FAIR Perspectives Ep. 25 - Why America Is Uniquely Stupid w/ Jonathan Haidt

[Music] [Music] hi and welcome to fair perspectives the official podcast of the pro-human movement brought to you by the foundation against intolerance and racism i'm your host angel eduardo and my co-host who you will hear from shortly is melissa chen today we have the pleasure of speaking with jonathan height jonathan is a social psychologist professor and author whose research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultures including the cultures of progressives conservatives and libertarians he is the author of the happiness hypothesis and of the two new york times bestsellers the righteous mind and the coddling of the american mind she co-authored with greg lukianov we chat with jonathan about his recent atlantic article why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid social media and its effects on our discourse and culture the need for a shared story the importance of dissent the distinctions between liberalism and conservatism the global impact of america's descent into what he calls structural stupidity and what measures we can take to improve it ladies and gentlemen jonathan height jonathan height welcome to fair perspectives what a pleasure to be here melissa and angel i love fair well we love you um yeah we you know been following your work for a long long time and i think you you rescued me from being kind of a kantian you know i used to be a kantian in my approach to my understanding of morality and uh now you're a human yeah i i've come to acknowledge that you know it goes against my my being to to believe the humane side of things but but you've convinced me um over the years and um well recently we want to dive into this bombshell of an atlantic article that you wrote it it is titled why the last what 10 years of american life has been uniquely stupid um and i think uniquely is doing a lot of heavy heavy lifting here so um maybe it will be helpful to the audience to kind of just like sum up what your arguments are in this sure sure so i'll just back up and especially i think for this audience uh you know i think people are very aware that something weird began happening in the 2010s and at first it sort of first came to earth on campus as that we were visited by some sort of space aliens or some weird ionic cloud and it sat down on you know the campus of silliman college at yale or whatever origin store you want to tell stuff got weird beginning of 2014 and then really exploding 2015 but it was just on campus and then a couple years later looking back at some data people pointed out actually no there was this great awokening it was like something happened to to progressive politics more around 2015. and then it floods into journalism around 2018. and wherever it goes the same pattern of stuff happens so that's sort of the story that would be very familiar to people at fair that it's like something happened to left-leaning organizations well it's more than that um i'm a social psychologist and i i i just had the sense in 2014 2015 that something changed in the basic fabric of space time like in the basic of like social space time of like the way we're all connected and and i had this general sense that had something to do with social media just that it just connected us in ways that were new and that had all kinds of unanticipated effects i've been struggling to make sense of it ever since ever since greg and i wrote that caught with the article the calling the american mind in the atlantic in 2015. and so i think a lot about metaphors i think we can't understand anything new unless we can assimilate it to something that's already in our heads so i've been playing around a lot of metaphors and i don't remember when i i came back across the babel metaphor this very short story in the early in genesis of the tower of babel but the key line in that story is god says you know he's offended that humans are building this tower to make a name for themselves and so they can't be flooded again because this is a few generations after noah and god says let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another when i reread that i don't remember what it was or two ago i thought oh my god wow yes this is what has happened to us and so i i i have just all these ideas about what's gone wrong i was going to write a book on i'm trying to write a book on it but i'm so concerned about how fast things are changing how fast things are falling apart that i wanted to get the ideas out as quickly as possible so i talked to the people i know the atlantic and said can i write this up as an article and they said yes and so the basic idea is that social media as it changed in 2009 to 2012 it became much more viral much more explosive you got the like button the retweet button it wasn't just hey look at the photos of my dogs it was you know do you want to retweet this like this yeah everything is like so my argument is that changes in the architecture especially 20 2009 to 2012 changed the way we interacted with each other and especially social it made social media really good at attacking people you could launch a you could accuse someone of something you could say something to her about that you could screenshot something and if you did it really well to be really nasty or really clever it could get literally millions of views within a day or two and so this i believe changed a lot of it just changed things in so many ways one of which is a lot of us just feel we're walking on eggshells um any one word out of place and it not even out of place just someone takes offense at one word and before you know it you have you know a week or two of people hating on you and demand you be fired so that's the basic argument that that changes to social media change the social connectivity in ways that are destroying many of our institutions from the inside to say nothing about teen mental health which we can talk about it's a separate part of the conversation who is god in this metaphor is it mark zuckerberg so so you know perhaps like many in the audience i've lost money i was going to say investing in cryptocurrencies but i'll just say gambling and speculating and one of the things but one of the things that you know it's kind of fun about is just learning about the blockchain and decentralized finance and just realizing that the technology makes it possible to have all kinds of things without anybody in charge and so many have observed this began in 2015. so i founded head rocks academy i co-founded that with some other other social scientists and some of our members from eastern europe were saying this is just like what we had in the communist countries i mean the fear of speaking up the the witch trials the the purity spirals um you know and so people ever since then people have been using these metaphors like what's happening on campus what's happening you know what we're all talking about is somehow like the totalitarian countries but yet there's no dictator there's no totalitarian person or authority or office so i think what we have is you might call it detote it's decentralized totalitarianism what that means is so so the difference between totalitarian and a dictator as i understand is a dictator tells you what he wants and he'll kill you if you don't do it but totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life we're going to control how you raise your kids what you think the food you eat the science everything control everything and that's very hard to do it's only been tried a few times certainly that you know the russians the chinese uh there are a few only a few countries that really tried to control everything about your life and in a way um you know this thing that we call wokeness is you know it has elements that are totalitarian but there's no person there's no authority so you have when everybody can report everybody when everybody can shame everybody you get human behavior reacting as if we were in a totalitarian country but yet there's no totalitarian so it's like ground it's like bottom up kind of censorship versus a top down almost yeah but it's more just like inside out it's just it's just all pervasive it's like it's like you know we took away the air that we were you know breathing and replacing that's not a good metaphor something we need a metaphor that