Making Sense - Sam Harris - #368 — Freedom & Censorship

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:44.760 Today I'm speaking with Greg Lukianoff. Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual

00:00:50.880 Rights and Expression. The acronym is FIRE. He earned his undergraduate degree from American

00:00:57.180 University and his law degree from Stanford. And he worked for the ACLU of Northern California

00:01:03.620 and other organizations before joining FIRE in 2001. And he's one of America's most passionate

00:01:10.500 defenders of free speech. He has written about the issue in the New York Times, the Wall Street

00:01:16.300 Journal, the Washington Post. He has produced documentaries on the subject. He also wrote,

00:01:22.400 along with Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. And most recently, he wrote,

00:01:28.840 along with Ricky Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind. Cancel culture undermines trust,

00:01:34.500 destroys institutions, and threatens us all. But there is a solution. And that is the topic of

00:01:40.720 today's conversation. Greg and I discuss the origins of political correctness, free speech and its

00:01:46.820 boundaries, the bedrock principle of the First Amendment, technology and the marketplace of ideas,

00:01:53.520 epistemic anarchy, social media and cancel culture, comparisons to McCarthyism, self-censorship by

00:02:01.180 professors, cancellations from the left and the right and how they differ, justified cancellations,

00:02:08.200 the Hunter Biden laptop story, how to deal with Trump in the media, the deplorable state of higher

00:02:14.760 education in America, and other topics. And now I bring you Greg Lukianoff.

00:02:27.460 I am here with Greg Lukianoff. Greg, thanks for joining me.

00:02:31.200 Thanks for having me.

00:02:32.060 So we've got a lot to talk about. The world is on fire. And you happen to run an organization

00:02:38.940 called FIRE, which addresses some of these problems. I will have introduced you properly

00:02:43.740 in my housekeeping. But what is FIRE, and how do you come to be running it?

00:02:49.180 FIRE is the foundation for individual rights and expression. And we're actually celebrating our 25th

00:02:54.460 anniversary this year. We were founded back in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate, who is a liberal-leaning

00:03:01.780 libertarian, and Alan Charles Kors, who's a more conservative-leaning libertarian, who is one of the,

00:03:08.300 you know, world's foremost experts on the Enlightenment, especially Voltaire. And they founded

00:03:14.800 it because even back then, they realized that, and Alan was a professor at Penn, that students

00:03:21.940 were increasingly getting in trouble for what they said, not just for what they did. And they

00:03:27.660 wrote a book called The Shadow University, trying to blow the lid on what was going on, that came out

00:03:33.100 in 1998. And Harvey always likes to say that he thought, you know, that would solve the problem.

00:03:38.240 But instead, they got emails and letters from people all over the country asking, particularly

00:03:43.700 professors, asking for help in their free speech and academic freedom cases. So in order to deal with

00:03:50.140 the onslaught of interest, they founded FIRE in 1999. And I joined as the first legal director in 2001.

00:03:58.660 And I'm the weird law student who actually went to law school specifically to do First Amendment law.

00:04:05.480 I took every class that Stanford offered on First Amendment. And then when I ran out, I did six

00:04:12.020 credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. And I externed, a weird word for internship,

00:04:18.720 at the ACLU of Northern California. So when Harvey went to Kathleen Sullivan, who was then the dean of

00:04:25.540 the law school to ask for who they would recommend to be the first legal director of FIRE, it remains

00:04:31.160 the greatest compliment I ever received, is she recommended me by name.

00:04:35.620 But what years were you at Stanford?

00:04:36.960 1997 to 2000.

00:04:38.820 Right. Actually, we overlapped a little bit there. But I was going back to finish my undergraduate.

00:04:44.160 But I remember that the first time I was there, there were some intimations of the coming

00:04:49.480 censorship apocalypse. I remember that the, the great books approach to, I forget what it was called

00:04:57.360 in the freshman years, like the freshman kind of literature requirement was a kind of a great books

00:05:03.320 seminar. And, you know, this was much maligned as just teaching the products of dead white men.

00:05:12.220 And there, there had been a march, I think it was, might've been a year before I got there as a

00:05:16.580 freshman, but, you know, Jesse Jackson had led a 500 person march on the Stanford campus that got a

00:05:21.980 lot of coverage. And there was certainly a movement afoot on that particular campus at that point to

00:05:29.260 reset everything with respect to how we talk about ideas. It's, I don't quite remember what was

00:05:35.880 happening in 1999, but I can only imagine the pot just continued to boil from there.

