TRIGGERnometry - Martin Gurri：＂There's No Going Back to Normal＂

00:00:00.000 What is very, very clear is that there's something systemically wrong with these institutions.

00:00:05.800 They are maladapted.

00:00:07.360 They are a little bit like the dinosaurs that are watching this comet streak down the sky

00:00:14.220 and it's about to hit the ground.

00:00:18.220 The elites have no real ideology other than control,

00:00:22.780 and they've gone to identity because it provides control.

00:00:27.000 They have lost their authority, but now they can have control.

00:00:30.620 The chaos is not going to go away.

00:00:32.320 We're not going to go back to, quote, normal.

00:00:34.740 There's a tremendous stream of politics in the United States.

00:00:39.740 I don't know if it's like that anywhere else.

00:00:41.380 I suspect that it is.

00:00:42.820 That wants to get back to normal.

00:00:44.280 This is crazy stuff.

00:00:45.840 You know, this idea that men aren't men and women aren't women.

00:00:49.000 God, can we go back?

00:00:50.040 Well, we're never going to get back to normal, okay?

00:00:57.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:07.760 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:12.980 Our brilliant guest today is the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, Martin Gurry.

00:01:18.820 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:20.380 Thank you.

00:01:21.480 It's great to have you on the show. Fascinating read, fascinating concepts that you lay out.

00:01:25.900 But before we get into that, tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:33.440 The journey through life, huh? I mean, look at me, or those of those who can't look at me should know that I am not a young man.

00:01:40.120 So that that would be a long answer. I was born in Cuba before I was 10.

00:01:45.640 I experienced a right wing dictator and a left wing totalitarian dictator.

00:01:53.640 So by the time I came to the United States as a kid, I already understood that democracy at its worst was better than the next alternative.

00:02:06.180 So I came to the U.S. and I have to say, I know that a lot of ink gets spilled, virtual ink gets spilled about the treatment of immigrants in this country.

00:02:19.380 I can't recall a single instance of anything other than being welcomed, being a Cuban, if anything, was an advantage with the girls. 0.84

00:02:32.040 It never was a handicap.

00:02:34.600 And I have no memory.

00:02:36.020 I mean, at a very strange moment, my mind flipped and I went from thinking in Spanish to thinking in English.

00:02:41.340 And I remember my Spanish life in English in a very weird way.

00:02:45.540 um i my career was with cia i moved to the washington area and and uh i i was an analyst

00:02:55.100 of global media and we can talk about that more extensively later if you want but i mean it's the

00:03:01.160 least least sexy job in cia okay like um i i did not have my license to kill and i i the lady didn't 1.00

00:03:09.560 fall madly in love with me, except my wife, thankfully. But it turned out to be

00:03:16.600 the strategically commanding heights to be at when the digital tsunami hit the world.

00:03:26.600 Okay. So while I was there, I watched that tsunami smack. I mean, we were used to very,

00:03:33.240 very small amounts of information, open information. I was looking at open media

00:03:37.960 across the world, sometimes in original, sometimes in translation, and we had this tiny little trickle

00:03:45.180 we got to play with, and we knew what was authoritative and what wasn't. Suddenly there

00:03:49.000 was this tidal wave, this tsunami that swept over everything, battered everything. What was

00:03:54.200 authoritative in that? Well, beyond that question, which had never been answered, behind that tidal

00:04:01.360 wave, I could see, and several of us could see, ever-increasing levels of sociopolitical

00:04:07.820 turbulence.

00:04:09.040 Things were going haywire in places like Egypt, for example.

00:04:12.980 And I know it sounds kind of naive now, but at the time we were asking ourselves, what

00:04:17.800 does this have to do, you know, a communications device like the internet with politics?

00:04:23.720 I mean, what, you know, today, of course, we know that the two things are intricately

00:04:27.340 connected. And of course, the book was an attempt to, you know, my book, which I began to think

00:04:33.840 about when I left government, was an attempt to answer that question. What is the connection

00:04:39.420 between information structure and political change? And we can get more deeply into that.

00:04:46.480 The book was first published as an e-book in 2014. It did okay. Then came 2016 and Brexit

00:04:56.280 it happened. And Donald Trump happened. And it did really, really well. And then Stripe Press

00:05:03.620 offered to publish a second edition in various formats like Heartbound and Audible.

00:05:11.880 And that one came out at the end of 2018. And of course, all the madness. I'm sort of like

00:05:17.680 Dr. Doom, you know? Whenever things go terrible, the books start selling like mad. And of course,

00:05:25.140 we had January 6th and the election and all that. So it did fairly well after that. So it's an

00:05:30.560 attempt to explain the madness, the craziness, the difference between the way things used to be,

00:05:39.020 what we used to consider to be normal life, and what today seems to be bombarding us from every

00:05:44.240 direction, including the hemorrhage of authority of our institutions that seem to be very feeble

00:05:52.960 and very distrusted. And one of the most interesting concepts, when you talk about

00:05:58.500 the digital tsunami, you're talking about the fact that there's a huge amount of information

00:06:02.300 that is now available to the public that in the past wouldn't have been. And that's combined or

00:06:07.800 maybe even caused the fact that you now have a rise of populism, which is in your conception,

00:06:13.680 essentially, people wanting revenge or some kind of, they want to punish perhaps the elites that

00:06:21.460 they now increasingly distrust. And the elites themselves have no idea what to do. They don't

00:06:27.100 have the protection that they used to have when, you know, if you were a member of the elite and

00:06:31.060 you were having affairs and whatever, that wouldn't really get into the press most of the time and

00:06:34.680 you'd kind of be covered. But now every mistake you make as a member of the elite gets exposed.

00:06:39.740 People find out about it. And so you have this crumbling of trust in the elites from people who

00:06:45.080 already don't like the elites. And the information flows that we now have are increasingly amplifying

00:06:50.600 that so how how is this all impacting our world well i mean basically you have to go back um again

00:07:00.980 i i you know reluctantly hark back to the fact that i am not a young man i lived in the 20th

00:07:06.660 century a chunk of my life okay a considerable chunk um and it was a different world it was a

00:07:13.540 different world it dealt with that scarcity of information that i was talking about that was

00:07:18.240 so comfy when I was a global media analyst.

