I'm a writer and neuroscientist, a podcast host, and the creator of the Waking Up app. I tend to focus on how our growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
I've always been interested in debating ideas. I think ideas are the most important things we have in the end, right? I don't think the story of all of our mayhem and unnecessary suffering has much to do with bad people doing bad things. I think for the most part, it's good people, or at least normal people, under the influence of bad ideas. And so, I've always thought that debating ideas was crucial for progress.
So I was never part of a debate club of any kind in college or high school, but I think most of my education was spent debating ideas in the end. I mean, you're either memorizing facts or trying to think critically about the facts you've memorized. And so, yeah, I mean, I've spent a lot of, especially in philosophy, when I switched my major to philosophy as an undergraduate, that's all debating ideas.
Well, it's been widely thought that we have something like a crisis of meaning, especially in the developed world at this point. As we become more secular and diverse, you know, pluralistic, there's a sense that culture has atomized, right? We're all kinda on our own with our phones and laptops, and our digital media experiences, which are fragmented in a way that no one can really understand. I mean, no one knows what everyone else is seeing on some level, certainly when you're talking about their social media feed, the kind of information that they interact with. Our information landscape has been shattered by our new technology. And we spend so much time thinking about and reacting to the digital lives we and others have created, that there has been this shattering effect of culture.
And one of the consequences of having our information landscape shattered by social media and related technologies is that it's become increasingly difficult to not only understand the world and to actually arrive at some kind of fact-based discussion of what's happening out there, but to converge with other people's understanding of the world, right? Everyone has a slightly discordant version of events, and conspiracy thinking and its adjacent forms of misinformation have become increasingly a problem. I mean, I worry at this point that we are quickly rendering ourselves politically ungovernable based on our interaction with this technology.
And this is a real problem because I see that the challenge is always how to get strangers to cooperate, you know, and solve a wide variety of coordination problems. I mean, this is really all that separates us from our primate cousins, right? It is the basis of civilization. If it's not all that we care about, it's the behavior that will allow us to safeguard all that we care about. We have love and rationality really, you know, love and curiosity by which to guide us. And cooperation is the only thing that ensures that that project is open-ended, right? I mean, and it's failures of cooperation, you know, the most extreme variant of which is war, which is the only reason, you know, apart from an asteroid impact that would bring the career of our species to an end, right? I mean, and even something like an asteroid impact is at this point probably solvable, given enough time on the basis of human cooperation, right? We simply have to decide what our priorities are and converge on a shared set of values and then have a rational conversation about how to achieve those goods.
And what makes that hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies, born of the fact that we just simply can't agree about who is lying most of the time, right? And, you know, who is misinformed, who is deranged, who is in possession of only half the story? And it used to be that it was reasonable to hope that if you simply continue the conversation long enough, well disposed, you know, neurologically intact people will converge on the same set of facts. And, you know, I think our faith in that timeless certainty is frayed, and it's frayed for good reason. Because we have built a machinery of political fragmentation and disinformation ultimately.
I mean, we have essentially performed a psychological experiment on ourselves in which we enrolled the better part of humanity. I mean, now, literally something like half of humanity. I mean, that's the number of people who are online at this point in the way that, you know, we would recognize. This has not been designed to optimize human wellbeing and a convergence on the same set of shared truths. It just hasn't. It's been optimized really to aim us all in the opposite direction. It's been optimized to shatter us on the basis of what we find most outraging, most salacious, most, you know, quite literally clickable, you know. And so we're all hostage to the business models of just a handful of corporations that haven't thought this through. And even if they had, they're incentivized to stay on their current path of just fragmenting the human conversation further.
Now there are pockets of culture that resist this. Certainly, you know, religious communities tend to resist this more than secular ones. And this is often thought to be a reason why religion is good and worth maintaining. I don't happen to believe that because I think all of these religions rest on completely unjustifiable and therefore intrinsically divisive ideologies, right? I mean, if what you believe can't really be proven and you're gonna believe it despite whatever evidence or arguments show up to contradict it, well then you're by definition someone who's not going to converge in your worldview and your set of values with other people. I mean, the conversation has stopped. Faith is a conversation stopper in my view.
So I think we need reason, we need a truly open-ended conversation with now 8 billion strangers. But we have to recognize the way in which the modern world has made this harder in many ways. I mean, there's this illusion of connection. You know, Facebook thought it was connecting everyone on earth, but it was also deranging everyone who interacted with it, because social media is a kind of hallucination machine, right? We find it very difficult to converge on even a fact-based discussion about the most fundamental things, you know, just what's happening in the world, what's happening in a given city at this moment? We're awash in lies and misinformation to a degree that was not possible before we got the internet in particular, before we got social media.
There are really two levels at which we experience meaning, and I think one is more fundamental than the other. So the more superficial level, and the level which most people worry about, is the level of the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. The kinds of thoughts we think, the things we believe, the narratives we trade in, and the conceptual frame around which we view experience. And these stories can be incredibly powerful, and negative stories can be profoundly enervating and dispiriting and divisive, right? I mean, all of the conflict between people in the world we see is born of irreconcilable stories each group is telling the other. All of this is conveyed by thought and language, and people are persuaded to one or another degree by stories in the end. And they're incredibly motivating, but they're not the most fundamental layer of our experience.
I mean, what's more basic than stories is our attention in each moment. Just what we can locate in our experience directly and how satisfying it is to see the universe through our own eyes, right? And the most satisfying way of engaging life is not to be endlessly thinking about it, to be endlessly rehearsing some set of ideas or some belief or some conceptual recitation of facts, right? It's not in understanding yourself conceptually or in telling yourself some story about your past or future that you can most fully engage what it's like to be you in the present, right? There's something deeper than that. And it's by definition non-conceptual as it really is. Just, can you let your attention fully sink into the present moment, so that you can discover what is beautiful there, what is sacred there, what is self-transcending there? What is a source of profound wellbeing and fulfillment? I mean, can you arrive in the present moment in such a way that its depth reveals itself to you, to consciousness in the present?
And most of us can't do that at all, or are hostage to the events of our lives. We need some kind of peak experience to knock us out of our normal rut. And we associate with those experiences the causal power of profundity, right? Like, it was only when I finally got to the mountaintop after preparing for months to climb this mountain and traveling, you know, 8,000 miles and getting all my gear together and surviving profound danger, right? It was, I finally got to Everest base camp or to the summit and risked my life and, you know, worried my spouse. And that was the moment that I was transported beyond myself, and it lasted about 14 seconds, and then I had to rush down unless I get killed on the highest point on earth, right? That's the normal experience of, you know, that's an extreme version of it. But that's what we do. We have peak experiences that come once a year.
Well, if we're lucky, those are moments where we recognize that it's possible to have a non-ordinary and truly sacred encounter with our lives in this world. But of course, that gets everything backwards. I mean, really what is revealed in those moments is a capacity that the mind has in every other moment, which is to pay full attention to experience. And the way to address that directly has to come by other methods. It's not a matter of schlepping halfway across the earth, or acquiring all kinds of new skills. It's a matter of training attention such that you can really be here in the present and break the spell of your ceaseless identification with thought.
