#400 — The Politics of Information

Sam Harris speaks with Helen Lewis about the culture wars. They discuss the role of journalists, DEI, political polarization, feminism, transgender activism, gender roles, the Rotherham scandal, Islam and jihadism, Elon Musk and X, the future of the Democratic Party, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That's why Sam Harris created the Waking Up https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life's most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with Helen Lewis. Helen, thanks for joining me.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:50Sam Harris?

  So I've been a fan for quite some time. I have not read everything you've written or heard everything you've said, but I've been following you, I think it's been, it has been four or five years or so. How long have you been at The Atlantic?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, since 2019, so back then.

• 1:06Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. So maybe we can start with your background as a journalist before we launch ourselves into the whole catastrophe, which is modern politics and culture war issues. How would you describe your focus as a writer and journalist?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  These days, I'm more and more interested in reporting. I don't know about you, but I kind of went through a phase where I felt like I'd gorged on opinions. I sort of thought everyone in the world has many opinions. I have many, many opinions, but actually, to me, the hard work of journalism is going out there, talking to people, finding out facts, writing them down, publishing them, all of which are, I think, a lot more difficult than sometimes people would think. You know, I always think of Rashomon as being the model for journalism, is you can get the same event that is reported by people who are there in the room into completely different ways. And that is, you know, that is really hard intellectual work to do, to try and sort out what actually happened from among this conflicting mess of all the people's versions of reality. So that's the stuff I'm most interested in doing at the moment.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  The Atlantic gives me a berth to do that. It also gives me a berth to do commentary, which is my kind of natural home. I started out as a copy editor, but I became a writer now over a decade ago. And I've always been somebody who has been quite free with their opinions. But yeah, I think you can overdose a bit, can't you?

• 2:23Sam Harris?

  Do you write pieces that are, in your view, ever free of commentary and opinion? And it's just actually straight reporting? Or you're always, you're definitely, everything I've read from you, it seems to be on the, at least it has a foot in the opinion side of the journal.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't do that. I really respect people who are just hardcore reporters, you know, and they, and they really work a beat really hard. And they go in and they just, you know, try not to put any of themselves into it. But I, I've never managed to do that. I think, you know, my natural tendency is often towards snark. So quite often snark creeps in there. But I, I don't think that's necessarily a bad response. You know, my, my model of journalism is the being the boy in the emperor's new clothes, right? You're the one who has to stand in the middle of everyone else. And everyone else is saying that they're having a wonderful time and everything's brilliant. And you have to be the one that points out, no, the emperor's naked. So having a kind of snarky British sensibility, I think, kind of helps. I mean, maybe there's some of the stuff we'll come to talk to you about later, but I feel like journalism has been kind of eaten alive by influencers. And these influencers are often very credulous.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  They're very happy to be near people who are powerful. And that to me is not the model of, you know, I'm not saying journalists should be sociopaths exactly, but you certainly shouldn't be in it in order to have a kind of nice life and hang out and for people to like you, I think, is, is a really big problem.

• 3:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. So there are certainly several podcasters of late who have interviewed very prominent people, starting with the, the current president. And I see all the scars there of people imagining that if you simply maintain a good feeling during the conversation, you have done your work as a host, even given this rare opportunity to interview the, the incoming president of the United States. And therefore they don't ask a single skeptical question. Yeah, it seems to me that the, the norms of journalism somehow have to be plowed into the most influential influencer venues, podcasts and, you know, other contexts. I don't know how that happens apart from just complaining about it.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Well, we'll try, yeah, let's, let's try that one. That, yeah, I think I've been trying that one for some time. It hasn't worked yet, but it might do.

• 4:31Sam Harris?

