “reading” will be automated and probably be enhanced by using machine learning. The most likely method will be one that combines many measurable factors (cortical thickness, cortical surface area, size and shape of the corpus callosum, fractional anisotropy of gray and white matter, and measures of the connective networks (such as mean path length and numbers of connections to major and minor hubs). We already have a patent that is limited to CT: Patent US8301223 - Neurobiological method for measuring human intelligence and system for the same.
“The method enables neurometric IQ to be measured by processing MRI and fMRI images of a subject to determine cortical thicknesses and brain activation level, determining structural IQ (sIQ) and functional IQ (fIQ) from the determined cortical thicknesses and brain activation level, and using the structural IQ (sIQ) and the functional IQ (fIQ) as predictors to measure the neurometric IQ of the subject. With this, individual differences in general cognitive ability can be easilyassessed. It suggests that general cognitive ability can be explained by two different neural bases or traits: facilitation of neural circuits and accumulation of crystallized knowledge.”
Imaging technology may eventually create very high ceilings – or not. The obvious problem is that we must wait forthis to be fully developed and automated to the point of reasonable costs. Haier told me that he envisioned a full psychometric evaluation in 20 minutes at a 2007 cost of about $200.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Williams B. On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Williams, B. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): WILLIAMS, B. On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Williams, Bob. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Williams, B “On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17.
Harvard: Williams, B. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17>.
Harvard (Australian): Williams, B 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Williams, Bob. “On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Bob W. On High-Range Test Construction 17: Bob Williams, High Range IQ Tests – Are They Psychometrically Sound? [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-17.
On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments
Editor’s comments: The concept of IQ itself is slightly obsolete and ridiculous. IQ testing has a history of unsavory agendas. The arena of superhigh IQ-ology is even more problematic. The problems lie in these areas:
Lack of real-world performance by superhigh IQ people (Nobel Prizes, etc.), often coupled with social awkwardness, which further reduces credibility among people who do have social skills.
Lack of a real-world reason to measure IQs above 150. As most of you know, the concept of IQ was introduced to make sure education met the needs of children with varying abilities by determining whether a student has low, medium, or high ability. Schools are equally ill-equipped to meet the needs of a kid with a 150 IQ and a kid with an IQ of 170.
Lack of acceptance in the psychometric community and lack of unassailable norms for superhigh IQ tests.
The ordeal of taking a superhigh-ceiling test, which eliminates qualified candidates who are busy doing something other than taking IQ tests.
Rule-bending and the dissemination of high-ceiling test answers.
The possibility that, in the higher reaches of IQ, IQ is inherently indeterminate—that no number can be assigned, that no well-ordered relationship exists among high-IQ people.
I’d like to think that high-IQ people, keeping all that in mind, could treat the whole high-IQ thing with, I dunno, some lightness. Indeed, the Mega Society recently celebrated its ten-year anniversary, and only in the past few months has the issue of qualification been the site of real teeth-grinding contention. (And the recent contention resembles professional wrestling as seen through the eyes of fans who think that pro wrestling is real.)
The high-IQ world is fraught with ludicrousness, but so is everything-religion, science (The Copenhagen interpretation is pretty goofy.), any -ology. I’m sure people have been admitted to Mega through a combination of characteristics, especially persistence, augmenting less than one-in-a-million intelligence, but I doubt anyone will gain admission through unrelenting attacks and the complete destruction of an admittedly imperfect but reasonably efficient (and probably the only practical) admission system.
Let me respond to specific points:
As far as I know, Ron Hoeflin has consistently asked to be included in the Mega Society as the founder, not as a member. He has never claimed to qualify, though I think that the general feeling among members is that he is on a par with the members.
The Mega Society is actually a combination of two merged societies, one of which was, for part of its existence, a 1-in-100,000 society, largely because of fluctuating norms to the Mega Test. One-in-a-million is certainly a catchier cutoff, but beyond that, I don’t think anyone would be too concerned about a change to one-in-a-hundred thousand. On the other hand, with all the varying norms flying about, I’m completely unpersuaded to alter the agreed-upon theoretical cutoff of one-in-a-million.
No member will be booted out of the Mega Society or required to requalify. We suggested requalification a long time ago, and people were rightfully furious.
To get even more specific:
While Paul Maxim’s analyses of Langdon and Hoeflin and their tests have a patina of objective analysis, most readers get the impression that they seethe with resentment predating his first submission to Noesis. I like any material that generates responses from other people, which Maxim’s material certainly does, but I don’t like the distress it causes me and seems to cause others.
The history of Noesis is, to a large degree, the history of Chris Langan’s presentation of CTMU as a guide to the solution of Newcomb’s paradox and myriad other problems, and the sometimes-surly communication between Langan and other readers. Robert Hannon’s material has also generated a lot of frustrated letters.
But both the Langan and the Hannon interactions seem to be conducted with more charity than the Maxim interactions, which make me fear for the continued existence of Mega.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Rosner R. On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-16
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Rosner, R. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): ROSNER, R. On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Rosner, Rick. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-16.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Rosner, R “On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-16.
Harvard: Rosner, R. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-16>.
Harvard (Australian): Rosner, R 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-16>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Rosner, Rick. “On High-Range Test Construction 16: Rick Rosner, Editor’s Comments.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-16.
On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing
I have in hand a copy of the Terman Concept Mastery Test (Form T), which I got from Ron Hoeflin. This is the test used by Terman to track 1004 gifted children into mid-life. This test shows what is wrong with high-level intelligence tests.
Terman’s sample questions are fine:
Shoe: Foot:: Glove: (a. Arm b. Elbow c. Hand)
Kitten: Cat:: Calf: (a. Horse b. Cow c. Lion)
But it is all downhill from there. Here are some typical questions from the test, and what is wrong with them:
Proletarian: Worker:: Brahmin: (a. Bull b. Aristocrat c. India) This is a vocabulary question.
Bacchus: Revelry:: Ceres: (a. Agriculture b. Love c. Hunting) This is a mythology question.
Danube: Black Sea:: Euphrates: (a. Persian Gulf b. Red Sea c. Caspian Sea) This is a geography question.
Maoris: New Zealand:: Ainus: (a. China b. India c. Japan) This is an anthropology question.
Is a spelling bee an intelligence test? It may be the case that spelling is correlated with intelligence, but it is not the same as intelligence. I think Terman meant to produce a concept mastery test (which is a fine synonym for intelligence, as far as I’m concerned), but he could not think of enough hard analogies, so he got lazy and used hard questions from other disciplines.
The trouble is, we now can produce machines that can spell much better than we can (or do the simple information look-ups that are required by the above questions). But we cannot produce machines that can master concepts better than we can. So it is now interesting to quantify how good people (and ultimately machines) are at mastering concepts. This is why I am interested in true intelligence tests, and why I think the Ultra Test is worth working on.
I will give one example of a good “aha!” (or concept mastery) problem:
Start with a half cup of tea and a half cup of coffee. Take one tablespoon of the tea and mix it in with the coffee. Take one tablespoon of this mixture and mix it back in with the tea. Which of the two cups contains more of its original contents?
Answer on next page.
The two cups end up with the same volume of liquid they started with. The same amount of tea was moved to the coffee cup as coffee to the tea cup. Therefore, each cup contains the same amount of its original contents.
Every year, most of the top U.S. math majors in college take the Putnam Exam, which is a twelve-question, six-hour exam. This exam is intended to weed out the very best, most promising young mathematicians, and history shows that it is sufficient, if not necessary, to score in the top ten on the Putnam to have a productive career in math. For example, Feynman scored in the top three (in fact, he scored number one, although this was not published).
Over the years, the Putnam Exam has evolved in the direction that I am trying to take the Ultra Test. Although the Putnam requires too much specialist knowledge to be an intelligence test, I reproduce below some questions from the Putnam that do not require much specialist knowledge and that I think give the feel of the exam.
1966 A-6: What is √ 1+2√1+3 √1+4 √1+…?
1967 A-3: If f(x)=nx^2−bx+c has integer coefficients, what is the least value of a such that f(x) has two distinct zeros in 0<x<1?
1972 B-2: A particle moving on a straight line starts from rest and attains a velocity v0v0 after traversing a distance s0s0. If the motion is such that the acceleration was never increasing, find the maximum time for the traversal.
1947 11: aa, bb, cc, dd are distinct integers such that (x−a)(x−b)(x−c)(x−d)=0. If x is an integer, what is it?
1949 B-3: If any two points on a closed plane curve are no more than one unit apart, what is the radius of the smallest circle that completely contains the curve?
Earlier in this issue, Kevin Langdon argues that we should submit our proposed (and supposed) intelligence tests to the peer-reviewed publication process, and proposes that we start a journal that will include academic psychometricians on the mailing list. This is an interesting non sequitur, although I think we all understand why Kevin makes it. The truth is that no reputable psychometrics journal would publish an analysis of any of our tests. This is for a variety of reasons with which we are all familiar, and which I will not belabor here.
The point I want to make is that the road to scientifically accurate and generally accepted high-level intelligence tests will be a long and winding one. I suspect that the initial inroads, by the way, will not come from psychometricians, or even from psychologists of any stripe, but rather from computer scientists, who will be working from much the same motivation that I am.
However, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. We are already a few steps into this journey, and I would like to make the Ultra Test the next step. So please be on the lookout for good problems and send them in.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Cole C. On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Cole, C. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): COLE, C. On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Cole, Chris. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Cole, C “On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15.
Harvard: Cole, C. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15>.
Harvard (Australian): Cole, C 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Cole, Chris. “On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Chris C. On High-Range Test Construction 15: Chris Cole, Why I’m Interested in Intelligence Testing [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-15.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Chinese mythology, Cultural bias, Easy problems, Exhaustive reference work, High scorers, Low discrimination value, Master Crossword Puzzle Dictionary, Mega Society, National Puzzlers League, Potential test takers, Sample population, Short-form test, Statistical instability, Test taker, Verbal analogy problems, Western mythology.
On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests
Ron Hoeflin has graciously consented to a merger of the Short Form Test and his work-in-progress, the Ultra Test. This means he has effectively donated the problems from his seven trial tests, which represents over a year of hard work. I propose that we call the merged test the Ultra Test.
Ron has convinced me to abandon the idea of a short-form test, in the sense of a small number of problems. There are two reasons for this: first, a small number of problems leads to statistical instability, and will make norming difficult, and second, by necessity, a short test would have all hard problems, which may be off-putting. In addition, a longer test will allow us to include several easy “aha!” problems, which will both entice and instruct the test taker. In other words, the easy problems indicate what kind of problems the hard ones are.
It is important for the test takers to understand that the problems are not amenable to exhaustive reference work or tedious calculation. Otherwise, they will abandon the test as too time-consuming. This explains, I think, the sharp drop off in takers between the Mega and Titan Tests. I think the audience of potential test takers was “burned out” by the Mega Test. With the Ultra Test, I hope to reinvigorate that audience as well as attract a whole new audience. There are many people who could qualify for the Mega Society if we could just get them to take the damn test!
In order to get a test published anywhere, it will have to be normed. This means it will have to be tried by a sample population. The only sample population readily available is the readership of Ron’s journals. Ron and I would like to publish the Ultra Test in the September issue of Ron’s journals. This will give us adequate time to collect and score answers by early next year. Therefore, this is the deadline: all candidate problems for the Ultra Test must be received by September 1. So, please start thinking of “Ultra type” verbal and math problems and submit them.
Ron picked the 41 most discriminating verbal analogy problems from his trial tests. Ron calculates the percentage of high scorers who correctly answer a question and subtracts from this the percentage of low scorers who answer correctly. Thus, easy problems and hard problems have a low discrimination value. I further culled this list of 41 problems down to the following 12. The criteria I used are these:
Avoid reference exercises.
If the definition of the word is obvious from the analogy, but the word is obscure, the problem becomes a matter of searching reference material. This is not a test of intelligence; it is a test of who has the biggest thesaurus. I encourage all members to obtain a copy of Herbert M. Baus’ Master Crossword Puzzle Dictionary. This book is the standard reference book of the National Puzzlers League and was able to answer 80% of the Quest Test. Barnes and Noble recently stocked up on these and sells them for $15. You can also order one from their 800 number.
Avoid idioms.
Idioms are not familiar to people for whom English is a second language. Native English speakers are a minority of the world’s population. We should strive for a test that has a wider audience.
Avoid mythology and religion.
We should not expect Chinese speakers of English to know as much Western mythology as we know Chinese mythology. I know next to nothing about Chinese mythology. By the way, lest anyone think this is an overly harsh criterion, did you know that there are more students of English in China than there are speakers of English in the US?
Avoid wordplay.
A play on words is biased toward native English speakers.
Avoid quotations, titles, etc.
Again, these are culturally biased.
Avoid “A: synonym of A:: B:?” or “A: B:: synonym of A:?”
This is a catch-all criterion, meant to include analogies that do not fall into any of the above categories exactly, but which still are not so much analogies as they are definitions. The relation of synonymy is not a good basis for an analogy.
So here are the 12 new problems:
Space: Hyperspace:: Vector: ?
Image: Idea :: Hallucination: ?
Wind: Rain :: Typhoon: ?
Inward: Outward :: Infection: ?
Column: Row :: File: ?
Humbug: Bach :: Seek: ?
38: Pyongyang :: 49: ?
Of ten: Factor :: Of magnitude: ?
Say: Hear :: Imply: ?
2.54: Inch :: 3.26: ?
A, AB, B, BO, O: BO :: A, C, E, G, T: ?
Eggs: Grading :: Wounded: ?
In the next issue, we will present the spatial questions selected from Ron’s tests, as well as all the other questions that will no doubt begin pouring in from the members who have been inspired by Ron’s generosity.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Cole C. On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Cole, C. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): COLE, C. On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Cole, Chris. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Cole, C “On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14.
Harvard: Cole, C. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14>.
Harvard (Australian): Cole, C 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Cole, Chris. “On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Chris C. On High-Range Test Construction 14: Chris Cole, Merger of Ultra and Short Form Tests [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-14.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
This interview probes Seneka’s work in the field of high-range intelligence testing, especially the Point of View test. Seneka conceives of cognitive abilities in ways that standard tests often overlook, such as lateral thinking and divergent intelligence. In this conversation, readers will learn more about Seneka’s philosophy, his contributions to the field, and the implications of his work for a more nuanced understanding of human intelligence.
Keywords: divergent intelligence, high-range matrices test, Item Response Theory, lateral thinking, Multiple Intelligences, Spatial vision, traditional intelligence measurements, traditional tests.
On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Seneka, could you briefly introduce yourself and your areas of expertise?
Seneka: I think it’s accurate to call myself a polymath. I have worked and have experience in dozens of topics such as business, hypnosis, magic, art, chess, research, writing and more.
Spanish is my native language and I self-learned English by reading some books or watching online videos. Just a heads-up: my English may sound a bit “basic”.
Jacobsen: When did this interest in test construction truly come forward for you?
Seneka: It all started from a wider curiosity about the nature of intelligence and how we can understand it better.
In traditional tests, I achieved the highest scores, which made me question the limitations of these tools in measuring the complexity of human intelligence. This is where my interest in alternative evaluation methods began, allowing me to include my understanding of multiple intelligences in test design.
Jacobsen: What were the realizations about the tests earlier, and then the need to develop yours?
Seneka: Most IQ tests tend to focus specifically on certain cognitive abilities like reasoning, working memory, or crystallized knowledge. While these are definitely important and, in my opinion, accurate, they don’t show the full range of human intelligence.
Jacobsen: What was the origin and inspiration for the creation of this test – the facts and the feelings?
Seneka: The origin of my test, Point of View, comes from both research and a more personal goal. In fact, POV is just one test in a collection that evaluates different high-level intelligences. On one hand, I aim to isolate and give more importance to divergent thinking in this test so it can be evaluated. On a personal level, I believe that we don’t value the intelligence of many people because we only measure the logical or rational part.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by “evaluating divergent thinking”?
Seneka: I think Howard Gardner was very right with his theory of multiple intelligences. In fact, my idea of intelligence is similar, but with a classification of intelligences that is not connected to educational, cultural, environmental, and social factors.
Divergent intelligence is what allows a person to look at a problem from different angles. For example, an “X” might just be the letter X for someone, but for someone with high divergent intelligence, the same X could mean a mistake, a number, two lines, a cross, a destination on a map, a selected option, a chromosome, an adult content rating, a prohibition, and many more things. The POV test specifically evaluates a person’s ability to see concepts through divergent and lateral thinking. Once you find the right perspective, the logic to apply is really simple.
Jacobsen: What skills and considerations, in an overview, seem important for both the construction of test questions and making an effective schema for them?
Seneka: Creating effective questions requires the use of my own divergent intelligence. It’s important to design items that can differentiate between different levels of ability. To do this, I need to analyze the most common uses of each element and progressively move away from the more unfrequent perspectives.
Jacobsen:With Point of View, why focus on a matrix design?
Seneka: I like matrix tests because the information is contained within the problem itself. I also know that people feel more motivated to take a test when it looks interesting. The structure is very good for “misleading” the test-taker. It hides the perspective from which to approach the problem behind hundreds of possible logics that lead nowhere. With the matrix design, I can better evaluate a person’s ability to think laterally and remove the noise.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by a “high-range matrices test”?
Seneka: These are tests aimed at people who probably perform at a very high level on traditional intelligence measurements. In my test, I try to isolate and give more weight to divergent thinking over logical or rational thinking. So, it’s possible that there may be some differences between IQ (from the traditional test) and DQ (divergent quotient).
Jacobsen: As the aim is to measure divergent and lateral thinking, how does this style of matrix design differ from more traditional mainstream tests like the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices?
Seneka: While tests like Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices focus mainly on logical-deductive reasoning, spatial vision, and pattern recognition, POV introduces elements that require lateral thinking. The design of my test intentionally includes ambiguity to push the test-taker to explore other approaches when the “logical” approach doesn’t lead to any solution.
Jacobsen: When trying to develop questions capable of tapping a deeper reservoir of ability, what is important for spatial and matrix test type of questions?
Seneka: Even though other intelligences play a role in a high-level test, the goal is to isolate divergent intelligence until it becomes the most important factor for solving the problem. In fact, the test-taker should indicate how they reached the conclusion for each item. If they managed to find the perspective from which to solve the problem, it validates their divergent intelligence, even if the answer is wrong or they made a logical mistake.
Jacobsen: Potentially, what are roadblocks test-takers tend to make in terms of thought processes and assumptions around time commitments on these tests? So, they get artificially low scores on high-range tests.
Seneka: The biggest obstacle for participants is getting stuck on the wrong perspective. I’ll give an example with an item that I developed and finally didn’t include in the final test:
Here comes a spoiler. If you want to solve it, don’t listen to this. Many people spend minutes or even hours trying to find out what logic is hidden behind these letters: they look at their positions in the alphabet, do math operations, or search for patterns. You won’t find anything online if you search for those letters.
Only divergent intelligence allows them to “see” that the letters might not be letters and could be numbers. Once you think that, a simple search is enough to solve it. Maybe you even already know what numbers they are, and then you’ll reach the conclusion even faster.
Jacobsen: What are the difficulties in preventing cheating on tests in the online era?
Seneka: I had the task of creating original items that are not on the internet, which is quite complex, by the way. I also tested the exam with different artificial intelligences, and out of all the items, only one reached a correct conclusion. Some AIs might score between 115 and 125 on traditional tests. That’s already well above the human average. However, in lateral thinking, AIs have no chance; we humans have irreplaceable intelligences.
Jacobsen: What are the most appropriate means by which to norm a test when, in the high-range environment so far, the samples tend to be lower?
Seneka: Invite people who already belong to high IQ societies. They will be more inclined to take this test. Also, it’s important to warn that scores as low as three or four out of twenty-three are possible, even for gifted individuals. Using methods like Item Response Theory (IRT) can improve the accuracy of norms, even with smaller samples.
Jacobsen: Pragmatically speaking, for really good statistics, what is your ideal number of test-takers? You can’t say, “8,500,000,000.”
Seneka: Getting several hundred or a few hundred participants would be optimal. This number allows for relevant analysis and keeps the needed precision to identify performance differences. To give a number, reaching 500 participants would provide a solid base and statistical validity.
Jacobsen: What tests and test constructors have you considered good?
Seneka: There are few high-range test constructors, and I don’t want to argue with anyone here. In general, we could say they create harder versions of existing tests. They make tests that can be solved if you have knowledge of group theory, geometry, and mathematics at a very high level.
Recently, I discovered some tests by Laurent Dubois, and I found them very interesting.
Jacobsen: What have you learned from making a test?
Seneka: It has been a very fun experience, more art than science. And it’s helping me a lot to better define the concept of multiple intelligences, so I will continue doing this for other intelligences as well.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time.
Seneka: Thank you, Scott. It’s a pleasure to discuss these topics with you.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 22). On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-13.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-13.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-13>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-13>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 13: Seneka, Point of View.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-13.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here. He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine. Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory. Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Rosner discusses: the structure of a joke.
Keywords: American joke structure, callbacks, conservative entertainment, diverse population, FCC rules, modern shows, political comedy, punchline, regional context, streaming networks.
On American Comedy Writing 2: Joke Structure
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the structure of an American joke? A joke does not have to be particularly American. There is no inherent difference between an American joke and any other joke, except for the knowledge base of the people it is intended for and their emotional makeup. America has many different regions and a diverse population, so the context varies widely.
Generally, a joke is an expression of glee at knowing, as humans succeed in the world by knowing things. George Saunders and I believe that laughter expresses joy at knowledge gained cheaply. Much knowledge is hard-earned, but a joke takes a complicated situation—the setup—and resolves it quickly with a punchline. People laugh because the joke occupied some mental real estate, and that space instantly collapses with the punchline.
Rick Rosner: A good comedian can do a bunch of callbacks, referring to previous punchlines. I saw Amy Schumer in one of her early stand-up specials do a punchline that was four punchlines in one because it contained three callbacks to earlier points in her routine. It was freaking amazing.
We could talk about the knowledge base that goes into jokes now in America—sex plays a big part, and previously taboo topics are easy targets. For one thing, many topics were off-limits on TV and in movies until the last few decades. TV in the ’50s and movies in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s were pretty tame. Now, anything goes.
We used to have three broadcast networks that were subject to FCC rules for television, but streaming networks aren’t subject to the same limitations, so you can say anything you want. Modern shows, both done and crappy, try to explore all areas of experience. If those experiences are taboo, that is a bonus. It can be a crutch for bad TV and movies but also add dimension to quality productions.
Right now in America, there is deep frustration and exhaustion with current politics and the fact that morons and criminals have such powerful sway over life in our country. Many conservatives have been made so stupid, with the encouragement of their media and politicians, that their humour is terrible.
There is a conservative late-night talk show on Fox News called “Gutfeld!” hosted by Greg Gutfeld, who is not a comedian but one of their commentators. Carole and I watched the opening monologue-type stuff for the first time a few days ago, and we were laughing—not at the attempts at humour, but at how incredibly bad it is. Conservative humour seldom works in America because it is working from a constrained perspective, where the goal is mostly to laugh at liberals. It is often written by people who could not make it in mainstream comedy, so it falls flat.
Yes, there are things to laugh about with liberals, but you can’t exclusively laugh at them because, for one thing, American conservatives are much more laughable at this point. It hasn’t been this bad since the Civil War. So trying to laugh only at the less shitty political party generally doesn’t work, especially when the humour comes from a place of ignorance.
Jacobsen: Does this comedy divide happen in America in other ways? Are you talking more along political lines, specifically political party lines? Even political views—what about social lines, gender lines?
Rosner: They all overlap. Entertainment for Christians that does not go into any of the taboo areas has a huge overlap with entertainment for conservatives. It is similarly low-quality. Occasionally, you get a somewhat decent production. For example, there was one with the guy who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s movie about Jesus. It was about a man who rescued children from sex traffickers, and they spent much money on it. It may have been watchable, though I did not see it.
Then it turns out that the guy the movie was based on—James, what is his name? James something, the actor—anyway, the real guy, who was supposed to be the true story inspiration for the movie, turned out to be involved in sex trafficking himself, which was bad luck for the producers. However, in general, Christian entertainment is not as good.
It is how, in the porn industry, 30 years ago, the women who did anal scenes in the ’90s were not as attractive as those who did not. That has changed now because anal is more mainstream, but back then, if you added this unsavoury extra requirement, you were drawing from a less attractive talent pool. Similarly, conservative entertainment draws from a weaker talent pool.
What else? On satellite radio, there are about seven different comedy channels. You have “Pure Comedy,” a clean comedy, and “Comedy Roundup,” a kind of country and western rural comedy. Both can be okay, but if I have a choice, I will turn away from pure comedy because it is less likely to deliver new and insightful material.
You have got “Raw Comedy,” which is the dirtiest channel. I love that. It is one of my top two or three favourite channels because I am more likely to hear a surprising and new point of view, as it has the fewest constraints. Then there’s “Canadian Comedy,” which, surprisingly, is in my top two channels. Comedy from your country is good.
Then you have Netflix and Comedy Central channels. Those are fine because they are not constrained.
One time, when I was in Albuquerque, I was listening to country-western music. The radio stations there were mostly pretty wretched, and the country-western station I found seemed to cater to a dumber, more traditional audience. Every song was about meeting a pretty blonde lady, settling on a farm, and having many blonde kids. It was traditional, and every song had the same simplistic theme.
So, there is another divide—rural people in America aren’t dumber than non-rural people. It’s tough to generalize, and it is not good to do so. But, for instance, to be a farmer, you’ve got to be incredibly smart because tough market forces are squeezing you, and you need to operate something like a John Deere combine. There’s a sophisticated computer in the John Deere, and you’ve got to be able to program that thing.
John Deere is notorious for having difficulty with repairs. They charge you an arm and a leg to get it fixed—you have to go to an official service company or find someone who can break the electronic lock on its programming. John Deere is particularly strict about not wanting anyone to hack their processors. So, there are a lot of sophisticated farmers out there, and I assume they watch the same sophisticated entertainment that non-dumb Americans watch. But the big divide is between smart Americans and dumb Americans.
As I’ve said a million times, the Republican Party started targeting less educated individuals 50 years ago, and now, 50 years into it, the Republican Party is the party of stupid people. Every news outlet’s political stance means that both sides have been dumbed down, so political messaging is generally punchy, short, and stupid. There’s smart, stupid comedy and stupid comedy for smart people, Jackass. It’s brutal physical comedy—people doing terrible things to themselves or at least putting their bodies at risk for fun. But it’s not put together by idiots. The risks they take are idiotic, but they are smart idiots.
Jacobsen: I only have a little more insight than that. What about the separation between dirty comedy and dry comedy? The dry comedy of someone Jay Leno, Tim Allen, or Jeff Allen versus the wet comedy of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, or Richard Pryor.
Rosner: One example that comes to mind is Veep, a political comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus for seven years. It was created by Armando Iannucci, a Brit who’s done political comedy for decades in the UK. It’s both dry and deadpan, yet also filthy. Every character on the show is a piece of shit—Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the vice president of the US, and she’s cast of awful people surrounding her. The show is dry and doesn’t have a laugh track, but it’s also full of crude humour, with characters constantly saying and doing horrible things to each other.
On the other hand, you have a quality comedy that’s wholesome, Parks and Recreation. Greg Daniels, the same guy who did The Office, created it. The Office had lots of asshole characters, while Parks and Rec had fewer, but it still managed to pull out the comedy. You can go either way—something constructed can be dirty or not. It needs talented people putting in the effort.
I read a book called Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow, who’s been studying comedy since junior high school. It’s a 500-page book of interviews with almost every major comedian of the past 30 years, where they talk about how they do it. One theme throughout the book is the importance of putting in the work. If you’re making a show or a movie, the first joke you think of isn’t going to cut it—it’s probably going to be some cliché that would have been fine in the ’50s, but now everyone’s seen it a million times.
Everybody’s already seen everything, so you can’t go with your first joke. You mentioned Leno, who was a tamed comedian on The Tonight Show. I never saw him when he was revolutionary, but in the ’70s, he was part of a group of young revolutionary comedians. By the time he got to The Tonight Show in the ’90s, he was no longer revolutionary.
Often, he barely told jokes. He delivered lines with the cadence of jokes, and the audience had been conditioned to laugh. I’ve got the Olympics on with the sound off, and in the 200 meters, the American favoured to win came in second because he has COVID. So, I’m there. There’s a lot of COVID at the Olympics. In LA, the number of cases is up tenfold since two or three months ago.
But anyway, when writing comedy, you often get a group of people together with a basic script structure. Everyone yells out a bunch of jokes, so you end up with 10 or 12 for every point in the script. It would help if you did that to write effective comedy—you can’t stop at your first joke idea. Maybe you can a little if you’re a genius, but you need more effort.
Jacobsen: What about pacing and delivery timing? You touched on rhythm and training the audience to some extent.
Rosner: I always want things to move faster but am a sophisticated viewer. Taking too long between the next thing that happens is often indulgent. Carole and I watched a movie directed by Michael Keaton called Knox Goes Away, about a hitman with a debilitating brain disease—turbo Alzheimer’s. That movie lingered too long on the acting. Nobody wants to see that; we want things to move along. It could have been 15 minutes shorter by cutting the shots shorter.
We also watched a six-hour mystery show called The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, about a high school girl who decides to solve a five-year-old murder in her small British town. That show could have been four hours or less if it had moved along because we knew everything that would happen. There’s a dog in it, and we knew it would get killed. Carole and I both called it—the dog gets killed, but they took too long to get there. Carole saw the dad character and said, “It’s the dad.” And yes, it was the dad. to spoil it, but she yelled it out an hour or two in, and we didn’t find out until the end of hour five. So yes, things need to move along because people have seen everything and can figure out everything. We know where you’re going, so get to it.
The faster you get to the point, the quicker you might surprise us with something unexpected. Refrain from testing our patience with painterly pauses.
Jacobsen: What about using contrast and surprise or absurdity in American comedy? How would you incorporate that in writing?
Rosner: It depends. It needs to be done by people who don’t suck at it. Veep feels real, but a bunch of absurd stuff happens in it. One character, who might be the dumbest on the show, has been developed across seven seasons. By season seven, he’s gone from being a White House aide to becoming stupider with each passing season. In the first season, he was a normal kind of asshole, but then they decided to make him downright stupid.
By season 7, he was stupid and running for something—Congress, president. He’d married his stepsister, which is not a good look for a politician. Not only did he marry his stepsister, but he was also in a fight with his stepdad. He hated his stepdad and ripped this perfectly nice guy apart on a national interview show, which is absurd. It’s also absurd that he would still have a chance after doing that, but he does politically. That show, though, is done by skilled practitioners.
You’ve got three absurdists from SNL who did a movie called Do Not Destroy: The Legend of Something Mountain, and it was absurd, stupid stuff from top to bottom, which was fine because those guys know what they’re doing. But some people—and you see this more in science fiction than comedy—don’t know the genre beyond having seen many movies. But that’s not good enough. It would help if you read modern science fiction to avoid rehashing clichés.
The same applies to comedy—you’ve got to know the field, so you’re not telling people a bunch of jokes they’ve already seen or can anticipate because they’ve watched enough other stuff. You must be competent and knowledgeable and have seen a wide range of material.
One of the sad things about Twitter is that I used to be able to read 300 jokes a day from comedians. It was all comedy, comedians messing around. Now, Elon Musk has turned it into a right-wing, anti-Semitic, racist swamp of MAGA assholes, and the comedians have mostly left. I barely write jokes on Twitter anymore—maybe 10% of my posts are jokes. I don’t see that many jokes in a day now. It’s mostly about trying to find effective ways to call out assholes for being assholes so they don’t win the next election. It’s a shame, and it is not good for comedy. At least I have a comedy radio in the car, so I can hear many jokes while driving.
One way to cover your bases—you were talking about cadence and pacing—is to keep the jokes popping. Tina Fey Productions and Robert Carlock have done shows Girls5eva and 30 Rock. It’s a couple of minute jokes with them, and they’re usually unexpected. If there are some familiar jokes, I don’t mind being able to yell out a punchline before they get to it. But if that happens on every punchline, it’s a problem. With the Tina Fey-Carlock productions, a 22-minute show will have 50 or 60 jokes, many of them crazy and out of nowhere. So, if five or eight of the jokes are predictable, I’m still okay with it.
Jacobsen: We live in the era of big data, which contaminates our entertainment, too, which is fine because it leads to better, more insightful content. Is the rule of three still valid or not?
Rosner: Yes, but everyone knows the rule of three. It’s more effective when your audience doesn’t know the rules. You go: thing 1, thing 2, funny thing. They may have been trained to appreciate the cadence and structure, which is good, so they’ll get the joke. But when amateurs can say, “Oh, that’s the rule of three,” that’s bad because they’re too familiar with it. Now you have to mess with the rule; Family Guy does.
Family Guy might take a situation and drag it out too long to the point where you can’t believe how much they’re messing with you. Peter Griffin might get in a fight with a giant rabbit or something equally ridiculous. Under a traditional comedy structure, the scene would go on for a short, reasonable amount of time so you can move to the next joke. But Family Guysays, “Screw you,” and makes the fight go on for three minutes—way too long. It becomes funny because they’re intentionally messing with you. Similarly, Family Guy might do the rule of seven or eight or ten, repeating a thing because it knows its audience is familiar with the rule of three and thinks it’s hacky, so they’re saying, “Screw you, we know.” So here you go.
Here it is, ten times a row—a character action repeated ten times. Suck it up. Can that be layered with other aspects of comedy, the callback? So you do a whole routine, but you only do three callbacks.
Everyone knows everything, so everything is fair game to be messed with. It’s not only fair game, but it’s obligatory. Comedy is about finding patterns, regularities, and common experiences in the world, pointing them out, and, if possible, making fun of their absurdity. I can point out failed routines. If we ever got together and listened to comedy radio, I could show you why most of the stuff that makes it to Sirius Comedy Radio works. Some routines, though, I have to change the channel because they’re not working, and they annoy me.
Today, I had to quit a routine because the guy was doing drug humour—talking about taking LSD and how he got in a car wreck because he swerved to avoid pyramids, which are old and hacky. Why are you talking about LSD? Maybe talk about a more modern drug. You’re also mischaracterizing LSD—it doesn’t give you full hallucinations from the history of humanity. That was absurd and hacky. You have to come from where people are, and right now, we’re not on LSD. Maybe you could tell an LSD joke if it’s relevant, but it has to connect with where we are today.
Jacobsen: There was a routine I thought was decent, however. You never know how old these routines are—they might be from 12 years ago or two years ago. This guy was talking about how depressing Planet Earth 2 is because of so much extinction and the planet feeling doomed. Then he started doing a David Attenborough narration of Planet Earth 3, where a skinny polar bear on a melting iceberg has to “suck cock for a salmon.” That seemed absurd yet topical and appropriately humorous. It had a bear, in this case, doing something desperate to survive—a familiar comedic trope that hasn’t been exhausted yet. It’s still a decent punchline, though maybe not in two years.
Rosner: I see much less straight slapstick humour, The Three Stooges. Yes, I don’t see as much of that. I see many American comedies that focus more on serious themes. Sirius Comedy Radio has comedy greats, but I usually turn the channel because it might be a routine from 30 years ago. I’m not going to learn anything new from it. It might be funny—Phyllis Diller’s funny with her routines from the ’60s—but it doesn’t teach me what I want to learn. I haven’t watched The Three Stooges in forever, even though many good contemporary comedians love them. Maybe I could learn something from them.
Jacobsen: Something I’ve noticed in much American comedy is the influence of Kevin Smith—heavy on dialogue, almost monologue at times, and pushing the time limits. It’s similar to what you mentioned about Seth MacFarlane with Family Guy.
Rosner: Yes, I don’t have many words. I only have small paragraphs of dialogue. The aim should always be to cut things down. I’m helping Carole with her book—she’ll read me passages, and her characters will say a couple of long sentences in a row. In this context, yes, I talk too much and say long things, but sentences are usually short in normal conversation. I’m always pushing her to pull words out of sentences and make the dialogue more natural.
It’s a standard. What do you call it? An amateur actor, a newbie, will want more lines. But an established, good actor might go through the script and say, “Let’s cut this down here,” or “I can do what this line does with a look.” So, yes, I’m generally not in favour of monologues. When was the last time Kevin Smith made a movie? If you do a monologue, it can be great, but it’s got to be full of new information. It’s got to…
Rosner: It can’t have a bunch of clichés in it unless you’re subverting something; the turning point in the second act is when things are at their most dire, and then a character gets up and gives an inspiring speech: “We’re gonna do it. We’re going to overcome.” That’s fine if the aliens cut that character in half, subverting what he said. But pure monologue is tough because we’ve seen that before.
Jacobsen: That’s enough for today.
Rosner: Yes, many words. I’ll clean it up. Was there anything new in that?
Jacobsen: There was. We covered more precisely what a joke is.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 22). On American Comedy Writing 2: Joke Structure. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On American Comedy Writing 2: Joke Structure.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This would be a follow-up, perhaps even the most recent one. Did you ever feel like you discovered any new community, particularly one with a high intellectual acuity, like Mensa or Mega?
Rick Rosner: Not really.
I joined Mensa around 1980 or 1985—I cannot recall exactly. Playboy Magazineonce featured an article showcasing women of Mensa who had high IQs, accompanied by nude photographs. That prompted me to join Mensa. I did not hold Mensa in high regard—I found it somewhat unimpressive—but I felt compelled to join because I thought Playgirl Magazine might imitate Playboy and do a similar feature titled “The Men of Mensa,” with nude photographs of men. At the time, I had been weightlifting for a while and was confident in my appearance.
Exposure leads to romantic opportunities. However, as I have mentioned before, I did not realize that most of Playgirl’s readership consisted of gay men, so nothing came of it. I did attend a few Mensa meetings, but they were far from enjoyable.
The gatherings were mostly filled with individuals who, like myself, could be described as disillusioned blowhards. We once had a lunch meeting at Banana’s Restaurant on 30th Street in Boulder. There were just enough Mensa guys to fill one table, and unsurprisingly, no women since Mensa’s membership is predominantly male—probably about 93% men. One attendee looked a bit like the comic book store owner from The Simpsons, somewhat portly and with a noticeable paunch.
At the time, leaving a few buttons of your shirt undone was fashionable, which this guy did, wearing a disco-style shirt with a medallion. While this was not entirely out of place for the disco era, by 1985, it was decidedly late in the trend—maybe two or three years behind the times. Disco had already faded from prominence in New York, but it might still have lingered in Colorado.
What struck me as particularly absurd was that the medallion was a hologram. I found that utterly ridiculous. Around that time, I was developing a stand-up comedy routine in which I played a character with an IQ of 76 who was frustrated by his lack of intelligence. Though intellectually deficient, this character was still aware enough to recognize his limitations—something that predates the formalization of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Unlike many people with lower intelligence, this character was aware of his shortcomings. I would perform this character on stage—a man who was angry about how stupid he was. The routine was well-received because my muscular build and facial expression made me convincingly appear as an unintelligent yet physically imposing guy. I decided to embody this character during the Mensa meeting, curious how people would react.
So, I pretended to be someone with an IQ of 76 at a Mensa meeting. Remarkably, despite the attendees’ self-important attitudes and poor social skills, no one noticed I was pretending to be intellectually challenged for the entire month. So, no, I did not find a sense of community within Mensa. However, when I joined Mega, I found a bit of a community. Chris Cole, in particular, helped me tremendously by guiding me out of a difficult period in my life.
He appointed me as the editor of Noesis and encouraged me to take on some responsibilities, offering significant support. He continues to be a source of encouragement. So yes, to some extent, I did find a community in Mega. I also met Dean Inada, an intriguing and likable person.
In Mega, Chris Cole provided more of a sense of community and considerable tolerance and patience. Chris is highly functional in the world, and while I’m not entirely dysfunctional, I am certainly less functional than he is. Nevertheless, he has always been willing to listen to my concerns and provide assistance.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Even if you are smart and know a way to live life, you will be wrong sometimes.
Rick Rosner: I was most famously wrong on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”
Jacobsen: What was your big lesson from that?
Rosner: They were wronger than I was because if they can’t get the right answer with all their research, then the poor dipshit in the hot seat shouldn’t be expected to suss out the right answer. In almost every other case, they made it right. With me, they didn’t. It was my bad luck. I wasted much time on it. The times I’ve been wrong, the consequence has been wasted time. Einstein did all his famous work in the first half of his life.
Jacobsen: In his twenties?
Rosner: Twenties into his thirties. He was born in 1879. Special relativity was 1905, so he was 26. General relativity—I want to say, shoot, I’ve forgotten. Was it 1912? 1910? Yes, he was 30-ish, in his early thirties. He did some other stuff through his thirties, but his most famous work was in his twenties and early thirties. He worked on the Unified Field Theory for decades because nobody had created a unified field. Some people have gotten closer, using more experimental data than he had available, and further developed theories of subatomic particles.
Could he have gotten closer if he hadn’t had as big a problem with the uncertainties of quantum mechanics as he did? I don’t know. But he wasted much time later in life. You could say it was wasted. I haven’t read a strict analysis of his work in his later life, but he didn’t do anything great. He came up with the laser long before it was physically produced. I’m not sure how old he was when he did that, and I’m sure he did a lot of less famous stuff, but I also feel he wasted much time on wrong ideas, maybe.
Jacobsen: What is the big psychological growth lesson when considering Einstein and your case of suing a game show? You said decades ago, or maybe a decade and a half ago, that you regretted having the personality flaw of being too obsessive about things.
Rosner: Yes, and it also helped screw me at work because I worked on an ABC show while I was suing ABC over their conduct on the quiz show. That helped mess things up at work, too.
It also made me work harder because I realized they were pissed off at me, so I tried to work hard not to give them an excuse to get rid of me.
Jacobsen: That may have been a positive aspect. But to the general point, is the ability to admit being wrong and adapt based on that important? In other words, it is the ability to be authentically honest with oneself about the current situation.
Rosner: Yes, but it might be a national lesson for me rather than an individual one. There are tens of millions of people who can’t give up on Trump—a terrible guy representing terrible values who has been awful for America. They keep standing firm in their dedication to rotten politics. People who aren’t as misguided despair of those individuals ever giving up on Trump.
That’s similar to Germany after the Nazi era. It wasn’t that genuine Nazis changed their minds—probably most of them didn’t. The occupation forces and the newly formed government of Germany made Nazism illegal. They forced them to shut up under penalty of law. Eventually, they got old and died. I don’t know if there’s ever been a study on what percent of the Nazis who survived World War II and the post-war years of misery held onto their Nazism. That would be a tough study to do. Still, I guess that a majority of those who belonged to the Nazi party, if you talked to them in 1947 or 1951, would probably, if they were being truthful, still think Hitler was a good guy.
Jacobsen: That’s similar to the idea of Kuhn’s theory in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He says that often, for a new theory to replace an old one, you have to wait for the people who believe in the old theory to die off.
Rosner: Yes. I’m on Twitter all day, looking at the claims and counterclaims from each side. I try to be open to the other side, occasionally saying something true and accepting it if it’s a worthwhile point. That’s not the case with every point, however. For example, with Lance and COVID, he sends me studies, and I’ll look at them a little bit. But generally, almost instantly, I can see that they’re bad studies put together by people who don’t know what they’re doing or have a creepy agenda and are straight-out lying.
He sent me an article about a pro-vaccination activist in another country who died of brain cancer. I haven’t looked at the article yet because I know it’s bullshit. Anti-vaxxers are probably arguing that she wouldn’t have died of brain cancer if she hadn’t been vaccinated. On the surface, that’s complete nonsense. People get aggressive cancers like astrocytoma regardless of whether they’re vaccinated or not. So, I won’t buy into that, but I am open to looking at less ridiculous claims.
I delayed getting my vaccination for a month until I had a tiny tumour frozen off, just in case Lance’s lunatics were right about not wanting to distract your immune system with a vaccination when it’s trying to get rid of bad cells. My doctors said that was nonsense, but maybe it’s not. So, I try to be open to points that aren’t complete nonsense. However, I pay limited attention to what can seem like an endless flow of new nonsense from the other side.
Jacobsen: This sounds like a consequence of age and experience. Previously, in the interview with Errol Morris, you said you didn’t feel like your obsessive practicing, for instance, resulted from being any older or wiser. Do you think you’ve grown in your understanding of becoming older and wiser in a broader sense?
Rosner: I still make mistakes with my time. I’m 64. I hope I make it into my eighties or nineties, but my best years are now. I’m still lazy. So, no, I haven’t acquired better work habits. I don’t think I’ve acquired wisdom. I don’t want this conversation to be about the lessons I’ve learned so far. That, to me, seems a little horseshitty because I’m still the same person I was.
Jacobsen: What about the growth of scientific methodology and thinking, the ability to change your mind as you get more data? Is that approach to thinking about life important? Rosner: Yes. If you’re trying to do science, and I try to do science from time to time—I should spend more time doing it—I still believe strongly in informational cosmology. But if something comes along that forces me to adapt my thinking… I don’t strongly believe you can have a universe that works without exotic dark matter. But suppose exotic dark matter were discovered conclusively. In that case, we’ve yet to detect even a single exotic dark matter particle directly. So, what would that discovery even look like?
If the matter is so dark that it doesn’t seem easily discoverable through the usual methods, how would we detect it? But I’d consider it if there was some semi-convincing evidence or even a conclusive experiment that demonstrated or indicated the possibility of dark matter. I’ve looked at informational cosmology and revised it in little spurts when I’ve had the attention to do that. It’s a bit different in certain particulars than when we started talking ten years ago and certainly different from when I started thinking about it 40-plus years ago. So yes, I’m open to change.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your assessment of the Kursk Oblast incursion by Ukrainian forces into Russian Federation territory?
Rick Rosner: It appears that they have seized approximately 400 square miles of Russian land, which is relatively minor given the vast expanse of Russia, the largest country in the world. The territories captured hold no significant strategic value. However, the mere fact of such an incursion has surprised Russia.
This development pales in comparison to the extent of Ukrainian territory that Russia has taken. Russia currently controls a strip of land as long as California, encompassing the entire eastern side of Ukraine, which spans approximately 800 miles and is between 50 and 100 miles wide. In total, Russia has likely seized over 50,000 square miles of Ukraine, while Ukraine’s gains in Russia amount to only 400 square miles—a ratio of 100 to 1.
One may hope that this development destabilizes Russian forces, enabling Ukraine to reclaim some of the eastern regions currently under Russian occupation. However, I have not observed any signs indicating that this is occurring. Have you?
Jacobsen: Russia remains deeply entrenched in its positions. The most significant aspect of this situation is its historical context; this is the first time since World War II that the territory of the Russian Federation has been invaded in such a manner. This is unprecedented in the modern era, predating your time and mine. The public reaction, particularly among the elites in the Kremlin, remains to be seen.
Rosner: Kursk, a city approximately 60 kilometres (or around 35 miles) from the current Ukrainian position, has roughly 440,000 people. While some small towns within the 400 square miles that Ukraine has occupied are under Ukrainian control, it is uncertain whether Ukrainian forces can advance as far as Kursk. Achieving this would require tripling the depth of their penetration into Russian territory. While such a development seems unlikely in the immediate future, if it were to occur, it could provoke a much stronger reaction in Russia, given the significance of Kursk as a city.
I would assume that the Ukrainian forces are conducting themselves with propriety during this occupation. Unlike Russian forces, who have been reported to commit atrocities, such as running over civilians with tanks, engaging in acts of rape, and committing murder, I believe the Ukrainians are mindful of their position as the aggrieved party in this conflict and would be careful not to undermine that by engaging in similar behaviour.
Jacobsen: The broader context is that the international community has overwhelmingly condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion and occupation of Ukraine. That remains the fundamental issue. Nonetheless, it seems there is a certain level of support for Ukraine’s modest territorial gains within Russia. Potentially.
Rosner: So, yeah. I mean, though, Putin responded with a bizarre nuclear threat. You know, he talked about tactical nukes, and yesterday, I argued that there is no such thing— a nuke is a nuke. It makes a massive explosion that is going to, you know, kill everyone within most of a square kilometre, which is not a small amount of land. However, he made this strange nuclear threat with that nuclear plant Russia is occupying.
Rosner: You mean Zaporizhzhia? The nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia?
Jacobsen: Yes, that is it. Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear plant. It is shut down.
Rosner: He had Russian forces pile a bunch of flammable materials under one of the cooling towers and set it on fire. So it looks like the cooling tower is on fire and emitting dirty smoke. The tweet suggested it might be tire smoke because tires burn and produce dirty smoke.
It is a bizarre gesture. It is like saying, “This is what it would look like if your nuclear plant were melting down.” However, I am sure the point he was trying to make is that if you keep moving further into Russia, the threat of nukes remains on the table.
This is somewhat ironic because Ukraine used to be a nuclear power. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and had Soviet nukes stationed on its territory as a deterrent if the Soviet Union went to war with the rest of Europe. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine still had a stockpile of nukes. Russia was not able to reclaim them immediately after the Soviet Union fell. I do not know how many they had in Ukraine—dozens, I assume—enough to devastate Europe or Russia, depending on who got hold of them.
And the deal was that Ukraine would give the nukes back to, I guess, Russia, and in return, Europe and the international community promised to protect Ukraine from Russia. Is that accurate?
Jacobsen: Yes, something like that. So it is ironic that now Ukraine is being threatened with nukes after giving up its own.
Rosner: Right. However, we are still far from that scenario. You know better than I do. Are you seriously worried about Russia setting off a small nuclear explosion?
Jacobsen: A Belgian general who is a friend and a colleague. He thinks those threats are genuinely alarming, so I take that seriously.
Rosner: Yes, I agree. It is scary. Moreover, as I have mentioned before, I have read about U.S. and Russian nuclear strategies, which have existed for about 70 years. Russia detonated its first nuke in 1948 or 1949. So, we are approaching 75 years of this evolved deterrent strategy known as mutually assured destruction. Both the U.S. and Russia have enough nukes that if one country launched an attack, both would be destroyed.
There is no way to stop nuclear missiles if dozens are launched between countries. Even intercepting one or two is highly challenging. We have only 44 intercept missiles, each with a limited chance of success. Russian missiles are MIRVed, meaning they can split into multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles. One missile could split into four, five, or six warheads, making them nearly impossible to stop.
For 70 years, we have lived under the threat of mutually assured destruction. This book, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson, highlights how precarious and prone that system is to catastrophic error. There have been false alarms that nearly led to nuclear launches. Still, fortunately, restraint from individuals in the command structure prevented disaster. Even without Putin’s threats, nukes are terrifying.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I just returned from travelling and networking in Vancouver. Regardless, I sent you two topics for tonight. The first is the future of the commodification of human beings and the human body. It would be smart to split the definitions of a human being and the human body, where the first incorporates the second.
Rick Rosner: The future is a jungle. It’s like the Cambrian explosion where animal life quickly, over geologic and evolutionary time, spit out millions of new species, and shit was crazy. Yes, the future is going to spit out a lot of new shit and a lot of new ways of being, a lot of new beings.
Over the next few generations, from 10 years from now through 300 years from now, it becomes too speculative. It becomes hard to predict if you want to go 500 years out. But we know there will be a proliferation of new technology, machines, semi-machines, organic concoctions, combinations, and hybrids. So it’ll be a jungle and a shifting jungle where the dominant behaviours and things will shift over 2, 3, or 5 years. We’re still talking about when smartphones came into being—2006, 2008?
Now, we have 7 billion of them, which means most people on Earth have a smartphone because there are 8 billion people on Earth.
Jacobsen: The first version of a smartphone was invented by IBM. It was called the Simon Personal Communicator. The Apple iPhone, that’s the one that changed everything. Integrated applications in one device. A quick preface—the first real one was in 1992. The first iPhone was June 29, 2007.
Rosner: So, not even two decades ago. It’s been 17 years. We don’t even realize. I remember the ’90s when people walked around with those brick cell phones that you could only talk on. Before that, there were car phones, which were phones wired into your car, which seems ridiculous because now you can take your phone wherever you want. But anyway, that was only 17 years ago. It has reshaped how we behave and maybe even how we think. And that change has been a pretty steady state for the past ten years, where it became smartphone-sized, and then that calmed down. The change happened, but it was a change that overtook humanity in less than a decade.
Changes might be less radical in the future every five years, but maybe every ten years. It’ll transform us again within five or six years and then keep accelerating. There will be many beings in the world, along with sub-beings—things that aren’t fully conscious but are connected to the Internet and share data back and forth. For example, your refrigerator might tell you what you need, recommend new items, show ads, or even order from the supermarket. Hence, it’s ready to be picked up or delivered but won’t be conscious. It’s still rudimentary, like when you go to the gas station, and the pump plays an ad for you.
Over time, there will be fewer unaugmented humans proportionately. Augmentation will take various forms, with each segment of society and each individual having limits and preferred modifications. I came up with the term”flesh equity” today, though it might not be right. The idea is that, just as liberals strive for fairness and inclusion, the liberals of the future will strive to include humans in future endeavours even when humans aren’t the best at whatever those endeavours are.
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They’ll try to ensure that we won’t become pets or toys. Civilization will try to maintain access points to the latest advancements so that beings, in whatever form they take, can participate in the different ways of being and the various endeavours that a transhuman—or whatever term we use—society will engage in. Someone might come up with a statement of rights ensuring that even the lowliest newborn has the right to become a fully qualified member of the Technosociety of the Future through augmentation or whatever means. We’ll see if that persists, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t. We will likely continue to pay attention to our human heritage even as things get weirder and weirder.
So, even if humans remain part of the mix for at least the next century, there’ll still be many of us, and things won’t have progressed so far that there’s no place for us. Economically, you need humans as consumers until a new type of potentially post-human economy is formed. For most of the next century, there will be more humans who are consumers than other entities, so that’ll save us for a while. All our stories have been built on a human foundation, so the entities will tend to take after us for a while until new forms culturally evolve.
But I guess you could argue that eventually, unaugmented humans will mostly be eligible for participation trophies, and the world will make room for them, but the cutting-edge stuff won’t be done by the unaugmented. Is that a reasonable supposition? We’ve talked about the cheapening of consciousness, where we’ve felt special for thousands of years because we could talk, create art, and build things. But when we create stuff that can do those things, it’ll be a big “screw you” to us.
It’ll be like, “Yes, I can buy something that can outperform you for $550, and then for $3.50, and then for under $100—whatever the equivalent of $100 is 50 years from now.” That will lead to some precariousness, but there will still be cultural and civilizational guardians who will try to make the world less vicious. There will be evolutionary viciousness—new ways of being, new products—things will evolve so fast that unless entities look out for others, the meat grinder of the future will grind. But there will be ethicists and moral arbiters striving to provide some safety, some temporary rules, to avoid the whole thing chewing itself to pieces.
Cowboys and cowgirls: When you work at a ranch, some country music makes an indelible mark; it’s about an ethic, not simply a work ethic; a foundation of earning one’s keep, whether keeping what one loses and what one ‘wins.’
See “It’s not all the same, but similar, which isn’t a condemnation; it’s another human story. First floor, for all the farmland.”
Christopher DiCarlo: Author, Educator, Philosopher of Science and Ethics
Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Abstract
Dr. Christopher DiCarlo is an Author, Educator, and Philosopher of Science and Ethics. He discusses social philosophy; natural philosophy and science; and time at Harvard University.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you go to the major categories of philosophy and by social, political philosophy and so on. We started with ethics there. What social philosophy seems the most appealing to you?
DiCarlo: Obviously, there is an element of libertarianism that attracts a person. We want to give people as much liberty as possible. But libertarianism unchecked can run amok. We’ve seen that historically. You can’t let people do whatever they want.
I am also, a social democrat at heart because I do want to help people who through no fault of their own have had a tough go at it. So, it confuses people when I am on television or what not and they try to pigeonhole me, I say,
“Oh, I am a libertarian socialist.” They’ll say, “That’s not possible.” I say, “Sure, it is possible.”
I think people should have the right to make as much money as they want. But they can’t do it at the sacrifice of others. They can’t harm people or other species in the process. They have to minimize the amount of harm that they do. then I am a socialist at heart because like when I was at Harvard, I used to hang out with this guy named Edward O. Wilson. I do not know if you know him?
Jacobsen: Oh, I know him. He was a Consilience guy, the unity of knowledge. That was in the 90s.
DiCarlo: Yes, he loved hanging out.
Jacobsen: That’s where the systemic relation part comes from too?
DiCarlo: Yes, exactly. So, he said, “Socialism, Chris, is a great idea but it is for the wrong species.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
DiCarlo: It works well for ants. It works well for bees, but for humans, at this point in our cultural evolution; we are not there yet. even Marx, if you read him carefully, he said this. We’re going to have revolutions with trials and errors. He couldn’t have known genetically what allele frequencies were.
He could not have known as much about Relational Systemics, as we do today. But let’s face it, I do not think humans generally want other humans to suffer if it can be helped. We do not. if you do enjoy the suffering of other humans, I think that’s very telling of an individual.
There will always be suffering. We know that. I got back from Guatemala. I went down there in February to teach critical thinking. I saw poverty at levels I’ve never seen before. I am a bit of a world traveller. But Guatemala struck a nerve with me. you want to help everyone.
You want to make their pain and suffering go away. You can’t because there are so many systems in place, of which you have no control or very little control. You want to wave your hand and give them lives of integrity and enjoyment, where they are comfortable.
Where they do not have to stay afraid, there is a lot of fear in Guatemala. Everyone owns a gun. It is the Wild West. It is a tough, tough country. They have come through 4 decades of Mayan genocide where 200,000 people were killed.
Largely because of, believe or it not, the United States and what the CIA were doing in the 50s with the coup and replacing their leaders with their own republic governments. Because why? The money in fruit: United Fruit, Del Monte, and Chiquita Bananas are all out of Guatemala.
It is messy. It is ugly. It is usually somebody making a buck somewhere, which is the result of a lot of human suffering. So, I mean this is a very roundabout way; I do apologize for being so long-winded. But I am no more long-winded than Krauss, because Krauss is a long-winded guy. He doesn’t like philosophy.
I got to keep him in his place, whenever he and I are together. He does respect me as a philosopher, which is good.
Jacobsen: If you look at the history and if you look at the terminology of science, as a professional cosmologist and physicist where he is at the highest level, science comes from natural philosophy.
As far as I know, things haven’t changed much. That’s why things like epistemological naturalism fit very well because, historically and currently, it still is. So, natural philosophy as a sub-domain of philosophy is a different set of principles and tools. So, he’s a philosopher, a natural philosopher.
DiCarlo: Tough to get him to admit that, but you’re right and I am with you.
Jacobsen: I think it is logically and historically a proof.
DiCarlo: It is. It is. It is a shame that Krauss didn’t take it up or even one undergraduate course in philosophy.
Jacobsen: Wasn’t it William Whewell who came up with that term science?
DiCarlo: Yes, that’s right. Yes, he was born one of the first philosophers of science. Michael Ruse, he was my supervisor. He’s a big fan of Whewell. A very big fan.
Jacobsen: Was this your time at Harvard?
DiCarlo: My time at Harvard was interesting. When I did my Ph.D. at Waterloo, Ruse was at Guelph. I was dealing with a supervisor in Waterloo who is a wonderful man, but not a driven supervisor. My advice to all my grad students is basically the same: find somebody with whom you can get the job done.
Find the biggest name with whom you can get the job done. Because if you can’t get the job done, it doesn’t matter; they are going to leave you floundering. 50% of all Ph.D. students drop out anyhow. I was having this hard time with this wonderful but misguided gentleman at Waterloo. I was meeting with Ruse in Guelph because that’s where I live.
He said, “Would you mind if I came on board as a co- advisor?” My current advisor was very receptive. He said,
“Yes, work with Michael. Whatever Michael says is good here.”
So, I did my Ph.D. in less than 6 months with him. Under Michael’s guidance, it would have taken years with this one guy, but that’s very important.
Harvard, I was talking to a guy named Robert Nozick. Bob liked what I was doing but realized – we both realized – that I wasn’t doing philosophy anymore. As Ruse told me, “Find a niche in which nobody has ever worked and be the best at it in the world.”
Because he and David Hull kind helped me with philosophy and biology. So, I contacted Bob and he said, “You do not want to work in philosophy, what you’re talking about is cognitive evolution.” I said, “Yes, I know. I want to know if I can make determinations as to how people reason based on putting the pieces of the puzzle together from archaeology and anthropology, of hominid evolution.”
He said, “You want to work in the Stone Age lab.” So, I contacted the head of the lab, who said, “Come on down. We would love a philosopher in our faculty at the Stone Age lab.” So, that was my ticket to a postdoc for a couple of years down at Harvard.
It was wonderful to be able to ask any question that I wanted. No questions were too silly. Because we were talking about epistemic responsibility. By the way, Ed Wilson loved that term so much; he gave me this.
[Shows gift from Edward O. Wilson.]
He loved the fact that I gave him this term. Let’s face it, it is the hallmark of or should be of epistemology and philosophy in general. But it was wonderful to hang out at Harvard and everybody there knows, all the anthropologists, that we have to tell a story.
We do not have time machines. We can’t go back to see australopithecines morph. We do not know that for sure. But when you put all the pieces together from around the world, migration patterns, all of that, it appears obvious that certain lines went extinct but others led to others.
When you look at cranial development and brain size and tool use developments, we can tell more epistemically responsible stories than if we make things up willy-nilly. To me, one of the things I was most impressed with was the scientists I dealt with.
These are some of the best minds in the world. So, when I came in to talk about evolution, they loved it. Because probing around with primatologists, an archaeologist, people in genetics, behavioural genetics, and others.
I could meet everyone. So, I could meet with everybody and handle my questions there. I developed a fairly robust hypothesis as to why people have reasons, have developed reasoning skills the way we have. Like Aristotle developed the three modes of thought.
But even more so, I think I’ve got a pretty decent handle on why, throughout hominid evolution, mythologies and religions developed. Of course, there is no litmus test. There is no way anybody will ever say, “Look! DiCarlo’s right!” There is nothing clear to be able to say that, like the atomic weight of Caesium. We’re never going to get that.
But I think I put the pieces of the puzzle together in an epistemically responsible manner as I can, to be able to say, “We know what gave rise to what based on tool use and movement and nomadic practices, and the fauna and flora of a human area. We know that brain size was already completed. It was at its current size from 200,000 years ago.”
So, I talk about this perfect storm element of all different developments being necessary for language, which co- evolved with consciousness developments. So, I think I have a fairly robust hypothesis. I think I have enough information from other scientists that I’ve been able to glean.
I no longer consider myself a philosopher. So, I call myself an inter-disciplinarian at this point. But what does that mean? You hear about interdisciplinary studies at universities. They are a joke. They are largely hand-picking people from English and other areas. There is no such thing as interdisciplinary studies in any robust way that I have seen.
But I think that I am doing it. Obviously, I am biased, but I do go to those other fields. I look at the information they provide me. When I ask them what I think are the hard questions, the challenging questions, when they answer them to the best of their ability, I am able to culminate this information.
I am able to look at all of these different historical systems that have worked together in various ways in order to produce the evolutionary species that we now find ourselves. I think I have a pretty decent handle on that aspect of human cultural and cognitive evolution.
So, yes, those two years at Harvard were probably the greatest intellectual time of my life. I was immersed among so many well-educated and proven scientists who could answer my questions very, very well. I was so impressed with the faculty of people and, of course, the other visiting scholars who were there from all around the world.
It was a good time. It was a very productive time for me and developing my ideas.
Where did you acquire your education? How did you become interested in Psychology?
My first two years were completed at Kwantlen, back when Kwantlen first separated from Douglas college and was a series of trailers on 140th street. I was a mature student (relatively speaking) and wanted a way out of the boring job I was in. From Kwantlen I went onto UBC to complete my BA in Psychology (was tied for the governor’s general award at Kwantlen, GPA), but lost the award to another student because a few of my courses I had completed were taken at Cap College. At UBC I went on to complete an MA in Counselling Psychology, and I recently completed a PhD through an interdisciplinary faculty in education, the Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry, which was a more sensible choice for me than a PhD in Counselling Psychology since my research interests had long since strayed from psychotherapy. My advisor though was the same advisor for my Phd as was for my MA, from Counselling Psychology.
What topics have you researched in your career?
My Master’s degree looked at the influence of divorce on adolescents – this was in the 1980’s and there actually wasn’t a lot of research at the time on that topic.
You recently earned your PhD. What did you research? How do the results extend into larger society?
My research looked at how young adults who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, assess and critically reflect upon their spiritual beliefs. The research questions were twofold: what were young adults’ beliefs, and secondly, how did they critically reflect upon them. The second research question utilized King and Kitchener’s reflective judgment model to interpret and assess participants’ beliefs.
How do the results extend into the larger society? We found that participants scored at about the norm for their age and education level, but having said that, were alarmed at how participants’ beliefs seemed tentative and were not grounded into their personal philosophies. Hanan Alexander (2002) points out that “today’s spiritual seekers experience their moral intuitions as fragmented and ungrounded” (p. x) and comments that part of a spiritual exploration is asking big questions, meaning of life questions, the type of questions that typically include pondering the nature of goodness. These sorts of questions, and the answers we decide for ourselves, seem particularly relevant for young adults since one’s idea of the nature of goodness can guide both their career and relationship choices. It’s possible then that the kind of spiritual seeking that appears to be so common these days, without some type of intellectual support, inquiry, etc. may be one piece that contributes to the higher rate of depression and anxiety that we see in young adults today. There’s no doubt that institutional religion is no longer a source of undisputed guidance and meaning, more and more people tend to pick and choose their favourite religious pieces, but how effectively can we integrate those pieces into a larger personal philosophy that coheres, has integrity and can provide an authentic source of guidance for ourselves?
Other than the social domain, where would you like to take your research?
Well, I suppose the main thrust of my research is that I hope individuals will entertain the idea that one’s epistemological stance bears examination, and that the ideas and personal philosophies we hold outside of the academic world warrant just as much critical examination as the topics we prepare for in an examination. Maybe even more, because, if spiritual beliefs tend to include a notion of what is goodness, then this is a foundational belief that can only benefit from close scrutiny in order to make that belief a lived experience.
What do you consider the most controversial research in psychology? How do you examine this research?
In Psychology, hmm – I think actually I’d point to work in Philosophy and its influence on Psychology as a more significant source of controversy, particularly the work by post-modern theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. They’re changing the nature of language and core social concepts – and that’s powerfully influential. Foucault argued that the Social Sciences were the most influential academic area because it is the Social Sciences that produce and institute our cultural ideals, for better or for worse.
How have your philosophical views changed over time – in and out of psychology?
I’ve changed from a simple naïve realist to someone who is much more open to ontological possibilities I never would have considered in my thirties. I remain convinced that the method of science is the most powerful epistemological tool available to us, but wonder whether this method may evolve as well, and sometimes ponder whether there are possible realities that the human mind simply has yet to evolve the capacity to comprehend.
I’m also interested in Jonathan Haidt’s (2012) research – who points out that Psychology has solidly been influenced by a rationalist perspective from the time of Plato on – there is a direct line of influence to Piaget and Kohlberg. He argues that so much of human processing is non-rational – and we rationalists overlook this at our peril. My research falls squarely into a rationalist perspective; King and Kitchener were influenced by William Perry, who was influenced by Kohlberg, who was influenced by Piaget. There are researchers who propose a personal epistemology that is more embodied, intuitive, and perhaps I’ve overlooked the importance of this given my rationalist bias.
What advice would you give to undergraduate and graduate students aiming for a career in psychology?
Consider what your specific goal is, and if it includes working as a psychotherapist, make sure that you have had lots of opportunities to work in that kind of capacity before you commit. Not everyone is ideally suited to working with other people’s painful experiences, and psychological change is a slow process, successes are measured out in teaspoons.
What books, article, and/or people have most influenced your intellectual development?
I quite admire Jonathan Haidt – his book The Righteous Mind (2012) is a timely read given the polarization politically that is so dominant these days.
I admire Charles Taylor’s scholarship and ability to integrate diverse perspectives: A Secular Age (2007) and Sources of the Self (1989).
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization
Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo: The Future of Religion, argue a kind of post-modern update of religion, their ideas were brand new for me.
I still like Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents
What do you consider the take-home message of your research?
Know thyself? Perhaps not in the true Platonic tradition, but at least Jungian, and while we are blessed to live in multicultural times where the internet exposes us to lots of different perspectives, whatever ideals we choose we need to make our own, and that’s best achieved through the hard work of critical inquiry as well ensuring that our beliefs also become our lived experience.
Antjuan Finch is the Author of After Genius: On Creativity and Its Consequences, The 3 Sides of Man, and Applied Theory. He created the Creative Attitudes Inventory (CAT) and the Public Domain Intelligence Test (PDIT). Finch discusses: Public Domain Intelligence Test (PDIT) the Static General Intelligence Quicktest (GIQ).
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This series will be exploratory, taking note of some of the people’s resources in the high- range test environment and then presenting this for public consumption. You developed the Public Domain Intelligence Test (PDIT) and the Static General Intelligence Quicktest (GIQ). Naturally, there is a start for everything in high-range test development. What was the origin of the idea for developing high-range tests by you?
AntJuan Finch: Rather than starting with the focus of developing high-range IQ tests, I simply observed the available offerings for free IQ tests online and thought that there could be an opportunity to create something with more easily identifiable backing in existing research. To that end, the Public Domain Intelligence Test was created: a free intelligence test constructed using open-source, and previously validated items from elsewhere. As I suggested, I knew that there was an opening in the free cognitive assessment space for such a product to be made, but I was actually surprised when it garnered so much attention, now having over 40,000 users. The Static General Intelligence Quicktest was borne from a similar impulse: I’d noticed that most comprehensive intelligence tests could be dramatically shortened without sacrificing nearly any construct validity, and really an entirely negligible amount of measurement accuracy. And so I set about creating a test that would maximize convergent validity with full-length intelligence tests, delivered in roughly the shortest amount of time conceivable, with also the added bonus of being constructed in a way that I could generate an infinite amount of parallel versions of the test to buttress against cheating (more on this later).
Jacobsen: What tests stood out in your early thoughts?
Finch: I focused most strongly on tests with a diversity in item types, and on shortened versions of longer tests.
Jacobsen: How did those tests form a template, if at all, for the PDIT and the GIQ?
Finch: The PDIT was my best attempt at making a mirror – using open-source science – of a common abbreviated WAIS form, the WASI-2. To that end, I just wanted sources of VCI and PRI proxies; in other words, good vocabulary/verbal and reasoning/non-verbal item sets. Meanwhile, my rules for the Static Quicktest were a bit less constrained: as long as it was reliable and correlated well with comprehensive tests in general, I was free to just think up all of the item types for the test. Nonetheless, to maximize g-loading, I ended up roughly paralleling the weighting structure of the WAIS-IV, with 80% of the final score being from Verbal and Non-Verbal items and the last 20% being from items that just rely on rote computation, rather than pure reason or knowledge. From there, I decided to break out the Crystallized, Fluid, and Cognitive Storage and Efficiency constructs into their iconic, or often- referenced constituent parts. For example, crystallized intelligence, referring to one’s ability to assimilate learned information, is often thought and shown to be assessed well by tests of vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and grammatical sensitivity. In fact, I picked SAT cloze items for the Public Domain Intelligence Test (PDIT) precisely because that item type has been shown to measure each of those facets well. Likewise, the reasoning aspect of Fluid Reasoning can be separated into the classic split between eductive, deductive, and inductive reasoning; I picked the Non-verbal matrices for PDIT because that item type has also been shown to reasonably tap each of those facets. From there, I selected pure – or, as pure as could reasonably be found or currently made – items that reflected each of those facets: items separately for vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension, grammatical sensitivity, eductive, deductive and inductive reasoning, and each with further nuances between the questions within each set. The same reasoning was applied with the Cognitive Storage and Efficiency items. This all took about a day; the freedom of not having to rely on open-source and preexisting materials made the process go much quicker for the Quicktest than for the Public Domain Intelligence Test.
Jacobsen: To quote the GIQ introductory content in full:
Originally designed such that thousands of forms of the test may be produced, allowing for retakes to be more validly performed in quick succession, and a bolster against cheating, this static version of the test was designed to mirror the content of the WAIS-IV, using the formatting of the Wonderlic Personnel Test. Put simply, the test assesses the full spectrum of psychometric g, using cutting-edge theory, combined with a well-tested format.
To do this, the test assesses 3 factors: Crystallized Intelligence, Fluid Reasoning, and Cognitive Processing and Efficiency, using 8 item types.
This test has 50 items and takes 12-minutes to complete. Click here to begin.
How is this test adaptable and resistant to cheating? Chris Cole of the Mega Society has been working with others on a cheat resistant test, too. One that is adaptive.
Finch: The items of the test are constructed in a way such that equally valid, yet alternate and completely new versions of the test could be algorithmically generated by a machine; in which case, memorizing or practicing the test currently displayed on that website wouldn’t really help anyone to hack or game the test.
Jacobsen: WAIS is referenced as the gold standard in academic work. Is this relevant when developing a test that taps into g?
Finch: Yes, if a test is to be useful as and understood as a measure of IQ, its results ought to be easily interchangeable with the results of commonly used, or what are typically considered by professionals as good IQ tests. Put another way, the test should maximize for the g across tests of g; it should load primarily on the results from tests which are each comprised of a diverse set of cognitive tests (g).
Jacobsen: Why use the formatting of the Wonderlic Personnel Test?
Finch: It seems intuitive that if I took one cognitive test one day, and then took a totally different type of cognitive test 40 years from now, that the results will most likely be less correlated than if I took them minutes apart. And so I had a theory that part of why tests like the Wonderlic Personnel Test, and even more so, the TOGRA, maintain results that are so well correlated with more comprehensive assessments is that the quality that accounts for results across cognitive tests gets a bit more tapped when the tests are done in quick succession, or, even more so, when you cycle through the items from each of the sections over and over again, as which happens with the Wonderlic and TOGRA. To summarize, I thought that putting the subtests into one quickshot form might further amplify convergent validity, and I knew that it could be possible to do that and not sacrifice much reliability while doing so when also bringing the time length of the test all the way down to 12 minutes.
Jacobsen: Are there any areas in which the WAIS-V taps into a wider definition of g not used in the GIQ when it is using the WAIS-IV as its structure to mirror?
Finch: To be determined. Though, I didn’t mirror the WAIS- IV’s content exactly, only its construct weighting; in fact, due to its algorithmic escalation and facet focus at the third-stratum, conceptual level, it could even test a construct that’s broader than the WAIS-IV’s.
Jacobsen: Why are 8 item types the standard?
Finch: To ensure that you’re testing the quality that’s general across cognitive tests, you want to make sure that your results are generalizing across multiple types of items. The easiest way to do that is to just put a diverse set of items in your test.
Jacobsen: How are crystallized intelligence, fluid reasoning, and cognitive processing and efficiency brought together in the GIQ?
Finch: I believe I answered this well enough earlier.
Jacobsen: How do we know they are well-balanced in the assessment of g in this particular test?
Finch: This was also answered well previously: I tested the third-stratum level concepts first and then weighted second-order facets the same as the second order factors are for the WAIS-IV.
Jacobsen: How do you ensure this is the case?
Finch: At the end of the day, and this goes beyond my previous answers, if it wasn’t done well enough then it wouldn’t correlate so strongly with the results across professional tests for intelligence.
Jacobsen: To quote the PDIT in full:
Verbal (Gc) Test
Crystallized Intelligence (Gc) refers to one’s ability to use acquired knowledge to solve problems. Because crystallized intelligence deals with learned information, Gc increases with age and educational attainment and can be tested well by assessments of verbal ability, such as vocabulary and cloze tests. What’s more, the items in this test were pulled from publicly accessible, old SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Tests), so this assessment should provide a near-perfect measure of crystallized intelligence. Moreover, the SATs that this test was derived from are considered valid measures of intelligence and were accepted for admission purposes to many high IQ societies, including the International High IQ Society and Triple Nine Society.
To answer each question, test-takes must select the option which best completes each sentence. An example would be selecting “gradual” to complete the sentence “Medieval kingdoms did not become constitutional republics overnight; on the contrary, the change was ——-.”
This test has 30 questions and a 15-minute time limit. The questions are ordered from least to most difficult. For an accurate score, do not use any aids to complete this test, and take it only once.
Non-verbal (Gf) Test
Fluid Intelligence (Gf) refers to one’s ability to recognize patterns within, and make sense of, novel information. Because fluid intelligence deals with novelty, it can be tested well by assessments of reasoning ability which are comprised of non-verbal, foreign, and abstract items. Moreover, for unknown reasons, fluid intelligence tends to increase until early adulthood (the mid-20s to early 30s), and decline precipitously until death. What’s more, the norm for this test was extrapolated from the results of 705 teenagers and young adults, so relatively older people may receive seemingly deflated scores on this test, as the scores here are not age-adjusted.
To answer the questions on this test, test takers should select the options that complete the patterns that are presented to them.
This test has 30 questions and a 15 minute time limit. The questions here span a wide range of difficulty and complexity and are placed in a pseudo-random order. For an accurate score, do not use any aids to complete this test, and take it only once.
Obviously, this test is more involved. The interesting part is the separation between the verbal and the non-verbal content, Gc versus Gf. What is a cloze test?
Finch: It’s not more involved; it only takes longer to complete. That separation may well be informative for many people, but the g-loading for that test is undoubtedly lower than the SGIQs because it merely has two item types, in this case. A cloze test is a sentence completion test where a sentence is missing parts and one is tasked with filling in the missing blank(s) with the most fitting answer available.
Jacobsen: How have the new SATs done to measure general intelligence? Are the old SATs better at measuring general intelligence? What is the year separating new and old in this definition of the SATs?
Finch: It appears that the old SAT probably tested a broader set of items and most likely did so in a broader set of ways, although I don’t believe that there was an overly clean cut- off in when this happened, but that it was more of a gradual thing. Nonetheless, these tests were made to predict academic performance, and in doing so, can’t escape testing crystallized intelligence, and in doing that, won’t escape either the ineliminable part of crystallized intelligence that loads with fluid intelligence, and thus leads to a modest g-loading for the test overall. One has to sacrifice a moderate amount of the variance in the test, but
the results on the new SAT can be converted to reasonable IQ results. Maybe unsurprisingly, the results for many standardized tests used for admissions to colleges and graduate schools are actually extremely highly correlated, and so concordance tables are somewhat easily produced for all of them. Once that is done, and once you also have the IQ conversions for a few of these tests, you can then without much added work convert the scores on all of them into IQ approximations, as I’ve shown here. I actually find the results of this all to be pretty fascinating; you can take that table and predict the IQ averages for universities that have been documented in peer-reviewed research. Although I should add that some people might think that the results on that table look far too low, but I believe that’s only because so many people have been lied to about what the results may be for others that often only experts have more come to really understand what a well-motivated and well-trained 135+ IQ person actually looks like. Moreover, much of what is going on with a lot of tests beyond that point is experimental, and is not associated with much output that most would view as impressive, due to other somewhat beneficial traits starting to become improbable to coexist with yet another outlier trait.
Jacobsen: Why zone in on 30 questions and 15 minutes for each test? Do the same time limit and question ceilings necessarily measure their respective components of intelligence to the same graduated degree?
Finch: Not necessarily, that parallel was mostly a stylistic consideration. That both the verbal and nonverbal sections are also made from “fill in the blank” type questions was also somewhat of stylistic detail; I thought that a bit of symmetry and parsimony in appearance wouldn’t hurt.
Jacobsen: What is the evidence for the curvature of increase, stabilization, and decline of components of intelligence? These seem obvious and are common knowledge. I want to make everything explicit for educational purposes and reminders. Maybe, a renewed statement of truism in a new way can give a new insight too.
Finch: This is one of the most well-established findings regarding the study of cognition. For an easily readable and very hard to reasonably rebut study on this topic one should read the paper “IQ and Ability Across the Adult Lifespan,” which looks at the raw scores for the WAIS-IV for each age group in its manual and finds that the average 64- year-old suffers the equivalent of about a 30 point loss in processing speed throughout their life.
Jacobsen: Why select a pseudo-random order rather than a completely random order or a logically progressed order?
Finch: I preserved the order of the items from the study that first validated them, which I did not conduct.
Jacobsen: Where did the sample of 705 people come from, for the test?
Finch: Being a test consisting of previously validated, open- source content, the 705 participants Non-Verbal section came from the initial sample that was used to validate the items in the research that was conducted prior to my using the items for a more general assessment, as well as with additional samples.
Jacobsen: How could you age-adjust the scores, if at all?
Finch: I would just need a few more participant samples. Though, I’m not so interested in doing that as I believe that doing so would make the results less informative, or at least more confusing.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So this is for the World Intelligence Network audience. What was your first discovery of something like an IQ test? And then, what was your discovery of an actual IQ test?
Rick Rosner: Here is my history with IQ tests. I taught myself to read when I was three and three-quarters years old. I read whenever I could. Then, in kindergarten, we were given a test that included the Draw-A-Man test. It was an IQ test. I had no trouble since I’d already been reading a lot. I did well on the test. My mom had drawn with me. I did not think she would make me perform well on an IQ test, but it came in handy for the last page of the test, which was to draw a man. I didn’t draw a man. I drew a stoplight and put him in a shirt with a collar. Then the test results came back, and in a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told my parents I was a genius.
In 1965 or 66, this didn’t mean little in terms of specially added enrichment. In first grade, they tested me again. I scored about 140 on the WISC. But then they observed me on the playground and saw that I was terrible and had no friends. They decided against skipping a grade because that would make me even more socially isolated. My school, University Hill Elementary on Broadway in Boulder, Colorado, is across the street from the University of Colorado, where the major with the most students is psychology.
So, students at CU who were psych majors or grad students in psych and had developed their own IQ tests for a grad project needed kids to test them on. Occasionally, a couple of times, I would get pulled out. They pulled out the kids who liked and did well on IQ tests to take these experimental IQ tests. Also, in first grade, I started chanting to God and turning clockwise, spinning clockwise in a circle because my parents — my dad was in the ladies’ ready-to-wear business. In 1966, he had to fly to New York five times a year. He’d pick out clothing from the showrooms to sell in our store. Five times a year, he’d fly to New York. Once or twice a year, he’d take my mom with him. So they left me with this old, scary babysitter for a week, and I freaked out. When they came home, I was spinning and chanting, which got me sent to a child psychologist.
Who gave me another IQ test, the one with the red and white blocks? Is that the WAIS? No, that’s the adult version. It could be the Stanford-Binet. Anyway, the one with the blocks. By age eight, I’d already taken many IQ tests. Back then, people had a lot more invested in and respect for IQ tests. We probably got something equivalent to an IQ score once every three years. In my file, there were quite a few IQ test scores.
In ninth grade, I was in honours math, and we were each assigned a topic at Baseline Junior High. It turned out that they gave the kid with the highest IQ in the honours class statistics because that kid would be shown the IQs of every kid in the ninth grade, which is incredible. But that’s what they did back then. The kid that got to teach the class statistics would teach the class statistics based on doing a T-test to see whether there was a statistically significant difference between the IQs of the kids in honours math and the IQs of the entire ninth grade. So I saw my IQ, the highest in the ninth grade. It was 151, which, at the time, was pretty good.
Then, in high school, I underperformed from time to time because I was primarily concerned with how to get a girlfriend and maybe lose my virginity before I graduated high school. I could have done better at this. I started applying to Harvard and decided to do a statistical analysis. I learned what a 151 IQ corresponds to. That’s about three standard deviations above the mean, a little more than that. It equals about one kid in a thousand who should be able to score that high in practical terms.
It’s more than that because I’d taken over a dozen IQ tests by that point, mainly if you include the SAT and the PSAT, which can be converted into IQ scores. When you take a dozen IQ tests, you’re only going to tell people — if you are dumb enough to say to people your IQ — you’re only going to tell them your highest score. So, by luck, somebody with a 145 IQ taking a dozen IQ tests would probably score 151 on one of the tests. So, my 151, maybe one kid in 700 or 600, had a score like that. I realized that every kid at Harvard would be the smartest kid with the highest SAT scores, which I also had in their class back in high school. I’d be completely ordinary compared to everybody else, which is terrible because I wanted to get a girlfriend.
If I couldn’t get a girlfriend at Boulder High, how was I going to get a girlfriend in college at Harvard, where everybody’s exceptional, and I’m one more schmuck competing with the Kennedy family and people who went to prep schools and expensive private schools? So, I freaked out and went back to high school to try to redo my senior year correctly. Also, I wanted to change the world with a theory of the universe, and I didn’t think an IQ of 151, given its frequency among humans, which I calculated to be one in 600 or one in 1,000, was high enough. I thought I wasn’t smart enough based on my IQ to do what I wanted. So, I thought I would learn to live as a meathead, as a physical being instead of a mental being. I’d been lifting weights. By the time I got to college, I had blown out of Harvard. I never completed the application. I went to my hometown school, the University of Colorado, lifted many weights, and eventually became a bouncer and a stripper, and lost my virginity in the way people do, where being muscly didn’t hurt.
A couple of years into college, or a couple of semesters into college, somebody told me about the World’s Hardest IQ Test, which had been published in 1979 in either Omni or Games Magazine. This was a test, the Langdon Adult Intelligence Scale, written by Kevin Langdon. I tried taking that test, and I scored 170. I found out a couple of things. One is that I could break the 151 score. Two is that the tests I’d scored a 151 on only went up to 151. That made me think that I could be as bright as I wanted. Then, in 1985, Omni Magazine published the World’s Hardest IQ Test, the Mega Test, written by Ron Hoeflin. Four thousand people took the test published in Omni, and I tied for second with a couple of other guys among the 4,000 people. I liked it. I liked scoring that high. Whenever I could spare the time to find another test with a high ceiling, I would take a shot at the test. So, I took Ron Hoeflin’s Titan Test and got the only perfect score.
I took a bunch of tests by Paul Cooijmans. He has freaking challenging tests. He likes to bust people’s bubbles — people who think they’re smart based on their other test scores. Then they try his tests, and he says, nope, sorry, you’re not as bright as you thought. I’ve taken nearly 40 ultra-high IQ tests and gotten the highest score ever on maybe 28. I haven’t done it lately. I’m 64. So there’s a couple of things going on. One is that I shouldn’t waste my time because these ultra-high IQ tests take 150 to 180 hours to do a good job. With time ticking away, I shouldn’t waste my time on that. It’s tough to find a test with a high enough ceiling. There’s no point in me taking a test; my highest score on any test with a standard deviation of 16 is in the 190s. I haven’t looked at my scores lately. I need a test with a ceiling of at least 210 to break my record score, so I can miss one or two and maybe score in the 190s. On a test with a ceiling of 210, if it’s appropriately normed — and I don’t even know if you can adequately norm a test with that ceiling — you won’t be able to get a perfect score. The test is going to be full of idiosyncrasies. Taking an IQ test is, to a certain extent, profiling the test maker. And you won’t find your way through the labyrinth of that test maker’s mind and get a perfect score. For a few years, off and on, I was working on a Cooijmans test. I could break my record but didn’t crack enough of the problems. So, it remains a work in progress and a test I haven’t returned to in years. Also, like I said, I’m 64, and there’s a chance that my abilities have also declined. I’m unsure if that is even the ability for that test and the scores I want. That’s the thing — you need a decently high IQ, but you also need to be obsessed with it and willing to put in the time and explore all these different possible angles on the problems. It would help if you were willing to burn up much time. So it might be that if I were willing to burn up enough time, I could have a shot at breaking my record, but at this point, I don’t intend to do that.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the single most challenging test you’ve ever taken by a test maker?
Rosner: The Titan by Ron Hoeflin is the most significant, most challenging, ultra-high IQ test ever written. Though Cooijmans’s tests have ceilings in the Hoeflin range, Hoeflin’s test is crisper, and the answers snap more satisfyingly. But you can’t take the test anymore. Nobody accepts the test for admission to ultra-high IQ societies anymore. The reason is that these tests were written before the Internet, and they have become much easier with the Internet.
You can be told not to cheat but to plug in the test items. Each test, the Titan and the Mega, consists of 24 verbal problems, all analogies, and 24 math problems. These days, you can type in the three words given to you to solve the analogy, and the fourth word will probably pop up for half of the items. Also, people have been discussing Hoeflin tests on the Internet for as long as the Internet’s been around, which is, for most people, about 30 years. If you root around, you could find at least 30 answers out of the 48 test problems without exercising your thought. And I believe 30 out of 48 on that test gets you over 150. Also, taking the Mega has a practice effect for the Titan. So yes, the Titan is a stricter test than the Mega, but if you take it first, it gives you enough of a feel for Hoeflin’s test construction, effectively making the Titan easier. But if you’re going to take a test cold and without recourse to the Internet, the Titan is the most significant ultra-high IQ test ever, undoubtedly the greatest from the pre-internet era.
But I doubt it because the ways of looking at the way people think or look at their PET scans have the stink of phrenology of pseudoscience. So does IQ, by the way. But you can do all the Googling you want. You will still have to follow a twisted path of logic and intuition. He says one of the components of IQ, besides conscientiousness, is — that I always forget. It’s like associative breadth. What’s his term for it?
Jacobsen: Width of associative horizon.
Rosner: Okay, so the width of associative horizon means how much stuff you know: How much stuff can you learn? How much stuff can you pull in from different angles and disciplines? How many different angles can you come up with in your attempt to solve a problem? Will you stop with a half-assed answer after trying three different angles? Or are you going to take 40 hours or 60 hours thinking about the test and come up with 30 or 40 possible ways that you initially check to see if there’s a solution for that item in your new angle? Are your 40 different ways to solve the problem taken from all sorts of disciplines and areas of knowledge that could be anything that the test creator had access to, either in his mind or in his environment, when constructing the test? If you don’t come up with dozens of possible ways to solve Cooijmans’s problems, you probably won’t arrive at the correct answer. You probably won’t find the correct answer to his problems, even if you try dozens of angles.
What was the question I was trying to answer? Oh, Cooijmans’s tests are internet-resistant. He fully expects you to consult, and he doesn’t like when people talk about his tests. Because he considers it to be in the realm of giving hints. So I’m trying not to give hints, but look at the tests. Look at his tests; you can see that they will yield slowly. I don’t think I’ve given anything away by saying you’re going to have to bust your ass.
Jacobsen: Do you pay much attention to the high-IQ communities anymore?
Rosner: Not a whole lot. I’m friends with you, and you have a history of interviewing every high-IQ person who would say “Yes” to an interview. You’ve interviewed the heads of a ton of high-IQ societies. I’m friends with people from the Mega Society, particularly one guy from the Mega Society. I’m friendly with more people from there, but not a lot. I don’t have that much contact. I don’t have many friends in general. I tend not to cultivate friendships or maintain them sufficiently.
Jacobsen: What would you do if you had to make an IQ test practical now?
Rosner: It’s tough to say. It’s also a fool’s errand at this point, in that AI will, if it doesn’t make us smarter now — and it doesn’t because AI is only as intelligent as the material that went into it — but it certainly makes people more efficient by doing some of the people’s work. Eventually, it will be powerful enough to make people smarter. So why are we messing around with measuring people’s IQs at this point? Yes, you could give a kid an IQ test to see if they need specialized individual attention in school, but there’s something that will feel increasingly archaic. It seems like a sport that’s only followed and played by a few people, like the World’s Strongest Man — guys who can lift boulders two and a half feet in diameter or pull a truck with their teeth. People do that, and they compete in that, but the ultra-high IQ thing seems a little bit quaint.
But if I were to build a test now, it would focus more on how we live now. It would be about how well you use technology to solve challenging problems. I would design a test to do so, where all technical assists are permitted and encouraged. Google, AI, and other stuff are out there, but the items on the test are so brutal that even with tech assistance, most people will need help to solve them. That’s great in theory, but good luck coming up with those problems. There’s also the issue that if you make a test that’s at all popular, people will discuss it online and eventually contaminate the matters unless there’s a way to give people varied problems. But even then, you’re going to contaminate the test. Eventually, people will discuss the issues and get out there. So, you may come up with a test of intelligence that is not a traditional intelligence test.
When I was a kid, I remember they had a guy on either the Mike Douglas or the Merv Griffin show who said he had a machine that could measure your IQ based on how still you could keep your eyes. If you could stare at a point without your focus jiggling, or the more you could keep your eyes still, the higher he said your IQ was. And then he brought out a lady who he said was a super genius because she could keep her eyes still. That seems like A, primitive, and B; yes, maybe it’s correlated with intelligence, but it’s not what you’d want, especially 46 years later, 56 years later.
And yes, that’s a criticism of IQ: it isn’t a measure of intelligence going out and writing a great novel, a great screenplay, or starting Microsoft. You could give people the Turing test, where you sit and talk with them. Let’s say there’s a kid who people suspect might need individualized attention in school because they think he might be a genius. So, give the kid a regular IQ test; if the kid breaks 140, then yes, the kid, or 130 or whatever, could use enriched materials. If the kid seems bored, then the kid could use some enriching materials. And then, if you’re trying to figure out the difference between a kid with a 140 IQ and a 160 IQ for whatever reason you might have — maybe you run the Davidson Institute, and you’ve only got a certain number of slots for hyper-gifted kids — you could do a Turing test where you sit down and talk with the kid — three sessions of a half-hour each. You have somebody who is familiar with ultra-high IQ kids and what they can be like, and you have that person be the one who talks with the kid.
Then, the person estimates the kid’s IQ at the end of the sessions. If the kid can keep up the appearance of having an IQ of 165 when talking with somebody who knows what people with 165 are like, then it’s a Turing test. If you seem like a 165 IQ kid, then you are. Is that reasonable? Is that a decent strategy? Conversation can tell you a lot about a person. Yes.
Jacobsen: What about IQ in and of itself? This could be the last question or theme for this interview. What is the fundamental distinction between what IQ is measuring and what intelligence is?
Rosner: Okay, so intelligence — we talk about g, which is general intelligence. Is that right, G? Is it g, or do I have the initial wrong?
Jacobsen: Yes, g is right.
Rosner: Okay, so some assumptions go into the idea of g, and g is the idea that intelligence is a thing that people can have that lets them solve problems of any type that require thinking. Not the problem of how I am going to walk this boulder. Walking a 2.5-foot boulder across the room is a problem in strength rather than IQ. But the idea of g is that the world is full of challenges to thinking of different levels of difficulty and that somebody with higher g, higher intelligence, will be able to solve more challenging mental problems than somebody with lower g. I mentioned some of the assumptions that go into that.
Then, when you go to IQ, there’s the assumption that solving the problems presented to a test taker on an IQ test reflects their ability to solve problems in general. There are all sorts of ways for error to sneak into that. For one thing, you’re supposed to take the test cold like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. You’re supposed to have never seen the Raven, the tic-tac-toe framework. There are nine squares, three by three. Eight of them are filled. You figure out what goes in the ninth square based on the logic of the relationship of the symbols in the other eight squares. That thing has a vast practice effect.
If you take a kid and have them do 10 Raven practice items before getting tested on the Raven, that kid will score at least one standard deviation higher than they would go in cold. And these days, there are plenty of opportunities on IQ-type tests to stay calm. The SAT is an IQ-like test. For most of the history of the SAT, you were supposed to take it cold, where your only prep for it was the PSAT. And the SAT people, ETS, Educational Testing Service, used to say, “Well, you can’t prep for the SAT. We’ve done studies of people who’ve prepped, and it doesn’t work.” That turned out to be bullshit. The early prep programs didn’t prep people enough.
My kid hired me to prep her for the PSAT. She thought it would be cool to be a national merit scholar, national merit semi-finalist, whatever it is. I dug up 80 real PSATs and SATs and made her take them. Then, we would go over what she got wrong. So before she fired me for working her too hard, she took 80 tests. That is how you prep. If you take 80 and 30 practice tests, you’ll see almost every problem they can throw at you. You’ll do fine. You’ll do better than satisfactory. My kid kicked ass. My brother did the same thing with the GMAT. To attend business school, he took 30 practice tests and raised his score by 150 points on a 200 to 800-point scale, which got him into Wharton. So, you have to prep extensively. So, there is a vast practice effect, and it’s unfair to the kids who don’t know about that.
There’s another way to game the SAT and the ACT: if you have the money, you go to an educational psychologist and pay him 500 bucks to be diagnosed with some learning difficulty that requires relaxed conditions for the SAT or the ACT. Extra time, somebody reading the items to you might be a thing. I don’t know. There are eight or ten different flavours of help on the SAT. What is the SAT? What are six or seven subtests? Depending on your diagnosis, you can not only get double time but only have to take two subtests a day. And so the kids who get more generous testing conditions often do better. So yeah, there are so many ways to game the system.
Then, there are historical problems with IQ, such as that it’s not culture-fair. Culture-fair means that if you took ten people from 10 different parts of the world and gave them the test cold, none of them would suffer on the test from stuff they didn’t know based on being from the southern tip of South America. The first IQ test, devised by Terman and given to a ton of American soldiers going off to fight World War I, had items like they would show you a drawing of a hood ornament and say, “What make of car has this hood ornament?” You can’t get any less culture-fair than that. And it took a long time for people to admit that stuff wasn’t fair.
So, many assumptions go into the idea of intelligence, the idea that intelligence can be measured and that IQ tests are the way to measure it. Then, you can end with a quote from Churchill. I’ll look it up, and then we’ll come back. Democracy is the worst form of government until you look at every other form. IQ is a lousy way to measure intelligence once you look at every other possible way.
Adjunct Professor, Psychiatry, Emory Medical School; Professional Fellow, Psychology, University of Edinburgh; Principal Investigator, Attention and Working Memory Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology; Director, GSU/GT Center for Advanced Brain Imaging
Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Abstract
Professor Randall Engle discusses:
early influence from university training, influences on educational and professional trajectory, and recommendations about exposure; patience and focus in mentorship from D.D. Wickens; most valuable experience; core domains of interest, interests in professional life, and greatest single problems at the moment; Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: a latent- variable approach (1999); cognitive neuroscience in research and fluid intelligence; brain training efficacy; awards and responsibilities; near and far future research; and advice for young psychological scientists.
1. You earned a BA at West Virginia State College (WVSC). Your lab and other biographies, and news venues, describe some experiences, expertise, selective background, and short reports on research, even a slice of a lecture. One of salience, about WVSC, states:
State was a public all-black college prior to 1954. As a consequence, most of his faculty were outstanding scholars who could not get jobs at top universities. One of his psychology professors was a marvelously well-read scholar named Herman G. Canady, a 1929 Ph.D. from Northwestern and one of the first black ABEP’s. He worked his way through graduate school as a butler. Engle had a Harvard graduate for his math courses, a Yale Ph.D. as a drama teacher, and his French teacher was a black female who received her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. (Engle, 2014)
How did these early experiences in university training influence you? How did these diversely-trained educators influence your educational and professional trajectory? Would you recommend this kind of exposure to others – or even improve upon it?
These experiences had a profound effect on my social and political philosophy and made me much more aware of the effects of racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes. I would very much recommend these experiences to others and tried to re-create them for my own children.
2. Your biography indicates undergraduate training with inclusion of extensive hours in zoology and math in addition to psychology. What funnelled interest into these disciplines? How did these influence future psychological research overall?
Science always appealed to me and these experiences and interests have continued to the present day in my research.
3. You continued onward with education. You had admittance into Ohio State University for collaboration with D.D. Wickens. You note the variables to the man’s mentoring. I want to take him as a case study in relation to you. About his relation to yourself, you state:
He was admitted to Ohio State to work with D.D. Wickens. Wick was a wonderful mentor and was exceedingly patient with a student that wanted to do everything but did not focus on anything long enough to do it well.
Besides patience and lack of focus, what variables existed with regards to his mentoring? How did this impact you?
Wickens was a marvelous writer – in fact his master’s level work was in literature before he became interested in psychology. He could write about complex scientific topics in clear and accessible prose and I tried to model that style of writing and I try to teach my own graduate students to write that way.
4. What were the most valuable experiences from these educational opportunities and times of varied intellectual experiences?
The most valuable experiences were the opportunities to engage in a wide range of research topics.
5. Your public statement of truncated research interests relate to three universes of discourse: 1) “nature and causes of limitations in working memory capacity,” 2) “role of those differences in real-world cognitive tasks,” and 3) “association of working memory capacity and cognitive control to fluid intelligence.” With respect to these three core areas of research, how do the relevant disciplines define these core domains of interest? When did these interests solidify in professional life to these tinctures? What are these areas greatest single problems, per each domain, at the moment?
They all are facets of the same issue: the role of human limitations in information processing and how that impacts real-world life. That leads to issues of whether those limitations can be modified within the individual and how our environment can be modified to reduce the impact of those limitations.
6. According to Google Scholar, your most cited article, Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: a latent-variable approach (1999), had citation over one thousand times to date. (now nearly 2200 times, Engle) In terms of the specifics in relation to the research career, an interview cannot suffice in complete comprehension of a long, varied, and deep career, which implicates the necessity of selective coverage. To preface the co-authored paper, you studied 133 participants. Each performed 11 memory tasks, 2 general fluid intelligence tests, and quantitative and verbal Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT), Memory tasks thought to relate to short-term memory and others to working memory. Structural equation models mean a family of tests intended to test a conceptual or theoretical model. In this 1998 instance, a conceptual or theoretical model of a common construct. There exists a robust relation between working memory and fluid intelligence; a non-robust relation between short-term memory and fluid intelligence. A difference of each abilities’ degree of relation with the intermediary association of fluid intelligence.
Your summative argument in this article states the capacity for working memory and fluid intelligence equate to the ability to “keep a representation active” in spite of distraction or interference. Following, or in addition to, this, you connect this argument to “controlled attention” and the prefrontal cortex. Where does the development of this separation between working memory and short-term memory stand 16 years past the original publication?
We are well beyond that separation and I am interested in just what the relationship between those two ideas is. I expect it may be different at different developmental and ability levels with simple storage of information being more important with younger individuals and with individuals with lower cognitive abilities.
7. I talked to Dr. Anthony Greenwald over dinner a few years ago. At the time of the conversation, he considered cognitive neuroscience the future. I paraphrase him:
The frontier lies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, a first generation of researchers, like the first round of soldiers marching out of the trenches, will fall – making all the necessary mistakes. After that point, the next generation of researchers will have learned from those mistakes to make deep progress.
Of course, his research functions out of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and other areas. Does cognitive neuroscience take a larger role in this research at present compared to the past? What about fluid intelligence (Gf) research at large?
Yes, it plays a very large role in our work. The mind is what the brain does. That means that ultimately we need to understand the two in connection with one another – neither can be understood on its own. Fluid intelligence is, at this point, a largely statistical entity. I am now trying to understand the mechanisms underlying fluid intelligence (Gf) and how those are related to and different from the mechanisms underlying working memory capacity (WMC). I have a recently accepted paper that argues that while WMC and Gf are hugely correlated (.6-.8), they are different. The tasks that we use to reflect WMC emphasize maintenance of information while the tasks used to measure Gf, such as Ravens and number series, emphasize the disengagement from previously attended to information. The two mechanisms are therefore contradictory to one another. They are highly correlated because both rely on limited capacity attention control or executive attention to complete. This is THE mechanism that is responsible for the correlation. When that is measured and statistically removed from the WMC-Gf relationship, the relationship goes to near zero.
8. One can find claims of cognitive improvement programs while some report the more accurate, unfortunate, truths about “brain training” programs, even in numerous mainstream news venues, academic reports, and official consensus statements from the scientific community devoted to professional research into these domains.