00:07:21.960 And all our institutions, including our institutions of politics and democracy, but also media

00:07:27.560 and also the entertainment world, also the scientific establishment, the academia, all

00:07:35.940 of them basically were resting on the fact that we had no alternative sources of information.

00:07:43.380 So they had authority because they did have, each institution had sort of a semi-monopoly on a stream of information.

00:07:51.760 So, you know, Walter Cronkite stood and looked us in the eye.

00:07:54.720 He was a very imposing man, looked like your rich uncle or something, and deep voice.

00:07:59.780 And he would say, that's the way it is for, you know, February 2nd, 2023.

00:08:05.640 You didn't think about the fact that he had given you like 23 minutes of two or three visual stories.

00:08:11.780 stories. And that supposed was to cover what happened in the world that entire day, right?

00:08:16.120 You just thought, well, that's all I got, right? That entire world was swept away by the digital

00:08:23.580 tsunami. Now we have massive amounts of alternative information that works both inside and outside

00:08:29.920 the institutions. The president, for example, in the olden days relied heavily in CIA, but

00:08:35.440 increasingly would say, wait, I'm reading this thing that's contrary to what you say, CIA. So

00:08:41.180 So the authority of – the CIA was kind of like the president's newspaper, but like all newspapers, it's kind of losing authority and credibility.

00:08:50.220 Why?

00:08:50.800 Because there are so many alternative sources.

00:08:53.300 Plus, where do these sources come from?

00:08:56.120 They don't come from the top.

00:08:57.200 They come from the bottom.

00:08:58.020 It's an eruption from the bottom of information that essentially represents a public that is very angry at what it has seen.

00:09:11.020 The old 20th century world promised a lot.

00:09:14.840 When things were not delivered, it could sort of put a lot of dirt under the carpet.

00:09:20.200 But also, you know, it could sacrifice an individual, a Richard Nixon say, but say, you know, the system worked. We saved the system. What is very, very clear is that there's something systemically wrong with these institutions. They are maladapted.

00:09:37.040 And the elites, as you say, who are on top of these, who basically manage them, and they're all the institutions that make modern life possible, they are not looking forward.

00:09:50.100 They're looking backwards.

00:09:51.080 They're very reactionary.

00:09:52.180 That world you described where you could be JFK, and apparently this is a man who had more affairs than a person like me could even conceive of, all right?

00:10:05.420 And yet, and I guess everybody knew it on the, in the inside circle of elites, the magic circle, everybody knew this was going on.

00:10:13.940 But those of us who were outside that magic circle had no idea because he was protected.

00:10:18.980 All right.

00:10:20.180 And that is what our current elite still, well, there's still too many boomers like me, too many people who remember or are nostalgic for the 20th century.

00:10:29.140 And they want to drag us there.

00:10:30.900 They want to drag us back there.

00:10:32.180 And yes, they are very terrified, they're very panicked, but they are working to get us back there.

00:10:40.160 And if you look at Twitter files and all the information that's been coming out there,

00:10:44.980 there is a pretty concerted effort to turn the information sphere,

00:10:50.260 the current churning digital information sphere, into something that looks something like

00:10:56.220 the front page of the New York Times circa 1985 or something like that.

00:11:01.920 Martin, so what are the problems with these institutions?

00:11:06.920 Well, the problems basically are they are a little bit like the dinosaurs

00:11:13.460 that are watching this comet, you know, streak down the sky

00:11:18.720 and are about to hit the ground.

00:11:22.760 They were these great big lumbering hierarchical things,

00:11:26.900 mostly in mobile, that they're just fine in the era of mass production, mass audiences.

00:11:35.460 Everything was top-down.

00:11:37.320 The masses were included in these institutions, but at the bottom,

00:11:40.680 and as basically passive recipients of what the top was delivering, right?

00:11:46.300 And in the digital age, basically, you're dealing with a very, very chaotic environment.

00:11:55.140 that digital tsunami is very unforgiving of these institutions,

00:12:00.960 unforgiving of the people who run them,

00:12:03.200 shows every mistake they make that didn't seem to come out so much,

00:12:07.060 shows that they're promising things and remembers what they promised,

00:12:10.460 and it brings it back up.

00:12:12.140 In the olden days, there was a big memory hole.

00:12:14.720 You put the things that you said you were going to do

00:12:16.500 and didn't get around to, and what could we do?

00:12:19.680 We had no way of remembering.

00:12:21.020 We had no way of bringing it up if we did.

00:12:22.800 And essentially, we are, as public, we live in a world that's fairly flat, relatively flat.

00:12:32.780 It moves at the speed of light.

00:12:35.040 So that, for example, if I wanted something from Amazon, I just push a button, a key, and it's on my doorstep on the next day.

00:12:46.720 But if I deal with my government, it takes months and months to get things done.

00:12:52.040 it may sometimes years sometimes never okay depending on which side of the government you're

00:12:56.760 dealing with and um and and the attitudes are very different we're used to personalization in in the

00:13:03.480 digital world well no the the government treats you and all these institutions academia for example

00:13:10.440 treat you as so you come to us and then we condescend to talk to you in our own terms

00:13:15.800 And then you will, you know, applaud us because it's what we deserve.

00:13:20.760 And I think that method, which is a combination of structural problems within the institutions

00:13:25.660 and of rhetorical and also almost moral problems with the elite class that runs the institutions,

00:13:36.560 I think it's made for a tremendous coalition between that group and the rest of us,

00:13:43.960 many of the rest of us anyway who are fed up they're just not happy with the situation want

00:13:49.000 to change want government to look a lot more like amazon i mean amazon is a great big institution

00:13:53.640 it's a great big hierarchy it uh but that's not what you that's not what you um encounter you

00:14:01.320 encountered service um government gives you service but that's not what you encounter you

00:14:06.220 encounter bureaucracy you encounter condescension arrogance so we want one thing to be more like

00:14:11.420 the other, I think it's perfectly doable. I don't think the elites want to do it.