  How would you describe the difference between US and UK journalism at this point? And maybe it's journalism and political culture. How would you, what could one side learn from the other? Or which are you more worried about? Which is showing the signs of erosion of our ability to make sense of the current moment more?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I think my work in America is definitely helped by having one foot still in Britain. And I know it's very easy to be jingoistic and assume that your country is sort of doing everything right because it's what you grew up with. But just think about our last election here we had last year in which we went from a, you know, conservative majority government, we'd had conservatives in power for 14 years, to a big swing to the Labour Party. But, you know, absolutely nobody called that as being, you know, the most important election of our lifetimes. It's an existential election on which democracy depends. If the other side get in, you know, either it's communism or it's fascism. Where are those things that I heard when I traveled around Pennsylvania in October? You know, one side genuinely thought that Kamala Harris, I would talk to people who genuinely

• 5:37Speaker 01

  thought Kamala Harris was a communist or a Marxist or whatever it might be. And I would talk to people who thought Trump is bringing in fascism. And when that's your opinion of the other side, it's very hard to see why anyone would vote for that person or why you might ever switch your party allegiance. And so you get into the same situation that you have with the problems of party corruption in much more religiously sectarian societies, right? Where if you never, you know, if your family's Protestant and you always vote for the Protestant Party and there's nothing on earth that can make you vote for the Catholic Party, that is not an invitation to the Protestant Party to behave really well. You know, they know that they've got a certain level of block votes. And I think something similar feels very true to me about US politics is if you kind of, if the number of swing voters is so small, that is fundamentally very unhealthy for

• 6:22Speaker 01

  the parties.

• 6:23Sam Harris?

  I mean, do you think that the nature of the candidates justified that level of hyper-partisanship this time around? Or is, are the differences as stark in the UK and that just the, the response culturally around them is not as hysterical?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  I don't think there's any world in which you can say that Kamala Harris or indeed Joe Biden are communists, right? Which was literally in some cases, the accusations, or even Marxists. And I think that's just from people who use those as a kind of boo word for very left wing. What I think they actually meant by that is what you might call quote unquote wokeness. They meant that they were identity progressives. Yeah. They didn't really think that they wanted to, you know, expropriate the means of production and put everybody to work on collective farms. But, you know, I do think that the media in America is more extreme, the politics is more extreme, more polarised. And I don't have a particularly good explanation for why that is, apart from one of the things I'm guessing is happening is people are sorting themselves out into, you know, into

• 7:22Speaker 01

  communities that are less mixed than they once were. And I think particularly in terms of the media, so the BBC is our state funded broadcaster, everyone has to pay their licence fee of £160 a year. What you do there is you have political programmes that have a duty to be impartial, a duty to present both sides. You know, I've sat on Question Time panels with people who are on completely different places from the political spectrum to me, and I have to listen to them and their opinions are given equal weight. And you don't really get that in American media. You know, I would watch CNN a lot during the election and they would have, you know, Scott Jennings, who's their kind of Republican, vastly outnumbered and everyone would scream when he said something. And then you'd watch Fox News and then maybe occasionally this sort of, as they let a liberal creep through the door, but then they'd say something and would immediately kind of get screamed

• 8:06Speaker 01

  down. And so you just don't have that tradition of listening, of being forced to listen to the other side. And then social media obviously allows you to opt out completely of listening to the other side. My boss at The Atlantic, Geoff, did an interview with Obama a couple of years ago, in which he said he watched the change happen even during his runs for president. He said he used to go to a little town in a swing state and there'd be a guy with a bow tie who edited the local newspaper, right? And maybe he was a Republican, but he knew that he had a district that had all kinds of different people in it and he'd give you a fair shake. And those people got, you know, those local papers have just been obliterated, replaced by very opinionated talk radio and now very opinionated conservatives. And so the number of places in the media that see their duty as talking to a wide spectrum of people has really dwindled.

• 8:52Sam Harris?

