Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Social media broke our ability to agree, with Jonathan Haidt

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Social media broke our ability to agree, with Jonathan Haidt · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans.
• 0:01
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:04
  In the interests of introducing you to some of the best interviews that have ever taken place on this show, I want to present you today with the one and only Jonathan Haidt.
• 0:13
  In terms of uncomfortable conversations and dangerous ideas, it's really one of the foundational and most groundbreaking dangerous ideas to soar across the cultural ether in the past decade.
• 0:26
  Jonathan Haidt's
• 0:27
  article and then book that he wrote with Greg Lukianoff called The Coddling of the American Mind.
• 0:33
  They were sort of the first to put this on the agenda and to spark uncomfortable conversations all across society in Anglophone countries about what we're doing to kids, not just with social media and algorithms, but in the way that we sort of favor victimization,
• 0:50
  and reward fragility instead of encouraging resilience.
• 0:54
  This is now a mainstream part of the conversation, but Jonathan Haidt was one of the figures who put it on the table, not just as a cultural analysis, but as a psychological one.
• 1:06
  He is a social psychologist at New York University.
• 1:09
  He had previously written books like The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, delving into the way that we conceptualize and think about right and wrong, sort of articulating the notion that really we have emotional reasons for feeling drawn in particular directions and having particular moral intuitions.
• 1:28
  And then we retroactively try to justify those things using our rational mind specifically.
• 1:33
  but we delude ourselves into thinking that our rational mind is the one in the pilot seat and our emotions are actually trailing along in its wake.
• 1:40
  Haidt is ranked as one of the top 25 most influential living psychologists.
• 1:45
  He was named a top global thinker by foreign policy and prospect magazines.
• 1:50
  And I spoke to him in April of 2022.
• 1:53
  This was actually as part of a series sponsored by the University of Technology, Sydney, where I was a visiting fellow called Permission to Think.
• 2:01
  So thanks to UTS for facilitating it.
• 2:03
  Thanks for John Height for doing it.
• 2:05
  And I've just generally sort of thought that because there are so many new listeners to this show, I don't want you to miss out on some of these gems in the backlog.
• 2:12
  So we're sort of opening the treasure chest and just resurfacing some of these things that you may have missed, or you may not have been following the show at the time, or if you did hear them, it's more than four years ago that you heard it now, and it's well worth resurfacing.
• 2:25
  So...
• 2:26
  So just one last thing to note before we begin.
• 2:28
  At the time that we recorded this, Jonathan Haidt had just written a piece in The Atlantic about the Tower of Babel, as Americans call it, or the Tower of Babel, as we say in Australia and the UK, making an analogy to the way that social media is fracturing American discourse.
• 2:45
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only, Jonathan Haidt.
• 3:00
  John, it's fantastic to talk to you.
• 3:02
  Thanks for being part of this conversation.
• 3:04
  My pleasure, Josh.
• 3:05
  How nice to see you again.
• 3:07
  You've got a piece in The Atlantic recently where you compare us to Babel, or as Americans call it, Babel.
• 3:15
  What's the analogy?
• 3:17
  So ever since around 2014, I felt like something changed.
• 3:23
  Something just changed deep in the matrix of the universe.
• 3:29
  And I've been struggling to figure out ever since.
• 3:31
  Things started going crazy and weird on campus and then in other parts of society.
• 3:37
  And I love metaphors.
• 3:39
  I cram too many metaphors, everything I write.
• 3:42
  But I came across the Tower of Babel story of people.
• 3:47
  And, you know, most people know, oh, you know, people built a tower and God knocked it over because they were, the humans were arrogant.
• 3:54
  But if you read the story, there's a key line in there.
• 3:56
  God sees them building the tower and he says, let us go down and confound their language so that they will not be able to understand one another.
• 4:07
  And when I reread that line, I thought, oh my God, that's it.
• 4:12
  That's what's happened to us.
• 4:14
  We can no longer understand each other.
• 4:17
  Now, the world was never such that, oh, we all understood each other perfectly, but there were shared understandings.
• 4:22
  There were things that most Americans could believe, like Osama bin Laden attacked us at 9-11.
• 4:28
  Most of us believed that very quickly, but that doesn't happen at all.
• 4:32
  And so that's what I was trying to get at, that something has changed.
• 4:35
  We're fragmented into our little bubbles and we can't understand each other.
• 4:42
  So let's chart that change.
• 4:43
  You talk about the first decade of the 21st century as being a time of techno-utopianism, where the idea about the internet was, how could you have tyrannies anymore when the demos can all talk to each other?
• 4:55
  This is going to be a utopian time where...
• 4:57
  There'll be no more misinformation because the system will correct itself because everybody will be able to override sources of misinformation and communicate with each other directly.
• 5:05
  And you point to 2011 as being maybe the high point of that.
• 5:09
  You had the Arab Spring.
• 5:10
  You had Occupy Wall Street.
• 5:12
  These were these sort of organic networks that really brought out the power of social media.
• 5:17
  And in the decade or so since, what's happened?
• 5:21
  That's right.
• 5:21
  So first, let's back up even before 2011.
• 5:24
  2011 is a pivotal year.
• 5:27
  But only recently have I come to realize those of us who were conscious in the 90s, it really did a number on us.
• 5:35
  It really makes you feel old when you say those of us who were conscious in the 90s, because you just made me realize, I was like, wasn't everyone?
• 5:41
  And then I realized, oh, there are human beings walking around this earth through our fully grown adults who were born in the 2000s.
• 5:46
  A couple of young people.
• 5:48
  We call them children, but perhaps young people is more like them.
• 5:52
  But, you know, so I went to college in the 1980s and I was very much a child of the Cold War.
• 5:58
  And when I was a kid, I was like, oh, my God, overpopulation and pollution.
• 6:04
  And, you know, it's just it was the 70s was a gloomy time and the 80s was not much better.
• 6:09
  And then suddenly the Berlin Wall falls and the Chinese want democracy, at least for a
• 6:18
  The U.S. actually runs a surplus in its, you know, we've had the gigantic budget deficits, except for a few years in the 90s.
• 6:24
  And peace breaks out in Israel and the Palestinians.
• 6:27
  It's like, wow, you know, is a real decade of incredible optimism.
• 6:31
  And tied in intimately to that optimism were two trends, democracy and technology.
• 6:38
  So this was a time, you know, the 20th century was this giant referendum between democracy and tyranny or authoritarianism.
• 6:46
  We won.
• 6:46
  We totally won.
• 6:47
  We totally kicked their asses.
• 6:48
  Complete victory.
• 6:51
  You know, we had the phrase, the end of history.
• 6:52
  Not that nothing would happen, but that the end or ultimate aim or goal or direction of history is towards liberal democracy.
• 7:00
  So we all believed that by the late 90s.
• 7:02
  And then this miracle thing called the internet comes along and it links everyone together and it brings education.
• 7:08
  And, you know, so the incredible optimism of the 90s, I mean, it was a joy to be alive then.
• 7:16
  And then it goes on to the 21st century, which gets darker.
• 7:19
  We have 9-11.
• 7:20
  It's not quite so optimistic.
• 7:21
  But the early days of social media, it was a continuation of this techno-democratic optimism.