00:14:16.680 That's a really, really interesting point. And Martin, how long do you think the elites are

00:14:22.300 going to be able to hold on to this power for? Because we're seeing in the UK, they're currently

00:14:26.720 debating in the House of Lords, the online safety bill about what people should and shouldn't be

00:14:32.520 allowed to say online. And to me, this looks like another paragraph, if I'm putting it bluntly.

00:14:38.220 So how long do you think they're going to be able to hold on for?

00:14:41.420 That's a really good question, and I have no answer. I don't make predictions. You want to be wrong, make a prediction, right? CIA's entire business model was prediction for the president. And as long as tomorrow looks like yesterday, you're good, man. That's most of the time, believe it or not.

00:15:01.080 But, of course, what people want to know, including the precedent, is discontinuities, and we can't predict those.

00:15:08.260 I don't know.

00:15:08.720 I've been surprised, I think, because nobody predicted COVID, which was the trigger where the public was so afraid that they actually wanted the elites to be what the elites had been claiming to be from the 20th century on, which is we are the experts.

00:15:21.620 We know we have solutions to problems, so there's almost a mathematical mindset to what are very squishy and difficult circumstances, not problems.

00:15:35.240 But I think the public wanted desperately for this to be a mathematical problem that could be solved right away by these wise people that were telling us they could do it.

00:15:41.500 And I think so then nobody complained too loudly when social media was essentially censored so that non-institutional opinions about COVID were either muted or just blocked out from the information sphere.

00:16:03.080 And of course, that took about five seconds before it tipped over into politics.

00:16:07.180 And it was more a question of, well, we need to protect our democracy and we need to protect our elections and this Russian hacking.

00:16:14.980 And suddenly everything that a certain side, you know, the progressive side found offensive, had become necessary to essentially censor.

00:16:25.300 And so how long can that last?

00:16:28.560 I'm one who believes that the Internet is too big an area.

00:16:32.180 I said it's virtually infinite.

00:16:33.780 For human purposes, it's infinite.

00:16:35.400 If you see how much gets ingested by YouTube in every minute,

00:16:39.180 you go like, well, you can't put a fact-checker on every corner

00:16:42.780 of this enormous territory.

00:16:44.280 So I don't think it can be controlled, but I don't know.

00:16:49.760 I mean, that's my guess.

00:16:51.780 Well, Martin, what you're describing, sorry to interrupt,

00:16:54.300 loath as I am to quote Vladimir Lenin,

00:16:57.660 but he said that you know a revolution is coming

00:17:00.260 when those at the bottom can't take it anymore

00:17:02.300 and those at the top don't want to give up what they have.

00:17:05.120 And it sounds to me like that is exactly the situation

00:17:07.720 that you're describing.

00:17:09.580 Well, let's put it this way.

00:17:11.420 Coming from Cuba, I'm not a real fan of revolutions, all right?

00:17:14.700 Yeah, sure.

00:17:15.600 Coming from Russia, I'm also not a big fan of revolutions.

00:17:19.120 Vive la revolución, Martin!

00:17:20.580 yeah so i and and what you said is is has a a big caveat attached to it okay i think i think

00:17:35.140 the short answer is it depends on us all right where this heads depends on us and if we're

00:17:41.940 passive then the elites will have what they had before in a very ramshackle much more ramshackle

00:17:49.140 and spotty way or they had some sort of control because we just kind of passively allowed it to

00:17:54.740 happen as we did during COVID. But the difference with the Lenin quote and now is that Lenin was

00:18:03.720 the head of what was a typical 20th century revolutionary organization, which was when you

00:18:11.380 looked at that, the Bolshevik party was a tiny little hierarchy that longed and lusted to take 0.64

00:18:18.160 power and become government, the state itself, right, and had a very powerful ideology that

00:18:25.140 it followed and attached or flowing from that ideology had any number of programs that would

00:18:32.080 be imposed if you took over the state because the ideology suggested or mandated that.

00:18:38.820 The public today has, oh, and you had a leader at the top of the organization that could

00:18:43.940 just say, and Lenin himself could say, okay, this is the way it's going to happen.

00:18:47.000 I mean, when Lenin arrived at the Finland station, he said, we're going to have a revolution.

00:18:52.280 And his entire group said, no, we're not.

00:18:54.700 And he said, yes, we are.

00:18:55.700 And they did.

00:18:56.280 Okay.

00:18:56.780 And he was right.

00:18:57.940 He called that situation much more clearly than they did.

00:19:01.260 Today, when you look at the revolt to the public in places like Chile, in places like Spain

00:19:07.340 with the indignados, the US with the occupiers, Black Lives Matter, there are no leaders. 0.79

00:19:13.020 Not only is there no ideology, it's almost anti-ideology.

00:19:16.100 There are no programs. There is no coherent set of, and there is no wish to take over power by any of these groups. It is a very, very paradoxical thing. They attack, they loathe the institution, they loathe the elite, they loathe the government.

00:19:35.920 And then they say, we hate this thing about you.

00:19:40.160 Fix it.

00:19:40.640 They're basically, they then cede to the government the duty of reform or revolution or whatever

00:19:48.500 you want to call it, right?

00:19:49.580 Which, of course, never works.

00:19:51.240 Never works.

00:19:51.800 So you have, for example, in Egypt, this crowd, this revolt in Tahrir Square that probably

00:20:01.760 was the determining factor in getting the dictator, the Hosni Mubarak, 30 years had been in power

00:20:08.400 out of there. He got overthrown. Then what happens? Well, who knows? The crowd had nothing

00:20:14.160 to do with what happened afterwards. Two old-fashioned hierarchical institutions,

00:20:18.560 the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood slugged it out for the next few years. The

00:20:24.080 military won, but the public had nothing to do with that because they had no ideality,

00:20:29.040 no program, no leaders, no organization. So, um, yes, you can say that we can't take it anymore,

00:20:36.960 but what do we put in its place? What do we put in place? And even January 6th is in some ways

00:20:43.520 an example of that people quote unquote storm the Capitol, but they don't have a plan or a program

00:20:48.720 to do anything. Right. Uh, it's, it's a, it's an interesting point that you make.

