Making Sense - Sam Harris - #429 — The New World Order

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

00:00:11.740 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

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00:00:26.240 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.200 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Ann Applebaum. Ann, thanks for joining

00:00:39.020 me again. No, thanks for having me. It's great to see you. Well, so you've just written a cover

00:00:43.640 article in The Atlantic, titled online at least. I haven't seen the physical magazine, but the title

00:00:49.080 online is The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth. This is recounting your two trips to Sudan, which

00:00:56.060 has been plunged into yet another civil war. And I want to use it, as you do in the article,

00:01:01.780 I want to use your experience of Sudan as a lens through which to look at the consequences of 0.82

00:01:08.660 American retreat from the world, and this general unraveling of the system of international law

00:01:16.440 and international aid, which has really underpinned what we have come to call the liberal world order

00:01:23.220 for more or less as long as we've been alive, a little bit longer. So let's start with your

00:01:28.020 experience in Sudan. What is happening in Sudan?

00:01:31.820 So Sudan is engulfed by a civil war. The two main warring parties, and actually there are several

00:01:38.560 others as well, but the two main warring parties are formerly components of the Sudanese military.

00:01:44.560 One part is the Sudanese armed forces, the kind of main part of the army. And the other

00:01:49.520 is a group called the Rapid Support Forces, who older readers or older listeners rather will

00:01:55.940 remember as the Janjaweed. This was a group that was created a couple of decades ago by a previous

00:02:02.820 Sudanese dictator, and it was used as a force against—there's an ethnic conflict in Western

00:02:10.360 Sudan between Arab-speaking nomads and non-Arabic farmers. Very old conflict, resolved many times

00:02:18.580 through intermarriage and so on, but in the modern era was juiced up by outside weapons,

00:02:24.660 outside interests, and so on. And that's a kind of—that's more or less a broader version of that

00:02:30.220 is what's happening now. But anyway, the other—the Rapid Support Forces are the other group.

00:02:34.960 They are fighting for control of territory. There are some other groups involved as well,

00:02:40.000 but they're the main two groups. And the hard thing about the war and the thing that makes it hard

00:02:44.980 for outsiders to understand is that it's not ideological. It's not a war of ideas.

00:02:51.120 It's not clearly an ethnic war either. It's really a war between two groups who want power,

00:02:58.960 who want money, who want control of territory, who want gold—they're big and important gold mines in

00:03:05.440 Sudan—who want other kinds of resources, and who are not particularly concerned about Sudanese civilians.

00:03:12.800 And the civilians have really borne the brunt of the war. I mean, it's, of course, always true that 1.00

00:03:18.620 civilians bear the brunt of the war, but they're in the middle of the fighting and often the subject

00:03:23.060 of the fighting in a way that's not always true in other places. So they're the focus of ethnic

00:03:28.820 cleansing or of revenge or of, you know, they're—particularly the Rapid Support, the RSF,

00:03:35.960 as they're called, have quite a lot of mercenaries in their ranks who've been told that they won't be

00:03:40.560 paid, but they can take whatever they can steal. And so there's an immense amount of

00:03:44.760 theft as well. So it's a very unusually ugly war. And I should say one other thing about it just at

00:03:51.460 the beginning, which is one of the other things that makes it unusually ugly, is the number of

00:03:56.960 outside powers who have—who are contributing to it, who are buying weapons, selling weapons,

00:04:03.900 trying to—making deals with one side or the other, increasing the conflict. And they are—include the

00:04:08.800 Saudis, the Emiratis, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Iranians are there, the Russians are there on

00:04:14.740 both sides, you know, and others. And none of them right now have any particular interest in ending

00:04:21.680 the war. Instead, they're all seeing what they can get out of it. And that, you know, in the way that

00:04:27.740 the old conflict, you know, in Darfur was once juiced up by outsiders, this one really is too. And of 0.99

00:04:35.400 course, now they're modern weapons, they're drones. The level of sophistication of the, you know, the

00:04:41.520 kind of violence that can be done is now just on a much different level than ever before.