00:05:40.640 Yeah. It was interesting that, you know, I started there in 97 and nobody really talked about the

00:05:47.080 fact that just two years earlier, Stanford law had lost a court case defending a speech code that it

00:05:55.140 had come up with, with professor Tom Gray, who was a professor who was there when I was there to limit

00:06:00.480 nominally racist and sexist speech, but really going after offensive speech to a vast degree. And even

00:06:07.520 though it was a private school, the legislature passed a special law called, it's now called the

00:06:13.160 Leonard law that actually made sure that non-sectarian schools in the state of California actually had to

00:06:18.840 abide by first amendment standards. So they actually lost in court in 95. And this was like a dirty little

00:06:24.520 secret by 97 because it was actually kind of a sweet spot to go to school. Because what I missed

00:06:31.620 was what I call in my latest book, the first great age of political correctness, which is essentially

00:06:37.980 85 to 95, which is when speech codes came into vogue. There was, I remember actually the chant was famous

00:06:45.140 by Jesse Jackson. It was, Hey, Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go.

00:06:49.080 Right. That was it. Yeah, yeah.

00:06:50.200 And this was a lot of what Harvey and Alan were writing about in the shadow university.

00:06:54.800 But by say 95, 96, political correctness had become even a joke on the left. So there was a

00:07:01.380 sense that the speech codes were defeated. The professor, it kind of fell out of love with

00:07:06.240 enlightened censorship. The students, you know, were more the kids of the boomers who were actually

00:07:10.820 quite good on free speech. And so this all, there was a sense that this all kind of died off.

00:07:16.000 What I learned in working with Jonathan Haidt, when I was doing the research for coddling the

00:07:20.500 American mind was that interestingly, even though this kind of fell off of the public radar, because

00:07:26.480 there was a sense of political correctness was like this fever that had broken sometime in the

00:07:30.420 mid nineties, but that the viewpoint diversity of, of the professor, of, of professor hirings

00:07:36.860 plummeted in the late nineties. It got much, much worse, even as people had taken their eye off the

00:07:42.180 wall. And when I started a fire in 2001, I was pretty shocked at how easy it was already to get

00:07:49.060 in trouble for what you said on campus. And I also say when, when I got to Stanford, it was a little

00:07:53.840 bit of a culture shock to meet so many wealthy kids who were pretty Victorian. Uh, I would almost

00:08:00.460 describe it in, in their ideas of what acceptable speech constituted. It seemed like it was very easy

00:08:06.440 already to get in trouble for saying something in an unapproved way, but it was a cultural thing.

00:08:12.460 It wasn't, um, that people were actually literally getting punished for it. It was more that it just

00:08:17.600 seemed kind of, forgive the expression, uptight.

00:08:20.500 Well, I should say much of what we're going to talk about, you cover in great depth in your most

00:08:27.060 recent book, the canceling of the American mind, which you wrote with Ricky Schlott. And where, you know,

00:08:33.920 there's just a ton of material in there and many case studies of which we are not going to get to

00:08:38.740 cover, which are, we may cover some, but- Let's cover all of them.

00:08:42.080 Yeah. Feel free to introduce any, any that you want, but there's just so much detail there where

00:08:47.080 it's just amazing. The, the, it's certainly amazing for anyone who thought that cancel culture wasn't

00:08:53.000 a thing. I mean, anyone who can be found having said that in the last 10 years really needs to read

00:08:58.820 your book. But, um, let's start with the concept of free speech and its boundaries. How do you think

00:09:07.120 about free speech and when, and what precisely do we want to defend here?

00:09:11.380 I have a pretty, um, expansive view of what the term free speech means. And I think of it as the big

00:09:17.880 Boolean sphere that includes the first amendment, but is much, much larger than that. Um, and I

00:09:23.880 definitely, you know, I think of it as not just being about the limits of the law of what you're

00:09:29.240 allowed to say, but also you're the cultural tolerance for the acceptance of people with

00:09:35.420 any kind of opinion. I sometimes explain there's no such thing as a free speech absolutist, or at

00:09:40.540 least I haven't met a serious person who is because we all believe that some speech is and should be

00:09:46.300 unprotected, but I am an opinion absolutist. And what I mean by that is that if you're merely

00:09:52.000 expressing your opinion, even if it's repugnant, that is protected. It has to be something more

00:09:56.880 than the mere expression of opinion. Uh, it has to be something like discriminatory harassment,

00:10:01.360 which is a pattern of severe persistent and pervasive behavior that targets someone on the

00:10:07.680 basis of a protected category that a reasonable person would also find offensive. And by the way,

00:10:12.820 we actually have seen genuine discriminatory harassment on campus since October 7th in a number of

00:10:18.540 cases. So it's not an unmeetable standard. Intimidation also, uh, also known as true threats,

00:10:24.260 which is when you make someone make, we would make a reasonable person fear that they're in

00:10:28.420 danger of bodily harm or death that is not protected, nor should it be. Defamation is not

00:10:33.860 protected, which is basically making a factual allegation that someone, for example, is guilty of

00:10:39.780 an odious crime. You know, I always gave the example when I was at the student newspaper

00:10:43.620 of, you know, groundlessly asserting that, you know, that someone is a pedophile, for example,

00:10:48.940 is a classic example, because I could ruin someone's life if, if they believed you, uh,

00:10:53.800 if they believed you. So nobody really believes that there, there's no way to use words in a way