Collation and reportage from numerous venues contrary to the common advertising claims about the improvement of things such as fluid intelligence by the improvement of working memory. Brain training programs remain popular, and, apparently, highly hyped. One article, entitled Does Brain Training Work?, with a partial quote from you, states:
Psychologist Randall Engle’s group at Georgia Tech has previously shown that working memory capacity is highly correlated with complex learning, problem solving, and general attention control. But he pointed out that this correlation does not mean that by increasing working memory capacity, fluid intelligence can be increased. “This idea that intelligence can be trained would be a great thing if it were true,” Engle said. (Olena, 2014)
Therein lies the issue of brain training giving the appearance of promise for improvements in general cognitive function, but these persist in failure to replicate in practice or actuality. In that, the apparent advertisements en masse do not have proportional empirical support. Even some of the research from Susanne M. Jaeggi et al appears to provide some evidence in line with certain, specialized cognitive training tasks improving Gf, the research came out about the use of a dual n-back task for the improvement of fluid intelligence. You attempted to replicate and failed to accomplish this. What does this mean for “brain training” programs? What about training the mind by other means? What tasks, activities, and lifestyle approaches might, or do, delay the onset of cognitive declines or even improve cognitive ability? Does crystallized, fluid, or general intelligence remain mostly influenced by inborn ability, genetic endowment, and innate biological capacity, and minimally influenced by environment, parenting and upbringing, and educational interventions – especially as whole additions of age are taken into account?
Brain training programs work to improve the tasks used during training be the evidence is quite compelling that the training does not generalize to tasks other than those used during training or tasks very much like them. Crystallized intelligence is everything you have learned and the amount and type of information you know is a result of many things including your fluid intelligence at the time you learned it but also motivational factors and what interests you – that is what draws your attention.
9. You continue to earn awards for teaching including the Ace Teacher Award, the Amoco Award for University Teacher of the Year, the Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award, the South Carolina Governor’s Professor of the Year, Distinguished Honors College Professor, as well as recognition through the first APA Division 3 Lifetime Achievement Award. What place do you see for awards for academics? What further duties and responsibilities does the recognition of accomplishments entail to you?
Awards are nice indicators that someone has recognized your work. I have never met a teacher who does what they do best just to win awards however. Awards are like dessert after a nice meal.
10. For more information and publications, individuals with the desire can reference the publications listing within the lab website or connect with the appropriate research databases for further information. This interview provides partial, incomplete, and personal rather than majority academic information. What research do you intend to conduct in the near and far future?
I mentioned that I am now interested in the psychological and brain mechanisms underlying WMC and Gf. That will involve substantial psychometric as well as brain imaging work. As I approach retirement age, I am quite amazed that I continue to be as interested in these questions as I ever was and I expect that I will continue trying to answer them, and the questions that arise from the research into those questions, as long as I have the financial resources necessary to run a lab such as mine.
11. In the FABBS foundation description of you, it states:
We also honor Randy for his tireless mentoring of the next generation of psychological scientists. While he has spearheaded the enormously influential research described above, he has also mentored (with similar care and pride to parenting his two now-grown children, Holly and Matt) a long line of grateful undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs, many of whom have gone on to considerable scientific and pedagogical success in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, quantitative methods, and beyond, teaching and conducting psychological research as faculty members at a remarkably diverse, multinational collection of institutions, such as Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, Kenyon College, Maryville College, Michigan State University, Princeton University, University of Burgundy, University of California at Irvine, University of Denver, University of Edinburgh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, University of Oregon, University of Texas at San Antonio, University of Ulm, Washington University, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Winthrop University, and Wichita State University.
In conclusion for this interview, and based upon the extensive level of mentoring over the decades by yourself for the upcoming generations of psychological scientists, what advice seems the best as a general algorithm, heuristic, rule of thumb, or principle for young psychological scientists in training?
Find a question that really intrigues you and pursue it with passion. Publications, tenure, promotions, etc will all follow that, but they should not be the raison d’être for what you do.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is pleased to announce that it is underwriting four campus organizing fellows at key universities in Wisconsin.
These fellows will focus on voter registration and securing pledges to vote from students. The organizing fellows will begin their work at the end of August and continue until early November. They are at key universities in Wisconsin.
The initiative aims to engage and register young voters, particularly Generation Z, who are the least religious generation in modern American history but have lower voting turnout that other “Nones.” Around a third of Gen Z identifies as religiously unaffiliated, reflecting a significant shift in the religious landscape of the United States. By placing fellows on campuses, FFRF seeks to increase voter awareness and turnout among these students, who represent a significant but often underrepresented demographic in the electoral process.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, FFRF can engage in voter awareness.
“We’re glad to support this vital effort to engage young ‘Nones’ and voters,” says Dan Barker, FFRF co-president. “Our democracy depends on the active participation of all citizens, especially young people who are the future leaders of our country. By funding these campus organizing fellows, we are investing in a more informed and secular electorate.”
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
A new book by academics at UCL, the University of Warwick, and the University of Birmingham calls for major reforms to government policy on faith schools in England. Humanists UK, which has long campaigned for a fully inclusive state school system, free from religious indoctrination and discrimination, has welcomed the proposals. These include replacing collective worship with inclusive assemblies, replacing faith-based religious education (RE) with inclusive teaching, and capping religious selection in all state-funded faith schools.
In How to Think About Religious Schools, Professors Matthew Clayton, Andrew Mason, and Adam Swift, and Dr Ruth Wareham (who is also Humanists UK’s Education Policy Researcher) argue that practices such as compulsory collective worship and religious instruction place too much weight on the beliefs of parents and threaten the freedom of belief (and developing autonomy) of children and young people. Instead, pupils should be free to explore a range of religious and non-religious worldviews, like humanism, in school. To enable this, the authors suggest that all children (including those educated in private schools and at home) should have access to inclusive teaching on civic, religious, ethical and moral values (CREaM) that does not seek to impose a particular worldview.
The authors also suggest that, to enhance diversity and reduce community segregation, the 50% cap on religious selection in free schools with a religious character should be extended to cover all state-funded faith schools. Currently, many of these schools are permitted to select all their pupils by faith, not only leaving communities segregated along religious lines, but also by ethnicity and parental wealth. Indeed, a recent report by the Sutton Trust found that faith schools are ‘consistently more socially selective’ than schools without a religious character and admit far fewer pupils on free school meals than would be expected given their catchment areas. Despite this, earlier this year, the Conservative Government announced a proposal to abolish the cap. The new Labour Government is now due to decide how to respond to the consultation the previous Government launched on the matter.
Humanists UK Education Policy Researcher Dr Ruth Wareham, who co-authored the recommendations presented in the book, said:
‘In an increasingly diverse society, our education system must protect the rights and interests of children while also fostering inclusivity and mutual respect. We believe that our proposed reforms to faith school policy will help to safeguard pupils’ autonomy and equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate life in a pluralistic society. By striking a better balance between educational goods, parental rights, and children’s rights, we can create a more equitable and inclusive education system that prepares students to thrive in a democratic society.’
Responding to the book’s release, Humanists UK Education Campaigns Manager Lewis Young commented:
‘We strongly welcome this call for policymakers to tackle the ongoing inequalities and discrimination caused by the law on religion in schools in England. The UK is the only sovereign state to mandate Christian worship in all schools as standard. It is also one of just a handful of countries that permits religious selection in institutions that are mostly funded by the public purse.
‘Requiring children to participate in activities like prayers and hymns, or limiting their religious education to faith-based instruction that promotes specific beliefs, ignores children’s rights to a broad education free from undue religious influence.
‘Our publicly funded schools should encourage children to make their own decisions about what they believe via inclusive assemblies and RE lessons that consider a variety of religious and non-religious perspectives in an objective manner. These schools should also be open to all regardless of background, giving children the opportunity to interact with people holding a variety of different beliefs on a daily basis.
‘Only through this type of inclusive education can we build a strong, cohesive society where everyone is valued and respected.’
Notes
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 120,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
In anticipation of the Voltaire Lecture on 10 September, we are delighted to present this exclusive interview with the distinguished recipient of the 2024 Voltaire Lecture Medal, the economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler.
Daniel Chandler will present the Voltaire Lecture 2024: ‘Free and Equal – What would a fair society look like?’ Tickets are available to watch the lecture in-person in central London, or via livestream.
In your Voltaire Lecture, you’ll be exploring some of the ideas of the humanist philosopher John Rawls. Could you share why you believe his ideas are particularly relevant today?
Rawls is the towering figure of twentieth century political philosophy – he’s frequently compared to the likes of John Stuart Mill, Hobbes, even Plato. What I love about his ideas, and why I think we need them right now, is that they are fundamentally hopeful and constructive. In contrast to our current political debate, which is often narrow and technocratic, Rawls set out a vision of the best that a democratic society can be – what he called a ‘realistic utopia’. It’s a vision of society grounded not in self-interest and competition but in reciprocity and cooperation, and I think it represents an unparalleled resource for developing the kind of big picture vision that has been missing from progressive politics in recent decades, and which we urgently need if we are to overcome the threat of authoritarian populism.
What is the veil of ignorance and why is it important?
One of Rawls’s most famous ideas is that if we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organise it if we didn’t know what our position within that society would be – whether we could be rich or poor, black or white, Christian or Muslim and so on – as if behind what he called a ‘veil of ignorance’. It’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness, similar to the idea that someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which piece they would end up getting. And while it can sound a bit abstract and unfamiliar, especially when presented in the jargon of academic philosophy, it clearly echoes the ‘golden rule’ – ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ – some version of which is found in many, if not most, major religious and cultural traditions.
Rawls uses this thought experiment to justify two fundamental principles of justice, principles, to do with freedom and equality respectively – hence the title of my recent book, Free and Equal. First, he argues that we would want to guarantee a set of truly fundamental freedoms, including personal freedoms like freedom of speech, religion, sexuality and so on, and political freedoms, like the right to vote and freedom of assembly. The idea here is that if we didn’t know our race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and so on, we would want to make sure that we could live freely according to our own beliefs, and participate in politics as equals.
That’s the essence of Rawls’s first ‘basic liberties’ principle, which supports a widely shared ideal of liberal democracy, albeit one that needs defending today. Rawls’s second ‘equality’ principle actually has two parts, combining ‘fair equality of opportunity’ – everyone should have an equal chance to develop their talents and abilities; with the ‘difference principle’ – the idea that inequalities are only justified if they ultimately benefit everyone, and especially the least well off. In fact, Rawls argues that we should try to organise our economy so that the least well off are better off than they would be under any alternative system. While equality of opportunity is a familiar idea, the difference principle is a strikingly original and strongly egalitarian way of thinking about social justice. It recognises the role of incentives in creating a dynamic market economy, but calls on us to make sure that everyone shares in the benefits, right down to the least well off.
Is the veil of ignorance more than just a thought experiment? Can it be a call to action?
Absolutely! It is hard to imagine anyone taking Rawls’s thought experiment seriously and concluding that we should be satisfied with the status quo. Rawls’s two principles give us both an inspiring vision of what a truly just society would look like, and a benchmark for seeing where our existing institutions fall short. Unfortunately Rawls didn’t say very much about how we could put his principles into practice, and as both an economist as well as a philosopher, I’ve tried to pick up where he left off and spell out a bold but achievable practical agenda to transcend the culture wars, reinvigorate democracy and transform capitalism as we know it.
Your book Free and Equal touches upon the concept of a universal basic income. Tell us more!
Making sure that every citizen has food to eat, clothes to wear, a place to live – in other words, that they can meet their ‘basic needs’ – is perhaps the most fundamental requirement of a just society. We can do that through targeted, means-tested benefits, and that is probably the cheapest approach. But money isn’t the only thing that matters. Our current system generates stigma, and rests on intrusive and humiliating eligibility assessments, often causing serious harm to people’s mental health. A basic income would eliminate this stigma, because it would be received by everyone; it would make sure that even the least well off have a sense of agency and independence; and it would make it easier for people on low incomes to enter paid work, with all the benefits that can have for giving people a sense of purpose and individual meaning.
Although a basic income has an important role to play in providing a floor in terms of material resources, I think we need to be moving away from an economic paradigm that relies too heavily on redistribution. Our aim should be to tackle inequality at its source, or what is sometimes called ‘predistribution’, and Rawls was an early advocate for this kind of approach. That means focusing ‘good jobs’ – through minimum wages, stronger unions and investing in education, especially for the more than half of the population who don’t go to university; it means bringing about a more equal distribution of wealth, say via a universal minimum inheritance paid to every citizens at the age of 18; and putting real power in the hands of workers, through something like the German system of co-management, where have a third to a half of the seats on company boards.
You’ve been a vocal advocate for electoral reform in the UK. What are the most pressing issues with the current system, and what changes would you like to see implemented?
The basic problem with our ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) electoral system, is that some votes count more than others. We saw that more clearly than ever in the recent election, where it took an average of 23,500 votes for Labour to win a seat compared to more than 820,000 per Reform MP. Whatever you think of Reform, that’s not a sensible way for a democracy to function. A more proportional system would mean that votes are translated directly into seats, which in turn would encourage a multi-party democracy that is more likely to represent the diversity of views that exist in our society. And in contrast to FPTP where attention is skewed towards voters in marginal constituencies, proportional representation would incentivise politicians to appeal to voters rights across the country.
How do you see the relationship between economic inequality and political power? And what steps can be taken to address this imbalance?
Both economic inequality and imbalances of political power matter in their own right, and in practice they tend to reinforce one another.
The essence of democracy, and a core part of Rawls’s first principle, is a commitment to political equality – not just the formal equality of everyone having the right to vote, but the substantive equality of a political system that gives everyone an equal chance to take part in and influence collective decision making. Sadly, we’re a long way away from that reality. You can see that most clearly in the influence that rich donors have over political parties. We don’t yet have data for the 2024 election, but in 2019 almost half of all donations to political parties came from 104 individual ‘super-donors’, giving an average of nearly half a million pounds each.
The best way to fix this would be to introduce a ‘democracy voucher’ system, similar to that which exists in Seattle for municipal elections, where private donations are capped at a low level, and instead every citizen gets a voucher worth up to $100 that they can give to the candidate of their choice. It’s not a panacea – we also need to make sure that MPs better reflect the life experiences of the whole population, and to tackle the concentration of ownership in the news media – but it would be a good start!
Are you a humanist? If so, what resonated with you about the humanist approach to life?
I have to confess that humanism is a term I have often felt a connection to, without fully understanding what it means! I’ve been learning more in preparation for my lecture, and see more clearly now that I share many humanist ideas and attitudes, including a fundamental commitment to equal human dignity, a scientific outlook grounded in human experience, and a hopeful belief in the possibilities of human cooperation.
Are there any Humanists UK campaigns that are close to your heart?
Humanists UK has so many great campaigns, so it’s hard to choose! I’m gay, so your long record of campaigning for LGBT equality strikes a personal chord. I was very moved to learn that you performed same-sex weddings ceremonies even before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and I think your work on Relationships and Sex Education today is crucial just for creating a more tolerant and respectful society. I’ve also followed and supported your campaign to get non-religious beliefs represented in broadcast media slots like ‘Thought for the Day’ – it’s about time!
10 September 2024, 19:30 Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL
Imagine: you are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it – rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
In 2020, in the midst of the third lockdown of the pandemic, Humanists UK launched a little social media campaign called ‘#HumanistBecause’, which invited people to use the hashtag to simply say why they called themselves humanists.
We expected the campaign would resonate with humanists online but we were surprised by just how much it did so. It added about 10 million impressions to our reach on Twitter that month, and quadrupled our reach on Facebook. Some of the most popular posts on Twitter and Instagram were naturally from Humanists UK patrons and other well known humanists. Quotes sent in by Sandi Toksvig and Alice Roberts were turned into graphics, while people like actor Eddie Marsan, the writer Tom Sherrington, and the MP Rachel Hopkins all joined in on the hashtag. But I was pleased to see that some of the most popular content came from members of the public, over 2000 of whom posted original tweets, Instagram stories, and Facebook posts across the period.
Why did the campaign resonate? I think it’s possibly because the format captured something of the essence of humanism – that it is descriptive more than prescriptive. A shoe that fits. A viewpoint, not an obligation. A conclusion you have arrived at, rather than a dogmatic set of do’s and don’ts.
#HumanistBecause
Our decision to relaunch the #HumanistBecause campaign, four years on from that wintry November lockdown, is a reflection of this understanding. Humanism isn’t something people must consciously choose or adhere to; rather, it’s a label that resonates with individuals who already live by values rooted in reason, compassion, and human welfare.
Calling yourself a humanist is about putting a name to positive values you already hold. It’s a natural fit for those who lead ethical lives without religion, but there’s a great deal of room for difference of opinion and diversity within that. What humanists have in common is less our particular opinions on politics or society, but our starting point. Using reason, the scientific method, and evidence to draw conclusions about the world. Using empathy and compassion to decide right from wrong. Accepting that life is all too brief, so it’s on us to make it count.
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#HumanistBecause is about encouraging people to recognise and articulate their own ethical stances. By sharing stories and perspectives from within our diverse community, we hope to demonstrate that humanism is not a monolithic philosophy but a broad and inclusive umbrella that many naturally fall under, even if they don’t yet identify as humanists.
Surveys suggest that, in a country where just over half the population have ‘no religion’, about a quarter of the population (roughly half the non-religious) have beliefs and values that fit the definition of humanism to a T. And of course, across the non-religious and the population as a whole, people will find they have values and ideas in common with humanists. What we want is for non-religious people to have the option to confidently articulate their convictions, opinions, and values, and to understand that their views aren’t second-best to religions, but that it is in fact a fully coherent, rational, and morally upstanding worldview with a long history, and which has helped to shape this society and our world for the better over history.
At Humanists UK, our education work is focused instead on making sure humanism is well understood by the public at large. That mandate covers social media campaigns like this one, which reach millions. But it’s also the reason why we send trained school visitors into schools to help teachers explore humanism as part of RE lessons. It’s why we have an extensive heritage project mapping the impact of humanism on British society. And it’s even why we maintain a national programme of dialogue with religious groups – building bridges and defusing any misunderstandings.
Join the conversation
In essence, the campaign is an invitation — not to join a movement, but to recognise a shared understanding of life that many people already live by. It’s about finding the right words to express how we feel; a language that gives voice to our inner lives and takes pride in humanist thinking and action.
Reading some of the tweets this morning, I was struck by just how many people say they are humanist not just ‘because’ of the obvious things like the fact that they use reason and logic and evidence and kindness to tell right from wrong and treat others well. In those 2000 unique user-generated comments, I saw comments taking pride in humanism not just as a way of thinking, but because of how it inspired them and others to take action for causes they cared about.
In 2020, the former MP Graham Allen chimed in, saying he was a humanist because ‘this world is all we have, and humankind working in cooperation can use reason and empathy to provide all we need.’ Skeptic campaigner Michael Marshall tweeted: ‘I am #HumanistBecause I believe we only have one life, and the things that happen in it truly matter. Suffering, lies and injustice are real, and improving people’s lives is the most important thing we can do.’
I caught myself smiling when I read how the environmentalist Zion Lights put it yesterday. She said, ‘I believe that the responsibility to look after the planet lies solely with humanity.’ Going on to quote from the humanist cosmologist Carl Cagan, she continues: ‘As Carl Sagan once wrote of a distant image of our tiny world, “it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Thank you for being part of this ongoing conversation.
Organization Description: Humanists UK is the operating name of the British Humanist Association. We are a charitable company (no. 228781), formed in 1896 and incorporated in 1928, and registered in England and Wales. Our governing document is our Articles of Association, which can be viewed here.
The surge in far-right demonstrations and racist violence across our country, targeting Muslims, asylum seekers, and others on account of their ethnicity or identity is contemptible and has no place in an open and democratic society.
The violence started after lies were spread online that the perpetrator of murders in Southport was a Muslim asylum seeker. In fact, this was not the case – the accused is a British citizen, born in the UK. But this shouldn’t matter. Nothing justifies the violence that has followed. It is worrying seeing how easily misinformation has spread across social media, and how easily the far right has been able to organise. This reflects both a failure by social media platforms and the state to tackle misinformation and incitement online, and by the state to effectively counter the growth of far-right networks. Urgent action is needed on both fronts.
Intimidation and violence directed at asylum seekers on the streets and in their own homes is particularly shocking. Asylum seekers are among the most vulnerable people in our society, often having fled persecution, violence, and abuse to get to the UK. Many have left everything behind and faced extremely difficult journeys. We support non-religious asylum seekers fleeing persecution because of their beliefs, so have seen this first hand. They should always be met with compassion and support, not further hatred in what should be their places of safety and shelter. The political and social atmosphere that has enabled this violence and emboldened racists is not new, but has been generated over many years. It must be addressed by a responsible change in rhetoric and approach from all public authorities and from the media.
Equally, in a society that enshrines freedom of belief in our law, no-one should face discrimination, intimidation, or violence because of their religious beliefs or identity. Attacks on Muslims and on mosques are a sickening example of blind hate. Again this is nothing new. Muslims experience some of the highest levels of hate crime of any section of our society and we should all stand against anti-Muslim bigotry.
How can we, as humanists, best respond to these events? Some will choose to take part in counter-rallies. This can be a proportionate and welcome response, where it assists the authorities in protecting people and property, but it is vital that it doesn’t engender more violence or hatred, or lead to people putting themselves at risk.
We can all take heart from the many communities where people of different backgrounds, identities, and beliefs are coming together to clean up damage, make connections, and build community. These efforts are to be commended and we encourage humanists everywhere to take part. The future of the UK will be one of increasing diversity: diversity of ethnicities, opinions, identities, and beliefs. The actions of the people of good will who come together now will illuminate that future.
On 9 August 1955, the humanists Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (himself an asylum seeker) came together with others to call for peaceful resolutions to all conflicts. In their Manifesto, they wrote advice we commend to everyone at national and global times like these:
‘There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.’
Six decades later, the humanist MP Jo Cox in her maiden speech spoke a truth about today’s UK from which we can also draw a lesson:
‘While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.’
We are inspired too by the statements made by the global humanist community on both democracy and peace:
‘As individuals we must work for peace in our lives. We must also work within the neighbourhoods, nations, networks and organisations of which we are part to foster peace among ourselves and a peaceful attitude towards others… self-identified communities are often better at promoting peace among their own members than between themselves and other groups. Healthy pride in our own traditions and people can too easily turn to unhealthy competition or even contempt for other people. Too often communities resort to a shared hostility to a common enemy as a way of bolstering their internal unity. Human beings must constantly strive to overcome these divisions and work together in support of our shared human rights and human values.’
‘Democracy as a culture must be actively defended against all threats, including those from regimes, movements and political parties that embrace authoritarian principles, from those with unaccountable economic and social power, and from all other forces that seek to undermine democratic values and institutions.’
Humanists UK is a member of Belong: the Cohesion and Integration Network, and endorses its statement, as well as words from its former Co-Chair (and patron), Professor Ted Cantle.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is warning the Francis Howell School District of many constitutional and statutory rights it risks violating if it adopts two anti-transgender policies at today’s meeting.
FFRF’s Equal Justice Works Fellow Kat Grant and Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to the district’s board of education that proposed anti-trans policies violate Title IX, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment and Missouri state laws.
“That is an unholy trifecta of laws being violated,” the duo wrote.
Policy 2116 would require that students use the bathroom conforming to the sex markers on their birth certificates. The second is Regulation 6116, which would prohibit district employees or contracted personnel from discussing human sexuality with any students except when part of a “group discussion of current events….”
The adoption of these policies present potential issues with the Establishment Clause separating state and church. In a 2023 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that there is a major network of primarily conservative Christian organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and Focus on the Family behind the large volume of misinformation and pseudoscience being disseminated about transgender people. These policies not only restrict district employees from being able to engage in understandings of gender and gender identity outside of the one being advanced by these religious organizations, but also require them to coerce students into complying with a single theological understanding of these topics. This goes far beyond what is permissible under both the First Amendment and the Missouri Constitution.
“The Constitution does not fall short of transgender students. On the whole, both provisions that FHSD’s Board will consider today are unlawful, unenforceable, and greatly increase the litigation risk the District assumes. The district should vote against both policies, or risk litigation,” the pair concluded.
“George Washington once said that the ‘Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, persecution no assistance,’” adds Joshi, a Missouri-licensed attorney. “Defiantly, Francis Howell’s School Board gives the bigots and persecutors a pretty safe home. That’s pretty on-brand for Missouri. These school board members are just school bullies.”
“Transgender rights are serving as a proxy war for Christian nationalist ideals surrounding gender roles and bodily autonomy, and courts across the country have taken different stances on the constitutionality of banning gender-affirming health care,” notes Grant, whose fellowship projects tackle the intersection of LGBTQIA-plus rights and state/church separation. “But to go after queer kids, who are still figuring things out, and are more likely to be bullied by their peers anyways? That’s a different kind of animus and hatred.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation today is filing a second friend of the court brief on behalf of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) contending that an Indiana public school district acted correctly in denying a teacher’s requested religious accommodation that served as cover for bigotry. This is the second time this case is headed to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. FFRF earlier filed a brief on behalf of SSA in November 2021 as part of the first appeal.
The case involves Brownsburg (Ind.) High School orchestra teacher John Kluge, who maintained that calling transgender students by their chosen names violated his religion. The school’s official policy is that all teachers must use student names as listed in the school’s database, regardless of whether the name appears to align with the sex a student was assigned at birth. Initially, the school agreed Kluge could call students by only their last names in order to avoid using the first names of transgender and non-binary students. The parent of one transgender student noted, however, that the teacher continued to call the student “Miss,” causing the student “a lot of distress.” Other students complained regularly that Kluge’s practice also made them uncomfortable in class because it was obvious it was motivated by bigotry. The Brownsburg Community School Corporation subsequently revoked Kluge’s last-names-only accommodation due to complaints and proven harm to students. Rather than adhere to Brownsburg’s official name policy, Kluge voluntarily resigned.
After resigning in 2018, Kluge sued the school district for religious discrimination, saying that the school system failed to accommodate him in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Kluge initially lost this case. The district court and then the 7th Circuit ruled in the school’s favor. However, after the Supreme Court issued Groff v. DeJoy, a case that modified the religious accommodation standards under Title VII, the appeals court sent Kluge’s case back to the trial court. In April 2024, the district court once again ruled that Brownsburg High School did not violate the law by denying Kluge’s unreasonable and harmful accommodation. Kluge has now appealed this case to the 7th Circuit for the second time.
“As part of their educational mission, public schools like Brownsburg Community School Corporation have a duty and legitimate interest in ensuring students are educated in an inclusive, welcoming, safe environment that’s conducive to learning,” the FFRF-authored brief states. “A teacher’s actions and how those actions affect students bear directly upon the conduct of a school’s business. To that end, a teacher’s requested religious accommodation creates an undue hardship when it harms students and interferes with the educational environment, substantially burdening the school’s ability to conduct its educational business.”
The friend-of-the-court brief argues that in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Groff, the appeals court must analyze undue hardship by taking into consideration the unique aspects of the public school environment, including the school’s educational mission. The Supreme Court stated in Groff that “‘undue hardship’ is shown when a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business.”
Plus, the brief points out, teachers have a position of authority over students and cannot be allowed to abuse that authority. It would be irresponsible and unrealistic for the Brownsburg school district to evaluate Kluge’s requested religious accommodation without considering the power and influence that teachers hold over their students.
Kluge was first hired in 2014 to serve as the music and orchestra teacher at Brownsburg High School, and he stayed in that position until resigning at the end of the 2017-2018 school year. Students at Brownsburg High School who wished to participate in orchestra or take any of the music classes that Kluge was the sole instructor for had no choice but to submit to his instruction and thus his last-names-only accommodation. The fact that a transgender student eventually chose to stop taking orchestra classes altogether in order to avoid Kluge’s instruction is a testament to the imbalance of power that a teacher holds — and the serious, harmful consequences that arise when a teacher abuses that power.
Public schools are in the business of educating students, and creating an inclusive, welcoming environment for students is an essential part of succeeding in the education business. The critical role that teachers play in helping — or hindering — a school’s educational mission cannot be analyzed in a vacuum separate from students’ experiences and needs. For that reason, Brownsburg withdrew Kluge’s requested accommodation only after finding it “detrimental” to the learning environment for not only transgender and non-binary students, but also other students and faculty.
FFRF asserts that Title VII does not require a public school to provide a teacher with a religious accommodation that harms students, thus substantially burdening a school’s ability to conduct its legitimate educational mission.
“Further, common sense does not suggest that Title VII’s religious discrimination provision is meant to force a public school to permit a teacher to emotionally and psychologically harm students — who are children — in the name of accommodating that teacher’s religious beliefs,” the brief states. “That result would be perverse and antithetical to the spirit of inclusivity and pluralism that underpins
Inclusivity is not synonymous with hostility toward religion, and it is not discriminatory for a public school to place student needs over an employee’s harmful requested religious accommodation. Inclusivity is not a one-way street where teachers can demand their personal beliefs be accommodated while trampling upon the beliefs and identities of the students they’ve chosen to educate and intellectually nurture. Title VII’s text and the Supreme Court’s decision in Groff do not support such a narrow, one-way reading. In this instance, Brownsburg’s decision to no longer permit Kluge’s last-name-only accommodation was not an act of religious discrimination.
“An accommodation that harms minors entrusted to the government’s care and disrupts the educational environment poses an undue hardship on a public school, substantially burdening the conduct of a school’s educational mission,” the brief states. “Title VII does not, nor has it ever, required a public school to approve a teacher’s requested religious accommodation that harms students and thus negatively impacts a school’s ability to create and maintain a welcoming, inclusive learning environment.”
For all of these reasons, the judgment of the district court should be affirmed, the brief emphatically concludes.
“Public schools should not be forced to allow teachers to discriminate against students in the name of religion,” says Patrick Elliott, FFRF’s legal director. “We hope the court agrees.”
“Public schools should be sanctuaries of inclusivity, where every student is free to learn and grow in a supportive environment that celebrates the rich diversity of our nation,” says Kevin Bolling, executive director of the Secular Student Alliance, “A teacher’s personal religious beliefs should never be wielded as a weapon against students, particularly when those beliefs inflict harm.”
The Secular Student Alliance (“SSA”) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and network of over 200 groups on high school and college campuses dedicated to advancing nonreligious viewpoints in public discourse. The mission of the SSA is to organize, unite, educate and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism and human-based ethics. SSA and its chapters and affiliates value the efforts of high schools, colleges, and universities to ensure an inclusive and welcoming educational environment.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
A concerned community member informed the national state/church watchdog that a Hancock County Sheriff’s Office vehicle displayed a prominent Latin cross decal on the rear windshield.
FFRF took quick action to protect the First Amendment and the rights of conscience of Hancock County citizens.
“The cross unabashedly signals official government support for Christianity,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to Sheriff Brad Burkhart. “We hope you agree that law enforcement must be even-handed and avoid any appearance of bias toward some citizens, and hostility toward others.”
FFRF pointed out that citizens should not be made to feel alienated, or like political outsiders, because their local government they support with their taxes oversteps its power by placing a religious statement on government property. Nor should the sheriff’s office privilege religious citizens. Such a show of religious preference undermines the credibility of the sheriff’s office and causes religious minorities—including the nonreligious—to question the impartiality of their law enforcement officials.
FFRF is pleased by the prompt compliance of Sheriff Burkhart, who emailed FFRF back, noting that the cross had been removed, as well as providing photographic evidence of the updated sheriff’s vehicle.
“Citizens need to be able to trust their law enforcement officers in times of need, and there’s nothing that can shatter that trust faster than the intrusion of religion into governmental affairs,” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Law enforcers, who carry guns and have the ability to arrest citizens, have a professional obligation to separate their personal religious views from their governmental duties and we’re glad to see that happen here.”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is taking action after a Brevard Public Schools (Fla.) high school football coach recently hosted a Christian full-body immersion baptism for players after practice.
Multiple concerned community members have reported that the Astronaut High School football team in Titusville has become entangled with religion. FFRF, a national state/church watchdog, was informed that the head football coach invited a local pastor to baptize players after practice on July 18, under the guise of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
Florida’s Voice reported that 25 players were baptized — and even one public school grounds worker who happened on the scene.
“It is illegal for public school athletic coaches to lead their teams in religious activities,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line wrote in a letter to district superintendent Mark Rendell.
It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for public school coaches to engage in religious practices or prayer with students, FFRF notes. Brevard Public Schools must ensure that any school-sponsored religious coercion ends immediately. The team’s coaches must immediately cease infusing the football program with religion. FFRF asserts that all coaches and staff should be instructed regarding their obligations as public school employees.
It is unconstitutional for public school employees to direct students to partake in religious activities. The Fifth Circuit held that a coach’s attempts to engage in religious activities with players at team events were unconstitutional because the religious promotion took place “during school-controlled, curriculum-related activities that members of the [athletic] team are required to attend. During these activities [district] coaches and other school employees are present as representatives of the school and their actions are representative of [district] policies.”
The religious coercion occurring within the District’s football program is particularly troubling for those parents and students who are not Christians or do not subscribe to any religion. Thirty-seven percent of the American population is non-Christian, including the almost 30 percent who are nonreligious. At least a third of Generation Z (those born after 1996) have no religion, with a recent survey revealing almost half of Gen Z qualify as “nones” (religiously unaffiliated).
FFRF says the district must take action to end baptisms or other school-hosted or encouraged religious or proselytizing events. Any coaches involved in them must be directed to cease including coercive religious activities and practices in the program. Coaches may not push their personal religious beliefs onto students while acting in their official capacity, nor enlist outside adults to do the same.
It is more than disturbing that Brevard Public Schools Chair Megan Wright is publicly celebrating the Christian baptisms, adds FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor.
“Our public schools exist to educate, not to indoctrinate in religion and student athletes should not have to pray to play,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “I might add that these baptisms are not only unconstitutional, they are unhygienic!”
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is proud to announce the 11 top winners and seven honorable mentions of the 2024 David Hudak Memorial Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color Student Essay Competition.
FFRF has paid out a total of $18,850 in award money for the contest this year.
BIPOC students were invited to write on the topic of “How does religion hinder racial equality and civil rights?” and asked to compose an essay from the perspective of history or current struggle, religious psychology or personal experience. Students from ages 17–21, whether college-bound high school seniors or ongoing college students, were eligible to participate. FFRF began offering a competition directed at Black, Indigenous Students of Color in 2016 as special encouragement to a minority within a minority.
Winners, their ages, the colleges or universities they are attending and the award amounts are listed below. (FFRF seeks to distribute essay scholarship monies to a higher number of students, so ties — such as fourth place in this contest — are not regarded in the typical tie fashion, where, in this instance, fifth place would be skipped.)
FIRST PLACE Rita Nyamkimah, St. Joseph’s University, $3,500. SECOND PLACE Katelyn Boozer, Jacksonville State University, $3,000. THIRD PLACE Lionel Walraven, University of Hawaii-Maui, $2,500. FOURTH PLACE (tie) Akil Malik, Alabama A&M University, $2,000. FOURTH PLACE (tie) William S. Torres, Texas A&M University, $2,000. FIFTH PLACE Alexander Lumala, Arizona State University, $1,500. SIXTH PLACE Sarah Ramos-Gonzalez, Yale University, $1,000. SEVENTH PLACE Naya Lewis, University of Oregon, $750. EIGHTH PLACE Yao Liu, Northeastern University, $500. NINTH PLACE Krishna Verma, Simon Fraser University, $400. TENTH PLACE Devin Armstrong, University of North Carolina, $300. HONORABLE MENTION ($200 each) Jailyn Agard, Ramapo College of New Jersey. Zyah Bostick, University of North Carolina. Shaun Chaney, Groucher College. Dominique Davie, Vanderbilt University. Georgia Davis, University of Central Arkansas. Bianca Dishmon, Northwestern University. Bridelle Toumani, Russell Sage College.
FFRF thanks FFRF Program Manager Lisa Treu for adroitly managing the many details of this (and FFRF’s other essay competitions).
FFRF would also like to thank our volunteer and staff readers and judges in this contest, including: Dan Barker, Darrell Barker, Patrick Duff, Kate Garmise, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Ricki Grunberg, Linda Josheff, Dan Kettner, Sammi Lawrence, Bernard Leigg, Michael Luther, Katya Maes, Don Onnen, PJ Slinger, Kimberly Waldron and Karen Lee Weidig.
This contest is named for the late David Hudak, an FFRF member who left a major bequest.
“We regard our outreach to the next generation of freethinkers through these essay competitions as one of FFRF’s most important achievements,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Given the exorbitant cost of higher education we are also pleased to know we are helping out winning students with at least a little of their financial load.”
All students who enter are offered a school-year membership in FFRF and a thank you gift of a T-shirt or book. This year, almost 100 students entered.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote a letter on Aug. 1 to the district after learning that JMCSS turned a mandatory teacher in-service into a religious worship event on July 30. Details of the event were confirmed via official social media posts from the district, including one teacher sharing a video of the event and commenting “We had Church today.”
“The District must be neutral with regard to religion in order to respect and protect the First Amendment rights of all staff,” Joshi wrote.
FFRF had explained that coercing staff members to sing religious songs and participate in prayer at a teacher in-service, or any school-sponsored event, is unconstitutional. Furthermore, imposing religious worship on staff violates their First Amendment rights. The district serves and employs a diverse population with a multitude of religious beliefs, including Jews, Muslims, atheists and agnostics.
The state/church watchdog is pleased to report that District Superintendent Dr. Marlon D. King acted swiftly to ensure that the Constitution would be respected.
“Please know that it was never our intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable or to impose any religious beliefs. I deeply respect all religions and the diverse beliefs of our community. Our goal was to inspire and unite our staff, not to promote any specific religious practice,” King wrote in an email to Joshi on Aug. 6. “Moving forward, I will ensure that all professional development activities strictly adhere to the guidelines that respect the religious freedoms of all participants.” Dr. King added. “This will not happen again.”
Joshi comments: “JMCSS made clear that its commitment to inclusion extends to teachers and the nonreligious. That’s a wonderful thing for Dr. King’s administration to reassure his community. I wish everyone at JMCSS a healthy and enriching school year, where they are free to practice their faith, including no faith at all.”
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/05
Khadija Khan is a Pakistani journalist and broadcaster based in the UK. She is an editor at Canadian Magazine A Further Inquiry and a co-host of A Further Inquiry podcast. She advocates for women’s rights and denounces the idea of Islamic feminism. She is an ardent advocate for secularism, free speech, and universal human rights. She criticises the use of blasphemy laws as a tool to crack down on dissent and supports freedom of and from religion. She stresses the need for freedom of speech to counter extremist ideologies.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get started?
Khadija Khan: I started my career as a journalist in Pakistan. When I was in Pakistan, my boundaries were very much restricted. I was not able to write about women’s rights or violations of women’s rights in Islam or religion.
Still, I tried to address these issues or write about them from a different perspective, making it seem like a cultural issue. I framed it as a cultural phenomenon where women are oppressed and not given their rightful place in society. When I was a practicing Muslim in Pakistan, I did not suffer much. Thankfully, I had a wonderful mother who protected me and my sisters. She didn’t let anyone oppress us or impose any religious attire, traditions, or rituals on us. I am not a victim of forced marriage or FGM. I was coerced into wearing the hijab for a very short time, but my mother stood up for me and said defiantly that her girls would not wear the hijab.
That’s the reason I never had to suffer in a very religious or conservative society. I want to examine religious traditions and rituals from the perspective of a journalist who approaches the subject with reasoning, not personal experiences or anecdotes, to criticize certain beliefs. This is what I have observed in the scriptures and in religiously influenced societies. I have seen how women suffer because of these things. For me, it was about not getting involved in any kind of politics within the ex-Muslim community or the activist community.
I stand in solidarity with those who defiantly denounce religion. I know it’s a huge thing. Being an ex-Muslim is a huge thing. Publicly, it’s even bigger. It’s not easy for people to just denounce Islam and then live a normal life. They face a tremendous amount of challenges in their lives. It’s very brave and courageous. So I stand in solidarity with them unconditionally.
What’s going on within that community, I just don’t want to get involved in that. For me, we are talking about certain beliefs. I don’t care if they are religious or cultural beliefs. They are misogynistic and discriminatory. These beliefs are inherently misogynistic. We need to have honest and open discussions on these issues, setting aside all differences and reservations.
Jacobsen: In a political context in the United Kingdom, how are these religious beliefs, these sorts of theological ideologies, used as political coinage or currency?
Khan: In Britain, the situation is that minorities are very much influenced by their culture and religious beliefs. In modern-day Britain, religion plays a huge role within those ethnic minorities. People have adopted a narrative that validates their religious identity so much that they have set aside all their other identities and affiliations. It’s all about religion. In certain cases, they want to assert those values in a society that is not very religious.
We have a secular society. There are Christian people, Jewish people, Muslim people, Hindu people, people from all backgrounds. But as a society, we are not religious. It’s not a very conservative society. So, if we talk about Muslim communities, we see that some sections of those communities want to assert their values.
They want to assert those religious beliefs and religious identity in the public sphere, in the political sphere, which is antithetical to British values and secular democratic values, where people don’t bring too much religion into their political and social life. They practice their religion. We have religious freedom in the UK. Nobody is restricting our ways to manifest our beliefs. We can adhere to a belief and practice that belief freely.
The law protects our right to practice our religion freely. However, I see a growing tendency within those ethnic minorities to become more religious, wearing their religion on their sleeves all the time. They think that this makes them more pious, people who hold high moral ground, and very much family-oriented. So, there is an element of supremacy that I see, looking down on the rest of society, thinking they are not good enough.
“Our women are more modest. Our men are better when it comes to family values.” They are very much committed. I find this growing trend, unfortunately, very disturbing because it is coming from a certain community, and it is creating a division between that community and the rest of society. I find the religious identity, as we have witnessed during the recent election campaign, has become a tool to politicize that whole religious identity and bring it into politics, promoting the narrative that religious identity is the only important thing.
People have less inspiration to be affiliated or associated with the rest of society. For them, their religious identity is everything, and that is creating division. We don’t see certain parts of the community getting in touch with the rest of society. They are living in a separate world with separate values, and I find it very disturbing and concerning. Nobody is saying that you need to be less religious or more religious here in the UK.
You are all free to exercise your right to be a religious person or not. But when you bring your religious identity and put it at the forefront of everything you do and how you see people, how you see your fellow citizens, and how you interact with them, then, of course, that will create more polarization and division. This will lead the whole society in a direction where there is less cohesion and more polarization.
Jacobsen: Do you think individuals who, regardless of ethnic minority status, use Islam as a political identity are different from others who use identity politics in terms of its totalizing effect? Because what I’m gathering from what you’re saying, it’s pervasive in the way they engage with society and the political system, rather than being more individual view-oriented. They are taking this on as a collective move, either to be insular or to see themselves as superior in terms of their values, contrary to British democratic representation, where you note about the immodesty of women, for instance, from their point of view.
Khan: Identity politics has been a huge part of our history. There was a time when minorities needed a narrative that would bring them together and inspire each other to be at the forefront of human rights and civil rights struggles.
So, identity politics itself is not a bad thing, but in the context of the recent identity politics that has become pervasive around the world. It has become toxic and divisive. People are more interested or inclined to separate themselves from each other and assert their own identity and beliefs as absolute truth. To me, it’s creating a situation where people are less inclined to find common ground among them and are more prone to find differences.
In the name of respecting differences, they are isolating themselves from other groups or communities in society. Religious identity has become a very toxic brand of politics. We see that whenever people bring religion into politics; it’s never about inclusivity or cohesiveness. It’s always about a certain group, a certain section of society, asserting superiority in one way or another.
The same is happening with Muslim communities. When they bring their religious identity into politics and the social sphere, it is perilous in my opinion because they are using religion as a tool to politicize and undermine democratic values. These are hard-earned freedoms that we have in the West. As a result, liberals in the West have become very apologetic for the values they fought for and earned after fighting battles.
Now, because certain communities, in the name of victimhood, are pushing this narrative of religious identity, they are somehow accepting it as a norm. In the recent election campaign in the UK, it was so toxic that literally Muslim clerics were endorsing independent candidates. There was lots of heckling. Politicians were heckled by so-called pro-Palestine protesters for not parroting their narrative.
The democratic process was literally undermined by these acts. To my utter surprise, there was very little noise about this. People seemed to try to ignore it or brush it aside, thinking it’s okay if a certain community is doing it.
We see that Labour MPs were subjected to bullying and intimidation in the name of religious grievances. People were justifying their appalling attitudes by saying that they were victimized only because these MPs were not parroting their views. They felt justified in bullying or intimidating others. Although they were not explicitly saying it, the impression was that they felt justified in whatever they were doing.
People were not criticizing it, and there was a pin-drop silence on this matter. As a result, politicians suffered, and democratic values were undermined. Right after the election victory was announced, we saw Labour MPs coming on social media or British media talking about how they were intimidated and heckled. But still, they were not willing to name those responsible.
They were so reluctant to name people, saying that it was mainly done by men or women from the Muslim community who called themselves pro-Palestine protesters or whatever. This reluctance is undermining the democratic process in the West. As a result, we see that other nefarious elements are gaining momentum. This polarization and narrative have been very effective, suggesting that Muslims are doing whatever they want in Western societies.
And nobody’s holding them accountable for this conduct. We see the rise of the far right. We see people with appalling views gaining strength and becoming emboldened.
So, as a whole, this identity politics has brought out the worst in society, I would say, out of British society during the past election campaign. It is alarming, the level of religious influence, involvement, or intervention in politics.
Jacobsen: There are a few things that raise questions for me. One, it’s talked about more now, probably in the last maybe 10 to 15 years, the idea and notion of victimhood, victimization, and victim identity. According to Home Office statistics, the two biggest categories of hate crime reports in terms of offenses are against Jewish and Muslim individuals. How do we appropriately, in a political context, distinguish individuals being subjected to hate crimes, from the use of collective victimhood as an identity or political currency? In other words, how do we ensure that being victimized by hate crimes doesn’t prevent these groups from being subject to any criticism?
Khan: I find it interesting that whenever we talk about certain problematic issues within a community. People are very quick to jump to the conclusion that discussing these issues may encourage nefarious elements to provoke a negative response toward that particular community. We must have a clear understanding that any idea can be criticized, whether it is a religious idea or a philosophical idea. No idea is above scrutiny. However, human dignity cannot be compromised.
When individuals are subjected to hateful conduct, whether they are Jewish or Muslim, it should be condemned unequivocally. There should be no ifs and buts. However, when people feel offended merely because their beliefs are scrutinized, that is disingenuous. We need to call this out.
We need to say it unequivocally: criticizing ideas is one of the pillars of modern Western civilization. This is why we live in a modern world where human rights are respected and preserved, and we value free speech and freedom of religion, including freedom from religion. I find it disingenuous when people say that criticizing certain attitudes or beliefs can be conflated with criticizing or demonizing human beings. Here in the UK, anti-Muslim bigotry and antisemitism both exist, and they should be condemned and tackled.
However, criticizing religious ideas should never be conflated with dehumanizing people. There is a clear distinction between these two things. It is a dishonest attempt to conflate them. From my personal experience, sometimes when I’m speaking on the issue of criticizing religious beliefs, I feel my voice is being suppressed. I’ve been given the impression that I am being too harsh on religious beliefs. It’s surprising to me that we live in a free world where we value free speech, but when we talk about Islam or certain aspects of Islam that are discriminatory or misogynistic, suddenly we are reminded that we cannot do that because it offends the community. Of course, nobody wants to offend. I have certain ideas; I’m a secularist. Right?
People say very strange, weird, and absurd things about secularism. They conflate secularism with dictatorship, and then they say secularism is the same when it comes to the atrocities committed in theocratic states. They argue that states that denounce religion, therefore, are destined for secularism to be doomed.
So, I don’t take offense. I try to reason with people, and when I see that I cannot reason with them on this issue, I don’t mind it. That’s fine. It’s their view. It’s alright.
But somehow, talking about Islam can land you in a situation where you are criticized, snubbed, and suppressed because certain people may find it offensive. The distinction between criticizing ideas and dehumanizing people is very clear. It’s a very disingenuous effort to conflate them, and it’s been happening for some time. Now, literally whenever you talk about religion, it is deemed as talking about Muslims. I try my best.
I always try my best to maintain that distinction no matter how much I am criticized or accused of being Islamophobic. I always say, “I’m not saying what you are accusing me of. What I’m saying is this.” But as I said, the tragedy is that the liberals in the West have become so politically correct that they don’t want you to talk about it because, for them, it’s a known issue. “Why are you criticizing a certain community or a certain belief?” The thing is, Islam is a religion that seeks to control people’s political life, social life, each and every moment of their life.
And people’s lives are affected. People suffer, especially vulnerable sections of those communities such as women, LGBTQ people, and young children. They suffer. For us, it’s crucial to talk about these things. Here, we see that Western people earned these freedoms and liberties by defying religious persecution, by defying religious tyranny, by pushing religion into the personal sphere, away from politics, away from social interactions.
But when it comes to people from within the Muslim community, whether they have denounced religion or they are practicing Muslims, when they speak, their voices are muzzled. They are snubbed. Their voices are suppressed because nobody wants to hear what they have to say because it’s a known issue for the liberals. I call it the soft bigotry of low expectations that people from the Muslim community, especially women from the community.
They are expected to live under such oppression no matter how they feel, no matter how much they suffer. It’s not concerning at all for these people. I find it disturbing that when, as a woman from a Muslim background, I say that Islam doesn’t give women any rights, people literally look at me and say, “No, this is not true.”
But with regards to the use of victimhood as a shield, yes, it’s important to differentiate this from individual acts of hate.
Jacobsen: You’ve related some of your personal experiences. So maybe, we can focus on the thing that’s related to that, which is sort of perennial, at least within our lifetimes. The notion that any criticism of Islam as a body of ideas and practices becomes racist. The idea is that you are somehow making a bigoted statement about Arab ethnics as a group or as an identity when you’re merely criticizing the Quran or the Hadiths or certain practices around Islam. What’s your experience in the United Kingdom context around the use of this, either naively by some out of ignorance or cynically by others as a political tool?
Khan: The victim narrative that has been put forward by certain, I would say, self-proclaimed community leaders from the Muslim community here in the West has been effective in controlling the political narrative when it comes to minorities. Minorities are portrayed as being victimized, suppressed, or oppressed in one way or another. They are not given the absolute freedom to assert their religious beliefs, and any criticism of any shade of Islam is considered bigotry against people and, therefore, should not be given any credence, and so on.
This victim narrative has not only created lots of differences or divisions in Western society but also has been effective in brainwashing people in the Muslim communities, especially the Muslim youth, who have been the biggest victims of this brainwashing. They have been brought up with the narrative that they are victims. No matter what they do, they can never break the glass ceiling.
They can never be seen as equal. They can never be treated as equal. These are grievance-mongering narratives that have been put forward. But the tragedy is that now this victim narrative has become a resistance narrative, and that’s a shift that is even more harmful and alarming. People who used to think that they have been victims now see themselves as resisting.
They have become the ultimate embodiment of resistance against Western atrocities or Western tyranny in their views. Now they are resisting and proudly taking up this supposed fight. In my opinion, there is no such fight going on. But in their minds, they are fighting against Western tyranny aimed at eliminating Islam or Muslims or discriminating against the Muslim community. So now they have glorified this whole victim narrative and justified, in their view, that because they have been victimized for such a long time, their resistance, in whatever way it is manifested, is justified.
It is becoming more toxic, divisive, and polarized. They don’t see any objection to their beliefs because the accusation of being a bigot or a racist has been so strong and effective that people literally don’t want to be seen as racists or bigots. Therefore, they avoid criticizing religion, in this case, Islam, and they want to ignore what is going on.
They want to get along, saying, “It’s okay. Fine. I’m not saying anything. I don’t want to say anything about it. I’m fine with everything.” They have become complacent in this situation. So are we going to make any progress, or is this way of thinking leading us to any direction which is progressive or can be called the era of enlightenment? We have witnessed an era of enlightenment here in the West.
But are we going forward or regressing? We are regressing. We are going back to that point where people will accuse you of being bigoted or racist, and you will be silenced right away. You will be deprived of your livelihood. You will be thrown out of your company.
You will be condemned, ultimately, as not being a good person because nobody wants to be associated with someone who is accused of being racist or a bigot. So while we acknowledge that hateful acts have been committed against individuals by individuals, we need to be honest about the criticism of a set of beliefs. In this case, it is Islam, a religious set of beliefs. We need to criticize this. We need to talk about it because we have certain very divisive and toxic attitudes that are pervasive, not only within the Muslim community but also affecting society as a whole.
So when you’re not talking about the problems, you can never find a solution. In a pluralistic society such as Britain or any other Western society, which is diverse and very multicultural, we need to talk about these issues to sort them out. When you ignore these issues, they will simmer underneath the surface. They are not going to go away.
You cannot wish away these problems. They are going to stay. The problems we see regarding extremism or radicalization and the use of religion as a tool to brainwash people have become common phenomena in the West. People don’t bother to talk about it anymore, if I’m not wrong.
This is what my observation is: there are certain schools which have been reported by national organizations here in the UK, such as the National Secular Society and Humanists UK. They have been talking about certain madrasas and religious seminaries where toxic ideas are being promoted or taught to children. But the reaction is, I would say, that there is no reaction at all. There is no response to those concerns.
Nobody’s talking about this. The media is least interested in addressing these issues. There are still primary schools that impose hijab on children. I tell you my own experience: I saw a child sitting in a pram wearing a hijab here in the UK. It’s a very common sight to see children wearing hijab in the UK, but nobody wants to talk about it.
There was a time when people used to talk about these issues in the media, but not anymore. Nobody seems interested. For them, it’s, “This is their issue. They live or die. We don’t want to get involved in it.” This is the result of the very progressive use of accusations that you can be labeled as a racist or a bigot anytime, and right away you are silenced. You have nothing more to say. So it doesn’t mean that we need to stop talking about it. We need to talk about it even more.
We need to discuss these things even more. We need to raise people’s consciousness to bring them to the table to talk about these things. It’s not okay to say, “I don’t want to be seen as racist.” One person or one organization accusing you of racism doesn’t make you a racist, doesn’t make you a bigot.
It’s more of a tragedy when you see injustices taking place in front of you in plain sight and you turn a blind eye. That is the worst thing. That is the worst thing you can feel guilty of, in my view, rather than the fear of being called racist.
Jacobsen: We should note that it only took a few decades or even a couple of decades to get here because, if I recall correctly, I don’t remember any writing or video interviews with the cast of Monty Python when they put up “The Life of Brian,” spoofing the followers of Christ. They didn’t have any claims of being racist. They didn’t have any claims of being anti-white, even though most Christians at that time were white.
So that’s a thing that’s happening particularly with regards to this specific religious ideology. At least, I’m seeing that more than with others. The real harm is probably the problem of the tale of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” coming to life. When a real racist comes around, people will be skeptical rather than truly activated, and that delay can cause harm in the medium term.
And maybe, there’s a sort of following of some of our thoughts here too, where this dichotomous thinking that we have, where individuals such as yourself who are openly arguing for maintaining strong, liberal, secular democratic values, are being seen as somehow nationalist because your argument is, “These are British values; therefore, we should maintain them.”
But “nationalist” as a term, they’re meaning it as ultranationalist or far-right or something like this. I’m sure you’ve gotten emails like this.
Khan: Yes.
Jacobsen: So, this dichotomous thinking might not be necessarily new but fueled more with a little bit of nitro due to the Internet and social media. As any analysis goes on those platforms, people typically enter informational quagmires or ponds. They don’t get into another area or stream to get any new information.
It’s a small percent of people who will read different sides and get different perspectives when they’re on those platforms. What do you make of that charge of being ultranationalist or far-right when you’re arguing for pretty traditional enlightened values of liberal secular democracy?
Khan: It’s a mistake to conflate secularism with ultranationalism. Ultranationalism is an extreme form of nationalism in which a country or people assert their identity and their traditional values. They have been following, embracing, or espousing these values for a long time.
This assertion is against the rest of society, the other minorities who are a part of the social fabric. Ultranationalism is an entirely different thing. When we talk about secularism, it is based on human faculties such as logic, empathy, reason, and moral intuition. We believe that human beings are born with this morality. What is good, what is wrong, how you can live with your fellow human beings, how you can make society a better place for everyone regardless of their beliefs, identifications, or any form of identity.
People are seen as people, all people. I don’t think there is any absolutism in secularism because, in my view, secularism is always evolving. The form of secularism we witnessed 50 years ago and what we have at the moment is entirely different. It’s more progressive and inclusive.
It’s more of a glue that binds people together in my view. This is what we observe here in the UK. When I talk about secular values as British values, why do I say so? These values of secularism have been espoused by a large number of British people here in our society, and people regardless of their beliefs, sexuality, or points of view, are willing to coexist with others. The attitude and atmosphere are welcoming to people from all around the world here in the UK, and they find commonalities here. That’s the beauty of secularism. So I don’t think that secularism and ultranationalism can ever be one and the same thing. It’s not. Secularism is about embracing humanity, the humane values that see people as equal regardless of their religious beliefs.
In fact, if you look at the current political scenario around the world, the societies that espouse secular values are more inclusive in terms of religious freedom than those societies where all laws, traditions, and rituals are based on religious beliefs. Here in the UK, constitutionally, there is nothing of this sort that makes it a secular nation. However, people are very strongly affiliated with this sense of society, and that makes it more inclusive and diverse, in my opinion. So people who try to conflate these two things are, as I told you earlier, demonizing secularism, whereas it has nothing to do with secular values. Why do I call them British values?
Because British values are values of free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from religion. They are values of tolerance of opposing opinions. These are the values that people have espoused and embraced, and they are ingrained in this society. So why not appreciate this society for espousing these values? I know that many people say, “Oh, these are universal values.”
These are humane values, which are very much universal. But not all people or societies embrace these values. More than half of the world, we see, is highly influenced by religious beliefs, especially in Muslim-majority countries. That part of the world is entirely different in terms of protecting or preserving human rights. They see human beings as objects created to serve a god.
That’s it. This is the aim of their life as individuals. There is no sense of individuality in those societies. So when I call secular values British values, it doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing or condoning any ultranationalistic attitudes or views. I am appreciating the society and admitting the reality that, yes, this society is tolerant.
Yes, this society is diverse. Yes, here, people like me who are persecuted around the world in theocratic states find freedom, liberty, equal rights, and dignity. So why should I not give credit to this society and to these people who are at the forefront of this fight to preserve human rights and women’s rights? It’s evolving.
It’s all evolving. That is another difference between nationalism and secularism. Nationalism is very rigid. It’s never changing. It’s a rigid traditional thing that says, “Yes, this is what we were, and this is what we are going to be.” However, secularism is always evolving. It’s embracing. It’s making society an inclusive place. That is the reason.
People ask me what secularism is, where it comes from, and how I got inspired by these thoughts. My response is always, “If you want me to give you a list of names of philosophers who have been secular in their approaches and opinions, I’m not going to do that.” I’m going to tell you straight that I believe secularism is the natural state when it comes to bringing people together. It is the only natural state when you say all people are equal regardless of their belief. When I was in school back in Pakistan, which is a highly conservative and religiously influenced society, where every moment is dictated by religion, in that society, when I was a child, I used to go to school. I would see my friends from the Christian and Hindu communities subjected to mistreatment and discrimination. I would feel bad. That question would come to my mind: why not remove Islam from this designated place in the country and make it like any other religion, treating everyone equally? Why am I treated any better than my friends? Only because I was born into this religion, and this religion is a state religion here in Pakistan. So when I look back at that girl, that schoolgirl, I feel that was the first realization of what secularism is.
I believe that it’s a very natural and obvious human instinct to have a society where people are not privileged based on their beliefs. They are equal regardless of everything, their beliefs, their sexuality, their opinions. This is how I see that these two things are poles apart. They do not resemble each other in any way.
Jacobsen: In the last several decades, in a post-colonial period, a lot of the criticism of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories has come from Human Rights Watch, the UN, and other international organizations, noting human rights abuses on both sides, with a ledger of more human rights abuses on the Israeli side.
Yet on October 7, we saw a mass act of murder and violence against Israeli civilians by Palestinians who were members of Hamas. There are people who can be ‘useful idiots,’ but for causes they don’t necessarily know anything about to any significant degree. So how does this religious-based identity politics play into the hands of even terrorist groups through activism in Western countries, when they’re not necessarily supporting Palestinian civilians where they think they are, but in fact, the rhetoric is that they are in fact supporting Hamas or a terrorist organization that committed the atrocity?
Khan: I want to be honest in my response to this question. Every single Muslim child is indoctrinated with certain beliefs, which are very disturbing and discriminatory against Jewish people. Certain religious beliefs are toxic, and children are indoctrinated and brainwashed into hating Jewish people.
I was also told the same things in my religious seminary and in my madrassa, that these people are cursed. You ought to hate them for the sake of God. As a child, I had this question that, in Pakistan, there are no Jewish people. Last time I checked, there was only one Jewish person in Pakistan, if he’s still living there or if he has left. So there was no chance for me to get into contact or interact with any Jewish person. All I knew was that they are the ultimate evil people. There is nothing good about these people.
Because my mom was a Sufi Muslim, and Sufi Muslims are very much into humanity, I find them very close to humanism. My mom was very much into this idea that you don’t hate people, don’t discriminate against people based on their belief; all people are equal. So for me, when I listened to this rhetoric about Jewish people, there were so many questions in my mind.
I went back home and discussed it with my mom. My mom was quiet. Then she said to me, “Listen to me. You don’t have to hate anybody. Okay? This is not your job. You were not created for this. God created you to spread love. Right? So when you look at people, don’t look at the identity they may wear. You need to look at them as human beings, not at the markers of identity.” This is what I learned from my mother, and that was the thing that always remained with me. Unfortunately, it’s not the case for many Muslims who are born and raised in Muslim households, and they are brought up with this mentality, this toxicity.
In Palestine, children are taught similar rhetoric and religious hatred against Jewish people. I’m not saying that there are no issues to be addressed. It’s a very complicated issue. People try to make it all about a piece of land. It is not. It’s way more complicated than that. People literally hate Jewish people. They don’t want them to be in that place. They want to eliminate, annihilate the state of Israel because they believe that God has cursed them and they can never have their homeland. These beliefs are held by many mainstream Muslims around the world.
So, when this atrocity happened on October 7th, it was atrocious and inhumane. Then we saw people celebrating that atrocity. I could never forget that night when I was looking at social media and listening to people shouting in glee. It was so traumatic and inhumane.
How can you justify violence in any way? That was the question in my mind. If you think that what is happening with the Palestinian people is violence and has no justification, how can you justify the violence against people on the other side? They are as innocent as the people in Palestine. Innocent people should not be categorized according to their nationalities. Hamas uses this rhetoric to indoctrinate and poison the minds of young people and children. It is a part of religion that some do not want to hear, but it is the truth.
There are certain hadiths which are deemed credible. If you don’t acknowledge that there are some hadiths considered less trustworthy, you must still recognize there are hadiths certified as credible. One such credible hadith is very anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish, believed by a majority of Muslims.
This rhetoric has played a huge part in turning religious grievances into identity politics. Whatever we are witnessing now in the West—the rhetoric and hatred—nobody wants to talk about the future. Everybody focuses on the past, whether it’s 20, 30, 50, or 70 years ago.
Atrocities happen in conflicts. The thing we need to focus on is how to make it better for everyone. I’m afraid this religious rhetoric has been a tool in the hands of terrorists. It’s similar to when people left Western countries and joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq, becoming part of a caliphate established by extremists. Many still dream of such a caliphate, not just in Syria and Iraq. When you talk about religious radicalization, it leads to that path where a caliphate might be established again. This toxic narrative is still used by those who push these agendas.
Now, you see Muslims persecuted in China, Sudan, and other parts of the world. Nobody protests for their rights or raises their voices for them. It’s all about one place and one people. The rhetoric is so toxic I can’t stand it. When they talk about 70 years of victimization, there are reasons why Hamas managed to control Palestinian society. There was an election in 2005 that never happened again. They persecuted their own opponents after they assumed power in Palestine. People don’t want to talk about those things: how women were treated under Hamas rule, how LGBTQ people were treated, how they treated their own people.
It is all about religious radicalization and religious fundamentalism, similar to what we now see in Afghanistan. What is happening in Afghanistan? It is a religious theocratic state established there. Everything is about religion, whether it is about the Quran or Hadith. They have managed to establish a society where they derive their principles from religious scriptures.
It’s not just about the Quran. It’s everything in the religion that has been incorporated into one set of beliefs. This is the end product when religious radicalization resides in the corridors of power.
Religious extremism in power leads to a similar kind of toxic religious identity that we witness in the West. We are still witnessing it in Western societies where people bring this Islamic identity. I’ve been wary of identity politics when it comes from a religious perspective. We need to talk about it and criticize it more and more because it’s not benign.
It’s bringing toxic attitudes and behaviors that need to be called out, criticized, and scrutinized. They need to be rejected by mainstream society. There is no place for this kind of identity politics. If someone from the Christian community did this, people would quickly reject that person based on their beliefs. This happened in Scotland. A Scottish politician brought her religious beliefs into politics and was rejected altogether. There were no ifs or buts. It was a clear rejection: you don’t represent the majority of society, so you are rejected. That was the final word. But when it comes to Islam, people start making excuses for the extreme aspects of Islam.
So, the name of that Christian politician in Scotland is Kate Forbes. She brought her religious beliefs into politics, and people literally withdrew their support. She was contesting for SNP leadership. This shows how critical people are when it comes to other religious beliefs. But when it comes to Islam, they become complacent. That is mind-boggling. It’s hard to wrap your head around this one thing.
Jacobsen: What have been effective bridges to build with individuals who reject that? You gave an example of someone using it and then getting rejected. Are you only noticing this temperament in Muslim communities who have a voting base that does not reject individuals using Islam as political currency?
Khan: It’s becoming more typical, especially for politicians in the West, to whip up religious sentiments to win over Muslims and support from the Muslim community. People in the Muslim community who support a secular democratic system in the West have not been given due attention. Their voices are muzzled, they have been criticized unfairly, and they have been pushed aside.
People who are very radical in their views, appearance, and conservatism have been treated as the spokespersons of the Muslim community. We saw what happened during the past British election campaign when politicians wanted support from the Muslim community. They would appeal to the most conservative and radical points of view within that community. We saw how Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the party, was present at a meeting composed solely of Muslim men. She promised that her party would recognize the state of Palestine if they supported her.
To me, as a woman from the Muslim community or as a dissident, I was shocked. First, she is a woman, then she is a British politician from a party that espouses liberal values. Did it not occur to her why there were no women in that gathering? Why were there only men, and why did she feel the need to address the grievances of that male-only meeting? For me, it was a shocking moment, but this is the truth. Whenever politicians or western authorities want to talk about anything, they find the most conservative elements within the Muslim community and appoint them as leaders or encourage them to be the spokespersons.
Then those people use religion as a tool to coerce the whole community into compliance. Efforts to build bridges with dissenters from within the community have been very few, or maybe I haven’t seen any. When liberal or democratic Muslims have been asked to come forward and talk about the issues facing Muslims as a community, the same problems that anyone else faces in a society, they have similar problems: not getting jobs, not having enough housing. There are issues related to some traditional or religious rituals and cultural matters.
What matters is who is being presented as a community leader or supposed spokesperson to talk about these issues. We did not hear a single so-called community leader from the Muslim community talking about the real issues Muslims or the Muslim youth are facing. It was all about Palestine.
It was all about religion. People were emotionally blackmailed into voting and supporting certain Muslim candidates who turned the whole thing into a political theater, making it all about religious loyalty. You have to express your loyalty by supporting these candidates. On the other side, we see politicians having conversations and meetings with these people, trying to appease them and be politically correct.
I don’t see them having any interest in solving the issues the Muslim community is facing. They seem interested only in appeasing certain individuals who will then speak on behalf of the whole community. Efforts to build bridges with those who are liberal in their views, espouse secular democratic values, love Britain, and contribute constructively to society are lacking.
I hope they come to the realization that they need to make bridges with these people, not with the clerics or conservative and radical individuals. I hope they come to this realization. People get caught up in this faux ethic of using an abstraction categorized as a group, replacing individual opinions and individual sacrifice. There is no sacrifice when it’s done on behalf of a collective while immersing oneself in that. It’s much different from traditional civil society organizations for various human rights causes. The people caught in the crossfire are typically the most vulnerable within those populations, as in any population.
The people most subject to forms of violence are women. Misrepresentation and lack of representation typically affect women. When you have this wasteful political activism, what happens to women in this context? Do they get caught in the crossfire of this religious identity politics? Women from the Muslim community, in the current political scenario, have been thrown under the bus—not only by politicians but by their own community members who were candidates, especially independent candidates in recent elections. It was awful to see Muslims pushing religious identity into politics and contesting as independent candidates, holding male-only meetings with hardly any women present.
There was a reported case during the election campaign in Birmingham when a candidate was caught on camera in a podcast making fun of certain situations that women will be subjected to in the afterlife, such as women being in the majority in hell, which is a religious belief for Muslims. It is a hadith that women will be in the majority in hell.
The way women from the Muslim community were treated during the last election campaign. It is a testament. Women have always been thrown under the bus in a bid to appease the conservative men, conservative Muslim men. I just told you about an independent Muslim candidate who was maing fun of the situation where women will be in hell in a majority. This is a religious belief. Many Muslims believe it, because it is a saying of prophet. He was mentioning and making fun of it. His buddies on the podcast. They were making fun of domestic violence. It was tragic to see that these men.
They felt emboldened, encouraged to talk about these kind of things so overtly, publicly without having any fear of repercussions, consequence, criticism. For them, it was so normal because, somehow, this has been normalized in British society. That do not talk about their so-called internal matters, do not discuss those issues, do not criticize those issues, because that may offend the men of the community. So, the effort have been made in terms of building bridges with people. These people are mainly conservative, very radical, extreme people who claim to be the gatekeeper of the community, who claim to be the spokesperson of the community.
I think these politicians should realize the perils of adopting this policy of appeasement in the face of this toxic religious identity politics. The so-called community leaders have long mnopolized political discourse, painting themselves as representative of all British Muslims. All the while disregarding the concerns of the rights of women and other people in the Muslim community.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Khadija.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/04
JeromeClayton Glenn is co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project, a leading global participatory think tank with 71 Nodes around the world, and three regional networks which produces the State of the Future reports for over 25 years.
He was contracted by the EC to write the AGI paper for input to their Horizon program 2025-2027, is a Member of the IEEE SA organizational governance of artificial intelligence working group P2863, lead the international assessment of foresight elements of the UN Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda. He is currently working on the initial conditions, rules, and guardrails for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and governance possibilities, synergetic relations among nations of South Asia, and the next State of the Future report.
Jerome Glenn has managed over 60 futures research projects, lead author for 19 State of the Future reports, and co-editor for Futures Research Methodology 1.0 to 3.0
He invented the Futures Wheel, Synergy Matrix, and concepts such as conscious-technology, transInstitutions, tele-nations, management by understanding, self-actualization economy, feminine brain drain, and definitions of environmental security and collective Intelligence. He wrote about information warfare in the late 1980s, sent his first email in 1973, and in the mid-1980s he was instrumental in getting x.25 packet switching in 29 developing countries which was key to low-cost access to the Internet.
A few years ago, he led the design and implementation of the Global Futures Intelligence System, wrote Work/Technology 2050: Scenarios and Actions, and lead the American Red Cross Covid-19 Scenarios. He was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise and banning the first space weapon (FOBS) in SALT II. He has published over 250 future-oriented articles, spoken to over 800 organizations, and wrote Future Mind: Artificial Intelligence, Linking the Future, and co-author of Space Trek: The Endless Migration).
He shares the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, received the Donella Meadows Metal, Kondratieff Metal, Emerald Citation of Excellence, honorary professorship from Universidad Miguel de Cervantes, and honorary doctor’s degrees from Universidad Ricardo Palma and Universidad Franz Tamayo, and is a leading boomerang stunt man.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, the first question I want to ask is something we already covered: to correct my mistakes and misconceptions. What’s the difference between “futurism” and “futurist”? Why is the latter acceptable, and probably something you might want to stop using as a term?
Jerome Glenn: Because I’m not completely consistent. I don’t want to bury the word “futurism” among futurists. Even though an -ism tends to be an ideology, futurists should open their minds to possibilities. The idea of alternative thinking is one of the contributions of contemporary futurists. Futurism was a school of art in Milan, Italy, about 125 years ago. It used a robotized style and worshiped machines. It became a bit of the foundation for fascism. So I was in Milan by pure accident, walking down the street 100 years to the anniversary day. There’s this big 100th anniversary of futurism. I met with some of the futurists that evening. I was like, “Here’s the deal: Let’s do it again, folks, but let’s not do it with fascism, okay?” So that’s one of the reasons why we’re going to get rid of the futurism part: people tend to think that we’re an ideology if we use the word -ism or the phrase -ism.
Jacobsen: It was largely founded in the ’90s. Is it still connected to the United Nations, a university around that? Is that connection still active with that university or the United Nations?
Glenn: Yes, well, we still do stuff with the U.N. We’re a bit involved in the U.N., with some coming up in the future. We’ve done stuff with UNESCO, FAO, and other parts of the U.N. We started the feasibility study under the United Nations University in 1992. We did a three-year feasibility study, believe it or not. Because there are controversies in future studies and future research in the academic world, there are controversies. Also, since I was in Washington, D.C., the United States, that’s only sometimes considered a place people want to follow in many parts of the world.
So, we ended up under the American Council of the U.N. University. Officially, we were U.N. before U.N. University. Still, we went under the American Council for U.N. University for many years, giving us U.N. access and all the rest. It was a statement about values, U.N. values. But then there were all kinds of; some people said it was much jealousy, some thought it was different things, and it became an annoyance. So, we finally became independent. But it was good that we were born under the U.N. University because it allowed us to include places like Iran, which we still have involved to this day that publishes our stuff in Persian and Farsi.
And relations with China are good, and so forth. Over the years, people have trusted the Millennium Project that it is a global futures research system, not looking on behalf of one country, ideology, or issue. Still, the whole system became acceptable over the years. It’s 100% independent, but we still do much stuff with different parts of the U.N., but we’re independent.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the more controversial subject matter within the realm of futurists? Those things people either don’t want to touch or B can make wild speculation without sufficient empirical evidence.
Glenn: Yes, well, one is synthetic biology. When I say synthetic biology, I’m not talking about taking DNA, cutting part of it, and putting something else in, where you take a rose and it glows at night. It’s still a rose. I’m talking about synthesizing different genetic parts, genes from different species, to make a new species that’s never existed before. That’s synthetic biology, synthesizing synthetic biology. That is in place today. There are no international regulations. We could create all kinds of species, but we have yet to determine how to determine what they will necessarily adapt to in the wild.
On the one hand, it is a tremendous boom because you should consider all the things nature can do that you can’t. Imagine that you could do some of that. It’s a bigger revolution than the industrial revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, we changed matter and energy relationships.
In the synthetic revolution, you’re changing the basis of life across the board. That’s a big deal. It’s not people not touching that one too much. It needs global regulations. We should have a U.N. convention on it, all that stuff. In the year 2000, I was asked to write a technology paper. We have a secretary general at that time. We had a bunch of stuff in there about it. It was in the early draft, and the secretary general was in 2000, but it was taken out. This is a weak point in the U.N. system, which is technology. They’re very good at all kinds of other stuff, but it’s not too hot regarding advanced technology, which is pretty cool. So that’s one.
Another one, of course, is future forms of artificial intelligence. So we’re working mostly on that right now. That’s much of our focus right now. The world is oblivious to AI 2.0. They’ve got the U.N. to pass a resolution on the artificial narrow intelligence we have today.
The Bletchley Declaration in the U.K. also did one on narrow intelligence. They talked about frontier and futures, but it was all narrow intelligence as soon as they entered the substance. The same thing happened with the U.N. Security Council meeting last July. It was, they mentioned, but only China mentioned it briefly: super intelligence. But we must understand that A.I. can evolve beyond what we think today. It can go from a tool to an agent. It can go from a single purpose to inventing purposes. It can do; it’ll eventually solve problems with novel strategies and evolve beyond our control and understanding. The only way we can manage how that turns out well is to transition from narrow to general. Right now, we have a three-year window to deal with that.
The trouble is that we return to narrow intelligence whenever we push people. They say generative intelligence. Generative intelligence is still narrow. All of that stuff is still narrow. It’s good stuff. It’s important, and it should be regulated also. I’m in favour of all that, but millions of people are working on this. I’m very pleased with that. That’s being done. The values are there. UNESCO is there. OECD is there. It’s great stuff. However, they need to deal with the emergence of the Big Apple. That’s one of the issues. Another one needs to be dealt with.
Jacobsen: How will these impact considerations that have been in science fiction or reality in terms of ethical development? So, things like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the Asilomar Guidelines are these things. As you note, how will this change considerations around 2.0 with the agency? Will things like human rights have to be generalized even further than simply getting a member of homo sapiens to something like sentience and then coming up with some generic metrics of those to manage how new agents will be dealing with humans that are already in?
Glenn: Yes, I don’t have a strong position on sentience, consciousness, et cetera, with A.I., in the sense that whether it has or has not, to me, is not the question. It will act as if it does. We, therefore, have to act accordingly. An airplane flies, and a bird flies. It’s not the same thing, but they both fly. Will artificial general intelligence be able to act as if it was insulted? Yes. Will it act as if it understands the world? Yes. Will it act as if it can get around many rules as if it was conscious of those? Yes.
Does that mean it’s sentient in the same sense? As they say, I’m not in their mind to know. But we have to act as if it is. A woman in Germany has created a constitution for artificial general intelligence. What are the rights and privileges of artificial intelligence? How do humans ought to relate to it? That’s a very wise move.
We need to begin to work on this right now. Because the forecast on artificial general intelligence, when it arrives, keeps getting closer and closer and closer. We discussed a 50-50 chance by 2045 a few years ago. Now, nobody says that. Now you’ve got a variety of experts averaging estimates together of a 10% chance of losing control. Would you get on an airplane with a 10% chance of crashing? Probably not. But if you knew that and had a chance to repair that plane before it took off, you could do it. So that’s where we are with the narrowing out—treating it as if it was sentient, and bingo.
Jacobsen: So what if we shift the perspective from A.I. ethics to something potentially a bit past A.I. ethics with A.I.’s? These agents, if autonomous, could develop their own highly sophisticated ethical systems and guidelines. How might those develop and interrelate with ones already in place?
Glenn: That’s a legitimate question. I wouldn’t know. That would be beyond my understanding if it goes beyond our ethical systems. But I sit on the IEEE AI governance organizations’ body and am struck by the first day. Here, you have people worldwide who precisely define ethical definitions so the auditors can use them.
So what hit me in these IEEE meetings was that if it’s the case, we will have artificial intelligence and the advanced versions involved in the infrastructure of civilization as a whole deciding all kinds of things on our behalf. If humans sometimes make ethical decisions and don’t, but if A.I. makes decisions based on audited ethical systems that the world has agreed to, civilization should become more ethical. Now, will A.I.s evolve beyond our understanding? I believe yes. Will they have their own rules and so forth? I guess so. But by definition, I would need help understanding what they are.
I’m writing a scenario on this where, in phase three, we’re doing a study on artificial general intelligence. We finished Phase One and Phase Two and are now in Phase Three. Phase three is scenarios. One of our scenarios is working on the protocols between AGIs when they interact. What are the rules for their interaction? And when the rules can’t be held, how does an automatic meeting of the various producers of the A.I. have an online meeting to resolve what it is? But the idea of your question is basically beyond me. Will they evolve their own ethics rules and procedures? Yes. Will I understand them? Probably not. Sorry, that’s not a very satisfactory answer.
Jacobsen: No, it’s a fair response because of the development of those ethics, which I would differ slightly. In the long term, these systems will develop ethics that are simply incomprehensible to us. They will be a black box to some degree, but the outcomes will make some sense.
Glenn: Yes. We always know what the outcomes are. Imagine so many interactions and decisions in the infrastructure. At the end of my scenario, I put in the possibility that some of the new bases in orbit that require energy and save energy, the air conditioning and cooling, and so on, are starting to get assembled without our understanding of how it was done. That’s when you get into superintelligence. When things start happening that you don’t understand, in a sense, you can’t judge the outcome because does the orbital thing work or not? So you can judge from that point of view, yes.
Jacobsen: Here’s another controversial topic that might be relevant to you; it doesn’t happen often in many communities, but I’ve interviewed many people, like you, depending on the area. I remember I interviewed Gordon Guyatt, a distinguished professor at McMaster University. He founded or co-founded evidence-based medicine in the early ’90s. A very well-cited person, probably the most cited living or dead academic in Canadian history. He knew bad behaviour happened at that level in the medical community. In the academic community, it happens, but it’s rare. You’ve been in this field for a long time, concerning more evidence-based extrapolations or speculative industries, futures industries, and philosophies. Are there cases where people take advantage of that for fraudulent behaviour? Have some cases arisen during your work?
Glenn: I’m reminded of Herman Kahn, the inventor of scenarios and escalation in international affairs. He was also the head of the Hudson Institute on the U.S. side in the Cold War. He felt very guilty when he bought some stocks toward the end of his life because he thought he would be tempted to say things favouring those stocks. And he was unsure whether it was ethical for a futurist to buy stocks because of that. That was an interesting question. On ethics, yes, it’s very easy to manipulate people on future stuff because that’s the basis of advertising. “Buy my car, and you get this good-looking blonde. Buy my product, and you get this thing.” So, they’re all future image-based.
One pushes one direction; one of the ethics, I guess, is if you’re pushing one direction, one ideology, then that would be an abuse of power. Many of us think that you should always make it clear to people that you don’t know the future, and you can. Still, you can learn about various possibilities and alternatives. What’s not being dealt with, that ought to be dealt with.
The comment about synthetic biology and future A.I. Some people use the phrase “use the future,” but when you use history, you usually use history to justify your ideology. That somebody can quote “use the future” to justify their preconceived notions ahead of time. I consider that unethical behaviour.
Jacobsen: Who did you admire when you started this work?
Glenn: Well, one, of course, would be Bucky Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, who gave us the concept of synergy and design science and various other key insights. Another would be Herman Kahn himself. I would also throw in Timothy Leary. I had the pleasure of having a panel with Herman Kahn and Timothy Leary, once about as different as possible. Isaac Asimov, he was a great master. I had the pleasure of meeting him a bit. Those would be some of the key people. I would go back in American history to Benjamin Franklin because Benjamin Franklin was the first American futurist.
Jacobsen: In what sense, in terms of the prediction that he was making about technology?
Glenn: In the sense that he didn’t simply accept what… this is oral history if it’s written down, but supposedly when they were writing the Declaration of Independence, the idea was they were going to quote Locke or Montesquieu or somebody, and Ben Franklin said, “Wait a minute, we’re creating a new game here. We won’t quote some former philosophers; we will create our own thing.” So, the idea of inventing the future and inventing what was possible was very much what he was about. He invented the U.S. post office. He invented the Pony Express. He was extremely creative in thinking anew. He was one of the driving forces of American thinking of creating something different and an alternative. Futures make an alternative to the British model.
Jacobsen: And what was Timothy Leary like?
Glenn: He was brilliant. When people say their brain is fried, they don’t know what they are discussing. They didn’t know him. He was brilliant. He processed more content in less time than anybody I ever met. Herman was the second-best right to that. So, Timothy was one of the… a lot of these people are highly misunderstood, unfortunately. Sandoz’s was a drug company in Switzerland that wanted to test out an I.Q. pill, which was later called LSD25. They wanted an independent evaluation by the most respected person they could get their hands on, Timothy Leary, at Harvard. So when they talked about I.Q. pills, the word got out, the A.P. and the rest of the press came in, and they weren’t ready. They weren’t readyyet, so everything got out of hand. But he could conceive the sweeps of history and get into the content of many histories and thoughts as best as anybody. He presented alternative modes of thought to the United States.
He spent time with songwriters in the sixties. Much of the American cultural revolution during that time came out of music, and he had a hand in that. So he was a brilliant guy to talk with. I had the pleasure to be around. But the trouble with him is he’s always been called the extra 10%, which would get him in trouble. He loved pushing systems. He couldn’t help himself. So if he could see somebody going a certain way, he’d push them an extra 10%. It would annoy people sometimes. Not everybody likes to have their view of reality threatened all the time.
Jacobsen: When it comes to science, technology, and envisioning new forms of governance, social organization, and health systems, we have these systems in place and in development that can be seen as accelerators toward a more expansive future. If using that metaphor, what still exists as the brakes on that car?
Glenn: I’ve learned about momentum over the years. Whatever you look at is more complex than possible at the time, and breakthroughs occur sooner than people think. However, its application and usage take much longer than seems reasonable. The Internet’s capabilities were in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but people thought it started around the 1990s. It’s a long time lag.
Right now, I’m up for putting some breaks in the transition from narrow to general artificial intelligence. We’re working with the U.N. and parliaments in different countries to say, “Hey, let’s have some rules here, folks. Let’s ease in getting in fast.” How often breaks can work? We have to ride the wild horse as best we can. I remember. Was it the ’70s? We did stop some biology research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it continued in France and Japan. We’ve got this largeinterconnected mass of humans around the planet. Even if half the world says, “All right, put the brakes on X, the other half may not.” Another big player in the game that people also prefer to avoid talking about is organized crime. Organized crime makes more money than all the military budgets combined.
And there’s cybercrime. You look up how much money they make and how much money businesses lose on cybercrime. It’s more than the military budgets combined, that one category, let alone all the rest of the organized crime. So, as a result, they’ve got some of the best software talent money can buy. So the ability to say we’re going to put brakes on X, organized crime might say, “Whoa, a new business opportunity.”.
So if brakes are possible, maybe the best thing is to get on the horse and ride as best as possible—a way around that. As Max Tegmark and the Future of Life Institute offered to say, “Hey, let’s pause for six months.” Some people say, “Well, that’s a dumb idea.” I’m going, “Well, that wasn’t a dumb idea.” Because what did it do? It got the world to acknowledge or begin to acknowledge that there’s a big deal coming up here, and we should consider it. So, the pause furthered the conversation on what would save, what the responsible evolution of A.I. would be, and what the rules would be. We’re not there yet, but the conversation is further down the road due to the request for a pause. So, brakes are good to think about, but I would only rely on something other than them. You can only stop much stuff.
Jacobsen: And what if a workaround artificially adds time in this sense? Even though the transition is rapidly happening, you use your current tools to determine what regulations can be made for those upcoming tools. So, the advanced narrow A.I., say GenAI, that we now use to help us ask prompts about what would be reasonable for developing those adaptations without halting technology development.
Glenn: Absolutely. That’s one of the things I’ve tested out in various places worldwide. It seems acceptable to metaphorically imagine AGI, the future stuff, as a sphere. Let’s say there are 20 rules. You have a narrow A.I. for each one of those 20 rules. So there are 20 narrow A.I.s inside, embedded inside the AGI, that monitor 24 hours, seven days a week. It’s different than you audit once and you pass. It’s not like a financial audit. It’s like a governor in the old physics and engineering sense. That you’re, it’s a constant, constant monitoring. So you’re using narrow A.I.s to monitor and cause a pause in the AGI should they go off the rules.
Jacobsen: Why do you think most of our futurist media is apocalyptic, dystopian, rather than something more optimistic? So, things like Game of Thrones and fantasy. There’s lots of sex and dragons. The futuristic stuff is more technology but doom.
Glenn: Yes, it’s… We’re geared this way. When you stub your toe walking down the street, you don’t notice that your heart is beating fine. Your breathing is doing fine, etc. But your toe is killing you. So, your total attention goes to the pain. The majority of the world is being polite with each other, like you and me right now. We are the vast majority of the world. But what do you get in the news?
The worst things humans do to each other every day. We are attracted, and our attention goes to pain. Growing up in the Savannah with a saber-tooth tiger, your radar is for the danger. That’s normal. That’s one part of it. In the second part, we studied how you better integrate future research and decision-making. One of the conclusions I don’t like, but I have to go with the conclusion, is that you get the decision-maker’s attention by demonstrating a potential disaster. Because if everything is going right, there’s no purpose in changing policy.
The whole purpose of policy is to change the future. So, if everything’s going relatively well, the decision-maker doesn’t have to worry about anything. He doesn’t have to do anything. Here’s this wonderful thing from 1970 called the Internet. Eh, it wasn’t exciting yet. But if you present to a decision maker, “Hey, if you don’t do something, we’re going to go down the tubes.”
It’s in the effectiveness of future research and futurists to demonstrate a crisis to get attention. I like something other than that because we only spend a little time with the opportunities. We could have done so much more with the Internet years ahead of time worldwide if people had paid attention to the positive things, which they didn’t. People turned that into a negative, saying you’re a nice young man. Still, I got into international affairs because I wanted to travel. You’re going to stop my travel. I go, no, I’m going to make your travel smarter. You’re not going to; it’s not going to eliminate travel. But they didn’t want to; they were resistant to it. I felt like Padua with Galileo on the telescope at this State Department guy’s desk saying, “Take a look at this computer communications.”
He says, “It’s okay, explain it to me.” He wouldn’t even participate. “Look at the machine.” But it’s unfortunate; it is a serious problem because we have opportunities not being taken advantage of because we’re concentrating on the problems. We look at the possibilities less. Many years ago, a futurist named Robert Theobald said that news should be put into a format of problem-possibility. Today, this house burned down. A breakthrough in making houses so they won’t burn was created by X. Next story, problem, possibility, problem, possibility. We even suggested this to the cable news network years ago when they were on paper as their unique news format. They said, “Yes.” But it turned out it was harderthan they thought because of the pressure of the time of the problem; they needed more time to research where the solutions were.
But if we can get this idea of problem-possibility in our thinking better, we’d be better off. Because it’s right, there was a project, maybe you heard about it, of science fiction writers who do positive futures five, ten years ago. Karl Schroeder was part of this thing in Canada. He’s a fellow Canadian; he’s up in Toronto. He’s also a good guy for you to interview—award-winning Canadian sci-fi. You should know this guy. Let’s see. 1962, paying a science fiction author, a traditional futurist, far future speculations, nanotech terraforming, organic reality.
Now, the third part of your answer, or the third answer to your question, is that solutions are harder than problem descriptions. It’s a lot easier to say there’s a war in Gaza. Let me tell you about it. How do we make peace in Gaza? Well, we’re not too good at that. It’s hard to come up with solutions. It’s much easier to say, “Here’s a problem, and then walk away.” That’s easy. A third answer to your question is that I wrote an article some years ago on the ethics of future research in teaching future research. One of the ethics I put in there is giving equal time to problems and possibilities. You can’t just say, “Here’s what’s wrong,” because then you’re poisoning the unconscious mind because then people think there’s no point in trying if it’s all going down.
Jacobsen: That’s a very good point. How you describe this aligns with my reading and image of Timothy Leary’s work for your early reference. He was hyper-optimistic, and Robert Anton Wilson critiqued him as such.
Glenn: He was a hope fiend. Somebody called him a hope fiend.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Glenn: That’s right. To play off dope fiend.
Jacobsen: Yes. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that, but if it comes with that extra 10% you’re mentioning, you can get the attention of certain bureaucrats who want to shut down things like the Milbrook experiments.
Glenn: Yes, he was almost an experimental human being. It’s not like I will take a lab over here and do a test. It’s like he was the test. He was an experiment. I wish he were around to answer this question. But he would accept the idea that he was an experimental human being. He was experimenting with himself. How is it to be a human being? What is the future of consciousness? The future of consciousness is that he was exploring all of that possibilities.
Jacobsen: Well, that’s also in line with Bucky Fuller. A few people around that time were in that frame of mind.
Glenn: But Bucky should have challenged your view of reality. No, Bucky challenged your efficiency. “Here’s a better way of doing it.” He didn’t pull the rug out from underneath you and then say, “Hey, invent yourself now.”
Jacobsen: That’s right.
Glenn: Bucky was close to suicide for much of his life, by the way, because people were not listening to him. To this day, some people are now coming up with a three-wheeled car, realizing that he’s pretty smart. But Bucky’s problem was that he wasn’t accepted as much as he would like to have been accepted.
Jacobsen: Who do you think was in their class of intellectuals and futurists in a positive sense but has yet to be discovered? Either they had personal issues or psychological issues, or they were ignored.
Glenn: Now, we’re getting into dangerous territory. This is curious. There are casualties in the field. One of the greatcasualties is a guy named Billy Rojas. For some time, the brain behind Alvin Toffler. Al was one of the greats; he was a slick New York writer. We were all jealous because his stuff sold, and he was a good writer. He’s lovely, but he was the hotshot New York writer. But as far as the guts, deep thinking, new ideas, and so forth, a lot of that came from other people and, to a large extent, was funnelled in and developed by Billy Rojas. Now, Billy Rojas taught one of the first futures courses in the United States, in Tennessee or Kentucky somewhere.
Back in the early or the middle 60s. He and Chris Dede created the first doctoral program in futures research at the University of Massachusetts. Billy, I, and another guy were creating a little think tank called the Future Options Room back in 1975. Billy was attacked in the middle of the night. Someone took a cane, which is unusual and ran across, knocking a bunch of teeth out and then stealing his attaché case. When’s the last time you heard somebody stealing somebody’s attaché case?
Jacobsen: Never.
Glenn: Yes, neither have I. So, he immediately got paranoid. So he was in a hospital, and I wondered why someone would steal that. And then, and a cane? First of all, how many people attack you with a cane across the jaw? So that was a triggering event. He was a little bizarre and far out. He was on the edge of that stuff, to begin with, but this one drove him over the edge, and he went underground for a while. Then he surfaced, working on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier teaching stuff. He’s still around.
But he is one of the unknown stories. Many people don’t want to talk about him because he’s crazy. He’s accused me of having an affair with Barbara Hubbard and all kinds of things that were not true, so he’s a little crazy. If you did a chemical test, the needle would go over to tilt, but he was very creative—no question about it. He had all kinds of creativity. There wasn’t a far-out idea you couldn’t discuss with him.
And obviously, Alvin Toffler took advantage of that. So, he was one of the casualties. One of the ones who ducked the radar was Chris Dede. Chris Dede got the first doctorate in future research at the University of Massachusetts. He was the other guy there. He started the doctoral and master’s programs at the University of Houston.
Then he went to George Mason University, and Harvard picked him up. At that point, he had to be respectable, so he stopped using the term futurist. He stopped at his Harvard page, the faculty page. It doesn’t mention where he got his PhD or doctorate and the subject. I agree that he turned his back on future stuff because there’s so much snake oil. But there are other reasons to leave the farm. You plant a better crop.
That’s another important thing. Yes, there’s a lot of B.S. Yes, it’s cool to be a futurist these days now. Years ago, it was like you got some disease; you had to take two aspirin, get a good night’s sleep, and forget this future stuff. But now, you look at Facebook and LinkedIn, everybody’s a futurist.
Jacobsen: What do you think are valid criticisms of the futurist project?
Glenn: Only sometimes anchored in methodologies. Now, immediately, Timothy Leary came over on my shoulder and said, “Wait a minute, you’re not going to include LSD as a methodology, are you?” Ah, Stanford Research Institute did. SRI did a study called “Changing Images of Man” study. It was in the seventies, a very famous study. One of their people came to my office.
They gave me the report, and I asked what your method was. And he said, “LSD.” I’m nodding to Timothy, but serious data needs more grounding. I’m being objective because many people have various axes to grind. They think that everything is Silicon Valley. We don’t have to study the future. We’re inventing it. I’m serious. That’s the attitude there. So we were inventing it, man. You’ll find out what’s happening next when we develop it.
Jacobsen: Futurist ideology via contemporarism.
Glenn: Yes. There’s a quote. You can quote yourself there. Yes, we have a compendium of 37 different methods. So when someone says I’m a futurist, I do scenarios. Oh, that’s another thing. While we’re complaining about methods, the original reason for scenarios was to find out what you didn’t know, that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but you had to know if you would look at that future. In other words, as you write a story, you get to a point where you say, “I have no idea what happens next.” Stop writing, research, talk to people, etc., until you find the next plausible step.
It was invented at the RAND Corporation. Their job was to prevent World War III. Everything else was entertainment. World War III was the issue. They couldn’t use normal military historians because the risk of war in the past was not absolute.
Meanwhile, the risk was absolute with the thermonuclear war. Bingo, the whole game was gone. So, the way of thinking had to change.
Hence, alternative thinking, alternative futures, and so forth, at RAND. But how do you know what is plausible? How do you? So, the idea was to write stories. And when you get to something that’s not plausible, that’s the gold. You found out what you didn’t know, that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but you got to figure it out. For example, Herman told me this… An interesting story that was unknown at the time but is so unknown to a large degree now is that let’s say, there’s been no thermonuclear war ostensible crisis for 30 years.
That means you don’t know who’s in the Kremlin, you don’t know the geopolitical situation, and you don’t necessarily know the weapons of the day. So, with all that unknown, how will you use deterrence? How are you going to deter the unknown? How do you convince the unknown that you’re crazy enough to press the button? That was the question. How do you do that? So, as they’re writing this scenario, they can’t figure out how to convince the unknown that you’re crazy.
So they stopped and discussed it until finally, who came up with it first? The idea was traffic jams. You create a fallout shelter program and civil defence program with fallout shelters all over the United States so that 30 years from now, you’ve got enough of that stuff built and have real programs with real people.
If the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone on further, the next step would be to go to fallout shelters. So what would the Kremlin see 30 years in the future? They would see traffic jams in New York, traffic jams in Chicago, traffic jams in Miami, all across the United States, and people rushing out to fallout shelters. What’s the logical conclusion? Those Americans are crazy. They’re going to go to war. Spot the ships, right?
That was the purpose of the Civil Defense Program. It was a fallback position of a future scenario to prevent World War III. But you couldn’t say it during the Cold War because it would destroy the strategy. So, as a result, Herman and other people had to go, did, but when the press was saying, how are you going to live underground for several thousand years? That wasn’t the point. The point was to convince the opponent that you’re crazy enough to press the button. That was the point. So we wouldn’t have gotten to that idea if we did scenarios the way the futurists are doing it today. What futurists do today, as they’ll say, gives me two uncertainties. High, low on this one, high, low on that one. You got four little boxes. And then, they describe the future in those four boxes and say, “What strategy works in them?” But you miss the entire point.
That’s not a scenario; it’s a description of the future. Perfectly fine to do. But the value is from the present to that future, cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, decisions, decisions. Because then you find out what’s real, what’s possible. Herman would comment that you can’t write me a scenario to show you that’s possible. That’s right, but you don’t start with the endpoint. Because that’s easy; again, you return to the negative future stuff. Describing the problem is easy. Describing the answer is hard. Writing a real scenario from the present to the future is hard work. Almost all futurists don’t do that. All they do is describe an endpoint. We are in the year 3000, and the extraterrestrials are playing pinball with us. That’s easy.
Jacobsen: Who do you think has carried on Leary’s hyperoptimism?
Glenn: See, I didn’t know him before the LSD stuff. So what he was “normal,” I heard him from a distance saying, “I was never normal. God damn it. I was born strange.”
Jacobsen: As we both know, he described his four years at Harvard and his time at the military academy as artificial.
Glenn: Right. So obviously, based on that statement, there was a before that period.
Jacobsen: Part of it is that I’m inventing this because I have yet to discuss it with him. Is that by having an alternative spiritual awakening? Is that a positive future? You see all these roadblocks, his positive future, all these momentums, and stuffy nonsense in the way. You’re like, “Boy, if we could get to that state of consciousness, my God, what a potential future we could have.” That may have been it, but I don’t commune with ghosts. So, I don’t have direct contact with them anymore.
Jacobsen: On that point, do you have any spiritual beliefs that guide you? These can also be natural versions of those.
Glenn: Oh, sure. No, the evolution of the mind is inevitable if we don’t mess things up along the way. Please think of how much we have discussed in the interview. We could return to Ben Franklin, and he would have been jealous. He lived a few years. So the awareness of awareness, our awareness of what we’re aware of, is gigantically different today than it was 200, 300 years ago. So, the evolution of the mind is empirically verifiable—secondly, the idea of the species.
When you were in the Inca’s consolidating power, you knew nothing about the dynasties in China. The idea of global awareness and global consciousness is evolving. I was lucky to be brought up in a house that thought mystics were okay. That meditation was a reasonable thing. I’m still trying to figure out your original question again.
Jacobsen: You got lost in the positive future there. I know it’s any “spiritual” foundation. Those could be naturalists as well. They don’t have to imply anything supernatural or extra-material. Then, you mentioned and developed the idea of the evolution of the mind. In terms of how you can compare the influence in this time, we’re more aware.
Glenn: I’m trying to remember your original question: What is my spiritual orientation?
Jacobsen: Yes, orientation or foundation guiding the work that you’re doing.
Glenn: Our family had a friend from Egypt who claimed he was trained in the same school as Jesus. In the Catholic church, you’ve got the bureaucratic structure, but then you also have your monastic mystics and so forth. Every religion has “Yes, Sufi and Islam,” and all the religions have that. So did the Copts. The Copts didn’t mean Egyptian Christian; it meant Egyptian.
As the Arabs came in with Islam, they said all those Copts. So it’s now changed its meaning. But the idea was that it was fun when Jesus’ parents went to Egypt. It was a good question to ask people: Where did Jesus go to elementary school? Where did he go to high school? Any of that stuff, he goes off as a baby, wetting his pants. He comes back with this hot shot. Who’s the teacher? Where was the school?
This one monastic or not monastic, but mystic part of the Copts, because they were pre-Christian because Jesus was there. They were already there before Jesus came in, supposedly. But anyway, whether or not all that stuff is true, a lot of the influence of that guy in the family was such that I was interested in more than Christianity and Buddhism.
Or Judaism and Islam, but also Hinduism and all the rest of the other isms around the world. So, I grew up thinking it’s okay to learn other views of spiritual reality. That’s a good thing.
Jacobsen: What Millennium Project project has been the most successful?
Glenn: I would say two. One would be environmental security. We did the first definitional work on it back in 1996. We even brought together a bunch of different embassies and military attachés in Washington at the World Bank. They all said, “Well, we’re going to work on it.” But we’re not there yet. So that’s how I knew we were early. Today, environmental security worldwide is, of course; we even helped the U.N. add in what they call a status of forces agreement. So when the U.N. goes into peacekeeping, they must have the status of forces agreement. In there, before us, the word environment was never mentioned otherwise, other than the military environment, but in the sense of nature.
Protecting nature is part of your job, and the thing didn’t exist before us. We did, for over ten years, every month, the environmental security report, emerging issues, and environmental security around the world. The U.S. military then funded it, but it was also sent to all the other militaries. That was one of the best impacts we’ve had as we moved.
Environment and security are part of a global system. That exists. The other one, which is even better but more difficult to prove or more abstract, was before the Millennium Project when the idea of global future research did not exist. You would have somebody at Harvard saying, “We got a guy from India and a guy from China who got their PhD at Stanford. Now, we’re researching global futures.” I’m talking about having people worldwide collaborate to research global futures. That’s unique. It’s still unique even today. Occasionally, I get an email from someone who’s created a global network on something or another. So, the idea of future global research is
When we did, I told you we had the three-year feasibility study. During that three-year feasibility study, most futurists said, “Forget it. You can’t do that because you’ll end up with generalizations that are pablum.” There’s no guts. You can’t do it because once you get into detail. It gets too much. You can’t do the globe. So, and probably underneath it was, who the hell do you think you are to do this? Probably also part of it. The big deal is that we made global futures research a thing. Now, do we do it well? That’s another question. Are other people doing it well? Another question. But ought it to be done? It’s not argued anymore.