• 7:28
  Reaching, as I say in the essay, reaching a high point in 2011, because that's when you have the Arab Spring.
• 7:34
  And that's when we really felt like that was the last shoe to drop was the Arab world.
• 7:39
  Like there was no democracy in the Arab world.
• 7:40
  And wow, you know, all it takes is Facebook.
• 7:44
  And before you know it, there are going to be democracies in Baghdad and, you know, Iran and everywhere.
• 7:51
  And then you're going to occupy when, oh, we're going to finally address inequality.
• 7:55
  Like, you know, so, oh, and then the final point, I just learned this recently, is that 2011 is when Google Translate becomes available on all devices, which is a little footnote in history.
• 8:09
  But if you think about the Babel store.
• 8:11
  You know, humanity is divided.
• 8:12
  We can't talk to each other.
• 8:14
  Because the key thing about the Bible is there were, everyone spoke one language before God destroys the tower.
• 8:19
  And what God does is he creates this multiplicity of languages.
• 8:22
  So we can't understand each other.
• 8:24
  And in 2011, oh my God, the curse is lifted.
• 8:27
  We can literally talk to people through a different language.
• 8:30
  So that's what I was trying to convey in the first part of the Atlantic article.
• 8:33
  This long, long human history of division and war and tribalism bursts into flowers in the 90s and reaches its culmination in 2011.
• 8:42
  And God says, the line is something like, and this is only the beginning of what they will do.
• 8:48
  And that's the way it felt.
• 8:49
  This is only the beginning.
• 8:51
  And just to clarify, to clarify for anyone who might be averse to religion, we're speaking in metaphors here about what we can take from the tale.
• 8:58
  You are not a creationist or a literal religious.
• 9:01
  That's right.
• 9:02
  I'm a naturalist.
• 9:03
  I'm a social scientist.
• 9:04
  I'm one that's rather sympathetic to religion.
• 9:07
  So Sam Harris and I used to be enemies, and then we became actually friends who disagree on some of these things.
• 9:15
  I'm quoting a character in a book, yes.
• 9:18
  Yeah, yeah.
• 9:19
  And John, there's something else that's going on around that time, which is that these social media companies that we're all just signing up to for the first time in the late 2000s, the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they start innovating in interesting ways.
• 9:33
  Facebook comes up with the like button, which it didn't previously have.
• 9:37
  And you make the point that your Facebook feed used to just be a reverse chronological list of anything that your friends had posted.
• 9:45
  There was no tweaking it.
• 9:46
  There was no...
• 9:47
  putting in front of you things that might agitate you more or that might entice you to click them or like them or share them.
• 9:52
  There was none of that stuff.
• 9:53
  You didn't like it and you didn't share anything.
• 9:55
  You typed in www.facebook.com on a web browser because we didn't really have smartphones yet.
• 10:04
  And you saw what all of your friends were doing.
• 10:06
  And then Twitter introduces the retweet button at the same time as Facebook introduces the like button.
• 10:13
  You see those things as pivotal.
• 10:14
  Why?
• 10:15
  Yeah.
• 10:15
  They are absolutely transformative.
• 10:18
  And I didn't realize this until I teamed up with a guy who actually knows about technology, Tobias Rose Stopwell, who's worked in Silicon Valley, and he's writing a book now called The Outrage Machine.
• 10:29
  So I invited him to help me write an article for The Atlantic in 2019, where we explored, what is it about social media that has made democracy go haywire?
• 10:37
  And it was from Tobias.
• 10:39
  that I learned about just how transformative those changes were in 2009.
• 10:43
  Because if you go back to 2003, 2004, when I think MySpace and Friendster are founded and Facebook is 2004, there was no newsfeed.
• 10:55
  It was just, look at me.
• 10:56
  Here I am.
• 10:57
  Here are photos of me.
• 10:58
  Here are links to my friends, my favorite bands.
• 11:01
  So it's self-presentation, but it's not harmful.
• 11:04
  It's definitely not harmful to democracy.
• 11:07
  And you can link to other people's pages.
• 11:08
  And that's what it was originally.
• 11:09
  It was kind of just a way to connect.
• 11:12
  And then I don't remember what year the news feed comes in, but that's where things start to get darker because now it's not about, hey, look at my wedding photos.
• 11:20
  It's like George Bush said this or that or something like that.
• 11:25
  So the news feed is an innovation that pulls it away from human connection and now brings it more into current events, public events, and posturing around them.
• 11:35
  But even still, what you're getting is what your friends post, no algorithms, and you can't do anything.
• 11:41
  You read it.
• 11:43
  And in 2009, though, just as Facebook has now achieved total dominance, before then there were several platforms.
• 11:48
  By 2009, it's clear, Facebook is winning.
• 11:51
  It completely dominates by number all the other platforms combined by then.
• 11:56
  Um, so Facebook introduces the like button, uh, so that now you can say that you like certain posts.
• 12:03
  And at the same time, um, Twitter introduces the retweet button.
• 12:07
  So it's not just that you like a post, you actually can say that here, I like it so much.
• 12:11
  I'm sending it out to everybody who follows me.
• 12:15
  And then because you now have two different measures of engagement, of course, Facebook copies, Facebook copies everything.
• 12:20
  They copy the retweet button as their share button.
• 12:24
  And now Facebook has so much information, not just about the links you clicked on.
• 12:29
  They've always watched that.
• 12:30
  Now they have lots and lots of bits of information as a user clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks on likes and shares.
• 12:38
  So now they use algorithms to feed you more of what is most likely to develop engagement.
• 12:43
  And there was no nefarious purpose here, I don't think.
• 12:46
  It was just, you know, they want to keep you on.
• 12:48
  It's, you know, magazines want to keep you reading.
• 12:50
  So you can look at their ads and same thing with Facebook.
• 12:54
  But the net effect is that what the algorithms find out on their own is that what most engages people is what makes them angry.
• 13:01
  And so that is really the turning point where social media, it's not about connecting people who are pursuing their own goals of connecting.
• 13:11
  And it becomes much more about hooking people on through emotions that make them generate content that makes other people click and like and retweet so that you get everybody sort of in a mutual cycle of outrage.
• 13:27
  And that's the beginning of the end.
• 13:30
  Now, John, a few years ago, which feels like a lifetime ago and also feels like yesterday, you and I did a tour of Australia and New Zealand when you came out here and we had a series of conversations.
• 13:40
  I guess this was just before the pandemic.
• 13:42
  Was this in 2019?
• 13:44
  That's right.
• 13:44
  It was.
• 13:44
  It was July 2019.
• 13:46
  So, and you were sort of a ghost of Christmas future in a way saying like, I have seen the opposite of the promised land.
• 13:55
  It is not a good place.
• 13:56
  You don't want to go there.
• 13:57
  You don't want to find your society and your culture torn apart by where these technologies could potentially take us and where the decay of democracy could take us as a result.
• 14:09
  And I suppose if you'd parachuted us into this scenario three years later, my first question would be, what has happened?
• 14:17
  Have things gone better or worse than you'd feared in recent years?
• 14:21
  Yeah.
• 14:22
  Pretty much everything has got worse and sometimes more quickly than I expected.
• 14:27
  So, yeah, so I just looked this up.
