Hello and welcome to a special Novara FM coming to you from the world transformed in Liverpool. If you have been following our content over the last couple of days you'll know that we've been pushing out interviews and panel recordings left, right and centre, although mainly left. So please do head over to the Novara Media website and rifle through it and tune in this evening to our live broadcast of Tisgy Sauer. Yesterday I was joined by the excellent Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute, Marxist scholar and brilliant historian of the Third World. I began by asking him about the current structure of global trade and the relation of international capital to the periphery. You know when very young Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, they were very young, they were in their 30s I think, they indicated that capitalism had a global appetite, that capital was not going to be held back by national boundaries. In fact there's that celebrated line about the Chinese walls will be broken. But of course it's not easy for capital to transcend its national boundaries. And there were two main blocks until the 1970s. One was as you said technological, the other was political. The anti-colonial struggles, the Soviet block, prevented capital from having a global footprint. So for at least 70 years capital was unable to enter the Soviet Union, China and very much a part of the Third World block, at least not on its own terms. When it came in, it came in on what we might call mediated terms. But also the technology was inadequate.  By the 1980s, the political obstacle to capital collapses. Soviet Union goes, Third World project collapses and China basically surrenders a very small part of its territory, the Shenzhen region. But this comes fortuitously for capital at the same time as you have these new technologies developed. So what this combination allowed is firstly it brought together under capital's dominion for the first time the world's working class. I mean it's extraordinary. We don't appreciate this enough that the world's working class was brought together under the dominion of capital in my generation.  Secondly, the new technological developments allowed capital to break up factories and distribute them around the world. This is called the global commodity chain. Now what these two things did was they basically suggested the defeat of labor and the defeat of socialism because by disarticulating factories, breaking up factories, trade unions were weakened globally. Nationalization as a policy disappears from the table. So the resources of socialism, the reservoirs of socialist strength are depleted. And in that sense, the contemporary condition we're in where capital is able to go and extract raw materials at will virtually and is able to provide super exploitative level wages to produce goods. This is a very interesting place we're in and it was constructed institutionally, not by some angel of history, but by the actual events that took place about 40 years ago. It's interesting to me. So I was reading recently Beverly Silver's book on struggling the automobile industry. She says you have it starting in these plants in Detroit, in the US and you have increasing technological advances allow increased exploitation, but they also weaken worker struggle. And then of course, capital moves once worker struggle becomes too intense. And she says that there's an increasing speed in this cycle, so it moves and moves and moves and moves. And with the rising technological composition of that production process, she says it becomes notable that worker strength is weakened. What are the resources for worker strength in an era where capital has the whip hand over technology? You know, this is something that workers' movements have thought about for the last couple of decades. It's no point surrendering because there is no surrender before us. I think the main direction that workers' movements have gone in has been quite productive, which is to say it's very difficult to organize workers at the factory. You see, one of the interesting features of the socialist movement, trade union movement and so on is that when people like Marx and Engels were writing in the 19th century, the factory was this gargantuan institution which concentrated labor and where capital had invested a vast amount of its resources into the factory. If you could strike the factory, if you could close it down, capital had to pause. Today we are in a circumstance where capital actually is not investing down the commodity chain. Subcontractors are investing. You know, a firm like Nike doesn't make shoes. Apple actually makes no computers. They basically collect rent against intellectual property. So in this situation, there is no point being obstinate. Trade unions are tasked to organize workers, not to organize in factories. And what they've come to understand across the world, and I think quite sharply in South America and in South Asia, is that unions need to organize workers where they live. In other words, you need to tackle questions of survival, like water for instance, access to water, access to energy, access to education. I mean, in Cochabamba, in Bolivia, when Bechtel of San Francisco got the contract to privatize water delivery, it was the trade union federation that actually led the protest. You know, it's so interesting in the world of social movement theory, it's ignored that it was the trade union that actually initiated and fought the water war against Bechtel Corporation. This lesson has been learned, and I think it's an important lesson, which is that the point is to build workers' strength, and to build workers' strength where you can have a paralytic impact on capital. So you find the kind of choke points, but if it's the case then that the factory is no longer an effective site in many of these kind of large globalized chains. On the one hand we have that problem of renterism, which you're pointing to, but then it seems to me that much of the stuff I read draws a very kind of sharp distinction between peasant movements and trade union movements. You're saying that that distinction is if it has any validity at all, it's decreasing. Let's go in two directions for this. One is let's return to the question of the choke point. An analysis of the global commodity chain suggests that the greatest vulnerability for capital today is in transportation. In other words, at docks, global logistics, including not only transportation if we call it logistics, you also mean database operators, you mean Amazon sorting centers. These are the choke points. If a trade union wants to actually resume its political control over the system, it has to put resources to organize or to renew the strength of dock workers, various forms of logistical operators. But also there has to be a political challenge against intellectual property rights. You see in the 1980s, up to the 1980s, the general understanding of intellectual property rights was you could only patent the process by which you got to a certain product. If you're making a phone, only the process could be patented, not the phone. In the last round of the general agreements on trade and tariff in the 1980s, the so-called Uruguay round, the West pushed for a shift in patent policy. So what they did was now the product is patented, not the process. We need to reverse that. This is a political fight. Now, of course, the sad thing is everything I'm saying is totally boring. And left-wing people of a certain era get bored by these things. It sounds like legalism. Actually this is the fundamental wealth of corporations today is the intellectual property. And we need to go directly after it. Are there movements doing that? Not enough movements doing that. You see what's happened is that in the international solidarity world around third world solidarity, the question of debt forgiveness, the forgiveness of debt has eclipsed everything. And this is largely to do with the fact that the third world debt crisis of the 1980s has not ended. And it's kind of metastasized into a very ugly situation for most countries in the world. A lot of energy is focused on what we might call a kind of defensive posture. I think we need to come to a much more aggressive place where we go directly after in the WTO, perhaps the World Trade Organization, in the UN's body, which deals with intellectual property rights, you know, the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization. I mean, in these places, people's movements, sympathetic governments need to keep putting on the table the fact that we want to reverse the Uruguay round decision on intellectual property rights. Are there state actors within, say, the hegemonic part of the global system that you can see is sympathetic to that? Well, let's not use the word sympathetic, because that's too much to ask. Of course, the Chinese are playing an interesting game here, because, you see, unlike the other countries that surrendered to global capital, China did something quite unique, which is the Chinese would say to companies, you want to bring your, you know, factories into our free trade areas, you want to use our cheap labor. If you want to do that, you have to turn over technological knowledge. You know, you have to teach us not only technology, but science. We want to know, for instance, how solar batteries work. And you see, the Chinese did this perfectly legally, because they had a right to ask a French solar company, tell us how you make batteries. Five years later, the Chinese are the biggest solar battery makers on the planet. Now, it's interesting, the French company goes to the WTO says a violation of intellectual property. The Chinese turn around and say, no, this is a business agreement. So what I think we need to learn from that experience. This one step in the other direction, which is, I don't understand why countries so easily give up negotiations.  