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Pictured above: Jeff on the left hosts uber-cool Bruce Lerro, who fascinates the fans with the politics of psychology, explaining it simply and clearly for all to understand. Well over 100,000 people have watched/listened to/read our previous shows, which confirms this.

Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff

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Note before starting: Bruce has been a popular guest on the China Rising Radio Sinoland Show several times. See them all here,

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=lerro

Here is Bruce’s article on The Greanville Post that was the basis for today’s discussion,

https://www.greanvillepost.com/2024/07/06/the-dark-side-of-left-brain-operations-part-ii/

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Transcript

Jeff J. Brown: Good afternoon everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland and I have an old friend on the show today, Bruce Lerro. How are you doing, Bruce?

Bruce Lerro: I’m doing great. I’m looking forward to this.

Jeff: I am too. Bruce has been on the show. This is either the fourth or the fifth time. I republished a couple of his articles. He is extremely popular. If I add up the number of people who have accessed the web pages where we’ve done our shows, it’s well over 100,000 people. He covers material blending psychology and socialism and capitalism. And even though you might think it’s going to be arcane and hard to understand, he really explains it well. It’s really fascinating. So thank you for being on now, Bruce.

Bruce: It’s a pleasure.

Jeff: Today is entitled “The Dark Side of Left Brain Operations Part Two”. The subtitle is Schizophrenia, Modern Art in Western History, Part Two. And he covers it. He starts with the Greeks, the Egyptians, and Mesopotamia. And then he jumps and he gets into the Romans in the Middle Ages and Shakespeare. And it’s just fascinating. So take it away, Bruce.

Bruce: Okay. Well, thank you, everyone, for being here and listening to what I have to say. Let me start out with the author and the title of the book that I’m referring to. The book is called The Master and His Emissary, and the subtitle is The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The author his name is Ian McGilchrist, and his background is he’s an interesting combination of a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, and he’s a trained philosopher. The really interesting thing about him is how interdisciplinary he is.

He just goes from field to field and tries to connect the dots together. What the article is about is the reason it’s divided into two parts: Part one covers how the left brain impacts schizophrenia and how it impacts modern art. Part two is about how this left brain orientation that kind of goes crazy manifests itself in Western Social Institutions. So my talk today is going to be focusing, as Jeff says, on part two, which is about how the left brain goes crazy in Western institutions.

So what I found most interesting about this is that I have read articles. I mean, I’m not an expert. I’m not a neuropsychologist or anything like that, but I’ve read other accounts of the way the left brain and the right brain work. And usually what they do is they say it’s a kind of division of labor. The left brain does certain things, the right brain does other things. And I found that interesting, but not that compelling. What made this book interesting to me is that he says that there’s a power struggle between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain.

And what I thought about, like, I tried to make sense of that and then I thought about a couple of things. One is, how Freud has a division between the aid on the one hand and the superego on the other hand. That’s one power struggle that goes on within the psyche that I think we could all pretty much understand what’s going on. The second thing is what Marx does in his work when he talks about the working class, he says working-class people are conflicted. On the one hand, they’re conforming. They go along with the program.

They just want to watch ball games and not think about anything else. But there’s another side of the working class that’s rebellious and wants to strike, wants to overthrow governments. Marxist terminology for that is when working-class people are kind of out to lunch about their class position, they’re called Class In Itself. When working-class people are organizing themselves or they’re trying to create a socialist society, they’re Class For Itself. So the reason this is interesting to me is I never thought about the size of the brain having a power struggle.

So what he does is he talks about how the power struggle operates within the minds of individuals. But the more important thing to me is how this plays out in social institutions. And that’s going to be the heart of my discussion. So what I want to do first is I’m going to tell you I want to do four things. So you kind of see where we’re going. The first thing I want to do is do a contrast between the left and the right side of the brain, just so you kind of see, oh, yeah, I see what the differences are.

The second thing I want to do is to show how things can go wrong with the left brain when the right brain is damaged. Then I want to talk about the dissociation connected with the left hemisphere and schizophrenia. And then the major thing I want to talk about is how the left brain wins a power struggle in the West, sometimes in some social institutions. And that will be like the fourth part. Okay, so that’s the overview.

