0:00:00 - 0:00:26 I wanna present a little bit of psychological research to quantify how often people make the right choice. No, that might seem like a moral question. What is the right choice? But I'll break it down and, and the, the, the people who did these experiments, they did it, they did them very well. It's cut 0:00:26 - 0:00:48 and dry. The takeaway of all of this is that people are much more evil than we would all like to believe. And of course, the most important application of that is when we look in the mirror, it's very important to, to know where we're starting as a baseline if we are serious about becoming better. So 0:00:48 - 0:01:12 let's get started again. What we're looking at is is trying to quantify just where everyone is on this. So what we're going to cover are the ash experiments. Ash was a psychologist and he was doing these experiments back in the fifties. I don't recall off the top of my head, how long this went on for 0:01:12 - 0:01:35 ? But this is the basic set up of the experiment and it's repeatable, this has been repeated many times with other groups and the the results are equivalent So the the patterns here are describing human nature. They're not just about the 50 people that were tested under the experimental conditions or 0:01:34 - 0:02:02 the 37 who were the control group. So how did they quantify what the right choice was? The experiment consisted of very simple questions. So for example, a set of lines where one line was clearly longer than the other lines, no tricks, very simple. And the people were asked which line was the longest 0:02:01 - 0:02:26 among three options or something, right? One line is really long, the others, the others are very short, which line is the longest. And with that kind of question, the participants were, were pulled to see if they were right or not. Now, the control group in 35 of the 37 cases, people got the answer 0:02:26 - 0:02:55 correctly correct uh across 12 questions. So they got 12 of these questions and 35 people got them. All right. One person got one wrong and one person got two wrong out of 12. OK. So they're very easy questions and to quantify just human error, honest mistake getting the question wrong. Two people got 0:02:55 - 0:00:00 anything incorrect after 37. So hopefully that gets the point across. It was very simple task. Now, what was the actual experiment? Well, then they took a set of 50 people and what they did that there were, there were 50 trials here and, and you'll understand why in a second the setup was that they, 0:00:00 - 0:03:47 they take a group of people that were actors, paid actors and the actors were told to state the wrong answer on this, on this question. And they were put into a group and the administrator would ask all uh each of the actors, what the answer was before they got to the test participant who didn't know 0:03:46 - 0:04:10 that everyone else was an actor and being paid to, to tell the wrong answer. And by the time they got around to the, the participant, the participant would have heard every single answer and been primed to repeat the wrong answer under social pressure, even though they knew it was wrong, given the control 0:04:10 - 0:04:38 group, they knew that it was the wrong answer. And so the experiment measured how often normal people are willing to lie due to peer pressure. Now peeling this apart a little bit, this was sort of the lightest kind of peer pressure that could be no one was gonna make fun of them. They certainly wouldn't 0:04:38 - 0:05:05 lose their job. They didn't know these people. There was no danger whatsoever of any kind of character or reputation damage. It was merely whether they were publicly willing to oppose people they had never met before in a situation that didn't matter at all. The lightest possible test of human morality 0:05:05 - 0:05:39 and how did they do? Oh And incidentally on the easiest kind of question you could ever get. So there was no, there was no factor of complexity or difficulty in the actual task. They, they weren't asked to do differential equations or something. Right. So how did they do? 38% of people made the wrong 0:05:38 - 0:06:19 choice more than 50% of the time. So under the slightest amount of peer pressure, under the the tiniest possible negative pressure tension, 38% of people buckled more than half the time. So I want you to think about all of the many situations across life, look out on the plane of life and all the different 0:06:18 - 0:06:56 obstacles you might face here in a lifetime and all of the different ways that you rely on other people out of choice. And also a lot of times without a choice. And now understand that 38% of the people that you interact with will fail abysmally under the lightest load more than half the time. This is 0:06:56 - 0:07:34 like running a marathon where everyone has a knife and 38% of people are going to stab you more than half of the times you you run past them. Now this is going to see seem like hyperbole or this sort of cat catastrophes that people like to, to accuse me of. But if you think carefully through your life 0:07:34 - 0:08:10 experience so far, this pattern is absolutely going to fit because the exceptions to the rule only exist because the peer pressure was pointing in the right direction. This is this is a terrible realization this this