somehow gets it like this weird new form of connectivity well i think angel's question was interesting because and this is kind of really a slight pushback just to challenge your narrative um well if his question was who is god in this metaphor and i was thinking you know i i love what you do at head rocks academy i think it's so important to promote viewpoint diversity especially in academia especially there i mean it's not there then where yeah exactly and and you talk about how you know welcoming that is a sign uh it helps to uh at least lower structural stupidity right like when we have uh this kind of a climate where civil dialogue is possible and different narratives are tolerated um the collective intelligence of that institution just goes up and i i was wondering you know in in your analogy of the tower of babel when it comes to media right um it is often characterized that the fragmentation of the media is actually a bad thing and that is all these narratives as you quoted steve bannon that his uh attitude to it was you know flood the zone was literally and um actually not literally figuratively but that's true thank you for using that correctly sorry you're the only person in the last three years to use that word correctly oh i would get skewered by stephen pinker if i didn't um the so you know i if you think about certain stories that the the news media when there were a few gatekeepers got wrong before social media and and you know the first thing comes to mind is is the iraq war the lead up to the iraq war um you know that can be seen as as as the as the god right that the media was trying was was god and that without challenging without breaking down i just imagine a world where there was social media at the time and we were able to have this discussion um and people were you know the the anti-hawks the the peaceniks could challenge the the prevailing narrative at the time would things have been different i i wonder about that yeah so here let's pay attention to the language here and use the word gatekeepers which is commonly used once you call it gatekeepers the normal reaction of most people is oh well who are they to keep me out like to keep everyone out like gatekeepers are bad and and also words you know you didn't use the word authority but the idea that they're authorities you know especially if you're sort of you know center left as sort of most people on campus or like left center left or maybe center uh there's an instant instinctive reaction like authorities gatekeepers um but from studying you know my early work was on moral foundations theory it was on how morality varies across cultures and just coming to see that that authority is a moral foundation which many cultures build on many cultures don't egalitarian cultures egalitarian movements like occupy wall street they they see certain certain injustices very clearly but they can't actually do anything they're really not able to act you need authority some sort of authority to be able to act you also need some sort of shared meaning and this is actually where i want to try to change people away from gatekeepers and talk let's look instead at do we have any possibility of shared stories while also leaving plenty of room for smaller groups and micro stories so if all we had was one television network i mean that's what they had in egypt and totalitarian countries one network and that's it okay that's horrible that's the worst possible environment um and you know what we had in america in the you know from the 50s through the 70s was three networks plus a bunch of little uhf things and if you move the coat hanger antenna maybe you could pick up some spanish language i mean so you know there was basically three television networks there were lots of newspapers so it's not as though there was a totalitarian control but you know three television networks was not enough and there was pbs there's a few others um so you know many people saw cable tv as like good and there's now there's narrow casting you can have a station just for bowling just for tennis or for cooking or for right-wing politics or left-wing politics so i think in general you'd have to say just without knowing details you have to say that sounds pretty good you know you want a media environment that people can get stories up there's no reason to stop people from expressing themselves so when we use the word fragmentation fragmentation doesn't mean lots of little things what it means is the breakup of any big thing and this is what is alarming me so it's great i mean so i actually think that we had a golden age of the internet and it was around like 2000 and 2005 when we had blogs and youtube i mean we're still in a we're still in an intellectual renaissance thanks to this technology with blogs and podcasts i think the blog and podcast universe is incredible and it's been that way since the late 90s early 2000s so when technology helps us get our story that's great but but part of what happened was because uh as social media changed and as um um uh martin gury says uh everybody should read guri revolted to the public he says socialists he says distributed networks are are excellent at tearing down but they're very bad at building up and so what's happened it's not just that like everyone has a voice on blogs and podcasts everyone can publish their own way that's great it's there will never again be the possibility of any shared understanding of anything um so you know 9 11 was probably the last time when we had some sense of national consciousness i would say the slap was the other one um everybody you know the slap at the austin oscars whatever was like everybody like everybody saw it everybody heard about it but it was just a reason for fighting it wasn't the same so you know we can have these brief stupid moments of shared stupidity but they don't bring us together they divide us 9 11 is probably the last time we had any real sense of shared consciousness um you know when i was growing up there was the moon landing there were all there are all kinds of things that we experienced as a country the olympics you know and there was also like you would watch things at the same time as other people so there's a lot more synchrony now everything is not just desynchronized but everything's fragmented there's no possibility of shows and that means we have exactly what emil zurkheim called anomie normlessness a know me the lack of norms lack of any sense of sheer feeling so that i think that's what the bible metaphor is supposed to get at that that to have a successful society it's great to have lots of voices but you also need some ability sometimes to have a shared sense of who we are what's happened to us what we're trying to do and that that's what i grew up with and that is gone and i don't think that's ever coming back you said so much there i would love to jump on but i keep thinking back well the first thing is i'm reminded of you know that moment when you find yourself at a funeral and you're like oh maybe this will wake everybody up and have them you know have the siblings who haven't talked in 10 years realize how stupid that is and you know maybe for for [Music] you know that's what this is what it took to kind of shake people out of that that you know wasteful kind of way of being but it only really lasts a little bit you know they'll get along for a couple of days that's right and then that's so cold right so kovit yeah kobit was that kobit was that uh now of course historically plagues don't unite people wars united people that's the you know being attacked by foreign the most powerful way to unite people and that happened on 9 11. and a lot of people thought that covid was like that but it wasn't um plagues historically have divided people because we're afraid of others and we don't have enough food and we don't want you know this time we had enough food although we didn't have enough toilet paper it looked like for a couple weeks um but but you know but actually you know but facing this global it was actually kind of cool the first time in human history that the entire planet has faced something together and there were moments of real beauty and elevation in february and march you know italy locked down and different countries locked down so there was some hopefulness there but then it didn't last very long i think you know