Now you must teach us how to do the following eight things. Otherwise, you know, it's not merely a commercial deal. We want some long term benefit out of it. This is a short term solution. But we need to build, I think, the intellectual and political will to reverse the last Uruguay round. And that's not on the table at all. Some of the stuff you're saying here, it seems to suggest to me that do you have a sense that the left has a sort of outmoded sense of how production works, of how, you know, how information is commoditized and how that feeds into the political system. Is it just that the left is still looking for that 19th century factory? It's a very good thing you've said, and I don't want to say too much about this. But you know, in the 11th thesis of Feuerbach, Marx wrote, the point is the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it. I'm with you. I doubt very much that our contemporary philosophers are even interpreting the world, let alone wondering how to change it. In fact, it is indeed the problem that we are working with understandings of capitalism that don't fully grasp this, I think, generalized rontierism that has taken place, you know, that the major companies, pharmaceutical companies, for instance, they don't produce things. The factory is not the site of their profit. They have become entirely rent collectors.  I mean, that small factory owner might be villainous, but that small factory owner is not the locus, the source, the, you know, center of the problem. So I agree that there needs to be much more attention placed on the contemporary, the real economy that we have. And you know, one of the things about Marxism, because after all, I'm a Marxist. I come to this from that tradition. One of the things about Marxism is it's meant to be a creative analysis of the current concrete conditions. You know, it's not meant to be a religion. So my friends, let's go out there and do some research towards transformation. You mentioned, just as we were talking earlier, the end of sort of third world resistance movement. I don't think we hear much in, certainly in the European left, about the history of the third world. I know you've written on it. What should the European left hear and learn from those movements, including the defeated ones? Well, you know, in my judgment, you go to the past, not as a destination, but as a resource. You go there to learn what has happened and so on. Why it was so important to track the anti-colonial movements and then this third world project that was developed, let's say, at Bandung in 1955 in Indonesia, Belgrade, 1961. Why it's important to look at that is because these states, the majority of the world's people in 1973 at the United Nations put forward a resolution called the New International Economic Order, N-I-E-O. It passed the General Assembly, but of course had no impact on the international bodies. Now why I'm coming to that is I would like people to go back and read the New International Economic Order, because in it are proposals that are fairly sensible even for today. In the 1970s, there was a Dutch Sufi, conservative by the way, who was the head of the IMF. And in his very short career, he made a quite important suggestion. He said this is right after the oil crisis. He said all the oil profits, the so-called petrodollars that are being sequestered by these oil-producing countries should not be turned over to Western banks, because what they will do is they'll inflate the banking industry, make the banking industry more powerful. Banking industry will not be able to find places to invest and will create fictional instruments. That sounds like a familiar story. Everything he said in the 1970s came true. What he said instead was why don't we create some international body, it could be a subsidiary of the IMF, but some international body that holds this money in trust and gives out loans to improve social development. For instance, some things, this is very much against the grain of new labor thinking, what I'm going to say. And since we are in Britain now, I'm nervous to criticize new labor too frontally. I think you'll find a welcome. You never know. You know, they rehabilitate themselves. In the United States, George W. Bush rehabilitated. Oh, yes. Hero of the resistance now. Exactly. Soon Tony Blair, all people may be rehabilitated. Anyway. Well, I'm breathing. Anyway, never mind. But there was an idea in new labor, but of course shared in the West generally, that everything that you privatize is more efficient. That efficiencies come out of privatization. The fact is some things are not efficient. You know, education is not efficient. Education does not have a rate of return. Education is our gift to children for the next generation. It's not meant to be something that we make money on. Health is our gift to each other to make sure we are all not as sick as we could become.  These are not meant to be profit making. You have a train system not to make money off it, but to move people to increase their imagination. So in this sense, what he was saying in the 1970s in the IMF, ironically in the IMF, was let's create a fund to invest in genuine social life without concern for rate of return.  Why do we need to make more money off it? Let's use this money to improve the lives of people. I think this is why we go back to the past, to learn in defeat, in the ruins, to learn what shines like a magpie. That's what a historian should be, a magpie in the ruins. We are in Britain, and obviously we have the unusual feat of a socialist now leading the Labour Party. He's a socialist with a history of international solidarity, of organisation with solidarity campaigns internationally. And yet, it has always seemed to me, it does seem to me that where this new socialist direction of the Labour Party is at its weakness, it's weakest, rather, is in the international dimension, is in its attitude to foreign policy, and maybe it's an accusation that's just leveled at European social democracy, is that it has a tendency towards chauvinism. But it seems odd that there's an oversight there. What do you make of it? Firstly, I would like to just say to you with my heart that Jeremy Corbyn is a person of great integrity, and over the course of his entire career has stood with people who have suffered in different ways. And I don't think Mr Corbyn has shirked any protest against injustice. So that must be said, I think the vilification of Jeremy Corbyn surprises me when I read about it in the media. The very fact that people can call him an anti-Semite seems to me strikingly ignorant. A man of such high integrity should have some, I think, dignity proffered to him even by his critics. But that doesn't, of course, mean that his party is alongside him. I think here is the gulf. I think there's a tendency in social democracy, particularly in the West, to move towards a kind of economic protectionism. How do we take care of our own? And I think this is a very limiting posture. It leads in disturbing places. Sarah Wagenek, for instance, of the delinquer, has gone in an extreme direction from delinquer, the party of the left, she has come to the position essentially of anti-immigration, saying let's take care of our people first. So I would suggest to people in Britain who are of the view that let's take care of our people first, that this is genuinely a slope that is well lubricated, that leads you to where Sarah Wagenek has gone. And I would say that that's something people need to be very cautious about, that you don't actually win your humanity by closing your island down. You win your humanity by reaching out to people. This is something Corbyn, I think, knows very well, intimately well. So here I think the question that the British progressive movement, the left social democracy needs to ask itself. You know, if you really want to live up to your values, look into the mirror of BAE systems because at the same time as you're saying let's fund our schools, let's fund public transport, let's fund the NIH, whatever it is, the various institutions, very important institutions. Do you want to fund these institutions by the profits of BAE systems, selling arms to kill Yemeni children, bringing famine in Yemen? I don't think so. I think sensitive people in Britain, the majority of the British public, sensitive people, don't want that. And I think we sharply need to put that forward as the choice. That really, if you don't want that, then you need to be internationalist. And this is where I say that I think that Labour Party really needs to become the party of Jeremy Corbyn and not merely have Jeremy Corbyn as its leader. Yeah, I agree entirely. Maybe building on that, so I'm thinking about that kind of core Marxist category of imperialism. Britain's in the imperialist core. It has things like BAE systems, huge funds of technological wealth. If we were to attempt to move politically in another direction, what is the best use for those kind of resources? So I get from what you've been saying that in one sense it would be ideal to roll back intellectual property to euthanize the rentier in a far more intense sense than Cain's probably meant it. But we still have this. Is there the possibility of a globally redistributive project? Not merely redistribution. After all, there is a lot of wealth in Zambia. Zambia doesn't need the city of London to provide it wealth. It needs for big Canadian Swiss mining companies not to misprice and steal plunder from Zambia today. You know, in Zambia, there is a region known as the Copper Belt. This is one of the richest seams of copper in the world. There are five companies that mainly mine in the Copper Belt. One is Chinese. The rest are not Chinese, but you'll only hear about the Chinese firm. They are Swiss. They are Canadian. You see, the Swiss and the Canadian are always able to show themselves as extraordinarily sophisticated. And therefore, nobody points the finger at them. But let's point the finger at them. The children that live above who walk on the ground of the Copper Belt, 60% of them are illiterate. There are more children illiterate now than there were when Kenneth Kwanza was the leader of Zambia. And Ken Kwanza was run out of power in the early 1990s. So there's been a slight backwards. You see, what I would say on the one hand is that we need to allow countries like Zambia to develop. We shouldn't be stealing from them. That's what's happening. So it's not a question of redistributing wealth. It's a question of allowing the country to actually live on its own two feet. But secondly, I think this was quite fashionable as a talking point when the Cold War ended. And this was the reconversion question. I mean, you have arms industry, but I see a lot of infrastructure in Britain that really does require help. And there's people whose entire careers, smart engineers who are wasting their lives designing weapon systems when they should be designing a clean energy way of moving people across even this small island. You know, you need better transportation. You need better transportation that links Manchester to Liverpool. I mean, of all things, it's so hard to get from that airport to Liverpool. I mean, there's got to be a fast train that comes here designed by one of the scientists or a group of them that are right now designing the best siting system for missiles. I mean, it's a waste of our resources. It's not even a question of redistribution. It's the better management of precious resources that are being deeply wasted in an inhumane direction. This is a strongly moral appeal, isn't it? And there's often a hesitancy, I think, within certainly the Western left to appeal in that way that there are better, like objectively better ways to use your wisdom or to use your skills. Is that hesitation wrong?  