And the name by which most of those efforts go now is meditation. And, you know, mindfulness is a specific type of meditation, which I recommend, but there are other methods. Of course, there's now a renewed interest in psychedelics, which have been quite helpful to people. But there's nothing that you can experience on psychedelics that the brain itself isn't capable of experiencing. I mean, these compounds either mimic neurotransmitters or cause neurotransmitters to behave differently or to be secreted in different quantities or to delay the reuptake, right? So there's nothing that your brain is being pushed to do that it isn't capable of doing already. And whatever method you use, I think it's important to recognize that your mind is all you have really, you know, your mind is the basis of your experience in each moment, and therefore it makes sense to train it. It makes sense to understand it. It makes sense to pay attention to it directly.
Well, I have many concerns at the moment. This might seem like an American framing of the problem. This is true of America, this is probably true of the developed world generally. This would be true of Western Europe and Australia and Canada. I think the percentages will slightly change, but something like half of the people on earth who really have the responsibility to not screw things up for everyone at this point, because we are the wealthiest and the most powerful and the luckiest, frankly, something like half of us can't quite agree that we have a stake in the maintenance of a global civilization, right? The very notion of thinking globally has been not only maligned, it's something like half of us believe that it is the source of our most pressing problems, right?
I mean, in America we have a rise of right-wing populism that has explicitly disavowed any American responsibility to keep order in the world, as though we have no stake in the futures of other countries, right? As though there were no problems of global scale that require global solutions. I mean, problems like climate change, problems like avoiding World War III, problems like artificial intelligence getting away from us because everyone who's building it is in an arms race condition, and no one is incentivized to truly do it safely. There's this sense that we can all look inward and pull back from any real engagement with the shocking inequalities we see in the world and just gonna tend to our own nest, right? And this isn't gonna work, right? Because there are, again, problems that are global in nature, and even those that aren't, you know, are going to continually erupt in civil wars and mass migrations and, you know, refugee crises.
And we have increasingly powerful enemies abroad: Russia and China and Iran to name just a few, who are committed to disrupting things in such a way as to really make, you know, life for us here in America more difficult. And the same can be said if you are British or if you are in any country in Western Europe. I mean, we're witnessing a fairly stark zero-sum contest between those of us who want to maintain open societies and, you know, anything like democracy and capitalism as we've come to understand them, and those who increasingly want to build closed ones and belligerent ones that make it impossible to share space in this increasingly common world.
There is a difference between democracy and totalitarianism, and the borders between them will invariably be bloody, right? It's just they can't cooperate really in any kind of open-ended way. And there are different versions of totalitarianism on offer. There are quasi-secular versions, even if they have religious components. I mean, there are personality cults and mass movements and populist hysterias, but they're not religious in any kind of otherworldly sense, right? So, you know, communism was a religion of sorts, and it still is, but it doesn't promise a hereafter obviously, that leverages people's death denial in a way that is increasingly powerful.
So there's the secular variant that we can worry about, but even there, even the inheritors of those movements tend to get some form of religion in the end. I mean, if you look at what's happening in Russia now, and, you know, Putinism has drawn a lot of energy from a Russian Orthodox kind of backing now, but then in the Middle East and really, you know, as a growing movement in dozens if not a hundred countries, you have Islamism and Jihadism, another quasi-fascist movement that has explicitly religious roots and is at odds with everything we need to build and maintain open societies, right? Free speech and respect for individual rights and political equality among the sexes and tolerance of diversity. You know, diversity of a sort that doesn't put everyone else's freedom in jeopardy, right? I mean, those are the requisites for an open society.
And those norms and values can be weaponized against any open society, right? And what we have now are Jihadists and Islamists and their supporters who will use our own tolerance and our own political norms against us, demanding free speech and tolerance where their values explicitly disavow free speech and tolerance. So we have to become increasingly intelligent as to how we deal with these threats without losing the values that we want to defend, right? I mean, this is a problem that many of our enemies don't have, right? We don't want to become brutalized by our own efforts to defend ourselves, which is to say, be made more brutal or brutish.
If you spread enough terror and chaos, even the most open and tolerant society, the inhabitants of that society will fairly soon crave security above everything else. And, you know, as many of us have said in various ways in recent years, if liberals won't defend borders, fascists will. And one of my main concerns at this point is that the political left has become unreliable enough in attending to the security concerns of open societies that many people have begun to support increasingly right-wing authoritarian voices in their politics. And you see this happening in America, and you see it especially happening in Western Europe. And it's, you know, increasingly something that worries me.
The thing to recognize is that we live in perpetual choice between conversation and violence. Those are really the two alternatives when the stakes are high, right? I mean, when the stakes are low, we can just keep talking. But when we approach something like a forced choice, right? When we have to converge, we have to decide what we're gonna do next as a society. When we have to get people in line, when people have to cooperate, well then we've got persuasion or coercion, right? And either we're gonna get everyone on the same page through the noises we make with our mouths, or we're going to have to force people or imprison people and in the limit, you know, fight a war and kill people in the service of goals that we find non-negotiable.
So really, the importance of conversation can't possibly be exaggerated because it is the bulwark against perpetual violence. It is the bulwark against murder. It's the bulwark against war. It's the only thing keeping those things out of our daily experience. We have built tools. When we look at the fact that most of our conversation now happens virtually online, in writing, and the kinds of information people take in on social media and on YouTube, and people educate themselves, they grow politically impassioned on the basis of some understanding of the world that they find credible. And we're finding it harder and harder to have a conversation that converges on a shared set of facts. And that makes violence, in my view, of all sorts, and at several different scales, more and more likely.
One thing we have to realize is that we're engaged in many forms of asymmetric conflict. On some level, the law of entropy governs all of this. So, for instance, it's easier to make a mess than it is to clean it up, right? It's easier to break things than to fix them. And that will probably be true forever, no matter what kind of technology we build, and no matter what kind of institutions we create. This is true in verbal debate, right? It's much easier for someone to just vomit a bunch of half-truths and lies and set many small fires over the course of a few minutes than it is to patiently counter those half-truths and lies and put those fires out.
It's true when you look at how authoritarians and demagogues and political opportunists and even genuine fascists can use the norms of open societies against them, right? So we have, as one of our most important principles of openness and tolerance, a commitment to free speech in America. That commitment is enshrined in our constitution. But it's a commitment that is shared, you know, throughout the West and, you know, really any democracy to one or another degree. But obviously free speech can be used, and the tolerance of it can be used, to undermine more or less everything of value in a society, right? I mean, this can be done in ways that are legal certainly in America, and yet they're genuinely sinister and corrosive and in the end get people killed, but in ways that are not necessarily attributable to the original speech, right?
So it's not, I mean, obviously not everything is legal. Not every form of speech is legal. So imminent calls to violence are something which are ruled out by the law. But that's not the only way to destroy cooperation and the peace of a society. In the West, we have freedom of religion, right? And freedom of thought, right? You can't jail someone merely for what they believe. Certain people in our society and certain immigrants to the West believe things that are perfectly inimical to our maintaining those values. I mean, there are genuine theocrats who want it to be a killing offense to believe or certainly espouse the wrong things about God, right? And they are advocating for their political primacy on the streets of London, and it's legal to do that.
