Podcast No. 2 
Interview with Kevin MacDonald

[1]43 minutes/6,038 words

Audio Version: To listen in a player, click here [2]. To download the mp3, right-click here [2] and choose “save link as.”

Greg Johnson: Our guest today is Professor Kevin MacDonald of California State University at Long Beach. Dr. MacDonald is widely known for his work on group evolutionary strategies and the psychology of ethnocentrism.

But what I want you to draw upon today, Kevin, is your expertise as a professor of psychology. In a recent piece [3] at the Occidental Observer you talked about Emma West and Anders Behring Breivik, and the fact that both of these people are being labeled “insane” for their ethnocentric political views and statements.

I just wanted to explore some of that with you, because although the Establishment wants people to believe that we’re all crazy in this cause, there really are a number of people in our movement who are kind of strange – and I don’t want to mention any names or anything like that – but I do think it’s very important to be somewhat sensitized to the different kinds of abnormal and aberrant mental types that you come across.

You mentioned in your piece on Breivik, specifically, that you didn’t think he was a schizophrenic, which is what they labeled him. But you did talk about some other traits that you thought might be characteristic of his behavior. Could you talk a bit about that?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, actually psychopathology has become one of my interests. I’m actually writing an academic paper right now, an evolutionary perspective on various psychiatric diagnoses, particularly aggression and what they call conduct disorder in children.

Breivik was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic by a panel in Norway, and I think that’s just completely out of line. At least one of the doctors that had interviewed him earlier said that if you were planning something as intensively as he did, you have to be very rational, you have to be very much under control. It just doesn’t fit with a paranoid schizophrenic, where the person is completely out of touch with reality. If you look at his writings, he’s very rational; quite a bit of his writings I’d be happy to have posted on Occidental Observer. He’s a very intelligent, well-read guy, and he had a lot of good ideas.

So this diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia is politically motivated, I think. It’s intended to make him seem completely insane, because paranoid schizophrenia is psychotic; that is the kind of guy you have to lock up and throw away the key basically.

And I’m not saying he’s not unusual. He is abnormal, I think. So what I suggested in my article was that he had a tendency towards a grandiose sense of self, and that’s associated with what I called the behavior approach system, in other words he’s very self-confident, he pursues his goals very aggressively, he’s very focused on his goals, and that sort of thing. But he’s very much grounded in reality.

There are states especially hypomania, or even mania, but when you get more extreme on the behavioral approach system, there are cognitive distortions. This is a system that we all have. We all feel good about ourselves and confident and pursue our goals, but some people are way out there and they suffer cognitive distortions. However, these cognitive distortions are not the same as psychosis.

I think that Breivik overestimated how effective this would be as a weapon in the struggle against the invasion of his country. I think he was overconfident that people would rally to his cause and that sort of thing. I’m afraid that in fact his actions in the end may be counterproductive. So people like that tend to be just a bit out of touch with reality in terms of what the effects of their actions are going to be. But they’re not completely insane by any means.

Greg: There was a book I recently reviewed [4] at Counter-Currents a couple months back by Nassir Ghaemi, who’s an American psychologist of Iranian descent who teaches at Tufts University. He wrote a book called A First-Rate Madness, and in there he tried to argue that a lot of political figures, most of whom are on the Left and all of whom are regarded highly by multiculturalists, suffered from some fairly severe mental abnormalities. And rather than say there must be something wrong with their politics, he says we need to re-evaluate mental illness. Maybe we need to get rid of this stigma. And he talks about people like Churchill, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and so forth.

And one of the things in the book that struck me as interesting is that he seems to define mental illness simply in a statistical kind of way. For instance he talks about mental abnormalities, and he talks about people who are basically kind of low-key individuals, people who are very high energy individuals, people who are highly strung and go back and forth, but it seems to me that those can be abnormal in the statistical sense that most people aren’t that way, but it doesn’t strike me that there’s anything pathological about being, say, kind of a low-key laid back guy or a high energy, high confidence person.

KMac: That’s pretty much the approach I’m taking. My view is that we all have these systems. We all have systems that bring us into the world and make us want things. It’s strongly attracted to reward, it wants social status, and so on. When you get to the extreme level you might call that pathology, but as you say quite a few normal people who are very high achievers are very high on these traits. Quite a few artists perhaps could be diagnosed as manic-depressive. There’s a lot of traits that are very useful, even when they’re extreme but not too far over the edge.

