Then we'll just get a shot. And I see some bouncing. Let you plug in. Let me know when you're good to go. Yeah, everyone's happy. Yep. Okay, fantastic. Walter Kearns. Such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders.
Great to be here.
Great to be here. You know, Walter, I think you must be at least right now one of my favorite contemporary students of the human condition. Oh, good. I think I think so. Um, you know, I, people keep referring essays of yours to me. I have checked the sub lists and summarize. Yeah. Yeah. Testing. Testing. Testing. Testing. Testing, testing.
It was your line only that had the
we'll find out. Testing, testing, testing. Testing, testing, testing. It's fine. Do you want do you want to do try to please I really liked that opening. Now we have to
spontaneous spontaneity repeated?
Yeah, let's let's try. Okay. Walter, Kirn, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders. Great to be here. So Walter, I think I have to say that you are one of my favorite contemporary, let's call it students of the human condition.
Well, good. I have no degree in it. But I've respired since boyhood, to study it. So mission accomplished. Thank you.
Well, you know, people keep sending me, you know, a new essay of yours. Hey, have you seen this, this is interesting. I know you've been looking at this, this is something that's really been on my mind. And what it is, is, it's amazing to me over the last, let's say, five, six years, I've discovered how incredibly important it is to people to have a sense of belonging. And I think you actually sort of built on that and, and the essay just to make sure I get it right, the power and the silence. And you said it has more to do with being acceptable to the person that has the power necessarily going beyond this sense of belonging. I thought that was a very fascinating.
So that so that essay was built on an anecdote that was told to me by a former president of a major US Bank, and he was in a golf tournament at Warren Buffett's golf course. On the morning of 911, the 2001. And Warren had a rule that cell phones, the new fancy cell phone that man had invented was not to be allowed to disturb the golf tournament. And so everyone was acting as though they didn't have one in their golf bag or in their caddies pocket when the news of 911 started causing those phones to ring the the collected CEOs and world class celebrities at this tournament, snuck away to learn that, you know, the towers had fallen in New York and the Pentagon had been attacked. But so cowed were they by Warren's prohibition or his ban on cell phones that they couldn't they couldn't show their reactions to this attack on the United States. Their their fear of displeasing Warren, their business superior was greater than their need to, you know, react to an emergency of that scale. And so I used that anecdote to really illustrate the point that you made that in human behavior. We're told it's self interest that rules but in fact, as demonstrated by this story, and many others, what seems to be the most prominent instinct social instinct in people is to please those who have power over them or to to Make the command chain feel good about itself and be good. Soldiers in whatever effort is deemed most important at the time. And so I think that explains a lot about human behavior generally, but especially lately as people's sense of what's going on around them and, and the sort of disasters and difficulties they're facing in this COVID era are inconvenient to state because the line coming from the top is, you know, we've got this handled or the vaccines are working or you know, lockdowns have no cost or whatever, whatever the lines coming from the top are, that are at variance with people's actual experience, tend to lead to people yielding to the yielding to the line yielding to the command or the propaganda and suppressing their own reactions. And that's a reflex I've seen, almost endemic to this situation.
Well, it's fascinating, but there's also, you know, some, I guess, portion of the population that seems to kind of enthusiastically support whatever the the decrees are, and frankly, you know, to some extent, almost, you know, in a cruel way vilify the people who aren't participating, is it?
Well, sure, I mean, I've seen that. So you're saying there's something more than the willing to sort of submit and to the consensus, but there is a instinct to affirmatively to aggressively. Applaud and, and show enthusiasm. And I've seen that too. And the thing that's happened during COVID, is that time and time again, we've gotten a scapegoat for the situation. Before the vaccines before it was the unvaccinated. It was the people who were reluctant to wear masks or the people who were keeping their businesses open, despite, you know, despite supposedly, you know, efflorescence of cases. And so at every step, we've been asked to blame someone, usually to the side of us rather than above us. For, for the pandemic itself and for the toll that it's taken, and people's willingness to eagerly pretty participate in that scapegoating has been troubling. But not if you know something about the sort of history of social science surprising. We're species that has been shown in the lab, you know, they you see the Milgram experiment often alluded to, in this context, we're a species that is quite willing to administer pain and blame and, you know, anger to one another, rather than look up and question the authority that would have us be aggressive or angry or divisive?
No, it's fascinating. I do see the Milgram experiment, I guess referenced a lot. I guess this this kind of so I guess, the same idea as your story.
Yeah, the middle of the action to the Milgram experiment was that I think it was conducted using students, our guinea pig population, even now because they they seem to be bearing the brunt of our COVID policies. But they idea was that they were given orders by an authority figure, I guess, the chief scientist involved to administer shocks to people in other rooms, I think people that they could even see through transparent partitions, and they were willing to do this to an extent that was nauseating maybe to a general audience, but in the confines of the lab was showed remarkable willingness to be sadistic almost on behalf of power.
Right and I mean, in frankly, almost not really be aware and that that's the part that I find really interesting right? Not Be aware that that that's what you're engage them. Yeah.
Well, there has been a sense throughout this pandemic that to be on the right side of it will bear no consequences. That if you are operating in accord with the authorities, you You won't face punishment. Even if the people that you're even the people you're vilifying demonizing, ostracizing are your own neighbors. You know, you'd think that feedback from them or, you know, backlash from them would be the most urgent concern for people. But it seems to be that disfavor from above Trump's that.
I was gonna say fascinating. But I know my viewers are saying I say fascinating, much too much on this show. Oh,
well, fascinating. Fascinating is a default setting that we fall into, because at some level, we have to view even a disaster with a certain degree of detachment, or else we can't survive. And so I don't think it's sinful, or ghoulish to be fascinated by the troubling aspects of the drama that we're all living through. It shows a welcome, ability to stand back from distraction, use your intellect, view things coolly, and from a more exalted perspective than the every day.
Right? I mean, some of these things, if you didn't laugh, sometimes you would be weeping. And I keep thinking that, right.
I've been laughing more than I've been weeping. And I tried to laugh every day because, you know, when the history of last 50 years, had shut, you know, a history of war, terrorism, and all sorts of calamity, as shown us. And I'm a writer, I'm a novelist, a journalist second a memoirs to that dark humor is often the greatest or the most accurate conveyor of the situation. To not, you know, we process the Vietnam War through satire. Show mash, you know, it was nominally about the Korean War, but was really an allegory for some of the absurdities and difficulties of Vietnam. And I think, though, we don't yet have a great satire of the COVID era come on too quickly. For someone to write the great American novel about it. We have every reason and every right to resort to that sort of Bleak perspective, with humor. Our job finally is to get through this and to get through it emotionally. Is difficult without without that distance.
So you describe this, let's call it this whole thing. This, you were in a drama. Yeah. What is the drama? To explain it to me? What is the drama you're seeing?