00:10:59.240 that isn't protected. I mean, there's also, of course, you know, you use words to commit extortion,

00:11:03.900 use words to, uh, that are incidental parts of existing crimes, use words to commit conspiracies,

00:11:10.700 for example. But I think that the, the most clearly protected kind of freedom of speech is

00:11:17.520 when you're merely expressing a viewpoint. And under that, they're really, the law I think is

00:11:23.280 sensibly set up in the United States to have what we call the bedrock principle, which is,

00:11:29.480 it comes from a case called Texas v. Johnson from 1989, which is about whether or not you can burn an

00:11:35.180 American flag or whether or not a anti-flag burning law would be constitutional. Uh, and it's a great

00:11:41.080 opinion, by the way, like I really recommend reading it because when I used to teach first

00:11:44.860 amendment, it does this wonderful kind of overview of the entire history of the first amendment and

00:11:49.800 a free speech decision. So it's a, it's a great one to just one stop shopping for, for learning about

00:11:54.880 the field, but it calls the bedrock principle of first, the first amendment is that you cannot in

00:12:01.220 the United States ban speech simply because it's offensive. And I always make the point that this

00:12:07.360 is a great rule for a genuinely multicultural society because what people find offensive and I,

00:12:14.080 my dad's Russian, my mother's British. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of kids from Vietnam and

00:12:18.860 Puerto Rico and Korea and from Peru, like all people who had very different ideas of like what offensive

00:12:26.660 speech looked like. And it was such a perfect example for why free speech had to be the rule

00:12:31.840 because we couldn't, you know, my British mom thought all sorts of things were offensive. My

00:12:37.340 Russian father thought practically nothing was, but Danny Nguyen's, you know, parents had different

00:12:41.800 ideas of what was offensive and same thing with Nelson Bolito's. And so I think that the bedrock

00:12:47.180 principle is a very sensible rule for a free multicultural diverse society, but it is one of the major

00:12:55.000 things that makes America so very different from Europe, for example.

00:13:00.260 Hmm. But let's linger on that point because I'm often guilty of just reflexively seeing everything

00:13:06.660 through an American lens. And then I'm reminded that even our closest cousins over in the UK or

00:13:14.680 elsewhere in the English speaking world don't enjoy the same kinds of protections that we do.

00:13:21.940 How is it different in Europe and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere? And

00:13:27.240 I think you and I are both going to agree that we have it closer to right in America than exists

00:13:34.940 anywhere else, at least that I'm aware of. What do we have that other nations don't around free speech?

00:13:40.760 I was sort of laughing right there because I violate a major convention among constitutional

00:13:48.220 lawyers when I travel to Europe. It's generally considered, and it's partially because a lot of

00:13:53.020 other constitutional lawyers are highly sympathetic to greater limitations to free speech. So it's

00:13:58.500 partially also just agreement. But even when they're not, there's a tendency to go over there and be very

00:14:04.200 deprecating of our own system and very complimentary towards the way things work in Europe. And I am not

00:14:11.120 that lawyer. I go over and I'm rude about it. I'm sorry. I actually think I'm quite polite about it,

00:14:16.500 but I violate the rule of saying, you guys have it all right and we have it all wrong. Because I'm like,

00:14:21.840 I don't think we do. Particularly since I attend a lot of these hate speech conferences and watching

00:14:27.060 someone with a German accent explain why this cartoon landed someone in jail, but this cartoon

00:14:34.140 didn't. And you're like, this doesn't make any sense. These are both arguably equally offensive

00:14:40.280 and you're just being arbitrary about it. So you're not really persuading me that this is the way to go.

00:14:45.940 And that's partially because they don't have a bedrock principle that you can't ban speech simply

00:14:51.260 because it's offensive. But I think that comes from an interesting place. And I think it's

00:14:55.380 essentially, oh God, I find myself thinking about the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, the nation state

00:15:01.620 model. Essentially, I think that in my mother's Britain, there is an idea that there's sort of a

00:15:07.800 modal Brit and that nation can be kind of almost analogized to a single person who has just like

00:15:15.960 any person a list of things that are offensive and a list of things that aren't a John Bull kind

00:15:21.880 of character. And I think that that's something that you'll see in sort of like the national

00:15:26.980 character of Germany and France. And there is an idea that there is like a modal version of that

00:15:32.380 person. And if you think of your country that way, it can make sense that you can call balls and

00:15:37.920 strikes in terms of what's offensive and what's not, because you think that there's some way that

00:15:42.100 most people in your country would. I think this has gotten much harder to argue as all of these

00:15:47.300 countries have become much more diverse, much more multicultural. And I think it was also a little

00:15:51.360 bit asinine to argue in the first place, particularly in a lot of these places, because of profound class

00:15:56.340 differences within these same cultures. And so I think that that's one of the reasons why that they

00:16:02.300 can be more comfortable thinking that they have that not having a bedrock principle makes sense.

