#400 — The Politics of Information
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
203.76616
Summary
Helen Lewis is a writer at The Atlantic and host of the podcast Making Sense, hosted by Sam Harris. In this episode, we talk about what it means to be a journalist, what it's like being a podcaster, and the role of influencers in shaping the culture we live in.
Transcript
00:00:10.860
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this,
00:00:15.100
and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast,
00:01:07.280
So maybe we can start with your background as a journalist
00:01:10.140
before we launch ourselves into the whole catastrophe,
00:01:13.480
which is modern politics and culture war issues.
00:01:17.200
How would you describe your focus as a writer and journalist?
00:01:20.940
These days, I'm more and more interested in reporting.
00:01:28.640
I sort of thought everyone in the world has many opinions.
00:01:32.740
But actually, to me, the hard work of journalism
00:01:36.800
finding out facts, writing them down, publishing them,
00:01:39.860
all of which are, I think, a lot more difficult
00:01:53.060
And that is really hard intellectual work to do
00:02:02.200
So that's the stuff I'm most interested in doing
00:02:15.880
And I've always been somebody who has been quite free
00:02:20.240
But yeah, I think you can overdose a bit, can't you?
00:02:36.100
at least has a foot in the opinion side of the journal.
00:02:40.460
I really respect people who are just hardcore reporters,
00:02:43.000
you know, and they really work a beat really hard.
00:02:51.580
I think, you know, my natural tendency is often towards snark.
00:02:56.540
But I don't think that's necessarily a bad response.
00:02:59.480
You know, my model of journalism is the being the boy
00:03:03.540
You're the one who has to stand in the middle of everyone else.
00:03:05.340
And everyone else is saying that they're having a wonderful time
00:03:10.600
So having a kind of snarky British sensibility,
00:03:15.820
I mean, maybe some of the stuff we'll come to talk to you about later,
00:03:17.660
but I feel like journalism has been kind of eaten alive by influencers.
00:03:21.600
And these influencers are often very credulous.
00:03:23.780
They're very happy to be near people who are powerful.
00:03:28.720
I'm not saying journalists should be sociopaths exactly,
00:03:31.740
but you certainly shouldn't be in it in order to have a kind of nice life
00:03:41.460
So there are certainly several podcasters of late
00:03:48.280
And I see all the scars there of people imagining that
00:03:54.700
if you simply maintain a good feeling during the conversation,
00:04:05.820
And therefore, they don't ask a single skeptical question.
00:04:10.500
Yeah, it seems to me that the norms of journalism
00:04:13.300
somehow have to be plowed into the most influential influencer venues,
00:04:22.760
I don't know how that happens apart from just complaining about it.
00:04:27.440
Yeah, I think I've been trying that one for some time.
00:04:30.840
How would you describe the difference between U.S. and U.K. journalism at this point?
00:04:41.020
I mean, how would you, what could one side learn from the other
00:04:48.340
which is showing the signs of erosion of our ability to make sense of the current moment more?
00:04:55.800
Oh, I mean, I think my work in America has definitely helped by having one foot still in Britain.
00:05:00.740
And I know it's very easy to be jingoistic and assume that your country is sort of doing everything right
00:05:07.320
But just think about our last election here we had last year
00:05:11.080
in which we went from a, you know, conservative majority government.
00:05:14.020
We'd had conservatives in power for 14 years to a big swing to the Labour Party.
00:05:18.360
But, you know, absolutely nobody called that as being, you know,
00:05:23.500
It's an existential election on which democracy depends.
00:05:26.580
If the other side get in, you know, either it's communism or it's fascism.
00:05:29.840
Where are those things that I heard when I travelled round Pennsylvania in October?
00:05:34.460
You know, once I genuinely thought that Kamala Harris,
00:05:36.820
I would talk to people who genuinely thought Kamala Harris was a communist or a Marxist or whatever it might be.
00:05:41.480
And I would talk to people who thought Trump is bringing in fascism.
00:05:44.660
And when that's your opinion of the other side,
00:05:46.500
it's very hard to see why anyone would vote for that person
00:05:48.980
or why you might ever switch your party allegiance.
00:05:51.020
And so you get into the same situation that you have with the problems of party corruption
00:05:55.760
in much more religiously sectarian societies, right?
00:05:58.820
Where if you never, you know, if your family's Protestant and you always vote for the Protestant Party
00:06:03.660
and there's nothing on earth that can make you vote for the Catholic Party,
00:06:06.640
that is not an invitation to the Protestant Party to behave really well.