donald trump deserves a lot of the blame at first a you know incredibly polarizing response um but i think again as many you know listeners and viewers at fair will know the cdc and a lot of health authorities boy did they blow it by being often so explicitly on the blue team it was not science first it was often progressive politics first um so anyway um yeah so i think a lot about shared to run a country you have to have some sense of shared story you have to have some sense of shared authority and it used to be that politics ended at the water's edge so you could fight about politics internally but if the president was going abroad you know if the country was behind him we wouldn't try to try to undercut him again that's gone right and that's a kind of that phenomenon of of not playing ball in that way is it knows no party right like both sides have done it and have proudly done it and pushed for it you know depending on who the president is yes but here's where so i think one of the most useful points in my in atlantic article that sounds stupid is that you're the best part of my essay now but the i think the most powerful the most powerful idea that nobody seems to pick up on um is the asymmetry and i only worked this out i had a vague feeling of that i worked it out when i was writing and it is this so you mentioned structural stupidity that's the key idea structural stupidity is if you have a group that requires viewpoint diversity um uh they get smarter because they challenge each other challenge confirmation bias if you have a community or a group or institution where dissent is suppressed guaranteed the group gets stupid the individuals can be brilliant they can all have phds and lots of life experience but once you lose dissent and of course i hear i'm quoting john stewart mill all minus one ably translated into arabic by ideas beyond borders thank you melissa that's awesome thank you so so if you keep your eye on that that the need the need for dissent and challenge and free speech in order to make ideas better to make groups smart now where's the stupidity and what i say in the article is it's asymmetric if you look at the two parties the republican party is clearly the stupid party that is they got rid of all their moderates you know if if trump said day is night republican senators would say yes you know we vote unanimously the day is night um and um so there's no question in my mind the republican party is the stupid crazy irresponsible party completely lost touch with conservatism with ronald reagan with edmund burke there's nothing that i can respect about today's republican party especially the congressional republican party whereas the democrats whatever you want to say about them policy wise they have healthy debates between the the far left and the and the centrists and guess who wins usually the moderates they're usually the ones who wins so the democratic party has not run off the rails it is not the stupid party okay that's step one but there's a major asymmetry and and democrats are always pointing to the republicans to say look how terrible they are therefore we're right i'm not gonna listen to anything you say and they're right that okay but at the same time the republicans are pointing to all the insane things that people on the left are doing in schools in the health system in the you know the lockdowns the the coveted policies um a lot of ideas about gender race immigration a lot of the ideas on the left because no dissent is allowed on any of these issues and if you say you know if you say you know everything is racist we have to defund the police we have to change you know we have to you know you know get people out of jail we have to change you know there may be reasons to do that but if you literally cannot critique that idea if you literally cannot even tweet an article you know why was steve there was a cancellation attempt on steve pinker most of the evidence was he tweeted several articles where he mentioned something in a new york times article that you know scientific studies so if you literally can't even quote contrary evidence then your site is structurally stupid and that means that the policies you push on elementary schools on high schools on colleges the policies you push are so stupid and unpopular that they almost guarantee you're going to lose elections so you know that's all i mean that the republican party is a stupid party but the cultural left is the stupid side of the cultural spectrum i don't have any i don't see problems from the cultural right they don't have any power but the cultural left basically has corporations institutions universities museums that sort of got them by the you know by whatever part of the body you want to say and you know it tends to produce very bad results ultimately for the left yeah yeah i see what you mean especially with um the the narrative surrounding police shooting in america and how that bubbled up into actual policy um you know police departments defunded demoralized and and then the consequences filtering down and affecting the the very vulnerable people who live in neighborhoods that are not so good they cannot afford you know private security and so in that sense um it came to bite them in the foot exactly so you know people should be familiar or people on the left should be familiar with the word pyrrhic like a pyrrhic victory i forget the origin of the greek you know some greek general or something that you know he won the war he won the battle but the cost was so great that he lost the war and you know what i've seen happening in recent years the left wins victory after period victory um and that's why you know that's why i think desantis is likely to be the next president that's uh yeah oh man all right i'm going to leave that there but get back on the social media thing before we jump to something else i've been thinking a lot about this and so i noticed for example twitter around 20 2008 maybe 2009 maybe 2010 somewhere in that or those early few years of twitter right specifically twitter it was like a playground for comedians it was this awesome place where you can go and follow all these comedians and they would just dump their brains out in tweets you know something that maybe didn't work on stage or just something that they just farted out while they were on the train or at the park or whatever and it was amazing to just kind of get a glimpse into their brains and they kind of ruled that platform and it was just this fun you get these fun bite-sized ridiculous yeah it was a nice place comedian yeah it was i mean i found it so fun right it's and and it was a great place for engagement with people that you otherwise wouldn't have any occasion to engage with right and then something started to shift as you mentioned and it started to get really serious and then all the comedians left i think that's that's emblematic of the issue in one direction um but but i keep thinking about you know the metaphor that you're using and my metaphor is more of prometheus my metaphor is that social media and maybe media in general but social media in particular is definitely fire we got fire and we can do all this great stuff with fire right we can cook great food we can you know warm ourselves when it's cold we can do all these wonderful things with fire but we also now can have house fires and buildings burning down and we have pyromaniacs yeah and and we have third degree burns and we have all this crazy stuff and you know just like with fire i think it becomes incumbent upon us to use this tool responsibly to use this tool in a way where we get all the benefits and mitigate all the harm right and i don't think social media we've figured out how to do it or we've realized that we need to do it we kind of keep expecting someone else to do it for us what do you think about so yeah so i love what you just said let me just modify it a little bit so first the premise the pr methods myth is definitely a great one it's the frankenstein story it's you know prometheus steals fire from the gods gives it to the mortals and then he himself is tortured by the gods forever um but i think that social media is not fire it's the internet the internet is the thing that you're talking about there so let me just work this out for you this is something i've seen there's a lot of confusion i talked