There’s sort of a fine line, and I think the reason these genes stay in the population is because some of these people are very, very successful. And some of them are complete basket cases. They’re too extreme to the point that they burn out, or they do dangerous things, or they’re completely out of touch with reality. But there’s a fine line there.

And I think with someone like Breivik, we have to look at his strengths as well as his cognitive distortions, and the fact that he was very rational about a lot of things is certainly something that is important from our point of view. And certainly the fact that they’re trying their best to make him into a complete psychotic is just purely political in my opinion.

Greg: So do you think that mental illness, then, can simply be understood as an intensification of abnormality? Because it strikes me as completely possible that somebody could be, say, very high energy, very self-confident, and yet not be out of touch with reality. And it strikes me that to be mentally ill, the mind can’t be functioning properly anymore. It’s not just a statistical definition, of “that’s abnormal, therefore he’s ill”; but that the brain doesn’t work well, and it seems to me that there are at least two things that we would say that the mind has to do. One is to perceive reality: be in touch with the world. And the other thing I think is necessary for a healthy psyche is to be able to relate to other people, which again is a kind of perception like empathy or something like that.

KMac: Exactly. In my system I have four specific evolved systems I think are the most important for personality. One of them relates to empathy, that is, close affection and relations and pair-bonds. People on the opposite end are what we call psychopaths or sociopaths. They have no concern about other people. And when you look at Breivik, he’s simply not that way. He has a very strong sense of his people. The fact that he killed those children is horrifying, but the fact is I believe that his sense of himself and his goals and his plans and his sense of impending disaster for his people made him suppress these normal associations and feelings that he had for other people. It’s something that I personally don’t think I could do, but he did it, and you have to think in terms of what would have made someone like that do that.

Again, I’m emphasizing his sense of grandiosity, his sense of having these goals of saving his people and that sort of thing. But again I think it did lead to cognitive distortions, and quite probably something that’s counter-productive. But psychosis is simply not indicated.

Mike Polignano: I thought that what you said in your article about oxytocin – you actually linked to another article [5], a recent study which showed that oxytocin, which is the “cuddle” chemical that is supposed to increase empathy, only does so for members of one’s ingroup, and in fact the same chemical can increase hostility towards people whom one views as being part of the “other,” or the outgroup.

KMac: Exactly, that’s exactly how I’m conceptualizing Breivik, because the fact is that you have this system which makes you nurturant and affectionate, and you want to help your people and all that, but it’s really directed at the family. If you accept an evolutionary account of human behavior, you can’t have a system that could evolve if it just made you indiscriminately nurturing and altruistic. So this system with oxytocin is really directed at family members and close relationships and people that you have affection for.

Greg: That’s really interesting. Plato in the Republic lays out a kind of psychology where he talks about the parts of the soul. One part of the soul, the “middle” part—which is middle because it’s associated with the chest—he calls thumos, which is sometimes translated as “spirit.” And thumos is a really complicated idea, but part of that notion seems to be love of one’s own. There’s a sense of attachment to what’s one’s own and what’s closest to oneself. And the flip side of thumos is enmity for people who are outside of that ingroup or opposed to that ingroup. So it’s interesting to see that modern studies of actual neurochemistry are coming up with an underlying basis for that kind of duality: the love of one’s own, the hatred or fear of outsiders.

KMac: That’s right. And I do think if you read Breivik, you see a very strong sense of affectionate love for his people. You can’t see him as a psychopath or a sociopath; it’s simply not there. And the fact that he’s really grounded in reality again simply does not suggest any kind of psychosis. So we’ll see what happens with this, but that’s my opinion.

Greg: Well, people like Breivik are dangerous to be associated with, definitely. If one is building a political movement or just a political network, I personally would want to be able to spot and avoid people like him who might go off fully loaded and kill a bunch of people. What are the signs that one might have that somebody is a potential Breivik? What would you be on the lookout for?

KMac: If I were talking to him I suppose what I would expect to find is that he would have unrealistic attitudes about his own capabilities, about the effectiveness of his own actions. He’d be just a little bit out of touch with that. He’d be overly confident, would not really listen to other people very well, and just essentially be on his own pathway, his own agenda.

Yeah, I’m very worried about people like that too. We always have to worry about that. Because I think that the people on our side have got to be in a sense a little bit extreme. We have to be a little bit alienated from the culture around us, and that automatically makes us extreme because the vast majority of people just want to fit in, and that’s very normal. Well, you have to worry that you’re going to have really, really crazy people associating with us. So we have to watch out for that, absolutely.