  And that hasn't happened in the UK to the same degree?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  It hasn't happened to the same degree. It's definitely happened. We've had in the last couple of years, the launch of two very, I mean technically under broadcasting regulations neutral, but in practice, right wing TV channels. One of them folded. It ended up just as Piers Morgan's YouTube show and then he kind of left. And then One GB News has become a kind of Fox News of Britain, really. Its viewership is relatively low, but it's definitely had an effect on British politics. I mean, you must notice sometimes where you see these memes kind of creep through and it's like everybody's been issued a kind of order, like there's some, there's some events that everybody now cares about or some, something that you say that just gets thrown at you and you, you just can't quite work out where it's come from. Like, it's like overnight, everybody has sort of heard the same phrase

• 9:37Speaker 01

  or the same argument. And quite often, I find that those come from those very partisan media sources. And, and there is an almost kind of like droid-like way that suddenly they kind of crest and they go into the public consciousness and then, and they move on and everyone's talking about someone else. And it's very hard, if you're outside of them, to kind of get an insight into how those things are happening and to understand why everybody's talking about this. And because of the BBC, there is still a sense in Britain that you do, you know, you are more likely to hear what the other side are talking about, rather than these, these memes arise that you just, you know, like sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Suddenly, everyone is talking about something you've never heard of before, like it's always been there and it's the most important thing in politics.

• 10:17Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are phrases where you, that you have a, almost a whole orientation toward not just politics, but information online crystallized in a phrase. I mean, if someone uses the phrase Russiagate hoax without scare quotes around it, I think I know everything about their political worldview at this point, right? I mean, it's just, it just condenses so much and it has been reiterated with such slavish loyalty now for, for years.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Right. When I'm writing about youth gender medicine, for example, there's a couple of ones that come up recently. So, and you, you heard them in the congressional hearings on, on girls' sport, the idea that actually what Republicans want are genital inspections.

• 10:59Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And people just go, of course, what the right want are genital inspections. And you go, well, actually, the way that they sex test in sport is through a cheek swab and then through a blood sample, right? This was, genital inspections used to happen in the, in the 60s, but then a lot of bad stuff used to happen in the 60s. That's not what actually we are asking for now. But I presume they've had a briefing from some charity or governmental lobby group or whatever it might be, or there has been something that's been, you know, some very prominent influencer in their social media feeds has been putting this in. And then suddenly everyone kind of goes, of course, what the right really wants are genital inspections. And there's a question for me as a journalist is always about how much do you spend, how much time do you spend rebutting stuff versus how much you try and spend actively trying to make the points that you want to make. And I think, I still don't know where the

• 11:42Speaker 01

  balance is for that, because actually, there is still a merit in somewhere like The Atlantic, writing stuff down and, and if it's not true, saying that it's not true. But you also do get this feeling that you're spending an enormous amount of time chasing phantoms.

• 11:56Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  And actually, is it stopping you from doing the good work that you would otherwise be doing?

• 12:00Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, there is also a perverse psychological effect where merely discussing something in order to debunk it kind of ramifies it in people's memory as being true. And it was, it's just, it's called the illusory truth effect. I don't know, it's, it could be one of these things that will not replicate when, when further studied. But there's this asymmetry in information warfare, which is if you can force people to keep talking about something, you're doing the damage, even if they're spending all the time debunking that something. And these are many topics we will, however, regrettably cover here. Before we do, is there anything that you, in your daily life as a journalist, are just

• 12:41Sam Harris?

  refusing to touch because of the, the hassle or perceived hassle of touching that topic? I mean, for me, it has always been, I noticed you, you got here way before me, but for some period of time, I was avoiding the transgender activist debate, just because I,

• 12:57Sam Harris?

  I saw other people dealing with it and it just seemed like it was more trouble than it's worth, right? I mean, it really had this this outsized negative impact on everyone's life who touched it. You know, I just saw what happened to Jesse Single and I'm sure there are many people who are in his orbit who shared some of that pain. J.K. Rowling, obviously. Is there anything like that that is still out there that you are just inclined to ignore, though it's a real issue that could be talked about in good faith?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  I think there are issues that I don't think about it exactly like that. I don't mind sticking my fingers in the plug socket, mostly because I kind of feel like if you don't, someone else always will, right? This is the kind of the idea that there is any way that the media can gatekeep what people talk about. You know, if the media doesn't talk about illegal immigration, then no one will think it's a problem. You know, that has just obviously turned out to be, you know, has been very demonstrably proved to be not true.