about this oh yeah like for example people say thank god we had social media during covet can you imagine you know i'm talk because i keep talking like look what happens to kids kids are in terrible shape teenagers are in terrible shape social media is messing them up and people say oh well come on well you know do you think they should what if they didn't have a during covet you know that was the only way they could communicate to which i say wait i think you're confusing social media and the internet like yeah can you imagine if they didn't have instagram and facebook and and twitter and and all they had was zoom and skype and texting and telephone and multiplayer video games and roblox and and 50 other ways they could interact synchronously you know are you saying if we took away this weird asynchronous way of communicating and waiting for people to rate you like that's what they needed no you're wrong um so what i really want to convey here is the you know we've got these three separate things there's the internet which is this incredible gift and i have something to do a demonstration i say you know imagine if a genie had come to come to you in the in the early 90s and said i've got three magical boxes here and you can open one two or three that were zero don't open any any box you open it's gonna give you something but it's gonna take 10 to 15 hours a week of your life for the rest of your life okay so you decide first box internet what do you think you can open it are you glad we have the internet even though you spend a lot of time on it raise your hand seriously you guys are you glad we have the internet yes yes everyone is yeah oh yeah so the internet is fire i'm glad we have fire yeah fire burns and things but you know yeah we're glad we have fire same thing for the internet okay the next box is the iphone now this is you know as steve jobs introduced it this is as he said it's a phone and a camera and an ipod all-in-one and a flashlight you know it's this incredible swiss army knife it's got all these tools on it so forget social media you've got all these tools now that's the second box now if you open it and you also have the internet on it so it's going to take an additional now you're spending 30 hours a week on your phone and on the internet total what do you think are you glad we would you open that box or do you wish we didn't have smartphones we had flip phones i still would flip but i'm a luddite yeah and this is a curse this is a curse honestly okay but hold on a second so first of all so yeah most when i do that i've done this twice live and you know everyone says yes to internet this they're slower like 70 say yes but they're slower yeah but part of what they're doing i think is you're saying it's a curse it's not this is the curse it's the social media because if this was just your camera your ipod and a flashlight and if this was just the four or five apps you'd love it that would be no problem the third box is social media the third box is facebook and twitter and uh you know and tick tock and all the others um and now that's another 10 15 so now we're up to 40 hours a week now you're gonna spend 40 hours a week and it's gonna make uh most uh teen and girls be depressed and and self-harming and it's gonna get people fired for stupid reasons and it's gonna do all kinds of terrible things uh but you know it's it's only gonna take 10 to 15 extra hours a week of your life what do you think you're going to open that box very few say yes well with the benefit of of you know hindsight like knowing what my life is like as a result right now i would still say yes that's the thing i wanted to i wanted to talk to you about this because every everything oh tell me about that why would you why would you say tell me what do you get from social media that's so great everything good that has happened to me in the last two years plus has been a direct result of of the things that social media allows me to have that i wouldn't be able to have like excuse me you know contact and communication with uh contact and communication with people who i would never meet in a million years otherwise um the ability to connect with certain people who now i have you know writing gigs for them right i published and i published a newsweek and a few other places as a result of my my engagement and also making friends i've made friends that i never would have met before and now we have these wonderful conversations we have these wonderful exchanges where we disagree and so so this is what i'm getting at what i'm getting at is that a lot of the onus is on me to use it properly right to use another metaphor i use another metaphor all the time that it's like a chainsaw right you need to know what you're doing or you will hack someone's arm off or your own arm off or your own leg off or something but if you know what you're doing you can build a house you can do amazing things and so again you know no this is just this is perfect because now we have us right the internet is fire we all agree we need that that does a lot of things social media is a chainsaw i love it because that also fits with the martin gury thing it's great it's great for tearing things down it's hard to build a house with a chainsaw but it would help to you know but it's great for cutting things down so yeah it's a tool and you can use it well uh okay i like that yeah yeah so but that's the thing i feel like what if what if our focus is misplaced what if i mean it's not that we shouldn't pay attention to the effects right like i think you know somebody like tristan harris is doing really wonderful work pointing out the way that these algorithms and these things are are programmed to hijack our attention and do all those things i think that's great i would never say we shouldn't do those things but i wonder if we should put more emphasis on kind of training you know like hey look this is the way and again i think of it as you know this is an evolution of what tv was like right like okay you're gonna you're gonna get television commercials right they're gonna flash lights at you they're gonna show people having a lot of fun they're gonna show really good looking people that you know you're already being pulled in all these directions psychologically but if you can inoculate inoculate yourself to that if you can be mindful of those things then you can watch tv without going out and buying everything okay good so the way you're putting it it is possible to use it well it takes some fair amount of discipline um it is it does have dangers yes if that's the case i think i don't want my 10 year old kid and my daughter's 12 now but i think you know i don't want i don't want 10 year olds on it and i certainly don't want the company making deals with with 10 year old girls behind our back luring them in a way we can't stop unless we keep them away from the internet everywhere they can't keep them away from fake making fake accounts um i i think you hit on a term you said it takes discipline right that i think and i think that's very key because i know i don't have discipline in that area so this is why i don't have instagram and and you know being a millennial one of the first questions like people before they ask for anything the first question is you meet a stranger you start you strike up a conversation the first question is what's your instagram really yeah oh wow yeah generally not even your number it's a totally different world um everyone assumes like everyone assumes that they meet you they assume you're on instagram wow yep and when i say i i don't have it there's usually you know like shock what's like you don't exist then like you know and um and in part like my but the reason that i had shunned instagram um was i i didn't like what it incentivized because i i do see people generally when they're you know in a place that they're somewhat amazed there's some positive emotion there their instinct is to think about how to frame that shot for the ground right and so it trains your mind to to not to precisely do the the exact thing that you should be doing if you do not want to be present in the moment and that's right that that's why i i shunned it um and your work on instagram especially uh you know linking a teenager especially for for girls um suicides and bad mental health outcomes to this platform is very uh it's