Well, if we're going to confine it to the last couple of years, the drama is, consists of a hidden enemy suddenly showing itself with powers, as yet to be as yet to be comprehend, comprehended, which forces us into a defensive position in every fashion, you know, personally, professionally, politically. And while we are reeling from the assault of this, you know, Trump used to call it the hidden enemy or something. We are being directed from on high to do various things, to protect ourselves, protect the community and so on, which have in their cumulative effect, become more and more absurd. We are promised ways out of this pandemic. It's like one of those escape rooms that people go to for amusement, you know, and the door opens but there's another lock door behind it and, you know, if you mask you'll be out of it if you distance yourselves if you stay in your home If you order your food from, you know, DoorDash if you take the vaccine if you take the booster and every one of these commandments, you know, if it's gonna be a stage play it, they come maybe from a megaphone on high has led to a new surge of hope that this new difficult regime is about to end. And then a new crashing wave of disappointment, that in fact, it isn't. And so, you know, as a drama, it may be went from a dark, tragic thing to a dark tragic farce. And that's where we're standing today. I think, you know, I've said that the novel catch 22, about the sort of absurdities and contradictions of bureaucratic rules rule is the best fictional advocation of our situation. And, and now, I think we sit squarely in the middle of an absurdist drama, where what we thought was common sense is, you know, portrayed to us as a problem, the common sense of taking care of yourself and, you know, treating diseases, with medicines that decrease the symptoms, and so on. That, that that's that's how rages, you know, you wait for you wait for the super vaccine, you do everything. But what you used to do when you got an airborne virus? So I really do I think we're in the grips of a kind of if you're going to personify it, a mad Captain, you know, Captain Queeg, or, you know, some sort of some sort of capricious monster
in this What do you mean by this monster? You're not referring to any one person, this is some sort of emergent property or something? Or what do you think
an emergent property would be a nice sort of academic way to describe a hydra headed bureaucracy, which includes supporting characters like Bill Gates, I mean, never in my lifetime, in all of the crises I've lived through, has a billionaire weighed in as some sort of actor in a public in a public emergency, but we've, you know, we've got Bill Gates, we've got Fauci, Lenski, the who all of these authority figures operating pretty much in a coordinated fashion, but all of them, but all of them very, very damaged, let's say, as as credible. Trust figures. So So it's sort of where to look, you know, where do you get your guidance anymore? Fauci has done all he can personally to personify the response, I think he'd be happy to be the only man in the world in charge of COVID At this point, but but he has been the only one it is, when you say it's an emergent thing. It's a certain kind of behavior seems to be common to this whole group. And one of the signal features of that behavior is amnesia. I have been asked throughout COVID to take as gospel a series of absolutely contradictory directives, which show very little awareness of the past or even recently past directive that didn't work. So, I mean, you know, Groundhog Day would be another popular novel, or popular movie that might you know, afford some allegorical amusement in this situation, because we do seem to be cycling through the same process of looking to authority, being disappointed by it, and then redoubling our search for an authoritative answer. You
know, one of the things that's really been, I guess, on my mind throughout throughout all of this is this idea. And I started thinking about it with when I was thinking about woke ideology or the elect as John McWhorter calls the people that that practice it is this disjunction between intention or connection between intention and impact, right. So you hear when it comes to people's feelings according to this ideology, it doesn't matter what your intention is, is the impact of someone's feelings or hurt, right or if, right, right, right. Now, the crazy thing about this is and this keeps drilling into me is that when it comes to implementing policy, it's actually the exact opposite. It's only the intent that matters. But the whatever the consequence, however, outrageous, it kind of doesn't matter. It's the it's the good intent that matters. And that it is reality, shouldn't it be it shouldn't be the other way around, at least in my mind, right? Anyway, by their
fruits, you shall know them that's been suspended, and it's by their good intentions, you should judge them. But you're right. There's a there's a real intellectual contradiction here in the landscape. On the one hand, we live in a time of micro aggressions, and speeches, violence, and as you say, if I feel bad, it doesn't matter. If you are trying to make me feel bad. It only matters that I do. Then we suspend that. We suspend suspend that criteria for the very powerful now who are constantly excused on the basis of having good aims. And every time one of their one of their edicts falls apart every time they say something like, oh, but masks, cloth masks never worked. You know, this Orwellian. You know, we've never been at war with EastAsia, or whatever. We're told, yeah, but their hearts in the right place. They care for the community and new information has emerged. And so we constantly have to forgive there. We constantly have to forgive the consequences, and often the dire consequences of their of their commands, for some floating sense of their civic mindedness. But at a certain point, you know, only in politics do results not matter. You know, politics seems to be the art of doings doing something ineffective or even damaging. And, but but but having an ideological justification for it, that survives the disaster and goes on to create more. And, you know, we are deep into the process of, of denial about, about the consequences of the COVID regime. And we're also deep into the sort of occult Adoration of the people who have made these mistakes and propounded these, to my mind awful policies.
The thing that's kind of brings all this together, I guess, for me is this. It's almost like we've lost our we're losing touch with reality, almost like VM being important. And I know like, I know, you think a lot a lot about this, because you're commenting on the metaverse all the time, right, just kind of, you know, reality, TM or whatever. Right, right. But in a world where reality is just what someone says it is on a given time, or what someone feels on a given time, like, that's the sort of reality where everything you just described becomes possible. Yeah. Right. I mean,
well, you know. So reality is supposedly in the West, the ground of our intellectual investigations. Science is, as classically defined the the exercise of experimentation, and hypothesis in pursuit of deeper and deeper awareness of the real, that science, political science and they become confused, seems to be more and more about the construction of a alternative reality, which is preferred, in fact, to the sort of substantial reality that science investigates big Because politics has taken the sort of social view of events such that they can be it is their engineering and their and their manipulation that's more important than their than their essence. And I sometimes wonder if the political leaders of the moment and the bureaucratic and their bureaucratic instruments even believe that reality exists independently of their machination machinations? You know, it is what I say it is. They're sort of like Norman Desmond, the imperious, silent movie star, you know, who says, you know, she's living alone in her mansion and hasn't had a movie in years. And they asked her what's wrong? And she says, Well, the movies got small, it wasn't me. And sometimes I feel like these Falchion bureaucrats and some of these, you know, blowhard politicians are saying, you know, reality is what I say it is, it's not I that was wrong. It's the world. They're, they're starting to diverge from anything that we formerly believed was sanity, sanity, as defined by some sort of correlation between your belief system and what's actually happening, their belief systems have become preeminent. And you know that that's what happens, especially I think, with left wing ideology, it's so concerned with the, it's so concerned with the engineering of a utopian future, that it sees the present only as material to be shaped for that purpose, rather than something having an independent life.
Well, and there's this other element where it's really, it's basically just about power, whoever holds the power wields the power to science. And so everything is sort of, I guess, built around trying to get that keep it. I mean, this,
it's a very cynical time. And it's a cynical time, that believes itself to be an ideologically pure and even optimistic time. You hear people saying things like, which were used, which used to be jokes, like, it's not, it's not who votes to counts the votes, but you'd now hear that from the top that, you know, that it's, it's who puts out the statistics, not the reality that creates them. That's important. And that's the sense in which I think our leaders are becoming almost fatally detached from the ground, they, they have begun to think that the painting that they make is more important than the landscape they're trying to depict.
Well, you you're, well, you're grounded in, I guess, some sort of reality. You're out in rural Montana, you don't like to come here to New York, I know that.
I like it as a I like it as a diversion. Were I to be trapped here without a flight home, I get anxious after about four days. But, you know, rural Montana is really just part of the great Midwestern non coastal American heartland, it's, you know, it's no longer the place of cowboys, and, you know, whatever Yellowstone the TV show depicts, it's not quite like that. But but but living in a small town in Montana does put me in touch with, you know, a variety of people that I might not be in touch with, if I lived in a place like New York, a hardware store or across the street. Now, current economic problems, involve shortages and inflation and so on. Were were evident to me many, many months ago, just to my conversations with the guy who owns the hardware store, you know, I can't get these bolts, I can't get these power tools. I can't get this sort of lumber. And so, knowing that I have not been surprised at all by the supply chain problems and the persistence of inflation and so on. A small town is really a laboratory in, in in pragmatism and getting things done, you know, we don't generate in Livingston, Montana, the opinion that moves millions We don't, we aren't a center of have legislative power of media power of commercial power, the business of a small town is surviving. And that's the business of America for the most part. And as people report on their adventures in survival, I get very good information. And it's proven correct time. And again, in later trends, you know, supposedly the Federal Reserve of America has its ears, to the, you know, business cycle in all sorts of regions. And, you know, it's all broken up regionally. And they, they get reports from, you know, individual businesses and financial institutions, and they, from that form their model of what's going on, I'm just doing what they do on a smaller scale. But one reason it tends to be good information is that the incentives to lie are very, very small. And it's a little town, you know, the incentives to please power because power is really present there are very low,
and the cost of lying too much, you know, you have to face your, your neighbor the next day, right? If once you get found out
exactly, I mean, a hardware store owner, a plumbing and heating guy, a truck driver. Name, a few of the professions, of people that I happen to know in my daily life are our reality based almost to a fault, in the sense that a lot of America, I think, right now is immersed in the business of making sure its bank account shows a positive balance at the end of the month, making sure that their business can meet payroll, making sure that their child's tuition can be paid, and so on. And, you know, it's, it's unfair to the country to accuse it of being out to lunch, or in denial or deluded, when we realize that, in fact, most of them are just very busy. And, and they're, their, their need to, or their desire to form big picture analyses and forecasts of things, is, you know, maybe they got 15 minutes before bed to do that if they want. And they also are dependent on the commercial media to do that, for them. A dependence, which I think a lot of them are weaning themselves from.
Well, I don't know, I we were definitely going to have to talk about media because I'm, it's really interesting how someone with your let's say journalistic pedigree, right? Well, you're not you're not talking the same way. A lot of other folks with a similar pedigree are talking right now. So I want to talk about that. Before we go there, though. This is what strikes me. You know, one of the consequences of pandemic policy. Yeah, right. It's been, I think, unequivocally a vast, fast, upward transfer of massive wealth to the wealthiest in the world and a huge cost to the working class, and perhaps the middle class, certainly the working class X. Yes, numbers. So you know, what you're talking about makes a ton of sense, like people are busy and busy surviving in these places. Yeah. And so I guess, I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think this is something that there's a huge awareness of, but this is there's been a massive shift over the past couple of years, you know, people talk about Gini coefficients. And you know, it's important to not get it too high. Well, that I don't know what it is going to be for the coming year, but it's going to shift.