00:04:46.620 Yeah, the list of outsiders from your article I found genuinely surprising. I mean, so you just

00:04:53.300 listed some, but I'll just read you from your article. The Turkish, Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati,

00:04:58.380 Qatari, Russian, Iranian, Ukrainian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Kenyan, South Sudanese, Chad, Libya,

00:05:05.800 Central African Republic, and the Chinese hovering in the background. I mean, maybe I don't know

00:05:11.120 enough about the history of whatever the 500 civil wars that have been fought in the last 200 years,

00:05:16.060 but that sounds like a pretty novel and awful contribution of outside powers.

00:05:21.600 And there are really novel elements to it. I mean, the Ukrainians, for example, this is one of the

00:05:26.620 big surprises for me. I have a special interest in Ukraine, and I told a Ukrainian friend of mine I

00:05:30.900 was going there, and he sort of turned pale, and he said, oh, be really careful. You know, I know some

00:05:36.540 people there, and Ukrainians are there too, and they're there to kill Russians. So in a way, 0.98

00:05:42.720 they're not there. They're not fighting on one side or the other. They're there attracted by the

00:05:47.760 anarchy itself. You know, that this is a place where they can harm members. Basically, it's members of

00:05:53.540 the Wagner group, that Russian mercenary group, has had a long involvement in Sudan, and the Ukrainians

00:05:58.840 attacked them there. And so the fact that they're there, you know, is from pretty far away, tells you

00:06:05.180 how much of a vacuum has been created by the war and by really, you know, and I'm sure this is the next 0.99

00:06:15.280 question by the absence of any outside power or organization or institutions who are able to help

00:06:23.580 end it. Yeah. You just used the word anarchy, and as I was reading your article, it put me in mind of

00:06:30.700 Robert Kaplan's very famous article from over 30 years ago, The Coming Anarchy, which was also in

00:06:36.360 the Atlantic. I think probably the most read article for at least a decade in the magazine. And his

00:06:42.000 prediction there, I think, I think in the final analysis of, did not come true. He was imagining

00:06:48.860 the unraveling of international order and kind of all of us being pitched into a kind of crime planet

00:06:57.440 as a result. But in reading your article and in, you know, now posing the question I have to pose

00:07:05.020 for you, I began to worry that, that you are, this is sort of the, an echo of his prediction there.

00:07:13.040 And it's now we're, we're on the cusp of something that is, you know, that of bearing out that

00:07:19.500 prediction that, because I mean, we really are witnessing a, just the consequences of a vacuum

00:07:25.360 of leadership. And I mean, there was, there was, there's one quote from your article that really

00:07:30.020 struck me as quite poignant and fairly arresting. I'll just read it to you because it, it, um, you

00:07:35.920 say a Middle Eastern ambassador in Port Sudan thought I was joking when I suggested that the

00:07:41.620 U S might no longer care that much about Africa. That was beyond his imagination and beyond the

00:07:47.220 imagination of many other people who still believe that someday, somehow American diplomats are going

00:07:52.240 to come back and make a difference. And I mean, that to me, that really speaks to the brand damage

00:07:57.200 that our country has suffered. I mean, it seems to me we've Trump and Trumpism and this American

00:08:03.520 America first, no nothingism has really, at least on the international stage ruined the very idea

00:08:10.360 of America. And so I just want, I wanted you to just reflect on that and, and, and tell me what

00:08:15.820 you noticed and what you, what you continue to notice. Well, you may live overseas most of the time. So

00:08:20.300 you have a, a very global view of our current moment in the States.

00:08:25.340 Yep. I'm in Poland right now. In fact, you know, I'll, I'll start with saying that Robert Kaplan,

00:08:31.600 you know, I agree. He, the meltdown that he described didn't happen, but you can find on the

00:08:37.900 planet now, a number of places where, you know, there used to be order and there isn't now. Sudan is 0.87

00:08:43.180 one, Libya, Yemen, Syria's on the cusp could go one way or the other. And all these places are also

00:08:50.140 places where this role of these so-called middle powers is very important where there's no, you

00:08:56.400 know, there, there's no U S there's no UN there's nobody else. And so you get these competition

00:09:01.100 between, between other countries. And I would say that the, you know, some of what people say about

00:09:06.420 the U S is maybe even nostalgia for something that never was. I mean, it's a, it's more of an idea of

00:09:12.880 America that there was such a thing as, I don't know, it's, you know, Camp David or either the,

00:09:19.680 the Dayton agreement, you know, that there could be an America that would come in and bring all the 0.97