very telling i i'm actually interested also in tick tock because i think there's a bit of a mcluhan kind of medium as the message um problem with these platforms because all the platforms are different right and so twitter incentivizes something else i am on twitter um and i know what it incentivizes in me yeah yeah yeah but instagram is something else and then tick tock is something else because that's more video that's that's a more interactive um you know addictive i think i actually think tick tock is you know hits the stream a little bit more yeah and and then i wonder if you have looked at tumblr because tumblr is an interesting comparison it's it's it's not uh you don't link your identity to it right it's actually anonymous uh you have like usernames and things like that and i wonder you know you're looking at mental health and social media have you done cross-platform comparisons and yeah no that's that's right this is this is where we should we should go now in our conversation and where we need to go as a society is looking is looking you know it's not all the internet it's not all social media it's different kinds of social media so uh so after right after i publish the atlantic article somebody wrote to me and said um you didn't mention tumblr tumblr is where the lab league happened loudly i mean the weird like the weird morality that came onto campus uh it actually came from tumblr there was no i'd say they sent me an article the idea was so tumblr is different from all the other platforms because as you say it's not first of all it's not real identity and it's not about the social network you don't find it because someone you know is on it you find it originally because you you're fans of the same performer or sports teams but if it was a fan a fan world and then parts of it became political issues so you could be on you know global warming tumblr or trans tumblr or it was very political and this is what and so one thing we know is that when all the kids got on phones the boys went for video games and youtube they preferentially use those the girls went for the visual ones they went for instagram tumblr and pinterest those three and so um and tumblr was the furthest left of them i believe i'm told i've never been on it but tumblr kind of nurtured it wasn't a community of people who were connected it was it was people community people who cared a lot about a particular issue who shared ideas about intersectionality and power and privilege and oppression and this i think might help explain first why these ideas they were not there on campus in 2012 or i should say they were contained in about five departments as they've been for decades but suddenly they just poured out everywhere 2014 2015. they you know it's basically so quick um but i think it's credible that tumblr played a role as like nurturing the particular virus that then sort of took over universities so tumble i think was the worst for that conversely at the other end let's look at linkedin so uh angel you said all these good things happen you met all these people now you could have met them on linkedin linkedin is probably for older more professional people than artsy you know artsy millennials or i'm guessing about you i don't know but i guessed pretty but um my point is that right we shouldn't just say social media we should say imagine a platform whose business model required spectacle so um that would be not linkedin that would be facebook twitter all those um so to go back to your chainsaw metaphor imagine one company makes chainsaws but what they're incentivized to do is make the best chainsaw for you they think about your needs what do you want to do and they make a chainsaw that helps you cut down trees okay so that's one company can buy from the other company is a very different business model they don't make their money by selling to you they sell from audience effects they get their money from audience effects so what they want they want a chainsaw that lashes out causes blood and other people come looking like wow look at that oh my god look at this chainsaw accident man and then you know you share it you retweet it and so they make their money not from helping you but by attracting eyebrows um so we're going to look far up with our metaphors here but that's my that's my metaphor facebook social media is not fire it's chainsaws and linkedin is a good chainsaw uh instagram is a bad chance so yeah no i can see it um i guess i'm like self i'm doing a lot of it myself it's kind of the the thing of you know some people can't take money out of the bank and have it in their wallet because then they're gonna spend it whereas i can have 60 bucks on my wallet and never spend it because i could just do that and maybe maybe there's something about me that's weird and that other people other people have trouble i don't know well actually yeah but the software the self control is a big one and that's and that's that's the same you know like i teach in a business school i teach a business ethics class and there are certain industries gambling cigarettes and um alcohol being the three preeminent ones where most of their profit comes from a small number of people whose life they are ruining so if you got rid of the alcoholics yeah alcohol companies go out of business most of them if you got rid of the problem gamblers casinos would shut down um so there are you know most people you know i love alcohol most people love it most people have no problem with it um but these things are attractive nuisances they they especially uh make money off of addicted people and the fact that there are no age restrictions and the industry is fighting age restrictions means um that our children are having horrendous rates of depression anxiety suffering suicide yeah i do think it takes a tremendous amount of restraint uh to do what angel does to use social media in a way that you know expands his intellectual life and and and social life and in part i think community building is actually something that social media does very well right and so if you look back um 2010-11 the arab spring ushered in so much hope about the power of using social media to organize and i had um recently maybe not recent a few months ago i tweeted this thing i said the best thing about the internet is that people who felt completely alone can find a community that shares their own world view and organize the worst thing about the internet is that people who felt completely alone can find a community that shares their worldview and organize yeah and and i'm wondering you know you you wrote in your article about about reforms but how can we reform social media in particular um to make sure that there's just the best thing about the internet and not the worst thing about it sure so a few of them are easy um so the age issue i mean that's just so easy um you know we don't let kids buy porn magazines we don't let them buy cigarettes we don't let them go to prostitutes even in nevada where it's legal for adults there's a lot of things that we think 10 year olds shouldn't be doing and you know 10 years ago we didn't know we thought you know posting photos of themselves posting videos of themselves dancing we didn't think that there'd be all these men ogling these little girls and then trying to contact them um so the idea that there's just no age restriction that the law is set to be 13 with zero enforcement is absurd and has to change the fact that the suicide rate has more than doubled um the self-harm rate is tripled for young girls um we have a catastrophe so the uh the hospital admission rate is more than 200 um for and this is true in canada and the uk as well um so we have a catastrophe that's destroying teen girls in this country large large number you know maybe not a majority but more than a third more than a third are damaged by this um i can't you know almost every time i talk to a woman in her 40s or 50s and i find that she has a daughter i see how she doing half the time it's hospitalization i'm exaggerating it seems like half the time it can't be 50 but it's frequent that her daughter is suicidal um and um so that has to change that i think is easy we have to raise the age to 16 or 18 uh with enforcement lots of industries have done it there are multiple ways to do it age verification so that's that one i think is easy it has to be wait