00:20:53.680 i suppose the big question that bothers me in all of this is if we accept the framing that

00:21:02.600 in the past let's say elite institutions dictated to the public what the truth was

00:21:07.660 and there was general consensus more or less about what the truth was and of course people

00:21:12.320 would argue you know do we need communism or do we need capitalism or do we need socialism

00:21:17.700 but he was still from a common shared set of beliefs about the world now we've got to a point

00:21:25.300 where i think the real problem is we're getting to the stage where it's hard to know what the

00:21:31.100 truth is anymore yeah i mean we're a moment of post-truth and i don't mean that in the way that

00:21:38.520 many liberal and progressive thinkers portray that phrase, which is post-truth is what Trump

00:21:49.360 does, for example, or what people who clearly lie and yet seem to have the fact that they're

00:21:59.040 telling something that's not factually correct seems to have no effect on their popularity.

00:22:06.160 That's only one aspect of it.

00:22:07.540 I think it cuts every way.

00:22:09.980 The digital dispensation has fractured us, has fractured us.

00:22:14.320 That is what it does.

00:22:15.640 And a case can be made, that's the way the public really is, right?

00:22:18.900 In other words, what we were before, a mass audience,

00:22:22.280 was a very artificial construct that kind of served the people

00:22:26.440 that were manufacturing to us and were entertaining us on television.

00:22:30.840 So you had two or three varieties of everything.

00:22:33.560 and we were happy with that.

00:22:35.980 No, I don't think so.

00:22:36.980 We would have wanted much more.

00:22:40.020 And so from personalization on out,

00:22:42.580 we're very fractured.

00:22:44.680 I think that we're kind of like a mirror that has fallen

00:22:51.520 and the public lives on the broken shards.

00:22:54.320 And each shard has a perspective on reality.

00:22:57.820 I'm not a postmodernist, okay?

00:23:00.040 if you stand if i'm standing in the middle of a street and i see a truck coming at me i can't

00:23:06.320 post modern my way out of being run over all right i i'm gonna just jump get out of the way

00:23:11.940 but most of what we deal with in our in our society today most of the facts most of the

00:23:17.940 reality most of the truth that we deal with our society are mediated they're given to us by

00:23:23.500 someone starting with your teachers and then all the way out with authorities that you trust

00:23:29.540 the media, and so forth. And I think that is what's also fractured. And so post-truth is

00:23:35.820 the idea that in certain quarters, people still believe that Donald Trump was colluding with the

00:23:41.920 Russians. It has been pretty much refuted with deep, deep investigations. The QAnon people that 1.00

00:23:50.020 stormed the Capitol building believe that our government was run by a pedophile ring, right?

00:23:58.480 So, I mean, these are, so the dangerous side of that is that at some point we disintegrate into the Tower of Babel.

00:24:10.440 We're all speaking different languages and we're kind of yelling at each other.

00:24:13.480 And Jonathan Haidt has a very interesting article at that point.

00:24:16.620 He stole the metaphor from me, though.

00:24:18.340 I want to know.

00:24:20.040 We'll take it up with him when we have him on the show.

00:24:22.460 And he acknowledged it.

00:24:23.840 He acknowledged it.

00:24:25.760 Sorry, carry on, Martin.

00:24:27.880 Yeah, just two more things. There is a point at which you have to somehow act, and you have to act on the reality that you understand to be, right? And that's hard under these conditions. That's the dangerous side.

00:24:42.760 On the plus side, science tells us that we don't have a firm grasp on truth.

00:24:50.000 I mean, the whole idea of science is not that it grants us truth,

00:24:54.780 it's that we don't know truth.

00:24:56.860 And I think maybe there's a healthy aspect to realizing

00:25:01.060 that there are different perspectives on truth.

00:25:03.640 Truth is perspectible.

00:25:05.160 It's not the postmodern thing that's not constructed.

00:25:07.900 It's perspectible.

00:25:09.760 And I can, you know, if you are at the top of the Empire State Building, New York looks like the heavenly city.

00:25:18.480 If you're at the bottom of the Empire State Building, you know, and there's a homeless person retching on the sidewalk and traffic and pollution, it looks like hell.

00:25:28.560 Well, it's the same New York City.

00:25:29.800 It just depends on your perspective.

00:25:31.220 And I think it's maybe it's good to have our sense, our perspectives questioned by others.

00:25:38.540 Yeah, I completely agree with you, Martin.

00:25:41.140 To me, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you is that you talked about a lack of

00:25:46.240 ideology within these kind of rebel movements, shall we just call them, for the sake of argument.

00:25:52.360 But there also seems to be a lack of ideology in our elites as well, doesn't there?

00:25:56.920 There doesn't seem to be a consistent way of thinking that they have.

00:26:02.040 Yeah, I would say that's true to a certain extent.

00:26:06.160 Yes. But certainly in America, the United States, the elites have converted, mass conversion. I mean, I don't think anything has happened since the age of Emperor Constantine, right?

00:26:20.380 The entire institutional set.

00:26:24.780 And I'm talking from like, you know, crusty old corporations like Coca-Cola all the way to the government, to academia, to entertainment, to scientific establishment.

00:26:39.060 Everybody has converted to the cult of identity.

00:26:42.220 I call it the established church, right?

00:26:44.920 So now identity is not an ideology.

00:26:49.300 Identity is sort of like a perpetual conflict machine.

00:26:53.400 Ideology reconciles contradictions and provides a context for a path to justice defined in a specific way, right?

00:27:04.040 This is not like that.

00:27:06.220 I mean, this is more of an endless jockeying, grinding of who gets what.

00:27:13.960 You know, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim.

00:27:16.160 But there is no way of basically justifying or ameliorating the conflict between victims, right?

00:27:28.300 So if you're a black person, you get proceedings over a white person.

00:27:33.040 But if you're a black woman, you should get proceedings over a black man. 1.00

00:27:37.180 But if you're a black lesbian, you should get proceedings over a black cis lady, right? 1.00

00:27:42.240 So do you need some gigantic algorithm here or some kind of thing like that to even work out how it happens? 0.92

00:27:50.820 So, yes, the elites have no real ideology other than control, and they've gone to identity because it provides control.

00:28:02.540 They have lost their authority, but now they can have control.

00:28:05.680 They can tell you you are not allowed to use that word because it's offensive.

00:28:09.240 It causes harm.