• 14:31
  It was great fun traveling with you.
• 14:34
  We did our act in Melbourne and Sydney and Auckland.
• 14:39
  And I just looked at my slides.
• 14:40
  I said that the little mechanism that I did for my talks was I said,
• 14:45
  I am the ghost of British-inspired, secular, multicultural, liberal democracies yet to come.
• 14:50
  You know, like Christmas Carol.
• 14:52
  Because what I've seen happening as I've been studying universities,
• 14:57
  is that these weird problems that I wrote about with Greg Lupionov in The Coddling of the American Mind, they broke out in American universities in 2015, and pretty much simultaneously in Canadian and UK universities.
• 15:10
  The safetyism, the shouting down of speakers who students thought were offensive or violent or dangerous
• 15:17
  All these things hit America, Britain, and Canada at pretty much the same time.
• 15:23
  But they seem not to be as bad in Australia and New Zealand, at least what I knew from a distance.
• 15:28
  Now, when I came down and visited you, I realized, actually, you have all the same trends.
• 15:32
  They're just a couple years late, which is what often happens down under.
• 15:36
  And so the gist of my talk was...
• 15:39
  We're all very simple.
• 15:42
  Our countries that descend with British institutions, which I believe are the best in the world, travel in Latin America.
• 15:48
  Thank God we were colonized by Britain, not Spain or Portugal.
• 15:54
  So I'm a big fan of British institutions.
• 15:58
  And I was sort of warning, like, you know, we've messed it up in America.
• 16:01
  We're much more polarized than any other country, much more polarized than the other Anglosphere countries.
• 16:06
  And so the question is, is it going to hit you all the same way just three years later?
• 16:10
  Or is America uniquely bad?
• 16:12
  We have unique aspects.
• 16:14
  And I'm not sure what the answer is.
• 16:16
  It's clear that things are, from what I hear from Heterodox Academy members, like Alan Davison, for example, what I hear from them is, wow, things are getting worse.
• 16:25
  You have all the same trends.
• 16:28
  And I believe that's what the Atlantic article is about.
• 16:30
  All of our institutions are getting stupid at the same time for the same reason.
• 16:36
  So that's at least my diagnosis.
• 16:38
  But I'd love to ask you, do you have the sense that this kind of craziness, this outrage, this inability to listen, is it just getting steadily worse in Australia?
• 16:47
  Well, I think it's worth picking apart a couple of things that we might be talking about that overlap a little bit.
• 16:53
  One is the corrosive effect of misinformation and the siloing of people's opinions that social media can create.
• 17:02
  So that a person who only ever hears or sees things that reinforce their prejudices, that either make them pander to what they think is true,
• 17:12
  and demonize things that they don't think is true.
• 17:14
  I think that is having an equally corrosive effect.
• 17:16
  It's harder and harder to talk across the boundary line of political and cultural divides.
• 17:21
  Then there's what you just alluded to, which is in places like universities and in media institutions,
• 17:27
  There's more and more of a mob mentality against anyone who expresses an unpopular opinion, especially if that unpopular opinion smells or sounds a little bit like something, for example, a right-wing person might say or, heaven forbid, a racist might say.
• 17:40
  If it contravenes a conventional progressive notion, then...
• 17:45
  then the sky falls.
• 17:46
  And of course, then we can also talk about the way that social media reinforces that because the social media Twitter mob then puts enormous pressure on CEOs and hiring managers and things to fire people for having tweeted a stupid joke that could be misinterpreted or something.
• 17:59
  And then I think there's a third component, which is what it does to our heads.
• 18:02
  And this is another area of your specialty to be constantly sort of curating our own existence and
• 18:08
  pawing at these screens and judging ourselves in comparison to other people and trying to find our tribes and our sense of connection online.
• 18:15
  So if we separate those three things, I don't think there's as much cancel culture in Australia.
• 18:21
  There are fewer examples of people being fired for having said something that upset the Twitter mob.
• 18:27
  But I do think that there is an equally dire scenario in which people who surround themselves by information that panders to them and reinforces what they want to believe careen off into their own channels.
• 18:42
  And it's becoming harder and harder to stitch together the fabric of democracy and the fabric of trust.
• 18:47
  Right, right.
• 18:48
  Okay, that's very interesting.
• 18:49
  That's very helpful.
• 18:51
  Because if you suppose that we're just little information processing centers, and then we get social media, the siloing effects and the misinformation effects would be similar all around the world.
• 19:05
  But if we focus now on the moralist part, on the mob mentality, the elements that really look like a fundamentalist religion,
• 19:14
  And there's been a lot of writing in the United States, John McWhorter being the best of them all.
• 19:19
  From the beginning, he was one of the first to say, this is exactly like certain strains of Protestantism, except without any of the good ones.
• 19:27
  And so if you see this as a religion, then I think we can see there's two reasons why this religion is much more intense than the United States.
• 19:37
  One is that even within the United States, there have been maps drawn based on what part of England the people came from.
• 19:45
  America has different values.
• 19:46
  And so the Puritans who settled in New England, who then moved across the upper Midwest, they were the most moralistic and intense.
• 19:54
  Whereas those who settled the mid-Atlantic region, like Virginia, I think they came from southern England.
• 20:00
  They were just morally intense.
• 20:01
  They were more about commercial interests.
• 20:03
  So America is very different based on where in England they came from.
• 20:08
  And I'll just go out on a limb here and say if the initial group of Brits in Australia were convicts, that would have been less like Puritan ministers thundering about fire.
• 20:17
  Yeah.
• 20:18
  I would think.
• 20:20
  Yeah.
• 20:20
  And John, this predates social media as well.
• 20:23
  I mean, I remember during nipple gates, when Janet Jackson exposed her nipple at the Superbowl, you know, Australia, Australians would say, thank God we were settled by convicts and not Puritans, you know, or during, during Bill Clinton's, you know, Monica Lewinsky and those sorts of things, those things don't carry the same level of outrage here as they, as they do there.
• 20:44
  But I am interested in your thoughts about what it's doing to our sense of
• 20:48
  and we should probably define this as well because not everyone is as online as we are but when you talk about John McWhorter's idea of this being a new religion John McWhorter's a linguist at NYU is he at NYU or Columbia?
• 20:58
  at Columbia, sorry and his theory is that
• 21:02
  Basically, the new progressive, racially aware, what one might call sort of woke consensus, which sees societies like Australia's and America's as being irredeemably racist and built upon white supremacy and tries to filter...
• 21:17
  all controversies and all social relationships through a prism of equity, diversity, inclusion, and everything is either sexist or not sexist, racist or not sexist.
• 21:29
  That's the context that he's talking about, this being basically a sort of unfalsifiable religion rather than a rational view of the world.
• 21:35
  Is that fair?
• 21:36
  Yeah.
• 21:36
  That's right.
• 21:37
  That's right.
• 21:37
  And because it really does map on to many aspects of Protestantism.
• 21:40
  He talks about, you know, all the rituals of confession, original sin, which is whiteness.
• 21:46
  So, you know, my my main book, the main book where I wrote about my own work is called The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
• 21:55
  And my argument is we evolved to be religious.
• 21:57
  We evolved to have all these mechanisms that bind us together in order to compete with others.