• 13:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I take a different approach, which is, I think this is probably how you maybe felt more about the transgender issue, which is there are some issues on which I don't necessarily have the expertise to add a lot. I don't think my voice necessarily is is the one that's needed.

• 14:06Sam Harris?

  There's that and also just that there is a perceived sense that just personally, it's just the hassle factor is too high. I mean, I distilled this once myself, you know, in a piece of advice that I never wound up taking, which is not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself, right? I mean, there's enough of a hassle associated with certain views, however valid they might be, that you just spend way too much time cleaning up the mess that everyone is eager to make on your behalf, right? Your people are going to willfully misunderstand what you said, even if it was only, you know, for two minutes on a podcast. And you could spend the next year of your life having that

• 14:48Sam Harris?

  be the first question you're ever asked in every context. And it just was, in hindsight, it just wasn't worth it because either the point wasn't important enough, the topic wasn't important enough, or it's just so easily misunderstood that, you know, albeit important, it's, you know, you've got better things to do.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I do feel like that about Israel and Palestine. You know, I'm not a foreign policy expert by any means. And I have, you know, my own views on it. But I think that what happens with that debate is you get sucked into having to say every bad thing that has happened on every other side dating back almost to the Middle Ages. Right. You need to kind of say, of course, we need to see this in the context of the displacement of the Palestinian people. Of course, we need to see this in the context of the Holocaust. Of course, we need to see this in the context of October the 7th. Of course, we need to see this. And I think you can end up being just derailed out of being able to say absolutely anything to the extent that I, I think that that's the closest I think I come to the mere hassle idea. The other one is probably IQ. So I've been writing this book about genius, which is out in the summer.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And I've gone a little bit through the history of IQ. And I went and obviously I read, you know, lots of the debates about the hereditarians versus the environmentalists. And I, you know, and I asked two friends of mine with very different views on the subject to see whether or not they would both read those chapters. But I've taken a policy decision with that, that if I'm asked about that in interviews and off the cuff, I'm going to say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to read the book. I just think that is a subject on which it is absolutely not worth taking an idea for a walk in a kind of casual way. Right. You know, and I don't think that's necessarily such a bad thing. There are subjects for which discussing them in a debate format or in a podcast format absolutely works. And there are others where actually just, you know, I think I more and more appreciate

• 16:31Speaker 01

  that feeling of just having time to sit down, something to say, do I really think this? Can I absolutely sure I support this? Have I got all the footnotes ready? And that being an okay way to approach some subjects. I'm not sure. Tell me, do you think, I mean, is that, is that cowardly or is that responsible? I don't, I just don't, I don't know.

• 16:47Sam Harris?

  Well, I do think you have to pick your battles. I mean, you only have so much time. So it's, it is a bit of a triage question with anything you do. Right. I mean, and insofar as you can foresee the outcome. I mean, often you can't, right? So you don't know what, just how much having touched a topic is going to eclipse every other thing in your life for a period of time and prove to be a massive opportunity cost. So I recognize most of those things in hindsight.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I know what you mean, though. I went, I went through a phase, you know, I interviewed Jordan Peterson for GQ back in 2018.

• 17:19Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  And I went through a phase where every time I did an interview on any kind of podcast, someone would ask me about it. And it was obvious what was happening, which was that everybody wanted their little spice, you know, slice of the controversy pie, right? They wanted to get me saying something about Jordan Peterson, they could put it on YouTube where his name was, you know, instant karma. And, and I just thought, this is going to make me look like some weird monomaniac who's just going around the internet, talking about something that happened to me now years ago.