Jeff: Sounds exciting. I can’t wait. And I know the fans can’t either. Keep going.

Bruce: Okay. So my kind of attraction for this is that the differences between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain are not just biopsychological phenomena. One of the most interesting things he makes is he says that somehow the left brain gets out of control, it expresses itself in social material structures. And as I’ll get into later on, so do certain movements for example like the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Industrial Capitalism, he says, are all expressions of the left brain getting off the rails.

On the other hand, what he says is that in the West, in the Renaissance, and in the Romantic period, they’re dominated by the right brain. What he doesn’t do and what I’m adding to this, which is my $0.02, is that I think that just as industrial capitalism is an expression of left brain gone amok, socialism has characteristics of getting more right-brained oriented and it’s a much more integrated way of living, which would go with the right brain. So if he were a socialist, I don’t know what he is, but he doesn’t bring up socialism. But it’s natural that what he’s describing would fit with a socialist society, socialist societies today.

Jeff: Like China.

Bruce: Exactly, exactly. So let me get to the contrast between the left and the right brain. So I’m just going to give you some back-and-forth contrast and then you can butt in whenever you like. So the first difference between the left and the right brain is the type of messages. The right brain gives analogical messages. In other words, the right brain works by interpreting facial expressions, voice intonations, gestures, and body language. It’s sensitive to that. The left brain is much more oriented towards digital communication, and it’s much more the use of words.

So they’re watching the content of things, whereas the analogical messages are much broader and they’re looking at body language and stuff like that. The second difference is between parts and wholes. The right brain looks at the whole as more than the sum of its parts. The left brain looks at the whole as only the sum of its parts. In other words, it’s rather mechanical. Another good way to think about the difference between the right and left brains is the right brain thinks about things organically. In other words, how all the parts fit together.

The left brain is much more atomistic and thinks about mechanical relationships based on machines. Now some of your listeners may want to think about if you know things about China you know something about Chinese philosophy, you’re going to see how lined up it is with the right side of the brain and how so many of the characteristics of the left side of the brain are about some aspects of Western civilization at its worst. So that’s a kind of way to think about how to think about this stuff in terms of culture too.

Jeff: I would like to just say that not only Chinese, but the components of Chinese culture, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism are also very much what you were describing as an integral whole and looking at it very holistically and being very elliptical and circular instead of linear, which sounds to me like the left side. Go ahead.

Bruce: That’s exactly right. Once you get maybe three or four of these comparisons, you can almost predict what the two sides are going to say about different issues. So, Jeff, you mentioned a really kind of direction of time. The right brain thinks in terms of cycles. It thinks in terms of spirals. If we’re spirals, it would be like dialectics and the left brain is linear, like it thinks about things as beginning, middle, end. The spatial orientations. Let’s go to the characteristics of the types of thinking.

I think you guys will find this interesting. The right brain uses reason, and reason simply means when you have to make judgments about things and it’s based on the best you can do is probability, because you can’t know for sure. And you figure out what is the best possible solution or judgment I can make based on what information I have? The other side is the left side of the brain uses rationality. Rationality is like thinking within closed systems. So where only one answer is possible.

So it would be like a good example of rationality would be a word puzzle or a visual puzzle where when you have the right answer, you know it. You don’t have this sense of, well, it could be, maybe it’ll be. We’ll have to see how it plays itself out. So most people use these words reason and rationality kind of interchangeably. But if you use them separately, you can learn a lot about how the mind works.

Now I just want to say along the way before I continue, is that it’s not like the left brain is bad. It’s really a way to think about it the right brain is older than the left brain. It takes into account the big picture. The left brain is kind of a specialist and it’s very good if you can control it, it has a function. So I don’t want to make this good and bad. It’s only when the left brain, for whatever reason, goes berserk then it’s a problem. Let’s talk about the form of attention.

So if you can imagine if you remember like you’re watching basketball games or something, sometimes there are guards in basketball that have peripheral vision they can pass the ball along the side because their eyes go this way. That’s called Diffused Attention. It means you can see the large picture. The opposite of that is what you can imagine is focused attention, where you see one thing very sharply and very clearly. I think you guys can imagine that the diffused is the right side of the brain.

Jeff: I get two points.