But these are people who, take the case of Islamism and Jihadism specifically, I mean, these are people who want other people killed for drawing the wrong cartoons, right? I mean, this is the worldview that they are advertising to us in all their demonstrations, and yet it's legal to do that. But they're telling us what they would do if they had the power to do it, right? And I think it's always important to ask the question: what would any individual or group do if they had the power to do what they want to do, right? I mean, that's how you can navigate this space of competing claims upon the patience and tolerance of otherwise normal people, right? It's natural to want to default to tolerance and the norms of open societies. I mean, that is how we maintain them.
But in the limit, you know, in extremis, we have to recognize that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice, right? And it's in the limit suicidal, right? I mean, there's a certain form of intolerance that will force our hand. And it is very hard to legislate in advance what that is, right? Because we are continually faced with new iterations of a kind of hacking of our source code. You know, it's just new technology, new events in history change what is possible.
Everything we do as human beings that is recognizable as a product of human culture, everything that differentiates us from our primate cousins is a matter of language, leveraging our powers of cognition. I mean, our explicit representation of the past and the future, our commitment to various goals, our ability to organize our cooperation with others, you know, across space and time. All of this is linguistic behavior. And even in the privacy of our own minds, I mean, our ability to represent states of our world to ourselves as propositional knowledge, you know, our ability to believe something to be true or false. All of this is what language has given us.
So language is incredibly powerful, and almost everything that we can do personally, and needless to say, at scale that is important, you know, for good or for ill, is made possible by this capacity to represent the nature of the world in our thoughts and to trade those representations in speech or, you know, writing or other forms of communication with other people, and to persuade other people of certain things being true. And most of what any of us knows about the world, what any of us knows about the past, you know, even the recent past, to say nothing of history, is a matter of what we've been told or what we've read, right?
No matter how well-informed you are, no matter how committed you are to drilling down to first principles, and no matter how conversant you are with science and a fact-based discussion in dozens of fields, I mean, you could be a proper polymath, still most of your knowledge of the world is derivative of what others have said and done and claim to have found out. So the consequence of all of that is that it really matters what you believe. And it certainly matters what millions and billions of us believe in any given moment because it's our beliefs that will dictate what we do next.
I mean, really, the greatest question that we face individually and as a society is what to do next. I mean, it's just morality and politics and, you know, all of these probabilities and basic uncertainty and, you know, seeing through a glass darkly and forming some conception of what is likely to lead to better or worse outcomes, right? And to do any of that, we have to agree at least to a first approximation about what is good and what is worth wanting, and how can we get there? It can sound abstract to talk about the power of belief and the power of language, but I mean, just imagine your phone rings and someone very close to you, whose voice you recognize on the other end of it, tells you that someone very close to you has died, right? Or has been taken hostage.
These are just small mouth noises that someone's making on, you know, their side of this communication channel, and your brain is decoding them. You're extracting meaning from these words, and all of a sudden, everything is different. Your life is different, right? And the gating function there is belief. It was whether you accept that this string of sentences is an accurate representation of the world, and the moment you spot an error in some string of sentences, well then the gate is closed, right? And they don't become emotionally or behaviorally operable for you.
You see, the number dialing you is one you don't recognize. And the voice on the phone is likewise one you don't recognize, and, you know, sorry, you've got the wrong number, right? This is not my wife who has died or been taken hostage, right? Yeah, I'm sorry for that other guy who you're gonna reach. All of a sudden you're not implicated in the emergency. There's a world of difference there, right? And it's just a matter of whether these sentences were meant for you.
And everything we do in life is framed by language. You know, if you look around, look around you, everything you see in the built environment, everything that simply isn't a rock or a tree or a cloud, right, is an idea, right? And these ideas were communicated by people and acted upon on the basis of concepts, which again are linguistic constructions. I mean, this is all language. So whether you're a racist or a fascist or a communist or a democrat or an environmentalist, I mean, whatever your thing is, that is a tissue of sentences in the end. It's a conceptual frame, it's a set of arguments, it's a rehearsal of history and expectations about the future. And it's all a word cloud in the end that you've given credence for whatever reason, right?
You know, and if you're rational, those reasons can be explained for the most part, right? They rest on arguments and semantic knowledge that amounts to evidence, right? You can point to the thing that persuaded you, and most importantly, you can point to some hypothetical state of the world that would convince you that you're wrong, right? Which is to say that your beliefs are falsifiable. And if your beliefs are not falsifiable, if there's no scenario that could convince you that your most cherished opinions are in error, well then that's proof that you didn't get them by being in contact with reality in any sense, right? These are dogmas then, and dogmatism is, you know, in the end something that will prove intrinsically divisive.
Because, you know, the world and human conversation has been historically broken into competing and irreconcilable systems of dogma, you know, ideologies. Many of these have been religious, but some are political, some are, you know, come from some other source. But for the last few hundred years, certainly anywhere outside of a temple or a mosque or a church, most people most of the time have recognized that dogmatism is an intellectual sin. It's something that we have to outgrow. It's something that was perhaps natural in the childhood of our species.
But all the progress we've made to arrive at anything like a universal conception of human flourishing and scientific rationality, and anything that scales beyond the mere accidents of culture and geography, all of that has been a matter of getting rid of dogma and having an open-ended and intellectually honest conversation based on facts and arguments.
Well, one basis for hope is when you look at how much of our suffering is self-caused, you immediately see that we could just stop doing that, right? I mean, if most of human misery and inequality and conflict and violence is a matter of the stories that people are telling themselves and finding credible, and the fact that those stories are discordant, then you see that virtually all of human suffering and chaos is just tissue thin. I mean, it's a bad dream. It's just, you know, thoughts that people are finding compelling, and they could cease to find those thoughts compelling. Not much has to change.
Again, it's not a story of there being a sufficient number of bad people in the world to make life unlivable, right? It's almost never the case. The numbers of truly bad people, you know, true psychopaths, true sadists, it's always tiny, right? It's the tiniest rounding error on what is actually the case, which is you have psychologically normal, compassionate, otherwise good people ruled by bad ideas, and ideas that put them in explicit conflict with other human beings who have different ideas. You know, all of this, you know, the status quo when you look at it can be very depressing. But the basis for hope in radical change is right there on the surface.
Because again, there's almost no problem human ingenuity can't solve, right? In the end, you know, I mean, there's just, there's, unless this, this is a point that the physicist David Deutsch made recently, which I find compelling. I mean, unless there's some law of physics that rules it out, any change in the universe that is possible is possible in the presence of sufficient knowledge, right? And I would add you need sufficient cooperation to implement that knowledge, right? But really, the sky is the limit in terms of how good we can make human life on the basis of our understanding how the world works, and on the basis of a disposition to spread the wealth around, right? And to cancel the truly unconscionable disparities in good and bad luck we see in this world.