• 17:45Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  But you also feel that you can't be, you know, it's impolite to say, I actually don't want to talk about this, like your kind of share, you know, in your 19th interview of the day. So I think that, that, that happens too.

• 17:56Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I had a similar thing with Ben Affleck. I think that took about a year for that not to be the, the first thing that I had to talk about in, in every context. And it's, uh, yeah, I feel your pain, although I'm probably going to ask you about Jordan Peterson in about five minutes. So, so what, let's start with the internet. This has to be the, the layer at which much of this mad work is being accomplished on our brains. What is the internet doing to us in your view?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  The thing I keep thinking about is the fact that we used to live in geographic communities and they were, you know, people obviously sought themselves into people who live like them, you know, if you are rich, you can go and make sure that you only live near other rich people. Lots of people end up living soft lives of racial segregation by the places where they choose to live, you know, that is all possible. But nonetheless, your neighbors were much more likely to be varied in age and political temperament, and actually just personality terms, right? You have this kind of just mixture of people around you. But what the internet has done, as far as I can see, you know, and I'm somebody who's been online since I was a teenager, is it's allowed people to sort themselves by interest.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  And that's had just some incredibly weird effects on us, I think. You know, we've ended up over indexing on people who are very like us in particular ways. And, and you see some very unhealthy communities. I don't think it'd be so easy to form in real life.

• 19:21Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  So my friend, Hadley Freeman, for example, she wrote a brilliant memoir about being anorexic and she talked about how unhealthy being on a hospital anorexia ward was for her, because it was full of anorexic women competing with each other to who could eat the least and who could weigh the less, you know? And that's really, those things are really unhealthy, but that's quite a specific environment. But if you go onto the internet, you can find proanna forums, you can find very unhealthy situations for teenage girls to be in, who we know are really prone to social contagion, and they are just absolutely everywhere. You want to find somebody to get into competition with about your dissociative identity disorder, or your alts, or whatever it might be. That's just something that is just lying in the middle of the road for

• 20:05Speaker 01

  you to pick up. And I think those things, and you see it now, I think what's happened with Twitter is a really fascinating example of this, which is that it's gone in the space of two years from an unrepresentative left-wing echo chamber to an unrepresentative right-wing echo chamber. And people have just aggressively sorted themselves into the place that they want to be with only people who are very much like them. I've just finished writing a piece about Ayella, who does these massive sex work research surveys and people's fetishes, and even things like that, even at the level of human sexuality, people have now got ideas about things that they could do that they probably never would have met someone in normal life in the 1990s who was into that thing. And I think, we don't really have a way of conceptualizing it, we don't really have a way of talking about that. But if

• 20:48Speaker 01

  the way that people organize themselves has just become narrowed in these ways, never mind the fact that now we're interacting with these things one-on-one, it's just you and this black screen that you stare at for hours and hours a day, all of that is really changing. I've been writing a bit about young men and their approach to the presidential election. And it really just struck me how ready-made the whole lifestyle from those podcasts is. You have your zin pouches, you have your protein powders, you have your crypto ice baths, you have your day trading, your gambling. And it's like a whole prepackaged consumer lifestyle that you buy off the shelf. But it sands a lot of the rough edges

• 21:31Speaker 01

  off. And when I see people complaining about online dating and stuff like that, a lot of the complaints seem to be about it feeling so much like a marketplace, but then everything online feels like a marketplace or a slot machine. And you just don't get these baggy, messy, human interactions in the way that I think if you had to live in a small village somewhere, even though you'd be seeing only a very limited number of people, they'd all be weird in different ways, rather than you finding all the people who are weird in the same way.