Bruce: Oh, you’re going to get a lot along with that. If we had more time, I could just say to you, here’s the category. I’ll give you one you fill in the other because you like getting this.

Jeff: I’m sure the fans are too.

Bruce: Yeah, I think so, too. I think this is pretty straightforward. So another way to think about this is what would each of these sides of the brain be at their worst? In other words, if you had some kind of psychological problem if the right brain were without the left, what would happen? Well, we have a disorder called attention deficit disorder. So that’s like where you’re so diffused in your attention that you never come back. And that’s what ADHD is. So that’s like the right brain at its worst. Jeff, do you want to take a shot about what the left brain would be if it were a disorder?

Jeff: Obsessive-compulsive disorders, sociopathy, unhinged psycho, maybe even psychopathy.

Bruce: Yep, that’s exactly right. Another comparison is that the right brain takes parts of things and synthesizes them into wholes. The left side of the brain breaks things down and tears things apart and says it takes a phone that’s not working. And it says, what’s going on here? And it tries to take the parts away to figure out what’s going on. Nothing wrong with that. They complement each other.

Jeff: I was going to joke that the right-brain guy just goes and plugs the phone in.

Bruce: Yeah, there you go.

Jeff: He turns it on.

Bruce: Here you go. So I’m going to give you maybe five more comparisons, and then I think you have enough of this to be able to move on. So let’s talk about time orientation. The right brain is focused on the present and it’s focused on the future. It’s focusing on what things are right now and where they’re going. The left side of the brain is interested in the past. It’s interesting that once the past is over, it seems like there are static relationships. The left brain loves that stuff because it likes to categorize things. It likes to say in history, this and this and this happened.

So it’s very good at categorizing what’s happened before. It’s not good about predicting what’s going to happen because it’s too narrow and it lacks the imagination of the right brain. Another comparison, I don’t know if any of you guys know there’s a philosopher, his name is Martin Buber, and he wrote stuff about religion and existential religion. That’s not my cup of tea but I know he made a distinction that was very good. He said there are two kinds of relationships. There’s an I-thou relationship which is the right brain, and the left brain is an I-it relationship.

Jeff: Yeah, things versus people.

Bruce: That’s exactly.

Jeff: Relations versus yeah I can see what you’re saying. Okay.

Bruce: So think about like mechanical relationships. The left brain likes things like space that are static and unfortunately, it then treats people as things that are. And you can imagine a little bit where I’m going. What does capitalism do? It wants to make people into things. That’s left-brain stuff. Okay, a couple more. This is a category of whether you want clarity or whether you can live with fuzziness, the right brain can tolerate ambiguity. The right brain says if you have a choice between 3 or 4 things, why don’t you take them all and add more? The left brain divides things into opposites. Not opposites like yin yang opposites, but opposites mutually exclusive like Aristotle. So the binary opposition to the left brain is like either-or choices.

Jeff: Black and white.

Bruce: Yeah.

Jeff: You’re with us or you’re against us George W Bush.

Bruce: That’s right. And so the right brain can tolerate ambiguity. The style of thinking, the right brain is open-minded. The left brain is dogmatic. I’m going to do one more and then we’re going to move on. Let me ask you this, Jeff, who has a sense of humor, and who doesn’t?

Jeff: Well, I would say that the right brain has a sense of humor, and the left doesn’t.

Bruce: Right, exactly right. The left brain is deadly serious. It’s nerd-like and the right brain is more lightened up, see the big picture.

Jeff: Sit down and have a cup of tea.

Bruce: Yeah, right. So that’s the first part of what I wanted to do just to get a sense of the differences between the two types.

Jeff: Well I would just like to summarize is, is that the right brain is very, very Confucius, Daoist, and Buddhist. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. It’s just like everything that is about not just China, but just Asian culture in general. It’s much, much more right-brained. Can I ask you a quick question, Bruce?

Bruce: Yeah.

Jeff: Did the writer ever say anything about left-handers and right-handers? Because they always say that left-handers are the only people in their right mind because they’re right-brained. Does he say anything about that?

Bruce: Nothing. I think pretty clearly.

Jeff: Well, I’m left-handed, so I’m in my right mind.

Bruce: I know.