00:06:09.960
You know, they know that they've got a certain level of block votes.
00:06:12.420
And I think something similar feels very true to me about US politics.
00:06:16.620
If you kind of, if the number of swing voters is so small, that is fundamentally very unhealthy for the parties.
00:06:23.560
I mean, do you think that the nature of the candidates justified that level of hyper-partisanship this time around?
00:06:30.480
Or are the differences as stark in the UK and that just the response culturally around them is not as hysterical?
00:06:39.200
I don't think there's any world in which you can say that Kamala Harris or indeed Joe Biden are communists, right?
00:06:45.540
Which was literally in some cases the accusations or even Marxists.
00:06:49.400
And I think that's just from people who use those as a kind of boo word for very left-wing.
00:06:53.820
What I think they actually meant by that is, you know, what you might call quote-unquote wokeness.
00:06:57.900
They meant that they were identity progressives.
00:07:00.060
They didn't really think that they wanted to, you know, expropriate the means of production
00:07:06.080
But, you know, I do think that the media in America is more extreme, the politics is more extreme, more polarized.
00:07:12.400
And I don't have a particularly good explanation for why that is,
00:07:17.320
apart from one of the things I'm guessing is happening is people are sorting themselves out
00:07:20.940
into, you know, into communities that are less mixed than they once were.
00:07:25.620
And I think particularly in terms of the media, so the BBC is our state-funded broadcaster.
00:07:30.940
Everyone has to pay their license fee of £160 a year.
00:07:34.060
What you do there is you have political programs that have a duty to be impartial,
00:07:39.380
You know, I've sat on question time panels with people who are on completely different places
00:07:43.360
from the political spectrum to me, and I have to listen to them,
00:07:47.980
And you don't really get that in American media.
00:07:50.540
You know, I would watch CNN a lot during the election,
00:07:53.100
and they would have, you know, Scott Jennings, who's their kind of Republican,
00:07:56.200
vastly outnumbered, and everyone would scream when he said something.
00:07:58.860
And then you'd watch Fox News, and then maybe occasionally they let a liberal creep through
00:08:03.680
the door, but then they'd say something and would immediately kind of get screamed down.
00:08:07.620
And so you just don't have that tradition of listening, of being forced to listen to the
00:08:12.680
And then social media obviously allows you to opt out completely of listening to the other side.
00:08:16.940
My boss at the Atlantic, Jeff, did an interview with Obama a couple of years ago,
00:08:21.300
in which he said he watched the change happen even during his runs for president.
00:08:25.080
He said he used to go to a little town in a swing state, and there'd be a guy with a bowtie
00:08:30.620
And maybe he was a Republican, but he knew that he had a district that had all kinds of
00:08:34.360
different people in it, and he'd give you a fair shake.
00:08:36.900
And those people got, you know, those local papers have just been obliterated, replaced
00:08:41.100
by very opinionated talk radio, and now very opinionated conservatives.
00:08:45.540
And so the number of places in the media that see their duty as talking to a wide spectrum
00:08:51.580
And that hasn't happened in the UK to the same degree?
00:08:57.460
We've had in the last couple of years the launch of two very, I mean, technically under
00:09:02.320
broadcasting regulations, neutral, but in practice, right-wing TV channels.
00:09:07.060
It ended up just as Piers Morgan's YouTube show, and then he kind of left.
00:09:10.880
And then 1GB News has become a kind of Fox News of Britain, really.
00:09:15.560
Its viewership is relatively low, but it's definitely had an effect on British politics.
00:09:20.000
I mean, you must notice sometimes where you see these memes kind of creep through, and
00:09:24.700
it's like everybody's been issued a kind of order.
00:09:27.480
Like there's some events that everybody now cares about, or something that you say that
00:09:31.740
just gets thrown at you, and you just can't quite work out where it's come from.
00:09:34.720
Like it's like overnight, everybody has sort of heard the same phrase or the same argument.
00:09:39.420
And quite often I find that those come from those very partisan media sources.
00:09:43.200
And there is an almost kind of like droid-like way that suddenly they kind of crest and they
00:09:48.300
go into the public consciousness and then they move on and everyone's talking about
00:09:52.340
And it's very hard if you're outside of them to kind of get an insight into how those
00:09:56.840
things are happening and to understand why everybody's talking about this.