After all, I come from the tradition which is deeply moralistic.  Well, Khrushchev went one step further and banged his shoe at the UN podium. But moral arguments are important because we are human beings. Now, I wouldn't say let's remain at the moral level. I'd say let's go to the next level, which is I'd like to ask people in Britain, do you like being inconvenienced?  You see, you are being given a false choice. You're being told public transport is bad. Let's privatize it. Well, I'm saying let's create another choice. Public transport is bad today. Public transport need not be bad tomorrow. The problem isn't public transport is misallocation of resources, the real issue. And I'm talking here now about intellectual thought, about where the brightest people seem to be going.   I go to universities and I ask people, do you have designs for smokeless chulas, basically a little thing? Many of these are already available because it's become a cliche of development projects for engineering students to design these. But then these same students, having designed this in their nice liberal environment of their development lab, go and work for BAE systems or Goldman Sachs or whatever it is. And they are suffering from a kind of moral calamity themselves. So it's not just a moral issue, it's also a practical issue. Is this the island you want to live on? And the issue of self-interest. It's definitely self-interest, not only for those who suffer from bad transportation, but for the human beings who have to go and design these awful things. I'm interested, I think in the question of how capital would resist these moves. And we know that it does. We know all too well the history written in letters of blood and fire, as Marx would say, of how capital resist this. Where do you see the strengths of capital? Because we can see some weaknesses at the moment. It's unusual. It's not how it was when I was 15 or so, that it looked like we were in the eternal 1990s. We can see some weaknesses, but we should think about its strengths as well. Where are capital strengths? Where will it fight back from? Well, there's two different things you're saying. One is what are its strengths itself and what are its weapons that it will use to protect what it has. I think the first one, and I'm not naive here, I think that one of the immense advantages of capitalism is it's been able to take advantage of human ingenuity. We've had incredible things produced in the modern period. But is this really thanks to capitalism? Because after all, so much of the ingenuity was publicly financed. The internet was a publicly financed venture. So many pharmaceutical drugs, major breakthroughs were publicly financed. So we sometimes gave capitalism too much credit for things that it takes credit for. But how will it fight back? Certainly on intellectual property, it's going to fight viciously. And it will make the argument that, well, we invested money in research, therefore, you can't take a property back. I'm going back to the manifesto because it's such a brilliant book. But in the manifesto, Marx says, and Engels say quite cleverly, look, we are not interested in your shirt. I'm not interested in your clothes or your, firstly, you don't own anything. He says 90% of peasants don't own their land. They own debt. They don't own their land. So what's happened is the word property has become inflated. When we say we are against private property, I'm not going to nationalize your toothbrush. I want to nationalize one part of the economy, which is to say, I would like to nationalize socially produced wealth, or at least a part of it. That part of it, which we should use towards, in an interesting, perhaps decentralized way, use towards the production of a new society. One of the great errors in the Soviet Union was that they centralized their nationalization policy. You don't need to centralize. We have learned over the course of the century the power of cooperatives, the power of small-scale sector nationalization. We've understood the value of small dams rather than giant dams. We've learned a lot in these 100 years. We don't have to go back and repeat the same, you know. One of the important things I would say about the tradition of socialism, you know, when you say how will they fight back? One of the important things about the tradition of socialism is socialists should give each other the right to fail. You know, we don't. We look at failed experiments and we condemn people. You should have the right to fail because we'll only learn dialectically through our failures. And I think that's a lesson we've really forgotten. I want to ask you about the left in India and Indian communism. Indian communism is something that is understudied, I think, in the West. You don't hear much about it. It has its own sort of unique history. Tell me a little bit about the history of the left in India and then we can come on perhaps to talk about the current situation. Well, I mean, the left in India is related intimately to the British left.  Of course, there is the Fabian tradition. It plays an important role in the early phase of the Indian socialist movement. Of course, there's a communist tradition which runs through the experience of the Russian Revolution but also the Communist Party of Great Britain, you know, played an important role. Cannot underestimate the role of Rajnipam Dutt, for instance, who I read as a schoolboy, his great book, India Today. I mean, RP Dutt didn't really travel much to India, but his essays, weekly essay in Labour Monthly was read, you know, Labour Weekly was read as if it was gospel because he was an extraordinarily well-informed person. But the Indian left, as it developed, as I said, is a wide stream. It's not a narrow current. It's a very wide river. And the width runs from basically what in the West you call social democracy or even sections of Gandhian socialism all the way out to Maoism. It's a very wide river. And I think we should emphasize its width and emphasize that the current moment left unity is very important in India. So groups are beginning to work together like they've never worked together before. Now, this tradition that developed in India, especially the communist tradition, began to have a serious debate around the time when India won its independence from Britain. And the debate was around how to understand the Indian leadership, the bourgeoisie. It was also the role of the Soviet Union, how to understand that. So the splits in the Indian movement, unlike in the West where the splits were around issues of Stalin, Trotsky, this, that and the other, much more sectarian in the West. In India, the splits were around how do you characterize the Indian bourgeoisie and what should be our relationship to the Soviet Union or China or what not. These were really important substantive debates because after all these were mass movements and these were movements where millions of people were card-carrying members of these organizations. You know, these are not small group of skills where doctrine and ideology became the main issue. It was really what strategy should you create. So over the course of the 20th century, the bulk of Indian communism had a fraternal but not subordinate relationship to the USSR. So when the USSR collapsed in the 1990s, Indian communism didn't collapse. You know, it's important to see countries where the break had come before 1991, those parties remained because their reason of existence wasn't the Soviet Union. It was their own revolution that they were trying to build and they had already built their own theory. You know, one of the things I've been trying to do over the last few years is to introduce people around the world to the theories of communist movements, left movements outside the West so that the debates are not always, you know, with reference points that are familiar, you know, Luxembourg, Lenin, Bernstein, etc. But let's see what EMS Nambudri Pad was saying. Let's even not talk only about Trotsky. Let's see what Neville Alexander was saying in South Africa. You know, a South African greatly inspired by Trotsky but created his own understanding, his own... So we need to actually see not only the width of this river, but its depth, because the fact is that they developed their own theories. You know, one of the sad ways in which the left is thought about is theory is made in Europe. And then the rest of the world, you have people writing guerrilla manuals. Che Guevara's guerrilla manual, you know, the guerrilla manuals coming out of Vietnam, etc. Those are just tactical, mini-manual of an urban guerrilla from Marighella of Brazil. But these