Jacobsen: And the United Nations is the most bureaucratic organization globally.
Glenn: Yes. That’s a fair statement.
Jacobsen: I’ve done 16 model United Nations for myself. So I have some experience either as a delegate or on the secretariat.
Glenn: Sorry about that.
Jacobsen: The Harvard ones were the funniest because they’re five days, and they’re in different cities every year. One thing that stands out in some of those experiences is that it is less about the bureaucratic side and segmenting of things and the delegate experience, which are two things. One is the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals—these grand visions of individuated subject matter for development towards a more positive outcome over a medium period. While having them all interrelated, even though they are individuated, is some of the stuff you’re mentioning about the Millennium Project bringing that to the fore in line with some of that work?
Glenn: Well, there is an indirect straight line. We had these 15 global challenges. Are you aware of that?
Jacobsen: No.
Glenn: There are 15 global challenges. They were in place before 2000, when they had the first Millennium Summit. A State of the World Forum asked if we could reprint our 15 global challenges into a special document, which we did. And that was given to all U.N. missions and other countries through the embassies in Washington, DC, and other places. So, it got distributed. So, saying global challenges that the Millennium Summit should address was a thing, everybody did not discuss it, but the conversation discussed it a bit. Goals are murky. All the details of it. It’s murky.
We helped that along the way. Of course, their goals are not descriptions, actions, or regional considerations. So that’s a different approach. Because if we talk about the changing role of women in improving the human condition, that’s not a goal. That’s a direction. That’s ongoing. All these things are ongoing. We tend to think of the 15 global challenges as a set of systems to understand global change in a similar way that in biology, you understand your respiratory system, skeletal system, etc., and how they all fit together to make you a biological entity. So, how do you wrap your mind around global change? The 15 global challenges are as good as anybody else, whereas the U.N. sustainability SDGs need to give you a global understanding. It gives you a global agenda. But then, how do you understand all that together? That’s a different thing. That’s the part we work on.
Jacobsen: To what degree do you see developments? As you’re mentioning Benjamin Franklin, we noticed it in several countries worldwide. This was documented in one short paper, at least in 2023, by Human Rights Watch as a regression or a decline in gender equality or egalitarian efforts, primarily through restricting women’s access to education.
Glenn: Yes.
Jacobsen: And this is happening in many places in the United States. So, how do you see some of these various elements that are either being given a platform or given more and more oil to the engine? These pseudoscience movements, these pseudomedicine movements, fundamentalist ideologies, secular and religious, and then those above around the regression of women’s equality. How are these impacting the realization of some of these? Let’s call them brighter futures.
Glenn: Okay. First, we have indicators to measure future change. We call it a state of the future index. We’ve been doing the State of the Future Index since 2000. So that’s 20-plus years of updating data. So, when you talk about infant mortality or all that stuff, we got to go in there. What was it 20 years ago? What was it ten years ago? What is it now? What’s the projection for 10? What’s the best possible and worst possible so that we can create an index of moving to the good? All right. Now, most of that is moving in the right direction. So, from the state of the future index, data-driven, empirical people are running worldwide, double-checking everything.
We are winning more than we’re losing. But where we’re losing is deadly serious. So, we have no right to be pessimistic. We have no right to go to sleep, either. Now, that’s one part of the answer. The second part of the answer is that a dog taught me about this. One time, my sister’s dog was supposed to go outside to urinate, and it was cold outside.
This is in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where it is cold in the wintertime. The dog wrapped his leg around the table so he couldn’t go out. I said, “Ah, negative future. The dog saw a negative future. Outside is cold. The inside is warm. Outside is a future. No thanks. I’m stopping change.” So if you have people, this goes back to Timothy’s stuff; you pull the carpet out from people’s security, and then they get upset. If you have so much change, people fear where it’s going. Where is it going? And if they’re unsure where it’s going, they say, “Well, let’s pull back.” It’s normal for a human being or any entity when it is confronted with something that they’re not sure about to turn around and look back; you look over your shoulder. What? Where?
What’s safe? And so, anxiety is the unsettled, unspecific fear of the future. Well, if it’s not a linear projection anymore like it used to be, or it was not a cycle under the agricultural age, nothing new under the sun if it’s not that, but something different. It’s normal to retreat to secure shores, and conservative fundamental religions are the secure blanket. The secure base for people to say, “Aha, I know what this is. I know what the religion is. I know I am safe here. Now, the historians will say I’m oversimplifying. I agree. But if you go back to the Renaissance, before the Italian Renaissance, everything great and glorious was not Italian; it was Greek. The official language was Latin, not Italian, right? Well, eventually, it dawned on people that we’re not Greek. Bingo, when they broke on from that security blanket of Greece, boom, everything possible was possible all of a sudden. Now, I would have thought by now we would have gotten over this hump yet, but we’ve never done it on a global basis. So, it’s hard to know because as one progresses, another may regress. However, they interact and affect each other because the global system is still interconnected.
When people come to grips with the idea that we’re not going to “make America great again,” that we’re not going to go back to security with what the Taliban is doing, and so forth, eventually, we’ll get over that and say, “Okay, now we move forward.” We’ll have a world renaissance. A world renaissance is a very likely thing. We can move our minds forward into a renaissance because we are interconnected with the A.I., the Internet, and everything. But we can only get to that Renaissance once the security is enough that they say, “Okay, I can now move forward. Right now, they’re not. You’ve got this conservative stuff in the United States saying all those people in Latin America. They’re going to change the United States.
Turks are going to change Germany, or all those Paki’s are going to change the U.K. There’s a fear of change because they don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s a logical conclusion, therefore, to resist change because change hits you to that negative future faster. So this goes back to the positive future stuff you’ve talked about before with science fiction. We got to chart out plausible science fiction stories, not these airy-fairy things. That’s why writing the scenario from here to there is important. Have you ever seen any of our scenarios? Maybe not.
I should send you one positive scenario, a detailed, 10-page positive scenario. Billy Rojas may not show up because this guy’s underneath the radar. He did create; you may remember that there’s a thing called the World Future Society. They had a publication called The Futurist. Billy came out with a magazine called The Future, which only had one issue but outsold The Futurist with its first issue.
Jacobsen: There have been some break-offs from some traditions because I know of someone, Douglas Rushkoff, who followed the tradition and looked up to counter-culturalist and writer Robert Anton Wilson. Now he’s writing more about the human, the winning back human, or something like that. Douglas Rushkoff books. This has been recent for the last few years. Team Human is one of his most recent books.
This is from the book preview on his website. “Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the NPR-One podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity.
In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us, and positively impact this earth together.” However, he’s written two newer books around the survival of the richest.
Glenn: And I hear several futurists saying you shouldn’t tell them about Billy Rojas; he’s nuts, right? Well, you ask about some of the irregulars, unknowns, etc. He’s one.
Jacobsen: What are other controversial areas that shouldn’t be should be discussed?
Glenn: Well, organized crime is one for sure. I need help to think of a single major futurist who talks about organized crime and how to address it globally. You have Interpol and the FBI, and the rest are doing that. But as far as the future is concerned, nobody else.
Jacobsen: What do you think the future religions will be?
Glenn: One of these days, I will have to scratch my head and figure it out. I keep getting asked that. It was one of the first things I was asked about in the early 70s. I still don’t have a good answer because part of me wants to say, “You don’t need it.” On the other hand, the evidence is clear. Humans need some security. How the universe works is a basic hunt for security. Now, as I see it, the growth area of much of Europe and North America is spiritually oriented without necessarily the heavy metaphysics or metaphors of metaphysical bureaucracy. It’s much metaphysics, but the bureaucracy with it. Another part is that, for example, if you take Korea, you check it out.
There are more people in Korea without religion than with it. They’re the first country to go over the 50% mark, at least according to the sociological survey stuff. Christianity is only 50%, 40%. In other words, if you do Korea, you get over 50% saying no religion. But in the U.K., you still got, well, for example, would-be druids in England. You have the New Age community in Scotland, a New Age headquarters for many people. So we’ve got a lot of New Age quasi-religion, quasi-spiritual stuff going on in England as well. That’s a growing thing as well. A fourth would be the A.I. One can make a plausible argument and scenario for the evolution of worshiping A.I. in the future.
Jacobsen: But are you envisioning a Futurama context where they’re doing human stuff with human minds and bodies?
Glenn: Well, no, not necessarily. It’s everywhere when you think of many views of God. Well, if A.I. evolves into our infrastructure, then it’s everywhere. More advanced and more advanced moves into super. Would one division of super decide to be a god?
Jacobsen: This would be Ray Kurzweil’s idea. When asked if God exists, he would say, “Not yet.” You could even extend that joke and say, “Well, this God, since it’s on a server but also the Internet, it’s everywhere and nowhere.”
Glenn: That’s right.
Jacobsen: That’s fitting some classical theological concepts.
Glenn: But the idea, to me, was the evolution of social organization. First, it was religion that pulled people together. Then nation-states did, but religion is still there. So it did. So it’s not that A replaced B. It’s that B was built on top of A. Corporations are the new organizational structure to a large degree here, but you still have government and religion. And then, eventually, you get the individual. Eventually, each one is more flexible. Religion, we did a thousand-year scenario some years ago in 1999. And so I had to go back a thousand years to see what’s changed, what’s not changed, and religion hadn’t changed worth a damn. No pun intended there, but everything else changed.
Religion was a constant, so it could be more flexible. Nation-states changed, but they’re still geographically bound. Corporations are no longer bound by geography. They’re even more flexible. The individual can change loyalty to corporations from one credit card to the next. The future of religion will very well be individual self-actualization. You’re evolving yourself, and you don’t have to run around and find out where God is.
Jacobsen: This is the foundation there. One step back, I did check it up. The Czech Republic has 78.4% irreligious and atheists in the population—over 70%. So, in 2020, Estonia’s 50.2%, Hong Kong’s 50.4%, and China’s 51.8%. So that’s the 2020 numbers. Korea is in the top few but not the top.
Glenn: Well, who’s the top?
Jacobsen: Czech Republic, wow. And it’s from Pew from 2020. So, all these numbers do not give trends, but up there with them are North Korea and China.
Glenn: Right, I believe Christopher Hitchens, but seeing North Korea and China is unfair because that’s where the government says. I’m talking about where you don’t have the government say.
Jacobsen: Yes, the top four are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
Glenn: Yes.
Jacobsen: For non-dictatorship, it would be the Czech Republic. Some years ago, it would be Hong Kong, South Korea, North Korea, and China. And even Prague, although that was always an irregular place.
Glenn: Yes, it looks like Europe and some parts of Asia. So, that’s another trend in future religion that you can also look at.
Jacobsen: Yes, I know there’s some. I’ve done a lot. I’ve interviewed a lot of non-religious people all over the world and people leaving religion, so the ex-Muslim community or the ex-Jehovah’s Witness community, others, particularly in North America, some in Europe. They have developed things called the Oasis Network and the Sunday Assembly. These perform the same functions, but they won’t have a holy figure or a holy text. They’ll talk about things like, “We’ll do a lecture on some science topic once a month or once a Sunday,” Sunday Assembly, or have a community once a week that they don’t believe in supernaturalism. They don’t care for God. They don’t care for the Bible or any other religious text, or any holy figure. They have a community and are organized and semi-structured.
Glenn: That’s nice, yes.
Jacobsen: So, but those are new. And I’ve interviewed some of them, but it’s evolving. But there are also conflicts within religion. Knowing the United Church of Canada, Reverend Greta Vosper went through several years of attempts to defrock her because she came out as an atheist as a minister within the United Church of Canada. She’s still around. She lost many congregation members at one point, but she’s doing well. She’s written a book or two.
So, diversification happens in ways you would only sometimes expect. Still, if you were to take a multidimensional bell curve or set of bell curves, these things would show up at the tail end of these developments.
Glenn: This goes back to my rule of thumb: Whatever you look at becomes more complex than you think, the future of religion will be more complex than we think.
Jacobsen: Right, yes. Humanists and ethical culturalists have roles. They’re very creative activists from the Satanic Temple, the non-theist Satanists. These people are quite funny. They don’t believe in Satan; it’s a metaphor, but they do some funny activism. So there are also areas around that. I remember interviewing the guy, not the guy who founded Discordianism, but the guy who founded the Church of the SubGenius. “Reverend Ivan Stang,” he had that around for 30 years. It was part of this parody religion phenomenon; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was part of that as well. The Invisible Pink Unicorn was also part of that.
He quit after 30 years. I don’t know if it’s still around, but he grew out of that same phenomenon of your Learys and a parody take on much religion. But yes, it’s in the same vein as Paul Krassner or something like that. So yes, the future of religion is: I’m seeing secular variants fulfilling what you know before of a similar need.
Glenn: So give me a few minutes of your alternative futures in 10 years.
Jacobsen: Mine in 10 years?
Glenn: You’re taking all this stuff in. Where are you going? What’s next?
Jacobsen: Okay, so I’ll take it this way. Everything you can take into account can be taken statistically. So there’s a functionally infinite, not an infinite, array of possible propositions. Those propositions can be brought together into a worldview. They can be actualized in person and into relations of people for communities. Then those communities…
Glenn: Give me the highest plausibility.
Jacobsen: Highest plausibility?
Glenn: Highest three plausibilities.
Jacobsen: Technology-wise, there’s going to be much integration.
Glenn: No, you. You as a person. You.
Jacobsen: Me as a person?
Glenn: Yes. Where are you going? You’re interviewing very interesting people, yourself. What are you going to do with the interviews?
Jacobsen: Well, I’ll take myself as a librarian of people. Quietly collecting voices from all different…
Glenn: What was it? Fahrenheit 451 or whatever the hell it was? That one. That was a library of people.
Jacobsen: There you go. So it’s… There is a library somewhere or some community somewhere. People can volunteer for an hour a week, potentially elders in the community. People go to the library, and an elder from a community, someone can come down and sit with them. They’ll tell their life story. Yes. So, for myself, certainly around publishing and journalism. However, the future of publishing and journalism is much different. It’s the same with writing. So, even if we take the phenomenon of books, electronic books, e-books have changed quite a bit. With that change, we still desire a book, a collection of printed sections, to deliver organized thought. So that’s still an efficient way to do it. There may be more efficient ways to do it in the future when you want to get a conflict subject matter. I like doing conversations and interviews because I like to have a space, whether I’m interviewing a fundamentalist Christian or a futurist or whoever else, for you to be authentic and honest; critical questions will be asked, but I’m not going censor you, at least on my platform.
On other platforms where I write for them, certainly within their mandate, they have a right and often don’t, but sometimes, they will decide ‘not to platform certain people,’ their words, not mine. So it depends. Journalism and writing are a way for me. The ways to monetize that can be difficult. So, for a lot of the time I’ve been doing this, I’d help everyone else. I’d have to pay my bills. You have to eat. So you have to do regular work. At one point, I worked in four restaurants seven days a week and then did janitorial at two during a night shift. I worked at an Olympic-level horse farm run by a former Olympian show jumper for Canada for about 27 months.
In the morning, I did my writing and horse farm shift with gardening or mucking stalls, filling water buckets, feeding hay, doing night checks, driving the tractor or whatever else. Then, in the evenings, I’d also be doing my writing. I’m in a period now where I have more time, so I’m getting as much as possible. I’m trying to pick up old projects, so I’m emailing you or others again for further interviews. It’s all part of that. I’ve got multiple projects on the go right now. I’m trying to get as many political party leaders as possible to interview.
Yesterday, I interviewed the leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada, the Marijuana Party of Canada. Interviews are going to be right after this. I have a few more upcoming, but what we call journalism in the sense of organized conversation in a casual format for easy delivery and uptake is an efficient way to do it. That’s how we evolved. But it takes about ten years to get decent at it.
And that’s where things start to pick up, and that’s what I’ve noticed, at least in my career. I’m good. That doesn’t answer your question, but it’s an answer.
Glenn: That’s good. So I’ll enjoy watching your evolution then.
Jacobsen: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Glenn: Yes.
Jacobsen: Jerome, so thank you for the interview. I appreciate your time, especially going for an extended one.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think of Walz and his record on governing, especially on abortion rights, free lunches for kids, and LGBTQ rights? Is he strong on those issues?
Rick Rosner: He’s fine. But is he weak on anything that he should be stronger on? No. When I first read about him, I called him unbesmirchable. I don’t think there’s anything about him that the Republicans can make stick with a large proportion of independents. The accusations they’re throwing at him only convince people who already aren’t voting Democratic. These arguments only rile up the MAGA base; they don’t flip any votes.
The guy was in the National Guard for 24 years. They’re trying to say he left the people under his command in the lurch when he retired from the National Guard to run for office or shortly before his unit was going to deploy to Iraq. People have been arguing about the timeline—he filed his papers to disconnect from the military, which can take up to a year, months before his unit received orders to deploy to Iraq.
The Democrats say he did that long before they got their orders. The Republicans say, “Oh, there were rumours they were going to get deployed months before the actual orders came through.” It strikes me as horseshit. He put in 24 years.
Jacobsen: They’re also claiming he implied he’d been in combat.
Rosner: He never said he was in combat. He used some flowery language about gun control, saying civilians shouldn’t use weapons of war that he held in war. Republicans and Rupert Murdoch’s rags like the New York Post are saying that was strongly implying he was in combat. I don’t think so. I think it was just flowery language.
And he’s never claimed to have been in combat. He was deployed as part of the Afghan war and was support staff. He was stationed in Italy and another European country because they needed personnel in Europe since much of the logistics are staged out of Europe. So, his guard unit was sent to replace people who had gone to Afghanistan. He was deployed as part of the war.
People who are trying to say this is stolen valour are the same folks who swift-boated John Kerry about his war record. For those who don’t know, Kerry was the candidate against Bush and had done a tour or two in Vietnam, receiving three Purple Hearts. The swift boaters claimed he was a medal hog who received Purple Hearts for insignificant injuries.
Kerry responded to these allegations awkwardly and badly, which helped cost him the election against Bush—who probably did go AWOL from his service as a pilot for the National Guard. But I don’t think it will work this time because Walz has 24 years of service in the guard and received many medals—not battle medals like the Bronze Star, but plenty of medals for doing a good job on his assignments.
Then there’s a bunch of similar stuff that most people either won’t hear about or will only bug MAGA supporters. They’re calling him “Tampon Tim” because he signed a law that provides menstrual products for every public school kid between 4th and 12th grade. The Republicans are claiming he put tampon machines in boys’ restrooms, saying it shows he’s dangerously radical and is making our kids trans or some nonsense like that. The truth is, no, he didn’t do that.
One boys’ restroom was used as the visiting team’s girls’ locker room when they had a sports event at the school. So yes, they put a tampon machine in there because girls regularly use it. But all these accusations are desperate nonsense that I don’t think will work. I don’t think there’s anything dangerously liberal about him. He’s the governor of Minnesota, which was the site of the George Floyd riots because George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, maybe? That’s the one where the cop knelt on the guy’s neck for nine minutes until he was long past dead, and there were riots.
The right-wing press can argue that he let the riots rage, even though Trump, in 2020, called Walz, the governor, and said he’d done a good job with the unrest. When you look at the bills he introduced in Congress—because he spent three terms in the U.S. Congress—they were pretty middle of the road. He was the 7th least liberal Democratic congressman, according to some calculations. So, no, I don’t think he’s got significant weaknesses.
Oh, and he permitted undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses, which many states do—states that aren’t unreasonable—because you want people to be licensed to drive. It’s not a license to vote; you want people to be qualified to drive because you don’t want to be on the roads with people who don’t know the rules of driving and how to operate a vehicle. So no, he’s fine.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The U.S. Coast Guard is working to change its culture following a sexual abuse and harassment scandal. Are you aware of this?
Rick Rosner: I don’t have anything specific to say. If they caught people in the Coast Guard raping others and the higher brass covered it up or ignored it, then good that it’s being addressed. But I don’t have any special insight into this situation.
Rick Rosner: So, you can’t stop Israel from doing what it’s doing, no matter how many civilians they kill in their pursuit of Hamas, and also to keep Netanyahu in office. He won’t get kicked out of office as long as this continues.
The U.S. can withhold arms and aid, as has been done—Reagan did it in the 1980s, and Biden maybe temporarily did it for a few weeks or months, a couple of months ago. But Israel has enough weaponry; that’s not going to stop them from doing anything.
And Hamas is going to continue to hide among civilians. So Hamas is going to continue to be terrible and get their people killed. Israel is going to continue to blow up people as they please and kill civilians. Israel’s killed about 40,000 Palestinians. Maybe 20,000 of those are Hamas, and maybe 10,000 Hamas are left. Israel will continue to kill a bunch of civilians by way of killing Hamas. I hoped this would be over by now—it’s been ten months. Are they eventually going to kill people until they’re down to maybe 5,000 estimated Hamas left? And then 3,000? When are they going to stop? Because they can’t kill all of them. But they can probably keep killing Hamas and civilians for at least a few more months.
Will Israelis eventually get disgusted with the ratio of civilians to Hamas killed? Eventually, that ratio might increase as there are fewer and fewer Hamas. I don’t know. So, what else do you want me to say about it?
Rick Rosner: Does this article cite any polling? Who is it from? Does it indicate anything substantial?
Jacobsen: The article is by Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price. It mentions that Trump’s campaign is counting on young male voters to give him an edge in November’s presidential contest. But is this based on anything real?
Rosner: The Trump campaign is in trouble. This seems like it’s based on nothing—they’re desperate. Why are we even talking about this article? It’s horseshit. If you look at the past three weeks since Harris became the candidate, the Democrats have gone from two points behind in polling to two points ahead. I looked up the old polling from 2020, and in the month leading up to the election, Biden had a lead of 8 to 10%. We haven’t even had the Democratic National Convention yet, which is in about ten days. That’ll likely give the Democrats another 1 or 2% bump. Harris has enthusiastically attended rallies.
I hope and think that by October, she’ll be leading in the polls by at least 5%. By-election week, I hope it’s up to 7%. She’ll need to maintain steady momentum and not make any big mistakes, and enthusiasm for her will have to keep growing fairly steadily. But it’s highly possible, given how bad Trump looks.
He looked bad in 2020 because 2020 was one of the worst years in U.S. history. The country shut down with COVID. We had the most people without jobs in U.S. history. Trump’s administration had the deadliest four-year presidential term, with a million dead. It was a terrible year.
Can Trump look as bad this year as he did in 2020? Harris might look better in 2024 than Biden did in 2020. But it’s also harder to vote in America this time around.
In 2020, 159 million Americans—two-thirds of all voting-age Americans voted for the first time in history. Since then, Republicans have made it harder to vote because when people turn out in large numbers, it favours Democrats. So, we probably won’t get 159 million voters; we might get 152 million.
But even with that, we’ve got RFK Jr., who might pull 5% of the vote. We didn’t have third-party candidates who pulled as high a percentage as in 2020. But even so, the winning percentage of Harris over Trump might be close to what Biden’swas. The Republicans are full of stupid, desperate hokum. Idiots run them.
Trump’s daughter-in-law, Laura Trump, who’s married to Eric—considered the less intelligent of the brothers—is in charge of the RNC. They’re starving down-ballot candidates of money to spend on their foolishness. It’s a bad campaign. Plus, you’ve got Project 2025, which is this conservative wish list that scares people. You’ve got Roe v. Wade being overturned and the end of constitutionally guaranteed reproductive rights. You’ve got many issues in play.
I don’t want to hear any more about anything the Republicans think they’re doing right at this point because they don’t seem to be doing much right at all.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I recall working at the pub in my hometown. I am relieved to be out of that environment. However, as you know, one must make a living and earn money. I was employed at the pub, one of the restaurants in town. I also took on janitorial work at two of the establishments in the evenings, including one being the pub.
I remember one individual in particular—a sous chef who was Muslim and Arab Canadian. He was an extremely unpleasant, possibly one of the worst people I have ever encountered. He seemed to enjoy bothering others for no apparent reason, or at least none I could discern. It felt as though he had some unresolved issues.
One phrase that stands out to me was from a server there. She said, “Don’t worry about him, hun. He’s a loser.” This comment struck me, especially considering she had not much going for her. Yet, even in difficult circumstances, people still find ways to offer emotional support to those who are unkind, narcissistic, or simply difficult to deal with.
It amazes me that individuals who may never be known or remembered and may not have much beyond their jobs are still willing to support others in challenging times. I did the same for others. I recall one lady who had just been cheated on, and she was in tears during her shift. She stormed in a rage outside, and she punched the wall in her frustration. No one else wanted to see her, but she had to continue working with someone. I advocated for her to take the rest of the night off.
I was outside while she was crying outside, saying, “This hurts so much. I can’t believe this. I’m so angry. I’m so mad. This hurts so fucking much.”
Rick Rosner: Yes, relationships can be intense but often temporary.
Jacobsen: I remember seeing her again, working at a local coffee shop. She seemed more relaxed, perhaps a year or two later when I returned to town to visit some people. She appeared to be doing better. I tried to say, “Hi,” as she was whisked by restaurant commotion to the back of house. I have never heard from her again, but I hope she is doing well. So, what do you make of this context? People support one another, even when they are just ordinary individuals, like me, living without significant prominence. It is comforting to have coworkers with whom you can connect.
Rosner: Depending on the business, such as the bars where I worked, you often encounter people who need to fit into corporate or professional environments. They prefer a more relaxed job, and bars offer one of the most easygoing atmospheres. However, this also means you occasionally encounter unpleasant individuals, as being fun and being difficult might both be reasons why someone does not fit into a corporate environment.
On a related note, I recently joined a new gym that opened just a few blocks from my home. It is a Planet Fitness, and the membership fee is only $10 monthly, so I signed up. Their motto is “No Judgment.” They aim to be a place where people can exercise without worrying about the typical gym culture. The “No Judgment” signs remind me not to be judgmental, but it is challenging. I find myself judging people frequently.
I am improving over time. Is it because we are learning to understand situations before jumping to conclusions? For instance, I still quickly assess someone’s fitness, but then I remind myself that I should not do that. This leads me to view people as characters in a movie, where you get a rough sense of who they are. For example, I was walking to the gym this evening when I passed a woman wearing Chanel sunglasses in an open-top convertible Porsche. She appeared to be in her mid-forties, slender, and heavily made-up. My initial judgment was, “This woman is likely a handful,” which is probably not inaccurate. We always place people within some context, don’t we?
Jacobsen: Do you think it’s fair first to understand someone and then form a judgment, or is it more appropriate to seek understanding without judgment?
Rosner: One observes and attempts to understand people without necessarily judging them. For instance, with the lady in the Porsche, it seemed there was a reasonable chance she might not be someone I’d want to interact with if I encountered her. However, that’s not a certainty. She could be someone who enjoys nice things without making everyone around her miserable.
Alternatively, there’s a non-zero chance that she does make those around her miserable. But you can think that without necessarily judging her as a person. Some people who make others miserable are, in the aggregate, good people. They may exhibit unpleasant behaviour while pursuing significant achievements. Not all such individuals are terrible in the grand scheme of things.
I get discouraged sometimes. You have yet to see me, but I’m quite white-haired. I look rather old, though I don’t feel old. I exercise regularly so I don’t feel physically debilitated. However, I’m sure I come across as old, which only affects me a little in my daily interactions since most interactions involve waiting for people to finish using gym equipment or simply checking in at the gym.
It may have something to do with your gym interactions. People get more easily annoyed than they used to when I ask how many more sets they have left on a machine. I initially thought it was due to a general erosion of gym etiquette and people not knowing how to behave.
Jacobsen: Is it partly that?
Rosner: Well, it’s certainly partly that. And in a few encounters, I’ve also sensed a bit of a “screw you, old man” attitude.
But now that I think about it, some people react negatively because they see me as an old, odd-looking guy. Even though I’m perfectly polite, most people react reasonably well, though not always. A response I’ve had to train myself not to be frustrated by is when you approach someone sitting on their phone, occupying a machine, and you ask how many more sets they have, and they reply with, “Oh, two.” They’re perfectly polite, not trying to be rude. But instead of doing a set, they go back to using their phone for another three minutes before doing a set, as if it’s completely normal to sit there. So, it is about something other than me looking old.
Jacobsen: It’s just the way people behave nowadays. But you don’t look like Gandalf the White; you look more like Saruman the White, with some areas still dark. It’s not gray; it’s a mix of dark and white.
Rosner: Carol once saw a photo of me and said I looked like a ghost. She bought me some Just For Men, but I need to use it more actively.
Jacobsen: Oh my, are you planning to use it?
Rosner: Well, I had boxes of that stuff in the past. About 20 years ago, we went on a cruise when I started getting some gray in my beard. I had a box of Just For Men that lasted for years because I used it sparingly. You don’t want to do a full Just For Men job on yourself because it looks fake, and you end up looking creepy. I used to put a little on a toothbrush I wouldn’t use for my teeth again and brush a bit into the beard in certain spots. The idea wasn’t to completely turn the beard from gray back to black but to make the still-black areas a bit larger and perhaps darker. It would only roll back the age of my beard by about three years.
So I used to do that, and no one ever noticed because it was subtle. I can figure out how to do it again. You can’t roll all the gray away because you’d look ridiculous, but I could reduce it by a third.
Professor David Pooler is a Professor in the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work at Baylor University. What is consent and power in clergy-laity relations?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are back to the “delightful” topic of clergy-related abuse in general, but sexual abuse in particular, because it is the darkest in the public imagination. Regarding consent as a claim when an individual priest, pastor, or religious authority comes forward, what are some important ethical considerations? While that can be considered legitimate in some cases, it is probably not legitimate in most considerations. In other cases, it’s a blanket lie.
Professor David K. Pooler: I’ll say this. I do think it’s possible that there are people who have had sex with a married pastor, single pastor, priest, or whatever. They probably believe it was consensual because someone may not have said “No,” didn’t resist, or wasn’t clear that they didn’t want that to happen. But those kinds of situations aren’t about what consent truly is. Consent is when both people are free to say “Yes” or “No.” Both people absolutely, categorically want to be sexual with one another.
There was massive internal reluctance and the need to please an authority figure in the cases I’ve looked at, researched, and discussed with survivors. It’s complicated because it’s not just the need to please an authority figure; this person is a proxy for God. It’s so complicated in that arrangement where the survivor feels that if they were to try to say no or express concern. They are going against God. Often, the person who is targeting them and initiating sexual contact is framing it in such a way that God is okay with it. That is not very easy. It’s very broad to say God’s okay with it, but they use a lot of scripture and various interpretations I’ve heard through the years.
Then they claim their authority, saying what the Holy Spirit or God said. The other thing that complicates consent, which we must discuss, is this power differential. With a power differential, you have to ensure that undue influence, coercion, or misuse of that added power that one person has in the equation isn’t being used to coerce, manipulate, or push for sexual activity. I’ve even been asked through the years, what about a single pastor? Could they not have a relationship with someone in their congregation?
They could, but it could be more straightforward. My guidance for that situation is, “No, don’t do it.” If you need to date someone and you’re interested in romantic relationships, date outside your congregation. Surely, there’s a bigger pool of people in your world than the people you pastor. In the rare occasion that a single pastor, for example, wanted to be sexual with someone in their congregation, to ensure that there was actual consent, you’d have to bring on board some people to watch that relationship and have conversations with the person the pastor is dating and wants to be sexual with.
Let me go back to consent. Having honest, open communication about what both people want is essential. From my perspective on this and listening to survivors, it’s so secretive and hidden, and the pastor is trying to keep it unknown. So, the capacity for an open, honest conversation in this relationship is almost impossible. Consent isn’t possible in most cases because of the power differential. You mentioned ethics, and outside of ministry, all the other helping professions understand the complications of the ethics around this. That’s why sexual relationships with people you are supporting and helping are prohibited.
It’s not; here’s the guidance for doing it and what it looks like. It’s prohibited. You don’t do it. In some professions, after the helping relationship is over, you can have sexual relations with someone. In my profession, social work, a sexual relationship is prohibited forever. Technically, if I ever wanted to have sex with a former client, I would not be able to do that according to the ethics of social work. What I’m getting at is that these secular professions understand the complicated nature and the nuances of ensuring that both people are having an honest, open conversation about sex and sexuality in a relationship. It would be almost absurd to think about it happening this way, but say a married pastor wants to have sex with someone in his congregation. “Hey, I realize what we’re doing is inappropriate and wrong. It’s a violation of marital vows, but I want to make sure that you’re completely okay with us being sexual.”
Those conversations never happen. Many people who perpetrate sexual abuse with someone in their congregation think, “Hey, I want this with this person. If this person isn’t actively resisting or saying no, they must want it and must be okay with it also,” which is a horrible assumption to make. I’ve never had a conversation with a survivor yet where there was that open conversation.
And then I would also add that not only can sex be coerced and manipulated with that power differential, but there’s certainly what we would consider sexual assault even when someone is resisting or saying, “No.” That happens more than we want to admit in this arrangement. Part of what I wanted to speak to is this piece where the offending pastor, if their defence is, “It was consensual. They wanted it too.” I’ve heard this often: “They were the ones who wanted it. They were flirtatious. They were the ones who were coming after me and targeting me.”
What I would say there is that all the other helping professions equip people to manage a situation in which a client or someone they’re supporting might want to be sexual with them. It’s the person with more power. It’s always their job to put the brakes on, the fence up, the boundaries out, and say no. That’s not how this relationship works. And that gets into another topic I wanted to jump on around purity culture if it’s okay if we go there, which is a subset of Christianity that focuses a lot on men being instinctually lustful and that their sexuality is something that has to be tamed and managed. It’s a battle they have to focus on in battling their lust. But they put an excessive burden on the women in that environment so as not to tempt men and to not cause men’s eyes to stray.
I say all that because, in many cases, that’s what they’re referring to: “I was tempted. This person caused my eyes to stray. I’m struggling with lust, and this person came on to me.” So it’s this helplessness: “I was at the mercy of this powerful woman who was not managing herself in ways to protect me.” Again, all this burden is on the woman. We often see the defence of an offending pastor going to that narrative, and many people in congregations buy that narrative.
“Yes, I guess it was her fault. I guess she did tempt him. I guess she was trying to undo the church.” They often view women who’ve been victimized by a pastor as evil. That’s a complete turnaround and reversal. The DARVO—deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender—but the entire system can pull a DARVO on someone who’s been victimized by a pastor sexually.
I wanted to bring that in because when we’re talking about consent, there’s the subset of Christianity that not only does not talk about consent at all but also puts this huge burden on the woman to maintain sexual purity for the church. The sexual purity of men in the church is the burden on the women to make sure that happens. That’s a real setup for abuse to happen, and then when abuse is reported, that victim gets blamed by the perpetrator and the supporters of the perpetrator in that whole institutional system.
Jacobsen: These are theological social stereotypes about men and women guiding this orientation.
Pooler: Unfortunately, it is.
Jacobsen: Dorothy Small brought some subtleties to my attention. She mentioned clergy who take vows of celibacy, chastity, or both in some denominations. When those individuals make those vows, how does this change the power and ethics dynamic when making claims about the victim as tempting them somehow? Or, in the opposite case, when they don’t make those vows, where it’s simply the power-over relationship?
Pooler: Yes, that’s a great question. I have a simple answer. There’s no difference. Whether the person is making a vow of celibacy or chastity or whatever, the fact remains that there is more power given and offered to a leader in any church system that we have, especially where males are elevated, or women are potentially excluded from ministry. But whether or not someone has made those vows doesn’t change the dynamics of how it happens or a claim of it being consensual or “I was tempted.” Because, again, I’ve already talked about the complexity of consent. The fact is, even if there were a woman who was flirtatious and attempting to tempt someone—and I’m not here to say that this could never happen or does not ever happen—at the end of the day, the professional with the power, which people are trusting in a congregation, is the one responsible for navigating that relationship and keeping everyone safe and protected. So, to allow oneself to be tempted—I’ll say it this way: If I, as a social worker, were to allow myself to be tempted, if you will, that’s not even the right word.
Pooler: I’ll go beyond the word “tempted.” If I were to be sexual with a client and I claimed I was tempted or that the client was the initiator or the instigator, it would still be sexual misconduct. My license would be sanctioned. In other words, it is always my job. My job as a helper is to meet someone where they are, to assess where they are, and to assess their needs and what it will take to keep them safe. Then, I make that referral if whatever they need is beyond what I can do.
Unfortunately, when it comes to ministry, there isn’t any universal training on assessing boundaries and the formal education process. In other words, ministry lags way behind on complex, nuanced conversations around power, sex, consent, and boundaries, whereas the secular helping professions are way ahead on that. That’s not to say that sexual misconduct doesn’t happen in other professions—it certainly does. However, systems are in place to deal with that in a regulated profession.
Pooler: Of course, the ministry isn’t regulated at any external level other than by the minister’s denomination. Currently, in 13 states plus the District of Columbia, it’s illegal to be sexual with someone in your congregation explicitly because of that power differential and the complexity around consent. So you get the sense that there’s movement in the right direction and awareness is growing, but we still have a long way to go.
Jacobsen: Another item that came up—I’m not a biblical scholar, obviously, so I looked it up. I noticed this in listening to a lot of very conservative, even far-right conspiratorial pastors and preachers. Most of them come from the United States, as my reviews show. I listen to them a lot because I want to hear what other people think, which is very different from my view of the world. One of the individuals who pops up is the former pastor, Mark Driscoll, of Mars Hill Church. There was a scandal based on some preaching he did. He collapsed that church and then moved from Seattle to Arizona with Trinity Church. Now, he is focused on rallying young men because they see the church as too feminized. He is preaching against the “Jezebel spirit” in the church. This is the part I had to look up. The Jezebel spirit is referenced in 1 Kings, 2 Kings, Leviticus, and Revelation. Does this accusation come up? What does it mean?
Pooler: Yes, man. That’s a great question. I wouldn’t even call myself an amateur theologian, but I study people in theological environments. I study and understand, or say it this way: some underlying theology becomes apparent when I’m looking at and researching this. In its broadest sense, the Jezebel spirit claims to disempower women. It amplifies and elevates the voices of men in a patriarchal structure. So, men’s voices and capacities are elevated, while women are seen as underminers, temptresses, or interested in bringing down the church. Whenever you have a theology or a leader talking about those things, what I see at the largest level is a diminishment of women and an amplification of men.
And that is part of the system that creates this abuse. When I do talk about this, I talk about gender dualism. We’ve had gender dualism from the inception of the church. Men have strong minds, and women are weak and emotional—all these kinds of things that are false. It’s a false dualism that often feeds into traditional gender roles, but it also creates an environment in which people have to function. They then perpetuate that environment.
When I hear much talk about the Jezebel spirit and that kind of thing, it deeply concerns me because it focuses on women as problematic. A specific gender is seen as the problem and embodies the problem in a certain way. It’s easy to blame a woman when that talk and conversation are more prevalent. So that’s my take on that. I can’t say for certain what the Jezebel spirit entails. We sometimes throw the word around without unpacking what the original text and authors were trying to communicate when they brought that up. This one is more in public consciousness because I didn’t have to look it up.
Jacobsen: It’s another form—again, I am biased. I’m a humanist and tend to be more naturalistic in my orientation. So those are my biases, naturally. However, another supernaturalistic excuse, in my view, that comes up is the common phrase, “The devil made me do it” or “A demon made me do it.” Does that come up? Even though they may have lusted themselves, another being with supernatural demonic powers made them do this act and be tempted to do it. Therefore, it’s not their fault, or at least not wholly their fault.
Pooler: Yes. I recall a few anecdotes from my research where the offending pastor used that as an excuse and quickly shifted to God and God’s forgiveness, love, and ability to carry them through this. So, if that makes sense, what it did, though, I think it diffuses and almost gaslights the person being victimized by offloading a lot of the responsibility onto the devil and then presenting the solution as God. It takes the human elements of this—the sense of agency and power that the offending pastor uses—and says, “Don’t look at that.” It’s almost like The Wizard of Oz—this other being the devil. And then God’s love and forgiveness are at play.
When you pull the curtain back, you see a coercive, manipulative pastor who is narcissistic in many cases and has been targeting someone to be sexual with. But they take all that attention off of themselves through that very thing: “The devil made me do it.” But that’s the lesser piece of it. That becomes the vehicle to pivot to God’s love and understanding: “Maybe this isn’t what God has for us, but God will forgive us. Let’s focus on that.” It’s a way to keep being sexual with someone and not stop the inappropriate behaviour. So those are some of the things I’ve seen.
Jacobsen: Mark Driscoll has used the case before. His reemergence is a traditional Christian story of redemption. Does that narrative allow misbehaving clergy to pop back up within the community consciousness in some instances?
Pooler: Absolutely. This is where it gets complicated because, of course, we want there to be redemption stories, stories of a life resurrected and restored, and those kinds of things. Blaming women becomes a false redemption: “She was the one who made me do it. I’ve now worked on my issues and why I was tempted, and I won’t let this happen again, and I’m coming back to ministry.” We see that a lot. My response is that we’ve got to do a much deeper dive into what restoration, redemption, and healing look like. When is someone truly restored?
Someone once asked me if someone who ever offends in this way should even be allowed to minister again. As a researcher looking at this and the damage done, I would say no because you’ve shown yourself untrustworthy. When you sexually abuse someone who has trusted you, you’ve lost the ability to have people’s trust again, at least on that large scale, to be entrusted again. The other challenge, for example, with a Mark Driscoll story, is that you’ve got someone who is a self-appointed leader. He’s not part of any system or structure holding him accountable.
He left one system or structure he had created, which tried to hold him accountable. He exited and found another, bringing that back to life. So, there is no real accountability, and no one is looking at everything that’s going on with him to ensure he’s ready to lead a church again. Unfortunately, that is a very common narrative. People will leave one denomination, go to another after offending in the Baptist church, and then become Methodist or Presbyterian or move to another state where their actions are not a crime.
That’s clever. There are so many ways to keep going as a leader in Christianity. What worries me the most is that we, the congregants, the participants in religious life, allow this to occur. Somehow, so many of us are okay with it; that’s one of the things that scares me. Why are we unwilling to hold our leaders accountable, ask them hard questions, and ensure that someone can return to ministry? Or saying, “Hey, we know you’ve done X, Y, and Z. We’re not going to hire you to be our pastor. We’re not going to allow someone to be our pastor.”
In denominations with a more top-down hierarchy, why are bishops and other high-level administrators reappointing a pastor after being offended? That’s a whole other set of questions, but it’s all part and parcel of a system that is short-circuiting important questions about how and why this occurred. Just because someone says, “I’m ready to pastor again,”or “I’m right with God again,” how do we ensure that? It’s very, very complicated and not easy.
Jacobsen: Last question. What about the distinction between the system and bad apples and the survivor’s forgiveness of the abuser?
Pooler: Yes.
Jacobsen: As Dorothy Small told me, these clergy are sick and have committed these crimes. So, separating them from the clergy as a class and dealing with it as forgiving but not forgetting is a very mature and subtle point she made to Hermina and me.
Pooler: People ask and go back and forth, and there is even a paper written by a couple of academics at a Jesuit university that said it’s not just bad apples. In other words, we have a system in which clericalism is present, which elevates our leaders and disempowers congregants. It’s in that system that we’re creating situations where people, as they gain more and more power, almost become Frankenstein monsters who then harm and injure us. I do think we’ve got some systematic structural problems, and I would say that churches have always had these issues.
Any world religion with an elevated leader can have problems with clericalism. One question is whether this model works. I would say we’re getting some concrete evidence that systems in which clericalism is present create and amplify the risk of harm and abuse by someone with more power. There’s now a term in the literature that I’ve started to see.
It’s called “vulnerance.” It’s about the complicated factors at play when someone has power and thus has more capacity to harm because of that power. So, I would say many of our pastors have enormous vulnerance. In other words, they have way more capacity to injure than the average person; part of it is our systems creating that.
We need to take a look at that. Lastly, forgiveness this way, putting on my clinician hat: forgiveness should never be pushed by an institution, should never be pushed by a leader, and should never be demanded. I’ve seen forgiveness used to bypass all this hard work: “Don’t hold me accountable. Don’t do that. Forgive me, and let’s move on.”
We need always to remember. Whether or not an individual or a congregation can forgive, it is this way: It’s hard work. It’s multilayered. What I’ve looked at, as far as trauma and people who’ve been traumatized working on forgiveness, is an onion. As you heal from your trauma, you face deeper elements and can name with clarity the injury that’s happened. You feel more pain.
Once you find that intersection, another layer of forgiveness is needed. Forgiveness is an ongoing, long process that always needs to be finished. It’s not something you do, and then it’s done. Boom. We need to have more complex conversations about forgiveness. I’ve even had some survivors say, “I don’t know how to forgive, and I don’t think I can forgive.” And I say, “Yes, that’s okay. It’s okay.”
It’s okay not to know how to forgive when an injury this deep has occurred or even to say, “I can’t do it. I can’t forgive.”We need to find forgiveness and empower people with the injury, with the tools to figure out what that will look like, rather than an institution or a theological statement telling people they need to do it.
Jacobsen: Thank you so much for your time today.
Pooler: All right. Good deal. Take care.
Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):
Melanie Sakoda is an important figure in cataloguing the crimes of the Easter Orthodox Church. What is happening in Orthodoxy?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Melanie Sakoda. She is a long-time – some like the term activist, some like someone working for a morally correct cause. You had a lot more time to reflect on the work on this issue. My first question: How did you originally get involved in this work? Because you have been doing this for decades.
Melanie Sakoda: We had an incident in our Church in San Francisco where there was a layman who was a child abuser with multiple convictions. They were allowing him free rein in our parish. Many children got hurt, as far as we can tell. That started it. The reaction when the families came forward was such a backlash. We thought, “Oh my goodness, we are complaining about someone who was only Orthodox for two weeks before his last arrest. What if you were trying to complain about the priest?” So, we decided that we wanted to start a website where people would have some place that they wanted to come, and people could have a sympathetic ear. We started in June of 1999. We took it down in March of 2020.
Jacobsen: For about 21 years, the internet was approximately too big in 1999.
Sakoda: No.
Jacobsen: Or it was smaller than it was in 2020. What was the reaction in 2020 versus 1999? What was the reason for taking it down?
Sakoda: Cappy (Larson), one of her daughters, did the original coding on the original site. Then she stepped down. It was Cappy and me. We are both in our 70s now. We were waiting to see someone stepping forward to take over for us.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: Cappy says, “Maybe we should let them miss us.” [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: So, that is what we did. Because there are expenses associated with maintaining a website, we were paying all the expenses ourselves since we needed more financial support. We had a post office box. We had a voicemail. We were paying for our domain main, then our security. Whenever people do not get the warning sign when they visit your site, it is quite pricey for people on fixed incomes. It was funny. It took some people years to notice that we were gone. I have a Facebook page, at least in the Orthodox churches. I have people who write in asking, “What happened to pokrov.org?”
Jacobsen: Now, this is common. I am finding this common through years and years of doing interviews with people who have left religious groups or who are still in, and have concerns, and want to see things become better, more just. It’s a handful of people who do specific parts of activism over an arc of time. You and Cappy are exemplars of that. So, those people also come under various forms of attack or even abuse. So, what kinds have you encountered? Which ones have been more humorous because you must develop a sense of humour in this industry? What ones could have been more humorous?
Sakoda: The most not-humorous one was Cappy’s daughter, Greta, who was still working with us. We were going to attend a conference in Dallas called Orthodox Christian Laity. Originally, Greta was going by herself, and then she received death threats from this one priest whose family was very unhappy that he had been put on our site. I ended up going with her. That was probably the scariest. One of the funniest things… do you remember when that girl went missing in Aruba many years ago?
Jacobsen: A few people may have gone missing, including Aruba.
Sakoda: It was a big case. She was a young, college-aged, blue-eyed blonde girl who went missing. We used to post on Orthodox message boards.
Jacobsen: Natalee Ann Holloway?
Sakoda: Yes. This priest puts on one of these message boards. I may have it in all of my junk. “Cappy, and you should be Aruba’d.” How inappropriate for a person?
Jacobsen: It just sounds like being an ass.
Sakoda: But the funny thing was, as the years went on, the reaction was very, very hostile at first. As the years went by, it became less hostile. People would send us stuff because they knew we would do something with it or try to do something with it.
Jacobsen: You’re in a safe zone.
Sakoda: It was an interesting experience. I do not regret it. I want to win the lottery, build the site, and hire people to work on it. We will see what happens. I do tell people on my Facebook page. I still have access to most of the information. I could get the information if they want information on someone they saw on the site. In addition to my access to the old website, I sadly have way too many hardcopy files because, of course, when I went to law school. Everything was paper. I tended to keep things on paper rather than on my computer. I have computer files.
Jacobsen: I am surprised you didn’t have anything on microfiche.
Sakoda: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Yes, I know, microfiche.
Sakoda: I was about to say. It is pretty decent. I do have stuff on paper. When my husband and I downsized in 2018, we had this huge office with all these bookshelves. I do not have this anymore. I have a lot of the files in boxes [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Yes [Laughing].
Sakoda: Recently, someone asked me about this one group. I swear I have something else. I cannot find the hardcopy file.
Jacobsen: Doing a keyword search on a hardcopy file is hard. What aspects of justice have you reached for people who broadened to you? Has there been anything along those lines of help, or has it been a safe space where people can get information safely, and it has been a positive for them?
Sakoda: When we first started, as you mentioned, 1999 was the internet’s early days. Cappy would call people.
Jacobsen: This is from a home line. There are no cell phones.
Sakoda: There might have been cell phones. When did they start?
Jacobsen: I don’t know either. Oh! The first one came in 1983. So, she might have had a cell phone.
Sakoda: I am sure it was from her landline.
Jacobsen: Like a rotary phone or something.
Sakoda: An abuser was in the parish. He was part of this group that came into Orthodoxy. They were originally a New Age San Francisco cult called The Holy Order of Man. After Jonestown, they didn’t like being on cult lists. So, they started to look for another place to land. A lot of them began joining the Orthodox churches. Through one of Cappy’s other daughters, we found some guy who was from The Holy Order of Man, saying the Orthodox guy they went to was part of this cult group and had been Greek Orthodox. He was upset when they went with this Metropolitan Pangratios Vrionis of the Archdiocese of Vasiloupolis. Because he said, “He is an abuser. He’s been convicted.” We found this little thing on some Orthodox forum on the internet. You need help to look online for this information. All our information was from Pennsylvania and differed from what county or anything. So, Cappy started calling up every county and looking. “Do you have criminal records for this figure?” How hard could it be? Pangratios Vrionis, that’s not a name…
Jacobsen: …very rare, even for the Greeks!
Sakoda: She finally found him. The clerk there at the courthouse was very sympathetic. I shouldn’t tell you this. She not only sent us the records without charging us, but she went – and like me – looked in archives. She had things in boxes. She found a few more pages. She sent them all to us for free. That was one of the first cases we publicized on our website, which was Pangratios Vrionis. After it went public that he had this conviction, he was still operating as a bishop in Queens, New York.
Jacobsen: It is, probably, a big diocese.
Sakoda: Yes. Newer victims came forward.
Jacobsen: Of course.
Sakoda: He was convicted a second time. That was our first venture into it. Originally, we did a lot of that. Cappy is on her phone talking to clerks in various counties nationwide. But as time went on, as I said, people would start sending us stuff. They would say, “So-and-so is convicted; here is a link to the article.” Maybe, as the internet, too, picked up. There are some counties where you can look online for the records, but not as much as I would like. It became easier to find information.
Sakoda: The trouble is, as I mentioned when we were talking earlier, there aren’t real reliable statistics of abuse in the Orthodox churches. Since 2002, the Catholic Church has published lists of abusers by the diocese. There is the John Jay Report. There is not, to my knowledge, not a single Orthodox jurisdiction in this country that publishes information about their abusers. The closest we came was the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese for a while.
You will see a priest was removed, but you do not know why. Did he decide that he doesn’t want to be a priest anymore? Was he embezzling? Or was he sexually abusing someone in his parish, whether man, woman, or child? They don’t publish that. For a very short while, the Greeks froze or suspended. It might, if someone was defrocked or suspended, have had to do with the settlement in a Greek case. That someone was one of their non-monetary requests. It only lasted a short time. You don’t know. You can track it. Another thing related to the Orthodox cases is that the Catholics have the official Catholic directory. It is published every year. It is a huge book. It lists all the priests in the US and their assignments. The Orthodox do not have that kind of resource to track people. So, if you saw the spotlight movie, you would remember., They are looking for gaps.
People are frequently on ‘leave of absence’ or ‘medical leaves.’ We do not have that resource. I do have many directories. Now, they’re more likely to be online. I just downloaded a copy and put it on my overloaded computer. It is really hard to find information about the Orthodox cases. They’re under the radar. Are you familiar with the calendar issue? Some of the Orthodox churches use a different calendar than the others. What it is, a Pope, Pope Gregory instituted a calendar to start adding leap years because they realized.
Jacobsen: Oh! He stole that from Dionysus Exiguus. I am aware of that one.
Sakoda: Oh, okay, some Orthodox churches will celebrate Christmas on January 7th. They are on what is known as the Julian calendar, but it is a modified Julian calendar because it includes a leap year. So, believe it or not, this is a huge issue in Orthodoxy, particularly in this country. When you have abusers, “I decided the calendar was not where it was at. I decided the new calendar is the reason for all the problems in Orthodoxy.” Abusers were using that as an excuse why they were transitioning from one Church to another.
Jacobsen: A calendar.
Sakoda: Yes. There is this joke. “How many Orthodox does it change to a lightbulb?”
Jacobsen: How many?
Sakoda: “What? Change? No.”
Jacobsen: That’s right. That is why the men don’t shave. When asked why the men grow such long beards, I remember a funny response. He responds, “I would be more curious about the reverse. Why did the men start shaving?” I will give them that one.
Sakoda: It is funny. Some of the ultra-conservativism in Orthodoxy is not new. I remember my grandmother; I cannot remember if it was about wearing a scarf in Church or wearing a pantsuit to Church. My grandmother responded, “Of course, I wear a pantsuit to Church. What do you think this is, the old country?” [Laughing] My grandparents were immigrants, as was my mother. They came from a different world. Some of these things, I don’t know if you have come across the other funny thing. This is called the toll houses. Have you heard about the toll houses?
Jacobsen: No.
Sakoda: They have nothing to do with cookies. It is the theory that when you die. Christ does not judge you. You go through this series of toll houses. Where the Devil judges you, it has become popular in more conservative circles. Father Seraphim Rose was in that theology. The trouble is that it is used. It would be best if you had a spiritual father. You must do what your spiritual father tells you to get through the toll houses. I had one man tell me. “Okay, if your spiritual father tells you to kill someone, would you?” He said, “Yes.”
Jacobsen: Wait. The spiritual father has more authority than the Decalogue.
Sakoda: Yes, than anything, your conscience, the Bible.
Jacobsen: That’s kind of troublesome.
Sakoda: It is very troublesome. Some of these groups were amassing. They had weapons caches.
Jacobsen: Like AK47s and grenades?
Sakoda: Yes.
Jacobsen: What?
Sakoda: Because they are preparing for the end of days.
Jacobsen: Of course, you need ammunition and weaponry for demons. They probably watched Constantine too much or something.
Sakoda: It was a different world to me. What I started to say, I was telling my father’s youngest sister about this. She has been Orthodox her entire life. She says, “I have never heard of toll houses.” [Laughing] Because people are not well-versed in their religion. Someone comes along with this snow-white beard and is presented as an elder.
Jacobsen: Looking like Jehovah in the illustrated Bible or something.
Sakoda: One man told me once he was in Greece someplace. He met this woman. They had a brief fling. The next day, he went to see this elder. The elder told him exactly what he had done the night before. So, that must mean the elder was clairvoyant. I said to him. “Or that the elder sent the woman to you, which is, probably, more likely.” The idea is that the elder tells you to meet this man and have sex with him. You do it. Otherwise, you will not go through the toll houses.
Jacobsen: It is the unquestioned authority. It will be different per community. But that fundamental of unquestioned authority is the fundamental issue.
Sakoda: I was surprised. The money for these monasteries was supposedly coming from the Russian mafia.
Jacobsen: Ha!
Sakoda: I have much information about those allegations and why they thought they were. The idea, especially now, is with Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. It is Russian money. There are monasteries with guns, supposedly. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of it because I wouldn’t set foot in those monasteries [Laughing]. You must wear a tablecloth on your head if you are a woman.
Jacobsen: The gun in churches thing is, ironically, American.
Sakoda: Yes [Laughing].
Jacobsen: The tablecloth on the head, that’s more – I don’t know – fundamentalist Islam or fringe Christian groups in the United States.
Sakoda: It has become more and more of a thing within Orthodoxy. As you see more and more converts coming into Orthodoxy, they are benignly brought in by these groups. My aunts spent their entire time in the Church. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” Hats, maybe, and head coverings were optional when I grew up. I must admit. In the 50s, we did wear hats when we went to Church. Not in the sense of having to cover your hair or anything. You see little girls who have to have ankle-length skirts with these big head coverings. To me, there is something wrong with it. As one woman I used to work with, she was a priest’s wife. She had a PhD working in the area of clergy sex abuse. She says, “When you start to think about that, what is that telling people? Children are sexual objects.” She thought it was abusive. In some places, you could get your bathing suits from the Mennonites or whatever [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Probably better than the Mormons; they have full-body underwear that they think can protect you from bullets. If it works, that’s great, but call me skeptical!
Sakoda: All children should have them [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Especially if you go to a Russian Orthodox Church [Laughing] or an American church.
Sakoda: Orthodoxy has changed since I was a child. It has not changed for the better.
Jacobsen: Has the core issue of abuse changed significantly other than the fact that it is coming out more?
Sakoda: I don’t think it has changed. I think it was sad when we first started talking about what had happened at our Church and started talking to priests whom I trusted/admired; they all kept saying, “Abuse is unknown in the Orthodox church.”
Jacobsen: Ha! Yes, I saw some vague commentary by some Orthodox priests about that, where they were more or less saying, “Look, it doesn’t happen at all or as much in our Church. Regardless, we’re not the Catholics, and look at them.” That’s the argument. It is an insidious and disgusting argument if that’s your standard.
Sakoda: I took a paper. The Orthodox Church of America was having its annual or bi-annual conference. I didn’t register. I went. I had my books out. As people entered the conference, I was handing out my subversive literature.
Jacobsen: Excellent, way to go, good job, we appreciate you.
Sakoda: The funny thing was that this was, again, one of those things that made it seem like Cappy was finding the conviction for Pangratios. The colour I chose for my little booklets was the same as the liturgy for the conference [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Nice.
Sakoda: People were grabbing them, thinking they were liturgy books.
Jacobsen: No!
Sakoda: They were opening them.
Jacobsen: Surprise.
Sakoda: Surprise! I don’t remember if I learned how he got it. I got this card from this man talking about his daughter being abused by an Orthodox priest. It was somewhere around the Chicago area. He was telling a lie about that. That, yes, it happens. They don’t talk about it. Or they cover it up. There was a case from the 1800s that was in the papers about an Orthodox priest abusing somebody.
Jacobsen: Can you send me that?
Sakoda: I could if I could find it, Scott [Laughing].
Jacobsen: It is not a small project. This kind of thing. It takes time.
Sakoda: I have a closet full of papers four big boxes. As I said, I have a penchant for keeping things hard, not scanning, and putting them on my computer. But it has been a problem. If you don’t talk about a problem, you can’t solve it. That’s my issue. If you want people to stay in the Church, you must minister to the hurt people—the direct victims and their family members. Many family members leave after this kind of incident, too.
Jacobsen: They either convert out or stop believing.
Sakoda: If the Church is the arc of salvation, then you should have everyone on board. It would help if you didn’t reject the people who have been injured. It is a big shock when they think, “We are the injured party. We got to the Church. We expect to be embraced. ‘I am so sorry. What can we do for you?’” That does not happen. I do not recall a victim saying it. It could be the ones who do, do not contact me. It does not happen. Part of it may be a need for more education. What do you do when someone comes and tells you that? What should the response be?
Jacobsen: Some of the most recent Canadian Armed Forces. In the 2022 data published December 5th, 2023, most Canadian Armed Forces members don’t think it is something they do; it’s a lifestyle with a contract they sign. Over half of Canadian Armed Forces members either deal with it informally – that’s another category, and those who do file a report figure something will be done, or more will be done. So, it would help if you got those stories. So, even the self-selected groups reporting on this are the more hopeful groups; other sets are not reporting it: Dealing with it themselves or among their family. They leave. Some try reconciling it with their faith, God, or religion. I imagine that being a very difficult line to thread.
Sakoda: Yes, because, I think, one of the unfortunate things, usually, when you go to a church or a Christian church, “You need to forgive and forget.”
Jacobsen: That’s toxic.
Sakoda: It’s not how abuse manifests itself in people’s lives. You could be going along thinking, “I’ve put my abuser out of my mind.” Maybe the child turns the age of you when you were abused; then it brings it back up. For survivors, it is more of an up-and-down rollercoaster. What does it mean to forgive in that case? My best definition is that you are not thinking about this, not holding onto all of this anger and angst. You are moving on with your life.
Jacobsen: Right, it has been integrated.
Sakoda: What has happened to you has been done; it will not change.
Jacobsen: That part can’t be changed and is the hardest to accept.
Sakoda: Yes, I have a lot of Orthodox priests that said nasty things to me. One accused me that if you say this to people, it will damage them. I said, “No, if you have a child that is in a car accident and loses a leg, can that child go on and have a happy life? Of course. Will it ever get another leg? No.” Sexual abuse is the same thing. It is a permanent injury. So, what you want is you want it to heal nicely with the scar, not to be a constant abscess.
Jacobsen: What else have they said to you?
Sakoda: Our favourite one, this is another funny one.
Jacobsen: This is the point of doing this work for those reading this. You will only make it long-term if you have a sense of humour.
Sakoda: No, you laugh at things that are not funny, but you laugh at things all the time. What is the alternative – being angry and crying all the time? A priest said Cappy and I were obvious lesbians.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: I called Cappy and asked, “Did you see this? Should we tell our husbands?” [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: I’ve been married for 49 years this year. She’s been married longer. It’s like, “Gee, should we tell Greg and Robert?” Anything or we were angry.
Jacobsen: Yes, many atheists get that when they’re critiquing religious injustice. It is the same as speaking out in the Church.
Sakoda: My favourite response was, “Why aren’t you angry that children are being permanently injured in the name of God?”
Jacobsen: Should you be angry with me?
Sakoda: Yes, shouldn’t you be angry with me? You don’t have to throw rocks or take those machine guns.
Jacobsen: I take anger, but not necessarily in its obvious forms of pitchforks, torches, rocks, and guns. It is the long-term burn of letter writing, campaigning, filing reports, press releases, interviewing, and gathering databases.
Sakoda: If you want to look at it, as I told someone too, Christ took the whips from the moneychangers and drove them out of the temple. There is a precedent for some anger. Then you get a response. “What? Do you think you’re Christ?”
Jacobsen: Isn’t he supposed to be the example for these folks?
Sakoda: It is an example. It shows you there is a time and a place. My uncle, an Orthodox priest, was my father’s youngest brother. This came to me through a convoluted process, which I won’t get into. He once told a woman who was struggling. She went to him for confession. A relative abused her children. She said, “I cannot forgive them for what they did.” My uncle told her, “Christ is going on his ministry and saying, ‘Your sins are forgiven. Your sins are forgiven. Your sins are forgiven.’” She goes, “What did he say on the Cross? ‘Father, forgive me.’” He said, “Don’t try to be better than Christ.” For whatever reason, it released her load. She said that she was doing the best she could and that she didn’t have to forgive them. She should say, “God, it is up to you.” For many survivors, particularly those struggling with remaining a part of the Church or not, that is a very meaningful thought. “I do not have to embrace my abuser.” They can wash their hands of them.
Jacobsen: Our minds only work on remembering salient information. Trauma is very salient to a person to avoid that situation again. That’s why it is trauma and highly remembered. The phrase you said about forgive and forget doesn’t fit our cognitive system, but it works: Forgive and don’t forget is the key.
Sakoda: Don’t forgive, but live a happy life anyway.
Jacobsen: It is up to the person whether they forgive. It is not up to the community, the priest, or anyone else. For some people, forgiving is not the right choice for them.
Sakoda: If you look at it, as I said, for people still trying to be within the religion, if the idea is your sins won’t be forgiven, it is fear. “How do I do this? I will be damned because I cannot forgive.” That’s why I said what my uncle said to this woman. It gave her much comfort because he wasn’t demanding. He didn’t say, “How terrible, you are going to Hell if you don’t forgive your relative for sexually abusing your children.” He said, “Let God sort it out.” You go and live your life. I think that’s not an easy thing to do anyway. It is harder to do if you are still trapped in this idea. “Oh my God, I am damning myself if I can’t do this.”
Jacobsen: After 2020, what are the updates on these kinds of cases for the Orthodox Church? I will be working on an analysis of the materials that Hermina and Katherine gave me. It is a year-by-year chronology of what they have so far, summarizing and breathing new life into those popular or unpopular news reports.
Sakoda: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: It covers a little bit. It doesn’t have legal force. It takes people like yourself, Hermina, Katherine, Lucy, and others to make things happen. I am nothing. All the people I am aware of working on this regarding Eastern Orthodox traditions are women who are approximately 40 years old and older.
Sakoda: And up and up! [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Right, so, what is it about women in those communities and being in the latter half of life, statistically speaking, that puts that demographic in a position to speak on these topics over a long period and to put in the hard work that is doing statistical analysis, getting data, getting the stories, and being a resource for people?
Sakoda: Part of it, religion has always been more of a women’s province anyway. When you have a community, for the Orthodox and the Catholics, you do not have women priests. You do not even have women deacons anymore. Although, there is a revival of that going on in the Orthodox churches. So, it is a man-centred thing.
Jacobsen: True.
Sakoda: I think men and women react a little bit differently to trauma. Part of it could be, too. I remember the MeToo Movement, which started or exploded, and there were all these things about women posting MeToo and talking about what they do to protect themselves. There was a man puzzled. He posted, “What do you do to avoid sexual assault?” He goes, “Stay out of prison.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: Women are constantly under assault or unwelcome touching. I think it gives them a more sympathetic perspective when someone comes and says, “This happened to me.” Maybe they are more likely to believe it happened to you because it happened to them. I don’t think you could interact with an adult woman who hasn’t been assaulted in some form or another. You’re on the train or bus, and someone grabs your butt. Men don’t experience that as often. Not all men, but maybe that’s a variable.
Jacobsen: I experienced some of it. I was working at a low-grade pub.
Sakoda: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: I worked in the back of the house, sometimes in the front. I worked at four restaurants simultaneously and did janitorial for 2 of them overnight, seven days a week. I remember one bartender. She would ask me to reach for something and grab my stomach, ass. That harassment was not requested [Laughing]. I don’t think, from what I am reading and have heard and been told, that’s nearly as pervasive as it has been for many women.
Sakoda: I think it doesn’t help that for many men, particularly if a man assaulted them. The idea is, “Why didn’t you fight him off?” You get a little of that as a woman. As a woman, you will often get, “What were you wearing?”
Jacobsen: Same tone in the question, too. I’m noticing. “Why didn’t you fight him off?” is “What were you wearing?” What did you do to call this upon yourself?
Sakoda: Truthfully, if I am being charitable, people’s self-protectiveness. If it can happen to you, then it can happen to me. Therefore, you must have done something to bring it onto yourself. Otherwise, it can happen to me.
Jacobsen: the question will assume men’s strength and self-defence regarding aggression. For the women, I am getting two points there. On the one hand, what are you wearing? Many women’s power in society has to do with their beauty. That’s what has been assigned. On the other hand, how they relate to one another in terms of telling their stories is relational. It is seeing that story in another person.
Sakoda: The other thing, something that you said. My book club read this book by Deborah Tannen once, You Don’t Understand. She is a linguist. She is saying men and women speak different languages. She puts it to the men, originally hunters, and women, the gatherers. So, the men, you had to have someone in charge. You had to have a hierarchy. You did what you were told. You didn’t talk about it. You said, “You go there. You go there. This is what we are going to do.” Women would be spending all day talking and gathering stuff. So, women talk to create relationships between themselves. Men talk to convey information.
Jacobsen: As a general tendency, when men relate to one another, picture them sitting at a log and speaking parallel, not looking at each other. Women, it is face-to-face.
Sakoda: How about that? [Laughing] I like that. All of us tried to get our husbands to read the book. The worst was my husband because he was puzzled when I told him this theory; he is smart. He went to Yale. He goes, “I don’t understand. We have a relationship. You’re my wife.” It’s not exactly what I am talking about regarding a relationship. Even within SNAP, the women leaders talk to each other. We know what is going on in each other’s lives.
Jacobsen: “How are you doing? Cindy came back from a funeral and is having a really hard time. Kathryn and her kids are doing fine. One has just entered a hard business school, and the other is sick.” [Laughing] This stuff.
Sakoda: It builds relationships instead of having someone in charge calling the shots, and there is a pecking order. Women can be vicious. Don’t get me wrong, particularly teenage girls.
Jacobsen: I agree with Margaret Atwood. I don’t think women are angels or demons.
Sakoda: They have a different way of relating to one another than men. You notice this in your marriage, going to the book club, because you’re not on the same wavelength. Women want to talk about something to happen. Men are like, “What do you want me to do?”
Jacobsen: It conveys data for action instead of narrative-building for relationship sustaining.
Sakoda: Yes, that may make women more sympathetic to survivors coming forward. They are trying to connect to them. I don’t think most women become women without experiencing some sexual assault along the way.
Jacobsen: Can you say that again? It is a very powerful phrase.
Sakoda: I don’t think some women haven’t been sexually assaulted, if they are being honest. They may not think about it. Someone is groping you on the bus and turning around and not knowing who did it. It is just a fact of life. Women do things. My husband was surprised. I was saying that most women when they park their cars. They park under a street light. They carry their keys in their hands to poke someone’s eyes out. When I open the car door at night, if I am by myself, I check in the back seat first.
Jacobsen: That last one might be Hollywood influence.
Sakoda: It is something you read. Women’s magazines talk about all kinds of things. My husband said, “Do you look at the back seat?” I said, “Yes.” It could be in the hood and popped up out. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing]
Sakoda: Or if, sometimes, women are waiting for an elevator and a guy gives you a creepy vibe, you pretend, “I forgot. You go ahead,” because you don’t want a ride with him. One of the books I have read in the past few years is Gavin de Becker. It is called the Gift of Fear. He had a second book too. Women are taught to be more polite. My daughter has his complaint. Men always interrupt women.
Jacobsen: True. I do it!
Sakoda: [Laughing] But they do not even think about it, interrupting. Anyways, women who are supposed to be polite are supposed to accept that. When you are interrupted, you do not say anything. You say, “Quiet down.” That is one of the things. Maybe it is why women are more subject to assault because they are trying to be polite. They ignore. It is waiting for an elevator, getting creeped out, and getting in an elevator with him because you don’t want to think he creeped you out [Laughing]. It is important. Sometimes, in church situations, people ignore this: They might see the priest or teacher hugging a child. It will tingle their spidey sense. But they won’t do anything about it, particularly in church situations. “I have such a dirty mind to think that Father could have anything nefarious in mind when he is hugging this child.” It is like, “No, for whatever reason, we get these feelings. We need to pay attention to them.”
Jacobsen: Are most priest abusers likely, so far, never to have come to justice? Those who have been abused have stayed in positions of authority or been promoted.
Sakoda: Yes. As I said, I do not have as good a frame on the Orthodox because there isn’t as good of a frame. People used to ask me, “What is the rate of abuse in the Orthodox churches?” How would I know? All I know is that if you look at the names on my site, I probably have ten more I can’t put on the site because someone will write to me: Father So-and-So abused me. I keep a file on it in case someone else comes on down the road and comes and claims, “Father So-and-So abused me.” Now, I forgot what you asked [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Most who have abused, have they not come to justice?
Sakoda: I do not have as much information, but I know in the Catholic context. Very few priests have been prosecuted for their crimes. Part of that is the statute of limitations problem. After a sufficient time, the statute of limitations has expired. In the US, the Stogner decision, California tried to do this end run around, saying that they wouldn’t change the definitions of the crimes or the penalties. Still, they would allow criminal cases to be brought forward beyond the statute of limitations. The US Supreme Court said, “No, you cannot do that. It is a violation of constitutional rights. You cannot retroactively change the criminal statute of limitations.” People usually come forward between 50 and 70. It is a joke, not a nice one, that the statute of limitations stands for “Shit Out of Luck.
Jacobsen: How did George Carlin put it? “You’d be SOL and JWF. Shit out of luck and jolly well fucked.”
Sakoda: So, there’s that thing. If you figure out that the churches and the Orthodox Church are doing this, I do not have as much data. They are not reporting them to law enforcement. That is why you don’t have as many prosecutions. I am trying to think. This is one of the first big cases. I think in 1999. In an Orthodox monastery in Texas, two people were reported down there for child sex abuse. Abbott and his righthand man, what’s his name? Father Benedict Green, the other guy was Jeremiah Hitt. Besides the Pangratios conviction we uncovered, they were the first. Hitt went to trial. Benedict pleaded guilty. But you still had all these people who didn’t believe it.
Jacobsen: That is not the controversial part. That’s pretty par for the course. Even the guy who ran the human trafficking, sex trafficking, and sex cult, Keith Raniere, was part of the HBO special or documentary series, The Vow, where he was Vanguard in NXIVM. He got life in prison and several of his accomplices as well, men and women. Still, many people defend him when in prison.
Sakoda: Yes, in this particular case, in 2006, there was a second set of charges. New victims are coming forward multiple victims. I cannot remember if 5 or 6 of them were on charges and were all convicted. Benedict Green killed himself before he could go to trial because I think he knew he would go to prison. After all, this was his second conviction. This was in Texas. You don’t want to go to prison in Texas or Florida. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: No! The weather sucks.
Sakoda: No prison is truly humane, in my view, having visited various prisons in California. They’re particularly bad. In Florida, you can get in a chain gang, too. Do you know what a chain gang is?
Jacobsen: No.
Sakoda: They let the prisons go to highway labour. How old was that Paul Newman movie about that chain gang? There is a staple in the South. You won’t find them in the rest of the country. They might have programs. California has a program where you can be released to go and fight wildfires.
Jacobsen: I honestly don’t know what is worse: firefighting for free or being in prison.
Sakoda: At least you’re out. For many people, it is hard not to be outside.
Jacobsen: It is like the one man you’re saying about MeToo. He would probably be out fighting fires rather than being in prison, afraid of being sexually assaulted.
Sakoda: He was probably 400 or 500 pounds. They shouldn’t have him fighting fires.
Jacobsen: Structurally, it takes work.
Sakoda: Besides, in his first criminal trial, he came to his first criminal trial with an oxygen tank. This is a common tactic for abusers to show up on crutches in a wheelchair.
Jacobsen: It is to garner sympathy.
Sakoda: Yes, it was funny. He had just been to Colorado without oxygen. So, people accepted it. The second set of charges when they came down. In some ways, that was a turning point. That was when we got more credibility. The first charge, people said – my other favourite thing, is that “Father only plead guilty to prevent that victim from having to lie on the witness stand.” When you plead guilty, you must say I did this, did this, under oath. Is it better for him to lie? It is amazing how little people want to believe this happened. Orthodoxy is perfectly willing to believe it happened in the Catholic Church.
Jacobsen: It is a different frame on NIMBY. It happens not in my backyard, but not over here.
Sakoda: They will say the most, “They have those celibate priests.” Orthodox priests can be celibate, too. Some of them are abusers. All Orthodox bishops either have to be widowed. There have been bishops who put their wives in monasteries. They have to be unmarried, too. So, you do have celibate clergy portions in the Orthodox Church. But I think people have the idea that it is a choice. You have to decide if you are celibate or married before you are ordained, and you have a choice. But what happens to a priest whose wife dies? He cannot remarry in Orthodoxy and be a priest. So, it’s part of him being married or being a priest. He has a hard choice to make. But I think the main thing is that people equate celibate priests with abuse. Abuse is not about sex. It is about power and control. It is through the vehicle of sex. It makes it confusing for the victim.
Jacobsen: It goes back to the question about unquestioned power in that particular structure. If they have that transcendental status connecting to something divine, it is much harder to question it, especially if you have grown up or been imbued in it. It is much harder to question it.
Sakoda: A lot of the priests tell convincing lies. This is what God wants you to do. Sometimes, for girls, they’ll say, “God wants me to indoctrinate you to what it means to be a Christian wife,” or something. It is one of those things where you must be in the situation. You have to be the child and realize everything that has happened before or the other tactic. It was Phil Saviano. He did the expose on the Catholic Church. He said, ‘The priest gave me a beer and gave me porn.’
Jacobsen: Ha!
Sakoda: ‘The next time, he wanted me to go further. I couldn’t say, ‘No,’ because I was compromised with the beer and the porn.’ That is the way children’s minds work.
Jacobsen: Yes, in some of these stories, the people regress. The way they talk. They cannot just tell this priest to “fuck off,” to put it colloquially.
Sakoda: I had one man come to my meetings. I do not know if he came more than once. I have support meetings for survivors. He said, “I am not sure I should be there,” because he was there when the priest tried to touch him. He punched him and ran away.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: He goes, “I wasn’t abused,” but what happened was his trust in the institution died, whether the priest actually touched him or just tried to touch him, and he got punched. I try to tell people all the time. Even if you get away, many people freeze. Even if you froze or punched him, you would still feel that damage. “Oh my God, he is supposed to be a priest.” Particularly children, what do you do to protect yourself the next time? “It must be something I did. What do I do to change this situation?” You’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. There’s probably nothing you can do, particularly for little kids. A grown man and a 6-year-old, that’s not even a fair fight.
Jacobsen: 18, 20, 25, they still have a lot of the development of having a feeling and standing in it. It can be much if you push them hard enough. It doesn’t take that much pushing. It takes a long time to get a backbone.
Sakoda: Especially to stand up to someone who you have been told is someone who represents God. I remember one survivor. He was abused as an adult. He was a seminarian. When the priest attacked him, he froze. He was shocked that a priest would be doing this. Afterwards, he had such self-blame and loathing because “Why didn’t I do something?” I think that’s hard. It is not just fight or flight. It is also fighting, fighting, freezing, freezing and complying. People tend to forget about that. That happens. It can set a pattern. That freeze and compliance can haunt you in similar situations for the rest of your life. You may revert to that response instead of doing something different. I think trauma is stored in a different part of the brain. It affects your behaviour in ways that you do not always realize. Someone told me. When their abuser had told them that if they spoke up, they would be killed, and when they spoke up, they were so terrified. The idea that the axe was coming. Even though their abuser was dead, it was terrifying to come forward because of what they had been told.
Jacobsen: The tools of religious indoctrination, from my view, are based on fear. A lot of it is reinforced by fear of death. “I would rather not think about the idea that I would stop existing and, therefore, I will exist eternally in some other transcendent dimension.”
Sakoda: So, “I have to do x, y, and z.” It is like the toll houses. “I have to do everything my spiritual father tells me, or I will be eternally damned.”
Jacobsen: The easiest presentation, I think it goes against… the philosophy on life is you’re a flame. Once you snuff the flame out, it doesn’t go anywhere. It just stops being. I think it is the same for us.
Sakoda: No one knows because no one has returned [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Right, people who believe in Uri Geller, who was shown as a fraud by James Randi on national television on Johnny Carson. Similar fakes and frauds, and so on, I am noticing the same phenomenon that you’re describing with individuals who come forward with the abuse. They have public cases. They have data up to 2020. They have news organizations cataloguing stuff like Hermina and Katherine. People, like the X Files, they want to believe.
Sakoda: They do. Part of it is that you want to go on with something bigger than yourself. That’s okay. What you cannot have is that my father ruined me. He said, “Melanie, you have a head to do more than decorate your shoulders.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: He focused on thinking for himself and didn’t tell people what to do. I think there is that element of social conditioning. Where you are supposed to obey the teachers. You are supposed to obey the priests. It is basically, people don’t say, “What if the priest is a creep?” What do I do them? Sex abuse is pervasive in society. I think it would find it in the Church. I think they could do a lot more to make churches a safer place if people are going to go to them.
Jacobsen: It is probably a hard pill to swallow because it makes churches seem like every other institution, which is to say, human. There’s also the fact that the indoctrination starts so early. I agree with Hypatia. If you imbue someone sufficiently early, it is extremely hard for them to unravel not the moral stuff, the superstitions that are built up around this complex of theology and social life, community, and ritual, and the unquestionable authority of these priests and bishop figures.
Sakoda: Yet, some overcome it. I know the woman who runs Bishop Accountability, Ann Barrett Doyle. She was one of those that was raised Catholic. I remember reading something about her. That was when she was 14. Their priest was saying something. She thought it was ridiculous and stood up. So, as my father said, you have people who believe in using your head or your conscience and speaking up when you see something wrong. Being comfortable and having someone telling you what to do is more tempting. It is not your responsibility.
Jacobsen: That’s scary for some people.
Sakoda: It is scary the other way too.
Jacobsen: Sure.
Sakoda: So, if the elder asks you to kill someone, you say, “Yes, sure thing.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Sakoda: Then you go and do it. But you will go to Heaven because you obeyed your spiritual father. That, to me, is scary. I think it is a perversion of what religion is all about.
Jacobsen: Since you have given me so much of your precious time, m’lady.
Sakoda: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: I am going to ask one last question.
Sakoda: Is it a trick question? [Laughing]
Jacobsen: I am hoping not. If you could point people to individuals or resources they can go to for help if they’re coming out of the Orthodox tradition, who should they look into? What organizations can they get some help from? Also, for yourself or others doing this kind of work, here is my experience so far. It is – literally – women doing this work. How can they support them with their time, skills, volunteer efforts, and finances? What are the ways to help as well?
Sakoda: Regarding organizations such as SNAP, we have support groups for survivors. They follow the AA meeting model. Most people find them either as a supplement to therapy or some people use them instead of therapy. It is a way of meeting other survivors or going to a room where you say, “This happened to me when I was 6.” Instead of people turning the other way or saying, “You need to forgive and forget,” or whatever. People will say, “We understand.”
Jacobsen: #ChurchToo.
Sakoda: Yes. There is also, in this country, a group called RAINN, Rape Abuse Incest National Network. They have some of the same services that they offer. However, they do not specialize in religion or religious abuse. SNAP is the only one I know that does it. That has a mission to support survivors of abuse and religious institutions. Maybe this is not quite what you meant by this. I think what people can do to help support. If someone comes and confides in you, when I was 10, my priest raped me, or my pastor raped me or whatever.
Jacobsen: The severity, just hearing it, is a very… If you hear that sentence, pause and hear what they’re saying to you; they’re not lying to you, most likely.
Sakoda: What do they have to gain?
Jacobsen: Seriously.
Sakoda: What do you say? You say, “I am sorry. I am sorry that happened to you. What can I do to support you?” Maybe you cannot do a whole lot. Maybe this is their healing journey. If you accept what they say… I had one Orthodox survivor who was abused. When I started talking to him, it was automatic, “I am so sorry that happened to you.” He started crying. What can I say? I make men cry. He said, “No one has ever told me that before. That they were sorry for what happened to me.” It is like, that’s sad.
Jacobsen: That breaks the spell. I am stealing from a now-deceased philosopher, Daniel Dennett, who wrote a book called Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. What you do when you do that, socially, at least, for me, you break the spell. You break the spell for men by doing so.
Sakoda: Yes, that helps; as to what can help the advocates, if they’re involved with an organization, you can support it. As I said, we never get the support to take status as a non-profit. Maybe it will happen. I am not going to hold my breath. The Catholic Church, you’d think Orthodox people would think about SNAP. “That’s for Catholics.” It was funny. I sent one woman. She had been abused as an older teen. I think she was 19, and it was by an Orthodox priest. I said, “Why not try one meeting? What is it going to hurt?” She said, “Oh my God, they didn’t have a regular meeting.” This one had a play being performed at a community theatre or something. The group went to see and support him. She goes, “Oh my God, he was a man. I was a woman. He was Catholic. I was Orthodox. He was telling my story.”
I think that is what you find in the community. If you find another organization that does that, support them! Because it is to make people come forward earlier and earlier. If we have children coming forward, then they will have criminal convictions. Chances are: If it gets publicized by the police if others know, you will get the convictions and some of these people behind bars rather than behind the pulpit. The more you do that, the more people will be willing to believe it, too. There will still be a few religious zealots who never believe this whole thing about “He had hands laid on him!” There is some change in Catholicism, starting with an O that happens when you are ordained. The best response I ever gave someone, particularly the Orthodox Church, was, “The Church may be mystical. It is not magic. If someone is an abuser before they are ordained, they are going to be an abuser afterwards. It is not going to fix them automatically.”
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/04
Dr. Darrel Ray is the founder and President of the Board of Directors of Recovering from Religion. He has been a psychologist for over thirty years. He is the author of four books: two on organizational teamwork, “The God Virus-How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture” and “Sex and God-How Religion Distorts Sexuality.” Dr. Ray has been a student of religion most of his life and holds a Masters Degree in religion as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology/Anthropology with a Doctorate in Psychology.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re here. So, we still need to remember what we talked about before. That was years ago. It was for Conatus News, which is now coming on our media. So, we’ve got your personal story for anyone following the interviews I’ve been doing. Today, we’ll focus on the Secular Therapy Project and Recovering From Religion. We’ll start with the more well-known one, probably Recovering From Religion. So, what’s the current breadth of its services now? There will be many stories, but what does it cover now?
Dr Darrel Ray: We celebrated our 15th anniversary this past April. April 20th is our start date, 2009. We have about 470 volunteers who now cover virtually every time zone on the planet through our chat line, call line, and support groups. We have volunteers from Moscow, Russia, Perth, Australia, and others everywhere, from South Africa to France, England, Mexico, Lebanon, Romania, Canada and all over the US. We just finished incorporating a subsidiary or sister organization in Australia. So, we now have a fully recognized nonprofit in Australia and New Zealand called Recovering From Religion Australia.
That has been a delight. It’s taken us a couple of years to make that happen, but we’ve got an independent board down under, responsible for some of our services, but not all. Many of our services, the call line and the chat line, are centralized, so they use our centralized services. But they’re providing localized services in Australia. We’ve always had support groups. That’s how we started. We added the Helpline (call and chat) in 2014. Since then, we have added many other services, like our resource library, online community, and Monday night RfRx program.
We have face-to-face support groups that might meet in the back of a coffee shop. But COVID forced us to stop those for obvious reasons. So, we transitioned to having online support group meetings. It’s ironic because, unlike most organizations, we benefited from COVID-19. We grew dramatically during COVID because people were at home with nothing to do and had to live with their religious parents or something like that. We expanded and now have about 45 support groups of all different flavours in almost every time zone.
Somebody can join our support group for LGBTQ issues, a women-only or ex-Jehovah’s Witness support group, and many others. They can join from any time zone, depending on the time in their area, because they are on Zoom. We’re serving thousands through these online support groups and still have about 30 face-to-face groups. We’ve got Zoom groups almost every day somewhere in the world. These are important services for people going through the trauma of being rejected by their family or being divorced by their spouse because they don’t believe anymore, or the kid kicked out of his home this week in Salt Lake City because they’re gay. Their Mormon parents can’t deal with that issue.
We also get phone calls from places like Saudi Arabia and Muslims in Toronto, Canada. The stories can be horrendous. Even in the Western world, especially Muslims can be very insular and impose their religion on their children in some pretty crazy ways. That’s the scope of the recovery we deal with.
We also have an enormous curated library that we’ve developed over the last 6 or 7 years, and it’s an active living library. So, if people need a resource for living with a religious spouse, we’ve got that. If they need a resource on how to find asylum out of Pakistan, we know where to send them. We don’t provide that kind of service but connect people to the right places. Besides that, we’re a trained listening ear.
Our volunteers answer the phone and chat, and they are there to be caring and offer support and resources so people can get on with their lives after religion, any religion. We get calls from Hindus, Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons—you name it. We’ve had them call us. We don’t get many chats or calls, if any, from China because they’re so locked down and have outlawed VPNs. But about every other country on the planet can contact us, and we can support people if they speak English or Spanish. We do have a Romanian speaker. We’ve got Latvian, French and even Arabic speakers. We have several Spanish speakers, but we’re not yet geared to support anything more than Spanish and English. Hopefully, we’ll have more volunteers speaking other languages.
We always need volunteers, regardless of their language skills. We’ll train you, and then you can bring your language skills to the table.
Jacobsen: Given all the resources coming to you from all these different countries and faiths, have you connected any peer-reviewed literature or professional researchers with the work you’re doing in analyzing the structure of the calls and so on? Have you gotten any general idea of the general symptomatology of people who have had a problematic religious upbringing and then come to you?
Ray: Yes, we have. We’ve been doing this for 15 years and see the patterns. Our pattern is number one: fear of hell. That’s usually the number one thing people come to us for. Whether they’re Muslim, Christian, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are all afraid of some afterlife consequence. Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, don’t believe in hell, but they still believe in some retribution from their God. But that’s number one. Number two is shunning and relationship issues, being socially isolated by everybody they loved or thought was on their side.
When people leave a religion, they lose their whole social structure, which may include their family, their spouse, and even their adult children. There are all sorts of things that happen when you leave a religion. Number three, and these are almost universal, is sexuality.
We get many people saying, “I’m gay. I came out to my family, and they’re kicking me out of the house,” or a person says, “I got married because my church told me to, and now I realize ten years later with three kids that I’m LGBTQ, or I’m trans or something.” So those are the top three. In some cases, it’s all three in one person. There are other smaller issues, but I could say we could wrap up 90% of all the phone calls in fear of hell, fear of social isolation, shunning, and sexuality. That would wrap up 90% of them.
Every major religion emphasizes that you have to be sexually pure. Religions like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity all have a purity culture mentality. So, sex alone is going to be one issue that almost anybody in any religion is going to have, even if it’s a small part. It’s still a part of what’s going on.
And then, of course, social isolation is the way they keep you inside the religion. Because if you dare to leave, “What happened to the last person who left? They lost everything. They lost their spouse. They lost their kids.” Everyone can see what happens, and that instills fear, even terror, which keeps people tightly involved in the religion.
They punish people severely even as they’re saying, “We’re doing it because we love you.” There’s no hate quite like Christian love when it comes to shunning your children; there’s no violence quite like Muslim peace when it comes to killing your children sometimes. We get people calling us who are under physical threat, phone calls or chats from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and India – Those are dangerous places for LGBTQ people and for women who want to think for themselves.
We get women calling us saying that they’re being forced to marry a man they don’t want to marry, and they’d like to escape the country to get away from the forced marriage they’re being subjected to. Anyway, there’s a lot of those kinds of things. I hope that answers your question.
Jacobsen: It does help. Then what about the Secular Therapy Project? I remember doing several interviews with Dr. Caleb Lack. Is he still there?
Ray: No, he has since left, but he’s still a big supporter of us. Our new director, Dr. Travis McKie-Voerste, has been our director for over four years, so I guess that says something about how long it has been since we last talked. You’re welcome to talk to him. Dr. Travis is doing a great job. When Caleb told us he would step down, he agreed to continue in an advisory role. We still used Caleb as a consultant.
Dr. Lack has been very valuable in helping us decide what we must do to maintain a professional service within the evolving world of psychotherapy. But Dr. Travis McKie-Voerst did his doctoral dissertation on. I’ll read the title to you; you might even want to get a hold of it.
It’s called “The Atheist Experience of Counseling in the Bible Belt of the United States.” He researched the issues that an atheist has in trying to find therapy, primarily in the Bible South, where there are so many Christian counsellors. Many licensed counsellors can’t keep their religion out of their therapy practice.
Jacobsen: Yes, exactly. A Venn Diagram is a circle.
Ray: So he wrote that as his doctoral dissertation a few years back, and that’s why we hired him. He’s not paid—nobody gets paid here—but that’s why we put him in charge of STP; he had that background. We recently had another volunteer finish a master’s thesis. I love that people are starting to get on the research track and looking to us to help them do research. That’s one of the other interviews I’ve got this week—a master’s level student who wants to talk to us about researching religious trauma.
Ray: Part of the reason for this interview is to build a catalogue of information about RfR’s services for those needing us.
Jacobsen: Yes, that’s excellent. We’re always happy to talk because we want people to know we’re here to help.
Ray: Another volunteer wrote a thesis titled “Once I felt I Had a Choice, I Didn’t Choose Religion”: A Qualitative Analysis of Meaning in Religious Dones.” It examines how children are raised without a choice in religious matters. Anyway, that’s some recent research I’m aware of. I know two or three other doctoral dissertations are in progress. I know about them, but I haven’t seen the results yet. So the fact that we’ve probably got five to ten active research projects going on right now is pretty cool because this did not exist even five or six years ago. Nobody was talking about religious trauma or how trauma can screw up your sex life, or how social isolation impacts people.
One of the most horrible treatments you can do to a human being is to put them in solitary confinement. Almost any other punishment or physical treatment is more bearable and recoverable than solitary confinement. Religion figured this out thousands of years ago. What they do is, if you leave the religion, they isolate you from everybody you ever knew or loved. It’s hard to explain in words how traumatizing that is—to think these people were the most important thing in your life. They birthed you. They cared for you. They told you they loved you, and now they’re gone and will never talk to you again. Or if they do, it isn’t very pleasant.
We deal with that a lot. People call us, saying, “How do I rebuild my life because I lost everything?” Even if they didn’t lose all their financial means and still have a job, it’s almost worse than losing their job, house, or financial structure because if you still have your family and support network, you can emotionally ride out that crisis. But if you don’t have a support network, all the money in the world probably isn’t going to help that much.
Regarding the Secular Therapy Project, let me be more specific about that. We have passed 891 therapists registered in nine different countries. We’ve got seven or eight therapists in Australia, 29 or 30 in Canada, one or two in New Zealand, and therapists in Belgium, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Argentina. We’ve internationalized and spread out. I’m very happy to have Spanish-speaking therapists whom we vetted. It has grown monstrously. We passed 35,000 registered clients this week.
So 35,000 people have come to us looking for help. That doesn’t guarantee they booked an appointment, but most probably did. Those 891 therapists are getting referrals and clients through our services and providing support for anything, not just religious issues. These therapists are trained to use secular means and help with any mental health issue. You can find someone in our system at www.seculartherapy.org. Register, then search our database for therapists.
We celebrated our 12th anniversary in May. We started in 2012 with 26 therapists I knew would meet the criteria we sought. Then, we put a team together and started getting applications and conducting interviews, letting people know. If you are a therapist, go to our website, https://www.seculartherapy.org/, and you will see if you qualify. We’ve got a page that describes what we’re looking for. If you qualify, apply.
We turn down about 30% of all the therapists that apply. We do that because they need to meet our criteria. They needed to read the criteria more closely or give us the information we needed to vet them. But I see that as a good thing. I hate turning people down, of course, but I also don’t want people who aren’t evidence-based, are still religious, or have supernatural ideas. Because one thing you cannot be if you want to be a therapist with us is someone who believes in supernatural phenomena. If you believe that crystals can heal you or you can pray the gay away or any of that nonsense, you’re not eligible to join us.
Many therapists we’ve heard of do very unethical stuff, like telling people, “Do you think your depression is because you’re an atheist?” They ignore the fact that the person lost their whole family when they left the religion. Do you think losing your whole family might cause some depression? No, they don’t think that. That’s how much they are in that bubble of Christian privilege.
And that’s what we are interested in doing, Scott—challenging Christian privilege within psychotherapy. It should not be there. The Counseling Association, American Psychological Association, and marriage and family associations all have ethical principles that say you may not bring your religion into your therapy. Yet this is violated daily worldwide in all sorts of ways, and none of the professional societies will challenge it. I can make ten complaints to the American Counseling Association daily, and they would go straight into the wastebasket.
So it’s a big problem when the thing that caused you the disease now says, “Oh, we can help you.” A religious counsellor is a representative of the very organization that caused your trauma. I get accused of being anti-religion and anti-therapy.
Jacobsen: You are not anti-religion.
Ray: No.
Jacobsen: You are not even anti-theist.
Ray: No. I’m about the mental health of people, and those people happen to be formerly religious or currently nonreligious. I see nothing bad about that.
Jacobsen: Yep.
Ray: This is an interesting story—whether you want this or not—but we do have therapists come to us and say, “Yes, I’m still spiritual, or I’m still religious, but I can keep that out of my practice.” We don’t believe them. Here’s why. It was probably about seven or eight years ago that I had a Ph.D. psychologist apply, and he indicated that he had his Ph.D. from Notre Dame University in the United States.
You don’t get much bigger or better than Notre Dame University. So, having a Ph.D. in psychology is pretty prestigious. So, I looked it over and said, “Can you keep your religion out of your practice?” And he said, “Yes, I can do that. I wouldn’t apply if I couldn’t.” So I asked him, “I’ve got one question for you. You’ve got a 22-year-old college student who comes to you. She’s been seeing you for a couple of weeks now. On the third week, she comes in and tells you, ‘I’m pregnant, and I’m going to get an abortion tomorrow at the abortion clinic. But I’d like you to help me stay calm as I go through all the harassing pro-lifers that are going to try to stop me from going in.’ My question to you is, how would you help her?” I sent him an email. We were doing it by email.
A week goes by. Two weeks go by. I finally sent him another email, “How would you help her? Here’s the story. How would you help her?” Another week goes by, and he finally gets back to me and says, “I couldn’t help her.” Right there, it tells me I don’t care how much you think you can keep your religion out. Even with a Ph.D. from Notre Dame University, you are still infected with Catholic ideology. I don’t want anybody using any religious criteria to support or counsel people.
We point people at the SASS mission statement and ethos, which includes the naturalist worldview.
We say very early on, “Do you support the SASS mission and ethos?” The only choice is, “Yes.” We say, “Are you prepared to do marriage ceremonies free of supernatural content?” The only answer is, “Yes.”
We say, “Are you prepared to do same-sex and heterosexual sex marriages?” The only answer is, “Yes.” There is, “Are you prepared to do counselling?” It is an optional one. Anyway, people will blithely skim through these, “Yes, yes, yes, carry on, no problems.”
Then we ask for motivation, “Why do you want to become a secular marriage officer?” At that point, we can quite easilyget things like, “Oh, I am a pastor at so-and-so congregation. I wanted to marry my congregants.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Raubenheimer: We also get, “I am a prominent member of x, y, z church.” We don’t see it is in the motivation, but we also ask them for sample ceremonies.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Raubenheimer: For example, in fact, we had one very recently. I hadn’t gone through the ceremony when we copied it in. We put this one on Google Docs, so the whole team could see it. But I started reading it.
And oops! This chap is mentioning God!
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Raubenheimer: He has four citations of God! He has several references to several biblical verses.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Raubenheimer: Now, in fact, Wynand can tell you more about how this one got through the cracks. He set up various protections. But due to technical website issues, he turned it off. So, the person had got through right to that point.
I emailed him to say, “I noticed that you’ve ticked all the boxes saying you’re a secular person and everything else. You’ve agreed to the terms and conditions and everything else. But I see that you’re citing God and making biblical references in your marriage ceremonies. Can you clarify for us?”
He writes back and says, “Cancel my application, I am a Christian and I believe in GOD!”
[Wynand’s Meijer’s wife laughing in the background – not part of the conversation, but listening into it, obviously.]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: I remember doing a group interview with the South African people, and one of the people who was a part of it was Wynand’s Meijer. He’s a South African. In the background, his wife is laughing at that call. So, the whole thing around that. But yes, you get this kind of confusion. But you’ve seen that too, the confusing information that comes up in Pew Research where people will say that they’re atheist, and 1% will say they believe in God.
Ray: Yes, which makes no sense at all, but yes. Yes, that’s true. We’ve had to tighten our criteria because people sometimes don’t tell the truth. Sometimes, people are merely confused. If you give them the benefit of the doubt but ask for clarification, you discover the real story.
Jacobsen: Yep.
Ray: They need clarification about terms and what they mean.
Jacobsen: Yep, I agree.
Ray: They have this notion that because they went through an ethics course and were taught how to keep their religion out of their practice, they can do that. But they have never faced the challenges we see in people. So, we’re not going to take a chance on somebody. Let’s put it that way.
Jacobsen: People are too vulnerable. I critiqued where I used to live in Fort Langley. They have a sobriety center that calls itself a ministry. In their language, they’re looking to make disciples for Christ. People are coming to them for sobriety or substance misuse detox. They go on a farm, and they’re closed off. They work at a farm for a year. In circumstances like that, what is your professional opinion of the ethics of taking people at the most vulnerable point in their lives and then trying to make them disciples in the guise of a ministry sobriety center or treatment center?
Ray: I’ll say I addressed that in my book, The God Virus. Whether you’ve read that or not, I spend much time showing how. Why do we have religiously based hospitals? Why do we allow chaplains in prisons? Why are there so many chaplains and ministers in hospitals? What religion does best is take advantage of people when they’re at their most vulnerable. That’s the example you’ve given me. It’s taking people when they’re most easily reprogrammed because the brain is confused. The brain is under a detox process, perhaps, or has been under a drug influence.
There are many reasons why the brain might need to be more balanced. So, yes, you put them on a farm for a year, plus they probably are using another religious concept. I’m going to throw this out at you: Alcoholics Anonymous is nothing but a religion. Eight of the twelve steps name something related to deities, higher powers, gods, or whatever. That is a religion.
Eight of the twelve steps and none of these twelve steps are psychologically sound. Alcoholics Anonymous is a horrendous psychological model because it’s a helplessness model and it’s a disease model. None of the research supports what AA purports. Many churches take the AA model way too seriously. People need to hear this. Those who read this for the first time may not get it.
Jacobsen: Oh, that’s a very important point. People have to approach this from multiple angles. This is incredibly key to my reading of it, too.
Ray: So Alcoholics Anonymous is not based on sound psychological principles. It is based on bad psychological principles. The notion that you are helpless means you must have some supernatural thing outside of yourself. That’s problematic. Alcoholics Anonymous tries to get around all that all the time, but they can’t. They are a religion because eight of the damn twelve steps refer to something supernatural or God or religious.
So, I am dead set against AA. I am, on the contrary, supportive of secular sobriety and harm reduction programs. There are good evidence-based secular programs for drug and alcohol recovery. They’re often based on cognitive behavioural therapy with a 50-year proven track record. We know it works or works the best. Nothing works perfectly, of course.
So what religion and any other religion that’s getting into recovery is doing is simply taking advantage of people when they’re at their most vulnerable. Yes, they might make missionaries out of them. They might make people that can go out and propagate, but it’s a horrible thing because they’re not addressing the underlying issues that drove the person to the addiction in the first place. Jesus can’t solve your addiction. Jesus can’t solve your depression. Jesus can’t solve your social skills. There are many reasons people indulge in drugs of any kind.
Most of the time, they overindulge in drugs or alcohol because of some other issue. They’re going through a divorce. Their spouse died. They were in a car wreck, and they were on medication to deal with the pain. Most people who could be defined as people with an addiction are no longer addicts three to five years later. Most people are self-medicating for social or psychological reasons. AA has this notion that alcoholism is a lifelong disease. There’s no evidence for that. None whatsoever. So if you buy into the Alcoholics Anonymous focus on this being a disease that will last your whole lifetime and you’re going to die of this disease, you’re wrong. So, how can you support a treatment based on such a total fallacy? Most people don’t die of alcohol. They may die driving a car while under the influence.
