Lefty Enervation Packet

The “Lefty Enervation Packet”, a concept coined by Eric Weinstein and introduced on September 2, 2024 on Modern Wisdom Episode 833, is the idea of a social script that conditions intellectuals, particularly on the American Left and in the academic/expert class, to dismiss potentially important lines of inquiry using safe, standard responses like:

• "Correlation does not imply causation."
• "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
• "Data is not the plural of anecdote."
• "What appears to be coordinated is actually emergent."
• "What appears to be a pattern is generally random."
• "What appears to be doable outside of markets isn’t worth attempting because it can’t be coordinated and/or it is against human nature and/or has too many unintended consequences."

These statements, while seemingly logically sound in moderation, function like ideological guardrails to:

• Protect power structures by discouraging critical investigation into institutional failures or hidden agendas.
• Promote conformity within intellectual circles by penalizing dissent.
• Prevent individuals from using analytical tools (like data or skepticism) against the institutions to which they belong or by which they are employed.

Eric compares levels of understanding to layers of counter-intuition:

• First-order counter-intuition sees through naive ideas (e.g., mocking flat-Earth beliefs).
• Most stop there, failing to pursue second-order counter-intuition, which could uncover actual conspiracies (e.g., Iran-Contra, Tuskegee, Twitter files).
• The system equates any questioning beyond first-order counter-intuition with "fringe" or "crackpot" thinking, thus socially punishing deeper inquiry.

This mechanism makes it difficult to distinguish between legitimate concerns and illegitimate, ill-founded theories, effectively marginalizing thoughtful inquiry and shielding the status quo.

The use of the term "enervation" in this concept refers to a deliberate draining of intellectual or critical energy—a kind of mental or moral weakening. Thus, the “Lefty Enervation Packet” describes a set of default phrases and ideas that sap the will to question authority or challenge dominant narratives. These ideas give the illusion of intellectual sophistication while actually discouraging deeper inquiry. The result is a compliant expert class that avoids confronting uncomfortable truths, thereby protecting entrenched power structures.

Quotes

00:20:59

Eric Weinstein: Here's my question. When did you wake up to this? Because in my situation—Peter Thiel, who I used to work for, said this to me, he was like, “Eric, how did you get there earlier?” And I said, “well, I was in the university system and academics has a faster glide path into the ground than everything else. You could see it there in the 1980s.”

Chris Williamson: I don't know. I think it has taken a little bit of time. Maybe moving to America, seeing these things closer up has been part of it. I have a strong non-conspiratorial disposition. So I will always attribute to incompetence, or negligence, or fear of losing your job, cowardice—

Eric Weinstein: You're running the packet.

Chris Williamson: What’s that?

00:21:46

Eric Weinstein: There's the Lefty Enervation Packet, and it's something that you're sort of obligated to run, if you're going to be a member in good standing of the American Left. So one part of it would say that “correlation does not imply causation”. “Data is not the plural of anecdote”. “Never explain by malice what can be understood through incompetence”. There's a large sequence of things that you're expected to say if you want the pat on the back from your colleagues—”a random walk down Wall Street”. “Nobody can beat the market”. You know that there are rich people three doors down who got that way from investing, but they're simply lucky idiots. All of these things you're expected to run if you're part of the expert class, so that the expert class doesn't turn on their masters and what it is—you see, I was about to do the double copula, “is, is” I always do that. What it is, in my opinion—I'm going to have to do it, I can't hit it, get out of it. What it is, is a, a collection of safeties so that you don't use the tools of data, let's say, on your masters, and attempt to convict them.

Chris Williamson: Give an example.

00:23:13

Eric Weinstein: For example, let's imagine that you have a high number of deaths around a vaccine or injuries. That could lead to questions about under what, what legal regime the vaccine manufacturers achieved immunity. And so you say, oh, no, no, no, that's just, correlation does not imply causation. Of course they're going to be runs in poker. Of course there are going to be clusters of data. This is what being fooled by randomness is all about. So if you think about what those things—how they function inside of your mind, they tend to keep you from seeking remedies. You're not going to put somebody in jail if you believe all these things, you're not going to go poking into the intelligence community. If “conspiracy theorist” makes you think about a lunatic, you're not a lunatic, you're a grown up! It's first order sophistication. Did you ever see a film called Victor Victoria?

Chris Williamson: No.

Eric Weinstein: Victor Victoria is this—I think the tagline on the poster was the story of a woman playing a man playing a woman. And so it was a female impersonator who was actually Julie Andrews.

Chris Williamson: Right.

00:24:32

Eric Weinstein: Right. Now, if you saw Victor behind Victoria, you certainly saw one level deep. That's one level of counter intuition. And most people, when they get to one level of counterintuition, stop, pat themselves on the back, and at least they're not like the poor fools who only see Victoria because Victoria, you know, is the female being impersonated. But what happens if you see Sally? And let's imagine Sally is the person playing Victor playing Victoria. Now you've got a problem, which is you say that's a woman. So everybody who sees Victor says, “you poor bastard, you were fooled”. And Reddit is great for this, by the way. The average Reddit post is, “Ha, I see through that thing that you're taken in by, but have fun with it.” You know, it's a superiority contest at first-order counterintuition. So at first-order counterintuition, conspiracy theorists are losers in their mother's basements who posited a new world order where the Flat Earth Society of Lizard People controls the cosmos. And the funny part about it is the Atlantic Council exists!