Greg: One really important thing that your article stressed and that we’ve already talked about is this issue of being sociopathic or psychopathic. Of course a lot of the quick and dirty dismissal of ethnonationalists is that “Oh, these are a bunch of cold-hearted sociopathic people,” and that’s obviously not the case. If you really are primarily motivated by a love of your own, that is definitely not sociopathic.

Is there a named mental disorder, though, where one doesn’t love one’s own but one loves things that are foreign? Guilliaume Faye talks about xenophilia, love of the foreign, which is the flip side of xenophobia. The corollary of xenophilia is ethnic self-hatred or “ethnomasochism” as he puts it. That really strikes me as a bizarre and aberrant mentality, and that’s the mentality that’s fostered by the whole diversity cult in America.

KMac: That’s true. Actually one of my pet theories is that when people get too high on the affection system, when they get too nurturing, they lose this ingroup/outgroup thing and it becomes [pathological]. In those experiments with oxytocin, they find that people who have high oxytocin still have a sense of ingroup and outgroup, but when you get really extreme on that scale, I don’t see that. I see people indiscriminately affectionate and without any sense of boundaries. And I think that is a real psychiatric disorder.

And actually there’s a name for it, dependency disorder, for people who are overly inclined to depend on people, and they’re indiscriminately affectionate, and they get exploited by other people, and that kind of thing. Most of them tend not to be very happy, which is why they go to a psychiatrist. But that is the kind of thing: there is a tendency for a certain kind of person to be indiscriminately and inappropriately altruistic and good.

Greg: It’s odd, though, that the very same people who are like that will turn really vehemently and viciously upon the people who are closest to them if they don’t go along with their kind of indiscriminate love for the other. I have friends in our larger cause who have been basically disowned by their families because they don’t subscribe to this bizarre xenophilia, as Faye puts it. And people who subscribe to that attitude are willing to attack and sever their connections with their own children. There’s something really strange about that. Can you explain that?

KMac: There is. Frankly I don’t really understand that one. But I do agree that [people like that] exist. I’ve seen them myself. In some ways looking at The Authoritarian Personality, that’s the kind of person that they idealize: the sincere liberal who would reject his own family in pursuit of these ideals. There are such people. I can’t say that I have a good analysis of that phenomenon, though.

Greg: One thing that strikes me as interesting that I read in your work is this discussion of “altruistic punishment.” The use of the term “altruistic” there is a little odd to me because it seems to really mean this: that one punishes people in one’s ingroup in a way that reduces the competitiveness and the survivability of that larger group. And that seems to be somewhat related to people who would attack their own children or their own kin in favor of foreigners.

KMac: It’s interesting; that’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that. But the idea is that you have these groups, especially groups made up of individualists who don’t want to have strong kinship relationships and have a strong sense of a moral, ideological ingroup; these people have a tendency to punish those who violate group norms. Even at cost to themselves. That’s what we call altruistic punishment, because they’re doing it at cost to themselves. They don’t really get a benefit from it, but they reinforce group norms, and that does seem to be a really strong part of our culture. It really appears in the Puritan culture, a strain of our culture which I think has been a dominant part of our culture in the last 300 years or so. That is an important aspect of things.

Mike: I think it’s an interesting phenomenon: white self-hatred and exactly what brings that out of people. Is it a product of our culture, of the moral universalism, or is it something that certain people have a predisposition toward but that wouldn’t normally be expressed under a healthier culture?

KMac: I think that’s a very good question, a difficult question. I’m trying to develop a theory about individualism—actually I’m writing a book about it—and the idea is basically that individualists, like everybody else, have to form groups, but they’re not based on kinship. In kinship groups everybody knows their place in the kinship hierarchy.

Most peoples around the world tend to be non-individualists, what we would call collectivists. For example, the Jewish groups are very collectivist. If you look at traditional Jewish society, everything is based on kinship.

Well, individualistic societies are based on reputation. And that is, you have to have a sense of integrity and moral uprighteousness within the community, and your moral reputation is critical. And so what seems to happen in these individualistic groups is that people are more prone toward altruistic punishment. They’re more willing to punish other people who make transgressions, even at cost to themselves. And the idea is that there’s a strong sense of having a good reputation.