I mean, just that, you know, there are many of us who are born with every opportunity and virtually no impediments to our wellbeing. And there are those who are in the opposite circumstance. And none of us are responsible for where we have entered this game. No one watching this can claim to have decided not to be born in some war-torn country to, you know, totally irresponsible or absent or, you know, soon-to-be-dead parents, right? No one who wasn't orphaned in Syria in a civil war is responsible for that. And no one who was born neurologically healthy is responsible for that. You know, you can't account for the fact that you don't have brain damage, right? Just list your advantages, you know, for as long as you like, really. None of them were brought into being by you, right?
You are a beneficiary of all of these gifts insofar as you have them. And if you're intelligent and you're capable of great effort, those things too are mere inheritances. You know, they're genetic, they're environmental, there's some combination of the two, but the fact that you weren't murdered in a ditch as a child, right, is something you can't control. So, you know, the better part of compassion ultimately is to recognize that you want other people to thrive. You want to cancel these disparities and bad luck insofar as you can, and more to the point you want to help build a society and a civilization that becomes a machine for doing this, right? You want a fair and just society that the wealthier it becomes, the more it makes life even for its poorest members better and better, such that the human world becomes unrecognizable ultimately, you know, and unrecognizably good.
And there's no question that's possible. It's already happened for some of us, right? If you look at the difference between the best life on offer now and the worst, I mean, it's as stark as you can imagine. I mean, you just can't possibly exaggerate how much better it is to live in a peaceful, orderly society and to be wealthy and healthy and surrounded by people who you love and who love you, and to be surrounded by increasingly happy strangers who just want to cooperate with you, right? And their hopes and dreams are being realized on a daily basis. And crime is low, and social trust is high. And all of that's possible. And many of us have lived this, if not all the time, certainly in our most secure moments, you know? And increasingly it's the norm, certainly in affluent societies, it's the norm. And insofar as it's unraveling in places, that is worth worrying about and addressing.
But there are places on earth where nothing like that is remotely possible at the moment. There are places that have known civil war or something like civil war for as long as I've been alive. And on top of that, they're ravaged by infectious illness at a level that hasn't been true in, you know, any place I've lived for more than a century. So, yeah, I think we have a global responsibility to make life better and better. And insofar as we lose sight of that responsibility or disavow it because we think it's no longer possible, because we think that, you know, there isn't enough wealth in principle, there are not enough good things to share, we're not gonna build enough knowledge to engineer a tide that lifts all boats, right? And so we have to hunker down and defend ourselves because the barbarians are at the gates, right? I mean, if that's the future, well, it's gonna be increasingly dystopian and terrifying.
So we do have a choice to make. And at the most basic level, we have to safeguard the tools by which we would make such a choice and continually correct course. And for that, there really is no tool better and no substitute for human conversation wherein we converge on a fact-based understanding of what's happening in the world.
Well, I think there are two levels at which each of us can seek to make the world a better place. And I think both are important. Neither is really a surrogate for the other. I mean, so there's the individual level. We can all decide on a kind of personal ethical code and seek to be better people, right? We can decide not to lie, for instance. You notice all the mad work done by lying and the way in which it destroys reputations and relationships. And you just, you have a good talk with yourself and you decide, well, I'm not gonna do that anymore. And then you don't, and you notice that your life gets better, the lives of those around you get better. And we can take those efforts very, very far.
You can become a more patient person and more kind and more compassionate and more generous. And you can maximize all of these traditional virtues and live a more examined life in that you're continually discovering in yourself the impediments to being a better person. The source of your impatience, the source of your selfishness, right? And you can unwind all that and become personally more and more saintly, you know? And there's nothing wrong with that project, and it's important to do. And insofar as you can do it, the moment-to-moment character of your experience of the world is going to become more and more loving, more and more ecstatic even. I mean, it is just a better life.
Even if you haven't changed the world in any significant sense, your response to the world can be radically transformed, right? Because so much of our personal suffering is born of our reaction to what happens. It's not a matter of what happens out there in the world, it's our reaction to it. It's our contraction around it, our aversion to, you know, some disorder or some unpleasantness. And it's possible to tap into a wellspring of patience and equanimity, which really does transfigure your moment-to-moment experience of the world. And meditation is a way of doing that. And just, you know, conceptually reframing experience is a way of doing that.
So, you know, the philosophy of stoicism, many people have found useful of late, and stoicism has techniques like negative visualization, right? So something bad happens to you, you have suffered some professional or personal disappointment or frustration. You're caught by it. You know, you have something you regret, say, or something that frustrates you. And one way to get out of that state of contraction is to simply reflect on all of the truly terrible things that haven't happened, right? And which are happening to someone right now. And you can recognize really just in a few thoughts that there's probably a billion people or more at this moment who would consider their prayers answered if they could just trade places with you in your current mediocrity, in your current contraction, in your current state of dissatisfaction.
And that reflection can really unlock a feeling of gratitude that can become increasingly the lens through which you view your life, even your pains, even your disappointments. So there's a lot each of us can do to be happier and better company for others in our day-to-day lives. But even if everyone did that, there would still be more to do, right? Much of human suffering, much of human conflict, again, is not a matter of pathologically selfish people colliding into one another, right? It's a matter of systems and incentives that are not aligned, right? And what we want more and more in society are institutions and incentives that make it easier and easier for even very selfish people, even very distracted people, even very myopic people to cooperate and to act ethically, right? Because they're incentivized to do so. If they're rewarded for doing so, they become richer if they do that, say.
So you want a system, and the perfect system would be one in which even a psychopath would, based on pure selfishness, would play well with others because it's just overwhelmingly advantageous to do so. That's when you know the incentives are truly tuned to human flourishing.
Now, unfortunately, we find ourselves in a wide variety of systems, even in the best societies, where incentives are perverse, and you have to be something like a saint to even be just ordinarily responsible, you know, in the context of those incentives, right? I mean, if you want to fight climate change and do your best on that front, you have to, you know, it takes a lot of cognitive overhead and decisions to deny yourself certain pleasures and certain forms of gratification, which are available and are available to everyone and seem intrinsically good, but for the fact that they have this negative externality of cooking the planet, right? So we're not gonna solve planetary-scale problems by each of us individually becoming more like St. Francis of Assisi, right? I mean, this is, we need systems that do this for us. So that's another level of addressing all that ails us.
And I think we have to be able to keep both levels in view simultaneously.
When you look at what it takes to improve your life personally, in your face-to-face relationships, and really in the privacy of your own mind — I mean, just what is it like to be you alone in a room with nothing to distract you — that really is a matter of understanding your habitual entanglement with thought and learning to break that spell, right? I mean, this is, you know, meditation by another name.
The reality is, for most of us, we wake up each morning and we are chased out of bed by our thoughts, and we think, think, think, think, think until we struggle to fall asleep later that night. And our lives are largely determined by the quality of those thoughts, the quality of the stories we're telling ourselves. We live moment to moment in a kind of waking dream.