• 22:02
  That's why we have religion.
• 22:03
  We wouldn't have religion if we didn't have group selection in which groups were competing with groups and sometimes killing them or at least out-competing them.
• 22:12
  So I think religion is built deeply into our minds, and it's secular liberal societies that are the exception that we have to understand.
• 22:19
  The normal state of affairs is to be religious.
• 22:21
  And then the interesting question is, what happens when you take people who evolved for intense, animistic, small-scale religion, and you take out God?
• 22:30
  What happens?
• 22:31
  Do they just become rationalists?
• 22:33
  Do they become scientific-type people who just want to follow the evidence?
• 22:37
  Or is there a God-shaped hole at the heart of every man, as Pascal said more or less?
• 22:43
  And I think Pascal was right.
• 22:44
  There is a God-shaped hole and people will fill it no matter what.
• 22:50
  And so this is, I think, John McForder's analysis.
• 22:52
  And I have a file.
• 22:53
  I have literally 30 other essays that have made this analysis.
• 22:58
  The similarities between woke culture and religion are overwhelming.
• 23:01
  Andrew Sullivan, so many people have made this.
• 23:05
  It's really hard to miss it.
• 23:08
  And so, and my view as someone who's interested in both biological evolution and cultural evolution is that institutions that evolve over time do tend to be, what's the word, made kinder and gentler.
• 23:23
  They tend to, the institutions evolve and certain forms of religion are pretty functional.
• 23:31
  In the United States, people who are involved in churches tend to have better mental health.
• 23:34
  They tend to be more charitable.
• 23:36
  There are all kinds of good things that happen.
• 23:38
  Whereas if you have an institution that comes out of nothing, that just appears on the scene and is untested, it's likely to be pretty inhuman.
• 23:47
  And so that's what I think a lot of this is going on, is we have the evolution of a kind of a fundamentalist religion, which is incredibly inhumane, not because the people in it are bad, but because they are, in a sense, inventing a new religion against its evil enemies, which they see as racists primarily.
• 24:06
  And it is evolving not based on what works, but based on who gets the upper hand in terms of prestige, what's prestigious.
• 24:14
  Yeah.
• 24:14
  So it's kind of a mess and it's messing us all up.
• 24:17
  And this wouldn't have happened if not for social media.
• 24:21
  Social media has made things so viral.
• 24:22
  Things can spread so quickly.
• 24:25
  So that's sort of a messy statement of what I think is going on in the post-Babel era.
• 24:31
  Hmm.
• 24:32
  That's interesting.
• 24:32
  So you've got a collision basically of this new secular religion in which people are jockeying for positions on a hierarchy of almost oppression or righteousness, right?
• 24:42
  To take the title of your book.
• 24:45
  You've got, as you mentioned, the confession where when someone gets called out by the mob for having told the wrong joke or done the wrong thing or having...
• 24:53
  hosted a panel on which there wasn't a person of color or whatever the transgression was.
• 24:58
  You know, we all know now they released a statement.
• 25:01
  I'm deeply sorry.
• 25:02
  I'm taking some time for myself to look into myself.
• 25:05
  This is a time for me to try the work.
• 25:07
  I'll try to do better.
• 25:08
  I'll do the work.
• 25:09
  Exactly.
• 25:09
  Right.
• 25:10
  It's a cleansing.
• 25:11
  It's almost quasi-religious cleansing.
• 25:14
  And then on the other hand, you're saying you've got the social media dynamic, which is creating an explosive pressure cooker in which that can happen.
• 25:23
  I'm still interested in what you think is actually going on between why is social media weaponizing the secular religion of wokeness so effectively?
• 25:32
  How?
• 25:32
  Yeah.
• 25:33
  Okay.
• 25:33
  So first, let me share with you an amazing discovery I made this morning to give you the backstory, and then I'll answer your question.
• 25:42
  So a friend sent me this quote from Jonathan Rauch, who's this brilliant commentator.
• 25:46
  He's a journalist.
• 25:48
  He's a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
• 25:51
  And he's gay.
• 25:52
  He was really active in making the case for gay marriage.
• 25:56
  He's sort of center-right, really interesting guy.
• 26:01
  And he's a great exponent of free speech back in the 90s.
• 26:04
  So he's really heterodox.
• 26:06
  Someone sent me an article that he wrote back in 2002.
• 26:11
  And after 9-11, there was a large group on the left that was basically saying, Bin Laden isn't the problem.
• 26:19
  America is.
• 26:20
  This is America's fault because America is so oppressive and look what America does.
• 26:24
  And so Rauch writes this amazing essay in 2002.
• 26:29
  This is in The Atlantic.
• 26:31
  And he talks about Aaron Wildabski, who was a great social theorist,
• 26:36
  who had analyzed egalitarianism.
• 26:38
  Egalitarianism is generally a good thing, but all virtues carried to excess become vices.
• 26:43
  And he was, Woldavsky and Rauch were saying, egalitarianism had been carried to this extraordinary extreme, which was bizarre and humane by 2002.
• 26:53
  And here it is.
• 26:54
  This is an exact description of what's going on now.
• 26:56
  He says, Rauch speaking about Woldavsky,
• 26:59
  He concluded that its many impulses, this is the impulses of the egalitarian left, its many impulses, the impulse to regard all whites as oppressors and all minority members as victims, the impulse to see America as incorrigibly racist and classist and unfair, the impulse to impose admissions and hiring quotas and then lie about them.
• 27:20
  The impulse to politicize all academic disciplines, the impulse to snuff out dissent, were all aspects of a single controlling imperative.
• 27:28
  That common factor, he contended, is egalitarianism, the belief in the moral virtue of diminishing differences among people of varying incomes, genders, races, sexual preferences, and especially power.
• 27:40
  So that is an exact description of the woke left today in 2022.
• 27:46
  And so that was true in the late 90s, and it was Rauch and Woldapski described it in 2002.
• 27:52
  So it's been around for a while.
• 27:54
  None of these things are new.
• 27:55
  What's new is the dynamics.
• 27:57
  So this is the way the left was in comparative literature departments, in women's studies departments.
• 28:04
  It was there in different parts of the left, but it was far from dominant on the left.
• 28:10
  I've always been on the left, and I saw this at university, but not in psychology.
• 28:15
  This wasn't in my department.
• 28:17
  This was just in seven or 10 departments in the university.
• 28:20
  What social media did, I believe, is, you know, I don't know if you ever see like, when you see like a city gets flooded, it's not just like, oh, there's the city with water.
• 28:29
  No, there's sewage everywhere.
• 28:31
  Like whatever stuff just comes out, everything mixes together when there's a flood.
• 28:36
  What social media did, I believe, is it knocked down all the walls.
• 28:39
  With social media, all walls are down.
• 28:41
  Everything is Twitter.
• 28:42
  Everything is the public square.
• 28:44
  And this ideology, this extreme egalitarian ideology, which had been confined to a few zones, spreads out.
• 28:52
  It's very aggressive.
• 28:53
  It's intimidating.
• 28:55
  And so it dominates, even though most people don't believe it, people on the center left, who are really the ones who run the institutions, are so intimidated.
• 29:02
  by the young people pushing this on social media.
• 29:05
  They can't stand up to being called racist or sexist or transphobe.