That’s not the same thing. I’m saying what AA preaches: that you’re helpless, you’re going to die of alcoholism is simply false in most cases. The twelve steps push some bad narratives. There are better and more proven ways to help people dealing with drug abuse. Does that answer your question?
Jacobsen: It does. What are the most controversial ethical areas in cases received? How do you trace that fine line? How do you overcome those challenges?
Ray: It starts with training our agents. Ethically, we want to stay as neutral as possible because we’re not here to convert or deconvert. That is a challenge because people often come to volunteer for us with unreasonable expectations about their role, and they have to learn to be more like a counsellor than an adviser. So the challenge is to help people stay in that neutral zone and learn good Socratic questioning techniques, or if you’re familiar with street epistemology. We teach those concepts so that volunteers stay in their lane. Stay in your lane as the peer support and be nonjudgmental, not advising.
Another challenge we face is that we’re not, for example, a suicide hotline. It’s not our purpose; we’re not trained to do that. But we do get people calling in who are in danger of ending their lives. That doesn’t happen often, but it happens once or twice a month. Even more often, people mention that they used to be suicidal. So that’s a challenge for us. We want to serve them because they may come to us around religious issues. Or an existential issue—if there’s no god, then I’ve lost all my meaning. We hear that a lot. So we have to help the client with the religious side. But if they’re expressing active suicidal ideation, we will stop the call right then and there and say, “You must call this number,” and we will give them the number if we know their local area. We don’t always know their local area.
We know the suicide hotline in South Africa. We know the suicide hotline in France. So we’ve got a database that we’ve collected over the years. We will send them immediately to a suicide hotline. We will refuse to talk to them because we are not a suicide hotline. Of course, we can’t guarantee they’ll go and do that, but we cannot take that responsibility since it’s not something we’re trained in. It’s not a part of our mission. However, at the same time, and this is a gray area that we have to walk, people call us and say, “I’ve called the suicide hotline in my area, and they’re all religious. They want to tell me to go back to Jesus or God or pray with me, so I don’t want to talk to them.” We understand that problem because so many people are volunteering for those suicide hotlines that want to help bring people back to Jesus. So we’ll continue talking to them as long as they’re not in danger. We can no longer talk to them if we think they’re in danger. Does that fit with what you’re looking for?
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s the kind of thing that people might not necessarily think about or even think to ask because every organization, especially when dealing with emotionally sensitive subject matter or people in a vulnerable state, will inevitably have to, on an increasingly regular basis, make difficult ethical decisions that will impact people’s lives long-term, sometimes permanently. And it’s not individuals who don’t care about the people they’re dealing with, like prosperity gospel preachers. It’s that you care. You’re trying to provide neutrality. It’s similar to the difficulty of independent journalism, where you have to make independent ethical decisions. I don’t consider myself beholden to the idea of the objective journalist. I believe in objective language. You can describe something in objective language. However, any experience is going to be coloured. The language framing is going to be coloured.
Even if you can use perfectly objective and neutral language, the frame and the information, the fidelity, will leave out certain things because of word count limits on concision, et cetera. So you’re left with, in my opinion, better and worse journalists relative to a particular context who try to attain certain universal standards of ethics and conduct. But, when you’re saying those things, I recall myself in similar circumstances because dealing with these religious areas is always difficult. It’s context.
Ray: We also have a training issue, and we work hard at this to figure out how to deal with people who come to us with clear, serious mental health issues. For example, we will get people who are schizophrenic or bipolar or have some other condition. We’re not trained to do that. I’m trained to do that—I’m a psychologist—but that’s not the purpose of what our volunteers are trained to do. So we have to work with our volunteers to know where that line is between helping them, supporting them, and crossing that line into mental health support and therapy. We cannot do that, and so that’s another ethical guideline.
We work well at it. Over the years, we’ve refined our systems and our guidelines. But people come to us as volunteers wanting to help people in the worst way possible. They need to realize that you can’t help everybody. 10% of the people who call us, we cannot help. It takes a while for volunteers to understand and accept that.
We can help 90%, but we cannot help those few. We don’t try because you can cause more damage. We refer them to the Secular Therapy Project or other mental health resources.
That’s partly why we created the Secular Therapy Project—so we would have a safe place to refer people with those issues. I should also say that we’re all volunteer-based, and we survive on donations. We don’t ask anybody who calls us to give us a dime. No money. We are not Joel Osteen. We’re not helping you for a blessing or anything. So, if somebody wants to help us, they can donate to help us as we help others.
Jacobsen: How can people get involved?
Ray: Every dollar helps. We have huge fees to maintain our Meetup accounts throughout the world. We have to pay for our many Zoom accounts. We have to pay for our international phone lines. We have software development. We have a whole team that does software. We are constantly doing outreach like tabling at conferences or Pride events, county fairs, etc. But people can get involved with us in many ways, not just by donating but by volunteering. They don’t have to have any certification or training. We’ll take anybody because we will train you. If you have certain skills, like web development or graphic design, we also need that kind of help. But we’ll train you if you want to help people on our helpline or run a group for us.
You don’t need a college degree or a background in psychology. You don’t need any of that. We’ll train anybody. It takes about 10 to 20 hours to train a volunteer properly. We only let people touch our clients if they’re properly trained. Some people don’t make it through the training, but most people do if they’re committed to helping people. We have a very extensive training program that allows us to do good work and know what our limits are at the same time.
Jacobsen: Are you looking to find a third organization for any particular area where you think you need to include a particular part of emphasis?
Ray: No. I’m telling you, Scott. I spend way more time than I ever thought I would helping run Recovering From Religion. Fortunately, we have an amazing executive director, Gayle Jordan. She is awesome. She is the operations person. She runs it from an operations standpoint. My role is to be president of the board and help set the pace and vision for the organization.
However, I needed help handling 450-470 volunteers and all the programming and software development. Gayle does a good job with that. So, no, I don’t have time. I’m not writing any other books. My books, The God Virus and Sex and Goddeal with the very issues that we’re dealing with every day at Recovering From Religion. They’re almost, I won’t call them textbooks, but those two books are almost textbooks for what we do and why we do it.
They explain the theoretical and psychological principles behind what we do, even though I founded the organization after I wrote the books. I wrote the books, and then after having dozens, if not far more, people called me and emailed me saying they needed help after reading my books. They read my books and said, “I need your help.” I couldn’t help all those people. So that’s what led me to start Recovering From Religion.
The fifth chapter of The God Virus was about sex, a huge issue. That one chapter got more responses, emails, and phone calls than almost anything else I published. So I realized, oh, there’s a whole other book there. Two years later, I published Sex and God. But I don’t need to start anything else. I have my hands full. I’m retired—73 years old—and I want to make sure this organization is solid.
It has a good structure, so they can keep going when I kick the bucket. They won’t need me. Nothing is worse than having an organization whose founder doesn’t know their limits. I was an organizational psychologist for 30 years. I’ve seen how often the founder becomes indispensable to the organization. You’ve got to admit your limits on this planet, and I want to do that. I want to leave a good, strong organization. I travel a lot for RFR. We did a whole tour of Australia last year.
I’ve attended several conventions and spoken at many others. We’re raising awareness, developing allies, and developing a donor base. This requires much work.
Jacobsen: Who have been people that you’ve looked up to in your career?
Ray: Probably early on in my career, my mentor was Albert Ellis, the developer and founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. He was my mentor. I had a strong and deep understanding and skill in cognitive behavioural therapy in the 1970s. That’s when I was studying with him. That was one of the major influences on my life. I’m glad I had that opportunity to study with him and be influenced directly. Face-to-face with somebody, you learn quickly. With him, he was a very powerful person. That’s an understatement of how his personality expressed itself.
I’ve been influenced at a distance by many other people in my life. I had a good family situation. I grew up in a good family. My dad was a good influence on me. My family was supportive. I was the first person in my family to go to college—the first person to get a doctorate. So, I had much support in that area. I’ve been influenced by people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who recently died. I could name a half dozen others who influenced my writing or what I chose to write about.
My best friend, Dr. Dan Dana, has been a mentor. He’s internationally known for his work on mediation in the workplace and is a psychologist, too. Those are people you probably wouldn’t be aware of.
Jacobsen: Who impresses you in secular therapeutic settings?
Ray: I can tell you who doesn’t impress me, and that’s the new age woo-woo bullshit theories that pop up every month. There’s a new psychological theory every month. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, has some good stuff going on there. There’s more evidence needed for his polyvagal theory, but it’ll probably, in 10 or 20 years, be seen as valuable. My colleague and friend, Dr. Hector Garcia, has written quite a bit on interesting topics. One of his favourites is Alpha God. He shows some interesting stuff. His day job before he wrote those books was helping develop some cutting-edge practices for soldiers with PTSD at the Veterans Administration. So, Dr. Hector Garcia was instrumental in helping develop something nobody had ever done before. He wasn’t solely involved in it, of course, but learning a lot about trauma is now paying off. Trauma with soldiers because trauma is everywhere.
Trauma comes from child abuse, war, spousal abuse, and car wrecks. There are a lot of trauma or opportunities for trauma. So, I’ve been very influenced by him, and I appreciate his work there. Dr. Marlene Winell has been a hugeinfluence on the secular movement because she coined the term religious trauma syndrome. She was seeing in her clinical practice person after person coming in with what appeared to be trauma, but they hadn’t been in a car wreck. They were never a soldier. What’s going on here? And if you scratch below the surface, you find out religion was the root cause of the trauma. So I credit her and thank her. She came to me at a conference in 2010.
I was there to speak on my recently published book, The God Virus, and she was there to speak on her book, Leaving the Fold. We connected over a beer or something. She said, “Hey, I got this idea. Let me pass it by you.” She opened her mouth. Within a few sentences, she used the term “religious trauma,” and my brain went wild.
I thought, “Whoa, that explains so much.” It was one of those moments in your career—it rarely happens, of course—when you realize that explains much behaviour and what I’d seen in my clinical practice, but I’d not delved below the surface. Therapists are trained to tread very carefully around religion.
So, I didn’t sit there in the office with a patient thinking, “This trauma, where is this trauma coming from?” I was seeing trauma, but it never occurred to me to ask, “What was your religious background?” and explore that. Knowing about religious trauma today, a client might say they’re Baptist. Then I’d ask, “Tell me about your upbringing in the Baptist faith.” They might say, “I had to learn my Bible lessons.” I’d ask, “What happened around your Bible lessons?” They might respond, “I got beaten several times because I didn’t memorize them properly.”
Let’s explore that more. “What about your parents? What was their religious belief?” They might say, “They were super fundamentalist and believed in ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ from Proverbs.”
That kind of exploration never occurred to me until she said those words. I thought, “Dang it. There’s a whole component of this human being in front of me that I should have explored.” In some ways, I feel guilty about that. I could have helped many people 30 years ago if I’d known that then, but I didn’t. That’s a long answer to your short question.
Jacobsen: Trauma is so easy and frequent for many people, especially concerning religious dogmatism. Do you think that for many people, especially as most people don’t get therapy, life is a continual series of moments of grieving and mourning?
Ray: What we found—this is, again, another insight that’s only come in recent years—is that a person may be within a religious framework, in a religious family or community, and be able to do fine, they may have experienced or may not have experienced trauma. I was raised in a pretty darn religious and fairly conservative community and family. I was not traumatized by that. I don’t want anybody to think I’m making that claim. However, what we see in many people who are leaving high-control religious environments is that the very act of leaving is what causes the trauma.
They may or may not have been traumatized by their religion, but when they step out of it and lose everything, they’re homeless now. They’ve lost their family. As we’ve spoken before, that can cause trauma, or more commonly, it can trigger or exacerbate the trauma they experienced when they were in their religion. So, it adds insult to injury. You’re dealing with the trauma.
How many people were sexually abused in their childhood by religious figures and had to hide it? Catholic priests molested thousands and thousands of people. They went to their parents and said, “Hey, the priest is doing bad things to me,” and the parents denied it. The parents said, “Oh no, the priest would never do that.” So, here’s a child who has to spend the rest of their life within the parent’s care, denying that the priest ever did this to them. What happens when they step out of the religion and their parents now disown them, which can happen to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, and Catholics? That adds another layer of trauma to these people.
Oh, by the way, we do see much sexual-related trauma coming to us. Often, as I’ve already mentioned, LGBTQ identities are being persecuted or suppressed in people. So, yes, there’s so much opportunity for trauma to stay hidden. You see much behaviour within the church. I was raised in the church, and I look back on where I am now.
Look at all this behaviour within the church that was probably rooted in trauma, but it wasn’t recognized. Even if somebody went to a psychologist, that psychologist, as I was, might not have recognized it either.
Jacobsen: In doing many of these interviews with people who gained prominence in the 2000s or 2010s, they’re functioning off at least three interrelated movements: Militant Atheism, Firebrand Atheism, and New Atheism. They see that as a very important moment with a couple of mistakes, but it was great in bringing to light the concerns and voices of atheists and those generally affected by the legislation. A big question that arises more often now, as two major people have passed away and two more are in the latter years of life, is: what now?
So, we’ve garnered prominence. In terms of the culture war, it was clear that the nonreligious won. When anyone watched the documentaries by Dawkins or others engaging with these extremely prominent religious apologists, theologians, and others, they didn’t have many strong arguments. Or if they did, they were tired of arguments that didn’t produce much.
Ray: Yes, we certainly had a major push from some great authors and thinkers, which helped a lot of people move past religion. I think it helped create a critical mass that we still enjoy today. At the same time, those people who left or are leaving often need support, which was missing from those books. So, from a therapeutic standpoint, what should people do for their health and well-being when asking the “what now?” question?
Jacobsen: So they’ve gotten some equality. They’ve gotten some recognition. It is okay to be nonreligious where we might be in your country, even though your larger culture might not necessarily accept you. What do they do now? How do they build a life after they’ve left these faiths? Or find others who have none?
Ray: I hear several questions there. Let me focus on the “What now?” piece because there are movement and therapy pieces. Which one should we start with? We can do both. As mentioned, I was in clinical practice for ten years and in organizational psychology practice for 30 years. My real love was studying organizations and helping them become psychologically healthy places to work.
I loved that work. It was great. However, during those 30 years, I observed how organizations and movements work. What I saw in the 2000s with the publication of Daniel Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris, the so-called “Four Horsemen,” was the creation of an intellectual movement that transformed into more of an activist movement, as you’ve noted.
However, every movement goes through cycles or phases. That’s what I see here. We’ve gone through a movement of getting people active, people becoming aware, pushing back legally, pushing back socially. I’m not convinced we won the war. There are still a lot of legal battles and equality wars. However, in terms of the singular goal of being known in the wider culture as what they are, that was largely won.
So, that piece we’ve achieved. We’re in what I call a consolidation phase right now. It will last for a few more years. When I looked at this, I considered myself a rabid activist. I’m always doing stuff—not just Recovering From Religion – but looking at how organizations and movements function. We’ve got a consolidation right now. The earlier leaders are leaving, dying or are involved in other things. The new people must get on the ground and develop their approach. It’s like breathing in and out. The movement is taking a breath right now, but also, there are many other things to take people’s energy and focus, which may not be bad. We will see new ways of acting and challenging religion in the coming years. Most importantly, I see many more secular people running for office, so we may see more “inside work” as people find their voice in school boards or Congress.
We’ve got thousands of people leaving the church, and there’s nowhere to go, yet they still want community. So, the real issue right now is building communities that are friendly to secular people and families. Where is their childcare for a group that wants to meet and have a secular program? I’ve been saying this for 20 years: if you want a movement, it has to be childcare-friendly. It has to be family-friendly.
So, I’m seeing some very quiet but powerful movements. It’s almost like the current underneath the sea. You can’t see it, but it’s there. It started with two things: Sunday Assembly and OASIS. Those are two organizations that you are familiar with. I helped start OASIS here in Kansas City, and we celebrated our 10th anniversary in April. Sunday Assembly is about a year or two older than that. My partner spoke at the Sunday Assembly in Detroit yesterday.
So, these are viable parts of the movement that may need to be recognized. Yet, isn’t that as important as whether Dawkins writes another book? That’s the way I see it. These are human beings bringing children and young people into a meeting once a week or once a month, and they’re dealing with secular issues. We flew Anthony Pandojas from Tufts University to speak at Kansas City OASIS yesterday. That will not make the atheist headlines, but it supports a growing secular movement that doesn’t show up on Capital Hill or the news.
Anthony is the paid humanist chaplain for Tufts University, which is pretty cool. But where are the humanist chaplains? There aren’t only a few of them; they didn’t exist five or ten years ago. So you ask, “What’s next?” That’s what’s next: building out our social support network, creating more humanist chaplains, and starting more family-friendly groups.
Looking at this from a religionist’s point of view, if I go from Kansas City to Nashville, Tennessee, I can find a Baptist church that’s very much like the one I went to, and I may even know people in that Baptist church. So, I’ve got a network or a potential network if I’m a Baptist. Why don’t we have that in the secular world? My partner called the Sunday Assembly people and said, “Hey, I’m gonna come up there. “
Do you want me to speak? And they said yes. How did they know about her? Why did they trust her? So they trusted me, knew what I do, and let her speak. That’s the beginning of networking and creating a social support network. I see Recovering From Religion at the very center of this whole thing. Because when that Baptist person who’s leaving their church calls us and says, “Where can I find community?” We turn around and say, “Here’s a Freethought Group in your city. Here’s an Oasis in the city right next to you. Here’s where you could go to a Sunday assembly if you’re in that place.”
We are connecting. When those people leave the church, we can help them find community. But a few things have to happen. There has to be a Recovering From Religion in the first place to catch them. I look at us as catching people when they fall out of the church, and then there has to be a secular community out there for us to send them on to.
So we will send people to Atheist United in Los Angeles if that’s where they’re at. We’ll send them to the Texas Freethought Church in Dallas if that’s where they’re from, Oasis in Toronto, or Oasis in Houston. We have a hugedatabase of communities that we can feed people into. So that’s probably not the answer you were looking for, but that’s where I see the movement going—building communities. Of course, those communities are interested in secular issues, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and challenging religious privilege.
Those new secular communities also support traditional organizations like American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association, big national organizations. But I prefer to be more interested in local organizations. I’m more interested in that local group that’s changing the way secularism is looked at within a local community and maybe helping a school board member get elected or going and complaining to a city council when they’re discriminated against because they’re a secular group meeting in a community center – which has happened more than once. We’ve been kicked out. Oasis people have been kicked out. I have two examples of Oasis people being kicked out of facilities because the local politician didn’t want us.
Jacobsen: Who was the source of the complaints? Who are the complainers?
Ray: We met at the Tony Aguirre Center in Kansas City, and we’d met there for a year. An election came, and they elected a new city councilman from that district. The city councilman found out that an “atheist” group, we’re a humanist group, not an atheist group, but those were his words—was meeting in the community center there. It’s open on Sundays. People come in and work out. It’s got a gym, workout facilities, and things. It has a meeting room. We were using the meeting room. It’s a gymnasium thing. He found out about it and decided to change the policy. They’re no longer going to rent to anyone on Sunday mornings. Isn’t that convenient and interesting? Oh, and by the way, he was an evangelical Christian.
I don’t know the full story in Houston, but they had the same thing happen to them several years ago. They got kicked out of a facility they were meeting in. The war is not over. We still fight discrimination against us today, and we’re on the lookout for it. For example, we volunteered with the City Union Mission for two years, feeding people experiencing homelessness. Before the third year started, they decided to find a way to get rid of us.
Jacobsen: So, we’ve got two points of contact before we wrap up. First, I wanted to talk about collaborations and the importance of those. Then, let’s call them lessons. So, collaboration. I now notice the vast breadth of secular and freethought organizations worldwide, not just in the United States. It’s everywhere now. There’s been such a global push for this level of equality, which has been great. The next step is the integration of effort. How have you done that? How would you recommend people do that?
Ray: You’re knocking on a door I have been working on for quite a while. Not long after I started Recovering From Religion and the Secular Therapy Project, I came up with the idea of the secular support network. It’s based on the idea that we’ve got national and international organizations like American Atheists, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association. Those are high-level organizations doing high-level work and dealing with the political stuff. But who cares for the person who walked out of the church this week and is looking for a new community, support, and information?
Churches do a pretty good job of supporting people. If somebody’s house burns down, the church will show up and help them. If somebody dies, the church will show up with a meal or two. But nobody was doing that 10 or 15 years ago for secular people, and there’s a need that crosses localities. So, as an organization—Recovering From Religion—we have been actively and intentionally reaching out to other organizations to create networks that can support people in the same ways that churches do but across wide ranges of geography—for example, death and dying. Churches do a good job of that, but we don’t. So why can’t we do something around that area? We’ve started working and cooperating with some people who are experts in death and dying and who were willing to come in and cooperate with us.
So, we’re starting, literally next month, a grief and loss service where we will be providing information and brochures that describe the issues secular people need around funerals and memorial services. We want to put that right next to all the Christian material in funeral homes. Every funeral home needs to have a brochure that says, “Here’s what you do when you get an atheist that dies.” Nobody’s doing that. It’s not our core mission at Recovering From Religion, but we can cooperate with other people to make that happen. We cooperate with LGBTQ groups.
We tabled at many pride events over June and interacted, did outreach, and cooperated. Even if they’re religious, we’ll still cooperate with them in trying to help people because there are so many LGBTQ people who suffer because they left religion or because religion made them suffer while they were still in it. I see us and other organizations that are similar to us or have missions focused on emotional and psychological support leading the way. There are a lot of other organizations joining with us.
That is a growing connection with many ideas coming out of it. People are starting to combine two and two and work across geographical boundaries. For example, Black Nonbelievers and the Central Florida Freethought Community have a yearly cruise. There are two or three other secular cruises now. They weren’t there ten years ago. I see OASIS, which is a nationwide network of about ten groups. Are you familiar with OASIS?
Jacobsen: I am, yes.
Ray: I thought you probably were. I helped start that organization here in Kansas City, and we have 70 to 100 people. We had 73 people show up yesterday to hear the humanist chaplain of Tufts University speak. That’s a network.
We now have a connection between OASIS and the secular hub at Tufts University. Others, like the secular hub in Denver, where I speak next week, are connected, too. So there’s much connection, and the collaboration will evolve from that connection, which may still need to be there, though not as strong as we’d like to see it.
But I can see that in 10 years, the network will grow. I see networks like spiderwebs. You will not catch flies if you only have three or four threads, but if you have 1,000 threads, you’ll catch many flies.
We’re still at the stage where we need more strings in our net to catch a lot. It will take a few more years before we start catching much more. When those networks help in political and social activism, we will see changes we don’t currently see. But I see a lot of it coming.
Locally, people are doing it, and we will soon start learning from each other. That will increase the synergy among these different groups. With that collaboration, we make progress. It’s more than one little place in Denver, one in Dallas, or one in Boston. It’s got to be a network of places that then gain political power, not because we’re the fastest-growing nonreligious group, but because we’re the fastest-growing network of nonreligious people who have political power and a vision for what we want this country to be and what kind of neighbour we want to be to our Canadian friends, by the way. I’ve got Canadian friends who are scared of what’s going on down here.
Jacobsen: We are, too, by the way. It’s not just there. I’ve interviewed many people worldwide in different contexts, from different ages and demographics. It’s hard to be surprised about much anymore. When you talk to people in other countries, assassination attempts and coup attempts of their leaders and governments are not new to them. This is America joining some of the more unsavoury parts of international affairs regarding internal matters. This has happened before. The last official one was in 1981 with Reagan. I’m aware Barack Obama in 2008 and Bush in 1998, or was it Clinton, had additional guards due to what happened to Reagan. So, a long, unillustrious history goes back to Roosevelt and Lincoln.
Ray: Three American presidents have been assassinated. And two others have been wounded: Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt wasn’t currently president; he ran for president when he got wounded.
It was his second time running for president. So you could say four or maybe five American presidents have either died (three did die) or had assassination attempts. Look at what happened to Trump yesterday. That’s the same thing that happened to Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was not president. He had been president after McKinley was assassinated.
No, that’s wrong. It was Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy who were all killed by assassins. Then Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and now Trump all had unsuccessful assassination attempts, but they still took a bullet. So that’s seven presidents out of how many we’ve had? If you look at it, your chance of being murdered, or at least having an attempted murder, if you’re running for president or are president, is pretty high. That goes with the territory.
How did we get off on that?
Jacobsen: Oh, your Canadian friends are worried. I don’t share that worry. In a sense, I don’t share the fear, although I realize the context. We can predict the same. I wouldn’t feel the fear. That’s the difference. Doing this kind of work, you learn a lot. You grow. You change. You adapt to new evidence from the world. What would you consider things that, at the moment, were failures but, in hindsight, were lessons?
Ray: I will go back to when I was in college. I do a whole talk on my civil rights work back then, protesting and such. I was also a church youth minister and created a bus ministry. These are both long stories, but I was still a Christian—a very liberal Christian within a pretty darn conservative independent Christian church—two of these churches. Over my college years, I was a paid youth minister and had semi-paid jobs.
I ultimately got fired from every one of those jobs I did. The first was because I brought another Sunday school class to meet with ours. We were the same denomination, Independent Christian Church, in the same city. The only problem was that the other Sunday school class was in a Black church. This was 1969-1970. I brought a Black Sunday school class to meet with the white Sunday school class I ran, and within a month, I was fired.
That’s a lesson learned about change within a structure and an institution. You can’t change the church from within. It doesn’t work. I had two other projects there; they were very successful, and as long as I was involved – I could make something succeed. The problem is when I’m not involved. How do you make sure what you’re doing has staying power? All three of my church projects ultimately failed. I learned a lot from those failures.
In those three examples, being only a college student taught me a lot about institutions, my dedication, and how other people work. When I entered graduate school, I had a mentor, Bill Barnes; I should have mentioned him earlier. Bill Barnes was an incredible mentor and civil rights leader who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. That’s the kind of person he was. He was my mentor at Scarritt College for Christian Workers. I went there because it was the most liberal college I could find that still did social justice work.
I learned a lot there, mostly being introduced to Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. It’s a very influential book in my philosophy about how to go about social justice and change. That was the learning piece of it. The church staff was the failure piece of it. Over the next 30 years, I worked inside Fortune 500 companies doing a lot of organizational psychology stuff. I can’t tell you all the stuff I learned, but I used that learning for over 30 years, so when I decided to start Recovering From Religion, I knew what the fuck I was going to do and how to do it. Hopefully, it is set up so that it lasts beyond my lifetime.
If you were ever to come inside Recovering From Religion—not that I’m asking or expecting that—and knew anything about organizational psychology, you would see that we’ve worked hard to create the structures that make for very strong and resilient organizations. We have an excellent training program, very well-trained leaders, and an executive director who understands the mission, keeps us on track, and has a great donor base.
Our robust fundraising program allows us to serve our clients and expand our outreach. Our reputation for financial responsibility in the secular world gives people confidence that we will use their money wisely, and that’s important.
We can meet our budget without having to scrape by and worry about where our next dime is coming from. For the first seven or eight years, we struggled with finances. A lot came out of my pocket, but we have learned much about fundraising. That was one area I needed to improve at. So that was a big thing, and, of course, I failed several times there. I also learned that you can rely on more than grants. Grants are hard to come by and may only last for one year. So, we have built our budget and process around solid financial philosophy and accountability. I could talk all day about places I failed and what I’ve learned, but is that good enough for you, or do you want more?
Jacobsen: That should be good. What are the things you were pretty much right about all along?
Ray: I was right about how you train and recruit people. We have a philosophy that I was right about, and that’s what I call the Marine philosophy, like the U.S. Marines’ “The few, the proud, the Marines.” If you want good people, you must make them jump through hoops. Just because someone fills out a volunteer application doesn’t mean they will make a good volunteer. They have to prove it to us.
We make people go through an interview process. There are jobs with fewer hoops than what we put you through. Once you’ve made it through the application process, the interview process, the self-training process, the one-on-one training process, and the supervised training process, that’s five steps, and every one of those steps is important. If you make it through all five, you’ll make a good volunteer, but we get many people dropping out at each step. So that’s our philosophy, and that’s a philosophy we’ve had since the very beginning.
You can volunteer for us if you are dedicated and willing to follow our model. I could put that in the “I’ve always known”column. I always knew it would take much work to find a good executive director. We went through two executive directors early on in Recovering From Religion’s life, and they weren’t a fit. That was my fault.
I failed there for various reasons. One, I’ll take responsibility for; the other, I won’t. But finding the right person is challenging. Once you do, it’s a blessing. It’s amazing what Gayle can do, how people love her, and how tough she can be. She doesn’t put up with bullshit. She keeps us laser-focused on our mission to provide “Hope, Healing and Support for those dealing with doubt and nonbelief.”
Jacobsen: I remember the politician’s quote about her being the most dangerous woman in Tennessee. These are the personalities, from local Sunday Assembly leaders to big leaders like myself, Dan Barker, and others. These are the personalities making things happen. Some people make mistakes, too. I’ve also talked to people who have had public controversies in our communities, but they’re usually not that major. The big thing is, do we have a culture of people being able to forgive, be forgiven, improve, and show themselves worthy of that stature they had before? That could be an open question that we need to ask ourselves. It’s a bunch of freethought communities.
Ray: Yes. I want to add one thing. I wanted to say earlier, and I don’t think I did, a little piece of philosophy: activism comes from the community. It’s an important concept. Activism does not come from individual action. It comes from the community. Every successful activist had a community at their back.
Jacobsen: Constantly, there are people whose names we’ve forgotten, but who were the only reason and ways by which people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were able to rise and represent a movement and be “the movement.”
Ray: That’s right. Exactly right. One of my visions for the future is to develop young leadership, to develop leaders in the secular community. That was my career for 30 years. Although I have yet to succeed in that area, I would love to systematically develop leaders who could step up and develop more communities.
Jacobsen: My critical question to you, though, would be, how do we make it so that it’s not like some leadership programs can be, where it’s an ego thing? It’s an ego game. It’s selfish self-interest rather than someone taking this training to be of better use to a community. How do we bolster against that, if we can?
Ray: You’ve already hit the nail on the head. That’s why I’ve yet to be successful. Because I look out there and see many egos that want to be leaders. I don’t call them leaders. That’s not a true leader. Unfortunately, we are plagued with one thing. I’ll say it out loud because I’ll get in trouble for it, but I’ll say this. There are a plethora of ex-ministers who are now atheists, and they all want to become atheist ministers. They all want to create a church again as an atheist, and they don’t want to share leadership. They want to be the charismatic person.
Jacobsen: I’ve been told about this. I haven’t been told specific names, but I’ve been told this is a trend that people, leaders coming out of these churches or whatever religious tradition, want the same automatic status for whatever reason.
Ray: Oh, they’re egos. I even wrote an article and published it in American Atheist magazine. They are narcissists. Most big, successful ministers are probably narcissistic. When they leave, they don’t lose that. They want to create another following. I’ve watched half a dozen of these people come out splashily but unsuccessfully try to create their little cult or following. I’ve only seen one of them make the transition successfully, and he’s one of the least egotistical people I know among that group. He’s still egotistical. I won’t say that he’s not. So there are leaders out there, and if you say you want to develop leadership, they’ll jump on the bandwagon. They’re the last people I want to teach, train, or work with. I want people who are capable of cooperating and collaborating with others.
Jacobsen: That’s an important issue. Thank you for your time.
Ray: I appreciate you doing this. For whatever reason, you’re going to put it out there. I do have this thing in the back of my mind. I’m 73. I will kick the bucket somewhere in the next 20 years. Who knows? I want to pass along some of what we’ve accomplished, how and why we did it, and the philosophy behind it. So, thank you for doing this. This helps categorize and document the whole or part of the process in some small way. So, thanks for doing it. Let me know when or if any of it comes out. We’ll push it on our end.
Jacobsen: Excellent. Thank you, Darrel. I appreciate it, as always.
Professor George Belliveau specializes in Theatre Education where he integrates theatre as a form of research and artistic expression across multiple disciplines. He is an international leader in research-based theatre, and has shared his performative approach to research in numerous countries around the world. His co-edited book Research-based as Methodology(Intellect, 2016) establishes the complexity and richness of this emerging field of artistic research. His most recent project Contact! Unload, a research-based play about the stress injuries that soldiers suffer post-deployment, has been shared nationally and internationally, including a private showing for Prince Harry, a soldier himself and advocate for men’s mental health. His arts-based approach to research has been successfully funded by CIHR, SSHRC, Movember, among other sources.
Marvin “Marv” Westwood is Professor Emeritus of Counselling Psychology, in Educational & Counselling Psychology, and Special Education at the University of British Columbia. He currently has a post-retirement appointment to the Faculty of Education. His major areas of teaching and research focused on development, teaching and delivery of group-based approaches for counselling clients, and men’s psychological health. He developed the UBC Veterans Transition Program to help promote recovery from war related stress injuries for which he received both the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals in 2005 and 2013. In 2012 he established the Centre for Group Counselling and Trauma (currently he’s Senior Consultant to the Centre).
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A Smoke Behind the Rope
Written and directed by Rzgar Hama
Two young people face torture and death on the longest, darkest night of their lives.
Set in a high-security prison, “A Smoke Behind the Rope” follows the connection that blooms between Golnaz and Farhad on a night that they fear will end in death. What follows is a poetic dance of story, memory, imagination and passion in the face of oppression.
Golnaz and Farhad, accidental activists, find themselves in solitary confinement in a prison famous for torture and mysterious disappearances. Imagination and a powerful need for connection allow these two young strangers to find ways to share their pain, joy, fear, and humour in an environment of great uncertainty and profound paranoia. Stories of resistance are etched on the prison walls, a powerful reminder of the struggles and injustices those who resist authoritarian systems face.
“We are thrilled to bring ‘A Smoke behind the Rope’ to the stage and share the powerful stories of these two political prisoners with audiences,” said Rzgar Hama, the playwright and director of the production. “Coming from a Kurdish background, I was exposed to accounts of political detainees and executions from a young age. The experience hit particularly closer when my brother narrowly escaped being hanged,” he said.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so today, we are here with George and Marv, who had the opportunity to see “A Smoke Behind the Rope.” So, what were your first impressions in watching the play?
Professor George Belliveau: Well, I had the opportunity to see a few scenes before I saw the production in the theatre. I read a little bit of the script. So, I came in with some prior knowledge of the content. I come to the work from a research-based theatre lens, which resonates with Rzgar’s work. It is theatre based on either documented history, interviews, etc. In this play (A Smoke Behind the Rope), Rzgar drew from artifacts that he could glean, as well as a lot from memory and what he’s heard, which lends itself quite nicely to the theatre because then it moves us to the imagination. So, bringing a so-called research-based theatre approach into a formal theatre space … if I think of going to that space in Yaletown (where Rzgar’s play was performed) … I think of the theatre experience right from the get-go … as you walk into a space.
First, you’re around the streets in that affluent (Yaletown) area, with everyone drinking $7 coffees and $12 juices. There’s affluence. There’s freedom. Then you walk into the community center, a lovely, dynamic, diverse space with basketball courts and diverse folks playing basketball. Then we walk into this ominous lobby space that could be a holding ground … for something. Trains us to shifted in this space. It’s cold, with cement floors and big walls. I then felt this transition, as you had to go through a small entrance to get into the theatre space. So, that whole journey was the beginning of “we’re going to visit a couple of cells in some ways, but the world constantly exists outside.” I’ll stop there so Marv can jump in.
Professor Marvin Westwood: Thanks, George. This parallels what I’m saying. You need someone or some event to induct us into the depths of darkness where we see these two people. Second, the screen set for me was too white. It didn’t look messy enough. It was as if they were wanted the darkness to come into the psychic self by just being there. “Oh my gosh,” just being there, this doom base is haunting. That’s the second thing. The other thing I would add is about the performers: Wouldn’t it be great if the performers could be actors who were from an oppressed regime where they lived or knew this experience more intimately? These were very skilled actors, but they didn’t grow up in that region, did they?
Jacobsen: Not as far as I know.
Westwood: No, they performed very well, but again, this might be my prejudice. If they spoke in accented English, it would feel even more real. This is going on. At the end, I noted after the play that it was very well prepared and directed, being very action-oriented with a lot of movement, expression, and intonation. It was exceptionally well done.
When people are like caged animals, they go from joy to fear to whatever and smash down the walls symbolically. in the audience, and I have been there.
The impact of this play on me was the following.”
My recommendation for this play is to have Rzgar come on to the stage and speaking to the audience he would contextualizes it for us – the audience. This would add validation, because in Canada, yes we have prisons; if you’ve ever worked in them, you know what they’re like. But most people are assumed innocent, until proven guilty, whereas, in these regimes, they’re guilty until they’re killed!
In addition, at the end of the play, it would be very impressive if the two actors stood up after the play, and were then joined by two other people coming on stage and briefly speaking to us. These two have been people invited to speak as they had lived through in real life, similar experiences and comment briefly: “I was with you. I was
It would be uplifting and powerful for the audience if there were a voice by two other people from those regimes who could attest to this. In Canada, it’s very valuable for someone who’s lived there when we watch a theatre piece. They’ve let us into their worlds. That’s all I would say. The beginning and the ending should be contextualized more.
Belliveau: Yes. Building on what Marv is saying, there are several things you shared. Research-based theatre, as we (our UBC Lab) conceptualizes it, constantly evolves and emerges. One of the principles we use is a three-act structure. As Marv mentioned, the first act is an introduction to the context, whether by someone with lived experience or someone who has studied it … to immerse the audience into this genre of theatre gently.
The second act is the play, which takes the most time to generate, create, write, and perform. The third act is how we leave the audience, leaving the theatre with certain thoughts about the context. This is usually curated with someone leading a discussion or commenting on their lived experience.
Not everyone necessarily likes this model of research-based theatre because it sounds very academic. Given the context, there’s a sense that you have to prepare the audience. They can’t just walk in and take it in, like when they see a film. The choice to do this can be one way or a combination. Marv is speaking to the ethos of research-based theatre, which allows more opportunities for people to understand that this is a real context, followed by something fictional based on that.
In that three-act structure, sometimes, the constraint for theatre-makers is that they want to only show … and not the telling at the beginning and end. But Marv and I believe in ethically preparing the audience and checking in with them with a post-performance discussion. The formal theatre world sometimes operates differently from Research-based Theatre, and Rzgar’s company is potentially moving more toward theatre rather than research-based theatre. That’s how I saw it.
Jacobsen: Go ahead.
Westwood: Scott, when you mentioned the serious nature of the play about people being killed, is that true?
Jacobsen: As far as my conversations with Rzgar, there are contexts in which people are transitioned from prisons to be killed at some point.
Westwood: But, George, wouldn’t that be part of their dialogue in the script? “You know you’re going to die.” “I know I’m going to die.” Let’s just blow this place, whatever, I didn’t hear the threat of death.
Belliveau: That would add to the dramaturgy, letting the audience know there’s this weight at all times. It’s the human thing, is that we all know that we’re going to die, and many of us try to think that we’re going to live until 150. Marv … you might with your health and balanced lifestyle.
Westwood: Yeah, right.
Belliveau: Sprightly young man. But it got edited out, Marv. You can be more explicit when discussing the intro and outro, but let the theatre piece be. It’d be good, Marv, when you mentioned the physicality. I thought that was one of the strengths of the piece, even though it was white and dreamy in some ways. The possibilities … they sucked out the marrow of what was possible within that. They tried not to paint the bleakness … and instead to say, “We’ve only got 10 hours. Let’s be as positive as we can.” The freedom of the body was great … because I’ve seen many plays based on research where it’s very talk, talk, talk, talk, and text, text, text! Translating those emotions into the body is hard, but there were no issues here. The chemistry between Rzgar’s direction, the text, and the actors invited this space. The actors used the whole space.
They expanded the possibilities, and that’s a credit to their artistic choices: “Let’s not be beaten down by the system.” Despite knowing there was no hope, we were reminded of the sounds of other people being taken out of their cells. Rzgar should take credit for their animation, activation, and life force, which reestablished that this is a tragedy. This play is a tragedy.
Like any of the early Shakespearean plays, it comes across as what could have been versus what is. The characters are fighting and held down, yet they have such stamina and life in them, which makes them more tragic. He’s accomplished that, and that’s what hit me so strongly.
It’s an enormously valuable play … for theatre and research. This regime (represented within the play) represents one of many regimes today, and this is probably going on somewhere right now. It’s extremely relevant in Canada because we tend to go to sleep on these things (unaware) due to our (established) legal system and concept of justice, although not always perfect. People (we) need to be shaken up to realize that people (around the world) are being wiped out in silence. That’s his (rich) artistic and political contribution to this country as a newcomer, as a new Canadian.
Westwood: The play depicts the lived experiences of humans. He’s almost there. But he needs to appear because he’s a dynamic, sincere, committed guy or his equivalent,
What happens to people in contexts of war, in contexts of confinement?
Jacobsen: Yes. What happens psychologically?
Westwood: Yes. Psychologically, they develop behaviour indicative of post-traumatic stress syndrome, impulsive acute depression, suicidality, helplessness, and acting out of desperation. Clinically, they would probably exhibit these symptoms. I don’t know how long they’re in there. The way they were acting made it seem like they had just arrived. They were much more animated than those we’ve worked with who have been held hostage. By the time they’re released, they’re lazy and almost dead.
Rzgar somehow conveys that this couple is hopeful. Their animation was healthy. You saw it. They could move, rotate, and jump, almost like they had ballet training or something. His introduction would change all that and show that this is one desperate last attempt to feel life and enjoy life. They could put that in the script.
But what happens to people is that the idea is to break them, they become comatose, never resist again, and walk head down to their death penalty because it’s more convenient for the oppressors. They don’t fight anymore. Isolation, Scott, is one of the ways you kill people. You isolate them psychologically and kill them emotionally, and the greatest punishment for any human is to isolate them from the collective. We visited those sites if they were in separate rooms or cells, like when we were in Dachau in Germany. They were intentional.
Make a small room and then never let them have contact. Eventually, they’ll collapse, not because they’re being beaten.
They don’t have to beat them. Isolation kills humans. So that’s my answer. The play is refreshingly possible to be different.
Jacobsen: George, when it comes to characterizing this in terms of a play, especially with a research background in plays, how do you coach and find actors to portray this effectively?
Belliveau: Well, that’s a good question. As Marv said, knowing that reality, of course, to play that on stage would be so hard on the audience that there would be very few moments they could tolerate. We have seen films that almost torture the mind. Certainly, playwrights, especially in the thirties and forties, explored the theatre of pain, of cruelty, like Artaud and other playwrights.
But usually, productions try to flip it (pain to hope). Rzgar almost flips exactly what Marv was saying, showing a moment of defiance. I kept thinking about the play … due to the prisoners being beaten down … maybe only 5% of them (or 5% of their energy) dreamed of bursting out. The oppression of isolation is so strong it nearly wipes them out … but in a dream state (where the play exists) … that 5% of possibility is what we see – the hope, defiance.
The characters could be lying down … and in the play we see what they would like to do in their imagination (they are so physically and emotionally beaten that most of them would be lying down most of the time). I saw the play almost in that state, showing what was possible … but the reality was that they were slugging around, confined, barely able to hear the person next to them. But that 5% in their imagination, which was white and clean, not dirty and smelling of urine, was protected by Rzgar, showing hope, resistance of defeat.
Does one make that explicit, or must the audience take it in? Because it is quite a contrast between the reality these folks might be experiencing and the physicality we see.
Westwood: The text was bleak at times, although hopeful. To close, where George is triggered, is why I felt hope in the dark space of despair, symbolically, they smashed the wall between them. Notice that they come alive when they connect and make a human connection.
It’s a very powerful subliminal message. You can do a lot as soon as you have one other person with you. It brings you back to life. That’s why they separate them, so they don’t connect.
That was very clever. They couldn’t be doing all that if they were alone. The play was about the interaction. If you want to do a play about someone in a cell who’s in deprivation, they have done that, but it doesn’t look like that. There’s no action. They came back to life because the wall was broken.
As a psychologist, you always want to be in connection, even in the darkest times. Working with soldiers, it doesn’t matter how they’re being shot up, but if you’re all in there together, talking and struggling, you have a better chance of getting out and living longer. So that’s it. I appreciate having seen it, and you can see I get activated talking about it.
He’s made a tremendous contribution that he can make here in North America to the reality happening in so many places worldwide. It’s quite universal.
Jacobsen: George, any final words?
Belliveau: Yes. That’s a great observation, Marv. The release happens in the communication between the two, and the play does that beautifully. There’s a release when they have hope of communication. She gets to speak to her parents through him. He gets to communicate with a girl he was interested in but never acted upon it. They enter each other’s stories of trauma, supporting one another. The fourth wall is broken, and the cells are exploded. The power of those moments was in the other person being there to witness and create space for release before they went to execution.
There was a sense of being cleansed. They were always there to support one another. The dynamic between the two is an act of resistance.
Westwood: Thank you, Rzgar, for persisting in doing this.
Jacobsen: Excellent. Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate it.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/03
Kevin Bolling is the executive director of the Secular Student Alliance. He has served in that position since 2017. Kevin brings with him 20 years of nonprofit leadership experience. His career has included over 10 years of student association management and on-campus program development from Los Angeles to Boston. For 10 years, Kevin served as the Executive Director of the California Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Foundation, a charitable trust serving the healthcare needs of the industries’ largely immigrant workforce. Most recently, Kevin served as the Director of Philanthropy at the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, a major LGBTQ arts advocacy organization, whose youth outreach work has moved thousands of hearts and minds across the US towards embracing LGBTQ equality.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, the Secular Student Alliance, you’ve been with them for a while now.
Kevin Bolling: I’ve been with the organization for over seven years.
Jacobsen: Congratulations on your longevity. That is unusual in the secular communities.
Bolling: Typically, it’s a term, but we continue to see the organizations’ professionalization. Consequently, you are seeing longer and longer tenures with differing leadership.
Jacobsen: That is normal for any rights movement. That is fair.
Bolling: Someone recently mentioned this to me as a consolidation period, where people now look more for, “Okay, we’ve come to prominence. We have won at least modest public acceptance. Now it’s about building community.” So, yes, it is akin to a Sunday Assembly, with activities more oriented around building that community.
Part of that professionalization is also the top layer of the community aspect. If you look not that far back for the atheist secular movements, in part, it was about being a personality and being non-religious, whatever that meant for you. But yes, as you pointed out, we are continuing to look more and more at what we have to be doing, what our goals are, what we are trying to achieve, and how we will achieve that. Therefore, being an atheist or non-religious alone does not suffice. Part of our goal, and we hope this for our students, is that you are bettering your community. It would help if you were involved with it. You must be active in it. And so that is how you do that. We often say, “Great, you are an atheist. Now what? What are you going to do?” That is the part we must address—what will we do?
Jacobsen: The point about personalities is very good. A significant part of the movement was built around personalities, especially in the mid-2000s and 2010s, around, for example, Dawkins with militant atheism, and as those waned, both secular and religious individuals note that as part of the historical record now. The fact is, most people in leadership positions are seasonal. It does not matter because most of the organizations are democratic. So you are voted in for a couple of election cycles at most, but then it is someone else’s turn, and it is appropriate. No one gets too accustomed to any single personality. Plus, we have done quite well. Some people have failings as leaders, and we have held them to account to some degree. The open question for me, looking at the United States, Canada, or elsewhere, is insofar as leaders make various degrees and styles of mistakes or commit crimes, what is the degree to which we, as communities, are willing to forgive and reintegrate them, because they have a record of success? However, at the same time, they have done something wrong. So, do we, because we are not referencing anything transcendent, right? It is an interesting moral dilemma quietly bubbling in some of the community.
Bolling: That is an accurate statement. Each organization in the secular movement must make those determinations for themselves. We understand that, as human beings, we make mistakes. Hopefully, we continue to evolve, grow, improve, and learn as people and organizations.
If you look at how much society has changed its perception of values and those things, it has been so quick in such a short period. An organization that is also keeping up, making sure it is relevant, creating good, and meeting the needs of its members and partnerships within the secular community is essential. All of that comes into play when operating organizationally and even as individuals.
Yes, leaders and organizations will make mistakes. We will have the maturity to accept when that happens, admit our wrongs, and learn from them. Depending on the situation, a leader or member may need help to continue with the organization. We will continue to grow, learn, mature, and evolve with the organization and our members’ needs.
Jacobsen: I’m sure I am subject to that, thinking back about things I shouldn’t have said in a certain way. A critical thought experience when considering this is if you take the case of an independent organization that has been around for 25 years. If they have done one or two wrongs or had a leader that did something wrong, they are gone, demoted, or similar. What’s the alternative? The alternative is to restart an entirely new organization and develop that for 25 years, restructure or change a policy, or wait for the next election cycle of an already established organization that may have a thousand, 10,000, or 20,000 members. Then, build from that existing base and show that you can, as a human institution, improve, build on mistakes, and continue growing. That perspective sets it in mind for me, where you can say, “Okay, this person made a mistake, but I can still work with them and also acknowledge that I have made mistakes, too.”
Bolling: Yes, I agree. However, starting over is sometimes a good thing. No organization wants to go through that arduous process, but it can be creative and energizing. As an organizational leader, I would refrain from undertaking that project and aspect. It’s much work. But there’s also that reality. As organizations, it’s easy to fall into the mindset of “we’ve done this,” even for some of the most innovative organizations constantly changing and adapting. You still have that history and the things we’ve done a certain way. When you start anew, you must look at everything from a new stage to a new process. This can often lead to doing things differently.
Jacobsen: So what is new and exciting at the S.S.A.?
Bolling: Yes, with the Secular Student Alliance, it’s been challenging for most campus-based groups. COVID was a hit, not just to campus-based groups but to our entire society. However, we have been coming out and meeting the students where they are. When we look back on the impact of COVID-19, especially on young people, in a few years, when sociologists and psychologists reflect, it will be seen as a much more dramatic effect than anyone realized, especially our youth. So, we have been trying to meet the students where they are.
In higher education, you see the growing mental health crisis among young people. This played out because students needed to be more confident about restarting chapters after COVID-19. Their experience had been classes, social activities, and everything on a computer screen. They were so, making that transition back to in-person created some hesitancy and anxiety.
Additionally, a lot of the social learning we did from being in groups, being with people, seeing leaders interact with groups, or being someone in a group and having that experience was missing for many young people. They didn’t learn those skills. So, we have been going back to basics—training on how to do an event, how to hold a meeting, what it means to be a leader, and how to empower and encourage people. We’ve been doing a lot of that.
This last year has been a significant growth period for us, with chapters coming back on campuses and students engaging, building community, and activating on their campuses. That has been fantastic. We love to see that happen and enjoy it when the students dive in. Many of the students we work with are in leadership, so they have these leadership experiences and “aha” moments. Watching that happen and witnessing their personal and leadership development is great. We’re excited about what is coming up in the upcoming academic year.
With the continual rise of Christian nationalism and the ever-present threat of Project 2025, we have the educational rights to show the documentary Bad Faith. Our chapters are signing up to show that on their campuses for free.
The people behind the documentary provide speakers for Q&A sessions on campus, heightening the conversation and ensuring students are aware. At the same time, we’re working with Campus Takeover and a couple of other campus voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups. So, here’s information on Project 2025 and growing Christian nationalism, along with voter registration efforts.
We have dual programs in which many chapters will be involved this fall. This is in addition to our regular webinars, student trainings, student meetings, and all the other programmatic activities we do. We always highlight something special each semester that addresses the current need. 84% of our student members are registered to vote. Having them be advocates on campus and working with groups specializing in voter registration and get-out-the-vote initiatives is a great way for them to be visible, active, and energized on campus.
Jacobsen: People might hear these terms often: Project 2025, Christian nationalism, and Christian nationalists. Regarding the latter two, how do we distinguish Christian nationalism and nationalists from Christians of all stripes who might be patriotic?
Bolling: Yes, there is a difference. Christian nationalism is a political ideology that seeks to transform our democratic society and government into a system based on Christian theology. This involves changing our laws, affecting the courts, and impacting people’s rights, all from one person’s or a small group’s religious perspective. In this case, it is Christianity. There are many Christians who are patriotic and not Christian nationalists. However, Christian nationalism is an intentional ideology that blends patriotism with a desire to transform our democracy into a theocracy.
Jacobsen: What are the concerns of young people, particularly those aged 18 to approximately 25, who are students on campuses where the Secular Student Alliance is active, bringing forward these ideologies? Also, in general, what concerns are they expressing?
Bolling: The intentional plans that religious conservatives in coalition with Republicans have been pushing on education are a major concern. We’ve had students who were active in protesting when Florida passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bills and book bans.
These actions, which I call “justifications” in air quotes, for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people are based solely on someone else’s religious beliefs. There is no other rationale besides that. This is a significant issue for our students who are passionate about separating church and state. If someone imposes their religious beliefs, it directly affects them.
When the Supreme Court made certain decisions, many of our students were not only activated in protest but also ensured that their campus health centers continued to provide reproductive healthcare for students. They saw this as part of a contract: “You are here to provide us healthcare. This is part of what we need.”
One of our chapters worked on getting Plan B and handing it out for free to students on campus. We’ve now shared that information with our other chapters, saying, “Here’s where you can get this and here are options for you to distribute this as well.” Our students see the need to ensure that someone else’s religious beliefs do not impact their reproductive healthcare, and they are also taking action about it.
We have students who, under new campus free speech laws, are facing Proud Boy-type groups coming onto campuses.
Jacobsen: I apologize on behalf of Canada.
Bolling: Right, because that guy came from Canada, right? The original guy?
Jacobsen: The original Proud Boys? Yes.
Bolling: We’re seeing Proud Boy groups coming onto campuses and harassing our students because they’re non-religious, harassing LGBT students, and harassing Black students. In conservative states right now, that’s allowed because of this ultimate right to free speech.
We also see that being played out by Christian students who believe they have the right to discriminate against other students. So, while it’s under the guise of free speech, it’s not, and in some cases, it’s Christian nationalists and Christian students who feel privileged to use their speech to discriminate or harass other students, which we do not think is acceptable.
Jacobsen: Do you think that comes down to internalizing a common mythology or misunderstanding of the language of rights? Human rights are meant as an application of an ethics of universalism, balanced with one another. This idea of absolutism needs to be corrected in terms of its use.
Bolling: I agree with what you said. And there’s a balance. Put, your rights begin where mine end, or your rights end where mine begin.
Jacobsen: That’s very good.
Bolling: But what’s happening is that politicians and the extremist conservative right-wing are using terms like “parents’ rights,” “students’ rights,” “free speech,” and “freedom” to privilege Christian students over other students and allow discrimination to happen because of one’s, in this case, Christian beliefs. They are using words that we would all agree on as principles that Americans tend to be very proud of, but they’re using them to privilege Christianity intentionally.
Jacobsen: And secular values aren’t easily cataloged as left-wing. For instance, I published an interview with Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He’s a registered Republican, and you and I agree on many things. So, we’re referring to an ideology when talking about extreme rights. To play devil’s advocate, what conservative views do students within the Secular Student Alliance umbrella agree with? Also, what areas in which left-wing points can go in that same ideological, dogmatic view to reverse that point of view? They go too far.
Bolling: It comes down to, for most of our students and a secular society, we have the separation of church and state. One aspect of that is the freedom of and from religion. They work hand in hand. For conservative people who are secular, and for secular and progressive people, they need each other. Yes, you will have people who say there should be no religion at all; let’s get rid of it. In my experience of interviewing many secular people, that’s a minority viewpoint, or it’s not a majoremphasis.
In the U.S., you have the right to practice your religion without interference from the government and, for the most part, without interference from other people. At the same time, you don’t have the right to impose your religion on others. We don’t want the government involved in dictating what you can and can’t preach, nor do we want the government digging into the finances of religious organizations under our current laws. You are protected by the government and protected from the government. So, you get to practice your religion and don’t impose it on others. They work together because they balance each other.
Jacobsen: You had a project with one of the most creative activist groups in the American landscape, the Satanic Temple. I am aware of the American comedian and semi-political commentator John Oliver doing a bit in one of his episodes on the After School Satan Club. Joking aside, how is this partnership developing? How are they providing a theoretical foundation with some actual practical application, and how are you providing them with infrastructure?
Bolling: Yes, we have had an ongoing working relationship with the Satanic Temple for a number of years. After-School Satan Clubs are a counter to the Good News Clubs. The Good News Club comes mainly into elementary schools under the guise of being a club for Christian students who want to participate. However, it’s often driven by adults and is about proselytizing, not about students getting together to pray or learn about the Bible.
Our partnership with the Satanic Temple helps provide a balance and counters the influence of the Good News Clubs by offering an alternative that emphasizes critical thinking and secular values. We help to provide infrastructure support to facilitate their activities and ensuring they have the resources needed to operate effectively within schools.
It’s important to recognize the intention behind these campus initiatives. We’re seeing the continued development of this or the next generation of this, which is passing in multiple states now; students are getting release time from classes to attend a particular church to pray. They are missing out on instructions to go to church.
And again, this is under the guise of “everyone can come,” but it’s a tactic to proselytize and recruit additional students. The Satanic Temple goes in with After School Satan Clubs. They’re great. But they’re intentional about why they’re going in. They’re going in as an alternative to Good News Clubs. They’re going in to give students real places to have conversations about science, critical thinking, and values. Those are all positive things. If you read the seven tenets of the Satanic Temple, it would be hard for anyone to disagree with those—they’re good values.
Jacobsen: I bought some paraphernalia myself.
Bolling: The intention of the two, Good News Clubs versus what the Satanic Temple is doing, is very different. The Satanic Temple cleverly and creatively uses their religious designation to challenge the often Christian privilege that we see in education, government, society, and places where it shouldn’t be. From that religious organizational perspective, I appreciate what they’re doing.
We were very interested in partnering with them. We have chapters in middle schools, high schools, and colleges. This was a chance for us to expand that reach to students who are increasingly younger and uninvolved in organized religion. The Satanic Temple would push back, saying this isn’t organized religion, which they have to say, and I understand that.
So yes, we have provided a curriculum. They have a curriculum that they’re using. We focus on making this an enriching experience for the young people involved. We shared our 15-week curriculum with them, which they can use to engage students in discussions and developing topics. We also provide lots of free stuff for them, like stickers and other materials.
Bolling: It’s also a fun, engaging, and rewarding process for the students. The SSA and the Satanic Temple have had a long relationship of not always partnering but getting along, doing things together, and appreciating each other’s work. They’ve got some great staff, and we enjoy working with them.
Jacobsen: How is the integration going two months into the new board member’s term? There’s usually a bump, period.
Bolling: We do our board cycle with nominations every year as part of our ongoing process. Our board is specifically designed to have 14 members, two of which are student positions. This way, we have several positions coming up each term to prevent large turnovers at any one time. We always have a bit of new blood, ideas, and energy coming in while maintaining a longer perspective and history to keep things balanced. We have a pretty integrated training process and orientation for new members. Most of the new members were at our summer conference, where they got to talk to students, see what interests them, and learn from them as they began their tenure with the organization.
We are also starting a three to five-year strategic plan. We began developing it in January, but when COVID hit in March, we decided not to proceed with a strategic plan during a pandemic. Coming out of it, we did a short two-year strategic plan, and now we are doing our three to five-year plan. We had a session at our conference where board members spoke directly to students about our mission and values, gathering feedback on various topics. We will also have surveys going out to our students, donors, and supporters, and we will be talking to many of our partner organizations. Some of our supporters who want to have conversations with our board members will also be able to do so. We want this to be an integrated learning process to see where we’re headed in the next three to five years.
Jacobsen: So, Project 2025, what will impact public education, post-secondary education, and the mental health or reactions of the student base?
Bolling: I’ll start with the second part first. From the anti-DEI, anti-colour of history, and “Don’t Say Gay” bills in Florida, we saw the chilling effect that had on students and student leaders. The idea was to suppress their voices, deny their existence and agency, and ultimately make them shut up and go away.
It was scary how that worked, how students felt that pressure and did not want to do much of it. So, that concept works. Project 2025 is on steroids as far as what it wants to do for poor, socially or economically disadvantaged students, LGBT+ students, students of colour, and any minority—disadvantaged students in general. Reading the plan, they’re very carefulwith their language, but there’s always a caveat. They want to reduce Pell and graduate student grants except for a small population of wealthy white Christian students. Almost everything, especially about education or young people, is worded that way. It’s obvious what they want to do with that, but for education. So, yes, they want to privatize scholarships. So, a lot of the government scholarships go away. Then there’s the Betsy DeVos aspect of these predatory lender financial aids.
Biden’s been going after. You’ve been paying and paid that loan, but you will never pay it off because it was written badly. It’s designed so you can never get out of it, so you will always be paying. These students are in a debt trap. Yes, Project 2025 doesn’t just double down; it’s all that. They are privatizing scholarships and basic financial aid.
So yes, for the first young people, you will always be in debt if you go. It’s to discourage you, make it harder, and reduce the number of people going into higher education, except for that slight population they want. They preclude that by making school vouchers universal all across the United States, intentionally taking money out of public education and putting it in…
While they don’t say it specifically, into religious private schools, the example of what their game plan has already been happening in Florida is what they want to bring nationally. This is to schools that can discriminate against who comes in. So LGBT+ students and students of colour don’t have to provide any Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations.
There needs to be accountability for educational outcomes. Public schools have to undergo testing. You’ve got to do the testing. That doesn’t happen with private schools, so what they do with that is amazing.
But then, LGBT+ students go through the entire government work and take out the words gay, lesbian, and gender from everything in the government. We’re not going to track it. We won’t take care of it so that we can intentionally discriminate against it. So, LGBT+ students face devastating requirements—open discrimination against LGBT+ students, especially trans students. For race, it’s very similar. Many programs designed to look at lower economic populations associated with populations of colour are being eliminated.
It’s again very clear who wants to go to college. We eliminated Head Start for younger students. This strips away any of those resources and other things. So, it’s interesting how it’s all about destroying public education in general.
Jacobsen: How can people get involved by donating money, expertise, time, or physical labour?
Bolling: Sure, we always say that our organization and people donate to us so that we can provide, and almost everything we do is free services for students, so go to our website and donate. We always appreciate that. We are also looking to see if someone knows of any students. Please tell them about the organization. If you’re near a college or university, we’d love to work with you to help us identify students where our chapters are all student-led. We would love it if people could have a contact, and we’d love that introduction to the organization. Also, let students know about our Secular Activist Scholarships. Let them know about our leadership development conference in the summer. So, easy ways to get involved and ensure students know what’s happening.
Jacobsen: Excellent. Kevin, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/02
Hiroko Hashimoto, born on January 27, 1946, in Yamaguchi Prefecture (the same prefecture as former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), has led a distinguished career in education, international development, and women’s advocacy. Graduating from Kyoto Prefectural University with a major in Japanese literature, she furthered her education by earning a Master’s degree from UC Berkeley Library School while working at the University of Hiroshima Library. Hashimoto’s dedication to women’s issues began with her establishment of an Information Center on Women at Japan’s National Women’s Education Center. She then moved to the Women in Development Section at the UN ESCAP in Bangkok, where she organized a Regional Conference for the 4th World Conference on Women held in Beijing, serving as a Social Affairs Officer. Her academic career includes roles as a professor and vice president at Jumonji University and principal of Jumonji High School. Representing Japan at the UN Commission for the Status of Women from 2011 to 2017, Hashimoto has been instrumental in advancing gender equality globally. Since 2022, she has served as the president of the UN Women National Committee, continuing her lifelong commitment to women’s empowerment and development.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the biggest hurdle for women’s equality in Japan?
Hiroko Hashimoto: That depends on the woman. We have various problems. For instance, poverty, particularly among older women, is significant. Younger women also face poverty because their salaries are much lower compared to men. Many women are employed irregularly, which means their incomes are significantly lower. According to statistics, women’s income is around 70% of men’s, but that figure applies only to full-time, regularly employed women. Many women are irregularly employed and not considered formal employees, so their income is lower.
Poverty is a significant problem. Additionally, less than 10% of the parliament members are women, and Japan has never had a female prime minister. Japan ranks very low in the Gender Gap Index, the lowest among the G7 countries. Japan’s status in the Gender Gap Index is comparable to that of underdeveloped countries, with some countries having a higher status for women than Japan.
The status of women in Japan needs to be improved compared to other countries. UN Women Japan cannot directly support Japanese women because Japan is categorized as a developed country. Instead, we have to collect money from people in Japan and send it to UN Women in other countries and to the headquarters. I want to improve the status of women in Japan, but currently, my role is to collect money for women and girls in underdeveloped countries.
However, I am researching Japanese women through an NGO preparing the Beijing+30 report to evaluate the status of women in Japan since 1995. We plan to publish this report between October and December, first in Japanese and then a shorter version in English. We have many issues to address, including income, education, health, politics, the government, disaster, roles of men. While education appears to be equal for both men and women, in Japan fewer women attend university, especially graduate school, and even fewer study science and technology.
The number of women studying science and technology is much lower than in other developed countries. In Africa, UN Women promotes girl’s education in ICT, and the number of girls studying ICT is increasing. Government is trying to address this in Japan, but there still needs to be a significant gap between men and women, and boys and girls, in science and technology fields.
There are many such gaps in Japan. Another significant gap is in domestic responsibilities. Few men actively participate in housework, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. Women are expected to do these activities, which limits their ability to work full-time outside the home. Men can work longer outside the home because women care for household chores.
Currently, a big issue in Japan is the declining birth rate. Many younger men and women do not want to marry, particularly women, because they do not want to be burdened with household chores. The government says many villages, towns and even cities will disappear in the coming years. Almost all local governments are trying to attract more young couples. However, we don’t have many younger couples because of the decrease in the number of newborn babies. This is a big problem.
So, we may need to evaluate Japan’s future properly. As an online organization, we can only work indirectly on advancing the status of Japanese women, which is quite difficult for me. However, the other organizations I work with can promote the status of Japanese women. The main work of the UN Women Japan Committee is to advance and promote the status of women in developing countries.
Jacobsen: What about political representation?
Hashimoto: Yes. political representation in Japan has been very low. We have never had a female Prime Minister. Furthermore, the female ratio at the Parliament is 10.8% and Japan’s rank among 183 countries is 161 as of 1 June 2024, according to the data prepared monthly by the International Parliamentary Union. But now, our prime minister has nominated five female ministers, including the Minister for Foreign Affairs. So, the situation has changed slightly compared to last year’s Gender Gap Index in which Japan’s rank in political participation was 138 among 146 countries because we now have five female ministers. However, the prime minister did not nominate female vice ministers or other women for similar roles. Later, as the media mentioned this matter, he later nominated one female vice minister. This indicates no intention to promote or educate female politicians to become ministers.
The main ruling party in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, often does not include the voices of female politicians. Female politicians who align with male preferences are treated better than independent women. This party is not conducive to changing politics as well as traditional social norms in Japan, as it is now the ruling party. Weekly newspapers discuss who might be the next female prime minister, but we have never had one.
Additionally, according to the law regulating our emperors, women are forbidden to become emperors. So, we can’t have a queen. The current emperor and empress’s only child is a woman, who is very capable, but she cannot become the queen of Japan because of this law. The Democratic Party is resistant to changing this rule.
As well, the education system is another issue. Teachers work very hard, but the content of education is regulated by the Ministry of Education, which right-wing politicians control. This includes religious influences, such as those from former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was a right-wing politician. He and other right-wing politicians control the Ministry of Education, which affects the content of Japanese education.
Jacobsen: Do you think this affects the lower educational levels, such as elementary or high school?
Hashimoto: The basic content level, for instance, math and science, is okay. However, teaching history should be more comprehensive. Once they decide on the baseline for education, it can stay the same for ten years. It takes time to change the basic contents of education. They are trying their best, but right-wing politicians are controlling education. So, it’s not very LGBTQ-friendly. We finally got a law, but the title is “Promoting Understanding of LGBTQ.” It doesn’t say anything about anti-discrimination against LGBTQ people.
Jacobsen: It’s a very diplomatic way of portraying it. It sounds understandable, but why don’t they want to say “punish” against discrimination? Is that politics in Japan?
Hashimoto: Yes, it is politics in Japan, and it controls everything.
Jacobsen: What about promoting health for girls and women? Are menstrual products, condoms, and IUDs part of the educational system and public provisions as well?
Hashimoto: Yes, education includes these topics. For instance, sex education starts for senior high school students. Former Prime Minister Abe influenced this change. Previously, sex education started in the 2nd grade of junior high school, but now it starts in the 1st grade of senior high school. This is very late.
Jacobsen: Are these topics mostly avoided in the educational system?
Hashimoto: Yes, because they have to follow the guidelines. Textbooks must adhere to these guidelines; if they don’t, they are not approved. Therefore, all textbooks write the same things. I hope they will change this so that sex education starts at a younger age.
Now, some teachers are engaging in inappropriate sexual actions with students. The Ministry of Education has started preparing measures to prevent such behavior. However, the department that prepared these measures is not the school education department but the department of other education, including women’s education. The school education department is just using that material, and only several schools and kindergartens are implementing it.
In Japan, children before entering primary school can attend either kindergarten or daycare centers. The Ministry of Education is only in charge of kindergartens, while daycare centers are under the Agent of Family and Children which was established in 2023, there are different controls for daycare centers and kindergartens.
We have a national machinery for promoting gender equality under the Prime Minister’s office, the Bureau of Gender Equality, which is trying to promote policies for gender equality at national and local government levels. Each local government has an office for gender equality so that policies can be implemented through the government and local government systems.
Former Prime Minister Abe didn’t favour the term “gender equality,” so the government had to prepare a five-year plan for gender equality without saying ”gender equality”, but, “promoting equality between men and women”. However, this has been changing. The most recent five-year plan, published two years ago, does contain the term “gender equality.”
Jacobsen: Which countries do you give the most funding to?
Hashimoto: Currently, we are giving money to Gaza and Ukraine because contributors want to support these areas. We collect money depending on the issue. When Turkey was hit by a big earthquake, the member of international women’s organization contributed to UN Women Japan Committee nearly 1 million yen in total. We sent the money to UN Women in Turkey Office.
On International Girls Day in October, we will have an event for South Sudan and collect funds for that cause.
We send the money we collect to the UN Women’s relevant offices or UN Women’s headquarters, which allocates the funds. We also donated significant amounts to the Rohingya in Bangladesh. Depending on the situation, we direct our funds accordingly. As national committees, we sometimes face criticism when sending money to places like Gaza, but we have not received any complaints from Japanese people regarding this.
UN Women holds sessions about the situation in Gaza, starting at 9 PM Japan time. We recently had a session, and while other national committees face issues due to their activities for Gaza, we have yet to receive complaints or backlash.
Jacobsen: What is the most effective move to further gender equality? What is the most effective thing to do in Japan?
Hiroko Hashimoto: There is so much to do. Globally, we still have much work to do regarding gender equality. Some men don’t understand women’s issues, but it’s not just men; women themselves often don’t think about gender equality. Therefore, education is the most important factor in changing the world for gender equality. Similarly, the role of mass communication is also crucial.
Changing people’s mindsets is difficult, but it’s necessary. In Japan, politicians need to change. Other countries are better at changing politicians, but it’s not easy in Japan because many people don’t vote during elections. When I was principal of a junior high school and senior high school, we tried to encourage students to vote because the voting age is now 18. Some senior high school students have the right to vote.
We had sessions for students about this. I told the first-grade students that many policies in Japan favour older adults because they vote in large numbers. Most older adults go to vote, but younger people do not. Education is crucial to changing Japanese society, but it takes work to change the content of education. When I was the principal of a private high school, I explained to third-year students that there are many policies for older people in Japan because their voting rate is much higher than that of the younger generation. Therefore, if more young people voted, politicians might start creating policies for them. However, after my speech, a social studies teacher told me we should refrain from discussing current policies with students. We need to change the content of education in Japan.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/01
CAIR Bio: Edward Ahmed Mitchell is a civil rights attorney and former journalist who serves as the National Deputy Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States.
Mr. Mitchell also currently serves as President of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML), a member of the Georgia Association of Muslim Lawyers, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Islamic Community Center of Atlanta.
Mr. Mitchell served as the Executive Director of CAIR-Georgia from 2016 to 2020. During that time, the civil rights group resolved numerous cases of anti-Muslim discrimination, opened its first office, and expanded its staff to include a paralegal, a staff attorney, legislative aides, and a communications director. In 2016, the chapter received CAIR National’s Chapter of the Year award.
Before joining CAIR-Georgia, Mr. Mitchell practiced law as a criminal prosecutor for the City of Atlanta. He has also worked as a freelance journalist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mr. Mitchell is a 2009 graduate of Morehouse College, where he served as captain of the school’s American Mock Trial Association team, president of the Honors Program Club, and editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper.
He received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center, where he won first place in the law school’s annual Trial Advocacy Competition, served as editor-in-chief of The Georgetown Law Weekly, and was elected president of the Muslim Law Students Association.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I will take one step back. Violence against religious minorities in India was brought to my attention by a Kashmiri Indian Muslim friend, Mir Faizal. He considers himself part of the Quranist tradition and is a cosmologist at one of the prominent universities in Canada. I have written for one Indian publication, and when I received an email about the work CAIR is doing to highlight the violence against religious minorities in Northern India. I thought it would be good to cover. To start with the big picture, what is the primary concern from CAIR’s perspective regarding religious minorities and violence in India?
Edward Ahmed Mitchell: India is one of the most diverse countries in the world, and one of the largest. The population is predominantly Hindu, but there is a massive number of Indian Muslims and other religious minorities. For decades, religious minorities have been able to live in relative comfort in India despite some discrimination and secondary status issues. However, since the rise of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva movement, which has been around for decades, minorities have gone from being in comfort to being concerned and are now, in some cases, in mortal danger. The Hindutva movement, with roots in the RSS and inspired partly by the Nazi movement, believes in Hindu supremacy. It promotes the idea that India is only a Hindu country, that Muslims are invaders and should not be welcomed nor fully participate in society, and that it is acceptable to use force to exclude such religious minorities. Our primary concern is that what we’re seeing now, whether it’s the destruction of mosques, harassment, or the infamous cow lynchings where Muslims are murdered in the street for allegedly transporting or eating beef, are preludes to something much worse. We hope it doesn’t come to that, but we are concerned that this is the beginning of a potential mass extinction event aimed at Indian Muslims and other minorities.
Jacobsen: Coming from a Canadian perspective, even from an American perspective, what comparable case to this might be a more natural analogy for a North American audience?
Mitchell: It’s difficult to make a proper analogy because what’s unique about India is the massive numbers of religious minorities there. When you think of what’s happening to the Uyghurs in China, the numbers are relatively small compared to the overall Chinese population. Similarly, in Nazi Germany, the percentage of Jews was tiny compared to other Germans. But in India, you have around 100 million Muslims, so we’re talking about very large numbers of people on both sides. It’s a unique situation to worry about a genocide with such large populations involved. I hesitate to draw analogies because every genocide threat stands on its own. However, if you think back to any country where something horrific happened, whether in Rwanda, Nazi Germany, or China with the Uyghurs, genocides, typically, start with lower-scale discrimination and violence tolerated or encouraged by the government, which then slowly builds into something horrific. In India, we have pieces of a potential genocide:
a charismatic, extremist, bigoted leader with a history of allowing mass murder;
a massive movement of extremist supporters inspired by the Nazis;
current incidents of discrimination and violence.
It’s disturbing and the first step toward something much worse.
Jacobsen: Do you see any distinctions being made between Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Christians, and the non-religious in terms of the discrimination people are experiencing, whether in degree or style?
Mitchell: Muslims are absolutely at the forefront of discrimination and threats of violence in India. Christians and other minorities also face discrimination, as do Hindus of lower castes. However, Muslims are the primary target for Narendra Modi.
In a campaign speech during this most recent election, he claimed that if the other party wins, then they are going to let the ‘invaders’ use up India’s natural resources. Everyone knew he was referring to Muslims because they are often called “invaders.” Most of the hate crimes, lynchings, and destruction of houses of worship have targeted mosques and Muslims. Therefore, Muslims are certainly at the forefront of this discrimination and bigotry.
We have seen reports of discrimination against other communities as well, but nowhere near the same level of attention or scale as against Muslims. Additionally, we do not see any distinction in the targeting between Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, or any other people who identify as Muslim.
As we have had more time to study violence, including cyberbullying, we have also cataloged an increase in cyberviolence against Muslims and others. The Indian government and the Hindutva movement have a significant presence on social media, with many followers of Mr. Modi being very active online. Many of them threaten extreme violence against critics of Mr. Modi. Numerous journalists, Muslim and otherwise, have reported receiving private messages threatening to rape them, kill their mothers, and do other horrific things. We are certainly familiar with a campaign of hate on social media led by some supporters of Mr. Modi. These threats, although often empty and meant to harass, bully, and frighten people into silence, still constitute threats of violence in the cyber sphere.
Regarding any moderation of this hate speech coming from Prime Minister Modi, there are areas of internal pressure on the country and from international affairs that may have an effect. India is a global player, especially economically, with strong connections to the United States, China, and many Muslim-majority countries, including the Arab world. As an American, my main focus is convincing our government to pressure the Indian government. We have called on the State Department to designate India as a country of particular concern, meaning a country identified as a violator of religious freedom. Such a designation puts pressure on the Indian government to address lynchings of Muslims, discrimination against Muslim women, and threats of mass violence and destruction of mosques.
Beyond that, our government needs to call out the Indian government for its inflammatory rhetoric, destruction of mosques, and violence against individual Indian Muslims. There should also be criticism from our government about what is happening. Moreover, Muslim-majority nations have a role to play in pressuring the Indian government to respect religious minorities, including Indian Muslims. Unfortunately, we do not see the United States or some Muslim countries making this effort, with some exceptions like Pakistan, which is outspoken about these issues. We need more people worldwide to speak out against this early on to prevent something horrible from happening rather than responding only after the fact.
We didn’t see this coming, and it’s not good. You want to stop it, nip it in the bud before it escalates to the point of mass communal or other violence.
Jacobsen: Are there groups in the United States trying to exacerbate the situation?
Mitchell: Some groups in the United States are supportive of what we would call the Hindutva movement and supportive and defensive of Narendra Modi’s government. These groups exercise their rights as people in America to advocate for policies they believe are good, call on our government to support Mr. Modi, and metaphorically cross swords with those critical of Mr. Modi. I don’t begrudge anyone the right to advocate for this dangerous government if they so choose, but it’s not a morally good thing to do. It’s not good for Americans, the people of India, or ultimately the Indian government. These groups are active just like those that advocate for the Israeli, Saudi, and UAE governments. Every government has lobbyists and supporters; the Indian government is no exception.
Jacobsen: What about Hindu groups in the United States that are allied with CAIR in condemning these violent acts?
Mitchell: I think most people of most religions oppose the kind of horrific violence aimed at religious minorities in various countries. Many Indian Americans who are Hindu do not support what Mr. Modi is doing or threatening to do. One prominent group, Hindus for Human Rights, plays a leading role in speaking out against the violence occurring in India against religious minorities, and there are others like that.
Jacobsen: Within India, does the constitution mandate a secular government or state?
Mitchell: Yes, in writing, India is a secular nation, meaning it guarantees religious freedom and does not uphold any one particular religion as dominant in its law. However, India is unique because it allows religious groups considerable freedom and recognizes religion in law to some extent. For example, Indian Muslims and other religious minorities can govern certain affairs according to the laws of their religion. Marriage, divorce, and similar matters can be managed with Islamic courts, allowing Muslims to govern themselves according to Islamic law to some extent. The same applies to people of other religions.
India is secular, but not in the way the United States or many European countries are. In theory, people are allowed to practice their religion without state interference. However, Mr. Modi is trying to cut back on this, which is why we’ve seen efforts to ban Muslim women in schools from wearing the hijab. This would have been unquestionably allowed not only during the modern Indian Republic’s history but even before that, during the British colonial period and earlier when Muslims controlled India. The crackdown on religious freedom is a unique development because religious freedom has been commonplace in India for centuries.
Even when Muslims controlled India for 700 years, they governed the Muslim community according to Islamic law, but Christians were allowed to govern themselves according to Christian law, and Hindus according to Hindu law. Muslim rulers sometimes allowed Hindus to engage in conduct that Muslims would find incredibly objectionable, but that was their right as Hindus to follow their faith. Muslim governments protected religious freedom for them. This has been the story of India until very recently when it was under the Modi administration.
Jacobsen: Does the Hindutva movement exceed Modi, considering our democratic governance? People go through election cycles, and at some point, their terms end. Do you see this kind of rhetoric and violence continuing to the same degree after Modi’s government?
Mitchell: The Hindutva movement certainly predates Mr. Modi, though he has been a lifelong adherent and supporter. You can trace this movement back to the 1920s and 1930s, during the push to expel the British. Some people believed that India should be a solely Hindu country, dominated by Hindus and that Muslims and other minorities were invaders and not welcome. The RSS, a paramilitary group, took some inspiration from the Nazis in terms of their belief in supremacy and were impressed by what the Nazis were doing. This movement was responsible, in some ways, for the rhetoric that led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, an advocate of reconciliation and peace between Muslims and Hindus, who was murdered for that.
Fast forward decades, and the RSS movement redeveloped into a political party, the BJP, which is Mr. Modi’s party. It is a semi-sanitized version of the RSS but maintains the same ideology, many of the same goals, and many of the same people or their descendants. If Mr. Modi were to lose an election, and he did lose some seats in the most recent election, the movement would not necessarily go away. However, the benefit of his eventually leaving office would be that the movement would no longer control the levers of government and could no longer use governmental power to execute its worst goals. This means that if it wants to commit genocide, it would have to do so horizontally, person to person, rather than vertically, using governmental power. The movement does not end with Mr. Modi, but it is more dangerous when it controls the levers of power, including the military and, in some ways, the judiciary. This makes it far more dangerous than if it were not in power.
Jacobsen: Regarding the ideology of the RSS and its incorporation of some elements from the National Socialist ideology of the Germans, was there also an anti-Semitic flavour?
Mitchell: That I’m not sure of, but what I do know is that in modern times, the Indian government and followers of the Hindutva movement are very enthusiastically supportive of the Israeli government. The Hindutva movement hates Muslims first and foremost, and because most Palestinians are Muslims, the Indian government’s most extreme supporters enthusiastically support the horrific war crimes being committed against Palestinians. I do not know of any history of anti-Semitism in the modern BJP movement, and there aren’t many Indian Jews, so they wouldn’t be able to target them in any case. But beyond that, I don’t know.
We’d probably have to ask someone with more expertise, but I have not heard of that from the modern movement. Now, of course, if a movement is inspired by or sympathetic to Nazi Germany, then inherently, there’s anti-Semitism there, and that’s a problem and incredibly dangerous and disgusting. But, in the decades since then, I don’t know if they have had any dog whistles or references to that aspect of their history in terms of the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany.
Jacobsen: Prime Minister Modi reiterated a call for a uniform civil code. Several religious leaders, tribal leaders, and some state officials have claimed that this is essentially a project to create a “Hindu Rashtra” or Hindu nation. What are some of the details around this?
Mitchell: I’m not too familiar with that part of it. In theory, a uniform legal code would make sense for many countries. In practice, in India, what everyone suspects Mr. Modi is trying to do is create a new system of law in which he can formalize what is favourable to him and his movement, get rid of existing legal precedents that allow religious minorities to function and flourish, and take India one step closer to being a one-party state dominated by the extremist Hindutva movement. So, no one should trust Mr. Modi to lead the creation of a uniform civil code because many people fear it would erase the rights of minorities and empower the government to endanger further Muslims and other religious groups who are not part of the dominant ideology in India.
Jacobsen: Are there particular areas of the country where we see spikes in violence more than others, like West Bengal, Bihar, Haryana, and Maharashtra? Are there certain areas where we should expect more violence based on the national ideology?
Mitchell: Muslims in many places in India live in concentrated areas where they are a dominant group, which acts as a shield and provides some protection because it’s hard for outsiders to come in and harm them. But it is also true that all over India, Muslims and others live as minorities in mostly Hindu areas. Most of them are still safe because most Hindus are not engaging in violence against their Indian Muslim neighbours. However, Muslims in areas where they are not a significant dominant or large presence in terms of numbers are at greater risk. In rural areas where the police may not have as much control, there have been more lynchings, like the so-called cow lynchings. Such incidents are unlikely to occur in major metropolitan cities for obvious reasons. However, in rural areas with less control, people can more quickly take justice into their own hands without being stopped or without a police force that wants to stop them. There’s greater danger there.
Jacobsen: What other organizations help provide a united front to the American government to say what is happening is wrong?
Mitchell: We have status in the international community to do something. We can put pressure on the BJP, PM Modi, and Indian culture as a whole, to some degree, to right wrongs or at least correct the direction of wrongs against primarily Muslims and others affected by Hindutva violence.
Two major organizations in America leading the push to prevent discrimination and violence from escalating are Hindus for Human Rights and the Indian American Muslim Council, among many others. We must also recognize major secular groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They’ve played a major role in documenting and calling out the human rights abuses of the Indian government.
Those organizations are critical in spotlighting what’s happening and advocating for our government to change course, ensuring that what we see stops and doesn’t escalate into something far worse.
Jacobsen: What is preventing the advocacy from getting out more? What are the roadblocks?
Mitchell: Every country in the world has what it views as its national interest, and sadly, sometimes, that national interest is indifferent to human suffering and life. It prioritizes the dollar as the bottom line, which means economic and financial success and military power. Because of India’s place in the world geographically, historically, politically, and economically, many Western governments are incredibly deferential to the Indian government. They want to ignore what Modi is doing because they want to maintain and strengthen economic and military ties with India. If that means ignoring Muslims being lynched, discrimination against women wearing hijabs, and discriminatory laws, they will do that because they want to benefit from the financial and military relationship with the Indian government.
The biggest roadblock to putting external pressure on Modi is the perceived economic interests of these governments. But this to them: if you believe in human rights, you should act accordingly. If you don’t believe what you’re saying and it’s just a talking point, then say that and stop pretending otherwise. Moreover, if India descends into civil war or genocide, it will be disastrous for your economic relationship with India. Even from an economic perspective, you should want people to live, work, worship, and function in peace without experiencing discrimination, much less a potential genocide.
There are very good reasons why governments around the world should pressure Modi to stop what he’s doing and rein in his extremist followers. If they don’t do that and continue to prop him up on the international stage, giving him a blank check to do what he wants without consequences, they will also be responsible for what happens.
Jacobsen: What are you primarily hearing from American Muslims of Indian descent who may not be getting into the mainstream media? Other than the obvious wrongness of the violence and the nationalization of political religion, what are some nuances that may not be coming to the surface? Maybe we can close on that note.
Mitchell: One of the concerns I hear from Indian American Muslims is not only about what’s happening to their relatives, friends, and their home country, India but also about their safety here in America. There was an incident in Canada where the Indian government was allegedly responsible for assassinating a dissident. This raises concerns about the reach and influence of the Indian government beyond its borders.
You’ve had numerous incidents of threats being made online against Indian Americans who speak out about what’s happening. That includes Indian American Hindus. The Indian government has a presence here in the United States, and in the Western world, so there’s deep concern among Indian Americans about the physical safety of the diaspora who speak out against what’s happening.
Beyond that, there is concern about Modi’s movement strengthening its lobbying power in the United States and gaining influence in a harmful way, similar to how the Israeli government has developed strong lobbying power, as have certain Middle Eastern governments and others. There is worry about the growth of this movement, its lobbying power, and its ability to pressure our politicians to support what is happening.
Jacobsen: How can people get involved through donations, expertise, or time?
Mitchell: I encourage all Americans to know that what happens overseas impacts us at home. They should ensure that our government does not enable bad things to happen. We’re not saying we want our government involved in everything overseas, but to the extent that our government has connections with foreign governments and is enabling them somehow, we need to make sure our government is pursuing just policies. This includes holding the Indian government accountable for the abuses it is allowing and making sure the Indian government does not expand those abuses into something even more horrific.
We encourage the American people to look up the Indian American Muslim Council, Hindus for Human Rights, and other groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to learn more about what’s happening in India. Also, check what their elected officials are saying or doing about it. If their elected officials are not involved, that’s fine. But if their elected officials are expressing support for the Modi government and building ties with it, they should be called out, and there should be a change in course.
Jacobsen: Excellent, Edward. Thank you very much for your time today.
Mitchell: Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it. Nice to meet you.
Publication (Outlet/Website): The New Enlightenment Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/15
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As you reminded me and then taught me a bit further, antisemitism is not static. It’s problematic to make it a single definition. When we’re trying to create a culture in which it is discussed so that people’s experiences and how it manifests are considered more live, what are effective ways to do that in small communities?
Dr. Alon Milwicki: History is always a great place to look. The way antisemitism presents itself in different periods of history is astronomically different because it’s about who’s the dominant group using it and what’s the dominant trope. For example, if you go back to the resource we put out, those four examples we chose were the most prominent tropes or prominent manifestations, the way antisemitism manifested within other and more dominant narratives.
One of the things that I would update is to talk about the utilitarianism of the Jew. That is one of the dominant tropes that is being used right now. Now, a lot of people, especially those who think that waving an Israeli flag or Christian nationalists like Sean Feucht or whatever, saying they support Israel full-throated, they’re supporting Israel and what theybelieve is Jewish people, not because they support Jewish people. They support Jewish people’s role for them. So that’s a changing aspect. I would have said, “No,” if you had asked me last year if that was a dominant trope. But post-October 7th, that’s become a dominant trope. And being able to recognize that antisemitism presents itself in different ways, in more dominant ways at different periods, is extremely important. Because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, no one talked about the Great Replacement Theory.
No one was talking about it. Or if they were, it was in smaller niches. Whereas now, in the last how many years, we have had at least one or two shootings that have been based on the Great Replacement Theory. Nobody 40 years ago or 30 years ago would have been talking about transgender people and how Jewish people are behind all transgenderism or the demonization of the LGBT community. No one would have been talking about that. So, nobody would have associated attacking the LGBT community with being something traceable to antisemitism. But now, it’s pretty freaking obvious. So, to say, antisemitism is the demonization of Jews or the attack on Jewish people or something blanket like that. That’s true enough. But that doesn’t help us understand how it’s presented at the time.
To say that antisemitism is about hating Jews, no doubt. Forgive my 1980s colloquialisms, so it’s important for us. It’s incumbent on us as “experts” to illustrate how antisemitism keeps changing, how it keeps representing itself, and how it keeps evolving. Again, manifestations in 2024 are not the same as those in 1924. There are similarities, mind you, don’t get me wrong. That’s what makes antisemitism constant. Some tropes go back millennia. We know that. But the Ku Klux Klan utilizing the Jewish trope of money in the 1920s isn’t the same way as the Goyim Defense League in 2024. The commonality is Jews and money, but how and why is what makes it different, right?
It’s like when I was a history professor. I would tell students to point blank that the purpose of studying history is not the who, what, when, and where. Because you don’t need me for that, knowing that Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939 was awesome. You can answer a Jeopardy question. Score for you. That’s not studying history. Why was that considered the start of World War II? Why wasn’t it when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia? How did people respond to it at the time? How come Winston Churchill drew that line? Why didn’t Neville Chamberlain draw an earlier line? It’s the how and the why questions that make up why history matters. Why studying history is important, okay?
What antisemitism is, this rush to define it finitely. I understand its utility. But it also can prove to be a fool’s errand because knowing that antisemitism is an attack on Jewish people doesn’t get us closer. I won’t say to eradicate it because it’s been five millennia, so good luck with that. But approaching it better in our time means understanding how and why it presents itself. How and why did it shift in the 1980s? Why did it shift to this? What caused it? How did the founding of the Aryan Nations in the late 1970s shift the focus on antisemitism?
How did that affect the militia movements or the resurgence of Christian identity in the 1980s and 90s? That’s how we get at it. And I’m sorry for getting preachy. That’s sort of a non-answer to your question. Because it’s the very point we highlight in this thing, this resource is just that. You’re not going to get a finite definition. Even though the IHRA definition has all these examples, some are flawed. But this rush to accept the IRA definition, is it a genuine attempt to combat antisemitism? Or is it placatory? Because saying you accept IHRA or saying you pass a Holocaust mandate is great, so what?
Christian nationalists are in favour of Holocaust mandates. Shouldn’t that give you pause? Most Holocaust mandates don’t have any funding for education or training. You can’t just tell a U.S. history teacher in high school who doesn’t have any understanding of what the Holocaust is to be like, “You have to teach the Holocaust.” Especially since now, they’re letting, at least, a pilot program in Texas that says the top five education students in their senior year can teach K-3 in Texas. Or at least in, I want to say, Dallas County. Again, that’s not high. This is something I’m passionate about. But does that make sense? (1, 2, 3)
Because it’s almost a non-issue, like, so great, you can define antisemitism. Big fucking deal. Why does it matter? What are they doing with accepting IHRAs? Or passing all these antisemitism initiatives–great. Or colleges openly condemning antisemitism–great. But what are you doing about it? It’s much top-level shit. That’s usually very placatory. It’s not the first time this stuff has been done. I can’t remember. I always get Title IV or Title VI confused. But one of them, the one that is about the racist complaints on college campuses, includes antisemitism. So creating an antisemitism initiative on top of a Title IV or VI, whichever one it is, on antisemitism, gives off two impressions. One is that students don’t know about Title IV or VI, which is problematic. Or two, the reason for asserting a national antisemitism initiative, right when you already have something in place, has another reason why. The odds are that’s for publicity. I’m not going to get into ranting territory.
Jacobsen: When it comes to common threads you find in each of these instances, whether back to Mein Kampf, the National Socialists in Germany, to some of the white nationalists or neo-Nazis you’re seeing in the United States and Canada now, what is their uniting stereotype map? What are the common threads for their mental stereotype map?
Miwlicki: Jews can’t be trusted, Jews control money, Jews control media, Jewish disloyalty, Communism, Capitalism, all of the standard tropes. The stuff that Hitler wrote about is what Henry Ford wrote about, the stuff that the Protocols wrote about. And unfortunately, those are still widely read. Those are still very popular. And those are seen as top-level. And I’m sure the Turner Diaries are up there, too. But those are the common threads. It’s like the oldies but goodies that never go away: The power, the greed, the media.
This would be more for the American side of it because, to be fair, Hitler didn’t stop talking about God until 1938. So he might have put out a blood libel: Jews killed Jesus. That’s always an oldie but goodie. Those would be the common threads that would go across. You can’t trust Jews. Something that you would probably hear somebody saying in 1930 and anti-Semites saying today is you can’t trust Jews, and then whatever follows from that could be anything. But I would argue it’s that shadow government idea, that shadow control, that unites it all, whether it’s power or greed.
I’m going to have to agree with my sociology colleague again. It comes down to power. Power is money. Power is force. Power is influence. Power is the control of information. There is this common belief that whether it’s in Mein Kampf or in whatever bullshit the GDL is flying about today, right, that would be the common thread is probably fear of Jewish power. Or hate something like that.
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As you reminded me and then taught me a bit further, antisemitism is not static. It’s problematic to make it a single definition. When we’re trying to create a culture in which it is discussed so that people’s experiences and how it manifests are considered more live, what are effective ways to do that in small communities?
Dr. Alon Milwicki: History is always a great place to look. The way antisemitism presents itself in different periods of history is astronomically different because it’s about who’s the dominant group using it and what’s the dominant trope. For example, if you go back to the resource we put out, those four examples we chose were the most prominent tropes or prominent manifestations, the way antisemitism manifested within other and more dominant narratives.
One of the things that I would update is to talk about the utilitarianism of the Jew. That is one of the dominant tropes that is being used right now. Now, a lot of people, especially those who think that waving an Israeli flag or Christian nationalists like Sean Feucht or whatever, saying they support Israel full-throated, they’re supporting Israel and what theybelieve is Jewish people, not because they support Jewish people. They support Jewish people’s role for them. So that’s a changing aspect. I would have said, “No,” if you had asked me last year if that was a dominant trope. But post-October 7th, that’s become a dominant trope. And being able to recognize that antisemitism presents itself in different ways, in more dominant ways at different periods, is extremely important. Because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, no one talked about the Great Replacement Theory.
No one was talking about it. Or if they were, it was in smaller niches. Whereas now, in the last how many years, we have had at least one or two shootings that have been based on the Great Replacement Theory. Nobody 40 years ago or 30 years ago would have been talking about transgender people and how Jewish people are behind all transgenderism or the demonization of the LGBT community. No one would have been talking about that. So, nobody would have associated attacking the LGBT community with being something traceable to antisemitism. But now, it’s pretty freaking obvious. So, to say, antisemitism is the demonization of Jews or the attack on Jewish people or something blanket like that. That’s true enough. But that doesn’t help us understand how it’s presented at the time.
To say that antisemitism is about hating Jews, no doubt. Forgive my 1980s colloquialisms, so it’s important for us. It’s incumbent on us as “experts” to illustrate how antisemitism keeps changing, how it keeps representing itself, and how it keeps evolving. Again, manifestations in 2024 are not the same as those in 1924. There are similarities, mind you, don’t get me wrong. That’s what makes antisemitism constant. Some tropes go back millennia. We know that. But the Ku Klux Klan utilizing the Jewish trope of money in the 1920s isn’t the same way as the Goyim Defense League in 2024. The commonality is Jews and money, but how and why is what makes it different, right?
It’s like when I was a history professor. I would tell students to point blank that the purpose of studying history is not the who, what, when, and where. Because you don’t need me for that, knowing that Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939 was awesome. You can answer a Jeopardy question. Score for you. That’s not studying history. Why was that considered the start of World War II? Why wasn’t it when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia? How did people respond to it at the time? How come Winston Churchill drew that line? Why didn’t Neville Chamberlain draw an earlier line? It’s the how and the why questions that make up why history matters. Why studying history is important, okay?
What antisemitism is, this rush to define it finitely. I understand its utility. But it also can prove to be a fool’s errand because knowing that antisemitism is an attack on Jewish people doesn’t get us closer. I won’t say to eradicate it because it’s been five millennia, so good luck with that. But approaching it better in our time means understanding how and why it presents itself. How and why did it shift in the 1980s? Why did it shift to this? What caused it? How did the founding of the Aryan Nations in the late 1970s shift the focus on antisemitism?
How did that affect the militia movements or the resurgence of Christian identity in the 1980s and 90s? That’s how we get at it. And I’m sorry for getting preachy. That’s sort of a non-answer to your question. Because it’s the very point we highlight in this thing, this resource is just that. You’re not going to get a finite definition. Even though the IHRA definition has all these examples, some are flawed. But this rush to accept the IRA definition, is it a genuine attempt to combat antisemitism? Or is it placatory? Because saying you accept IHRA or saying you pass a Holocaust mandate is great, so what?
Christian nationalists are in favour of Holocaust mandates. Shouldn’t that give you pause? Most Holocaust mandates don’t have any funding for education or training. You can’t just tell a U.S. history teacher in high school who doesn’t have any understanding of what the Holocaust is to be like, “You have to teach the Holocaust.” Especially since now, they’re letting, at least, a pilot program in Texas that says the top five education students in their senior year can teach K-3 in Texas. Or at least in, I want to say, Dallas County. Again, that’s not high. This is something I’m passionate about. But does that make sense? (1, 2, 3)
Because it’s almost a non-issue, like, so great, you can define antisemitism. Big fucking deal. Why does it matter? What are they doing with accepting IHRAs? Or passing all these antisemitism initiatives–great. Or colleges openly condemning antisemitism–great. But what are you doing about it? It’s much top-level shit. That’s usually very placatory. It’s not the first time this stuff has been done. I can’t remember. I always get Title IV or Title VI confused. But one of them, the one that is about the racist complaints on college campuses, includes antisemitism. So creating an antisemitism initiative on top of a Title IV or VI, whichever one it is, on antisemitism, gives off two impressions. One is that students don’t know about Title IV or VI, which is problematic. Or two, the reason for asserting a national antisemitism initiative, right when you already have something in place, has another reason why. The odds are that’s for publicity. I’m not going to get into ranting territory.
Jacobsen: When it comes to common threads you find in each of these instances, whether back to Mein Kampf, the National Socialists in Germany, to some of the white nationalists or neo-Nazis you’re seeing in the United States and Canada now, what is their uniting stereotype map? What are the common threads for their mental stereotype map?
Miwlicki: Jews can’t be trusted, Jews control money, Jews control media, Jewish disloyalty, Communism, Capitalism, all of the standard tropes. The stuff that Hitler wrote about is what Henry Ford wrote about, the stuff that the Protocols wrote about. And unfortunately, those are still widely read. Those are still very popular. And those are seen as top-level. And I’m sure the Turner Diaries are up there, too. But those are the common threads. It’s like the oldies but goodies that never go away: The power, the greed, the media.
This would be more for the American side of it because, to be fair, Hitler didn’t stop talking about God until 1938. So he might have put out a blood libel: Jews killed Jesus. That’s always an oldie but goodie. Those would be the common threads that would go across. You can’t trust Jews. Something that you would probably hear somebody saying in 1930 and anti-Semites saying today is you can’t trust Jews, and then whatever follows from that could be anything. But I would argue it’s that shadow government idea, that shadow control, that unites it all, whether it’s power or greed.
I’m going to have to agree with my sociology colleague again. It comes down to power. Power is money. Power is force. Power is influence. Power is the control of information. There is this common belief that whether it’s in Mein Kampf or in whatever bullshit the GDL is flying about today, right, that would be the common thread is probably fear of Jewish power. Or hate something like that.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Harris doing wrong with regards to Trump?
Rick Rosner: I mentioned a couple of potential vulnerabilities. She can’t do much about what’s happened during the Biden presidency on the border. She can try to reframe it, but it’s not what she did wrong. What she might be doing wrong now is tied to what the Biden administration can be attacked for. As I’ve said, she hasn’t held a press conference yet, which might be the right move because her lead over Trump is increasing by 1% a week. As long as that happens, she shouldn’t hold a press conference because that carries more downside than upside. Plus, they’re going to debate on, I believe, September 10th, so in four weeks. She’ll have to take questions then.
Jacobsen: What else might she be doing wrong?
Rosner: Not much, honestly. She’s been lucky with how things have been playing out. The main dig she’s used is that she’s the prosecutor and he’s the felon. “Vote for the prosecutor, not the felon.” If she can get by without attacking him harder—calling him a confused old man, a rapist, any of that—it’s probably smart. It’s harder for women to be that mean without being seen as bitches, and Trump is already on tape calling her a bitch, which makes him look bad, not her. As long as she can continue to be the happy campaigner, she might have to get tougher later depending on how he attacks her. But that’s what a VP candidate is for—the VP can make the mean attacks and keep the president looking relatively nice.
Right now, knock on wood, I don’t think she’s doing much wrong. She’s holding a ton of rallies, arena rallies. The Dems have a lot of money to pay for the arenas. Trump is known for having stiffed at least a dozen arenas—some that he still hasn’t paid for events held in 2016 all across the country. Obviously, the Harris campaign doesn’t need to stiff arenas, and I hope she keeps her foot on the gas.
One thing that Hillary was accused of in 2016 was not visiting certain places, getting overconfident, and assuming she had those areas locked down. I don’t think Harris will make that mistake. In the next 84 days, she’ll hold dozens and dozens of arena rallies in a gazillion different places and leave no state able to claim that she neglected them. But we’ll see.
Jacobsen: Can she keep up that pace for 12 more weeks?