And our entanglement with thought is very much like the dreams we experience while asleep, right? And not like the lucid ones. I mean, there's this phenomenon of lucid dreaming, which is interesting, but obviously not the normal case. No, our thoughts are more like the truly psychotic dreams we have every night where we have no idea what has happened to us, right? We're not even doing enough reality testing to be surprised by the fact that we find ourselves in another circumstance, right?
You go to sleep at night and then the next thing you know, you're on a beach somewhere, or you're, you know, you're flying on an airplane, or you're talking to somebody who's famous who you never met, or to someone who's dead, or whatever it is — you're in a new circumstance and you don't even know enough about yourself to be surprised, right? All the laws of physics have been violated and you don't even blink, right? The most surprising thing about dreams is our fundamental lack of surprise when they arise.
And so it is with thoughts, right? You're sitting and you're ostensibly doing something productive — you're, you know, you're working or you're reading a book or you're having a conversation — but your moment-to-moment use of your own attention is competing with this continuous product, this inner voice that is saying things, right? Or broadcasting images.
I mean, your attention is being buffeted each moment by the intrusion of memories or, you know, images about the future, sources of, you know, anxiety or regret, right? So you're buffeted back and forth by past and future as represented by thought, and you're not noticing thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness, right? They seem to come up from behind and become what you are, right?
I mean, even now, as you know, I'm speaking and you're struggling to follow the thread of this increasingly long and perhaps ungrammatical sentence, my voice is competing with the voice in your head that feels like you, right? And it's not you in the sense that you normally presume, right? It's this appearance in consciousness, there's space around it, there's a context in which it's appearing that you are not tending to recognize. And recognizing it, you would see that that thought is just this gossamer object in awareness that really comes out of nowhere, it disappears back into nowhere.
And yet unrecognized, it seems to be what you are in each moment, right? It feels like a self, it feels like I. And that identification, that lack of distance between consciousness and its object, right? That is the thing that leaves us hostage in each moment to the emotional and behavioral implications of each thought, right?
So if you're thinking about that thing that profoundly embarrasses you, or that concern about which you are, you know, deeply frightened, right? Your child is ill, right? And a moment ago you weren't thinking about it, but now you are, right? And it's all-consuming. It is just this linguistic representation of a state of the world that, unrecognized, completely changes your emotional state and trims down your mind to some seeming imperative: you need to react just like this right now at the volume that you're currently experiencing, right?
And the reason why meditation becomes a great tool and art of emotional regulation is that it introduces a degree of freedom here. It introduces a distance between the sense of being the subject of your experience and the various objects, the various states of the nervous system, the physiological changes that you recognize to be, you know, this emotion that's being kindled by the next thought, and the thoughts themselves. And you can begin to witness all of that in a way that allows for some space, and ultimately for quite a lot of space.
And then you're free to choose, right? You know, how angry do I want to be right now? How fearful do I want to be? How impatient do I want to be? How motivated do I want to be to respond to an emergency? And I'm not saying there aren't emergencies. I'm not saying there aren't circumstances that benefit from, you know, a full adrenaline dump that gets you running, you know, or fighting. But in truth, those moments are few and far between.
And all of those strong negative emotional reactions like anger and fear, they're necessary as information. They're salience cues, right? They tell you that something has happened in the world or in your body that is worth paying attention to, right? But the question is, what is the optimal state to be in once the world has got your attention, right? I mean, how useful is anger 30 seconds later or 30 minutes later? I mean, the half-life of the utility of anger is very short.
And so it is with almost any other negative state. And until you learn to meditate, until you learn to recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as emotions, until you break this spell of just kind of helpless identification with each new appearance in consciousness, you are just condemned to be as angry as you will be for as long as you will be. And it will be, you know, could be an hour, it could be a day, it could be a week, depending on just what you do with your mind, but there's no degree of freedom.
But you're busy trying to arrange the world so as to no longer justify this negative mental state. You have to change the things in the world that are making you angry. That's the only way to get off that ride. But the truth is, anger or any other negative emotion has a very short half-life. Physiologically, I mean, the moment you recognize it, the moment you cease to be entranced by the thoughts that are telling you, you know, why you have every right to be angry, the moment you break the spell, you know, it diminishes over the course of seconds, you know, tens of seconds at the longest.
And then it'll come back again the moment you get caught by the next thought. But then you keep punctuating these reactions to life with this clear seeing of what the mind is like prior to identification with thought. And those punctuations give you real freedom. I mean, it is the kind of superpower to just decide, okay, I'm not going to be angry now, right? I'm just going to let it go. That's possible once you develop the skill, and then the neurology of that is reasonably well understood at this point.
It's important to be able to do it because so much of the chaos we see in the world, and so much of the chaos that gets introduced into our own lives, is a matter of kind of pathological emotional dysregulation, right? It's normal in the sense that it's all too common. It has a lot of subscribers out there in the world, but it's not normal in the sense that it's normative, in that it is good or necessary for us.
You know, it's analogous to road rage, right? I mean, road rage is so comical and insane because, you know, we've all — most of us have experienced it — and it's delimited, you know, it's exaggerated by the context, right? We all get in these metal boxes of privacy and, you know, start moving around at high speed, and it brings something out in us that, you know, the moment we step outside of the car, we would recognize is just totally unsustainable.
And an experience that is so easy to reframe, right? Someone cuts you off in traffic, nothing's happened. You know, they just did something that caused you to hit the brakes and you got angry. And it's so easy to tell yourself a story that diffuses that reaction. I mean, you could just recognize that you have no idea what's going on in that person's life. You know, who knows what phone call they just got? Who knows what hospital they're racing to get to? Who knows what personal chaos they're, you know, failing to overcome.
You don't know what's happening there, and yet you are taking everything personally, and you could just feel compassion there, but no, now you feel rage and now you're shrieking at them and gesticulating, and now they notice, and now you're in the middle of a conflict. You know, that's a very — it is a cartoonish version of chaos that most of us have lived to some degree or another. But it is the same automaticity of capture by thought and emotional contraction.
That is it. It's the bottom of basically everything we're seeing in the world that is deranging us. I mean, all of our overreactions, all of our failures of compassion, our failures of mutual understanding, you know, just an inability to be kind and patient and curious about what's happening on the other side of the wall or the other side of a conversation. It always starts with this moment of contraction into self and self-preoccupation and fear and anger, and everything gets layered on top of that.
And it's the inability to unclench the fist, you know, that has formed in your mind that is at the root of everything. And we can try to create a world that never pisses us off. You know, I'm not saying there are no problems in the world worth solving, there are certainly many, but the question is, how unhappy do you have to be in the present as you struggle to figure out how to solve the problems in the world? And you know the answer, you know, in almost every case is that you don't have to be unhappy at all, right?
I mean, it is possible to be happy even while working under fairly stressful conditions. It's possible to be happy even when you don't yet have what you want, right? I mean, it's a capacity of the human mind. This is starkly illustrated by the fact that, you know, there are people who go into solitude for years at a time and do nothing but meditate. I mean, I've studied with meditation masters who've spent years in solitude, even years in caves, you know, in the Himalayas. And it's exactly what they wanted to do. And they came out, you know, radiantly happy, right?