Jeff: Oh, you are okay. Yeah.

Bruce: Actually, one time, I’ll just be quick about this. One time an ex-girlfriend of mine said to me my mother was right about you. You’re not marrying material. However, the reason I’m breaking up with you is because, first of all, you’re an artist. Second of all, you’re Italian. And third and most important, you’re left-handed.

Jeff: That’s a good story.

Bruce: This is the second of my four parts. What I want to do now is talk about what he has found as a neuroscientist when the right hemisphere of the brain is damaged that means the left side of the brain is on its own. What’s the fallout of that?

Jeff: So you’re talking about traumatic brain injury on the right side of the head?

Bruce: That’s exactly right. So here are the characteristics. It looks like there are about nine of them. I’m just going to knock them off in a bulleted form. What he says is subjects don’t understand the context. Next, subjects don’t understand the elements of discourse like subjects, predicates, and objects. And this is not surprising, I think. Subjects have difficulty interpreting emotions. Subjects have difficulty separating wholes from parts. There is a decrease in the functioning of the limbic systems. The limbic system and the mammalian system in the brain are connected to the right brain.

The left brain is later developed. It’s like when the neocortex forms in the brain. So it makes sense that you need all three parts of the brain, but it makes sense that when the left brain is cut off from the right, it lacks these sorts of emotional and survival orientation that the right brain provides. And you can see there’s a connection between all this and schizophrenia like that these are also characteristics of schizophrenics. His argument in the book is that you can interpret it. His model of the left brain going berserk is a very good interpretation of what happens in schizophrenic conditions.

Jeff: Oh, interesting.

Bruce: So that’s all in the article. I don’t want to dwell on it because we don’t have enough time for that. I mean, the schizophrenic part. But let me hit on 3 or 4 characteristics. Here, you can imagine there is difficulty interpreting the tone. In other words, you can say open the window or you can say, open the window. A person with right brain impairment will not understand that the same words can be either an order or a request.

There’s also difficulty interpreting facial expressions and there’s trouble understanding underlying points of view. And the last one is there was a lack of common sense. You know, like good judgment. You know, you’re walking down the street, a situation looks a little unusual or creepy, you’re oblivious to it. You walk right into it. You don’t say, well I don’t know. I’m going to cross the street. I’m going to give you one more set of bullets.

Jeff: By the way, fans, I, of course, will give the link to this article and the previous one, and also all of our previous shows. So you’ll have this article that he’s talking about to go through when we get finished. Go ahead.

Bruce: So I’m just going to give you a set of dissociations that occur when the left brain has gone berserk or over has gone beyond its natural limits. So the first one is the inability to tell what another is thinking. In other words, you don’t know how to really read minds or sort of read between the lines of things.

As you can imagine, there’s a lack of judgment about nonverbal cues and communication, there’s an inability to detect deceit, and one of the most interesting to me is when there’s a dissociation with the left brain or the right brain is not operating, there’s an attraction to the mechanical. And this is very interesting. He talks about in the article, how people that are schizophrenic, love things. They like to play with things and they’re attracted to the inanimate world more than the animate world, because, in a way, it’s more controllable.

It says that in this dissociation, the left side of the brain treats people and body parts as inanimate objects. Then let’s see maybe two more. Well, the last one I’m going to characterize is there’s a loss of feeling of belonging in the world. It’s a feeling within schizophrenia and the left brain that is sort of spectators in the world rather than actors or actresses in participation. There’s a kind of mechanical ness and a distance from the world that you don’t really feel part of. So Jeff, do you want to comment on any of this?

Jeff: Well, it’s just it’s really fascinating, Bruce. It just seems like you were just saying they don’t feel a part of the world. It’s like they just more just kind of maybe feel like they’re kind of like a cog in a machine. The right brain is very holistic and inclusive and the left brain breaks things down and separates things and this is like East versus West. I mean, I have not studied it to your extent, but this to me just seems exactly a tremendous the Marlboro Man, the individual.

I’m going to do it on my own. I don’t need anybody to help me. And which of course, is, is not true in 99% of the cases. So this for me, is a gigantic dialectic between the East versus the West. Did he say anything about war and Cologne? I mean, let’s jump up to the geopolitical level. Does he talk anything about the left brain, right brain versus war? Colonialization, slavery, capitalism, imperialism, etc.?