presentation is short slide wise, but it's, it's bitter. The people that you think of 0:08:10 - 0:08:43 is good odds are they're not good odds are they've just been placed in a situation where the conditions have caused them to act as if they were good. But all the wrong reasons are still the motivating factors for that behavior. And we're going to keep picking apart these numbers for the duration of this 0:08:43 - 0:09:17 presentation and then get to some applications of those ideas. But it's bad. OK, it's really bad. So let's start at the top. Let's start with the people who out of 12 trials only gave the wrong answer once or never. Let's start with the, the never people. Maybe, maybe we'll come back to those folks in 0:09:17 - 0:09:50 a minute. So when you look at these numbers, 13 people out of 50 refuse to give the wrong answer. They passed the test 13 out of 50. Now that's 26%. And you might think well, 26%. That's pretty good. I think it's pathetic. But maybe you think it's pretty good. OK, that's one in four. So if you take a 0:09:50 - 0:10:23 random sample of the population, one in four are not willing to lie when basically it doesn't matter. There's no negative consequence for telling the truth other than you have to disagree with someone publicly, not argue, just state that you do not agree. How much does that number crumble when there's 0:10:23 - 0:10:49 any pressure whatsoever? Beyond just the need to disagree with someone. What happens when it's going to cost you a friend, what happens when the person you're disagreeing with is going to hurt you in some way or even just make your life a little more difficult. So we could escalate the consequence. And 0:10:48 - 0:11:20 if we graft this out, if we, if we conducted the experiments, of course, you would see a quick drop off from about one in four down to who knows what the number would shrink so quickly, relative to the cost of telling the truth, how many people are willing to tell the truth, even if it cost them their 0:11:20 - 0:12:01 lives. No, when we expand the number to include people who are willing to say what they know is wrong. Once out of 12 trials, we pick up another four people out of the 50 another 8%. So now we've got a larger number and the question is in our system where we load so much responsibility when we, when 0:12:00 - 0:12:36 we enable people to have so much power, just a few people wielding immense amounts of power in government, in religious situations, churches and whatnot and even at work. And especially in families. Now, that's a, a question of who you marry, right? Even with the plussed up number from adding people 0:12:35 - 0:13:10 who are willing to do what they know is wrong. Once out of 12 times, you're still dealing with far less than 50% of the population. And the problem is that there are more positions of power, then there are people worthy of them. That's what these numbers tell us frankly. Again, I I don't want to beat 0:13:09 - 0:13:37 a dead horse here, but it's just so important to understand this is under the lightest conditions imaginable. I if you have the launch codes for the nukes, you're not under the lightest conditions possible. If you're a father just paying the bills, totally normal family life, you are not under the lightest 0:13:37 - 0:14:12 conditions possible, right? That's not counting when you unexpectedly lose your job or your kid gets leukemia or whatever that these things happen. Everybody's got a tragedy at least one. So again, there aren't enough good people to fill the slots where good people are needed. And this is uh I I don't 0:14:12 - 0:14:35 wanna get too off, too far off the beaten path with this, but this is absolutely coupled to the idea of how complex our lives have become with technology and cheap energy. We have built a system that we cannot populate effectively. Do you understand the system has controls on it that need to be manned 0:14:35 - 0:15:04 by people with certain attributes and sufficient numbers of those people don't exist. And so when you get a doofus at the helm of the ship, the ship crashes, there's no other alternative. And in this case, it's not just a question of intelligence, in fact, that was stripped out of the experiment that 0:15:03 - 0:15:30 makes the situation even worse, but just in the most basic moral sense, there aren't enough people to run the controls where they're needed. You, you can't have someone who has to make hard decisions. Sorry, you can't have a job where you have to make hard decisions. A responsibility when there aren't 0:15:29 - 0:15:58 people willing to, to just merely state something that they know is right, undeniably in the face of other people who disagree with them. Now, this has probably the most obvious implications in terms of government. You see and how much of this I want to get into. Let's go to this slide and then we'll 0:15:58 - 0:16:18 come back. There's this really interesting pair of verses in DNC 98 and it says the following. Nevertheless, when the wicked rule, the people mourn wherefore honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold otherwise whatsoever is less than 0:16:18 - 0:16:51 these cometh of evil. It used to be the case that as a culture, we understood that representative government was ideal that we should seek out people who are better than we are and put them in