• 21:57Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's a very interesting insight. There's something about The internet that also filters the social idiosyncrasies and pathologies that would disqualify a person as a source of information too. I remember seeing this in a family member now, almost 25 years ago with the 9/11 truth conspiracy theory stuff. So this is like the early internet phenomenon, at least in my world, where I saw someone go down the rabbit hole with 9/11 trutherism. And one thing was clear is that if he had had to go to a conference, a physical conference out in the real world and meet the people who were similarly obsessed with this idea

• 22:39Sam Harris?

  that 9/11 was an inside job and that all those voicemail messages from the doomed passengers on Flight 93, those were faked by CIA voice faking technology and those people, that plane landed and those people were brought off and murdered and et cetera, et cetera. It gets as crazy as you want it to get. If he had gone to a conference and met the people who were manufacturing these ideas, in many cases, he could, he would be able to see at a glance the dysfunction in their lives, the fact that this was, you know, that their attitude toward what was passing as journalism for them was born of, you know, psychological and social pathologies in many cases that were quite stark, right?

• 23:23Sam Harris?

  And what you get with the internet is a webpage or a, you know, now a feed on X, which is exactly as the person wants it to be. I mean, some of them are shrieking psychopathology, you know, despite the best efforts of the person involved, but still, you can't tell that this, that the person who made, to go back to 9/11, the documentary Loose Change that deranged the brains of a generation on that topic, was, I think at the time, you know, 18 years old and, and living in his mother's basement, right? Like what you, what you saw was the product online and it was radicalizing because...

• 24:02Sam Harris?

  It was just a pure information vector of ideological contamination. And yeah, now we're living in a context where if you want to stay on the anorexia ward, surrounded by the most persuasive anorexic, anorexics on planet Earth, you can stay there forever now on the internet. Whereas in the real world, that kind of thing would have a natural half-life.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Right. And that's what Hadley writes about, about the thing that finally sort of snapped her out of it, was watching somebody who was 32, having a tantrum because they put butter on her toast. And she thought, you know, she was then in her teens, do I really want to be 32? And my entire world, the scope of it, the largest thing that's happening in my life is whether or not they put butter on my toast. No, I want to go to university. I want to live. I want to have kids. I want to have a life.

• 24:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  And I think that that mechanism, that really important mechanism of there is something bigger than this, has been slightly broken by the internet because there doesn't have to be anything bigger than this. You can sit home and get DoorDash and, and, you know, and game and crypto day trade. And you can just have, you know, and that's, the world is set up for you to do that.

• 25:07Sam Harris?

  Okay, so let's talk about the two sides of our politics. I hesitate to put too much stock in the notion of left and right at the moment because they're, you know, we have horseshoe theory and other variables now that make it less than useful schema. But something like that is, is my way into this. I mean, there's kind of the failing liberal order, right? Where we have this loss of trust in institutions, in many cases for obvious reasons. Some of those reasons are exaggerated. But, you know, I share, you know, many right of center concerns around DEI and trans activism. We, we mentioned, I worry about how we reboot, in the US context, how we reboot the Democratic Party into a sane platform for politics

• 25:50Sam Harris?