are not just tactical manuals of how to fight a guerrilla war. Look elsewhere for their theories. And I think that's something I'm very interested in, you know, helping the Western left broaden its terms of reference so that this Western Marxist tradition is not so claustrophobic. Yes, and there are Indian Communist parties that have quite significant experience in power, certainly regional power in say Kerala, right? Do you think there's something bad that can be, you know, specifically brought to bear on the situation of a European left approaching state power for the first time in decades? Well, I'm happy that you asked me that question. One of the places I work is at Leftwood Books in Delhi, where we have been publishing a series of books on the Kerala experience. We have done two already and a third is going to come out. And I'll tell you quickly what they're about. One of them is about a participatory planning process that the government of Kerala did in the 1990s, where the government said that our budgeting, the budget that we're going to have is not going to be written in Trivandrum, in the capital. It's going to be written in every village. And the process started months before the budget was to have been proposed, where in small local areas, people came in to train, you know, interested parties to come and start the process of budgeting. In order to do the budgeting, they had to first understand what is our natural resources? What resources have we commodified? What are other resources we don't want to commodify? You know, do we in our area need to spend money on a road or do we need little metal bridges to cross the stream so that people who don't have cars can walk? And those decisions then went upward to the state government and a very good budget was produced. I think this is a very productive area to look at, the idea of participatory budgeting, but participatory planning as well, not just budgeting, because you have to plan your economy. They did budgeting in Porto Alegre, the workers' party attempted participatory budgeting. But this is participatory planning. The second book we produced was on a construction workers cooperative that is now almost 100 years old.  And the workers still control it. Now, I am very, very much a booster of the idea of cooperatives. I mean, I know that there are people on the left who sniff and sneer and don't like to pay attention to these things, you know, who say silly things like, well, you know, let's wait for the revolution and then the forms will show. It doesn't work like that. You have to build tomorrow today. And cooperatives are an excellent way to reconstruct production relations. And in Kerala, they are experimenting with cooperatives. And finally, finance. How do you raise finance to do interesting things? You don't actually have to go to international finance markets. There are lots of resources available to you. It just depends what you want to do. Do you want to build a big petrochemical hub that spews toxins? Then you need to go to international finance markets. Do you want to improve the quality of life of the people who live there? Well, now you can reach out to people for different kinds of resources, such as voluntary labor. You know, the labor of people is a great investment. So if you're able to canalize people's voluntary labor, this is something Che Guevara understood and wrote about. He theorized the concept of voluntary labor. We take this very seriously. When there were terrible floods in Kerala, it was voluntary labor that came in and cleaned things up.  The island is still devastated. Richest country in the world, the center of world imperialism, and they've still let this area be devastated. Kerala, the floods were just a few weeks ago. Voluntary labor, just as in Cuba during Hurricane Maria, voluntary labor came in and sorted things out. It sounds naive to say these things, but I'm sorry to say, socialism has to draw from your actual love and belief in the people. It sounds naive, surely, because certainly we sit in a system in which alienation is so fundamental, but it's very hard to imagine something outside of that. And you're saying that it's, even if it's not completely achieved, it's sort of partly achieved and that's what spurs that kind of thing. You know, I'll tell you some things that might be portable into the British context. You see, our goal as human beings is to create communities and societies. And we have allowed corporations to even take up this part of life. So for instance, you'll have a London marathon. It will be sponsored by corporations. So why doesn't a trade union say we want to do a 10 kilometer run to end cancer or to raise money for cancer? You see, cancer is a problem in our society. Why can't a trade union do, why can't Nuwara media say we want to do a cleanup day? You know, we have an office in this building in London and we want that neighborhood. We are calling upon all businesses in our neighborhood to come on Sunday. We are going to do a cleanup. We've got a DJ playing music. We're going to have food. You know, we've allowed corporations to do these things but this is what brings people together. It gives people an experience of doing something where you don't have to wear a sign. This is brought to you by the Bank of Scotland or whatever. You know, so I think these are practical ways in which people feel that the society is in their building society.  What's nice about them is it brings people together but it doesn't bring us together to do voluntary labor. It only brings the volunteers together but what a great experience the volunteers have. You know, but the other people come as spectators. We have to reconstruct festivals like this so that nobody is a spectator. Everybody is participating in some voluntary labor, you know, in militant work as they call it in Brazil. I want to end just by asking about political situation in India because it is extreme and it is severe. There was muted reaction to the election of Narendra Modi globally. Someone with whom we can do business I think was the general sense.  You know, his RSS background, he's the butcher of Gujarat and there were, you know, Britain rolled out the red carpet for him over here. What is the political situation like now in India? I mean, I'm glad you said all that in the introduction to the question because it makes the point about Modi himself. Modi is the antithesis of Corbin, shall we say. It's important to remember that the BJP only won 30% of the vote in 2014. That means 70% of those who voted did not vote for Narendra Modi. The problem with our electoral democracy, what we call democracy, is that a minority government can behave as if they are imperial. In fact, Mr. Narendra Modi sometimes behaves as if he's the Maharaja of India. So this is important because there is a very strong section, thoroughly opposed to Mr. Modi. What the election of people like Modi, Erdogan, Trump, Duterte, you name them, what they do is they enable the sliver of the far right to try to take over society. You know, society hardens. Society becomes scared. Society becomes much more unfriendly, dangerous, violent and so on. But there is a very strong undertow against Mr. Modi. You know, recently the Modi government arrested five activists, journalists. Really, in fact, I am friends with most of them. You know, one of them and I write for the same media house, NewsClick, that's Gautam Navlakha. So they went after these people saying that there's a plot to kill Mr. Modi. There's no such plot to kill Mr. Modi. Everybody knows that. But I must say that there has been a reaction outside India, which has been quite good, including from the United Nations, which suggested that these arrests were really going too far. And the election next year is not going to be easy because after all, Mr. Modi does command a section of the population, just as Mr. Trump commands 30% of the American electorate. But India is a parliamentary system. It is hoped that in one small section of India, that is the belts that speaks Hindi, particularly Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, there is a hope, especially in Uttar Pradesh, that Mr. Modi's party will be defeated if the opposition comes together. And that's the crucial issue. Because when the opposition doesn't come together, his people can get elected with 20% of the vote. In one seat, the person wants 17% of the vote. That means, just to say it, the obvious point, 83% of the people voted against the member of parliament. The situation kind of vitiates. Congress party represented. Tarik Ali wrote a book which was not one of the books that really was read much, but it was called something like the extreme center. I thought that phrase was quite charming, the extreme center. What it means, of course, is that the center has become extremist with its privatization policies, its, let's say, counter-terrorism kind of policies and so on, they've become fanatical in their fear of those whom they deem to be terrorists or those whom they deem to be anti-privatization. And it's this fanaticism that leads them to criminalized dissent. I think this is the way the arrow goes. The arrests of these five people in India, the disdain for dissent in the West, it all comes from this fanaticism. So these extreme fanatics of the center, they want you to look at the fascistic forces and say, look at them, they are horrible. Taking the eye off this, but in fact, both of them go after dissent. One, perhaps charmingly, you know, who can deny the fact that in his youth, Tony Blair was much more charming than Theresa May today. Who can deny that? Now, of course, he's not charming anymore. He looks sort of punch drunk, drugged by the Saudis and others who are pumping, you know, oil money into his veins. But they like to give this view that they are socially progressive and so on. I think this is an issue in India as well. The Congress party is utterly an extreme centrist party. Socialist core has been relatively vacated. The current leader of the party, very young man, Rahul Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, you know, has been trying