00:10:00.080
And because of the BBC, there is still a sense in Britain that you do, you know, you are
00:10:04.160
more likely to hear what the other side are talking about rather than these memes arise that
00:10:08.160
you just, you know, like sort of invasion of the body snatchers, suddenly everyone is
00:10:12.320
talking about something you've never heard of before, like it's always been there and
00:10:17.880
I mean, there are phrases where you have almost a whole orientation toward not just politics,
00:10:24.840
but information online crystallized in a phrase.
00:10:28.220
I mean, if someone uses the phrase Russiagate hoax without scare quotes around it, I think I
00:10:35.160
know everything about their political worldview at this point, right?
00:10:38.780
I mean, it's just, it just condenses so much and it has been reiterated with such a slavish
00:10:47.780
When I'm writing about youth gender medicine, for example, there's a couple of ones that
00:10:51.440
So, and you, you heard them in the congressional hearings on, um, on girls sport, the idea that
00:10:56.020
actually what Republicans want are genital inspections, you know, and people just go, of course,
00:11:00.840
the, what the right one to genital inspections and you go, well, actually the way that
00:11:03.640
they sex test in sport is through a cheek swab and then through a blood sample, right?
00:11:07.400
This was, genital inspections used to happen in the, in the sixties, but then a lot of
00:11:12.700
That's not what actually we are asking for now, but I presume they've had a briefing from
00:11:16.780
some charity or governmental lobby group or whatever it might be, or there has been something
00:11:21.620
that's been in, you know, some very prominent influencer in their social media feeds has been
00:11:26.120
And then suddenly everyone kind of goes, of course, what the right really wants are genital inspections.
00:11:29.540
And there's a question for me as a journalist is always about how much do you spend, how
00:11:33.640
much time do you spend rebutting stuff versus how much do you spend actively trying to make
00:11:40.180
And I think, I still don't know where the balance is for that because actually there
00:11:44.680
is still a merit in somewhere like the Atlantic writing stuff down.
00:11:48.780
And, and if it's not true, saying that it's not true, but you also do get this feeling
00:11:52.920
that you're spending an enormous amount of time chasing phantoms.
00:11:55.680
And actually, is it stopping you from doing the good work that you would otherwise be
00:12:00.700
I mean, there is also a perverse psychological effect where merely discussing something in
00:12:07.040
order to debunk it kind of ramifies it in people's memory as being true.
00:12:11.840
And it was, it's just, it's called the illusory truth effect.
00:12:15.940
It could be one of these things that will not replicate when further studied, but there's
00:12:20.380
this asymmetry in information warfare, which is if you can force people to keep talking
00:12:25.580
about something, you're doing the damage, even if they're spending all the time debunking
00:12:30.620
And these are many topics we will, however, regrettably cover here.
00:12:35.720
Before we do, is there anything that you in your daily life as a journalist are just refusing
00:12:41.580
to touch because of the hassle or perceived hassle of touching that topic?
00:12:46.520
I mean, for me, it has always been, I noticed you got here way before me, but for some period
00:12:51.060
of time, I was avoiding the transgender activist debate just because I saw other people dealing
00:12:58.940
with it and it just seemed like it was more trouble than it's worth, right?
00:13:02.920
I mean, it really had this outsized negative impact on everyone's life who touched it.
00:13:09.520
You know, I just saw what happened to Jesse Single and I'm sure there are many people who
00:13:16.540
And J.K. Rowling, obviously, is there anything like that that is still out there that you
00:13:22.080
are just inclined to ignore, though it's a real issue that could be talked about in good
00:13:28.340
I think there are issues that I don't think about it exactly like that.
00:13:31.400
I don't mind sticking my fingers in the plug socket, mostly because I kind of feel like
00:13:38.200
This is the kind of, the idea that there is any way that the media can gatekeep what people
00:13:44.080
You know, if the media doesn't talk about illegal immigration, then no one will think
00:13:48.260
You know, that has just obviously turned out to be, you know, that's been very demonstrably
00:13:52.920
I take a different approach, which is, I think this is probably how you maybe felt more about
00:13:56.840
the transgender issue, which is there are some issues on which I don't necessarily have
00:14:02.880
I don't think my voice necessarily is the one that's needed.
00:14:06.280
There's that and also just that there is a perceived sense that just personally, it's
00:14:14.520
I mean, I distilled this once myself, you know, in a piece of advice that I never wound
00:14:19.340
up taking, which is not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself, right?