Now of course, there's another name for that condition. It's called solitary confinement, and it's considered a torture even inside a maximum security prison, right? I mean, most people, given the way their minds are, would rather be out there experiencing the community of rapists and murderers than left alone in a room with their thoughts, right? And that tells you a lot about what is considered normal for most of us, most of the time with regards to our thoughts.
And there's another possibility. It really is possible to break that spell and recognize just how much intrinsic freedom there is in consciousness itself, prior to identification with thought.
I mean, the amazing thing about our circumstance is that each one of us is in a position that is in some sense as free and as profound and as in touch with reality as any other position in this universe. Where you stand, the universe is illuminated as your experience in this moment. And that we call this, you know, this substratum of experience, consciousness, for lack of a better word. I mean, the fact that it's like something to be you is what we mean by consciousness.
And consciousness in the case of every person really is in some basic sense the same. We have different memories, we have different skills, we have different perceptions based on where we are and what is happening. But the experience of being in this world is what is profound, right? I mean, everything else is a passing appearance. There's nothing you can hold onto.
This is true in the grossest sense, right? I mean, the things in the world are continually changing. You know, the face in the mirror is continually changing as you age, right? I mean, this is just — there's no way to stop the processes you see and embody moment to moment. We're not surrounded by things so much as we're surrounded by processes, and we're part of those processes.
But all of this is appearing in this condition we call consciousness, and it is already free of all of the problems we are attempting to solve. Really, I mean, when you continually drop back into it, as you recognize what it's like to be you prior to reacting, prior to experiencing, prior to thinking, prior to rehearsing, prior to remembering that thing that is making you angry or frustrated, there's just this open space in which your experience of the universe is illuminated, and you're identical to it, right?
It's not that you are a self on the edge of experience having an experience. There's just experience, right? There's just this openness in which everything is appearing — sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions. I'm not saying there's no real world out there, there almost certainly is, but your experience of it really is a visionary experience.
I mean, this is neurologically so. I mean, what you're experiencing now with your open eyes is something that's happening in your brain as it stands. You know, it is a physiologically mediated vision, right? Very much akin to a dream. What this offers is an extraordinarily wide latitude for experiencing well-being, regardless of what is happening in the world.
I mean, it's possible to recognize that that in you which is aware of sadness is the same thing that's aware of joy, and you can drop back into that condition of awareness and recognize that it has this intrinsic quality of openness and tranquility and freedom from any sort of contraction, right? And so you can be aware of sadness from a point of view that is not merely sad, and you can be aware of fear from a point of view that's not merely afraid.
And the ability to drop back into that condition is always available, really, if you simply remember to look for it, you know? And it's always available because it is what you are as a matter of experience in each moment. I'm not making any metaphysical claims about consciousness being prior to the physics of things or separate from the brain. I mean, all of that — we can be agnostic or uncertain about all of that because, you know, science certainly still is, right?
We don't know how consciousness arises out of the unconscious complexity of the universe. We don't know at what level it arises. One could even argue that we don't know that it does arise ultimately, that maybe it's a fundamental property of matter. I mean, the jury is to some degree still out on questions of that kind. But what really can't be debated is that from your point of view as a being in this universe, consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion.
It's the one thing to which you moment to moment are identical, even if you are wrong about everything, even if you're confused about everything, even if you are, you know, psychotic, or this is just a dream, or you are in the matrix, or this is all a simulation on some alien supercomputer. I mean, even if our physics isn't real physics because we're not in touch with the base layer of reality, and your personal history is merely imagined, right? I mean, you could be utterly confused.
What you can't doubt is that something seems to be happening. Something seems to be the case. There's an appearance here, whatever its real status, and that seeming is consciousness, and it admits of certain intrinsic properties, which really are a refuge for us. I mean, it is an antidote to the ordinary course of suffering.
When you look at the mechanics of your psychological suffering, when you look into the painfulness of pain and the way in which, you know, various negative mental states and dark moods color experience, consciousness is the prior condition to all of that. It's in some basic sense transcendent of all of that. I mean, you can locate its quality as the condition of all appearances. And in locating it as such, you are free in some basic sense of these appearances.
It's not that you're rejecting experience, you're not, you know, moving away from your emotions. You're not becoming a zombie. In fact, the method of meditation that would allow you to recognize this about consciousness requires that you feel your emotions even more deeply than you tend to, right? Like, so the next time you feel anger, for instance, let yourself become incandescent with anger. I mean, just feel it on the molecular level. Feel it in every cell of your body that is participating in it, feel that, right?
But notice too that thought is a separate set of appearances, right? I mean, there's the mere physiology of anger, and then there are the thoughts about it. And notice the difference between those two things, and let the thoughts arise and pass away, and watch the physiology and see what it does. And you'll notice that it too arises and passes away.
And the truth is, the moment you break the spell of thinking about why you're angry, and you just feel the raw physiology as this display of energy in your mind and body, on some basic level anger ceases to be anger. It ceases to have the same kind of psychological import that it had a moment ago, or seemed to, right? It has no more real meaning or imperative than a stomachache does, right? Or a pain in your elbow, right? I mean, it can be very intense and yet have no real psychological implication.
And again, this is not a matter of moving away from it. It's a matter of allowing it to be felt so fully that it evaporates, right? And so it does with any other psychologically rejected state or classically negative emotion. I mean, there's just something deeper to our being moment to moment than our thoughts and our reactions and our states of contraction, right? There's this wider condition in which everything is appearing all by itself.
And the more you recognize it, the more you are free of your imagined problems, right? Again, I'm not saying there's nothing to change in the world. There are many thoughts that are worth thinking and many things that are worth doing, but the question is, is it possible to be free while you're cleaning up all those messes? Is it possible to be happy before the next good thing happens? Before the next goal is realized? And for thousands of years, people have recognized that the answer to those questions is yes.
Well, we can mean at least two things by artificial intelligence. There's the narrow version where we have increasingly competent machines. I mean, now we're experiencing large language models that are quite amazing in their ability to produce text. And then there's the wider version, often called AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, which refers to a human-like capacity to do many different types of things, wherein there's no real specialization and there's no degradation of function across those domains, right?
So the better you get at parsing language, that doesn't mean you get worse at solving math problems, right? Or recognizing faces. So the moment we get something that is truly general, that is human-like in its ability to solve problems across a range of environments, and with no degradation in its learning, it just becomes, you know, in the end, self-improving — one thing becomes obvious, right? First, this thing will be immediately superhuman because we will not have built any of these individual capacities at a level lower than human, right?
So, you know, your calculator in your phone is already superhuman for arithmetic. There's no way the calculator we put into the AGI is going to be worse than the one we've put in your phone, right? So the moment we get this omnibus suite of capacities, right, that are truly general, we have to recognize that human-level intelligence is a mirage that we never even, you know, arrived at for even a moment, right? We just crossed over from this piecemeal kind of superhuman narrow versions of intelligence.