to move some sort of social democratic agenda, but he's not a natural politician. You know, in some families, some businesses are good with families, maybe shop keeping and so on. Politics is a very bad family business. You know, it hasn't really worked out well for the children of politicians who try. It's a good thing Mark Thatcher continued to try to race cars in the Sahara Desert and to take bribes from friends here and there. He would have been a terrible. Imagine him as the leader of the conservative party. Appalling. Not that your leader of the conservative party today is any better. Maybe he would have been better than her, but still. So Rahul Gandhi is, you know, attempting to move an agenda, but I don't think he's going to be able to do it quickly enough. It's going to come down to the regional parties, actually. The parties of the dominant castes in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samajwadi, they need to unify against the BJP. In the South, the BJP is going to be wiped out again, but the temptations in places like Tamil Nadu to ally with the BJP in the center, somebody has to pay a cost for that. And the party in Tamil Nadu in power, the AIADMK, is an ally of the BJP in the center, even though the BJP doesn't need their seats. They need to be, you know, punished for allying with the BJP. In fact, the BJP might lose its ally in Maharashtra, the even more far-right group, the Shivzena. So let's see what happens. But I just want to emphasize that 70% of the population did not vote for Mr. Modi in 2014. I'm not saying this to protect the dignity of India. I'm saying this merely as a practical issue. Yes. Vijay Prasad, thank you very much for joining me today. Pleasure. Thanks a lot. And we'll be keeping an eye on those elections. This show is brought to you by Navara Media. To find articles, videos, and more audio content like this, head to navaramedia.com. If you've particularly enjoyed this podcast and encourage others to listen to it, why not head to iTunes and as well as subscribing and leave us a review? Navara Media can exist only thanks to the generosity of our subscribers and supporters. If you have the means, please consider subscribing at support.navaramedia.com. As well as helping us continue to produce regular content, subscribers will also receive priority access to events as well as promotions throughout the year. For regular updates, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. 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So this is the second part of the two-part series about victims, victimhood and how victims react as narcissists and psychopaths do. They become temporary or transient narcissists and psychopaths. Susan Isaacs wrote in her book Magic Hour, I thought if I have a good and beautiful wife and nice kids and a comfortable house, I would be at peace. But I've got too much damage and too many needs. Putting a picket fence around me won't make me into a whole person. And when you look at collective abuse, you see similar collective damage. And this collective damage exactly like in individual narcissists, provokes narcissistic, psychopathic reactions, behaviors and traits. In other words, victims who have been damaged for a very long time experience complex PTSD, which renders them effective narcissists and psychopaths. As I said in the previous video, some victims emulate the misconduct of their abusers. They guilt-trip, aggress, confabulate, manipulate, act entitled and grandiose and show more decline in empathy. And I mentioned the latest riots. And I said, black lives do matter. No one is disputing this. There is a systemic discrimination, institutional animus towards black people. Racism is rampant, slavery is horrendous, etc., etc. Slavery was a near genocidal process that lasted four centuries and decimated blacks on four continents. And it's justified for whites to feel guilty. The collective guilt for all these atrocities, whites did it to blacks, fact. But blacks guilt-trip the whites. They manipulate them by leveraging their guilt to obtain desired economic and political outcomes. And there's no question that certain individual whites egregiously misbehave and should be punished for their heinous crimes. But by rioting destructively and indiscriminately, blacks are punishing all the whites as a collective, exactly what the whites did to them. And so today, in this portion of the video, I would like to discuss racism. And perhaps from a controversial or unusual point of view. So what's new, Wagner? You're always controversial. Here we go. Henry Willer Shaw wrote, The trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that ain't so. And so people are flooded with information. There's only that much that we can process. The nuances and fine distinctions between groups of people, most of which most of these groups feel entitled, demand special treatment and so on. So it's become too much. Political correctness reflects this weariness and this anxiety of being free to hurt someone, even unbeknownst to you, by saying the most innocuous things. Because everyone now belongs to some group or other. Everyone is a one-person minority and everyone has special rights is unique by virtue of existing. And everyone is entitled and has rights which confer obligations on society to gratify his needs. So it's a very, very tinderbox, fractured, fragmented, non-society. Individual, malignant individualism and atomization led to a situation where the only common denominator we all share is our predatory instincts, predatory instincts in trying to extract benefits from others via institutions or directly by rioting, for example. And so we have shortcuts because of the avalanche or tsunami of information, we have stereotypes. The question is, do stereotypes usefully represent real knowledge? Or do they only reflect counterproductive prejudice, sometimes narcissistic prejudice, because many stereotypes are grandiose, the white men's burden. White men is superior to black people, is more intelligent. Men are more intelligent than women, nonsense, by the way. And many, many stereotypes involve fear and weariness. So for example, today, men, big groups of men in the hemisphere, men going their own way, red pillars and so on, black pillars. Today, men have developed this theoreticized, structured misogyny which relies on a total misunderstanding of insights from evolutionary psychology and so on. Evolutionary sociology, anthropology. And so these kind of stereotypes, they are defensive stereotypes. They are like women are perceived as alien life forms, very threatening, how to get you, how to exploit you, how to abuse and maneuver you. And women are better at leveraging institutions to support them. And so institutions are compromised as well. So stereotypes have a tendency to ripple effect. They have a tendency, it's like concentric waves, you drop a stone, a stereotypical stone, and then you have waves that would expand. And if your stereotype has to do with women, instantaneously it will also stereotypize institutions. If you believe that blacks are inferior, it reflects on your own superiority. So you become a stereotype.  And of course, Aryans who stereotyped Jews during the Nazi period, they also stereotyped themselves. Thereby assuming certain rights and obligations as a race. And I will dedicate a special video to antisemitism, the most ridiculous stereotype of all. But stereotypes are there. And the question is, should we discard the baby with the buff water? Or do they contain a kernel, a core, something of real knowledge? Are they 100% prejudice or a mixture? 60% prejudice, 40% real knowledge. We know that a disproportionate number of criminals in the United States are black. That's a fact, end of story. The vast majority of anti-Western terrorists are Muslim. Terrorists are not Jewish grandmothers. Last time I checked. And most criminals in the United States are not Jewish grandfathers. So racial profiling is a powerful and justified and accurate tool based on knowledge. It's knowledge and evidence based. It reflects inalienable, indisputable statistics. Is this a stereotype? In light of these facts, racial profiling, which is considered to be a subspecies of stereotyping, appears to be rational actually, ethically justified.  But you can immediately argue that racial profiling is a post hoc ergo-popter hoc policy. In other words, does racial profiling cause the very crime and social malaise and ills that it is intended to counter? In other words, is the reason that most criminals are black, is the reason that they are racially profiled? Does police brutality breed black crime? Or does black crime breed police brutality? Or is there any causal connection? Maybe there isn't. I mean, there could be a third reason. A third overarching reason which yields both police brutality and black crime. But one is hard-pressed to see a causal chain between racial profiling and black crime. Yes, no one is disputing the fact. No one is disputing the fact that there's racism embedded, reified, hard-wired, hard-core racism in most police departments in the United States. And that this racism, this racial bias, sometimes unconscious, leads to behaviors which are highly psychopathic and narcissistic, including a lack of impulse control, overt and dangerous aggression, etc., etc. No one is disputing this. But this does not cause an effect. There's no cause and effect here. There's not even correlation here. Stereotypes invariably refer in a generalized manner to often arbitrary groups of people, usually minorities. Stereotypes don't necessarily have to be derogatory or cautionary. I mean, most stereotypes are. You don't want to be at the receiving end of a stereotype usually. But they don't have to be. Because, for example, take the stereotype of a noble savage and compare it to the stereotype of a wild savage. So in movies, for example, Indians are overwhelmingly in movies. Indians are overwhelmingly drunken, treacherous, unreliable and childlike. That's based on Ralph and Natasha Fryer, who wrote a wonderful book called The Only Good Indian, The Hollywood Gospel, published in 