00:16:07.040 But I can see that the strain on the system is really happening in places like Scotland and

00:16:12.780 Ireland and Germany, for that matter, in terms of how do you enforce this fairly? And the answer is

00:16:17.720 it's incredibly difficult. Meanwhile, in the United States, we've always had an understanding

00:16:22.720 that Boston is not like Richmond, is not like Georgia, is not like, and then later, California,

00:16:29.640 not like Texas. So we've never really thought of ourselves, despite the image of Uncle Sam,

00:16:35.020 we've always been a country that we know full well that different parts of us are simply not going to

00:16:40.600 agree. And I think, frankly, we've been at the genuinely multicultural, generally multi-ethnic

00:16:46.700 society thing longer than a lot of the countries in Europe. And so I think we actually did get this

00:16:52.880 one right. And I think that what you see going on currently in Europe, particularly around issues

00:16:58.680 like immigration, I mean, I think about that, the polling that you presented on Bill Maher's show

00:17:05.500 about some conservative Muslim attitudes about a variety of issues. That struck me as something

00:17:12.940 that absolutely protecting the United States. But I could imagine that even some factual assertions

00:17:17.940 could be treated in some countries in Europe as if they're actual offenses now.

00:17:21.080 Yeah. Well, the modal Brit or the modal German or the modal Frenchman is increasingly going to be

00:17:29.080 guilty of Islamophobia in that context. So let's return to the American view of things. I think we

00:17:37.820 both agree that as well-intended as they might be, prescriptions against offensive speech in other

00:17:45.840 countries like the UK or Germany, Holocaust denial laws, for instance, in places like Germany, and I

00:17:52.480 think Austria has it, I'm not sure where else, you know, they can, you know, literally land you in

00:17:57.760 prison for denying the Holocaust. You know, as much as I am a student of the Holocaust and am alert to

00:18:04.600 the, even to the forward-looking prospect of future Holocaust, I think laws of that sort are just

00:18:11.220 wrong-headed. I mean, they don't accomplish what you would hope they would accomplish, which is to get

00:18:16.580 everyone to understand that, you know, in this case, the Holocaust really did happen and it was horrific.

00:18:21.600 And it's just the wrong algorithm to be running socially so as to purify people's thinking and to get

00:18:29.420 people to converge on a fact-based and well-intentioned discussion about reality, right? I mean, what I think we

00:18:35.760 want, and I'm now putting words in your mouth and feel free to take them out, but what I think we want is the

00:18:40.720 the proper error-correcting mechanism of it being legal to more or less talk about anything,

00:18:49.100 leaving aside those cases where speech isn't quite just speech, where it is, you know, I think, as you

00:18:56.200 said, a provocation to imminent lawless action or, you know, obvious harassment, where it's more,

00:19:02.580 you know, you're, it's a kind of behavior, you know, you could be defrauding someone with speech,

00:19:07.380 et cetera. But if you're, if you're just expressing opinions and even, you know, extraordinarily odious

00:19:12.820 ones and, and even in principle dangerous ones, you know, dangerous if acted upon, I think we want

00:19:20.100 the, generally speaking in the public sphere, which is to say, you know, that the sphere that the

00:19:26.280 government coercion casts a shadow over, I think we want just the best idea to win in collision with

00:19:35.040 all other ideas. Is that how you, do you agree with what I've said on that?

00:19:38.700 Well, the marketplace of ideas theory of freedom of speech, I think is, I think it's a great idea.

00:19:45.560 And I think it's particularly relevant, um, in higher education where it is supposed to be a

00:19:50.400 clashing of ideas and the use of disconfirmation to, you know, chip ever closer to the truth by chipping

00:19:57.120 away at falsity. But I, I have a little bit of a more idiosyncratic theory on freedom of speech

00:20:02.780 that unsurprisingly is fairly expansive. And I just call it simply the pure informational theory

00:20:08.000 of free speech, which is that there is, if the goal of human knowledge is to know the world as it

00:20:13.500 is, then you can't really know the world as it is without knowing what people actually think. And if

00:20:21.320 you create a situation in which people aren't too terrified to say what they actually think for fear

00:20:25.720 of punishment, you are depriving yourself of really important knowledge about the world. And I, and I

00:20:30.600 extend this also to conspiracy theories. So like, let's take a real one, the protocols of the elders

00:20:35.600 of Zion. If the idea that that wasn't a relevant and important thing to know about its existence

00:20:42.340 in history is just delusional. I think it's very important that people understand that there was

00:20:48.540 this massive conspiracy theory at the early part of the 20th century, that that was based on very

00:20:53.340 shoddy writing that basically was saying that Jews controlled the world. Is it true? No. Is it worth

00:20:59.680 knowing? Of course it is. And so when it comes to conspiracy theories, when I'm being a little more

00:21:05.100 lighthearted about it, the way I explain it is, listen, lizard people who live under the Denver

00:21:09.860 airport do not control the world. But knowing that your girlfriend or uncle believe that lizard people

00:21:17.000 living under the Denver airport control the world is very important information to have.