• 29:09
  They can't stand up to it.
• 29:11
  So that's what I think has happened.
• 29:12
  Social media changed the dynamics, not the ideas.
• 29:16
  Can institutions like universities fight back against that, or is it impossible?
• 29:22
  Well, it's possible in theory, and there's one that did it a little bit, the University of Chicago, because ultimately you have to see there are competing narratives.
• 29:30
  And this brings us back to Babel.
• 29:32
  Before Babel, it was possible to have a narrative that was widely shared.
• 29:36
  And, for example, in universities, we had the sense that we were the descendants of Socrates and of Galileo.
• 29:44
  That's the guild that I joined in 1987 when I entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.
• 29:52
  There's a real sense of continuity in the academic world that we are here to discover truth.
• 29:57
  It differs in the arts.
• 29:59
  That's not the mission.
• 29:59
  But in most of the university, scholarship is a different means of discovering the truth.
• 30:04
  And right up until about 2014, that was the governing narrative that we are scholars and our goal is to discover truth.
• 30:12
  But once the Tower of Babel falls, everything is confusion.
• 30:15
  Everything is babbling.
• 30:17
  Everybody is trying to put their narrative in.
• 30:19
  And what I saw on campus after campus was the progressive activists, the group on the left, come in with their new narrative, which is exactly what Rauch just described.
• 30:28
  It's everything is racist.
• 30:29
  Everything is oppression.
• 30:30
  If there's inequality, it's because of white supremacy.
• 30:33
  And even though this was obviously nonsense, especially a place like Yale, I mean, to say that Yale was, you know, racist and white supremacist, it's about the most anti-racist place you could imagine.
• 30:43
  So, but nobody spoke up to say that.
• 30:46
  Nobody dared contradict it.
• 30:48
  I've spoken to a number of university presidents.
• 30:50
  None of them are woke.
• 30:51
  They're almost all true liberals, but they're terrified.
• 30:54
  They couldn't say anything.
• 30:56
  So, again, the point of my Atlantic article is...
• 30:59
  After Babbel, it's all about intimidation.
• 31:02
  It's the dynamics.
• 31:04
  What most people believe is irrelevant.
• 31:06
  It's the fear of speaking up.
• 31:09
  That's what has made all of our institutions get stupid at the same time so quickly in the last five to seven years.
• 31:15
  And there's another thing going on here, Jonathan, which you address in your other book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which you mentioned briefly that you wrote with Greg Luganov, where we're not just talking about this sort of justice mob mentality coming to impose its superior vision of racial equity on all fuddy-duddy old middle-aged straight white guys like you.
• 31:39
  But there's also the fragility mentality
• 31:41
  component here where it becomes more and more difficult to talk about anything that might quote unquote trigger somebody who, if they've had, I don't know, if they've been a victim of sexual violence in the past or something, then you have to get warnings before talking about anything that might even broach the possibility of discussing sexual dynamics in a way that doesn't pander to them.
• 32:01
  There's a sort of a, I suppose, a disrespect towards the resilience of one another.
• 32:10
  where Richard Dawkins says, I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid ideas.
• 32:18
  And I sort of like that notion of robust debate.
• 32:22
  I mean, that's what my podcast is all about.
• 32:24
  This is what I'm sort of engaged in.
• 32:26
  Let's actually have the conversations that are impolite to have because that's the only way that you grope your way towards the truth.
• 32:32
  But is there a relationship there between the justice mob which wants to take down anyone who makes a sexist joke on Twitter
• 32:40
  And the students at university and elsewhere in society who don't want anyone to be able to talk about anything that will offend them.
• 32:51
  Yes, there is a connection.
• 32:53
  You know what I'd like to do?
• 32:54
  I definitely want to segue into the fragility and the depression and anxiety.
• 33:01
  But before we do that, I need to say something to sort of close up what we were just saying about the justice model.
• 33:09
  Sure.
• 33:09
  Because what we've been talking about, what I've been talking about here, is the pathology on the left.
• 33:15
  That's what we've been talking about here.
• 33:18
  I used to call myself a liberal a while ago.
• 33:22
  Then I called myself a centrist.
• 33:25
  Then I called myself nothing.
• 33:27
  Now I call myself a liberal again, but I don't mean left.
• 33:29
  I mean liberal, the John Stuart Mill sense, liberal institution, liberal society.
• 33:34
  And I'm in a university and I'm writing about the left.
• 33:39
  But let me be crystal clear.
• 33:42
  If you're on either extreme, the same dynamics are happening.
• 33:46
  And you are ramped up into a kind of a fundamentalism and extremism and a use of intimidation that is devastating your society, at least if you're in the United States.
• 33:57
  And so just to be really clear about this,
• 34:00
  But the two biggest, the biggest assault on democracy that has happened in my lifetime and since the Civil War is that a sitting president tried to literally steal an election when he had no evidence that it would be literally went around trying to find evidence.
• 34:15
  I mean, nothing compares to what Donald Trump did.
• 34:18
  Nothing compares to a Republican Party that let him do it and that tries to cover it up and lie about it while prosecute him for it.
• 34:25
  The only thing that comes even halfway close is the fact that the Republican Party would not let President Obama appoint a Supreme Court justice.
• 34:35
  seven or nine months before this term ended.
• 34:37
  And then they rushed through one of their own.
• 34:39
  So to be really clear here, what I might say clearly in the article is we have this weird asymmetry in that in the United States, the Republican Party is insane, irresponsible.
• 34:49
  They've lost conservatism.
• 34:50
  They have nothing to do with the tradition of conservatism or the constitution.
• 34:54
  So the Republican Party is an incredible danger to democracy and they are being driven insane in part by these events.
• 35:01
  Although for the Republicans,
• 35:04
  cable TV plays a much bigger role than it does on the web.
• 35:07
  So Fox News in particular.
• 35:09
  So cable TV- Yeah, but I would also just add that there's a feedback loop that's going on between the clickiness of social media and what Fox News is doing.
• 35:17
  Like Tucker Carlson's not an idiot.
• 35:19
  He knows what's going to play well and what's going to go viral on social as well.
• 35:22
  If you remove social- You're right.
• 35:23
  The ecosystem, maybe Fox News would be different.
• 35:26
  Yes, it is absolutely a feedback loop because, yes, the people on those right-wing stations, they know what's going to play well in social media.
• 35:34
  And if you watch the right-wing stations, so much of it is about Twitter.
• 35:37
  So much of it is somebody tweeted something.
• 35:40
  So the problem for the Republicans is not just social media.
• 35:43
  It goes back to Bob's News in the 90s.
• 35:45
  So I want to make it clear.
• 35:46
  I'm an equal opportunity centrist.
• 35:48
  In fact, I'm thinking of starting a movement called We Are the 80%.
• 35:52
  you know, the middle 80%.
• 35:53
  Like we really can't have a democracy if the outer 10%, I mean, of course, they're welcome to be in the country, but social media has given the two extremes so much more influence and it has made everyone in the middle so much more fearful
• 36:06
  that this is unsustainable.
• 36:09
  So the problem on the right, I believe, is the Republican Party.
• 36:12
  The problem on the left, I believe, is that progressives dominate all the high points of the culture.