professor height i have a question specifically about that how do you how do you delineate because i you're looking at suicide rates of girls using instagram and girls who are not using no stats we don't know we don't have good data no okay i wish we had that the companies know but we don't all we have is big studies in the uk and america how many hours a week do you spend on social media how many hours do you spend a week in church you know and then how's your mental health and so you know these are very crude measures and we look at the correlations they're also experiments um so if listeners actually if you go to jonathan height dot com slash social media i have everything there um i i put everything together in a 12-page memo i gave testimony at the senate judiciary committee i put it all in a very short succinct memo so just go to jonathan.com social media you'll see all the stats laid out uh there so the age one i think has to be done it's bipartisan it's it's an emergency this should be done tomorrow um uh okay now how do you for not just enough for adults for people over 18 so i'm i i have a lot of libertarian friends um i'm very reluctant to tell adults what to do i would lose all of my libertarian friends if i tried um and and i you know and i i generally share share their values so i'm not i'm i don't want to tell 18 you know adults what they can do but at the same time there are communities organized on certain principles and as a social psychologist i can say if we can bring together a community in which everyone is anonymous and they have no past they have no future and they only have a short you know 240 characters and everything is public that sounds to me like the worst possible forum in which people can interact that is like a definition almost of like the roman coliseum we'll have a bunch of short acts we'll have people killing lions lions killing people we you know push them off the stage another one you know these things that you know each each car record lasts you know a day or two and then it goes on so um so twitter is about the worst possible way you could have a public square or democratic discussion or any twitter i think is is really damaging to to institutions and democracy um uh whereas you could do you know if people had a sense of that we're tied together we're a community we're responsible to each other and so the other extreme would be linkedin uh where you need to be professional responsible civil polite uh you can make your case you can publish things you can put up all kinds of things and if they're popular other people will share them but it's very very stable and constructive so so all of this is about does their their architectural features of systems and then the question is what's the role of the federal government or any government um shouldn't this all just be left to the private to private industry and that gives us the innovation i certainly wouldn't want you know in in britain they have the bbc and they have regulated these regulated televisions all that i don't want that i don't say we need you know government social media but i do think that if a company wants this amazing special protection that only the gun industry has which is you can't sue us you can't sue us because you know we have a congressional influence so we got this thing passed in section 230 and there's a reason for section two that's the reason why we don't hold twitter responsible for everything anyone post so but if you want section 230 protection you actually have some minimal responsibilities like to verify that your users are people and that they're over 18 and if they make death threats you know you you have a way to stop them from just coming back on tomorrow with a different different identity so i think the biggest thing we could do is identity verification or authentication even elon musk wants a form of this so at least verify that they're a human not a bot um verify that they're over 18 there's a bunch of different ways to do that i think you should verify that they're in a particular country and i think um there are some ways you verify and i'm talking not that you give your driver's license to facebook although that would be one of seven different ways but uh if you want to open an account at facebook or instagram anywhere it kicks it over to a third-party place that verifies that you're a human being and if necessary that you're old enough and then if you pass it then passes it back it says yes this person can open an account that i think would make a huge difference uh whereas what we have now is any troll any person with a personality disorder any russian agent can create hundreds of accounts and harass millions of people you've touched on it a couple of times with this idea of a shared story a shared sense of kind of community and purpose right and that is something that i think if it existed outside of these social media platforms or if it was more robust then it would it would affect the way we operate within these social media platforms it would be more difficult for for how crazy it actually is to be that crazy in my view and i'm curious what you think about you know um when you wrote the righteous mind you you know you you talked earlier about the democratic party and the republican party but then that's distinct from liberalism and conservatism right and if i remember right your basic point with the righteous mind is that we all hold the same set of fundamental values it's just that the dials are kind of turned differently depending on a variety of things experience temperament etc right yeah um correct me if i'm wrong there but it seems to me it seems to me that some of those dials have have been drastically changed for either camp and it may be we may be in a place where liberalism and conservatism are unrecognizable um you know with with respect to the the categories you were using in your analysis and i'm curious what we should do about that it seems to me we were just talking with peter burgosian and he seemed to draw the line at you know the the principal divide seems to be i trust institutions versus i do not trust institutions and i'm i'm curious if you think we need to reassess this if if things have shifted so drastically that we need to reassess all this so the argument i'm trying to make in my the book i'm writing which is life after babel adapting to a world we may never again share is that since about 2014 we live in the post-babel world so you know i grew up in the pre-babel world uh where there were possibilities of shared meanings and there were newspapers that had some authority and you know if someone accused you of something you could defend yourself you know it was a world that was in some way connected to the world that we evolved in thousands you know millions of years ago a thousand years ago and then in 2012 2014 15 things changed and now we live in this weird world with all these exponential features that our brains don't work well with um and so one of them is that while it looks to you as though the settings have changed it looks to you as though liberals and conservatives have changed but i think that's not exactly what happened rather um america we happen to have two parties which is a terrible number one is the worst number of political parties in the country but two is the second worst number um in europe they have multiple parties and parliamentary systems are much more robust against polarization two is maximally efficient at creating polarization and hatred and dysfunction and so our two parties though have always been um tense that included multiple kinds of people multiple kinds what happened was on the left you always had a range of people including you know the radicals and communists and people in brooklyn who don't shave or shower or change their clothing you know but they weren't in charge like you know it was like it was more you know center left you know ivy league educated uh you know progressives at the new york times i mean so you always had multiple people voting for the democrats but the far left never really had any power um and as i said before the far left is not running things on the democrats but they have a lot more cultural power now so the left has super empowered its illiberal wing and you know we all see all of us in the fair community we all see that you know wokeness is