You have a superhuman calculator, and you now have a superhuman large language model. When all of this gets knit together by whatever architecture, you will suddenly be in the presence of the most competent mind you've ever met, right? I think the thing that's important to recognize there is that if we're truly talking about general intelligence, we're talking about autonomy, we're talking about a relationship, therefore we're talking about being in the presence of another mind.
Whether it's conscious or not, we can leave consciousness aside because I think it's genuinely uncertain whether consciousness comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence. I happen to think there's no reason to expect that at this point. But so whether the lights are on or not in our robots or in our most powerful computers, they'll certainly seem to be conscious because we'll build them that way, or certainly we'll build some of them that way.
And we might just lose sight of the problem as to whether it's interesting intellectually or ethically to figure out whether these systems are conscious, because they're just going to seem conscious. I mean, certainly if we build humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, we will feel that we're in relationship to conscious entities. And many things follow from that.
So there are really two levels of risk here. There's the risk that bad people or badly intentioned people or unwise people will do bad things with their AI, whether it's, you know, narrow AI of increasing strength or the general AI that they build. And that's one bad outcome that we can try to safeguard against. And that's not easy, but there's this additional problem, and probably deeper problem, that in the presence of truly autonomous AGI, general intelligence that is superhuman, we need not merely worry about human bad actors, we need to worry about what's called the alignment problem.
You know, whether this now more competent mind is aligned with our interests, or disposed to be realigned with our interests whenever we detect that there's some daylight between what it's doing and what we want, right? I mean, is it just the kind of mind that cares what we want? Have we built it in such a way that it could ever lose sight of what is good for us, right? And it's not obvious in advance all the ways in which minds more intelligent than our own could grow unaligned with our interests and depart from this ongoing effort to make the world better and better for us, right?
I mean, just imagine by analogy what it's like for every other species on Earth watching humans grow more and more powerful, right? Human culture, human society, human technology. You know, at one point we were hairless apes with sticks and rocks, you know, and flint tools, and that gave us this overwhelming advantage, right? Just our ability to cooperate through language and the most primitive technology we began to leverage — already there we were unstoppable.
When you consider the career of any other species, even our closest cousins, you know, the Neanderthals, which we very likely wiped out — what will it be like to be in the presence of minds that, again, whether they're conscious or not, are so much more competent than we are, and so busy doing things that they are forming instrumental goals that we can't possibly understand, right? And they're doing all of this so quickly, right?
I mean, just speed on its own could be totally destabilizing. I mean, just imagine we built AI that was no smarter than the 10 smartest people together in a room, but it just worked a billion times faster, right? Well, what would it be like to be in relationship to 10 people who every time, you know, you stop to think for a second, they did 32 years, you know, a billion seconds worth of cognitive work, right? What would that conversation be like? I mean, it's unimaginable, right?
And that's why this whole thing is described as a singularity, right? Or an intelligence explosion. And the moment this really becomes a concern, once we imagine that the machines themselves could become recursively self-improving, that they could be the agents of improving their own software, or they could build the next generation of more competent machines, right? The moment we engineer anything like that — and there's no reason to think we won't do that at this point — something like an intelligence explosion certainly becomes conceivable.
And whether it happens slowly or quickly, again, I think the thing to recognize is that we have to understand that we will be in relationship to other minds more powerful than our own, right? And unless they have been built so as to have at bottom a core concern to more faithfully approximate what we want, you know, ad infinitum, it remains a genuine fear that we could build something that could, at a certain point, no longer care what we want.
Well, the question about what to do to build AI safely is genuinely difficult. I think the first thing to recognize is that the current incentives are wrong. I mean, we are in an arms race condition, both with respect to the individual companies that are doing this work in America and in the West, and we are in an arms race with any other society that is close to getting into the end zone themselves. And I think China being the most obvious example, when you look at what we should do globally, geopolitically, I think we need to win the arms race, right?
So that doesn't solve most of our problems with AI, or much less all of them. But it solves a problem of what would a totalitarian society that is not well disposed to our own do if it had God-like power? And we don't want to find out, right? So we don't want the Chinese to get the perfect self-improving AI before we do, or even the imperfect but nonetheless powerful self-improving AI before we do. We don't want them to get the lethal autonomous drones or the robot army before we do.
And if my thinking has changed on anything here — and this is going in a very dystopian direction — but, you know, I used to think that we didn't want to militarize and weaponize the most powerful AI as we acquired it. I thought that autonomous weapons was almost definitionally a bad thing. I don't think I believe that anymore. I think it's conceivable that we would build weapons that are autonomous, that are better than humans at making judgments with respect to, you know, when to use lethal force.
Which is to say their error rate will be acceptable to us, even though they'll have one, because it will simply just be better than keeping a monkey in the loop, in the same way that self-driving cars will almost certainly exist and be better than we are. And at that point, we'll consider it unethical to be driving our own cars because we'll just, you know, be reliably killing each other because we're just bad at it.
So I think that's conceivable, but more to the point, I think China is guaranteed to attempt to build this kind of weaponry. And what we need are weapons that can counter that, and we need to be more powerful. I just think we're in an arms race that's now unavoidable, analogous to the arms race we had with nuclear weapons. And, you know, unfortunately the game theory is such that, you know, it is just — we can't opt out. I think it would be bad for us to opt out. That's not a future we want to live in.
That said, I think the real solution ultimately is to achieve a world that is politically sane enough, that offers enough of a basis for cooperation at a global scale such that we can get out of this arms race condition. You know, we want to live in a world where, you know, we don't fear the Chinese and they don't fear us, and we don't live in a world where at least one of those parties is right to be feeling fear at this moment.
Because the other party really is committed to goals that are inimical to everything that we value and are right to value, right? I mean, there are good actors and bad actors. It's not that everyone has an equal claim upon the moral high ground here. You know, there's certain human futures that we don't want, and we are right not to want them. And the fact that you can find millions, and in some cases even billions of people who want them, doesn't mean they're not wrong, right?
We should get powerful AI before those people have changed my thinking to some degree on how much we should lean into the arms race, insofar as it's impossible to opt out of it. But ultimately we need to move on another track toward something like political sanity where we can step off this current course.
We need media that we can trust, but more important, we need media that we're right to trust. I mean, many of us trust in messages and messengers that we like the sound of, right? I mean, we have curated our newsfeeds, we're succumbing to a greater or lesser degree to a kind of confirmation bias. And we tend to like to reaffirm stories that we think are true. And we're not disposed to look to disconfirm those stories, you know, but that's certainly not most of what we do as we consume information, right?
So there are good and bad habits here that we have to be more or less cognizant of. For the most part, we want media institutions that we can outsource our reality testing to reliably. You know, there simply is no substitute for institutions we can trust. I mean, this is beyond media. This relates to government, this relates to — we need channels of information that we know are governed by incentives and processes that are reliably truth-discovering and truth-preserving insofar as possible.
And when it comes time to respond to a global pandemic, right? We can't all be left wondering whether the government is lying to us or lying to itself. Whether the CDC has such perverse incentives that we can't trust anything it says, whether the pharmaceutical companies are just trying to make billions of dollars, et cetera, et cetera. We need institutions we can trust. And in media, you know, we have that to one or another degree.