Gini coefficient is a measurement of
basically the wealth disparity. I think, is it the upper 20 versus the lower types? I don't remember the exact number, but basically, that it's a measure of the distance between the wealthiest and the poorest in the country. Yeah.
Well, so you're, so what you're saying to me is that there is every reason for the Americans who aren't of the upper 20% to be engrossed in the business of getting by which that which I believe they are was what I see. They're also I think, dimly and maybe more and more keenly aware that what you've described is happening. Why should the hardware store next door to me have at one point to close it stores when the Costco 20 miles the Costco warehouse with its parking lot for 1000s of cars, practically, hundreds certainly be wide open. Why? Why should Amazon be able to, you know, come right to your door and send its drivers out in the middle of a pandemic, and so on. While everyone else has to stay locked up. The wealth transfer has been immense. It's been measured the number of new billionaires, the the extent to which those 15 top billionaires quadrupled or multiplied, their wealth has been now calculated. The results are in the rich got richer, and they got richer faster than ever before. And they seem it would appear to have almost a rooting interest in this new status quo. Because why should they voluntarily retire from the business of getting richer? When it's working so well, they tend to identify there and you know, what's good for Bill Gates is good for the country. You know what used to say what good for General Motors is good for America. It's frightening, frankly, to see the most powerful people in society incentivized to continue this regimen, which is such a disaster for everyone else. They aren't protesting. They aren't trying to get kids back in school, they aren't worried about, you know, the survival of small businesses or the excess deaths that seemed to be occurring. And Bill Gates I read last night is warning of even worse pandemics. Now I have seen a lot of dystopian movies and I read a lot of science fiction, but in very few of them have the world's richest or second richest person appeared on TV to scare and terrify the populace with scenarios of death, destruction and disease. That that's not a healthy society that in which that either happens or is tolerated
you know, so let's let's go into this the media media question that I was mentioning a bit earlier. You know, you so how is it that Walter Kirn as this? I think I when we were chatting, another time I called you contrarian. You contested that. Yeah, that was, I thought that was very thoughtful, actually. But let's say different, quite different perspective on the world and people, then you're then frankly, your peers, right?
Well, it has to do with my path through life. Frankly. I grew up in rural Minnesota. I grew up on a farm. I went to a school that's now closed because it didn't have enough students, kindergarten through 12th grade in one building. And that was my reality until I went off to Princeton University. You can imagine the collision between farm kid and child of of wealth at Princeton that I experienced. I then went to Oxford University on a fellowship, I was academically fit to do that. forever grateful I was given the opportunity came back to New York City, worked in Vanity, Vanity Fair magazine, many other magazines I've written for time I've written for the New Republic. I've been a columnist at Harper's, these are these last two magazines, very establishment liberal magazines. And so rather than a contrarian, I'm still just that kid, Dorothy from Kansas, maybe seeing the ways of power without a lot of stake in in affirming the ways of power. I just feel like a kid who snuck into the Faire and is peeking in the back, and seeing, you know, how the con artists operate and so on and how the carnies seduced their marks. But it's not contrary because I'm not reacting to anything. I'm simply reporting with a natural skepticism, which I thought was the job of all reporters. I mean, the reason I say I set out to become a journalist or become a writer, because I wanted to tell the truth that those people who have authority and power in society might not want told, or might not even be able to see by virtue of their position. You know, they're they're subject to agreements and tribal loyalties that may not allow them to perceive correctly, what's going on, I thought the job of a reporter was to be that little boy who sees the, you know, Emperor naked, or, and, and I found out to my chagrin, that there's a name for that they call it a contrarian, they might even call it a conspiracy theorist, if you're to note that a few of them got together to do something that wasn't good. And I always thought of it just as the job. So yeah, I do reject contrarian, just as I, you know, reject a lot of the labels they're using now to marginalize people, you know, they call people who are who don't want to take the vaccine anti vaxxers as though they have an ideology. Well, they don't they there's a certain medicine that they are feel dubious about, and maybe not, and maybe don't feel they need. And so the establishment the system, which does exist, and I mean, I'm here to tell you that my voyage from farm to, you know, the canyons of midtown Manhattan media has taught me, yeah, they know each other, there's a group, there's a set of institutional affiliations, marriages, gold school ties, financial bonds, that, in aggregate, do create an establishment, which does have some consciousness of itself, its own needs, desires, and interests. And, you know, to to honestly, reflect that fact, is not to me to be contrary. It's simply to be clear.
Well, and so it just struck me as you're talking, you know, of course, you're also a novelist. Yeah. And, you know, still short story writer. And so for that, I wonder if it isn't that, you know, kind of you always hunting for, you know, interesting story. I mean, I, you know, we've spent a little time together, I see you hunting all the time in all sorts of ways. I'm wondering if that didn't somehow contribute to inoculate you from sort of, I don't know, getting into the, I don't know if it's groupthink that you're suggesting?
Yeah, I always looked at, I always looked at journalism, the way a aspiring rock musician looks at bartending, you know, it's a job I do until I make it journalism, which for me, was always what they call a side hustle. And so I wasn't terribly invested in my rise through the ranks. You know, I guess in some ways I was a spy, because I didn't ultimately have loyalty to those institutions, my loyalty was to my own mind, imagination, and intellect, such as it is. And so so in that sense, I never made the passage to Insider status. But I was inside enough that I saw some of the shenanigans and I was able to see the cultures that have developed on that in interior, you know, side of power, and what I've seen has worn home again, and again, the lesson that these people are out for themselves, as isn't any group. The auto industry is out for itself. The agriculture, you know, mericans grain farmers are out for themselves. But this thing that doesn't quite have a name, which has a media face and a governmental face and an NGO face and a financial face, it's also out for itself. And it would be the height of epistemological inaccuracy to not beat that truth and help others perceive the results of that situation.
Well, so of course now I'm thinking about another essay, which he wrote, which a number of people actually sent my way which is lashing I can't say the name on the show. Yeah, the BS. Yeah, the
BS. So so so I am. I grew up in the Mormon church, I don't like to swear. You'll see me saying you know, Dagnabbit, and all sorts of things at home, but I decided that my revulsion with the with the media. And the big electronic and corporate media especially deserved a exception to my policy of Andy Griffith, euphemisms and so I call it the BS, use the whole word. And that came about one morning when I was sitting on my Apple iPhone and looking at the headlines, it pushes at me. And my wife said to me, what are you doing? And I said, I'm just looking at today's BS, you know, and I decided, because part of my job, as a writer, I think, is to take things that are complex, and render them simple, or at least translate them into simpler terms. And I said, Oh, that's just gonna be my word for the whole thing. The stuff that comes in your iPhone, the stuff that streams on your TV, the internet headlines every time you, you know, log on to Yahoo or whatever, it's all the BS, and never has it behaved more like the BS than now. I mean, I've actually gotten to a kind of radical point at which I wonder if consuming this stuff at all is good. People argue, well, you know, even if it's not all credible, you should know what they're saying. And I used to believe that myself, but now I don't even know if that I should know what they're saying. Because the minute I know what they're saying, the minute I know the kind of stories they're launching, and the fables they're telling, and the propaganda, they're pushing, I become enmeshed in it, and I become emotionally agitated, and I start to push back against it and debate it, when in fact, I should not be I should not be in that neighborhood. Why go into a neighborhood where there's only trouble? Why not try to create a separate, a separate, parallel unmuting and superior process for understanding events? This one is so you know, to use a legal term, it's all the fruit of the poisoned tree. If the tree is poisoned, why do I keep picking the fruit? Even if it's to put it in my mouth and reject it? Maybe I should get out of that forest and find another one or grow one even you know,
you know, so this is a evolution because I actually pulled something on exactly this topic from the from that essay that you had wrote, you know, engaging with the BS news stream for the defensive can for defensive deconstructive reasons has been my personal program for a while now. The game can be intellectually amusing, it confers a sense of brave revulsion. But now you've evolved from your position, it seems
I don't want to be outraged anymore. Because to be really, you know, folkloric with you, I think they want me outraged. I think in some ways, we know that we know that. Campaign politics has a thing called the wedge issue, an issue that isn't an issue that isn't really pressing in reality, but which if brought into the conversation will cause people to sort themselves into warring camps. And hopefully 51% of them will come to your side. And and I don't know that I want any more to have a wedge issue per hour inserted into my consciousness, such that I can't see the big picture. And like I say, I used to think, well, you know, imagine I'm in a communist country. I watch the propaganda channel, just to see what the party wants me to believe. So that I can what, counter it, not believe it, laugh at it, be angry about it. But at least in the US, there is still an alternative, which is to cultivate other sources. Other to grant credibility if earned to other authority figures. And there is a very dynamic Alternative Press in the United States. Now. It's not as easy to read, it doesn't just, you know, it's factory just doesn't send out one headline that you swallow the whole you there are often strong personalities involved and, you know, sometimes actual misinformation. It requires a lot of critical and analytic and sort of social wisdom to interpret. But the result to me is often something approaching reality, while at whereas, the result of swallowing whole, the, you know the daily line, the seven word soundbite is fury, confusion, and demoralization. And more than anything, I think all of us are fighting demoralisation, you know, it would be very easy given the drama that I've described earlier, to reach a point of and NERT, numb, detachment, and even depression. And we've seen that in the country. I mean, we've got actual, we've got an actual epidemic of depression. And some of it comes from people losing their jobs and their livelihoods and be, you know, being forced to let relatives die in institutions that they can't walk through the front door of because of some COVID policy. But I think some of that depression comes from a real collapse of faith in, in the reality guides that we used to rely on.