00:28:10.920 And, of course, all the words they put in that stack are the words that convey opinions they don't like.

00:28:16.920 Yeah, it's a really, really good point, Martin.

00:28:19.380 And we're talking about this kind of post-truth world, but doesn't it mean that in a post-truth world it's impossible to have a cohesive society?

00:28:29.580 Because the most important thing is that we all agree that something is true.

00:28:34.020 And if we can't do that, then how can we have any type of discussion or debate?

00:28:38.780 Well, at some level, that's true. Well, let's not forget that liberal democracy is an amazing invention, right? And what you're describing is the world of a 30 years war, right?

00:28:53.720 Where I believe in a certain kind of God, and I believe in a certain kind of Christianity, and a certain kind of life that must follow from that, and because you believe in something very slightly different, the kind of thing that from the perspective of history seems almost insignificant, right?

00:29:13.620 But there's a few words difference between what you believe and what I believe. 0.83

00:29:16.840 We have to now kill each other, all right?

00:29:19.820 And liberal democracy, which evolved out of that world as a way to solve that dilemma,

00:29:25.560 well, how do we do that, allowed for people who believed in radically different religious,

00:29:31.880 cosmic views, sources of meaning, which in the end are the most important things to any

00:29:37.460 human being or to any community, to be side by side with very different ones that believe

00:29:43.200 and very, you know, if you are an atheist, that's not a minor difference anymore. Or if you're a

00:29:49.540 Muslim or a Jew, that's not a minor difference anymore. And yet we all lived peacefully with

00:29:57.160 each other, although our beliefs about cosmic truth were so different. Something like that can

00:30:03.500 be worked out. You just have to want to work it out. The incentives in the digital world,

00:30:08.860 unfortunately so far, have all been towards conflict. Because we do live in the Tower of

00:30:16.440 Babel. People who speak with soft voices are just not heard, okay? You need to scream. And if you

00:30:22.460 can scream with anger in your voice, you catch a little more attention. And you can scream with

00:30:26.640 anger in your voice. And you get somebody on the other side to scream back at you. Now you're

00:30:29.840 suddenly a hero, right? And people start to gather behind you and behind the other person.

00:30:33.720 And you have a sort of heroic battle of barbarians, you know, like it used to happen in the dark ages. 0.71

00:30:41.860 That's the incentive so far of the digital world, but it doesn't have to be.

00:30:46.700 So how does this get fixed?

00:30:49.720 Oh, well, of course, if I had the answer to that, I wouldn't be talking to you guys.

00:30:54.960 I'd be counting my billions.

00:30:57.820 Yeah.

00:30:58.320 I mean, I go back to what I said before.

00:31:01.340 It's all up to us.

00:31:02.860 nothing is determined i am not a determinist i don't believe like like the marxists do that 0.97

00:31:07.860 there is a fixed um direction of history i don't believe there martin hold on hold on you i think

00:31:14.680 would agree with me that human beings first and foremost respond to incentives and if you have an

00:31:19.660 incentive structure that incentivizes conflict you will get conflict and if you have an incentive

00:31:24.480 structure that doesn't incentivize conflict and incentivizes cooperation for example you will get

00:31:29.960 cooperation. So as you say yourself, in this current climate, particularly online, we have

00:31:35.580 an incentive structure that incentivizes people to antagonize each other, to see each other as

00:31:41.080 enemies, to see each other as almost subhuman. When I observe people's interactions, it feels

00:31:47.860 like that. So how do we change that incentive structure? Because at this point, it's not just

00:31:55.000 that it's a random accident of of the fact that online seems to have created this facebook twitter

00:32:01.320 instagram tick tock they're all invested in this youtube is invested in this it benefits them

00:32:07.400 because these are the things that get clicks online so how does this get fixed well i mean

00:32:13.320 how how did the 30 years war end right i mean in the end there are many the same um structure can

00:32:22.120 be applied differently so that the 30 years war ended with exhaustion all right with exhaustion

00:32:31.560 look we're in the early early days of a colossal transformation that uh from the industrial age

00:32:41.080 to something that doesn't even have a name yet okay i am not gonna see the end of that

00:32:46.840 you guys i'm looking at you you may not see the end of it all right

00:32:50.040 right? You're saying we're old, mate. We're not going to make it.

00:32:54.580 Well, you can interpret it that way, or you can interpret that this is going to be a long,

00:32:58.880 long process, okay? So what is going to be at the end? Okay, when I say it's up to us,

00:33:06.480 the chaos is not going to go away. We're not going to go back to, quote, normal. There's

00:33:10.800 a tremendous stream of politics in the United States. I don't know if it's like that anywhere

00:33:17.040 else I suspect that it is, that wants to get back to normal. This is crazy stuff, you know,

00:33:21.940 this idea that men aren't men and women aren't women. God, can we go back to, well, we're never

00:33:26.560 going to get back to normal, okay? But we can carry to the end of this process those things

00:33:32.300 that are really important to us. For me, it's democracy, for example, okay? So what happened

00:33:37.980 in 30 Years' War was exhaustion. All these religions fought themselves to a standstill, 0.99

00:33:44.840 And suddenly something new came up, the nation state that said, to hell with this, right?

00:33:50.120 We are now going to impose a way of being that is less destructive.

00:33:58.760 Well, we can't see what's going to be happening in 10, 15, 20 years from now.

00:34:02.840 But the same incentive structure that today seems to generate a lot of views may 10, 15 years down the road make people sick because they've been at it for so long.

00:34:14.000 and then the incentives will flip all right the incentives will flip it's possible i'm not saying

00:34:20.180 it's going to happen i'm not saying it's not going to happen it's up to us no i think you're

00:34:24.480 right and action always causes some kind of reaction and people will get fed up with this

00:34:29.260 and i already you know one of the conversations we we obviously on this show talked a lot about

00:34:34.100 this progressive the excesses of progressive ideology and how it's infected all sorts of

00:34:39.380 different industries etc but on the other hand a lot of a lot of people i think in our space are

00:34:43.720 starting to think about okay well we've identified what the problem is what's the answer what is a

00:34:49.180 positive vision for the future that can people can unite around that actually inspires people

00:34:53.660 so i suppose my question for you is if it's up to us what is a responsible person who's watching

00:35:00.260 or listening to this what are we to do in our own lives about all of this right okay start with this

00:35:08.420 All that anger or all that questioning, let's call it, all that distrust, all that pushiness, let's call it, that you are now aiming at people that you don't even know and at institutions that you have no access to, start by aiming that at yourself.