• 36:18
  Universities, Hollywood, advertising, the arts, museums, education, kindergarten through high school, everything.
• 36:27
  So both sides are human.
• 36:29
  Both sides are intense.
• 36:31
  Both sides are moralistic.
• 36:32
  And both sides are super empowered by social media.
• 36:35
  Okay.
• 36:36
  So that, just to be clear, this is not just attacking the left.
• 36:38
  This is about both.
• 36:39
  Yeah.
• 36:40
  Back to your regularly scheduled question.
• 36:42
  Okay.
• 36:44
  So you asked whether it's related to the fragility.
• 36:47
  And I think it is several ways.
• 36:49
  So when Greg and I first, so Greg Lukianov is the first person who really saw this happening in 2013, 2014.
• 36:57
  in his job as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he saw this on college campuses, on a few campuses in 2014, came to talk to me May of 2014, and I had just begun to see some of it at New York University, where I'm a professor.
• 37:11
  And so we wrote up this article in Atlantic, and we thought that the problem was just for college students.
• 37:15
  We thought college is doing something.
• 37:17
  to kids teaching them to think this way.
• 37:20
  So that was our original hypothesis, and it was wrong.
• 37:23
  Because we later found, after the article came out in August of 2015, later we found, actually, it's not just college students.
• 37:29
  It's the exact same stuff that's happening to all kids who were born after 1995 or 96.
• 37:34
  In other words, Gen Z.
• 37:36
  We didn't have that label in 2015, but by 2017, we knew there's a new generation born around 1996 or later.
• 37:44
  So Gen Z has much, much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-arm and suicide.
• 37:48
  I've never seen hockey stick graphs like this.
• 37:51
  You never see them in mental health where a generation, like the curve in a hockey stick at 2012, teenagers get much more depressed and anxious.
• 37:59
  They weren't that way in 2011.
• 38:00
  And by 2014, they're much more depressed and anxious.
• 38:04
  So now I know or now I believe that it's the fact that they largely were not on social media on a daily basis in 2009.
• 38:12
  It was just beginning to get on.
• 38:14
  But by 2013, 2014, they were and especially Facebook, Instagram for the girls.
• 38:20
  So we have a generation-wide mental health crisis, especially for girls, that begins right around 2012.
• 38:27
  And then these young people arrive on campus around 2013, 2014.
• 38:32
  That's what Greg saw.
• 38:34
  That's what we wrote about.
• 38:37
  So, and what we called, what did we call it?
• 38:39
  We had a...
• 38:41
  of vindictive protectiveness is what we called it.
• 38:45
  Because other people call it cry bully.
• 38:49
  It's not even the claim that I'm a victim.
• 38:51
  It's usually the claim that if we allow this person to speak,
• 38:55
  This speaker will deny the existence of transgender people.
• 39:02
  He will be literally killing them or erasing them.
• 39:07
  He will be a danger to them.
• 39:08
  So it was the sense that everyone is fragile and I am protecting these fragile victims.
• 39:13
  And you, Mr. President of the University, you have to disinvite the speaker.
• 39:17
  You have to shut this talk down.
• 39:19
  So it was this vindictive protectiveness.
• 39:22
  So I think that's an answer to your question.
• 39:24
  I love that term, vindictive protectiveness.
• 39:26
  Yeah.
• 39:26
  Cry bullying as well.
• 39:27
  I haven't heard those.
• 39:28
  That's fantastic.
• 39:31
  I wonder what you think, as you were just talking there, I was thinking about the retort that I often hear on when...
• 39:37
  people hear someone like you talk about something like this, which is, look, there's free speech goes both ways.
• 39:43
  I mean, speech has to have consequences as well, right?
• 39:46
  You know, you have the right to say whatever you want, but you don't have the right to be free from the consequences of your speech.
• 39:52
  So if you say something that's a white supremacist statement, then I have every right to exercise my right to free speech, to tweet at your boss and try to get you fired.
• 40:02
  Like you can't say what you want and then...
• 40:06
  But obviously, I can smell bullshit there, but I'm not quite sure what the best retort to that is.
• 40:14
  So it's an open question whether something like the First Amendment, which says everyone gets to speak, and if you want to deny the Holocaust, go ahead.
• 40:21
  We're not going to put you in jail for it.
• 40:23
  Or whether European-style laws or Canadian-style laws where you say, if you say certain things, we're going to put you in jail.
• 40:29
  So I believe certainly before the age of social media, I'm quite confident that our way was better, that those laws backfired.
• 40:36
  I'm hopeful that that's still true, although I'm not as confident now.
• 40:39
  But if I give a talk or if I say, you know what, men and women are biologically different, and I think that people should be free to live however they want.
• 40:52
  If a person wants to change their sex, that's fine.
• 40:54
  They should be able to live as a woman.
• 40:56
  But I think that it would be different if they're playing on a sports team.
• 41:00
  Like, okay, so I have a right to say that.
• 41:04
  and you have a right to say that I'm wrong, and you even have a right to call me a transphobic if I were to say something like that.
• 41:13
  But do you have a right to demand that Amazon stop carrying my book?
• 41:19
  Do you have a right to put my name out in public and encourage people to come harass me and my family?
• 41:25
  So in here, we're not even talking about constitutional rights.
• 41:28
  John Stuart Mill was very clear
• 41:30
  But the issue is not generally limitations from the magistrate, he said, from the law.
• 41:35
  The issue is social, he said in 1959.
• 41:38
  And so if you have a climate in which I say something and you say something back that's critical of it, great.
• 41:46
  But if I say something and you punch me in the nose and then I say something and you light my house on fire.
• 41:51
  Right.
• 41:52
  But there's a physical that the difference that the progressive or that the workster would say to that is punching you is physical violence.
• 41:59
  So let's let's outlaw physical violence.
• 42:00
  Right.
• 42:01
  Lighting a house on fire.
• 42:02
  That's an act of arson.
• 42:04
  Let's rule that out.
• 42:05
  but that it's part of the big roiling, you know, delightfulness and messiness of democracy that some people will be asking, will be calling for the firing of someone because that, or that, you know, let's say Spotify and Joe Rogan or something like Neil Young, like I don't want to be associated with this person.
• 42:23
  So I'm going to pull my, all these sort of mini acts of coercion that are amplified by social media.
• 42:29
  I find it hard to get my head around that.
• 42:31
  Because clearly I do have a right to write a letter to your boss at NYU and say that you should be fired because you're a transpo.
• 42:38
  I mean, I have a right.
• 42:39
  We don't want to live in a world where I'm thrown in jail for doing that.
• 42:43
  But I also understand that when 100,000 people on Twitter do that for a bullshit reason, then you live in an untenable world.
• 42:53
  Exactly.
• 42:54
  So let's distinguish between what you have a legal right to say and what is conducive to the benefits of free speech and what is not.
• 43:03
  And so I would have a legal right to say whatever I thought about gender, and you would have a legal right to write to the president, demand that I be fired, or to say that publicly.
• 43:14
  This is not a question of what you should be thrown in jail for, what I should be thrown in jail for.
• 43:17
  This is a question of what norms give us a better society and what don't.
• 43:21
  And so if I say, you know, I believe in Jesus Christ, and if you doubt me, you will be thrown in jail or your house will be not burned down.