Bruce: Yes what I found is that he does talk about industrial capitalism, which is very important. He doesn’t talk about the expansion of industrialism capitalism like he doesn’t talk about imperialism or any of that kind of stuff. But he does have a sense that the left brain is connected to capitalism. But let me go back and let me just get into the fourth part of this talk, which is looking at this in terms of Western history. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to contrast three periods.

The Renaissance and the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and then industrial capitalism and socialism. So those are going to be the three that I’m going to focus on in the time we have. Let’s start with the Renaissance. Iain McGilchrist says that the Renaissance is very right-brain oriented. And, he points out the Renaissance love of imagery, love of pictures. He also talks about the Renaissance as being interdisciplinary. He talks about how the people who lived in the Renaissance people like Leonardo and Michelangelo, these people were not just painters.

I mean they were sculptors, they were anatomists, they were Leonardo knew about you know. He was a master of 6 or 7 different disciplines. He said, that this whole historical period of the Renaissance is extremely right-brain oriented. He talks about in the Renaissance, you had altered states of consciousness. There were great mystics in the Renaissance. There were Renaissance magicians. So there was a sense, a great sense in the Renaissance of the merger of art and science. I mean I tell my friends that know me that, like, I was born in the wrong century, man, because, like, I love this interdisciplinary stuff and that’s like Renaissance stuff. That’s all right-brain kind of stuff.

Jeff: That’s why we use the term. Oh, he’s a Renaissance man. That’s someone who can do art and math and science and build furniture, and just all kinds of polymath can handle a variety of creative disciplines.

Bruce: That’s right. He contrasts that to what came after that, which is the Reformation. McGilchrist says the Reformation is a social movement of the Protestants that had a very left-brain orientation. And he says that, in the Reformation, as you guys probably know. I mean, there was a real rebellion against imagery and the Reformation, they had the beginning of the printing press and writing became the way that you had religious experiences. And he would say that one of the ways that the Reformation got out of control was that it would destroy so many of the Catholic images.

Bruce: So that’s an example of like the left brain not understanding the importance of images.

Jeff: That’s why a full Catholic mass is much, much more beautiful than a Protestant one.

Bruce: Yeah, yeah, the Catholics know how to work the whole system in a way that, I mean, they were the original great propagandists where they had they knew all these ways of creating an altered state of consciousness. And the Protestants come along and they see all this, and they say, you are so Catholics, you are so drunk with material resources and theatrics and opera that you’re forgetting about God and the Protestants say it’s just you, the Bible, and God.

That’s it. So they cut off all this. McGilchrist says that is a social kind of pathology that happened in the West. Destruction of images. He says that the pulpit replaced the altar with the product because you pay attention to the speaker, and you don’t look around. You don’t see all the stations of the cross and all the things that the Catholics have going on. Focus on one thing. Focus on the words of the preacher.

Don’t focus on anything else. The other thing that I find really interesting about the Reformation that McGilchrist talks about is in the Protestants, he calls it the mechanization of sacred space. And what he talks about is how the church was organized into these rows. The rows where one is in the back of the other. He says that’s like creating a sacred space of machines. One is sitting right next to the other.

There’s no interaction between the people. It’s all you individuals focusing on the priest. And he says that’s also a way to make people obedient, to make people forget their community and he says, this is a disaster. He talks about how you have to stand, sit, kneel, you have to move around. And he connects that up with the right brain altered states. Whereas when you’re just sitting in rows, there really isn’t much on you.

Jeff: And you also go up to the altar for communion.

Bruce: That’s right.

Jeff: Every week, every Sunday. Whereas in the Protestant religion, it’s usually like Easter Christmas, not nearly as often whereas it’s actually an integral part of the Roman Catholic tradition.

Bruce: Right.

Jeff: So you are getting up and you’re moving, you’re standing in line next to other people, etc. Interesting.

Bruce: So let’s go to the second of three points which is enlightenment versus romanticism. So, I mean, the Enlightenment is a great movement and he simply shows the dark side of some of these things. It doesn’t mean that the entire Enlightenment is bad or is embedded in this, but it does have its dark side. One of the things that they talked about was the Enlightenment. I’m going to compare the Enlightenment to romanticism which is Enlightenment is basically the 18th century. Romanticism began a century later.