00:35:29.640 All right. And I'm always struck when I look at the Victorians, the English Victorians, okay, that have such a terrible reputation for being smug and being self-righteous, how not like that they were. All right. Go read Gladstone's diary. This man was, you know, one of the great figures in the world.

00:35:53.580 one of the great prime ministers of Britain.

00:35:58.540 And he was very Christian.

00:36:00.500 And his diary was one gigantic self-questioning.

00:36:04.940 And the answers were, he felt very inadequate.

00:36:08.880 He was not yelling at everybody else for not living up to his expectations.

00:36:12.880 He was asking himself, how can I be better?

00:36:15.840 And he did some very strange things trying to do that.

00:36:19.100 We can get into that later if you want.

00:36:20.400 But I think we need to start with that. We need to ask ourselves, we need to have a more thoughtful relationship with our elites.

00:36:33.780 The Spanish philosopher, José Ortega Gasset, says that we have a mutual, selective relationship with our elites.

00:36:43.900 So think about the people that, not just that you vote for or the parties that you give money for,

00:36:51.180 but who do you, what movies do you see you patronize, right?

00:36:55.600 What products do you buy?

00:36:56.860 What companies do you give your money to?

00:37:00.360 You are basically selecting an elite class by doing that.

00:37:05.720 Be more thoughtful about that, okay?

00:37:08.740 And we need a new elite class.

00:37:10.720 I mean, honestly, I think the current class we have just is mired in 20th century reactionary

00:37:17.180 thinking, and we need an elite class.

00:37:19.400 This will not be solved until that changes, because I am not a radical egalitarian.

00:37:26.640 Nothing gets done without institutions being added, institutions being hierarchy of some

00:37:32.180 kind, and hierarchies require elites.

00:37:35.600 So they'll have to be shallower.

00:37:37.360 within a class of elites that is more comfortable being far closer to the public than the current

00:37:43.100 elite class is. And we have at least a part of a role in selecting that elite class.

00:37:51.100 And then be what you would want others to be. Part of the reason, for example, that I never

00:37:56.080 say make predictions is because it's bullshit. I mean, I would be pretending to do something 0.98

00:38:01.140 that I cannot do. In principle, we cannot predict the future. I would love for people to think that

00:38:07.080 can that would make me a very important person but if i do it and i fail i have tarnished my

00:38:13.320 integrity i've tarnished my my um authority as as anybody who knows anything right so speak humbly

00:38:22.600 speak uh um directly and don't dance around and and have some courage i think part of what's

00:38:30.920 happening to us now to this is more on the public side is uh people are afraid to speak out because

00:38:37.240 they can lose their jobs they can lose their um they can be you know silenced in social media 0.98

00:38:42.440 they can be demonetized all kinds of bad things can happen to you well damn it you know do it do 0.97

00:38:48.760 it if you really believe in what you're doing you speak out do what um what uh pope john paul said 0.98

00:38:56.760 be not afraid, be not afraid. And that he was talking about the people in places like Poland,

00:39:02.120 who are in the communist government. The punishment there was a lot worse than it is here.

00:39:06.360 So do it. And I think if that trajectory is followed, this entire churning crazy

00:39:15.640 Tower of Babel circumstance will start to crystallize in something more manageable.

00:39:20.200 it's a really good point you make do you think our institutions can be saved or do you think

00:39:28.220 we need to build new institutions i think both i think both um i i think the the old institutions

00:39:37.460 certainly can't stay the way they are you look at political parties the traditional political

00:39:42.740 parties today and it's no wonder that they completely just withered up and they're they're

00:39:47.420 just shriveled versions of what they used to be.

00:39:50.240 But there's so many different ways in which you can run a political party.

00:39:53.480 I mean, you can run a political party like a subreddit, you know, like you can just say,

00:39:57.100 what is everybody interested in?

00:39:58.540 And the issues that the majority are interested in rise to the top.

00:40:02.160 And then at least the elites that run the party understand what the base is really,

00:40:07.880 really looking at, not the other way around, where the elites tell the base, this is what

00:40:12.980 you're interested in.

00:40:13.880 And everybody's shaking their heads and nobody's listening, right?

00:40:16.080 so um some some institutions i mean like the newspaper is gone i mean that that's there are

00:40:23.660 many institutions that are just basically going to be swept away um some are going to be drastically

00:40:29.780 altered and i believe our politics are going to be very drastically altered um but all this has

00:40:37.260 happened before i mean you can call it reform rather than revolution here in the united states

00:40:41.600 for example, our founders and framers, who were such a brilliant crew, basically created a republic

00:40:50.640 of gentlemen. Then in the early 20th century, that was drastically changed. What was erected was

00:40:58.080 the system that we're not trying to leave behind, that 20th century mass system that basically

00:41:05.160 incorporated literally tens of millions of people that were just entering history at that time.

00:41:10.380 And at the bottom of these mass structures, like mass production, mass parties, mass movements, mass consumerism, mass entertainment.

00:41:21.660 So the system has been changed.

00:41:23.700 The institutions have been changed.

00:41:25.240 They can be changed again.

00:41:26.920 We think of them, we call it the federal government, and we call it the state governments.

00:41:32.840 And we think of them as if they had been the same from George Washington's day to our own.

00:41:38.420 They're very different.

00:41:39.080 But if Thomas Jefferson, one of my favorite persons in history, woke up, and he's also a Virginian, like I am, and took a look at what was going on with the government today, he would crawl back in his grave and never come out again, okay?

00:41:53.420 It's a very different world, a different set of institutional world from the one he expected would be created.

00:42:01.080 So we can change the institutions.

00:42:04.860 We can move them from the past to the future.

00:42:08.200 It's happened before.

00:42:10.260 Some will wither away, and that's fine.

00:42:13.780 Some will be drastically altered.