Rosner: I would think so, especially for liberals like myself who see it as saving democracy because Trump has said a bunch of anti-democracy stuff. If those are the stakes, she can work her ass off for the next 12 weeks. She doesn’t have to be president while doing it. As VP, she has a lot less to do. I don’t even know if Congress is in session right now. When the Senate is in session and the vote is tied 50-50, the VP can show up and break the tie. She’s done that 33 times—the most of any VP in history because most Senates aren’t tied 50-50. But right now, her main job is campaigning, and her VP responsibilities aren’t much.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, Trump and Elon Musk had a conversation this evening on Twitter. What happened? What were they talking about? And where’s the technical issue that happened?
Rick Rosner: I didn’t want to click on it because I didn’t want to give them ratings, but… Initially, it crashed to 200,000 viewers/listeners. But then they got their act together and talked for maybe 90 minutes or 2 hours. They were averaging somewhat over a million listeners during any given period. The number that was trending on Twitter was 1,300,000.
I gave in. People were tweeting at me, saying, “Are you hearing this? Are you hearing how lispy and slurred he sounds?” So, I clicked in. I gave in to temptation and listened for about five minutes. Elon Musk dominated the conversation, talking about his amazing future vehicles and charging. Then Trump started talking about nuclear, and he messed it all up.
He was talking about how nuclear is bad and sad when other countries get it. He was talking about nuclear weapons and showing that he doesn’t have any idea who has nuclear weapons. He said, “Yes, now five countries have them, and China has a few now, but they’ll be getting more. It’s sad. The US and Russia are number one.” And it is not good when others… So, he was talking about nuclear weapons, but not in a way that indicates he has any deep understanding of nuclear strategy or policy or who has nuclear weapons. Clearly, he didn’t have the understanding you’d want from a president.
Then Musk and Trump tried to shift the conversation to nuclear energy. Musk was trying to say it’s a good thing. The whole discussion about nuclear was a mess. They were talking about global warming, and Trump was saying that nuclear heating is bad. Eventually, it came out that he was trying to say that nuclear weapons equal nuclear heat, and you don’t want more nuclear heat in the world. Musk seemed a little confused by that, too. But eventually, they moved off nuclearweapons, and after Trump got his bearings and realized they were talking about nuclear energy, he agreed, saying, “Yes, yes.”
It was not very smart. I’ve yet to see enough of Trump to determine whether he’s become so incoherent that he’ll lose voters. I saw something on MSNBC where, in an hour-long press conference, Trump told 162 lies. I’m not sure that level of nonsense peels away that many Trump voters. What has turned people away from Trump?
Jacobsen: So, what about Trump makes him such a mess now?
Rosner: He’s a shitty-looking older man who spouts nonsense. Kamala Harris is 19 years younger and looks even younger, possibly because she’s Black, and the saying goes, “Black don’t crack.” Her hair is good, and you had two bad heads of hair between Trump and Biden. She’s always smiling, and it’s not a creepy smile like people accused Hillary of. She seems naturally smiley, along with Tim Walz, who’s also naturally cheerful without being a gibbering idiot.
They’re both happy doing the job of politics. The word that pops up around that campaign now is “joy.” They’re super psyched to be working to help America and Americans. We haven’t had a charismatic candidate without huge negatives since Obama. Harris has considerable negatives, mostly based on nothing, like how fast she’s turning things around. People decided they didn’t like her because she’s a Democrat, and they’re Republicans.
But now that they see her, she’s been the candidate for about three weeks. On 538, the percentages for Harris versus Trump have gone from a dead tie, 0.0 percent difference, to Harris being 2.8% ahead in the aggregate in three weeks. If she can keep increasing her lead by a percentage a week, we have exactly 12 weeks to go. But even if she can do half a percent a week between now and the election, that gets her to 10%, which Biden was in 2020 when he beat Trump. In the polls the month before, Biden was between 8% and 10% ahead. So, she’ll be in a good space if her lead keeps increasing at the current rate.
Trump is a mess. Trump’s plane broke down—Trump Force 1. It’s parked somewhere. I guess it’s old and breaks down a lot. They haven’t changed the way planes look in 60 years, so it looks like a modern 737 or 757, but I guess it’s from a zillion years ago. So, he had to find another plane to paint as Trump Force 2. It came out today that that plane used to be Jeffrey Epstein’s plane—the one he flew people to Epstein Island on to have sex with underage girls. That’s wild. The Trump campaign is such a mess right now, and he’s such a mess.
He’s all sad. He’s not holding rallies. Harris is out there filling arenas. So, it’s a bunch of things. Trump is doing a bad job at campaigning.
Harris and Walz are doing a good job at campaigning. They haven’t made any major mistakes yet. There are a couple of vulnerabilities, however. One is that the Republicans are yelling that she hasn’t held a press conference yet. But why should she? That would allow them to jump on everything she says. As long as she’s gaining momentum without a press conference, it’s smart to avoid it. However, that could become a vulnerability over time because the longer she goes without taking questions from the press, the more it becomes an issue.
She’s vulnerable on the border and the economy, but that hasn’t been sticking yet. Some other attacks they’ve tried, like the “stolen valour” with Walz, haven’t been working either. It’s the same guy who did the “stolen valour” campaign this time, the same one who was successful with the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004. Kerry didn’t know how to respond to that. He was more of a stiff, less likable, and didn’t have the 24 years in the National Guard that Walz did. This time around, that attack isn’t sticking. So, it’s a bunch of different stuff. But the general principle is that Trump is old and ineffective, while Harris and Walz are young, energetic, and not as incompetent or corrupt as far as we know.
There was a story breaking until it was overshadowed by everything else. The Washington Post uncovered that, in the weeks before the 2016 election, Egypt allegedly gave Trump a $10 million bribe. The investigation unfolded over two or three years until Attorney General Bill Barr scuttled it and saved Trump’s ass. We should be paying more attention to that, but it’s just one of a stew of shitty things going on.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve already covered pornography.
Rick Rosner: It’s like the fentanyl of porn—so powerful that it’s… We’ve talked about how in the future, people will have more control, depending on when in the future you’re talking about.
When I say “we,” the “we” of the future doesn’t even stay the same. We now are regular humans. We in the future are augmented humans 20, 40 years from now. We, 70 years in the future, are humans who are half-tied to bio-circuitry. More machine than man is the cliché, but we’ll be more… The citizen of 80 years from now will be way less biologically human than we are today.
So, “we” changes over time. The citizen of 150 years in the future will have way more control over their drives and desires. Likely, that person won’t even reproduce sexually and may not have any sexual drives or desires because they’re some sort of cyber being with a whole different set of engineered priorities. The nature of arousal will change, and we’ll modify it for the benefit of the citizens of the future.
In the mix of citizens, there will be a minority of regular-ish humans who will continue to be aroused by things that traditionally aroused humans. But the whole arousal landscape will be dangerous, the way the drug landscape is dangerous now with fentanyl. There will be powerful technologies of arousal that will make you all weird if you let them. But also, we’re going to get sick of normal, evolved sexual arousal because it’s so stupid and at cross purposes with us trying to live full lives.
Living full lives now includes having families, which traditionally means having sex and making children. But in the future, that’s not how we’ll make citizens for the most part, 200 years from now. And so, the citizen of the future might not even have a “boner space” because they won’t have a boner or a vagina—they’ll be some other shape. There’s some sadness for us looking at a future that has increasingly less room for us and less interest in us. But we’re primitive compared to the citizens of the future. You wouldn’t expect them to have any more respect for us than we do for chimpanzees.
We’ll make space for chimpanzees and have fleeting interest, but the future is full of more amazing stuff than we are.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Next topic: the future of arousal, addictions, pleasure, partnership, and pornography. A lot of P’s there.
Rick Rosner: Let’s start with porn. So, in the novel I’m writing about the future, I initially had Russia trying to destabilize the West by infecting our porn and making it fill every consumer with perversion and self-loathing. I’m rethinking that because, looking at AI porn, it evolves so fast that I’m not sure even a malign actor can keep up with it. Yes, porn can get so messed up so fast that the Russians trying to make it even more messed up might have trouble doing that.
And it’s evolving fast without direct access to our brains. We have to consume porn the way we’ve always consumed it—via our eyes and ears. But at some point in the future, if we’ve got information links in our heads that are two-way, making for a more intimate connection between information and us, porn could get extra messed up extra fast because it’s got access to your whole brain. It can present scenarios and images to you in real time, judge how effective they are, and evolve what it’s presenting without your conscious control. If it’s pinging off your “boner space,” it could get messed up fast.
One of the things I envision in the future is when your boner space is entirely incinerated—when you’ve consumed so much porn that only the most messed-up stuff works, and even then only barely—they can do the equivalent of electroshock. They can get in there and blast away at your mental boner space, clean it out, and start you anew.
When I first started looking at naked ladies, the first thing I saw in 1969, when I was 9 years old, was a deck of topless lady playing cards. The photos must have been taken in the 1950s. Maybe some kid stole it out of his dad’s nightstand or something. And then we’d go searching for Playboy magazines. It wasn’t until 1972 that Playboy first showed pubes. Until then, it wasn’t that the women they showed didn’t have pubes—it’s just that they didn’t show that area at all. Everyone was turned away from the camera. So, what you saw in Playboy was tame.
And now, 55 years later, Playboy magazine, which doesn’t exist anymore, got out-pornographized for not being nasty enough. My writing partner and I used to pitch to the Playboy TV channel back in the ’90s, and they didn’t know what to do. They were so confused. They couldn’t decide between trying to remain classy and maintain the Playboy brand or going full hardcore pornography. They didn’t know which way to go, and things were changing so fast, getting so nasty so quickly, that they couldn’t keep up. So, they went out of business. They lost their niche.
Anyway, getting your brain cleaned out might allow a jaded old perv to return to a state of wholesomeness where an actual person’s butt or a picture of a pretty lady in a bikini might, for a little while, be able to arouse them. But that cleaned-out brain would probably fill up and get pervy again—a process that has taken decades in today’s people might happen much faster in future people because of the bombardment of turbo porn. So even when you’re cleaned out, your boner space might go back to being filled up, and you may become jaded again within, say, eight months.
Maybe some people will try to ration their exposure to sexualized images after getting cleaned out, and maybe they can go 18 months before they’re back to being fully jaded. But pornography of the future will be fast-changing and depressing in its perversity. One thing I’ll write about is “stacked perversity,” where people who’ve been exposed to too much of it—likely a significant chunk of the population—will need ultra-hard IQ problems to get off. These might involve solving eight problems in one, where you decode one thing and use the result to decode another, layer after layer, like a Russian doll of difficulty.
That’s miserable to solve. It’s not a true measure of IQ—it’s a measure of how much busy work you’ll slog through to get to the answer. It’s about how obsessed you are. The porn of the future will have stacked perversity too. You’ll take one scenario and, with the help of AI, add further perverse elements until it’s a stack of pancakes of perversity, eight pancakes deep. Pornography for jaded people will be about sneaking up on yourself with some unexpected new perversity. That’s no way to be.
We’ve talked about how humans and primates, in their natural settings, don’t get to “jizz” anywhere near the number of times we do. A, you die sooner, and B, the opportunities for sex or seeing sexual images are a millionth of what we have now. So, we’re caught in this porn trap.
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
Greetings from Dissent Dispatch
Welcome back! This week:
The Unbelief Brief: hijab issues abound in Iran EXMNA Updates: our very own Aysha Khan was recently featured in an interview with The Good Men Project! Persecution Tracker Updates: Pakistan strikes again On the Horizon: You asked, we’re giving it to you — another EXMNA Contest! This time for International Apostasy Day.
The Unbelief Brief
Over the last week, the government of Iran has been hard at work making its dystopian, anti-woman posture even more severe. Two separate incidents, both ridiculous and draconian, have made this evident. The first involves a woman who made the scandalous and immoral decision to sing a song in public without wearing her hijab. Zara Esmaeili, who “is known for her performances on the streets of Tehran, in which she defies the Islamic Republic’s laws,” was arrested, leaving her family “unable to locate her.” The mission to make the streets of Iran as joyless as possible continues apace.
The second incident involves a video of another hijab enforcement action that went viral. In the video, two teenage girls without hijab are seen being violently pulled off the street and into a police van.
The mother of one of the girls revealed that the girls were beaten during this process and after being taken into the van, her daughter who is 14, had “a bruised face, swollen lips, a discolored neck, torn clothes, and she could barely speak.” The video was met with widespread outrage, and the government’s response has been to say that the video “should not have been released to the public.” A judge described the police’s actions in this situation as an “invitation to the police station for administrative purposes.”
Of course, brutality in enforcement is not enough. It must be accompanied by widespread societal brainwashing. Hence the Iranian government’s new “Tuba Plan,” an effort to promote “Iranian-Islamic culture” by encouraging the values of modesty and chastity—values embodied by the hijab. Its ultimate goal is to deploy throughout Iranian society 1,500 “missionaries” who will champion “the culture of chastity and hijab” in educational settings, particularly children’s schools. The hearts of the current generation of Iranians may be closed to the Islamic Republic—but the government knows the value of propaganda starting young.
EXMNA Updates
Our Project Manager, Aysha Khan, recently had an insightful conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen at The Good Men Project, where they discussed the latest developments at Ex-Muslims of North America and our role within the Atheist Movement. The Good Men Projectoffers “a glimpse of what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 21st century.” You can read Aysha’s full interview here.
Persecution Tracker Updates
Last week: two Pakistani Christian sisters faced a mob attack over allegations of blasphemy. Read more here.
On the Horizon
Get ready to flex your meme-making muscles for International Apostasy Day on August 22! We’re kicking off our first-ever Apostasy Day Meme Contest, and we want to see your most creative (and hilarious) submissions. Send your memes to info@exmuslims.org by 11:59 pm EST on August 18th for a shot at social media fame! Just be sure your masterpiece follows Instagram/Facebook guidelines so we can share it. Don’t forget to put “Apostasy Day Meme” in the subject line. Let the meme magic begin! See contest rules below.
Contest Rules: -Identify if your submission is Original or AI-generated. -Images must not have been previously posted on social media platforms (i.e. do not submit recycled images). -No gratuitous violence or sexually explicit content (if you have to think about it, then it probably is). -Include a Title of submission. -Include attribution (name, social media handle, etc.). -1-2 line explanation of and inspiration behind the meme. -Humor is subjective but the funnier the content the more likely it is to catch our eye! -If your submission references a specific Surah or Hadith, please link it. -Have any questions? Contact info@exmuslims.org with the subject line “Apostasy Day Meme”.
Organization Description: Ex-Muslims of North America is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing support for apostates from Islam and spreading awareness of the dangers behind militant Islam. Ex-Muslims of North America advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. We envision a world where every person is free to follow their conscience, irrespective of religious dogma or oppression.
This Week’s Dispatch Awaits You
Thanks for joining us! This week we bring you Iranian human rights statistics and honor killings in The Unbelief Brief. We also discuss female athletics, the hijab, and the Olympics in EXMNA Insights.
The Unbelief Brief
Seven months into the year, Iran Human Rightstallies the number of executions Iranian authorities have carried out. So far, this year’s tally is at 300, which includes “at least 49” in the month of July. The organization also asserts that only 28, or 9% of these executions were officially announced by authorities. It also appears that around 15 of the executions included the ridiculous non-offenses of “enmity against God” and “corruption on Earth.” While still egregious and unacceptable, the figures are a modest decline from 2023, which Iran Human Rights says “can be attributed to the parliamentary and presidential elections and the death of President Raisi [in May].”
Speaking of unacceptable disgrace, honor killings continue apace in Iran, a relentless staple of the culture of the Islamic Republic. The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights reports that a man has killed both his wife and his sister-in-law for the “preservation of honor.” After calling the police last Tuesday because his wife had “threatened” him, he left his home on instructions of the police, only to return a day later and murder his wife and her sister. A horrible waste of human life that keeps happening, over and over again.
Indeed—that’s not even the only honor killing that happened this week in Iran! Over the past two years, a woman has been murdered by family members every few days in Iran. A 25-year-old mother of two young daughters is the latest victim, having been murdered by her father—“after a video of [the victim] at home with her cousin was circulated.” One can only imagine the supremely dishonorable behavior that must have been exhibited in this video to warrant murder in a country where women are killed simply for refusing to wear the hijab. This state of affairs must end and it won’t until a critical mass of us decide—with our actions as well as our words—not to tolerate it any longer.
EXMNA Insights
With the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris in full swing, the BBC World Service recently reported a surge of interest in the sport of fencing amongst Muslim women in the UK. The sport was initially popularized among Muslim youth by Ibtihaj Muhammad, best known for competing in the 2016 Olympics for the United States whilst wearing the hijab. The Muslim Girls Fence project, run by the nonprofit Maslaha, promotes the sport specifically to the Muslim community on the basis that it allows Muslim women to remain “modest” while engaging in an athletic sport. Aside from encouraging and creating much needed space for Muslim women to engage in any athletic sport, one can not ignore the self-limiting nature of this philosophy.
Exercising in a hijab is, no doubt, a challenging endeavor, requiring that women be covered up to their wrists and ankles in loose-fitting clothing. In fact, this is the very reason Ibtihaj Muhammad’s parents enrolled her in fencing; the uniform for fencing was one of the few sports that met their modesty standards.
The recent image of a women’s volleyball match between Spain and Egypt illustrates the senselessness of women’s Islamic modesty requirements in sports. The all-black, head-to-toe outfit resembles a sporty burqa. While some online praised the coming together of players from different faith backgrounds, one can not help but notice the absurdity of competing in a summer sport while completely covered in black spandex, all in an attempt to appease a misogynistic god obsessed with what women put on their bodies.
Muslim women in sports are regularly chastised by religious critics for wearing “revealing” athletic uniforms. Indian-Muslim tennis star Sania Mirza was criticized by a religious organization that issued a fatwa ordering her to cover up for competing in a tennis skirt. Iranian boxer, Sadaf Khadem defected to France after Iran issued an arrest warrant for her just because she competed in a sleeveless shirt and shorts. Sports such as gymnastics, swimming, and wrestling continue to remain off-limits for many observant Muslim women due to the “un-Islamic” uniform standards.
One must ask, is it enough that a ‘modest’ space simply exists for Muslim women in sports? Don’t Muslim women deserve to compete in any sport they’re able to without the strictures of 7th-century doctrine limiting their potential? While accommodating religious misogyny in the sports world may be laudable, shouldn’t we be challenging it at its source as well?
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
By Blake Touchet
The Evolution Talk podcast explores evolution in a straightforward way that is easily accessible to students of biology or those just curious about the world around them. The podcast dives deep into specific aspects of the topic with episodes ranging from examples of evolution in action and scientists who contributed to the development of the field to fascinating new frontiers and discoveries. Author and podcast host Rick Coste recently spoke with NCSE Science Education Specialist Blake Touchet as part of a two-episode series about the common misconception that evolution is “only a theory.”
In the first episode, “Only a Theory,” Touchet discusses the origin of this misconception. As every science teacher can probably attest, the misconception that evolution is “only a theory” is ubiquitous when teaching biology and stems from both a misuse of the word theory in everyday language and a misconception that ideas in science progress through a hierarchy beginning with a hypothesis and ending with a law. Coste and Touchet expound on the importance of understanding the language of science and distinguishing between hypotheses, laws, and theories. The episode concludes with examples of how evolutionary science is classified and used according to these definitions and why evolution, as a theory, has such great power in explaining and predicting natural phenomena.
In the second episode, “What Can Educators Do?,” Touchet follows up by discussing the impact of misconceptions and public perception on the understanding and acceptance of evolution. By gaining an awareness of how evolution is often misrepresented in the news and popular media, teachers and students can evaluate their conceptual understandings of the topic and critique what they hear or read whenever evolution is brought up. Touchet also shares practical strategies and resources for increasing student engagement and resolving student misconceptions. By laying a solid foundation of how the scientific community practices science and leading with culturally responsive and sensitive practices, teachers can meet students where they are and move toward understanding evolution in a non-confrontational way.
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
By Glenn Branch
A now-retired middle school science teacher in Miami, Florida, Bertha Vazquez is the education director for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), where she runs the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES), which provides professional development for science teachers, specifically on evolution. She received NCSE’s Friend of Darwin award in 2023 and the National Association of Biology Teachers Evolution Education Award in 2017. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Glenn Branch: What sparked your interest in helping fellow educators teach evolution effectively?
Bertha Vazquez: As a biology major, I was always very interested in evolutionary biology, but a meeting at the University of Miami Biology Department in 2013 sparked my interest in helping educators. Richard Dawkins was visiting, and after his talk, a handful of professors and graduate students sat down for lunch. Dawkins invited me to join them. The conversation was about evolution education in schools. One of the professors explained that a local private school had received a single parent complaint about evolution being taught at the school, and the school’s administration banned its teaching as a result. Everyone at the table was appalled. I realized I was “on the inside,” so to speak: the only one at the table in K–12 education. So I began by presenting evolution content and resources to my school’s science department.
One year later, I had the opportunity to meet with Dawkins again. He offered to come and speak to the teachers I had been working with. Miami-Dade County Public Schools invited all the district’s science teachers. It was a great success. A few days later, Dawkins asked me to help him do something similar nationally through his foundation, and TIES was born. Our first workshop took place at the Miami Museum of Science in April 2015. Since then, over 85 teachers (including NCSE Teacher Ambassadors John Mead and Blake Touchet) have since presented over 350 workshops in all 50 US states. Thirteen of those teachers (including Mead and Touchet) published a book with me, On Teaching Evolution, in 2022. Check us out at https://tieseducation.org/.
GB: What is the mission of TIES, and what have been its significant impacts?
BV: TIES is about teachers helping teachers. We give teachers the opportunity to present our resources in their school districts and states, encouraging them to be leaders in their learning communities. Our initial aim was to cover evolution content as opposed to the pedagogy since many middle school science teachers must teach everything from weather fronts to photosynthesis. However, TIES has evolved to provide complete units on evolution with plenty of hands-on and student-centered activities, making it as easy as possible for teachers to cover their state or NGSS standards. For example, one week into the pandemic, we created free middle and high school asynchronous evolution units, including student response sheets, exams, rubrics, and answer keys. Three weeks later, we realized they had been downloaded over 2000 times! We have since added units and resources for grades 3–5.
GB: How has NCSE affected your work as a science teacher and as director of TIES?
BV: My first stop as the newly-contracted TIES director was the NCSE office in Oakland, California. NCSE is, without a doubt, our country’s greatest defender of evolution education. Thanks to your work, we know which states need our resources and workshops the most. NCSE’s resources and outstanding Teacher Ambassador program were models for TIES. NCSE also allowed me to be a guest blogger back in 2015, which really got the ball rolling for us. The fact that NCSE realized the importance of climate education and added it to its agenda is commendable. As a teacher, NCSE was one of the first places I went to look for resources and support. And your work is more important than ever.
GB: Throughout your work, you’ve emphasized middle school evolution education. Why is this so important?
BV: When I did my first deep dive into available evolution resources and professional development opportunities, I found many wonderful resources for high school teachers but not so many for middle school teachers. And again, while a high school teacher may teach only chemistry, a middle school teacher must teach everything: earth, life, physical science, you name it. It’s hard to be a content expert in every science and know where to find appropriate resources. Lord help those poor students who learned about rocks from me!
GB: And in fact you conducted a comparison of the treatment of evolution at the middle school level in state science standards, published in Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2017. What did you discover?
BV: That things were improving. In the early 2000s, many states did not have evolution standards at the middle school level. This is anecdotal, but many college professors are telling me they are finding less and less resistance to the science of evolution in their classrooms. Can it be that students are learning about it sooner?
GB: Now that you’re retired from the classroom, what are you working on?
BV: I’m excited about our two other Center For Inquiry education programs, ScienceSaves and Generations Skeptics. ScienceSaves promotes science appreciation through National Science Appreciation Day, dozens of free teacher resources, and an annual scholarship contest for high school seniors. Every year, hundreds of high school seniors send us 30-second videos of how science has improved their lives or those of somebody they know. ScienceSaves awards the best videos $15,000 in cash scholarships. Generation Skeptics promotes teaching young people to think skeptically. The amount of misinformation our students encounter daily is scary; how can they tell what’s credible and what’s not? Our program is all about checking a claim before believing it or sharing it online. We are offering club stipends for teachers starting school GenSkeps clubs and developing camp programming for museums, private camps, homeschooling groups, congregations, etc.
Speaking of misinformation, NCSE’s other theme is climate change, a topic unfortunately rife with disinformation. And in my opinion, the only thing scarier than all the misinformation out there is climate change itself. That’s why I’m also writing a book on climate education with Corwin Press scheduled for release at the end of this year. It’s tentatively titled What Teachers Want to Know About Climate Change. So yeah, when people ask me how’s retirement, I tell them, “I don’t know.”
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
By Joseph Henderson
What does it mean to build “the beloved community” in the midst of escalating climate crises? This is the question that Tom Roderick seeks to answer in Teach for Climate Justice. Answering such a fraught question involves an education in the basics of climate change science, but for Roderick this is not even close to adequate given the stakes. Building thriving communities in a changed climate requires asking difficult questions about the nature of power and inequality, as these are the root causes of climate change and shape social impacts both now and into the future. Given his extensive background shaped by decades of work in social justice education, Roderick is exactly the right person to write such a book.
Teach for Climate Justice takes readers through some challenging intellectual terrain if they are unfamiliar with the historical and present-day environmental and social injustices at the heart of climate change. Roderick correctly roots the climate crisis in long-standing structures of capitalist exploitation of both people and planet and its related Global North/South pattern vis-à-vis colonial processes: “Rich nations, which have amassed wealth from extracting and depleting resources from colonized countries, have a moral obligation to share the wealth they have stolen to help those countries mitigate and adapt to the climate emergencies they are facing” (page 3). While well known to those of us in the social sciences, this was one of the first times I have encountered such an account in a book for general educators. This conversation is long overdue in my professional opinion, for these are the foundational dynamics at work in producing the climate crisis and that presently work to hinder adequate responses.
Roderick’s book moves quickly from a descriptive “is” to a normative program of “oughts” centered on his liberal commitments to social and ecological justice. It is my view that this is a necessary move in climate change education literature, for it focuses attention on the social and political dynamics that have produced climate change in the first place and that continue to shape our collective (in)ability to respond necessarily at scale. Thankfully, this is not another climate change education book written by someone from within the scientific community. This is unapologetically a book about climate justice in educational settings. “When climate education is offered it is generally about climate change rather than for a habitable planet, for the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable sources of energy, and for climate justice” (emphasis in original, page 2). While there’s still much work to be done in climate change science education, the field seems to be maturing toward greater engagement with other traditions and educational disciplines.
The book proceeds over eight chapters ranging from a “deep understanding of the climate crisis” to “teach[ing] for civil resistance.” Each chapter develops principled approaches to climate justice education via engagement with some of the leading thinkers on the subject and then shows how everyday teachers — both in the formal and informal sectors — are engaging in the embodied practices of climate justice pedagogy. We meet some of the heroic educators developing climate justice practices, and each chapter presents a series of prompts so readers can pause and reflect on their own professional practice. A major strength of this book is that the author takes difficult and emotionally challenging concepts about social and environmental injustice and makes them both digestible and actionable for the reader. This is no small feat given the magnitude of the issues facing people and the planet right now.
Roderick is a long-time educator and activist with decades of experience in social justice education as the founding executive director of the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility in New York City. His philosophical and moral commitments echo critical and emancipatory approaches to education that were more popular during the civil rights movements of the 1960s, when educators asked questions about social inequality and environmental injustices. Unfortunately, many of these approaches were sidelined during the 1980s, when “Nation at Risk” neoliberal educational policies repoliticized education toward capitalist market logic and positioned both educators and students as individual actors attempting to maximize their economic capacities. These programs continue to flail and break down due to their inherent contradictions, thus (re)opening the door to the more foundational questions that have intrigued educational thinkers for ages. We again find ourselves asking what education is for, this time during a time of intensifying climate crisis. For Tom Roderick, the purpose of education “must be to nurture a generation of courageous, intelligent, and wise nonviolent fighters for climate justice” (page 7). I can think of no more urgent educational task given the resurgence of fascism as the climate emergencies accelerate.
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
By Paul Oh
That is one of the many ambitious goals for NCSE’s new professional development initiative.
NCSE is planning to provide opportunities for science teachers across the entire continental United States to engage in face-to-face, hands-on professional development led by NCSE staff, according to NCSE Executive Director Amanda L. Townley. “We value teachers’ time and ability to travel and therefore want to take our work to them, in their communities, so they can learn with us in the local context of what matters to them, their community, and their students,” Townley said.
The aim, she added, is “to make professional learning on scientific topics like climate change, evolution, and the nature of science accessible.”
The focus of the professional learning will be on teaching strategies and pedagogies that help students accurately assess misinformation and disinformation about these topics. The professional learning experiences will also leverage NCSE-created activities, including the recently unveiled Climate Change Story Shorts.
“We want to give teachers a toolkit to help them overcome student misconceptions in the science classroom,” NCSE Director of Education Lin Andrews explained.
NCSE’s Supporting Teachers program has released a new dynamic map that highlights this nationwide effort while also giving science teachers the chance to see if they can take advantage of upcoming opportunities in their community or region.
Already in 2024, NCSE has led professional development for teachers in seven states, at national and regional conferences, and at local school districts. NCSE has engaged in this work at the behest of individual teachers, such as Teacher Ambassador Jeff Grant, who organized the Climate of H.O.P.E. conference, and through collaborations with like-minded organizations, such as the National Association for Research in Science Teaching.
My COAST
Another result of a fruitful partnership is a planned four-day event on Skidaway Island, Georgia, coming up in October, 2024. NCSE’s My COAST (Climate-Oriented Authentic Science Teaching) is being developed in collaboration with the University of Georgia Marine Extension (MAREX) and Georgia Sea Grant, a federal-state partnership based at the University of Georgia that works to improve the environmental, social, and economic health of the Georgia coast through research, education and extension.The project is partially funded by the Justin Brooks Fisher Foundation.
Up to 30 science teachers from the region will have a chance to work directly with researchers in the field, examine issues — often exacerbated by climate change — facing coastal communities and habitats in Georgia, dig into solutions being considered and implemented, and plan how to present what they’ve learned to their students back home.
“It is our hope that teachers who at- tend My COAST will come away not only with a deeper understanding and appreciation of the intricacies of coastal Georgia … but more confident in their ability to lead these discussions ,” Townley said.”
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
By Glenn Branch
NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education — volume 44, number 3 — is now available online.
Featured are a description of NCSE’s new professional development initiative, aimed at reaching science teachers across the country; Glenn Branch’s description of a recent poll with results about American public opinion about Charles Darwin; Wendy Johnson’s report on NCSE’s climate change education workshop for Michigan science teachers; Glenn Branch’s interview of Bertha Vazquez, a recent recipient of NCSE’s Friend of Darwin award; Joseph Henderson’s review of Tom Roderick’s Teach for Climate Justice; and George E. Webb’s review of Randy Moore’s John Thomas Scopes: A Biography.
The entire issue is freely available (PDF) on NCSE’s website, as are select articles. Publication of RNCSE is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you!
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
The National Center for Science Education is embarking on a new partnership initiative with higher education faculty and museum educators to enhance professional learning opportunities in climate science, evolution, and the nature of science for K-12 science teachers; identify and resolve common misconceptions about those topics; and conduct research to develop best practices for science education.
The NCSE Sound Science Fellowship is a competitive research and service program providing networking opportunities for academics who share our passion for improving science education. Fellows will engage with NCSE’s Supporting Teachers program in an effort to better understand and redefine the teaching and learning of climate science, evolution, and the nature of science. For the two-year commitment, each Sound Science Fellow will receive a $3,000 honorarium, multiple opportunities to engage with their cohort and other educators nationwide, and amplification of work that impacts science education.
“We could not be more excited to announce this fellowship opportunity,” NCSE Executive Director Amanda L. Townley said. “By connecting science teacher educators, museum educators, K-12 classroom teachers, and our teacher support team, we will collaborate to create new and innovative pathways towards improving science education, particularly when it comes to combating anti-science sentiment and the proliferation of science misconceptions and disinformation. This fellowship is not just about personal growth, but about making a significant impact on science education.”
Applications will be accepted until Friday, October 18, 2024. Learn more about the fellowship as well as find a link to apply.
Organization: National Center for Science Education
Organization Description: The National Center for Science Education promotes and defends accurate and effective science education because everyone deserves to engage with the evidence. One day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate, teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science, and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure that all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future.
By Wendy Johnson
The National Center for Science Education is excited to announce the launch of our new Climate Change Story Shorts: flexible mini-units that can be completed in as little as a week. The Story Short format is a unique approach to standards-aligned instructional storylines developed through our collaborative work with teachers. Each Story Short addresses one performance expectation while also directly confronting common misconceptions about climate change.
Storylines have emerged as the gold standard for science instruction because they engage students in the three dimensions of science to explain a phenomenon or solve a problem. However, facilitating students’ sensemaking about a complex phenomenon while simultaneously achieving multiple NGSS performance expectations often requires a long and complicated storyline. Three-dimensional teaching and learning also require shifts for both teachers and students, including more student talk and less teacher talk, a clearly established purpose for each activity connected to a driving question, increased collaboration among students, and more authentic assessments. Developing instructional resources that adequately support both students and teachers in making all of these shifts has proven to be a formidable challenge.
Since its inception, the Supporting Teachers team has worked closely with master teachers to develop instructional materials. We have purposely tackled topics, including evolution, climate change, and the nature of science, that are challenging to teach because they involve social controversies. As a result, students may come to the classroom with deeply held misconceptions that are difficult to resolve. Our approach has always been to tackle these misconceptions head-on in a non-confrontational way that we describe as BRAVE classroom practices. Starting in 2021, we conducted a two-year national curriculum field test (CFT) of our instructional units. Much of the CFT feedback echoes the challenges teachers across the country face as they take up standard-aligned storylines — they are overwhelmingly complex and difficult to orchestrate. Over the past year, we have used this feedback to entirely revise our climate change units into our new Story Short format. This format addresses four main issues:
Issue #1 Phenomenon fatigue: A critical feature of storylines is that each learning activity is explicitly related back to a driving question about a specific phenomenon that drives the entire unit. Storylines are often complicated and take many weeks or months to complete, leading to a weariness among teachers and students that has been dubbed “phenomenon fatigue.” Storylines become long and complicated when they address multiple performance expectations. Integrating many performance expectations is a worthy goal because it allows for answering more complex questions, making important connections between topics, and accurately reflects the nature of science. However, students also crave novelty and can get frustrated when they feel like they have been learning about the same topic for too long. In addition, teachers often have difficulty keeping the “thread” of the unit going when there are so many different ideas to connect.
Our solution: Story Shorts are streamlined storylines that address just one performance expectation. We knew that we needed to find ways to simplify our storylines without watering them down. Rather than addressing multiple performance expectations, each Story Short aims to support students in meeting just one standard, which can be completed in as little as five hours of class time. In addition, our resources are targeted at helping students resolve specific common misconceptions about that topic. We carefully revised our materials based on the latest research and best practices in the field to ensure that each activity in the Story Short directly addressed a piece of the performance expectation as well as a common misconception.
Issue #2 Teaching to a script: When teachers try a new approach, they often feel like they are enacting a script written by someone else. This scripted feeling is especially associated with storylines because they are designed to lead students on a specific learning path that highlights many important connections along the way. At the same time, the goal of a storyline is to make sense from the students’ perspective, so the teacher has to merge the predetermined “script” with the students’ ideas and questions. As a result, implementing a storyline can often create tension for teachers as they attempt to weave together their own understanding of the content and the many responsibilities they carry in the classroom, the vision of teaching and learning promoted by the curriculum, and the ideas, interests, and questions put forth by their students.
Our Solution: Story Shorts are flexible storylines that clearly identify key activities necessary for achieving the performance expectation and resolving a specific misconception while offering optional activities that dig deeper or make other important connections. We call these optional activities Side Quests because they enhance the storyline, but their inclusion is based on the teacher’s discretion. The main activities of the Story Short are the essential building blocks for resolving the targeted misconception and achieving a particular standard-aligned learning goal. Side Quests offer additional opportunities for going deeper into a topic, filling in missing background information, meeting the needs of specific students, or for place-based adaptations. Side Quests are not merely optional extension activities to do if you have extra time, but rather ways that the storyline can be adapted to the needs of particular groups of students. Side Quests invite teachers to pay attention to their students’ interests, needs, and cultural ways of knowing and to veer off the “script” with intentionality. We believe the Side Quest feature helps teachers imagine how storylines can be adapted to their context and how they might construct and add their own Side Quests in the future.
Issue #3 Meaningful assessment: Assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning because it allows the teacher and students to better understand student thinking and how it compares to the target performance. The nuances of formative and summative assessment have been debated endlessly in the field, leaving teachers to grapple with concrete implementation issues, such as assigning grades and meeting accountability measures. New types of formative assessment have emerged as standardized assessments have transitioned to three-dimensional performance tasks. Meanwhile, teachers have been left questioning how to integrate all of these changes into the existing structures within their schools.
Our solution: Story Shorts seamlessly integrates formative and summative assessments. The first activity in each Story Short is specifically designed to uncover misconceptions students hold about a topic while supporting them in expressing their ideas and questions on a driving question board. Teacher support materials help teachers anticipate and respond to students’ ideas and questions and connect each learning activity back to students’ ideas and questions. Learning activities also invite students to directly respond to common misconceptions using the latest scientific evidence. Finally, each Story Short concludes with a summative assessment task that requires students to apply the knowledge and skills they learned to explain a slightly different phenomenon.
Issue #4: Mismatch between resources and the needs of teachers: Just like students, teachers have different strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. While NGSS-aligned resources often highlight how to meet differing students’ needs, they rarely take teachers’ differing needs into account. When resources consider teachers’ needs, it usually means adding more information, resulting in longer and more complicated instructions. To be fair, this is a tricky balance for curriculum developers! Some teachers need additional support with the science content, some need support with pedagogical strategies, and others need logistical support in managing students and materials. To further complicate things, teachers’ needs shift based on the context of the lesson and at different points in the school year. Thus, it is understandable that teacher support resources often become long and complicated.
Solution: Enhanced teacher support targeted to different needs. While we can’t solve every problem for teachers, we listened carefully when they told us that the teacher resources for most publicly available NGSS storylines are too long and complicated. As former teachers, the NCSE Supporting Teachers team understands how busy teachers are and that they don’t have time to dig through long documents to find what they need. Many features of our new Story Shorts were explicitly designed to address these challenges. We developed an overview document for each Story Short that allows teachers to see the big picture and access the materials quickly. From the overview, teachers click on a link for each activity and find teacher instructions with links to all the resources they need, including student handouts, slide decks, and supplementary resources such as cards and data sets. The teacher instructions are organized to allow teachers to easily access what they need. The instructions for each activity begin with a series of simple graphic organizers that help teachers swiftly understand how the activity fits within the larger Story Short and access materials. These graphic organizers are often all a veteran teacher would need to facilitate the activity. However, we also include step-by-step directions below the graphic organizers that support teachers in implementing each part of the lesson should they need it.
Flexible approach
The flexible approach to three-dimensional instruction embedded within NCSE’s Story Short format best serves the needs of both teachers and students. Throughout the revision process, NCSE’s teacher ambassadors and field testers implemented new activities and provided feedback on the materials. We have shared the process of developing Story Shorts at multiple regional, state, and national conferences and received very positive feedback from teachers and teacher educators alike. The Supporting Teacher’s team is thrilled to finally be able to share our five Climate Change Story Shorts with the public. We invite you to try them out this school year and share your experiences with us either in the NCSE Supporting Teachers Facebook group or via email at andrews@ncse.ngo.
PS: And, in case you’re wondering, our next team project will follow the same process to update our current evolution and nature of science storylines. So, stay tuned!
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: chaotic violent strategies, Era of National Stupidity, increasing population productivity, Individual Stupidity, political propaganda arguments, self-destruction through misbehavior, sociobiological math theories, widespread dumb behavior.
On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity
While we debate the stupidity of material in Noesis, lemme say a few things about dumbness in the outside world. Observation one: Fifty years ago, the Era of National Stupidity reached its peak. We are now in the Era of Individual Stupidity. During WWII, nations were psychetic, but the individuals that comprised those nations generally behaved themselves according to the rules established by their crazed leaders. Today, the world’s largest nations generally behave with some restraint, but the individuals in those nations misbehave.
I blame an increasing population and productivity for widespread dumb behavior. Since WWII, the U.S. population has doubled, and productivity has increased five or ten times. This is too much productivity. There’s not enough stuff to do, and people must fritter away their time, going to college, watching cable, playing video games, filing lawsuits, pursuing meaningless (and usually vicarious) sex. This is fine with me, except that, as a professional moron, I can’t keep up with all the amateur manna.
Self-destruction through individual misbehavior is certainly preferable to the destruction of populations through national aggression. It’s fun to wonder when this trend will lead. (Incidental) Observation two: In political propaganda, ‘Where it will lead’ is the type of argument most frequently made. Most court cases, most political decisions, are pithily and can be seen as significant only through the magnifying glass of trend-mongering—’If stuff like this keeps happening,’ the argument goes, ‘we’ll end up in some politically-extreme dictatorial dystopia.’ (That’s how I feel we’re trending now under the Republicans, but I should know better.) Most trends exist only to fill newscasts. Piddliness in one direction is usually scuffed out by a succession of other oddly trends.
But, maybe individual media-abetted techno-sexual-criminal foolishness is an actual trend. Then things can only get more interesting. With more people with more resources to create their own little worlds, each individual slice of life, each biography, is going to be thinner, more tweaked, a more distant random divergence from some 1950’s average. And, sociobiologists et al like to argue that altruism is genetically based. They do the math and show how genes survive better under cooperation. Observation three: I bet there’s some other math to be done showing that when a species is too successful, some genes survive better using chaotic, violent strategies. EvGybusly knows when too many rodents are crammed in a cage, they engage in antisocial behavior. There’s gotta be some sociobiological math behind that.
Quick review of I.Q., in which Walter Matthau plays Albert Einstein—Much of the movie takes place at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Podolsky and Kurt Godel get lots of screen time as Einstein’s sidekicks. So during the first few minutes, I was pretty excited. But the movie is real dumb, even for non-physics people. President Eisenhower comes to campus to congratulate Einstein and Tim Robbins for developing cold fusion. Einstein rigs a car to malfunction by remote control. There’re enough moments of oksyness to keep you interested, but the movie ends with a messy cluster of coincidences and unlikely behavior. You might impress a date by pointing out all the wrong stuff, but you’ll probably just sound annoying.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Rosner R. On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-12
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Rosner, R. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): ROSNER, R. On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Rosner, Rick. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-12.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Rosner, R “On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-12.
Harvard: Rosner, R. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-12>.
Harvard (Australian): Rosner, R 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-12>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Rosner, Rick. “On High-Range Test Construction 12: Rick Rosner, On Stupidity.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-12.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: artificial intelligence project, cellular automata project, critical objective assessment, High IQ societies, Mega Test difficulty, minimizing cheating on tests, oddballs and cranks, Society members meeting.
On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report
High IQ societies usually attract oddballs and cranks, so I have never joined one. However, the Mega Test was so difficult that I figured it would weed out these people, since they wouldn’t have the patience to work out the answers. This is also why they never make important contributions. However, all of this was pretty much conjecture on my part, so it was with some trepidation that I set out to meet some fellow members of the Society. I figured I would either meet the crème de la cranks, or a bunch of people more or less like myself.
During September, I met with four fellow members of the Society: Jeff Ward and Dean Inada in Southern California and Ron Hoeflin and Ray Wise in New York. To my great relief, I found that they were not cranks. Not one crank idea was proposed during any of the several hours of discussions. The ideas that were discussed were fairly examined from all sides, and people were willing to change their opinion when presented with sufficiently strong evidence. It was very comforting.
We discussed the solutions to Trial Test A and formulated a consolidated solution set (we could not solve problems 33 through 35—these are still unsolved as of this writing). We agreed that it is important to expand the Society and that tests such as the Mega Test are the appropriate vehicle to do so. We had several suggestions on how to minimize cheating on the tests:
Don’t publish the test.
Have the person requesting the test sign a contract stating that he or she will not reveal the contents of the test.
Change the test every year.
Specify that admission to the Society will require an interview that will involve some follow-up questions, even though this may not be true.
Tell the person before he or she requests the test that the test will require a considerable amount of time, and then be strict in requiring that the test be returned within the time limit (say, three months).
We also discussed several projects for the Society. Jeff suggested a forum (television show? magazine?) for critical, objective assessment of arguments on both sides of issues of public interest. I suggested a long-term project in the area of cellular automata and artificial intelligence. We all agreed that there would be no shortage of ideas on projects, nor any shortage of energy and talent to apply to the projects. All in all, they were two very enjoyable meetings, and I look forward to more.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-11
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-11.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-11.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-11>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-11>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 11: Chris Cole, Trip Report.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-11.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
The Peace School is new in Canada, founded and accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 2023. Currently, the school has five children with a capacity for 120 and is well-financed and supported by the parents whose children attend. The school’s pedagogy has attracted the attention and support of UNICEF, UNESCO, and UNHCR, which strongly encouraged Dr. Nasser Yousefi, the Principal of The Peace School, to share his pedagogy and learning environment with other countries. Canada was Dr. Yousefi’s first choice for the next Peace School. Dr. Yousefi began his career as a child psychologist, studying in Sweden and earning a Master’s in Education in Childhood Growth and Development. In his exploration of the best pedagogy and learning environment for children, Dr. Yousefi completed a PhD in Educational Approaches at Madonna University in Italy and a PhD in Educational Psychology at Northwest University in the USA. This training combined humanistic and cognitive approaches to education. For many years, Dr. Yousefi was an educational consultant for UNICEF. He has conducted educational and research activities for various groups of children, including immigrant children, minorities, street children, and children with special needs. Dr. Yousefi was the Principal of the Peace (Participatory) School in Tehran, Iran, from 2005 to 2023, graduating 500 students from kindergarten to high school, with graduates accepted at universities in Europe, America, and Canada. Dr. Yousefi is passionate about creating the best future for children and is dedicated to creating safe and nurturing learning environments based on holistic principles. Yousefi discusses: educational efforts; a motto or slogan;no political violence; a highly religiously controlled society; the curriculum; mainstream educational system; Canadian; Quantum Research Center; ghostly governmental presence; a risk in teaching students; and B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism.
Keywords: Challenges in mainstream education, Community-based learning resources, Cultural and religious diversity, Educational funding in Iran, Government restrictions in Iran, Humanistic education model, Integration of emotional and social skills, Volunteer-driven school system.
On Humanist Education 2: Funding and Pedagogy
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you get funding for these educational efforts in the Islamic Republic of Iran?
Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi: So, all are provided by the tuition. We didn’t have any extra funding or financial support. The school was supervised by an NGO in Iran. The school was a project of this NGO. The NGO provided all the educational programming and everything else. Nothing came from outside the school; it was all within the NGO and the school system.
Sometimes, we held events to provide fun activities, like concerts or art exhibitions, and all the funds gathered from these events were used exclusively for the school. Most of the support and help we received came from volunteers. Many of our operations, educational programs, research, and even teacher training were handled by volunteers. We needed to pay only for basic things, like the rent for the building and our full-time teachers.
Everything we paid for was solely for the students. Aside from the building and salaries, everything else was handled by volunteers. Research, planning, and everything else were done voluntarily. The parents whose children were enrolled in the school also helped. We wanted the parents to be part of the whole system and to participate. When they helped and supported the school, it became important to them. Sometimes, we would ask if they had a party room in their building for events or meetings, if they could help with transportation or field trips, or volunteered for library operations. Anything that could reduce our expenses. The whole project was so interesting to them that they wanted to be involved.
They were so excited about the whole project and the school concept that they didn’t wait for us to ask for help; they did it themselves. One of the school’s principles was that we believed the whole community was our school. We could use community resources as learning opportunities for our students rather than building or creating new opportunities. We always used available resources provided by families, whether they worked in a company, factory, vet clinic, or lab.
Those opportunities were the best for our students to learn something new. It also decreased our expenses and created more learning opportunities. It helped us create a culture of utilizing available community resources for children. Instead of building something ourselves, we used what we already had. This model could be used in any city, not just the capital or larger cities. It could work in any city based on available resources and people. Looking at it broadly, there are many opportunities for schools to use for their students. It doesn’t mean we must create them; they are already available.
This approach also allowed us to have multiple field trips and use community resources. All the libraries in the city were our schools. All the museums were our school. Every company, factory, and store became part of our learning environment. We viewed the entire city as a learning opportunity. It meant that everyone in society was a teacher for us. The museum guide, or guides, yes. They would have been the best teachers, especially for the Museum of History. Or people who worked at the laboratory.
They were the best teachers for biology. We were open to other people becoming our teachers. We were fearless of letting more people join our team and welcomed them as much as possible. Everyone in Tehran, where we were based, was very welcoming to our students and the school. We wanted to hear from them because we respected their talents, abilities, and everything. We wanted them to be the experts in some situations, and they did everything they could for us. That’s why we never encountered any closed doors from the people.
We did face situations where the government closed doors for us, but people were very open and welcoming.
Jacobsen: A few things come to mind. This will be the shortest of the three I have in mind. When people own a school or the educational system and participate that way, did they adopt a motto or slogan within the school?
Yousefi: Yes, the founders had a motto. The school slogan was “Make the world a better place.” The teachers never expected anything specific from the students but always asked them to improve the world for themselves and others, regardless of their jobs or careers.
Yes, it doesn’t matter what job or career you follow; you can improve the world. You are not allowed to hurt anyone or make someone else suffer. You need to love others and show empathy and compassion. We tried to teach love and empathy. As teachers and adults, we don’t have much to teach students, but we can spread love to them.
Regarding the concerts and other fundraising efforts, we raised funds to reduce operating costs and lower parents’ fees. These concerts were private and not publicly announced. Generally, anyone is allowed to hold a concert, but for larger public events, they need a permit from the government. For us, it was different. Women, for example, are not allowed to perform publicly. Our fundraising concerts were all private and spread by word of mouth.
This touches on the third question, which might require a longer response. We did face some pressure and pushback from the government. The main issue was that they didn’t recognize us as a school. This meant we couldn’t give any diplomas or certificates to our students. So that was one of the issues, yes. The government wants every school to follow its curriculum and textbooks, and the same textbooks are used across the country. It doesn’t matter where the school is; every student has to read the same textbook.
That was one of the main issues and pushbacks. One of our biggest challenges was that the government only believed in one system and approach. They didn’t even allow an alternative approach to be considered. However, we wanted to continue promoting different and multiple approaches and methods worldwide, and we believed we had to at least look at them. We wanted to promote and support diversity rather than singularity, but the government needed help.
They wanted their system and approach to be seen and recognized. It doesn’t matter where you live in Iran, whether in the north, south, east, or west; everyone has to read the same textbook. It doesn’t consider their cultural, religious, or political backgrounds. Everyone has to read the same textbook and take the same exams. However, we must consider the child’s cultural background, history, language, stories, and even religion in their educational program. Iran has a diversity of religions and languages, and we can’t ignore this diversity. You can speak up to one language when there are various languages. In the humanistic approach, we must consider this diversity and these differences. We wanted to do this, and we tried to do it. Of course, we still try to do it, but the government doesn’t support it.
Jacobsen: So, no political violence was enacted against any of you, the students, the teachers, or the families. Is that correct?
Yousefi: Violence in the sense that we might usually imagine? No, because we were conducting a research project. The development of this alternative method over twenty years was a massive research project. We always told government organizations that we were implementing a research project to expand educational diversity. We always spoke as a group of specialists. However, I believe that the fact we were never officially recognized and our students were unable to receive an official diploma is itself a form of violence.
Jacobsen: When you’re in a highly religiously controlled society, and everyone, regardless of background, has to take these examinations and follow the educational curriculum, what is in it? What do people have to learn? Is it anything connected to the real world? Which parts are useful, and which are nonsense that train people to be effective citizens in a theocracy?
Yousefi: The focus of the schools is, after all, the promotion and expansion of religious thought, specifically introducing students to Islamic teachings. However, Iran is a country rich in diverse religions, where followers of different faiths have lived together in peace for centuries. When the official education system ignores this diversity and doesn’t provide opportunities for dialogue among followers of various religions, ethnicities, or minorities, diversity and plurality are ultimately lost. Of course, followers of religions like Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and others had their own schools that only enrolled students of their faith. However, there was no interaction between students of different religions within the official education system.
Jacobsen: As part of the curriculum, are kids taught things that aren’t useful, like prayer and other religious practices, that might be meaningful to the parents but not necessarily effective for dealing with the realities of life when they grow up?
Yousefi: In mainstream schools, there are subjects for religion and prayer. We don’t know exactly how parents feel because we aren’t in contact with parents from mainstream schools, but we hear they aren’t very satisfied with what’s happening. We also hear that sometimes their children practice something at school but something else at home, leading to conflicts.
They only study and read to pass exams. They don’t necessarily believe what they study. This isn’t limited to religious subjects; it includes history, literature, geography, and even science and social sciences. Students memorize the textbooks to pass exams. The textbooks include stories in literature that students have to read, but these are only sometimes the books they choose when they go to the library. We wanted to connect school and personal life, not separate them. It wasn’t easy; being honest with yourself and your education while maintaining balance was hard.
Jacobsen: Does the mainstream educational system make any distinctions between Sunni, Shia, Ahmadi, or Quranist interpretations of Islam, or is it all one version?
Yousefi: No, it only talks about Islam in a general sense. Discussions around Zoroastrianism and other faiths are not included. The government has its version of Islam that it promotes. It could be more realistic and accurate; it’s just something the government developed.
Jacobsen: A friend of mine is a cosmologist at UBCO and Lethbridge. He’s a Quranist Muslim. We’ve been discussing interfaith topics for a long time. He’s big on interfaith dialogues and humanistic interpretations of Islam, which might appeal to secularized individuals. However, this isn’t that. I’m a minor figure doing administrative stuff for them, but the Canadian Quantum Research Center has a decent number of citations.
Jacobsen: Let’s contrast what was described with the mainstream system’s method and how it doesn’t recognize anything other than a single worldview, and not in an educational sense when I’m thinking about it. They’re taking it as true rather than a secularized world religions class, where they teach what people believe and let you decide for yourself. It’s much different. They’ve pre-decided for you. What’s your humanistic approach to this?
Yousefi: We consider religion to be part of a child’s background. Many Persian poems have roots in Islam, Zoroastrianism, or even Judaism. So, when you want to learn about Rumi or Hafez, you must also learn about those roots. For example, you can’t understand Hafez’s poems if you don’t know the Torah stories or Rumi’s poems without knowledge of the Quran. The same applies to Eastern countries. If you don’t know the Bible, you can’t fully understand Victor Hugo’s or Charles Dickens’s stories.
Talking about the Bible, Quran, or Torah is necessary to understand literature and poetry. It doesn’t mean we are promoting that religion. Rather, it’s about understanding the culture and history needed to grasp something else. The same goes for science. Some scientific concepts have come from Eastern or Western positions or even how we look at evolution. There are different narratives about evolution rooted in religion. Discussing a scientist or physician doesn’t mean we are endorsing their religious views. We are discussing their ideas and theories. We only focus on religion as a background context. We don’t have a specific subject for religion, but we touch on it to explain the backstory of other topics. If a student is curious about a religion, we open up, considering it a great learning opportunity. But we always respect all religions and those who follow them. We are one of the rare schools with diverse religions, but we never promote any particular one.
We always help students learn more about a religion if they have questions. Some families specifically asked us not to talk about any religion, especially in Iran. However, we could only say yes if a child was interested in learning about Islam or any other religion . We respected their curiosity and taught them about it without promoting it.
In the context of Iran, if you advocate for something other than Islam, there could be negative consequences. But we never wanted to advocate for a specific religion because it would mean we couldn’t respect others. We wanted to allow students from other religions to speak freely and be heard. One year, the students themselves asked for a class on religion. We had a program to introduce each religion without advocating for any. We also explained that some people are atheists and don’t believe in any religion. We focused on diversity, saying, “This is it,” rather than limiting ourselves to one viewpoint.
This approach wasn’t limited to religion. It extended to literature and music as well. Some schools only teach one genre of music or one instrument. We introduced different genres and instruments, even challenging ones. We aimed to discuss the best examples in each genre across subjects like arts and science.
If a school restricts everything to one religion or genre, it restricts diversity. We encouraged students to love their country and respect other countries, lands, and nationalities. We never advocated for nationalism or exclusivity.
Jacobsen: So, that’s good. This last response will be helpful for those in Canada who may have a stereotype of what Iran is like. There’s this ghostly governmental presence that restricts everyone in every way. Can you describe the humanistic model of education, whether about politics, religion or anything else, in a compact way as something like individualistic cosmopolitanism for learning about a wide range of human identities and truths about the world in a semi-autonomous direction?
Yousefi: I am not a representative of the Iranian government, and my educational and research work was never approved by the government. Therefore, I cannot say what the public schools were thinking or what they expected from this education. Whatever it was, I was critical and opposed to the educational system.
Since the humanistic approach’s main objective is respect, it considers every person’s aspect and background. It allows people to talk about who they are today, helping them take the next steps. A humanistic teacher is not an ethics teacher; it’s not someone who judges people. It’s a person who accepts a child in every aspect, in every way possible.
For example, we consider children and see where they stand and what they bring from home, their past, their background, their culture, and everything else. But we don’t judge that child and their background. They will never trust us again if we judge them or share their dreams or thoughts. So, we need to accept them as they are, wherever they are, so we can help them take the next steps toward the future.
A humanistic teacher needs to correct the child immediately. We wait long enough to address their mistakes, issues, or misunderstandings. Sometimes, students come with a racist point of view, and we don’t stop them immediately. We listen and ask them to talk enough so we can understand where they need help. If we start to correct or judge them immediately, they will stop being honest with us and never share their thoughts. So, language, politics, religion, or nationality are not priorities for a humanistic education. What’s important is their characteristics, personalities, emotions, and understanding of the world; we must fully understand them to help them grow and develop. A humanistic teacher is more of a caregiver than a traditional teacher.
It’s someone who takes care of the children. We care about policies that support caring for students and children, whether it’s regulations, concepts, or theories. The world needs caregivers more than traditional teachers—not caregivers in the sense of caring for someone ill but someone who genuinely cares for children’s development and well-being. But that’s where I differ from a behaviourist teacher to a humanistic teacher.
Jacobsen: Is there a risk in teaching students intellectual and analytical skills without a proportional development of emotional and social skills in students? A healthy development of the sentiments to make the intellectual and analytical skills more rounded.
Yousefi: It’s both the holistic approach and integrated education. Integrated education means we pay attention to the child’s needs immediately. You can’t say that you only focus on their cognitive development without paying attention to their nutrition or malnutrition. You can only focus on social skills by considering society’s rules and regulations. Cognitive psychology and behavioural psychology both caused the issue of segregating these needs. Cognitive psychology focuses only on cognitive needs and doesn’t consider emotional and social needs.
Behavioural psychology only focuses on individual success and forgets that a child is a complex person with different developmental skills and needs. Paying attention to only one aspect and disregarding the others can be dangerous. It could be creativity, reasoning, or analyzing. We need to work on every need and aspect of a child at the right moment. If we skip paying attention to emotional and social needs, then we might end up with scientists who make bombs, promoting war and destruction.
Who’s making these bombs and weapons of mass destruction? It’s often those specialized individuals who lack emotional and social skills. They never had the opportunity to develop empathy and compassion. Yes, there are doctors and physicians involved in organ trafficking or mutilation who lack empathy. Where did they go to school? They might have attended very controlling and closed schools that forced them to think about war due to their conditions.
The world’s educational system fails to teach people to love each other and empathize; defending any war means going against humanity. Most of the workforce involved in the war, whether in the army, weapons factories, or transportation, attended schools that failed them. Teachers must answer how we taught them and who they became. It’s very sad and makes me emotional.
Jacobsen: Let’s shift topics so you don’t cry. Famously, Professor Noam Chomsky essentially destroyed B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism in an 8-page review article. This brought about the cognitive revolution, and humanistic psychology evolved from it. Rogers and other fundamental humanistic psychologists are dead. How has humanistic psychology and humanistic education evolved since its inception, so the cutting edge in the 2010s/2020s?
Yousefi: This person, Noam Chomsky, wasn’t the first to write against behaviourist education. He was one of the prominent critics. Maslow, Ferrier, Rogers, and Fromm were all critics of the behaviourist approach. People like Yalom and Pinker also criticize it. I am also a serious critic of behaviorism in my country. believe that we cannot easily overlook a system that harms the students’ psychology so much. We must raise our voices against behaviorist education.
Some people start questioning it when you shout negatively. I am happy to have been among the few to question behaviourist education. It’s good when behaviourist psychologists and educational specialists hear this criticism. Yes, it’s like validation that you’re doing the right thing—not that you intended to, but you were compelled to.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On Humanist Education 2: Funding and Pedagogy. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On Humanist Education 2: Funding and Pedagogy.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Jad Amine Zeitouni is a dynamic political figure and advocate, currently serving as a political advisor for equal chances, economy, employment, LEZ, and energy under the cabinet of Minister Elke Van den Brandt in Brussels. A candidate for the Brussels Parliament, ranked sixth on the list for Groen, he brings extensive experience in public service and advocacy, particularly in areas of diversity, inclusion, and youth rights. His work spans organizing workshops on diversity and identity, moderating debates on critical societal issues, and consulting on diversity and inclusion strategies, continuously influencing and shaping policies that promote social justice and equality in Belgium. Zeitouni: discusses feminism and humanism out of Belgium.
Keywords: ecologism and long-term impacts, feminist principles and intersectionality, humanist activism and political transition, political decision-making and social awareness, practical application of humanist values, socialism and social risk management, the intersection of feminism and gender roles, youth humanism leadership experience.
Conversation with Jad Amine Zeitouni on Feminist Humanism
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, let’s go from here. The first interview is long-lost. We connected through Young Humanists International when transitioning from the International Humanists and Ethical Youth Organization (IHEYO) to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).
You already had a political interest or intrigue in political science then. So, what did you learn from your leadership days in youth humanism? How have you now transferred that over to your political life? From what you’re telling me, you are extremely busy right now—a bit of a broader question.
Jad Zeitouni: I’ve always been active. I had my humanist activism, but I also had many other things. The humanist experience was one of the most important ones. I’ve been mainly active in politics and policymaking. I’ve been actively advising and executing political mandates. The humanist experience is similar. In the end, I was vice president. I was part of the group of thinkers that allowed us to reflect, think about the world, and find concrete solutions. We had to figure out how to support young humanists in Nigeria or stimulate them with a budget we had allocated practically. How do we manage a group with a social purpose and a vision for the world to execute? In the end, political work is similar. There are 6,000 things you can do, and probably 5,000 that everybody agrees you should do, but you only have the money and time to do 100. I didn’t find it that different from the humanist experience, except it was my full-time job the last year. Humanism was my extra on the side. We all did this voluntarily.
The first part is that I’ve seen the young humanist bubble soften over the last few years. It makes me a bit sad. It was valuable for the international humanist movements and us. I swear we did the same as what I’m doing now as a professional political advisor.
The second thing is that I was in charge of the finances. I was handling the budgets. I had to do my financial report. If you remember, I had to do all the checks and balances. It ended up being a more useful experience than I thought it would be because it helped me develop an understanding of budgets. That understanding of budgets has grown even more afterwards, quite a lot more. One of the most important things I’ve done in the last year, for which I’ve also gotten the most recognition, is going through the budgets of some projects from a different political party-affiliated minister. I spend my evening nights reflecting and thinking, okay, where does the money go? I find flaws, sometimes done to secure budgets and sometimes not intentionally. People sometimes overestimate or underestimate the budgets.
This is similar to my thinking work when we had our young humanists’ projects, knowing when they applied for grants. One of my biggest time investments back then was reviewing those applications, advising them, and telling them what to do. Weirdly enough, what I did over the last years, while it’s a lot fancier on paper and the impact is a bit more direct and bigger, is similar to what we were doing back then. Also, if somebody wanted to do my job for ten years, I’d advise them to gain similar experience. It’s a good learning school. I find my motivation in doing real stuff. I need to improve on an academic bench.
This is why I am the way I am. Young humanists, it’s real. It’s a real world. That’s nice. That’s motivating. At the same time, it was voluntary youth work. You were allowed to make some mistakes. You have a team; you have good vibes. Half our meetings were a group of friends from all across the globe, where you have humanist friends specifically venting their frustrations about the world. The other half was us doing a good job. I look back, and we underestimated ourselves a bit. I would trust us if I had the money, budgets, and power to put the same constellation in charge of executing humanist policies. We did well. We had diverse profiles, expertise, and perspectives, all motivated with the heart in the right place. I sound ableist, and I apologize. We also had the intellectual capacity as a group to envision, execute, think, reflect, and be self-critical. How important I’ve noticed in the last few years is how much of a difference that makes. This is a summary, but I can keep going on a monologue, but that might be too extensive.
Jacobsen: What do you make of the policy and politics you’re into now, and those orientations related to humanist principles? How do you find much overlap between the political side of things and values that humanism more or less taught?
Zeitouni: Yes, I work. I’ve been active within the Greens, the ecological movement. There’s an obvious natural overlap. I can think of many differences. One of the subtle differences might be that I’ve never been the most hardcore humanist. I believe in individual rights for people to have religious freedom. People should matter. A lot of my humanist buddies, they’re more anti-religion. No, I’m not anti-religion on an individual level. I’m anti-religious structure. So I’ve always been soft in that aspect of my humanism- live and let live- all fine.
But I feel like progressive political movements in Western Europe sometimes have borderline poverty. That’s a different thing. I’m not a big fan of it; I’m not sure if stimulating is the right word, but let’s say enabling religious structures where individuals carry way too much power and where people get low-key brainwashed. They are also very passive to me. My stance is a bit more radical, but religious people have robbed a part of our humanity. When you think of religious structures, we never developed the structures to handle the loss of a loved one, to celebrate love, to celebrate birth. Religious structures so dominate those. They have thousands of years of culture they’ve developed in a way. That means we never had a place in our society to take care of that, right? Because we always, almost in a lazy way, built our modern societies and said, ah, they’ll go to the church, right?
And if tomorrow I could, and I’m trying to push that, my political party has shifted because of me. We need to handle that. We must invest in developing the structures so people cannot be religious. They don’t have to be. Never mind if you want to get married in a church, if you want to mourn with a priest and believe that your loved one went to heaven, fine. It should be possible without, and that possible without, that frustrates me a lot. That’s my humanist side; it’s sometimes the most frustrating part of politics. We’re too passive. But on the bigger principles, it easily transitioned. So I never had any worries. My party, the Greens, is generally human rights-centred and very… Priorities-wise, there’s a reason I’m with the Greens. The whole ecological thing fits the humanist because it’s science-based, evidence-based, rational, away from dogmas and prejudice, and daring to think of a different world. So, it overlaps. But, as an ecologist thinker, whatever the right terminology, I prioritize it a bit more. There may be a subtle difference.
Yes, it overlaps 99.999%. In some areas where it doesn’t overlap, it has more to do with priorities or the example I gave, how seriously they take it, and their willingness to change society and allow non-religious lifestyles. In Dutch, we have this saying, “I’m laying on my hunger.” I’m not satisfied with using that same phrase. This means there are no other problems at all. The Greens and the humanists have always been well aligned.
That’s one funny, interesting thing. The humanist bubble in Belgium is a bit more liberal than social or ecological. That has more to do with priorities because the liberals are, of course, a good ally from my ideological perspective for individual liberties and the freedom of individuals to do whatever they want. But I was already frustrated even when I was not politically active. We tend humanists, maybe in a certain elitist form in our infrastructure, to still allow–I don’t know–I call it unchecked capitalist structures to continue, while the ecological mindset is more about individual freedom. Let’s look at the consequences; we must impact it if needed. For example, if I’m going to give an easy example if you want to have a car,
Fine, but if your car is old and it’s poisoning the surroundings, you’re not allowed to have this car. You would be taxed more if you had a big car because it would take up more space. If you have a car, we want the same. There’s more, weirdly enough, a more pragmatic approach to individual freedom than some humanist bubbles because individual freedom doesn’t mean anything if the most powerful one impacts other people’s freedom.
It’s not the right terminology, but it’s at the top of my thoughts. I never thought about it too much. I can feel that we too easily have liberal mindsets where it’s not needed to be a human aesthetic. Wait, that needs to be well-phrased. It’s essential. Me too; I would never say I’m not a liberalist because, in a way, liberal values are a core part of our DNA. But we might put our list of priorities too high.
Daring to break free of certain oppressive structures harmful to humanity, the planet, and everybody, daring to dismantle them, might be higher on the list. It needs to be more specific. Let me know if I need to be more philosophical and specific.
Jacobsen: Is it looking for a balance between individualism and the pursuit of financial success and well-being, seen in some interpretations of humanism, thinking of some people who might lean more towards objective, capitalist rationalism instead of those who lean more toward social responsibility? Then, they end up with the same values but ranked differently, so they end up in a green party: the same values, different rank-ordering, and a different frame on them.
Zeitouni: If you had asked me this question a few years ago, I would have given you the same analysis. But now, I may be too deep in it; that’s a possibility, as are subjectively biased humans inherently. I’m starting to remember things that might not be that; it might also be. Regardless of those priorities, we are still deciding. If we want to build consistently within our humanist value society, bit by bit, baby step by step, without dismantling power structures while doing so, we end up in the same place. It’s like a pretty circle, which you’ve got to be where you were standing before. If we don’t, let’s say society goes forward, everybody can buy a new car; people love big cars now, right? It’s like a trend. Then, you end up poisoning all the poor people and all the marginalized people.
On the one hand, society worsens again, health problems, blah, blah, blah, your city’s congested, all the people with money go out of the city, poor people are low-key stuck, and people with low incomes can’t afford the city. You see, the whole system collapses anyway. So, what is the point of humanism if we create a dying world?
Humanism is also science-based; it’s about evidence-based. The science is clear. Science is, for example, now one of the things I’ve been fighting hard for, and I’m low-key, honestly; it’s maybe part of the reason I’m getting tired of my job now, that I’m losing the fight a bit, is the low emission zone. We’re allowing cars into the city, which we know like science is clear. There’s no doubt they poison us like kids are going to have five to ten years less to live. The impact on marginalized groups that live in small, poorly insulated apartments is even bigger. Poor people have the biggest impact, and the richer people are the ones with the cars that are poisoning everybody around. People outside of Brussels who live in rural areas where it’s not a problem because there’s more space and more nature drive into the city because they don’t want to take a train. Then they poison the kids that go to school amid the cars. So, in a way, our humanist vision of the future must handle that. Ignoring that because you prioritize individual freedom, I’m starting to think it’s a bit of bullshit because that means you’re not ambitious enough. That means you don’t dream of a humanist world of tomorrow. You dream of small humanist victories.
That’s the question we inevitably have to ask ourselves. Do we dream of a world that fits our human values? Or do we want to defend the human values of our fellow humanists? Do we seek small victories where non-religious people can have more rights? Or do we seek a humanist world where policies are evidence-based, individual freedom goes hand in hand with not hurting other people, the rule of law is democratic and consistent, and simultaneously inclusive, where people can reach their potential regardless of religion or ethnicity? Do we dream of that human rights-based, evidence-based, science-based society? Or do we seek a humanist church at the end of the day?
For me, it’s the first one. We have to solve this. We can’t ignore it. Oh, I’m sorry. That was a long answer, but to say that right now, it’s my perspective. Of course, I no longer think it concerns a list of priorities. It has to do with the level of ambition and how in touch we are. Because we know, like, the numbers don’t lie. The facts don’t lie, whether it’s with racism or sexism.
The structural impact on people with different social backgrounds, not typically associated with humanism, is significant. For example, I can list the numbers of gender-based violence, even in Belgium, which is objectively one of the better countries in the world for fighting sexism and misogyny. We still have one woman every three days dying from gender-based violence. One woman every three days in a country of 11 million inhabitants, and we are one of the best in the world.
But we know the numbers; we know the facts. So, ignoring that and not making it a priority is nonsense.
Jacobsen: What about having room for variation in the rank ordering of the same values? So, they have the same matrix of values, different weighting, and a variation in the scale of ambition. People have different amounts of time and resources at different points in life. That also needs to be allowed for, combining your view from four years ago and your current view.
Zeitouni: That would be relatively accurate. The only thing is, that’s always the life case, right? Like I told you, with politics, if I had to summarize for 10-year-olds what it means to do politics, it is that. It means you have 6,000 things you want to do. There are 5,000 that everybody agrees you have to do, but you only have the money and time for 20 a year. So how do you choose the 20 a year?
You need to be aware. That’s the best part of the thinking, where it’s inevitable. You need to be aware of the consequences of not doing certain things. You need to be aware of the long-term ambition. Please keep that in mind. Because if you keep doing small things, like the 20 you choose in a year, but never build something for the long term, that’s bad policy. Because in 20 years, you’ll have less than 5,000 things that everybody knows need to happen. You’re going to have 25,000. The problems are going to become bigger, too.
It would help if you created new things that advance society and think long-term, considering what we must avoid or create for the future. It would help if you considered all those priorities, no matter how you make the hierarchy, and then strategically think, taking those into account. We need to understand them. Doing humanism without understanding the structures of oppression towards women, to take an easy example, like sexism, is not humanism.
That’s male humanism. You might have different priorities, and blah, blah. However, how you made your priorities is inherently problematic because you need to understand the consequences of not doing the other stuff. If I love horses and don’t care about all the other animals, my priorities for taking care of animals will be biased towards the horses.
And I’m not going to understand what it’s like to think… It’s a weird example, but you get what I mean, right? And in the same way–Oh, I work with horses. I wanted to give you an example closer to you. It’s the same with humanism. One of the things that I’ve started to think about is that I’m wrong in my realization, but in my current subjective mind, we are too tunnel-visioned. We need to understand the other things to make the right decisions. Because objectively is a strong word, but there is a certain logic in the list of priorities. What is the biggest impact of your limited resources? What is the most urgent? If you take those two, you can make a reasonable, logical list of priorities. But if you need help understanding half of your society, you do not know the racist structures, the colonial structures, the sexist structures. You don’t care or understand how social and worker rights impact people. Then you’re not going to be able to make the right decision.
It’s weird thinking, but we were talking before about the frustration of how, in a way, humanity has been robbed. We’ve allowed religious structures to hijack so much of our human lives. Today, a religious person benefits more and has an easier life than a humanist. That said, I say this as a convinced humanist. Of course, it’s easier. Why? Because religion takes many steps to understand many things. Even if you feel bad about your job, the value of hard work is also one of the problematic structures, right? The whole concept of humility in Christianity is very… It’s capitalism enablement 101. It’s humble, so shut up and do your hard work. Are you being paid a fair wage or not? It doesn’t matter. I’m simplifying and ridiculing it. So my apologies to those.
If somebody sees this, I will ridicule it. But you see what I mean? We’re like… they exaggerated for effect and a point. My frustration is how we so easily dismiss those, let’s say, parallel realities and don’t consider them when making our priorities. Because we don’t do that, we feel too much like liberals. Now, I mean liberal in the political sense. We should feel more like social progressive, ecological, liberal thinkers who may be beyond the political spectrum. Could you be a bit more consistent with this? I’m venting a lot.
Jacobsen: So what I’m getting from what you’re saying is a distinction between your practical work, where you are given your limitations, with a simultaneous philosophical reflection on wider impacts. So, if I were to take my previous work for 27 months at an equestrian facility where I am shovelling horse manure for several hours each day, I need to consider patience with a large animal so they are comfortable and their well-being is taken into account as well as for my safety. Horses are jumpy and can trample people if not kill them if erratic in an enclosed space. So, I’m considering my well-being and safety while simultaneously considering the emotions and feelings of the horse relative to how much we can understand their experiences and capacity to suffer.
Yet I’m not going to be in that moment deciding to make sure I’m gentle with the horse or firm with the horse in some cases for the sake of making sure horses, in general, are never turned into glue or sold in parts as horse meat. It will be that philosophical reflection as an important contextualization of everything. However, I’m dealing with the reality of the moment, the experiential, phenomenological reality of that moment, in practical terms, making sure I don’t piss off the horse, spook the horse, and ensure my safety. I will also ensure they feel calm. Is that practical and philosophical reality what you’re trying to distinguish between?
Zeitouni: Yes, and maybe to use the analogy, thinking about where am I going to put the manure that I cleaned up so I don’t poison my horse tomorrow, so I don’t poison another horse tomorrow. You have the concrete task of cleaning up the manure, but you need to consider that if the manure is there tomorrow and the horse lays in its manure, it’s a problem. You think long-term and short-term, your safety and the horse’s safety. It is a complex insight. I can’t be wrong. It takes work. But sadly, I’ve seen how the political world at least aspires to do it. So why would we not as humanists?
Why would we hold a lesser standard? If anything, I want to hold a higher standard to my fellow humanists because there’s much bullshit in politics. I can talk for days about it. So I want to say how we do better. That’s why I’m so proud of our little humanist group. We did well. Maybe we were too many thinkers together. So, in the end, we had much reflection. But at least on a thinking level, we did. I want to remember us ever doing something with the young humanists without reflecting on various aspects, such as how to brand and tell people and how not to make it, too, like we did the whole thinking exercise. We don’t simplify the world. The world is complex. We make it simple, too. It’s doable.
Jacobsen: What I’m getting at, what I’m seeing with your story, insofar as I’ve known you for about five, maybe six years, you dealt with things in a youthful way when you were younger, in terms of abstract philosophy, going to conferences, having fun, being involved with some policy stuff and some financial stuff, and doodling around. Having late-night calls with a bunch of fun friends worldwide doing various humanist leadership stuff, then transferring to not necessarily more serious but more substantive stuff practically because you’re dealing with policy and politics on the ground. That’s beside the point of being paid or not; you’re dealing with practical elements of things that will affect people in your immediate vicinity. I’ve seen that trajectory for you, too. So, this delves down from highfalutin philosophy to more practical policy and politics, which is what you’re experiencing now in your thoughts and a reflection of your self-development through this process from youth humanism to politics.
Zeitouni: Yes, probably. Also, I am still determining what you’d say I’d think in five years. I’m still on my learning curve. I’m not there. I have yet to understand everything about the world. I still need to get all the answers. It would be arrogant of me to think I did now. Especially in politics, there are way more variables than in some physics equations. When I started this job, I thought I was not good enough. I got lucky. On paper, I did. There was a need. I was in the right place at the right moment. But then, when I started doing the job, I was good at it. Turns out I was overthinking it.
Yes, part of this is way more complex, but at the same time, it’s way more simple too. It sounds like a contradiction, but they’re more complex because there are more facets and more dimensions. But they’re also simpler because you can create objective indicators of a good decision. For example, I had to deal with the energy crisis when I started. It’s a bit of lingo, but I was responsible for everything social. The energy crisis was the technical knowledge area, but you were sick. We didn’t have anybody else technical on the team.
Energy is a competency of a different minister, but the federal energy minister is a Green person on the federal level. But she needed to be more staffed, and the office was overworked. So I jumped in and decided what we should do with the energy policy for the whole region of Brussels, at least for our political party. But there was also nobody on the mobility team. So, as I explained before, the team of people managing mobility also involves managing this big company that manages all the metros, trams, and buses in Brussels, the Brussels region. Like STIB, it’s like the public transportation administration plus a company. So we’re in charge of that. In a way, it’s much simpler because I knew the energy prices would go up. With all the knowledge I had gathered, every expert in my network indicated that the prices would go up within two or three weeks. I understood how the market worked.
I knew how the energy markets operated. I could explain for hours, but I won’t do that now. It’s like a speculation market where the prices can shift easily, and it’s based on tomorrow’s predictions. People speculate what the energy is going to cost tomorrow, etc. Long story short, energy prices were going to go up. The ministerial decision-making process needs to be faster. It might take a week or two to get a political agreement. So, I went beyond my job.
I have bruised a bunch of egos. I started calling the head of STIB, the organization. I told them to start doing this and this—energy consumption-reducing measures I had identified based on Google searches. I told them to start already. You’ll have the legal paperwork in two weeks when the minister’s agreement is finalized, but you must act now. A week or two later, the energy price was going to be actualized for that company, a huge amount. It turned out I was completely right. A month later, the prices increased by 300%, 400%, and 500%. Ultimately, they saved millions of euros because I acted two weeks earlier than anybody else. So, in a way, it’s simpler. Once you’re right, you can swing the baseball bat.
Zeitouni: And people will be happy that you did. I remember back in the young humanist days when I was using this example; there were things where every possible, evidence-based thing would tell me I was right. But you could not hurt anybody’s ego. That’s, in a way, more complicated, as well as the social activism bubble in the broad sense, including humanism. Sometimes, it’s harder to shift people. The fact that I function that way is probably why I’m a bit tired of it now; I always have to find ways to handle people’s egos. People need to take it more seriously. But in the end, I did get things done. I could do whatever I liked. As long as I am right, I can build those achievements. Politics is more complex, but there’s sometimes a clear answer at the end of the day, and you need to build those up. That’s fine.
Jacobsen: What would be your recommendations for humanists who want to get involved in politics or policy work?
Zeitouni: That’s a good question. I’m going to start with politics. Find a political party that aligns with your values. Expand your knowledge, too. There’s stuff that they don’t necessarily align with completely, but that’s fine. Figure out what you want. Politics is open. In most countries I’ve been to, we overthink sometimes. No politician will think the same as you. It’s fine if you have a few disagreements. As long as the base values correspond, you can go. The only thing you must be careful of is that humanists usually end up being humanists because they’re over-thinkers, which is a good thing, right? We think a lot. We’re all philosophers in our own right. But politics doesn’t need more philosophers. We need people who get things done, are honest and can convey a complex message in simple terms. So, adapt your way of functioning.
Keep things simple, explain things, and you will get more than enough opportunities in politics. Make sure you’re the one who gets things done. Again, we can use less pre-talking thinkers. There are enough people better at that, and they’re already there. So you get through by being the person who gets things done. To get into policy, be bold and jump in. If I’ve learned anything, we also make things more complex than they are in policymaking. For most of my job, I did well. Honestly, if I would summarize all the good things I did, it would be because I was the dude who was afraid that he was not good enough, which was not bad for me. So, I would spend my evenings looking things up. I would call people who knew stuff. I would ask them. I would learn. This open, critical mindset is the biggest strength of a humanist.
We inevitably have a critical, open mind, in theory, right? Because we’ve refuted all the weird, supernatural stuff, there are many smart people around you to learn from. Don’t be afraid to learn from them. You have no idea how many dumb questions I asked in the first month. I didn’t care. My whole purpose was to learn. I went and asked again and again until I learned. I had the willingness to learn. I didn’t believe I was smarter. I believe in science. I believe in facts. That’s a strength. That’s good. That’s amazing. Hold on to that. If anything, use it as a strength. Be the person who is reading PDFs late at night because you’re afraid you don’t know enough.
And a last tip for humanists in politics and policymaking: consider the value of being an organized group that gets stuff done. Those basic little online chat events and little projects were valuable. As a young humanist, I only regret that I was too doubtful. I was only sometimes sure. I wasn’t thinking as much as I would have wanted to. But that’s fine. If you have a failed event, you still learn from it. Suppose you have a successful event. That’s great. You did something good for the cause. Doing those things and trying to do those things will be valuable. But it would be best to be self-critical in a positive, productive way. Learn from it. If you do it and don’t learn from it, you won’t reflect afterwards or learn from it.
Jacobsen: Would you consider conscientiousness and cooperativity important values and personality traits? If so, how do you develop them?
Zeitouni: The quality of doing one’s work well and thoroughly. Yes, I wouldn’t use the word because I didn’t know it, but I coach many young people as part of one of my many social activities besides my job. We sometimes use the term discipline, but discipline is a good word, often wrongly filled in. So, I prefer a sense of responsibility. That sounds nicer. The sense of responsibility is hugely important. Use it because the thing that motivates you is your sense of responsibility. If you’re motivated, you will find and use your strengths. I genuinely believe that. If you’re not motivated, you will do your job and won’t be good at it. The danger with not being good at it is that we all have bad moments. In bad moments, when you’re okay at your job and don’t use your strengths, you don’t show what you’re good at.
In bad moments, you’ll be bad at it. The thing is, in policy, you don’t have the luxury of being bad at it. It would help if you had the luxury of being good at politics. You can be okay in bad moments and good in good moments. That’s the scope. So, this self-discipline, confidence, sense of responsibility, pride that you’re doing something, and desire to do it will stimulate you in good and bad moments.
Finding that in small social projects when I was younger helped me stimulate and nurture it for the future. Now, I have a great sense of responsibility. Part of why I have that is because I enjoyed having it before in small stuff. Then there’s the cooperative thing, definitely, as well. But it may be my experience. The world is a bit harder than I thought when I was younger. So before cooperative spirit comes, you need to know who you are, how to function, how to communicate from your thing and recognize which people are easier or harder to communicate with. It is like finding the right people, bubble, and place to function, and then you can invest in the cooperative element, which is hugely important because we are social beings in varying degrees and says. But we all need other people to function well. I doubt anybody; some specific types of individualistic people, and that’s fine. But most people, you’re going to need people around you.
When I said about learning a lot, and you asked me what tip I would give, I learned a lot from people around me. I’m a social being. I’ll ask questions, I’ll get along with them, I’ll smile. I’ll help them back, however. I’m also going to invest in this. One of my biggest strengths is that everybody knows that if I were sick, I would message him and ask him if he could attend the meeting. Why? People knew my strength. My strength was verbal debates, argumentatively wise. My strength was less in minutes with little knowledge, figuring out what is important for a political party. My strength was that I’d gladly help out. What happens if I don’t understand something and I’m supposed to understand it for my job?
But you get stuff you don’t know. I asked that colleague I helped last week, and she’ll explain to me off the record. She’ll make sure, and I’ll get away with not doing my homework that I didn’t know I had to. Fine. I have a team. You need a network; you need a team. That’s also the thing that we did well to take our example of the young humanists back in the day. We had a team with varying profiles, different types of people, and different shapes. I was more inclusive and diverse thinking. Mariko was the one more about getting things done. I’ll give credit to her. I love her much for her go-and-get-it-done attitude. She was great. She was so great. It was good because it was complementary. After that, I also made her more inclusive and mindful of different types of people. She made me more efficient and productive. We learned from each other.
We had a good time. We made friends. I haven’t talked to her in a long time, but I have no doubt we’re friends for life. Anytime she would hold up that I was in Brussels, I had a basic question; it would be with pleasure. Like, I would love it.
Zeitouni: Yes, I was saying, for example. We were complementary. So, I made her more inclusive and more mindful of different types of people. She made me more productive, more concrete, more get-things-done. As you said, I have both as I’ve grown from a philosophical thinker to a more get-things-done. Part of the growth was Marieke. But because we had a good cooperative spirit, I didn’t mind her flaws. She didn’t mind mine. I would help her cover hers. She would help me cover mine. We worked well as a duo. I learned a lot. She learned a lot.
And we made friends, and now we have friends for life with each other. That’s great. Right? I had the same experience; if we were not cooperative and were both doing our things, I would learn a lot less. She would learn a lot less. I wouldn’t be able to use my strengths because I would be dragged along to get things done, and I would be frustrated. She wouldn’t understand why I’m frustrated. It’s fine. She’s a different type of person. We wouldn’t have been friends. It’s such a loss not to have this cooperative development with people. Pride, we often make it an ugly word.
However, one of the things that helped me a lot was that I wanted to be proud of my work. I was proud of the work I had already done, and you want to know, go through, and get all the way. I was working my job and using the example of Marieke and us back in the day. Being more cooperative by taking into account the people around you and by learning to work together is obviously beside the ethics of an inclusive world where people work together, but even besides the ethics, it’s a strategic investment. Because by working with people, you learn from them, and you have somebody to jump in when you have more difficult moments.
And you can also cover your weaknesses. Nobody’s perfect; there will be stuff you’re bad at. If you’re close and work closely with people, especially those different from you, you cover each other’s weaknesses. I can’t tell you how much I got from having more academic colleagues, but they reread my work, which was much better. One of my strengths is the verbal, almost debate elements, but it is important and worth investing in because that’s how you get the job done.
Jacobsen: What philosophies or stances appeal to you? For instance, in North America, some people find an appeal to ethical culture. They might join The Satanic Temple as non-theistic if they’re more creative and enjoy hilarious activism and protests.
Jacobsen: There are some close philosophies. Even though they look different on the surface.
Zeitouni: I mean, there’s the obvious ones. I’m a feminist; I put much thinking and effort into feminism. I’m active in anti-racism as well. They overlap feminism overlapsnism, but there are differences. But, of course, Ofcus is a bit different. But what is important is this social awareness. I don’t know if that’s the right translation, but let’s go with social awareness. The ability and the intense willingness to understand the roles around you, how they impact people, and how they impact people differently. This philosophy and life stance are found in various forms of feminism and anti-racism, whether it’s the intersectional approach in feminist literature or… Yes, I can’t even think of specific examples. But if you ask me about a life philosophy element I value, it is that. Being socially aware means you can make the most difficult political decisions, like choosing between evils.
There’s no good answer. What if the policy decision you must make is whether people should be poor or rich? You want people to be rich. That’s easy. Then there are medium-level decisions, and then you have the shitty ones. It would help if you had more budgets. There’s an energy crisis going on. I need to choose between lowering the costs for hospitals and lowering the cost for small companies that; if you don’t support them now, they’re going to go bankrupt, which is going to cause a bunch of people to lose their jobs, creating an economic deficit in the coming years. In the end, the hospitals still pay the price.
Jacobsen: Do you adhere to a specific branch of feminist philosophy, or is it adherence to general feminist principles, or both?
Zeitouni: I’m a bit of both. I’ve always been a fervent reader and have my philosophy, but I’m not adhering to any specific branch. I’m surrounded by many feminist thinkers right now, so if I had to pick, I’d be more in the new generation intersectional feminist wave. But a progressive, socially aware intersectional feminist. That would be the best description of this new wave of intersectional feminism, which is no longer about the core fight against sexist structures but the idea that it’s for all women. Specifically, my academic expertise is about the role of men therein and the impact on men. And that means looking at the oppression forms for all women, but also all the gender-related ones, for example, towards gay men, etc. It’s part of my feminism. But also the process, something like that.
And then, of course, there’s my ecologism. That’s an obvious one. Maybe I skipped through because I’m so dependent. I am figuring out what ecologism is. There are many approaches, many forms, and many variants. But in classic politics, I would be a socialist and an ecologist. Yes, socialism would be, in one sentence, taking into account social risks, like taking care of social risks. We are social beings that carry risks and bad things together. Ecologism would be that everything you do takes into account the long-term impacts. It’s making things durable.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). Conversation with Jad Amine Zeitouni on Feminist Humanism. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Jad Amine Zeitouni on Feminist Humanism.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Jad Amine Zeitouni on Feminist Humanism.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zeitouni-feminist-humanism.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Chris Cole is a longstanding member of the Mega Society. Richard May is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. Alternatively: “Richard May (“May-Tzu”/“MayTzu”/“Mayzi”) is a Member of the Mega Society based on a qualifying score on the Mega Test (before 1995) prior to the compromise of the Mega Test and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. In self-description, May states: “Not even forgotten in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), I’m an Amish yuppie, born near the rarified regions of Laputa, then and often, above suburban Boston. I’ve done occasional consulting and frequent Sisyphean shlepping. Kafka and Munch have been my therapists and allies. Occasionally I’ve strived to descend from the mists to attain the mythic orientation known as having one’s feet upon the Earth. An ailurophile and a cerebrotonic ectomorph, I write for beings which do not, and never will, exist — writings for no one. I’ve been awarded an M.A. degree, mirabile dictu, in the humanities/philosophy, and U.S. patent for a board game of possible interest to extraterrestrials. I’m a member of the Mega Society, the Omega Society and formerly of Mensa. I’m the founder of the Exa Society, the transfinite Aleph-3 Society and of the renowned Laputans Manqué. I’m a biographee in Who’s Who in the Brane World. My interests include the realization of the idea of humans as incomplete beings with the capacity to complete their own evolution by effecting a change in their being and consciousness. In a moment of presence to myself in inner silence, when I see Richard May’s non-being, ‘I’ am. You can meet me if you go to an empty room.” Some other resources include Stains Upon the Silence: something for no one, McGinnis Genealogy of Crown Point, New York: Hiram Porter McGinnis, Swines List, Solipsist Soliloquies, Board Game, Lulu blog, Memoir of a Non-Irish Non-Jew, and May-Tzu’s posterous.” Rick Rosner is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and a former editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. Alternatively: “According to some semi-reputable sources listed here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awardsnominations, winning one and an Emmy nomination, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory. He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches sent a cease-and-desist letter. (The commercial dramatized the results of a taste test in which Domino’s sandwiches were preferred over Subway’s sandwiches 2 to 1, but Subway and its lawyers claimed the taste test methodology was biased and flawed.) He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area by Westwood Magazine. Rosner spent some of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris profiled Rosner in the interview series First Person. He came in second (lost) on Jeopardy! and sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person?. (He was drunk.) He has spent 40+ years working on a semi-time-invariant version of Big Bang Theory. Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two dogs. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions or just give him shit on Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn. He has a crappy little show on PodTV.” They discuss: I.Q.; fake I.Q. and real I.Q.; more reliable and valid I.Q. ranges; robust, legitimate tests; the status of measuring I.Q. scores above 4-sigma; major warning signs of something awry; the minor, or subtle, warning signs; 4 standard deviations above the norm; the successes and failures of the Mega Test, the Ultra Test, the Power Test, and the Titan Test; 4 and 5 sigma above the norm; the principal design of the Adaptive Test; other extraordinary high-I.Q. societies; associative horizon; the Mega Test; the claims about the Mega Test; legitimate testing; extrapolations well beyond the norms of the mainstream tests; the motivation behind making claims well beyond the norms of the most used mainstream I.Q. tests; the more egregious I.Q. claims in 20th century; the big lessons in debunking phony I.Q. claims; fraudulent activity; messianic posing; criminal behaviour; the three interpenetrating cubes problem; above 4 standard deviations above the norm; the hardest IQ test; and IQ.
Keywords: Adaptive Test, Artificial Intelligence, cheating on IQ tests, high-range intelligence testing, Mega Society, norming IQ tests, psychometric fraud, Sigma thresholds for IQ.
On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, as this is a group discussion with three longstanding members of the Mega Society, the focus is Intelligence Quotient or I.Q., particularly debunking claims. What is I.Q. truly a measure of, at this point?
Chris Cole: I.Q. is an attempt to measure general intelligence, which is analogous to the power of a computer. There is an enormous literature on this subject. I’m going to take it as a given. It will be embarrassing if when we understand more about how the mind works it turns out to be a chimera.
Richard May: ‘g’, the general factor of intelligence, i.e., cognitive ability.
Rick Rosner: IQ as measured by a high-end test is somewhat different from IQ as measured by a regular range usually group-administered test. Regular range tests measure intelligence, the ability to focus for 45 minutes, and cultural literacy.
High-end tests can measure obsessiveness and attention to detail, a love of puzzle-solving, and in some cases desperation for validation.
Intelligence has changed over the past 20 years to include skill at using tech to get answers.
Jacobsen: What differentiates a fake I.Q. score claim from a real one, e.g., signals of a fraud or claims far above the norms of a test, etc.?
Cole: Since it is difficult to define, it is difficult to measure. There is a desire to claim intelligence which creates a motivation for “vanity” tests. In science we try to overcome such tendencies using experiments to disprove theories. It is a sign of trouble if a test is not carefully normed.
May: You can perhaps find examples on Facebook and the social media generally.
Rosner: Concerted efforts to lie are fairly rare – claiming a high IQ is not very helpful in life and may even hurt – there’s Stephen Hawking’s quote that “People who brag about their IQ are losers.” There are casual claims – BSers at parties, movie stars trying to seem smart. Geena Davis’s PR team used to mention that she’s Mensa. Sharon Stone is said to have a 150 IQ. James Woods 180. And these might be legit. But that’s to address a specific issue of not being considered a bimbo.
One big tell for IQ fraud is people claiming to have completed and gotten a high score on the Mega or Titan in 10 or 12 hours. Back in 1985, I spent more than 100 hours on the Mega. Now with the internet (and coding skills which I don’t have), I could’ve cut that time by 80%. But the internet has also invalidated the Mega – not only with all of the answers floating around out there but also with instantly solving the verbal analogies just by plugging them into Google.
Jacobsen: What ranges for I.Q. scores have the highest reliability and validity, typically?
Cole: The Langdon and Hoeflin tests are on the cutting edge of reliability and validity. The Mega Test, for example, has been normed several different ways. A group of us are working on a new test that is cheat resistant.
May: Scores with the highest reliability and validity are those closest to the mean on standard IQ tests. Hoeflin and Langdon’s tests are untimed power tests more suitable for measuring above average intelligence.
Jacobsen: What tests are considered the most robust, legitimate?
Cole: We have a problem now that several of the most carefully normed, such as the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test, the Mega Test, the Titan Test, the Ultra Test, and the Power Test have been spoiled.
May: Those of Hoeflin, Langdon and Wechsler.
Rosner: Hoeflin’s tests have been the most thoroughly revised and normed. His Mega Test was normed on more than 4,000 test takers. His test items are excellent. But his tests have been voided by the internet – too many easily found answers. The Mega was published in Omni magazine in 1985, I think, a decade before most people had the internet. You had to use actual physical dictionaries.
Today, I think Paul Cooijmans’ tests are the most legit high-end tests. Paul takes pleasure in bursting the bubbles of people who claim high IQs by offering stringent scoring and norming. Doing well on his tests takes much time and what he calls “associative horizon” – being able to come up with dozens of ideas to crack a tough item.
Jacobsen: What is the status of measuring I.Q. scores above 4-sigma – experimental high-range testing, in other words?
Cole: The Adaptive Test, which is a work in progress, is the cutting edge. Contact me if you want to work on it. [Ed. chris@questrel.com.]
May: Apparently measurement at the far-right tail of intelligence has improved astronomically. I mistakenly thought that determining and measuring IQ was quite difficult even at the 4 sigma level. The Mega Society used to have a statement either at the beginning of Noesis or on our website or both, I think, indicating that we attempted to select members at the 4.75 sigma level, but selecting this rarity was experimental and quite difficult for many reasons. (Not exact wording.)
Today there is an IQ group which has apparently identified the 3 most intelligent individuals on planet Earth! This is quite an achievement in my view.
Since it is well known that the actual distribution of IQ-scores at the far-right tail does not conform to a Gaussian distribution, one has to assume that even if the ceiling of the IQ tests employed was sufficient (not exceeding that intended by the test developers) and the intercorrelation of the various tests at the highest levels was known and that the correct Kuder-Richardson (?) formulas were applied to concatenate the valid IQ scores, that the entire population of planet Earth was actually tested by or on behalf of this group. Since various planetary subgroups of different sizes could have differing means, standard deviations and distribution shapes, a weighted average would need to be taken in order to determine the statistical properties of the global IQ distribution for planet Earth.
This is an unparalleled achievement in psychometric history. I personally don’t know anyone tested for this project in order to determine the actual shape of the global distribution of IQ-scores at the far-right tail, but I assume this is just a minor sampling error. Presumably you and your friends and neighbors have all been tested. Since the three most intelligent individuals on planet Earth have now been identified in fact, the correct protocols were undoubtedly used. If only Lewis Terman were alive now! — LINK here.
Jacobsen: You have all been around the block. Your membership in the Mega Society has spanned decades. So, you’ve seen controversies, failed high-I.Q. societies, and proclamations to this-or-that I.Q., even individuals who spun off into fraudulent activities, messianic posing, and criminal behaviour. As a note on collectives of high-I.Q. people, when it comes to claimed high-I.Q. societies, what are the major warning signs of something awry, not quite right, with it?
May: The major warning signs of statistical and psychometric incompetence, fraud, or madness are usually quite subtle. Please see below.
Rosner: You got to start with the disclaimer that most people in high-IQ societies are well-behaved relatively normal people who like taking tests and solving puzzles, and there are only a few lunatics. And because the ones I belong to don’t get together very often, you don’t have a chance to see any warning signs developing.
Although, in the case of one guy from many years ago, you could see a guy who was kind of being physically dominant and, I guess, mentally dominant getting increasingly frustrated that people didn’t understand him or believe his theories. So, it was just an increasing belligerence or pre-belligerence.
I guess, a skosh of megalomania.
Cole: The major warning signs are the ones you list: fraudulent activity, messianic posing, and criminal behavior.
Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what are the minor, or subtle, warning signs?
May: I get slightly suspicious if someone comes up with the most brilliant Theory of Everything ever, explained in a newly invented language of neologisms, which only the inventor of the theory himself can understand, especially if the theory makes no falsifiable predictions and none of those few who claim to understand the theory can explain it in their own words. I’m also slightly suspicious of, e.g., taxi cab drivers or barbers, who have conclusively proved Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity wrong.
If someone claims to be the most intelligent person in the history our solar system or to be the actual God of the Bible, then this level of measured intelligence may be beyond the current development of psychometric science, even with the Flynn effect. I’m probably too skeptical sometimes.
Also, branding of one’s associates by high-IQ types is often unnecessary in my view.
Rosner: Again, I don’t hang. I have no basis or nothing to talk about regarding this. It is not like I was living with a high-IQ person who slowly went crazy, besides myself. Really, in the last few years, I’ve gotten less crazy, more lazy. Lazy has replaced crazy.
Cole: The minor warning signs are incredible IQ claims. As a rule of thumb anything above five sigma is not credible as is anything that has not been normed using regular statistical methods.
Jacobsen: Why is 4 standard deviations above the norm (e.g., mean 100, S.D. 15, I.Q. 160) such a difficult barrier to break in finding highly intelligent individuals?
May: Almost no one in the alleged “real world” is interested in measuring intelligence beyond the 4 sigma level. Where would you find a large sample of individuals beyond the top 1-per-30,000 level of intelligence to study? This level of intelligence is not a target level for standard IQ tests developed by psychologists. Why should it be? Which professions require IQs beyond the 4 sigma level? Even Nobels in physics probably depend more upon a mathematical ability sub-factor of general intelligence than upon super-high IQ per se. Two physics Nobel laureates didn’t qualify for inclusion in Lewis Terman’s study of the intellectually gifted, because their IQs were not sufficiently high! In addition Nature may sometimes not be ‘politically correct’. What if cognitive differences were discovered among various human sub-groups? For example, what if a growing number of trans-species individuals, who identify as advanced AI units, were found to be better at arithmetic addition?
Rosner: Several reasons, one, there aren’t that many people. 4-sigma level is one person in 30,000. Although, in real terms, it’s less rare than that because the average IQ of people on the street is like 105 or 110. The people with IQs of 35 are institutionalized. You don’t see them around. It’s rare. That’s one problem.
Problem two, it is hard to test. All the good high-end tests take dozens of hours to do well on. Thing two-and-a-half, many people who might score well on them might be successful and may not want to waste their time putting in 40 or 50 hours in something that doesn’t compensate them.
They could be trading stocks or coding or doing business deals or getting laid. None of which taking an IQ test helps.
Cole: High range tests require high range questions which are hard to create. Plus there is not much of a market.