00:21:21.960 And so knowing what people really think and why is a key part to understanding the world.

00:21:27.640 And when it comes to conspiracy theories, I mean, here's one thing that I just have to say over

00:21:32.260 and over again. If you're battling someone who believes that there's a conspiracy to shut them

00:21:37.600 up, do absolutely nothing that looks like a conspiracy to shut them up because they're just going to

00:21:44.300 take that as like, well, I must be onto something. And then the last part of like why you have to let

00:21:49.760 these bad ideas out is something that I call the, um, I call mills trident from the, uh, from on

00:21:56.840 liberty, which is that in a truth seeking discussion, which is actually not most discussions, but in a

00:22:02.500 discussion to try to get towards truth, there's only three possibilities. You're either completely

00:22:08.060 wrong, you're partially wrong or partially right, or you're completely right. And now that middle

00:22:14.540 category is the one that's going to be the most common is well populated. Yeah, exactly. But in

00:22:19.840 the case that you're completely wrong, of course, free speech is useful because people can point out

00:22:25.140 how and why you're wrong in the middle one. There's really no other way to get at what's the wrong

00:22:31.780 parts of your opinion, uh, without usually a somewhat long process of, of, of debate and discussion.

00:22:38.100 But even under that final one, if you're completely right, that obviously the Holocaust really happened,

00:22:44.580 but you never actually get tested on that. People tend to hold their beliefs like they hold

00:22:49.160 prejudices. They know that something's true or they believe that something's true, but they don't know

00:22:54.500 why. And that's a very brittle state of affairs because if basically, you know, that it's illegal

00:23:00.940 to say that the Holocaust didn't happen, but you're never actually challenged on whether or not it

00:23:05.540 happened, you may not even end up being aware of how overwhelming the evidence that it absolutely

00:23:10.840 completely happened is. And so I think that a lot of these anti-conspiracy laws backfire in,

00:23:17.940 of multiple ways. And one thing that is, I think, interesting is when you look at the prevalence of

00:23:24.040 Holocaust denial, but also of things like antisemitism in Europe versus the United States,

00:23:29.960 Europe passed a lot of laws that, particularly places like France, laws that were designed to

00:23:35.800 go after antisemitic speech. There was also a push, of course, on college campuses to do the same thing

00:23:40.900 both in the nineties, but they actually got passed in France and they only got passed on

00:23:45.300 campuses in the United States. And for the most part, they were defeated in court.

00:23:49.980 But when you look at sort of like the rates of antisemitism in Europe, they're much,

00:23:56.200 much higher than they are in the United States. Although unfortunately things have been getting

00:23:59.840 worse in the past couple of years. And I think that's at least in part underestimating what can

00:24:05.080 happen if you don't actually create a situation in which people are, people are actually finding out

00:24:10.980 what people really think and why. I think we should introduce a few more distinctions here,

00:24:15.380 because I think as, as much as we seem to agree that we may disagree on a few points,

00:24:21.300 and it'll be interesting to have you defrag my heart drive if it needs it. So there's obviously

00:24:28.460 a distinction between laws and norms, and there's a distinction between public and private spaces or,

00:24:35.960 you know, platforms. And a failure to notice these distinctions, in my view, does kind of confound

00:24:42.400 a lot of the discussion around censorship and misinformation and, you know, big tech and

00:24:47.480 what should have happened on Twitter during COVID, et cetera. And some of which you cover in your

00:24:52.540 book. So as I just said, I'm, I'm, I fully agree, agree with you that nobody is a free speech

00:24:58.580 absolutist. That's just a cartoon of a cartoon. And especially when you move into private space and

00:25:05.680 private platforms and businesses that have brands to be maintained, right? Your meta or Instagram or

00:25:13.120 your Twitter now X, right? You're, you're a business that has to make money at some point,

00:25:19.200 presumably. And then the question is, what, what sort of information do you want on your platform?

00:25:24.960 You're, you're in a position to make decisions, you know, curatorial, you know, moderating decisions.

00:25:30.380 You have to make those decisions unless you're going to become the next 4chan or 8chan or some other

00:25:37.460 digital sewer that nobody or a few, a few of us want to spend much time in. And certainly no one

00:25:43.940 wants to advertise in, right? And yet any effort to clean up the sewage is, you know, routinely described,

00:25:53.300 you know, mostly right of center now as censorship, right? And this has always just struck me as pure

00:26:01.100 confusion. And especially in a political context where you're, you're, you're seeing the, the

00:26:07.160 algorithmic amplification of obvious misinformation and disinformation, some of which obviously is put

00:26:14.580 there maliciously by, you know, Russian troll farms, right? Although that's not the bulk of it, that

00:26:19.520 certainly happens. But much of it is just generated by maniacs, whether it's Alex Jones or someone you've

00:26:25.300 never heard of. And the way it's different than ordinary speech is once again, it is algorithmically