00:42:16.540 I don't think any will be unchanged.

00:42:18.600 All of them will be changed in some way or another.

00:42:21.660 Yeah, I keep reiterating that's a good point

00:42:26.060 because the thing that I like about you, Martin,

00:42:28.800 is that your answers are very measured,

00:42:31.420 and it's very easy in these times to be a polemicist,

00:42:34.840 to go one way or another,

00:42:36.260 because, as you said before, it gets clicks.

00:42:40.820 So we need you to do more of that if you want this interview to get watched.

00:42:44.580 Exactly. We need the million views, Martin.

00:42:46.480 Tell me society is going to crumble.

00:42:48.540 But what effect do you think technology is going to play in this?

00:42:52.380 Because it's obviously going to play a major part,

00:42:54.340 and now we're going to see the rise of AI.

00:42:56.620 And I know you don't do predictions,

00:42:58.400 but you can already see things are being shaped by technology.

00:43:01.620 i mean information structure um sets the stage and arranges the props for the human drama

00:43:13.840 part of the reason that we cannot go back to the 20th century is because we have a 20th century

00:43:20.260 stage set and um and the props are arranged for the 21st century and the elites you know i sometimes

00:43:28.840 I probably shouldn't use this comparison because most young people don't even know what I'm talking about.

00:43:34.520 You guys know what the Marx Brothers were?

00:43:36.600 Yeah, of course.

00:43:37.920 Okay.

00:43:38.420 Well, don't say of course.

00:43:39.360 You'd be surprised at the number of young people that I say that to and they go, huh?

00:43:43.760 So 21st century stage is set for something like a Marx Brothers comedy.

00:43:49.700 It's kind of slapstick, irreverent, crazy, makes no sense.

00:43:54.260 People falling down, people standing up.

00:43:56.620 the elites desperately want to play hamlet it's shakespeare it's epic it's important

00:44:06.640 but the problem is this you know even if you play hamlet it's going to be groucho marx playing

00:44:12.780 hamlet and he's going to do pratfalls all right so it just can't work it just can't work so

00:44:17.720 technology is going to play a fundamental part in this it's already played a fundamental part

00:44:22.600 Now comes the human aspect. Now comes the human moment where we take the technology and make it our own in a way, hopefully, if things go right, in a way that sustains democracy and sustains our prosperity and maybe tones down the incentive for conflict.

00:44:44.240 and what gives you reason to hope because a lot of the times when we talk about this when we talk

00:44:52.520 about these issues people say you know they point out the things that we should worry about and of

00:44:59.060 course that's a valid argument but we don't also talk about the positives as well yeah okay let's

00:45:06.400 go back to the 30 years

00:45:08.440 war, all right?

00:45:09.960 I always like to tell a story that

00:45:12.140 my friend

00:45:13.620 Antonio Garcia Martinez,

00:45:16.640 a fellow Cuban,

00:45:19.280 tells,

00:45:20.280 which is, if you went to

00:45:21.560 the 30 years war, which, by the way,

00:45:24.300 was the most devastating war in Europe,

00:45:26.140 including World War II, ever.

00:45:28.720 I think Germany, it took like 0.74

00:45:30.040 three or four generations to even go back

00:45:32.180 to its former population.

00:45:34.620 If you go back to that war,

00:45:36.080 and interview the man in the street and ask him,

00:45:38.340 what do you think of the printing press?

00:45:41.740 That person would say, it's the most destructive, horrible,

00:45:47.180 and evil innovation ever.

00:45:50.480 Take it away and destroy it.

00:45:51.540 Because at that time, people were coming out of church

00:45:54.460 with their little hymnals, and my hymnal had those three words 0.99

00:45:58.820 that were different from yours, and now I had to kill you, 1.00

00:46:00.840 and you had to kill me, right? 0.99

00:46:02.460 So the printing press was responsible for this fragmentation,

00:46:05.260 which tends to happen with new information structures, and basically it was represented

00:46:14.380 in hideous, horrible violence. We're not there. Okay, you want to be optimistic? This is not the

00:46:21.160 30 years war. Come on, look around you. Look around you. Yes, we're yelling at each other,

00:46:26.740 but you know what? It just flipped down the monitor on your laptop, and okay, I can tell

00:46:34.340 you, I'm looking, if I were to do that, I would be looking at the window of my neighborhood in

00:46:38.820 Vienna, Virginia, where people are peacefully walking their dogs and waving at each other as

00:46:43.880 they pass in the street. And I don't know whether they're pro-Trump or they're pro-woke or they're

00:46:49.300 any, they're just my neighbors. Okay. And they're walking their dogs or they're just exercising or

00:46:55.040 whatever. So this is not the 30 years war. Let's not exaggerate the conflict. I think part of what

00:47:03.000 Tower of Babel effect is, it's so loud. It's so uproarious. And it's so surrounding us. If we're

00:47:11.180 online, it's just everywhere. But this is not life. We're not shooting at each other. We're

00:47:17.320 not killing each other, mostly. So if you want to be optimistic, we can get past this moment.

00:47:25.540 It took 150 years for the human race to figure out what to do with the printing press. And it

00:47:31.100 probably won't take as long. Things move faster now to figure out the digital information structure,

00:47:36.520 but it will take a long time. It will take a long time. And then we may get there without

00:47:40.680 massive bloodshed. So far, there hasn't been any. Well, that is certainly a good thing. Although,

00:47:45.680 of course, I would argue that some of the excesses of what people call the culture void

00:47:51.140 does bleed out into real life. I mean, if you look at the trans issue, for example,

00:47:55.020 there are real world impacts of that particular worldview on young people and women in particular.

00:48:00.980 But, of course, you're right.

00:48:02.040 We're not killing each other.

00:48:03.120 And the curious thing for me speaking of killing each other is what do you think the impact is of this on the West versus its adversaries, let's put it gently?

00:48:14.940 Because we spend a lot of time in the West, you know, doing this division and argument and conflict thing in a way that other cultures are not.

00:48:24.060 Are we making ourselves more vulnerable or will the West prevail in this situation?

00:48:29.520 What are your thoughts?

00:48:30.480 Yeah, what is the West? I mean, that is such an old-fashioned category, right, that you will probably get banned on Twitter, you know, before Musk by even using that term.