charge. This has become something you're not allowed to say that you'll be ridiculed for openly acknowledging 0:16:51 - 0:17:19 we've set up this idol of quote unquote pure democracy direct elections and in those elections, what people look for are the folks who are going to give them what they want instead of looking for people that are better. We're lucky if they even managed to look for people that are the same in many ways 0:17:19 - 0:17:40 , they look for people who are worse because they're looking for folks who are going to promise them whatever they want. Even if it's terrible. When you think of a good parent today, most people would define a good parent as someone who gives their kids what they want. That's how most parents operate 0:17:40 - 0:18:08 today. But a good parent is someone who gives their child what's good for them. And very often that's different than what they want. We've redefined. Even the word love is to give someone what they want. No or empathy, right is to, is to feel bad for someone and give them what they want. Love is to benefit 0:18:08 - 0:18:39 another. It's not to give them what they want and completely coupled to this is the necessity of knowing what benefits. And there are many situations where one person will have a more accurate idea of that than the other. What we have in society is this great pantomime of pretending that we are all equal 0:18:38 - 0:19:00 and we have a whole lot of ideas like this that are obviously false. You're slapped in the face with it every day. But we play this, this pantomime of pretending that it's not that way. Do you know how Steve Jobs made as much money as he did and changed the world with the technology he developed, he 0:19:00 - 0:19:24 believed things like, the customer doesn't know what the customer wants. We have to design what they do, not have the capability of imagining even and put it in their hands and then they'll see that it's good, but that's extremely repulsive to say to normal people because they want to believe that they 0:19:24 - 0:19:44 , they can not only imagine what's good but that they can do it all themselves. They're like little toddlers that, that live in a world constructed by people much better than them functionally. But they want to pretend like they're equal partners to all of it. And really, they're just playing with the 0:19:44 - 0:20:09 , the big plastic kitchen set with the fake peas and the little plastic pots. That's how most people live their lives. They're walking around with a marvel of technology in their hand 24 7 that they couldn't even describe how the thing works, but they pretend they deserve it. They live like kings and 0:20:09 - 0:20:37 queens without any of the principles of good kings or queens, any of the utility. So that's a big problem. All right. Now, let's go down the line here. We've talked about the exceptional people, the exceptionally honest people who just, they're going to tell it how it is and they don't really care if 0:20:37 - 0:21:06 there's peer pressure against them. Ok. Now, what about the rest as we migrate down towards the, the halfway mark of how frequently they got it wrong. How frequently they lied essentially under peer pressure as we're much closer to that threshold, we s we start to see this group who I if you look at 0:21:06 - 0:21:35 the COVID fiasco. These are the people who fall for the slogans. These are the people who are persuaded by the most insufficient arguments. Basically, they are people who are, who are looking for some excuse to walk in the default human behavior. So the default human behavior is I don't want to resist 0:21:35 - 0:22:01 other people. I want to go with the crowd. I want my life to be easy and I don't want to have to think about things or march to the beat of a different drum. But I'm smart enough to know that the answer is wrong and feel bad about it if I lie. So I need some excuse. So someone whips up a slogan and all 0:22:01 - 0:22:32 of a sudden, hey, I'm on board now. I've got, oh, you, we have to save grandma. It's safe and effective. I'm on board. Right. Stop the spread two weeks to stop the spread. I'm on board. Right. That is a huge chunk of the population. So if you start looking at five or six mistakes out of 12, you're somewhere 0:22:32 - 0:23:05 around the halfway point and you're talking about a huge chunk of people. There's a third group in my little arbitrary separation here and these are the people who got it wrong 10 or 11 times. No, there's a lot of bad news in this topic. So there is one piece of good news. Zero people got it wrong every 0:23:05 - 0:23:30 time, but I'm actually gonna spin this and tell you why. That's actually bad news too. The fact that zero people got it wrong 12 times means they really knew how bad it was that they were lying. They wanted to save one time, every one of these people wanted to save one time. So that in their heads, they 0:23:30 - 0:23:58 didn't lie every single time. Do you understand that? And for, for most people, so as you go down the line from 1211, 10 and so on, the numbers increase. So basically what this tells you is that it helps you to quantify how many times someone has to tell the truth to feel like a halfway decent person 0:23:57 - 0:24:26 to not feel like utter garbage. This is so telling of human nature because when people talk about being good