You know, so one of the things that I'm fascinated by I'll use the word again, sorry, sorry, audience, I'm going to keep the word but I keep seeing various types of messaging, for example, on Twitter, which, you know, I both of us use, yeah, quite a bit. I sees. And I don't know if this is just for me, or if it's for the whole population, because they don't know how their algorithms work. But for example, you know, I see fact checks being kind of prominently displayed sometimes days on it, right. So the one that that has been up for the last two days, for me has been, the great reset, is the World Economic Forum's proposal for post COVID economic recovery, Reuters and BBC report. And then they explain their, their debunking all sorts of conspiracy theories around the concept of the great reset, right. Like why so and I'm thinking to myself, you know, what, is it that? How are they deciding what it is? And what do they think this will do for the viewer?
First of all, that's not a fact check. That's a concept check. That's a thought check. You know, a fact check would be, is there such a thing as a great reset or not? Does it come from the Language of the World Economic Forum or not? What this is, is, here's how you should think about the great reset, here are its real purposes you go to its intentions are to reconstruct society at the end of COVID. I can fact check that fact check and tell you that the great reset was a concept that preceded COVID, that the notion that there was this fourth industrial revolution, as the World Economic Forum likes to call it, in which you know, digital identification and other tools will be used to kind of reformat the economy and our interactions with each other, that that's that was going on long before COVID. COVID may have been the proximate excuse to hasten, its advanced. But but so so that, that that fact check in itself, I would submit is erroneous. But this notion that we need to be constantly wrapped on the knuckles every time we think the wrong way, think the wrong way. Yeah, yeah. They're not so much the thought police as, as the thought, you know, hall monitors or, you know, the thought bathroom attendants, you know, they, they they work below the level of the law and below the level of actual punishment, to keep us constantly in motion in the direction that they wish us to go. I mean, they're like sheep, Gods nipping at the heel of the herd. And more and more, this seems to be what journalism believes its mission to be. We think of journalism, or I do in my old fashioned way as revelatory. It's about revealing and, and exposing and opening up a view of the facts, but journalism has become disciplinary. In this most recent time, it's about disciplining the response to events. It's about disciplining the thought streams of the audience. It's about calling out misinformation and disinformation, which is an interest you know, I saw the other day that CNN has just put out a call for a It's sort of an employment advertisement for its new misinformation unit. And and I thought my first laugh at that was how can they label misinformation if they've never reported on the information in the first place? In other words, that that presumes that they can identify misinformation instantly, because they're in possession of the correct version? Well, they haven't shown any record of being in possession of the correct version, from Russia gate to, you know, the origins of COVID. They've been wrong in a way that would, you know, bankrupt you at the racetrack. But they want to not only not only do they want to be the presumed bearers of the true story, they want to be the punishers of the untruth. Well, to do that second thing, you have to do the first thing well, and they haven't.
Okay, let's stop and get a drink of water.
Yes. My mouth sticky. Yeah.
No, no, I might as Oh, and I and I, and I'm only talking a little bit, so I figured you might need it too.
Yeah, I'm at the stage where I'm starting to grow animated too. So excellent.
Let's, let's, let's keep going.
And if you want to run long and cut it, I don't care man. You I trust you to. We'll go judiciously.
And I mean, do you like do you like the opening? They're very open. Yeah. Like v2, we may, we may want to do it, we may want to do another version of the opening. Sometimes when that I'd love the first opening always works. When it gets captured. The second opening is up. Maybe, anyway, but it's just it's just a thought we may decide we want to look at it. Okay, I know, I know what I want to go with here. So. Okay, here's a question I asked to a number of guests on the show over the past months. And my own thinking about this as evolved recently, too. So are we living something closer to 1984? Or something closer to brave new world? Is it Orwell? Or is it Huxley? And I'm not gonna say what we're what I'm thinking these days you tell me. Okay, well,
when I was at Harper's a little background, because I've done a lot of thinking on the relationship of dystopian literature to the present. And I wrote a column for Harper's, in which I'm made the observation that I think dystopian literature, despite being depressing is so popular, because we think that if we read about it, if we worry about it in advance, it won't happen. That's proved to be a false hope. The fact that you can identify a malevolent trend doesn't at all prevent it from reaching completion. Those are two pillars of the dystopian canon that you've mentioned. In 1984, which was in a way a transfer of Stalin's Russia onto the postwar landscape of of England. The great reigning feature is austerity, to the point of kind of grim shortage shortages, and people huddled in unheated apartments and so on. And the rule of the party is through fear. The Big Brother rules through the Ministry of Truth and the other instruments of government rule through fear, they will through fear and deception
in the Huxley and vision rule is conducted through anestesia people are people are made to conform, comply, a and go along through the use of amusement, diverting entertainment and actual drugs that cause euphoria or, you know, chemical gratification. So,
in 1984, that people are scared. In Huxley's Brave New World, they're asleep, or, you know, caught up in trivial gratification. These don't have to be mutually Exclusive scenarios, both men and they were both men and they were both competitive men and they there exists. Tape of Huxley sort of denigrating Orwell, I believe. But in any case, both men pursued their central insight to its logical conclusion and being literary people, and egotists as we all are at some level as writers, they they, they doubled down on their insights because they were trying to write great books, not just tell the future, but between the two of them, they did tell the future. Because what I see as the present, our present predicament is a merger of the two visions. We are at once anesthetized by tick tock by pharmaceutical drugs, by illegal drugs, by Hollywood by a kind of news as entertainment. On the other hand, to give the Orwell position, we are also afraid, we know ourselves to be surveilled. As a journalist, there was a year when I realized that private private communications with sources were not private, or could not be presumed to be. And every good journalist now uses some form of signal or other communications app thought to be less surveilled, or surveillance will. My fear that I'm being watched, which is rational, because I am, comes with a fear of being ostracized, which is even more acute, and I think even more influential in our day to day life, we put up an opinion on social media or even in conversation. And we find ourselves rather instantly if it's Twitter's specially attacked, denigrated, called names, or just dropped, you know, I blocked him. And so, between the stick of Orwell and the drugged carrot of Huxley, we are, I think, a much more complacent and malleable and somewhat manipulable society than we used to be. And the people whose job or who see it as their job, to to govern us, to guide us, to direct us and to exploit us often have used a combination of these age old tools. And, you know, listen, it's much more Huxley and then Orwellian, to be locked up in your house, but to by by by by official decree, but to find it pleasant because you can play video games in order food that you know, and maybe if you live in a medical marijuana state, or legal marijuana state, you know, be be Hi, that's, that's Huxley to a tee, you know, um, Vax cards, presenting your papers, worrying if something you said on Twitter is going to get you canceled can from your job, or rejected by your friends, that's all well, and we've got a great cocktail going. I say with morbid humor. So so these are these are compatible and fully interoperable visions that for all I know, we're used as templates by the more sinister forces in society and there are sinister forces. I mean, you know,
we have a, we have a multi billion hundreds of billions dollar intelligence budget in this country. Where do we think that money goes? You know, we've got we've been studying for 100 years, techniques of propaganda and behavioral manipulation, often to us in societies where we say well Want to de radicalize Islamic extremists? You know, the military has perfected the SIOP. And then, the other day, I read a Bloomberg headline on Twitter, in defense of psyops as ways to combat misinformation. It was actually the headline, cya. You know, to paraphrase SAMSA good, because they combat misinformation. Oh, well, maybe that's a news, perhaps to the naive American? Oh, I've been the subject of psychological operations a military term? Well, it's not me suspecting that it's Bloomberg, celebrating it. I never thought we'd get there. Not so quickly.