00:48:41.300 I, look, I intuitively would agree with you, except I'm looking at the world.

00:48:51.620 This is what I do, right?

00:48:52.620 This is what I've been trained to do.

00:48:54.900 I'm looking at the world, and let's talk about the West.

00:48:58.780 Let's talk about liberal democracy, okay?

00:49:02.660 And, okay, what are the rivals of liberal democracy?

00:49:07.800 Well, again, back in the 20th century, there was a severe, there were several, there were several major rivals. Liberal democracy at a certain point, that was before my time, was considered to be old fashioned and useless, right? And the fascists and the Nazis and the Bolsheviks all had better ways. 0.65

00:49:25.660 Well, where are those systems now?

00:49:27.960 Well, they basically have bit the dust.

00:49:32.140 What is the ideological rival?

00:49:34.440 What system is the rival of liberal democracy today?

00:49:38.260 There is none, right?

00:49:39.740 And what countries are undemocratic and hostile to us because we are democratic?

00:49:44.980 Well, look at Iran. 0.50

00:49:47.700 It's a mess.

00:49:48.780 People are shouting from the rooftops.

00:49:50.660 I was watching this video.

00:49:51.720 Shouting from the rooftops of Tehran, you know, Ayatollah, you're a dictator, go away, resign, right? 0.70

00:50:01.260 I mean, there's tremendous, tremendous anti-government, anti-regime upsurge of anger.

00:50:09.780 Look at Russia. 0.82

00:50:11.140 Russia is a bear that got stuck in its own trap. 0.97

00:50:14.180 I mean, it thought it was going to walk over Ukraine and it's got this army that is so 0.98

00:50:20.340 incredibly incompetent that it essentially can't move forward, incapable of aggressive

00:50:31.240 maneuvers.

00:50:32.240 And it's got a demographic hole that the entire country is falling in so that in another

00:50:39.780 generation or so, Russia being a power won't even be a consideration. Look at China, we would have 0.68

00:50:45.540 thought, well, they're the ones, they're the ones that are really kind of pushing us back. Well,

00:50:51.060 not that long ago, people were yelling in the streets of China, Xi Jinping, you are a dictator,

00:50:57.380 resign, the Communist Party is no good, because they had imposed this bizarre zero COVID policy

00:51:05.700 on the public. And you would see videos. This is the information environment. You can see videos

00:51:10.920 of people yelling from their balconies. You can see videos of somebody whose wives had jumped

00:51:16.580 from a balcony because they had been stuck alone for so long. She'd been depressed and she killed

00:51:21.120 herself. And what happened? Well, the mighty G reverses his zero COVID policy. I mean,

00:51:30.400 on a dime. Either he was scared and backed away, or there are still people in that very opaque

00:51:39.720 regime who can force action policies that he doesn't like, because they backed away on a dime.

00:51:47.380 So they're also in some kind of trouble. So we are a mess. Look, starting with the United States,

00:51:53.380 the American people are suffering what I call a psychotic episode. We're a mess. We're a mess.

00:51:58.860 but everything in life what you learn is relative uh and i i look at i'm i kindly didn't speak of

00:52:08.620 europe but um you know i look at everybody who is not the united states and certainly everybody

00:52:13.100 who's not democratic and relatively speaking they're bigger mess than we are well there's a

00:52:21.160 relief people people are even more messed up than we are uh martin it's been a pleasure speaking

00:52:27.360 with you we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters that they've

00:52:30.980 already submitted but before we do we always finish with the same question which is what is

00:52:35.400 the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be

00:52:39.840 yeah i would say um it should be how do we reform ourselves so that's a moral question

00:52:50.760 in other words uh morality is very very um it's hard to talk about and i i tend not to talk about

00:52:59.200 it because i i feel like i know a lot about a few few little things but morality is about being

00:53:04.720 right and why the heck should you listen to anything i've got to say you don't know who i am

00:53:08.720 i could be a bad person so um we each can only do that from the inside and i talked about it

00:53:15.780 briefly before that we need to kind of step back from thinking that people who are online are

00:53:24.320 somehow have direct influence on our lives. You have influence on your life. What happens on a

00:53:29.920 computer screen doesn't have that much influence on your life. And number two, reform the

00:53:34.400 institutions. I think our politics are very policy-driven, but instead of talking about

00:53:42.420 policies, we should talk about institutional reform. Because whatever policy we settle on,

00:53:47.080 for example, on immigration, you, under the current institutional framework, are going to

00:53:52.780 spark a revolt of at least 50% of the public, or probably more, right? So we need to reform those

00:53:59.140 institutions, make them more like Amazon, and less like, you know, the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

00:54:05.540 And it concerns me, honestly, that we keep fighting about the marginalia, the policies.

00:54:12.420 instead of getting to the heart of the matter, which is how do we move from the 20th century

00:54:18.500 institutionally to the 21st? Martin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. If people

00:54:24.460 want to find you online, ironically enough, if they want to buy your books, where is the best

00:54:28.420 place to do that? Well, Amazon, of course, you can buy the book there. I mean, I think even in

00:54:33.640 uh britain these days it's it's in the bookstores or it can be um and online i i am mostly i mean i

00:54:42.840 i write way too much and you can find me at discourse uh and um at city journal for example

00:54:50.760 they're two of my favorite places to to write for um so that's just pretty much where

00:54:56.600 and martin thank you so much for coming on stay with us for the bonus questions but for now thank

00:55:01.960 you so much and thank you guys for watching and listening we will see you very soon with another

00:55:06.980 brilliant episode like this one or raw show all of them go out at 7 p.m uk time and for those of

00:55:12.500 you who like your trigonometry on the go it's also available as a podcast take care and see you soon

00:55:17.980 guys see you on locals what advice would you give anyone who wants to diminish their digital

00:55:23.700 footprint particularly with respect to government and big business

00:55:31.960 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - April 12, 2023

Martin Gurri：＂There's No Going Back to Normal＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

TRIGGERnometry - April 12, 2023

Martin Gurri： ＂There's No Going Back to Normal＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Martin Gurri：＂There's No Going Back to Normal＂