00:26:31.700 amplified based on the dynamics of these hallucination machines that we have built. And it's just a much

00:26:39.420 more complicated picture where, again, there are distinctions between laws and norms, public and

00:26:44.380 private, normal speech versus algorithmically boosted speech, speech whose terrible effects you can see

00:26:51.160 play out hour by hour. And in certain cases, you know, many of us worry that the misinformation

00:26:56.880 component of this, if left unchecked, could render us just ungovernable politically, right? I mean,

00:27:05.960 people are so confused. When you look at what's happening on college campuses now, I look at it as just a,

00:27:11.500 it's a manufactured hysteria based on almost pure misinformation. I mean, it's a lot of stupidity,

00:27:18.700 you know, greasing the wheels there and moral blindness, but there's a tremendous amount of

00:27:23.620 misinformation. And so the, you know, the happy talk I uttered a few minutes ago about how, you know,

00:27:30.800 the best idea should win in collision with all other ideas, we have created private and public and,

00:27:37.100 you know, semi-private, semi-public, you know, contexts, whether you think of each of these things as

00:27:42.280 publishers or platforms, you know, depending on how you squint your eyes, you can make a case for either.

00:27:47.100 We've created a situation where we appear to be driving ourselves fairly crazy and it's worth

00:27:54.300 worrying about this. And so I'm just wondering, I mean, take any side of that grotesque object I just

00:28:00.740 put in view you want, but how does your commitment to free speech in a very, you know, deep way help you

00:28:11.040 navigate the mess I just made?

00:28:13.780 Yeah. No, this is, and I wish I could, I could have a short answer to this, but I don't think

00:28:21.180 I really can because I think that we have to take a big step back to where we are in 2024. And I talk

00:28:29.140 about this a lot within my organization. Probably people are sick and tired of hearing the printing

00:28:34.140 press, but I mentioned that I did censorship during the Tudor dynasty. But the reason why I was

00:28:39.540 studying censorship during the Tudor dynasty is that was all directed at the printing press as being

00:28:45.300 this infernal device that spread misinformation that led to all of these social ills. And I always

00:28:51.800 want to be clear here, it did. It really did in a lot of ways because, and this is a point that I

00:28:59.000 sometimes, you know, take a somewhat different approach than my much beloved friend, John Height,

00:29:03.900 is that I'm, you know, I'm more of a civil libertarian, but also I come from, you know,

00:29:07.900 a little bit of a different sort of academic background. And I definitely, you know, tend to

00:29:13.940 see solutions as more bottom up than top down, because I look at what happened in England around

00:29:20.880 the printing press, starting with Henry and then also going all the way through Elizabeth, actually all

00:29:25.400 the way through the glorious revolution and a little bit beyond about the printing press. And

00:29:30.920 essentially what happened there was you suddenly had millions of additional people in a faster paced

00:29:39.120 global discussion about what is true and what is not. And in the short run, it was devastating.

00:29:46.960 It meant an increase in the witch trials. It meant religious unrest. It meant political unrest.

00:29:54.720 It meant genuine bloodshed. And in some ways, this disorder led to the biggest war in European

00:30:01.400 history before World War I, the Thirty Years' War, which was just an absolute calamity.

00:30:08.240 So Henry's and Elizabeth's and Mary and Edward's, you know, concern about the printing press, you know,

00:30:14.840 honestly should not be so easily dismissed because it really was a device that led to all this

00:30:20.340 destruction. But that's going to happen anytime that you have this many additional people brought

00:30:25.560 into a conversation. Over the long term, it actually turns out that this many additional

00:30:29.900 eyeballs and minds on problems was a tremendous boon for the production of thought and for human

00:30:36.200 progress, because it allowed for things like the scientific revolution. It allowed for

00:30:40.740 decentralized disconfirmation of information, which is, you know, one of the great,

00:30:46.260 that we're still benefiting from to this day. Social media has added billions of people to an

00:30:54.800 instantaneous and fast paced global conversation. So there's literally no way to avoid that being a

00:31:03.140 anarchical, epistemically anarchical period. So I feel like we're unavoidably in a crazy period right now.

00:31:10.940 And I get sometimes more concerned about ways to fix the problem if they're heavy handed top down

00:31:16.980 problems. But another thing that happened when you have this many new minds and voices into a

00:31:22.260 conversation is you realize that the old authorities probably didn't necessarily deserve to be authorities

00:31:28.860 in many ways, because with this many minds and eyes on a problem, you realize, you know, the thinness

00:31:35.940 of what, you know, some of the ancient voices were actually telling us, particularly about things like

00:31:39.680 science. And so the old authority gets destroyed. And there's always a period before new, new authority

00:31:46.860 is able to establish itself. And it can be a messy, ugly process. I feel like we're in the epistemic

00:31:53.300 anarchy period still, but I do think that people are kind of raising their hands to say, actually,

00:31:59.900 and institutions and papers and publications as being, I will actually, you know, I can, I will be