or evil, they're not talking about the extremes. They like to live in a place somewhere in the middle and they will go out of their way to do overtly good things a couple of times so that they're 0:24:26 - 0:24:50 not on the extreme of evil and then they think they're good. That's how people are. So again, just using COVID as an example, why do you think people rushed to get the shot? It wasn't because they believed it was gonna work. Now this is a multifactorial situation but things like this get tons of traffic 0:24:49 - 0:25:16 because when you make something, a moral situation and you give an easy solution, it's like throwing chum into the water and the sharks show up surprise. Why? Cause you're telling terrible people that they can make this, this um penance for their sins. You know, all you have to do is give your money 0:25:16 - 0:25:37 to the church, indulgences, right? Give your money to the church and then you can sin but you're not gonna be evil anymore because you're doing or this overt act of charity. And Jesus said, don't do your alms before men. Why? Because you'll prance up to the offering box and dump in your gold. That's 0:25:36 - 0:26:01 like maybe 1% of your income. And because you're rich and then you'll go off and do horrible things and feel justified and you'll be wrong. This happens again and again and again, that's why virtue signaling is such a big deal. These arbitrary shibboleths that people choose and it's not just one side 0:26:00 - 0:26:22 of the political spectrum who does this. It's absolutely everyone. It's a human problem that everyone is susceptible to and that many people fall for. They want to give their offering and then be good knowing that they're evil. They just, they want to stay off of that extreme because they think as long 0:26:22 - 0:26:48 as they do good in a couple of ways, they could keep doing evil in many other ways. Any, any named religion has something like this. Every single one does. It it's, it's got to be somewhere in the IRS code for churches or something because you'll find it in every single one where they have something 0:26:48 - 0:27:14 that they do that they say makes them good without actually being good. It's some, right. It's some belief, some mantra that they repeat over and over again and I could name names and go down the line. But if you have half a brain cell, you've already got it for the ones, you know. So these people, these 0:27:14 - 0:27:38 tens, elevens and twelves, well, there are no twelves, but the tens and elevens, these are the ones who drive these campaigns that the other people fall for. These are the people who orchestrate the spread of evil, the practice of evil. We were talking about these folks, these folks are the ones who 0:27:38 - 0:28:05 engineered the systems that encourage the other people to be better than they are. These folks do the opposite. These folks are evil even though they're not twelves. All right. Let's keep rolling. Did that. All right. I actually did this vocally already. So I'm not sure I will actually walk through this 0:28:05 - 0:28:35 slide, but it's scary to break down the percentages here. Ok. Just briefly because we kind of already touched a little on this one takeaway. I want to highlight here that we haven't talked so much about is how easy it is to willingly do the wrong thing. A lot of times and still think you're a really 0:28:34 - 0:29:09 good person. So looking at this table, people who, who chose the right answer most of the time, that's this section here. That's 60% of the people. That's a big number. It's more than half. Those are the kinds of people who walk around smugly thinking that they're good people and who respond violently 0:29:08 - 0:29:39 when someone who's actually good points out their sin. It says, hey, you still need to work on this. You're not as great as you think you are and they freak out why? Because they think that the person criticizing them is making a mountain out of a molehill. Here's the thing. If you actually quantify 0:29:38 - 0:29:58 the percentages here and you can do that, this experiment allows us to quantify how often these things happen. And again, it's under the lightest load. So the real numbers are much worse than this, but it gets really hard to measure. All right. The fact is that these people who do good quote, most of 0:29:58 - 0:30:26 the time they still do what they know is wrong. A heck of a lot of the time. If you depended on someone on matters of life and death, let's say that you were strapped together and they're the ones that had the parachute and you're jumping out of a plane, would you jump out if one time in 12, they weren't 0:30:25 - 0:30:52 gonna pull the line? Maybe if you just had to jump out once. And that's basically Russian roulette. OK? The numbers are slightly better because instead of a six shooter, it's a 12 shooter, but there's one boy in the, in the, in the drum and you get 12 options. 