I’ve often discussed the importance of speaking up, even if you are the only person in the room with a particular belief or opinion. I’ve referred to the powerful tendency to sit on your hand and NOT speak up, based on social psychology experiments run by Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

Bret Weinstein has repeatedly spoken up when others dared not. After others blasted him and censored him for speaking out, he has often been proven correct. He discussed the need to speak out in a long-form disussion with Tucker Carlson. I transcribed the following part of that discussion:

[Bret Weinstein] But let’s just put it this way, we have a large, global population. Most people have no useful role, through no fault of their own. They have not been given an opportunity in life to find a useful way to contribute. And I wonder if the rent-seeking elites that have horded so much power, are not unhooking our rights because, effectively, they’re afraid of some global French Revolution moment as people realize that they’ve been betrayed and left without good options. Is that what we’re seeing?

It certainly feels like we’re facing an end-game where important properties that would once have been preserved by all parties because they might need them one day, are now being dispensed with and we’re watching our governmental structures and every one of our institutions captured, hollowed out turned into a paradoxical inversion of what it was designed to do. It’s not an accident. The thing that worries me most actually, is that whatever is driving this is not composed of diabolical geniuses who at least have some plan for the future, but it’s being driven by people who actually do not know what kind of hell they are inviting. They are going to create a kind of chaos from which humanity may well not emerge. And I get the sense that unless they have some remarkable plan that is not obvious, that they are just simply drunk with power and putting everyone including themselves in tremendous jeopardy by taking apart the structures on which we depend.

[Tucker Carlson]: You’re you’re speaking in in Grand terms that three years ago, I might have laughed at and I’m not laughing at all. And I think you’re absolutely right. But you’re also choosing as you know, as a 50-ish year-old man, to say this stuff out loud, and to pursue the truth as you find it and then to talk about it? Why did you decide to do that? And how do you think that ends?

[Bret Weinstein] Well, you know, we are all the products of whatever developmental environment produced us. And as I’ve said, on multiple topics where my family has found itself in very uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous circumstances, because we speak out, I don’t think I had a choice. I just, I, I literally cannot understand how I would sleep at night, how I would look at myself in the mirror, if I didn’t say what needed to be said.

I heard a very good speech by Bobby Kennedy Jr. Though neither of us are libertarians, he was at the Liberty conference in Memphis. And the last thing he said in that speech struck me to my core, something I’ve thought often and said almost never. But there are fates far worse than death. And I think, for my part, I have I have lived an incredible life. There’s plenty I still want to do and I am not eager to leave this planet any earlier than I have to. I have a marvelous family. I live wonderful place and I’ve got lots of things on my bucket list. However, humanity is depending on everybody who has a position from which to see what is taking place to grapple with what it might mean, to describe it so that the public understands where their interests are, is depending on us to do what needs to be done if we’re to have a chance of delivering a planet to our children and our grandchildren that is worthy of them. If we’re going to deliver a system that allows them to live meaningful, healthy lives, we have to speak up.

And I don’t know. I don’t know how to get people to do that. I’m very hesitant to urge others to put themselves or their families in danger. And I know that everybody’s circumstances are different. Some people are struggling to simply to feed a family and keep a roof over their heads. Those people obviously, have a great deal less liberty with respect to standing up and saying what needs to be said.
But this is really, it’s what we call in game theory a collective action problem. Everybody responds to their personal well being. If everybody says that’s too dangerous to stand up, you know, “I’m not suicidal, I’m I can’t do it,” then not enough people stand up to change the course of history. Whereas if people somehow put aside the obvious danger, their ability to earn and maybe their lives of saying what needs to be said, then we greatly outnumber those we are pitted against. They are ferociously powerful, but I would also point out this interesting error.

So I call the force that we’re up against Goliath, just so I remember what the battle is. Goliath made a terrible mistake. And it made it most egregiously during COVID, which is, it took all of the competent people. It took all of the courageous [people] and it shoved them out of the institutions where they were hanging on. And it created, in so doing, the Dream Team. It created every player you could possibly want on your team to fight some historic battle against a terrible evil. All of those people are now at least somewhat awake. They’ve now been picked on by the same enemy. And yeah, all right. We’re outgunned. It has a tremendous amount of power, but but we’ve got all of the people who know how to think. So. I hate to say it, or maybe I like to say it, but I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, but I like our odds.