The there was a headline from a little while ago, which I thought was really interesting. It's tied to a book that is sort of, you know, at the top of my list right now out of the UK, where I forget what they're called behavioral
nudges.
Well, yeah, so basically, but there's actually governments have these behavioral unit behavior modification, or something like this, where they do this so called nudging Yeah, right of the population in a particular direction. And then, you know, there was some of these people in this book are basically saying, I think we may have gone a little too far on the fear side of things like they're kind of writing this, and it just is just reading about this. I thought, That's fascinating. But aren't we talking about like the removal of, you know, core democratic agency here? Isn't that the corollary of, of this type of activity? I mean, it's kind of incredible. That Well, the point is that that this is obviously being done without the awareness of the population, which is supposed to be electing the people that are putting out the decrees about what they're going to do right with these with these units are going to do
so show. To break down what you just said. Yeah, the UK found that its use of psychological techniques to create fear in the population. So as to foster compliance with the COVID regimen went too far. It's like they have a soundboard. Let's hope one of the Levers is labeled hope. When Levers is labeled, you know, financial incentives, incentives, one is labeled fear. Well, now they're admitting we turned the fear level. A little too high. Shouldn't the news be that we were doing this at all, and then that we did wrong, but but they, they sort of buried the lead? And they said, We did it a little bit incorrectly? Here in the United States? We have this Harvard psychologist Cass Sunstein, who was brought in under the Obama administration, to to nudge and use his sort of academic knowledge to nudge people into what were thought to be socially desirable. decisions. And it it's a kind of pseudo science of, of getting people to do things for their own good, that they thought was helpful for desirable civic ins. But in both cases, you're talking about overriding agency, you're talking about overriding freewill, with invisible manipulations in order to get a desired response. Now, is that incompatible with the project of democracy as classically understood, because democracy was thought to be the, the collective exercise of the will of the people, and that will was thought to be the result of their hopefully educated and enlightened sense of their own interests and of reality. What sort of democracy is it? Where it's a robotic and automated process of getting people to vote? You know, yes, they sign off on decisions, that in a sense they haven't made that were made for them and installed in their consciousness. That's a travesty. It's a philosophical travesty, you know, yes, everyone gets a vote, and we decide what it is. And when we install the opinions, and the urges that lead to that vote, that that's a subversion of the democratic ideal at its very root. But there seem to be these Dr. Strangelove like characters in modern technocratic government, who believe that it is fearing that people be moved to do the right thing below the level of consciousness, that their instincts and their emotions
be be
engineered to bring about outcomes that the state itself has identified as desirable. You know, Walter Lippmann, the great journalist back in the 1920s, believed that the job of the press was to lead the people to make correct decisions, because he said, The the expert, the person who could judge all situations and be and be educated on all matters didn't exist, and that the press had to be that figure. And, you know, it was it was a consciously elitist model for journalism. And and I think it's sunk in at every level, when we talk about elitism. What we're really talking about is a class of people who believe it's their job to, to engineer and bring about right behavior, using tools that often only they know they have. And that elitist vision of democracy has gotten to my mind, I mean, it's all well and good to guide and form, exhort, and use all the traditional, the political tools to bring about your desired outcomes, but to sort of get into the operating system of the human mind and program it without its knowledge. is, you know, that's a matter for science fiction writers not, you know, not American citizens. To my mind,
I can't help but wonder if you know, some of these folks that are doing this would be thinking, well, we've been, it's been kind of an arms race already, right? You have all these, you know, advertising agency pushing products, which are essentially, you know, we have, you know, that all kind of let's call it weaponized or what least taken out several orders of magnitude out through social media through these very find ways in which they can understand what are the things that you're interested in, and then they can program for you and feed it to you in a kind of quasi addictive way, we know that that happens. So they're, you know, so maybe these people are thinking, Well, that's all happening anyway. So we have to have RSA too. We have to have our programming and as well, you know, or something like that.
Well, it's true, you know, the the available weapons dictate the form of the wars that that ensue from their use, and having data collection on the scale that we have it having this sort of algorithmic predictive capability that can tell you what your next purchase of a book on Amazon might be. That that that weaponry, as it were, that social weaponry of massive data, predictive algorithms, and a kind of surveillance of your behavior would tempt any one wanting power to employ those means. The problem is, is that when I was a kid, I remember there was a book in our school library is called the hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard and it was about subliminal messaging in advertising, and showed you the way that the Coca Cola ad used eroticism to make the product attractive. And the whole reason Vance Packard wrote the hidden Persuaders and the whole reason you were supposed to read it was you were supposed to arm yourself in this arms race, with skepticism, with knowledge with insight into their tactics. I see less and less of an appetite among people to to fight this war. To fight back in this war. They seem more and more willing to be the the sort of hapless and ignorant marks of this of this machine, rather than full combatants in a contest. Of course, power wants to use all the tools it can to propound itself to establish itself and to sustain its own position. We should assume that but we should also Be aware that it's our job, to arm ourselves for the struggle. It's not our jobs to go to sleep and say, you know, they want the best for us. They're good people, their intentions are good, even if their execution is terrible at times, I'll wake up tomorrow and find out who I am and who they want me to be. And then I'll go about, you know, fulfilling the script. No one should aspire to be an AI automaton. And yet, some seem to feel content being one. And it's because their deep conviction is that these people want the best for us. And they're advertising their own virtue. You know, our leadership advertises its own virtue nonstop. It's, it's, it's forgivable to think that they are the saints or the, you know, the seers and priests of the new good that they purport to be. How how wearisome it is, to wake up every day, having to, you know, interpret the propaganda, fight back against the the buzz words and the emotional button pushing. It's just, it's just exhausting. You know, who wins a war depends, to some degree on whose army gets tired first. And I think Americans to a large extent, and justifiably are probably pretty tired of having to resist this onslaught.
You know, as we finish up, I want to talk about a couple of things. You know, the first one is you actually expressed recently on Twitter, your greatest fear, but I didn't fully understand it, I want to get you to clarify for me, so you wrote, My greatest fear right now is a kind of perfect storm, that kind of perfect storm is in the offing and not on the people's timeline. And so what is that?
That's Nostradamus, Twitter, that's my, that's my nomadic Gypsy, fortune cookie, Twitter, but I will, I'll translate the message. My fear is that between the great emergencies that have already shown themselves COVID, now, inflation, even hyperinflation, we're about to add international conflict, you know, whether it comes in the Ukraine, as seems at this moment to be possible. Whether it comes in a Chinese move on Taiwan, I don't know. But I fear that we are already consumed almost to our capacity to withstand it by by emergency thinking and, you know, distorting directives from on high, and that if we add too much more crisis, to our crisis rich environment, we may find ourselves unable to act, unable to process unable to do anything traditionally Democratic about a situation that threatens to be all encompassing. And, you know, in my darker moments, where I, where I suspect we could have resisted inflation a little bit more effectively, maybe by budgetary restraints, where we could have anticipated supply chain crises and lubricated the system beforehand. And so on, I start to think, are we in a regime now, that is kind of bringing together all of the, you know, all of the bad news at once, such that it can act with impunity, because I think it is the desire of every every ambitious, and proto autocratic regime to want to grow by Fiat. And Fiat rule is made most attractive to people when they feel powerless and swamped. And so sometimes I wonder, you know, Biden's Biden's popularity plummets, plummets, plummets, yet he never changes course. Why are they so content to see the crises pile up? Why are they not acting to it? You know, moderate the stresses on society. In fact, they seem to be, you know, talking about insurrection, and, you know, threats of terror, domestic terrorism in advance of anything really happening. You know, they're turning up the fear, they're turning up the apprehension, and a few more of the, and we have Bill Gates saying, what wait for the next pandemic. And that's ominous to me, the idea that maybe our leadership is invested to some degree in a situation that the people will find overwhelming such that they can launch their great reset or hatch their plan for a new order. It doesn't seem out of out of the realm of the possible. And they certainly have shown some sort of appetite for and even enjoyment of mash difficulty. So I guess my fear is that we could reach a point where as we're digging out of COVID, and we're, as we're adjusting to inflation, hyperinflation and, you know, restocking our large at home to accommodate shortages, we get an international crisis, we get a military crisis. And that would be that would be very hard to deal with it in a date, in an already weakened state.
The flip side now, you know, when in other conversations we've had, you said something that I loved actually, he said, I absolutely allow for wishful thinking I wrote it down for myself. This is so this is so beautiful, you explain it. Okay, explain this to me. Well, I'm going to get you to explain it to me on camera, because I think it's a beautiful idea.