about as opposed to liberalism as authoritarianism or fascism these are doctrines that believe in using force to compel people to do your bidding to live according to your ideals so uh so the left has super empowered it's it's it's it's far left wing not in the democratic party necessarily but in the culture on the right yo reagan put together this very successful electoral coalition of the business conservatives who are fine with gay marriage they're you know a lot of the libertarians and the true social conservatives the edmund burke you know george w george h.w bush wouldn't be prudent it's the old saturday night live joke you know they're like the social conservatives have a lot of respect for them read edmund burke you know he understood you don't go tearing down institutions you have to change them gradually um so that's like the intellectual core or the the heart of conservatism is the berkey and conservatives but then you also have the authoritarians who used to be there used to be a lot on the democratic side as well they were technically more like you know working-class blue-collar people who had strong beliefs about immigration uh they would say things that that many would consider racist they wanted more restrictions i'm a big fan of karen stenner the political scientist who studies authoritarianism as a predisposition they when they fee when when about 20 of the population when they feel that we're losing any sense of moral coherence when they what she calls normative threat or moral threat you know uh what what did trump say in his opening is opening statement of his campaign mexican rapists you know they're coming across the border this was like totally targeted at the authoritarian receptor to activate the authoritarian mindset so anyway reagan brought them especially into the republican party so you've got you had sort of the libertarian business conservative laissez-faire people the social conservatives and the more authoritarians um that was a big and very successful electoral coalition and it's and what social media i believe has done the post battle world has done is it's given the authoritarians enormous power um the fact that you know so steve bannon is one of them um what's his name oh she what's the guy the guy who coined the the metaphor uh the flight 93 election uh if if this is you know if we're flight 93 we're going to crash you've got to rush the cockpit if hillary clinton gets controls america is dead therefore vote trump that was a very powerful argument anyway my point is it's not that conservative liberalism change it's that the two coalitions have changed that the extreme members now have so much more power than they did before social john how do you think about so we're in a post-babel world um as you say but there are still some countries right now on this planet that are pre-babel and we are going head-to-head with them geopolitically who wins out yeah well if you talk well china is the obvious country that i think you're talking about cause china is different from all other countries uh i mean the chinese you know the russians have one narrative yeah yeah that's right so you know as tristan harris puts it the technology especially social media is making democracy much worse democracy and by the same token the technology is allowing the chinese communist party to have much better totalitarianism and by better i don't mean for human beings efficient efficient effective and so just you know for example they're able to say uh oh you know only a certain amount of video games and then they cut the kids off yeah their tick tock is is pretty wholesome and healthy and they whereas they let it rip here you know they let all the garbage rip here which is uh so so um so clearly the technology points to china having having uh being in better shape i can't weigh in on on which country wins 30 years from now just because china has all kinds of other problems the declining birth rate the aging population so i can't say that china's gonna i really don't know but what i can say is that when i see the way the chinese communist party is able to anticipate they see what's happening and they actively work to maintain a sense of coherence national pride uh mental health they're doing things the technology helps them be more effective and for us i think it's doing us in i think we're going to have some pretty serious um i can't not sure i can say collapse per se but i you know the model that i'm sort of playing with that i i bring out on shows like this and then we'll see if people on twitter or elsewhere say argue back and say why i'm wrong but i think the model to look for is something like venezuela or argentina because these are countries that have had a lot of prosperity in their past and they've also had democracy and they've also had authoritarianism and we're a country that has had the most prosperity of any country other than oil countries and we've had nothing but democracy but that's not eternal or inevitable and so i think we're going to have a lot more political violence you know as we did in the 70s and early 70s late 60s it could get a lot more serious because now they're much better organized the weather underground couldn't there's no way they could do any sort of big thing you know they were literally hiding from the police all the time um whereas you know a lot of the right-wing militias now they're called accelerationist that is uh so i read um uh barbara walters book how civil war started absolutely terrifying because we are on the very path that she describes that civil wars after the second world war civil wars have a certain pattern to them you have a declining democracy um or a rise or rising up from autocracy but you have a middle zone anocracy um you have militias and you have identity-based politics not issue-based identity-based and so a lot of this points to the right especially the militias especially are on the right but the identity-based politics that the left is pushing they're doing everything they can to make these right-wing militia people try to launch a civil war you know so anyway um i think we have a lot of turmoil in our future um but you know history goes in cycles and we had a long wonderful cycle with you know peak in the 1990s of you know peace breaking out everywhere and now we're due for a crack up which many theories have predicted um it won't go on forever um but it's you know there's no way to know how long it'll last other than i think it's going to be more than 10 years i don't think you know i i think the next 10 years will be crazy compared to what we've gone through in the last few years and and so each so the grand unified theory of why everything sucks for you is is social media that if we didn't have social media that this decline would not be as hastened or yeah so yeah so i hope i don't have a grand unified theory although sometimes it might seem like i'm talking that way i've been focused on social media because that's the thing that made it so sharp in 2014 like everything went crazy around 2014. that's social media but um but i am a big fan of peter churchin who has books like war war and peace and war and psycho you know he writes about cycles of history um and stroud and house had a book in the 1990s um there's a 14th century muslim scholar ibn khaldoon a lot of people have observed that there are cycles of history and what happens is you have a crisis a generation meets the crisis and they build institutions and then you have you know you have a two or three generations of prosperity and that happened to us with world war ii in the post-war world but that can never last forever it can't even last a hundred years it just lasts two or three generations then it begins to crack up and so that's where we are and that was true before social media so it's not it's not that social media caused this we were due for the normal you know the post world war ii world was going to crack up um but if it's happening when suddenly we're blind like with like you know dust thrown in our eyes or disoriented and we're full of anger that didn't have to be that i think is social media so um so we're going down we would have been going down anyway uh peter churchian predicted in 2010 that the big crack up would be 2020 so that would be a peak year stronghouse said 2025 a great gate history will open up they said