1972. And so in most movies they are like that. And that's the wild, uncontrolled, impulsive, infantile, ape-like savage. But there's a group of westerns, a group of movies, not a small one, especially in the 1950s, where Indians are portrayed as noble, as trustworthy and as victims. And that's the noble savage, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's noble savage. That's also a stereotype. And when you say the Jews know how to make money, that's a stereotype, not necessarily a negative one in capitalism. But when you say the Jews control the media and abuse it for their own ends and means, that's a negative stereotype. So the same minority, the same minority group, can be the recipient of both negative and positive stereotypes. The same goes for blacks. But let's go back to Native Americans. Both alcoholism among Native Americans, especially those crammed into reservations. So alcoholism among them is indeed more prevalent than among the general population. Let me put it in a less gentle way. Most Native Americans are dead drunk most of the day. By the way, statistically, same applies to people in Finland. Finnish people are notorious for being drunk most of the day. And many Russians are met. The stereotype conveys true, and I would argue useful information about inebriation among Indians. But could the other descriptors be equally accurate that they are treacherous and reliable childlike? It is hard to unambiguously define, let alone quantify, this kind of traits. At which point does self-centeredness become egotism? At which point the pursuit of self-interest becomes treachery? What precisely constitutes childlike behavior? For example, if you're curious about the world, that's very childlike, but it's wonderful. Some types of research cannot even be attempted due to the stifling censorship of political correctness. Endevering to answer a simple question like, do blacks in America really possess a lower IQ? And if so, is this deficiency hereditary? This simple question has landed many in American academic beyond the pale and fired. There are lots of jobs. Today there are numerous questions you cannot ask about blacks, about women, about Jews. Academic freedom had been curtailed to the point that I would venture to say that most studies have become utterly sanitized. They're sanitized and impotent. The two most castigated aspects of stereotypes are their generality, their prejudice. And Akkadim today is producing actually stereotypes by outlawing certain questions. In both criticisms of stereotypes that they are too general and that they are prejudiced, they're biased. In both criticisms it is implied that there's a lack of veracity and that stereotypes are not rigorous. But that's not necessarily true. There's nothing wrong with generalization per se. Science is constructed on obstructions from private cases to general rule. We see a multitude of private cases and we make a general rule. In historiography we discuss, we use phrases like the Romans. What do you mean the Romans? They're like millions. The ancient Greeks, we refer to them as a group.  These are all forms of group speak. These are all generalizations. We can't have a meaningful discourse without generalization. In an essay titled Helping Students Understand Stereotyping and published in the April 2001 issue of Education Digest, Carlos Cortés suggests three differences between group generalizations and stereotypes. He says, group generalizations are flexible. They're permeable to new, countervailing knowledge. In other words, there's no confirmation bias. Ideas, interpretations, and information that challenge or undermine current beliefs are open. Stereotypes are rigid. They're resistant to change, even in the face of compelling new evidence. Second thing says Cortés, group generalizations incorporate intra-group, internal group heterogeneity, while stereotypes foster intra-group homogeneity. So intra-group heterogeneity in group generalization and intra-group between group homogeneity and stereotypes. Group generalizations embrace diversity. For example, there are many kinds of Jews, tall, short, mean, generous, clever, stupid, black, white, rich, poor, and of course, narcissists. Stereotypes cast certain individuals as exceptions or deviants. So stereotypes say the whole group is homogenous, but there are exceptions. So someone may say, listen, though you're Jewish, you don't behave as a Jew, you're different, or some of my best friends are black. So finally, while generalizations provide more clues about group culture and behavior, stereotypes purport to prefer immutable rules applicable to all the members of the group. Stereotypes develop easily, rigidify surreptitiously, and operate reflexively, providing simple, comfortable, convenient basis for making personal sense of the world. In other words, if you have a stereotype of blacks, you would think it applies to all blacks, all black individuals. The group identity is identical to the individual identity. And because generalizations require greater attention, content flexibility, and nuance in application, they do not provide a stereotype security blanket of permanent, inviolate, all-encompassing, perfectly reliable group knowledge. End of quote. It is commonly believed that stereotypes form the core of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, other forms of xenophobia, etc. So every phobia, every hatred of a group, every group hatred, supposedly the engine and the fuel are stereotypes. Even when Freud discussed the narcissism of small differences, he said that people hate each other because they are similar, not because they are dissimilar, but even that's a stereotype. When you say he is like me, it's a stereotype. Stereotypes go to the refrain, determine the content and thrust of prejudices, and propel their advocates to take action against minorities. There is direct lineage, it is commonly held, between typecasting and lynching. Like you start by typecasting, you say, I don't know, all blacks are lazy, you end up by hanging them from trees. There's a direct line there. Almost one would say, ineluctability, like you can't help it. It's a slippery slope. You start by stereotyping, you end up by killing people.  It is also claimed that pigeon mourning reduces the quality of life, lowers the expectations and curbs the accomplishments of its victims. If you stereotype blacks, you could strict their lives. You reduce their opportunities.  The glass ceiling and the brass ceiling are pernicious phenomena engendered by stereotypes. Stereotypes of women, in this case. The fate of many social policy issues, such as affirmative action, immigration, immigration quarters, police profiling, gay service in the military, transgender, all these social issues are determined to a large extent by stereotypes, rather than through informed scholarships or opinion. USA Today magazine reported the findings of a survey of 1,000 girls in grades 3 to 12 conducted by Harris Interactive for girls. Roughly half the 1,000 girls who were studied, half the respondents, thought that boys and girls have the same abilities. But only one third of boys thought the same, so girls were more egalitarian. A small majority of the girls felt that people think we are only interested in love and romance. Somewhat less than two thirds of the girls were told not to brag about things they do well and were expected to spend the bulk of their time on housework and taking care of younger children. So stereotypical thinking had a practical effect on these girls. Girls who believe that they are as able as boys and they face the same opportunities are way more likely to plan to go to college, studies have shown. But is it true this assumption that boys and girls are the same, identical, equal?  Unfortunately, it's a lie. It's nonsense. It's not true. Boys for example are better at spatial orientation and math. Girls are better at emotions, networking, relationships, empathy. Do girls face the same opportunities as boys? It would be perplexing if they did, taking into account physiological, cognitive, emotional and reproductive disparities. Not to mention historical and cultural handicaps. It all boils down to this politically incorrect statement. Girls are not boys. And I have shocking news for all of you. Girls will never be boys. Luckily for boys. And still there's a long stretch from girls are not boys to girls are inferior to boys. I didn't say girls are inferior to boys. I said girls are not boys. I personally actually think that women in today's environment are far better equipped, far better adapted than men. I think women of the future. I think there's a transition of mastery. Transition of husbandry. Transition of control from men to women. In this sense, I'm a feminazi, if you wish. But I would never say that girls are boys. Or exactly like boys, identical to boys, same like boys. It's nonsensical, nonsensical. Sentence, anti-scientific. Girls are not inferior to boys. And of course, girls should not be discriminated against, should not be confined. So much separates stereotypes and generalizations from discriminatory practice.  