Well, what I said to you was that I allow in my intellectual process, a place for wishful thinking, I allow myself to imagine what I hope will happen. Because I see no other way of making it happen. If we don't first picture, our desires, articulate our hopes, and even dream past, likelihood or probability, a world that's better, and in which things work out. We can't, we can't write the script for recovery, or the script for normalcy and revitalization. Without wishful thinking. And it's not, you know, the philosopher or the analytic scientist may say there's, there's no place for hope in the experimental method. But we're not conducting a science experiment. In society, we're conducting an experiment in living. And without a, without a beacon, without a sense of how ideally things could happen. We're powerless to make progress in that direction. And so if some, you know, sometimes people have come to me and said, Walter, you're a weird combination of a creative writer, and an analytic thinker. And I go absolutely right. Because without imagination, analysis is retrospective. It can only tell you what's happened, it can only examine that which is already. History is already presented. But how do you make history? How do you how do you turn the wheel of events in time, to your benefit, and that comes from imagination? And and, you know, insofar as people say, Walter, you're on the right, or you're a conservative, and I don't know that those are accurate labels. I say, one problem for me with conservatives and sort of right wing thinkers is that they're not doing a good job right now. of imagining the future they, they want. They often speak in terms of return to classical or past golden ages, classical situations or golden ages. But I think it's time that those in the dissident free thinking conservative, Libertarian, whatever community allow themselves to picture not a paradise, but a better world and start to lead by attraction. And bye, bye. But appeal rather than scolding and criticism, the left has become a very scold full world, you know, put your mask on, take your vaccine, shut up, don't say that word, etc. The right all call it that, I think has a great opportunity to corner the market and hope. And they should do a better job of it. Because the situation that we've been in for a couple of years has left a lot of distressed and depressed and I think hollow souls out there who are waiting to be filled by something a little more nourishing, a little more optimistic. You know, we don't have a Ronald Reagan yet right now, who is capable and is accurately weigh it say there's a city on a hill, a shining city on a hill and make and sell it. But but but we have to we have to be moving in that direction now. Because pointing out the hypocrisy is the contradictions, the failures, the institutional conflicts of the media of, of corporate and governmental power will get you only to the point of disgust. But how do we get to the point of motivating optimism?
Well, okay, so So two things. First one is, well, what's Walter Kearns? Hole, or wishful thinking? Yeah. And the second one is, what are you working on these days?
As my wishful thinking, I think that if there has been a silver lining in the pandemic, period, it's that America's Federalist system, in a way our disorganization, the fact that we're broken up into all these smaller governments, and our media decentralization the fact that, you know, a guy like Joe Rogan can have a bigger audience than network channel. And, and the fact that there is a Twitter however, however, cruelly ruled it is at times it's been in a way, our American chaos, or disorganization, our decentral is Asian, that I think has seen us through so far, you know, the fact that DeSantis in Florida can can can govern his state in a different way, showing solutions that we are told from the central government are possible. The fact that voice is on Twitter, doctors, scientists, and so on, are able to at least be heard in some way. So my hope is that America would embrace in pursuit of a better future, its own true diversity, not the diversity that's indicated by skin color and gender and so on. But the diversity of thought and experience and sentiment that that leads to interesting negotiated solutions. Because overall, what I see, having failed is our command central form of governance, you know, to the extent that that's been imposed, it hasn't worked. To the extent that people have been free to experiment, do their own research. They're trying to make that seem, you know, a suspect, but I love people who do their own research. To the extent that we've been doing that, I think we've we're weathering the storm. So so my wishful thinking is a real embrace of our of our heterodoxy have iconoclasm of our Federalist diffusion of power, such that between all of us, we can come up with novel solutions that the World Health Organization or the CDC or the Office of the President might not. Yeah.
The TV screens I think you were gonna start on.
Yeah. Oh, I thought something had happened. Yeah, something
had happened. Oh, I just I just I'm just I don't want us to I always lose my train of thought and this happens. Yeah,
I actually do need a sip of water it's a bit of water heavy
to finish that point. The unruliness that is built in to America, thanks to its constitution is to me, the source of its creativity, the the the tumult, the turmoil, the sort of wit Manian textured diversity of our country is it's great resource bureaucrats don't see it that way. Bureaucrats want a direct line from, you know, command to outcome. But, but I see, I see America's kind of simmering, skeptical, suspicious, show me pragmatic nature as its greatest asset. And I hope we appreciate as such, rather than look at it as some opening for disinformation or error, you know, you know, anti communal hyper individualism. Now, what I'm working on now is something I've been working on for years, it's a little bit complicated. In 2018, I set out across the country to write a kind of book that's not written much more a nonfiction travelogue, a lot like John Steinbeck's travels with Charlie that would try to take the temperature of the society by the simple means of getting in a car, getting on the road, not knowing where I was going to stop that night, having conversations with everyone along the way. And by that means, try to draw a sketch at least of where we were. I complete that trip. And here comes COVID. And COVID has been, if anything, a restraint on movement. And that Jack Kerouac style, Jazzy, improvised way of setting out learning, you know, all of a sudden seemed anachronistic. And rewriting that book, which is largely written with cognizance of the COVID interlude is, is my next projects, you know, it's a, you know, travels with Charlie with a big interruption, big intermission. And, because, you know, I, I, I love this country. I, I I'm an old, unguarded not just patriot, but, but but a fan of the American people. They raised me, they're my friends. They taught me and their language, their ways, their opinions are all to me. Fascinating and nourishing. I think it's time this country stopped looking to the top for its solutions, and started investigating its own, you know, its own self started looking sideways, started exploring again, you know, the, the answers are to be found among one another, not by turning on the television. And I think that's become clearer than it's ever been this in this society.
A Walter current. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
It was great. Great pleasure and a privilege. Thank you.
Do we want it to be I don't know. I don't know if we need to do that in the opening and then we'll Yeah, Ronnie. So you didn't find that question? Yeah. All right. All right. You're gonna put it out and make sure you watch that screen. Yep.
My legs are probably crossed in the in this fashion or the other dispatch. Okay.
There's so yeah
you're pretty naturally, Matt. Good. Good, good camera face.
And the opposite I just constantly fail. Oh, that's to be covered up.
Oh, I think Matt Yeah.
Yeah, there's some people are just like ready to rock
Ben Carson's like that he doesn't need any makeup at all. He's just mad at the rock. I don't know how that works. It's certainly not an issue of, you know, racial background or anything like that.
I'm just trying to kind of grab this one hook that I that I started with, because I think that will help us
the night we have a new set of knowledge you're talking about? I remember.
So so recently in the UK press, there was this story, which I thought was absolutely incredible to find. I mean, in a nutshell, we have this, I guess it's the behavioral modification unit and the government, which frankly, I hadn't really fully realized that these things necessarily exist. Members of this unit, we're telling a journalist, she's written a book about this now that well, perhaps we went a little too heavy on the fear aspect here. And essentially in trying to manipulate or so called nudge the population in a particular direction. Are you familiar with this?
Well, I remember the story and by in the government, you mean the British government? Yes. Yeah. So I'm not at all surprised. You know, the United States has its equivalent. We brought in this Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, years ago to start using behavioral science to oh, I don't know, optimize the reaction of American people to various policies, and, you know, so and the, and the, and these are programs, which I think initially had military applications, they kind of come out of the desire to maybe do radicalize, extremist, terrorist entities. And so now they're being used on the civilian population as tends to happen, you know, with weaponry and military technology and in Britain, apparently, the, the mix of stimuli that they used to get people to act in ways they found beneficial, was tilted toward fear in a way that they now regret or maybe feel was even, you know, anti democratic. I wish that they had revealed the existence of these programs before they reveal the abuse of the program, or the pain it might have caused. It's nice to know As a citizen of the United States or of Great Britain or any allegedly free country, that you're being, that you're that you're being manipulated, that you're being targeted and that actual research and government resources are going into getting you to act the way they want. I guess those programs aren't as effective when there's foreknowledge on the part of the targets, that meaning us, the people. Now that it's been revealed, I hope, it will be considered less of conspiracy theory to suggest that we should look with some skepticism at our governments emotional warfare on us, it does exist, that's good to know. It's good to know that they use fear. It's not all just positive emotions that they're trying to manipulate. It's pretty scary to know I'm sure that the equivalent exists in the United States. Why wouldn't it and but but but in a more philosophical and bigger way, what's concerning about all this is that the government which is supposed to embody our will reflect our will and then amalgamate our will, has decided it should also be a guide to and Channeler of or not channel are of our own, that we should channel its will, that we should, in some way, respond like a piece of protoplasm, electrified by Dr. Frankenstein, in the ways that it deems suitable. That's big news. And that's a real and that's a real renegotiation of the Democratic contract. We don't, you know, we might expect political campaigns to use all sorts of psychological tactics on us. But do we expect the bureaucracy and, you know, established departments of government to be treating us like, lab rats? That's not That's not news that I found. Encouraging. And, and that they say that they revealed it at all seems almost accidental, there was no commission, there was no public outcry. There was no legal pressure for them to do so. I kind of wonder why they casually admitted it at all.