00:09:23.700 warring parties and make them sit down at the table and have a conversation. I mean, maybe that

00:09:28.000 didn't happen as much as people like to think. And maybe when it did happen, it didn't work as well

00:09:32.100 as people remember, but there is a, it's a, it's almost a, you know, it's kind of reflex. Like

00:09:37.080 when are they coming back and why have they gone? Of course you do also increasingly have people who

00:09:43.100 are angry or don't care or have tossed America into the group of, you know, irrelevant sort of

00:09:51.980 countries that are just as nihilistic and just as transactional as everybody else. And so again,

00:09:57.680 I don't know whether, how much of the longing for a different America, what is some based on something

00:10:02.120 real and based on an ideal, I don't know, but it is going to be gradually replaced by an

00:10:06.900 idea that, Oh, America is just another, you know, what's the difference between America and Saudi 1.00

00:10:10.980 Arabia and Russia and Iran? I mean, they're all just a bunch of greedy transactional countries 1.00

00:10:15.880 whose leaders are looking for personal wealth and, you know, who, who, who aren't really bothered

00:10:22.600 about anybody's wellbeing. And, you know, I should say the United States, I mean, it's complicated

00:10:27.200 because the United States has behaved badly in so many places over so many years, but it was always

00:10:32.500 that the bad behavior was often balanced out by other things, by USAID, especially maybe by American

00:10:40.000 health, you know, the contribution that Americans made to ending AIDS, to ending pandemics,

00:10:45.840 working on Ebola, working on, on child health care all around the world. I mean, people knew

00:10:51.600 all of that as America too, whatever they thought of American foreign policy at any given moment.

00:10:56.860 So there was an idea of American benevolence, you know, that is, I think really gone or is

00:11:03.180 disappearing fast.

00:11:04.900 When I think about the, the damage to our reputation and just the, now the, the failure of, of leadership,

00:11:11.220 I'm thinking much more in terms of those ideals against which we measured ourselves, even in our

00:11:17.000 failure. I mean, we do have a lot to apologize for, uh, in how we've behaved historically, but our

00:11:23.000 failures have always been measured by the ideals that we really did stand for on our best days.

00:11:30.200 I mean, like we, you know, for as long as we've been alive, America could credibly be thought to

00:11:37.220 care about whether other nations cared about human rights or, you know, through, through their

00:11:42.740 journalists in prison or, you know, treated women like chattel. I mean, like those are, you know, 1.00

00:11:48.240 we stood for something, but as you say, now we seem to stay, I mean, we seem to have announced to

00:11:54.960 the world that none of that really matters. And we just want our president and his rapacious family

00:12:03.420 to get a hotel deal in your capital city. I mean, so it really, it is just a, just the corruption

00:12:09.400 is not even hidden and it's just been shamelessly advertised. And it really, it just, it, it makes me

00:12:15.980 very sad to think that the ideals themselves now are understood, I think erroneously, but,

00:12:23.780 you know, all too plausibly, they are understood to have been bogus this whole time. I mean, we are

00:12:28.220 just like Saudi Arabia in some basic sense.

00:12:31.460 So one other thing that's happening, this is, this wasn't the subject of this story,

00:12:34.960 although it's something I am going to write about in the near future. The U.S. is also dismantling

00:12:40.480 a lot of small institutions. This is much smaller than USAID or trying to dismantle,

00:12:46.100 I should say, because they're, they're all fighting back. But the administration is trying

00:12:49.880 to dismantle. For example, we have foreign broadcasters who broadcast in a lot of languages,

00:12:56.040 you know, Russian, you know, many Central Asian languages, Chinese, Uyghur language, actually,

00:13:02.480 which almost nobody else broadcasts in Arabic, obviously Persian and so on. And we have broadcasters

00:13:08.900 and a lot of them have real important followings and they have listeners in around the world.