  and a, an antidote to the populism we're seeing on the right. Let's take the nominally left side of this before we talk about the right. How do you view the loss of trust in mainstream journalism and other institutions? And what do you think we can do to regain that trust?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I really worry about it because I know what you mean. The difficulty in talking about it is about keeping the correct sense of proportion between the errors. You know, and I, you know, I've written a lot about errors in journalism. There are some, but it's, you know, it's the same procedure as with science is that what really matters is not the idea that you're never going to get anything wrong. What matters is what you do when you get it wrong and what the correction mechanism is. And journalism does have a correction mechanism. It should do. The idea of a free and diverse press is that everybody scrutinizes each other. And yes, you won't get a complete picture of reality from the New York Times or the Atlantic or Fox News. But if you have all of them in the same environment, then you are hopefully, you know, if you want to, getting somewhere closer to the, to a kind of complete picture of the truth.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  And so, you know, that worries me that people don't seem to care about that. And I, and I do wonder how much of that is about a feeling of just the fact that the world is very overwhelming and people want a kind of simple narrative. You know, conspiracy theories are very simple usually, right? There's a bad guy who did it, or a lot of bad guys in a room who did it. And it's very obvious and the solutions are very obvious. And that's what strongman politics is. So I think I see some of those things as being a reaction to what people feel is just overwhelming complexity in the world. But from my point of view, you know, all, you know, all of us are only kind of stonemasons who can only build our own little houses one by one, right? I just, I don't think it's possible to, to fix everything at once. What I can do is kind of keep going out and doing the work that I think is important.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  And I suppose, you know, that doesn't feel very meaningful, but this is, I don't, tell me whether or not this is unbearably bleak, or if it is in fact actually quite hopeful at the end of the day, which is that I just think that we're also an incredibly complacent society. And I think that's true of both Europe and America. I'm primarily talking about, you know, professional, middle-class people. You know, when Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, people were absolutely delighted. When they got the smallpox vaccine, people Were absolutely delighted, the measles vaccine, they were absolutely delighted because they knew what the alternative was like. Yeah. At the end of the Second World War, when we built all of these liberal institutions, people knew what it was like to experience a world war, to experience, you know,

• 28:18Speaker 01

  the idea that your son wouldn't come home or that, you know, your entire family was murdered. And I think we've just been coasting for a really long time on things getting a little bit worse, but for most people, still extremely tolerable. And so I think when I talk to people, and this is true on both sides of the political aisle, there is a kind of great deal of complacency about how bad the world can get and how bad it still is in lots of places. Something I think about a lot is the fact that Michael Lewis wrote, I think, in The Fifth Risk about these awards they had for civil servants, you know, who'd done really great bureaucratic things, or they'd come up with great initiatives. And he found that a hugely disproportionate number of them were from first, I think, and second generation immigrants.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  So if you've come to the US from Somalia, then you are not complacent about the fact that it's nice to have drinking water and not to have a militia come around in the middle of the night. And I wonder if some of that, you know, this is my, this is what I cling to as Trump passes ever more kind of crazy executive orders, is that when things do get bad, that's the necessary mechanism for people to react against it. And what has happened at the moment is that people have had things a little bit bad, but not actually that bad. And therefore they, you know, when I talk to people, I talked to a young woman who was very interesting in Pennsylvania, and I asked her about, she was a Trump supporter, and I asked her about January the sixth. And she said, well, you know, if he didn't respect democracy, why is he running for president?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And I thought that was a really great and insightful thing to say, because from her point of view, there was nothing that I could say that would, you know, that would counteract that. He was paying deference to the electoral system by participating in it. And I thought, you know what, we're right. She, you know, she believes that if he was, if he was a maniac, the Republican Party would have stopped him. And the Republican Party didn't stop him. And that's the, that's the failure there. But it's not, she doesn't have a bad understanding of politics. It's just that politics has let her down in some profound way.

• 30:07Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I think complacency is part of it, although there, when you look at the real, the extremity of the problem, I don't know that the complacency covers the nature of, of the error. I mean, so like, I wouldn't think of the, the January sixth rioters as especially complacent. All right. I mean, they actually, you know, many of them traveled halfway across the country to attack the Capitol. And so it is with, you know, people who go all in on, you know, the anti-vax, you know, religiosity essentially, right? I mean, they're completely subsumed by this concern. And they're spending a tremendous amount of time trying to find, you know, all of the nefarious clues online that reveal, you know, how dangerous vaccines are, or how

• 30:50Sam Harris?

  corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is, or, you know, they've listened to scores of hours of RFK Junior, uh, spread his misinformation and half-truths and, you know, genuine lies in some cases. So there's a massive, in many cases, there's a massive investment of time and even resources in becoming kind of actively misled, but, you know, or what we would consider misled based on having a sense of what the ground truth, reality is on any one of these topics. I mean, I mean, no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. It was not stolen from him.

• 31:28Sam Harris?