Discrimination is one group's way of protecting its turf, its prerogatives, its privileges, its access to resources, against other encroaching groups. And discrimination has little to do with stereotypes and a lot to do with societal and economic power matrices. It's true that most races typecast blacks, Indians, Jews, Latinos, Hispanics. But tag-casting in itself does not amount to racism, nor does it inevitably lead to racism or discriminatory conduct. In a multi-annual study titled Economic Insecurity, Prejudicial Stereotypes and Public Opinion on Immigration Policy, this study was published by the Political Science Quarterly. And the authors, Peter Burns and James Gimpo, substantiated the hypothesis that economic self-interest and symbolic prejudice have often been treated as rival explanations for attitudes on a wide variety of issues. But it is plausible that they are complementary on an issue such as immigration. This would be the case if prejudice were caused, at least partly, by economic insecurity. In other words, put simply, the poorer society is, or the greater the number of poor people in society, the more social friction and tension and unrest. There is, you don't need to be a genius to get that. I mean, social collapse and disintegration and social inequality led directly to all the major revolutions in human history, from the French Revolution to Adolf Hitler. A long list of scholarly papers demonstrate how racism, especially among the dispossessed, dislocated and low-skilled people, racism surges during times of economic hardship or social transition. You can safely expect a tsunami of racism following this pandemic. Often there is racism, antisemitism. Often there is a confluence of long-established racial and ethnic stereotypes with a growing sense of economic insecurity and social dislocation. Social identity theory tells us that stereotypical prejudice is a form of compensatory narcissism. The acts of berating, demeaning, denigrating and debasing other people, these acts serve to enhance the perpetrator's self-esteem to regulate their labile sense of self-worth. It is stereotyping as a vicarious pride by proxy. I can't be proud of myself as I am, so I'm proud of myself by comparison. I may be a poor hillbilly redneck, but I'm still superior to the most superior black, so I'm proud. I'm now grandiose, belonging to a self-styled, self-imputed elite group bestows superiority, bestows and dows superiority on all its members.  Having been entangled sometimes unjustly with bigotry and intolerance, the merits of stereotypes have often been overlooked, and yes, stereotypes have merits otherwise they would not have existed. In an age of information overload, nutshell stereotypes encapsulate information compactly and efficiently, and thus stereotypes possess an undeniable survival value. Admittedly, many stereotypes are self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling prophecies. A young black man confronted by a white supremacist may well respond violently, I would, and Hispanic unable to find a job may end up in a street gang. So, stereotypes are one thing, but discrimination leads, leads, guarantees, behaviors which conform to stereotypes. But this recursiveness does not detract from the usefulness of stereotypes as reality tests. Stereotypes enhance our reality testing. They are serviceable prognosticators. They are good predictions. Why? Because blacks do commit crimes over and above their proportion in the general population. Blacks are also more sick with COVID-19. Pleasant facts, but true.  Their healthcare system is crumbling, etc. Doctors tend to mistreat black patients, or actually under treated, but these stereotypes are true. Though stereotypical in the extreme, it's a useful fact to know and act upon. Racial profiling reflects this fact, however unpleasant. Stereotypes are like fables. They are often constructed around middle-class morality. They are prescriptive. They split the world into the irredeemably bad. The other, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, women, gay, transgender. And the flawlessly good, we, the purveyors of the stereotype. While expressly unrealistic, the stereotype teaches what not to be, how not to behave. So if you say Native Americans are drunk, the implication is you should not be drunk. If you say blacks commit crimes and are lazy, the implication is you should not commit crimes and it's not going to be lazy. It's a morality play. It's a form of moralizing. A by-product of this primitive rendition is, of course, segregation. A large body of scholarship shows that proximity and familiarity, hold on to your seeds. Proximity and familiarity, exactly as Igmond Freud had predicted, actually polarize rather than ameliorate into ethnic and interracial tensions. Do you remember Spike Lee's movie? Movies, where the friction between whites, Italians, for example, and blacks leads to massive volcanic eruptions of social pressure cookings, stereotypes minimize friction and violence. How? By keeping minorities and the majority apart. Segregation works, venting and wanting substitute for vandalizing and worse. In time, as erstwhile minorities are gradually assimilated and new ones emerge, conflict is averted. So segregation is a temporary measure. It should never be a long-term fixed policy. It should never become a part height. But in times of stress and friction, economic dislocation, segregation is not a bad idea. Moreover, though they frequently reflect underlying deleterious emotions such as rage or envy or hatred, not all stereotypes are negative, as I said. Blacks are supposed to have superior musical and athletic skills. It's a stereotype. It's not negative. Jews are thought to be brainier in science, shrewder in business. These are two compliments, stereotypical compliments. Hispanics uphold family values and ethnic cohesions as do Italians. Gays are sensitive and compassionate.  And negative stereotypes are attached even to positive social roles.  Soldiers inflexible and programmed like robots. These are stereotypes. Stereotypes are selective filters. Supporting data is hoarded and information to the contrary is ignored. And this phenomenon is known as confirmation bias. There's a silo, a silo of like-minded people, echo chamber. One way to shape stereotypes into effective coping strategies is to bombard their devotees with exceptions, context and alternative reasoning. So, for example, Blacks are good athletes because sports is one of a few egalitarian career paths open to Blacks. The only way out of the ghetto is to become LeBron James. Becoming an NBA player is the only way out. Jews historically excluded from all professions. I mean, for the majority of the last 2000 years, Jews were not allowed to do anything but lend money. They were not allowed to be farmers. They were not allowed to study the universities and so on. So when the universities did open, Jews crowded into science and business and specialized. If gays are indeed more sensitive or caring than the average, perhaps it's because they have been repressed and persecuted for so long. Athletes are not prone to violence. Violent athletes simply end up on TV more often. And soldiers have to act reflexively and robotically to survive in battle. It's an automatic function or driving. There's nothing wrong with stereotypes if they are embedded in reality, if they promote the understanding of social and historical processes. Western, multi-ethnic, pluralistic civilization celebrates diversity and the uniqueness and distinctiveness of its components. We are not trying to homogenize like in Mao's China. On the contrary, we want people to be different. And stereotypes merely acknowledge this variety and diversity. U.S. Today magazine reported in January a survey of 800 others conducted by social psychology professors Amanda Dickman of Purdue University and Alice Igley of Northwestern University. These two ladies found that far from being rigid and biased, stereotypes regarding the personality traits of men and women have changed dramatically to accurately reflect evolving gender roles. Dickman noted that, I'm quoting, women are perceived as having become much more assertive, independent and competitive over these. Our respondents, whether they were old enough to have witnessed it or not, recognize the role change that occurred when women began working outside the home in large numbers and the necessity of adopting characteristics that equate them to be breadwinners. So stereotypes evolve. We evolve. Stereotypes are part of us. They're not external alien entities. They are the way we think about groups of people. And we always group people. As long as we regard people in groups, two member groups, two million member groups, 200 million member groups, as long as we think in groups, our group, others groups, there will be stereotypes. And it's a good thing.


It sounds easy. I can wake up, roll out of bed in my pajamas, turn on my computer, put on a headset, call people that wanna buy and help them do that over the phone. Not quite how it works. Some people make it look that easy, but it's more difficult than face-to-face sales. It seems like the nuances are more punishing.  Yeah. It seems like there's small things that make a big difference. Unless you're like plugging into somewhere, if you're trying it on your own, it's, it is tougher than face-to-face sales. It just is. Why is that? There's several reasons. There's face-to-face sales is, you know, I'm driving to someone's house and sitting down with him. Phone sales, I have to make myself either buy live transfers, either plug into a company, either dial leads. But I've got to literally plug into the phone for eight hours a day, make calls, put forth more effort than face-to-face sales, more, a lot more activity, and realize that the closing percentage, and it's weird, most ages don't get this. The closing percentage is going to be lower on phone sales than face-to-face sales. What that should tell you is you have to talk to more people to make phone sales. But it's easier potentially to talk to more people because you're not driving and I can sit up. This is true. This is true. And also, most Asians think it's, you know what, I can just talk to, you know, I have the gift of gab. I can talk to anybody. I'm gonna be great at tele-sales. It's not easy to talk to a random stranger, get them to trust you, get them to like you, build a relationship with them, build the value, fact find, ask a tough questions, and oh, by the way, get their social bank account information, go through a complete application, get them approved, and get them to share everything about themselves with you on sometimes the very first call. Yeah. I mean, it's probably easier to go no thanks versus the awkwardness of shoving someone out your door and maybe there's some of that. That's the other thing too, is like you just said, you have control when you're sitting, a little bit more control when you're sitting in front of them. I like to keep control of a conversation. I like to get them talking, asking questions, but dude, I mean, they can always hang up. True.