00:32:07.340 straight. I will, I will actually be, be someone who will be a reliable source of expertise and

00:32:12.680 information. But the thing that one of the reasons why trust is in the title canceling of the American

00:32:19.380 mind is because I think cancel culture, I think what the calamities we're seeing on campus has been a

00:32:26.440 well-deserved disaster for the credibility of the academic class and for the, for the expert class

00:32:33.260 overall, because nobody really, after, you know, a professor loses their job, for example, for saying

00:32:38.640 biological sex is real, which really happened, you're, nobody's going to listen to you again,

00:32:43.460 when you try to claim actually it exists on a spectrum, because they realize you can't be

00:32:46.660 objective in an environment where your job would depend on giving the quote unquote right answer on

00:32:51.560 that. So I think that right now we're seeing a much bigger disruption because nobody knows who to

00:32:59.040 trust. And a lot of the voices that we were supposed to be able to trust, whether it's mainstream media,

00:33:04.660 whether it's academia, whether it's the expert class, have shown themselves to not be that

00:33:09.180 trustworthy. And I, and unfortunately I, I actually agree with that to a large degree. I actually think

00:33:14.460 that the expert class has really shot itself in the foot and in a lot of ways, but we haven't yet

00:33:19.540 reached the, the stage where we know which experts are actually reliable. And unfortunately the,

00:33:25.240 a lot of those same experts, you know, that we, that we would hope would be, are the same people

00:33:29.640 who created sort of the, the misinformation on campus. So there's a big problem there. And I've

00:33:35.600 been thinking a lot about how to create social media specifically for truth, for truth identification.

00:33:44.740 And, and I think it's possible. I talked about on Lex Friedman's podcast about the idea of, um,

00:33:49.880 being able to even create a truth seeking stream with an X. Now the rules have to be different,

00:33:55.240 in order to create that, in order to create that. But if you do it top down,

00:33:59.740 people aren't going to trust it, but also largely be based on the expertise of existing authority

00:34:04.540 who've proven themselves, not that trustworthy. So it has to be a process. It has to be relatively

00:34:09.120 transparent, but we're not quite doing it yet. I think that some of the authorities that you should

00:34:15.040 have some faith in have raised their hands, for example, on Substack. Um, I think the New York

00:34:20.400 Times is trying to improve its trustworthiness to, to the larger public, at least to some degree.

00:34:26.040 But I think we're unavoidably in a messy period where we haven't figured out a way to make our

00:34:31.640 systems for chipping away at falsity, you know, for, for establishing what is true by getting rid of

00:34:36.700 what isn't. I think we need to figure out a way to make that whole knowledge system more reliable.

00:34:41.860 Yeah. I, I, I take your point about the printing press and, and I, I have a, uh, printed copy of

00:34:47.300 the Malleus Maleficarum somewhere in the house. Oh, wow. So, uh, not, not an old one. I mean,

00:34:52.360 a new one. So, but, uh, it's just, I understand the chaos wrought of suddenly being able to manufacture

00:34:59.380 crazy documents and- Has it helped you find some witches?

00:35:02.540 Yes. Yeah. I'm still looking, but, uh, it's a good read. But the, I, I, I worry about drawing

00:35:10.740 a false analogy here or being misled by an analogy that doesn't quite capture the dynamics of what

00:35:18.500 we're suffering here, because it's not just a matter of more people talking, right? Because it's,

00:35:25.820 you know, if you're going to talk about just literacy and its consequences, well, we, we almost

00:35:30.760 got maxed out before the internet, right? I mean, not, you know, leaving aside like perhaps great

00:35:36.360 swaths of illiterate people, but when you're talking about the developed world, you know,

00:35:41.680 we had something like, you know, 90 plus percent literacy across it. And we were talking to each

00:35:48.440 other about everything under the sun. And what's happened now is we're talking much faster and the

00:35:55.760 usual gatekeepers no longer really, you know, really can man the gates because, because we go

00:36:02.300 around them and above them and below them on social media. And it's introduced some fairly perverse

00:36:09.920 incentives to the, and that have undermined the business model of, of journalism in particular.

00:36:16.040 It's made, you know, academia brittle in the face of public opinion online, you know, perhaps

00:36:22.820 quite unnecessarily, but nonetheless, they respond to the, the various mobbings we have seen on Twitter

00:36:29.260 in, in ways that have proven totally dysfunctional, you know, firing a professor for claiming that

00:36:35.300 there are only two biological sexes is the perfect example. We've, so we've created a machinery that is,

00:36:41.600 it's not just more voices. It is a, again, it's algorithmic amplification that preferentially

00:36:49.240 spreads misinformation over the truth. It biases us toward outrage. I mean, all of these, these effects

00:36:57.620 have been, you know, at this point, endlessly described by me and others, but, and, and I'm not

00:37:03.760 saying there's, there, there, there are no benefits to, you know, every piece of this machine. I mean,