00:14:24.820
I mean, there's enough of a hassle associated with certain views, however valid they might
00:14:29.820
be, that you just spend way too much time cleaning up the mess that everyone is eager
00:14:38.540
Your people are going to willfully misunderstand what you said, even if it was only, you know,
00:14:43.000
for two minutes on a podcast and you could spend the next year of your life having that
00:14:48.080
be the first question you're ever asked in every context.
00:14:51.860
And it just was, in hindsight, it just wasn't worth it because either the point wasn't important
00:14:56.260
enough, the topic wasn't important enough, or it's just so easily misunderstood that,
00:15:00.580
you know, albeit important, it's, you know, you've got better things to do.
00:15:04.300
I do feel like that about Israel and Palestine.
00:15:07.140
You know, I'm not a foreign policy expert by any means and I have, you know, my own views
00:15:11.920
But I think that what happens with that debate is you get sucked into having to say every
00:15:16.020
bad thing that has happened on every other side dating back almost to the Middle Ages,
00:15:20.380
You need to kind of say, of course, we need to see this in the context of the displacement
00:15:25.320
Of course, we need to see this in the context of the Holocaust.
00:15:27.220
Of course, we need to see this in the context of October the 7th.
00:15:30.660
And I think you can end up being just derailed out of being able to say absolutely anything
00:15:36.580
to the extent that I think that that's the closest I think I come to the mere hassle idea.
00:15:44.760
So I've been writing this book about genius, which is out in the summer.
00:15:47.620
And I've gone a little bit through the history of IQ.
00:15:50.180
And I went and obviously I read, you know, lots of the debates about the hereditarians
00:15:56.960
And I, you know, and I asked two friends of mine with very different views on the subject
00:16:00.500
to see whether or not they would both read those chapters.
00:16:03.520
But I've taken a policy decision with that, that if I'm asked about that in interviews
00:16:08.000
and off the cuff, I'm going to say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to read the book.
00:16:11.160
I just think that is a subject on which it is absolutely not worth taking an idea for a walk
00:16:17.860
You know, and I don't think that's necessarily such a bad thing.
00:16:21.120
There are subjects for which discussing them in a debate format or in a podcast format absolutely works.
00:16:26.720
And there are others where actually just, you know, I think I more and more appreciate
00:16:30.920
that feeling of just having time to sit down something and say, do I really think this?
00:16:38.460
And that being an okay way to approach some subject, I'm not sure.
00:16:42.000
Tell me, do you think, I mean, is that cowardly or is that responsible?
00:16:47.500
Well, I do think you have to pick your battles.
00:16:51.060
So it's, it is a bit of a triage question with anything you do, right?
00:16:57.720
I mean, and insofar as you can foresee the outcome, I mean, often you can't, right?
00:17:01.120
So you don't know what, just how much having touched a topic is going to eclipse every other
00:17:06.320
thing in your life for a period of time and prove to be a massive opportunity cost.
00:17:11.360
So I recognize most of those things in hindsight.
00:17:15.140
I went, I went through a phase, you know, I interviewed Jordan Peterson for GQ back in
00:17:19.840
And I went through a phase where every time I did an interview on any kind of podcast,
00:17:25.560
And it was obvious what was happening, which was that everybody wanted their little spice,
00:17:31.240
They wanted to get me saying something about Jordan Peterson.
00:17:33.880
They could put it on YouTube where his name was, you know, instant karma.
00:17:37.940
And I just thought this is going to make me look like some weird monomaniac who's just
00:17:42.300
going around the internet talking about something that happened to me now years ago.
00:17:45.820
But you also feel that you can't be, you know, it's impolite to say, I actually don't want
00:17:49.760
to talk about this, like you'll kind of share, you know, in your 19th interview of the day.
00:17:59.020
I think that took about a year for that not to be the first thing that I had to talk about
00:18:09.340
Although I'm probably going to ask you about Jordan Peterson in about five minutes.
00:18:17.120
This has to be the layer at which much of this mad work is being accomplished on our brains.
00:18:22.720
What is the internet doing to us, in your view?
00:18:25.860
The thing I keep thinking about is the fact that we used to live in geographic communities
00:18:30.500
and they were, you know, people obviously sort themselves into people who live like them.
00:18:35.720
You know, if you are rich, you can go and make sure that you only live near other rich people.