that in the 90s so sometime in the 2020s is like the peak chaos um and then how what will happen nobody knows but i think social media makes it much more likely that the bottom will be far down compared to where it would have been so what can we do about this i'm feeling like uh i'm going to be around so i kind of want to know what do i what do i do here so no so left okay you know okay wait so i actually know i have okay so let me let me let me i don't i don't want to leave i don't know how much more time we have but i don't want to leave yeah the largely millennial i don't know if it's larger than mine but i don't want to leave the audience like i want to shock people to say we can't just do business as usual the trends are really really bad i mean they're much worse than i think that people realize um but it's not like we're gonna die that is um you know in argentina and venezuela you know people didn't die countries are still there i mean okay venezuela is in really bad shape but that's economic catastrophe and we have so you know we're not gonna be like venice because we have a very good private sector we have very vibrant economies so we'd be more like argentina but if argentina had a better economy um so it's not that we're going to die it's that a lot of things we take we took for granted are going to break and what that means is that is that your generation so there's millennials and gen z after you um you actually have the chance to matter you actually have the chance to build whatever comes next i was born in 1963 i just got to enjoy the fruits of my parents labor i didn't have to build anything everything was sort of easy and boring it was fun in the 90s but didn't take any work um but you guys are gonna have to work and what that means is you have a chance to be heroes you have a chance to be like my parents generally to my grandparents generation you know they you know however bad you think things are it's not compared to the great depression of world war ii nothing um so your things are going to break and then they'll get rebuilt they're not going to stay broken forever so your generation has a chance to matter and to do that to do it well you have to rid yourself of structural stupidity if you go into this in just a cultural mindset and especially i would say this directly to members the fair community you know fair the general vibe is anti-woke now i hate wokeness as much as everybody else but i try not to do culture war i try to just understand everything and you you know with a real war you can win by literally killing all of your enemies with a culture where you can't the more you hit them the stronger they get so um so i would urge especially people involved in fair you know this cultural problem is is damaging our institutions but the people doing it are not bad people we have to think sociologically and social psychologically we have to figure how do we change things to defang them how do we change things to make our institutions smart um and so while i you know i don't think that fair is structurally stupid that is i've never felt in any of the communities that you and i are in i've never felt that if i descent like like what i just said i've never felt like if i criticize oh i'm going to be kicked out like oh i'm going to be no you know it is it is a very open intellectually open community um but um but i would you know urge people to you know read as widely as you can talk to people as widely as you can and really have like an attitude of not of anger but of compassion i mean our species are are civil we're in trouble um and everybody's hurting and and there's no you know there's a clear i mean there's no clear villain here it's a systemic problem well you're you're following the trend of our recent episodes where you preempt the last question before we ask it uh and if the final question we ask every guest is as you know our focus at fair is providing what we call a pro-human approach to the issues of the day the issues that we've been talking about all these difficult things and so the question would be what what does pro-human mean to you and how can everyday people apply that pro-human principle yeah no that's sort of i didn't know that was the last question what does pro-human mean um so i i see humanity as this long incredible story um i have a real sense of kinship with you know our ancestors going back millions of years and and i think about about humans you know struggling to to find food every day and make fire every day and i look at how easy we have it and how far we've come and i'm filled with awe and i have a strong sense that we're living so far above our design specifications that it's miraculous and so now we're we're falling down now somewhat but we're still way about where we should be um so i guess pro-human means to identify with the long and incredible story of our species we're humans all of us we're all humans and that means that we're complicated we are prone to arrogance and confirmation bias so we need to be more humble we have these deep social needs that especially in modern life we're starving to to have fulfilled so i guess this is part of what keeps me from i i never feel anger i like never get angry um and and i think part of it is maybe just as a social scientist it's just like it's this incredibly fascinating story and right now we're in a very difficult part of the plot um and um you know it's going to work out someday i don't know when i don't know what the next chapters are and the next chapter probably is going to be one of the darker chapters in the book certainly in the more recent chapters of the book so i don't know what it's going to be but if we approach it with a sense of humility um you know and that's and i haven't mentioned hedorah's academy i don't think i mentioned it much um you know that's part of what we're we're trying to do is since you know humility curiosity and a commitment that you know we cannot we can figure this out if we if we think together that's what we're trying to do at universities so that's a bit scattered but i do want to end with this one particular quote that i love that that really helps me um so here it is it's from so it's from joseph campbell who i don't know if you know who he is but he was a very famous uh he studied mythology in the 20th century he was at uh which school was it yep exactly he wrote a hero with a thousand faces and it was a pbs special on him which i watched in the night isn't it really affected me and i remember this line i looked it up and i found it so he says in one of the interviews he says the the lesson of the hero's journey the lesson that you get from study because the hero stories are very similar around the world again it's part of the human story he says the lesson is this quote he says participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world we cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy the warriors approach is to say yes to life yes to it all so that's where we are this is this is our lot this is the hand we've been dealt it's going to be it's going to be difficult but you have no choice but to say yes to it beautifully put jonathan height thank you so much for joining us on fair perspectives my pleasure angel my pleasure melissa thank you for listening to fair perspectives if you'd like to support the show you can do it by subscribing on youtube and on your favorite podcast platform and leaving us a positive rating and review you can also access exclusive podcast content such as q and a's and bonus episodes by visiting us and signing up at fairperspectives.org for weekly fair news and opinion pieces by members of the fair community visit our sub stack at fare4all.substack.com and tune in to fair news weekly wherever you listen to podcasts if you'd like to join or support the pro human movement visit us at fare4all.org join us thanks again and see you next time [Music] you

Channel: FAIR Perspectives

Views: 86,314

Keywords: #fairperspectives, #angeleduardo, #podcast, #rationality, #optimism, #thelanguageinstinct, #rationalism, #enlightmentnow, #thebetterangelsofournature, #thesenseofstyle, #theblankslate, #howthemindworks, #race, #seggregation, #media, #policeviolence, #freedomofspeech, #notforprofit, #freespeech

Id: W3Gvxpb-hQQ

Length: 66min 29sec (3989 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022