And so what’s happening in this culture of political correctness that’s been erected by these Jewish intellectual movements that I discussed in The Culture of Critique, is that any infraction against multicultural morality and righteousness is met with guilt and punishment, that is, people will altruistically punish people who deviate from it.

If you look at Emma West and that little incident on the subway, it’s another white woman who yells at her and gets extremely in her face. She’s one of these altruistic punishers. She’s out there punishing somebody who has deviated from the moral status quo that’s been erected by this culture of the Left, this very anti-White culture where White people are the only people that can’t have a sense of ingroup pride or sense of interests or anything else.

So that’s what I’m concerned about: this culture of moral uprighteousness and people wanting to maintain their reputations and feeling good about themselves is not only turning us against ourselves—people are terrified and feel morally guilty for any kind of infraction against political correctness, whether it’s not wanting immigration, having attitudes that blacks  are prone to crime, and all of these things that are proscribed by these elites.

The idea is that this becomes the moral establishment, and then people do not want to violate that because it ruins their reputation. They will altruistically punish others who do do that, and as we’ve seen over and over in history.

Again, one of the main groups I’m focusing on are the Puritans. The Puritan strand of Western culture is a very important strand in American culture and English culture, so that’s where I’m headed in my book. It’s hard to discuss all this on a radio interview, but that’s where I’m headed.

Greg: That sounds really interesting.

Mike: I’m curious as to whether that phenomenon is racially specific for Whites, whether it has some kind of evolutionary basis, if there’s a link between that and the high investment parenting and reproductive strategies of Whites.

KMac: Yes, that is definitely part of the argument. The idea is that Whites essentially evolved in the North, and required a very high investment style of parenting but did not have strong selection for competition between groups, and so we’re more individualistic. When groups did form they were not based on strong kinship relationships because we just didn’t have those types of tendencies, unlike Jewish groups and other Middle Eastern groups that are very strongly kinship-focused. A paradigm is the organization of the Indo-European military groups that were so successful. They were built entirely on reputation, not on the basis of kinship relations.

So Western groups tend to be individualistic; they tend to be built more on a moral or ideological sense of the ingroup. And yes this is, I believe, an ethnic phenomenon. We are the only major culture area in the entire world that is prone to individualism. You can go to India, China, the Middle East, Africa, they’re all based on kinship. They’re all what we call collectivist. So Western culture is unique because of this individualism.

We have to understand this completely, at a psychological level and in terms of our having a theory of the evolution of individualism. It’s critical to understanding our weaknesses and our strengths. Our strengths are incredible; we went out and conquered the world. We created the modern world. But we have these weaknesses, where we are now self-flagellating, this ethnomasochism as you say. We are destroying ourselves before our very eyes. We have to understand these psychological proclivities that we have.

Greg: One question I have that was brought up by your remarks about the Puritans: when they came to the colonies, the Puritans were very, very trusting with the Indians. They came with their hands out, and they were then attacked by the Indians. And yet they kept trying to show their goodwill, demonstrate that they were good people, and there was this drive amongst the Puritans that made them very prone to being exploited and attacked by the Indians. And, it’s easy for racialists to mock them as these “goofy liberal types” who just always were trying to demonstrate their goodwill to people who were radically different.

But I wonder if there’s a flip side to that, which is this: Western civilizations, White civilizations, tend to be high trust societies, whereas non-Western civilizations tend to be low trust societies. They tend to be divided on a kinship basis, and there’s a lot of ethnocentrism and enmity.

It strikes me that one of the foundations for the amazing progress that Whites have achieved in Europe is that we had very high trust societies, and therefore we were able to create very large, complex social orders. But then when we encountered other races that were not prone to that same kind of behavior, that made us easy to exploit.

But the implication for the White Nationalist movement is this: the White Nationalist movement tends to consist of highly ethnocentric and low trust White people. And I’m wondering if one of the reasons we have such trouble getting anything organized, is because we are so high in distrust of other people. So maybe the Puritans, maybe the liberals, maybe the high-minded people have an advantage in building organizations, at least among people of their own kind, that the nationalistic groups don’t have.

KMac: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. But it is really true that Western societies are high trust societies, and that really fits in to what I was saying about reputation. In Western societies the most important thing you have in the world is your reputation. It’s a public commodity, which is based on past experience with the person. Whereas in these kinship-based societies, basically if you get power and money, you’re expected to help your kin. So these societies tend to be totally corrupt; you cannot trust anybody except very, very close relatives.