00:18:40.200
Lots of people end up living soft lives of racial segregation by the places where they choose
00:18:47.720
But nonetheless, your neighbours were much more likely to be varied in age and political
00:18:52.260
temper and actually just personality terms, right?
00:18:54.900
You have this kind of just mixture of people around you.
00:18:58.620
But what the internet has done, as far as I can see, you know, and I'm somebody who's
00:19:01.860
been online since I was a teenager, is it's allowed people to sort themselves by interest.
00:19:07.480
And that's had just some incredibly weird effects on us, I think.
00:19:12.020
You know, we've ended up over-indexing on people who are very like us in particular ways.
00:19:18.840
I don't think it'd be so easy to form in real life.
00:19:20.920
So my friend, Hadley Freeman, for example, she wrote a brilliant memoir about being anorexic
00:19:25.340
and she talked about how unhealthy being on a hospital anorexia ward was for her because
00:19:29.880
it was full of anorexic women competing with each other to who could eat the least and who
00:19:35.780
And that's really, those things are really unhealthy, but that's a quite a specific environment.
00:19:41.820
But if you go onto the internet, you can find pro-ana forums.
00:19:44.720
You can find very unhealthy situations for teenage girls to be in, you know, who we know
00:19:53.760
You know, you want to find somebody to get into competition with about your dissociative
00:19:57.660
identity disorder or your, you know, your alts or whatever it might be.
00:20:01.440
Like, that's just something that, you know, is just lying in the middle of the road for
00:20:06.460
And I think those things, you know, and you see it now.
00:20:09.180
I think that what's happened with Twitter is a really fascinating example of this, which
00:20:13.080
is that it's gone in the space of two years from an unrepresentative left-wing echo chamber
00:20:20.360
And people have just aggressively sorted themselves into the place that they want to be with only
00:20:25.360
You know, I've just finished writing a piece about Ayala, who is, who does these kind of
00:20:29.100
massive sex work research surveys and people's fetishes and even things like that, even at the
00:20:34.220
level of human sexuality, people have now got ideas about things that they could do that
00:20:37.840
they probably never would have met someone in normal life in the 1990s who was into that
00:20:43.500
And I think, I just don't, we don't really have a way of kind of conceptualizing that.
00:20:46.620
We don't really have a way of talking about that.
00:20:48.220
But if the way that people organize themselves has just become narrowed in these ways, never
00:20:53.940
mind the fact that now we're interacting with these things one-on-one, it's just you
00:20:57.420
and this, you know, black screen that you stare at for hours and hours a day.
00:21:03.640
You know, I think I've been writing a bit about young men and their, you know, their approach
00:21:07.140
to the presidential election and it really just struck me how ready-made the kind of
00:21:11.640
whole lifestyle from, from those podcasts is, you know, you have your Zin pouches, you
00:21:15.800
have your protein powders, you have your crypto, the ice baths, you have your day trading, you
00:21:21.660
know, your gambling and it's like a whole pre-packaged consumer lifestyle that you kind of buy off
00:21:27.800
the shelf, but it's kind of sands a lot of the rough edges off.
00:21:31.680
And I, when I see people kind of complaining about, you know, online dating and stuff like that,
00:21:35.580
a lot of the, you know, the complaints seem to be about it feeling so much like a marketplace,
00:21:40.080
but then everything online feels like a marketplace or a slot machine.
00:21:43.420
And you just don't get these kind of baggy, messy human interactions in the way that, you
00:21:48.260
know, I think if you had to live in a small village somewhere, even though you'd be seeing
00:21:51.500
any very limited number of people, they'd all be kind of weird in different ways rather
00:21:55.300
than you finding all the people who are weird in the same way.
00:22:00.360
I mean, there's something about the internet that also filters the social idiosyncrasies
00:22:08.040
and pathologies that would disqualify a person as a source of information too.
00:22:13.280
As I remember seeing this in a family member now, almost 25 years ago with the 9-11 truth
00:22:21.560
So this is like the early internet phenomenon, at least in my world, where I saw someone go
00:22:29.780
And one thing was clear is that if he had had to go to a conference, a physical conference
00:22:35.300
out in the real world and meet the people who were similarly obsessed with this idea that
00:22:40.200
9-11 was an inside job and that all those voicemail messages from the doomed passengers on
00:22:46.680
flight 93, those were faked by CIA voice faking technology.
00:22:51.180
And those people, that plane landed and those people were brought off and murdered and
00:22:54.100
et cetera, et cetera, it gets as crazy as you want it to get.