So one of the things that happened in the Enlightenment is, that the Enlightenment is very interesting in light, in what’s obvious, what’s scientific, and what’s static. In other words, the Enlightenment idea of beauty is like symmetry, having things exactly perfect, in perfect alignment. He also points out, however, a dark side of this. Maybe some of you listeners have heard this, there was this guy named Jeremy Bentham who started to develop this prison system right Panopticon.

Jeff: The Panopticon. I’ve actually used that in my writing as an analogy for the police state.

Bruce: And so this guy is, Jeremy Bentham is inventing this kind of system where the organizers of the prison can see all the prisoners, the prisoners can’t see the authorities, and the prisoners cannot see each other. That is the use of rationality. That’s what happens when you use your rationality. And you can see how out of control it is that somebody could make something like this up and not think like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing to human beings? It doesn’t have the big picture.

It just uses the left brain to organize these systems but it doesn’t keep track of the social consequences of doing these things. The last thing I want to say about well, two things about the Enlightenment are the Enlightenment appreciates things that are timeless and are permanent. It loves that. It’s timeless, permanent, and also universal. The Romantics are really the opposite of all that. They’re interested in things that change. They’re interested in particular places. They’re interested in cultures. They’re not interested in the whole picture.

They’re interested in local cultures, not universal cultures. And the last thing about the Enlightenment is Adam Smith wrote, The Wealth of Nations in 1776. It’s right in the heat of the Enlightenment. So, like if you think about what Adam Smith says, it’s very brain because what he says is we create a system in which the selfishness of individuals without caring anything about social life can create a wealthy society that’s a very left-brain way to think about how wealth is created. Let’s accept that people are selfish.

But how can create a system in which individual selfishness can lead to social good? That comes out of the Enlightenment. So that’s like part of that. Okay, let’s go to the last one and then we’re I’ll be at the end here. So the Industrial Revolution. What McGilchrist says is that the mechanization of the factory. One is the mass production of commodities. Two, turning workers into interchangeable parts. Three, those are all functions of the left.

Jeff: The left brain. Yeah, for sure.

Bruce: That’s what you do when the left brain gets out of control. Now I’m adding something of my own that he doesn’t do. But I think that if he knew what I was doing, he would agree with what I’m saying because it’s completely consistent with all of his right brain stuff. So under socialism, you would have artificial intelligence which would allow people to work less because the machines would do the rote work. And people would have more free time. So that’s a right-brain answer to capitalism. The second is, as this is right out of Marx.

A right-brain socialist orientation is not to make commodities more and more and more commodities to make commodities for use value because more products change value. That’s a project of socialism. And then the last thing that socialism would do, would be instead of turning workers into interchangeable parts, doing the same thing over and over and over again. In socialism, you overcome the specialization of labor with well-rounded individuals.

That’s the goal of socialism. It’s not to simply work less at a single job. It’s to move around. Remember, Mark says, at some point when he starts speculating about communism, he says in communist society, individuals will fish in the morning, raise cattle in the afternoon, and criticize in the evening. I might have the order of that wrong, but, I mean, the idea is that we don’t want complete specialization, we want people to move around.

So that’s as much as I can about the cultural part that I think. And I think we’re pretty close to time. What I want to leave you guys with is a couple of questions that Ian McGilchrist doesn’t address. One question is he doesn’t really talk about how the left brain gets out of control, especially culturally. I mean, what does it look like? How does that process happen? He just he just says, this is what happens, but he doesn’t say how it started.

The second thing, and I think you’ll really appreciate this, Jeff, is the second thing is he only talks about the West and if this were a real biological and psychological process, we would have indicators in the eastern part of the world, the part of the world in Africa and Latin America where they had left the brain going off the rails too. But we don’t. And so for me, that was probably the biggest question, where he really didn’t talk about why this kind of stuff didn’t happen in other parts of the world, what were the reasons for that.