It could be that a lot of people that are White nationalists or are prone to White nationalism are a little bit less trusting. We’re more ethnocentric, and we’re more skeptical about all this. Myself, I tend to be a high trust kind of person, but intellectually and rationally I’m saying that this is crazy.

You look at the Puritans: one of the things they say about these people is they tend to think other people were just like them. And so the Indians and Blacks are the same as us, but with dark skin, that kind of thing. These were very common thoughts among the Puritan intellectuals and Puritan-descended intellectuals in the 19th century. “They’re just like us,” and so you bring all these people over and it won’t make any difference. And you still see that, right now. You have the idea that you can bring half of Africa over here and it wouldn’t make any difference in the institutional structure of our country.

So that’s really an issue, but I think that we have to be less trusting and we have to be more realistic, we have to maybe go against the grain — and in my case it is going against the grain – to be more cynical, to be more realistic about what these people are capable of and how much they hate us for various real and imagined slights against them.

Greg: That’s really interesting. But it does present this challenge: within the White nationalist world, I notice a greater lack of civility and a willingness to entertain really negative thoughts about other people, a lack of charity and charitable assumptions in interacting with people. I think a lot of that has to do with the internet too, because the anonymity that comes with the internet allows people, as Harold Covington said, to get in touch with your inner psychotic.

KMac: [Laughs] Exactly.

Greg: It’s definitely a problem when people get together in the real world, and you’re meeting new people, and you get these rooms where people are eying one another uncomfortably with these uncomfortable silences.

KMac: Well I think it’s important in the long run at least to get a bunch of high trust people who are on our side. People who have a lot of integrity, a lot of honesty, who trust other people, but they also have a sense that if we don’t do something then our people and our civilization are going to be completely destroyed. So at some point the high trust people have got to take over. We have to have really good people running the show. People you can trust, people you have faith in.

Greg: Do you know of ways that groups could work to build that kind of culture of trust and transparency?

KMac: Well, I’m not sure. I just had a recent experience with this, where this woman sent me these emails and she was just excoriating me and making all these horrible assumptions about how I was treating her. And I just responded really nicely. I didn’t take it too seriously, and [conveyed] I wasn’t trying to do anything bad to her. Her whole attitude changed. I think that when you show that you don’t reciprocate this hostility and suspicion people really loosen up. I think they appreciate that, and I think that’s the kind of person who’s going to eventually be at the center of our movement – I hope.

We can’t have people who are just really suspicious and mean. We have to have people who are prone to good relationships: good parents, people who have good close friends, people you can trust and have some integrity. Those are the kind of people we want in our movement. If we see people who really aren’t like that, who really are sociopathic or psychopathic, we really have to get them out of the movement, drum ’em right out, because they’re not going to be helpful.

Greg: Right. One of the things that always amuses me about White Nationalists is we tend to be rhetorically and ideologically very elitist, but any stray dog of humanity that shows up in our midst, we put our arms around them and coddle them and will make all kinds of amazing allowances for them, even when they start behaving in really antisocial and destructive ways. My little line about this is “elitism needs to begin at home.” We need to start practicing what we preach in that area. We should be as nice as we can, of course, but back slowly out of the room sometimes.

KMac: I agree completely.

Mike: I take inspiration from the open source software movement. We need to apply that principle of transparency and openness and being forthright about these ideas, and also portraying them in a way that intelligent people can understand and get people to have a dialog about openly. Because I think that we do have truth on our side and the more light we shine our ideas, the more people we get talking in a mutually respectful way, where the ideas are debated and it doesn’t descend into an ad hominem flame war the way it so often does on these internet message boards. I think the real turning point for White Nationalists will be when we have more people who become immune to social ostracism when talking about these ideas, because they know that they have the truth on their side.

KMac: That’s right. That’s very important. Being ostracized is very difficult psychologically. Everybody wants to be liked. But when you have become cognitively aware of what’s going on, I think it really makes you a whole lot stronger. When you find other people who are good, honest people who are not psychotic or psychopathic or sociopathic, when you see them in our movement, that is really going to attract more and more people.

You talked about message boards. I get attacked horribly on the Occidental Observer, and my first inclination is to respond really negatively, but I don’t. I respond, but in a really laid back kind of way, without a lot of accusations, and I think it changes the tone of everything. People then don’t do that again; they tend not to do those vicious kind of attacks after that.