00:22:57.520
If he had gone to a conference and met the people who were manufacturing these ideas, in
00:23:04.580
many cases, he would be able to see at a glance the dysfunction in their lives, the fact that
00:23:10.200
this was, you know, that their attitude toward what was passing as journalism for them was
00:23:16.000
born of, you know, psychological and social pathologies in many cases that were quite stark,
00:23:23.400
And what you get with the internet is a webpage or a, you know, now a feed on X, which is
00:23:34.080
I mean, some of them are shrieking psychopathology, you know, despite the best efforts of the person
00:23:40.000
But still, you can't tell that this, that the person who made, to go back to 9-11, the documentary
00:23:47.600
loose change that deranged the brains of a generation on that topic was, I think at the
00:23:52.340
time, you know, 18 years old and living in his mother's basement, right?
00:23:55.840
Like what you saw was the product online and it was radicalizing because it was just a pure
00:24:03.000
information vector of, you know, ideological contamination.
00:24:06.840
And yeah, now we're living in a context where if you want to stay on the anorexia ward, surrounded
00:24:14.000
by the most persuasive anorexics on planet earth, you can stay there forever now on the
00:24:20.640
Whereas in the real world, that kind of thing would have a natural half-life.
00:24:25.400
And that's what Hadley writes about, about the thing that finally sort of snapped her
00:24:28.740
out of it was watching somebody who was 32 having a tantrum because they put butter on
00:24:33.100
her toast and she thought, you know, she was then in her teens, do I really want to be
00:24:37.960
And my entire world, the scope of it, the largest thing that's happening in my life is
00:24:46.960
And I think that that mechanism, that really important mechanism of there is something
00:24:51.960
bigger than this has been slightly broken by the internet because there doesn't have
00:24:57.560
You can sit home and get DoorDash and, you know, and game and crypto day trade.
00:25:03.420
And you can just have, you know, and that's, the world is set up for you to do that.
00:25:07.900
So let's talk about the two sides of our politics.
00:25:10.980
I mean, I hesitate to put too much stock in the notion of left and right at the moment
00:25:15.440
because there, you know, we have horseshoe theory and other variables now that make it
00:25:24.560
I mean, there's kind of the failing liberal order, right?
00:25:27.240
Where we have this loss of trust in institutions, in many cases for obvious reasons.
00:25:31.900
Some of those reasons are exaggerated, but, you know, I share, you know, many right of
00:25:39.960
We, we mentioned, I worry about how we reboot in the U S context, how we reboot the democratic
00:25:46.260
party into a, a sane platform for politics and a, an antidote to the populism we're seeing
00:25:53.400
But let's take the, the nominally left side of this before we talk about the right.
00:25:58.620
How do you view the, the loss of trust in mainstream journalism and other institutions?
00:26:05.180
And what do you think we can do to regain that trust?
00:26:09.580
I really worry about it because I know what you mean.
00:26:11.280
The difficulty in talking about it is about keeping the correct sense of proportion between
00:26:15.740
the, the errors, you know, and I, you know, I've written a lot about errors in journalism.
00:26:19.960
There are some, but it's, you know, it's the same procedure as with science is that what
00:26:24.580
really matters is not the idea that you're never going to get anything wrong.
00:26:27.440
What matters is what you do when you get it wrong and what the correction mechanism is.
00:26:31.820
And journalism does have a correction mechanism.
00:26:35.200
The idea of a free and diverse press is that everybody scrutinizes each other.
00:26:39.160
And yes, you won't get a complete picture of reality from the New York times or the Atlantic
00:26:44.260
But if you have all of them in the same environment, then you are hopefully, you know, if you want
00:26:48.240
to getting somewhere closer to the, to a kind of complete picture of the truth.
00:26:52.860
And so, you know, I, that worries me that people don't seem to care about that.
00:26:56.980
And I, and I do wonder how much of that is about a feeling of just the fact that the,
00:27:00.580
the world is very overwhelming and people want a kind of simple narrative.
00:27:04.880
You know, conspiracy theories are very simple usually, right?
00:27:06.960
There's a bad guy who did it or a load of bad guys in a room who did it.
00:27:10.220
And it's very obvious and the solutions are very obvious.
00:27:14.160
So I think I see some of those things as being a reaction to what people feel is just overwhelming
00:27:20.940
But from my point of view, you know, all, you know, all of us are only kind of stonemasons
00:27:26.520
who can only build our own little houses one by one, right?