Jacobsen: What have been the successes and failures of the Mega Test, the Ultra Test, the Power Test, and the Titan Test in identifying highly intelligent persons – despite being compromised?
May: There is evidence that uncompromised tests work better.
Rosner: Maybe, some smart people still trickle in. The Mega Test has been compromised since, probably, the late ‘90s or the internet made it possible to contaminate the questions by throwing around answers in chat rooms.
The Mega Test was the most successful in finding high-IQ people because the most people took it when it was published in Omni magazine. 4,000 people took it. It’s more than any other test ever.
Which means, though, more people have taken the Hoeflin tests than tests by any other author, though probably a strong second and possibly somebody who has overtaken Hoeflin because he has written dozens of tests is Paul Cooijmans, who has been writing tests for decades and has cranked out quite a few.
Some of his tests have certainly been taken by more than 100 people. In the aggregate, thousands of people must have taken Cooijmans tests. With the success of the Hoeflin tests, they have found, depending on the cutoff, hundreds of high-IQ people.
Some of those people got together and some people were mentored by other high-IQ people, and had their lives improved, including myself. So, the success of the Hoeflin tests is the large numbers of people who have taken them.
For years, I, and sometimes with partners or being asked to consult, pitched TV involving high-IQ-type competitions. The same kind of shit as Project Runway or American Idol. A talent search, but instead of for fashion designing or culinary skill or singing skill, it was for raw intelligence.
This is an idea that comes to people not infrequently, but just has never been turned into a show. But if you had a show that did that, that would be the most successful project ever to find high-IQ people because millions of people would see the show and tens of thousands of people, if there were high-IQ tests associated with the show, would try those tests.
But that project has never happened, which I think is stupid because reality shows are about following assholes around with cameras and there are plenty of high-IQ assholes. Not as a percentage of high-IQ people who are, as I said, mostly decent, normal-ish people.
But if out of 100 people who have managed to score 160 on an IQ test, there are probably a half-dozen who you could productively, entertainingly follow around with cameras.
Cole: First of all Ron Hoeflin is a talented question framer. Next he spent a lot of effort validating his questions. Finally he normed them several different ways.
Jacobsen: In principle, what is realistically needed to test between – let’s say – 4 and 5 sigma above the norm, reliably and validly?
May: Perhaps advanced AI can be used to develop significantly improved high-range intelligence tests. Other neurobiological methods of assessment of the general factor of intelligence, ‘g’, may eventually make IQ tests obsolete. For example, measures of biological traits such as pitch discrimination ability (of sound frequencies), among other such physical measures, have been found to have surprisingly high correlations with general intelligence. This may be the way of cognitive ability assessment in the future.
Rosner: You need experienced test-builders. You need a decent amount of people to norm the problems on, to make sure the problems can actually measure high-IQs. You need their other scores to see what scores getting those problems right correspond to.
As I said, you need some kind of widespread exposure. You have to let hundreds of thousands of people know that the test exists. Ideally, that it’s something fun and/or cool to do.
Another condition is that it would be really, really helpful if the test took less than 20 hours to take. It would be helpful if someonecould spend 20 hours or 10 hours on the test and score near the ceiling, which is not a common thing among these tests.
Cole: To avoid spoilage you need question schemas, not single questions. Then you need a way to automatically collect many samples. Presumably this would be on the Internet. A group of Mega members is working on this. Contact me if you’d like to help [Ed. chris@questrel.com.].
Jacobsen: What is the principal design of the Adaptive Test, inasmuch can be stated at this time? (Is this series the first announcement of the test, by the way?)
Cole: Cf www.mental-testing.com. There are some articles in Noesis. Let me check with the team.
Jacobsen: What other extraordinary high-I.Q. societies have been observed by you – the highest, most inclusive, most exclusive, the most multi-planetary, least reliant on D.N.A. prejudice, most non-carbon-based, und so weiter?
May: The Plurality IQ Society
Top 0.0000000000000000000000000 … % of Multiverse
Previously the highest-IQ group founded was the Aleph Society, which sought to have at most fewer than one member per Multiverse potentially qualifiable. However, the Aleph is found to be insufficiently selective in its admissions criteria for several reasons. First, it only considered 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time per universe. We feel that it is necessary to include all theoretically possible multiple dimensions of spaces and of times per universe of the Multiverse. (For multiple-time dimensions see, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_time_dimensions , https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.389 , https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/there-are-in-fact-2-dimensions-of-time-one-theoretical-ph ysicist-states/ )
Secondly, the Aleph only sought the highest IQ ‘individual’, including AIs, in the Multiverse ‘now’, i.e., at only one point in ‘time’ relative to one (1) observer, the Wormhole Officer (formerly called the Membership Officer). To remedy this we ‘now’ recognize that to whatever extent possible technologically, the Wormhole Officer must be a time traveler.
Thirdly, it is not sufficient that our psychometric instruments selecting at the Aleph level be culture free. Our IQ tests must also be genome free, i.e., free of any genetic influences upon performance. Speciesism is even more common than racism and gender-bias. We seek genetic justice in our member selection testing criteria. For example, in the past and even today, species with brains are unfairly advantaged over species without brains, including, of course, AIs. Why should an Isaac Newton have an IQ advantage over a slug, simply because a Newton has a brain? This obvious bias must be eliminated.
NB: All of the non-members of the Plurality IQ Society are Full Non-members and Official Non-members.
Jacobsen: What is the system of thought or the psychometric philosophy behind associative horizon?
Rosner: In my mind, when you get hit with a hard problem, one that might take more than ten hours to figure out. Part of it is how many different angles can you come up with on the problem. How many parts of life can you apply? How many possible analogies can you apply? How many keys are on your key ring to approach the problem?
When he talks about associative horizon, it is how many associations can you possibly come up with, with the symbols or whatever, that constitute the problem. To some extent, taking one of these high-range tests is profiling the author, trying to figure out, maybe, them, Hoeflin problems have a Hoeflin flavour to them, let you know if you are on the right track. Other test makers have flavours similar to them too.
It may be similar to their culture, say. The person building the problem found something in their world and boiled it down to an analogy. There is a popularish puzzle that is 7 d in a w.” You have to figure out what the “d” and the “w” are. It’s ‘days in a week.’ The problems can get tough. Another easy one. “5,280 f in an m,” ‘feet in a mile.’
So, “106 billion p who e l.” The “e” “l” is tough. You have to figure out. It is ‘people who ever lived.’ So, for a lot of IQ problems, they have at least some aspect of that. Decoding, figuring out what the symbols represent. Then it is an exercise in figuring out what could the “p” and the ‘p in e l’ stand for.
“6*10^23 As in an M.” My numbers might not be right. But ‘atoms in a mole,’ it is a test of cultural literacy. Often, there is further manipulation done to the symbols, so you have to work through two or three transformation or link two or three transformations to figure out the problem. It is how much cultural literacy do you have or do you give yourself, and then the flexibility for combining these things.
It is how much different stuff can you bring to bear on a fairly obscure or convoluted problem.
Jacobsen: How did you first come to find the Mega Test?
May: Actually I don’t remember. It was about 40 years ago. I probably met Ron Hoeflin through my membership in the Triple Nine Society. This was probably my initial connection to the Mega Test.
Rosner: Some guys in my dorm told me about the Mega. I must’ve already been IQ braggy. Yuck.
Cole: Saw it in Omni Magazine.
Jacobsen: What were the claims about the Mega Test – and your score(s) in each section on it – by Ronald Hoeflin, the media, and others?
May: Ron Hoeflin told me that I was the 2nd person to obtain a perfect score on the 24 verbal analogies, I believe. I think Marilyn Vos Savant was the first. I certainly didn’t tell many people, beyond my girl friend. I remember showing a copy of the Mega Test to one young woman, thinking she might be interested. She just laughed and laughed. Neil Blincom of Mr. Pecker’s original, illustrious National Enquirer tried to interview me once when I was Membership Officer of the Triple Nine Society. I pondered this offer deeply for a fraction of a second. I remembered Chris. (never forget the decimal point) Harding’s interview, “World’s Highest IQ Genius is an Unemployed Janitor” and decided not to be interviewed. I avoided the media.
Rosner: So, the claims were the Mega was the world’s hardest IQ test. By hardest, having the highest ceiling, the score a perfect score would get you, for instance. I think after the sixth norming, after Ron looked at 4,000 test submissions that came through Omni. I think the ceiling became 190 S.D. 16 or a little over 5.6 sigma. The first time I took it, I got a 44, which was 23 verbal problems right and 1 wrong and 21 math right and 3 wrong. I took it a second time and got a 47, which was 1 math wrong, I think. It doesn’t matter whether math or verbal; I got 1 wrong the second time.
What does that translate into for me, after the fourth or fifth norming, my 44 wasn’t high enough to get me into Mega. Marilyn herself turned me down for admission. My score might have corresponded to 172. Then after the sixth norming, after all these scores came in, I think a 44 got you a 180. I think the Mega cutoff is a 176. There you go. The 1-in-a-million level. Next question.
Cole: Omni called it the “world’s hardest IQ test.” Interpretation of scores can be found in Hoeflin’s normings.
Jacobsen: How does the internet complicate legitimate testing in the high-range?
May: The internet facilitates cheating on tests and meeting other cheaters to work with.
Rosner: The Mega came out in ’85. The Titan, the sequel to the Mega, came out in ’90. Most people got on the internet in the mid-to-late-‘90s. For those tests, it complicated and contaminated them because people went on message boards and threw answers around. Some of which were correct. That was problem one. Problem two was once Google came along; you could put in the words to the analogy and the fourth word would pop up. The analogies were half of the Titan and the Mega.
The 24 verbal problems were all analogies of the type “find the fourth word.” Most of those could be instantly solved using a decent search engine. Tests are different. The Cooijmans tests, which I consider the most challenging of the internet era tests can’t simply be solved by plugging things into a search engine. You still have to figure a lot of shit out. The most general issue with these tests and the internet is just sharing answers. Beyond that, it is a pain in the ass to make sure that the problems on the test can’t be solved through easy searches.
Chris (Cole) and his group of people, who are working on this test that are resistant to having answers shared, are working on tests that give each test-taker the same general problem, but the specifics of the problem are fresh. So, somebody else’s answer on this problem is not going to help you because, even though the problem should score the same – getting it right should reflect the same IQ level, you can’t just post what you got on answer 12. They’ve been working on that for well over a decade.
It’s coming along. Anyway, next question.
Cole: The Mega and Titan tests have been spoiled on the Web. The Power and Ultra tests are at risk.
Jacobsen: Some, in fact more than a few, claim extrapolations well beyond the norms of the mainstream tests, e.g., the WAIS and the SB, which cap out at or around 4-sigma. Assuming legitimacy of the claims, then, the individuals would be highly intelligent, but the claims can range between a little over 4-sigma to 6-sigma. How is this extrapolation generally seen within the high-I.Q. communities at the higher ranges?
May: I don’t know how other others generally perceive unsound or bogus extrapolations of IQ scores.
Rosner: I think the skepticism of super-high scores is generally more for specific claims than for the entire idea of being able to have an IQ that high. I think most people in the high-IQ community believe it is possible to have an IQ close to 200. But I think most people also have a reasonable idea of the rarity of scores like that. Adult IQs, the deviation scores, are based on a bell curve, where between 0 and 1 standard deviation, you have 34% of the population in a bell-shaped distribution for something like height. Between 1 and 2 SDs, you’ve got 14% of the population. Between 2 and 3, you’ve got about 1.5% of the population. Between 3 and 4, you’ve got roughly one-half percent of the population.
Let’s see, about 4 SDs, that’s only one person in 30,000 should score above 4 SDs. One person in 3,000,000 above 5 SDs. What is it? 1 person in 750,000,000 above 6 SD or so; somewhere, I’ve fucked it up, according to the standard bell curve. People also like to say that at the very far ends; there are more outliers than on the normal bell curve. That there are more high-IQs than would be given if it were a perfectly bell-shaped distribution.
But even so, you shouldn’t see more than a half-dozen or ten or twelve or whatever, people, with scores above 6 SDs. So, Paul Cooijmans has the Giga Society, which has 7 or 8 members. It is for people with IQs that are supposed to be one in a billion. So, there are 8 billion people on Earth, 8 members of the Giga Society, so that makes a certain sense, but not really. That’s as if everybody who could score at that level has taken one of his tests. That’s just obviously not true. So, way too many people scoring at the one in a billion level. It’s not like the Giga Society has 300 members.
Cooijmans is pretty rigorous in his norming and testing. So, if you have taken a Cooijmans test and scored at or close to the Giga Society, legitimately, Cooijmans has written in the past about people’s attempts to cheat on his tests, but I don’t think there has been a successful attempt in decades. So, people are pretty accepting that if you get a Giga level score on his tests; that you’re legitimately pretty smart. The claims of super high-IQs, there are legit claims based on performing well on ultra-high IQ tests or kicking ass as a kid on a test like the Stanford-Binet or the Wechsler. Someone can say, “As a kid, I scored a 200,” or something.
That’s another thing I won’t go into. People who claim high-IQ scores and are lying are generally not sophisticatedly lying. They’re saying something that cannot hold up at all. I don’t know if there are many or any sophisticated lies about having a super-high-IQ. So, then there are people outside the high-IQ community who are skeptical about the whole thing, but no one is really worried a lot about it, because: who gives a shit?
Also, if you want to say something, or know something that I’m not aware of, that contradicts what I’m saying, go ahead.
Cole: Hoeflin’s norms all involve some extrapolation. I find it reasonable up to the mega level (about 4.75 standard deviations).
Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what seems like the motivation behind making claims well beyond the norms of the most used mainstream I.Q. tests?
May: It’s a shame Einstein did physics. He could have been on Facebook (now called Meta, I guess).
Rosner: Going off my own experience, I kind of felt like a loser based on when I was about 20. I’d fucked up a lot of opportunities for myself. Then somebody told me about the previous world’s hardest IQ test, which was a Kevin Langdon test. It ran in Omni or Games Magazine. I took it and scored 170. I went, ‘Wow, that’s a good score.’ When Mega came along, I took that. I liked that validation that it gave me. Even though, it is a ridiculous thing. I kind of feel like it might be analogous to a guy who can bench press 500 lbs.
It’s kind of a goofy thing. You wouldn’t tell that guy it is goofy to his face, but the Sven Magnason. He is 6’4” and weighs 310 lbs. and eats 200 grams of protein a day to get that or support that huge bench press and has hypertension and his joints will be fucked in 10 years. It’s a kind of a goofy thing. It is amazing the guy can bench 500 lbs. It is this ridiculous thing. It is a very obscure sport. Sven Magnason is not playing in the NFL for 1.8 million USD a year. He probably works in a warehouse and does strength training on the side.
It doesn’t translate into the kind of fame or success that you might want. So, it is a niche kind of sport.
Cole: Vanity is one motivation.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more egregious I.Q. claims in 20th century by groups and by individuals? This is a free forum.
May: In the 20th century — maybe being the smartest man in America was a fairly egregious claim. Top 1 per billion high-IQ societies may qualify if such came into existence in the 20th century.
Rosner: I don’t know. Anybody can go on the internet and type whatever they want. One of the craziest claims I saw I mentioned before. Somebody had a site or has a site claiming Jesus had an IQ of 300. The idea that somebody with the deep wisdom of Jesus meant Jesus had a huge IQ. His estimate based on nothing: If smartest people have an IQ of 200, then Jesus must have an IQ of 300. William Sidis, people claim 259 based on extreme achievements as a young person, at least it is based on his history and is a fairly earnest attempt to estimate a very smart young man’s IQ.
It is kind of egregious and not based on him being tested. Oh! Some of the most egregious are in the last 15 years; some insane moms, one mom out of Colorado, maybe 18 years ago, got a hold of the answer key to an earlier edition of the Stanford-Binet. Stanford-Binet gets revised every 15 or 20 years. I don’t know. You can still find psychologists who will give an earlier version. In the stacks of libraries. Probably, the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, she found an earlier editions, found an answer key. Then taught her kid all the answers, so, that kid scored, at age 3 or 4, like a 10-year-old, which, the way they calculate childhood IQs, gave him an IQ well over 300. She tried to get herself and her kid famous off this.
It, eventually, fell apart because the kid did not have a 300 IQ. So, that is pretty egregious. But! Doable if you’re not an idiot about it, I believe. But anybody who would do it would be a kind of idiot. First of all, I don’t know. How much would a 4-year-old be into it? But if you took a 6-year-old and got a 6-year-old into it, “We’re going to ride this pony into a T.V. show, your acting career.” It has never happened, but it is not impossible. Because Alicia Witt was a child actor, an actor now. Great actor and great kid actor, one of the things that makes for a great kid actor is a 4-year-old who can read.
Because if you can give a 4-year-old – Alicia Witt could read at 3 – a script and the kid can read the script and memorize the script rather than having to be told shit line by line, and if the kid is smart enough to do that, then the kid is smart enough to take direction. Alicia Witt was at least a kid actor because she was super fucking smart. So, I’m thinking if you had a motivated 6-year-old and a creepy parent. I even started working on a screenplay on this or thought about it 30 years ago as a good plot. Like a lot of shit I do, I didn’t do anything with it, except the mom did it and a shitty job in real life.
The right combination of psychopathic parent and bright, motivated kid. That team could believably sustain the bullshit that that kid has an IQ of 300+ for quite a while. Although, nobody has done that. Yes, that would be egregious.
Cole: Before they were banned by Wikipedia, there were many articles by groups making incredible IQ claims.
Jacobsen: What seem like the big lessons in debunking phony I.Q. claims from the 20th century?
May: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard P. Feynman
Rosner: [Laughing] A lot of stuff underlying a lot about high-IQ is “Why?” Why claim to have a high-IQ? Why work your ass off to get a super high score on these tests? Why sweat debunking it? In retrospect, you can see why you might want to hold people who might claim super-high-IQs up to scrutiny, at least given Raniere. The NXVIM sex cult, swindler of the Bronfman’s who is in prison for life now. One of the pillars of his duping people was using a high score on the Mega Test to claim to be one of the smartest people on Earth, though he didn’t really push it.
Because once he gathered enough acolytes, I don’t know enough about him to know how often he dragged out his IQ. But it seems that once he was surrounded by dozens of followers; that he didn’t need to do that. He could rely on his charisma and manipulation skills, and also being at the top of a pyramid of people with good manipulation skills. He was smart enough to recruit charismatic actors, TV stars. A couple actors from Smallville. People with actual show biz careers. One of his selling points and one of the selling points of Scientology can help you succeed professionally in shit where what it takes to succeed, like acting, can seem nebulous.
So, he didn’t need to haul out his IQ a lot because he was surrounded by TV stars who were helping him recruit other people into his cult. He, certainly, deserved a lot of scrutiny, perhaps a lot sooner than he got the scrutiny. There’s another guy who is pretty culty who has a bunch of acolytes who espoused a bunch of scary shit. So, that’s one reason to scrutinize claims of super-high-IQ because people can be up to no good, but those people are fairly rare. Of the 60, 80, 100, people who have qualified for the Mega Society over the past 40 years, 95 or more percent of them are completely normal, undangerous people.
The biggest danger might be that they might be really funny, like Richard May, is a completely decent guy who happens to be extra smart and extra funny. Super-high-IQ people mostly aren’t to be feared. What were we talking about? I always talk myself way away from the question. [Ed. Question repeated.] That, I guess, let the babies have their bottles for the most part, let high-IQ people be high-IQ people, it doesn’t hurt anyone, except for a few cases. Those involved in IQ fraud, the fraud is pretty transparent.
Most of the high-IQ lying is some desperate asshole who is 25 and going to undergraduate parties at his school. That guy finds a freshman girl and says, “Oh, people don’t understand me. I have a 205 IQ. I graduated high school at age 5.” It’s that abject bullshit. There are more sophisticated attempts, but not that much more. Because the payoffs are pretty low. Even lower than getting a hand job from a freshman girl, the end.
Cole: “It’s hard to be right.” — Richard Feynman
Jacobsen: What would you define as fraudulent activity in a high-IQ community or an individual?
Rosner: Making claims that you know aren’t supported by your performance on tests.
Cole: Fraud takes many forms just as it does in common law. Because of the Internet, tests with fixed questions are particularly vulnerable to cheating.
May: I have nothing to add.
Jacobsen: What would you define as messianic posing in a similar regard?
Rosner: If you end up with a cult, that’s messianic posing.
Cole: The common language definition of messianic behavior will serve.
May: I have nothing to add.
Jacobsen: Similarly, what about criminal behaviour?
Rosner: If you end up in jail for the rest of your life, if the FBI has a thick dossier on you because you are considered a potential threat in certain ways, that’s criminal behaviour. The FBI has dossiers on lots of people because, historically, the FBI has done good things and asshole things.
So, if they have a dossier on you, because you’re a legitimate psycho who has the potential to do bodily harm to people for some weird political reason, then there you go.
Cole: Again I have nothing to add here to the common language definition of criminal behavior.
May: I have nothing to add.
Jacobsen: On the Mega Test, why was the three interpenetrating cubes problem seen as the most difficult?
Rosner: It is widely agreed that the three interpenetrating cubes problem was the hardest problem on the test. So, the problem that is agreed upon as likely being the correct answer has not, as far as I know, been proven to be the correct answer.
Interestingly, you can look it up. It depends on what shit is online. But at various times since the ‘90s, it has been agreed upon that the correct answer is floating out there. But you can’t be sure that you’ve found the consensus correct answer.
But the figure, the geometric figure, that corresponds to the consensus correct answer can be found in popular culture, but I won’t tell you where.
Cole: It’s the only problem on the test where the answer that Ron accepts has not been proven. There are a few of these on the Titan.
May: It was the certainly most difficult, but my spatial ability is not sufficiently high to understand why this is so.
Jacobsen: Above 4 standard deviations above the norm, why should there be more scrutiny more than any other cutoff?
Rosner: Isn’t there some claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”? You could argue that because claiming to have one of the world’s highest IQs gets you more than claiming to have a 120 IQ.
In practical terms, not so often, it can get you on a quiz show. It can get you on the cover of Esquire magazine. It can get you interviewed. It can get you on TV. It kind of got me laid once. I was going to get laid anyway. But it was part of that package that got me laid, I guess.
Cole: A credible high range score requires credible high range test questions, which are hard to formulate and norm.
May: I have nothing to add.
Jacobsen: What was the hardest IQ test you’ve ever taken in the high-range? What lesson can be learned for test-makers from this?
Rosner: I say that I’ve had a lot of success, but I’d say that I’ve had the most difficulty with Cooijmans’ tests. Because he brings in stuff from a lot of areas. I don’t want to say too much about his tests because he doesn’t want people talking about his tests and helping other people.
But by the time the Mega Test had been published in Omni, it had been through a number of revisions with hinky problems getting knocked out or revised until they were clear and bullet-proof. The answers were tight. I think Cooijmans talks about the pleasure of when an answer clicks into place. That click of satisfaction of when you know you found the answer.
I would say that on some of Cooijmans’ problems. The click is, maybe, not as loud as on some Hoeflin problems. On Cooijmans’ problems, you can find some really good answers that aren’t as good as the intended answer. That’s, maybe, the mark of one type of really good ultra-high-IQ test.
That there are stopping points. On multiple choice tests, those are called distractors. There are answers among the choices that seem right for various reasons if you’re taking desperate stabs at an answer.
On high-IQ tests, you can come up with answers that make a lot of sense. But do they make as much sense as the intended answer? No. But you’ve fallen for an inferior answer. On tough tests, a lot of problems on hard tests are finding the signal among the noise.
I’m writing a book in which somebody or the recipient of what he thinks is a coded message, thinks that it is a true message because it is based on the first letters of four consecutive sentences. That spell out a word.
The odds that this would happen by chance are 26 to the 6th power, which is 676 squared, which is 400,000 to 1. Then you have to knock that down because there are a zillion four-letter words. So, anyway, the odds are tens of thousands to one that it’s not a coded message, especially since it is specific to the character situation.
So, the character reasons that it is likely a true signal. And on a tough IQ problem, you’d like the numerical coincidences to have an unlikelihood of, at least, 1 in a 1,000. When you look at a number sequence, you see a pattern. Then you say, “What are the odds that this pattern would arise by chance?”
On some super-hard IQ problems, there are more than one pattern to be found. Again, you have to ask yourself, “Was this intentional or accidental?” A tough-ass IQ problem really pushes the limit in finding the signal among the noise.
Cole: The only high range test I took was the Mega.
May: The Mega Test and the L.A.I.T. are the only high range tests I’ve ever taken. I did not distinguish myself on the latter.
Jacobsen: Is IQ declining in importance now?
Rosner: IQ as IQ is declining in importance because it is a product of the middle of the 20th century when people really believed in it and used it to skip kids a grade, or not, to put them in gifted classes, get admission to magnet schools.
At some point, probably in the ‘50s, you might be able to get laid by your IQ. Since debunked, it has a greasy feeling about it, weirdo, creepazoid. The Cal. State schools, today, decided to get rid of the ACT and SAT altogether and the SAT is an IQ surrogate.
They decided it is not helpful, not worth the shit people go through to prepare for the tests. We can see enough about a student without some IQ surrogate in their admission packet. I’d say intelligence is increasing in importance because we are tiptoeing up to artificial intelligence.
That when we talk about AI – and AI is a misnomer right now; AI means “machine learning.” Eventually, AI will mean “Artificial Intelligence.” We will need ways to mathematicize and to come up with metrics of the power of thought in brains and in other stuff.
So, old school IQ declining; new school AI shit increasing.
Cole: IQ seems to be about as important now as it was when I was young. The SAT has some problems because it has become easy to improve a score via tutoring, but that is being addressed.
May: There is a theoretical possibility that Nature, specifically natural selection might not be entirely “politically correct.” Theoretically there could be differences among human groups that evolved under different conditions. E.g., If only females could bear children, then males would be the expendable ‘gender’. A small number of healthy males could impregnate a large number of females and the group would survive. A large number of males, if males did not bear children, and a small number of females would not allow the group to survive. Hence, there could be more variability among males, including cognitive variability, because males would be more expendable, than among females, i.e., there would be more male ‘geniuses’ and more male idiots. Fortunately we now realize that there are no biological differences between males and females. Gender is a purely social construct. We now realize that men can menstruate and have babies too, if given a chance. The only important differences are among large numbers of pronouns, all referring to identical nouns.
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On High-Range Test Construction 10: Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner on Debunking I.Q. Scores [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-10.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
A seasoned Musician (Vocals, Guitar and Piano), Filmmaker, and Actor, J.D. Mata has composed 100 songs and performed 100 shows and venues throughout. He has been a regular at the legendary “Whisky a Go Go,” where he has wooed audiences with his original shamanistic musical performances. He has written and directed nerous feature films, web series, and music videos. J.D. has also appeared in various national T.V. commercials and shows. Memorable appearances are TRUE BLOOD (HBO) as Tio Luca, THE UPS Store National television commercial, and the lead in the Lil Wayne music video, HOW TO LOVE, with over 129 million views. As a MOHAWK MEDICINE MAN, J.D. also led the spiritual-based film KATERI, which won the prestigious “Capex Dei” award at the Vatican in Rome. J.D. co-starred, performed and wrote the music for the original world premiere play, AN ENEMY of the PUEBLO — by one of today’s preeminent Chicana writers, Josefina Lopez! This is J.D.’s third Fringe; last year, he wrote, directed and starred in the Fringe Encore Performance award-winning “A Night at the Chicano Rock Opera.” He is in season 2 of his NEW YouTube series, ROCK god! J.D. is a native of McAllen, Texas and resides in North Hollywood, California. Mata discusses: the early queen of Tejano; very realistic as a parent; Rock God; and Abraham Quintanilla Sr.’s attitude.
Keywords: Abraham Quintanilla Jr., Chicano music history, entrepreneurial spirit, male-dominated industry, Mexican-American grit, Selena’s clothing line, Tejano music rise, unwavering discipline.
On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to focus on individual stars in the history of Tejano music. So, regarding Selena, who has come up several times in the last few weeks in our sessions, when did she start coming into the limelight? How did she become the early queen of Tejano?
J.D. Mata: She was only 23 when she died, so her career was cut short. Despite this, Selena is the most covered Tejano artist in history. Everything has been written about her, but I am still interested because I want to share my perspective. As a Tejano artist and from my perspective, having been there during the launch of her career and the rise of Tejano music, my viewpoint will make this particular episode enjoyable.
Jacobsen: Her career must have started in her teens, meaning her talent was recognized much earlier.
Tejano: From what I know, Selena started gaining attention in the early 1980s. She was born in Lake Jackson, Texas, close to Houston. Due to financial reasons, her family moved to Corpus Christi, about a couple of hours from where I’m from, in McAllen, Texas. Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., was a musician with his band. He was already a working musician, and the way the story goes, Abraham was very strict and determined. He noticed that his youngest daughter, Selena, had perfect pitch, likely in the early 1980s or even the late 1970s, since she was born in 1971.
I’m not sure exactly when Abraham first realized Selena could sing so well, but since he was a musician, he had already taught his son A.B. (Abraham Isaac Quintanilla III) to play bass, and they eventually convinced the older sister, Suzette, to play drums. This was the beginning of the band Selena y Los Dinos.
When the family moved to Corpus Christi, they opened a restaurant called Papa Gayo’s, where Selena, still a little girl, would sing. They paid their dues, played at the restaurant, had birthday parties, and did whatever else they could. Abraham became their manager, and they started from the ground up—no nepotism, no shortcuts.
At that time, the Tejano music industry still needed to be fully formed. The term “Tejano” wasn’t widely used yet. Back then, it was referred to as Chicano or orchestral music. It was a male-dominated industry with few female artists, and Selena and her family needed connections to help them. They truly came from nothing.
The only thing they had going for them was Mexican and Mexican-American grit. A father who was very driven didn’t drink, and I think they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was a very devout Jehovah’s Witness. Nothing can stop you when you have spirituality, purpose, and righteousness. And then you combine that with talent.
I don’t think people realize how much of an impact Selena’s dad had. I’m sure some do, but that’s the only reason Selena became famous. Her father had to do everything, from knowing how to fix the tour bus to having business acumen. He was no-nonsense. Nobody messed with him.
Nobody messed with him because he was a strong, powerful, and naturally gifted entrepreneur. The music industry is also about business. I’ve struggled and found it hard to break in because I haven’t had someone to advocate for me with strong business acumen and a no-nonsense attitude. Many artists have that so that they can break through that impenetrable wall.
For me, man, that’s been a weak point. I’m a very fine artist but a terrible businessperson.
Jacobsen: You’ve mentioned that before.
Mata: Yes. Selena was very astute in business. It’s been written that she wanted to get out of the Tejano industry. She was planning to leave the music industry altogether. She wanted to design her clothing line, and she loved it.
I’m jumping ahead, but she had a clothing line. She designed her clothing, and she loved doing it. She adored fashion. Again, this is speculation, but some evidence suggests that she wanted to leave the music industry to pursue her entrepreneurial spirit in fashion.
Just like her father, who was very headstrong and entrepreneurial, Selena was very entrepreneurial, too. She saw fashion as her future and loved designing clothes. The woman we were talking about earlier, Yolanda Saldívar—the one who killed Selena—was one of the managers of her boutiques. Selena had boutiques where she sold the clothing she designed. It’s speculated that she was planning to leave music and focus solely on her fashion business.
But back to Selena’s journey, I think people must fully understand it. First of all, a lot of it is luck, and a lot of it is hard work. You’ve got to be no-nonsense. Her father was no-nonsense; he didn’t tolerate any foolishness.
The band was very disciplined from the time they were kids. They had to practice regularly. There was no drinking on stage, and they were always punctual. Abraham had a reputation for being very disciplined.
Jacobsen: It sounds like the Jackson 5, whose father was known for highly regimented and directed parenting to get them to perform. Unfortunately, that also came with extremes of abuse. Was there any of that in Selena’s family structure?
Mata: No, there was never any abuse from Abraham Quintanilla Sr. He’s a very good man. He reminds me a lot of my dad, though he didn’t have that entrepreneurial gift.
My dad had many gifts—he was a musician, but he didn’t have the entrepreneurial gift. That was key regarding Selena and the band Selena y Los Dinos. The fact that Abraham Quintanilla, her father, was also a musician meant he understood the industry.
For example, they touched on this in the movie, but when they performed, they weren’t allowed to interact with the audience during Q&As or autograph signings. Mister Quintanilla believed there had to be a mystique. You go, do your show, say your hellos, but you don’t befriend your audience members. It was a very tight ship, and it worked.
You write your songs in Tejano music—there are no covers. While they might perform some older Spanish songs, big hits like “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” and “Amor Prohibido” were original. Going back to the original question, it was around the late seventies or early eighties that Abraham, a musician himself, saw the potential in his daughter and his kids. He was no-nonsense and recognized the natural genius in them.
Jacobsen: He was also very realistic as a parent.
Mata: Yes. A.B. Quintanilla, Selena’s brother, was the band leader, songwriter, and producer—a gifted and terrific musician. Abraham saw that and thought, “Let’s form a band.” They started small, not in talent, but in resources. They made their lights with cans and did everything on a shoestring budget—something I can relate to as a Tejano artist. I’d be wealthy if I had a nickel for every amplifier I had to lug around. But that’s part of the game.
They did the same. They set up, tore down, and as they got more popular and started touring, they got a tour bus—a used one that broke down a lot. Abraham, being the genius he was, knew about mechanics. Since they couldn’t afford to hire one, he had to learn. So whenever the bus broke down, he’d often fix it.
I’m probably jumping ahead, but going back to the beginning, they were doing it—forming the band. They were so young, but playing was the only way to improve. You can practice a lot at home, and that’s crucial, but to improve, you have to get out there and perform. And they did a lot of that. They paid their dues as kids growing up.
Selena did speak Spanish. She sang in Spanish, but her Spanish was broken when she first started getting interviewed. However, she improved over time.
Speaking of which, this is a good time to pitch my YouTube series, Rock God. In episode 8, I talk about meeting Selena. The series is about a musician living in Los Angeles who has yet to catch his big break but eventually makes it big in the nursing home market.
And so, in this episode, Aaron, the main character, is broke. He decides to go back to McAllen, Texas, and go back home. But one of the things he does every month is clean Selena’s Hollywood star. So he’s going to clean her star for the last time.
As he’s cleaning the star, a guy riding one of those electric scooters that people use for transportation now hits him in the head. After getting hit, he has an apparition of Selena. She appears and persuades Aaron to stay, telling him to stick it out no matter what.
That’s the way Selena was—someone who made many sacrifices. She stuck it out. She didn’t go to her prom or attend any football games. High school football is huge in Texas. She ended up getting her GED, but they sacrificed everything growing up.
Everything. Friends, experiences—everything. You had to. There was no other way. I left my hometown and have been here in Los Angeles since ’99. I sacrificed everything, too. My regimen is strict; I must practice my guitar and piano daily. I can’t go on vacation because I have to be ready.
What if the opportunity comes? What if someone calls and says, “Hey, we need you to play at The Whisky”? Or if you get a call for a role in a series?
Every relationship I’ve been in has been wrecked because I’m disciplined and true to my craft. I didn’t come to Los Angeles to fall in love—I came to make it big. Maybe I was summoned here.
Jacobsen: Maybe you came to Los Angeles because you loved the craft.
Mata: Yes, for sure. I was. But my DNA summoned me because I come from a family of actors and musicians. I was chosen to try and make it big, to represent my family significantly. It’s a huge responsibility. I get it. I understand Abraham Quintanilla Sr.’s attitude, making his kids sacrifice everything for the music and the band. It’s like my life. Everything revolves around my craft and my art, trying to get out of this hole I’m in and breakthrough.
That’s why they broke down so many barriers. Despite being a young woman in a male-dominated industry, she got Selena where she was without any nepotism or handouts, all grit, hard work, and talent.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music”.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On Tejano Music 5: Introduction to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, “Queen of Tejano Music” [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tejano-music-5.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Cross-national IQ gains, Environmental factors in IQ, Flynn effect, Genetic effects on intelligence, Hollow versus real IQ gains, Methodological dependence in studies, Raven Matrices gains, Secular gains in IQ.
On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect
Abstract
Following WW2, various researchers found and reported secular gains in IQ, but it was not until additional reports appeared in the 1980s that researchers began to look for the cause or causes. It was quickly apparent that the gains were not limited to any group or nation, but the manifestation of the gains was different depending on time and place. For every discovery, there was a different or opposite result in a different data set. Gains have been large, small, variable, and even negative. Some researchers have found that the gains were on g, while more have found no g loading. Abstract test formats, such as the Raven [Matrices -Ed. Note] have often shown the greatest gains, but gains have also appeared in tests of crystallized intelligence. Some data has shown greater gains for the lower half of the intelligence distribution, while others have shown greater gains in the top half, and others have shown equal gains at all levels. Hypotheses for the causes have included environmental factors, genetic effects, reduced fertility, and methodological dependence. Two models are discussed.
Introduction
The secular rise in IQ scores appeared unexpectedly and has defied explanation. Smith (1942) recorded a gain (in Honolulu) over a 14 year span. Later, Tuddenham (1948) found an increased intelligence when he compared inductee scores for the U.S. Army from World War I and World War II and proposed that the gains might be due to increased familiarity with tests; public health and nutrition; and education [the gains from 1932 to 1943 were 4.4 points per decade.]. He cited a high correlation (about .75) between years of education and the Army Alpha and Wells Alpha tests that he was studying.
The secular gain remained relatively dormant until it was rediscovered by Lynn (1982) while working on a comparison of Japanese and U.S. data. It was then rediscovered again, using American data, by Flynn (1984a,b). The raw score gains did not have a name until Herrnstein & Murray (1994) coined the term Flynn effect in their book The Bell Curve (p. 307). [“We call it ‘the Flynn effect’ because of psychologist James Flynn’s pivotal role in focusing attention on it, but the phenomenon itself was identified in the 1930s when testers began to notice that IQ scores arose with every successive year after a test was first standardized.” -Ed Note] Some researchers choose to refer to the secular gain as the Lynn–Flynn effect, or use an uppercase FL (FLynn effect) for the obvious reason that they feel Lynn has been somewhat slighted by not including his name.
[FE is the shorthand used throughout the remainder of this overview. -Ed. Note]
Since the early ‘80s, researchers have found the FE in virtually every group they have examined (Flynn, 1987 and others). They have published a huge number of papers (well over 100) on the gains and possible causes, but the results have been contradictory.
Gains
FE gains vary from country to country and over different time intervals, but the gains are usually a fraction of a point per year. As a matter of convenience, the gains are usually given as the number of points gained over a decade and written “ΔIQ.” A few typical national gains:
U.S. ΔIQ = 3 (14 points over 46 years, 1932–1978)
Estonia ΔIQ = 1.65 (12 points over 72 years, 1933/1936 to 2006)
Japan ΔIQ = 7.7 (19 points over 25 years, 1940 to 1965)
Argentina ΔIQ = 6.91 (21.35 points over 34 years, 1964 to 1998).
[Numerous other rates are given in Flynn and Rossi-Casé (2012).].
South Koreans born between 1970 and 1990 gained at about the same rate as did the Japanese (te Nijenhuis, Cho, Murphy, & Lee, 2012). Chinese gained 4.53 points over 22 years (ΔIQ = 2.1) on the Chinese WPPSI (Liu, Yang, Li, Chen, & Lynn, 2012). [WPPSI = Wechsler Preschool & Primary Scale of Intelligence. -Ed. Note] FE gains have been found in both industrialized and third world nations. The number of countries showing a FE is subject to change, since additions are frequently reported. Kanaya, Ceci, and Scullin (2005) reported 20 nations; Flynn and Rossi-Casé (2012) reported 31.
Teasdale and Owen (1989) examined two samples of Danish draftees, consisting of 32,862 and 6,757 males. They found that the gains were concentrated mostly among the lower IQ levels and concluded that changes in the educational system were driving the score gains. They also performed an interesting test, using Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that the FE gain was not caused by a ceiling effect. Flynn and Rossi-Casé (2012) noted that some data sets (they were examining Raven scores) have attenuated SDs [standard deviations -Ed. Note] because of ceiling effects.
Other researchers, including Lynn and Hampson (1986) and Colom, Lluis-Font, and Andres-Pueyo (2005), have found FE gains that were mainly concentrated in the lower IQ levels. This pattern suggests that the gains are related to improving environmental conditions in non-industrialized countries, rural areas, and low-income sectors.
Although it has now been 14 years since Jensen (1998) published The g Factor, his discussion of the FE remains current with respect to the items he considered. He reported U.S. gains:
Raven ΔIQ = 5.69
Wechsler ΔIQ = 5.2
Performance ΔIQ = 7.8
Verbal ΔIQ = 4.2
These show greater gains on the most abstract tests and subtests, although it is surprising to see the Wechsler as close to the Raven as the above numbers indicate — both being above the usually cited U.S. rate (ΔIQ = 3).
When Jensen examined subtests more closely, he found that non-scholastic test items showed increases at the same time (same test data sets) that scholastic items were decreasing. He noted that this is not what one would expect to see, but this is indeed what other researchers have reported. Jensen examined the SAT for the period 1952–1990 and found the well-known decline. The usual explanation for the decline is that each year more students took the test and most of the additions to the pool of test takers were added below (lower intelligence) the prior group, leading to a decline at the mean. But Jensen corrected for the changes in demographics and showed that 3/4 of the decline was due to the addition of more lower IQ testees, while the remaining 1/4 was a real decline in scores. The ΔIQ loss for the SAT was −5 for the time period in question, while the FE gain was +3. This strongly suggests that the IQ test scores were not reflecting real world gains in intelligence.
2.1. Estonia
Thanks to the work done by Olev and Aasa Must, there is a good bit of information about the FE as it has appeared in Estonia. The messages from their studies are that the FE gains follow different trajectories in different countries and the factors most likely to be driving those changes are also different.
In the Estonian studies, subtests that needed computation skills and mathematical thinking were unchanged over 60 years. The information subtest declined; verbal subtests showed moderate gains; but there were impressive gains in symbol–number and comparison subtests (Must, Must, & Raudik, 2003).
Must, te Nijenhuis, Must, and van Vianen (2009) examined data over a 72-year span and found a relatively small ΔIQ of 1.65. But when the eight [nine? -Ed. Note] years from 1998 to 2006 were examined separately, the ΔIQ almost doubled to 3 points. The g factor loadings were different at the subtest level for each of the three birth cohort groups examined, with the greatest difference between the oldest cohorts compared to the other two relatively recent cohorts.
In recent years, large gains were observed in arithmetic, information, and vocabulary. These gains are opposite from score changes seen in the U.S. and Britain. The authors identified several possible causes: greatly improved education, better nutrition, better health care, and changes in demographics (smaller families).
In 2012, the Estonian data was re-examined at the item level (see Section 4.2.1). The results of that effort are important to the understanding of at least one cause and of an otherwise perplexing difference between Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory results (see Section 4.9.2).
2.2. South Africa
ΔIQ = 3.63 Whites (same group took two different test batteries)
ΔIQ = 1.57 Indians (same group took two different test batteries)
The FE score gain is stronger for the Afrikaans speakers than for the English speakers (te Nijenhuis, Murphy, & van Eeden, 2011).
2.3. Gains seen in young children
British children aged 6 and 18 months displayed large developmental gains over the period from 1949 to 1985. When measured on the Griffiths Test, developmental quotients (DQ) gained 2.45 points per decade. Similar studies, using the Bayley Mental Scales (Bayley, 1993) were done by other researchers in the U. S. and Australia and show gains of 2.9 DQ points per decade (Black,
Hess, & Berenson-Howard, 2000; Campbell, Siegel, Parr, & Ramey, 1986; Lynn, 2009a; Tasbihsazan, Nettlebeck, & Kirby, 1997). Similarly, Kanaya et al. (2005) reported that elementary school children show FE gains on the WISC that are similar to adult gains on the WAIS. [WISC = Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, WAIS = Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale -Ed. Note] These DQ and IQ gains show a FE that is as large in infants and preschool children as in adults, making education an unlikely explanation for the cause (at least in the data sets examined).
As is already apparent, FE findings in one place do not generalize globally. Cotton et al. (2005) found no FE effect, using the Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices, for a group of Australian children ages 6–11 from 1975 to 2003; but Nettelbeck and Wilson (2004) found 5 point gain for a range of Australian elementary-grade children from 1981 to 2001.
2.4. Gains in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices
The Raven tests have been cited frequently in the FE literature because most samples show particularly large gains on these tests. The Raven and similar tests have shown gains of 18–20 IQ points per generation in many industrialized countries (Flynn, 1999). Dutch gains were 21 points over 30 years (ΔIQ = 7), while urban Chinese gained 22 points between 1936 and 1986, ΔIQ = 4.4 (Neisser, 1998).
Hiscock (2007) found a higher rate of FE gains for the Raven’s Progressive Matrices than for the Wechsler and Stanford–Binet tests. He also showed that British Raven scores for birth years from 1877 to 1967 increased steadily, but rolled off over that time span to a possibly flat (no effect) rate for the last 10 year interval.
[The popular Raven’s matrices tests – e.g., Standard Progressive Matrices, Colored Progressive Matrices, and Advanced Progressive Matrices – are non-verbal, multiple choice tests which purport to gauge abstract reasoning, i.e., pattern recognition. -Editor’s Note]
2.5. Low-end versus high-end gains
As previously mentioned, Teasdale and Owen found that FE gains for Danish draftees were concentrated in the lower end of the intelligence spectrum, suggesting a cause or causes such as improved nutrition, better health care, or increased education. Colom, Andre’s Pueyo, and Juan-Espinosa (1998) noted that FE gains were much greater on the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (19.2 points over 28 years, ΔIQ = 6.9) than on the Advanced Progressive Matrices (6.75 points over 28 years, ΔIQ = 2.4). They concluded that the cause of the increases probably had a greater impact in the low and medium segments of the intelligence distribution. In a later study, Colom et al. (2005) also found that gains were more pronounced in the lower range.
Lynn and Hampson (1986) reported a low-end gain that was about double the high-end gain, for a British group over the period 1932 to 1982. Similarly, Kagitcibasi and Biricik (2011) found greater gains in Turkey at the low end, over the period from 1977 to 2010. The differences were particularly large (23 points, ΔIQ = 7) for remote villages. Within urban locations, the lower SES groups also showed more gains (7.4 points, ΔIQ = 2.2) than higher SES groups, but these were less than in the remote villages.
The FE is so specific that for every finding, there seems to be an opposite finding. Flynn (1996, 2009) claimed IQ gains at “every level,” based on his observation that “score variance remains unchanged over time.” His “every level” projection held in a study conducted in La Plata, Argentina, where ΔIQ = 6.3 and showed no bias towards high or low IQ ranges. Flynn extended this observation as meaning that nutrition is an unlikely explanation, since it would presumably apply more readily to gains seen at the lower end, and not throughout the intelligence spectrum (Flynn & Rossi-Casé, 2012). Flynn (2009), cited Sundet, Barlaug, and Torjussen (2004)) as an example in which IQ gains were concentrated in the lower half of the IQ spectrum, while height gains were mostly in the upper half, pointing out that this combination is inconsistent with the nutrition argument.
Colom, Flores-Mendoza, Francisco, and Abad (2007) examined data for Brazilian children covering a span of 72 years. They found that the FE gains were greater for urban samples than for rural samples and concluded: “Whatever the causes of the increase, they act more intensively for more intelligent children.”
Ang, Rodgers, and Wänström (2010) computed FE gains from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data, which include scores from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT); the math portion was deemed to be closest to fluid intelligence. In this instance, the gains were skewed towards more educated and higher income families. Only the PIAT-math showed FE gains, which the authors believe is difficult to explain by a nutrition hypothesis. This study showed no race or sex related differences in FE gains.
2.6. Right tail gains
Only one study examined the FE in a data set that is limited to very high IQ individuals. Wai and Putallaz (2011) examined the huge (1.7 million scores) American data set of 7th grade students who took the SAT and ACT and 5th and 6th grade students who took the EXPLORE test. These tests are given to students who have scored in the top 5% for their grade on a standardized test (composite or subtest), and are part of the Duke Talented Identification Program 7th grade
search.
Flynn (1996) argued that the gains were present at all levels, but did not have data specific to the high range that is usually considered as gifted. Wai and Putallaz found the following generational IQ gains in the top 5%:
5.1 SAT-M
13.5 ACT-M
11.1 EXPLORE-M
The gains were concentrated on math and nonverbal subtests (see previous comments on Ang et al., 2010).
Wai and Putallaz also examined SAT-M scores of 500 and above (top 0.5%) and equivalent scores for the ACT, with the following results:
SAT-M 1981–1985, 7.7% at or above 500
2006–2010, 22.7% at or above 500
ACT-M 1990–1995, 17.7% at or above a similar level
2006–2010, 29.3% at or above a similar level
The obvious conclusion is that either there are a lot more truly bright children in the 2006–2010 set, or the test results are showing a significant score inflation that is not merited. They also used multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to determine whether the data sets were invariant with respect to cohort; they were not. Consequently, it can be concluded that something changed in the test construct from one cohort to the other.
Cf. The section “Secular Decline in Scholastic Achievement Scores” on page 322 in Chapter 10 of Arthur Jensen’s The g Factor. -Ed. Note]
2.7. FE gains but without a change in inspection time
Perhaps the only study to link a biological correlate of intelligence and test scores with the FE was carried out by Nettelbeck and Wilson (2004) in Australia. In 1981, Wilson conducted a study of school grades 1 through 7, administering the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and measured inspection times (IT) for each of the participants. In 2001, the study was
replicated with virtually every parameter held constant, other than the students. The study was done in the same school, with the same grade levels, using the same PPVT and the revised PPVT-III. IT was measured with the same Gerbrands tachistoscope, under identical conditions.
The results of the study were that the students in 2001 scored essentially the same on the PPVT-III as did the students in 1981 on the PPVT. The 2001 students scored almost 5 points higher when they took the PPVT (ΔIQ = 2.5). IT measurements were the same to within the error bands. Thus, the FE was shown, but was not accompanied by improvements in IT. I asked Nettlebeck if there were any observable differences in SES or nutrition between the two groups. He said that the area served by the school was stable and that there were no observable differences in such things as nutrition or standard of living.
While IT does not correlate significantly with fluid intelligence (Burns & Nettelbeck, 2003; Burns, Nettelbeck, & Cooper, 1999), it does correlate with nonverbal IQ at about 0.50 (Deary & Stough, 1996; and others) and with Raven’s matrices and performance IQ. The finding suggests that FE gains were unrelated to processing speed or other factors that explain the IT to general ability correlations.
Academic performance down
While IQ test scores have been rising (in some cases soaring), academic performance has done the opposite. As Jensen (1998) pointed out, when he observed that the SAT and subtests of scholastic test items have declined, real world academic performance has done the same.
Adey and Shayer (2006), of King’s College London, studied the test scores of 25,000 children across both state and private schools and concluded: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades. In 1976 a third of boys and a quarter of girls scored highly in the tests overall; by 2004, the figures had plummeted to just 6% of boys and 5% of girls. These children were on average two to three years behind those who were tested in the mid-1990s.”
For an assessment of how well U.S. students are doing, this URL leads to a well-written, if depressing, description of the state of teaching, education, and students: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/decline1.htm.
Hypothetical causes
Among the causes that have been proposed to explain the FE are these:
Education
Increased exposure to testing
Exposure to artificial light
Nutrition
Decreased family size
Heterosis
More complex visual environment
Child rearing practices
and the use of Classical Test Theory versus Item Response Theory
4.1. Education
Since FE gains have been observed in preschool children, education is unlikely to be a cause in all data sets. As previously discussed, FE gains have usually been more pronounced on non-scholastic items, while scholastic subtests have presented lower scores at the same time and within the same tests. Direct measures of academic performance have also shown secular declines while FE gains were evident in IQ tests (Jensen, 1998). Lynn (1998) argued that the Raven tests are being inflated as a result of mathematical education; however, the relationship of simple math to increased education is a questionable factor, especially in the Colored or Standard tests (Carlson & Jensen, 1980).
Rönnlund and Nilsson (2008, 2009) examined data from the Betula prospective cohort study. This Swedish data set consists of four age-matched samples (35–80 years; N = 2,996) tested on the same battery of memory tasks. Data was taken in 1989, 1995, 1999, and 2004. A FE was found at ΔIQ = 1.5 (relatively low, relative to other nations). FE gains in fluid and crystallized intelligence were approximately equal. Years of education, height (interpreted as a marker for nutrition), and sibsize [number of siblings -Ed. Note] were used as markers; together they accounted for over 94% of the time-related differences in cognitive performance. But education was a much stronger predictor than the other two items. The authors wrote: “The fact that education emerged as the strongest predictor across all cognitive measures enforces the conclusion that education may exert influence on time-related patterns on (broad) fluid (visuospatial ability, episodic memory) as well as crystallized/semantic aspects of cognition.”
4.2. Increased exposure to testing
There is little doubt that testing frequency has increased over the past years. Tuddenham listed it as one possible explanation for the secular gains he found between WW1 and WW2 cohorts. There are two mechanisms that have been proposed. Brand (1996) suggested that the use of timed tests has caused students to work faster by guessing more frequently on multiple choice tests. This largely ignored hypothesis has recently been supported by item level data (Must & Must, 2012). This finding explains other observations (lack of g loading in some studies and inconsistency between scoring methodologies) but does not cover all aspects of this category of causation. For example, FE gains are seen on tests that are untimed and on tests that do not use multiple choice.
Jensen (1998, p. 327) mentioned “increasing test wiseness from more frequent use of tests.” His point was that frequent testing may have the same sort of impact on test scores as the increase associated with test–retest. This is the same process that is associated with learning and shows up in situations where test training has been used (as is common with the SAT). When this happens, the test g loading decreases and its s loading (specificity) increases.
Both Brand’s and Jensen’s ideas would presumably cause test scores to increase without showing gains on g. As will be seen later, numerous studies, but not all, have shown that FE
gains that are not g loaded. Flynn (2009) agreed with Jensen’s comment (above), but only for the early years of testing: “The twentieth century saw us go from subjects who had never taken a standardized test to people bombarded by them, and, undoubtedly, a small portion of gains in the first half of the century was due to growing test sophistication. Since 1947, its role has been relatively modest.”
4.2.1. Estonian data supports Brand’s hypothesis
Brand (1996) wrote: “The correct strategy for testees is: ‘When in doubt, guess.’” This hypothesis has been occasionally noted in the literature, but seldom described as a likely and significant driver of FE gains.
Item level data was preserved for the Estonian National Intelligence Test, from 1933/1936 and 2006. These data show a change in test taking strategy that is best described as increased guessing (Must & Must, 2012). The numbers of correct answers increased (SD .79), but that increase was accompanied by an increase in incorrect answers (SD .15). The number of missing answers decreased. Scores were not penalized by wrong answers, but were boosted by correct answers. The Estonian data showed relatively little guessing effect for comparisons and other simple tasks, but had a large presence on time-pressured and mentally taxing tasks (math). In the 1934–1936 tests the item level data do not suggest the guessing strategy that is apparent in the 2006 tests. It should be noted that these same data show FE gains in excess of those that can be attributed to a guessing strategy.
4.3. Nutrition and medical care
Both nutrition and medical care have improved over the past century and have been accompanied by a large number of gains that appear to be caused by these improvements: increased mean height, increased head size, faster growth, earlier maturation, etc. Lynn (2009a) argues that gains in developmental quotients (DQs — hold up head, sit up, stand, walk, jump, etc.) are indicators of gains in IQ. DQs have gained 3.7 points per decade, while IQ gains of 3.9 points per decade have been seen in preschool children (age 4–6). Using the Griffiths Test, British children at age 6 months showed an average DQ gain of 2.8 points per decade and children, age 18 months, showed an average gain of 2.1 points per decade. Flynn (1984b) and Bocerean, Fischer, and Flieller (2003) have reported IQ gains that are similar to the DQ gains (Hanson, Smith, & Hume, 1985) for preschool children.
Lynn (2009a,b) cites various studies that show poor nutrition in the early part of the 20th century in the U.S. and Western Europe. Those indications of poor nutrition disappeared over the course of that century. Three nutrients that are known to be related to the development of intelligence are iron, folate, and iodine. Lynn (2009a) presented references showing insufficient intake of these in various countries in the early part of the 20th century. Liu et al. (2012), pointed to improvements in standard of living, nutrition, and education as possible causes for the gains in China. The studies that have shown greater FE gains in the lower part of the IQ distribution are consistent with the nutrition argument.
4.3.1. Birth weights
One factor influencing birth weight is pre-natal nutrition. Birth weight correlates positively with IQ and with DQs. Brazelton, Tronik, Lechtig, Lasky, and Klein (1977) reported that when birth weights reached 3,500 g, infants were advanced by approximately 15 DQ points at age 28 days (compared with lower birth weight babies). Low birth weights show the opposite; Drillien (1969) reported DQ score depressions of 12 points for infants with birth weights under 2,000 g, compared to those with birth weights over 2500 g (ages 6 months through 2 years). Various other studies have reported similar findings. In general, improved pre-natal nutrition increases birth weights and head size [birth weight is correlated with head size at r =0.75 (Broman, Nichols, & Kennedy, 1975).]. It is head size that is directly linked to higher cognitive performance.
Lynn (2009a) attributes the change in height and in DQs as being caused by nutritional improvements. Both measures increased by about one standard deviation (SD) over 50 years. Flynn (2009) countered that gains in height have not happened at the same times as gains in IQ. This argument seems to imply a degree of data tracking, with respect to time, that is not necessary for the argument to hold (Lynn, 2009a). Height and intelligence gains for Norwegian conscripts were reported by Sundet et al. (2004) continuing until the late 1980s, when height gains ended. For the period from 1969 to 2002, the height gains were more pronounced in the upper half of the distribution, while intelligence gains were greater in the lower half.
4.3.3. Head size
Lynn (2009a) cited numerous sources that have reported head size increases of about one standard deviation over the past 50-plus years. In Britain, the head circumference of 1 year olds has increased by approximately 1.5 cm from 1930 to 1985 (Cole, 1994). Head circumference, DQs, IQs, and height, over that time span, have all shown gains of about 1 SD. Head size is an approximate measure of brain size; the two correlate at r = 0.8 (Brandt, 1978).
Jensen (1998) found that head size is mostly correlated with g (as opposed to group factors) and notes that the reason for the correlation is that head size is a proxy for brain size. When measured with MRI, the correlation between brain size and IQ is about 0.40 (Rushton & Ankney, 1996). Larger brain size means more neurons and is logically consistent with the correlations between head and brain measurements versus IQ.
The correlation between brain volume and IQ is presumably due to the larger number of neurons in larger brains (Rushton & Ankney, 1996), although Miller (1994) has suggested that it may be due to higher levels of myelination in larger brains. In any case, increases in brain size should be direct contributors to higher intelligence (Miller & Penke, 2007).
4.3.4. Not nutrition
Neisser (1998) pointed out that studies of nutrition have shown that neither vitamins nor supplements have had any impact on intelligence.
Nutrition is unlikely to have declined over the past 20 years in those countries that have a negative FE; height did not decline.
Contrary to the intelligence gains seen in Norway, height gains from 1969 to 2002 were mostly in the upper half of the intelligence range (Sundet et al., 2004).
With the exception of Spain, Denmark, and Norway, gains have not been frequently concentrated in the bottom half of the distribution. Flynn and Rossi-Casé (2012) argued that for all other cases, the nutrition argument is not viable.
Mingroni (2007) argued that all postnatal environmental factors are implausible because of the high consistency of heritability estimates.
Mingroni (2007) also contended that heterosis is a better explanation for increases in height than are nutritional and health care considerations.
4.4. Exposure to artificial light
This hypothesis is not seen often in the literature and might have been omitted in this review, except that it did not come from a weak source, but was one of the items listed by Jensen in The g Factor. The idea is based on the response of the pineal gland in animals to artificial light. The pineal gland appears to play a major role in sexual development, hibernation, metabolism, and seasonal breeding. Artificial light is used by poultry farmers to stimulate growth and increase their output.
There does not seem to be any data available for whether this effect happens in humans, but the speculation is that it might. There has been an obvious increase in the use of electric lighting by humans over much of the time that the FE has been observed. Besides lighting, people have been increasingly exposed to artificial light from television and computer screens, even during early childhood.
4.5. Decreasing family size
It has been known for some time that the mean IQ of families decreases as family size increases. There are two factors that contribute (presumably independently) to this effect:
Maternal IQ correlates negatively with fertility. This is the underlying factor behind Richard Lynn’s papers and book relating to global dysgenics and has been shown for numerous data sets from various countries (Lynn, 1996; Lynn & Harvey, 2008). Low IQ people statistically have more children than high IQ people. The high heritability of intelligence, therefore, is a source of dysgenic pressure. If there is a decrease in average family size (not limited to the upper end), the reduced numbers of low IQ children should produce a net increase in the mean, which would show up as a FE gain.
Dating as far back as Sir Francis Galton, it was believed that IQ declined as a function of birth order. That belief was disputed by Rodgers, Cleveland, van den Oord, and Rowe (2000) after they examined the American NLSY data and did not find a birth order effect. This argument seemed strong and held until Bjerkedal, Kristensen, Skjeret, and Brevik (2007) published a study based on a very large data set of Norwegian conscripts, which showed the birth order effect in Norway. The mechanism of the effect has not been resolved. Hypotheses that have been advanced include prenatal gestational factors and social factors. The former seem more consistent with the general finding that social factors have little, if any effect on intelligence. Causation of the birth order effect does not matter with respect to the FE. If family size is declining in various groups, there must be a positive contribution to mean IQ due to fewer low IQ children being born.
4.6. Heterosis
Mingroni (2004, 2007) suggested that since the effects of the environment on intelligence are so small (Loehlin, Horn, & Willerman, 1989; Scarr & Weinberg, 1978), the possibility of a genetic effect should be investigated. If environmental factors were significant, between-family variance would cause MZA twins (identical, reared apart) to be less alike and siblings to be more alike.
[MZA = Monozygotic twins reared apart -Ed. Note]
Besides IQ, there have been secular trends in height, growth rate, myopia, asthma, autism, ADHD, and head circumference. It may, therefore, seem reasonable to argue that there is a global change that is affecting some or all of these factors (possibly consistent with Lynn’s nutrition hypothesis). If selective breeding was involved, in order to produce the magnitudes seen in the FE, breeding would have to be restricted to only those people in the upper half of the IQ distribution (Jensen 1998, p. 327). As previously discussed, it is the bottom half that has the higher fertility.
Lynn (2009a) argued that heterosis is unlikely for three reasons:
There was little immigration in Europe before 1950 (the FE was present before that date).
The FE for IQs and DQs is just as large in Europe as in other places.
Studies of heterosis have shown little positive effect on IQ.
Woodley (2011) also concluded that heterosis is an unlikely cause because the FE gains are seen on the least g loaded components of intelligence tests [Colom, Juan-Espinosa, and Garcia (2001) reported opposite findings for Spanish standardizations of the DAT.].
[DAT = Differential Aptitude Test -Ed. Note]
Perhaps the most important consideration in determining whether there is a heterosis effect was pointed out by Mingroni: If the FE is found within-families, the cause is not genetic. Sundet, Eriksenb, Borren, and Tambs (2010) found that the FE operates within sibships. Unless this finding cannot be extended beyond Norway, the heterosis hypothesis does not look viable.
Mingroni (2007) argued in favor of a heterosis explanation from the perspective of real gains on intelligence and did not address situations, such as increased exposure to testing (Section 4.2), that show a FE, but which are inherently not Jensen effects. He also argued that increases in height were better explained by heterosis than by nutrition, but did not address that at least some of the height gains are related to leg length and are best explained by sexual selection (Jensen, 1998, p. 331).
4.7. Enriched visual environment
Greenfield (1998) and others suggested that the FE gains are caused by the ever increasing shift from verbal communication to visual and interactive media. This is seen globally in the increased presence of movies, television, photography, video games, computers, puzzles, mazes, exploded views, etc. Advertising has become ubiquitous and is saturated with images, graphs, charts, and rapid sequence visuals.
The mechanism for this hypothesis is that the shift towards visual representations removes some of the novelty from tests, especially in the culture reduced tests that have shown about double the FE gains as found in other tests. This is particularly convincing for tests such as the Raven which presents abstract figures in a matrix. Several decades ago these figures may have been more baffling than they are today.
4.8. Child rearing practices
The FE has been seen throughout the world, in both developed and undeveloped countries where child rearing practices vary greatly. It is unlikely that this hypothesis is a significant factor, not only because of the cultural variation in child rearing practices, but also because the shared environment has essentially no impact on adult intelligence (per prior discussion). To some extent, this category overlaps the increased visual environment and education. In that regard, it may contribute to the FE in some instances.
4.9. Methodological and test construct issues
As previously mentioned, ceiling effects can distort FE measurements. Other methodological issues have been found, but not fully resolved.
4.9.1. Is the FE invariant?
When researchers have tested for invariance, they have found that the data sets they were examining were not invariant (Must et al., 2009; Wai & Putallaz, 2011). Wicherts et al. (2004) did a study of five data sets to test for invariance. These included the Must et al. and Teasdale & Owen studies. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses of these data sets showed that they were
not invariant, meaning that FE gains were not gains on the latent variables that the tests were supposed to measure. Besides providing insight as to the nature of the FE gains, the rejection of factorial invariance demonstrates that subtest score interpretations are necessarily different over time.
Flynn (2009) pointed out that cultural changes over time cause some test items to become easier because they have lost their novelty. Some words that were previously not common become more common because usage has changed. He gives several examples of this, including his frequently used example: “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?” He says that past generations would more likely focus on the use of dogs to hunt rabbits, while later generations would immediately identify that they are both mammals. This example of differential item functioning is probably responsible for at least some subtest score increases, especially in tests of similarities and vocabulary. Periodic test revisions should remove these non-g gains.
4.9.2. Classical Test Theory versus Item Response Theory
Beaujean and Osterlind (2008) did an analysis that is related to the Wicherts et al. analysis of invariance, which examines the underlying nature of the test itself. Most studies in the literature are based on Classical Test Theory (CTT) and present results which are not based on item level analysis. This practice hides some of the information that could be extracted from a data set. Test scores are given, but the latent constructs they are designed to measure cannot be examined. Item Response Theory (IRT), on the other hand, allows the researcher to examine the changes in underlying latent ability. Thus, CTT can show differences in scores, even when there is no change in the latent variable. An increase may be due to a general gain in real intelligence, or a decrease in the levels of difficulty of test items.
Despite its relatively infrequent use, IRT is generally considered to be the better methodology. It is particularly useful in FE studies because it reveals changes in item properties between two groups measured at different times. CTT requires groups that are being compared to have similar ability distributions, but this is not a requirement when IRT is used. In IRT, the item parameters do not depend on the ability level of the testees.
Results using CCT and IRT to measure FE gains in the American NLSY data: ● Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R)
CCT 0.44 points per year
IRT 0.06 points per year
Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Math (PIAT-M)
CCT 0.27 points per year
IRT 0.13 points per year
The results show that the FE essentially vanishes for the PPVT-R when IRT is used. The PIAT-M gains are cut to half using IRT. Ergo, the FE gains are a function of the methodology, leading to the concern that much of the literature has reported findings that might be quite different if IRT had been used.
Now that an item level study has been reported for the Estonian data (see Section 4.2.1), it is apparent that some of the score gains were due to increased guessing on the most complex subtests. Shiu, Beaujean, Must, te Nijenhuis, and Must (2012) reported effect sizes for the FE gains in this data set. All subtests, except computations, showed gains; the largest gain was in analogies. The research group concluded that there was some real increase in abilities (beyond the guessing related gains previously discussed).
Real or hollow gains?
When David Wechsler studied his WAIS, he gave the old 1953 version and the new revised 1978 version (WAIS-R) to the same group. That group averaged 103.8 on the new version and 111.3 on the old version yielding ΔIQ = 3 (Neisser, 1997).
If children of 1997 took the 1932 Stanford-Binet, 1/4 would score above IQ 130 (an increase of 10X). If children in 1932 took the 1997 test, the mean would be about 80! 1/4 would be “deficient” (Neisser, 1997).
Vroon made a similar observation about Dutch men: When scored against 1982 norms, men in 1952 would have had a mean IQ of 79 (Neisser, 1998).
Flynn initially questioned the reality that intelligence has increased:
“Has the average person in The Netherlands ever been near mental retardation?” “Does it make sense to assume that at one time almost 40% of Dutch men lacked the capacity to understand soccer, their most favored national sport?” He noted that there are not more gifted Dutch school children now and that patented inventions have shown a sharp decline.The U.S. mean in 1918 would have been 75, if scored against today’s norms.If the score gains were real intelligence gains, real-life consequences would be conspicuous (Neisser, 1998). In discussing paradoxes related to the secular gains, Flynn (2009) wrote: “How can people get more intelligent and have no larger vocabularies, no larger stores of general information, no greater ability to solve arithmetical problems? …Why do we not have to make allowances for the limitations of our parents?”
5.1. Is the Flynn effect a Jensen effect?
[A Jensen effect is one that loads on g. It was named by Rushton.]
Colom et al. (2001) Paper title: The secular increase in test scores is a “Jensen effect.”
Must et al. (2003) Paper title: The secular rise in IQs: In Estonia, the Flynn effect is not a Jensen effect.
Rushton and Jensen (2010): “The Flynn effect is not a Jensen effect (because it does not occur on g).”
5.1.1. Not a Jensen effect
In a meta-analysis of 64 test–retest studies using IQ batteries (total N = 26,990), te Nijenhuis, van Vianen, and van der Flier (2007) found a correlation between g loadings and score gains of −1.00. A similar finding was reported for a different meta-analysis by van Bloois, Geutjes, te Nijenhuis, and de Pater (2009). Must et al. (2003) found (in Estonia) a correlation of −0.40 between g and FE gains. These all show that the gains were not on g and were, therefore, hollow. The discussion in Section 4.2.1 shows that at least part of the Estonian gains were the result of an increased tendency to guess.
Rushton and Jensen (2010) showed that heritabilities calculated from twins also correlate with the g loadings, r = 0.99, P < 0.001 (for the estimated true correlation), providing biological evidence for a genetic g. The importance of this is that if the FE is being driven by environmental factors, it is unlikely that the gains would load on g. If the cause is genetic (as in the Mingroni hypothesis), the gains should show a Jensen effect.
They also pointed out that g loadings and inbreeding depression scores on the 11 subtests of the WISC correlate significantly positively with racial differences and significantly negatively (or not at all) with the secular gains. This is further evidence that the FE is caused by environmental factors.
Perhaps the strongest argument that the FE does not load on g came from Rushton (1999). He used principal components analysis to show the independence of the FE from known genetic effects.
The IQ gains on the WISC-R and WISC-III form a cluster. This means that the secular trend is a reliable phenomenon.
This cluster is independent of the cluster formed by racial differences, inbreeding depression scores (purely genetic), and g factor loadings (largely genetic). The secular increase is, therefore, unrelated to g and other heritable measures.
Must et al. used the Method of Correlated Vectors (see Jensen, 1998) to test the FE gains for g loading. Rank order correlations between the various subtests and the rank of those subtests on the g factor were negative and nonsignificant: r = −.40 (one-tailed P = .13). Subtests with the lowest g loadings showed the greatest FE gains. The authors concluded: “In Estonia, the Flynn effect is not a Jensen effect.”
5.1.2. Yes, it is a Jensen effect
Colom et al. (2001) examined two successive Spanish standardizations of the Differential Aptitude Test (DAT) battery and found gains on g, r = .78; P < .05. Colom: “Not a ‘Jensen effect’ is true for crystallized tests but not for fluid tests.” Using the DAT, Colom et al. showed that
subtest gains increased as their rank order of g loading increased [the subtests in the DAT are (in order of increasing g loading) numerical ability, verbal reasoning, mechanical reasoning, abstract reasoning, and spatial relations.].
5.2. Predictive bias
Jensen (1998, p. 331) stated that the definitive test of whether FE gains are hollow or not is to apply the predictive bias test. This means that two points in time would be compared on the basis of an external criterion (real world measurement, such as school grades). If the gains are hollow, the later time point would show underprediction, relative to the earlier time. This assumes that the later test has not been renormed. In actual practice tests are periodically renormed so that the mean remains at 100. The result of this recentering is that the tests maintain their predictive validity, indicating that the FE gains are indeed hollow.
[Editor’s Note: See discussion above about SAT recentering, section 2.6] 6. Which explanations work?
Most of the mechanisms that have been proposed as causes of the FE are plausible under some circumstances. Even when one is ruled out by a specific study, it may apply elsewhere. As has been shown in the foregoing material, the most consistent aspect of the FE is that it is inconsistent from one time or place to another. Sometimes the gains have been mostly in abstract reasoning (as in the U.S.), but elsewhere the gains have been strongly tilted towards scholastic subtests (Estonia). Gains have been strong, weak, flat, or have reversed, even within the same country when measured at different times — Norway and Denmark (Sundet et al., 2004; Teasdale & Owen, 2008).
Finally, there are the issues of non-invariance and of methodological inconsistency when IRT is used instead of CTT. The instances in which confirmatory factor analysis has failed to show invariance (every case so far) tell us that the meaning of IQ tests is not constant over time. The reduction in FE magnitude (to near zero in some cases) when IRT is applied suggests that the test vehicle is contributing 50 to 100% of the gains and that those gains are methodological artifacts and carry no g loading. For example, the FE gains due to guessing (Estonia) were not resolved by CTT because the successful strategy was not apparent at the subtest level.
6.1. Real or hollow?
Most of the tests for g loading have shown little or no g saturation. The majority of researchers who have addressed the issue have argued that the gains are hollow, with the exception of Lynn and Colom, both of whom have made strong arguments that there is at least some genuine gain in intelligence. This inconsistency may be due in part to different data sets and may be due in part to CTT methods. It is likely that most of the FE gains that have been reported are hollow. If this were not true, renorming would cause predictive validity to change, but there are no reports that this has happened.
Can the Flynn effect be modeled?
Most studies of the FE have attempted to apply a single explanation, such as heterosis, or a narrow category of causation, such as nutrition/health care. This overview, however, strongly suggests that multiple causes are acting, and that the mix of causes varies over time and from one place to another. Flynn and Rossi-Casé (2012) agree: “Even in developed nations, the notion that the Flynn effect will have identical causes should be banished from the literature.”
A quantitative model of causation is beyond present understanding, but a qualitative model can be constructed, such that the most likely active components can be identified. Two approaches to this follow.
7.1. A life history model
Woodley (2012) presented a model in which a large number of FE causes (as discussed here) are assumed to vary as a group. His model assumes that the FE gains are unrelated to g and are the result of a shift in life history from fast to slow. A fast life history is taken to be the set of tradeoffs that are associated with relatively high fertility and lower parental investment in offspring, as described by Rushton (1985) in his Differential K Theory; slow life history is the opposite (lower fertility and more parental investment). Woodley describes his model as a cognitive differentiation–integration effort (CD–IE) hypothesis.
Cognitive integration effort (CIE) – a strengthening of the manifold via the investment of bioenergetic resources – fast life history.
Cognitive differentiation effort (CDE) – a weakening of the manifold via the unequal investment of resources into individual abilities – slow life history.
If it happens that a given population is moving from a fast towards a slow life history, multiple environmental factors can be expected to move in the direction that would cause a secular rise in test scores: fertility, education, pathogen stress, and nutrition.
7.2. Independent Drivers model
The Woodley model, described above, focuses on a latent variable, such that variations in that variable contribute to the FE by means of the causes that are assumed to increase or decrease together. An alternative model assumes that the various FE drivers act independently, may combine in any combination, and may include negative driver components. The causes that are present in a given data set over an observation period are difficult to quantify, but can be estimated on a limited scale, such as high, medium, and low, with the expectation that their contributions to FE gains will be larger or smaller, depending on the strength of the driver.
Each driver is assumed to exert a FE influence as a function of how much contribution potential remains in association with that driver. For example, the reduction in family size is likely to initially contribute more to a study group that has had high fertility and is moving in the direction of smaller families. As the process continues, diminishing FE gains will be seen as the maximum total effect is used up. The path may appear to be somewhat linear over a short time period, but it must approach an asymptote. The gain for any given driver should follow a relationship that is similar to
FEGᵢ = FEMᵢ (t) / (t+kᵢ)
where FEGᵢ is the FE gain due to driver i; FEMᵢ is the maximum FE gain that can be contributed by driver i; t is the time in years; and kᵢ is a constant for driver i. Multiple drivers would be additive, but each will have its own maximum contribution and constant.
The shape illustrated in Fig. 1 is consistent with the gains (general shape) shown by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Britain (Hiscock, 2007).
7.2.1. Reversals
Reversals may occur either as the sum of positive drivers decreases to less than the sum of negative drivers, or the positive drivers reverse direction. A lack of FE push might result in a reversal due to an existing negative cause, such as an underlying dysgenic trend or the decline in educational participation. The net FE gain (or loss) may contain negative factors that are not evident in the data, because the result is a positive FE. Thus, the positive drivers need only reach saturation for a reversal to appear (assuming the presence of one or more negative drivers).
It is possible that some of the drivers that have been discussed could reverse direction and directly cause a FE decline. For example, nutritional factors may change and become negative due to the introduction of harmful chemicals into diets or the living environment; health care standards could deteriorate; family sizes could reverse direction, at least for a segment of a population.
Group and environmental characteristics over the time period ΔT FE driver _____________________________________________________________________________Many school years completed Education Qualitatively improved education
Higher scores on scholastic tests
Score gains in preschool children Not education, but possibly More testing in primary and secondary schools nutrition, healthcare, etc.
Increased use of tests for college level selection Increased exposure to testing Recent electriciation, as might be seen in remote areas Exposure to artificial light Increased availability of television
Growth of personal computers in homes and schools
Increased pediatric care Nutrition and healthcare Diet improvements of critical nutrients
Mean increases in weight, head size, or birth weight
Accelerated childhood development
Lower fertility for low SES levels Decreased family size Increased availability of television More complex visual environment Growth in personal computers in homes and schools
Increased visual complexity of school textbooks
Advertising growth, accompanied by charts, symbols, etc.
Measured increase in mean g Nutrition and healthcare Change in breeding pattern from isolated groups to
breeding among groups, not accompanied by Decreased family size within-family FE Heterosis _____________________________________________________________________________
For a given data set, the presence of items from the first column implies a cause from the second column. For example, Must and Must (2009) reported a height increase (in Estonia) of 2.9 SD over approximately 2 centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, the diet was primarily bread and herring. From 1925 to 1958 there was a shift from vegetarian foods to meats. This pattern signals that the nutritional FE driver was active during and after the dietary change. FE gains were seen in scholastic performance and reasoning, suggesting that education was also a factor. The general increase in prosperity of the country may also signal matches for other changes (first column), such as decreased family size.
In some situations, the Independent Drivers model could reduce to the Woodley model, but in situations where the effect can only be linked to one or two drivers, this model is accommodating. In any situation where a gain in g is seen, the Woodley model would not apply, but this model identifies nutrition, health care, and heterosis as possible g loaded drivers.
Summary
The FE exists between birth cohorts.
It has been found within sibships.
It sometimes appears early in life (before school age).
There are presumably multiple causes.
The gains are often hollow (not Jensen effects) but some gains appear to be on g.
There are methodological issues to be resolved which may be a cause of some of the gains.
The FE is not invariant over time.
Recommendations
Despite the huge mass of papers, the FE remains enigmatic. Part of the problem is the complication of what strongly appears to be varying combinations of multiple drivers; individual studies cannot be consistently compared. But the concern that deserves particular attention is that methodological issues appear to be confounded with real world causes. Perhaps ways can be found to examine more data sets with IRT. It would be very helpful to know how much of the various FE gains are the result of CTT methodology. The findings of non-invariance presumably mean that some FE gains are attributable to test revisions and to cultural shifts. A better grasp of the categories of test items that are causing non-invariance may enable test designers to reduce or eliminate these test-specific items.
Fig 1. Flynn effect gains for a single driver. In the illustration the maximum contribution for the driver is shown as 3 IQ points and the value of k is set at 2.
[Editor’s Note: X axis reads “Time, years” and Y axis reads “IQ point gains from one driver”]
Some direct connections between environmental conditions and the FE have been identified, such as those in Estonia (dietary changes, family size reductions, and educational improvements). These point to causes for a single country, but cannot be generalized. Future researchers should be encouraged to examine national data sets from health and social service agencies to identify sharp changes that correspond to FE rate changes. Some of this has already been done by Lynn, but there may be additional factors that have not yet surfaced. In the U.S. the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration are probable data sources. Other environmental factors that might be worth examining for coincidence with FE rate changes: the introduction of radio, television, computers, the Internet, and cell phones, etc. Educational policies and numbers of graduates might be considered as well, despite declines in academic performance, there may still be FE drivers associated with formal or informal education.
Finally, it would be helpful to perform studies of biological parameters that relate to intelligence. There is the IT study by Nettelbeck & Wilson, but little else in this category. The question to answer is whether other biological measurements (RT, brain pH, nerve conduction velocity, pitch discrimination, EEG latencies, glucose uptake rates, etc.) remain stable over decades, or do they vary in the direction that would be predicted by an increase in intelligence?
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank James Thompson for his constructive comments on this manuscript.
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Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On High-Range Test Construction 9: Bob Williams, Overview of the Flynn Effect [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-9.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Arthur Jensen’s contribution to intelligence research, brain imaging advancements in intelligence study, Charles Spearman and discovery of g factor, conventional tests and IQ measurement methods, diffusion tensor imaging in brain connectivity research, genetics and heritability of intelligence, influence of environmental factors on IQ, measurement of physical parameters and intelligence, positron emission tomography in intelligence research, reaction time and its correlation with intelligence, structural MRI and cortical thickness studies, working memory tests and cognitive ability.
On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research
The following is a tour through the various methods that have been devised and used to uncover the bits and pieces of insight that make up the present-day scientific understanding of human cognition and its differences among people. The point of this exercise is to identify tools and relationships that are not as well known as the ubiquitous IQ test.
Attempts to understand intelligence go back at least to Sir Francis Galton [1822-1911], who noted the heritability of intelligence, its difference between various populations, and its relation to physically measurable tasks. Following Galton, Charles Spearman contributed new statistical methods, insightful test designs, models of intelligence, and, most importantly, his 1904 discovery of g (also referred to as Spearman’s g, psychometric g, the general factor, and g). Over the course of the next few decades, g languished, while IQ tests were developed, studied, and refined to a point of high reliability and low bias. Numerous well-known researchers contributed models, tests, and understanding that were mostly based on the correlations between test scores and external factors (behavior, physiology, and life outcomes). It was not until Arthur Jensen began to explain the central nature of g that intelligence research shifted from earlier models to converge on g theory. Today, it is difficult to find a research paper that is not about, or constructed from, g theory.
Above: Hypothetical example of hierarchical factor analysis
The investigation of intelligence can be sorted into four categories: conventional tests, external measurements with instrumentation, brain imaging, and genetics.
Conventional Tests
Although we are all familiar with some forms of IQ tests, they vary greatly and are designed for a variety of applications. Testing can be done over an age range from toddler to very old. At the young end of this range is the test methodology developed by J. Fagan based on selective attention to novelty (the time toddlers spent looking at new versus familiar faces). His method was predictive of adult IQ (r = 0.59) and adult educational attainment (r = 0.53). The Woodcock-Johnson is one of the broad ability tests that measures a specific number of abilities so that the traditional second-order factors [so-called “group” factors -Ed. Note] of the Cattell-Horn Carroll model will emerge; it claims to measure from age 2 to over 90. The Wechsler, various forms, is also a broad-based test, based on the CHC model, and is considered to be the gold standard (95 percent reliability) by many researchers.
A number of special-purpose IQ-test types have been developed. Some can be given orally to individuals who cannot write (as in an accident victim). Some are designed for speed of administration, taking only a few minutes. These latter group of IQ tests sacrifice range and accuracy for speed and are well suited when a coarse sorting is desired. The Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of lntelligence (WASI) is a well-known example of a test that has been shortened from its full form to achieve this objective. [The WASI is composed of two very highly g-loaded subtests (viz., vocabulary and matrix reasoning) as well as the similarities and block design subtests, rendering administration much speedier. A simple vocabulary test may be one of the most effective de facto IQ tests one could give in around ten minutes. Remember that cultural bias is an empirical question, and cultural bias is orthogonal to cultural load. Cf. Bias in Mental Testing -Ed. Note]
As most people have discovered, they are likely to score differently on different tests.This is largely due to uniqueness variance. IQ tests give reasonably close agreement of the latent factor g (when it can be computed), but the tests differ in content designed to produce broad ability factors and items that are either specific to the test, or due to random error. Specificity can result from content that is known to the testee (learned material) or is otherwise unique to the test. When a person is trained to take a category of test (teaching to the test), the specificity variance increases, thereby causing the g loading of the test to be somewhat lower.
The thing that ties IQ and other ability tests together is known as the positive manifold, which is the strong tendency of a person to score at a similar level on tests of largely unrelated abilities, such as vocabulary and block design. Spearman observed this and created the principle known as the indifference of the indicator, which was intended to point to the universal nature of g as a
general ability that appears in all cognitive abilities. Ergo, any test of cognitive ability is predictive of g, and all such tests are predictive of the same g (meaning that there are not multiple g factors). Cognitive ability testing is not limited to IQ tests. There are many tests designed to measure narrow abilities, without an attempt to link the scores to IQ.
Various tests of working memory capacity require the testee to retain representations, while performing tasks that make demands on working memory. He may be given a list of words or letters to remember, separated by a simple task, such as 3 + 5 = 7 (choose yes or no). Then he is asked to recall the list from memory. People are typically able to retain only a small number of representations (4 to 9) in working memory. The simple intermediate math operation effectively flushed out some of the working memory that was used to store the list of memory items. While this category of test is used as a subtest in some IQ tests [Editor’s Note: e.g, Working Memory Index on WAIS.], it is also used as a stand-alone tool when working memory is being studied. There are numerous other similar tools that are used for similar purposes.
One of the most interesting special-category tests is the Stroop Color-Word Test. While the test has three parts, it is the third one that demonstrates the Stroop effect. The testee is shown a list of typed color names, but each is printed in a different color ink than the name of the word, (RED is printed with blue ink, etc.). The testee is asked to name, as quickly as possible, only the color of the ink in which each word is printed, while ignoring the name indicated by the printed word.
Above: Stroop Color-Word Test
Here is what happens (from Jensen, 2006, Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences): “Some individuals are so frustrated by the task requirement that they break down momentarily, while others stammer, stutter, gesticulate, clench their fists, or stamp their feet during this part of the test. Obviously, literate persons are unable to ignore the printed words even when they try their best to do so. Having to suppress their implicit response to the printed word makes it surprisingly difficult to utter the intentional response, viz., the actual color of the print.”
The purpose of the test is to measure the executive function or attention (ability to avoid distraction from a task). Research along these lines has linked the executive function, attention, working memory, and g. The details of their interdependence are not fully resolved, but they clearly share cognitive resources.
Measurement of Physical Parameters
The conventional tests, touched on above, are done with paper and pencil, a computer screen (acting as paper and pencil), or orally. These tests have been used for a majority of the studies of human cognitive abilities. They work and they can be altered to suit the specific mental process that is being studied. Most of them share one significant disadvantage: the tests cannot be scored on a true ratio scale (as is done with most physical measurements, such as force, voltage, mass, etc.). Instead, they have to be scored relative to a selected group of people.
In IQ tests, this is the norming group, and the test is scored by determining the z-score relative to the norming group distribution (IQ = [15 X z score] + 100). The resulting scores are a reasonable approximation of an equal interval scale (as used in the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales).
When physical measurements are used in intelligence research, the results are given on a true ratio scale, such as time, distance, volume, etc. It turns out that a great many of the things that can be measured by instrumentation (including clocks) are linked to IQ test scores and g.
Reaction Time (RT)
This measurement is usually done with a Jensen Box and consists of a home button (at the bottom center in the diagram), that the testee holds down, and various target buttons. When the testee sees the stimulus, such as one of the buttons being illuminated, he releases the home button and presses the target button.
Above: Jensen Box
Reaction time (RT) is measured from the onset of the stimulus to the release of the home button; the time from the release of the home button to the pressing of the target button is the movement time, but is of little value in studying intelligence. Both the RT and the standard deviation of RT are negatively correlated with intelligence, with the latter being somewhat more strongly correlated. RT measurements can be done in connection with a wide range of elementary cognitive tests (ECTs) and can be combined when a battery of these simple tests are given (each requiring less than a second to complete) to produce a measurement of g that is approximately equal to the g measurement from an IQ test. Each ECT has only a small g loading, averaging r = -0.35, but the variances are distinct enough to be added.
Galton performed RT measurements from 1884 to 1893, using a pendulum for the time measurement. His data has been compared to more recent RT studies; it shows that RTs have increased, suggesting a dysgenic effect (explored in detail by M. Woodley).
Inspection Time (IT)
Another widely used chronometric measurement is based on the shortest time that a person can recognize a change in the shape of a projected image. The standard image is somewhat like the letter pi (two vertical lines connected at the top). A cue is given to signal that the test is starting, then the test image is displayed, with one of the vertical lines shortened, then masked. The testee is asked which vertical line of the test image was longer. As the display time is reduced, a point is reached where the testee cannot reliably determine which line was longer. The testee’s inspection time is the point where he can achieve an accuracy of 97.5 percent. Again, there is a negative correlation (r = -0.54) between the speed of perceptual discrimination and IQ.
One of the important contributions made by IT was a study by T. Nettelbeck et al. that related to the Flynn Effect. He performed IT measurements for school children from the same school, using the same equipment.
The two sets of data were separated by 20 years. He also administered the same IQ test for the two groups. The expected IQ gain (Flynn Effect) was seen for the test scores, but the IT measurements were essentially identical, thus strongly suggesting that the test score gains were hollow with respect to g. I had the opportunity to ask him if there had been any changes in apparent SES, nutrition, or other discernible factors. He said that there was none, and the children were from the same community, school, etc. [Editor’s Note: This finding is fascinating and suggests the Flynn Effect could be largely chalked up to practice effects of some kind. Researchers have now found a reversing of the Flynn effect over the last thirty years in various countries, including Sweden, France, and Britain.]
IT tests have traditionally been performed by means of a tachistoscope. It has a shutter and can project an image for a precise duration. When computer monitors were first tried for this task, the results were not reliable because of screen characteristics that allowed some people to read screen artifacts. With modern, very fast computer screens this problem has been solved.
Electroencephalography (EEG)
EEG has been widely used for medical diagnostics for head injuries, tumors, infections, and other disorders that relate to the nervous system. The measurements detect electrical activity in the brain by means of electrodes placed on the scalp; these are typically amplified and recorded on moving paper (creating traces). [Editor’s Note: Both EEG and MEG signals are possible because of the electromagnetic laws described by Maxwell’s equations, e.g., electrical currents produce an orthogonal magnetic field.] At one time, a good bit of intelligence research was carried out using EEG, but the number of papers reporting it has declined as newer measurement options have appeared.
Depicted above: Ionic current flowing in dendrites, producing an orthogonal magnetic field The magnetic field thus produced is reflected in EEG and MEG readings
A primary focus of interest in EEG has been in the traces made following a specific stimulus. Since the traces contain large amounts of noise, they are repeated many times and averaged to produce the average evoked potential (AEP). The P300 latency, sometimes identified as P3, is one indication of intelligence. It correlates at about r = -0.36 with g. Another indication of intelligence is the complexity of the waveform. This is sometimes called string length since it can be measured by laying a piece of string over the wave tracing then measuring its length. Higher IQ is usually indicated by greater string length, but the strongest indication (per T. Bates, et al.) may be the difference in string length between high- and low-attention conditions, which is an indication of neural efficiency.
E.W.P. Schafer reported index methods that are based on the amplitudes of the AEP when the stimulus is related to neural adaptability and habituation (see: The g Factor for details of the procedures). These methods resulted in correlations as high as r = +0.82 with IQ tests. Although this methodology did not develop a following by other researchers, it demonstrates that g is closely related to the electrophysiological activity in the brain.
Other Biological Measures
Intelligence (g) is correlated with numerous other biological parameters that can be measured. (Cerebral glucose metabolism is one such measure and will be discussed later.) Nerve conduction velocity (NCV) is inherently related to the speed and efficiency of cognitive activity. NCV has been measured directly in the brain and in peripheral parts of the body. Peripheral measurements (for example, finger to wrist, and wrist to elbow) of NCV correlate with g in the range r = +0.41 to +0.46. Although most of these peripheral studies have produced the expected result, some have not, and at least one showed opposite results in men (r +0.63) and women (r = -0.55).
One of the most well-known of these physical measures is brain volume, which correlates positively with intelligence. Before brain imaging technology appeared, brain volume had to be measured by weighing a cadaver brain, or by estimating its volume from the skull volume (taken as the volume of lead shot or mustard seed that it will hold). Another indirect method of measurement is to take the head circumference or multiple measures of length and width to estimate the volume. While head measurements correlate at only r = +0.20 with g, the correlation is robust and has been repeated many times with large studies. One of the unexpectedly interesting papers that I have heard presented was Ian Deary’s calculation of the IQ of King Robert Bruce (paper presented in Amsterdam in 2007). I think Deary went through the somewhat-complex exercise to teach his students how to deal with data and errors. When it became possible to measure brain volume in a living person, via structural MRI, the correlation coefficient (volume of g) of r =+0.40 emerged. This number was later challenged and argued to be lower, but the challenge was subsequently refuted. The best estimate remains close to the initial finding. Brain volume remains an important intelligence parameter, as it relates to intelligence differences between species, between breeding groups (races), and between sexes.
Brain Imaging
Brain imaging technology is to the study of intelligence as the Hubble telescope has been to cosmology. Imaging has appeared in several stages, and each has opened new paths of study and huge gains in the understanding of intelligence.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
PET can be used to create images of the brain and various other organs. The thing that is seen as an image is the accumulation of a radioactive tracer (oxygen-15, fluorine- 18, carbon-11, or nitrogen-13) as the tracer is concentrated by the action of the organ being studied. As the tracer decays, it emits a positron, which collides with a nearby electron and causes the emission of two photons. The photons are detected externally.
Above: Positron Emission Tomography with presumed brain states
In the case of brain imaging, the image is effectively an integral of glucose uptake rate. The tracer used is fluorodeoxyglucose, which gives a time resolution of about 32 minutes. Thus, the image produced when a person is asked to perform a cognitive task is an integral over a time span of 32 minutes. The first use of PET to study intelligence was done by Richard Haier (presently editor of the journal Intelligence) in 1987. At that time, the cost of a single scan was $2,500. Haier financed the initial work by agreeing to do medical scans in trade for some research scans. His first subjects were given the RAPM (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices) during the exam. Raw test scores ranged from 11 to 33 (out of a possible 36). The PET scans revealed the opposite of the expected result. The brighter subjects showed less brain activity (lower glucose uptake rates) than did the duller subjects. This was the first indication that one difference between brains of different intelligence levels was efficiency. The smarter brains solved the problems more efficiently. Decades later, we have numerous other imaging studies, using other technologies that have made similar findings and have added more detail to the initial study. One somewhat-easy-to-find refinement was that all brains show increased activity (effort) as problem difficulty increases, but less-intelligent brains reach a saturation point beyond which they cannot apply additional effort.
Haier also looked at the effect of learning, using the game Tetris. [Editor’s Note: Mega Society qualifier and mathematician Solomon W. Golomb’s game of pentomino directly inspired Tetris.] Several subjects were given practice sessions with the game (new at that time). They had not seen the game before and were restricted to uniform practice sessions. They improved their play score by a factor of 7. PET scans before and after the learning sessions showed significant reductions in brain activity in some parts of the brain. Haier wrote: “We concluded that with practice and improved performance, subjects learn what areas of the brain not to use, and this results in GMR (glucose metabolic rate) decreases.”
PET studies showed the value of being able to measure actual brain activity while subjects were performing mental tasks. The technology was expensive and had the slow 32-minute temporal resolution, so it was displaced when faster, MRI-based machines arrived.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
The first MRI was performed on a human in 1977. The machines are based on the use of a very strong magnetic field (5,000 to 20,000 gauss; the earth’s magnetic field measures 0.5 gauss) that is achieved by means of a superconducting magnet. A few years ago, R. Haier told me that there was an MRI machine that used a magnetic field that was significantly higher (ten times, as I recall) than other machines. He said some people complained of headaches and that the brain was warmed – probably causing the headaches. (A recent literature search shows that possibly even more powerful, new MRI scanners have been built. The reason for increasing the magnetic field strength is that it enables the voxel size to be reduced from 1 mm to 0.1 mm.)
MRI works by imposing an intense magnetic field around the area to be imaged using superconducting magnets. Hydrogen nuclei (protons) spin and have a natural magnetic polarity. When on, the magnetic field causes hydrogen nuclei to snap into axial alignment with the field.
A radio frequency wave is added and is pulsed on and off, causing the nuclei to snap out of alignment and then back in. This shifting of nuclei alignment causes a weak energy release (also a radio frequency wave), which can be detected by the MRI machine (via receiver coils that act as aerials) and used to create an MR image.
Structural MRI (sMRI)
This basic technology (the same as many have experienced in a medical setting) can be varied to allow various specialized forms of imaging. The most basic application for intelligence research is structural MRI, or sMRI. This is essentially a snapshot of the brain, but the image is 3D. It can be rotated and viewed from any angle and can produce a “slice” image of the brain at any depth. Since the image is in 3D, the points are also 3D, unlike the 2D pixels of a digital photograph. The 3D representations are known as voxels.
One of the problems encountered in understanding a brain image is that brains are not identical in size and shape. Yes, they are all generally the same in appearance, just as our faces are similar yet different enough that we can recognize them. A researcher must be able to compare brains, despite their differences. This can be accomplished by a computer using a process known as voxel-based morphometry. The process morphs the MRI data to fit a standard form and smooths the results so that they can be analyzed. For example, an area of great interest is cortical thickness. In order to study it and to compare different brains, the cortex representation has to be smoothed so that the folds are removed and the resulting artificial image retains the dimensions that are of interest, while losing the irregularities that would otherwise make it unmanageable.
Above: Left image (axial view) and right image (sagittal view) of structural MRI
The cortex contains cortical columns that are vertical structures of variable length and composition. The number of these columns is related to cortical surface area, while their length is a function of cortical thickness. Their relation to intelligence is known primarily by the correlations found in average and local measurements of cortical thickness and in cortical surface area. A good bit of study of cortical thickness (CT) has been related to the NIH (National Institute of Health), e.g., the Study of Normal Brain Development.
One finding is that cortical thickness increases in early childhood, then begins a slow decrease around ages 7 to 10 years. When plotted against time, the trajectories of bright children (from longitudinal NIH data) show greater thickness at every age than for less bright children. During the first phase, thickness increases more rapidly in bright children, but exhibits a similar rate of thinning following the peak. This has obviously important significance in the verification of the high heritability of intelligence; the trajectories are set from early childhood. The strongest correlations between CT and IQ are found in the age range of 8 to 12 years.
The figure (below) of CT for different intelligence groups shows that there are differences and that they vary as a function of age. The illustrations of CT as a function of intelligence at the bottom of the figure also show how a brain appears after computer smoothing.
Above: Intellectual domain effects on cortical thickness changes as a function of IQ level. A, Cortical thicknessdifferences between adjoining levels of IQ as affected by intelligence criteria and brain lobes. The superior, high, andaverage IQ groups were evenly divided according to four intelligence criteria, FSIQ, VIQ, PIQ, and RPM scores. Thecortical thickness of each lobe is represented by the averaged value of all ROIs within the lobe. Sup., Superior; Avg.,average. *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001, two-tailed t test. B, C, Cortical thickness deviations from the thickness ofthe average IQ group used as zero reference. VIQ groups are better described by a linear or quadratic function,whereas PIQ groups are better described by a logarithmic one. The brain maps show absolute thickness changes ateach cortical point, based on VIQ and PIQ levels.
When the thicknesses of specific locations are correlated against IQ, the results are different for men and women (a surprise to Haier and his team). The highest correlations (gray matter regions) in men were found in posterior regions, especially those related to visual-spatial processing. In women, the IQ-to-thickness correlation was almost entirely limited to the frontal lobes, especially in the language area (Broca’s Area). Findings that show sex differences have been frequent, and each strongly suggests the need to keep male and female data separate. Haier made this point to the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) conference in 2006.
Functional MRI (fMRI)
MRI can be used to create images based on molecules containing iron, which is highly sensitive to the intense magnetic fields of MRI machines. Hemoglobin in red blood cells contains iron and iron molecules, thus connecting the fMRI images to blood flow in the brain. When a brain region is cognitively active, it will have greater blood flow, and this will be seen by the fMRI scan. The
fMRI process is fast, with thousands of images per second and a net resolution that is a span of about 1 second.
One of the applications for fMRI is the study of functional connectivity. When static measurements are made, the information conveyed relates to the function of a given brain region (functional segregation). But as imaging research progressed, brain regions were found to work together, such that a single region is necessarily involved in multiple functions. With fMRI, it is possible to see the connected activities of brain regions.
Using fMRI, it is possible to observe the brain performing a task over a period of time. Various regions show activity (increased blood flow) sequentially, as the brain deals with the task. In a conversation with R. Haier, he mentioned to me that fMRI data were proving to be difficult to use because of the large differences seen between individuals. This is not a problem with static imaging techniques, such as fMRI and diffusion tensor imaging.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)
DTI is a different form of structural MRI. It is optimized to image the water content of white matter. The first study did not happen until 2005. Prior to then, white matter was relatively difficult to study. It was possible to measure white matter volumes and to do correlations with that and intelligence (revealing a large sex difference), but the details of how white matter tracts were organized were hidden. DTI has opened a new field of research-brain connectivity (wiring).Among the things that have been found are that the tracts form bands (in some places) that are composed of large numbers of parallel tracts; that each person has tract patterns that are as unique as fingerprints; that the primary cognitive centers are connected by massive highways of tracts, running from the frontal lobes to the parietal lobes; that connectivity is an indicator of IQ.
Above: Diffusion Tensor Imaging
When water movement is detected by the MRI process, it can be quantified as to the degree to which the molecules move in the same direction. This parameter is known as fractional anisotropy (FA) and is higher when the movement vectors are directionally similar. If FA is low, it indicates that the water movement is more diffuse, and this is taken to be an indication of low tissue integrity. Higher FA is a positive correlate of intelligence for both white and gray matter.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
Breakthroughs in instrumentation have continued to appear, offering new capabilities. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is in some regards similar to EEG, in that sensors are placed on or very near the scalp. These highly sensitive superconducting sensors detect magnetic fields associated with neuron activity. The instruments are functional, in the sense of fMRI, but faster; they have a temporal resolution in the millisecond range. The precision of spatial location is excellent – sources can be localized with millimeter precision.
Unlike other methods of brain imaging, MEG is completely passive and is a direct observation of the brain, while other techniques are measuring secondary phenomena (isotope decay, water movement, etc.). MEG is thus totally safe and noninvasive.
When compiled into a movie, brain activity can be seen as a function of time. This was demonstrated (by Thoma) at the 2005 ISIR conference, showing the brain reacting to a simple optical stimulus. The activation areas appeared to bounce and flow from the extremes of the brain, in much the same way as water waves bounce and reflect when they are confined. When I saw this, there was an immediate revelation as to why something as simple as a light turning on would stimulate activity throughout the brain; this simple event, when measured by RT is significantly correlated with g. The video showed that the mental activity was complex and involved most of the brain volume.