00:13:13.900 And the Trump administration has been trying to cut them or trying to end them and their work for a

00:13:18.520 long time. And, you know, for a lot of the world, that's how they know us. I mean, they listen to

00:13:22.480 Radio Free Europe or Radio Liberty or Radio Farta or Radio Free Asia. And that's how they knew about

00:13:30.080 America. And that's how they learned about us. And also that's how they learned alternative stories

00:13:35.240 to the ones told them by their own propagandists, you know, by their own, by their own regimes. And

00:13:40.340 they would listen to, you know, U.S. radio. And often it was, as I said, it was U.S.-backed radio,

00:13:46.600 but the radios was done by nationals of those countries and those places. So it felt to them

00:13:51.960 like it had a local element as well. And that a lot of it has already gone off the air or there's

00:13:57.820 already, because they've had cuts to their funding, it's disappearing. And when that disappears,

00:14:02.860 you know, it's not as if, you know, the U.S. stops doing that and nothing happens. You know,

00:14:08.520 the U.S. will stop those broadcasts if that happens, which I hope it doesn't. And Chinese 1.00

00:14:13.640 and Russian, you know, and Cuban and Iranian information will come and take their place.

00:14:20.140 There isn't, you know, there isn't ever a vacuum, you know, in the world. I mean,

00:14:23.820 the vacuum is always filled by somebody.

00:14:25.900 Right.

00:14:26.340 And there are already examples, for example, of Voice of America had a number of Chinese

00:14:31.060 language programs that have disappeared to be replaced by Chinese state media. There was a

00:14:36.920 specific example, the Wall Street Journal found of, there was a Thai program that used material

00:14:42.140 from Voice of America, Voice of America has now disappeared. That's been replaced by its Chinese 1.00

00:14:46.800 equivalent. Over and over and over again, every time we disappear, the stories that we used to tell,

00:14:53.500 the ideals that we used to have, we used to talk about, you know, the information that we were able

00:14:58.120 to provide is simply gone. And so it's very ironic, given how many people who back this

00:15:04.680 administration or claim to back it, who talk about fighting censorship and that they believe

00:15:09.300 in free speech. And it may turn out, I mean, very soon, that one of the biggest impacts of this

00:15:16.000 administration is to undermine and degrade people's ability to speak and to hear real information

00:15:22.880 all around the world. So it's not just aid. It's also the end of those kinds of programs,

00:15:29.160 the small, small support that we often gave to democratic leaders and movements, but also to

00:15:35.520 independent press, independent lawyers, all those things that were, again, really tiny amounts of

00:15:41.720 money by compared to what we spend on the military or what we're about to spend on ICE. And cutting those

00:15:48.760 means that people won't even hear about this democratic ideal or the free speech ideal anymore

00:15:55.240 because it simply won't be available to them. And the short-sightedness of that, you know, the lack

00:16:03.140 of thought about what that means, you know, for the future kind of flabbergasts me, particularly given

00:16:09.480 there's still China hawks kicking around and there's still people in and around the White House and

00:16:15.320 certainly in Congress who understand that the United States is in competition with other

00:16:20.360 countries, not only economic competition and military competition, but also kind of war of

00:16:25.100 ideas competition and that the United States would just give that up is extraordinary. And I'm amazed

00:16:31.180 there isn't louder reaction. I know that there's some in Congress are trying to help and trying to

00:16:36.900 save some of these, some of these programs, but the administration seems to be not interested at

00:16:41.920 all. Well, you mentioned USAID. Can you tell me what has been the effect of Elon Musk's

00:16:48.900 compassionate and judicious and technically agile editing of that program? So what you need to

00:16:56.820 understand about USAID is that it was, it represented, aside from everything else, whatever else it did,

00:17:02.260 it was about 40% of international humanitarian aid. That means food and medicine, basically. It's nothing

00:17:08.780 else. No other programs, nothing. But it was also a huge part of the logistics. So, you know,

00:17:16.320 trucking contracts to bring grain around the world or shipping contracts or statistics or payment

00:17:23.160 systems. And as it turned out, there were a lot of international organizations that were somehow

00:17:29.040 dependent on them and those systems that didn't necessarily even know it. And so one of the things,

00:17:34.600 even when I was in Sudan in the spring, which was a little bit after the destruction of USAID,

00:17:39.720 is people were literally just discovering that they, you know, they had a budget cut or some

00:17:44.540 institution they were used to relying on was going offline. And you had this sense of this complete

00:17:50.380 disruption. And remember that when USAID ended, it didn't end in a way that, you know, we passed on

00:17:57.240 responsibilities to someone else or, you know, wasteful programs were cut, but in a bit in a

00:18:03.560 careful way so that programs that were useful were kept. No, it was shuttered. It was shut down.