00:27:29.380
I just, I don't think it's possible to, to fix everything at once.
00:27:32.880
What I can do is kind of keep going out and doing the work that I think is important.
00:27:36.580
And I suppose, you know, that doesn't feel very meaningful, but this is, I don't, tell
00:27:41.480
me whether or not they should think this is unbearably bleak or if it is in fact actually
00:27:44.440
quite hopeful at the end of the day, which is that I just think that we're also an incredibly
00:27:49.500
And I think that's true of both Europe and America.
00:27:51.600
I'm primarily talking about, you know, professional middle class people.
00:27:56.820
You know, when Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, people were absolutely delighted.
00:28:01.920
When they got the smallpox vaccine, people were absolutely delighted.
00:28:04.960
The measles vaccine, they were absolutely delighted because they knew what the alternative was like.
00:28:09.780
At the end of the Second World War, when we built all of these liberal institutions, people
00:28:13.640
knew what it was like to experience a world war, to experience, you know, the idea that
00:28:18.540
your son wouldn't come home or that, you know, your entire family was murdered.
00:28:22.440
And I think we've just been coasting for a really long time on things getting a little
00:28:27.040
bit worse, but for most people still extremely tolerable.
00:28:31.120
And so I think when I talk to people, and this is true on both sides of the political aisle,
00:28:35.320
there is a kind of great deal of complacency about how bad the world can get and how bad it's
00:28:42.020
Something I think about a lot is the fact that Michael Lewis wrote, I think, in The Fifth
00:28:45.260
Risk about these awards they had for civil servants, you know, who'd done really great
00:28:49.800
bureaucratic things, or they'd come up with great initiatives.
00:28:53.200
And he found that a hugely disproportionate number of them were from first, I think, and
00:28:59.960
So if you've come to the US from Somalia, then you are not complacent about the fact that
00:29:04.940
it's nice to have drinking water and not to have a militia come around in the middle
00:29:09.360
And I wonder if some of that, you know, this is what I cling to as Trump passes ever more
00:29:13.780
kind of crazy executive orders, is that when things do get bad, that's the necessary
00:29:20.840
And what has happened at the moment is that people have had things a little bit bad, but
00:29:25.420
And therefore, you know, when I talk to people, I talked to a young woman who was very interesting
00:29:29.300
in Pennsylvania, and I asked her about, she was a Trump supporter, and I asked her
00:29:32.500
about January the 6th, and she said, well, you know, if he didn't respect democracy, why
00:29:39.320
And I thought that was a really great and insightful thing to say, because from her point of view,
00:29:43.400
there was nothing that I could say that would, you know, that would counteract that.
00:29:46.280
He was paying deference to the electoral system by participating in it.
00:29:51.060
And I thought, yeah, you know what, we're right.
00:29:53.200
She, you know, she believes that if he was a maniac, the Republican Party would have stopped
00:29:57.580
him, and the Republican Party didn't stop him, and that's the failure there.
00:30:01.720
But it's not, she doesn't have a bad understanding of politics, it's just that politics has let
00:30:07.740
Yeah, I think complacency is part of it, although when you look at the real, the extremity of
00:30:13.520
the problem, I don't know that the complacency covers the nature of the error.
00:30:18.880
I mean, like, I wouldn't think of the January 6th rioters as especially complacent, right?
00:30:24.680
I mean, they actually, you know, many of them traveled halfway across the country.
00:30:29.960
And so it is with, you know, people who go all in on, you know, anti-vax, you know, religiosity,
00:30:37.160
I mean, they're completely subsumed by this concern, and they're spending a tremendous
00:30:41.800
amount of time trying to find, you know, all of the nefarious clues online that reveal,
00:30:48.540
you know, how dangerous vaccines are, or how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is, or,
00:30:52.260
you know, they've listened to scores of hours of RFK Jr.
00:30:56.100
spread his misinformation and half-truths and, you know, genuine lives in some cases.
00:31:03.120
So there's a massive, in many cases, there's a massive investment of time and even resources
00:31:09.280
in becoming kind of actively misled, you know, or what we would consider misled based on having
00:31:17.700
a sense of what the ground truth reality is on any one of these topics.
00:31:22.440
I mean, no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.