• 43:32
  You will be publicly shamed and basically shunned from society.
• 43:36
  That would be a fundamentalist Christian community.
• 43:38
  That would not reap the benefits of free speech.
• 43:41
  I'd say keep the focus on the intimidation.
• 43:43
  That's, again, the point of my Atlantic article.
• 43:46
  That's what social media involved in.
• 43:48
  So the metaphor I use in the article is when you tweet that somebody is this or that, or they should be fired, or come get your boy is a common thing.
• 44:01
  What's that?
• 44:01
  I haven't encountered that one yet, John.
• 44:04
  Somebody says something and then you tweet and you copy their dean or the president of the company or something.
• 44:11
  And you say, oh, look, your employee said this.
• 44:14
  Come get him, meaning punish him, take him out back, fire him.
• 44:19
  And so the issue is not what you're legally allowed to say.
• 44:23
  The issue is what are our norms of discourse?
• 44:25
  And of course, you should be allowed to argue back.
• 44:28
  But if I make an argument and you use your speech to get me effectively fired and impoverished, because now if there's a scandal, it's forever.
• 44:39
  You can't get a job again because it'll be online.
• 44:42
  The record will be online forever.
• 44:44
  So I would argue that if your response to speech is to get someone shamed, fired, canceled, unemployable, and to bring harassment on that person and their family, I would argue that that's not literally violence.
• 45:01
  But in terms of the beneficial or harmful effects on our speech culture and our democracy, it's the same as violence.
• 45:10
  Yeah.
• 45:11
  Most people throughout history would have preferred death to dishonor, being shunned, being ostracized, being banished.
• 45:20
  So then the next logical pushback to that, John, is, well, what if you say that Hitler didn't have everything right, but he got a lot of things right?
• 45:29
  And it is true that the Jews have been troublemakers since the dawn of time.
• 45:33
  So you say something that is really beyond the bounds of...
• 45:39
  reason beyond the bounds of humanity.
• 45:42
  And there should be, I think we all agree, there should be a social opprobrium for that.
• 45:45
  I wouldn't want to work in an environment in which a flagrantly anti-Semitic person was working.
• 45:50
  And I think that would probably be just grounds for firing them.
• 45:54
  How do you...
• 45:55
  So then the workster says, what's the bound?
• 45:57
  So...
• 45:58
  So here, I think we have to, these conversations about where do you draw the line, I find them to be impossible and unfruitful unless we specify the institution that we're talking about.
• 46:12
  And so a lot of these conflicts have taken place on campus.
• 46:16
  And so, you know, what speakers should be invited?
• 46:19
  So if, so on campus, our telos, our purpose, our goal, what we do is to find truth.
• 46:28
  So if some guy were to come, and you see these people on the street corner sometimes, you know, yelling about homosexuality and sin, and Jesus said this.
• 46:36
  They weren't invited.
• 46:38
  They have a free speech, right, to stand around the corner and shout that.
• 46:41
  But if we were to bring them into a classroom or if someone were to bring them to a classroom to rant, no, they shouldn't be invited in to speak to a classroom.
• 46:48
  This has nothing to do with our telos, our purpose of finding truth.
• 46:52
  But what if there was a scholar who discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union that actually some of the things we thought about the Holocaust were actually not true?
• 47:05
  And that maybe the number wasn't 6 million, it was 4 million, whatever.
• 47:08
  Just suppose someone, a scholar, found documents that minimized something about the Holocaust.
• 47:15
  should that person be allowed to speak on campus?
• 47:18
  I would say, of course, of course.
• 47:21
  If they're a scholar and they use scholarly methods, then of course they should be allowed to speak on campus.
• 47:25
  It doesn't matter if people are offended.
• 47:27
  I'm Jewish.
• 47:28
  I would love to see, I mean, I would be perfectly happy to engage with somebody who had scholarship on Nazis or the Holocaust.
• 47:34
  Now there's no point in bringing in someone ranting and raving with no credentials, but I would say,
• 47:38
  So let's talk about the institution.
• 47:42
  Now, let's say your example, I think, was in a company.
• 47:45
  So let's suppose you are in a company.
• 47:48
  Now, in a company, you do not have free speech rights.
• 47:50
  Absolutely not.
• 47:51
  I mean, of course, you can say what you want outside, but even still, the company can fire you for any reason other than race, gender, and five other categories.
• 47:59
  So if you're a high executive at Pepsi and you start saying that on your Twitter feed and that's bad for Pepsi, yeah, they can fire you.
• 48:07
  I don't think they should have to let you rant or rave if you're going to arm the company.
• 48:11
  So you tell me the domain and I'll tell you what I think about when there should be consequences.
• 48:17
  The point about a scholarly person making a scholarly point is also tricky because with social media, there are so many people who have PhDs and who have illustrious biographies that some of them are going to be batshit crazy.
• 48:35
  And so I alluded to Neil Young pulling his music from Spotify over the Joe Rogan COVID misinformation scandal.
• 48:43
  Well, Joe was only talking to...
• 48:45
  scholarly people, you know, Dr. Malone or whoever this guy was, has a PhD.
• 48:49
  He was one of the early founders of, you know, mRNA technology.
• 48:53
  And so it becomes really, really tricky because he is a person in a, you know, in a public platform, uh, who has credentials.
• 49:00
  He's not ranting and raving, but he's saying things that, uh, that the vast, vast bulk of medical professionals disagree with, and he's making insinuations and allusions.
• 49:11
  that are conspiratorial and that are frankly, I believe, to be untrue and misleading.
• 49:16
  On the other hand, in a big, boisterous democratic society, there is space for those voices.
• 49:22
  So I can just see the whole social media edifice, this whole mosaic of little people kind of swarming to and from and trying to figure out in real time
• 49:32
  what is worth paying attention to, what is worth objecting to, and how the objection happens.
• 49:37
  I don't know if there's an answer to that.
• 49:38
  I mean, I feel like we're muddling towards a sort of a hierarchy of opprobrium here.
• 49:43
  In other words, don't try to get a person fired for what they have said, if you can avoid it.
• 49:53
  Don't try to misinterpret what they say and publicly shame them on the basis of your reinterpretation of their opinion.
• 50:01
  words, try to take them at face value and try to interpret them in the most generous possible way.
• 50:07
  I mean, if everyone was operating on that baseline and all of the people who you objected to, you were able to actually engage with in good faith, then the whole problem evaporates, doesn't it?
• 50:16
  The problem is that, as you know, we're messy humans and we don't behave that way.
• 50:20
  Yeah.
• 50:20
  Again, I would want to put it within specific institutions.
• 50:22
  So what you just said is actually reasonable in an academic setting.
• 50:26
  And that was more or less the way things were until 2015, not in all disciplines.
• 50:30
  There were some disciplines in which people are nasty.
• 50:32
  But for the most part, if I was in any academic setting and someone made an argument and I interpreted it uncharitably in a way that was distorting, I would be called out for not getting it right.
• 50:41
  But that's not as common anymore.
• 50:45
  What you said would be lovely and wonderful if all of society did it, but I recognize that's not going to happen in the public sphere.
• 50:55
  To go to your example of Joe Rogan, I think what we need to really distinguish here is between...