00:18:10.940 I spoke to a woman, she's quoted in the article, who didn't want her name used because she's still

00:18:15.360 technically there. She's still part of the humanitarian aid programs in the United States.

00:18:20.000 And who said to me, I talked to her in February and she had been cut off from her email. She had

00:18:26.480 been kicked out of her office. She had been cut off from payment systems. And she was personally

00:18:30.840 responsible for a group of refugees. I won't say in which country, you know, and that was like her, 0.99

00:18:37.200 her responsibility was to get food to them or get payments to them. And she was unable to do it. 0.71

00:18:43.040 She didn't know what had happened. She didn't know where the money or the food was going.

00:18:46.340 She had no ability to track it. And it just disappeared overnight. And the consequences

00:18:51.940 of that, you know, the chaos, the canceled contracts, the expense, a colleague of mine

00:18:57.500 at the Atlantic reported a few recently in the last couple of weeks reported a story about

00:19:02.460 a huge amount of sort of nutritional food aid. They're these special products that are high,

00:19:07.320 high calorie products that are made for people who are malnourished that was in a warehouse.

00:19:12.240 And because it hadn't been distributed, it was going to have to be destroyed.

00:19:15.640 But of course, to destroy a warehouse full of food is also very expensive. So the cost of

00:19:22.240 destroying it, the cost of this destruction is going to be with us for a long time. And there

00:19:26.760 were there were other very specific moments. I mean, I met a doctor who was using exactly some

00:19:33.220 of this kind of nutritional aid food for the malnourished children in the hospital where he

00:19:38.380 worked. And these were I saw the children. I mean, they were tiny babies. Mostly they were

00:19:43.580 very weak. They were lying down. Their mothers were also famished and lying down and they were

00:19:48.240 in a hospital ward. And he was almost, you know, he was saying to me, don't worry, you know, we don't

00:19:54.040 waste it. I mean, he'd heard that Elon Musk or somebody in America is worried that they're wasting

00:19:58.560 this food. And he said, no, no, of course we don't waste it. We use it. And I I had this feeling of

00:20:03.560 shame, you know, that this man who's really on the front line of saving people's lives is

00:20:09.200 justifying his use of, you know, of this product that Americans, you know, don't even care enough

00:20:15.380 about to continue sending and would rather burn in a warehouse. I mean, it's a it's a very dramatic

00:20:20.940 moment. And people don't understand it either. They ask, you know, what why? What's the reason?

00:20:26.980 And it's very hard to explain, you know, why didn't you hand it off? Why didn't you you know,

00:20:32.380 if you didn't want if you wanted to end it, why didn't you do it slowly? Why didn't you make sure

00:20:35.640 nobody was going to starve or die because of what you're doing? And there's no explanation.

00:20:40.960 Yeah, I mean, I'm hard pressed to come up with any charitable framing of what happened. I mean,

00:20:47.040 I, you know, I think the obvious callousness and ruthlessness and even cruelty and, you know,

00:20:53.860 jubilation with which it was this vandalism was accomplished, you know, going on to X and saying,

00:20:59.100 I spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper when I could have been going to great parties.

00:21:04.700 Uh, I mean, just the gloating and calling all the people in the field who have given their life to

00:21:10.980 this kind of work criminals. I mean, it's just a completely psychopathic exercise in the destruction

00:21:16.880 of American soft power. But if we were going to come up with some charitable version of skepticism

00:21:25.140 about aid to Africa or to anywhere in the developing world, what would you say to someone who would say,

00:21:32.260 listen, Africa has been, you know, you know, many of these countries certainly have been basket cases

00:21:37.800 for as long as I've been alive. We've been giving aid there, uh, at whatever level continuously,

00:21:42.860 maybe there's some set of incentives here that need to be re-examined. Maybe this is,

00:21:49.060 maybe aid is not really as helpful as we imagine. Maybe what these countries need is a dealmaker like

00:21:55.460 Donald Trump to, uh, come in and, uh, you know, privilege economic interests over handouts. And

00:22:01.840 we've, you figure out how to bring these countries into the 21st century under their own power in some

00:22:08.200 sense. I mean, is there any, again, I'm, you know, I'm casting a straws here, but is there some version

00:22:13.660 of skepticism that would kind of demand a reset of, of the status quo in this area that, that would be

00:22:21.760 anything less than morally insane?