00:31:28.500
And, you know, all of your QAnon-inflected ratiocination on that topic is, in fact, a
00:31:36.960
The problem, I think, is that whenever you find a kernel of truth to any of these conspiracy
00:31:44.280
I mean, the real, you know, background incidents of vaccine injury or the actual case where DEI
00:31:54.580
I mean, to take this recent plane crash in Washington, in D.C., you know, Trump's first
00:32:01.820
allegation is that, you know, DEI explains this plane crash, whether it was on the FAA side
00:32:08.100
or the, you know, the military helicopter side or both.
00:32:11.020
It seemed an utterly grotesque and, you know, borderline psychopathic thing to say in the
00:32:19.800
moment when your job is really to restore people's sense of normalcy and assure them
00:32:26.840
that you're going to get to the bottom of the problem.
00:32:29.360
And it was obviously, it was before any of the facts were in, so he couldn't possibly know
00:32:36.980
But if, in fact, it proves to be true that the FAA had some, as is now rumored at the
00:32:44.480
time we're discussing this, the FAA had some aggressively and, in hindsight, probably patently
00:32:51.680
insane DEI program that was selecting not for competence but for skin color for some considerable
00:32:58.580
period of time, that will seem to confirm everyone's worst fears about everything on that
00:33:05.080
And so, again, this comes back to something like asymmetrical information warfare, whereas
00:33:11.060
when you can find the half-truth or the single conspiracy that is, in fact, true, then that
00:33:17.720
gives people more or less carte blanche to believe anything on insufficient evidence as long as it's
00:33:23.300
to their taste in that vein, you know, for years to come.
00:33:26.860
And you have to do so much extra work to debunk any of that misinformation because what's always
00:33:33.520
lingering, and we have this with the, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak issue now,
00:33:39.520
I mean, because that was stigmatized as a racist conspiracy theory within 15 minutes by the
00:33:44.560
left, and now it has proved an all-too-plausible thesis, although, albeit one for which the jury
00:33:50.000
is still out, now the New York Times is no better than Fox News or even, you know, paradoxically
00:33:58.080
And you're now dealing with people who won't believe anything that the normal gatekeepers
00:34:05.240
There's an awful lot of Mott and Bailey, though, isn't there?
00:34:07.040
And that's, you know, that term for the argumentation strategy where you go out on a limb and say
00:34:10.580
something really crazy and then in challenge, you know, withdraw back to your castle.
00:34:14.640
And, you know, some of the claim about that was that COVID was a bioweapon developed in a lab,
00:34:19.520
And that's not what anybody who's now saying, well, look, we don't know what was happening.
00:34:23.360
So that, you know, that's, and I think the same thing is possibly true with the case of
00:34:26.980
the air crash in that Tracing Woodgrains, who used to be a reporter on Blocks and Reported,
00:34:31.580
did some really interesting reporting on the FAA under Obama changing the regulations.
00:34:37.200
But what that's turned into is the fact that, you know, the relatives of the female pilot who
00:34:40.900
died were afraid to have her name released because they thought she'd be, you know, torn apart
00:34:46.920
But people will kind of just throw this sort of chaff up into the air.
00:34:50.660
And then if any tiny bit of it is true, they claim victory.
00:34:54.800
And I think that's the bit where I really struggle because it does make you feel very,
00:34:59.560
you know, like the kind of ground shaking beneath your feet in that, you know, that
00:35:02.540
you can point out the facts all you want, but the vibe is just so much stronger.
00:35:06.660
I had a friend who described the point of journalism as the war of facts against narrative.
00:35:11.140
And I think that is the kind of, that is the big challenge now today for journalism is
00:35:15.960
saying, yes, this, there might have been this going on, but it's actually a little bit more
00:35:23.180
Whereas what people want it to be is, you know, yeah, is it, was it, was it a Chinese,
00:35:29.100
And you kind of go, well, it's a bit more complicated than that.
00:35:33.320
Well, actually, yes, you know, it might be a bit more complicated than that.
00:35:38.720
And I think it leads to a lot of faulty thinking because people just apply that heuristic,
00:35:42.660
They just apply the frame that they want, that they are now used to thinking of everything
00:35:49.260
Sometimes that frame is right, but as a shortcut, inevitably, sometimes it's wrong.
00:35:52.880
Well, what do you think the sanest way is to thread the needle on DEI and transactivism
00:35:59.160
and intersectionality and all of these other ways of framing or misframing?
00:36:06.660
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:36:14.820
Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with
00:36:19.540
other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've
00:36:27.020
The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.