https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QHlxVzXUq60
You opened the can of worms by stating that people now don’t have differences of opinion about the facts. They have different facts. Yes. And the question is, in part, how is it under normal circumstances that people do see the same facts, but then have different opinions? It means there’s a very deep consensus on top of which there’s relatively trivial dispute. That’s a much better situation. But part of the way that people do that is by using, well, look at it this way. You have five senses, each of which depend on very different physiological mechanism. And that’s because you can see things that aren’t there and you can hear things that aren’t there and you can touch things that aren’t there. But you can’t see, hear and touch things that aren’t there. So you use this multi-dimensional process of triangulating. You actually use pentangulating, I suppose, with your five senses and you determine what’s real. But even that’s not enough. Then what we do is we seek consensus. We say, OK, well, here’s what the phenomenon appears to be to me. What do you see? And then if you see it and someone else sees it, and this would especially be good if we didn’t share the same opinions, but we could agree on what we saw, then we think it’s real. Now, the technical problem is now, no matter what you believe, you can find a like minded group that’s discussing this avidly to to confirm your confirmation bias and what that means. And I’m seeing this happening. I can’t believe how rapidly it’s happening. I’m seeing people degenerate into a conspiratorial paranoia. And I’m seeing it in family members and in friends and as well as manifesting itself in broader society. And it’s really, I think we’re driving ourselves insane with the net. Yes, I absolutely agree. I’m very, very worried about where we are. And I’m in political terms. I mean, it’s obviously deeper, but in political terms, I’m worried about it because I think the right is about to go off in America like the left in America has gone off. Well, that was the likely outcome five years ago. It looked to me like that was why I tried to. I was concerned back in 2016 that things were starting to degenerate and that the left would wake up the sleeping right, you know, the radicals on the far end of the spectrum who prefer action to words, let’s say, by a large margin and who are truly dangerous. I could see them being prodded into awakeness. And it was a very frightening thing. It still is a very frightening thing. I mean, one of the things I’ve thought about a lot in recent years about this is, of course, is, is, is not just that there’s that possibility of the two sides fighting against each other, but there ends up being no place to trust each other. This is this seems to me in my conversations with people of different political types, what I notice is that there is the most important thing if you’re actually going to solve a problem. And you know better than anyone how how much the political talk, shall we say, is actually not set up to solve problems. It’s set up for a performative thing. It’s set up for people to just play their part and read the script. And and almost none of our political discussion is actually problem solving oriented. Almost none of it. But when you do when you do get close to solving a problem, it exists. And it exists. The possibility only exists if the other person is is able to be trusted by you not to pull some funny stuff when you’re not looking. And I was thinking about this recently, I think, by the three of us in America, I was talking at one point with Brett Weinstein on his podcast. And I completely Brett is Brett is from a very different political tradition from for me. We have very different instincts on an awful lot of things and a lot of very similar instincts. But when I talk with Brett about problems like we talked about poverty and homelessness and things, I completely trust him. And he allows me to concede where I’m not willing often to concede, because I’m slightly worried that, you know, for instance, let me give the obvious one. I worry about the inequality discussion like a lot of people on the right, not because I don’t believe inequality exists. But I worry that the people who’ve been thinking about it most of the ones with the worst possible answer. You know, yes, well, that’s another thing we should discuss, because inequality is a terrible, terrible problem. It’s a society devouring problem. The only thing worse than inequality are the purported solutions frequent. So it’s a perfect example of it, because every political side has a version of this. You know, what I think I think we’ve talked about this in the past. I think one of the reasons that the right find it so hard to persuade the left to talk about immigration, for instance, is that the left just doesn’t want to acknowledge it. It’s the serious debate it is because it notices the right is the side that’s been thinking about it most. And it doesn’t trust the answers the right has. So it’s definitely something that both sides have as an instinct. So how do you solve a problem in this situation? Only by people from across the political divide trusting each other that they don’t have something funny they’re going to pull when you’re not looking or put it another way. They’re not going to do something when you’re beyond your own competency on the subject you’re trying to solve. So that that’s how you actually solve a problem. Now, of course, as I say, we’re not solving any problems at the moment. And I noticed this. I said that the last couple of years is like the eye of Sauron. Our society, particularly whipped up by the wretched social media companies that make them rich, have turned our societies into a great eye of Sauron, which scours across the land. And it looks at one thing dementedly and then it moves on to another thing. And the problem about it is it doesn’t solve a damn thing. None of the things none of the things it focuses on, you know, it focuses on on on on. Oh, what did we have? We had we had a green issue in January. It was meant to be a climate emergency of January of last year. Every every democratic government was meant to announce a climate emergency. Then we had the covid emergency. Then we have the BLM emergency. You know, it’s been emergency after emergency and we don’t seem to solve them. In fact, we seem to we seem to make them worse when we address them because we can’t agree on the thing that we’re meant to be addressing. So, as I say, if if if if I was to try to try to come up with the things to solve this, it would be that the people from the left and right who could trust each other. But just just one other thing on that. The thing about that is the reason why I think we haven’t been able to do that, particularly in America, is this. In my view, the American left has an incorrect approximation of the proximity of fascism to the American political system, you know, or white nationalism to the center of the political system. And obviously, Trump has given them a heck of a lot of ammunition, but they were willing to use it anyway. They’ve been using it for years. They wanted to claim basically that fascism was very, very close. Now, you see, seems like the reprehensible scenes of the Capitol the other day. And you see the ammunition that these reprehensible people have just given the left to continue to pretend that the American right, all of the right, you know, CNN presenters and others have said all of the right is now with the Nazis, with the fascists, with the the white supremacists. And if that’s the case, you can’t if you’re on the American left, communicate with anyone on the American right, because when you’re not looking, they’re going to smuggle fascism in and get you all. And the problem is that an element of the right, look, sometimes it’s a reasonable critique distrusts the left because it doesn’t trust that its social welfare instincts aren’t going to be then subsumed into their socialist instincts, aren’t then going to be subsumed by a deep desire to have communism. So so the right doesn’t trust that now I think there are elements of the right that particularly in America deeply overstated the proximity of communism to the American political system. Just do you think I’m one of those? No, I don’t. No, I don’t. Why not? Well, I think something I worry about, you know, when I’m looking at this positive feedback loop situation arise, you know, I can’t help but see similarities in the social identity movement and the Marxist movement. And I mean, you make that case in your book. So maybe you’re one of them, too, you know, And I don’t know if this is a situation where, you know, the left purports to see fascism lurking behind every right wing move. And do you think the right is just as culpable with regards to seeing communism behind every left wing move? I mean, I think it’s complicated. It’s a risk. Let me let me give you a statistic here. A friend of mine just told me the other day. You know, there’s only two self-described democratic socialists sitting in the in the Congressional House in the United States on the Democrat side. There’s only two. The rest of them are moderates and most of the moderates are moderate moderates, you know. Now those two attract a disproportionate amount of attention, partly because they’re incredibly savvy social media users, whereas the moderates aren’t as much of a threat to the democracy. And they’re not social media users, whereas the moderates aren’t at all and are technologic or blind technologically in that sense. But, you know, I guess I wonder how much conscience scouring. Everyone’s asking themselves that, I suppose now how much conscience scouring is in order after the events on the Hill last last week or two weeks ago.