Hi Psych2Goers, welcome back to another video. Thank you so much for being here. With your help and support, we're able to succeed in our mission to make mental health and psychology more accessible to everyone. Now let's continue. To use struggle with your emotional strength, are you unsure if you are emotionally strong? If so, that's completely understandable and normal. Having emotional strength is very different from having physical strength. Your emotional strength comes from internally working on yourself and because of this, it can be hard to figure out what your emotional strength level is. To help you with that, here are 10 signs that you're emotionally strong. 1. You express your emotions in a good and healthy way. Emotions are important indications of your deeper needs and they're there to alert you if something is wrong. Bottling up your emotions makes you less responsive to your own needs and you may also wind up letting them all out at once on an unsuspecting friend, making it difficult for you to get close to others. Though our society does stigmatize emotions, they're healthy and normal. Being able to freely express yourself around the people you trust is a good sign of emotional strength. 2. You don't let your emotions run wild. When you're emotionally strong, you tend to have good control over your initial reactions and emotions.  Controlling your more instinctive reactions can be hard since it takes a lot of self-control, but it's a very important part of being emotionally strong. 3. You trust yourself. Do you have trust in yourself?  Having faith in yourself is hard. To have the confidence to do what you want and pursue your personal goals without caring about what others think of you is something that can be difficult to obtain, but not impossible. There's no reason to beat yourself up if you're not there just yet. Being confident and sure of yourself takes a lot of emotional strength, so as long as you're trying, you're doing a great job. 4. You accept your limitations and are open to receiving help. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and that's okay. No one is perfect. We all want to be flawless and have our lives put together seamlessly, but the real world isn't built that way. Asking for help doesn't make you weak or burden. Instead, it means you have the strength to admit you need help and want to learn from your mistakes. Finding the acceptance in that and loving yourself enough to admit when you need help is a sure and pure sign of emotional strength. 5. You're open to feedback from others. Have you ever been so proud of something that you didn't want to hear a single negative comment said about it? We all have things that we don't want to hear criticism about. However, a big part of emotional strength is receiving feedback and honest thoughts from others who care about us. Regardless of whether you agree with that feedback or not, getting upset about it is likely not going to be worth it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. It takes a strong person to put this into practice, but try to remember that criticism doesn't take away from the value of your hard work or the project itself. 6. You know when and how to apologize. Has someone's apology ever felt like a never-ending list of excuses? Admitting when you're at fault is one of the most difficult things to do. After all, who wants to be in the wrong? Although it may be unpleasant, accepting your wrongdoings and apologizing for when we make mistakes is a trial everyone must go through. Apologizing you've made a mistake and apologizing for it is a huge sign of emotional strength and maturity. Knowing when and how to apologize also helps you to make strong, long-lasting relationships with others because it allows the chance for forgiveness and subsequent growth in that relationship. 7. You try to take care of and improve on yourself. Are self-care and self-improvement always in the back of your mind? Does it feel like they all too often get pushed to the side when you've got a million other things to do? It takes a lot of focus and discipline to make sure you are properly taking care of yourself and fulfilling your personal emotional needs. It can be hard to put this into practice and keep up with it, but as long as you keep trying and are finding the time to carve out for yourself, you're doing great. 8. You're kind and empathetic. In the kind of world we live in, it can be easy to lose your motivation to be kind to others. Sometimes, it feels as if people are only nice to you when they want something in return. However, as tempting as it can be to throw in the towel, that's probably not the case most of the time. While there are a few people like that, a lot of people aren't like that. Emotionally strong people don't let a couple of bad apples sour all the other amazing people they have yet to meet. 9. You're open to new things. Most people often want to stick to what they're good at. After all, doing what you're good at is satisfying to you and makes you feel good. Trying new things and branching out to new skills is good for you too and can lead to discovering new passions that you might have never even thought of before. However, like everything in life, there is a possibility of failure. Being emotionally strong means that you recognize and accept that possibility of failure without letting it stop you from trying out new things. 10. You're persistent and consider all the options. When making a decision, it can be easy to fixate on an option without considering all the facts. For example, you may let one aspect of a choice, such as a single person or a material item carry too much weight. It can be tempting to do this since it takes the stress out of making that choice. But it's always better to consider all the options. You could overlook something and regret your decision later if you don't. Although it'll make your decision harder and take more time, it's the best way to make tough choices. So next time you're deciding on something important, try to be emotionally strong and consider all the options. Emotional strength takes time and energy to develop as long as you keep trying and taking the steps you need to take, you're moving in the right direction. Do you think you're emotionally strong? What are your strongest areas or your weakest areas? In what ways do you think you can do your best to get emotionally stronger? Tell us in the comments below. Please like and share this video if it helped you, and you think it could help someone else too. The studies and references used are listed in the description below. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more Psych2Go videos. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next time.


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Hello everybody Andrea here. So you want to know how to take a really good before and after photo for whatever it could be. It could be for any type of business but I'm just going to talk to you guys specifically about being a teeth-wining technician. You need really good before and after photos and imagine yourself as the client. If you see a really good photo, a really good before and after photo of hair, nails, teeth, anything, you might not have been thinking about getting your teeth whitened, but now you really want your teeth whitened. And to dig a little bit deeper, you might be saying oh my god that patient or that client's teeth were pretty yellow before. That's kind of like mine. And now they look amazing. Oh my goodness. I need to book an appointment with her or him right away, but you need really good before and after photo. So I talk about this in full. There's a full module inside the teeth whitening technician training course.  I train online how to start your own teeth whitening business. But let me give you guys kind of the basics. You need a ring light. You don't have to get the biggest ring light ever. I have a selfie ring light. That's what it's called. Look it up on Amazon, but I'm going to also leave the link for you guys down below the exact one that I have. A selfie ring light. It just attaches to your phone. So it's very easy to take with you. I am a mobile teeth whitening technician. So I don't want to bring with me this huge big quality ring light. I just don't want to do that. I'm okay to bring this one. It was $20 or $30 at the most. I can take it with me anywhere and then I just have to charge it up when it needs charging by USB super easy. And what I love about it is there's different levels depending on your client's household if it's too dark to light too many windows not enough windows, you might want a different setting. If you're seeing patients in your own home same thing though it could be a cloudy day it could be a super sunny day different settings are really really good and it's easy a click of a button. Another thing that I talked about is you need to get the right app. I use the collageable app. That's what it's called you guys look it up. And I'm going to show you guys right now. This is the app that I use. This is kind of the icon sorry it's kind of blurry but you get the idea. This allows me to add the before photo on the top, the after photo on the bottom I do not alter the photos in any way you shouldn't do that because I would you that's not true results but I do like to zoom in to make a really good before and after photo as an example you guys here is one of them. This one doesn't have the cheek retractors in but I did that on purpose I want to show you guys the difference between. Sorry guys I'm just making this better look again. Very, very nice right but then with cheek retractors in. Let's see how does that look oh you know it's funny I can't find the one with the cheek retractors. Okay this isn't the best example but you get the idea there's more examples inside the teeth whitening training Academy. Okay. But notice how things look different with the cheek retractors in the lips are pulled back everything's pulled back again you guys kind of hard to see with my bright ring light on top here. But I do suggest having the cheek retractors in, but it does look nice with the cheek retractors not in sometimes to you know I do a little bit of both. I'm just showing you guys a couple examples but see they look professional don't they professional real good lighting. Let me know you guys if you have any questions thank you for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one.