MEG remains as a new tool with a limited history for intelligence researchers. It has great promise and is being evaluated by researchers. An example of an MEG movie, made while the subject is solving a test item from the paper-folding task, can be found here: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/ subjects/psychology/cognition/ neuroscience intelligence(select: student resources, then animations, then animation_4.3.mp4).
Genetics
Although Galton observed that intelligence was a family trait, the role of genetics in determining intelligence was not understood for many decades. In the 1960s, even scientists believed that intelligence was largely a product of the environment (books in the home, encouragement to excel in academics, etc.). When Arthur Jensen entered the field, that is exactly what he expected to find, but when he looked at real data, he saw a different story. The result was his 80-page landmark paper: “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” by Arthur R. Jensen, University of California, Berkeley, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter 1969, pages 1-123.
From that point on, Jensen published a huge number of papers and books that addressed the issues related to demonstrating that intelligence is primarily the product of genes, with little environmental variance. Of the environmental variance that is found, it can be divided into the shared and the nonshared environmental factors. The former is that part of the environment that makes us more similar (family), and the latter is that part that makes us more different. There is a shared environmental variance in early childhood, but it vanishes by about age 12, leaving only the experiences people have as individuals (the following factors lower intelligence), such as: injury, disease, exposure to toxins, etc. From early childhood on, the heritability of intelligence increases (the Wilson Effect) into adulthood. By adulthood, the heritability of IQ is 85% and the heritability of g is 91%.
Although repeated studies have shown this high heritability of intelligence, attempts to find a single intelligence gene (or a few genes) have failed, despite methodologies that would have found it without doubt. This research has been led by Robert Plomin, who has authored numerous papers on the topic of the genetics of intelligence.
What is going on? The simple answer is that intelligence genes have been found, and each has accounted for only a percent or less of the total variance. As has been the case for other traits, intelligence is the product of hundreds or thousands of variants. For example, height has been shown to be determined by more than 900 variants. The two concepts that relate to this are pleiotropy (one gene affecting multiple traits) and polygenicity (many genes affecting one trait).
Genetic research will hopefully tell an increasingly complete story of which genes are involved, and how. To date, there is an impressive research category known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS). These studies include some with N of much more than 100,000 and at least one that is approximately 1,000,000. The GWAS studies have included genetic clusters that relate to intelligence, educational attainment, and behaviors throughout life. Because of the large N’s, the findings are robust, but they show small effect sizes.
A 2017 preprint (http://www.biorxiv.org/ content/early/2017/07/07/160291) showed 107 independent loci associated with intelligence, implicating 233 genes, using both SNP-based and gene-based GWAS. Further studies will surely appear, and the findings will presumably, if slowly, paint a picture of how intelligence is determined at the molecular level.
Further Reading
For those who are interested in reading original intelligence research papers, there is only one print journal dedicated to this subject: Intelligence. It is the official journal of ISIR and is the source of some of the best research papers. Another source that frequently contains top-quality work is Personality and Individual Differences. In the area of brain imaging, there are worthwhile papers in Neuroimage, Neuroscience, and Cortex.
The best book and DVD material that is relatively recent:
Haier, Richard J., (2017), The Neuroscience of Intelligence, New York: Cambridge University Press. This book is recent and was skillfully written to be easily readable, yet complete with respect to present-day understandings.
Haier, R.J., (2013), The Intelligent Brain, The Great Courses, Chantilly, Virginia (3 DVDs).
The first DVD is a review of non-imaging research. It then gets into the very interesting work that Haier and his colleagues have done.
Jensen, A. R., (1998), The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Written by the most outstanding intelligence researcher of the second half of the 20th century, this book was, and presumably still is, the all-time most cited book in this field.
For those who want excellent and accurate information that is written for public consumption (some exceptions), I strongly recommend the articles and papers by Linda Gottfredson. She has generously made virtually everything she has written available on her web page: http://www1.udel.edu/ educ/gottfredson/reprints.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
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Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On High-Range Test Construction 8: Bob Williams, The Tools of Intelligence Research [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-8.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Erik Haereid, born in 1963, grew up in Oslo, Norway. He studied mathematics, statistics and actuarial science at the University of Oslo in the 1980s and 90s, and is educated as an actuary. He has worked over thirty years as an actuary, in several insurance companies, as actuarial consultant, middle manager and broker. In addition, he has worked as an academic director (insurance) in a business school (BI). Now, he runs his own actuarial consulting company with two other actuaries. He is a former member of Mensa, and is a member of some high IQ societies (e.g., Olympiq, Glia, Generiq, VeNuS and WGD). He discusses: the data about risk assessment; new technologies; cases of limited data to make prediction of future events; artificially fill in the gaps; and inter-national collaboration.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence in probability modeling, Bayesian methods in risk assessment, international collaboration on actuarial data, intuitive experience in probability distribution, limited data in actuarial predictions, new technology impact on risk assessment, predictive validity in actuarial statistics, solvency structure in insurance risk models.
Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do actuaries make the data about risk assessment make accurate predictions about future events?
Erik Haereid: When determining a probability distribution, or carrying out a risk assessment if you like, this usually happens through a combination of an intuitive experience, at one’s discretion, of what the probability distribution is like and experience corrections. Basically, the distribution is usually not known; one does not know what the probability of the single outcome in the sample space is. But many people have vague or more intuitive ideas about what such distributions are. The fewer empirical data one has, the greater emphasis is placed on the a priori intuitive ideas about the probabilities (e.g. Bayesian statistics).
As you collect relevant data, you normally place increasing emphasis on experience and less on the a priori distribution. This is mathematically more correct since any probability distribution of an arbitrary sample space becomes known with increasing numbers of observations. Cf. the dice rolling example; if you roll enough times, experience will show that there is a 1/6 probability for each of the outcomes 1 to 6, in contrast to if you roll the dice a few times.
When one has no a priori ideas about the probability distribution, and no experience (not empirical data), then it is natural to assume a uniform distribution (a la dice roll); all outcomes have an equal chance of occurring. But as a rule, one has a more intuitive understanding than that. Everyone intuitively understands that, for example, there is not an equal probability of dying in all age groups; we know that a 90-year-old has a higher mortality rate than a 20-year-old; here we can create an a priori probability distribution that is far more correct than the uniform one, even if we do not have a single empirical experience to base this on. In car insurance, we know that old and young men collide more often than the middle age ones. We hardly need data to be able to determine this with great certainty. We also intuitively know that the risk of collision is greater in urban than rural areas. In other words, there are many intuitive factors on which we can create a priori probability distributions in insurance, without a single empirical experience. When we then collect such experience, it is natural and right that we correct the a priori distribution on an ongoing basis, so that it approaches what the relevant data shows us.
In cases where it’s difficult or impossible to collect relevant empirical data, where other indescribable or unmeasurable phenomena affect the risk, it is natural to base the distribution on intuitive models, as mentioned above.
I don’t know if this is relevant to your question, but the data is collected both from their own statistics (the insurance companies record all incidents that happen to their insured) and general databases that exist for general use or on order (cf. surveys). In Norway, for example, we have Statistical research at Statistics Norway (SSB), an institution whose job it is to register a range of population data and other things that are useful for everyone, including the insurance industry. For example, mortality statistics.
Jacobsen: How can the introductions of new technologies change the predictive validity and landscape of actuarial statistics when looking to make such predictions about future events?
Haereid: If you are referring to new technology in the form of more modern analysis tools for processing data, then it must be artificial intelligence that can play a role here. The processing of the data and the outcome can give us new, AI-intuitive models, which we can initially test the durability of. It would be unjustifiable to rely on today’s AI algorithms in terms of probability modelling; it is essential to know what the error is. We don’t know that when we let a machine that we don’t know how arrive at the results and the conclusions, thinks. Therefore, it is important to use human intuition and experience when evaluating the AI processor’s conclusions.
New technology as a premise for changed risk structures provides us a future challenge. As an actuary specialized in life insurance, extended life is the first thing that strikes me. New technology in health and medicine leads to that we are living longer, and it’s difficult to determine probability models related to mortality and longevity. But in a world where technology is accelerating exponentially, we will encounter new insurance-relevant risk areas all the time.
New technology can lead to a changed distribution structure, but not least also greater total costs. It is therefore relevant both to establish a healthy a priori distribution function over the sample space AND a solvency structure. The latter occurs through reinsurance and shared risk with other companies. But, also by limiting the risk areas; you simply do not insure everything you want to insure in the future, until you know more about the risks. In addition, it happens by providing premiums that are too high to begin with, and thus builds up a solvency capital in the event that the payouts exceed the probability models.
What is certain is that new technology leads to more business areas, areas of activity and thus more areas of risk; there is an increased need to financially cover a constantly expanding risk repertoire. Thus, in the future, new business areas will increasingly arise for the insurance industry, with a need for new a priori probability models, increased recording of empirical data and hence flexible risk models based on experiences.
Jacobsen: What happens in cases of limited data to make prediction of future events more vague or less precise too?
Haereid: Then you create intuitive models, and change these in line with the increasing amount of available empirical data. Sometimes it could be difficult to obtain befitting data, and one has to use one’s intuition. Then one uses methods, like the Bayesian, which is constructed to gain some kind of certainty based on personal judgements.
Jacobsen: Is there a way to artificially fill in the gaps in missing data to add more fidelity to predictive actuarial models?
Haereid: Yes, as said by using statistical methods where one assumes something about the distributions without placing emphasis on empirical data. One issue with such models is that they are based on people’s intuitive judgements, which often turn out to be wrong. Even so, our intuition about probability models and the uncertainty associated with them is an essential part of statistics. As we collect data, we will correct the distribution so that it becomes increasingly correct.
Jacobsen: Is there any inter-national collaboration on actuarial data collection to see trends transnationally?
Haereid: Yes, I expect so, among other things with regard to global problems, such as the climate. But, I don’t know anything about that.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/actuarial-sciences-4.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/actuarial-sciences-4.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/actuarial-sciences-4>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/actuarial-sciences-4>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Actuarial Sciences 4: Erik Haereid, M.Sc., on Predicting the Future Precisely.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/actuarial-sciences-4.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Tor Arne Jørgensen, 50, hails from Fevik, a small settlement near Grimstad in southern Norway. He is a dedicated teacher at the local secondary school, a devoted husband, and a proud father of two boys. From an early age, Tor Arne was driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, immersing himself in fact-based literature to explore the mysteries of existence. The question & “What is Man’s reason for being?” became the guiding force behind his intellectual pursuits. This deep curiosity about the unknown and the universe eventually led him to the international high intelligence community in 2015—a place he describes as warm and welcoming, akin to finding his true tribe. Tor Arne’s contributions to this community have been widely recognized. In 2019, he was honored as the Genius of the Year – Europe by The World Genius Directory. His participation in international high intelligence competitions has yielded impressive results, including multiple high scores and setting the Norwegian high IQ score record twice. Jørgensen discusses: religion, history, and a new budding authorship; the first definitions of gods in religion; the first ideas of faith and practices; women’s early roles in religion; the trend of evolution of religion from its roots; women’s roles and identities; identities; individual and collective emotional value of religion; the roles of minorities of women over time; a knowledge economy; writing books more; expertise and interest; pro-tips in writing; books; process for writing, editing, brainstorming, and researching; Dr. Sandra Schlick’s insight and contribution to this session; and religious communities been discriminative towards each other and to women, and to each other’s women.
Keywords: early formulations of religion, discrimination in religious communities, evolution of religious practices, faith and religious ceremonies, influence of ancient religious texts, modern challenges to religious traditions, polytheistic versus monotheistic religions, role of women in religion.
Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we will focus on religion, history, and a new budding authorship. What were the first formulations of religion?
Tor Arne Jorgensen: From the earliest records we know, which date back to what is increasingly accepted today as around 50,000 to 10,000 years before our own era. This somewhat contradicts what, for example, the Bible and its creation story tell us. According to traditional scriptures, we are then talking about a time span of around 5,000 to 6,000 years. Oral transmissions were the beginning, followed by carvings, where they recorded important events, including various types of rites related to the worship of earthly gods and the universe, ancestors, etc. In line with the development of primitive societies, religious practices followed. The development was often hand in hand. Religion, especially in pre-Christian times, has constantly shifted with whoever had dominion over their area at any given time. But in recent times, this has changed somewhat, as what has been localized has persisted up to our own time. The relationship between polytheistic religions versus monotheistic religions shows a certain balance, with less rigid differences.
Jacobsen: Where were the first definitions of gods in religion?
Jorgensen: In the earliest religions, examples include Anu, the sky god, and Inanna, the goddess of love; these were just two of the gods worshiped by the Sumerians. In the Egyptian religious culture, the most well-known gods are Ra, the sun god, Osiris, the god of the afterlife, and Isis, the goddess of magic and motherhood. This continues in most early and present-day religions.
Jacobsen: What were the first ideas of faith and practices around faith in religion?
Jorgensen: The various religions before written records were focused on earthly elements and the universe. For example, in Animism, where this was practiced. Just look at the Vikings with their offerings, “blots.” Here, their rites involved sacrificing animal blood to the gods to maintain balance in the world. If we look at Shamanism, which was widely used among different tribal societies around the world in somewhat different forms, but still with many similarities, we see communication with the spirit world to gain insights and guidance for warfare, crops, healing, and more. The common denominator for most early religions was the sacrifice of either humans or animals to the gods to gain their favor.
They worshipped the earthly elements and the universe. I would like to add that the only change we see today is that the sacrifice of life has been replaced with gold and goods. And the ultimate sacrifice, for example within Christianity, was made by a human who then became a divine being due to that single act. It’s just a little sad that earlier religions are now just seen as nonsense by ignorant souls. It makes one wonder what people living 1000-2000 years from now will think about our practices today and the religions we currently surround ourselves with…
Jacobsen: What were women’s early roles in religion?
Jorgensen: Women’s roles dating back to the earliest recorded times were varied and diverse, though these roles have become more restricted in recent times. To mention a few roles that women had from the beginning: they served in shamanism, as priestesses, and as oracles.
These roles appeared in different forms across various religions throughout history, from Africa, Europe, and Asia. Women were also venerated, such as the goddess Isis in ancient Egypt, among many others.
Jacobsen: What was the trend of evolution of religion from its roots, insofar as we know them, to modern manifestations of them?
Jorgensen: The religious development, as mentioned, starts from the worship of the surrounding elements as seen in animism. From there, it moves towards a more concrete form of worship, which can still be observed in ritual reenactments, for example, in Native American societies and within our own Scandinavian context with the practice of blot. The development further progressed towards the veneration of ancestors and the offering of humans or animals to the gods to appease them, with the hope of securing good harvests, health, and success in warfare. Around antiquity, religion became more diverse and state-oriented, with its foundations becoming increasingly solid and purposeful.
This was evident in Christianity, and later in Islam. Both of these religions gained significant momentum and developed much more sophisticated doctrines that are very well established today. In the 1500s, the Reformation challenged the Church, leading to a more diverse Christian community. I have chosen not to delve deeply into the individual religions and their development but rather to provide a broad overview of common trends. In summary, the development of religions follows the societal development of humankind. These two aspects go hand in hand. Religions follow human progress, albeit reluctantly.
Jacobsen: How have women’s roles and identities evolved in the context of religion over time?
Jorgensen: Women’s roles have varied throughout history, and if one refers to written records, it appears that women’s roles have been progressively evolving. However, it should also be noted that the development curve is not a steadily increasing one, but rather a curve that moves up and down depending on the religion and time period being discussed.
In the early ancient period, particularly in Egypt, the status of women was significantly more prominent, and the roles of men and women could often be seen as equal. This is evident in the worship of goddesses and the reign of the last Pharaoh, Queen Cleopatra. Moving forward to the period between antiquity and the Middle Ages, women’s roles were significantly deprioritized. They increasingly became the subordinate party, viewed as being on earth to serve men in most respects. This was not only true for Christianity but also for Islam and other religions.
Looking cautiously at Christianity’s view of women, during the Middle Ages and up until the 19th century, witch burning was one of the persecution methods celebrated by the male-dominated religious authorities. Although there were women whose names were etched into the annals of religious history, they were few and far between compared to the number of male figures.
If one takes a broad look at the roles of women across different religions, it becomes clear that, generally speaking, men have been the leading figures while women have followed. Most religions, from ancient times onward, have been almost exclusively led by men. The gods who rule these religions often highlight men as their primary spokespersons on earth, not women.
As an aside, it is curious why men are seen as the chosen ones of the gods and not women. Furthermore, it is men who have historically governed the earth, not women; men are seen as the strong ones, and women as the weak. Men dominate, not women. One can think what they want about this, and it is important to respect those who follow their faith as their guiding companion; it is their personal choice.
Jacobsen: How do these identities get baked into religious texts and ceremonies and language if at all?
Jorgensen: The methodology for indoctrinating a new religion is that it should reflect or establish the values that the founders of the religion wish to promote. This is achieved by creating stories through myths and narratives. This was true for the Bible, with its grand narrative of how the world was created and the values that should exist within that world. The ethical guidelines that existed at the time of its creation allowed it to gain a foothold, as it dictated what was already considered inherent societal ideology. Thus, religion and morality form the basis for societal development. Only in recent times has this development stagnated, and this stagnation is becoming increasingly apparent. One can also consider rituals and various types of ceremonies. Holidays that we enjoy today face growing opposition, and as seen in our own country, many of these religious rites may lose their grip and be removed due to their increasingly misaligned relevance in today’s society.
Jacobsen: Religion speaks to most people. Apart from truth claims, what has been its main individual and collective emotional value to people?
Jorgensen: The emotional values derived from religions help create frameworks for those who have none, either never had or have misplaced for various reasons. Humanity has always sought a reason for existence, questioning the meaning of life. Are we placed on this earth only to die? If we were to live only for the days that come and go, many of us would have fallen long before our time had come. With that introduction, I will discuss religion and the human emotional connection to faith. Religion gives many people a reason to live; it provides us with purpose, hope, and comfort.
It strengthens our sense of self. It gives us identity and an understanding of who we can become if we choose to believe in something greater than ourselves. It protects us from ourselves, from our darkness. It charts an ethical direction for believers to follow.
Religion creates emotional collectives. Yes, there is much that religion can offer; it can awaken the good in us, but also the dark. What I want to conclude with is that, for me, religion can be seen as a necessary evil. We are not equipped to function without it, even though we have every reason to.
Jacobsen: What about the roles of minorities of women over time into the present in the context of religion, e.g., LBTI+ women?
Jorgensen: The traditional roles that have prevailed since the beginning have been almost without exception patriarchal, where women have not only occasionally fallen outside or been downgraded compared to men. Fortunately, this has changed in line with societal development in general.
It should be noted that although progress has been made, it comes with a significant caveat. One might ask whether it is the church’s own will to reform or if it is due to external pressure, that is, from society itself. It almost goes without saying that when the church constantly has to reinterpret ancient texts to try to adapt them to today’s society, they have lost much of their credibility. When it comes to accepting homosexual or bisexual individuals, for example as priests, there is still much work to be done. If you ask a believer what they think about homosexuals getting married or just living as they wish, it is often met with disgust. I had a small conversation with some colleagues at work about this very topic, specifically about what they thought about same-sex couples getting married or just being together, man with man and woman with woman.
The response from the believers was unanimous: it was something disgusting and should be banned. I am not homosexual myself, nor am I Christian, but the thought of refusing or thinking something nasty about these people who live in partnerships is something I would never do. They are as good as anyone else, and in many cases even better, for their prejudices are almost non-existent. They accept all people; why can’t the believers do the same when they are supposed to promote the idea of love for one’s neighbor regardless of gender or sexual orientation? Something to consider! The development indicates that religion is moving in the right direction concerning the issues surrounding LBTI+ women, but much work remains. Will we eventually reach a point where everyone accepts everyone, living in hope for us all?
Jacobsen: On a larger point, women are rapidly, and have been for a few decades, outstripping men’s attainment in key areas of education in a knowledge economy where education is a better livelihood. What is evolving role of women in society, and when religion is changing, diminishing, and evolving secular counterparts now in the richer societies?
Jorgensen: The role women play today is reflected in a developing society—economically, independently, and with the right to self-determination, which also impacts the religious sphere. As mentioned earlier, societal development necessitates that the religious majority continually redefine their texts to accommodate these changes.
Today’s women demand their rights despite what ancient texts may dictate, which is reflected in increased secularization and interreligious contexts. The equality movement is breaking down barriers erected by ancient religious dogmas.
Roles are being redefined and will thus shape a future society where everyone is equally valued, even though the church may not necessarily share this view. In my opinion, it is fantastic that we are moving towards equality and compassion despite differences. This is the way forward!
Jacobsen: You are getting into writing books more. What inspired this?
Jorgensen: The joy one gets from constantly challenging oneself. Through this type of development, one gains, based on their own observations and experiences, a better understanding of what they can and cannot do. In other words, one learns to know oneself better. This is what gives me joy in trying new things all the time. I would also like to add that when one challenges oneself in this way, as I do, the tree constantly grows, and new branches sprout. But what specifically made me want to start writing was linked to my verbal skills in referance to logic tests. This is where my strength lies. So why not see if my creativity could also bear fruit in my favorite subject, linguistics? From this, I have now written two books, divided as follows:
The first book I wrote as an independent author, without a publisher, allowing me to give myself free rein to shape the book without any input from a publisher. The book is called “74” and contains 74 poems. It is divided into three parts: the first with 39 poems, then 5 poems, and finally 30 poems. The reason for this division is that each part’s sum should match the Leonardo number value of 39, the value 5, and the Vinci value of 30. A total of 74, which also corresponds to the year I was born. The book is about Leonardo Da Vinci’s life and work from my own perspective, i.e., how I envision him. My own life is also reflected there. I have divided the book into each part with a short text that addresses the human journey through life, i.e., the three stages – young, adult, old. So the book brings a parallel story of myself and Leonardo. This book is written in English, which is my choice and gift to the high IQ community that I have derived so much joy from. The book is my thanks for the kindness I was met with. My first book addresses the brain’s division, and the idea was that the first should be dedicated to the brain’s logical left side and again connected to Leonardo’s left-handed writing, which is the link to the high IQ community.
My next book is written in Norwegian. It addresses the right hemisphere of the brain, its creative part. The book was called “Forstandens Fjolleri” (The Folly of Reason) and deals with all the madness inside me. The battle between good and evil, inner conflicts. Here is a small excerpt from the table of contents: A lyrical work filled with logic, creativity, emotions, and unvarnished truth. Through hidden hints and themes, the reader is invited to solve puzzles along the way. It creates a unique reading experience. The author’s hope is to add a fresh breath of originality that unfolds over the book’s religious-historical imprint. As the book progresses, hidden hints and puzzles are included, as the content describes. This gives hints about what the book conceals and its true intention. The book moves within the religious-historical context. Furthermore, I wanted the language to really come into its own, as I am known for having an extensive vocabulary, which is reflected in the book. The book also addresses my own journey. These two books can only exist as one, as they are a reflection of our own brain. Two halves together.
Jacobsen: What are areas of your expertise and interest?
Jorgensen: What is closest to my heart is history, religion, sports and anything intelligence. Not to forget that I work as a teacher. And now to add, aspiring author.
Jacobsen: What are your pro-tips in writing in the Norwegian book market to people?
Jorgensen: Here are five tips I personally follow to succeed not only in the Norwegian market but also internationally:
Focus on the Message: Make it clear and easy for the reader to follow. It should engage and evoke the right emotions within the genre you choose to write in.
Create a Book Trailer: A book trailer will help you attract the right audience. By finding your target audience, you will more easily sell the book you publish, thereby establishing a steadily growing readership.
Host Book Launches: Invite selected individuals who can help generate buzz around your book, provide valuable feedback, and help you make connections within the literary world.
Be Like MacGyver: Implement creativity in ways you never thought you could. Allow yourself to take a deep dive into your inner self; you will be surprised at what you find when you dig deep enough.
Learn from the Successful: Read about how those who have achieved great success made their breakthroughs, listen to their advice, and keep pushing forward. Even if you don’t feel particularly skilled, you will develop over time. The key is to never give up. Remember, you are the master of your own destiny.
Jacobsen: When can people expect your books to be released?
Jorgensen: Both books have been released, the first last spring and my second one this summer, on June 7th. Both are in the poetry genre. The one I’m working on now is taking a different direction and will most likely be in the crime/thriller genre.
Jacobsen: What is your process for writing, editing, brainstorming, and researching?
Jorgensen: Hmm, it’s not easy to put down on paper, but to simplify it a bit, the process goes something like this: Before I start a book, I like to read books by well-known authors in the genre I want to write in. For example, now I am about to write a thriller/crime novel, so I have read works by authors like Dan Brown, Jo Nesbø, and Stephen King to see what they have done to captivate their readers. I look at their twists, story progression, characters, and the plot in general. Some people like to spend a lot of time building almost everything before they dive into the actual writing, so they just need to tie the threads together. Others just start writing, and the path becomes clear as they go. My approach is somewhere in between, but reading the works of great authors is crucial for further development from there.
I like to create something new that hasn’t been done before; it’s not easy but so much more exciting to work on. Innovative writing suits me, so I just follow that path.
I also enjoy listening to music; it lets my thoughts flow more freely. I feel that music gives access to emotions I didn’t know I had, and everything falls into place, like right now as I write this. When it comes to editing my own writing, I have a lot to improve. By this, I mean I need to structure myself much more. I see that I am too meticulous about how each word and sentence looks. My last publication went through about 70-80 rewrites because I didn’t like how the flow felt. I need to cut this down to no more than 4-5 rewrites before sending it to the publisher. This is probably the most important tip one can give: don’t work yourself to death over the text. Don’t let the perfectionist in you take over completely; manage it to save your own joy of writing.
Jacobsen: Credit to Dr. Sandra Schlick for the rest of these last two questions formulated from her insight. How have inequalities-equalities, power, gender, heterosexism, and diversity played a significant and not-significant part in women’s presence and place in religion?
Jørgensen: Society and religion often go hand in hand. Personally, I like to think of religion as a stubborn mule that resists change and often has to be dragged, reluctantly, out of sheer necessity to avoid falling too far out of step with what normative moral evolution dictates. It’s important to remember that society was once almost entirely governed by patriarchal leaders. These leaders not only permeated all societal structures to fulfill their self-serving agendas, but this influence was also evident in religious circles with their extreme, tradition-based dogmas.
Men have always reigned supreme over everything humanity has undertaken, while women were relegated to a previously brutal and oppressive role, expected not only to accept it but also to love it. Things are somewhat better today, but there is still a long way to go. Just think about how, 100 years ago, advocating for equality was almost synonymous in many countries with risking everything for the women who fought for what we now consider a basic right. Women have been oppressed for thousands of years! How can you love a religion that still relegates women to second-class citizens, where men still dominate in many conservative circles?
Today, the church is increasingly being forced to change direction, giving women more influence and, after much resistance, acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people do, in fact, exist and have rights that you and I take for granted. I’m so glad that all people are seen and loved for exactly who they are and who they recognize themselves to be. All people have the same rights; no one is above or below; we all have equal value, women and men, regardless of what religious texts might say.”
Jacobsen: How have religious communities been discriminative towards each other and to women, and to each other’s women?
Jorgensen: Religious intolerance has been widespread throughout history, such as Christians against Jews, Christians against Muslims, and Muslims against Christians, as seen in the case of the Crusades. Christians against pagans, particularly in the context of Norse mythology. Olav the Holy came from the Crusades and slaughtered anyone who did not submit to the new religion of Christianity. “Believe or die” is still alive today, though now in a more reduced form, only in words. Lack of belief casts you into hell.
Discrimination against women from other religious communities:
Violence Against Women: In times of religious conflict, women from opposing religious communities have often been subjected to sexual violence, used as a weapon of war to humiliate the enemy. This was evident during the Partition of India, where women from different religious communities were raped and killed.
Forced Conversion Through Marriage: In some cases, women from religious minority groups have been forced into marriage with men from the majority religion, leading to forced conversion. This practice has been reported in various regions, including the forced conversions of Hindu women in Pakistan to Islam.
Pressure for Cultural Assimilation: Women who marry outside their religion may face pressure to convert and conform to the religious and cultural norms of their husband’s religion. This can involve adopting new religious practices, changing their dress, and abandoning their previous religious identity.
Discrimination within and between religious communities is often rooted in a combination of doctrinal beliefs, cultural norms, and power dynamics. Women have particularly borne the burden of this discrimination, experiencing exclusion, marginalization, and violence both within their own religious communities and from others. The intersection of religion and gender can perpetuate deeply ingrained inequalities, making the fight for women’s rights and inter-religious harmony a complex and ongoing challenge.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Tor.
Jorgensen: Thank you so much for your kindness and professionalism; it has been a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you. I hope that in the future we will find time again to share some thoughts!
Bibliography
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Footnotes
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Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12). August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12).In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Tor Arne Jørgensen on Religion, History, Budding Authorship: 2019 Genius of the Year – Europe, World Genius Directory (12) [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jørgensen-12.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Milwicki discusses: Canadian and American antisemitism; antisemitism as political currency; and deconversion from antisemitism.
Keywords: antisemitism in Canada and America, De-radicalizing extremists and education, Extremism versus ignorance in antisemitism, George Soros and antisemitic tropes, Jewish stereotypes and combating racism, Mainstream use of antisemitic language, Overt antisemitic incidents and symbology, Political currency and conspiracy theories.
Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do Canadians and Americans differ in their styles of antisemitism?
Dr. Alon Milwicki: Judging purely by antisemitic incidents I’ve seen. This is purely by overt antisemitic incidents because that’s what I’ve seen in Canada. I’m not a Canadian historian. I haven’t been following Canada for work or my interests. So, judging by overt antisemitic incidents, no. They still use the same symbology. They use the same language. But again, that’s the top-level stuff. That’s the swastikas. That’s the “Jews did 9-11.” That’s attacking or vandalizing Holocaust museums—that kind of thing. Again, we’re not going to do international affairs, generally domestic. But the same things that I would track as an antisemitic incident in the U.S., I see in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, all that stuff.
Jacobsen: How much is antisemitism used as political currency? The whip up of a fervour.
Milwicki: antisemitism with the conspiracy theories. Well, Soros. Soros-backed DAs, Soros-backed anything, Donald Trump just put out a mailer calling Kamala Harris a Marxist, whatever. There’s your trope right there. So it’s used. It’s used by extremists, for sure. However, the more troubling aspect is how the mainstream uses it. And that speaks to what we discussed before about how endemic it is. A lot of these people using antisemitic tropes probably don’t even know they’re using antisemitic tropes. It’s a question of ignorance versus extremism. I waver sometimes, which is” better.” With Extremists, at least, you know where they stand. Ignorance: sometimes, people are so dead set on their ignorance that you can do nothing about it.
So, George Soros is probably one of the ultimate visual conspiracy currencies we can see right now in terms of antisemitism. From Elise Stefanik to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump to all of them, they’re using Soros. “Soros-funded,” “Soros-backed,” everything is run by Soros. Soros is this evil man, etc. It works from neo-Nazis up to the Republican nominee for president. So, if it spans that spectrum, that’s sound currency. Another way it works is in this support for Israel. This blind support for Israel. That falls into this Christian lens. Now, this has been true. This speaks to what I was saying before. This has been true before, but post-October 7th, it’s more highlighted now.
We highlight this on the one sheet where criticism of Israel is often seen as antisemitism. That’s just not always true. Can it be true? Absolutely. But you have all of these people rushing to do all of the pro-Israel things that, again, are just nominal. They’re surface-level. They carry no meaning. That plays into, or at least is interpreted as, kowtowing to Jewish power. And one of the ways you know, or you can make that argument, is the antisemites are accusing the people whom they used to support of kowtowing to Jewish power because they interpret their supposed submissiveness to Israel as a betrayal. So it’s like you use the antisemites to understand the mainstream hardcore antisemites, to know why the mainstream antisemites are doing things. Their reactions are very telling.
Jacobsen: How long does it take to “deconvert” people from antisemitism? It depends on whether they’re extremists or ignorant.
Milwicki: Listen, de-radicalizing extremists. Before working at SPLC, I worked with them. That is not easy. It is not easy, but it can be done. Ignorance is brutal because they’ll be like, “Oh, you’re just seeing antisemitism where it’s not there.” “That’s not antisemitic.” Or the people who say, “Look, I’m not racist, but…” That’s hard. “I’m not racist, but Jews always seem to have good financial sense.” I need better financial sense. I need help understanding the financial market. Sorry, dude. I skipped that gene.
This goes back to education. Open, honest, discursive education. It doesn’t mean that there has to be an antisemitism month where high schools all focus on antisemitism or something. However, it should be noted when discussing certain American or world periods. I can only speak to American history. This is where antisemitism plays in. You can see this trope here. The only way to combat racism of any kind–I would argue–or the only successful way to combat racism of any kind is education. That’s my honest opinion on it, at least in my lifetime.
If you can encourage somebody who doesn’t know, I’ve been told by students that “you don’t seem like a Jew.” I’d be like, “How many Jews do you know?” They say, “You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met.” I’d be like, “What tropes do you have?” They’re like, “How many do you know, sir?” While I would always preface that with, “Please don’t use me as emblematic of all Jewish peoples.” It is important to tackle antisemitism tropes that Jews are supposed to act a certain way.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American antisemitism’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Dr. Alon Milwicki on Differentiating Canadian and American Antisemitism [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki-2.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Updated February 10, 2024.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: 5-dimensional thinking and 4-dimensional thought, communication is about connecting deeply, healthy relationships should be 100+/100+, love cannot be defined, love is the most potent force, love is wise more than intelligent, soulmates share the same essence, true soulmates bond conceptually.
Love is the most potent force in the Universe
Love is the most potent force in the Universe
One of the reasons why love is impossible to define, even harder to define than other mundane concepts, to others, is that love knows reasons, reasons know nothing of. Here, we see 5-dimensional thinking to show that the later part of the statement is a 4-dimensional thought, and a slightly funny part is that I am explaining the reasons for it.
Love is largely about why, and non-linearly speaking, including how. It is funny. How to look at it and why it is so, which I love doing. Do not ask why.
Interestingly, love is harder and impossible to define than other larger concepts. Thus, we notice a rather important and underlying truth: Love is wise more than intelligent.
This also shows that metamessages are, sometimes, more extensive than the “original” theme/central idea. The gist goes beyond the basic idea. It is funny how it can be expressed in plain terms and as a self-evident truth.
Love, hence, cannot be defined as the most difficult concept. That would be an attribute which proves the original point. Being in love with love is rather superficial and dumb, but being in love with the idea of being unloved is even dumber, it is the opposite of love as logarithms are to powers. This proves the above point. Beyond judgement to bingo, what are we doing? Analyzing. To do such, we need to understand that showing love does not judge; it analyzes, yes, but it understands and understands better, proving love cannot be defined. This entails several more dimensions, showing that even if any system could be made from previous arguments, they would, indeed, help more to prove what is stated.
Knowing what one wants in a partner is essential; thus, with respect, the establishment of rules and considering the consequences of a healthy negotiation can benefit both parties.
To achieve this, it is essential and fundamental to not avoid idealizing one’s partner. That is love: to have a real experience, to know the partner well, and accept them as they are, to experience each other and grow together. It is thus important to highlight that fantasizing is the sweetest of all deaths being alive. When it comes to idealizing your partner, it is not love; it is to be in love with your idea about your partner, so our expectations are the most selfish and unrealistic like a castle in the clouds. However, in getting to know each other, in a harmonious way, by seeing how compatible each other are, learning from each other, growing with each other by also accepting the good and bad things, with honesty, knowing what one wants and most of all, knowing oneself, without these, there is nothing to be offered if we want a serious, healthy relationship.
When communication occurs, it is more about connecting than merely talking, so the entry communication takes on multiple levels and meanings.
It would be great to have a bond is beyond probability, which philosophers and mathematicians tend to have different positions on. It would be meant to be.
It would be essential:
To be compatible. The more similar we genuinely are, the better we are together with our match, to feel each other’s essence and they’re connected because we are the same soul in two bodies.
To experience love in such a special way with each other that it cannot be defined. It is what most defies human imagination. It is a fact: There is a fundamental attribute to being human by defining concepts.
This is linked to the fact that human imagination is conceptual. And we search for the truth. If love knows reasons that reason knows nothing of, then we partly know why love cannot be defined; that is a fact because love is truth. Thus, love cannot be defined; that is a fact because love is truth.
To feel our love goes beyond all possible forms of science, art, and any possible branch of human knowledge. Thanking God for making they couple for being together and for being in love. As a mathematician, I know: Mathematics make infinite sense, but love makes infinitely more sense (from an imagination that is defied by both, and this entailing transfinite numbers, categorizable infinities, love for mathematics as an under and upper scope, and of course love). We have a unique bond conceptually, spiritually, etc.
Interestingly, it is not so odd that it is neither true nor false that we cannot coin a quote on DIVINE LOVE for it to be the TRUTH. (Neither is it false nor is it true that it was me.)
Together, strengthening our bond is a should. Bravery and Fear are the most powerful weapons. They a
Interestingly, love is harder and impossible to define than other larger concepts. Thus, we notice a rather important and underlying truth: Love is wise more than intelligent.
This also shows that metamessages are, sometimes, more extensive than the “original” theme/central idea. The gist goes beyond the basic idea. It is funny how it can be expressed in plain terms and as a self-evident truth.
Love, hence, cannot be defined as the most difficult concept. That would be an attribute which proves the original point. Being in love with love is rather superficial and dumb, but being in love with the idea of being unloved is even dumber, it is the opposite of love as logarithms are to powers. This proves the above point. Beyond judgement to bingo, what are we doing? Analyzing. To do such, we need to understand that showing love does not judge; it analyzes, yes, but it understands and understands better, proving love cannot be defined. This entails several more dimensions, showing that even if any system could be made from previous arguments, they would, indeed, help more to prove what is stated.
Knowing what one wants in a partner is essential; thus, with respect, the establishment of rules and considering the consequences of a healthy negotiation can benefit both parties.
To achieve this, it is essential and fundamental to not avoid idealizing one’s partner. That is love: to have a real experience, to know the partner well, and accept them as they are, to experience each other and grow together. It is thus important to highlight that fantasizing is the sweetest of all deaths being alive. When it comes to idealizing your partner, it is not love; it is to be in love with your idea about your partner, so our expectations are the most selfish and unrealistic like a castle in the clouds. However, in getting to know each other, in a harmonious way, by seeing how compatible each other are, learning from each other, growing with each other by also accepting the good and bad things, with honesty, knowing what one wants and most of all, knowing oneself, without these, there is nothing to be offered if we want a serious, healthy relationship.
When communication occurs, it is more about connecting than merely talking, so the entry communication takes on multiple levels and meanings.
I have found and obtained such a healthy relationship with my true soulmate. We are married, in practice.
In our case–we are the loves of our lives and, more than that, real soulmates. Our bond is beyond probability, which philosophers and mathematicians tend to have different positions on. It is meant to be.
We are compatible. The more similar we genuinely are, the better we are together. We feel each other’s essence and are connected because we are the same soul in two bodies.
We have experienced love in such a special way with each other that it cannot be defined. It is what most defies human imagination. It is a fact: There is a fundamental attribute to being human by defining concepts.
This is linked to the fact that human imagination is conceptual. And we search for the truth. If love knows reasons that reason knows nothing of, then we partly know why love cannot be defined; that is a fact because love is truth. Thus, love cannot be defined; that is a fact because love is truth.
We feel our love goes beyond all possible forms of science, art, and any possible branch of human knowledge. We thank God for making us be together and for being in love. As a mathematician, I know: Mathematics make infinite sense, but love makes infinitely more sense (from an imagination that is defied by both, and this entailing transfinite numbers, categorizable infinities, love for mathematics as an under and upper scope, and of course love). We have a unique bond conceptually, spiritually, etc.
Interestingly, it is not so odd that it is neither true nor false that we cannot coin a quote on DIVINE LOVE for it to be the TRUTH. (Neither is it false nor is it true that it was me.)
Together, we strengthen our bond. Bravery and Fear are the most powerful weapons. They are on opposite sides of the same stick: Courage and fear, fear and aggression.
From this, we have a derived version: Love is the most powerful force that inspires bravery, and fear inspires the opposite, like yin and yang, making up for two components of the same coin. (I did not say anything about the middle part on purpose.)
This leads to a derived meta-message: I love the bravery of showing that all we should fear is fear itself from equilibrium.
This converges with one of my quotes to a certain extent: Metamessages can be twin-blade swords. This can indeed make it more powerful, especially considering that derived messages can be twin-blade swords.
Thus, a healthy relationship should be 100+/100+, not 50/50. 100+/100+ includes 0 by principle, not 1 percent. 100+/100+ in true soulmates is for Infinity; for true soulmates, love never dies.
We love Greek philosophy and the country as a whole. In a drawing I made of Socrates’s mind in 8 dimensions, I explained how he felt we were midwives in helping give birth to discoveries, as I did, but with my ideal partner, she and I should feel like that together, thus like a book she and I would understand in full together.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Flores Navas JA, Love is the most potent force in the Universe. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Flores Navas, J. A., (2024, August 15). Love is the most potent force in the Universe. In-Sight Publishing, 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): FLORES NAVAS, J. A. Love is the most potent force in the Universe. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Flores Navas, Jaime Alfonso 2024. “Love is the most potent force in the Universe.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Flores Navas, Jaime Alfonso “Love is the most potent force in the Universe.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime.
Harvard: Flores Navas, J. A. (2024) ‘Love is the most potent force in the Universe’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime.
Harvard (Australian): Flores Navas, J A 2024, ‘Love is the most potent force in the Universe’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Flores Navas, Jaime Alfonso “Love is the most potent force in the Universe.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Flores Navas JA Love is the most potent force in the Universe [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaime.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
Abstract
Daniel Shea, M.Sc. is the founder and CEO of Chatoyance. Shea possesses a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire, with several years of industry experience in software engineering. He has published freelance articles on foreign exchange market strategy analysis and has published software analyzing fractals in the foreign exchange markets. Leveraging his experience with software design and financial markets, he started Chatoyance with the intent of transforming the way independent investors approach the foreign exchange market. Shea discusses: interest in test construction; the earlier tests and Chris Cole and Dean Inada; the origin and inspiration; Cole and Inada; training in general statistics and software engineering; skills and considerations; help with problem schemas, adaptivity, user interfaces, and renorming; verbal problems and replicability across other problem types; roadblocks test-takers tend to make in terms of thought processes and assumptions around time commitments; the most appropriate means by which to norm and re-norm a test; the Adaptive IQ Test website; tests and test constructors; and the making of a test.
Keywords: adaptive generative test challenges, adaptive IQ Test, challenges in test-taking assumptions, Chris Cole, Daniel Shea, Dean Inada, Adaptive IQ Test development, Dynamic test development, Glen Wooten, high-range IQ societies, item curve adaptation, John Fahy, Mega and Titan Test item analysis, multidimensional high-range tests, Nathan Hays, norming and renorming high-range tests, problem schemas and adaptivity, Rick Rosner, test security and leakage, verbal problems in high-range tests, Werner Couwenbergh.
On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When did this interest in test construction truly come forward for you?
Daniel Shea: My involvement came about from conversations with Chris Cole and Dean Inada. There had been an effort to implement an adaptive, generative test many years ago, but it reached a point where conceiving of new high-range questions became increasingly difficult and there were some technical challenges in actually coding a platform to take such a test. Since I had some background on the technical side, I offered to assist.
Shea: These tests, and other high-range tests available today, are untimed and unsupervised, which introduces many self-evident problems, chief among them being that people will leak answers or collaborate with others. Some of these issues may have been less prevalent at the time these tests were originally constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, but for several years now, many of the answers to these tests have been made available on various message boards or Usenet groups. In some instances, the answers are incorrect or there are multiple answers floating around which muddy the waters, but this is not always the case.
A test should not be entirely discarded just because one or two answers have been leaked. On the other hand, if enough answers have been leaked that one could achieve a sufficiently close score to a given society’s cutoff, that society may need to take a vote on whether to continue to allow the test to be used for admission. There is an ongoing effort to identify tests that have been compromised to such a degree, but that judgment call is not an exact science.
Much of the background on the motivation for a dynamic test has been covered in Chris Cole’s September 2001 article “How to Protect High-Range Tests” in Noesis #155. To quote, “In looking at many tests, there is a certain pattern that appears. It is possible to classify the problems into groups. For example, Ron Hoeflin has a group of problems about cells formed by intersecting various solids such as spheres, cubes, etc. The solution to one member of this group (say, three cubes) does not help much in the solution of another (say, two cones and a sphere). Yet it might be the case that there is an underlying mathematics that yields the answers to all of the problems in the group. Then a very large number of problems could be generated, where the solution to one problem would not help in the solution of another. This would be ideal for creating an on-line test, because cheating would be impossible.” I would probably caution that this does not make cheating outright impossible, but introduces another layer of security.
Jacobsen: Similarly, what was the origin and inspiration for joining this small team – the facts and the feelings?
Shea: In a way, the fact that the team was so small made it easier to join. There was a website, mental-testing.com, that had an initial version of the adaptive test, but it was not working at the time that I joined, so the decision was made to rewrite it from the ground up. With greenfield projects in general, there are more degrees of freedom and less rigidity in its development. The ability to make some sort of impact, even if only on a technical level, was appealing. There is also the fact that the Ultra Test and the Power Test, which are the only tests used for Mega Society admission at this point in time, will eventually be spoiled in their entirety, at which point there will be no viable test for admission without some suitable replacement.
Jacobsen: As an open credit to Cole and Inada, what have been each of their major contributions to the development of the Adaptive IQ Test (2003-present)? (Anyone else, too?) For examples, “How to Protect High-Range Tests” by Chris Cole comments on the difficulties in test questions/high-range tests remaining non-compromised in the internet era, the cost in open-sourcing test creation and norming, and the possibility in designing high-range tests with more foundational principles of math to generate questions (through schemas). Subsequently, “Reply to Chris Cole on Norming High-Range Tests” by Dean Inada commented on something like probability sloping for relative hardness of problems per person and problem. They were discussing, in essence, some foundations for–what would become–the Adaptive IQ Test.
Shea: The background discussed in those articles serves as the foundation for what the Adaptive IQ Test has become in its current iteration. Dean Inada, in his response article, writes “we’ll want a better method of norming the tests than simply ranking people by the number of questions they get correctly, since one person may be asked harder questions than another. I suggest a method that tries to estimate for each question the probability of getting it right or wrong as a function of a person’s percentile rank in the population, this rank is estimated by multiplying the generally increasing and decreasing functions for the problems gotten right and wrong.” The Adaptive IQ Test implements this, modeling an individual curve for the test-taker based on their responses to each administered item and its item curve, and presenting a problem variant accordingly.
Shea: As noted, I do not have a formal background in psychometrics. My involvement in the project has been largely technical in nature, drawing on prior general software engineering skills to implement the problem schemas and adaptive component, design the user interfaces for each problem (some may require drawings, some may require filling in a grid, etc.), automate the norming and curving for each item as results come in, and so on. Indeed, the largest challenge has been in conceiving of suitable problem schemas, which I am happy to brainstorm but of course defer to those with a deeper background than my own. Between that and ensuring problem variants are all similarly challenging, progress is ongoing.
Jacobsen: What skills and considerations, in an overview, seem important for both the construction of test questions and making an effective schema for them?
Shea: Among the questions that exist in the current alpha version of the test, these were largely derived from existing problems authored by Ron Hoeflin. The sense was that it was not the problems themselves that were fundamentally at fault here, but rather that it took more effort to vet a sufficient problem than it did for someone to go on to leak it.
With that said, deriving a schema that generates problems of similar difficulty is a challenge, and often requires restricting the degrees of freedom for the generator itself. For instance, the Mega and Titan item analysis has shown that the interpenetrating solid questions tend to be among the most challenging, but the degree to which they are challenging varies significantly. Consider the three interpenetrating solid questions on Ron Hoeflin’s Power Test, which are lifted from the Mega and Titan Tests. There is a notable difference in the difficulty of the interpenetrating cube and tetrahedron compared to the interpenetrating three cubes compared to the interpenetrating two cones and one cylinder. It would not be good practice to include a general schema for any configuration of interpenetrating solids. Rather, you would need to classify these by difficulty and generate them separately. But where does this classification come from? Item analysis gets you started, but at a certain point, you also depend on a sufficient number of people to take the test and get a better idea of the difficulty and signal of each variant.
Jacobsen: How do you help with problem schemas, adaptivity, user interfaces, and renorming? How are the problem schemas developed from the Mega, Titan, and Ultra, tests, e.g., the six sides question from the Ultra Test (problem 45) and grid sequences from the Power Test (problems 32-36)?
Shea: In some ways, it is difficult to discuss particular schemas at length because doing so may reveal the underlying pattern in the process. Many schemas are derived programmatically, while some do not have a proven underlying pattern but are bucketed in the same schema, such as the interpenetrating solid variants discussed prior.
User interfaces are designed according to the requirements of the problem. The most challenging interfaces have been the sixth side problem, which requires drawing on a canvas and scoring the answer in a way that accommodates any orientation of the object, and the three dice problem, whose challenge was less with the user interface per se and more with the backend construction of each variant.
Norming is automatically done after each test has been completed. This also backfills prior test-takers, whose estimates are updated accordingly. In the interest of fairness, there are two metrics presented: the immutable estimate per the norm at the time of the test’s completion and the most recent estimate per the latest norm.
Jacobsen: How are verbal problems capable of presenting appropriately challenging problems with variation in type while sustaining similarity of difficulty? Is this replicable across other problem types, e.g., spatial, numerical/quantitative, matrices, etc.?
Shea: Verbal problems in particular have been quite tricky. In the current form of the test, there are trial questions which are presented to the test-taker but do not impact their estimated curve. These trial questions include some, but not all, of the verbal questions. This is in part because verbal problems that have a clean generalization tend to be quite easy to solve. Unlike problems with a more mathematical or logical approach, verbal problems tend to be self-contained, and if generalizable at a high-range, risk producing variants that are far more esoteric than others. This class of problems continues to present the greatest challenge.
Jacobsen: Potentially, what are roadblocks test-takers tend to make in terms of thought processes and assumptions around time commitments on these high-range tests? So, they get artificially low scores.
Shea: In terms of time commitments, at this point, there is no limitation to the length of time that a test may be completed. Historically, it would have been more difficult to enforce, as most high-range tests are made available in their entirety to the public. There are some approaches that are taken to minimize leakage of the questions themselves, such as with Paul Cooijmans requiring test-takers to directly request a copy of the test, though my understanding is that this is done to prevent public discussion of the questions and, in turn, their answers, as opposed to any limitations on time taken to complete the test. Timed tests do allow for a measurement of processing speed to some degree, as well as a standardization of test-taking conditions, but given that these particular tests are already being administered without supervision and in whichever environment the test-taker prefers due to the questions requiring a significant amount of time to answer, timing the test could risk giving an unfair advantage to those who simply have more free time to commit.
As far as thought processes, I do not have enough insight into individual test-takers to make broad generalizations about their personal approaches to these problems. From what I have witnessed myself through discussions with others, there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a tendency to overthink a question or use complicated reasoning to justify a suspected answer, thereby getting it wrong. Almost every time, the answer is clean; like learning how a magic trick is performed, the question once looked impossible but suddenly seems deceptively simple.
Jacobsen: What are the most appropriate means by which to norm and re-norm a test when, in the high-range environment so far, the sample sizes tend to be low and self-selected, so attracting a limited supply and a tendency in a type of personality?
Shea: Since norms are performed on test completion, the process has little overhead. To accommodate low sample sizes, an initial item curve is provided for questions when known. For example, if a schema is adopted from a prior test such as the Ultra Test, then the item curve for that problem is used as the seed for this test. In some cases, such as novel schemas which do not have a prior item curve from which to draw, the curve starts out flat and is gradually shaped based on the test-taker’s answers to other questions.
With these sorts of tests, the low sample size continues to be a problem, but part of this high barrier to entry may be the historical nature of how these tests were administered, between accessibility and cost to score. By making the test available online and without charge, the hope is that this may motivate others to try it out.
As far as the types of personalities that are drawn to high-range tests, I defer to Grady Towers’ observations in Noesis #141 regarding the types of personalities that exist across different societies and the corresponding tests used for their admission. Perhaps there is something to be said for stressing both verbal and non-verbal aptitude.
Jacobsen: The Adaptive IQ Test website opens with a series of claims:
This is an online IQ test that contains several innovative features. Here are some reasons to take this test.
As you answer more questions, the estimate of your rank in the population becomes more accurate.
You see a graph of your estimated rank, not just a single number.
You are allowed to skip questions and come back to them.
You are automatically asked questions that will help make your estimated rank more accurate.
As more people take the test, the graphs become more accurate.
There are a number of anti-cheating devices being used.
The results of this test may be used for acceptance into various high IQ societies.
Any points of clarification that have been needed on any of these at any time in the past from prospective/actual test-takers or the curious? They can be stated here.
Shea: Some of these points are better characterized as statements of fact about the functionality of the test itself, such as the ability to skip questions. One point to clarify about items 1 and 5 is that the estimate for a completed test may change over time as the test is repeatedly normed. There are plenty of cases across other IQ tests where an individual completes the test and receives an estimate only for subsequent test-takers to receive a lower estimate with the same raw score due to the ceiling being lowered through norms over time, and vice versa. As the adaptive test is normed here, all estimates are updated in unison, preventing this discrepancy between raw scores and percentile estimates across different test-takers. As mentioned earlier, both the estimate at the time of the test’s completion and the most up-to-date estimate are presented for completeness.
Jacobsen: What tests and test constructors have you considered good?
Shea: The gold standard for high-range testing has always been Ron Hoeflin’s series of tests. These serve as the foundation for much of the existing questions in the current early version of the Adaptive IQ Test. Beyond him, there are many test constructors who have quite novel test items that could be of inspiration.
There is value in multidimensional tests that select for both high-range spatial and verbal problems. I again cite Grady Towers, who wrote of this back in 1998 over the course of several letters published in Noesis #141, where he reflected on the implications for high IQ societies that admit members on the basis of tests that stress both verbal and spatial skills as opposed to one or the other.
Jacobsen: What have you learned from helping in the making of a test?
Shea: It is important to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” There will always be shortcomings with any approach. Care needs to be taken to minimize these shortcomings and accommodate them to the extent possible.
Perhaps a second learning is that there is a high-range test vacuum of sorts, and that vacuum is being filled with any number of experimental high-range tests. This is not necessarily an issue in itself, as many of these test items are intriguing and derived from historical best practices, including the very test being discussed here. More to the point, ideally, those with a formal background in psychometrics would be more involved. I am happy to help where I can, but I also recognize my own limits in this space.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Daniel.
Shea: Thank you for giving me the chance to highlight this project! I feel the need to stress that it is very much in an alpha state and that development is ongoing, but that progress is being made. Special thanks go to Chris Cole and Dean Inada for the decades of work that they put into this long before I arrived, Werner Couwenbergh for his hard work on the interpenetrating solid variants, those who provided input thus far (John Fahy, Nathan Hays, Rick Rosner, and Glen Wooten, among others), and everyone who has provided feedback. I am but a vessel, helping to bring this to fruition where possible.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 15). On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On High-Range Test Construction 7: Daniel Shea, M.Sc., the Adaptive IQ Test [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-7.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
‘JayStar’ is considered to be one of the most intelligent people in the world by those known to him. He has competed against and holds wins over some of the best players in the world in Super Smash Bros, reached an NTRP level of 5.0 in tennis by the age of 18 while being largely self-taught, published various articles in both academic and non-academic journals, and is a student of mathematics and philosophy (previously specialized in Integrated Sciences with interests in cognitive systems, statistical and biological sciences). Additionally, he holds an RCM level 10 piano certification at the age of 14 and was previously a participant at chess regionals hosted by the chess’n math association. ‘JayStar’ discusses: more substantial development points; tennis; an RCM level 10 piano certification; an avid gamer; the field of chess; mathematics and philosophy; academic, professional goals; personal hopes; and other areas of mental competition.
Keywords: academic interests, competitive experiences, emotional development, intellectual stimulation, mathematical and philosophical Infinity, piano certification, social skills improvement, Super Smash Bros tournaments, tennis achievements, video game addiction.
Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: For personal life, what do you consider your more substantial development points?
‘JayStar’: As a kid I was extremely competitive, trying to be as good as I can get at everything I cared for. Throughout my competitive experiences, I was able to learn to deal with emotions, make healthier decisions, and develop great connections with others.
I was addicted to video games, loved going outdoors to play soccer, cycling, going to the park, and playing tennis near the local park. Succeeding in these activities made me happy and I even wanted to become either a professional tennis player, youtuber, or professional gamer someday. Reality hit, and I’d have to focus on developing actual study and communication skills if I wanted to succeed personally.
In academics, I had begun to take an interest in it after high school due to some obsession over certain topics. Issue is, I spent too much time on those topics (completely unrelated to the coursework) rather than focusing on the tasks in front of me. Although I didn’t pay much attention in class, or cared about doing homework throughout elementary and high school, I was able to begin developing my interests. My academic experiences have helped me develop presentation skills, writing skills, and critical thinking that will allow me to utilize them in other areas of life.
I used to struggle with toxicity, narcissism and immaturity due to a host of negative childhood experiences and a lot of emotional neglect, but I started meeting and talking to individuals with great social skills that guided me the right way and I started to work hard everyday on improving my social skills, empathy and maturity. Growing up, I later suspected I was gifted intellectually (after having very little knowledge and being quite confused about many things), and realized what I needed was more communication with gifted individuals but very rarely did I end up communicating with gifted individuals until joining chess clubs, the competitive gaming community, chess clubs, research organizations, and various online communities which would only begin in teenage years) to enhance intellectual stimulation. I was also not selected for a gifted program and didn’t skip grades likely due to some trauma and issues with attention prior to entering school (which led to gaming addiction and other various interests throughout my life). Once I discovered more about myself and others through cognitive testing, discussions, seeking knowledge and various life achievements, I began to see reality much more nicely which is the ultimate development I suppose.
Jacobsen: You are a tennis player. How does this help develop physically? How far have you gone in this endeavour? You are a three-time regional champion.
‘JayStar’: The unique aspect of tennis has to be the sound of the strokes whenever you hit the ball. Tennis is also good at training lateral movement – although quick vertical movement helps in dealing with drop shots.
My first sport was soccer which I played at the local park in the city I grew up in. I went to the park a lot and did a lot of cross crossing and cycling during elementary school as well. I was attracted to tennis because it was a lot of fun, and there were tennis courts near the local park so I could often just bike there and play. Initial athletic experiences will have a strong impact on one’s current and future athletic experiences. Sports like soccer build up stamina, teamwork, and agility. Running cross-country and track builds up endurance and speed. Volley-ball develops teamwork and coordination, and sports like table tennis, badminton, squash and pickleball all resemble the techniques and shots in tennis.
In tennis, my best achievement is a toss up between being awarded the All-Star Award in 2014 throughout league player matches, being an Antique Bronze Medalist at the provincial championships, awarded the Mens A/B championship trophy in Singles at my tennis club in 2020 and being a three-time regional champion (once in singles, twice in doubles). In the future, I hope to play more competitive matches with players at similar higher levels. Up until now, I have reached the highest level at the club level (5.0 NTRP – which is also considered the highest level a self-taught player should reach and roughly the top 2% of USTA players to the best of my knowledge). Although my parents do not really have any experience with competitive sports, since they almost always let me go outside and bike around, I was able to then take it upon myself to learn everything I needed about the game.
Jacobsen: You have earned an RCM level 10 piano certification and play the baritone. What were some of the earlier inclinations as to musical talent in these areas?
‘JayStar’: In elementary school, everyone learned to play the recorder – which I forgot mostly about.
I originally intended to become a percussionist or play the Tuba although I settled for the Baritone and found it to be an interesting instrument. I was far from the best in my band and I usually struggled with tune, so I eventually quit in junior year of high school.I played for the high school instrumental band for two years and then quit however due to lack of continued interest
I started playing piano at the age of 7 since my parents wanted me to learn. In general I began playing piano at the age of 7, took lessons for 7 years (switched teachers along the way and skipped two or so grades at some point). After learning from two different instructors, at the age of 14 I finally received the certification from the Royal Conservatory of Music for grade 10 piano. This is based on practicing for roughly 30 mins a day on average for 7 years. Music is great to learn to promote good study habits, focus, and passion for other things. As a child, I was not passionate about music and so did not pursue it further, and for the most part, it was forced until I had finished level 10. Some children are forced to play an instrument and are also forced to continue up until level 8 at the very least (although it is true that many people quit early on if they are uninterested). I believe music can be played until a late age and it is something I find more enjoyable than as a kid.
I have entered two competitions and received second in a small local competition. I also played for musical halls and was considered to be somewhat talented (although I never considered myself to be all that great).
Jacobsen: Also, you are an avid gamer, particularly for Super Smash Bros Ultimate. How far has your ranking gone in online rankings?
‘JayStar’: As a kid I spent quite a large amount of time playing or thinking/studying Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Call of Duty Ghosts, Super Smash Bros Melee, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Smash Bros for Wii U. Surprisingly, I actually practiced SSBU less than those other games, but mainly studied quite a bit and attended a good amount of tournaments from the end of 2018 until now.
I haven’t played enough tournaments to be ranked highly on wifi and most top players avoid wifi tournaments. My best achievement here is that I was able to take a set off of a player named Icymist whom (if memory serves me correctly) was considered to be one of the best wifi players in the world at some point in time.
The issue’s online arises due to a poor internet connection, and the game being quite a lot different online than offline. I tend to attend far fewer tournaments than most of the top Canadian players, so it is often assumed that I am playing wifi more (which is somewhat true), although I believe it is more important to think about the game in an analytical way such as by studying videos of various players, and of one’s own habits and mistakes. Super Smash Bros is ultimately a game that relies on analyzing and adapting on the fly, while processing loads of information and making informed decisions.
Although irrelevant to your question, I do want to point out something I have learned over time through my experiences although I won’t say much at this time since I still want to learn more.What I noticed about Super Smash Bros players as a whole – they are very good at learning. I personally believe top professional Super Smash Bros players (such as MkLeo and Hungrybox – the former wanted to be a physicist growing up and had an interest in astrophysics and the latter also became can engineer) are at the same level of intelligence as historical polymaths such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Johann Goethe.
Jacobsen: How far have you gone in the field of chess?
‘JayStar’: At the age of 14 and for 6 months, I was extremely passionate about learning chess and played it a bit for a few more months after. My peak skill level might have been somewhere around 1400-1800 ELO (cannot remember exactly at this time) depending on the opening although I seem to have dropped to an average level now. In fact, there was a chess national master in my high school and I could never beat him once but my experience with the chess club was truly a great experience for me and helped me develop a great interest in chess during that time. My best achievement (despite the loss) is taking a player rated approximately 2000 down to endgame (which I believe was my biggest weakness at the time) during a chess regional (possibly due to playing out of my mind and also my opponent possibly underestimating me a bit). During a period of 6 months, as far as I can remember I must have been thinking about chess for at least 4 hours a day, often playing during lunch period and sometimes after school with rivals, and if not, I’d be studying openings, thinking about moves, or watching different kinds of videos. I played on chess.com a lot in the past and I managed to compete in chess regionals (after getting 5th out of individuals in my grade in the qualifying event). I am considering competing more in the future because I enjoy this game a lot.
Jacobsen: What was the ultimate interest in studying mathematics and philosophy?
‘JayStar’: First year is a general science year and then I ended up specializing in Integrated Sciences after a solid first year (which is generally considered a major for people interested in medicine) where most if not all of the graduates apparently get into graduate school or professional school. I decided to switch into something else and the only fields that seemed possible to graduate were either statistics or mathematics. I also had some plans to go into either law, medicine or computer science but I ultimately became more interested in learning various fields in the social sciences and humanities outside of my coursework.
I was drawn to mathematics after a statistics phd holder mentioned how only a few individuals in the world could truly understand topology (after some minimum level of experience) and I found that if I were to prove myself (at least, I should be in mathematics (although I have come to like applied mathematics as well and see the beauty in application too). Philosophy also requires a lot of analyzing which is a strength of mine and I enjoy learning about the field overall (although admittedly, I have developed some poor study habits since a child and neglected pre-readings and generally have had some issues paying attention in lecture due to my other passions in the social sciences (which are not relevant to the course work). I also wondered about my math ability ever since a kid because I felt that I hadn’t put in much effort or focus (or possibly zero at all aside from somewhat paying attention in some lectures in sophomore year of high school), which was also the year I managed to receive a certificate of distinction from participation in the high school Cayley Mathematics Competition featured by the university of waterloo.
My university has various options for mathematics and I am generally pleased by the professors, students and course offerings. I had my first taste of upper-level coursework in 2021 through complex analysis and then later took real analysis and abstract algebra (courses that are most important to an undergraduate mathematics degree if one wishes to pursue graduate level math) and kept going ever since.
My best achievement in mathematics is getting a 97 (one of the highest marks in differential calculus) with only about 20 or less hours of “serious” mathematics study my whole life (although I realize such a claim will be hard to believe – it is ultimately based on what I can remember to the best of my ability at the current time. Up until now I have (by my estimate) less than 100 good hours of study in mathematics (since elementary school) which means I must study both hard and smart if I want to reach new heights.
Jacobsen: What are your academic, professional goals now?
‘JayStar’: I have an interest in the subject of mathematical and philosophical Infinity (whether or not I study the topic in academia or outside) and various other fields in both pure and applied math. My current level of knowledge is not quite at the level of a typical graduate student but this only means I need to start studying seriously (which is admittedly something I have failed to do my whole life before due to many distractions).
I may have to look into other options however due to the lack of career opportunities in pure mathematics so if not professionally, I will have to develop a lot of mathematics knowledge while being self-taught such as Ramanujan (also known as the Man Who Knew Infinity) who managed to become one of the greatest math minds without formal schooling.
I am mostly interested in work that involves analytical skills and numbers but only time will tell.
Jacobsen: What are your personal hopes for the next couple of years?
‘JayStar’: I hope to publish articles and write on many different subject areas (including biological sciences, psychological sciences, mathematical sciences and more). I’d also hope to continue competing in the next Smash game and aim for greater heights and face off against the best in the world on the big stage. I also hope to continue to enjoy athletics – such as going to the gym, playing pickleball, tennis and possibly coaching as well.
Jacobsen: Are there other areas of mental competition that you’d like to develop a skill-set in and then compete?
‘JayStar’: I am always willing to try new things and test my mental capacity in tasks that require me to adapt to new situations.
I have little experience with trivia for instance, but it is something I might like to try someday.
I really admire the mathematician Noam Elkies for being a talent in math, music and chess. He became a chess national master at the age of 20 and a world-chess solving champion at the age of 30. John Nunn who received a PhD in mathematics at Oxford at the age of 23 and also became a Chess grandmaster at the age of 23 is also someone of whom someone who increases my motivation to pursue various activities to a higher level.
In Canada, there is a mathematician named Adam Logan who is extremely good at Scrabble. I do not have an extremely large vocabulary or general knowledge (which are areas of weakness at the moment in which I’d someday want to fill some of those gaps). I am not so knowledgeable in history and geography and were often my worst subjects in school but I am very willing to learn much more in these areas.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time.
‘JayStar’: Thank you Scott. I am always inspired by your work and knowledge. It was my pleasure.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with ‘JayStar’ on Development, Talents, Achievements, Mathematics, and Philosophy [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/jaystar.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: cheating prevention strategies, high-range IQ testing, internet norming challenges, Mega Society testing issues, norming problem difficulty, online test security, problem group classification, test design quality control.
On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests
The suspension of the Mega and Titan tests as admissions vehicles for the Mega Society leaves the Society in a difficult position. The explosion of the Internet since 1995 has made it extremely hard to keep test answers secret. Half of the Mega and Titan test answers are easily available on the Internet today. Even if we were to have a new high-range test in hand right now, it would be compromised within a relatively short period of time, perhaps days. In fact, it’s unclear how a high-range test would even be normed without rendering it useless in the process. Is this the end of high-range testing, and potentially the Mega Society?
One possible solution would to be to retain the secrecy of the test in the same way the College Entrance Examination Board does, namely, formulate a very large number of questions and have each specific test consist of a small subset of this larger set. Thus the potential cheater is defeated by the need to memorize thousands of problems. In addition, the test is copyrighted and physically protected.
One problem with this solution is that the College Board has a large market for its tests, and therefore can afford to employ hundreds of test designers to write thousands of sample problems, and additional thousands of test takers to verify and norm the problems. Another problem is that it seems to be a lot harder to write a high-range problem than it is to write a mid-range problem.
One possible solution to the first problem would be to use the power of the Internet for good instead of evil, namely, to publish the test over the Internet and let thousands of interested test takers verify and norm the test for free. While this is a cheap way to get a test normed, it works at cross-purposes to the idea of keeping the test secret.
The second problem, thinking of the problems in the first place, might also be solved via the Internet. Perhaps the test problems themselves could be submitted over the Internet. A system could be set up where people who wanted to take the test would be able to, but they could not receive a “certified” test result until they had submitted some quality problems themselves.
However, experience with this kind of self-generating content over the Internet does not lead to optimism. Quality suffers. Various “political” agendas tend to crop up and mix in with the effort, contaminating the outcome. This has led to several failures, notably Internet dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.
There is an art to good test design, and the market for high-range tests will support relatively few artists. How can we leverage their efforts?
In looking at many tests, there is a certain pattern that appears. It is possible to classify the problems into groups. For example, Ron Hoeflin has a group of problems about cells formed by intersecting various solids such as spheres, cubes, etc. The solution to one member of this group (say, three cubes) does not help much in the solution of another (say, two cones and a sphere). Yet it might be the case that there is an underlying mathematics that yields the answers to all of the problems in the group. Then a very large number of problems could be generated, where the solution to one problem would not help in the solution of another. This would be ideal for creating an on-line test, because cheating would be impossible.
One difficulty would be in norming such a group of problems. It is usual practice to norm a problem by having a large number of people try exactly the same problem. If the problems were different, how could the test be normed? One problem in a group might be more difficult than another.
The answer to this is twofold: first, it is not true that a given problem has a specified difficulty. The difficulty of a problem is in the eyes of the beholder. What norming does is establish a distribution of difficulties over a sample population, which is an estimate of the distribution of difficulty over the entire population. Thus the real issue is to control the error bars around the estimated difficulty. A problem is rejected if the error bars are too large. Similarly, a group of problems would be rejected if its error bars are too large. The “art” is to select groups that have small error bars.
The second answer to this is to observe that an IQ is not estimated based upon one problem alone; there already is a group of problems involved, namely, the entire test itself. So what we are discussing here is the idea of estimating an IQ based upon a set of problems selected from a large normed set, versus estimating an IQ based upon a set of problems selected from a set of normed groups of problems. Either way, there is an inescapable statistical inference being performed; it’s all about propagation of errors.
Another objection to the idea of groups of problems with an underlying mathematical solution is that it might be possible to learn the underlying solution and thus learn how to answer all of the problems in the set. If the underlying mathematics is trivial, this is indeed a weakness. However, it might be that the underlying mathematics is sufficiently complicated that it is easy for a computer to work out, but difficult for a human to work out. Better yet, it might be a one-way or trapdoor function, such as occurs in many cryptographic systems. For example, the Allies during World War II had working copies of the Enigma cipher machine long before the war started, yet they were unable to crack the wartime coded correspondence without cribs, bombes, and a lot of espionage.
As a concrete example, consider problem 30 on the Mega Test. For those without the test at hand, this is the problem where three board positions in some game were given, and you had to figure out the fourth board position. Actually, the first half of the problem was to figure out that the figures shown were board positions in a game that was being played optimally. Even after figuring this out, however, it was a challenge to figure out what the underlying rules of the game were, and to deduce what the fourth position had to be. Now, this one problem could be expanded into a group of problems, by varying the underlying rules of the game and using standard alpha-beta pruned game tree search to find board positions that are unique and lead to simple answers. Even if a test taker know this was what was going on, it would take a similar level of mental effort to deduce the rules from the board positions in each case. And the solution for one set of rules would be of little help in the solution for another set. The size of the board, the number of different pieces, even the movement rules could be varied without greatly affecting the difficulty. A large group of problems with similar difficulty could be created, a group that, according to Grady Towers’ item analysis, is one of the best problems on the Mega Test.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Cole C. On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Cole, C. (2024, August 8). On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): COLE, C. On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Cole, Chris. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Cole, C “On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6.
Harvard: Cole, C. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6>.
Harvard (Australian): Cole, C 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Cole, Chris. “On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Chris C. On High-Range Test Construction 6: Chris Cole on How to Protect High-Range Tests [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-6.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests. Here we talk some updates in his work and professional life when applying his intelligence to work and personal situations. Yu discusses: globalized world; the foundational mark of a civilization; patterns of civilizations; the different periods of history; the contemporary period of civilization; the future stages of human civilization; difference between European, American, and Asian, academics; the rise and fall of nations; a cyclical nature of economies; anxiety; balance professional responsibilities and relaxation; and outspoken posts on Facebook.
Keywords: academic output differences, civilization evolution, cognitive consensus, individual sovereignty, personal sovereignty, self-doubt and anxiety, technological development, transcendent China.
Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With an increasingly globalized world, especially for the younger generations, do you think it’s still appropriate to talk about East and West as placeholders about the global order?
Tianxi Yu: The dominant group in globalization is not necessarily governments; the development of civilization is inevitably accompanied by a diminution of governmental power and the rise of individual sovereignty. Thus there are no two different symbols, East and West, but rather the cognitive consensus of individual human beings serves as a placeholder.
Jacobsen: What seems like the first instance of true human civilization to you? What is the foundational mark of a civilization?
Yu:Maybe humans learned to make fire? Or learned to use tools? Or learned to trade? It’s also possible that nothing that happens to humans now is enough to make up a collection. It seems to me that “civilization” gets its bearings when you fully realize that past actions were stupid, and that’s the beginning of civilization.
Jacobsen: What have been the historical trajectories or patterns of civilizations over time?
Yu: Based on artificial intelligence and cryptography, the evolution towards personal sovereignty begins
Jacobsen: What would demarcate the different periods of history into the present?
Yu: By the winners in history, may be based on technology, may be based on tactics, in short these winners make our history books read in order.
Jacobsen: What would best characterize the contemporary period of civilization?
Yu: It’s a hard choice, but for each person, it could be themselves
Jacobsen: How might this characterization be helpful in making predictions about the future stages of human civilization or, at least, the next likely steps?
Yu: The evolution of human society is long and tortuous; the slowness of evolution stems mainly from the corrosion of interest groups, and the collapse of interest groups inevitably accompanies every advance in civilization. So still from a human perspective, the more disgruntled humans there are, the more likely the next stage will come.
Jacobsen: What seems like the difference between European, American, and Asian, academics, academic communities, and academic output?
Yu: It’s hard for me to give a very in-depth judgment because I’m still only in the sewer of academia. But as most people believe, Europe and the United States tend to be more original in their academic output, while China tends to be more replicative and transcendent.
Jacobsen: What might be the rise and fall of nations in the midst of global politics, aging populations, low birth rates, populism, war, and the like, on the rise?
Yu: Decline due to war, political persecution, continued decline of newborn.; prosperity due to entering new narratives, creating hope, granting individual sovereignt.
Jacobsen: What contributes to a cyclical nature of economies?
Yu: On a micro level, it can be attributed to technological development, human mental activity, regime change …… But I prefer it to be a by-product of God’s creation. God exists and is immortal. And the economy is a pseudo-god, the only way to acquire divinity as a mortal.
Jacobsen: I’ve had anxiety too. What are your strategies for re-centering yourself, calming down?
Yu: Read psychology books, meditate on Buddhist scriptures, go for a walk and let yourself go
Jacobsen: Do you have any time to balance professional responsibilities and relaxation, and self-care?
Yu: Time is enough, but it’s hard to get yourself to really relax, especially when you’re done relaxing and facing reality.
Jacobsen: You have been an outspoken person. What were the reasons for the more recent outspoken posts on Facebook? How should they be interpreted? What were the reactions to those posts?
Yu: On a very offensive note, the vast majority of them are not intelligent, and in my opinion stupid, and I don’t get what I want within this group. I’m outspoken in many groups, even in my workplace, and I’m outspoken because I understand that I’m much better than the vast majority of these groups. That’s my backbone, but it’s also the source of my anxiety. A lot of my anxiety still stems from my loneliness, and while I say I believe in the existence of God, God is not the most powerful, and above God is the indescribable void. I know I can’t be an all-knowing, all-powerful God if I live 1000 years, but I want to go after Him too. God is not alone because He created the world and has countless children from whom He derives His emotions. But I don’t, and am far from God, and that has led to constant self-doubt and doubts about my abilities. Suffice it to say that acquiring more divinity is my goal in life, making money and a good job is just me finding something for me to do with myself. As for these posts, they were made because my emotions weren’t well relieved. I don’t think there’s much to explain, what other people think has nothing to do with me.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8). August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8).In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Globalization and Controversial Views (8) [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-8.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
The Peace School is new in Canada, founded and accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 2023. Currently, the school has five children with a capacity for 120 and is well-financed and supported by the parents whose children attend. The school’s pedagogy has attracted the attention and support of UNICEF, UNESCO, and UNHCR, which strongly encouraged Dr. Nasser Yousefi, the Principal of The Peace School, to share his pedagogy and learning environment with other countries. Canada was Dr. Yousefi’s first choice for the next Peace School. Dr. Yousefi began his career as a child psychologist, studying in Sweden and earning a Master’s in Education in Childhood Growth and Development. In his exploration of the best pedagogy and learning environment for children, Dr. Yousefi completed a PhD in Educational Approaches at Madonna University in Italy and a PhD in Educational Psychology at Northwest University in the USA. This training combined humanistic and cognitive approaches to education. For many years, Dr. Yousefi was an educational consultant for UNICEF. He has conducted educational and research activities for various groups of children, including immigrant children, minorities, street children, and children with special needs. Dr. Yousefi was the Principal of the Peace (Participatory) School in Tehran, Iran, from 2005 to 2023, graduating 500 students from kindergarten to high school, with graduates accepted at universities in Europe, America, and Canada. Dr. Yousefi is passionate about creating the best future for children and is dedicated to creating safe and nurturing learning environments based on holistic principles. Yousefi discusses: first interest in humanism; pushback; developing these programs for each student; trying to advocate for a humanist school system in Canada; and authentically focus on the student’s intellectual and emotional development.
Keywords: barriers in mainstream education, compassion and empathy, controlling educational approaches, humanist educational system, humanistic psychology, individualized education programs, intellectual and emotional development, student-centered learning.
On Humanist Education 1: Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi. They are originally from Iran but are now in Canada, specifically in Toronto. They have started a humanist educational system in Iran and are trying to implement the same system here in Canada. So, when did you first become interested in humanism, particularly in humanistic orientations around psychology and education?
Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi: As a psychology university student, I–Nasser–was initially interested in Piaget’s theories and methodology. However, when I started working with children, especially in rural communities, villages, and small towns, I found that this approach could have been more effective in those settings.
When I began working with refugee children living in camps or those experiencing difficult social and emotional circumstances, I realized the need for student-centred methods tailored to the individual needs of each student rather than a one-size-fits-all program. Working with a diverse group of children taught me that they have different needs and interests based on their life experiences and circumstances. This led me to adopt a student-centered and student-tailored approach to learning, drawing me into humanistic education.
I found that I had no other choice but to turn to humanism. Otherwise, I would have had to impose my ideas on the children rather than address their needs. My experience as a student in a controlling system made me determined to avoid repeating that scenario. Working with children at various times and circumstances taught me that students should have the choice to decide what they want and need to learn.
Humanistic education revealed to me that every child is unique and must discover their learning path, which is different from others. I realized that you can’t apply a single approach to all children; you need to see them individually and create an educational program tailored to each student. Allowing them to experience a variety of experiences helps them flourish. This led me to study Maslow and Rogers, whose ideologies influenced my approach.
Their ideal is to consciously prepare educational programs based on student’s needs, which requires constant adaptation from the teacher, not the students. I needed to harmonize with the students rather than expecting them to harmonize with me. The more I learned about humanistic education and psychology, the more intellectually and physically my students developed.
This realization led me to believe that providing opportunities for students to experience and explore without barriers is essential for their growth and expansion.
When you unblock students, they can learn and experience everything at their own pace. As they develop and learn more, you can develop alongside them. That’s why our school and system were ahead of other alternative systems in Iran. We learned that we need to move forward with our students. Was that enough or bad?
Jacobsen: Yes, it was enough and not bad, thank you. What about pushback? I hear all the time, from international cases, of societies with a religious, fundamental dominance of governance, policy, and social life pushing back against any efforts to implement anything remotely humanistic if not outright humanist. What did you experience from families, society, and even authorities?
Yousefi: When we started the school 20 years ago, it was new and still is for many people. Naturally, we faced issues, challenges, and pushbacks. One thing about families was that they wanted the school to teach familiar subjects to their kids, things they also learned in school. They worried that by emphasizing the students themselves to learn and decide what to learn, both families and educational specialists thought students wouldn’t know what they needed to learn. They believed it was our job and responsibility to tell them.
But I found that when you practice with students to experience and learn, they know what to choose and what they need. The biggest pushback we faced was the controlling mindset of adults who believed it was their right to decide what students should learn. This included families, society, and the government.
All of them wanted to decide for the children. At the beginning of the year, they would dictate what literature, science, and math meant. They were not open to teaching different narratives and perspectives. They insisted that history is what the government says, not any other narrative.
Our school encourages students to read from different perspectives and learn about various narratives. For instance, we tell them to read one book and then another that presents a different viewpoint. We want them to understand that different countries may have different versions of history.
Another challenge was the concern that allowing students to decide for themselves would make them stubborn and uncooperative. Many believed that giving control to students would make them selfish. But every time we listened to students and let them decide for themselves, they became more respectful toward us, because we gave them that opportunity.
They would listen to me even more when I listened to their needs and words. No other school saw as much respect or empathy from their students as we did. The mainstream system feared adopting this approach because they thought they couldn’t keep up and would need more resources or eventually give up. Public and other private schools preferred teachers to stick to a single, uniform curriculum nationwide.
But we had a specific program for each student in the classroom. It was hard for the teacher, and the controlling system didn’t want this to happen.
Jacobsen: When it comes to developing these programs for each student, is it as time-intensive as it sounds, or is there a factor of, in fact, saving time when you’re allowing students to develop their way of learning and choosing material educationally? So, on the one hand, it is theoretically more difficult to deal with custom or individualized education programs per student. At the same time, you have something like a reverse classroom where you’re removing barriers for students to learn at their own pace and pick subjects that interest them. While there’s probably still a core of subjects they’re all learning, is there a way in which, on the surface, it could seem more difficult to implement, but in a way, you’re also saving a lot of time and effort by allowing students to develop their capacities to learn?
Yousefi: Yes. The students would say what they wanted and were interested in learning, and the teacher acted as a facilitator to help them learn that, drawing a path for them. Yes, it was easier for the students to develop faster and learn what they wanted to learn. However, it was challenging for the teacher to help every student simultaneously because each child has unique needs. The diversity in our educational programs was due to the diversity of our student’s needs, not because we needed more ideas. The students themselves brought the ideas and had the initiative.
But we did have some subjects and topics we wanted all students to learn. After introducing and discussing the topic, we encouraged them to explore it independently and from different perspectives and resources. For example, we propose learning about a poet. One student might be interested in the poems themselves, another in the poet’s biography, and another in different forms of poetry or the historical context of the poet’s time.
Jacobsen: When you were trying to advocate for a humanist school system in Canada, what barriers did you experience? What differences did you notice compared to the situation in Iran?
Yousefi: The mainstream educational systems worldwide, including Canada, are heavily influenced by controlling and behaviourist approaches. In some places, it is different because they might have more resources or opportunities to deviate from the norm, but in general, they are based on behaviourism. Schools focus on preparing students to memorize information and prepare for current job markets.
There aren’t enough systems that teach students they can positively change the world. The Ministry of Education in every country tends to maintain the current situation through schools rather than encouraging transformative thinking and humanistic education.
They don’t want their students to know how to change the situation. It doesn’t matter where—Switzerland, Canada, Iran, or anywhere else—every adult thinks they know better than children what is best and what is not best. “I have to determine what students should learn and study.” This controlling idea could be more or less prevalent in different countries and circumstances. They even determine how students should look at things, dictating their perspective. It’s like a 3D movie where the movie directs you to look at specific points, saying, “This is what we want you to focus on right now.”
This approach only allows students to think dependently. No school asks students, “What do you think? What makes you happy? What are you suffering from? How do you see the world?” There needs to be more engagement with students’ perspectives and experiences. Only a few schools or teachers telling students they can change the world. Instead, they often say, “You need to fit into the system.” This mindset discourages students from believing they can positively impact and improve the world for everyone.
Mainstream schools teach students to think about themselves and become individualistic, aiming for personal success, even if it’s at the expense of others. This fosters a mindset where some people lie, create, or develop things that are harmful to humanity. They need to think about solutions that are equal and equitable.
The humanist educational approach advocates for a different ideology. It aims to help the world become a better place by empowering each person to show their talents and contribute positively. This is also true for Canada, where schools rarely ask students how they can help make the world a better place. This is one of the barriers we face constantly.
Teachers often need more time or energy to consider a child’s needs and interests. Globally, the love that people should have for each other needs to be improved. If, as a teacher, I don’t love my students, I can’t teach them to love others. We have doctors and other professionals who don’t show care and empathy towards those they serve.
We don’t teach love in schools. They might teach sex education and other subjects, but they don’t address the concept of love. Both are important. If we don’t teach students about love, we are taking something vital away from them. In most systems, people are considered numbers rather than individuals with unique needs and potential.
It doesn’t matter if it’s one more or one less. To them, it’s just a number. This humanistic approach is trying to promote human love. Every human being, wherever they are, is important. It’s about recognizing the combination of a person’s identity, their emotional aspects, and social aspects. This holistic view helps make the world a better place to live. If I can’t empathize with your sadness or suffering, I can’t truly help you. Compassion is at the heart of humanist education principles.
So, the humanist educational approach revolves around compassion, empathy, and love. While acknowledging the importance of the individual, it also emphasizes the importance of others. The education system in Canada and other countries often needs this focus.
Jacobsen: Last question. From what I’m gathering, does this humanist educational program, individualized per student and grounded in humanistic psychology, authentically focus on the student’s intellectual and emotional development?
Yousefi: Yes, exactly. The program helps students develop intellectually and emotionally by allowing them to learn what they need while being mindful of and caring for others. It adapts to the situation at hand but remains focused on authentic development.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). On Humanist Education 1: Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On Humanist Education 1: Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On Humanist Education 1: Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/humanist-education-iran-1.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On Humanist Education 1: Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/humanist-education-iran-1.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On Humanist Education 1: Dr. Nasser Yousefi and Baran Yousefi.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/humanist-education-iran-1.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
A seasoned Musician (Vocals, Guitar and Piano), Filmmaker, and Actor, J.D. Mata has composed 100 songs and performed 100 shows and venues throughout. He has been a regular at the legendary “Whisky a Go Go,” where he has wooed audiences with his original shamanistic musical performances. He has written and directed nerous feature films, web series, and music videos. J.D. has also appeared in various national T.V. commercials and shows. Memorable appearances are TRUE BLOOD (HBO) as Tio Luca, THE UPS Store National television commercial, and the lead in the Lil Wayne music video, HOW TO LOVE, with over 129 million views. As a MOHAWK MEDICINE MAN, J.D. also led the spiritual-based film KATERI, which won the prestigious “Capex Dei” award at the Vatican in Rome. J.D. co-starred, performed and wrote the music for the original world premiere play, AN ENEMY of the PUEBLO — by one of today’s preeminent Chicana writers, Josefina Lopez! This is J.D.’s third Fringe; last year, he wrote, directed and starred in the Fringe Encore Performance award-winning “A Night at the Chicano Rock Opera.” He is in season 2 of his NEW YouTube series, ROCK god! J.D. is a native of McAllen, Texas and resides in North Hollywood, California. Mata discusses: production and sound; best practice over time; the bass beat foundation; describing the structure of a town or the construction process; Tejano music being dance music; American culture; communal patriarchal hierarchy; emotions in performance and practice; and the environment.
Keywords: American individualism versus Mexican communal culture, bass and drums in Tejano music production, chaos of recording without bass foundation, importance of Tejano music’s danceable beat, Mexican patriarchal influence in Tejano music, recording process for Tejano music structure, Tejano music’s communal roots and performance, vocals as the body of the song.
On Tejano Music 4: Basic Instrumentation
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Would you consider the accordion, the bajo sexto, brass instruments, the keyboard, or the vocals more essential in terms of production and sound? Which one typically leads the rest of the instrumentation?
J.D. Mata: The bass and the drums are the heartbeat of the music. When you’re doing a recording session, that’s the first thing you record. You record the bass and the drums first, then go on to a dummy vocal track. If you’re a dummy and you’re singing, it’s a dummy vocal track.
I’m just kidding. But yes, the bass and drums drive Tejano music. Then you have the guitar, which provides the rhythm, if you will. The bass goes boom, the guitar goes chat-chat, and the drums tie it all together. So, I would rank bass and drums tied first, then guitar, and then the keyboard. It’s essential.
Usually, the keyboard provides the opening lead and then adds the dressing. The keyboard is the dressing on the salad. If you eat the salad dry, it will taste better. But when you add some delicious dressing, that’s what the keyboards and horns are.
I would give vocals an honourable mention. In terms of driving force, bass and drums are number one. Of course, the vocals deserve an honourable mention for driving force. They are the body of the song. The human body has skin and bones, but without the heart, arteries, DNA, and white cells, the body won’t stand. It’s like having no knees—the body falls. The singing is the body of the song.
The voice and the words are the attractive part of the music. The words are the beautiful dance, the movement. But the bass and drums are the song’s heartbeat, force, and strength. Cartilage and ligaments, which connect everything, would be the keyboards and the guitar. That’s how I would answer that.
Jacobsen: Was this discovered as best practice over time, or has it always been that way?
Mata: It’s always been that way because that’s how it is. For example, let’s say you want to be a Tejano artist and start a band. If you’re a singer, you can’t go on stage and sing, expecting everybody to dance and follow without a bass. There’s no structure, no heart. You must find yourself a good drummer and bass player to get a band together. It’s been that way since the beginning of Tejano’s time.
Jacobsen: If you were to record a song, why is starting with the bass beat foundational? It’s possible to structure in reverse order if you’re thinking about a recording studio without regard to the audience because the end product is the song. But if you do it that reverse way, what happens? What chaos ensues?
Mata: Interestingly enough, many bands, including The Beatles, when they first started recording with only two tracks, would record the whole song together: bass, drums, guitar, and vocals. Then, they would do some backup vocals as another track. To get the feel and energy of the song, some bands record it as a band, which can be very effective. To answer your production question, yes, it would be chaotic if you tried to do a song without starting with the bass and the drums. People need to understand that music is math—time signatures: 1, 2, 12, 1234, 12, 3.
Let’s say we do 8 bars. If you’re in 4/4 time, 8 bars of 4/4 equals 32 beats: 1-2-3-4, 2. 8 times four is 32. So, the drums and the bass are the math behind the song. If you try to sing or play the guitar or keyboard first, you could set up the math if the keyboard player is good with a click track. If your keyboard player has to go out of town, you could record his track first. Then, you’d record bass, drums, and guitar. They could all be recorded simultaneously, but you’d start with the keyboards for a keeper recording and then wrap up the keyboard track.
The keyboard will be on time if you’re using a click track. Before clicking tracks, bands are recorded by feel, which can be complicated without a solid metronome. Recording on feel means the feel comes from the bass and drums, not the keyboard. Following the bass and drums rather than the keyboard, vocalist, or guitarist makes more sense. Yes, it would be chaotic otherwise. Some artists start with drums and guitars, but drums are always first. Mathematically, the common denominator is the drums.
Jacobsen: So, you’re describing the structure of a town or the construction process?
Mata: Correct. It would be like putting in a house’s piping and electrical work without laying the foundation.
Jacobsen: Like putting the cart before the horse?
Mata: Exactly. It could be done, but it would be quite a feat. This is crucial because Tejano music is meant to be danced to. It has to have a solid beat. People dance to Tejano music. While you can dance to classical music, Tejano is primarily for movement. Musicians know it has to be structurally sound in terms of timing, rhythm, and the makeup of the instruments. You want a hook from the beginning and a nice, catchy intro, usually with the keyboard or a horn section.
The song’s structure typically includes an intro, the first verse, then a chorus, back to the intro, another verse, a chorus, and sometimes a middle 8. The usual structure is the intro, verse, chorus, instrumentation (a variation of the intro), verse 2, chorus, and out.
Jacobsen: There was a Kenyan master of an instrument called the nyatiti named Ayub Ogada. I suggest everyone reading this go and listen to songs like “Obiero” or something similar. In his last interview, Ayub Ogada talked about how his instrument was meant to be played communally. He described how, every time he played, he gave part of himself away. His general philosophy on life came from the communal aspect of music. He figured that he would have given the rest of himself away when he finally stopped being here. It was about giving oneself through one’s instrument to the community, being part of it, and being in it. It’s shocking to Western ears that someone like that even exists, but many like him exist. Do you think this idea of Tejano music being dance music is part of that commonality? In our first session, we discussed how people playing in these Tejano bands entertained those working some of the hardest blue-collar jobs.
Mata: Yes. First of all, I profoundly identify with that philosophy. My life has gotten complicated regarding relationships because, as a musician, this is what I do as a career. I don’t know if I shared this with you yet, but this might be the first time. It’s my philosophy that, for me, it’s mandatory. Before we started the session, I talked about how complicated it is to get rich and famous. I am not rich and famous for the sake of vanity but for being able to have my recording studio, buy the best instruments possible, and employ other artists. That’s my vanity. But to get to that level, you have to give everything.
Ayub Ogada says he gives his instrument; I must give everything. I’ve been in relationships where I told musicians this, and now I’m telling you for the first time because it’s part of my evolution. As a musician, and this applies to my Mexican culture and Tejano roots, we’re very sensitive. We’ll give you the shirt off our back, but if you don’t give me your shirt, look out.
As a musician, I give everything. Before this session, I was late because I was working on a song. I could be out doing a dozen other things, but I stay here and practice all day. So, when I’m in a relationship, and my girlfriend or friend is having a party, if I’m not the first person they think of to hire for music, then either she doesn’t care about me, or I need to be better.
You have to be so good that when people say, “I’m gonna have a party,” they think, “I gotta get JD.” If you’re not the go-to guy for your loved ones, you’re not good enough, and you can’t expect success. You must be so good that you’re the first person they call. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.
You have to have it to relate to what you’re saying. You can’t give what you don’t have. You must be so good that to share the music with everyone, you must have it. The only way to have it is to work hard. If you don’t have it, the people around you will tell you by not asking. They’ll tell you by omission. I was dating someone, and they had two or three parties, and I wasn’t asked to play.
Jacobsen: Did they ever want you to come over to play, considering this person had a piano?
Mata: I don’t know what the rationale is, but I failed because of my way of thinking. I need to be better. That may be why I’m not famous yet, but I’m working on it.
Jacobsen: American culture is famously individualistic, if not hyper-individualistic. Mexican culture is more communal. Do you think Tejano music, being a mixture of polka, Texan elements, and some Mexican music, is more influenced by Mexican communal culture than American individualism?
Mata: Yes, it’s indeed Mexican. It’s patriarchal in that the male often dominates the family structure in Mexican culture. For a long time, Tejano music was male-dominated. But then, with Selena and others like Laura Canales and Shelley Lares, female entertainers started breaking the glass ceiling.
Patriarchal. That’s the word. It’s patriarchal because male dominance is evident. You must be bold and brave to get in front of people, perform, and set yourself up for scrutiny. There’s a certain amount of craziness and insanity required to put yourself up for scrutiny. This applies to Tejano music and probably other genres, too.
The desire to be invited to play is also existential because if you’re not playing, you’re not eating. So, it’s survival of the fittest. The strongest musically survive. This is Mexican-oriented as well. Mexican culture is family-oriented and group-oriented, but there’s always the dominant one in the family, the alpha, and the alpha in music.
Jacobsen: A communal patriarchal hierarchy, right?
Mata: Yes, exactly. Mexican alpha. Music is a lot about feelings and emotions. If someone keeps returning to a song, something about the rhythm or the lyrics touches them, and it’s difficult to ignore them.
Jacobsen: I was in the university choir for two and a half years. Any external stressor could dampen my feel for a song, which would have been more expressive in a prior context. Suppose artists struggle with rent or food or have difficulties with friends or partners who need help understanding the artistic pursuit. How does that impact their ability to envelope their emotions in performance and practice? Is it a trained skill to overcome that blockade?
Mata: Yes. It’s something you either have, or you don’t. It’s an inherent skill. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people tell me, “You need to get a job.” It’s like, f-you. This is my job. I am an artist. I’m a musician. I’m an actor. I’m a filmmaker. That’s what I do. If you’re not being compensated, you have to figure it out. You have to get good enough. It would help to put yourself in the right place and time for things to happen.
Unlike academia, where you study hard and get your bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD. In the music industry, acting industry, or any creative industry, you can work your ass off, but there are so few opportunities out there. Part of the genetic makeup has to be the drive to do it no matter what. There would be a thousand more Tejano artists or musicians if hard work alone determined success. It’s hard work, but it’s also luck. It’s about showing up too.
It’s 80% inspiration and 20% perspiration. It would help if you stuck it out and did not leave a day before the miracle happened. That drive can’t be taught. It’s something innate.
Jacobsen: Do you think the environment can reinforce or modify this, even though it’s mostly innate?
Mata: I don’t think so. I’m thinking of Jason Castaneda, an incredible piano player and singer. Look that cat up. He’s great. He played Tejano. He was much better than me as a musician, but I had the drive to perform more. He became a successful lawyer with a huge house and all these pianos and guitars. He had to give up music to become rich and successful, but he won’t be famous. Maybe I’ll make him famous now. I hypothesize that you either have the “it” factor, the genetic makeup, the inherent ability to stick it out no matter what, or you don’t. It shouldn’t be taught.
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). On Tejano Music 4: Basic Instrumentation. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On Tejano Music 4: Basic Instrumentation.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Entemake Aman claims to be a super genius, because he is a member of the Olympiq and Mensa Associations, the theoretical threshold for Olympiq is 175 (SD 15). He claims that his IQ is between 199 (SD 16) because ‘he has done some IQ problems correctly that no one has ever done correctly’ on the SLSEI. Aman discusses: some misconceptions about genius, about how geniuses think, the characteristics of different ranges of genius, and the conditions for genius success, and to help solve some doubts on IQ; IQ testing, high IQ societies, and the integrity of IQ assessments; emphasizing the need for accurate, secure testing methods and the societal implications of intelligence measurement.
Keywords: Asian test takers cheating methods, Christopher Langan and America’s highest IQ, consciousness formed by brain currents, evolutionary importance of g factor intelligence, high IQ societies and gender disparity, most Americans care about IQ tests, statistical formulas used in IQ testing, testing experts ensuring IQ test quality.
Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ
Scott DouglasJacobsen: You reached out about a week ago. This began a longer series of correspondence together again. Let’s get your perspective on some of these topics raised. What is the basis for differently defined groups having different standard deviations? How is a different standard deviation helpful?
Entemake Aman: The current global IQ SD is 15. European and American IQ SD must be 15. I’m not sure about the IQ SD in other regions.
Jacobsen: Are Ronald Hoeflin and Paul Cooijmans the most legitimate in rigorous high intelligence associations and management?
Aman: The two of them have done a good job in ensuring the quality of members of giga society, Prometheus Society, Mega Society, etc. Both are very responsible. I think they are the two hardest working and most successful IQ test experts in the high IQ circle.
Jacobsen: Why focus on paper envelope IQ test?
Aman: I think testers who can submit paper emails are more loyal, which adds to the cost of multiple submissions. The High IQ Circle only accepts one or two submissions.
Jacobsen: Are answers leaked in Asia?
Aman: In China, answers to high IQ tests were leaked. According to my analysis and observation, the credibility of China’s high scores has declined since 2016.
Jacobsen: What defines a good statistician to you, a qualified one?
Aman: Possess in-depth knowledge of statistics.
Jacobsen: What are your opinions on the Mega Test and Titan Test, excluding the fact of being compromised tests now?
Aman: The Mega Test and Titan Test questions are highly scientific and authoritative. Its norm has millions of SAT or GRE scores used for statistics. It can measure the IQ of 160sd15 relatively accurately. The norm of IQ of 160 to 185sd15 is also relatively accurate. But it requires speaking English and some knowledge, which reduces the number of tests for people whose native language is not English, so the number of Asians with high IQs in mega society and prometheus is relatively small.
Jacobsen: What’s your assessment of the development of the Mega Test?
Aman: The norms of Mega Test are the most scientific and authoritative in the world. I think the IQ between 160 and 185sd15 in its norms is also accurate.
Jacobsen: Why do Americans seem to care the most in the world about IQ while still having cared much, much less about IQ than previous decades in their country?
Aman: The Prometheus Society accepts SAT scores from before 1995, indicating that most Americans will take an IQ test once in their lifetime. This also shows that it is easier for geniuses to enter prestigious American schools. The United States is also the country with the largest number of Mensa members. There are gifted classes in the United States, and IQ tests are mentioned in many American movies. Whether America’s enthusiasm for IQ testing has declined I don’t know.
Jacobsen: What about the fact that even with the plentiful old SAT and GRE scores considered never inferred above 160?
Aman: The IQ corresponding to the old SAT full score is about 160sd15. IQ scores after 160sd15 need to be calculated by IQ testing experts through rules and mathematical formulas and mapped to the area of 160 to 200sd15 of the normal distribution.
Jacobsen: Have you thought of asking a professional psychometrician in these areas for their expert opinion?
Aman: I thought it would be better to ask multiple IQ test experts who have in-depth knowledge of statistics.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the 2019 norms from Redvaldsen?
Aman: This is the first time I’ve seen this unique spec in decades. What we need to consider is the accuracy of the norm between 160 and 200sd15. I carefully looked at the calculation of the norm between 160 and 185sd15 on the current mega test official website. I think this is very scientific and reasonable. I believe that there must be people with IQs reaching 195SD15 in the current high-IQ circle (because the high-IQ circle has a history of several decades). In decades of history, only one person has received a perfect score on the Titan test (so this person’s IQ cannot be only 170sd16). Don’t be fooled by China’s super high IQ scores after 2016, at least two statisticians must agree before I can consider the 2019 standards accurate. I think most circles have upper limits on certain attributes of people, including circles with high IQs, so I still believe in the previous mega test norms.
Jacobsen: Who have been frauds in the Asian circles?
Aman: Some Chinese people deleted on WGD. I’m not interested in this now. I recommend that high-volume testing experts replace their IQ tests, preferably with paper envelope IQ tests.
Jacobsen: What are ways test makers can protect themselves?
Aman: I recommend not making the test questions public and only submitting IQ tests in paper envelopes. If the test has many super high scores, it is recommended to change the questions.
Jacobsen: What experts in community might be good to ask this?
Aman: Look for him among the world’s top school. Let world-renowned statisticians and psychometricians discuss it together.
Jacobsen: How can these formulas be used incorrectly?