• 51:02
  What would be beneficial in the instance?
• 51:04
  And then what happens if that becomes the policy?
• 51:09
  And so, yes, you could definitely make an argument that stopping Joe Rogan having COVID skeptics on would slow the spread of the virus if it increased for that.
• 51:20
  You could make that argument.
• 51:21
  Maybe it's even right.
• 51:24
  And we've done that over and over again.
• 51:26
  Anybody who suggested that COVID might have come from a lab was shunned and destroyed and shamed and literally called a racist.
• 51:33
  No matter what you do, you'll be called a racist.
• 51:37
  And Google hides certain search results.
• 51:39
  You do certain searches, you won't get the results that you're looking for if Google thinks that those are not socially valid or valuable.
• 51:47
  And in each of these cases, you can make the case that that's for the good.
• 51:51
  But what happens when you do that?
• 51:53
  What happens when you do that is people who are on the right or now even in the center, they know that everything's bullshit.
• 52:01
  They know that these, what Jonathan Rauch calls epistemic authorities, we should be able to trust professors, researchers, doctors, the American medicalists.
• 52:11
  We should be able to trust them, but we can't.
• 52:13
  And I have to say, I don't trust the American Medical Association and the medical establishment as much anymore because of how they behaved in COVID.
• 52:20
  They, you know, the use of noble lies, the many demonstrations that they're on Team Blue, they're on the left, the Democratic team.
• 52:31
  I think have devastated the authority of the scientific authorities.
• 52:36
  Journalism, of course, has always been, you know, people love to hate journalists.
• 52:39
  But boy, the New York Times, I mean, used to be much more respected five or seven years ago than it is today.
• 52:46
  And so when we lose trust in all of our epistemic institutions, by we, I mean 70% of the country, people in the middle and on the right.
• 52:53
  When people lose trust in universities, newspapers, medical authorities, then there's
• 53:00
  we're lost.
• 53:00
  We're in Babel.
• 53:01
  We have no authority.
• 53:03
  We cannot trust our institutions.
• 53:05
  So I think we paid a tremendous cost by trying to silence people in the name of what we now think, what we currently think is a moment of truth.
• 53:14
  I'm so glad you brought it back to trust, because this is a great way to start to wrap this up, John.
• 53:20
  I mean, you talk about
• 53:23
  When trust is eroded in all of those big institutions, journalism and the media and the academy and public health and government and politicians...
• 53:32
  every decision becomes contested.
• 53:35
  And so the squabbling, and then social media empowers that, right?
• 53:39
  So, you know, we can all have our arguments about everything.
• 53:42
  We all have to do our own research about everything and figure everything out because the truth is, right?
• 53:48
  And that reminds me of the three things that you say are sort of bind democracy together.
• 53:55
  you know, a trust in institutions or, you know, the sanctity of institutions.
• 54:00
  You also talk about shared stories, which you alluded to earlier, but the idea of having a common narrative and social capital.
• 54:08
  Do you want to just give a brief summary of that as maybe a way to wrap this up and tie it together?
• 54:13
  Sure.
• 54:13
  Sure.
• 54:14
  So a large, diverse sector democracy is a miracle.
• 54:18
  It shouldn't exist.
• 54:20
  I've heard it said that the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly.
• 54:22
  I don't know if that's really true.
• 54:24
  But given everything we know about human history, to have a diverse society that functions as well as our liberal democracies did in the late 20th century is kind of a miracle.
• 54:37
  And there are certain, you have to look at what are the forces pulling us together, what you could call the centripetal forces pulling us to the center, and what are the centrifugal forces pulling us apart?
• 54:50
  And traditional societies use shared blood, shared gods, shared enemies.
• 54:55
  These are the ways the tribes hold themselves together as they battle other tribes.
• 54:58
  This is not what we want.
• 54:59
  This is not what we can have in our modern societies.
• 55:02
  But having a shared story of who we are that has some virtues in it, and in America, we especially had to do this because we had nothing else in common.
• 55:11
  So a shared story, institutions that we respect so that we trust them to resolve disputes and we accept the decisions.
• 55:20
  And then social capital, networks of trust.
• 55:23
  This is what Alexis de Tocqueville observed about Americans when he traveled here in the 1830s, that when there's a problem, we get together and we fix it.
• 55:30
  We don't wait for the king or the nobles to do it as they would in France and England, he said.
• 55:35
  So because we have we had a lot of social capital in our communities.
• 55:39
  And my argument is that social media has weakened all three of those.
• 55:42
  It certainly has shattered any possibility of a shared narrative.
• 55:45
  That's the Babel metaphor.
• 55:49
  It has spread extraordinary distrust in our institutions.
• 55:52
  There's a lot of research on that now.
• 55:55
  Because social media is very good at tearing things down, but it's terrible at building.
• 56:00
  That's what...
• 56:02
  Martin Gorey says, this brilliant former CIA analyst who wrote this great book called Robotic Public.
• 56:09
  And then the third thing is social capital.
• 56:11
  The idea, back to the beginning of our conversation, that golden age of techno-democratic optimism, it was, wow.
• 56:19
  Wow.
• 56:20
  Social media makes it easy to connect with everybody.
• 56:22
  You can have so many more connections.
• 56:24
  You can keep in touch with your high school friends.
• 56:26
  It's going to be the greatest boon to social capital.
• 56:29
  And it looked like it was.
• 56:30
  It did.
• 56:31
  In the early 2000s, it did.
• 56:33
  But now it looks like it's turned nasty.
• 56:37
  Like a lot of these platforms, Twitter, TikTok, all of them start off in lovely places.
• 56:42
  They pretty soon get much nastier.
• 56:45
  So I think that's where we find ourselves.
• 56:47
  We find ourselves having lost the binding, the border that holds us together.
• 56:53
  And the challenge of the next decade or two is going to be to figure out how to counteract that.
• 57:00
  Obviously, we're never going to get rid of social media, but how do we change it that's not so toxic?
• 57:06
  How do we harden our democratic institutions so that, let's say, our courts can still function even though people don't trust them?
• 57:12
  How can we restore trust in a polarized time?
• 57:16
  And lastly, how do we prepare the next generation?
• 57:19
  Because Gen Z, as we just briefly spoke about, Gen Z is so anxious, depressed, and fragile.
• 57:26
  And it's not their fault.
• 57:27
  We deprive them of the opportunities to work out conflicts themselves.
• 57:31
  We're always there supervising, at least in America.
• 57:35
  Also in Australia, I learned.
• 57:36
  In New Zealand, they actually let kids out to play more.
• 57:38
  But we've denied kids the very experiences of unsupervised play in which they practice democratic skills.
• 57:49
  So I'm worried because these trends are all bad.
• 57:52
  Odds are we're going to come through it.
• 57:54
  History is lost and it's full of setbacks, but it's been a steady upward arc other than those setbacks.
• 58:02
  So odds are we'll find a way through this.
• 58:03
  But right now, I think we can expect things to get worse for another five or 10 years.
• 58:08
  I mean, who knows how long, but I don't think there's going to be any quick turnaround.
• 58:12
  On that optimistic, pessimistic note, Jonathan, thanks so much for being with us.
• 58:17
  Great to talk to you.