  And, you know, all of your QAnon-inflected ratification on that topic is in fact a waste of time. The problem, I think, is that whenever you find a kernel of truth to any of these conspiracy theories, right? I mean, the, the real, you know, background incidents of vaccine injury, or the actual case where DEI has led to some horrifically bad outcome. I mean, just take these, this recent plane crash in Washington, in DC, you know, the, Trump's first allegation is that, you know, DEI explains this plane crash, whether it was on the, on the FAA side, or the, you know, the military helicopter side, or both.

• 32:11Sam Harris?

  It seemed an utterly grotesque and borderline psychopathic thing to say in the moment when your job is really to restore people's sense of normalcy and assure them that you're going to get to the bottom of the problem. And it was obviously, it was before any of the facts were in, so he couldn't possibly know if DEI was the real reason for it. He certainly couldn't know that at that point. But if in fact, it proves to be true, that the FAA had some, as is now rumored at the time we're discussing this, the FAA had some aggressively and in hindsight, probably

• 32:51Sam Harris?

  patently insane DEI program that was selecting not for competence, but for skin color for some considerable period of time, that will seem to confirm everyone's worst fears about everything on that topic, right? And so, again, this comes back to something like asymmetrical information warfare, whereas when you can find the half-truth or the single conspiracy that is in fact true, then that gives people more or less carte blanche to believe anything on insufficient evidence as long as it's to their taste in that vein, you know, for years to come. And you have to do so much extra work to debunk any of that misinformation because what's

• 33:33Sam Harris?

  always lingering, and we have this with the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak issue now, right? Because that was stigmatized as a racist conspiracy theory within 15 minutes by the left, and now it has proved an all too plausible thesis, albeit one for which the jury is still out. Now, the New York Times is no better than Fox News, or even, you know, paradoxically worse, et cetera, et cetera. And you're now dealing with people who won't believe anything that the normal gatekeepers say, whether it's the government or media.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  There's an awful lot of Motte and Bailey though, isn't there? And that term for the argumentation strategy where you go out on a limb and say something really crazy and then in challenge, you know, withdraw back to your castle. And, you know, some of the claim about that was that COVID was a bioweapon developed in a lab, right? And that's not what anybody who's now saying We don't know what was happening. So that, you know, that's, and I think the same thing is possibly true with the case of the, the air crash in that Tracing Woodgrains, who used to be a reporter on Bloomberg reported, did some really interesting reporting on the FAA under Obama, changing the regulations. But what that's turned into is the fact that, you know, the relatives of the female pilot who died were afraid to have her name released because they thought she'd be, you know, torn apart as a kind of tokenistic hire.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  But people will kind of just throw this sort of chaff up into the air. And then if any tiny bit of it is true, they, they claim victory. And I think that's the bit where I, I really struggle because it's, it does make you feel very, you know, like the kind of ground shaking beneath your feet in that, you know, that you can point out the facts all you want, but the vibe is just so much stronger. I had a friend who described the point of journalism as the war of facts against narrative. And I think that is the kind of, that is the big challenge now today for journalism is saying, yes, this, there might have been this going on, but it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. And that bit of that you believe isn't true. Whereas what people want it to be is, you know, yeah, is it, was it, was it a Chinese, you know, was it a Chinese plot? Yes or no? And you kind of go,

• 35:29Speaker 01

  well, yes, a bit more complicated than that. You know, was it DEI? Yes or no? Well, actually, yeah, you know, it might be a bit more complicated than that. And no one really kind of wants that. And I think it leads to a lot of faulty thinking because people just apply that heuristic, don't they? They just apply the frame that they want, that they are now used to thinking of everything through to every new situation. Sometimes that frame is right, but as a shortcut inevitably, sometimes it's wrong.

• 35:53Sam Harris?

  What, what do you think the sanest way is to thread the needle on DEI and trans activism and intersectionality and all of these other ways of framing or misframing are obviously illegal to journalists? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.