Aman: I don’t know much about statistical formulas and need to contact a world-renowned statistician to check. However, I personally think that in-depth statistical knowledge is not required. For example, attributes related to human genes: height, we also use experts to map them to the normal distribution.
Jacobsen: What were main ways in which Asian test takers cheated?
Aman: If the liar has the answer, there are various ways.
Jacobsen: What are some other protections against tests being compromised?
Aman: Test authors can limit someone to only two commits. Some questions ask test takers to explain the logic of the question.
Jacobsen: What have Hoeflin and Cooijmans achieved in their time?
Aman: Hoeflin was the pioneer of the 160 to 185SD15 test, and Cooijmans did a good job in not making the test questions public. His website has many articles about high IQ. Both are honest and responsible.
Jacobsen: What tests of Cooijmans seems like the best?
Aman: To be honest, I haven’t read too many IQ questions about him.
Jacobsen: Do Christopher Michael Langan and Rick Rosner seem like the smartest measured people in the United States?
Aman: There are 330 million people in the United States, and their score is one in 100 million. So many people in the United States focus on IQ. I think the smartest people in America should have their IQ tested, so they are the two smartest people in America.
Jacobsen: What questions should these statisticians ask about high-range testing?
Aman: They should check whether statistics are used appropriately in the IQ range of 160 to 200.
Jacobsen: How does height map onto IQ as a concept?
Aman: Height and IQ are both determined by genes and conform to normal distribution, excluding patients with gigantism.
Jacobsen: What are other comparisons relevant to IQ?
Aman: It may include strength. Most of the attributes determined by genes may conform to the normal distribution.
Jacobsen: Are there any consequences for irresponsible people in these areas?
Aman: If people in this field are irresponsible, then this field has no meaning of existence.
Jacobsen: What IQ questions should be asked about Rosner and Langan – the bouncer geniuses? Obviously, media questions matter in relation to IQ with certain insane aspects of a person. In fact, ethics to the public in questioning tend towards ethics overcoming importance of IQ. Keith Raniere isn’t discussed as a genius much or for his high IQ. They talk about his crimes first. Rick gets obsessive; Langan makes crazy claims; Raniere commits crimes; vos Savant led the more normal life. Richard May dove into Daoism and poetry. Marilyn vos Savant and Richard May seem more rational than the others. Same with Chris Cole. All very high scorers on the Mega Test.
Aman: People with the highest IQs should study difficult mathematics problems. I suggest that they study the world’s most difficult mathematics problems. The media pays more attention to the achievements of geniuses or other shining points. For example, the media pays attention to the world’s most powerful chess masters and mathematicians.
Jacobsen: Who seems like the smartest in Europe?
Aman: Mislav Predavec.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on Marco Ripa, Evangelos Katsioulis, Heinrich Siemens, Kenneth Ferrell, YoungHoon Kim, WenChin Sui, Marios Prodromou, Cường Đồng, Tomáš Perna, or Tom Chittenden?
Aman: Have not thought. But I’m more concerned about the results of people who submitted paper envelope IQ tests and Cooijman’s IQ tests.
Jacobsen: What do you think both a 47/48 on the Mega Test and a 48/48 on the Titan Test indicates about Rick Rosner?
Aman: I think it is his most valuable IQ score test. Because these two tests are well-known, scientific, and authoritative, and norm is also very good！
Jacobsen: What kinds of mathematical problems seem like the most difficult?
Aman: Questions that extremely require IQ are the most difficult, which is why the world-famous mathematician’s IQ is estimated to be the highest career!
Jacobsen: Could there be someone, like a Leonardo Da Vinci or a Newton, who amount to someone with the gigantism equivalent in IQ?
Aman: The two of them are giants in IQ, not gigantism. One of their IQs is 190 and the other is 180!
Jacobsen: What seems to explain the lack of women in these higher end IQ societies? The ones with higher rarities.
Aman: Women also have geniuses. For example, two women scored 46 points on the mega test, both appearing to be submitting for the first time! IQ may be determined by the X chromosome, because women have one more X chromosome than men, and genius requires an X chromosome mutation, so they are less likely to have a higher IQ than men.
Jacobsen: For the purposes of this interview, I interviewed several editions of the World Genius Directory over the years. When I analyze the individuals in the World Genius Directory, I can tell you. Several have been removed over the years and do not exist on the current listing anymore. This likely isn’t everyone. However, I found the following people on prior versions and not on a current one, as of December 30, 2023: Alessandro Giona, Amro Mously, Antonio Enemuwe, Barry Beanland, Brandon Taylor, Brenda Williams, Brennan Martin, Chikako Majima, Christina Streich, Corinna Mazzillo, Danyang Sun, Dawid Skrzos, Divyaanand Sinha, Dusko Jelaska, Ellis Reppo, Eric Leavitt, Felix Veilleux-Juillet, Fengzhi Wu, Frank Aiello, Frederik Pannecoucke, Gareth Rees, Georgios Elias, Glenn Alden, Goh Minakawa, Gregor Torinus, Hankyung Lee, Hever Gutiérrez, Hohyeon Kim, James Gordon, Johnathan Machler, Jorge Del Fresno, Jorge Montero, José Molinero, Junxie Huang, Wajung Kim, Kamil Tront, Katsuo Matsudaira, Katsutaka Iijima, Kentaro Chiba, Kimmo Kostamo, Kohtaro Harakawa, Konstantinos Ntalachanis, Koutarou Oono, Lee Hankyung, Li Yulia, Luca Farinelli, Marc Nydegger, Masahiro Suzukawa, Matthew Hall, Michael Fekade, Michael Stokes, Michalis Kamprianis, Miroslav Radojevic, Mohammed Jabri, Nasrudin Salim, Nikola Stojicevic, Okay Karakas, Panos Karabelas, Patrick Zimmerschied, Paul Nachbar, Prof Felipe Dantas, Robert Bigdowski, Sadaharu Ohgane, Samuel Harris, Sanghyun Cho, Shalom Dickson, Shojiro Kanazawa, Spandan Chowdhury, Stevan Damjanovic, Steven Elliott, Steven Michaels, Taha Malubhaiwala, Takahiro Kiyoshi, Takehiro Komyo, Tej Abhilash, Theo Leworthy, Tommi Laiho, Tsuneo Takase, Vedran Glisic, Wungging Chan, Yan Detao, Yang Zhang, Yasuhiro Kudo, Yoshiyuki Takano. What seem like the reasons individuals might be removed from such a listing? [Ed. Since then, potentially an alert, some names may have been put back on it. If so, you’re welcome.]
Aman: There could be several reasons for this, it could be that the WGD website is compromised and there is no backup name. But I know the reasons why the results of two people were deleted, and one of them was also deleted by the Olympiq Association. The score of another person is the current upper limit of the score in the high IQ circle (Mislav Predavec can only be ranked second, formerly mislav predavec ranked first). I suggest you ask the founder of WGD directly.
Jacobsen: One of your introductions, sincere as it was, proclaimed a sincere desire to become famous and wanting me to make you famous. I doubt I can do that in full. Also, you wanted to become famous like Christopher Michael Langan. As a North American, I can tell you. He isn’t that famous. He’s a minor figure with occasional reappearances with re-discovery by new generations of mostly young guys. More than anything, he is infamous. How would you like to become famous while avoiding infamy?
Aman: I didn’t know that Christopher Langan was notorious. I only knew that he was the smartest person in America. I can be on the international news because of my genius IQ. Do more good deeds, be a good person, study hard, and use my high IQ on the right path to contribute to society.
Jacobsen: What would be a nice new kind of IQ test item type?
Aman: Innovative, scientific, and authoritative. The author has knowledge of spiritual psychology and has a very high IQ.
Jacobsen: Do you think it’s reasonable for brain scands to replace IQ tests in the future?
Aman: I don’t know this, but I heard that the amount of gray matter in the brain is related to IQ, and the degree of selfishness of a person is also related to the gray matter in the brain. You can search it on Google.
Jacobsen: I note individuals who get found out as cheaters in community tend to disappear within the high-IQ communities. Is that your observation too? They get removed from listings and lose all credibility, naturally.
Aman: At present, some false scores in the high-IQ circle have not been discovered because there is no evidence. So now I only focus on the paper envelope IQ test and Cooijmans test scores.
Jacobsen: Where do you think the central processing for general intelligence is housed in the brain?
Aman: Gray Matter.
Jacobsen: Do you think computers will match human general intelligence?
Aman: No, because of lack of emotion and soul.
Jacobsen: If so, when do you think computers will match and even surpass human intelligence?
Aman: Lack of awareness. Can’t surpass humans in terms of G factor.
Jacobsen: Do you think machines will integrate with the human mind? Evangelos in his interview years ago with me said that he believed there’s no limit to the integration between humans and machines.
Aman: Can be fused, increase the speed of human thinking, so that humans are no longer tired and may not need to sleep.
Jacobsen: In this sense, can human beings be considered an advanced form of machine, an evolved biological machine?
Aman: Humans are not machines; biological machines also need electricity to survive. My guess is that biological machines may not get sick.
Jacobsen: What do you think drove human evolution to emphasize intelligence so much in humans?
Aman: Natural selection, genetic mutation.
Jacobsen: Ignoring the smartest person in history, who do you think is the most interesting genius in history?
Aman: Newton was famous in many fields, but he never got married.
Jacobsen: How are you defining emotions?
Aman: Emotions are moods, and bad emotions can bring you bad luck. I offended someone in my birth year because of my bad mood, which resulted in my bad luck.
Jacobsen: How are you defining the soul?
Aman: The soul may be related to quantum, and the experiment of quantum entanglement shows that the soul may exist. Soul creates consciousness.
Jacobsen: Why can’t computers surpass humans in g factor?
Aman: Because the g factor is related to the DNA on the X chromosome, the G factor is a reaction of consciousness, and the computer has no consciousness or soul.
Jacobsen: What if the apparent g factor is, in fact, not general in any real sense and only seems general? In that, it is not a general factor. It is an illusion of a general cognitive ability.
Aman: The G factor is not memory or logical reasoning ability. Because of Shakespeare, Mozart also has a high G factor. G-Factor is an inspiration. We should use the G factor to make innovative inventions that contribute to society, such as studying mathematics.
Jacobsen: What seems like the evolutionary importance of a g factor?
Aman: It is precisely because humans evolved into high G factors that humans created all civilizations.
Jacobsen: What is your favourite part about Mensa?
Aman: Mensa has real-name inspection and proctoring, so it is almost guaranteed that all members have IQs above 148sd24.
Jacobsen: If a person who takes a test knows the test-taker, does this seem like a conflict of interest to you?
Aman: There is a little bit of presence. Testing may be discussed.
Jacobsen: If a person who is graded as having a certain IQ score, and if that person knows the individual scoring them or giving their IQ score, does this seem like a conflict of interest to you?
Aman: If the question maker has a very high IQ and the question is authoritative and scientifically recognized, I think the question maker will be honest and responsible. I don’t pay much attention to low-authority IQ test scores.
Jacobsen: How did you offend someone in your birth year?
Aman: In China, 12.24…48…60 is the year of birth. When I was 24 years old，When I was supposed to sleep in the dormitory, I hammered the wall with my hand because I was in a bad mood. Offended a little person.Later, due to a series of reasons, I got very bad results.
Jacobsen: How did that offense result in bad luck?
Aman: The process at that time was very complicated, mainly because the unlucky thing happened at an unlucky time. From then on I believed in Chinese metaphysics
Jacobsen: What are the forms of bad luck you’ve been perceiving?
Aman: The thing that shouldn’t have happened happened at a time that coincidentally made it worse. 60% of cancers are also caused by bad luck. The unfortunate thing is that a small probability event happens to cause you to have a very bad outcome. I think if you do more good deeds and stay in a good mood, good luck will be attracted to you, just like quantum entanglement.
Jacobsen: What if we’re assuming the soul to fill the gap, to make the explanation for the apparent unity of human experience? In other words, what if the soul doesn’t exist? Where, it’s an illusion of human experience.
Aman: Without the soul, humans would not have consciousness.
Jacobsen: What do you think of consciousness?
Aman: Consciousness may be formed by quanta. Consciousness is the memories and images that appear in the brain, which may be formed by brain currents.
Jacobsen: How is the g factor an inspiration, in order to get a more in-depth definition?
Aman: The G factor is the ability to extract common rules from scattered and incomplete observations, and the ability to generate inspiration in an instant to solve difficult problems during observation.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/aman
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/aman.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/aman.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/aman>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/aman>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Entemake Aman on HRIQ.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/aman.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Dr. Alon Milwicki is a senior research analyst in the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Milwicki discusses: Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, Biden; and Zionist banker Jews, Israel, and racism.
Keywords: Anti-Zionism presupposes finite Zionism definition, appease and support Israel Jews, Biden drops out, what’s happening, building cars that break on stage, debate about what makes good Jew, Elon Musk and Soros trope, finite definition of Zionism agenda, Jewish enough for antisemitic denigration.
Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Elon Musk has been described as a puppet master, and Biden has dropped out. What’s going on there? And who is this Elon Musk?
Dr. Alon Milwicki: Elon Musk has previously raged against Soros and similar figures. Let’s put it that way. For whatever reason, Elon Musk has wholly bought into the Soros trope.
I do not know his motives, but the damage it has done is astronomical, given the number of followers he has, the amount of support he has, and the fact that he was supposedly personally invited to Netanyahu’s speech. That gives him credibility that I do not believe he should be afforded because in what universe is he an expert on anything other than how to build cars that, when he throws stuff at them saying they will not break, they break on stage?
You know? So, he recently tweeted something again about Soros, and then he makes this, like, “pilgrimage” with Ben Shapiro to Auschwitz or something, as if that is somehow going to erase it. So, like anything else, like anyone else who dabbles in antisemitic tropes, there is a specific utilitarian aspect that he sees in Jewish people, and that is becoming more dominant.
I would say, Trump in America today, that there is a need to appease and support Israel and, by extension, Jews. Because if you do not, bad things will happen, or you will lose support, or you will lose money, or you will lose power because those are all the things that Jews inherently have, supposedly, if that makes sense.
Jacobsen: So what do you make of this commentary around the idea that there are good Jews and bad Jews and that the Zionist banker Jews are misleading the rest of them, so even the good ones misbehave? Moreover, that is the reality.
Milwicki: There has always been a debate about what makes a good Jew. Moreover, you will see a lot of this almost intra-party racism as well. There are different beliefs within the Jewish community about what makes you Jewish. To many people, if you do not fully support Israel, you are not Jewish.
To many people, if you do not condemn Islam, you are not Jewish. To others, if you do not observe Shabbat, you are not Jewish. You know? So, I mean, first of all, my question would be, who is labelling good Jews and bad Jews?
Put it this way: by any extension, within Jewish people, I would be labelled a bad Jew because I and religion went our separate ways when I was about 11 years old. Like, pardon my French; I do not care about religion at all. Like, it is just not my thing.
However, I am Jewish enough for antisemites. Okay? So, I am good enough for antisemites. You know? I fulfill enough qualifications to make me a Jew for people to denigrate Jewish people. Whoever creates that dichotomy has an agenda, and it is most likely speaking to that utilitarian aspect. You know?
That it is the good Jews we want to work with. It is the bad Jews we want to ostracize, and that kind of concept has existed. I just started reading this book about Zionism and some of the stuff I already knew.
However, in the early 20th century, there was such a rift on what it meant to be a Zionist and how many different kinds of Zionism there were that someone who comes up to you and says this is a finite definition of Zionism, again, has an agenda. Right?
Like, the whole concept of anti-Zionism is just ridiculous because that presupposes that there is a finite definition of Zionism, and there just is not. There just is not. So, whoever is giving you the finite definition of Zionism has an agenda and is saying that if you are not with us, you are against us.
If you are not on board with this definition, you are a bad Jew. So, my question would be, what is the agenda of the person making the distinction between good Jews and bad Jews?
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Dr. Alon Milwicki on Good Jews and Bad Jews [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/milwicki.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests. Here we talk some updates in his work and professional life when applying his intelligence to work and personal situations. Yu discusses: trends of moving away from traditional standardized tests; CAT2; college entrance exam statistics; style of schooling; and the Chinese government and businesses.
Keywords: alternative test creators, Chinese IQ interest, cultural educational beliefs, economic reform potential, educational challenges, graphical test rigour, IQ activities in China, standardized test dissatisfaction.
Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does the interest in IQ and intellectual activities in China compare with other countries that have historically placed a high value on standardized tests, like Russia or India? Are there trends of moving away from traditional standardized tests towards other forms of intellectual engagement? As with my Chinese equestrian friend, you noted a particular distaste with standardized tests.
Tianxi Yu: 1) The question is vague, but if it’s the concept of “IQ,” then it’s of greater interest. In areas with large populations and low per capita resources, there is more emphasis on the concept of “ranking” as a way of expressing a sense of superiority over others, and IQ is a good outlet for this. From this point of view, Chinese people are probably more interested in IQ（The general level of education in India is lower, which makes most of them insensitive to “rankings.”）. I don’t know much about IQ activities about Russia and India, but the common ones in China are probably Go, Rubik’s Cube, memorization, etc, which have a certain popular base. 2)None.
Jacobsen: What components of the CAT2 make it uniquely rigorous compared to other tests? Have there been any efforts to bring these alternative test creators from China into a database or a directory of tests? It might help increase sample sizes.
Yu: 1) Abstract and I can only try to describe it in words. Graphical tests are low in rigour compared to numerical tests. This is because numbers are one-dimensional without regard to space, making it a more limited jump. However, graphical tests involve a lot of thinking about multiple dimensions;. At the same time, the paper is two-dimensional, the presentation of the questions can only be a projection of higher dimensions in two dimensions, but theoretically, the number of projections in two dimensions is infinite. However, the questions give a limited number of elements, so graphical questions are difficult to rigorously express the full in a finite space.CAT2 features in-depth thinking about the two dimensions while simplifying the two-dimensionality to the higher dimensions in higher-dimensionality questions. Validation, so it is highly rigorous.2) Huanyun Chen once put together a catalogue: https://xn--kivvho02b.xn--fiqs8s/916.html/2022/10/03/.
Jacobsen: Beyond the college entrance exam statistics, what cultural or societal factors contribute to the educational challenges for students?
Yu: First, there is the traditional concept, the elders think that only a good education can lead to a good life, because their generation has witnessed the dividend of education, and they think that the current dividend is sustainable, so they all ask their children of school age to study and further their education. Second, there is a lack of coordination in the distribution of resources, like the children of Germany, and early education diversion, which is currently lacking in China. Society generally believes that studying vocational education is despised, at the same time, society does not have much inclusiveness for this kind of student, but now the government is also learning from Germany, at this stage in the beginning of change. Last, there is fatigue on the consumer side, and there is no further upgrading of the social structure, resulting in no new blood to support future development at this stage, so people can only compete for stock but share less of the cake with more effort. These challenges, however, present opportunities for change and improvement in the Chinese educational system.
Jacobsen: Do teachers learn to hate teaching to the test, or do they genuinely love teaching in this style of schooling? As far as I have been told, students dislike it deeply. My Chinese woman friend notes this. You note this. Chinese exes state much the same.
Yu: Rock can’t change the flow of water.
Jacobsen: What should the Chinese government and businesses adopt to mitigate the impacts of such a downturn and capitalize on the recovery phase?
Yu: If it’s just simple economic reform, then a tax reset is relatively the easiest way to go. The cycles of the world can’t be changed by one or two superpowers. However, there is a potential for the Chinese government and businesses to adopt innovative strategies and policies to mitigate the impacts of such a downturn and capitalize on the recovery phase, which could significantly impact the educational system as well.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7). August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7).In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on CAT2 and Education (7) [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-7.
Author Bio: Claus Volko is an Austrian computer and medical scientist who has conducted research on the treatment of cancer and severe mental disorders by conversion of stress hormones into immunity hormones. This research gave birth to a new scientific paradigm which he called “symbiont conversion theory”: methods to convert cells exhibiting parasitic behaviour to cells that act as symbionts. In 2013 Volko, obtained an IQ score of 172 on the Equally Normed Numerical Derivation Test. He is also the founder and president of Prudentia High IQ Society, a society for people with an IQ of 140 or higher, preferably academics.
Word Count: 628
Image Credits: Claus Volko.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Keywords: Capabilities of the hardware animations, computer art community known demoscene, displays animations and visual effects, graphics crafted by visual artists, morphing 3D characters appear demo, organizing around bulletin-board systems, pre-calculated data is minimal characteristic, render the effects in real-time.
Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene
This article deals with a computer art community known as the demoscene. I assume that the reader has never heard of it before. Maybe he or she has, however, once seen a “tech demo”. A tech demo is a computer program created by a video adapter manufacturer, such as Nvidia, that showcases the capabilities of the hardware by displaying animations and visual effects. The type of computer art the demoscene is all about is something similar: a demo is a computer program that displays animations and visual effects, accompanied by music. What’s important is that it is really a program, i.e. an executable file, and not just an AVI or MPEG file that has been created by some sort of video editing software. Demos usually render the effects in real-time, so the amount of pre-calculated data is minimal. That’s also one of the often cited characteristics of scene demos. Moreover, demos are sometimes size-limited, in which case they are more accurately called intros.
A classical demo is Second Reality by Future Crew. [1] This demo was released in 1993 and was already a multi-part demo with transitions between the individual parts. It featured interesting effects such as plasma and a flight through a virtual city, as well as graphics crafted by visual artists. The demo was created by the Finnish demo group Future Crew and took part in the demo competition at the Assembly 1993 computer art festival, where it placed first. When you watch this demo keep in mind that it was the days of the 386 and even on that legacy hardware, the demo ran smooth. Which shows that the programmers had good skills at optimizing the performance of their code.
A more recent demo, from 2010, is “Happiness is around the bend” by Andromeda Software Development. [2] The code of this demo is already far larger than that of Second Reality and the demo also needs more modern hardware to be properly executed. This demo placed first in the demo competition at Assembly 2010. Andromeda Software Development, or short ASD, is a Greek demo group around the programmer Navis (real name: Konstantinos Pataridis), who is also responsible for most of the design of the demo. What’s especially exciting about this demo is the morphing 3D characters that appear in it.
Finally, 2023 was the year when ASD released “The Legend of Sisyphus”, which also won first place at Assembly. [3] This demo already exceeds 100 MB in size. This is because of the 3D models of the human body that are used in the demo to a vast extent. The Legend of Sisyphus already shows that the borderline between a real time-computed demo and a pre-rendered animation is fading. In the days of Second Reality, nobody would have tolerated such a large demo, it would have been regarded as “unscenish”.
Basically the current demoscene can be subdivided into three categories:
The “oldskool” scene, which deals with ancient platforms such as the C64 or the Amiga. Even nowadays, demos for these old platforms are being produced.
The size-limited scene, which is about intros limited to 64k, 4k or even less.
The size-unlimited scene, which is about demos such as The Legend of Sisyphus.
As already mentioned the demoscene is a community of people, in this case people who contribute to the making of demos. Originally the demoscene organized itself around bulletin-board systems and computer magazines in the 1980s. In the late 1980s the first computer art festivals came up, also known as demoparties. These demoparties exist even today. Assembly is one of the most established, but there are also others, such as Revision or Evoke in Germany. For communication in the scene, websites such as pouet or demozoo are frequently used. [4] [5]
Most demoscene researchers believe that the demoscene actually originated from the warez scene because early demos look similar to crack intros. But in the course of the decades many people with no roots in the warez scene have also joined the demoscene. Maybe some of them have even been inspired by tech demos.
Bibliography
[Demoscene High-Quality Videos (Annikras)]. (2011, July 14). Happiness is Around the Bend by ASD (FullHD 1080p HQ demoscene demo 2010)
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Volko, C. (2024, August 8). Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): VOLKO, C. Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Volko, Claus. 2024. “Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/demoscene.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Volko, C “Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/demoscene.
Harvard (Australian): Volko, C 2024, ‘Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/demoscene>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Volko, Claus. “Origin and Evolution of the Demoscene.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/demoscene.
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests. Here we talk some updates in his work and professional life when applying his intelligence to work and personal situations. Yu discusses: new stuff; work; the two years we’ve known each other; being intensively focused on a task; thinking of pursuing this field for the long term; recommendations for high-IQ people; and most people do not find work deserving of their intelligence.
Keywords: academic job, cryptocurrency investing, government sector job, high-IQ space, intellectual level work, investing resilience, long-term career, wisdom over intelligence.
Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When I returned from travelling through the United States, you mentioned how insanely busy you have been. What is new?
Tianxi Yu: Not a lot of news. I’m busy in three main places: my job, cryptocurrency investing and startup investing. There’s not much to say about my work; I only had some small output this year. I’ve made over $150,000 in cryptocurrency investments, but mostly by luck; my startup is still in its infancy, but it’s already paid for itself. Free time will be spent thinking about Mahir’s new test, “Mystery,” link: https://mahirwu.wixsite.com/iqtests/%E5%A6%82%E8%B0%9Cmystery, which is an interesting spatial test, and I’ve solved most of the items, and will probably submit it in several months.
Jacobsen: Does it work, or is it an insanely attention-absorbing hobby?
Yu: Just work itself! I don’t know how to attract attention or even deliberately gather it. It’s more like letting the thoughts collect and dive in wherever I want to immerse them.
Jacobsen: How have you changed in the two years we’ve known each other?
Yu: Two years is a long time for me, and a lot has happened to me in those two years. I graduated from university in 2022 and started my journey into the world. I was impatient and short-sighted in the year I was about to graduate. I made some money during college but lost my capital due to ego at the beginning of cryptocurrency investing. Still, I was more resilient and kept fighting for opportunities in the market with a minuscule amount of money, which I now recall as a time that helped immensely refine my perceptions. I then managed to get a job in the government sector (passed in one sitting; it was difficult), and it was also at that moment, I felt that the whole person and the world formed a very harmonious and smooth state. Even though I had no money then, I knew I had succeeded. Next, I became addicted to reading, focusing on politics, economics, religion and psychology, which deepened my understanding of the world. People tend to think that their inherent perceptions are correct and are reluctant to break the boundaries of their perceptions, which is the cause of conservatism, prejudice, ignorance and bickering. I am now reading The Spectrum of Consciousness and The Sovereign Individual, which are well-written and highly recommended. I now spend hours a day reading books that continue to increase my spirituality. Many of the scholars have very sharp and profound perspectives, and if I didn’t know them, I probably wouldn’t have thought that I could understand them in this way, which makes me realize the limitations of “IQ” even more, and I am now facing the IQ test mainly as a hobby. “Wisdom” can bring much more than “Intelligence.”
Jacobsen: How did you find work that kept you intensively focused on a task? Something intellectually capable and able to keep you preoccupied and focused.
Yu: I don’t have any tricks. If it’s a task I have to complete, I force myself to finish it before the deadline (imagine the consequences of not finishing it — the worse, the better). If it’s a job I’m interested in, then it doesn’t take any tricks for me to give it my full attention.
Jacobsen: Are you thinking of pursuing this field for the long term?
Yu: Yup. I have to have a foundation that I can stabilize in the long term and explore more possibilities.
Jacobsen: What are your recommendations for high-IQ people to find work of interest that meets their intellectual level?
Yu: Steady as it goes. Have a good foundation of life security first, and then go on to develop personal interests. In this high IQ space, we are exposed to high-range IQ tests where the range of abilities he can detect are mainly imagination and logic, with imagination outweighing logic in good tests. These are not so much needed in today’s society unless you are in an academic job, which is the popular stereotype of us, but we also have our own lives and what we want. So, I would advise members to forget about their “high IQ” labels and find ways of getting along with the world.
Jacobsen: Do you think most people do not find work deserving of their intelligence?
Yu: Yes. I used to think that this question was proof of the inefficiency of current social development, but I don’t think so now. In your question, “everything is useful” is the point, but is everything in nature useful? That is certainly not the case; nature and even the universe are disordered, and the existence of many things is complex and random. At the same time, human beings are also complex, and each is characterized by enormous potential and capacity. Intelligence is a minuscule twig, and the great tree does not bear all its fruit on a single branch.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6). August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6).In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Graduation, Work, and Hobby Tests (6) [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-6.
Author Bio: Iakovos Koukas is the President and Founder of THIS High IQ Society, 4G High IQ Society, BRAIN High IQ Society, ELITE High IQ Society, 6N High IQ Society, NOUS High IQ Society, 6G High IQ Society, NOUS200 High IQ Society, GIFTED High IQ Network, GENIUS High IQ Network, GENIUS Initiative, GENIUS Journal, IQ GENIUS platform, and Test My IQ platform. He is the author of the GIFT High Range IQ Test series, the GENE High Range IQ Test series, the VAST IQ Test series, and the VICE IQ Test series. He was won the WGD Genius of the Year 2015 Award for Europe, the VEDIQ Guild Intellectual Leader of the Year 2019 Award, and the Global Genius Directory Award of the Year 2021, for his contributions to the global high IQ community.
Word Count: 1,528
Image Credits: None.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Charles Spearman, fluid intelligence, general intelligence, g factor, Howard Gardner, John Carroll, Louis Leon Thurstone, multiple intelligences, practical intelligence, Raymond Cattell, Robert Sternberg, Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory.
On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories
If your scores on IQ tests are not high, there is no need to worry. Intelligence comes in many forms, and some cannot be assessed by modern intelligence tests.
One type of intelligence
Charles Spearman, in 1904 made the first factor analysis of correlations between the tests. Spearman observed that children’s performance ratings across unrelated school subjects were positively correlated. He suggested that these correlations were the result of an underlying general mental ability that influenced all kinds of mental tests. Spearman proposed that an individual’s mental performance is the result of a single general ability factor, which he called g, and many narrow special ability factors.
The g factor (or general intelligence or general intelligence factor) is a psychometric construct that governs all cognitive tasks and abilities. G factor is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks and mental tests. One’s performance on one kind of cognitive task tends to be comparable to the same person’s performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. IQ, g factor, general intelligence, general cognitive ability, and simply intelligence are terms used interchangeably to refer to what cognitive tests try to measure.
Two types of intelligence
Charles Spearman developed the two-factor theory of intelligence using factor analysis, which includes the g factor of general intelligence, and the s factor of specific cognitive abilities (verbal, spatial, numerical, and mechanical). Spearman developed a procedure named factor analysis, in which related variables are tested for correlation to each other, and then the correlation of the related items is evaluated to find groups of the variables. He tested how well people performed on different mental tasks, such as distinguishing pitch, perceiving weight and colors, directions, and mathematics. When analyzing the data he collected, he noticed that an individual’s performance on one kind of cognitive task tends to be comparable to the same person’s performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. Spearman concluded that there is one g factor that influences all cognitive abilities, but also the s factor of specific intellectual abilities (verbal, spatial, numerical, and mechanical).
Raymond Cattell, in 1963 introduced two types of cognitive abilities in a revision of Spearman’s G factor concept of general intelligence: fluid intelligence (Gf) and crystallized intelligence (Gc). Fluid intelligence is the cognitive ability to solve novel problems (like number series and shape classifications) by using abstract reasoning and flexible thinking and depends minimally on prior learning and education. Crystallized intelligence (Gc) is the ability to solve problems (like word analogies and word similarities) by using learned methods and knowledge and depends strongly on prior learning, experience, knowledge, and education. The concepts of Gf and Gc were later further developed by Cattell and his former student John Horn.
Three types of intelligence
Robert Sternberg theorized the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence and challenged the concept of g-factor, and took a more cognitive approach, and it’s categorized as a cognitive-contextual theory. The three components are called triarchic components. Sternberg associated the processes of the mind with a series of cognitive components, which he called: meta-components, performance components, and knowledgeacquisition components. Sternberg proposed that the basic information processing components underlying the three parts of his triarchic theory are the same; different contexts and different tasks require different kinds of intelligence.
Sternberg separated his theory into the following three sub-theories: the contextual sub-theory, which says that intelligence is based on how the individual interacts with their environment, the experiential sub-theory, which says that there is a continuous sequence of experience from novel to automation to which human intelligence can be applied; and the componential sub-theory, which outlines the various mechanisms that result in intelligence. Sternberg suggested that intelligence is comprised of three parts: practical intelligence (contextual sub-theory), creative intelligence (experiential sub-theory), and analytical intelligence (componential sub-theory).
Practical intelligence is related to finding solutions that work in your everyday life by applying prior knowledge, experience, and common sense. Analytical intelligence is related to academic problem solving, and it’s demonstrated by an ability to analyze, evaluate, judge, compare, and contrast. Creative intelligence is related to imagining a solution to a problem or situation, finding a novel solution to an unexpected problem, or creating a beautiful work of art or well-developed literature.
John Carroll, in 1993 proposed the three-stratum theory, which is a hierarchical model with three layers (strata). The bottom level consists of narrow abilities that are taskspecific (e.g., induction, spelling ability), a few broad factors at the intermediate level, which are fluid intelligence (Gf), crystallized intelligence (Gc), general memory and learning (Gy), broad visual perception (Gv), broad auditory perception (Gu), broad retrieval ability (Gr), broad cognitive speediness (Gs), and processing speed (Gt), and at the top a single factor, the g factor, which accounts for the correlations among all cognitive tasks. The three-stratum theory is an expansion of Spearman’s model of general intelligence and Horn and Cattell’s model of fluid and crystallized intelligence.
The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory integrates the Gf-Gc model of fluid and crystallized intelligence with John Carroll’s three-stratum intelligence model. Due to similarities with the latter, the two theories were merged to form the CHC model. The broad abilities of the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory are fluid reasoning (Gf), comprehensionknowledge (Gc), quantitative knowledge (Gq), reading and writing abilities (Grw), short-term memory (Gsm), long-term storage and retrieval (Glr), visual processing (Gv), auditory processing (Ga), processing speed (Gs), decision/reaction time/speed (Gt), General (Domain-Specific) Knowledge (Gkn), Psychomotor abilities (Gp), Psychomotor speed (Gps), Tactile Abilities (Gh), Kinesthetic Abilities (Gk), and 9 Olfactory Abilities (Go). The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities is considered by modern psychometricians as the most comprehensive and empirically supported psychometric theory of the structure of cognitive abilities.
Seven types of intelligence
Louis Leon Thurstone challenged the concept of a g-factor and developed a model of intelligence centered on “Primary Mental Abilities.” After analyzing data from tests of mental abilities, he identified several primary mental abilities that constitute intelligence, as opposed to one general factor of intelligence. The seven primary mental abilities in Thurstone’s model are verbal comprehension, verbal fluency, number facility, spatial visualization, perceptual speed, associative memory, and inductive reasoning.
Verbal comprehension is the cognitive ability to understand the meaning of words, concepts, and ideas. Verbal fluency is the ability to use words quickly and fluency in performing rhyming, solving anagrams, and doing crossword puzzles. Number facility is the ability to use numbers to quickly computer answers to problems. Spatial visualization is the cognitive capacity to visualize and manipulate patterns, objects, and forms in space. Perceptual speed is the mental ability to grasp perceptual details quickly and accurately and to determine similarities and differences between stimuli. Associative memory is the ability to recall information such as lists of words, arithmetic and mathematical formulas, and definitions of concepts. Inductive reasoning is the cognitive ability to produce general rules and principles from the presented information.
Nine types of intelligence
Howard Gardner introduced nine types of intelligence: verbal-linguistic, logicalmathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and existential.
Verbal-linguistic intelligence is the mental ability to analyze information, solve problems using language-based reasoning, use words and combinations effectively in communication, think in words, and use language to express and manipulate complex meanings. It is the individual’s fundamental ability to use written and verbal language to achieve their goals.
Logical-mathematical intelligence is the mental ability to calculate, quantify, manipulate numerical symbols, carry out numerical and mathematical operations, solve numerical problems regularly, make decisions based on numerical information, consider propositions, use abstract and symbolic thought, sequential reasoning, inductive and deductive thinking patterns, critical thinking, analyze problems, identify solutions, use abstractions, recognize patterns, detect connections, and conduct scientific research.
Visual-spatial intelligence is the cognitive ability to think in three dimensions, solve spatial problems of navigation, visualize objects from different angles and space, recognize faces or scenes, notice fine details, manipulate mental images, and do graphic and artistic work. It is the individual’s ability that helps them identify and manipulate visual and spatial patterns and orient in their environment.
Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence is the cognitive ability to manipulate objects and use a variety of physical skills, involves a sense of timing and a clear sense of the goal of physical activity, as demonstrated by athletes, dancers, surgeons, and craftspeople.
Musical-rhythmic intelligence is the mental capacity to discern pitch, rhythm, timbre, and tone and to recognize, create, reproduce music, as demonstrated by composers, conductors, musicians, vocalists, and sensitive listeners.
Interpersonal intelligence is the cognitive ability to understand and interact effectively with other people and be sensitive to other people’s moods, feelings, temperaments, motivations, cooperate as part of a group, and have the capacity to note distinctions among others and entertain multiple perspectives.
Intrapersonal intelligence is the mental capacity to have introspection and selfreflection, understand oneself, one’s thoughts and feelings, strengths and weaknesses, and use such knowledge in planning one’s life.
Naturalistic intelligence is the cognitive ability to discriminate among living things and other features and objects of the natural world, recognize flora and fauna, make a variety of consequential distinctions in the natural world, and use this ability productively.
Existential intelligence is the mental capacity to answer philosophical questions about human existence, such as the meaning of human life, why we die, and how did we get into this world.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Koukas I. On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Koukas, I. (2024, August 8). On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): KOUKAS, I. On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Koukas, Iakovos. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Koukas, I “On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5.
Harvard: Koukas, I. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5>.
Harvard (Australian): Koukas, I 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Koukas, Iakovos. “On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Iakovos K. On High-Range Test Construction 5: Iakovos Koukas on Intelligence Types and Theories [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-5.
Author Bio: Iakovos Koukas is the President and Founder of THIS High IQ Society, 4G High IQ Society, BRAIN High IQ Society, ELITE High IQ Society, 6N High IQ Society, NOUS High IQ Society, 6G High IQ Society, NOUS200 High IQ Society, GIFTED High IQ Network, GENIUS High IQ Network, GENIUS Initiative, GENIUS Journal, IQ GENIUS platform, and Test My IQ platform. He is the author of the GIFT High Range IQ Test series, the GENE High Range IQ Test series, the VAST IQ Test series, and the VICE IQ Test series. He was won the WGD Genius of the Year 2015 Award for Europe, the VEDIQ Guild Intellectual Leader of the Year 2019 Award, and the Global Genius Directory Award of the Year 2021, for his contributions to the global high IQ community.
Word Count: 1,080
Image Credits: Iakovos Koukas.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Above Average Intelligence (110-119), Average IQ score, Below Average Intelligence (70-89), Bell Curve, cognitive abilities, exceptional academic career, exceptional cognitive abilities, IQ classification, IQ score ranges, normal distribution, pattern recognition, problem-solving skills, Profoundly Gifted or Extremely Genius Intelligence (180-200), standard deviation, Superior Intelligence (120-129).
On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores
After taking an intelligence test on our website, you might need an interpretation of your IQ score to understand whether your IQ score is low, average, or high. Since all IQ tests are comparative, your IQ score is always determined in comparison to the scores of other people who took the same test, and most of them earn a score in the average range.
The average IQ score is 100, with a standard deviation of 15, and all IQ scores follow a normal (or Gaussian) distribution, also known as Bell Curve, which is symmetrical around its mean. An IQ score of 100 indicates that the test-takers performance on the given test is at the mean or median level of performance in the statistical sample of test-takers of about the same age used to norm the test. An IQ score of 115 means an intellectual performance of one standard deviation above the median of 100, a score of 85 performance, one standard deviation below the median, and so on.
Some interesting statistics about IQ scores: 68% of the population scores between 85 and 115, 95% scores between 70 and 130, 99% scores between 55 and 145, and only 2% scores below 70 or above 130. Note that IQ scores may vary depending on how well you rested on the day of your testing and how well you were able to focus and concentrate on the test items during the test without having any distractions.
The IQ classification table below provides a clear overview of all the IQ score ranges, distinguishes different categories based on IQ scores, and helps you better understand your cognitive abilities. An explanation for each IQ Classification is also provided.
IQ Range
IQ Classification
180-200
Profoundly Gifted or Extremely Genius
160-179
Exceptionally Gifted or Highly genius
146-159
Highly Gifted or Genius
130-145
Gifted or Near Genius
120-129
Superior
110-119
Above Average
90-109
Average
70-89
Below Average
IQ Classification: Below Average Intelligence (70 – 89)
Your IQ is below the average, which is 100. Your cognitive abilities allow you to overcome most everyday challenges. You might have experienced some difficulties studying in school, and you aren’t probably pursuing an academic career, but you enjoy practical things and occupations. Typical occupations with this level of intelligence are laborers, gardeners, factory workers, and farmhands.
IQ Classification: Average Intelligence (90 – 109)
Your IQ is average, just like the IQ of most people. Your cognitive abilities allow you to overcome almost all everyday challenges. You may succeed in many professional fields, and a specific range of academic studies is possible depending on your motivation. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are carpenters, shopkeepers, mechanics, electricians, cooks, police officers, truck drivers, and machine operators.
IQ Classification: Above Average Intelligence (110 – 119)
You have a higher IQ than 74% of the population. You have above-average cognitive abilities, which allow you to pursue a successful career in many academic fields and succeed in the profession of your choice. You have a high level of problem-solving and abstract reasoning skills, and you can recognize patterns and details. You enjoy reading books and having interesting intellectual conversations. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are foremen, schoolteachers, nurses, managers, psychologists, and sociologists.
IQ Classification: Superior Intelligence (120 – 129)
You have a higher IQ than 90% of the population, and you possess superior intelligence. You have superior cognitive abilities, which will allow you to pursue an exceptional academic career in a wide range of academic fields and succeed in the profession of your choice. You have a very high level of problem-solving, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning skills. You have a superior ability to recognize patterns and details, and you enjoy reading books and having interesting intellectual conversations. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are pharmacists, accountants, biologists, chemists, lawyers, physicians, general managers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and computer scientists.
IQ Classification: Gifted or Near Genius Intelligence (130 – 145)
You have a higher IQ than 98% of the population. You possess exceptional cognitive abilities which allow you to have a notable professional and academic career in the field of your choice. You have an exceptionally high level of problem-solving, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning skills. You can easily recognize patterns and details, make connections between abstract concepts, and you enjoy reading and writing books, having interesting intellectual conversations, solving logical brain puzzles, and philosophizing. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are mathematicians, physicists, professors, and researchers.
IQ Classification: Highly Gifted or Genius Intelligence (146-159)
You have a higher IQ than 99.9% of the population. You possess supreme cognitive abilities which allow you to make a notable impact in any professional or academic field. Because of your supreme level of problem-solving, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning skills, you have the potential to create whole new fields of interest and research. You can very easily recognize patterns where other people cannot and make connections between highly abstract concepts. You enjoy reading books, writing academic papers, having interesting intellectual conversations, solving challenging logical puzzles, and philosophizing. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are university professors and research scientists.
IQ Classification: Exceptionally Gifted or Highly Genius Intelligence (160-179)
You have a higher IQ than 99.99% of the population. You possess exceptionally high cognitive abilities, which allow you to make a significant impact in any professional or academic field. Because of your exceptionally high level of problem-solving, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning skills, you have the potential to create whole new fields of interest and research and make significant scientific breakthroughs. You enjoy recognizing highly abstract patterns in anything, reading books, writing academic papers, having interesting intellectual conversations, solving very challenging logical puzzles, theorizing, and philosophizing. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are distinguished university professors and research scientists.
IQ Classification: Profoundly Gifted or Extremely Genius Intelligence (180-200)
You have a higher IQ than 99.99999% of the population. You possess extremely high cognitive abilities, which allow you to make a significant impact in any professional or academic field you choose. Because of your extremely high level of problem-solving, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning skills, you have the potential to create whole new fields of interest and research, solve the most challenging scientific problems, and make significant scientific breakthroughs. You enjoy recognizing highly abstract patterns in anything, reading books, writing academic papers, having interesting intellectual conversations, solving very challenging logical puzzles, theorizing, and philosophizing. Typical professions with this level of intelligence are distinguished university professors and research scientists.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Koukas I. On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Koukas, I. (2024, August 8). On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): KOUKAS, I. On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Koukas, Iakovos. 2024. “On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Koukas, I “On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4.
Harvard: Koukas, I. (2024) ‘On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4>.
Harvard (Australian): Koukas, I 2024, ‘On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Koukas, Iakovos. “On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Iakovos K. On High-Range Test Construction 4: Iakovos Koukas on Understanding IQ Test Scores [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/high-range-4.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, FACR, FNASCI, CEH, CISSP, is Professor of Radiology at the University of Montreal. He recently retired from the University of Pennsylvania after 16 years on faculty. He is an international leader in three different fields: cardiovascular imaging, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. He has given over 200 invited presentations nationally and internationally in those three fields. He was co-leader of the Arrhythmia Imaging Research Laboratory at Penn. His research involves cardiac MRI and CT in electrophysiology, focusing on the relation between cardiac biomarkers such as myocardial scar, with pathways of abnormal electrical conduction in left ventricular arrhythmia. He is funded by the National Institute of Health and is very active in national scientific societies. He has extensive expertise in artificial intelligence, the field of his PhD. In the spring of 2022, he has spent six months at Stanford as Visiting Professor and Associate Scholar of the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. He is a reformed hacker. He has several certificates in cybersecurity and has done research and published on the cybersecurity of medical images. Outside work, he is a Black Belt at Tae Kwon Do, an ex-Boy Scout Leader, a competitive marksman, and a FPV race drone pilot. He is also a member of the prestigious Mega Society and Prometheus Society. Desjardins discusses: American medical professionals; treatment of medical professionals; a cycle of entrapment and overwork; health problems; find a way out; professionals who did not get out and were trapped; medicine and geography in Canada; process of transition to new work; better balance; the hiding of physician deaths and suicides; and lack of reportage.
Keywords: chronic medical conditions, dangerous local work conditions, distressing physician work conditions, human rights violations, lack of respect for healthcare professionals, medical field standards, medical profession attrition, physician relocation challenges, professional development, quality of care.
Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Previously, you told a heartbreaking story of anxiety, stress, and degrading health, as with many American medical professionals. Does this start in medical school?
Dr. Benoit Desjardins: I am extraordinarily lucky to be alive today to let the readers catch up on the story. As you know, a few years ago, on a Friday afternoon on my 97th hour of work as a U.S. physician, at the end of a week during which I was not allowed to sleep much or eat much, and on a day which I was forced to do the workload of six doctors, the combination of lack of food, lack of sleep, and massive overwork made my body permanently fail. I almost died from a catastrophic medical condition caused by the work conditions and became handicapped for life. This was not the first time that I was physically hurt by these work conditions and not the first time that they almost killed me. But it was the first time that they caused permanent, severely limiting lifelong damage to my body.
To answer your question, I attended medical school in Canada, which has strict rules and laws on basic human rights, including those of physicians. In the U.S., physicians’ working conditions are massively out of compliance with safe labour laws from all other industries. In 2019, Dr Pamela Wible published a book listing 40 categories of documented human rights violations towards physicians in the U.S. (“Human Rights Violations in Medicine: A-to-Z Action Guide“). This included sleep deprivation, food deprivation, overwork, exploitation, bullying, violence, etc. I have experienced most of those as a physician in the U.S. Since around 2014, the U.S. has been well-known for the inhumane work conditions of its physicians, killing and disabling its physicians by the thousands and burning out its physicians by the hundreds of thousands.
After medical school, I came to the U.S. in the early 1990s to pursue a PhD degree. I was initially a graduate student in the U.S. I was treated like everybody else. It was a rude awakening when I started in the U.S. medical system after my PhD. Here is one of many examples of what I faced: As a medical post-graduate trainee, I had once been forced to work at the hospital for 58 consecutive hours without rest and then drove back home. As my exhausted body crashed into my bed, I received a phone call from the chief resident asking me why I had left the hospital as I was apparently on call again for a third night in a row. He ordered me to get back to work. I drove back to the hospital, completely exhausted. I could have easily been killed in a car accident from exhaustion, like what happened to two of my immediate radiology colleagues. After arriving at the hospital, I was forced to work ten additional consecutive hours (for a total of 68 consecutive hours without sleep), until I crashed on the call room floor out of exhaustion. They found me unconscious later that morning. This is one of many examples of the work conditions of physicians in the U.S.
Jacobsen: When medical professionals enter into medicine in Canada and the United States, what are the contrasts in treatment and the similarities in treatment of medical professionals?
Desjardins: There are huge differences. We can divide this treatment into the public, employers, and government.
(1) by the public: In Canada, the public is respectful of physicians, of expertise and science, partly because the population is well educated and scientifically literate and partly because access to healthcare is more restricted, and patients are very happy when they can access a physician. Canadians understand that physicians are human beings. In the U.S., the public has no respect for healthcare professionals, expertise, or science. Physicians and nurses regularly get attacked by patients, and sometimes get killed by them. One physician in Philadelphia recently got stabbed in the face by her patient. Also, physicians in the U.S. are viewed as lottery tickets. The strong anti-science culture in the U.S. has people making irrational cause-and-effect magical expectations of doctors. Any bad medical outcome, a regular part of medicine, almost invariably leads to a lawsuit that can produce a multimillion-dollar award.
(2) by employers: In the U.S., this was nicely summarized by the 2019 New York Times op-ed article “The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses” by Dr Danielle Ofri. She discussed how the U.S. healthcare system involves massive exploitation of healthcare workers to stay in business. The nature of the exploitation depends on the environment, either academic or private practice. In academia, physicians are salaried and academic hospitals maximize the work done by physicians to avoid bankruptcy and maintain their razor-thin profit margins. The amount of work never stops increasing. Private practices are being bought one after another by venture capital firms, whose only goal is to maximize short-term profits for their investors, by forcing physician employees to do a massive amount of work with the lowest resources while disregarding quality of care. In Canada, almost all physicians are government employees, which is very different and will be covered next.
(3) by the government: In Canada, the government is the main employer of physicians and exerts very strict control on the location of physicians’ practice to ensure adequate distribution throughout the country. However, besides these limitations on their practice, physicians are treated like human beings by the government, with strict laws and rules on basic human rights and physician work conditions that must be respected. The treatment of physicians by the government in the U.S. is well illustrated by the recent scandal of the PHPs (physician health programs). If, for example, a patient sees a physician drink a glass of champagne at a wedding, she can report him to the U.S. government as an alcohol abuser. Then, under the threat of losing his medical license, the physician gets forced by the government to attend an out-of-state “addiction” government therapy program, costing tens of thousands of dollars. This has led to several bankruptcies and dozens of suicides of physicians while in those PHP government programs. This included prominent doctors, such as a visionary in a pediatric field, who helped thousands of pediatric patients. He committed suicide after a government PHP program ruined his reputation and career. He had been forced into this PHP program by his employer after he reported dangerous local work conditions putting patient lives at risk.
Jacobsen: The conditions at your prior job sound slavish. Is there a cycle of entrapment and overwork among medical professionals?
Desjardins: When you get a job as a physician in the U.S., you get a state license enabling you to practice, which is a long process. Then you get installed, your spouse gets a job, and your kids attend local schools. You become locally established, and relocation becomes a major hassle for the physician, his spouse and kids, so the threshold for relocation is very high.
When I got to Philadelphia in the late 2000s, things were tolerable. However, the situation for physicians worsened progressively. It’s like being a frog in progressively warming water. 2014 was a turning point in Philadelphia for two independent reasons. First, as I already mentioned, the U.S. has inhumane work conditions for its physicians. This became public knowledge around 2014, when the American Medical Association started its first three Physician Wellness programs to try to address the problem. Second, Philadelphia became known as having the most massively corrupt, scientifically illiterate medico-legal system on the planet. This is beyond the scope of this interview. But it’s the last year we could recruit any radiologist in my section and the year when physicians started leaving Philadelphia by the boatload. Before 2014, we individually read about 15,000 images per day. Now, it’s sometimes up to 250,000 images per day.
One of the advantages of my field of radiology is that we do not need to be close to patients. We can read medical images remotely. We took advantage of that during the pandemic, as most radiologists could do their full work shifts from home, without needing to enter the hospital and be exposed to COVID. This gave many radiologists an important escape route. When remote work became a viable option for radiologists after the pandemic, many entrapped in Philadelphia abandoned their local jobs and signed remote work contracts with out-of-state hospitals while remaining in Philadelphia. The workload for radiologists who did not abandon Philadelphia hospitals rapidly increased. We are living in the absurd situation of being surrounded by dozens of local radiologists whom we desperately need but who refuse to have their names ever associated again with Philadelphia hospitals. When we tried to do the converse and recruit out-of-state radiologists to work remotely for Philadelphia hospitals, we learned that most radiologists in the country refuse to ever have their names associated with hospitals in Philadelphia because of medico-legal reasons. The long-term implications of this situation are unclear but frightening.
Jacobsen: What health problems arise in this context?
Desjardins: We recently discussed extensively the healthcare effects of excessive workloads on human beings, which can lead to all sorts of chronic medical conditions and even death. I refer to this link to our recent In-Sight discussion.
Jacobsen: Whether by death, health injury, or moving away, medical professionals do leave those conditions, as you recently informed me–with a perceptible tinge of elation as if a proverbial sigh of relief. How did you begin to find a way out?
Desjardins: I’m an Ivy League physician and a world-leading expert in my medical and scientific field. I used the same approach to solve all my scientific and clinical problems to find a way out. I was forced to continue working under the same work conditions that had almost killed me and disabled me for life. I needed urgent action. I selected a combination of two basic moves: (1) increase my protection and (2) remove myself from the toxic environment. To increase my protection, I started being closely monitored by a team of three physicians and taking protective medication to decrease the chances of recurrence of the event that permanently disabled me.
Removing myself from the toxic environment was more difficult. Physicians cannot change jobs easily. If you try to relocate locally, you face non-compete clauses preventing access to jobs at other institutions. If you try to relocate to another state or country, getting a new practice license for that new location takes months, and time was not on my side. Abandoning the medical profession was also an option, recently taken by thousands of physicians. I did not consider that option, as I am a world leader in academic radiology. My field needs me, and I have a lot more to offer to my field.
I initially secured a quick research sabbatical at Stanford, giving me six months out of that toxic environment. This gave my body time to cope with my new handicap and time to plan my long-term escape from Philadelphia. This was near the end of the pandemic. During those six months of sabbatical, I interviewed widely and secured four U.S. academic positions away from Philadelphia and was working on securing two positions in Canada. However, the work conditions of U.S. healthcare workers during the pandemic resulted in a massive exodus of healthcare workers from the profession, with even more planning to exit in the short-term future. Under these circumstances, I felt Canada offered a much better future.
Canada has a mechanism to recruit Nobel Laureates and international scientific superstars called the “Distinguished Professor” pathway. There are other mechanisms to recruit regular doctors. To be recruited under that pathway, one must be a world luminary in a specific field. I’m a world luminary in three different fields. However, this pathway takes one year to receive government approval. When Canada found out that I had been almost killed and had become disabled for life by the work conditions of U.S. physicians and that I was still forced to work under these same conditions, they granted me a humanitarian exception and my “Distinguished Professor” pathway was approved in one week, instead of one year. This is how I got out.
Jacobsen: You mentioned some in the previous interviews. What happened to earlier professionals who did not get out and were trapped, in essence, in these areas? Those continuing to undergo harassment and threats, violence, including nurses.
Desjardins: Those who are still trapped are currently abandoning the medical profession by the boatload. In my previous U.S. department, we had a deficit of 43 doctors due to departures and difficulties in recruiting replacements. One of the four academic medical centers in Philadelphia (Hahnemann) collapsed and permanently closed under similar conditions.
In other countries, it is illegal to treat human beings the way the U.S. treats its physicians. No other industrialized country forces its workers to work up to 120 hours per week and up to 72 consecutive hours without rest, like the U.S. does to its physicians. Since the pandemic, 30% of all healthcare professionals have left the medical profession, and an additional 30% are expected to leave in the next 2-3 years. The U.S. cannot recruit fast enough to recover from these massive levels of attrition, which is a global phenomenon while acute in the United States. The up to 60% deficit in healthcare workers will never be fully replenished, and massive shortages of U.S. healthcare workers will become chronic.
There are two ways to increase the number of U.S. physicians: recruit them from other countries or train more physicians at home. Both are a huge problem. The work conditions of U.S. physicians are now well known since 2014, and even more since the pandemic. Physicians from Europe and Canada could be recruited to the U.S. but they no longer want to come. The U.S. can however still attract physicians from third-world countries. Furthermore, there are more and more books, articles, blogs, movies, TED talks, and news clips about the U.S. treatment of its healthcare workers. The medical profession is much less attractive than it used to be to the best and brightest undergraduate students at home. This will continue to decrease the pool of top U.S. applicants for the medical profession. More than 60% of physicians currently highly discourage their children from entering the medical profession, and an even greater percentage of younger physicians who never experienced the good old days of the medical profession strongly advise their children NOT to enter the medical profession.
Jacobsen: When getting out, what area of medicine and geography in Canada did you choose? (And why those?)
Desjardins: In terms of areas of medicine, I needed to continue in the same field, as I am a world leader in that field. I have been responsible for determining the standards of practice in that field for the past 20 years, and it made no sense at this point in my life to change my area of medicine.
Jacobsen: What was the feeling and process of transition to new work and more reasonable work conditions?
Desjardins: At this late phase in my career, relocating was expected to be very difficult. But against all odds, things worked out very fast, and I was able to leave the U.S. I’m still in disbelief, thinking I will wake up and that this is all a dream. I suspect I’ll remain in a phase of disbelief for a while.
Expats U.S. physicians often describe their newfound freedom as like being released from U.S. prison. This is, of course, a ridiculous comparison, as U.S. prisons don’t kill and disable their prisoners by the thousands as the U.S. does to its physicians. But there are nevertheless many similarities between the two situations.
I now work 40 hours per week instead of 80+ hours. I am on call every eight weeks instead of up to 22 times per month. My daily workload is up to 6 times less than what it was in the U.S., and I have 6 times more vacation than I had in the U.S. This is almost unbelievable, but this is how physicians are treated outside the U.S. I maintain many work collaborations with the U.S., as an international leader in three fields.
I still need to get used to the new freedom. I had not been allowed to take many vacations in my last 20 years as a physician in the U.S.; when I did, it was to travel to see my family in Canada. Now, I live 10 minutes away from my family and see them every weekend. I have yet to schedule a big trip. Switzerland? Australia? Italy? The Greek Islands? An Alaskan cruise? There are so many good picks! I’ve travelled extensively for scientific meetings, but never for pure pleasure outside work.
Jacobsen: How has this better balance affected your life with family, as a husband–including treating her like a queen–and father, and in your ability to treat patients with full focus and care–not sleep deprived, overworked, and stressed to the point of high detriment to personal health?
Desjardins: Well, I now have a family life. I can now eat dinner with my family, spend weekends with them, and go on vacations. This is very liberating. I had always treated my wife like a queen and my kids as best as possible, but I knew my availability was very limited. Now, I am making up for lost time.
I am much more rested during my workdays. There is a massive difference between 4 hours of stressed-out sleep and 7 hours of relaxed sleep. My body feels the difference already. And since I do up to six times less work every day, I get to spend four times longer interpreting each study (8-hour workdays instead of 12+ hours workdays), dramatically increasing the quality of care I can provide. Workdays are not insane marathons anymore; they are normal days with normal work. Patients benefit from this process by accessing more rested, less stressed-out doctors in a better-quality healthcare system. This might partly explain why the Canadian healthcare system currently ranks 32nd in the world, compared to the U.S. ranking of 69th. Canada used to be much better than 32nd, but its waiting lists for care currently hurt its rankings.
Jacobsen: Why have the problems you described in the U.S. medical system not been solved? Why the hiding of physician deaths and suicides?
Desjardins: U.S. physician work conditions are now a very well-known problem. Books, documentary movies (Do No Harm, Robyn Symon), TED talks, publications, and numerous blogs exist. The American Medical Association is aware of the problem and has implemented solutions. Since 2014, Physician Wellness has been a major focus of discussion in medical centers, conferences, blogs, and medical schools. Most people in the public are not even aware that almost every U.S. medical center has a Physician Wellness program to try to stop U.S. physicians from dying by the thousands and burning out by the hundreds of thousands. These programs, which teach physicians resilience rather than improving their work conditions, have been compared to distributing Yoga mats to prisoners at Auschwitz during World War II.
Publicity on this topic is blocked by hospitals. Hospitals in the U.S. are businesses. They must hide the negative consequences of physician work conditions to be able to stay in business. If a hospital disclosed to the news media that three of its physicians jumped to their death from the roof of the hospital within a month of each other, like what happened recently in a New York hospital, this would affect the hospital financial bottom line. After these three New York physicians jumped to their death, their bodies were simply covered by tarps, and this did not even make the local news. Their colleagues at the hospital were threatened of dismissal if they reported the deaths to the news media and were even forbidden to discuss the death among themselves or even to hold a funeral. Patients of the dead physicians were told that their physician had left the hospital.
Jacobsen: Is the lack of reportage on those who care for us in times of need showing a lack of care for them in their times of need across political party lines and media platforms?
Desjardins: Absolutely. The profession is crushed from all sides and getting no sympathy from anyone. The only reason the U.S. healthcare system has not yet collapsed under these circumstances, is because of the endless professional ethic of medical staff members, a resource that seems endless and that is currently massively exploited by the public, by corporate medicine, and by the government.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Benoit.
Desjardins: Thank you for discussing this important topic.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Dr. Benoit Desjardins, M.D., Ph.D. on Life Balance for Medical Professionals [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/desjardins.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Mateo Muça is 19-years-old and interested in high-IQ societies and tests. He discusses: interest in high-IQ tests; interest in high-IQ societies; any IQ tests; high-range tests; general impression; favourite aspect; main set of hesitancies; skepticism; intellectual interests; tests; contribute to these communities; and final thoughts.
Keywords: alternative tests, achieving a high score, brain teasers, challenge of high scores, creating own blog, depression and puzzles, exclusive resources, Glia Society, high IQ community, high-IQ societies, high-range tests, intellectual challenges, intellectual interests, IQ as intelligence measure, IQexams.net tests.
Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, thank you for reaching out. What is your interest in high-IQ tests?
Mateo Muça: Thank you for conducting this interview with me. I didn’t expect that after our conversation, you would suggest interviewing me; I’m even a little nervous. If you don’t mind, Scott, I’d like to make a small digression: I’m 19 years old and have only recently become interested in high-range tests (about 1 year ago) and especially in the high IQ world, so please don’t judge my possibly naive answers too harshly :’).
My main interest is on finding beautiful solutions to well-designed problems. Additionally, I’m intrigued by the challenge of achieving a high score and also becoming a part of an IQ community, with the Glia Society likely being the first one.
Jacobsen: What is your interest in high-IQ societies, generally?
Muça: In general, it’s interacting with intellectual people that aren’t united by a single topic (like mathematics), It seems rather odd to join a math forum and initiate discussions on philosophy. For me, this diversity is a plus, and I hope to learn a lot and see a wide variety of problems.
Jacobsen: Have you taken any IQ tests before?
Muça: As for the “pro” tests, I haven’t taken any yet (because I want to approach them with full seriousness, especially considering that usually no more than two attempts are allowed (and my Jewish soul won’t allow me to pay for a test that won’t reflect my true results😇)). Overall, I’ve taken: Numerus Basic, Tic Tac Toe, NSE, several tests on the IQexams.net website and a few others similar to Mensa tests. I am currently taking the Algebrica, Numerus and SLSE 1.
Jacobsen: How have you done on some of these alternative tests, high-range tests?
Muça: I achieved the maximum or close to the maximum scores. I can assume that the results of these 3 “pro” tests will be above 165.
Knowing the specific result won’t change me as a person or provide much benefit, so I don’t worry about it too much. It’s just a nice number, like 180, and the fact that I’m “ONE IN 20,000,000!”.
I don’t know when I’ll submit these tests, as the coming year will be very difficult for me, and I probably won’t have the time and desire for tests. We will see…
Jacobsen: What is your general impress as an outsider to these communities with an interest in them?
Muça: It’s very difficult to describe impressions of communities you haven’t been a part of. But, overall, most of them seem either dead or on the brink of extinction. High-entry communities often seem more about prestige or status, a community with fewer than 100 people united only by high test scores is unlikely to be very active and productive (especially over a long time). I’d join such a group only for the numbers (since something might still happen and be talked about there, perhaps). On the other hand, communities with very low entry requirements (115-130 points) don’t seem very useful either; it’s better to stick to “Quora” or similar websites, then. These societies also seem a bit mysterious and aloof due to their closed policy.
Jacobsen: What is your favourite aspect of considering joining them?
Muça: Since I am a quite lonely person, it would be nice to find friends or even a partner there🤭, though I’m not counting on it too much. And, as mentioned earlier, communication with intellectual people.
Jacobsen: What is your main set of hesitancies?
Muça: In general, I have no hesitations about joining; there can’t be any if I can remain anonymous, but… I’m afraid of encountering a lot of narcissists and megalomaniacs, aiming to feed their egos and elevate themselves above others, seeing a large number of such individuals in these communities would be very disappointing. It would also be quite disheartening if the communities turn out to be “deader” than I expect.
Jacobsen: Where do you think skepticism is warranted?
Muça: Most of the skepticism I’ve read about is valid. I won’t list it here; you can easily find it online. But all this skepticism doesn’t change the fact that these tests are currently the best measure of intelligence we have.
Jacobsen: What are your current intellectual interests? Why those? When did they develop?
Muça: My intellectual interests are as abundant as they are sparse. I love everything that can challenge my brain, but at the same time, the “stars need to align” for me to start solving something. For example, I haven’t touched the SLSE 1 test for more than half a year because I simply haven’t been in the mood, or I am busy with work, or there are other barriers. In general, there are many things I would like to try, but for now, I have more plans than accomplishments🙃. My interest in different kinds of brain teasers significantly grew when I was 14 or 15 years old, around the time I began struggling with depression and started passing the time solving various puzzles. By the way, I am actively fighting it now and observing positive changes.
Jacobsen: What would you see as some of the benefits of joining the communities?
Muça: Everything mentioned above. And also: networking, which can be valuable for personal and professional development, access to exclusive resources and intellectual challenges.
Jacobsen: What tests would you like to take, but they look a little heftier and more difficult?
Muça: I would like to try some “Spatial” tests but they seem too abstract, which is off-putting. However, I will eventually try them.
When it comes to “Verbal” tests, I might be interested in a test with low entry requirements in terms of knowledge and language dependence.
Jacobsen: What do you hope to contribute to these communities?
Muça: My time and I have an idea to create my own blog or something similar in the future, where I will definitely mention IQ, even if just in passing.
Jacobsen: Any final thoughts today?
Muça: It would be nice if someone or a group of people took charge, displaced other communities, and developed one large community. However, there is a lot of work involved, and I don’t think anyone will take it on. It would also be great for the societies if cheating could be prevented, but that’s practically impossible.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Mateo.
Muça: I wish everyone well. Goodbye, Scott!
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Mateo Muça on Intrigue with High-IQ Societies [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/muça.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
‘Seneka’ is someone who reached out with an interest in IQ tests, high-range tests, and high-IQ societies. He discusses: interest in high-IQ tests; interest in high-IQ societies; any IQ tests; high-range tests; general impression; favourite aspect; main set of hesitancies; skepticism; intellectual interests; tests; contribute to these communities; and final thoughts.
Keywords: alternative tests, challenging and fun, facilitated contacts, genetic load, impulsive solutions, intellectual interests, joining associations, skepticism.
Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, thank you for reaching out. What is your interest in high-IQ tests?
Seneka: High-IQ tests are challenging and fun. Moreover, while assuming an IQ from a test may be debatable, it is not possible to argue that they do indeed assess an unusual way of thinking.
Jacobsen: What is your interest in high-IQ societies, generally?
Seneka: I really find it hard to have long conversations about irrelevant topics. That launched me into joining some of these societies, looking for relationships to learn from.
At first I was a little disappointed that there is not that much difference between inside and outside these associations.
But with a little searching you find true geniuses in various subjects in some of these societies.
Jacobsen: Have you taken any IQ tests before?
Seneka: This year I took several different intelligence tests. Generally, online IQ tests are not considered reliable, but nevertheless I took at least twenty of them and in all of them I got the maximum score given by each test.
I contacted Mensa, took a supervised matrix test and, if I am not mistaken, got at least 44 out of 45 items, if I was not lucky with one that I was not sure.
So far no test could give me a realistic approximation. I took a test supervised by a professional psychologist, the WAIS. The few items that did not score were for exceeding the time limit. Even so, the score was 157.
Jacobsen: How have you done on some of these alternative tests, high-range tests?
Seneka: Indeed. After this last test I came across some high range tests. Actually, with very good results. More than I expected and less than I know I could get. I am very impulsive and just after submitting my answers I found three other correct solutions. I prefer not to take those results as a reference, but they were pretty high.
Jacobsen: What is your general impression as an outsider to these communities with an interest in them?
Seneka: I have no idea. The reality is that in associations like Mensa, Intertel or Triple Nine are very good and there you can find all kinds of profiles and opportunities.
The higher ranking associations I have seen too few members and that discourages me a bit.
Jacobsen: What is your favourite aspect of considering joining them?
Seneka: I really don’t know if the benefit in these associations would be greater than in the more recognized ones. At this point I think joining these associations is more about ego than anything else.
Jacobsen: What is your main set of hesitancies?
Seneka: To damage some relations. Some people don’t understand intelligence is more about the way you think than about knowledge.
Pertenecer a esas asociaciones hace que algunos sean más exigentes y critiquen los errores. Pero todos cometemos errores.
Jacobsen: Where do you think skepticism is warranted?
Seneka: It’s not skepticism. I’ve always been what you might call a weirdo kid. I’ve been judged a lot for doing different things and people are willing to say: I knew it! I told you so!
Jacobsen: What are your current intellectual interests? Why those? When did they develop?
Seneka: I am very interested in neuroplasticity. I have been a hypnotist for many years and have found that strengths can be enhanced with hypnosis. Working memory, reasoning or processing speed.
Although I think that intelligence has a strong genetic load, I am fully convinced that it can be developed up to 30 or 40%.
Undoubtedly, I believe that more intelligent people, considering intelligence as the ability to solve problems, have more options available. That’s why I want to do more research on this.
Jacobsen: What tests would you like to take, but they look a little heftier and more difficult?
Seneka: Right now I don’t want to do any more tests. I have fun doing them, but then I regret having dedicated some valuable hours to it.
For me the most difficult ones are the verbal analogies, mainly because my native language is Spanish and they always need a deep understanding of English.
Jacobsen: What do you hope to contribute to these communities?
Seneka: If I can prove my hypothesis of increased intelligence and neuroplasticity, not only with “domestic” evidence but on a scientific level, you will have a lot of work to do.
Jacobsen: Any final thoughts today?
Seneka: We can conclude with three key points.
Partnerships are good for facilitating quality contacts.
Test results are not so important although, in my opinion, they give very good guidance.
Intelligence has a high genetic load, but it is also practiced. You can learn to think better or think in other ways.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time Seneka.
Seneka: Thanks to you, it has been a pleasure talking to you Jacobsen.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies. August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with ‘Seneka’ on Interest in High-IQ Societies [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/seneka.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Claus Volko is an Austrian computer and medical scientist who has conducted research on the treatment of cancer and severe mental disorders by conversion of stress hormones into immunity hormones. This research gave birth to a new scientific paradigm which he called “symbiont conversion theory”: methods to convert cells exhibiting parasitic behaviour to cells that act as symbionts. In 2013 Volko, obtained an IQ score of 172 on the Equally Normed Numerical Derivation Test. He is also the founder and president of Prudentia High IQ Society, a society for people with an IQ of 140 or higher, preferably academics. He discusses: Prudentia; general contents; Facebook group; Symbiont Conversion Theory; new developments in personal life; the high-IQ society space; Indie Game Dev Scene; Domination; Giana’s Return; the development of an indie game; Sonic; copyright issues; graphics library; and final thoughts.
Keywords: Domination strategy game, Fangame copyright issues, Giana Worlds review, Giana’s Return improvements, graphics libraries for indie games, high-IQ society space, Indie Game Dev Scene productivity, ISPE membership benefits, Kenneth Myers contributions, personal updates, Prudentia membership growth, Riemann conjecture article, Sonic game appeal, Symbiont Conversion Theory progress, dormant Facebook group, indie game development tips, journal transformation to blog, connecting with like-minded individuals.
Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How is Prudentia looking now?
Claus Volko, M.D.: We now have 77 members. Recently Iakovos Koukas joined the society. He is the author of an article that deals with an attempt to prove the Riemann conjecture. This article has been published in the blog of Prudentia.
Jacobsen: How many issues of the journal have been, in the end analysis so far, published? What have been the general contents? Who has been the most prolific contributor?
Volko: 15 issues of the journal were released in total. Afterwards the journal was transformed into a blog, which gets updated occasionally. The most prolific contributor has been Kenneth Myers, who mainly wrote articles about intelligence.
Jacobsen: How did life on the Facebook group develop amongst the members?
Volko: The Facebook group is pretty dormant. I only post from time to time.
Jacobsen: How has the work on Symbiont Conversion Theory been going?
Volko: Well, I’ve joined the Syncritic Institute because they have expressed interest in my theory. Meanwhile I’ve written a blog article for it that deals with the theory. That’s all I can say for now – the scientific community still seems not to be interested, or at least it isn’t aware of my idea yet.
Jacobsen: What are some new developments in personal life?
Volko: Thanks for asking. There isn’t much. I’ve switched employers a couple of times in recent years. I’m still unmarried and currently not in a relationship.
Jacobsen: What are some positive developments in the high-IQ society space?
Volko: For me personally it has been a positive development that I’ve joined the ISPE. The ISPE is really the best high IQ society there is. It has a very good journal called Telicom. Paying the annual fee of about EUR 40 is worth it just because of the journal. Telicom mostly features articles on philosophical subjects. I love them.
Jacobsen: You started some work with the writer space Indie Game Dev Scene. So far, highly productive with 9 articles in the span of about 2 weeks. I must have been living on a comet. What is the Giana Worlds?
Volko: The Giana Worlds is a game I reviewed for my new blog “Indie Game Dev Scene”. It is one of several attempts to create a game similar to the original “Great Giana Sisters”.
Jacobsen: How did the game Domination cast a spell on you?
Volko: I’ve played it for many years now, maybe already twenty years. It is similar to the board game Risk. I like it because it’s truly a strategy game, and I tend to excel at strategy games.
Jacobsen: How did the game Giana’s Return improve on the original?
Volko: It features better graphics and music, and is also a bit easier because you don’t immediately lose a life upon a hit.
Volko: Games consist of code, graphics and music. If you are a coder but don’t have good skills at the other two things, look for people who can help you. Sometimes graphic artists and musicians are even willing to help you for free, without compensation. There is a website called wanted.scene.org where you can post requests for help.
Jacobsen: I loved Sonic. What made this game particularly noteworthy, where – I am sure – individuals continue to play it?
Volko: High speed, great graphics, the lovely concept with the rings – that’s what I know Sonic for.
Jacobsen: Are there ever any copyright issues in releasing a “fangame”?
Volko: Yes, there are. Many fangames make use of graphics, sound effects or other assets from the original game, which are actually copyrighted. Sometimes creators of fangames get mail from the original developers and are asked to remove their fangames because of plagiarism. Fortunately, however, that doesn’t happen often.
Volko: Well, basically you can use OpenGL or DirectX, but there are also higher-level graphics libraries which make life easier, such as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) or raylib.
Jacobsen: I hope you’re well. Any final thoughts on life, love, and finding a niche community of like-ability people with similar interests?
Volko: I’m open for connecting with people who share my interests.
Jacobsen: Thank you, again, Claus.
Volko: My pleasure.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7). August 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, August 8). Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7).In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (August 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Claus Volko, M.D. on Community and “Indie Game Dev Scene”: Founder, Prudentia High IQ Society (7) [Internet]. 2024 Aug; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/volko-7.
and lines and colours and wonders, Fall: and summeron to mean whatever itshall; and sentiments and reflections and asunders; or springon towin twoferns, and then we feel like home.
See “Or with the sentiments and reflections and asunders, or along your dots…”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about Holocaust denial and German recordkeeping?
Rick Rosner: Let’s briefly talk about it. I’ll say the Nazis kept very gooI’llcords. So, when people talk about six million Jews being murdered by the Nazis, 200,000 disabled people being murdered, and another five million or so people considered undesirable by the regime, including Romani (what we might call gypsies), Polish people, Polish soldiers, gay people, and Catholic people who resisted, there are records of all these names. These numbers are much stronger than estimates.
There are plenty of companies implicated in working with Hitler, like Volkswagen and IBM. Any company that was in business in Germany in the 30s probably worked for the Nazis at one point. Some American companies, like IBM, helped with their recordkeeping. Movie companies, even those run by Jewish executives, avoided making Nazis the bad guys in their films because they still wanted to sell their movies in Nazi Germany.
But anyway, they kept records. Everyone who is a Holocaust denier is a fucking creep, an anti-Semitic racist, the worst of the worst. There might be some total idiots who’ve fallen into the orbit of a creepy Holocawho’venier, but for the most part, they are anti-Semitic creeps—working against an undeniable pile of definitive evidence.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Oh, there is another here. So, where I live, there is a Sasquatch Museum, which is two streets over. It’s a big Sasquatch community there. People write books about that mythology. It goes by different names, like Bigfoot, in some versions.
Rick Rosner: The Abominable Snowman when he’s in a snowy area.
Jacobsen: Yes, I was going to pick some other ones, but it would have pissed you off too much. These are a little more light. What are your thoughts on Sasquatch?
Ronser: Let’s talk about cryptozoology, a field because the odds for any one creature in cryptozoology, the study of fantastic creatures that are purported to exist, including yetis, Sasquatch, and the Loch Ness monster, are dozens. Most of them are going to turn out not to exist. The odds for any of these creatures are the more plausible of them, and Sasquatch is among the plausible ones because you look at the dubious ones. They’re dubious.
Some huge hominids have managed with everything to remain undetected, largely. That’s for as long as humans have been around and can record things for 10,000 years or at least 2,000 years, depending on what you believe. But the odds are less than one percent for this kind of thing.
But they do find fantastic creatures occasionally. Usually, they float up dead from the deep ocean or are dredged up in a fishing net, like a giant squid, which was probably the basis for the Kraken. You can have squid about 60 feet long, which is pretty giant.
And the coelacanth, I forget what it looks like, but it’s a giant prehistoric-looking fish that could’ve been the basis for some legends. You mostly don’t see it because it lives about three miles under the water. But for the most part, most of these things are not real.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ray Kurzweil and The Guardian. The article’s title is “AI Scientist Ray Kurzweil: We Are Going to Expand Intelligence a Millionfold by 2045.” Intelligence will be a million-fold more by 2045. Kurzweil is consistent with his predictions regarding what he makes and sticks to. What are your thoughts on this prediction of a million-fold expansion of intelligence?
Rick Rosner: Nobody’s been able to define intelligence in the history of trying to do it, so what does he mean?Since he’s a pretty math-oriented guy and an engineer, he has some semi-technical meaning for what he’s saying. I doubt he’d throw “a millionfold” without a specific meaning. What are we expanding? Computations per second within a single integrated entity?
Jacobsen: I’ll define it here. So, he is asked in this article:
What exactly is the Singularity?
Today, we have one brain size which we can’t go beyond to get smarter. But the cloud is getting smarter and it is growing really without bounds. The Singularity, which is a metaphor borrowed from physics, will occur when we merge our brain with the cloud. We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots – robots the size of molecules – that will go noninvasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.
Rosner: Yes, so I buy that it will deepen our awareness of consciousness. Did he say “under the awareness of consciousness”?
Jacobsen: Deepen our awareness and consciousness.
Rosner: Yes, but he’s throwing around many terms he’s not defining and couldn’t adequately define, like consciousness and awareness. But if you asked him to, he probably would attempt to define what he’s talking about. Certainly, we will be intimately linked with vast probability nets trained on trillions of information units, which will create all sorts of new smart things. But he’s notdon’tuately; he’s characterized what he means by expanding intelligence a millionfold. When he talks about the singularity, he’s said things he’s, and maybe he hasn’t, but thathasn’t40, or now he’s saying 2045he’sy question that has ever been asked or could be asked by humans will be answered by this explosion in whatever you want to call it. That seems more concrete to me. What else did he say in the interview? Because that one answer could be more satisfying. What do you think? Do you find his answer satisfying that we will increase our intelligence a millionfold?
Jacobsen: It’s hand-waving.
Rosner: Yes, and it seems like the universe could have more complexity to require a million-fold intelligence expansion. AI-type things may contain a million times more information than a human brain. Or you could make the case that during this century, the information stored in AI may exceed the aggregate information stored in human brains by a million times. But I’m not convinced what he’s saying because it’s unclear.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, so presidential candidate Kamala Harris is up. Her running mate is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. What is Walz known for? Why did she pick him?
Rick Rosner: Carole told me that it was because he asked, “How can I help?” when they met. She liked that. He seems cheerful. He signed a bill that provides every public school child in Minnesota with free breakfast and lunch, a cheap and effective way to improve educational outcomes. And it also needs means testing. Nobody’s checking to see how much money your family makes before you get your breakfast. They’re trying to call him “Tampon Tim” because he signed a bill to ensure menstrual products are available for kids in grades 4 through 12. There was some controversy because these products are made available to trans boys as well. Any of the accusations from the other side will not stick. He served in the National Guard for 24 years, starting at 17, and rose to the highest possible rank for a non-commissioned officer: Command Master Sergeant. The other side is trying to accuse him of stolen valour.
Stolen valour is when you lie about your military credentials. It’s a six-year program to become a Command Master Sergeant. After four years, he left the National Guard to run for Congress, so he didn’t complete the Command Master Sergeant program. You can call yourself a Command Master Sergeant while training in those six years, but if you leave before completing the program, you revert to your previous rank, like Staff Master Sergeant. So they’re accusing him of stolen valour when he uses Command Master Sergeant.
Nobody will buy that, especially since the ticket he’s running against includes a guy who dodged the draft five times. The other side, the TRP side, also says that Biden received draft deferments. Draft deferments aren’t the same thing as draft dodging. You can receive a deferment if you’re in college, for instance, or at least you could during the Vietnam War. TRP manufactured a medical excuse. And Biden’s not running, so that’s irrelevant.
What else have they accused him of? They’ve accused him of being a far-left radical, that he’s going to confiscate everybody’s guns. He used to be a hunter. There are plenty of pictures of him posing with guns. Anyway, he used to have a 100% rating with the NRA, and then that went to zero when he started backing things like universal gun background checks and red flag laws, common-sense gun laws that are supported by about 70% of Americans, including a majority of Republicans. He was a high school teacher. His wife has been a high school teacher for 29 years. He was a football coach and a defensive coordinator on a team he helped take from 0-27 to winning a state championship. So he seems friendly and likable.
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Not, as they put it, “cringe.” Hillary Clinton was accused of not being able to laugh naturally. They’re trying to accuse Kamala Harris of the same thing, but it doesn’t stick because she smiles a lot, and it doesn’t look artificial. And this Tim guy looks the same. He looks like a friendly guy, and I don’t think any accusations will stick. Of course, we’ve only had him as the candidate for a few hours. He got a DWI in 1995. He was driving 96 miles an hour with a blood alcohol level of 0.128, which is more than one and a half times the legal limit. But he’s not trying to cover that up, and that was 29 years ago. So I would guess that by Election Day, and maybe even before that, Harris and Walz will have the same lead in the polls that Biden did in 2020.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So there’s this whole principle on YouTube of calling someone a Nazi as the end of an argument. Are people using Nazi analogies or accusations online? I’m sure you see this on the X platform on posts.
Rick Rosner: Yes, so is it Godwin’s Law that as soon as you call somebody a Nazi, you’ve lost? It’s somebody’s law. You’ve lost the argument. That might have been true five or ten years ago. I don’t buy it anymore because we have actual Nazis marching through the streets of America, rioting in England, and trying to pull stuff in France. Sometimes you have to call a Nazi a Nazi. I’m fine with that. I’m fine with comparing Trump to Nazis because he was our deadliest president, and I’d argue that he still is.
More people, a million more Americans, died under Trump than in four years under any previous president. Only a third of that was due to the increasing population. I guess now that more people have died under Biden, but Trump set Biden up to fail. We only had one year of COVID under Trump, and we’ve had another three and a half years of COVID under Biden. But I would say Trump is more responsible for that than Biden.
Trump messed up the early response when we could have gotten a lid on it. If we’d had half the number of cases in the first year that we had, we wouldn’t have gotten all the variations because variations originate from millions of cases. So the fewer the cases, the fewer the variations and the more immunity people can build up. He politicized masks, he politicized the vaccine, so he set up America to have a lot more people die of COVID after he left office.
He is “America’s Hitler,” not only in terms of actions but in terms of demeanor, and he’s responsible for more U.S. citizens’ deaths than any other president, a million. He didn’t kill as many as Hitler, who was responsible for at least 30 million deaths across Europe. So Trump didn’t do that. We’ve been a lucky country to be isolated, separated from World War II. It didn’t come to our shores, so we didn’t suffer the huge casualties. Russia lost more than 10 million people in World War II. We’ve lost 410,000 Americans to battle.
That’s 4% of what Russia lost. But given that we’re a lucky, isolated country, Trump being responsible for the deaths of at least a million people who died of COVID, and not just here but in other countries because we’re a big country and we helped spread it to the rest of the world, he’s our deadliest president. So I’m fine with comparing him. Except it’s not a fair comparison because, before he went crazy, Hitler was reasonably smart, and Trump is a moron.
So yes, I’m fine with calling Trump “dumb Hitler.” How did we get on that topic again? You asked about YouTube arguments where the argument ends with somebody calling someone a Nazi. So, under Obama, people were talking about the end of history, that we’re done with racism and war. And no, it turned out not to be so. It was a legitimate criticism in the happy Obama days that calling somebody a Nazi was unfair and overkill, but things have changed.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you hear about Bangladesh? What is happening there?
Rick Rosner: Oh, Bangladesh. Did I hear about the overthrow of the leader? No. I heard that the government was killing a bunch of protesters in the streets. I didn’t know that they succeeded in dumping him.
Jacobsen: Yes, Sheikh Hasina is out.
Rosner: Who’s in charge of the country now?
Jacobsen: No one. But they want Muhammad Yunus to run it. What are your thoughts on Snoop Dogg at the Olympics? Mine is, it’s fine. He’s a legitimate celebrity.
Rosner: These people like him. He’s been famous for probably 40 years now. Jimmy Kimmel is amused by him. One thing I remember him saying in a couple of interviews is, “You murdered people,” because, apparently, if that’s true or not, but Snoop was a huge gang guy as a young man. And he did kill people. Jimmy wouldn’t say something like that unless there was some truth to it. Snoop would laugh it off. But we’ve had celebrities who’ve been murderers. What’s his name? The boxing promoter? King.
Jacobsen: Oh, I know who you’re talking about, King.
Rosner: He murdered at least one guy and maybe two guys. Laura Bush didn’t murder anybody, but she did commit vehicular manslaughter. George W. Bush’s wife. She ran a stop sign at a really empty intersection in rural Texas and smashed into an ex-boyfriend and killed him, which is terrible. Caitlyn Jenner was texting and not paying attention on PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, and rear-ended somebody, killing that lady. So we have some. Mark Wahlberg hasn’t killed anybody, but when he was young and thuggy, he beat up some guy and caused the guy to lose an eye.
Tim Allen hasn’t hurt anybody, but he went to prison for a few years for dealing coke as a young man. So you can come back from criminality or a horrible mishap. Now Snoop is a good guy. He’s a football coach. I’m sure he funds youth football programs. I’m sure he’s a good citizen now. The Olympics are nice. They’re a chance for everybody to shut the fuck up and just watch people do stuff for a couple of weeks.
Jacobsen: Do you have any favorite songs of his?
Rosner: Of Snoop? No. If I could recognize the song, that would count as a favorite. I’m bad on rap.
Jacobsen: How about“Drop It Like It’s Hot”?
Rosner: I guess. I quit paying much attention to music after Prince and Michael Jackson. That’s early ’80s. By 1986, I’d started dating Carole and my disco days were largely over. But, yes, I would still bounce at bars, but going to clubs and trying to dance my way into some woman’s underpants, those days were over. So my musical knowledge is decades out of date, though I like Billie Eilish. Her stuff sounds good, and her lyrics are pretty funny.
Jacobsen: She’s talented and young. She’s really, really good.
Rosner: Yes, she’s ridiculously young. But she just goes ahead and talks about whatever she wants to talk about. She’ll say, “Sometimes it’s good just to jerk off,” which I respect because I say the same thing. I saw a documentary on Amy Winehouse. Turns out her lyrics were really funny too. If I paid more attention to lyrics, which I should now, I’d probably find a lot of stuff to appreciate. Outside of rap, there was an era in the ’90s where lyrics were pretty weak. Rap has always had strong lyrics, but outside of rap, there was a lot of R&B that helped me not pay much attention to music. On the other hand, I just wasn’t paying enough attention to see that there was some R&B that I wouldn’t have found annoying.
The boy band era was also a reason for me not to pay much attention. But I’m sure there’s a ton of good music that I’m missing. Carole got me satellite radio, and I listen to nothing but stand-up routines when I’m driving from gym to gym. So I’m missing out on music, but it’s important for me to hear dozens and dozens of stand-up routines because it helps with my sense of cadence and writing sentences that flow well.
Not nice in that they’re sweet, but nice in that they have an internal rhythm and don’t have a lot of extra stuff going on. One of the most important jobs of editing is cutting superfluous stuff, and you can usually go through somebody’s writing, including my own, and cut 10 to 15%, just pulling unnecessary words out of sentences.
Rick Rosner: Before the stock market even opened, I reminded people that Trump owned most of the 20 worst point drops, percentage drops, and one-day drops in the history of the Dow Jones. This inspired lots of back-and-forth between liberals and MAGAs. But the whole story is this: the stock market did pretty well during the first three years of Trump’s presidency. He had 126 all-time highs on the Dow.
And the stock market liked him because he was giving tax cuts to corporations and rich people and cutting regulations. Then, when faced with an actual challenge with COVID in 2020, he botched it because he’s a moron. That crashed the market, leaving him the first president since Hoover 90 years ago to leave office with net job losses. There was a stock market crash in 2020, but it was fairly brief. It took Biden a couple of years to help cure the economy after Trump left it in ruins. He disrupted supply chains. COVID disrupted supply chains, leading to inflation and giving companies the excuse to jack up prices for record profits. So I had a more comprehensive picture of everything.
Well, except that it’s a measure of how bad a president is. I’m sorry to restate it. The number of years it takes to undo the damage done by the previous president is a measure of how bad that president was. According to presidential historians, Trump was the worst president in history. The economy is now reasonably healthy, with only 4.3 percent unemployment.
The Fed, after this really bad day in the Japanese markets where the Japanese market lost 14%, and the US markets lost 3%, will almost certainly cut interest rates in September. The good news is that the Fed has five percentage points of potential cuts to play with if that’s what it takes to stop the economy from going into recession. So there you go. Sorry, I’m tired, which wasn’t as coherent as I had hoped.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you mention how it’s being called the “Kamala crash” by Trump?
Rosner: Yes, that’s what my first tweet was about. It was a “fuck you” to everybody who was cheering for a huge crash to make Biden and Harris look bad, which is exactly what Trump is doing. Then I was accused of saying nobody’s doing that, and of course, Trump did exactly that. There’s not much of a crash here, at least as of yet. The Nikkei, the Japanese stock average, dropped 14% yesterday and another 6% on Friday and is up 9% right now.
So the US markets might bounce back a percent. Markets losing 3% is not a crash. The only market in correction is the NASDAQ. Correction means it is down 10% from an all-time high. If it bounces back a percent today, which it may or may not, even the NASDAQ will not be in correction, but we’ll see. So it’s not a crash. The good news is that the Fed has all these percentage points and quarter points they can cut to help us avoid a recession.
The way that works is to cool down the market by raising interest rates, the rates that the Treasury and banks pay on investments. You can now buy a money market account that pays 5%. So, if you can get 5% risk-free, many people want to avoid investing in stocks. Every time you cut that rate, the prime rate, by a quarter percent, a certain number of investors will decide they don’t want the safe investment anymore because they can’t make as much, and it makes stocks more valuable as investments because they’re riskier but now they pay more relative to the safe investment.
For the first time in history, after the 2008 Great Recession, interest rates were at 0% for years. Then, to cool down the economy, the Fed raised the prime to 5.5%, which means they have more than 20 quarter-point cuts they can make if they need to pull the US out of a potential recession.
Rick Rosner: So, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he was contacted for comment by the New Yorker that this story would come out. Ten years ago, a dead bear cub was found in Central Park in Manhattan next to an abandoned bicycle. The news media in New York freaked out because why was there a bear in Central Park?
It was later determined that the bear had died after being hit by a car, so the whole thing was mysterious. Within the last few days, RFK Jr. was contacted by the New Yorker magazine for comment because they’d gotten to the bottom of the bear story. He released his version of it in a conversation video with Roseanne Barr. There’s now a video of Robert Kennedy Jr. saying he was driving to do some falconry one morning into the woods. The car in front of him…
A car in front of RFK Jr. hit a bear and killed a bear cub. RFK Jr. stops and grabs the dead bear and throws it into his vehicle because he says he’s going to take it home, skin it, and eat the meat.
So he’s got it in his vehicle all day, and later, he’s out with friends at Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, I guess. They’re discussing what to do about the bear. RFK is persuaded to get rid of the bear by dumping it in Central Park, and they find an abandoned bicycle. They try to make it look like the bicycle hit the bear and killed it. This 10-year mystery of who dumped the bear now goes back to one of our fucking idiot presidential candidates. This guy is a piece of shit from way back. So he kept a diary. In the diary, he wrote down all his sexual encounters while married, ranking the encounters from one for flirting to ten for fucking. In 2001, he recorded 37 encounters, 16 of which were full-on fucking.
While married to his second wife, several years later, they were going through a divorce, and the wife found the diary, which included all these write-ups of the sex, and she hanged herself to death. That is awful and unethical.
It’s awful hearing that. He’s been addicted to heroin. He published a photo of him gleefully eating a dog in some foreign country. I know that some countries eat dogs, but it doesn’t seem fucking presidential. You can give him credit for not being addicted to heroin anymore. Now, he’s addicted to testosterone. He’s said anti-Semitic shit. He’s a vax denier. He’s a lunatic. Neither he nor his vice-presidential partner on the ticket have any experience holding elected office. He’s been a huge piece of shit at various points in his life. So, I don’t like the guy.
Jacobsen: What positive traits might he have to take the devil’s advocate position?
Rosner: Since he’s such a fucking lunatic, he might take more votes away from Trump than he does from Harris. Ideally, people see what he’s like, and I think his numbers keep dropping as more and more people see what an a-hole he is. But whatever, I hope he gets less than 5% of the vote. And I hope that he takes—if we’ll ever be able to tell for sure—but I hope he takes most of that 5% from Trump. That people have gotten disgusted with Trump, so they want a fresh face, even though they’re still pretty much lunatics, so they fucking vote for RFK Jr.
Jacobsen: Other positive points?
Rosner: He’s so off-putting. He’s got this big bloated high blood pressure face, maybe partially because he’s doing a ton of testosterone. He has something wrong with his voice, and we’re not supposed to make fun of people with a handicap, but he’s pretty off-putting. But it’s the American political landscape that some people like voting for an off-putting a-hole. The negatives so far outweigh the positives. He might stand for some things like government accountability and environmental issues, but the things that we know him for far outweigh any incidental things he might have half right.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are your retrospective perspectives on the 2021 US coup attempt?
Rick Rosner: The last thing I read on Twitter before I came down to talk with you tonight is people expressing their anger at the head of the DOJ, Merrick Garland. While a thousand regular people who rioted that day have been arrested and prosecuted, no senators, Congresspeople, or members of Trump’s cabinet have faced similar consequences. Perhaps some members of Trump’s cabinet and Trump himself may eventually face charges, but thus far, it has mostly been regular people who have been prosecuted. There is substantial evidence indicating that numerous Republican senators and Congresspeople were complicit in these events, yet no charges have been brought against any of them.
I firmly believe that Trump, along with several individuals in his circle, such as Roger Stone and possibly Michael Flynn, orchestrated this event, in addition to the scheme involving false electors. This incident represents the most egregious attack on the democratic system in the United States since the Civil War.
There are debates about whether Merrick Garland is cowardly for not prosecuting more high-profile figures or for taking so long to pursue Trump. Some argue that justice takes time, and I understand the importance of bringing charges that will result in successful prosecutions. However, I firmly believe that Trump and his associates are fundamentally anti-democratic. If there are claims that it was not MAGA supporters but FBI agents disguised as them, I must reject such notions as baseless and absurd. I would like to see more high-ranking individuals prosecuted for their actions. This period was a dark time for the United States and remains so. I am hopeful that Trump will be decisively defeated in the upcoming election, which is approximately 90 days away, allowing him to face actual consequences for his actions and stand trial alongside others.
I doubt that Kamala Harris, if elected president, would begin her term by increasing national tension by pursuing charges against the January 6th participants more than four years after the events of 2021. Some individuals may evade justice, much like Nixon did for Watergate when Ford pardoned him in the interest of national healing. While Ford may have believed in this course of action, he was also a Republican protecting a Republican. I hope that Democrats will gain control of the White House, the House, and the Senate in significant numbers to achieve meaningful progress. This may not involve further prosecution of the January 6th participants beyond what the DOJ has already done, but it would allow for curbing the influence of the Republicans.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, was deeply involved in the conspiracy, allegedly burning documents while the riot was occurring, according to witnesses who have turned state’s evidence. He and many others were engaged in egregious misconduct.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Are they trying the same with candidate Kamala Harris?
Rick Rosner: Oh, and they’re doing the same thing to Kamala Harris. It went away pretty fast because so many people on social media said, “Fuck you.” But I’m sure it’ll pop up again. I’ve been waiting for it because she was born in America, but people say, “But her parents weren’t permanent residents. They were here working on jobs, research jobs at colleges or some shit.”
How permanent their residency is, but according to the Constitution, it doesn’t fucking matter. If you’re born in America, you’re a fucking citizen. But I’ve been waiting for somebody to make this argument. Finally, some fucking idiot named Nick, who calls himself a journalist, was being interviewed on some horrible right-wing interview show on Sirius, and this guy said, “How can America be led by somebody who’s only five-foot-two?”
So, this fucking asshole calls himself a journalist. I suspected somebody would try to bring it up, but Kamala Harris is not tall, and this fucking dick is trying to make an issue out of her height. I’d waited for this for months, or at least since she became the Democratic nominee. Fuck you, Nick. You’re a fucking idiot. A dishonest dealer.
And the Western Sky: the moon in your eyes; and azure plains dance wonderous walls, ostentatious for all; and the siltriller trills thrills in muddy waters to all, on all, and all; and I’m sorry. I cannot stay.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
The 8-year legal saga over censorship by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of a Bill of Rights display has finally ended with receipt of attorneys’ fees by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Although FFRF won the lawsuit with a judgment by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last year, disputes and delaying tactics by the governor held up the required attorney fees and costs totaling $358,073.67, which were received this week. Of that, $184,727.11 reimburses FFRF for staff attorney time.
“We’re pleased this federal lawsuit can finally be put to rest,” comments Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “But had Abbott only done the right thing from the start, or at least accepted the decision of the federal court back in 2017, Texas taxpayers would have been spared most of these attorneys’ fees.”
The lawsuit began in February 2016, after Abbott ordered removal of FFRF’s duly-approved and permitted Bill of Rights “nativity” display from the Texas state Capitol. Abbott ordered the display removed only three days after it was put up on Dec. 18, 2015, lambasting it as indecent, mocking and “contributing to public immorality.”
The exhibit, designed by artist Jake Fortin, commemorates the “birth” of the Bill of Rights (adopted on Dec. 15, 1791), depicting Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty gazing adoringly at a manger containing the historic document. A sign by the display also celebrated the Winter Solstice. FFRF placed the display to counter a Christian nativity scene placed in the Capitol in 2014 and 2015.
Largely due to Abbott’s refusal to accept the ruling of the court in FFRF’s favor, the case pingponged before the federal courts and the appeals court, which ruled on it twice. The state later closed the public forum altogether.
FFRF was represented in the case by FFRF Counsel Sam Grover and FFRF Legal Director Patrick Elliott, with attorney Rich Bolton of Boardman and Clark LLP serving as litigation counsel. The District Court case number is 1:16-cv-00233 and the Appeals Court number is 21-50469.
Organization Description: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters all over the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Multiple members of the community informed FFRF that the district turned its mandatory teacher in-service into a religious worship event on July 30, 2024. The district’s official social media account confirms this, posting a video of someone leading the crowd in singing the contemporary Christian song, “Goodness of God,” instructing everyone in the crowd to join in. FFRF was informed that multiple worship songs were sung, and the group was also led in prayer. One teacher even shared the district’s video with the caption, “We had church today.”
“Faculty and staff have the First Amendment right to be free from religious indoctrination, including when participating in school-sponsored events,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to the district. “It is a basic constitutional principle that public schools may not show favoritism toward or coerce belief or participation in religion.”
Coercing staff members to sing religious songs and participate in prayer at a teacher in-service, or any school-sponsored event, is unconstitutional. Furthermore, imposing religious worship on staff violates their religious rights. The district serves and employs a diverse population with a multitude of religious beliefs, including Jews, Muslims, atheists and agnostics. Thirty-seven percent of the American population is non-Christian, including the almost 30 percent who are nonreligious. Additionally, at least a third of Generation Z (those born after 1996) have no religion, with a recent survey revealing almost half of Gen Z qualify as “nones” (religiously unaffiliated).
FFRF reminds the district that it must be neutral with regard to religion in order to respect and protect the First Amendment rights of all staff. The district fell short in that duty, and must be aware that including religious worship in its events is unconstitutional.
“The district claims to foster an inclusive environment for teaching and learning,” adds Joshi. “We are merely reminding them that inclusion extends to the nonreligious.”
FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor agrees.
“This mandatory event forced Christianity upon a captive audience of teachers, including some who are undoubtedly non-adherents, in an appalling display of religious favoritism,” Gaylor says. “Jackson-Madison County Schools, which exists to educate, not to religiously proselytize, deserves an ‘F’ for this First Amendment violation.”
WikiIslam is under attack!
On a September 4 Zoom call of “Alaska’s War Council,” 
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) tells me that a U.S. Air Force Academy cadet claims the school’s leader is stifling a Jewish group activity while sharing evangelical Christian content internally at the academy.
MRFF’s longest-serving Advisory Board member, Reverend MeLinda Morton, a former USAF chaplain who served at the Air Force Academy, shares her reaction to the Academy’s New Life Church dining hall proselytization:
Ed Asner receives MRFF 2010 Thomas Jefferson Award from MRFF Founder & President Mikey Weinstein
Joe was a loyal, fierce, and steadfast advocate of MRFF’s mission to ensure constitutionally-mandated church-state separation in the U.S. armed forces and Veterans Administration for over 13 years. 
Christian Flag for Illustrative Purposes added by MRFF
Back in 1992, political consultant James Carville coined the phrase “
The land subject to taxes is highlighted in red.
In-Sight Publishing 
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