12 chances, right. Are you gonna jump out 0:30:52 - 0:31:16 of that plane? Are you gonna pull the trigger? Most people would say that they're not going to do that. But how many people get married? How many people take a job? So, are you telling me that those things are actually not all that serious? How many people join a church? And now they have some church 0:31:15 - 0:31:41 leader who's pulling the rope, who pulling the, the, the, the parachute, right? So either you have to play Russian roulette and put this thing that could end you against your temple and pull the trigger knowing that one out of 12 of these things is loaded or you have to water down that experience so 0:31:41 - 0:32:01 much that it doesn't matter if they're a terrible person. So what's the difference between a marriage where you actually have to fully rely on the other person? You're fully invested in them, you're completely open with them. You actually have the deepest intimacy and a marriage where you're playing 0:32:01 - 0:32:27 it safe because one out of the 12 chambers has a bullet in it, their worlds apart. And guess which one is more common in the world today? I challenge you to find the first type at all. What about a church? We could go through that? What's the difference between thinking your church leader is just some 0:32:27 - 0:32:49 dude who spends a little bit more time in the scriptures than you do or has a certificate or something or wears funny clothes and thinking this person is more like Jesus than anyone. I know there's a really big difference between those two things. And again, I reverse the order, but I challenge you to 0:32:49 - 0:33:14 find any church that's like that. Even one. Let me know government. What's the difference between thinking that the person who's representing you in Congress or your, your county board or whatever is more virtuous than you and does that job better than you could to the point where if you disagree with 0:33:14 - 0:33:35 them on something, you're gonna assume they're right and you're wrong and that might not be true, but that's where you'll start and what we have today, it's worlds apart. And what difference does it make? It makes all the difference? It makes all the difference. We could keep going. But you get the point 0:33:34 - 0:34:03 right. So, doing good most of the time, but not all the time is not good enough. It's not good enough. You can't have nice things in this world without these kinds of relationships where you can really lean on somebody. If your spouse really messes up and willingly does what they know is wrong one out 0:34:03 - 0:34:36 of 12 times or two out of 12 times or three out of 12 times or five or six or whatever the number is, that will absolutely be disastrous. It will completely prevent you from having the ideal kind of marriage and we could go again through all these other situations and that's the 60% the best, 60% of 0:34:36 - 0:35:15 people, slightly less than half of people are much worse than that. Now again, we are not talking about capacity that's excluded from this conversation. It makes everything worse because most people are really dumb. On top of all of that, the fact is if you cranked up the difficulty of these questions 0:35:15 - 0:35:42 , these numbers would get way worse very quickly. No one thing that, that we can't talk about because it would make this presentation way too long. But which I have talked about before and I will spend more time on it later is the fact that another limitation of this experiment is that these were isolated 0:35:41 - 0:36:11 trials. So each participant had to answer 12 questions in life. There are many more than 12 questions. And the fact is that as you traverse through life and you willingly do less than your best, it actually occludes your ability to see what is best as you go forward. So in other words, every time you 0:36:11 - 0:36:35 willingly do less than your best, you actually reduce your ability to see what is best and without going too much more into that, hopefully, it's clear that most people are on a downward trajectory in life where they're just going to get worse with time. And that is, in fact what you see and it's terrible 0:36:34 - 0:37:04 . So, as a result of this, I think, I hope that one, you pay more attention to the quote unquote little things where you knowingly do less than your best, where you willingly lie, where you willingly say something that you know, is not true or you say nothing when someone else does those things. Two 0:37:04 - 0:37:35 , I also hope that you now start to understand a little more how God sees you. Because if you're the kind of person that would get one or two or three or four or five of these questions wrong, you are not right with God. Even though you can accurately say I do the right thing most of the time or I try 0:37:34 - 0:37:57 , I tried to do the right thing. Well, whoop de do you know, let's get you one of those paper crowns from Burger King for all your hard work. But you, you're not right with God and it has a, an astronomical effect in your life, which we just talked a little bit about. But this is a poison that will spread 0:37:56 - 0:38:23 through everything. It will absolutely prevent you from having the desirable version of human relationships in your life. You cannot be a reliable person to anyone in your life. If you're willing to do what you know, is not the best even once because you will fail those people and it will be in ways 0:38:23 - 0:38:44 that absolutely matter. And it's just not gonna take very much to persuade you to do that to totally drop the ball. So I hope that you see that this is a big deal and I hope this gives you a little bit of insight to make serious changes in your life where they're needed.