Well, it seems like some of the people had, I guess, remorse, some remorse about what they did. And I thought that was really interesting as well. But here's the thing, like, I, here's how I think they might justify it. Okay. You know, we've been in this kind of world of information warfare for a long time, right? We have these companies, marketing to us. And this has been happening for decades, you know, basically manipulating our emotions so that we purchase certain things in the consumer society. And then now, this has all been taken, I guess, multiple orders of magnitude up with social media and the capability of, you know, micro targeting, figuring out exactly what it is that you might be interested in, and giving you that. Right, right. So they'll say, well, we need we need to have a hand in this to look, there's all this these guys are into it. Maybe the government should have a say too, right? You
know, but there's a saying when it comes to any commercial entity, let the buyer beware. And, and we, I think, assume and are properly wary of the people who want to sell us things we try to be and we like to be trusting and sort of believing and loyal to our own democratically elected government to think that it acts in a way that is counter to our instincts, because if our instincts were fine, they wouldn't have to do it, right. I mean, they're obviously trying to modify behavior that they don't find sufficiently helpful. And so that suggests we're at actually a in some kind of a game setting versus our own government in which their moves and our moves are counter poised. And that's weird. That's just weird. One of the one of the functions of democratically elected government should not be to hypnotize the people, which is what we're talking about.
That's, that's very, you also had a bit about there's this whole piece about whoever wins the war is whoever gets tired first, right? Remember that whole vantage point? I don't I don't remember how we started with that, actually.
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I remember how we got there. I mean, do you want to set it up with a question? Or?
I don't know, do I need? Should I? So how did we get there? Well, we
got there by me saying that the burden? I don't know if it came out of that perfect storm question or not.
But this is a head of that. Okay.
I think I was saying that the burden of constant skepticism, and, you know, calendar and having to counter what is essentially psychological warfare is exhausting. And sometimes,
so, maybe just jump into that, you know, you know, come to think of it.
Right. Okay. You know, not another difficulty or troublesome aspect of a government using the tactics of psychological warfare, sIaps, or whatever. And, and I'm not exaggerating to say, exaggerating when I say that's what they are, is that the people grow tired after a while of having to look skeptically dubiously and with an eye to preserving their own interests at every government directive, and speech and suggestion. In other words, if we're now engaged in this sort of cat and mouse game with our own, with our own central powers, in which, you know, we, they want us to do something, we're moved to do something else, they counter our they counter our resistance with a nudge or a fear based provocation. That that whole model of relating your government is exhausting for the people. In a war, the side that wins first is the side that still has energy left, and the side that loses is the one that gets tired. And I think, to some degree, we're all we're all tired of this dance that we've been playing with authority, the stance we've been engaged with and authority, or a card game, even in which they seem to hold cards that we can't see. How do we know how much of what they tell us is part of this emotional, this emotional. Initiative, and how much of it is fact based? That that that British story suggests that they used fear by what? amplifying disturbing statistics, using rhetoric that was darker than need be? I mean, well, when you when you inflict such stress, and anxiety and apprehension on a subject population, it will after a while, grow weary and demoralized and dispirited. And you know, that that that's the worst case scenario for this sort of relationship with government, that the people actually grow, that people actually grow tired and weary of the constant barrage of emotional provocation?
Yes, this actually makes me think of something that I that I noted you had posted on Twitter that made me think, No, you said that your greatest fear right now, is that kind of perfect storm is in the offering. There's a perfect storm in the offing, and not on the people's timeline. And I was kind of curious, maybe you've already started talking about this a little bit here. But what were you thinking? Exactly? Sure.
Well, that was a late night tweet that comes from my sort of, you know, Gypsy, Nostradamus side. It's not a fully articulated warning. But it comes from an intuitive sense that the convergence of crises and emergencies that has dominated our public life for the last couple of years, has just by itself, become almost overwhelming. You know, we're seeing people in vast numbers, susceptible to depression, drug abuse, people not going back to work people who seem to have lost their way by all sorts of metrics. And that's COVID. And that's inflation. And that's a few other pressures that have brought about this. This the state of distress, add international conflict to that add war, you know, should we end up in a war with Russia, over Ukraine? or should there be a Chinese takeover attempt to take over Taiwan, and we may reach add those things. And we may reach a point at which the people have absolutely lost their morale or sense of sense of the possible in influencing government completely. Were one or two crises away, I think from a kind of paralysis and what they might be, you know, as I say, it could be an international conflict, it could be domestic terrorism, which we're constantly being warned against in this ominous way. That leads me to believe. You know, where there's smoke, there's fire, either there is this actual white supremacist, nascent, nativist threat, insurrection, or threat, or they're happy to have us think there is, I don't know, but, but add too many more. logs to this fire, and it could turn into a conflagration. And I guess it's it's a measure of how little faith I have in our, our leaders, and our media and so on. That I wonder sometimes, if they might not see further crisis as helpful to the reset or the reconfiguration, or the build back better plan that they're always talking about, you know, every time I hear build back better, I'm scared, because it suggests everything's in shambles. And, and things may be difficult, but I don't perceive them as in complete shambles. And so, I might my, and I presented it as my worst fear, my nightmare is that there are elements of our government or establishment that have some investment in disorder at this point, because they are looking at the world as a kind of Lego set. And they're only going to be free to build the utopia capsule that they crave, if the former structures are completely disassembled. And, you know, it's not me who came up with the notion, never let a crisis go to waste. It was, you know, Rama manuelle, top adviser, Obama and so that never let a crisis go to waste mindset is one step away from never avoid a crisis, because there are opportunities, and we can't afford much more of this. Down on the people side, up on the elite and leadership side, there may be some faith or some notion that things aren't bad enough yet to really impose the great reforms that we feel are necessary. You know, we seem in some ways to be allowing an energy crisis to intensify. We're discouraging exploration. We're discouraging pipelines doing things like that, watching fuel prices go up. And then there seems to be a pretty open
admission that, yeah, these high prices and these shortages, and so are what it will take to create the pain that will lead to a green future. So I don't think it's I don't think it's madness on my part, to worry that some of their solutions require further disintegration and not that they might actively promote it, but they might also not. Not be unhappy with it.
You know, and there is precedent for such things. As you're talking. I'm thinking about, you know, the cloud strategy, basically being an active city and so forth. That's interesting.
Well, you know, Hegel, the great philosopher of sort of political history, saw progress. And he was a philosopher of progress. He believed that the politics and history were leading toward the creation of a sort of all powerful state, which he identified with the deity in fact, and the process by which they did this was conflict, the dialectic the synthesis and antithesis. And so, in his abstract way, he suggested that we, we go forward through this constant internalized conflict and crisis machine. And, you know, I sometimes worry that that's the politics of the day that sometimes they are waiting for the pretext for reforms that they believe are inevitable, and perhaps are even willing to help that pretext along. There's a novelist and me, obviously, and there's a screenwriter in me. And I tried to police his influence over my thought I tried to be a little more analytic and cold. But you know, we have movies like wag the dog we have, we have plenty of movies that are pretty cynical about the political use of you know, network, the Paddy Chayefsky satire, we've got a lot of precedent in our culture, for thinking that the powers that be don't mind don't mind problems when they suit their predetermined sense of a solution.
So let's do the flip side here. And then I'm just also remembering something you told me a conversation in the past, and I love this. I actually wrote it down. He said, I absolutely allow for wishful thinking.
Yes. Yes. So what I said, and and I don't think I'd ever articulated before I said it to you is that in my intellectual process, and the way that I engage with events, think about them, evaluate them, I allow myself and my imagination, to foresee things as I wish they were. And the reason I do that, the reason that I sometimes let my hopes for how things work out affect my actual analysis of what I think is likely, is that I, if we don't let in optimism, wishful thinking, hope, etc, to our, to our evaluation of reality, then how do we ever move forward for what we want desire? And would like to see if all we're always doing is retrospectively, you know, analyzing and critically taking apart? And so scientifically, looking at history, how do we ever get history to go our way. And part of the way we do that, to my mind, is by creating a script for our behavior, that that flows from our, our hopes, picturing picturing things working out, even when they don't seem like they are is a helpful exercise, because it at least keeps you conscious of what you want. And it may even open avenues for action to bring what you want about. And so as I say, Socrates, or Plato or Aristotle might not recommend it. But I think dreaming is part of thinking because it's the part that moves us away from a merely scientific evaluation toward a sort of historical and value based way of looking at the world. Our values have to be a part of our analysis, our dreams Should inflect our insights? And if if the job of human beings is to get across the bridge over and over to something they like better, then I think fantasy should have a little role and thought.