Chris Williamson: What's that?

00:25:38

Eric Weinstein: Well, that would be Sally playing Victor playing Victoria. I mean, in other words, of course there are conspiracies everywhere. We’ve found a million conspiracies. I could tell you, you know, various operations: Operation Condor, Operation Sea Spray, where we sprayed bacteria on all of San Francisco. We all know about the Tuskegee medical experiment, Operation Northwoods, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Ajax in Chile. We know that conspiracies are the lifeblood of the world. Every trade group is a conspiracy. The Twitter files are about conspiracy. So we're living in a world—hopefully you've achieved a point in your life where you've been invited to many conspiracies. And if you haven't, I'm really sorry, but they're everywhere. Now, what is a Conspiracy Theorist? It's somebody trying to figure out what these things are from outside. That's what you've got to stop. And how do you do this? Well, there are a lot of bad conspiracy theorists. There are a lot of losers and a lot of morons and a lot of idiots who imagine that lizard people are controlling everything. And so you try to make it look like the people who—well, let me give you an example: the moon landing and the JFK assassination are not in the same category. It's quite probable that something funny is going on around the JFK assassination, and it's highly improbable that the moon landings are fake. You know, TWA flight 800 seems very strange or, what is it, like, 300 missing MANPADs from the Afghan theater, a bunch of people saw something streaking up to a plane and the explanation doesn't exactly add up. Now you have a problem. Like, let's, you know, the famous one that I like, which is just so dangerous, it's funny, you can just watch the radioactivity—if you can agree that nothing like Building Seven's collapse has ever happened in structural engineering, you can say, well, that is interesting. It's just interesting that no building has ever collapsed like that. No steel building of this height, you know, from flames, whatever. And the instant you say that, some member of a group of ten friends will say, oh, yeah, I bet it was a bunch of thermite placed by Israelis, right, Einstein? Then, you know, you're thinking, wow, gosh, that seems like a really high penalty to pay for just noticing no building’s ever collapsed like that. I'm not saying I—I don't believe that—

00:28:10

Chris Williamson: So it's this kind of pattern match of any type of skepticism with a slippery slope down to the most extreme conspiracy.

Eric Weinstein: And that's—and yeah, you're just in error. You're—you took first-order counterintuition so that you became superior to the Flat Earth Society, but you're not the guy who's going to figure out the Iran-Contra scandal. Because if I told you the Iran-Contra scandal, it doesn't matter how many documents you look at, you'll still never believe that that was true. It's so insane.

Chris Williamson: This retconning, this, mass-lighting, gaslighting at global scale. It is mind blowing to me that this is done on the internet when everything is held together.

Eric Weinstein: Why?

Chris Williamson: Because the entire internet is obsessed with pointing out hypocrisy. If—

Eric Weinstein: No no no no no no, it's not the entire internet.

Chris Williamson: A large portion, a very vocal—

00:29:07

Eric Weinstein: A large portion of very small accounts, a large portion of right of center accounts. Almost no one in what I considered my world does anything remotely like this. In other words. If you walk into a physics department, good luck finding a Republican. And good luck finding anybody who will believe almost anything that you tell them or will do so publicly. I took a tour through the East Coast, the corridor of great universities, from Massachusetts down to Philadelphia. And, you know, I have many friends and colleagues in these departments, and they take me into their offices and they'd all close the door and they say, you have no idea how bad it is in here. And these are mathematicians and physicists, and they are living in a world in which it is simply too dangerous to dissent, to ask questions.

— Eric Weinstein on Modern Wisdom Episode 833

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Eric Weinstein
@EricRWeinstein

There is an old suite of ideas from a different time:

What appears to be coordinated is actually emergent.

What appears to be malice is actually incompetence.

What appears to be a pattern is generally random.

What appears to be doable outside of markets isn’t worth attempting because it can’t be coordinated and/or it is against human nature and/or has too many unintended consequences. ——

When enough people were educated to believe that suite as a sign of membership in the sophisticated elite, it then became possible to weaponize those ideas because they all shared a hidden feature: enervation.

People too sophisticated to believe in conspiracies, blame, patterns or the possibility of change will not only tend to do nothing, but they will tend to ensure that nothing can be coordinated around them except by narrow self interest. Which means markets/commerce/business is the only thing left.

In this clip, “Is Google trying to influence the 2024 election.” Chris is struggling to point out that it doesn’t require a conspiracy. Of course that is true.

But it is much more helpful to notice that if you have a portfolio of explanations and with allocations to emergence vs coordination, it would be insane to have a zero allocation to conspiracy.

Moral: Learn how to be a responsible conspiracy theorist. There are no lizard people. But there are sure a lot of back channels and algorithms you know nothing about.

NOTE: Zuckerberg’s letter pointing to such a coordination in an earlier election appeared after this was taped. So…

9:20 AM · Aug 27, 2024

Eric Weinstein
@EricRWeinstein

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” -Hanlon’s Razor

“Never stupidly apply Hanlon’s razor to a series with large N where perhaps an N of at most 3 could plausibly be explained without malice, giggling & winking.” -Weinstein’s Correction

6:53 PM · Nov 17, 2019

Related Pages

• Responsible Conspiracy Theorizing
• Victor-Victoria Problem