00:22:25.380 So you can meet people, and I know some of them, who worked at USAID and who've worked in the aid world

00:22:32.220 and who would argue very strenuously for a different way of thinking about it, a different way of doing it.

00:22:37.840 I mean, just for example, so in Sudan, one of the few really amazing positive stories is a movement

00:22:45.180 called the Emergency Response Rooms, somewhat awkward name, but what it is, is a kind of Sudanese

00:22:50.040 mutual aid organizations. And in a lot of cities, they've sprung up, they created, they raised outside

00:22:56.300 money or they, they found access to food or medicine and they created their own networks. This is after the

00:23:01.820 war broke out, their own networks to help people and so on. And sometimes they had a little bit of money

00:23:06.600 from, from the outside world and some they raised themselves and so on. And there are, for example,

00:23:12.120 ex-USAID people who think that that's the kind of, you know, organization we should help. So rather

00:23:18.100 than helping, you know, large organizations or large charities or large, you know, these sometimes even

00:23:25.380 for-profit companies who helped to move aid and food around the world, you know, we should, it should

00:23:29.800 have all been much more grassroots and local. So there is a, there's a version that would make that

00:23:34.660 argument. But that wasn't what Elon Musk did. You know, what Elon Musk did was just blow up the whole

00:23:41.240 thing, as I said, in ways that were disorienting and costly. You know, it's also, you know, it's not

00:23:47.320 true that there's no progress. Actually, there's a lot of Africa that's better off than it was. And a lot 1.00

00:23:52.920 of, much of the rest of the world is more prosperous than it was. And lots of countries that were formerly

00:23:58.280 consumers of aid, like India, aren't anymore. You know, so it's, you know, it's not, it's not true

00:24:04.760 that it doesn't work or doesn't help or it never changes or nothing ever, nothing ever alters. I

00:24:09.540 mean, countries go up and down for different reasons. Sudan is a kind of, maybe is a special

00:24:13.980 case because of the war. But also Sudan, you know, and one of the things I regret about the article

00:24:19.580 and in some ways the story and the photographs and so on is that, you know, you can see in Sudan,

00:24:25.780 you can see in Khartoum that there was a middle class life there. I mean, there were apartment

00:24:31.100 buildings and blocks and infrastructure and schools and universities. And I met a lot of people who had

00:24:37.980 young people who had been in university and studying something at the time the war broke out and then

00:24:43.900 had to go home. I mean, there, it's not as if there was nothing. It's not, you know, or it's some

00:24:49.860 primitive empty place. I mean, it's very rich in terms of culture and in terms of people are well

00:24:55.200 educated. They speak excellent English. They have, they know very, they know a lot about the outside

00:24:59.960 world. You know, they're not as far away from us as we would like to imagine. And as I say, it's not

00:25:05.680 clear that everything that we did there was a disaster and a catastrophe. But there were moments when the

00:25:10.800 U.S. did help and there was a big North-South Civil War in the past. That was the old Civil War. 0.98

00:25:15.800 Yeah.

00:25:15.920 Which did have a more, it has a more of a religious component because the North was Muslim and the South

00:25:20.860 was Christian. And we did help to end that. And we did, we were part of the South Sudan, which had

00:25:26.700 been part of the same country. We were part of them breaking off and establishing themselves as an

00:25:31.160 independent state. That's a longer story, but there is progress and things do improve. And, you know,

00:25:37.040 it's just not true that, I mean, the kind of aid that I'm talking about is the aid that keeps people

00:25:41.940 alive. So nutritional supplements, medicine, things like that. And I don't see any good argument for

00:25:49.560 ending that. I can see good arguments for finding ways to get it to people in better ways. I can

00:25:55.400 see, I can imagine, you know, changing the way it was distributed, but to cut it off from one day to

00:26:01.000 the next seems like it was impossibly cruel and pointless.

00:26:04.540 Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we have good intuitions for how societies unravel. And this is, a lot of your

00:26:12.020 work is focusing on how precarious democracy is and, you know, what happens when democracies turn

00:26:19.980 illiberal. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe

00:26:25.880 at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense

00:26:31.580 podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 11, 2025

#429 — The New World Order

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