Jeff: Well, that’s very interesting that you brought up. I’d like to just comment that I’ve read papers and articles and stuff where sociopathy, of course, the spectrum can be all the way into psychopathy. And, of course, these are people who have no feelings for others and no regard for the consequences of their actions. That’s why they’re criminals and rapists and warmongers. And these articles were saying that in Asian culture, sociopathic psychopathy is about 2% of the population whereas in the West it’s 15 to 25%, depending on your definition.

So obviously this dialectic, the East is right-brained and the West is left brain, I think, is something worth considering. And you also brought Bruce. You brought up some really good points. People in the West are freaking out about robots, and the fact that they’re taking away jobs from people and all, etc., etc. whereas in China they love robots because the difference is that in China they will tax the productive labor that those robots generate. So that of course, they’re going to tax them. They’re not going to give all that productivity to Wall Street.

They’re going to tax the productivity of the robots to give money to society, to give people things that they might otherwise not have. So if they lose a job turning a screwdriver in a factory, well, by taxing the productivity of all of those robots, then they will have money to help the people come up with creative ways to contribute to society, even if it’s not necessarily making widgets and creating monetary wealth, but maybe creating things and developing social wealth. The other thing is, and that’s just like AI. Everybody here in the West is freaking out about AI.

AI is going to take over, etc., etc., etc. But if the AI is used to help society, instead of being used to help Wall Street in the City of London and NATO, it can be a very, very good thing. There are all kinds of things like the West is freaking out about 5G. Well, the Chinese have no worries about 5G because 5G is put to good use, put to use to help society is a very powerful, powerful, liberating tool. Whereas in the West where we are all worried about the evilness of our governments and the evilness of our leaders maybe Western should be worried about 5G.

So there’s this tremendous dichotomy between China and Western governments, digital currency. It saves so much time and it saves so much energy and it’s so efficient, and of course, the West is freaking out because their banks are crooked, corrupt, and completely ready to kill a million people or kill their mother for another dollar.

And whereas in China, the digital currency is controlled by the People’s Bank of China, and all the banks are publicly owned and owned by the people, so why would they be afraid of it?

So, you have all of these liberating things like digital currency you know there’s no money left in China now it’s all done with your Alipay with everything with the telephone. And so that’s very liberating and very good for society, AI, robots, etc., and yet all of that is evil and fear in the West. And I think that left-brain societies or rightfully fear all those things because their leaders are left-brained and right-brained societies like China do not fear all of those things because their leaders are right-brained.

So well, listen, this has been incredibly interesting. Every time I have you on, I think, oh, no one’s going to listen to this because it’s too intellectual. It’s too up there. It’s not nuts and bolts, but every time, the watchership, the listenership and the readership are off the scales. So you obviously have a great way of presenting complicated and thought-provoking topics in a way that appeals to a lot of different people. So thank you very much, Bruce.

Bruce: Jeff, let me just say one other thing about that. All my teaching, I was an adjunct for my whole teaching career, and I had to learn how to present things to people in ways that they could understand. And I would watch people’s body language, and I would just learn that a certain way of saying things or certain vocabulary, people drift off. They’re not paying attention. So I learned many years, like what works and what doesn’t work. And thankfully it’s gotten embedded in my writing. And so I try to write for educated lay people, not for academics.

Jeff: Yeah, well it works, it works.

Bruce: Thank you.

Jeff: Well, listen, Bruce and also everyone out here can thank Bruce’s partner, Barbara McLean because she’s the one that takes care of all the technical issues. And so she’s off there on the sidelines. So, a big thank you to her too. Bruce, I will ask you to send me all of the links, or at least the names of the books and the authors that you have cited today. And I’m using the one that, in fact, Patrice Granville at the Greenville Post. Bruce is a regular at the Greenville Post, so it’s actually on the Greenville Post in his latest two articles. Although he and Barbara have their own website and their own bailiwick socialist planning after capitalism.

Bruce: Beyond capitalism.

Jeff: Beyond capitalism. I follow them on X and they have a lot of great stuff on X, and I really enjoy all that they do. So thank you so much, Bruce. And I’m going to give you a Buddhist bow, a right-brained Buddhist, Confucius, Daoist bow. And this is Jeff J. Brown talking to Bruce Lerro in the United States for China Rising Radio Sinoland. Thank you, and have a great day. Bye-bye.

###

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