I mean, obviously, many of our institutions are showing their capacity for failure and their capacity for ideological capture. And that's why so many of us are spending a lot of time worrying about them, right? But the worry is all toward a purpose. It's not that we want to tear these things down and build from scratch. I mean, some people might want that, but I want a New York Times and a Harvard University and a set of scientific journals like Science and Nature that I can trust.
What's more, I believe I'm right to want that, right? Because the admonition 'do your own research' in the best of times is just an invitation to waste your time, right? I don't want to live in a world where I have to become an oncologist once I get cancer. I don't want to live in a world where I have to become a plumber when my toilet's blocked. I mean, it's just like you want to be able to rely on civilization as a greater machine of intelligence and expertise by which to solve these problems.
I mean, media is absolutely essential to us at this point. And it's unavoidable. It's never a question about whether or not to have it. The question is how can we create norms and procedures and institutions that are reliably error-correcting, right? Error-detecting and error-correcting. And we know a lot about how to do that, and we know a lot about how to fail to do that, you know? But overt political partisanship, right, we know is just a machine for self-deception and the deception of others, right?
We just, we know that being a partisan and trying to always put your self-advantaging spin on a set of facts, to pick and choose the facts you like, to ignore facts that are inconvenient to your message — we know that's not a way of tracking the truth. So we want media that doesn't do that, right? And where it is doing that, we want that to be self-conscious and just — that's something other than journalism, right? That's just naked partisanship, it's propaganda, it's salesmanship, it's something else.
But in the journalistic space, in the academic space, the space where we're trying to be truth-preserving, we need heuristics and norms and institutional knowledge that we can rely upon. And what's so frustrating at this moment is that, you know, we have, for a variety of reasons, we have performed a stress test of our institutions, and so many of them have failed or nearly failed, right?
I mean, our universities are in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas. Our universities, even especially our best universities, seem to be filled with people who couldn't figure out who the bad guys were on October 7th, right? I mean, that's a moral obscenity, right? And also an intellectual one. It's just — leaving aside completely what Israel should have done in response and how you feel about how they've prosecuted the war on Gaza, the moment those atrocities happened, we saw some of the most educated people in the West begin to condemn the victims of violence as though they were the perpetrators of it, right?
We were confronted by people who couldn't see the difference between a society disposed to defend itself against a genocidal death cult and a genocidal death cult that declares itself to be a genocidal death cult. I mean, the moral high ground was so obvious as to require absolutely no elucidation or argument, right? I mean, there was literally one party to this dispute that describes itself as a genocidal death cult.
Our most educated people, both professors and students alike, and administrators in places like Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Stanford and UCLA couldn't figure this out, right? Or reliably got the wrong side of this grotesque object. There's a lot to worry about when you consider the integrity of our institutions. And so it is with places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and CNN. I mean, we are increasingly observing a kind of leakage from the fringe into the mainstream, right?
So when you look at the — especially coming from the left side of our politics — I mean, what the fringe activist class on the left has captured much of elite institutions ideologically. I mean, it's just — this is a difference, you know, sort of difficult to describe, but kind of easy to intuit between the extremes of right and left. They're similar in certain respects. They're similar in the degree to which they are showing an authoritarian tendency to shut down speech and to issue various, you know, blasphemy tests among their adherents and to defenestrate people who won't toe the line.
There's similar cultic dynamics as you go, you know, far enough right and far enough left. But the difference between the left and the right in most societies in the West is that the left has captured elite culture. You know, to take the American perspective in particular, it's leftist ideology that has vitiated the New York Times and Hollywood and, you know, elite academic institutions and scientific journals.
And it's not the right, you see. You're not meeting neo-Nazis at the New York Times, right? But you're meeting their far-left equivalents. You're meeting people who actually think we should defund the police, people who actually think we should have no borders, people who actually think, in the case of the war on Gaza, that, you know, Hamas are just freedom fighters who are perfectly sane and doing what anyone would do under similar conditions, right? So there's a difference in that extreme leftist ideology has captured the ivory tower and media to some considerable degree.
And we have to perform an exorcism there. We need a return to sanity without losing sight of all of the risk posed by the right. And as we know, we have a level of right-wing populism in America that is, you know, genuinely at odds with the assumed norms of our democracy. It's not only in America, it's, you know, much of Western Europe too.
Unfortunately, I don't have an algorithm I can recommend for, you know, always finding the truth in media. I tend to rely on the same institutions I've always relied on. I'm just more skeptical of their reporting. You know, I'm more aware of their capacity for error, and on certain topics, I'm more aware that they will reliably produce errors. I'm aware of the bias in institutions that can, with a straight face, claim to be unbiased, right? And parts of the newspaper that traditionally were firewalled from any kind of bias, you know, the journalistic pages as opposed to the opinion pages.
And you just need to be aware that bias has leaked in, you know, across that firewall. So I just think we all have to be more intelligent consumers of media and become cognizant of the way in which the business model has distorted the practices of even the most respectable and, you know, highest-integrity sources of news. I mean, just the search for clicks, the desperation to feed the algorithm, has captured more or less everyone.
I mean, there are a few business models that are better than others. I happen to think relying on subscriptions is almost intrinsically better than relying on ads. But even there, we have to be aware of the prospect of audience capture and of a business model that is unaligned with the disposition to simply report the facts as they're found.
In response to this problem, many of us have relied more and more on alternative media, you know, whether it's podcasts or newsletters. And this is the space I inhabit. You know, I have a podcast and I will eventually have a newsletter. And, you know, I think it's fantastic to be able to find an audience that way. And, you know, I consume a lot of alternative media at this point, but it's important to recognize that everyone in that space who is reliably delivering the truth is dependent upon institutions that are out there gathering stories and interpretations of facts and just raw data that only institutions can gather, right?
Just, you know, I don't have a man on the ground in Beirut, right? Your favorite podcaster or Substacker doesn't have a newsroom. And insofar as traditional media has cut its budgets in such a way that it's, you know, relying on random people with cell phones to deliver imagery and relying on, you know, a brief visit to a place to just get a vibe, that's the erosion of real journalism.
We can't fully abandon the practices and principles that gave us journalism in the first place, right? So every newsletter writer or podcaster who's actually doing the work of journalism, or doing the work of, you know, a real historian, or doing the work of, you know, any expert in any field you would recognize — as independent as that person might be — they're having to recapitulate the practices that made any of those fields fields of intellectual integrity in the first place, right?
I mean, if you're doing the work of journalism, you have to be doing it with real journalistic dispassion. And you have to be worried about the integrity of your sources. And you have to be fact-checking your articles. And this is not a space in which we can reinvent everything. I mean, we have various principles by which we stay in touch with the world and represent our beliefs honestly. And those don't have to be reinvented. I would argue they can't be reinvented.
We know what they are to a first approximation. We can get better and better at them, but eventually we need to recapitulate all the institutional knowledge that was valid, even from the institutions that have proven themselves to be unreliable and worth transforming.
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