And so that's interesting, because the, I suppose in a sense, what you're talking about is also, I guess, you know, the progressive project, to some extent people dreaming, wanting to create a better world. Right? I guess the question is, when you try your model, and you see the results, you need to incorporate that piece into the dreaming as well.
Well, first of all, it my my program differs from the progressive in mind is individual, and there's a sort of party line, utilitarian predetermined consensus about where we should go. In other words, I'm suggesting that every individual and every thinker on these matters, should should create some room for their own fantasies and positive wishes. The progressive project, as I understand it, posits a utopia that's pretty much standardized for all of them, you know, and then looks at the practical ways in, you know, to use the Marxist term praxis, the practical ways in which it can be advanced, often by hook or by crook, that's the ends that justifies the means. I'm talking about something else, I'm talking about letting ourselves as democratic citizens infuse our view of reality, with our own particular hopes for it, such that the symphony of these hopes, may create, you know, movement, progress, though I don't like the word progress, because progress always requires a measuring point, you know, it's progress toward a specific demarcated endpoint. And from another point, I'm talking not so much about progress as elevation, or or improvement. It doesn't mean, we have a picture of this perfect society at the end of this process, toward which we must jam all our inputs. And bring so as to bring it about, I'm talking about letting happiness, optimism and what we're enjoying to do the pursuit of happiness into our opinion set in our thoughts set.
Well, so then, let me ask this as we finish up a couple of things. Number one, well, what what is your wishful thinking? What are your hopes? And number two, you know, what are you working on these days? Yeah.
My, my, the wishful thinking I'm doing these days. In other words, when I look at the situation, and I try to imagine an optimistic outcome for it, what I hope and what I sometimes see, maybe I'm confusing it with my hope. Is it a new embrace of America's unruly, tumultuous, Democrat, truly democratic spirit? I think that to the extent that we have survived this COVID crisis, we've done so because of our disorganization, in some ways, because of our Federalist system, because we have states that tried different solutions to the same problem and some succeed, and some don't. You know, the ability of Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, let's say, to take two different approaches to COVID. And then to be able to measure the success of one or the failure of the other and draw conclusions has really helped us I think there hasn't been a lot of diversity in the international community to in the response to COVID. But there's been a lot of diversity internally in the United States in the response to COVID. state by state community by community. And so I would hope that what bureaucrats and sort of command and control type leaders see as a flaw in America would be embraced as a strength. And that is the fact that we have all these little laboratories, we let all these accidents happen, we take all these different approaches. And we, and we don't look at it as failure and chaos, and incoherence, we look at it as creative, experimental
tumult that they can, that can actually lead to real solutions. The thing that I love about this country is that, besides being individualistic, and, you know, aspiring to traditional Democratic goals, we seem to be a country that's willing to try stuff, just try it for the heck of it, you know, you know, Tinker in the garage and see if you can make that, you know, car that'll go on water, whatever, we've got a kind of scouting attitude toward, toward things, you know, let's just see if it, see if it works. And that and we get it, we get the personal computer from that, or maybe we get the light bulb, or maybe we get, you know, a new medicine. And I just think that we've forgotten to properly value our own creative chaos. And, and I think that one of the ways we've gotten through this crisis, in terms of the media is that we really have probably the most heterodox, and, you know, zoo illogically diverse media landscape on Earth, where we've got Joe Rogan, interviewing scientists and doctors, and getting a bigger audience than CNN or, you know, we've got substack writers who've left major newspapers or magazines, who are, you know, and couldn't maybe write what they write or think the way they think under an advertising regime, selling directly to the audience. We're constantly reading that that diversified media landscape is opening from misinformation and disinformation. But I see it much more as a sort of research and development laboratory for good information in the end. So that's, that's my positive vision for things that that the shambolic roughhewn multi tonal nature of our society will once again be seen as a real resource rather than a dangerous source of error. As for what I'm working on,
I think we already have a working on right. Oh, yeah, I think it's okay, good. Okay, good. But then what was the can you just remind me what that little bit about you had mentioned something about media that I thought was super interesting at the beginning of our conversation, it completely left my mind now.
Before we started. Yeah, before we started filming, I was talking about prestige
or definitely, yeah, addiction. So I just I read and I have to, I have to, we'll see if we can insert this. Okay, because it's just so, so interesting. So I'll just ask about that. I don't know. I can even say I think you've written about this, right?
Mm hm. I haven't I haven't used the term No.
So why why did i Why did this really
well, it came out of you just saying as an aside, Will. I want that for the epic times I want. I will
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay, so let's see. Let's see what see what I can ask you.
Oh, yeah, you were telling me about Harper's Of course. Right. So we don't
know necessarily. Yeah we're gonna have a little bit yeah. And Scott, just got jostle. I'm not sure there So we're kind of in this very young Yeah.
We're still rolling so Walter, we're kind of in this very interesting situation. I heard a sound. I'll do it one more time. So Walter, I think we're in this kind of really interesting situation with media right now, where you have, you know, people who were, I guess on the inside, as we discussed earlier, or at least, are the spies, like you described yourself on the inside of the mainstream corporate media environment. Now just kind of pursuing substack pursuing all these other different forms of or means of let me get let me do this one more time. We do this one more time. So I want to get you to this
is a good attack angle.
Yeah. I just, there's, there's there's a there's a piece that I'm missing a piece that I missing? Okay, let's see. Because you because you talk about substack later, I don't want to this, we're gonna insert this a little bit earlier. So I don't want to mess with that. He said.
Okay, I'll just, I'll just try to keep this very simple. Yeah. So Walter, when it comes to media, the media environment, we're in this situation now, it seems were a number of people who are once I guess, on the inside of the corporate or mainstream media environment, like yourself, perhaps even a spy, as you described yourself earlier, are now kind of on the outside. And, you know, I see people, you know, many notable examples come to mind, and they're kind of trying to figure out what to do with themselves. Some have been very successful, and some haven't necessarily.
Well, so what you're describing is a matte tie, EB leaving Rolling Stone and starting a sub stacked or leaving the intercept. Greg, I've been a Glenn Greenwald leaving the intercept, a publication he helped found, and left because he didn't feel it was being honest. And it's reporting on a Hunter Biden laptop before the election. Those are two prominent figures, Barry Weiss from the New York Times, going out and starting her own substack, which has become a kind of miniature newspaper in that she has many guest writers and reporters on her platform. And, you know, this, this movement is one I applaud. One I'm part of, I write chiefly about politics when I do through substack. After, you know, having columns and mass circulation magazines, and yet, I see a lot of people, even writers who are thinking of going to this mode, or readers who are not quite comfortable getting their information from this array of sources. I'm hesitating to hesitating to commit to the new model. And I, I have a sort of term for this phenomena this, this phenomena of resisting the new media. And I say people have to get over their prestige addiction. As writers and as readers as producers of content and as consumers of it, we have to break this attachment to the old sound Like a revolutionary to the old, esteemed legacy media, it's not that we need to reject it, it's not that we need to, you know, silence or at or, you know, tune it out. But we do need to break this prestige addiction we have, which assigns greater value to stories based on the sort of cultural charisma of their, of their sources. Because the truth is, by this time, a place like the New Republic, or a lot of other magazines, the Atlantic and so on, they've had five owners in the last 20 years, you know, they may, they may have prestigous fonts that they print their words in, but they're also new media. They've been recreated and recreated under the same heading, but they have different interests and different personalities behind them. And so as I say, if we're to move into a new world of more independent, more dissonant and more somewhat skeptical news, we have to break that prestige addiction that keeps us bound to those mastheads those New York Times those Atlantic's and so on, and, and it's especially hard for writers, you know, I talk to writers all the time, who, who have a story that they know, won't run the editors at this or that mainstream magazine won't run, but they're, they're reluctant to publish it on substack or to start a subject themselves, or to, you know, go on a podcast with with their story, and I go your prestige addicts, you just can't get that monkey off your back. You want to credentials you want the diplomas you want, you know, in the Wizard of Oz, you know, when he says the secret to a learned man is a diploma, you know, as though that as though the card or the certificate is what's important. And and I think, you know, we have to, we have to move past. We can't evolve if we're continually entranced by by now I think the sort of expired legacies of some of these institutions.
Okay. I mean, we'll try to tuck this one in somewhere. I think this is very important. Thank you.
You're welcome. I appreciate it so much. Oh, boy, I better run. Yeah.