Mike: Right. I do think as well that there are a lot of people who are considering our ideas or thinking about them in their own heads but are totally unwilling to go public with them, and I think that’s really the audience we need to have in mind when we talk about these things.

KMac: And the audience we have in mind has to be normal people, who are good people. That’s the kind of people who will be attracted when they see that kind of person in our movement. So that’s who we have to aim for.

Greg: Kevin, are there any last thoughts that you have?

KMac: Well, I think we’ve covered an awful lot. I can’t stress enough our kinds of groups are built on trust and integrity, and I don’t think there can be any significant movement of White people unless at the top you have people that are seen as trustworthy and as having a sense of decorum and integrity. So that’s what we really have to try to put forward in ourselves.

Greg: I agree with that. One thing that I think needs to be pondered and explained is why the conservative movement has been losing so consistently–gracefully, but consistently–for decades. And just hanging around conservative groups and conservative-ish sorts of people, one thing that I noticed is very prominent is there tends to be a lot of fraud in social interactions.

And especially in discussions having to do with religion. I’ve been in rooms where the majority of people were nonbelievers, but they’re all bowing their heads and saying grace. It just strikes me that if people can’t be real with one another within a political context, that’s a sign of low trust for one thing, an inability to really fuse together and work together.

And one thing that I try to do with Counter-Currents is to create an atmosphere where people can be real even about very controversial issues. So that if we’re going to work together, we’re working together with people that we know where they stand on certain things, and they feel that they can be themselves, even if it’s saying “I’m a heathen” or “I’m an atheist” or “I’m an agnostic” or “I’m a Christian.” But that level of honesty, I think, is one way that I’m hoping we can address some of these character problems that have certainly beset the conservative movement.

KMac: That’s a good point. Just having people be tolerant of some differences within our movement [would be progress]. You see some people just freaking out if anybody’s got a [different] religious belief or something like that. We have to be tolerant: some people are going to be religious and some people aren’t.

I do think that looking at conservatives, I have the same feeling you do where there’s an awful lot of insincerity and duplicity. You listen to someone like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity whenever they talk about Israel or something like that, and you just know that they’re lying through their teeth. It’s just a sense that these people really don’t have integrity. I think that sooner or later people – an awful lot of people are going to see that.

Greg: I’m sure there are a lot of other factors as to why conservatives are such losers, but I think that for me that’s one of the things that resonates most deeply, because I tend to think the Greeks were right about vice. And one of the teachings of the ancients is that ultimately [a lot of] vice is rooted in cowardice. Including lying. People lie because they’re afraid to face the truth. They’re afraid to speak the truth and take the consequences. And if you have a political movement where lying is just the bedrock norm of getting along, then that builds cowardice right into the foundations of it. And I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that these people are always in retreat.

KMac: I think that’s right. The whole establishment is just so corrupt. And we’re the guys with the truth on our side; we’re the ones with integrity and honesty; and out of all sides from liberal to conservative in the media all we see is lies and corruption. At some point it’ll be like the Soviet Union where nobody believes it anymore and then I think maybe they’ll come to our side, I don’t know.

Greg: They’ve tried everything, except sincerity. Maybe we should try sincerity. People have worked every possible angle except just being sincere, so maybe we could trot that out and see if it actually has some political power in the end.

KMac: There you go.

Mike: You do see among our enemies – in Israel especially with the settlement movement, but also with their supporters, you mentioned some of them, Hannity, but especially Glen Beck as well—this real religious dogma and conviction. I wonder if that level of conviction is only attainable through a religious belief, or if we can get ourselves to have that without religion. Not be blinded by it, like they are. Not let it get in the way of being able to debate and have dialog and discussion about ideas. But that inner conviction that – to go back to what we were talking about in the beginning, I think Breivik had that in him, even though I disagree with what he did, I wonder if that is something we can consider a strength or if it is a weakness.

KMac: Well, I do think it is really important that we have these really strong beliefs now. We have a lot of integrity and a lot of honesty. The data are on our side. Some of the models of opinion change that I’ve seen lately show that if even small numbers of people are really convinced and continue to hold their views they eventually have a big effect. And I think that’s some hope for the future.

Greg: Well, thank you very much, Kevin. This has been a really enlightening conversation.

Mike: Yes, thank you Kevin.

KMac: I enjoyed it.