00:37:08.580 it's, it's not that social media has been bad for us across the board, but it does have this effect of,

00:37:15.040 I mean, now we have, you know, people in Congress who are there, it seems just to talk to their social

00:37:21.760 media followers, right? I mean, they're not there to govern, you know, you know, somebody like Marjorie

00:37:25.780 Taylor Greene, it's just, she's building a lunatic brand on social media from Congress. That seems to be

00:37:33.480 the project. And I worry that it's a different situation. And like, you know, so for instance,

00:37:40.980 like one thing you said before we hit this topic, which you seem to take as a, a fairly ironclad

00:37:47.680 heuristic, which is, you know, if you, in the face of a conspiracy theorist who claims that he,

00:37:53.000 he's being deprived of speech or a community that claims as much by no means do anything to deprive

00:38:00.360 such people of speech, because then you're just, you know, then you have, you know, you've,

00:38:05.400 it's like the, um, I guess the David Koresh principle, you know, that he pulled himself up in a

00:38:09.880 bunker claiming the government was going to come and take his guns. And the government came to try

00:38:13.900 to take his guns and all hell broke loose. But given the dynamics of the situation, I think a

00:38:20.920 very strong case could be made for canceling certain people that is depriving them of speech

00:38:26.740 on these private platforms. And I think Alex, I think the defenestration of Alex Jones has always

00:38:32.000 made a lot of sense given what he was doing on Twitter. Yeah. And I was actually kind of shocked

00:38:38.120 that he was invited back to Twitter because, well, I mean, it's also kind of personal. I grew up in

00:38:45.240 Danbury, Connecticut and Newtown is kind of a suburb of Danbury. And one of the guys who used to come to

00:38:51.080 parties at my house lost a little girl at Sandy Hook. And so I knew from friends and family, you know,

00:38:59.140 that some of the Alex Jones insanity was leading to, you know, people showing up and targeting parents

00:39:07.240 who lost their kids. But here's the thing, that was defamation. Like, like, like, and that was

00:39:13.320 textbook defamation. And the idea of actually saying that these particular parents are engaged,

00:39:19.980 they're part of a conspiracy, they're, they didn't even lose their kids, you know, and leading to a

00:39:25.640 situation in which they were actually being targeted. That's something that, that I actually

00:39:31.280 thought that him being devastated in court was completely appropriate. And I think once you have a

00:39:36.840 finding like that against you, it would have been perfectly justifiable because that's unprotected

00:39:41.080 speech that the, he not be invited back to X. But Greg, I'm sure there's a version of it where he,

00:39:46.340 let's say he hadn't named the parents specifically, but he's still talking about it in such a way

00:39:52.240 on, again, this media platform that facilitates this kind of mob-like convergence on untruth.

00:40:01.160 He's propagating his lies and, you know, his, quote, opinions in a way that doesn't meet the

00:40:07.400 standard of defamation. No one could sue him over, no one would have the standing to sue him over it.

00:40:13.180 It's a little bit like, you know, mini Holocaust denial, which we, you and I think should be legal.

00:40:18.840 And I think, to be clear, I think everything that I'm aware of, defamation aside, most of what

00:40:24.640 Alex Jones has said, I think he should be free, legally free to say, but I think any platform

00:40:30.980 should be free to say, we want nothing to do with this. And we certainly don't want to help this

00:40:35.840 maniac ruin the lives of people who have already suffered the worst, worst thing on earth. So yeah,

00:40:43.360 well, he's, he's gone, right? We've effectively buried him in a digital hole out in the desert.

00:40:48.360 I think that's totally fair game. And if I was running one of those platforms, I would have

00:40:53.260 kicked him off in the first five minutes of my tenure there. And many people beyond him who are

00:40:59.980 participating in the same kind of destruction of our, of our information wilderness, you know,

00:41:06.260 in many cases, consciously and maliciously, but in many other cases, they're just insane, right? So

00:41:11.720 the way I tend to think about this is if you shrink the scale of it, if you just imagine,

00:41:16.420 you know, if I own a restaurant and the bar, I find out that the bartender is talking to

00:41:20.900 customers about how the, the Holocaust never happened or, you know, the Jews deserved it on

00:41:26.100 October 7th, right? Well, you know, I'm totally within my rights to fire that bartender, right?

00:41:31.180 It's just, he's destroying the brand of the restaurant, right? He doesn't get to do that as

00:41:35.760 my employee. And so it would be with a patron to the restaurant. If somebody is actually just making

00:41:41.080 it an unpleasant place to be, I should be able to kick them out, right? So how does that

00:41:46.400 change when it scales to the size of a, quote, platform like X or meta or, or does it change

00:41:54.780 in your view? Yeah. I mean, the primary concern with misinformation and disinformation as a

00:42:01.600 rationale for, for kicking people, well, certainly like, you know, as a rationale for punishing people

00:42:06.900 in a legal sense, it scares me a little bit. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 21, 2024

#368 — Freedom & Censorship

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